Autobiographical Elements in Behn's Oronooko

Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

NALANS
JOURNAL OF
NARRATIVE AND
LANGUAGE STUDIES
June 2019
Volume 7 – Issue 12
Editors of the Issue

Dr. Fehmi TURGUT
Dr. Nazan YILDIZ
ISSN: 2148 – 4066 (Online)

www.nalans.com


All rights reserved. No part of NALANS’s articles may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher and the author(s)
Copyright Policy
By submitting a paper to Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, the authors represent that their text
and any illustrations thereto comply with national and international copyright laws. The authors release
and hold Journal of Narrative and Language Studies are harmless from any claims or liabilities under
such laws. Contributors also claim and accept that the articles submitted are original and unpublished.
As stated on each page of the journal, the copyright of each article belongs jointly to Journal of Narrative
and Language Studies and the author(s). Permission is hereby granted by the Editors of the journal for
any article published herein to be reproduced in full or in part for any non-commercial purpose, subject
to the consent of the author(s), as long as Journal of Narrative and Language Studies with its URL
(http://www.nalans.com) is clearly indicated as the original source.
The book version and the articles in the current issue of Journal of Narrative and Language Studies were
designed and prepared for publication by the web editor of the Journal, and the copyright of the design
belongs to Journal of Narrative and Language Studies.
Submission Guidelines
Submission of a paper implies the author’s commitment to publish in this journal. Authors submitting a
paper to the Journal should not submit it to another journal; nor should papers repeat information
published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content. The author’s
transmittal letter accompanying the manuscript should affirm that these conditions are met. Authors in
doubt about what constitutes prior publication should consult the academic coordinators.
Please find submission guidelines for NALANS at www.nalans.com
Published in Turkey
Contact Address:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa Zeki ÇIRAKLI
NALANS, Editor-in-Chief
Karadeniz Technical University,
Faculty of Letters
Department of English Language and Literature
Trabzon, 61080
Turkey
Phone: +90 462 377 35 49

Fax: +90 462 325 55 93
Email: mzcirakli@gmail.com

Editorial Board
Editors-in-Chief
Dr. M. Zeki Çıraklı & Dr. M. Naci Kayaoğlu
Co-Editors
Dr. John Pier, ENN, European Narratology Network
Dr. Ferit Kılıçkaya, Mehmet Akif Ersoy University
Dr. Tzu Yu Allison Lin, Gaziantep University
Dr. Şakire Erbay Çetinkaya, Karadeniz Technical University
Dr. Hasan Sağlamel, Karadeniz Technical University
Acquisition & Production Editor

Nimetullah Aldemir, Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University
Advisory Board
Dr. Marie-Laure Ryan, Independent Dr. Osamu Takeuchi - Kansai University,

Researcher, USA Osaka / Japan
Dr. Stephen Ryan - Waseda University / Japan Dr. Richard McGarry - Appalachian State
Dr. Devo Y. Devrim- University of New University Boone, North Carolina / USA
England / Australia Dr. Lyudmila Petrovna Muhammed, Moscow
Dr. Jaroslaw Krajka, Maria Curie-Skłodowska State University, Russia
University, Poland Dr. Dimitris Kargiotis, University of Ioannina,
Dr. Enrique Alejandro Basabes - Universidad Greece
Nacional de La Pampa Santa Rosa / Argentina Dr. V. Dmitriyeviç Heylik, University of Z.
Dr. Gayane Hovhannisyan - Yerevan State Gosudarstvennıy Meditsinskiy, Ukraine
Linguistic University / Armenia Dr. Dariusz Stepkowski, Cardinal Stefan
Dr. Georgeta Rata - Banatuli University of Wyszński University, Poland
Timişoara / Romania Dr. Orsolya Falus, University of Dunaújváros,
Dr. Hasnaa Sary Helwaa - Benha University / Hungary
Egypt Dr. Mustafa Bal, Sarajevo University, Bosnia
Dr. Inna Vladimirovna Pevneva - Kemerovo Herzegovina
State University / Russian Federation Dr. Ali Fuad Selvi - Middle East Technical
Dr. Kingsley O. Ugwuanyi - University of University / TRNC (Cyprus)
Nigeria Nsukka / Nigeria Dr. Babürhan Üzüm, Sam Houston State
Dr. Kyung Sook Cho - Busan National University, United States
University of Education / South Korea Dr. Walter Grunzweig, University of
Dr. Maya Khemlani David - University of Dortmund, Germany
Malaya / Malaysia Dr. Hilal Peker, Bilkent University, Turkey
Dr. Maya Sugita McEown - Waseda University Dr. Farzaneh Naseri-sis, Chatfield College,
/ Japan United States
Dr. Michael W. Purdy - Union University / Dr. Mansoor Abbasi, Independent Researcher,
USA Author, Canada
Dr. Muhammed Hussein Keshavarz - Near East Dr. Christina Flitner, Universität für
University / TRNC (Cyprus) Bodenkultur Wien, Austria

Dr. Gina Aurora Necula, Universitatea Dr. Bilge Alkım Zileli, Başkent University,
"Dunărea de Jos" din Galaţi, Romania Turkey
Dr. Irine Goshkheteliani, Batumi State Dr. Hasan Baktır, Erciyes University, Turkey
University, Georgia Dr. Tzu Yu Allison Lin, Gaziantep University,
Dr. Burçin Erol, Hacettepe University, Turkey Turkey
Dr. Yasemin Bayyurt, Boğaziçi University, Dr. Nil Korkut, Middle East Technical
Turkey University, Turkey
Dr. Arif Sarıçoban, Selçuk University, Turkey Dr. Nazan Yıldız, Karadeniz Technical
Dr. Arda Arıkan, Akdeniz University, Turkey University, Turkey
Dr. Bedrettin Yazan, University of Maryland, Dr. Serkan Ertin, Kocaeli University, Turkey
USA Dr. Ali Şükrü Özbay, Karadeniz Technical
Dr. Mukadder Erkan, Atatürk University, University, Turkey
Turkey Dr. Olcay Sert, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Dr. Esra Dicle Başbuğ, Boğaziçi University, Dr. Seda Coşar Çelik, Abant İzzet Baysal
Dr. M. Zülküf Altan, Erciyes University, Dr. Ufuk Ataş, Artvin Çoruh University,
Turkey Turkey
Dr. Damla Demirözü, İstanbul University, Dr. Mustafa Kırca, Çankaya University, Turkey
Turkey Dr. Ahmet Selçuk Akdemir, İbrahim Çeçen
Dr. Hasan Karal, Trabzon University, Turkey University, Turkey
Dr. İbrahim Yerebakan, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Dr. Derya Çokal, Newcastle University, UK
University, Turkey Dr. Sinem Sonsaat, Iowa State University, USA
Dr. Mehmet Takkaç, Atatürk University, Dr. Kerem Kobul, Karadeniz Technical
Dr. Ferit Kılıçkaya, Mehmet Akif Ersoy Dr. Gülden Taner, Çankaya University, Turkey
University, Turkey Dr. Yıldırım Özsevgeç, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Dr. Sinem Sonsaat, Iowa State University, USA University, Turkey
Dr. Margaret J-M Sönmez, Middle East Dr. İfakat Banu Akçeşme, Erciyes University,
Technical University, Turkey Turkey
Dr. Sevil Hasırcı, Gaziantep University, Turkey
Dr. Çiler Hatipoğlu, Middle East Technical
Dr. Mine Özyurt Kılıç, Social Sciences University
University, Turkey
of Ankara, Turkey
Dr. Yeliz Biber Vangölü, Atatürk Üniversitesi, Dr. Şakire Erbay Çetinkaya, Karadeniz Technical
Dr. Ayşegül Kuglin, TED University, Turkey Dr. Hikmet Yazıcı, Trabzon University, Turkey
Dr. Recep Şahin Arslan, Pamukkale University, Dr. Şule Okuroğlu Özün, Süleyman Demirel
Dr. Fehmi Turgut, Karadeniz Technical Dr. Fatma Kalpaklı, Selçuk University, Turkey
University, Turkey Dr. Mustafa Polat, Bahçeşehir University,
Dr. Mehmet Ali Çelikel, Pamukkale University, Turkey
Turkey
Dr. Sedat Akayoğlu, Abant İzzet Baysal
University, Turkey
Dr. Bilal Kırkıcı, Middle East Technical
University, Turkey
Dr. Julie Mathews-Aydınlı, Social Sciences
University of Ankara, Turkey
Dr. Nurten Birlik, Middle East Technical
University, Turkey
Dr. Hasan Sağlamel, Karadeniz Technical
University, Turkey
Dr. Berkem Gürenci Sağlam, Çankaya
University, Turkey
Dr. Mehmet Özcan, Mehmet Akif Ersoy
University, Turkey

