B etween a Rock and a H ard

P lace? Interstitial Female

S ubjectivity in between
C olonialism and Patriarchy :
W OMEN IN PRAMOEDYA A NANTA
Toer ' s B uru Tetralogy

Razif Bahari

Pramoedya's checkered literary career has made reception to his works inconstant
and inconsistent. Incarcerated by the colonial power he sought to displace and then
banned by the very government he helped to bring about, Pramoedya's position is
controversial, to say the least. This "outside/insider" status1 problematizes any
reading of his works. As a controversial figure situated on the margins of discourse in
several senses, traversing the intersections of historical junctures, notions of selfhood,
and subjectifying practices, Pramoedya offers a unique perspective on how female
subjectivity can be articulated differently than the socially dominant discourses of
Indonesia would have it. In patriarchal colonial culture, female identity has always
been "doubly colonized"; a woman finds herself rendered subject to a "higher" power
once because she is a woman and again by virtue of her status as "other" (read: native).

1 For interesting discussions of Pramoedya's "outsider" position, see A. H. Johns, "Pramoedya Ananta
Toer: The Writer as Outsider—An Indonesian Example," in Cultural Options and the Role o f Tradition: A
Collection o f Essays on Modern Indonesian and Malaysian Literature (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 1972), pp. 96-108; and Bakri Siregar, "Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Orang Luar dan Orang Dalam,"
Bintang Timur, February 23, 1964.

Indonesia 83 (April 2007)

42 Razif Bahari

Pramoedya's writing is an attempt to create the necessary conditions for the

dismantling of this double marginalization and the fabrication of a new space wherein
woman's specificity can be narrated: in between colonialism and patriarchy.
Acting as a synthesis of much of Pramoedya's previous writing on women2 and
literature, the Burn tetralogy blurs the boundaries between mapping the process of
"coming into subjectivity" and its very occurrence as an "event." In other words, the
tetralogy both chronicles the process of recovery and becomes that process itself, the
necessary and difficult articulation of the previously silenced female voice. Painfully,
agonizingly, Pramoedya's female characters and their narrative voices make and
unmake words and worlds. Female protagonists in the tetralogy like Nyai Ontosoroh
and Mei struggle for selfhood, stumble, fall, and start again, until the possibility of
articulation is no longer in question and the narrative of women's experience begins to
show itself.

Narrative "Dispatterns"
The explosion of pain and anguish that so defines Pramoedya's work is intensely
personal,3 signaling the eruption of his own passion as he struggles to write Indonesian
women and their role during the fight for independence into existence. It becomes
obvious, as soon as one reads other works by Pramoedya—his essays, short stories,
and the interviews he has given—that he believes fervently in the important role
women played in the Indonesian nationalist struggle. While many writers have
explored the impact of colonialism on the discursive, constructed, or imagined nature
of national identities, Pramoedya has gone further by exposing how patriarchy and
colonialism exacerbated gender oppression and showing that men and women were
subjected to it differently. Through his description of the coming into being of national
consciousness in Indonesia, we begin to see that women were not only objectified
collectively through the figure of the "child-bearer," portrayed as nurturers of the
cultural and family values of the nation (as gendered assumptions of women would
have us believe), but that they were active participants in the struggle for
independence.

2 See Pramoedya's novellas, Kelmrga Gerilya (1949; repr., Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara, 1980); Midah —
Si Manis Bergigi Mas (Bukittinggi: Nusantara, 1955); Cadis Pantai (Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1987); his
articles, "Hamidah," in the "Mengenangkan Kembali Bangkitnja Bangsa Indonesia" series in Bintang
Timur, June 8, 1962; "Hikayat Njai Dasima," Bintang Timur, December 13, 1964; and "Sekali Lagi tentang
Njai Dasima," Bintang Timur, December 27,1964; and series of essays in Panggil Aku Kartini Sadja (Jakarta:
Nusantara, 1962).
3 In an interview with Chris GoGwilt, Pramoedya, asked to comment about the feminist "awakenings" in
the tetralogy, replied: "In my view, women deliver everything. In the back of my mind is always my
mother—my mother as teacher, educator, and bearer of ideas." See Chris GoGwilt, "Pramoedya's Fiction
and History: An Interview with Indonesian Novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer," in Pramoedya Ananta Toer
70 Tahun: Essays to Honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer's 70th Year, ed. Bob Herring (Stein; Yayasan Kabar
Seberang, 1995), pp. 12-13. In a footnote on Pramoedya's reference to his mother, GoGwilt notes that "[t]he
second volume of Pramoedya's Buru memoirs, made up of letters written to family members, includes an
extended meditation on the image of his mother. Entitled, "De Revolutie, moeder van alle deugden" [The
Revolution, mother of all virtues], the letter develops a moving and striking analogy between the memory
and image of his mother and the ideals of the Indonesian revolution." Ibid., p. 25n.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 43

What is of particular interest here is the portrayal of women in Pramoedya's works,

which breaks away from traditional stereotypes of female subordination and instead
provides a model of autonomous womanhood. Barbara Hatley offers an analysis of
Pramoedya's female characters along these lines:
[Pramoedya's] female characterization ... confronts dominant gender ideology.
Where women figured in mainstream literary works embody notions of cultural
continuity and conservative social values, Pramudya[sic] ... depict[s] female
characters of a contrasting type with opposing political suggestion. These women
arguably recall age-old images of independent, assertive female power, but here
with implications which are positive, even heroic, rather than threatening. Rather
than marginalising them from the national domain, exclusion of such women
from traditional structures of political control instead frees them to represent
possibilities of a new, transformed Indonesian polity. The stereotypical
association of women with nature, nurture, and "tradition," as well as their
exclusion from the domain of politics and nation, is boldly challenged."4
In the tetralogy, Pramoedya's portrayal of some of his female characters reveals the
ideologies of misogyny or patriarchy that operated in the hierarchical arrangement of
both colonial and Javanese societies in the East Indies at the turn of the twentieth
century—a moment in which female subjectivity is affirmed, yet shows itself to be
inscribed with the marks of patriarchal discriminations and divisions which are at
work in the novel's representations. Here we should also consider the fact that the
textual constructions of "woman" and "femininity" are being mediated at all times by
a man (whether Pramoedya, as the author of the tetralogy, or Minke—the narrator in
the first three novels—or even Pangemanann, the narrator of the last novel); this adds a
further layer to the contestations surrounding the representation of gender in the
tetralogy.
The tetralogy's movement, along with the formal manipulation of narrative lines,
or "story lines" in "he said /she said" form,5 within the text depict and enact the
emergence of previously silenced female voices in Indonesian literature and history.
The Buru tetralogy, made up primarily of Minke's, the male protagonist's, narration in
the first three novels, is interspersed with accounts (in the form of retelling, letters, and
court testimony) by female characters—interconnected fragments of narration within
narrations. This narrative pattern, or "dispattern," reflects the structure of the entire
tetralogy. By interjecting these female accounts, Pramoedya builds a material history of
women's experiences in colonial Indonesia, a history that is literally "in pieces." Even
more prominent in the tetralogy is the story of Nyai Ontosoroh, the native concubine
whose dignity and indomitable will defy subjection both by Dutch colonialism and
traditional Javanese androcentricism. This "story" is also constructed fitfully, almost as
a matriarchic source that gives birth to Minke's story of nationalist awakening. The
reader pieces together the life of Nyai Ontosoroh, in particular, and native women, in
general, after coming across a multitude of references to her and to the oppressive
colonial and patriarchal systems women are subjected to; these references are strewn

4 Barbara Hatley, "Nation, 'Tradition/ and Constructions of the Feminine in Modern Indonesian
Literature," in Imagining Indonesia: Cultural Politics and Political Culture, ed. Jim Schiller and Barbara
Martin-Schiller (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Centre for International Studies, 1997), pp. 103-4.
5 Jamie James, "The Indonesiad," The New Yorker, May 27,1996.
44 Razif Bahari

throughout the tetralogy and narrated in both the first and third person. These female
accounts, these multiple "story lines" merge, intersect, and move in and out of the
pages of the tetralogy.
The tetralogy, at the level of narrative structure, sets in place several female
narrative subjects whose identities and stories interact and intersect. In chapter five of
the first novel, Bumi Manusia,6 for example, Annelies, the half-Dutch-half-Javanese
(Indo)7 daughter of Nyai Ontosoroh, relates to Minke her mother's own account of her
woeful and wretched life as a nyai8 or concubine before she picks up from where her
mother's account left off with her version of how the arrival of her Dutch stepbrother,
Maurits Mellema, destroyed the former "happiness" of Nyai Ontosoroh's family.
Interwoven into Minke's narration of the chain of events leading to the trial of Nyai
Ontosoroh's son, Robert Mellema, and the mysterious Fatso, over the murder of
Herman Mellema, Robert's father, is Maiko's (Maiko is a Japanese prostitute)
testimony in court. In the second novel, Anak Semua Bangsa, Minke's narration is
corroborated by the story of Surati, Nyai Ontosoroh's niece, retold in Minke's narrative
voice, which describes the economic hardship experienced by Nyai Ontosoroh's

6 All references to the Burn tetralogy are to the Wira Karya, Kuala Lumpur editions: Bumi Manusia (This
Earth of Mankind) (3rd ed., 1990); Anak Semua Bangsa (Child of All Nations) (2nd ed., 1989); Jejak Langkah
(Footsteps) (1986); and Rumah Kaca (House of Glass) (2nd ed., 1990). Quotes from the tetralogy in this
essay are my English translation of the original Bahasa Indonesia version and will be marked by their
abbreviated Bahasa Indonesia titles as BM, ASB, JL, and RK respectively.
7 The children of a liaison between a nyai and her hum—referred to as "Indo" (mixed-breed or peranakan)
or, often denigratingly, as anak haram (illegitimate children or bastards)—were at the mercy of the father.
Only the father had the authority to grant or withhold the gift of citizenship to his Indo child/ren under
the new Mixed Marriage Regulation promulgated in 1898. He could consign them to an orphanage when
he left the country. Even after the death of the father, the mother had no rights of guardianship. The status
of the child would then become the prerogative of the Court of Justice. If the children were not recognized,
then they had few prospects and could be abandoned, along with their mother, at any time. Children were
a mother's responsibility, as Tineke Hellwig notes in Adjustment and Discontent: Representations o f Women in
the Dutch East Indies (Windsor, Ontario: Netherlands Press, 1994), p. 33.
8 The term nyai in the context of association with foreign men is usually translated into English as
"concubine" or "native mistress." Commonly, the word was applied to a woman, usually a prihumi
(native), who lived with a foreigner (prang asing) as if she were his wife, but outside a recognized
marriage. Despite the provision of the gelijkstelling or "equalizing" policy (which regulates the granting of
full rights of Dutch citizenship to an inlander), the nyais were veritably personae non gratae, without any
legal rights to protect themselves or their children. A nyai was subject to the whims of her male partner.
She was often treated as a "property" and often referred to as isteri/bini simpanan or bini piaraan (kept
woman). Her treatment at the hands of her tuan (literally, "Mr.," or "master," usually used for foreigners)
also denoted her status as property: a nyai could be evicted from the tuan's home at any time for any
reason; or she could be treated as chattel, abused and discarded when no longer of use. Although the
word nyai is usually understood to mean "native mistress," this is not the only meaning. The term nyai,
and its equivalent terms, were used in a wide variety of household situations. Apart from their role as
sexual partners or mistresses (usually coerced) for which nyais are best known, they were usually required
to fulfill many other duties: for instance, as housekeepers, cooks, laundry maids, language teachers,
financial consultants, and mothers. The term nyai then has a multiplicity of meanings and connotations. It
cannot solely be equated with "concubine," "native mistress," or "housekeeper." In part this is reflected in
the names used for unmarried women who were perceived to be in illicit relationships. They were referred
to as nyai and gundik (mistress, housekeeper, concubine) as well as jalang, sundal, and gendak (prostitute).
Furthermore, there were pribumi women living in diverse relationships with foreigners—Dutch, Indo,
Arabian, European, and Chinese men—and there were peranakan women in relationships with peranakan
men. There were also a number of Dutch terms used to denote nyai: huishoudster (housekeeper), bijzit
(concubine), menagere (housekeeper), and meid (maidservant, girl, wench). All of these equivalents, though
euphemistic, were taken to mean nyai. For an insightful summary, see Hellwig, Adjustment and Discontent,
pp. 31-37.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 45

brother, Sastro Kassier, and his family in the rural village of Tulangan under the forced
cultivation, or rodi, system of the colonial Dutch regime. Missives and notes from the
de la Croix sisters, Miriam and Sarah, also intermittently intersect with the main
narration. The narration of the third novel, Jejak Langkah, is interspersed sporadically
with letters from Nyai Ontosoroh, who now lives in self-exile in France with the
French artist, Jean Marais, as well as letters from Maysoroh, Jean's daughter. In Rumah
Kaca, twenty-one female villagers, while under interrogation, relate their stories of
rape, abduction, and brutalization at the hands of European plantation owners to
Pangemanann in a way that makes his "heart shrivel up" (RK, 43). While women are
hardly present in the action of the fourth novel, they are imaginatively present, as
evidenced by Pangemanann's anxiety over the influence women's writing could have
on the burgeoning nationalist sentiment. Their metaphoric significance in this narrative
cannot be overestimated. I am referring here, of course, to Raden Adjeng Kartini and
Siti Soendari,9 whose writings are alluded to quite frequently by Pangemanann in his
narrative throughout the course of the novel.
These fractured female accounts function as textual representations of women's
"broken" and "ravaged" nature, as Nyai Ontosoroh puts it. She states: "Consider me
your egg that has fallen from the egg racks. Broken." (BM, 82); "I had no soul anymore,
like a wayang puppet in the hands of the puppet-master ..." (BM, 79); "... like a
wooden doll ... " (BM, 78). As the novels present it, the telling of women's stories
cannot be coherent or linear in any traditional sense, for there is no coherent or linear
story to tell. This story has to be created from ground zero, and the process is painful,
splintered, and ruptured. Narrative voices of the female characters in the tetralogy and
the complicit narrative structure present a patchwork of reflections, experiences, and
histories that signal the preliminary breaking forth of woman into language. It is true
that the feminine "I" frequently emerges in the narrative of the tetralogy, but its
referents are many and various. Paradoxically, therefore, far from representing a
unitary and coherent subject, the inscription of the feminine "I" in the discourse
produces an enunciative plurality. Despite the reiteration of the "I," it is not one voice
that speaks in the text and still less one particular subject; it is a polyphony of feminine
voices that can be heard in these individual collective forms. This enunciative plurality
(which never totally eradicates singularity) calls into question the myths of the unitary
feminine subject and of a homogeneous female collective voice. It is as if the tetralogy
is multiplying "differences" by indexing them to the changing forms of the feminine
"I": from the gloriously divine but childlike and innocent "Creole beauty" (BM, 201)
Annelies, to the "beauty that wasn't empty" "with different origins" (JL, 70) that is Ang
San Mei, Minke's Chinese second wife; from the "lioness without strength" (ASB, 185),
Djumilah, the wife of Sastro Kassier, who despite her frequent vituperative tirades is
helpless to safeguard her daughter from being sold to the Dutch manager of the sugar
mill in Tulangan (Frits Homerus Vlikkenbaaij, alias Plikemboh [Ugly Penis]), to
Djumilah's daughter, Surati, who contracts smallpox voluntarily as a way to commit

