Rules of the Game

Lindos daughter Waverly Jong says that when she was six, her mother taught her the art of invisible
strength, a lesson that helped her to become a child chess prodigy. he then begins the story of how her
talent emerged! at "hristmas, one of the members of the Jongs church in "hinatown dressed as anta
"laus and handed out wrapped "hristmas gifts, the donations of members of another church. Waverly got a
multipac# box of Lifesavers, and one of her brothers got a secondhand chess set that was missing two
pieces. $y offering two of her Lifesavers to stand in for the missing pieces, Waverly convinced her brothers,
Winston and %incent, to let her play. &he winner could eat both candies. 'westruc# by what she deemed to
be a sort of hidden power within each piece, Waverly closely studied the dog(eared instruction boo#let and
borrowed chess strategy guides from the "hinatown library. he soon learned that the game hinged on
invisible strength in the form of secret traps and #een foresight. 'fter her brothers lost interest in the game,
Waverly began playing with Lau )o, an old man who played chess in the par#. *e taught her many new
strategies.
Waverly began to attract attention because of her young age, and she became a celebrity within an
+ranciscos "hinatown community. he played in tournaments, and by the age of nine she had become a
national champion, ,-. points away from grandmaster status. Lindo too# great pride in her daughters
talent, and although she gave her daughter preferential treatment, she also made use of Waverly to feed her
own self(pride. he would force Waverly to come to the mar#et with her, presenting her in all the shops. /ne
day, exasperated, Waverly yelled at her mother in the street, telling her that she was embarrassed by her
constant bragging. Waverly ran off, ignoring her mothers shouts0 when she returned later that night, Lindo
said that because Waverly had no concern for her family, the family would have no concern for her. Waverly
went into her room, lay down on the bed, and envisioned a chess game in which her mother was her
opponent. Lindos pieces were advancing across the board, pushing Waverlys pieces off0 Waverly felt so
dislodged that she had a feeling she would fly away0 she felt she had lost her anchor. Waverly ends her
story with the statement, 1 closed my eyes and pondered my next move.
A wall is Safer
A Wall Is Safer is the deconstruction of the belief that a woman is always happy behind
the safe walls. The protagonist Hema forgoes her lawyers profession and settles in a
remote village along with her husband who is an agricultural scientist. She has done it as
she has no other alternate other than that. The reason for her action is that she cannot
tolerate months of separation from her husband. Though she keeps on saying that she is at
peace with her life, she has the grief that she cannot continue with profession or take it
with her.
"I go to bed in a good mood, but I am surprised by a fierce surge of longing to be one of
those women who carry their work about with them a writer, a painter, a musician"
!"#"$.
She even has a hint of envy on looking her husbands %ob satisfaction. "I only know that I
bitterly envy &asant, when he comes home tired, satisfied and full of what he has been
doing" !"#"$. She is uneasy when her friend cross'e(amines her about her life and career.
)inally she goes to the e(tent of not willing to meet her friend for she threatens her
imagined peace. *hen Sushama declares that she may come there for another meeting
she doesnt look forward to it. She feels, "In some way, Sushama threatens the tenuous
peace Ive built around myself" !"#+$. It is not Sushama but her inner stigma that
threatens her. It is obvious from her ,uestion, "-ut suppose the dangers are inside. *hat
do you do then."
A Room of Ones Own
The narrator is disappointed at not having found an incontrovertible statement on why women are
poorer than men. She decides to investigate women in Elizabethan England, puzzled why there were
no women writers in that fertile literary period. She believes there is a deep connection between
living conditions and creative works. She reads a history book and finds that women had few rights
in the era, despite having strong personalities, especially in works of art. The narrator finds no
material about middle-class women in the history book, and a host of her questions remain
unanswered.
She is reminded of a bishops comment that no woman could equal the genius of Shakespeare, and
her thoughts turn to Shakespeare. She imagines what would have happened had Shakespeare had
an equally gifted sister named !udith. She outlines the possible course of Shakespeares life"
grammar school, marriage, work at a theater in #ondon, acting, meeting theater people, and so on.
$is sister, however, was not able to attend school, and her family discouraged her from studying on
her own. She was married against her will as a teenager and ran away to #ondon. The men at a
theater denied her the chance to work and learn the craft. %mpregnated by a theatrical man, she
committed suicide.
This is how the narrator believes such a female genius would have fared in Shakespeares time.
$owever, she agrees with the bishop that no women of the time would have had such genius, &'or
genius like Shakespeares is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people,& and women
back then fit into this category. (evertheless, some kind of genius must have e)isted among
women then, as it e)ists among the working class, although it never translated to paper. Even if a
woman surmounted various obstacles and wrote something, it would have been anonymous.