Table of Contents
Articles
Rachid Boujedra, Auto-Fiction, and the Interplay of the Aesthetic and Personal ................................. ..1
Khedidja Chergui
Heteroglossia and Multicultural Uniformity in Rushdie’s Novels .......................................................... 9

Mehmet Ali Çelikel
At the Margins of the Margins: Liang Fang and Sinophone Sarawakian Fiction. ................................. 16
Antonio Paoliello
Difficulties of Constructing the Feminine Subject Resulting from Limitations of Language - Based on
Poetic Texts of Ingeborg Bachmann and Lia Sturua ............................................................................. 30
Salome Pataridze
“Silence is not Silent”: A Postcolonial Feminist Appraisal of Women Silence in Mia Couto’s
Confession of the Lioness ..................................................................................................................... 40
Samya Achiri
A Nietzschean Reading of Androgyny in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ................................... 57

Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız
Reality and Fantasy in British Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Protagonists at the Cross Roads ............... 70
Galip Zorba
Female Homosocial Desire in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or Little Female Academy .............. 78
Nilgün Müftüoğlu & Mustafa Zeki Çıraklı
Review Articles
Autobiographical Elements in Behn’s Oroonoko, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Woolf’s Orlando ........ 91
Sinem Çapar
Depiction of Sensuous Beauty and Love in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander .......................................... 98
Kübra Baysal
The Oriental Phobia: A Postcolonial Reading of The Thing About Thugs .......................................... 106
Mustafa Büyükgebiz

Introduction
Fehmi Turgut
Nazan Yıldız
From the Editors
Academic journals are like human beings in that when they are born they are vulnerable,
weak, and in dire need of protection and care. This was the picture when we published our first
issue in December, 2013. From then on, with each issue, we have been encouraged by the
continuing influx of academic interest. Fortunately, today we enjoy being an academically
grown up journal bringing our readers the best national and international writing both by high
profile, established and emerging authors. We keep strongly holding our believes, hopes and
objectives to create a lighthouse for international literary and linguistic culture.
This issue publishes articles each of which is a transcript of human experience that
produces powerful and compelling alternatives which will help us resolve our long-standing
philosophical, political, psychological and ontological debates, of facts and perceptions
standing for facts with their varied forms, of emotions that have a deep influence on how we
view the world, of problems that have reverberated across centuries.
Khedidja Chergui, with a particular emphasis on the Boujedra’s obsession with the
Motherly figure in his narratives, this paper considers in what ways personal experiences
intervene to shape the writer’s image of women in his society. Taking the Algerian society as a
frame of reflection, the present paper articulates the interplay of the aesthetic and personal
dimensions of Boujedra’s auto- fictional narratives.
Mehmet Ali Çelikel, in his article titled Heteroglossia and Multicultural Uniformity in
Rushdie's Novels, introduces us to a world where multi cultural conditions as the outcomes of
post-colonial migrations are reificated in various forms in Salman Rushdie's novels.
Antonio Paocelona, in At the Margin of Margins: Liang Fang and Sinophone
Sarawakian Fiction, writes about Liang Fang, a prolific Sinophone Sarawakian writer, and his
most achieved work Longtuzhu with a focus on Sarawakian ethnicity and Chinese experience
and origin in Sarawak, a state in Malaysia.
Salome Pataridze's paper Difficulties of Costructing the Feminine Subject Resulting
from Limitations of Language-Based on Poetic Texts of Ingeborg Bachman and Lia Sturua
abtly focuses on the lyrical works by two geographically and culturally diverse women,
Ingeborg Bachman of Austria, and Lia Sturua of Georgia referring to the self-identification and
self-expression problems of femininity.
"Silence is not Silent": A Psot Colonial Feminist Appraisal of Women Silence in Mia
Couto's Confession of the Lioness by Samya Achiri discusses how female silence which can be

Introduction / Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
considered as submissive in other cultures can be subversive and a cry for self-empowerment
and self-expression in Mia Couto's Confession of the Lioness with its focal female character
Mariamar in Mozambique.
Critically reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse with a focus on the concept of
'androgyny' using a Nietzschean approach, Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız claims that Woolf, as
Nietzsche did in his philosophical writings, presented a positive force for modern artist and
modern women highlighting the idea that femininity alone is not enough to challenge
phallocentrism and that androgyny is an answer to what women needs to achieve this end.
Galip Zorba, analyzes the initial settings and entrances of the secondary worlds in
British children’s fantasy fiction, namely by reading, L. Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, J.
R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and J. K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It is seen that, the initial settings in the works
studied are situated either in the real world or in a place in which a realistic setting is dominant.
The results of this study show that the protagonists, except for Harry Potter, often find darkness
and danger in the secondary worlds.
Nilgün Müftüoğlu and Mustafa Zeki Çıraklı, considers the same-sex relationships of female
characters in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or Little Female Academy within the framework
of homosocial settings and eruption of homosocial desire. This erudite study shows how
satisfied homosocial desire turns into a power of transformation from chaos to harmony.
Reviewing Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Mary Shelley's Frankestein and Virginia Woolf's
Orlando using an autobiographical approach, Sinem Çapar argues that Behn, Sheley and Woolf,
being devout advocate of feminism, androgyny and gender fluidity, reflected their own world
views on their novels and redefined the boundaries between femininity and masculinity.
Kübra Baysal, taking us onto the wings of poetry, argues that Christopher Marlowe, the
chivalrous poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan Era, made an avant-garde interpretation of the
Greek myth bringing sensuous beauty and erotic love to the centre of his splendid piece of
narrative poem Hero and Leander.
Mustafa Büyükgebiz with the help of postcolonial studies, explores the concepts of
discontent, anarchy, otherness, and ethnic and religious terror highlighting the “colonized”
characters in Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs.
All in all, on our long way from a near past to an endless future, we feel indebted to all who
have cooperated with us and will do so very much in our search for academic merit.
Rachid Boujedra, Auto-Fiction, and the Interplay of the Aesthetic