9 Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879-1904), a native princess from Jepara who became the first Western-educated
native woman in twentieth-century East Indies. A feminist and educator, she wrote extensively to support
the emancipation of native women in the East Indies. On her role in generating a new nationalism and her
contribution in promoting popular education for Native children, girls as well as boys, see Pramoedya,
Panggil Aku Kartini Sadja, pp. 62-65.
46 Razif Bahari

suicide and thus escape becoming Plikemboh's mistress;10 from Rientje de Roo,11 the
alluring high-class prostitute who tempts Pangemanann's fancy in Rumah Kaca, to
Princess Kasiruta, Minke's fiercely loyal third wife who shoots Robert Suurhof in
defence of her husband's life.
Pramoedya's depiction of the incoherent female "non-subject" as she exists prior to
the act of "writing" herself recalls feminist paradigms that use notions of madness or
hysteria to describe the condition of women in uncontested patriarchal systems.12
Unlike feminist theorists who go further and recognize spaces conceived as outside
"reason," or outside the "real," as the locus of legitimate opposition, Nyai Ontosoroh's
narrative voice insists, although tentatively at first, on her presence in the text and in
the world. She ends the first section of the tetralogy with this manifesto:
Yes, Child, Nyo, we must fight back, we must resist ... We need not be ashamed
if we are defeated. We must know why ... The main reason is that we don't have
the courage. And more generally still, we haven't learnt anything. All their lives
the Natives have suffered what we are now suffering. No one raises his or her
voice—dumb like the river stones and mountains, even if cut up and made into
no matter what. What a roar there would be if they all spoke out as we will now
speak out. Perhaps even the sky itself would be shattered because of the din.
(BM, 330)
Coming at the end of one of the most inspiring sections of the first novel, this statement
can be read as an affirmation of the desire not to be silenced. Whereas so much of the
preceding imagery has evoked silence, surrender (Nyai Ontosoroh's mother, we are
told, could only cry and sob in a corner of the kitchen, "silent in a thousand tongues"
[BM, 74] when Nyai's father decided to sell her to Herman Mellema as his concubine),
immobility, and entrapment, here the speaking voice begins to talk of movement, of
approaching boundaries with words, of speaking out so that "the sky itself would be
shattered because of the din" (BM, 330). This affirmation of presence, like the multiple
female "story lines" and accounts, moves in and out of the text. Its contorted path,
which leads the female presence in these novels from a condition as voiceless object to
speaking subject, is also mirrored in the formal structure of the tetralogy.

Angels and Monsters

Beginning with the narrative representations of women in the first novel, Bumi
Manusia, we can identify Annelies and Nyai Ontosoroh as the two main loci on which
the text focuses its construction of "women" and "femininity." The image of Annelies
as an "angel," "beautiful," and "arresting" (BM, 34), and as a "child-like maiden" (BM,

10 Pramoedya "borrows" this smallpox episode in Tulangan from Tjerita Nji Paina (published in Batavia in
1900), by H. Kommer, a Dutch journalist and story writer. This story is included in Pramoedya's anthology
of "pre-Indonesian" literature, Tempo Doeloe (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1982).
11 A character Pramoedya modeled after the historical figure of Fientje de Feniks, an Indo prostitute who,
after she spurned the advances of one of her Dutch patrons, was murdered by the jealous man's hired
killer in 1912 in Batavia. For a study see Tineke Hellwig, "A Double Murder in Batavia: Representations of
Gender and Race in the Indies," Review o f Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 35,2 (2001): 1-32.
12 See for example, Elaine Showalter, "Feminism and Hysteria: The Daughter's Disease," in The Female
Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago Press, 1987), pp. 145-64.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 47

44), and of Nyai Ontosoroh as a "sorceress" (BM, 42) whose "black magic" grips
people's hearts and minds (BM, 61), conforms most closely to the archetypal dual
images of women as either "angels" or "monsters." In her influential analysis of the
question "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?," the anthropologist Sherry
Ortner notes that in every society "the psychic mode associated with women seems to
stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating."
Attempting to account for this "symbolic ambiguity," Ortner explains "both the
subversive feminine symbols (witches, evil eye, menstrual pollution, castrating
mothers) and the feminine symbols of transcendence (mother goddesses, merciful
dispensers of salvation, female symbols of justice)" by pointing out that women "can
appear from certain points of view to stand both under and over (but really simply
outside of) the sphere of culture's hegemony."13That is, precisely because a woman is
denied cultural autonomy, or the subjectivity, she comes to embody just those
extremes of mysterious and intransigent "otherness" that patriarchal culture confronts
with worship, fear, love, or loathing. Because the male construction of "woman" in the
tetralogy reveals the very anxieties of a patriarchy in transformation, and because this
male representation of "woman" has for so long been radically qualified by the angel-
and monster-imagery in male-authored texts, I will attempt here a brief analysis of the
fundamental extremes of angel and monster archetypes of women as they are
engendered in the Buru tetralogy. Although the tetralogy seeks to impose its own
hegemonic definition of "masculinity" and "femininity," neither goes uncontested. The
very representations of male emasculation and female empowerment constitute
slippages that can expose and question the constructions themselves. As a work full of
overlaps and ruptures where discourses intersect, the Buru tetralogy stands as an
intriguing example of the shifting ideological tensions to be found in Pramoedya's
representation of women.
The ideal woman that male "authors" in the tetralogy dream of generating is
ineluctably almost always an angel: "[h]er cheeks, her lips, her forehead, her nose, even
her ears—all are as if formed in wax, shaped according to all men's dreams" (BM, ,
303). At the same time, this angelic figure of woman has an alter-ego in the pernicious
images of the witch, siren, ghost, or whore. Throughout history, women in Javanese
narratives have been represented both as angels and monsters, a condition that can
seem quite varied, even rich, because so many masks, reflecting such an elaborate
typology, have been invented for them. Where and how did this ambiguous image
originate? In Javanese myths, legends, and folklore, mankind's great teacher of purity
was Kunti, the selfless and devoted mother of the Five Pandawas, the archetypal
Indonesian mythic heroes (of Indie origin)—Bima, Arjuna, Yudistira, and the twins,
Nakula and Sadewa. She is the symbol of motherhood, a mother goddess who
perfectly fits the female role Ortner defines as "merciful dispenser of salvation."14This
eternal type of female purity is represented also in a pantheon of other Javanese
legendary and mythic icons in the figures of Dayang Sumbi in the Legend of
Tangkuban Prahu (Indonesia's answer to the Oedipus story); Roro Jonggrang in the
legend of the Temple of Prambanan; Nawangwulan, the fairy nymph, in the legend of

13 Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle
Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 86.
14 Ibid.
48 Razif Bahari

Jakatarub; Sita, the beautiful and faithful wife of Prince Rama of the Ramayana epic;
and, of course, the famous Nyi Roro Kidul, the goddess of the Southern Ocean. In these
legends and myths, the female goddess (or dewi kayangan, literally "ethereal maiden"),
invested with supernatural beauty, power, and immortality, embodies the role of
interpreter or intermediary between divine and mortal men. This female intercessor at
the symbolic level operates as an agent of a greater Javanese cosmology; through her,
the inaccessible is symbolically portrayed and the inexpressible is symbolically made
manifest. The eternal feminine (that is, the eternal principle symbolized by woman)
draws men to other-worldly spheres; in Javanese legends and myths, Woman can drag
men down into ignobility and perdition or exalt him to great glory and triumph. The
ideal of contemplative purity is always feminine, while the ideal of significant action is
masculine. An "angel" woman's essential virtue, in other words, is that her virtue
makes her man "great." (This is obviously not true of the witch or monster woman.)
According to the laws of this cultural grammar, a good "woman" can serve only as a
signifier of "man," her very ability to mean predicated on her functioning as a
subordinate term. Once again, therefore, it is just because "angel" women are defined
as wholly passive, and completely void of generative power, that they become
numinous to male authors. For in the metaphysical emptiness, their "purity" signifies
that they are self-less, with all the moral and psychological implications that word
suggests.
Minke's description of Annelies conveys the conventionally masculine image of the
angel figure:
Down those stairs descended the angel Annelies, in a batik kain, a laced
kabaya. Her sanggul was a bit too high, revealing her long white neck. Her neck,
arms, ears, and bosom were decorated with a pattern of green-white emeralds,
pearls and diamonds ...
I was entranced. She must have been more beautiful and arresting than Jaka
Tarub's angel in the legends of Babad Tanah Jawi. She was grinning all over as if
embarrassed ... And I knew she had dressed up for me and me alone. (BM, 34)
Annelies "feels permanently dependent" (BM, 198) and has a mentality "of a ten-year-
old child" (BM, 231). She gives advice and consolation to others, listens, smiles,
sympathizes; her unselfish grace, gentleness, simplicity, and great beauty make her fit
to be the "adornment of [Minke's] life" (BM, 194).15 In short, Annelies has no story
except a sort of anti-story of selfless innocence based on the Javanese feudalistic notion
that
A good wife serves her husband, takes care of the children and makes the family
happy irrespective, and ahead, of her own feelings; contributes and maintains the
success of her husband's career/reputation by accentuating his positive
characters while understating the negatives.16
There is a long and crowded road—from G. Francis's Tjerita Njai Dasima (1896) and
Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana's Layar Terkembang (1936), to Ajip Rosidi's Roro Mendut:
Sebuah Tjerita Klasika l)jawa (1968) and Umar Kayam's "Bawuk" (1975), to Y. B.

15 The Indonesian word "menyuntingkan” here means both to put flowers in the hair or behind the ear as
ornaments, as well as figuratively to take as a wife.
16 "fistri apik nyangga bokong, nyangga karma, mikul dhuwur, mendhem jero."
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 49

Mangunwijaya's Roro Mendut (1983) and Durga Umayi (1994)—of Indonesian works of
fiction that, despite having female protagonists who are assertive and independent
minded, play a part in the confirmation of those "eternal feminine" virtues. The virtues
of modesty, gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence, chastity,
affability, selflessness are all modes of mannerliness that contribute to woman's angelic
innocence.
The arts of pleasing men, in other words, are not only the characteristics of angelic,
mythic prototypes; in more worldly terms, they are the proper acts of a lady:17 "It was
not proper for a well-mannered girl to lift up her eyes and face towards a male guest
who was not known well to the family. Especially if he was white" (BM, 75). Even the
well-educated and "modern" Moluccan Princess van Kasiruta resigns herself to a
domestic role, reaffirming the traditional belief that "women began their life with the
wedding bed" and the opinion of the Governors-General of the Indies that "women
could be silenced by bringing them to the wedding-bed" (JL, 375). "I only have one
husband," declares Princess van Kasiruta. "My husband's work involves taking care of
many things. My main work is to look after my husband ... [My] husband is [my] star,
[my] moon, [my] sun. Without him, nothing will exist, including myself' (JL, 436, 454).
Similarly, Ang San Mei regrets her own perceived failing as a wife: "Since a child I
have been told to be correct, to behave correctly ... I've been very unfair to you these
past months, not like a good Chinese should be to her husband" (JL, 137, 141). Thus
marriage has been seen as a primary site for women's subordination, as many
feminists have noted.18 As the ultimate of exchange commodities, women are highly