The narrator questions what state of mind is most amenable to creativity. She finds that creating a
work of art is e)traordinarily difficult* privacy and money are scarce, and the world is generally
indifferent to whether or not someone writes. 'or women in the past, the conditions were even
harsher. The privacy of a private room or vacations was a rarity. +oreover, the world was not only
indifferent to female writers, but actively opposed their creativity. ,ver time, the effect on a
budding female writer is very detrimental.
The narrator believes this male discouragement accords with the masculine desire to retain the
status of superiority. -nfortunately, genius is often the most susceptible to the opinions of others.
She believes the mind of the artist must be &incandescent& like Shakespeares, without any
obstacles. She argues that the reason we know so little about Shakespeares mind is because his
work filters out his personal &grudges and spites and antipathies.& $is absence of personal protest
makes his work &free and unimpeded.&
.nalysis"
#acking historical evidence, /oolf again uses her fictional powers in describing the plight of
Shakespeares sister. She first details all the factors that aided Shakespeares natural genius" his
early education* his freedom to leave his wife for #ondon* his ready employment in the theatrical
world* his ability to earn money for himself* his opportunities to e)plore other walks of life* his lack
of familial responsibility. !udith, conversely, is victimized by a number of socioeconomic factors"
lack of education* discouragement from reading and writing* absence of privacy* lack of
employment opportunities in the artistic world* the burden of children.
The narrator again cites the looking-glass relationship between men and women" men rely on
womens supposed inferiority to enlarge themselves. 0eyond the socioeconomic factors described
above, women writers have the additional obstacle of discouragement and disdain from their
patriarchal society.
.nd obstacles, the narrator concludes, are poison to a writers mind. She starts developing her
theory that for a writer to attain genius like Shakespeares, there must be no e)ternal obstacles, nor
can there be personal grudges within the work. ,nly then can genius be &incandescent,& yet another
word choice that equates brilliance with light.
The modern reader may find /oolfs theories classist* indeed, the statement &'or genius like
Shakespeares is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people& would be met with furor if
published nowadays. $owever, it is important to remember that /oolf believes that money and
personal independence foster freedom of thought, and that poverty and its attendant ills inhibit
such thought. +oreover, she admits that brilliance does emerge from the working class, albeit
rarely.
Still, /oolf is clearly at odds with any kind of &protest& literature, feeling that it dilutes the
&incandescent& brilliance of the writer. +any contemporary critics maintain that protest literature is
the strongest kind of art, the only art that can truly effect social change. %ndeed, much
contemporary feminist and minority literature theory emphasizes protest as a means to reclaim
voices historically drowned out by white males. /oolf will soon elaborate on her controversial
theory.
In Search of Our Mothers Garden
.lice /alker1s essay, %n Search of ,ur +other1s 2arden, talks about her search of the .frican .merican
women1s suppressed talent, of the artistic skills and talents that they lost because of slavery and a forced
way of life. /alker builds up her arguments from historical events as well as the collective e)periences of
.frican .mericans, including her own. She uses these e)periences to back up her arguments formed from
recollections of various .frican .merican characters and events. /alker points out that a great part of her
mother1s and grandmothers1 lives have been suppressed because of their sad, dark pasts. 0ut all of these
are not lost because somehow, these are manifested in even the smallest things that they do, and that
they were also able to pass it down to the very people that they loved. ,ur search of our mother1s garden
may end back to ourselves.
/alker builds up her argument by mentioning the e)periences of other people in the essay. ,ne of them
is !ean Toomer, a poet in the early 3456s. $e is a man who observed that 0lack women are unique
because they possessed intense spirituality in them, even though their bodies endure every aspect of
punishment in every single day of their lives. They were in the strictest sense Saints 7 crazy, pitiful saints.
/alker points out that without a doubt, our mothers and grandmothers belong to this type of people. 0y
building up on the observations of Toomer, she was somehow able to show how hard it was to be a
mother or a grandmother or even 8ust a woman at that time, one reason perhaps is that they are black.
The mothers and grandmothers at that time endured all of this without any hope that tomorrow will be
different, be better. 0ecause of this, they were not able to fully e)press themselves. They were held back
by their society.
.nother black character that she used to build her argument is 9hillis /heatley, a 0lack slave girl with a
precarious health. 9hillis is a poet and a writer at her own right, but unfortunately, she wasn1t able to do
much with it because she was a slave. She didn1t have anything for herself, worse, she didn1t even own
herself. $er futile attempts for self e)pression would be washed up by forced labor and pregnancies. She
lost her health, and eventually her life without fully e)pressing herself through her gift for poetry.
.lice /alker used the story of 9hillis to establish the understanding that indeed, .frican .merican women
at that time were not allowed or didn1t have the lu)ury of time to e)ercise their gifts, to hone their talents
and abilities, and use them to fully e)press themselves. 0y doing so, /alker proves that our mothers and
grandmothers lived a bo)ed life back then, with no way to channel to them emotions and thoughts other
than hard labor and forced servitude. She pointed out that we wouldn1t know if anyone of them would1ve
bloomed to be poets, singers, actresses, because they never really had the chance to know what they can
do.