and Personal1
Khedidja Chergui2
L’École Normale Superieure de Bouzareah, Algeria
chergui.english88@gmail.com
APA Citation:
Chergui, K. (2019). Rachid Boujedra, Auto-Fiction, and the Interplay of the Aesthetic and Personal. Journal of
Narrative and Language Studies, 7(12), 1-8
Abstract
Analyzing the female character in Rachid Boujedra’s select narratives and with insights from both the sociology
of gender theories and the narrative texts, this paper reflects on how literary portrayals of female characters might
be subject to personal standards of evaluation while being responsive to social norms and expectations questioning
whether writers can keep loyal to their artistic objectivity while writing women. With a particular emphasis on the
Boujedra’s obsession with the Motherly figure in his narratives, this paper considers in what ways personal
experiences intervene to shape the writer’s image of women in his society. Taking the Algerian society as a frame
of reflection, the present paper articulates the interplay of the aesthetic and personal dimensions of Boujedra’s
auto- fictional narratives pointing out that literary representations of female characters in male narratives do often
oscillate between social expectations of women roles and the writer’s personal experiences.
Keywords: auto-fiction, female identity, loyalties, Rachid Boujedra, writer intuitions
Literature both reflects and helps to create reality. It is through their preservation in works of art
that we know what the stereotypes and archetypes have been and are; in turn, knowing the way
images influence our view of reality and even our behavior.
(Mary Ferguson, p.5)
Introduction
In literature, the debate over how woman character and identity can be portrayed while
considering sociocultural norms and ethics of standardization is a multitudinous one. No matter
what is the sociocultural context, the same dynamic of self and other shaped the way female
characters were/are projected in literary works with reference to the same social expectations
that define woman’s place and role in society. Being loyal to woman feelings and character in
1
A part of this paper was presented at The Ear of a Woman: Passive Female Audience in History and Literature
International Conference organized by the Tunisian association for Comparative Studies, Hotel Djerba, Tunisia
(TBA), 11-12 April, 2018.
2
Assistant Lecturer Department of English, L’École Normale Superieure de Bouzareah, Algeria.
Khedidja Chergui / Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
the world of the text created an air of opposition between some writers who married their
intuitions about women personality and aspirations with the social image prescribed for
centuries and others who resorted to their lives for more enlightening examples to depict in
what ways a woman might fit in to the social world she is raised in. The issues of gender roles,
women passive voice in history and sociology and woman/female representations in literature
have always formed a part amidst a wider and more evolving cycle of social and literary
theorizations. Both gender social theories and literary approaches to woman character do
intersect to possibly argue about the proper way of defining a woman identity or role in society.
Over the ages, writing women accounted for different social priorities and considerations.
While the woman figure in Greek mythology was held in a position that elevates her to be gods’
and warriors’ pleasure satisfying agents whereas socially performing the role of a second class
citizen, the Mary and Eve distinction in Medieval times inspired most literary approaches to
women confining their roles to certain spiritual behaviors the refusal of which leads to social
exclusion and deprivation. More standards were attributed to the way women were portrayed
in the coming periods leaning more towards shaping clear cuts between a male and a female
character as for Victorian women who were glorified as staying at home daughters, wives and
mothers supportive and obedient to their male counterparts. This kind of domestic incarceration
of women, according to the general perception of the time, allows more room for woman purity
and innocence while developing her character in more straight ways.
More rebelling and uplifting attempts at portraying women started to be given shape
towards the 20th century albeit remaining within the confines of a norms prescribing society.
Whereby female characters became enjoying the position of protagonists and heroines in novels
and poems, they were projected tragically as ending up in circumstances that force them to
reevaluate the danger inherent in their attempts at achieving independence, equity or defying
the general norm of the house angel. Thereafter, and upon gaining more weight, establishing a
distinct voice in literature and taking advantage of the pen to sound their thoughts and desires
became pertinent with many feminist initiatives and movements. Woman portrayal of her
woman fellows sprang from her personal and social experiences yielding in fine
autobiographical narratives aiming at schooling the way societies tend to structure vile gender
distinctions along biological and class lines.
Be that as it may, while the general scheme of things supposes that a piece of literature
can exert a kind of effect on the way a society might view women and their roles and where the
textual abodes different writers fashion try to project female identity and character with certain
aspired to extricating potentials, some male-authored narratives are still ambivalent in their
representation of women as Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope state in Who am I This Time?:
Female Portraits in British and American Literature:
"Patriarchal society views women essentially as supporting characters in the drama
of life. Men change the world, and women help them. This assumption has led to
an inaccurate literary terminology and criticism." (p. 10)
This what the epigraph seems to relate to; the fact that literary works help us make sense of the
prejudices and stereotypes as advocated by certain societies and the way they are transmuted in
the world of the text. Making use of literature to endorse a personal cause or reflect upon
personal experiences defined many male-authored narratives which gave a different dimension
to the way women can be possibly approached and portrayed. Accordingly, the writer’s
envisaging of the social world gives way to what he sees plausible to project his female
characters. This determines the behaviors of women in the world of the text and in the eyes of
the demanding society they are obligated to adhere to.
2
Rachid Boujedra, Auto-Fiction, and the Interplay of the Aesthetic and Personal,
With reference to Rachid Boudjedra’s fiction, that is known to delve deep into the Algerian
society’s socio-cultural fabric, this paper attempts to examine the extent to which literary
portrayals of female characters in male-authored narratives might be subject to personal
standards of evaluation and how writers can keep loyal to their artistic objectivity while writing
women. With a particular emphasis on the writer’s obsession with the Motherly figure in his
narratives, this paper examines the way personal experiences intervene to shape the writer’s
image of women in his society and how a writer’s loyalties might fluctuate between response
to the social image of women and his personal experiences and intuitions.
Rachid Boujedra’s Schizoid Aspirations in Literature
Rachid Boudjedra, a writer known to be wearing many hats and a mind tearing open a rebel
oscillating spirit, is a prominent figure amid modern Algerian novelists who tried to grapple
with various issues appertaining to a postcolonial and contemporary Algerian society. With a
francophone expression and with both the Algerian society and the human condition as his
extrapolating spaces, his narratives broach questions as regards socio-cultural transition in
modern Algeria, postcolonial dialectics, universal existential ethics as they are regarded an
outline for woman freedom and emancipation. Through a language adorned with fine poetic
and philosophical pronouncements and with a captivating equivocacy of subject treatment,
Boudjedra’s writings constitute a cry of anguish in the face of a father who, according to
Boudjedra’s view of him and in reference to so oft-made statements, is a reflection and symbol
of a pietistic and hypocrite Algerian patriarchal society; a society that opened up his horizons
for a literary vision that moves from the narrow context of the Algerian family to act upon a
wider social scale. Adding on several micro limbs of the daily dynamics of the Algerian family,
with his being a focal point, Boudjedra’s novels furnish examples of social investigation
targeting the major tenets of a postcolonial society like Algeria.
As we earlier argued that over and above the fact that a piece of literature emanates from
certain social and historical contexts where a certain cause pertinent to a society might be
espoused or defied, the world of a narrative text acts as a retaliatory terrain giving the writer
the possibility to unveil some personal truths and experiences for the sake of satisfying an
instinct or criticizing a disagreeable mode of social behavior. Writing becomes borne out of a
personal necessity to uphold or oppose a certain cause with the writer himself playing the role
of an active character. This trend of drawing on the affective and transformative potential of
literature to speak out a tortured soul is characteristic of Boudjedrian literary output. While
responding to women plight in his society with the desire of propagating hidden histories and
stripping bare what other literary productions regard as beyond retribution, the personal
dimension of Boudjedra’s writing is so manifest through his body of works as he patently
declares:
"Je crois que j’ai écrit -particulièrement au début- parce que j’ai été rebelle à mon
milieu, à mon pays, à ma religion. Tout cela revient à dire que j’ai été rebelle au
père, je me suis rebellé contre lui, dans tous les sens du terme, c’est-à-dire
sociologiquement et psychanalytiquement. Cela a donné la nécessité et l’urgence
d’écrire". (KOM, p.78)3
3
. Rachid Boujedra’s statements and the extracts taken from his novels La Repudiation and La Pluit are quoted in
French due to their access only in French; and personal translation is avoided in respect to the writer’s exactness
of message and structure.
3
"Dans la mesure où j’ai eu personnellement des problèmes avec mon père quand il
a répudié ma mère. J’en ai énormément souffert, mon père a épousé trois femmes,
j’ai une vingtaine de frères et sœurs". (Ibid.)
"Ma blessure symbolique, c'est le rapport au père extrêmement violent, ce salaud

de potentat minable de 1,60 m." (Boudjedra, 1969, p. 221)
For that being the case, gender dynamics in Boudjedra’s fiction, mostly prompted at the
beginning by a desire to rebel against an irresponsible father and a restricting milieu, are torn
between the need to eke out a path for women emancipation and the necessity to redeem and
get over a troublesome past. In a Freudian parricide like fashion, Boudjedra’s novels constitute
spaces of resentment over a repudiating father and a strong desire to engage in literary avenging
trials. The writer inveighs against a father-centered horde for the sake of deconstructing such a
fatherly order to erect a more tolerant and less restricting family abode for himself and his
repudiated mother:
"Entre nous, le père disposait une barrière d'hostilité qu'il s'ingéniait à consolider.
Effarés, nous allions nous abîmer dans cette lutte difficile où les couleurs ne sont
jamais annoncées: la recherche de la paternité perdue." (La Repudiation, p. 49)
"J'érigeais l'érection en système verrouillé d'automutilation, à tel point que, dans

