"Into a Horizon I Will Not Recognize": Female Identity and Transitional Space Aboard Nair's Ladies Coupé

Abstract

The experience of railway travel "is necessary for the birth... of unknown landscapes and the strange fables of our private stories."-Michel de CerteauBeginning with its epigraph, Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe is a novel about female identity and female space: "Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn. But we fight for our rights, we will not let anybody take our breath away from us, and we resist all attempts to prevent us from using our wills." This invocation from Rebecca West, in a passage which also recalls Woolfs A Room of One's Own, evokes the demand for an opening, for the creation of both literal and figurai spaces for women within a patriarchal system that has long confined them. It recalls those women persecuted for existing outside of marriage and rejecting motherhood, embraces those women who exist in marginal or potentially dangerous spaces, and exhorts all women to set and pursue their own agendas and to seize the right to live a life of their own choosing. The novel that follows under this banner is similarly about awakenings, about navigating the spaces of and between "in" and "out," about transformative change and self-discovery, and, also, about existing limitations.Space, far from natural or neutral, is deeply ideological, and the division of space into public and private realms is a gendered phenomenon. Since the 1960s, historians have used the concept of separate spheres to interpret the lives of women (Richter 6). Some scholars have defined the public/private divide as an oppressive set of cultural norms that confine women to the home and limit their destinies (Malcolm 255). While men are afforded the freedom of public affairs, women are marginalized, confined to domesticity, to an ideology of oppression that is experienced both as a spatial limitation and, in limiting the roles open to women, a way of denying them autonomy and self-fulfillment. Other scholars have interpreted the private sphere in a more positive light, viewing it as a woman's domain, a nurturing alternative to the public world of men, and a catalyst for gender consciousness and the emergence of feminism (Richter 6). And yet, public spaces remain spaces of power governed largely by patriarchal structures and institutions, in which women have very little visibility and influence (Malcolm 256).However, this public/private binary overlooks, as Doreen Massey has argued, a third important area of space: the transitional space. As obscured zones, transitional spaces deserve more attention: neither fully public nor fully private, they break a binary structure which, much like patriarchy, can be experienced as overly confining and determining. If, within this tenuous, as-yet-unformed model of space, "dwellers produce their own mutable spaces" (Malcolm 256), it may well be within these transitional spaces that women can enact change, transformation, and transgression.The railway, the industrial force which proves largely significant in Nair's novel, is just such a transitional space, as the cars within its closed system work as obscured and progressive zones that disrupt binaristic considerations of gender and femininity. In Ladies Coupe, the train functions in a number of paradoxical and opposing ways, just as the narratives comprising it bespeak not only liberation and change but the limitations circumscribing those hopes. While Nair's novel delves into the expectations for Indian women and relates their search for strength and independence, it details complex characters who are caught in a net of relationships partly of their own making and partly made by the precepts of society. While some critics have asserted that these women become 'Tilled with the incantatory power to see a new destination and to bum up the tracks" (Sinha 151), the reality seems to suggest that while the train journey and space of the coupe afford the women passengers with the opportunity to be critical of patriarchal structures, they remain very much embedded within that same system. …