The Woman’s Way of Seeing, and Writing: From Charulata to Virginia Woolf, a Different Rhythm
In May 2024, a newly elected member of the UK Parliament, Hannah Spencer, stood before the world and delivered a victory speech that was notable for its complete departure from political convention. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” she said. “I’m a plumber. And two weeks ago, during all this, I also qualified as a plasterer… we do things differently here.” It was a small moment, easily lost in the avalanche of election coverage, but it carried within it a profound truth about the nature of power, representation, and the stories we tell. As writer Sumana Roy reflects, Spencer’s words echoed a sentiment articulated a century earlier by Virginia Woolf: “But those tools aren’t our tools, and that business is not our business. For us, those conventions are ruinous, those tools are dead.”
This is the essence of the woman’s way of seeing and writing. It is a perspective that does not arrive trailing the smoke of boardrooms and battlefields, but one that emerges from the kitchens, the gardens, the sewing rooms, and the quiet observations of daily life. It is a perspective that finds its most powerful artistic expression not in imitation of established male traditions, but in the creation of a new language, a new rhythm, a new way of capturing the world. And perhaps no work of art has explored this more beautifully, more subtly, and more profoundly than Satyajit Ray’s cinematic masterpiece, Charulata.
For those who have not seen it, Charulata (1964) is set in 19th-century Bengal and tells the story of a young woman, Charu, married to Bhupati, a busy, progressive newspaper editor who is consumed by his work. Lonely and intellectually starved, Charu finds a kindred spirit in her brother-in-law, Amal, who comes to stay with them. Amal is a writer, or at least, he aspires to be one. But Ray, with his characteristic slyness, lets us know exactly what kind of writer Amal is. His works are derivative, bookish, imitative. His writing comes from the library, from copying the established male literary tradition. He has not found his own voice; he has merely learned to mimic the voices of others.
Charu, on the other hand, is a woman whose life is defined by the rhythms of the household. She sews and embroiders. She plans a garden. She supervises the kitchen. She reads literary magazines voraciously, hungry for contact with a world of ideas from which she is excluded. Her tools are not Amal’s tools. And it is from this seemingly constrained domestic sphere that her art begins to emerge.
In one of the most famous sequences in Indian cinema, Ray shows Charu looking at the world outside her marital home through a pair of opera glasses, her vision fragmented by the slatted windows. She then moves on a swing, her body in motion, her perspective shifting from the balcony to the garden to the bedroom and back to her notebook. This movement—what Woolf might call “rhythm”—is Charu’s subject. It is the rhythm of a life that is not linear, not confined to a single sphere, but constantly oscillating between the domestic and the intellectual, the observed and the imagined.
Intimidated by Amal’s superior, bookish airs, Charu is initially hesitant to share her own writing with him. But we, the audience, are given access to her creative process. She hears the call of a bird, a cuckoo. Her first instinct is to record it as a simple report: “Kokiler dak” (the call of a cuckoo). Dissatisfied with this bare fact, she revises it, adding emotion: “Kokiler byatha” (the pain of the cuckoo). But even this she rejects. It is too sentimental, too easy. Then something happens. Ray shifts into a lyrical montage, a visual stream of consciousness: images from Charu’s childhood, a village fair, fragments of memory. And from this flow of consciousness, she writes down two words: “Amar gram” (my village).
It is an extraordinary moment, a perfect illustration of the artistic process. Charu has rejected reportage (the bare fact of the bird’s call). She has rejected sentimentality (the projection of human pain onto the bird). She has arrived, instead, at something far more profound: a grounding of the self in community, in memory, in place. “My village” is not a report and it is not a sentimental effusion. It is an identity, a foundation, a claim to a history that extends beyond the narrow confines of her own autobiography. It stakes a claim to a new kind of history, one that is not available to women through traditional channels, but which they must create for themselves.
This creative struggle, this search for an authentic voice that is not merely an imitation of male conventions, is precisely what Virginia Woolf was exploring in her 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Woolf describes an imaginary encounter on a train between two characters, Mr. Smith and Mrs. Brown. When the narrator “interrupts” their conversation, the two react in starkly opposite ways. Mr. Smith, “a man of business,” becomes silent and closed off. Mrs. Brown, in contrast, is “relieved.” She is eager to connect, to share.