ma rage de confondre les choses, j'associais à la douleur physique […] la coupure
définitive avec le père." (Ibid)
In this light, most of Boudjedra’s narrative texts assume an autobiographic nature in both
content and structure. Autobiographic narratives attribute validity and assertion to narration for
they give meaning and context to experience and "a life journey confused by frequent
misdirection and even crises of identity but reaching at last a sense of perspective and
integration, a satisfying wholeness" (Buckley, 39-40). Self-writing, even though in a
fictionalized rhythm, allows for introspection, soul-searching and allures the reader’s capacity
for reflection and analysis, with all being bound on how much discussion a writer intends to
generate upon laying open specificities of his life.
Literarily Avenging a Repudiated Mother: a Fatherly Horde Deconstructed
Most of Boudjedra’s narrative texts expose female psychology and aspirations through the eyes
of a repudiated mother. The Mother figure, as it develops through his major fiction, gains weight
and freedom reflecting an enslaving obsession of the writer with his mother and his interest in
avenging her from a repudiating father. Howbeit the issues being investigated in his texts; the
status of women in the Algerian society, religion, sexual inclinations, psychological
redemption, politics in a postcolonial state, the theme of 'repudiation' forms the crux of them
all. His first novel, La Repudiation (Repudiation), won him the "enfant terrible" award which
became synonymous with Boudjedra’s troubled childhood. A novel which is regarded as a
family drama digs deep into the writer’s psychology revealing the complications one might
experience while living within the confines of a detached family headed by a repudiated mother.
With Boudjedra stressing the fact that it is a "drame familial dont j'ai été le produit,
littérairement parlant," (Boudjedra, Le Matin) and that it is "une oeuvre qui a longuement muri
en moi et qui est ensuite venu comme ça " (Achour, p. 136), this part of the paper attempts to
examine how the writer engages in an avenging initiative against a repudiating careless father
while trying to elevate his mother’s submissive status, with his novel La Répudiation being the
4
space of reference, to expose her as reaching both psychological and social balance in later
texts mainly La Pluit.
Boudjedra adopts the word 'repudiation' instead of 'divorce' to emphasize how much a
repudiated woman is more heavily tortured compared to the divorced and released. In a
repudiated status, the woman is still restricted to the husband’s control but excluded, abandoned
and abjured physically, emotionally and psychologically. In the novel, aged thirty years when
her husband repudiated her, the narrator’s mother experiences victimization at many levels.
Burdened by the obligation to preserve the entire family’s honor, she accepts repudiation
sharing that duty of honor preservation with the uncles. The protagonist’s brother Zahir’s
drowning in alcoholism and homosexuality; and his sister Yasmina’s returning home after a
broken marriage to die of intestinal fever at twenty-one inflict further pain on the family’s
tragedy. Amidst this frustrating context, Rachid, the protagonist, is ten years but old enough to
witness the tormenting impact of a family shattered by repudiation. The father’s indifference to
the mother’s and the family’s declining status and his marriage with a second 15- years aged
girl further fueled the narrator’s, Rachid’s, avenging sentiments. While he himself feels
repudiated and for the sake of achieving the revenge he sought and to show his denunciative
revolting attitudes, Rachid, sleeps with his young stepmother, and commits incest with his half-
sister Leila and a cousin. This kind of misbalance that afflicts the family forms the dynamic of
the novel being tragically intensified the more the narrative develops. The psychic status of a
repudiated woman as experienced by the protagonist’s mother is intensely and tragically
portrayed:
"Lamentable, ma mère qui ne s’était doutée de rien ! […] La peur lui barre la tête
et rien n’arrive à s’exprimer en dehors d’un vague brouhaha. Elle est au courant.
Une angoisse bègue. Elle se déleste des mots comme elle peut et cherche une fuite
dans le vertige ; mais rien n’arrive. […] Elle ne sait pas cerner le réel. […] Lâcheté
surtout.
Elle est debout et lutte contre l’envie de s’évanouir. L’indifférence rutile dans la
pièce fraîche. Le père continue à manger, très lentement comme à son habitude.
Pour lui, tout continue à couler dans l’ordre prévisible des choses. […] Ma hésite.
Une gêne… La banalité des mots qu’elle va prononcer. Elle ne sait pas se décider.
Et les fantasmes ! Surtout pas d’insolence pour ne pas rebuter les ancêtres. Se
taire… […] (Dans la ville, les hommes déambulent. Ils crachent dans le vagin des
putains, pour les rafraîchir. Chaleur… Les hommes ont tous les droits, entre autres
celui de répudier leurs femmes. […] Ma mère ne sait ni lire ni écrire. […] Elle reste
seule face à la conspiration du mâle allié aux mouches et à Dieu." (La Répudiation,
p. 34)
Bringing to focus an alienated paternity through revolting against a careless father and through
looking for a solace in the mother figure, being an epitome of sacrifice and dedication, inspired
the thematic of Boujedra’s first and most accomplishing novel, La Répudiation. The Father
Figure and the question of a good or alienated paternity shape the dynamic of many world
narratives. Some works like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which projects a father utterly
prepared to sacrifice everything to save his son amidst the hopeless and grimy context of the
novel or Jane Austin’s Mr. Bennett who reflects the image of a father having ecstasy in the
affectionate relationship that connects him to his daughters and who is projected as having
solace in the intimacy he shares with his daughter Elizabeth whom he confesses to be his
greatest source of pride, draw the image of the father character as caring, responsible and
dedicated to his role as the head of family. A parenthood portrayed in the way it plays a role in
5
the child’s self-development and as a positive drive towards having a balanced sense of self.
Other narratives tend to assume a critical tone through spotlighting the complexities emanating
from certain types of fathers who inflict misery on their children through escapism,
irresponsibility, inadequacy, ambivalence and self-interest as it is the case of the father
portrayed in Boujedra’s narrative, La Repudiation. From the psychoanalytic perspective to
literary portrayals of the father figure, the strong presence of the father in a child’s life is
regarded as a moving motif towards maintaining both defensive and integrative capacities while
passivity, on the part of the father, yields in the child developing revengeful sentiments further
motivated every time a child loses a chance to relate actively and passionately to the father. It
is viewed as a modal to be emulated being lost and substituted with internally fashioned images
having no alternative manifestations in the real world. In the context of Boujedra’s narratives,
fatherhood, or paternity, is conceived as an obstacle to self-improvement and family unity and
the writer’s search for a lost parenthood is one of his main concerns in this narrative.
This feeble, compliant and serene character of the mother, as vehemently criticized by the
narrator, heaps more submission on her status for being reluctant to face repudiation with more
assertion and prowess, "Ma4 ne s'y trompe pas, elle sait qu'il faut rester digne et se faire à l'idée
de l'abandon" (La Répudiation, p. 35). "Ma, quoique fraîchement répudiée, reste soucieuse du
bien – être de Si Zoubir" (p. 35). With the writer being the protagonist of this novel, the way
the maternal love captures all his aspirations and actions is well expressed when he pronounces:
"Comme ma mère était condamnée à ne plus quitter la maison jusqu'à sa mort, nous
étions très inquiets à l'idée de l'agonie qui allait nous envahir et de l'amour maternel
qui allait nous dévorer. Il n'y avait plus d'issue!" (p. 88)
The writer’s approach to the mother’s status springs from the way he views the entire confining
and limiting social context of the society he intends to project. Viewed from the perspective of
the sociology of gender theories, social expectations of women cut across cultural boundaries
and range from personality traits, domestic behaviors, occupations to physical appearances.
Although there are slight differences across cultures, woman character is shaped by the kind of
expectations a society builds around the woman figure. Passivity, submission, and fragility are
traits very often associated with woman character while toughness and domination are most
commonly male traits. Women are described as incompetent and emotionally-laden in the face
of men’s ability for action and alacrity for calculation. Self-perceptions are often shaped in
relation to these environing factors that render the person’s image of himself an acquired rather
than a self-conscious dynamic. These self-perceptions are altered by the kind of effect the social
other might have on that self, actuating either its edifying or degrading potentials. The way
personal traits are then internalized portend even more the extent to which external variables
could exert their judging or evaluating effects on one’s image generating a new model of self-
viewing that exceeds the individual level to absorb more externally inventive variables.
The sociologist Charles H. Cooley developed the theory of the "looking-glass self"
(1902) in which he argued that the image an individual gives to himself is a response to the way
society wants him/her to be. In that sense, personal traits are acquired in line with the roles
assigned to them and expected of them on the part of that society. Accordingly, gender develops
into a learned behavior and a socially produced identity that subjects self-viewing standards
into a self/other inter-relational activity. Social referencing of one’s capacities and potentials is
further supported every time one relates to others in his social realm since "the tendency of the
self, like every aspect of personality, is expressive of far-reaching hereditary and social factors,
4
. "Ma" refers to 'mother' or 'mum' in local Algerian dialect.
6
and is not to be understood or predicted except in connection with the general life"(Horton,
1902, p. 185). This social other can be an active variable in constructing and inventing the way
a person comes to perceive himself. This motivated self-feeling can come about while
interacting with a family member, a friend or any other person who can have hold on that self.
In Boujedra’s later novels mainly La Pluit, complementary to the thematic of the previous
novel and assuming cathartic overtones, this image of the submissive, indifferent, and afraid
mother started to find momentum. This novel assumes a liberating tone with the mother figure
reaching a readjusting stance with self and society. The image of the mother in this later text
resumes all the facets of the mother figure as portrayed in the previous texts, La Répudiation
and L’ Insolation, while consummating the writer’s trial at elevating his mother’s status the
way he started it in La Répudiation. The female figure is getting more resonant and willingly
responsive to its self-assertive claims. While previously portrayed as deprived of the capacity
to speak for herself and to espouse her motherly cause, the mother figure of this later novel is
projected as educated, working, true to her womanhood and distinction, cherishing a positive
attitude towards crisis, enjoying her individual world with much vivacity:
"Ma mère s’efforce de recevoir mes invités avec beaucoup de gentillesse et de
délicatesse. Certes c’était un peu surfait et cela manquait de spontanéité et de
naturel. Mais je lui en su gré. Elle ne me déçut jamais. Quand mon vieil ami et son
épouse s’en allèrent ma mère me dit-il ressemble à ton père comme une fève
ressemble à une fève." (La Pluie, p. 101)
And with the elevated motherly figure speaking out her renewed self and as having an
impetus in writing and introspection:
"Je griffonne. J’écris. La plume glisse sur le papier lisse et blanc. Elle le blesse
profondément. L’encre paraît comme une sorte de sang bleu par la chaleur de la
lampe. J’ai envie de planter mes doigts dans cette matière aveugle et brute". (p. 20)
"Elles me ramènent à cette zone limite de l’écriture intime. Celle des émois
solitaires. J’ai envie de conserver mon journal. Etre sincère, jusqu’au bout. Ne pas
m’autocensurer. Puis très vite après ce grabuge infernal je retrouvais mon calme.
La paix s’installa de nouveau en moi. Je pus alors me récupérer entièrement. Bout
par bout. Je pus aussi rassembler mes propres éléments qui s’étaient éparpillés en
moi-même. N’importe comment. Dans un désordre inouï. Le dedans se rendurcit
de nouveau. J’eus envie que la pluie cesse pour pouvoir me concentrer." (pp. 116-
117.)
While being critical of his mother’s malleable status in his La Repudiation, the writer, in later
texts, insisted on drawing a more positive image of this female figure to show that despite all
that impedes and obstructs a woman’s road to self-assertion, she can resume resonance to her
character against the inordinate impact of patriarchy, repudiation and male domination.
Conclusion
The present paper veers towards emphasizing the fact that a writer’s loyalties to his art
and aesthetic preoccupations might be fluctuating between the need to design literary texts for
women emancipation in his society and the desire to lay open some personal truths and
experiences to reach some sort of catharsis with self and society. Still, one might ask, upon
reading Boudjedra’s fiction and mainly his Repudiation, would his narratives be that avenging
7
and contemplative in tone if he, the writer and narrator, has not personally and intimately
experienced the feelings of detachment and deprivation? What would our view of the sexual
relation with a stepmother, incest with a half-sister be when considered out of the retaliatory
context of the novel? To what extent can this novel be regarded extricating to women
predicament in the Algerian society while it tries to upbraid some female figures like the
stepmother and the half-sister while extolling others like the mother? As a prevailing trend in
most narratives that assume an autobiographic character, an answer to such questions is
dependent on how much we know that a literary work can be so blinded to truth while being
immersed in self-apprehension and introspection and to what extent we come to perceive the
role of a literary piece in constructing and deconstructing reality to serve an implicitly designed
purpose.
Adding to what has been advanced so far; Boudjedra’s intellectual sagacity reflects an
adamant spirit so insisting on according to literature its unraveling dimensions. Boudjedra’s
narratives question reality as seen through psychologically and emotionally tormented
characters. With women being a considered priority, reaching catharsis, then suggests opening
closed sores, retrieving old memories and investing the present with a reconciliatory self-
affirming energy with writing being the most manifest medium to do so.
References
Achour, Christiane. (1990). Dictionnaire des oeuvres algériennes en langue française,

