Novels about Authorship : Thai female Writers' Personal Manifesto

Abstract

This paper aims to study novels which present the lives and carees paths of famous Thai female writers between 2516 and 2526 B.E. The four novels written in this decade, which are used in this research, include Thamayanti's Monkut Nam (2516), Suwanni Sukhontha's Phrachan Si Nam Ngoen (2519), Krisana Asoksin's Nam Thuam Mek (2522) and W. Winichaikul's Thang Rai Dokmai (2526). The paper will concentrate on two issues : the manifestation of their identities as female novelists in their works and their refutation of the broad sweeping comments on literary works produced by female writers, using analysis of the texts and the societal context at the time when the novels were released. 

The findings show that all the selected novels present not only the lives of the protagonists who are female novelists but also the similarities of their career paths to becoming authors. As for their personal lives, all the female writers of the four novels share the same background, such as a great fondness for reading during childhood, overcoming obstacles to career achievement with extreme effort, possessing abundant life experience and considerable insight, working laboriously and developing their own writing styles. One novel maintains that the writer must possess a talent for writing from birth. Nevertheless, all the novels stress that success stems from the strenuous practicing of writing rather than talent.

In addition, this type of novel also resists the broad and generalized evaluations and criticisms of the critics of female writers' works at that time. The selected novels contend that the protagonists' works, representing the images of female writers, derive from actual human life as evidenced by the presentation of the authorship process and of the characters' attitudes towards the writers' responses to the criticisms they received. Hence, it is not too far fetched to claim that the selected four novels about authorship are a record of the female novelists' life experience, feelings and attitudes towards novel composition, and their stance on the value of artistic works in the dispute over the evaluation of literary style and its artistic merit.