17 The Javanese has strict precepts governing female morals and manners encapsulated in what is called
the Kodrat Wanita (Woman's Nature), which characterizes the proper women as "lemah lembut [soft and
weak], don't speak out loudly, and specifically not in their own interests, don't push their own affairs
against those of husbands and fathers, but are instead docile wives and dutiful daughters." Saskia
Wieringa, "The Perfumed Nightmare: Indonesian Women's Organizations after 1950," in Pramoedya
Ananta Toer 70 Tahun, ed. Bob Hering, p. 277. These precepts are epitomized in the ideology of the New
Order family welfare programme, the PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga), which promotes the
Panca Dharma Wanita (Five Duties of Women), which are: "to be a loyal companion to her husband, to
procreate for the nation, to educate and guide her children, to regulate the household, and lastly, to be a
useful member of society." Wieringa, "The Perfumed Nightmare," p. 277. For an analysis of this Javanese
code, Kodrat Wanita, as it applies to Sri, the central figure in Pramoedya's short story, "Dia Yang
Menyerah," from his collection of short stories, Tjerita dari Blora (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1952), see Hatley
"Constructions of the Feminine," pp. 90-93.
18 One thinks of the eponymous juvenile female protagonist in Pramoedya's short story, "Inem," who is
forced into marriage at the age of eight. The story, a critique of the traditional practice of child marriage, is
narrated by Gus Muk, who follows the life of his neighbour, Inem, the daughter of a breeder of fighting
cocks and a larcenist. Inem is forced by her parents into marrying Markaban, a seventeen-year-old son of a
well-to-do man who often beats her. After a year, Inem leaves her husband and returns to her parents. Her
tragedy is not unrelieved, however. Escape from an abusive forced marriage not only brings pecuniary
penalty but shame, stigmatization, and abasement, as the narrator ruefully reflects: "And thereafter, the
nine-year-old divorcee—since she was nothing but a burden to her family— could be beaten by anyone
who wanted to: her mother, her brothers, her uncle, her neighbours, her aunts. Yet Inem never came to our
house." Pramoedya Ananta Toer, "Inem," in Contemporary Literature o f Asia, ed. Arthur Biddle et al.
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 148. Another of Pramoedya's earlier work that looks at
the intransigent nature of prevailing patriarchal attitudes towards women is Gadis Pantai (The Girl from
the Coast) (first appeared in 1962; reprinted by Hasta Mitra in 1987), which looks at the custom followed
by aristocratic Javanese men who took "practice wives" to fulfill their personal and sexual needs until they
decided to marry a woman of their own class. The novel is modeled after the lifestory of Pramoedya's own
maternal grandmother, Satima, who suffered the fate of being a "practice wife" to the head of local
religious affairs, a Javanese man working for the colonial Dutch administration. See Pramoedya, "What
They Did With Their Lives," TIME Asia, Special Issue on Asian Heroes, April 29, 2002, pp. 46-47. The
50 Razif Bahari

valued for providing a family lineage, and the centrality of marriage to a woman's self­
conception is a common theme through traditional discourses on women. What is
interesting here is that the standards by which Mei and Princess Kasiruta measure
themselves as ideal "woman" and "wife"19 remain so deeply informed by traditional
codes that seek to contain women. Enshrined within her home, the East Indies pure,
contemplative angel-woman becomes her husband's holy refuge from the blood and
sweat that inevitably accompanies his life of significant action, as well as a living
memento of the otherness of the divine.
In the severity of her selflessness, as well as in the extremity of her subordination
within patriarchal and feudalistic cultural praxis, the representative angel-women in
the Burn tetralogy, Mei and Annelies, become not just mementos of otherness but
actually memento mori, producing both a conventionalized iconography and a stylized
hagiography of ladylike fragility and delicate beauty doomed to ephemeral existence.
Annelies dies in chapter two of Anak Semua Bangsa, shortly after being extradited to the
Netherlands, where her fragile health quickly deteriorates after she is forcibly
separated from her natural mother, Nyai Ontosoroh, and her husband, Minke, and
placed under the legal custody of her vindictive stepmother, Mrs. Amelia Mellema-
Hammers.20 The Chinese Mei, whose selfless devotion to the Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan,21

narrative tells of Bendoro, the son of a minor aristocrat who has taken a girl from a fishing village as his
"practice wife." As his "practice wife," she is bestowed with the honorific title "Mas Nganten," bedecked
with all the finery befitting a woman of his class, and even instructed by a private tutor in the etiquette
expected of a lady of the nobility. In exchange, she is expected to pay absolute obeisance to her master,
Bendoro. Despite the prestige she enjoys in return for the ignominy she suffers, she remains his property.
And readers are reminded poignantly of this when Bendoro discards his "practice wife" after she has
given birth to a baby girl. Bendoro immediately and unceremoniously takes custody of this child, and the
baby's mother is sent packing back to her parents in disgrace. There she decides that, instead of living out
the rest of her life in humiliation in her own village, she will eke out a living on her own, away from her
birthplace, in effect choosing autonomous womanhood over subordination. See also Tineke Hellwig, In the
Shadow o f Change: Images o f Women in Indonesian Literature, Centers for South and Southeast Asia Studies,
International and Area Studies, Monograph no. 35 (Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley,
1994), pp. 69-95, for a juxtaposition of Bumi Manusia and Cadis Pantai that lays the basis for an analysis of
patriarchal power over women in the two novels.
19 It is interesting to note the etymological affiliation between the Indonesian word for "wife," isteri, and
the Sanskrit upastri, meaning subordinate, concubine. The customary appellation for "wife" in traditional
Javanese culture, as Hatley, "Constructions of the Feminine," p. 97, points out, is kanca wingking (literally
"background companion").
20 For want of a better term, I use the term "stepmother" here though it does not capture the exact nature
of the relationship between Annelies and Mrs. Mellema-Hammers, who is the legal Dutch wife of Mellema
in the Netherlands. In Java, Mellema took a nyai and fathered Annelies out of wedlock.
21 The Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan (Chinese Assembly), which was founded on March 17,1900, in Batavia, was
said to be the precursor and inspiration for the first modern nationalist political organization in Indonesia,
the Boedi Oetomo, which was founded on May 20, 1908. The Chinese community during this period was
riven by a schism between the totok (characterized by its pure Chinese culture) and the peranakan
(composed of Chinese already partly assimilated into Indonesian society and characterized by its cross
Chinese-Javanese culture) communities. In 1901, the fofok-dominated Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan set up the
Tiong Hoa Hak Tong (Chinese schools), whose aim was two-fold: to revive peranakan interest in, and to
maintain and propagate, pure Chinese culture among the peranakan Chinese; and to redress the neglect
hitherto shown by the Dutch colonial government towards the education of the local Chinese community.
These schools proved to be very popular, and by 1911 the Tiong Hoa Hak Tong had developed into a
nationwide Chinese educational movement in Indonesia, which challenged Dutch hegemony in education
by providing an alternative school system in the East Indies. To counter the spread of incipient nationalist
sentiments bred by the movement and the threat to Dutch control over the peranakan Chinese community,
the colonial administration established the first Dutch primary school for the Chinese, the Hollandsch-
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 51

an organization dedicated to furthering the cause of her people and country, takes a
toll on her health, finally succumbs to hepatitis and dies "without leaving behind a
word" (JL, 145). Together these two pale, frail, and consumptive heroines constitute
complementary halves of the emblematic "angel-woman." It is the surrender of self—
of personal comfort, personal desires, or both—that is the beautiful angel-woman's key
act, while it is precisely this sacrifice that dooms her to death and elevates her
imaginatively to heaven. For to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. In
noting the unidimensionality in Annelies's character representation, for example, we
can see that, in general, a life that has no story, like the life of Annelies Mellema, is
really a life of death, a death-in-life. The ideal of "contemplative purity" evokes,
finally, both heaven and the grave. To return to our earlier patriarchal archetypes of
woman as "angel" and "monster," there is a sense in which woman as "angel" has the
pernicious potential to become a "ghost, fiend and witch." Certainly, imprisoned in the
double-walled tomb of both sexism and racism, a woman might long demonically for
escape. In addition, the fact that the angel woman, as the providentially selfless
mother, manipulates and mediates through her maternal power her domestic/mystical
sphere in order to ensure the well-being of those entrusted to her care reveals that she
can manipulate, she can scheme, she can plot—stories as well as strategies.
Nyai Ontosoroh, for instance, proves to be considerably more powerful and
influential than at first she seems. As if symbolizing the indomitable earthliness that no
woman, however angelic, could entirely renounce, Nyai Ontosoroh shows herself to be
powerful through her psychological hold over Annelies (BM, 244) and her
overwhelming personality, which casts "giant" (ASB, 68) shadows over men and
"dwarfs" them (ASB, 72). As a character, she resists being immured in the prisonhouse
of subordination and subjugation that both a feudalistic Javanese society and a
patriarchal colonial system would impose on her. Viewed from either a feudal or
patriarchal perspective, her ability to resist suggests monstrous female sexual energies.
Repression disfigures the angel-woman and makes her monstrous, makes her a
furious, uncontrollable avenger filled with destructive force: "She has real strength of
character, reinforced by the hardness of someone with revenge still in their heart" (BM,
199). To Dr. Martinet, in his assessment of Annelies's psychological condition, which
he shares with Minke, Nyai's assertive personality and influence over her daughter
make her seem both terrifyingly physical and fiercely supernatural:
Without being conscious of it, Nyai has moulded Annelies into her second
personality. That child will never show any initiative if far from her mother.
Initiative, in the form of commands that Annelies cannot refuse, will always be
something that comes from her mother ... The mother's personality is
overwhelming, she knows so much: more than enough for her life's needs in this
jungle of ignorance which is the Indies. People are afraid to face her, afraid that
they will be unable to move once under her influence. (BM, 244-45)

Chineesch School (HCS), in Batavia in 1908, with branches in other major cities established in later years.
See Leo Suryadinata, "Indonesian Chinese Education: Past and Present," Indonesia 14 (1972): 49-71.
52 Razif Bahari

Motherhood Reconceived
Motherhood as a site of origin needs to be problematized here. Feminist theories of
nationalism have pointed out that the nation is essentially feminine in construction.
The nation is narrated on the body of women who collectively become an emotionally
laden symbol of the nation, self, the inner, spiritual world, and home. One's
motherland, or ibu pertiwi (literally "mother-earth"), as it comes to be called in
Indonesian,22 becomes invested with the kind of erotic attraction felt towards women
by men, especially as regards the figure of the mother. The country comes to be
represented and appropriated in words that have strong romantic and erotic, as well as
maternal, connotations. The desire for this land/woman/pertiwi is constructed as a
masculine desire: the desire to possess it, see it, admire it, love it, protect it, and die
fighting for it against rivals. The imagery of nation-as-mother and motherland suggests
common mythic origins: like the land (which gives shelter and "bears" offspring), she
is eternal, patient, essential. There seems to be a primordial sense of connection
between earth (pertiwi) and mother; both are perceived as being in need of protection;
both are loved and admired; both are respected; there is a willingness to die for the
honor of each. Woman, by providing that originating moment which gives
"civilization" a sense of roots and beginnings—the moment of birth—figures as a site
where the pristine, pure childhood of man could be glimpsed. The figure of the mother
is used to provide a site for the fantasy of origins.
If motherhood is so closely associated with the concept of nation, we see how the
symbolic appropriation of woman as mother into the narrative of the nation-state
involves an immense emotional investment. Women's primary entry point into the
nation-state is as mothers, as producers of strong, brave sons ready to fight to death for
the sacred land. It has been argued that the family plays such a central role in the
nation's public imaginings that motherhood could be viewed as a national service. The
idea of motherhood as a national service was explicitly present in New Order
Indonesia's instructions to women's organizations, which were expected to support
moral motherhood for the benefit of the family, nation, and State.23 The New Order
family was the basic unit of society, as well as the pillar of the State, and it was within
the family that the nation could reproduce itself, its sons and future mothers. It was the
family, therefore, that exercised the greatest control over female sexuality in the name
of the purity of the nation. To the extent that the nation was considered to be the family
writ large, women's sexuality can find legitimate expression only in national service
through the family.
The irony is that, while the trope of mother-as-nation is so powerful in nationalist
thought, actual mothers and women are unequal, lesser citizens with fewer rights in
the nation's power structure. Since the desire for women gets transferred onto the
nation, and women's bodies come to signify the nation, communal, regional, and
national conflicts, as well as battles for empire and dynasties, come to be played out on
women's bodies. "In days of yore," Minke's mother reminds her son, "countries would
wage all-out wars to win a maiden like my daughter-in-law, mbedah praja, mboyong
putri, was our ancestors proverb, victory over kingdoms, possession of its princesses" (BM,

22 The other Indonesian phrase to describe "motherland" is tanah tumpah darah (literally "land where blood
is spilled"), which is consanguineous with the metaphor of birth.
23 Wieringa, "The Perfumed Nightmare," pp. 275-83.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 53

303). Women's bodies thus become arenas of violent struggle. Women are humiliated,
tortured, brutally raped, and murdered as part of the process by which the sense of
being a nation is created and reinforced.
The image of Minke's mother, the quintessential aristocratic Javanese wife, as the
ever-faithful and hard-working wife and mother, conforms most closely to the
traditional image of the virtuous wife and good mother. The extent to which Minke's
mother (whose name significantly is not revealed to us, as if she is signified only by her
role as "mother," her identity elided, erased) conforms to this model of behavior is
clearly portrayed by her serendipitous appearances throughout the first three novels of
the tetralogy. It is her role to fuss over Minke's brides each time he is about to get
married, and, more importantly, to dispense pearls of wisdom about Javanese codes of
conduct and heritage or to relate some Javanese legends or folklore to remind Minke of
his noble lineage. In the still feudal atmosphere of Javanese society at the turn of the
twentieth century, the importance of a good upbringing for those who would struggle
to save the nation effectively linked the role of women as mothers to the fate of the
Nation. The sacrificial mother performs the age-old traditional function of producing
and reproducing for the patriarchal family or Nation. In this role, women act as the
mediators. Through their efforts, children grow into citizens and come to be valued for
their contribution to the Nation.
The family, often mobilized as a metonym for the nation in nationalist thinking,
becomes a site laden with meaning having to do with the ways women's roles are
imagined in the nation. The Indonesian Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga (Family
Welfare Development) program, for example, firmly delineated women's place in
Indonesia as the home.24 Nationalism, as Parker and co-authors observe, "depends for
its representational efficacy on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful,
daughterly, or maternal."25 Although the domestic setting is extremely common in
twentieth-century Indonesian fiction, in Pramoedya's tetralogy the domestic setting
has the added significance of being the sphere in which women's social role in the
nation is defined. Definitions of "womanhood" and of women's place within the
nation form an integral part of nationalism in the tetralogy. Minke's mother conforms
to her culture's ideals of femininity, showing more interest in domestic order, playing
her role as propagator of traditional cultural values and supportive, subordinate wife
and mother, which is how nationalism idealizes the role of women. Pramoedya's
portrayal of Minke's mother exposes the misogyny inherent in nationalist thinking and
exaggerates the conventional ideal of Indonesian womanhood as passive. It serves to
expose the gender politics behind a national discourse that stereotypes the female,
discourse that has served two distinct ideological purposes: as applied by feudal
Javanese society, it has helped to confine Javanese women in a straitjacket of purity
and passivity; and as applied by Dutch cultural imperialists, it imprisoned the whole
race in debilitating cliches.
The Burn tetralogy presents an alternative discourse, in which the search for
identity that the female subject negotiates outlines her own subjectivity in a patriarchal
system that is based on dominative and gendered power relations, where the only

24 Hatley, "Constructions of the Feminine," p. 98.

25 Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities (New
York, NY: Routledge, 1992), p. 6.
54 Razif Bahari

exercisers of power are those accorded status as Subject—that is, male, non-native
(read: white) owners of capital. My reading of the tetralogy focuses on the signs that
the text marks out as indicative of female subjectivity, and, more crucially, focuses on
how its narrative structure places the narrating subject in positions where its desired
sovereignty and autonomy interpellate, and are created in conjunction and opposition
to, several axes of domination: race (Miriam Frischboten nee de la
Croix/Anneliese/Nyai Ontosoroh/), class (Princess Kasiruta/Nyai
Ontosoroh/Djumilah, Surati, and Minem), and gender (Pangemanann/Siti Soendari).
Racial and sexual categories provide a fantasized site, sometimes of origin and at other
times of difference, against which the emerging narrative subject is created and placed.