0y building up her argument using these two accounts, she is also presenting very strong evidence to her
claim. These accounts were personal e)periences of real .frican .merican people, and these are not 8ust
isolated cases. These are shared e)periences not 8ust by these two but by all of their people. /alker can
confidently say that there is a lot of 9hillis /heatley in those times, perhaps including her mother and
grandmothers. This is concrete evidence because it is not fictional, it is not imaginary, or something
conceived out of /alker1s creativity. Slavery, forced pregnancies, poverty, and artistic suppression were
the realities during the time of our grandmothers. (o one can deny this, and no one can deny the
e)istence of 9hillis or the accounts of !ean Toomer.
:onsidering .lice /alker1s authority in her arguments, she could be considered as an e)pert, a reliable
source of information on the topic. 'irst off, she is an .frican .merican woman, who had her fair share of
poverty in her childhood. She was born and raised by hardworking parents, who really had to work day
and night to provide for their family. .lso, she witnesses first hand that even though her mother may not
be a poet or a novelist* she was an artist in the truest sense. $er artistic side is manifested in her gardens
and the beautiful flowers that she grows. .lice /alker witnessed all of this, e)perienced first hand what it
was like to be poor and seemingly talentless.
The accounts that .lice /alker used to prove her points and back up her arguments were .frican
.merican history that she was all too familiar with. %t may have been shared to her by her families, or
simply a collective knowledge passed down from one generation to another. She is also well-educated, a
wide reader, and an artist. She often cites ;irginia /oolf1s . <oom of ,ne1s ,wn, relating a white
woman1s plight to a black woman1s hardships. She emphasizes that even though she recognizes /oolf1s
point about society1s unfair treatment to women of her time, /alker still believes that black women
suffered the most =/alker>. There is simply nothing that could compare to the artistic suppression that
her mother and grandmothers e)perienced.
%n this essay, she is appealing to a general audience, with no specific race or ethnicity. % think this essay
was written to highlight the .frican .merican women of her mother and grandmother1s time, who were
unable to e)press their talents and hone it to its full potential. This essay is written to inform anyone and
everyone reading it about their stories, and of her discovery of her mother1s garden. She was glad to
know that it is possible for .frican .merican women to e)press themselves even unknowingly, that it is up
to us to discover these ?gardens.@ She is appealing to the readers in general that even though some
people like our mothers and grandmothers seem talentless or artistically inferior, it doesn1t mean that
they really lack the talent. %t 8ust means that were not looking hard enough to find it.
.lice /alker1s method of using personal e)perience and historical accounts allow her to truthfully see and
say what has really happened. She doesn1t have to make up hypothetical events because she already has
a basis for her arguments. !ean Toomer1s recollections and 9hillis /heatley1s e)periences are enough
proof of her argument. %f some people would disagree with what she1s saying, she can always go back to
their e)periences, to how 9hillis suffered without fully using her gift, or what Toomer saw in the streets in
the early Twenties. 0ut because of this, % think /alker is somehow limited to the sad and pitiful stories of
the past. /ell, in reality, most of the stories of .frican .mericans were really sad and pitiful, but still,
/alker failed to mention of any successful artist who rose from the ranks of slaves to write her own story.
%t is either this kind of story really didn1t e)ist at that time, or /alker 8ust didn1t mention it, since it wasn1t
the focus of her essay.
.lice /alker concluded her essay by saying that 9hillis /heatley1s mother was also an artist, and that the
achievements of their daughters were in some way brought about by their mothers. $er conclusion states
that the mother is somehow responsible in every achievement of their daughter. .ny artistic output by a
person is also a product of their mother. %ndeed, their children are their best creations, their very own
wonderful gardens. This conclusion is related to her method because it goes back to how 9hillis /heatley1s
mother was somehow responsible for her daughter1s artistic sense, and that beyond the poverty and the
hardships that our mothers and grandmothers e)perienced during their times, they were still able to
artistically e)press themselves through their children, their very own wonderful gardens
The Swing of desire
wing of 2esire, the play tells the story of women who are ambitious and desire to use their talents and potential to the
fullest and thereby achieve a name. /f the two women,3aansa4played by $airavi5and her sister(in(law4played by
6eshma5, one is a dancer and the other a traditional woman respectively. 1t is 3aansa who finally lives her dream inspite
of all the obstacles in her path, whereas her sister(in(law, has nothing left to call her own. 1t is the spar# of desire which
changes 3aansa7s life from day(to(day drudgery into something that gives her fulfilment, that forms the crux of the wing
of 2esire, written by 3amta 8 agar.