Woolf then gives Mrs. Brown a line of dialogue that is both utterly mundane and deeply revealing: “Can you tell me if an oak-tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for two years in succession by caterpillars?” It is the kind of question that would never occur to a “man of business.” It is a question rooted in observation, in curiosity about the natural world, in a kind of patient, attentive watching that is often coded as feminine. It is a question that irritates Mr. Smith into silence. It is a question that, for Woolf, contains the seeds of a whole new way of writing.
Woolf’s plea to her readers, and to the writers of her generation, is to abandon the comfortable, well-worn conventions of the Edwardian novelists like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. Their tools, she argues, are “dead” for the purpose of capturing the elusive, complex, and fragmented consciousness of a character like Mrs. Brown. “Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure,” she urges. For it is in these fragments, in these failures, in these seemingly inconsequential observations, that the truth of a life resides.
The connection between Woolf’s Mrs. Brown, Ray’s Charulata, and a 21st-century plumber-plasterer turned Member of Parliament is not immediately obvious, but it is real. Hannah Spencer’s victory speech was a triumph of the “spasmodic” and “fragmentary” over the polished and conventional. She did not present herself as a product of the political machine. She presented herself as a worker, a woman with calloused hands and practical skills, someone who “does things differently.” She was, in effect, saying that the tools of traditional politics were not her tools, and that she intended to govern with a different set.
This is the woman’s way. It is not a single way, but a multitude of ways, all rooted in the specific, the local, the observed. It is the way of the plumber who becomes a plasterer and then a politician. It is the way of the housewife who watches a cuckoo and writes “my village.” It is the way of the woman on the train who worries about oak trees and caterpillars. It is a way that is often dismissed as trivial, as unserious, as not the stuff of which history is made. But it is, in fact, the stuff of which life is made. And as Woolf and Ray and, in her own small way, Hannah Spencer remind us, it is a way of seeing and writing that the world ignores at its peril. The conventions of the “men of business” may build empires, but they do not capture the soul. For that, we need the rhythm of the swing, the fragmentary vision through the slatted window, and the courage to write “my village” and mean it.
Questions and Answers
Q1: What is the significance of Hannah Spencer’s victory speech in the context of this article?
A1: Hannah Spencer’s speech—”I’m a plumber… I also qualified as a plasterer… we do things differently here”—is presented as a modern, real-world echo of Virginia Woolf’s idea that the conventions and tools of the established (male-dominated) order are not the tools of women. It signifies a refusal to imitate traditional political molds and a claim to bring a different, practical, lived experience to governance.
Q2: How does Satyajit Ray’s film Charulata illustrate the difference between male and female creative traditions?
A2: In the film, Amal represents the male literary tradition: his writing is derivative, bookish, and comes from imitating other writers in the library. Charulata, confined to the domestic sphere, develops her art from her lived experience—sewing, gardening, observing. Her creative process, shown through the famous swing scene, is rooted in the rhythm of life, not in bookish imitation. Her final, pared-down phrase “amar gram” (my village) represents an authentic artistic voice, not reportage or sentimentality.
Q3: What does Virginia Woolf mean when she says “those tools aren’t our tools, and that business is not our business”?
A3: Woolf is arguing that the established literary conventions of her time, exemplified by writers like Arnold Bennett, are inadequate for capturing the complex, fragmented consciousness of characters like “Mrs. Brown.” These “tools” are “dead” for women writers who need to find new forms, new rhythms, and a new language to express their unique perspective and lived experience, which is not represented in the dominant male literary tradition.
Q4: What is the significance of Mrs. Brown’s question about the oak tree and caterpillars in Woolf’s essay?
A4: Mrs. Brown’s question—”Can you tell me if an oak-tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for two years in succession by caterpillars?”—is a perfect example of the kind of observation that is dismissed by the “man of business” (Mr. Smith) as trivial. For Woolf, it represents a different way of seeing and thinking, one rooted in patient attention to the natural world. It is the kind of “spasmodic” and “fragmentary” detail that, for her, contains the seeds of a new and vital literature.
Q5: What is the “woman’s way of seeing and writing” that the article ultimately champions?
A5: The article champions a way of seeing and writing that is not based on imitating established, male-dominated conventions. It is rooted in lived, often domestic, experience; in patient observation of the everyday; in the rhythm of life rather than linear narratives; and in the courage to find an authentic voice that speaks from one’s own specific location and community. It values the “spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary” as essential tools for capturing the truth of human existence.