(l’Harmattan, Paris,)
Buckley, Jerome Horton. (1984). The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse
Since 1800. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press)
Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope. (1976). Who am I This Time? Female Portraits in British
and American Literature, (New York: McGraw Hill)
Charles Horton, Cooley. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order, (New York: Scribner's)
Mary Anne, Ferguson. (1973). Images of Women in Literature. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin)
KOM, Amboise. (2006). Jalon pour un dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires de langue française
des pays du Maghreb, (l’Harmattan, Paris)
Rachid, Boudjedra. (1969). La Répudiation, (Paris, Denoël)
__________, (1972). L’Insolation, (Paris, Denoël)
__________, (1990). La Pluie (traduit de l’arabe en 1985 par Antoine Moussali en collaboration
avec l’auteur), Paris, Denoël, 1987 [Titre original: Leiliyat Imraatin Arik]; réédité sous le titre
Journal d’une femme insomniaque, (Alger, Dar El Idjtihad)
__________, (2003). " Écrire pour atténuer la douleur du monde ", Le Matin, (Alger, 17 juin)
8
Heteroglossia and Multicultural Uniformity in Rushdie’s Novels

Mehmet Ali Çelikel *
Prof. Dr., English Language and Literature, Pamukkale University

macelikel@pau.edu.tr
APA Citation:
Çelikel, M. A. (2019). Heteroglossia and Multicultural Uniformity in Rushdie’s Novels. Journal of Narrative
and Language Studies, 7(12), 9-15.
Abstract
Salman Rushdie’s novels bear significant stylistic and thematic tropes allowing his fiction to be studied under
the critical assumptions of postcolonial and postmodern literary theories. Midnight’s Children, Shame and The
Satanic Verses reflect not only an anti-imperialist stance in before and after the colonial enterprise, but also a new
form of hybridised identity for characters of both Indian and English origin, thus suggesting a new postcolonial
culture. Dislocation of culture and identity through the process of hybridisation produces its own resistance
towards changes in values, principles and beliefs. In this respect, Rushdie’s novels portray postcolonial individuals
attempting to resist cultural hybridisation by preserving their traditional and religious identities. However, their
resistance is another form of hybridization through their multilingual discourse and the cultures of both the
colonizer and the colonized begin to have a dialogic relationship in the colonial and postcolonial conditions
depicted in Rushdie’s texts. This article studies Rushdie’s novels in terms of Bakhtinian heteroglossia and argues
that the polyglottal nature of Rushdie’s texts is a way of representing the multicultural condition created by the
colonizer. This study questions further whether or not multiculturalism and heteroglossia contradictorily transform
the postcolonial identities into a uniform identity.
Keywords: heteroglossia, multiculturalism, hybridity, identity
Salman Rushdie’s novels have been identified and categorised within the multiple theories
of post-colonial and postmodernist fiction. They reflect the multi-layered cultural condition
caused by aggressive global capitalism. However, his novels cannot be entitled under a
generalising heading like “novels of commodification” or “novels of the logic of globalisation”,
because the margins of the postmodern cultural condition are flexible and these margins are not
possible to be defined as a singular and unified entity. Nevertheless, in Rushdie’s novels, the
narrative still reflects the postmodern fiction’s susceptibility of trademarks, names of
consumerist products and deterritorialization of cultures.
Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in particular,
reflect not only an anti-imperialist stance before and after the colonial enterprise, but also a new
form of hybridised identity for characters of both Indian and English origin, thus suggesting a
new postcolonial culture. Dislocation of culture and identity through the process of
hybridisation produces its own resistance towards changes in values, principles and beliefs as
*
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Science and Letters, Pamukkale University, Turkey
well as polyglot. In this respect, Rushdie’s novels portray postcolonial individuals who resist
cultural hybridisation by preserving their traditional and religious identities. However, their
resistance turns out to be yet another form of hybridization through their multilingual discourse
and the cultures of both the colonizer and the colonized begin to have a dialogic relationship in
the colonial and postcolonial conditions depicted in Rushdie’s texts.
This article, therefore, aims to study Rushdie’s novels in terms of Bakhtinian heteroglossia
and argues that the polyglottal nature of Rushdie’s texts is a way of representing the
multicultural condition created by the colonizer. This study questions further whether or not
multiculturalism and heteroglossia contradictorily transform the postcolonial identities into a
uniform identity. Therefore, my purpose here is to study the multiculturalism and heteroglossia
in Rushdie’s novels from the perspective of reification and unification.
Multiculturalism celebrates the cultural condition that occurred as particularly the result of
post-colonial migrations to the imperial centres of the former colonies in the aftermath of the
independence. London, as the capital of the British Empire, has been the home to migrants from
the former colonies since the disintegration of the Empire. Thus, it has turned into a city of
cultural contrasts and a centre of a metropolitan identity which is an amalgam of all these
contrasting cultures. This new cultural condition does not necessarily function as a reference to
its colonial past, but also as the indication of London’s unique culture generated by particularly
the post-colonial migrants.
As migrants cannot identify themselves with the local culture, they begin to alienate
themselves from the values of the new homeland. This is not only an alienation process from
the values of their new homeland but also inevitably a temporal and a spatial distancing from
the values of their homeland. This alienation leads them to rebel against their hybridised
situation. Yet, the migrant has a crucial need within this process of alienation and rebellion:
survival. They realise that the post-colonial world is a capitalist one that leads them to
ambivalence as either to integrate into the new culture and reject their identities or to hold on
to their own values. As a result of the need for survival, the post-colonial migrants begin to
isolate themselves from the label of post-colonial identities attached to them and succumb to
the values of the western capitalist world, turning their cultural products into commodities.
The process of reification stands out as the repulsion of identities and beliefs. The
postcolonial discourse in Rushdie’s novels reflects not only an anti-imperialist stance in the
aftermath of the colonial enterprise, but also a new form of hybridised identity for the characters
of both Indian and English origin, thus suggesting a new postcolonial culture. Within this
intense reification, identities succumb to the models constructed by the market which totalizes
and accumulates all individuals under a cultural uniformity. Literature of the postcolonial
period, then, reflects Western products as the forms of cultural fetishism in order for
postcolonial migrants to be more westernised, while it reflects the ethnic characteristics of the
postcolonial individuals not only as the sources of their means of cultural preservation but also
as their means of financial survival.
Food, for instance, functions as the intensifier of immigrants’ cultural representation; it not
only turns into a means of survival but also into the representation of the immigrants’ cultural
background, while it gets commoditized. Shaandaar Café in The Satanic Verses is run by a
Bangladeshi family whose story helps us understand how cultural concepts are forced to change
after migration. Muhammad and Hind Sufyan start running a café and guesthouse after
migrating to London. In Bangladesh Muhammad, a man of culture, a cosmopolitan capable of
quoting from the Qur’an as well as the military accounts of Julius Caesar, was the breadwinner
of the house, as a teacher. However, due to his inability to cook, his wife Hind becomes the
breadwinner in London, while Muhammad waits on customers in the café. Having to leave his
10
Mehmet Ali Çelikel / Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
homeland due to his Communist ideals, he becomes a second-class citizen, and Hind’s cooking
becomes the basis for their restaurant. Their two daughters, Anahita and Mishal, exhibiting the
situation of immigrants, are unaware of their homeland, Bangladesh, a place that their ‘Dad and
Mum keep banging on about,’ which Mishal prefers to call ‘Bungleditch.’ (p. 259).
Thus, the metropolis becomes a melting pot of cultural contrasts and the marker of an
identity which is an amalgam of these contrasting cultures. The multicultural condition in
London does not only stem from the city’s colonial past, but also from the objectification and
commodification in global capitalism. Therefore, the introduction of global motives functions
