Toward an ecriture feminine: A study of the utopian novels of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain as pioneering endeavors in establishing a feminine literary tradition

Before the awakening of the feminist literary movement the stereotyped images of women in the literary output were basically those of the "other." These images were dictated by the dominant patriarchal code of society. This patriarchal code relegated most of the literary works by female authors to a marginality that shackled both the authors and their works heavily. To remedy this situation and establish for themselves a form and a language that would be more suited to express their needs and desires and to gain for themselves a recognition as writers in their own rights, certain woman authors set out to break away from the style, the plot structure, and the mode of conventional expression in literature. This study examines the contributions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman to the Western literary canon, and of Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain to the South Asian literature, as pioneering feminist writers who started their journey toward establishing an Ecriture Feminine---a female poetics---through the publication of a new genre---the narrative of the women's community. The utopian novels of Gilman and Rokeya become the focus of this examination that helps us to recognize those early steps taken to break away from a male narrative structure, a male language and expose the absurdity of the situation where one half of the representatives of the society was marginalized and deprived of their human rights both as literary characters and as writers. The similarity in the strategy used by Gilman and Rokeya in their use of the utopian novels as vehicles to expose the universality of the plight of woman authors in every part of the world suggests a deeper link in the collective female consciousness that bespeaks a female literary imagination. These writers unite under the same canopy in their attempts to establish the coveted Ecriture Feminine; they unite in their efforts to portray their common antipathy to an unfair social and political order shaping its literature and their concomitant dedication not merely to the eventual achievement of radical alternatives, but to the necessity for revolutionary overthrow of the present literary order to reach their ultimate goal of a universal literary tradition.