White, But Not Quite Right

If the imperialist formula that figures the East Indies as paradisial "mother"-land
mythologizes the colony as female, which is made to "bear fruit" for the colonizer, the
same discourse these sexualized tropes imply also makes "colonizer" synonymous
with "man." It is interesting to note, too, that while the metaphor for country, nation,
and land is the figure of the mother, Pangemanann, the narrator of the final novel,
House of Glass, makes an analogy linking "colony" with "wife:"
A country without colonies was like a widower who had to do all the housework
as well as make a living by himself. The colony was like the wife who went out to
work, who was submissive and faithful and obedient. Even though it was
contrary to Christian morality ... the more wives a colonial power had, the more
prosperous he would be, and the more desirable. (RK, 65)
The question arises, then, whether a European woman's responses to the enterprise
of empire in the East Indies might not potentially be as different from a European
man's as would her relation to the maternal/feminine figure(s) in her psychosexual
history. The intricacies of the Dutch de la Croix sisters' ambivalence toward
colonialism and the political, moral, and social implications of their ineluctable
complicity with it, and the import of their doubled positioning—as at once subject and
object within the imperialist frame of reference—require a comment. Despite their
affiliations with the colonialist project, which implicitly granted them "freedom" to
"speak" on the oppression of the Natives (in their many correspondences with Minke
in the first two novels), as women they too are among the colonized. The definitions of
woman that have evolved throughout Western cultural history are strikingly similar to
the definitions of colonized people shaped by colonialism, both groups having been
construed as naturally secondary, properly subordinate, and acceptable only when
kept "in their places" for the sake of (white, masculine) "civilization."
The dogma of culture versus nature, "us" versus "them," that structures the logic
and ideologies of imperialism also structures the logic and ideologies of gender, which
subordinate woman in the name of the father just as colonialist enterprises have sought
to subordinate the colonized in the name of civilization—a construct commonly
represented as the peculiar property of the white man. Both symbolic orders operate
within an economy of difference based on a subject/object dichotomy, whereby
colonized peoples are regarded as inferior, insensate, or subhuman instruments of the
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 55

colonizers, and women regarded as ciphers who, merely because they belong to the
female sex, do not "exist" outside their relation to men. The case of Miriam and Sarah
de la Croix is a good case in point. The de la Croix sisters, daughters of the Assistant
Resident of Bojonegoro, Herbert de la Croix, are portrayed as ardent supporters of
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje's "Association Theory"26:
Association means direct cooperation, based on European ways, between
European officials and educated natives. Those of you who have advanced
would be invited to join together with us in governing the Indies. So the
responsibility would no longer be the burden of the white race alone ... The
bupatis could cooperate directly with the white government. (BM, 140)
During their first encounter with Minke, the garrulous and rather belligerent sisters
mocked, teased, and tested him on what he has been taught in school by his Dutch
teacher, Magda Peters. They engaged in an animated argument with him on the
knowledge he has obtained from his European education about his own country, while
at the same time extolling Dutch tutelage in the education of the Natives in the East
Indies and expressing their belief in the altruistic intentions of the Association Theory.
Echoing Hurgronje, Sarah and Miriam declare that the "one and only road" (BM, 187)
for the native is to be taken under the patronage of Dutch "philanthropists," who make
it their business to educate and thereby elevate his/her untutored self into
respectability, so that the educated native can share (albeit not quite on an equal
footing) the tasks of the "white" civilizing mission with their Dutch overlords. This is
the project that the de la Croix sisters intend to undertake with Minke, whom they
regard as their own personal "experiment" and "guinea pig" (BM, 143-44). What is lost
on the two sisters is their complicity in the reification of the colonizer's uncritical
assumptions about race and cross-racial understanding.
Although Sarah and Miriam have persuasively defended the altruism of those who
advocate the Association Theory, their description of the methodology employed by its
original proponent is revealing:
The important thing is that he [Hurgronje] has undertaken a valuable experiment
with three Native youths. The purpose: to find out if Natives are able truly to
understand and bring to life within themselves European learning and science.
The three students are going to a European school. He interviews them every
week to try to find out if there is any change in their inner character and whether
their scientific knowledge and learning from school is only a thin, dry, easily

26 C. S. Hurgronje (1857-1936) was a professor of theology and Arabic studies at Leiden University. He
lived among the Indonesian community in Mecca and published a study of Islam in 1889. Subsequently,
he became advisor to the Dutch government (1889-1907) and the architect of its colonial "Ethical Policy"
and developed what he termed his "Association Theory." One key step for instituting the ideals of the
Ethical Policy was to provide opportunities to Indonesian pupils to profit from modern Western education
so they could develop as persons, and in turn develop their land and peoples. This meant that Western
education and science should be related as much as possible to the life and culture of the Indonesians.
(This was called the "policy of association," especially by Snouck Hurgronje.) But what was really
intended was Westernization, even a kind of spiritual annexation (geestelijke annexatie) of native society.
Hurgronje believed that, in order to deflect and harness the nascent but growing anti-Dutch sentiments
among the native populace, education should be used as the vehicle for co-opting Native leadership. On a
critical re-evaluation of Hurgronje's role and contribution to Dutch colonial policy, see A. S. Kami,
Mohammad Deden Ridwan, and M. Nur Ichwan, "Snouck Hurgronje: Dipuji Setinggi Wali, Dikutuk
Serendah Iblis," Gatra 23 (2003): 47-52.
56 Razif Bahari

shattered coating on the surface, or something that has really taken root. (BM,
139-40)
Most immediately disturbing in the experiment described here is the way the native
youths are summoned to stand under the scrutinizing gaze of the white scholar. They
are appraised to determine whether they deserve the approval of the arbiter of culture,
the white man. The gaze of Hurgronje, despite his benevolence and no matter how well-
intentioned, enforces a hierarchical relationship between the gazer and the object of his
scrutiny. The prejudice involved in this effort to recognize some equality between the
colonizer and the colonized—identifying the racial Other with one's own ego-ideal—
while in many ways more humane, is finally no more effective in creating real
understanding between the Subject and Other than the prejudice that grounds the
colonizer's sense of superiority. The native is considered "a leader, a pioneer, an
example to [his] people" (BM, 143) only as (and precisely because) he or she embraces
white values of progress, modernity, science, and learning (an imitative race27). So the
native, whose "psychology hasn't yet developed as far as that of the European: his
wiser considerations [are] ... still too easily pushed aside by lustful passions" (BM, 216-
7), can yet succeed "one day in the future ... [to] sit together, as an equal with
Europeans, in advancing [his] people and [his] country" (BM, 187). "... that will be the
face of Java in the future, a Java which has absorbed itself into [European] civilization,
no longer shriveling up like a worm struck by the sun" (BM, 185). Minke, in particular,
whom the Dutch Assistant Resident considers to be "a different type of Javanese, of a
different ilk, a pioneer and innovator at one and the same time" (BM, 185), has
succeeded in imitating his white mentors, copying and conforming to their standards.
Only as such does he become acceptable, his status as a member of "this nation of
worms" (BM, 185) held in abeyance so long as he maintains his obedience to Dutch
liberal middle-class cultural and societal norms.
But just as Minke—who realizes that he "was the guinea pig caught by [the de la
Croix sisters] along the side of the road" (BM, 140)—is made to stand under the gaze of
the de la Croix sisters ("Sarah de la Croix had stopped laughing. She put on a serious
face, and observed me as if I was some mysterious animal" [BM, 137]), the two Dutch
girls are also being appraised, albeit to a vastly different end, to determine if they meet
the approval of the arbiters of their own (paternalistic) culture. "European dilemmas
concerning sexuality and its control," Sander Gilman notes, were "transferred into the
need to control the sexuality of the Other, the Other as sexualized female."28 There
were profound "structural connections between the treatment of women and of non-

27 Though Dutch liberals like the followers of Hurgronje sought to eliminate categories of racial
difference—to show that Natives could be like Europeans—what they failed to allow (the Native's
prerogative to evaluate the world and draw conclusions that differ from those of the white middle class)
effectively prevents them from establishing any tolerance or understanding of difference at any level. This
is, ironically, lost on Herbert de la Croix, the Assistant Resident, who exhorts: "Minke, if you maintain
your present attitude, I mean your European attitude, not a slavish attitude like most Javanese, perhaps
one day you will be an important person. You can become a leader, a pioneer, an example to your race"
(BM, 143; my emphasis).
28 Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry 12,1 (1985): 237.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 57

Europeans in the language, experience, and imaginations of western men"29 in the

nineteenth century: both groups were characterized as childlike, dependent, and in
need of active male guidance. The attitude of the de la Croix sisters towards Dutch
male cultural and social authority is undeniably ambiguous. Arguably feminist in
outlook, as these sisters are inimitably trenchant and stirring in their criticisms against
the inherent evils of colonial rule, and unwavering in their sympathy for the Natives,
they are, however, cast, foremost and ineluctably, as "daughters"—both literally and
figuratively. The symbolic father who signals most fully the sisters' equivocal status as
young women engaged in basically frivolous—unnecessary—occupations is the
patriarch as "social parent": this is the liberal father, epitomized in this case by their
own father, Herbert de la Croix, who ordains his daughters to attack injustice, celebrate
the spirit of Reform in nineteenth-century Dutch colonial policy in the East Indies, and
justify Western cultural superiority. Shaped by their privileged white middle-class
background, which is characterized by benign paternalism, Sarah and Miriam fawn
over father-figures: their early letters from Holland to Minke are memorable, as much
for their firm, lucid, uncompromising style, which conveys their strong feelings about
the colonial situation in the East Indies, as the refrains of "Papa said" that punctuate
"their" arguments in the letter. Their admiration of Hurgronje, the "brilliant scholar"
(BM, 139), whose experiment they try to "ape" (BM, 140), is almost devotional.
"Paternalism" is a suggestive word in this context. It directs us to consider the
complexities of the European woman's involvement in a colonialist project that she
simultaneously participated in, benefited from, despised, and unsuccessfully sought to
subvert. As an "eccentric" (also read: ex-centric), liminal figure at once inside and
outside the colonialist frame of reference, she, like the Natives as they were construed
by colonialism, constitutes a site of potential disorder, a profound disruption of those
categories of existence which the notion of "an inside" and "an outside" upholds. In
the tetralogy, Dutch patriarchal society considers instability of this sort to be a problem
that requires a remedy. Though it has no doubt about the capabilities of women, it
subscribes to the prevalent ideology of gender, which severely limits the public role of
women.30 The assertiveness of women, as exhibited by the "subversive," liberal,
progressive female European characters like Magda Peters (Minke's teacher of Dutch
language and literature at the HBS school) and the de la Croix sisters, as well as the
"real" characters in the novels, such as Marie van Zeggelen,31 though often deemed
necessary, is to be taken as a sign of a destabilized situation that needs to be rectified.
Indeed, it can hardly have been otherwise, for a situation in which there is no suitable
man to take charge is inherently unstable, within the ideological context from which
Dutch patriarchal society operates. The success of a white colonial woman's exercise of
power in such a situation can thus be gauged by her return to a traditional role, often
involving marriage ("condemn[ed] to the matrimonial bedroom, to be silenced" [JL,

29 Joanna de Groot/"Sex' and 'Race': The Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth
Century," in Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies o f Gender in the Nineteenth Century, ed. S.
Mendus and J. Rendall (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 91.
30 Miriam remonstrates ruefully: "One day, in the future, we will go home to the Netherlands. I will go
into politics, Minke. It's a pity though that the Netherlands still doesn't allow a woman to sit in the Lower
House" (BM, 188).
31 Marie van Zeggelen (1870-1957), a Dutch writer who wrote many historical novels about the Dutch East
Indies. Sympathetic to the Natives' struggle for freedom, she wrote a biography of Kartini as well as a
trilogy of novels about Aceh in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
58 Razif Bahari

162]), once the crisis that has summoned her to a position of authority has passed or
has been resolved by her.
Attacking the iniquities of colonial policy in the East Indies, saluting the spirit of
reform, and greeting scientific and technological change with sanguine forecasts of
improvements for humanity all round, the female Dutch characters in the tetralogy do,
indeed, enact dutiful, daughterly work for their political fathers. This filial usefulness,
however, becomes a threat and destabilizing force the moment they stray into the male
sphere of public affairs and make conspicuous success of it. There needs to be some
force that directs them back into their proper place, at least according to patriarchy's
logic. For all their idealism, energy, and capabilities, they are treated like a set of
ignorant and wayward children in need of a man's guidance, a dependent state that
prevents them from achieving their full potential, as the text makes clear. And this is
what they get: by the third novel, Jejak Langkah, Miriam Frischboten nee de la Croix—
who has returned together with her sister and father to the Netherlands in the first
novel—has married a Dutch lawyer, a thirty-eight year old widower, her once youthful
idealism about Hurgronje's Association Theory all but dissipated: "That's all in the
past now...all that talk about the Theory of Association, about gamelan, it was all
garbage, it was all mixed-up nonsense" (/L, 225). Sarah's spirited missives to Minke
from the Netherlands too have long ceased, and we learn later that she has married a
Canadian and emigrated to Canada to live with her husband. Magda Peters, on the
other hand, has been banished from the East Indies for her radical and critical views on
Dutch colonial policy in the East Indies, by the end of the first novel. There is thus a
nervous unease in the tetralogy around gender roles among members of the colonial
community, both an awareness of the mechanisms by which they are sustained and
also an unwillingness to examine too closely how those mechanisms were essential not
only to the maintenance of middle-class respectability, but also of racial identity, as
well as how the ideology of the separate spheres was imbricated with other areas of
colonial social life.
Similarly, along the interstices of race and class, colonial attitudes toward women
are differentiated as they interpellate these categories, and although the patriarchal
colonial construct of "womanhood" serves to objectify all women, whether Pures,
Indos, or Natives, the Native woman is inevitably most fully affected by the negative
aspects of the construct. For the "totok" (read: "pure" or full-blooded Dutch) woman,
womanhood functions as a positive objectification—a stereotype that, hypothetically at
least, she could achieve and profit from.32 Colonial phallocentric cultural economy may
have extracted a heavy psychological toll on the Dutch woman in the East Indies,
encouraging her to repress her sexuality, yet it compensated her in ways that allowed
the white mevrouw (Dutch for "Madam") to live her contradictory role in comparative
comfort. As Elsbeth Locher-Scholten points out, this objectified gender role "merged
seamlessly" with the "social roles and sense of identity" of the Dutch woman.33 She