to modify the local habits and interests in his novels. The multicultural scene in The Satanic
Verses provokes racist attacks on immigrants. The account of the race riots in Brixton is
appalling. The Shaandaar Café becomes the target of an arson attack and both Muhammad and
Hind Sufyan die. The theme of hybridity and migration is a challenge from the marginal
provincial centre to the metropolitan imperialistic centre. However, even Hind’s language and
values undergo a change in the multicultural environment of London:
Everything she valued had been upset by the change; had in this process of translation, been
lost:
Her language: obliged, now, to emit these alien sounds that made her tongue feel tired, was
she not entitled to moan? Her familiar place: what matter that they had lived, in Dhaka, in a
teacher’s humble flat, and now, owing to entrepreneurial good sense, savings and skill with
spices, occupied this four-storey terraced house? (p. 249)
As pointed out by Sukhdev Sandhu, London, for many immigrants, is not a place to refashion
themselves, but a place to migrate and inhabit for financial reasons (p. 154). This process is
taken further by Arif Dirlik and called as “global unity” created by trans-nationalisation of
production (p. 349) which is obviously made easier in the aftermath of colonialism. Dirlik’s
assumption is that the world is homogenized both economically and culturally (p. 349). Arguing
on globalization and commodification, Timothy Bewes asserts that “the concept of reification
presupposes the assimilation of all cultures to a single culture” (p. 21). Multiculturalism is the
commercialisation of even ethnicity, in which case, hybridity is commodified rather than being
hybridised. Thus, commodification and reification disguise the postcolonial cultural scene.
When it comes to speaking of cultural fetishism, despite being analogous with the
multiplicity of the global cultural representation in a local setting, Rushdie’s characters appear
to be similar to each other in that they all reflect hybridity. The post-colonial characters are all
presented through their body ornamentation, mutilation or deformity. The post-colonial body
turns into a performance of cultural fetishism. Judith Butler asserts that
What are being performed are the cultural norms that condition and limit the actor in the
situation but also in play are the cultural norms of reception, which may or may not accord with
the ones that are constituting a situation so that we actually have a retrospective of constitution
of the performance through the norms of reception – and this can produce really interesting
problems of cultural translation and cultural misunderstanding. And those problems are very
productive. (p. 346)
Butler suggests that racial identity depends upon the representation of bodies, both in
physical and performative terms. In this way, people outside of a certain race classification are
Othered and must choose either to perform their societal racial norms or take on the potential
problems of racial performativity. Rushdie’s characters aim to conceal their otherness by using
garments and objects that are culturally attributed to the west. For instance, Midnight’s
Children’s William Methwold has a desire for the continuity of colonial customs in his house
even after it is owned by the Sinais. He asks them to keep everything as it is until colonial rule
11
ends officially. Methwold “is named after the East India Company officer who in 1633 was the
first to envision Bombay as a British stronghold” (Goonetilleke 25). This reference clearly
indicates what ideological intentions are attributed to Methwold, which clearly reflects the
imperial idea of colonialism:
‘Lock, stock and barrel,’ Methwold said, ‘Those are my terms. A whim, Mr Sinai … you’ll
permit a departing colonial his little game? We don’t have much left to do, we British, except
to play our games.’ (p. 95)
The game played by the British starts the multiculturalism even before the independence.
Rushdie offers a version of multiculturalism similar to the demands of performativity that
change according to the societal needs. His search for authenticity rejects self-definition based
solely on them. He demonstrates performativity in practice, creating a visualization of some of
the tenets of the theory. His characters offer both a literary example of how performativity
through the reification of cultural values and objects can work in conjunction with the search
for identity. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem’s father Ahmad Sinai switches to Oxford drawl
while speaking to Methwold, which indicates the construction of an Anglophile identity that
would be reconstructed into a uniform identity that combines Englishness and Indianness.
Ambreen Hai argues that “if language has […] politically and materially formative power, then
Rushdie’s self-conscious postcolonial goal is to take control of that language, to reinvent that
language to begin anew, to reshape the world” (p. 206). Thus, the new identity is formed
through the author’s control of a newly constructed language in Sinai’s case, which gives him
a mock identity.
As well as the unification of the mock identities in the form of multiculturalism, the
reification in this study is the reification of the local traditional and religious values in the
colony itself as an outcome of the colonial venture. The Satanic Verses, in terms of its cultural
deterritorialization and commodification of myths, ruptures the conventional narration by not
only forming a multi-layered structure but also recreating and satirizing religious myths through
the deployment of commodities. This type of reification stands out as a result of the western
products introduced in the colony by imperialism and the colonial venture.
Gibreel Farishta, in The Satanic Verses, is a film star famous for acting in theological movies
in India. In a satirical contradiction to his roles in theological movies, for which he is famous,
he loses his faith soon after his arrival in London. His new identity offers what Amin Malak
calls as “the clash of cultures and the conflict of representations” (p. 183). A theological movie
star turns into a non-believer, and a theatre actor becomes a voice-over actor for commodities.
Catherine Cundy regards their condition as the result of a cultural “dislocation” (p. 68). By
ironically reformulating these post-colonial identities, Rushdie satirises the aggressive capitalist
tendency of imperialism by harshly deploying aggressive marketers and brand names.
In the opening pages of the novel, when the two expatriates fall off the crashed aircraft,
Gibreel begins, in the air, to sing an old Indian song that pre-informs the general halo of the
novel:
‘O, my shoes are Japanese,’ Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-
conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, ‘These trousers English, if you please. On
my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that.’ (p. 5)
Gibreel’s song foreshadows the cultural bricolage in the novel. Gibreel and Saladin represent
a hybridised nation that has lost its national identity. According to the song, this loss of identity
is caused by the economic hegemony of non-national products. This song not only suggests a
cultural bricolage, but also informs the reader of the upcoming tone of the novel that clashes
myths with commodification. Both religion and nation are under the same economic hegemony.
12
Hal Valance, one of the minor characters in the book, is a racist advertising executive who
used to “employ [Saladin] for the voice-overs in his commercials” (Brian Finney, p. 82).
However, he “uses market research to justify removing all signs of black immigrants from his
commercials” and sacks Saladin (Finney, p. 82), because he is too alien. Finney regards this as
Rushdie’s use of black comedy “evident in the passages concerning politics, capitalist greed
and racism” (p. 82). Thus, Saladin’s exclusion from the scene functions as part of the unification
of identities. It is only his English voice that is allowed on the screens.
The most striking religious myth that clashes with commodification is Gibreel’s final dream
about a walk of pilgrimage organised by Ayesha who persuades a whole village to go on a
pilgrimage with her. Mishal, who has cancer, is one of the villagers to join Ayesha. She believes
that her cancer will disappear if she walks to Mecca through the Indian Ocean believing that
the ocean will part for them. However, her husband Mirza’s attempts to stop her are humorous
and suggest a realism that overtakes magic:
‘… When the waters of the ocean part, where will the extra water go? Will it stand up
sideways like walls?...’ He began to cry, and fell on his knees, ... . His dying wife came up and
embraced him from behind. ‘Go with the pilgrimage, then,’ he said ... ‘But at least take the
Mercedes station wagon. It’s got air-conditioning and you can take the icebox full of Cokes.’
(p. 239)
Rushdie creates a grotesque image by parodying an Islamic duty and a holy myth. The
burlesque generated by the clash of eastern magical reality with western products indicates how
powerfully capitalism dominates religious and national identities and how influentially it reifies
