A Personal History of Womanhood

I have been in an existential limbo these past few months. It’s a universal phenomenon. As we enter our 20s we all must confront the terrifying reality that we are in fact now independent, autonomous people who can’t just passively live through other people's rules, expectations and values. 

As I was trying to parse through the cluttered dialogue of my internal monologue, I found myself focusing more on who I have become rather than who I am going to be. I came to the realization that I have become a woman. 

I’m not trying to be cheeky when I say I recognized I am a woman. I’ve lived my life existing as a woman, but now I realize how singularly pervasive that is. 

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” In her existentialist fashion, she believed that it was history that structured womanhood; no biological or psychological phenomena really can define what being a woman is. Beyond the totality of mankind's past, she believed it was a woman's personal history, namely her childhood, which constructed her femininity. 

In an ode to my 20th birthday falling during Women's History Month, I’m returning to my personal history as a means to reflect on the teenager I’m leaving behind.  

How does one unpack a personal history? Do we take a Freudian approach and psychologize our past? Or flip through photo albums and try to recognize yourself in them?  Or do we contextualize our self and psychology, and turn to literature. Of the infinite means through which I have been shaped, it has always profoundly impacted and shaped me.  

I’m not an authority on what womanhood is — I’m not sure if there actually is one, but I know it definitely would not be a sophomore in college who’s read a little Simone de Beauvoir. But, I think literature is a mechanism through which one becomes a woman — or at the very least, becomes what one understands to be a woman. Like all the art we consume, literature distorts femininity through one gaze or another. Women serve as plot devices; as means to an artistic end — delicate metaphors, intangible symbols. But we still absorb these portrayals as to what we think we should be, and it is naive to think otherwise. The books I read growing up have in many ways fundamentally structured what I value and who I aspired to become as a woman. 

Image courtesy: NPR

I’m reminded of the Hermoine Grangers and Annabeth Chases I read as a child. Girls who were witty, confident, clever, sharp and unquestionably more mature than their male counterparts. I was determined to embody their fierce spirit. It was characters like them that developed in me a disdain for shallowness and conformity to the hyper feminine ideals of girlhood.

As I grew older I began to encounter more romantic female characters. Jane Austen’s “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice” illustrated that women who were unforgivingly authentic to themselves would be respected. That those women were the ones deserving of true love. 

From Austen, I transitioned to one of the most influential writers of my teenage years — Lana del Ray. I distinctly remember sitting on the couch in middle school mesmerized by the “Ride” music video.

American anthems on older men, cocaine, love, tragedy, ecstasy — Lana was the cool girl who could be anything you wanted. “Born to Die”  and Lorde’s Pure Heroine album (both in their entirety) were the only things on my first Spotify playlist. There was a gritty yet delicate nature in Lana’s femininity. It felt unattainable and intoxicating. She experienced everything so passionately — she delivered herself sacrificially to love. I was obsessed with the tragic, tortured, beautiful romance of her musings. 

This year, my past readings of Marquez, Murakami, and Hemingway, while intensely rewarding, lacked the female voices I was craving. I wanted women written by women. 

I find it hard to describe what I find so particularly satisfying about Annie Ernaux’s novels. In "Happening” , a novel in which she recounts the time surrounding her illegal abortion in the 1960s she writes, “‘I had stopped being an ‘intellectual.’ I don’t know whether this feeling is widespread. It causes indescribable pain.’” In “Simple Passion,” she begins “From September last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man…” 

To describe Ernaux as raw or authentic would be misleading. She painstakingly recounts her own history without tarnishing it with flourishes that undermine her true experiences. Her writing is beautiful and faithful to the past. 

With Annie Ernaux and her quasi-predecessor Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar, “ Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot,” New Yorker short story “Cat Person” I was not inspired by the female protagonists. 

Unlike many of the books I’ve read in the past, I was unsettled by the image I saw of myself in these characters: self-destructive, disillusioned, hopeful, obsessive and reckless. Women who spent too much on clothes, wallowed in self-indulgent depressive moods and found incredible satisfaction in the bare-minimum validation from others. They were also intelligent, worldly, assertive and tough. In these characters, I saw not who I thought I should be, but who I am. 

Image courtesy: NY Mag

Writing this piece, I felt this pressure. If I was going to write about being a woman, I had to create something that was original and powerful otherwise it would undermine my credibility as a writer and perhaps even as a woman. 

Now that I’ve reached the end, I know that trying to write any piece that really authentically captured the female experience would be audacious and wholly foolish, at least on my own. There’s no discrete way of parameterizing what the female experience is. This is merely my narrative. 

I’m not rewriting my personal history to fit some new mold of who I want to be for this next decade. But I am reframing it, synthesizing years with history, reflecting not only on my own past, but on the women who shaped it.  I think there’s hope for me, and us, yet to find some intelligible meaningfulness in the chaotic unknown of our 20s. Rather than clinging to the ideas of who I wanted to be, I’ll honor who we are. I’m just reframing my narrative. 

Strike Out,

Writer: Naina Chauhan

Editor: Kate Corcoran

Gainesville