32 I mean this term "positive objectification" only as a conceptual handle. Of course no objectification is
good, but it is important to be able to differentiate here in order to understand what was at stake for
different groups of women.
33 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, "So Close and Yet So Far: The Ambivalence of Dutch Colonial Rhetoric on
Javanese Servants in Indonesia, 1900-1942," in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in
French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 133.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 59

could at least experience womanhood as protection, and could at best partake of the
material benefits of the status she reflects for her husband. If her chastity is ultimately a
commodity, the product of her sexuality serves the positive good of society that
simultaneously objectified and exalted her. Her reproductive role is "glorified," and
her children, as Frances Gouda notes, "[are] heirs to the economic, social and political
interests in the maintenance of the colonial system":34
"Hendrik," said Mir[iam], "here is your child, the child you have been
longing for."
"As white as cotton, Meneer!" added the midwife. "Congratulations,
Meneer, congratulations, Mevrouw. No, Meneer, don't squeeze his nose like that,
his bones aren't strong yet. A true Roman nose. No, not really, more a classical
Greek." QL, 360)
The idea of "womanhood" for the Dutch woman, however, is more complex than
an analysis of her domestic role within nineteenth-century colonial phallocentric order
in the East Indies would suggest. As the drama of paternity in the above extract
exposes, imperialism is fundamentally masculine in its construction and instrumental
in creating and reinforcing notions of gender roles and national culture. It seeks to
exercise control of women, the family, sexuality, the home, and reproduction as part of
its formulation of national identity. The women are bodies to be policed and confined
since female sexuality threatens to undermine the nation's eugenic purity, just as it
threatens to disrupt the family's integrity. Dependent on the myth that nationality can
be pure, this subjectifying practice casts women as the territory upon which the men
reproduce that pure nation and as the ground that can be sullied by foreign
penetration. The women's position on the periphery of the nation—since according to
the logic of an androcentric symbolic order they can never be fully active citizens, even
in their highly symbolic roles as domestic caretakers and mothers—makes them
dangerous to a regime grounded in fictions that idealize racial purity precisely because
it makes their sexual purity central to the race's purity.
However, the assertion, defence, and definition of eugenic purity through the
exercise of paternal control—both on the level of the family and as "fathers" of the
nation—are proven to elicit evidence of masculine insufficiency, as Miriam's attempt to
get herself pregnant reveals:
"My husband wants to have children, but he has already given up all hope.
He no longer believes that he will ever have any children. Twice he has offered to
divorce me ... You must know, Minke, it's not only he who suffers, but me even
more so ... I don't believe in dukuns or herbal medicines, Minke. And that's why I
have come to you. Forgive me!"
"Mir!"
"Give me what my husband cannot give me. Give me your seed!" (JL, 310-
311)
More is at stake here as the father of Miriam's newborn son turns out to be none other
than Minke, her Native friend whose relationship she reestablished when she and her

34 Frances Gouda, "Teaching Indonesian Girls in Java and Bali, 1900-1942: Dutch Progressives, The
Infatuation with 'Oriental' Refinement, and 'Western' Ideas About Proper Womanhood," Women's History
Review 4,1 (1995): 42.
60 Razif Bahari

husband, Hendrik, returned to the East Indies. Confiding in Minke one night about her
husband's impotency, Miriam entreats him to impregnate her as her husband longs to
have children. Despite Minke's refusal to acquiesce to her request, she eventually gets
her wish and becomes pregnant with Minke's child. Minke's impregnation of Miriam
represents his penetration of the colonial territory and his sullying of Dutch racial
purity. As Jean Franco says in her examination of gender and Mexican nationalism,
The problem of national identity was ... presented primarily as a problem of male
identity ... In national allegories, women became the territory over which the
quest for (male) national identity passed, or, at best ... the space of loss and of all
that lies outside the male games of rivalry and revenge.35
Franco describes here the phenomenon in which the woman's body—and specifically
her reproductive capabilities—becomes the very site of nationalist territorial dispute.
For colonial society in the East Indies, the child's paternity is the only issue, and
Miriam plays no part in assigning nationality to the child, except that she exists as a
conduit that the patriarchal order must control. Yet the child is a hybrid of Javanese
and Dutch ethnicity and in itself constitutes a threat to the designation of race as
oppositional. Miriam exemplifies the threat of the "sexualized woman" that the
inadequately policed female body represents to colonialists. Minke has not only
penetrated the racial boundary between definitions of "Pures" and "Indos" but he has
also impregnated one of the daughters of the Dutch nation: a threat both to Hendrik's
masculine authority and to patriarchal Dutch colonial society.
Miriam reassures her unknowing, cuckolded husband of his patriarchal claim over
the newborn child by saying, "Here is your child, the child you have been longing for,"
thus denying Minke access to paternal dominance (JL, 360; my emphasis). As if to
reinforce this, the Dutch midwife remarks that the baby's complexion is "[a]s white as
cotton," asserting Dutch paternal authority over the child, an assertion to which
Miriam assents silently, without objection. For paradoxically, "legitimacy" itself
depends on the mother's verbal guarantee: the necessary paternal affirmation—"this is
my son"—is a leap of faith across an unbridgeable gap in time and knowledge, an act
of interpretation hinged on woman's word.36 The mother of the "illegitimate" child, its
paternity suspect, exposes the instability and finitude of masculine authority by
representing a subversive maternal lineage and implicitly calls into question the
symbolic order maintained in the Name-of-the-Father. Thus woman's word becomes
for the father unspeakable in several senses, the ultimate scandal and potentially the
most radical source of disruption in a symbolic economy predicated on the control of
women's bodies, wills, and voices. In reserving the term "illegitimate" for the
fatherless child, so that to be "only" the child of a mother is to be a sign cut off from
any proper referent, the patriarchal system counters that threat by doubly ratifying the
erasure of the mother as origin and name.
By this formulation, not only does Dutch colonial society seek to control definition
of the national progeny, both at the individual and at the more general level, but also it

35 Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press,
1989), p. 131.
36 Hinting to Minke that he should conspire to let Hendrik think that he is the father of the child, Miriam
emphasizes to Minke that it is "Hendrik's child too" (JL, 360).
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 61

seeks to control the means by which that progeny is defined, and its definition is
permeated by its fear of the source from which they see the nation's future emerging—
female reproduction. At the same time also, it seeks to keep the national blood "pure"
and to ward off "difference" in the composition of demographics in its colony.
Miriam's child of mixed nationality threatens that national purity that colonial
society must uphold. Ironically, Miriam's pregnancy—a hybrid originating from
Javanese and Dutch roots—is a harbinger that perhaps the nation that will be born out
of the nationalist struggle in the East Indies will also be a hybrid, that the archipelago
will not remain "purely" a Dutch possession forever. Dutch colonialism's dependence
on the myth of essential racial purity means that the ideology cannot accommodate
miscegenation: hence its need for control over female reproduction and sexual
behavior. If the state adopts the role of "father," this entails keeping the national
bloodlines "pure," maintaining the sexual purity of its women, and ensuring that the
women's behavior is appropriately chaste. The "state fathers" can legislate to ensure
national purity. However, because at any moment a nation's composition is unstable
and impure, any version of national purity will be an arbitrary construction and will
disclose the irreparable rifts in the fabric(ations) of androcentric sociosymbolic order.

My Master Had Power and Law; I Had a Determined Will

In order to explicate further the perceptual and conceptual schemata that help
sustain the structures and ideologies of both imperialism and patriarchy, we turn our
attention now to the problematic of womanhood and the Native woman. For the native
woman, "womanhood" operates as a negative objectification—a model that was
unattainable and offered her neither protection nor benefit. This cultural ideal for the
native woman served as a double negation, branding her with dishonour. First, as for
the white woman, the imaginative ideal of womanhood required an ostensible denial
of her full sexuality. But secondly, because of the enforced cohabitation—essentially
collective rape—institutionalized by Dutch colonialism,37 womanhood functions as a
negation of the native woman's ability to live up to that ideal of the asexual woman,
immune to and untouched by passion. The depth of the Native woman's anxiety about
the oppressive structures that govern phallocentric definitions of sexuality (and
concomitantly, the commercial basis on which her subjectivity is transacted) is
reiterated as Surati, Nyai Ontosoroh's niece, contemplates her wretched fate as her
father, Sastro Kassier, plans to trade her to the Dutch manager of the sugar mill in
Tulangan in order to settle his debts:
She was unwilling to go freely to become someone's concubine, isolated from the
world, looked upon by everyone as something strange, a public spectacle to be
gaped at ... Then for a moment she saw Annelies's marriage again—Annelies
sitting beside her husband, looking so happy. Surati knew such happiness as that
was not now for her, nor would it ever be. A tear dropped. She too wished for
such happiness. But it seemed her fate was to be different. And she was afraid of
her parents' curse." (ASB, 140,143)

37 Until the late nineteenth century, the European community in the Indies had tolerated, and in some of
the outer regions even institutionalized, concubinage and mixed marriages as a normal convention. See
Gouda, "Teaching Indonesian Girls in Java and Bali," p. 50.
62 Razif Bahari

Surati's enforced sexuality, like her auntie's, Sanikem alias Nyai Ontosoroh, before
her, defined her failed status as "woman." The stereotypes attached to native women
either cast them as "the substratum of life" (ASB, 287) (Djumilah: the wife of Sastro
Kassier, Nyai's sister-in-law, and Surati), or present them, in the tetralogy, as wantonly
promiscuous (Nyai Ontosoroh and Minem, the village coquette and Nyai's farm
worker, who has a child by her employer's son). Either stereotype serves to obfuscate
the operative dynamic by displacing responsibility for native women's sexuality from
the party whom it benefited to the victim. Thus, as Nyai Ontosoroh sardonically
remarks, the white master is never held culpable for the atrocities he commits; instead,
the "The Natives must always be in the wrong, Europeans must be innocent; so just
being a Native is already wrong. To be born a Native is even more wrong"(BM, 272).
The system works to ensure for the white master that both his licentiousness and
avarice are safeguarded by law. For the native woman, it negates her entitlement to her
own subjectivity and womanhood, as those concepts are culturally constructed.
Pramoedya's tetralogy lays bare to reader scrutiny not only the negation of female
subjectivity but also how male subjectivity is structured and becomes dominant. In a
series of ruminations, Pangemanann, the male narrator of the last novel, House o f Glass,
reflects with triumph on his role as "overseer" of the movements of the female
nationalist figure, Siti Soendari. Here, the tetralogy structures its analysis of the
motivations of patriarchy and its psychological connections with colonialism through
the trope of the surveilling gaze:
I do not want to go hunting after her ... She must not meet too hasty an end
inside my house of glass. She deserves the chance to enjoy her beauty, youth,
education, and intelligence. Let her develop in accordance with her true nature,
let her full beauty bloom ... Of course she would never be a Native Joan of Arc,
but she still deserved to get more out of life yet ... Silently and secretly, I kept
watch on this young woman as her star rose higher and higher, shining brightly
in the firmament ... "Yes, make that leap, Soendari, go on, do it! ... Isn't life
strange? I had already put Marco inside my house of glass. And now you, sweet
maiden from Pemalang, you have joined him inside too ... [as] objects of my
study ... I will still be watching you, Non, pretty maiden from Pemalang. Be
careful ... I will use all my abilities to make sure that I do nothing to harm you,
Soen. My pen will not decide your fate ... I feel a moral and intellectual
responsibility for you. I have given you a chance. Now what will you be able to
achieve? (RK, 207-210)
Significantly, it is the specter of that surveilling gaze, the Foucauldian Panopticon
effect,38 that most fully constitutes Pangemanann's triumph. Just as Snouck
Hurgronje's approving gaze on the three Native youths in the first novel confirms their
worth for him, so does Pangemanann's surveilling gaze—and the almost licentious

38 Michel Foucault, in his discussion of the prison system, describes surveillance as a form of social control
which enables the group with the power to observe (or gaze upon) those whom they have power over and
to control their behavior at all times. Calling it the Panopticon (first coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1791)
effect, he explains: "[T]he major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious
and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things so that the
surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action, the perfection of power
should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary." Michel Foucault, "Panopticism," in Discipline and
Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 201.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 63

pleasure he derives from "keeping an eye" on Soendari's movements—ensure his male

dominance in the phallocentric symbolic order. Not only is the power to oversee, to
monitor, to keep an eye on someone, intrinsically connected with the power to
regulate, to manipulate, to dominate, but the scopophilia reveals the power dynamics
inherent in traditional representations of the female body as the site of masculine
desire, signified by the appropriative gaze which that body is constructed to elicit.
Feminist film criticism has extended this analysis of male spectatorship as it relates to
narrative, demonstrating (to quote Teresa de Lauretis's summary) that "it is men who
have ... defined the object and the modalities of vision, pleasure, and meaning in the
basis of perceptual and conceptual schemata provided by patriarchal ideological and
social formations." In the trajectory of both the look and the narrative line, "the male is
the measure of desire."39 Soendari, surveyed by Pangemanann's gaze, is appraised
("[an] interesting object of study" [RK, 233]), assayed ("she is indeed beautiful in an
unassuming way" [RK, 208]) and divined ("What joy she would give to the man who
captures her heart" [RK, 209]). Within the economy of the phallocentric gaze, to be a
spectator/voyeur marks a position of power and subjectivity; conversely, to be
subjected to surveillance is to be made a spectacle of, trapped inside a glass house,
exposed to gawkers and observers. In short, spying on Soendari, monitoring her every
move, and relishing the prospect of her eventual containment, endows Pangemanann
with a sense of potency and pleasure, as well as confirming his male subjectivity. The
gaze structures, within this masculine specular economy, the hierarchic relationship
between the viewer and the object displayed/exhibited figured, in this case, through
the analogies of man/woman, violation/privacy, possessor/possession,
hunter/quarry. It is that old "dream of symmetry," as Irigaray puts it, from which
woman's subjectivity is excluded like a "blind spot" and within which woman is set
"off-stage, off-side, beyond representation, beyond selfhood," caught in a "game for
which she will always find herself signed up without having begun to play."40 Despite
Pangemanann's professed sympathy with Soendari's positioning in this "game" of cat-
and-mouse, it is he who proposes to his superiors to "apply gentle pressure on her
father to find her a husband" (RK, 234), in the hope that the "Native girl would cease
her histrionics41 once she had been taken to the wedding bed" (RK, 244). His
subsequent patronizing analysis of the "circulation" of women in the tetralogy who are
wont to make "gifts" of themselves, and his professed sympathy for "poor Rientje" is a
masterpiece of ambivalence, its condescension charmingly mixed and masked with
sympathy:
Woman! You passed briefly into my life, bringing with you other stories.
But you always remained a woman. And womankind was created by God for