them. An air-conditioned car and cold fizzy drinks are suggested as facilitators of a religious
duty, thus decreasing the reverence of such a task. The duty of pilgrimage is taken out of its
local and spiritual paradigms and converted into a secular task through an impious
commodification. Rushdie presents the post-modern cultural condition of the world as an
impediment of authenticity and religious and national identities and calls this “the Coca-
Colonization” in The Satanic Verses:
Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies – the uselessness of the mermen, the
failures of plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-
Colonization of the planet – … (p. 406)
Rushdie represents the eclecticism and juxtaposed images of the postmodern condition. In
this representation, consumerism and media surround everything, including religion, in
contemporary culture. The walk of pilgrimage organised by Ayesha succeeds to elicit attention
from media and the business world in The Satanic Verses. However, this interest in the
pilgrimage is far away from its spiritual content:
The story of the village that was walking to the sea had spread all over the country, and in
the ninth week the pilgrims were being pestered by journalists, local politicos in search of votes,
businessmen who offered to sponsor the march if the yatris would only consent to wear
sandwich boards advertising various goods and services … (p. 488)
In Damian Grant’s words, Rushdie’s fiction calls into question the “value-free world of
contemporary culture” wherever it may be found (p. 87), and he presents capitalist marketing
as what demonises the divinity. The values of consumer culture become more important than
the values of religion and nationality. The interference of consumer culture provides capitalism,
in Lyotard’s terms, with “the power to derealize familiar objects, social rules, and institutions
to such a degree” that reality can only be realised as nostalgia or mockery (p. 74). The holy
pilgrimage is derealized to a degree of mockery, since it is a contemporary attempt that cannot
avoid the bombardment of brand-names and advertisements. When power is possessed by
13
capital, to quote Lyotard once again, contemporary culture becomes eclectic (p. 76) and this
eclecticism gives birth to a new form of heteroglossia which lacks the Bakhtinian dialogism as
the commodified cultures can only get into a dialogue only when they take part in consumerism.
It is a question whether Rushdie’s fictional universe is an allegory of global cultural
homogenization, the death of authenticity, the loss of meaning, or, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, a
“transnational” and “translational dimension of cultural transformation” in postmodernity.
Bhabha asserts that “the construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of
colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference – racial and
sexual”, and these epithets are seen as “modes of differentiation, realised as multiple, cross-
cutting determinations, polymorphous and perverse” (p. 96). When this is the moment of
colonial discourse in Bhabha’s terms, the same discourse based on differentiations and
polymorphism still prevails both in the Western and Eastern post-colonial discourse. I wish to
distinguish the western and eastern post-colonial discourses deliberately, since it is possible to
differentiate the western post-colonial discourse which takes up the colonial subject’s
integration to the western society as its major theme as opposed to the eastern one that presents
the colonial subjects in their authentic environment, which is even more hybridised. What is
contemplated in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, for instance, is the hybridisation process of not
only the eastern colonial subject, but also the western originated rock music. Rushdie employs
Bombay’s multicultural and multilingual cultural scene which provides the novel with post-
colonial cultural hybridity. Umeed Merchant, the narrator, describes the jargon comprehensible
only to Bombayites:
Not only in English. Because it was only me, she could prattle on in Bombay’s garbage
argot, Mumbai ki kachrapati baat-cheet, in which a sentence could begin in one language,
swoop through a second and even a third and then swing back round to the first. Our acronymic
name for it was Hug-me. Hindi Urdu Gujarati Marathi English. Bombayites like me were people
who spoke five languages badly and no language well. (p. 7)
Rushdie’s play on language and identity indicates that Indian culture is manipulated and
hybridised by imperial intervention. Although Hug-me is the consequence of imperial rule to
fit into a colonial or post-colonial discourse, it is the mixture of four different indigenous
languages, as well as English. Even though the description of this hybrid language stands out
as an indicator of the polyglottal nature of Rushdie’s narration style, this polyglot does not
provide a space for postcolonial multiculturalism in an affirmative sense. As Rushdie suggests,
they spoke five languages badly and no language well. He denotes that people in different parts
of India have no common language to communicate in other than English (Imaginary
Homelands, p. 17). Comically in Bombay, people can only communicate in Hug-me.
This hybrid Bombayite language turns out to be an ambivalent identification for the people
of Bombay in Bhabha’s terms. Bombayites are far from creating a national narrative for
themselves. Rather they create an ambivalent identification through Hug-me, through uncertain
cultural meanings in Bhabha’s terms (p. 239). Such a use of language invites a Bakhtinian
analysis which focuses on the discourse of a novel, arguing that “there is a highly characteristic
and widespread point of view that sees novelistic discourse as an extra-artistic medium, a
discourse that is not worked into any special or unique style” (p. 260). My argument here is not
to exclude Bakhtinian analysis from Rushdie’s texts, but if “all attempts at concrete stylistic
analysis of novelistic prose” stray into linguistic descriptions of the language, in Bakhtinian
terms (p. 261), they also stray into cultural descriptions in Rushdie’s narration.
Having said that, the multicultural condition as the outcome of post-colonial migrations in
the second half of the twentieth century has been subject to reification. This reification,
14
however, functioned in various ways. The first type of reification has been observed as the
commodification of cultural values and objects like traditional types of food and icons of
religious beliefs, which were regarded as the means of survival for the immigrants. The second
type of reification has come out as cultural fetishism in which the post-colonial immigrant
adapts himself to the local culture by using the western cultural icons and symbols to appear
more western and to conceal his authentic origin. The third type on the other hand mostly
occurs in the form of intrusion of western brand names in the colony, in which case the colonial
local culture is dominated by western products. The common point in all these three types is
the objectification of culture which leads to uniformity. The more the cultures are reified the
more they are alike since reification strips them of their spiritual and traditional meaning and
content. Last but not the least; multiculturalism is juxtaposed with cultural uniformity
introduced by global capitalism which leads all cultures to sameness. Thus, it is no more the
differences that count but it is the uniformity that dominates the new internationalism.
Bibliography
Bewes, T. (2002) Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
Butler, J. (2004) “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification”
The Judith Butler Reader. Ed. Sara Salih. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 325-56.
Cundy, C. (1996) Salman Rushdie. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press.
Dirlik, A. (1994) “The Postcolonial Aura: third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry. 20, Winter. 328-56.
Finney, B. (1998) ‘Demonising Discourse in Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”’, in
ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. 29:3, July. 67-93.
Grant, D. (1999) Salman Rushdie. Plymouth: Northcote House.
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (1998) Salman Rushdie. London: Macmillan.
Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated from the
French by Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Malak, A. (1989) ‘Reading the Crisis: The Polemics of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic
Verses”’, in ARIEL: A Review of the International English Literature. 20:4, October. 176-
186.
Rushdie, S.(1981) Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape.
Rushdie, S.(1983) Shame. London: Jonathan Cape.
Rushdie, S.(1988) The Satanic Verses. London: Viking.
Rushdie, S.(1996) “Interview: Salman Rushdie talks to the London Consortium about The
Satanic Verses’”, Critical Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, (Summer). 51-70.
Sandhu, S. (2000) “Pop Goes the Centre.” Chrisman, L. & Parry, B. (eds. “Postcolonial Theory
and Criticism,” Essays and Studies 1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 133-
54.
15
At the Margins of the Margins: Liang Fang and Sinophone