39 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1984), p. 67.
40 Luce Irigaray, "The Looking Glass, from the Other Side," in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine
Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 22.
41 I choose the term "histrionics" for the Indonesian ulah (in Pramoedya's original Bahasa Indonesia
version) or olah or kerenah, which, in this context, describes more aptly the unpredictable, often
exaggerated, emotional behavior that the conventional sexist attitude usually associates with woman. It is
this "histrionics"—a force of excess and transgression at once repellent and seductive to man—which
breaches every masculinist code of logic, probability, decorum, decency, refinement, dignity, good sense,
and "womanly modesty" that threatens the boundary of order that the male senior colonial officials
struggle to control.
64 Razif Bahari

men. And men for women. You trod your own path in giving yourself to men.
Different from Madame Pangemanann. Different from the way Annelies gave
herself to Minke ... And then there was Sanikem who gave herself to Herman
Mellema. How numerous were the different paths that bring together men and
women. And is it correct to describe all these relationships as women giving42
themselves to men?
Madame to Monsieur Pangemanann was based on mutual affection, each
giving him and herself to the other. It was the same with Annelies and Minke.
Rientje gave herself to whoever could pay the money that she asked for, but the
essence of the surrender was the same. Sanikem gave herself because of force
majeure, because of a stronger force that acted against her will. (RK, 274)
With his own security badly shaken by the departure of his wife and children, and
by the news that Rientje, for whom he has begun to feel affection, has been brutally
murdered, Pangemanann finds solace in his assignment to "watch over" (RK, 210)
Soendari. He considers her no "angel" (RK, 226), but a "delinquent young woman, who
didn't know what was proper, a Dutch woman in Javanese clothes" (RK, 225), and her
radically unconventional, nonconformist ways that defy the stereotype of the Native
woman titillate Pangemanann and at the same time encourage him to regard her as a
kind of "gift" from the gods (RK, 226). Thus she seems bestowed on him as a healing
assurance of his own sovereignty, assuaging his besieged male pride, predicated as it is
on man's mythic status as hero on his "possession" (read: control) of woman. Her
surreptitious activities to incite nationalist agitation amongst her people are a challenge
to his manhood, and he relishes the opportunity to monitor and quell the young female
rabble-rouser. Pangemanann's attempt to restore his manhood by regaining control
over the insurgent movement led by Soendari leads to the transferral of eroticism from
her (as the desexualized woman leader of the movement) to his own mission of
counter-insurgency. Penetrating Soendari's clandestine movement, possessing her
subjectivity, becomes the indubitable sign of manhood for Pangemanann,43 becomes
his raison d'etre and a major motivation for his dogged commitment to his job to pursue
and persecute her, perhaps to the detriment of his own domestic relationships. He
describes his emotional crisis and, while denying the pain his broken marriage has
caused him, insists that "Madame Pangemanann had left, and I had felt no loss then
either. My children went away and I felt no loss about that either. So why was it then
that I would feel a loss if my position was taken away and my reputation sullied in
public?" (RK, 275)
Rumah Kaca employs sentimental language to reveal Pangemanann's emotional
crisis; throughout this text, sentimental language (even when inherently insincere or
unconvincing) is directly opposed to the exploitively dominative nature of colonial
male subjectivity. In fact, this episode subtly provides an alternative reading which

42 The Bahasa Indonesia word mempersembahkart, from the word, sembah (meaning
worship/adore/idolize/submit/surrender/acknowledge the power of, etc.) is interesting as it also has
another meaning: to present, or put up a show, presentation as in persembahan, which also means gift, or
present.
43 Pangemanann's remark as he was about to deliver his coup de grace on Soendari— "now my pen, and my
ink, must interfere in your [i.e. Soendari's] life, still so young and beautiful" (RK, 234)— reiterates the
Freudian topos of the pen as a phallic symbol, and the countervailing sign of woman as a lack or
castration.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 65

suggests that the hierarchic power structure figured through the topos of
viewer/viewed, male gaze/surveillance of woman has begun to shift imperceptibly
even as it is articulated. As Pangemanann recounts his persecution/harassment of
Soendari, we see the extent to which his mastery of her depends on her. Repeatedly in
his interior monologue, he apostrophizes her to recognize his dominance: "that is as far
as you will ever go, you will never develop further ... I will be watching you, Non,
pretty maiden from Pemalang. Be careful" (RK, 210; Non is the contracted form of
"Noni" or Miss). In a key scene at the end of chapter eight of Rumah Kaca,
Pangemanann, in a clearly agonized reflection on his own complicity in the oppressive
practices of his Dutch colonial masters, which he finds morally abhorrent, invokes the
absent Soendari: "And you, Siti Soendari, do you know that Pangemanann, the man
devising all these plans for you, is as sane as sane can be?" (RK, 214). Addressing her
using a diminutive of her name which he has patronizingly coined for her, he pleads
for Soendari's understanding, and forgiveness, of his actions: "It's not because I want
to do it, Soen...you must forgive me if you suffer because of what I must do" (RK, 234)
and goes on to protest that he "will prepare the most moderate proposal that [he] can"
(RK, 234) because of the affection he feels for her, despite the pressure from his political
superiors in the Dutch colonial government who favor more drastic measures be taken
against her. His response here asserts the prerogative of the Subject over the Object—to
silence, to suppress. But Pangemanann could not resort to more draconian measures in
dealing with Soendari because he needs her to confirm his mastery of her (her symbolic
death). His own identity depends on her recognition of it. He apparently cannot feel
his mastery until she reflects it to him.
One might argue that Pangemanann's need to tell his story, to turn Soendari into a
figure in his own account, indicates his concern that her prominence in the annals of
the nation's history would eclipse and elide his own ("her star rose higher and higher,
shining brightly in the firmament; the higher she rose, the brighter she shone" [RK,
208]), which would mean he had lost control not only over her, but over his story—and
history. While upholding the masculine perspective through Pangemanann's first-
person narrative, Pramoedya undermines its authority by suggesting another way of
seeing, and the existence of other writing, neither counted on nor comprehended by
Pangemanann's phallocentric narrative economy. Undoing the process whereby
Pangemanann would enter Soendari into his account, Pramoedya turns his narrator to
account in his. Putting him into circulation, as it were, by retailing his retellings,
Pramoedya subverts the hierarchical oppositional logic whereby man situates himself
as the sovereign subject-speaker vis-a-vis woman as object. Pangemanann's earlier
rhetorical question—"[I]s it correct to describe all these relationships as women giving
themselves to men?" (RK, 274)—is made moot by Pramoedya's ironic representation.
Here Pramoedya anticipates Jacques Derrida's recognition of the continual eruption
therein of the discourse of woman as giver:
Either ... woman is woman because she gives herself, while the man for his part
takes, possesses, indeed takes possession. Or else ... she is woman because, in
giving, she is in fact giving herselffor, is simulating, and consequently assuring the
66 Razif Bahari

possessive mastery for her own self. Henceforth all the signs of a sexual
opposition are changed. Man and woman change places.44

Nyai Doesn't
We return now to one of the most remarkable female characters in the tetralogy—
Nyai Ontosoroh. Her portrayal in the first three novels asserts the subjectivity of a
native nyai and thus serves as an ideal ground for enlarging the ongoing discussion of
subjectivity and representation within feminist theory: "Ontosoroh is a very fascinating
character in This Earth of Mankind, precisely on account of her position as nyai."45
Western colonial culture, which begins with a notion of normal from which any
deviation is counted as a negative mark, can only see Nyai Ontosoroh as an extreme
example of alterity who is so thoroughly marginalized that she should simply not exist.
She is a nyai, whose marginalized position as transgressor of both native and colonial
boundaries of race, sentiment, and morality situates her outside the borders of
"reason."
In Nyai Ontosoroh we see the most explicit demonstration of female creativity as
she defies the phallocentric sociosymbolic order and the mutually inflecting
homologies of patriarchal colonialism and feudalism. The roles Nyai Ontosoroh
assumes are not random: she becomes, successively, a nyai (read: mistress/
concubine/whore), revolutionary, and heroine, enacting thereby three of the most
overdetermined versions of "woman" in colonial patriarchal culture.46 But with a
difference. For by playing these roles, she remains at once inside and outside the
semiotic systems that would codify "woman" according to masculinist logic, resisting
even as she appears to fulfill traditional categorizations of the feminine. In traversing
the whole continuum of roles that tend to polarize the aspects of a woman, rendering
her either as heroine or whore, domesticated object or revolutionary agent, Nyai
Ontosoroh demonstrates the essential interchangeability—and hence the invalidity—of
these oppositions. Through her assumption of these roles, she exposes the
provisionality and instability of phallocentric conceptions of woman, thus implicitly
threatening the foundations of a culture predicated on the control of women as both
bodies and signs. Nyai Ontosoroh brilliantly anticipates Simone de Beauvoir's famous
observation that "man dreams of an Other not only to possess her but also to be
ratified by her."47 Herman Mellema, her Dutch tuan (master), in an obvious gesture of
ownership, refers to her as "my nyai" (BM, 79), seeking to claim her permanently as

44 Jacques Derrida, Spurs/Eperons: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979), p. 67.
45 Gerard Termorshuizen, "From Whore to Heroine: The Nyai Motif in Some Novels by Pramoedya
Ananta Toer and P. A. Daum," in Pramoedya Atlanta Toer 70 Tahun, ed. Bob Herring, p. 56.
46 To complete the range of "feminine" possibilities under patriarchy, she is also represented as a daughter
sold by an avaricious father, "mother" to her "bastard" Indo children, and as "sorceress" ("a regal woman
of great powers of bewitchment" [peribadi mengagumkan dan mengesankan itu—seorang ratu pemilik
dayasihir] (BM, 184); she has the power to "[hold] people in her grasp, and bewitch them from afar"
[mencengkam orang dalam genggamannya, dan mampu pula mensihir orang dari kejauhan] (BM, 62); she
"cast[s] a spell over [Minke's] mind"; she is "clever" and "subdue[s] people so they would bow down to
her will" [Nyai kurasakan telah menyihir kesedaranku ... pandai menaklukkan orang untuk bersujud
pada kemauannya] (BM, 41).
47 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, NY: Knopf, 1953), p. 170.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 67

"his" by writing her into his own finalizing script. Having been sold to Mellema to be
his mistress for twenty-five guilders (BM, 77) by her own father, Nyai was initially
submissive and resigned to her fate: "there was nothing I could do. Neither the tears
nor the tongue of my Mother could prevent the disaster. Let alone I, who neither
understood nor owned this world. I did not even possess my own body"(BM, 76). Her
utter submissiveness encourages Mellema to believe that he possesses her, confirms his
reading of her as "mine," his ownership ratified by the signs of her passivity, as
evident in Nyai's recollection of their first encounter:
I was left on the chair, bathing in my own tears, shaking and not knowing
what I must do. The world seemed dark ... He came out from the room and
approached me. He pulled my hand ordering me to stand. I trembled. It wasn't
that I didn't want to stand up, or that I was rebelling against an order. I didn't
have the strength to stand. My kain was soaking. My two legs trembled so badly
it was as if bones and sinews had come loose from their joints. He picked me up
as if I were an old guling and carried me in his arms into the room, and put me
down on a beautiful and clean bed, powerless. I was not able even to sit ... I
rolled over prostrate on the bed ... he picked me up and carried me around the
room like a wooden doll ... He picked me up again and hugged me and kissed
me. I can still remember his words, though I didn't then understand their intent:
"Darling, my darling, my doll, darling, darling."
He threw me up and caught me around my waist ... I felt I had no soul
anymore, like a wayang puppet in the hands of the puppet-master. (BM, 77-79)
Mellema's relationship with Nyai Ontosoroh is predicated on his possession over
her, as assurance of his own sovereignty in a feudalistic and colonial Indies where men
control the circulation of women as of money and "livestock" ["My father sold me like
the offspring of a horse" (BM, 80)]. But if Mellema thinks that he has total possession of
Nyai, that he has penetrated and possessed her subjectivity and her discourse as he has
her body, then he is wrong. For toward the end of their relationship, as Mellema's
sense of his own moral security is badly shaken with the arrival of his son Maurits (the
offspring of his marriage to a Dutch woman, contracted prior to his coming to the
Indies), who confronts his father with his licentious relationship with a nyai, the
hierarchic power structure figured through the codes of man/woman,
colonizer/colonized, and owner/property has begun to shift in obvious ways. Armed
with the knowledge she imbibed from her Dutch master, she begins to wield the power
he once had over her, gradually taking over Mellema's "big, European-type
[agricultural] firm" (BM, 65), the Boerderij Buitenzorg, and assuming control over his
household. She becomes "a woman ... who didn't want to make peace with her own
fate" (BM, 227):
So it was that Mama began to understand that in reality Mama was not at all
dependent on Mr. Mellema. On the contrary, he was dependent on me. So Mama
then began to take a role in making decisions on all matters. He never rejected
this. He never forced me to do anything, except for study. In this matter, he was a
hard but good teacher. I was an obedient and good pupil. Mama knew
everything he was teaching me would, one day, be of use to me and my children
if he went home to the Netherlands. (BM, 82)
68 Razif Bahari

Ironically, Nyai's link to the "world of the rulers,"48 which could gain her access to
cultural centrality, is precisely that which Indies society relegates to the margin.
Nyai—native, shrewd businesswoman, literate, self-educated, angry, articulate,
renegade—hardly matches the image, either as ideal or degraded stereotype, of the
passive native woman. Yet Nyai Ontosoroh affirms her identity, refusing to be
marginalized. She will not yield to the rulings of the Amsterdam district court
concerning the custody of Annelies, though eventually her resistance proves to be
futile. She insists that she be addressed as "Nyai" instead of "Madam" by those
uncomfortable with the former, not only as a sign of defiance against the moral norm
of polite society that tries to gloss over the existence of women like her, but more so as
an emblem of pride of what she is. Not only does she defy the Dutch court's injunction
that she address them in Javanese; she speaks in flawless Dutch, unleashing a tirade
against colonial hypocrisy and the oppressive nature of its laws. In a cultural economy
in which only males have rights of ownership over female bodies, woman's
subjectivity represents a dangerous excess that, by transgressing the bounds of the
androcentric system, might subvert its claims to dominance. By effectively removing
herself as an object of exchange within a masculine economy, by choosing, that is, to
own herself, to determine her own fate, Nyai Ontosoroh positions herself (figuratively)
as her own tuan.
According to the logic of an androcentric symbolic order, all contracts between
men and women become variants of prostitution. The objectification this economy
forces on native women in the Indies is epitomized by the role of the nyais. The
tetralogy interrogates this system and the ties that bind it together, explicating the
symbolic contracts it entails while at the same time addressing the problematic of
woman and reading, or—to borrow a phrase from John Berger's classic study of the
female nude—of "ways of seeing" woman within phallocentric referential frames.49
Through the trope of the nyai as prostitute, which locates the relationship between
colonial man and colonized woman at the core of the narrative, we can relate the act of
reading to both a specific historical moment and, more fundamentally, a larger history
of social and psychological systems that underwrite Dutch colonial management of
sexuality, domesticatie, and motherhood in the Indies.
While the subordination of the nyai as prostitute may appear, in the foregoing
analysis, to occur at the symbolic level, the actual material circumstances of the
position of the nyai are, of course, more palpable:
[A nyai] is just a bought slave, whose duty is only to satisfy her master. In
everything! Then, on the other hand, she has to be ready at any moment for the
possibility that her master, her tuan, will become bored with her. And she may be
kicked out with all her children, her own children, unhonored by Native society
because they were born outside wedlock. (BM, 80)
Nyai Ontosoroh's position, it can be said, is not dissimilar to that of Maiko, the
Japanese prostitute, who inhabits the "pleasure-house" run by Babah Ah Tjong in the
first novel. By comparing Nyai and Maiko, we can extend our critique of the use of

48 Jean Gelman Taylor, "Nyai Dasima: Portrait of a Mistress in Literature and Film," in Fantasizing the
Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 227.
49 John Berger, Ways o f Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 45-82.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 69

woman as property in male economies. If Nyai Ontosoroh was sold to Mellema by her
own father in exchange for "the promise that father would be made cashier after he
passed a two-year internship" (BM, 77), Maiko is Ah Tjong's "gift" to Robert Mellema
in return for future favors Ah Tjong hopes Robert will bestow on him once he inherits
the Buitenzorg business from his father (BM, 171). This symbolic mode of exchange,
based on the condition of women as property, highlights the fact that in a feudalistic
and colonial value system, which assumes the privileges of class and property and
exalts androcentric codes, men circulate women like gifts in order to extend their own
bonding systems: "Almost every wealthy Chinese had his own brothel, his own
pleasure-house. In Hong Kong, Singapore, Batavia, or Surabaya, they all had the same
custom, namely, to take turns in visiting each other's places" (BM, 167).
As a transgressor of codes and boundaries, Nyai Ontosoroh challenges this
androcentric economy. Since the violence to women on which this order is founded is
decreed and protected by colonial law, anyone who transgresses this law threatens,
potentially, to dismantle it. As Michele Richman notes,
... the symbols men manipulate in order to perpetuate the differential hierarchies
which either subordinate or exclude women, children, and the weak, are
systematized into codes whose key is their monopoly on power ... It has
traditionally been argued in favor of [the exchange of women] that it channels the
force of sexuality which would otherwise unsettle the fragile foundations of the
social order. But ... the real violence lies on the side of the law which seeks to
maintain one segment of society in bondage to the other ... By challenging the
anachronistic remnants of [this system, women] have at their disposal the most
effective weapon to precipitate the demise of the patriarchal order.50
The trial scene in the first novel, one of the most dazzling in all of Pramoedya's
fiction, represents a quintessential defiance of official patriarchal worlds and words. As
a synecdoche of the larger text that undermines and challenges the repressive paternal
order of colonialism and feudalism, it uncovers the instability of the categories on
which patriarchal "reality" appears grounded—revealing law, marriage, patrilineal
property, filial identity, and the name and word of the father to be profoundly
inflected by the very forces they would repudiate. The scene is constituted as a series of
oppositional categories—civilization /savagery, law/ anarchy, security /danger,
purity /pollution, sacred/profane, good/evil. Their epitome is the contrast between the
sanctioned and legal marriage of Herman and Amelia Mellema, and the "unnatural"
familial relations and social disintegration represented by the illicit union between
Herman Mellema and his native concubine, Nyai Ontosoroh. The scene is a telling one,
for the text in every sense "questions" boundaries, and it is useful to quote it at length:
The next question was flung at Nyai Ontosoroh: Nyai Ontosoroh, alias
Sanikem, concubine of the late Mr. Herman Mellema: "How could Nyai allow
such improper relations between Nyai's guest and Nyai's child?" The surging
laughter became more exuberant, more insulting, more demonstrative ... With a
clear voice and in flawless Dutch—defying the judicial order that she use
Javanese, and ignoring the pounding of the gavel ... she began: "Honourable

50 Michele Richman, "Eroticism in the Patriarchal Order," in Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille, ed.
Paul Buck (London: The Geroges Bataille Event, 1984), p. 99.
70 Razif Bahari

Judge, Honourable Prosecutor, seeing that you have already begun to make
public my family affairs ... I, Nyai Ontosoroh, alias Sanikem, concubine of the
late Mr. Herman Mellema, look upon the relations between my daughter and my
guest in a different light. I, Sanikem, am only a concubine. Out of my
concubinage my daughter Annelies was born. Nobody ever challenged my
relationship with Herman Mellema. Why? For the simple reason he was a Pure-
Blooded European ... Between Mr. Mellema and I there were only the ties of
slavery and they were never challenged by the law ... Europeans are able to
purchase Native women just as I was purchased ...
There was turmoil in the courtroom. Nyai kept on speaking, paying no heed
to the Judge's gavel ...[she] no longer heeded the court's authority ... her tongue
did not stop letting fly words, bullets of revenge: "Who turned me into a
concubine? Who turned us all into nyaisl European gentlemen, made Masters.
Why in these official forums are we laughed at? Humiliated? Or is it that you
gentlemen want my daughter to become a concubine too?" Her voice rang
throughout the building. And all present were silenced ... She, this Native
woman, had now become the unofficial prosecutor, plaintiff against the
European race—a race now ridiculing their own deeds. (BM, 281-283)
The trial episode in the tetralogy can be analyzed as a paradigm to explore Nyai's
resistance to patriarchy and colonialism. For it is precisely in that episode that we see
most clearly some of the integral features of the rhetoric of imperialist law: a language
that disguises power relations beneath the idealization of unity, stasis, and totalization
in textualized form. The "law" seeks to veil and sanction the self-interest of patriarchy
and colonialism. As this telltale scene indicates, law serves as a rhetoric of camouflage.
But as the text makes clear, laws cannot be separated from the motives that occasioned
their existence. Colonial law, in this sense, emerges in the tetralogy as that official
attempt to "arrest" the dangers of ambiguity (hence, fluidity, amorphousness, anarchy)
by caging such ambiguity in the fixed "hardness" of written language.51 As such,
hermeneutic disputes about it cannot help but be political struggles. Within this
context, the trial of Nyai Ontosoroh reappropriates colonial law; it dramatizes (and
makes visible) the invisible processes by which colonial law per se embodies
oppressive centralist ideologies. The trial scene can be seen as a semiosis of power
relations: the site wherein colonial authority asserts its own supremacy, listening
unendingly to its own voice. Accordingly, although both Nyai and Minke are fluent in
Dutch, they are prohibited from using it to address the court. Instead they are made to
"speak" through a translator.
Since it is predicated on male agency, female objectification, and the legal
subordination of women, Dutch colonial law does not acknowledge children born out
of the relationship between nyais and their European masters:
One day Tuan and I went to Court to acknowledge Robert and you as the
children of Mr. Mellema. In the beginning I thought that with such
acknowledgement my children would receive legal recognition as legitimate
children. But it wasn't so, Ann. Your elder brother and you continued to be
considered illegitimate but now you were recognized as the children of Mr.

51 Sanford Levinson, "Law as Literature," in Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader, ed. S.
Levinson and S. Mailloux (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 156.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 71

Mellema and could use his name. The Court's decision meant that the law no
longer recognized you as my children, you weren't my children any longer,
though it was I who gave birth to you. Since that day, both of you, according to
the law, were the children of Mr. Mellema alone. According to the law, Ann,
Dutch law in these Indies. Don't be mistaken. You're still my child. Only then did
I realize how evil the law was. You obtained a father, but lost a mother. (BM, 85-
86 )
Dutch patrilineal kinship system is predicated upon the dependence of
genealogical and racial purity on maternal chastity. It is interesting to note the
etymological affiliations of the words chastity (Indonesian suci from the Sanskrit zuci)
and caste (Indonesian kasta from the Portuguese casta) in this context. Both words
possess a common root in the Latin castus—"spotless, innocent" but also akin to car'ere,
"to be without," related to Greek and Sanskrit words meaning "to split," "to cut to
pieces" (keazein, sasati). The chaste mother, then, necessary guarantor of patrilineal caste,
must also exist as a kind of eunuch, symbolically dismembered by a phallic culture, in
other words, castrated and severed from her own desire. For native women deemed
genealogically "tainted" or racially "impure," whose children are born of Dutch
fathers, Dutch law—in a strategy to displace, disclaim, and distance the native mother
from her offspring—cuts the mother off from her own biological children by effecting a
law whereby their European father is recognized as the sole parent if he acknowledges
them, even though the children are legally regarded as "illegitimate."
It is a critical commonplace that for patriarchal culture, concubines (prostitutes)
and their illegitimate offspring (bastards) represent a "socially unstabilised energy that
may threaten, directly or implicitly, the organisation of society, whether by the
indeterminacy of their origin or their attitude to the ties that hold society together and
that they may choose to slight or break."52 These forms of social disruption find
analogies in narrative disjunctions within a system where textual genealogy,
traditional narrative, and language itself operate, in Edward Said's words,
"dynastically," in "relationships linked together by family analogy:father and son ... the
process of genesis, a story."53As figures outside the bounds of legitimate culture, devoid
of "official" lineage or names, the bastard children of Nyai Ontosoroh, and the Indo
"half-breeds" they represent, become persistently associated with the breakdown not
only of social and familial structures but also the racial "purity" the Dutch apartheid
colonial regime sought to preserve. Yet as Pramoedya would repeatedly suggest, the
figure of the Indo conceals—even as it implicitly re-presents—a figure still more
scandalously anomalous: the bastard's mother, who by giving birth outside the
"legitimate" confines of what, in English, we so tellingly name "wedlock" (in
Indonesian, anak luar nikah from the Arabic word, nikah meaning "marriage"; or anak
haram—with its religious/Muslim connotation—meaning literally "forbidden child"),
fractures the containing social caste system, causing unwanted leakages and seepages
to result in a hybrid race. Potentially more threatening to androcentric culture than her

52 Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1981), pp. 3-4.
53 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
1985), p. 66; my emphasis; see also pp. 83, 93, and especially 96-100, 141-145. Citations are to the
Columbia University Press edition.
72 Razif Bahari

children, it is she whose origins and origination colonial culture most insistently seeks
to cancel or conceal in order to maintain its authority. The mother of the "illegitimate"
child exposes the instability and limitations of paternalistic colonial authority by
representing a subversive maternal lineage, and she implicitly calls into question the
symbolic order maintained in the Name-of-the-(Colonial)-Father. Thus Nyai
Ontosoroh's outburst during the trial scene becomes for the colonial court unspeakable
in several senses, the ultimate scandal and potentially the most radical source of
disruption in a symbolic economy predicated on the control of women's bodies, wills,
and voices.54 In reserving the term "illegitimate" for the bastard child, so that to be
"only" the child of a native mother is to be a sign cut off from any proper referent, the
partriarchal colonial system counters that threat by doubly ratifying the erasure of the
mother as origin and name. In making "identity" and "origin" equivalent in the
tetralogy, Pramoedya underscores these interpretive issues. Through the character of
Nyai Ontosoroh, he enacts a metaphorical relation between the mother-figure of the
nyai and the "concubinage" of the Indonesian motherland under Dutch colonial
exploitation.
By (re-)claiming the large Buitenzorg farm formerly owned by her Dutch master,
Herman Mellema, and taking charge of it, Nyai Ontosoroh ruptures the lines of male
colonial genealogy and hence, implicitly, destablizes the patriarchal colonial order that
reigns over the Dutch East Indies. The responses Pramoedya's characters adopt toward
the "(il)legitimacy" of Dutch claims over Indonesia may be read on one level, then, as
his indirect interrogation of the colonial symbolic order and its strategy of naming and
claiming. The genealogical model predicated on woman's erasure is repudiated, for it
is precisely through the figure of woman that Pramoedya interrogates the guilt-
inducing logic that conditions the plight of the nyais in the colony during the last
decade of the nineteenth century. Offering an alternative to the essentially masculinist
vision of law, history, and text perpetuated by the figure of the bastard, he celebrates
the mother-figure's (this figure is embodied by Nyai Ontosoroh) most flagrant gestures
of "illegitimacy" as fertile sources of leadership and originality. As he has Nyai
Ontosoroh observe, "Shame is not a concern of European civilization" (BM, 330)—it is
only in the illicit that a new space opens, and with it freedom to "challenge ... with
words" (BM, 273), with signification itself, to make up new fictions in a bastardized
language with an imaginative "legitimacy" of their own.
Reading the character of Nyai Ontosoroh offers a model of a certain "feminine"
critical practice: one that would elude paternally constructed enclosures, rereading
woman's much-deplored marginality as a powerful positive position, both for the
perspective it offers for a critique of the Centre—and the centrisms—of the fathers, and
as an ever-moving site of vision, a horizon rather than a limit. It is also notable that in
attempting to represent Nyai, the men in the tetralogy can only explain her in terms of
metaphor—she is "a castle of puzzles" (BM, 17), "like something out of a legend from

54 It is her outburst in court that prompts the Eurasian-owned newspapers to publicize the controversial
issue of Dutch patrilineal family laws in the Indies and the omniphagous expression of phallocentrism and
power-hungry paternity they sanction—Nyai is stripped of her ownership of Buitenzorg by the same laws
that robbed her of the family business she helped build—which eventually culminates in the riots over the
court's decision to grant Maurits Mellema custody over Annelies. (BM, 320-322; 339-341)
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 73

A Thousand and One Nights" (BM, 227),55 "like a giant, like a mountain of coral" (AST,
68). Minke ruminates on the tragic, yet enigmatic, position of the nyais:
Those issues formed a web of life like that of a spider's web. And in the middle of
the web were the concubines and nyais. They don't catch all the victims that come
to them. On the contrary, the net seems to catch all sorts of humiliation that they
alone must swallow. They aren't employers even though they live together in the
same room with their masters. They are not included in the same class as the
children they themselves have given birth to. They are not Pure, not Indo, and
can even be said not to be Native. They are secret mountains. (BM, p. 325; my
emphasis)
The ambiguous figure of the nyai—like the Javanese feudal attitude that reviles
concubinage publicly but condones it privately; and like the traditional Judeo-
Christian bifurcation of woman into temptress and virgin which subtends it—registers
in concentrated form the paradoxical conjunction of horror and revulsion with
attraction and desire. This ambivalence has repeatedly marked masculine responses to
feminine sexuality—that "taboo" that underwrites the most diverse male
representations of woman-as-sign. Within this context, the desirous nyai figure is so
gravely threatening to the self-regarding phallocentric order that she must be
contained, domesticated, or neutralized, either transformed into an asexual ideal,
written into patriarchal marriage plots, or cast out as a scapegoat. De Beauvoir writes
that
... the male's hesitation between fear and desire, between the fear of being in the
power of uncontrollable forces and the wish to win them over, is strikingly
reflected in the myth of Virginity. Now feared by the male, now desired or even
demanded, the virgin would seem to represent the most consummate form of the
feminine mystery; she is therefore its most disturbing and at the same time its
most fascinating aspect.56
Similarly, though conversely, the nyai is at once alluring and forbidding, a liminal
figure whose body signifies the quintessence of transgression as surely as does the
body of the virgin. "In this way," the nyai, as de Beauvoir notes of the prostitute,
"regains that formidable independence of the luxurious goddess mothers of old, and
she incarnates the Femininity that masculine society has not sanctified and that
remains charged with harmful powers."57

55 Pramoedya's reference here to Scheherazade's The Thousand and One Nights is ingenious. We recall a tale
in Thousand and One Nights when Ali Baba's slave, Morgana, saw that the forty thieves had found her
master's house and marked it with a cross in order to return and kill him. She took a piece of chalk and
marked ninety-nine other houses in the neighbourhood with the same sign, so that Ali Baba's house was
undistinguishable among them. This was a stroke of genius, and as a result Morgana has become justly
immortal, for she not only had ingenuity, initiative, and self-confidence, but she knew what she was
doing: her purpose was to confuse. In Bumi Manusia, writing is used in comparable ways—as both
protective device and sign of subversion. Nyai Ontosoroh urges Minke to write to "oppose [the Dutch]
with words," and like Morgana, Nyai Ontosoroh too, under the guise of submission to both patriarchy
and colonialism, would enact a feminine duplicity in subverting these oppressive orders that would
ultimately liberate her from being a "slave" in her Dutch master's house.
56 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 141.
57 Ibid., p. 181.
74 Razif Bahari

Forever resistant to colonial and feudal mentalities and ideologies, Nyai Ontosoroh
defies the laws that seek to hold her as their object, putting her in her (read: their)
"place." Sarah Kofman has demonstrated how obsessively and unsuccessfully Freud
sought to "solve" the "riddle" of woman, to comprehend a power at once repellent and
seductive to man, a fixation that he would struggle to control:
Does he admit that woman is the only one who knows her own secret, knows the
solution to the riddle and is determined not to share it, since she is self-sufficient
...? This is ... a painful path for man, who then complains of woman's
inaccessibility, her coldness, her "enigmatic," indecipherable character. Or does
Freud proceed, on the contrary, as if woman were completely ignorant of her
own secret, ... persuaded that she must be, that she is, "ill," that she cannot get
along without a man if she is to be "cured"? This path, reassuring for man's
narcissisms, seems to be the one Freud chooses ... [T]he task assigned to thought
in both cases seems in fact to be that warding off some formidable danger ... Men
wonder about [woman] because she worries them, frightens them, gives them the
impression of a disturbing strangeness.58
Pramoedya perhaps anticipates this critique of the masculine plight by
representing Nyai Ontosoroh as the embodiment of woman at her most baffling, a
"castle of puzzles" who constitutes so extreme a contradiction that she can be
accounted for only as a "secret mountain." The mountain has a special symbolic
significance in Javanese cosmology. The gunungan, a ubiquitous mountain shape that
can be found in various Javanese rituals and ceremonies, is a symbolic expression of
the cosmic order. It represents Mount Meru (Sumeru, Mahameru), the cosmic
mountain, abode of the gods and axis of the universe in Indian cosmology. Like the
cross in Christian tradition, it assumes various dimensions and serves numerous
functions. Every wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performance begins with a lacy
gunungan occupying the centre of the screen. The offerings of rice and fruit that
retainers bear through the kraton (palace) may be heaped into mini Merus. With its
peaked roof, each pendopo (a large roofed verandah or reception area at the front of a
Javanese dignitary's residence) is also a gunungan; and so is the layout of the whole
kraton with its elevated central focus. The tiers of Borobudur and the towers of
Prambanan (a great Hindu temple complex located near the city of Yogyakarta) tell of
the symbol's antiquity, while the soaring profiles of Mounts Merapi and Agung serves
as primordial prototypes. It is within this mystical topos, simultaneously a symbol of
divinity and the transcendental as well as the "tree of life," that Nyai Ontosoroh is also
prefigured. We recall here Minke's mother's peroration on the significance of the
woman as symbol: " . . . without a woman, a knight goes against his nature as a man.
Woman is the symbol of life, and the bringer of life, of fertility, prosperity, of well­
being. She is not just a wife to a husband. Woman is the centre around which circles
and from which comes the giving of life, and life itself' (BM, 307). While marking the
opposite ends of the androcentric cultural spectrum—at once located at "the
substratum of life" (ASB, 287) and the apex of divinity—the figure of woman also
operates homologically as culture's most extreme paradox. It is this vast maternal

58 Sarah Kofman, The Enigma o f Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings, trans. Catherine Porter, 2nd ed. (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 66-68.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 75

body, this free-floating "feminine" force, that embodies the very principal of
transgression—literally the crossing of those boundaries that maintain civilization.
If Nyai Ontosoroh is on one level a classic image of immobilized and appropriated
woman (the puppet traditionally represented as female "doll" under male control), on
another she is the ultimate figure of mystery, sorcery, illegitimacy, and transgression, a
threat to the very foundations of patriarchal culture. Far from being mere object, Nyai
Ontosoroh appears driven by her own "demonic" powers. Indeed, in the mother-
daughter joint construction of her life history as nyai, her control over Mellema
increases in direct proportion to his progressive loss of control over himself. In all these
incarnations—from whore to self-sacrificing mother, from repressed concubine to
furious, uncontrollable avenger, from mocked and scorned native woman to the object
of man's desires—Nyai Ontosoroh is a striking illustration of Simone de Beauvoir's
thesis that woman has been made to represent all man's ambivalent feelings about his
own inability to control his physical existence. As the "other," woman comes to
represent the contingency of life. "It is the horror of his own carnal contingence," de
Beauvoir notes, "which [man] projects upon [woman]."59 Not surprisingly, given
women's comparable association with divergence, marginality, and disruption, the
most powerful figure of this untamed world in the tetralogy is a woman. Like a
temptress, Rientje de Roo, the "young prostitute whose beauty had stirred the hearts of
Betawi's young dandies" (RK, 30), appears to the police commissioner, Pangemanann,
like an alluring siren, a wanton vamp, a figure of excess, who tempts him with the
forbidden fruit of carnal lust; she is also the barely displaced sign of incest:
[S]he greeted me sweetly, displaying all her allure for me to savour. Without any
kind of preliminaries, she sat herself on my lap ... "This is not what you desire,
Meneer?" ... She got up and came close to me, showing off her body in its light
brown silk gown ... [and] whispered: "I have never had a favourite. Perhaps if
one day I have one, he will be a police commissioner" ... She grew more sweet
and endearing—this child who was perhaps the same age as my young daughter
... In her embrace, and with her head nestled up against my chest, it felt once
more as if she was my youngest daughter ... "Would you like to see my room?"
asked Rientje. (RK, 31-34)
In conflating the element of the incest taboo with the image of woman as
"seductress" who goads phallocentric fantasy, as the putative object of man's sexual
desires, and as an embodiment of the forbidden fruit itself, the text hints at the
potentially devastating effects of transgressing the taboo that both represents and
insures women's subordination. In addition, as Karen Horney and Dorothy
Dinnerstein have shown, male dread of women has historically objectified itself in the
vilification of women, while male ambivalence about female "charms" underlies the
traditional images of such terrible sorceress-goddesses as the Sphinx, Medusa, Circe,
Delilah, and Salome—to which we might add female sorceresses in Javanese
mythology like Nyi Roro Kidul, female ghosts like the Kuntilanak (the ghost of a
woman who dies at childbirth), and monsters like the Balinese Rangda, the ugly,
lolling-tongued, pendulous-breasted Supreme Witch—evil incarnate in the Barong

59 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 138.

76 Razif Bahari

dance, the Indie Kali and Durga—all of whom practice duplicitous arts that allow them
both to seduce and to steal male generative energy.60
Emblems of filthy morality and monstrous female sexual energy, and constantly
equated with degeneration, disease, and death, women in the tetralogy continue to
imperil the paternal order by their ability to infect, both literally and figuratively, the
body of men. Surati infects herself with smallpox in order to wreak revenge on
Plikemboh by infecting and killing him with the virus:
She ascended the steps, escorted by Plikemboh, and surrendered herself to
be taken into his room—the place which forever would be the boundary that
marked the end of her life as a virgin and the beginning of her condition as a kept
mistress.
Take me! Take all you can get from me, she thought, and may you soon be
destroyed.
As soon as she entered the room, the smallpox ran amok within her. Her
strength was broken. From the moment she lay prostrate on Plikemboh's bed, she
was unable to rise again. And very quickly Plikemboh too became infected.
During those last few days, they both lay sprawled out on the bed, awaiting
death. (ASB, 151)
Robert Mellema, infected by Maiko, the Japanese prostitute in Babah Ah Tjong's
brothel, finally dies in Los Angeles having contracted venereal disease (ASB, 289). If
woman is the "repressed" of man within phallocentric culture, which is grounded on
male-ownership of both woman's body and the social text of the body politic, the
tetralogy implies that the inverse may be true, especially when women wields power
over man sexually—at birth and in death. The instances of women infecting men with
disease and death in the tetralogy anticipate the ideology that can be seen to underlie
Bataille's assertions about the operations of eroticism. To give oneself over to eroticism,
writes Bataille, is to give oneself over not only to the "efferverscence of life" but also to
its loss: "The loosing of the sexual urge ... means a barrier destroyed ... [J]ust as the
violence of death overturns—irrevocably—the structure of life, so temporarily and
partially does sexual violence ... Inevitably linked with the moment of climax there is a
minor rupture suggestive of death."61 In essence, the domain of eroticism is the
domain of violence, of violation, conventionally involving the sacrifice of the female
"victim" and the male sacrificer:
In the process of dissolution the male partner has generally an active role, while
the female partner is passive. The passive, female side is essentially the one that is
dissolved as a separate entity ... Stripping naked is the decisive action.
Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession ... Stripping naked is seen in
civilization where the act had full significance if not as a simulacrum of the act of

60 See Karen Horney, "The Dread of Woman," in Feminine Psychology, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Norton,
1993), pp. 133-46; and Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human
Malaise, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Other Press, 1999 [Harper and Row, 1976]), pp. 124-54. Citation is to the
Other Press edition.
61 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: John Calder, 1962), pp. 106-7.
 Between a Rock and a Hard Place? 77

killing, at least as an equivalent ... [T]he female partner in eroticism was seen as
the victim, the male as the sacrificer.62
In contraposition to this observation, the two episodes most explicitly demonstrate not
only man's vulnerability and mortality (mediated by female bodies), but the
provisionality of a phallocentric cultural economy founded on the subordination and
exogamous exchange of women. Here Bataille's androcentric analysis of eroticism, via
magisterial discourse on the sacrifice of the female "victim," is impugned. Surati's and
Maiko's role—the former intentionally; the latter unintentionally—in this case is
certainly not as stereotypical "passive" victims. Simultaneously "sacrificer" and
"sacrificed," occupying both polarities on the axis of sexual pleasure and danger, they
are the doubly extreme embodiment of forbidden eroticism for which men who seek it
sometimes pay dearly.
And yet it is from the point of view of the victim that the tetralogy constructs a
critique of patriarchy's dominative model of identification. The four novels provide
important critiques of patriarchy and its deployment of female subjectivity by factoring
in gender and insisting on the social, political, and economic axes along which power is
distributed and identities are constructed. For these reasons, the tetralogy is valuable
to an understanding of the drives of power and authority in patriarchy and
colonialism, and how they create prejudiced social formations based on gross
falsehoods. Remarkable for its portrayal of individual female subjectivities and
national identity against the grim background of the triadic intersection of race, class,
and gender, the tetralogy is an important voice in the literary dialogue on the
subjectifying practices used to inscribe Indies female selfhoods and the engendering of
that narrative.

62 Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 16-18.