Sarawakian Fiction
Antonio Paoliello
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

antonio.paoliello@gmail.com
APA Citation:
Paoliello, A. (2019). At the Margins of the Margins: Liang Fang and Sinophone Sarawakian Fiction. Journal of
Narrative and Language Studies, 7(12), 16-29.
Abstract
Sinophone Sarawakian literature is produced and circulates in a position of multiple marginality. Written in
Sarawak, a geographically peripheral entity within the Federation of Malaysia and not produced in the national
language (Malay or Bahasa Malaysia), it finds itself on the fringes of several literary realms: at the margins of
Malaysian Sinophone literature, which has its center in Peninsular Malaysia, and at the periphery of Malaysian
national literature, which only includes texts written in Malay. Despite this position, I argue that Sinitic-language
Sarawakian literature goes beyond its frontiers and is able to deal with issues of great relevance, such as the
environment and multi-ethnic relations, without having to compromise its local characteristics. Through the
analysis of “Longtuzhu” a short story by prominent Sarawakian writer Liang Fang, both representative of
Sinophone Sarawakian literature in terms of themes and sensibility, I aim at exploring the characteristics of Sinitic-
language Sarawakian fiction, while also presenting an author, a text and, ultimately, an entire body of literature
unjustly neglected by international scholarship.
Keywords: Liang Fang, Longtuzhu (龙吐珠), Sinophone Malaysian literature, Sarawakian Sinophone literature,
Sinitic-language fiction, Sino-Iban identity
1. Introduction
Occupying the northwestern part of the island of Borneo and separated from Peninsular
Malaysia (also known as West Malaysia) by the South China Sea, the former British crown
colony of Sarawak joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 on the condition that its
geographic, ethnic, religious and social characteristics were respected and safeguarded within
the new political entity (Fong, 2011). Although many of the privileges bestowed upon Sarawak
have been gradually withdrawn, the eastern member of the Federation still presents great
differences with the peninsula, in many ways. For instance, in its ethnic diversity, it is the only
Malaysian state in which none of the more than 26 ethnic groups forms an absolute majority
and it is also the only federal entity that does not possess a Muslim majority population (Lee,
2018, p.2). The geographic distance as well as the distinct natural and human environment that
At the Margins of the Margins: Liang Fang and Sinophone Sarawakian Fiction
set Sarawak (and the fellow Bornean state of Sabah) 1 apart from the more-populated Peninsular
Malaysia have also shaped centre-periphery dynamics that marginalize Sarawak (and Sabah) in
many aspects of federal life, including literature.
This peripherality affects literary production in Sinitic languages, as well. Therefore,
Sinophone literature from Sarawak finds itself in a position of multiple marginalization: not
being written in the national language (Bahasa Malaysia), it finds itself on the fringes of
Malaysian national literature; moreover, being produced at the geographic periphery of the
Federation, it is frequently seen as marginal, by writers and critics alike, also within the
Sinophone Malaysian literary system (Chan, 2006, p.57), which has historically had two
centers: Singapore, before the region’s independence from British rule and Kuala Lumpur, after
the formation of the Federation (Tian, 2001). Some scholars, such as Chai Siaw Ling (2016),
have gone as far as proposing the notion that Sinophone Sarawakian literature is indeed “an
independent body” not belonging to the Sinophone Malaysian literary system, since it came
into being in the 1950s, that is before the formation of Malaysia as a country including both the
peninsula and northern Borneo, and because “it has its own uniqueness” (p.2), connected to its
unique natural, ethnic and social environment.
Despite this fringy position and the strong attachment shown by its authors to their tropical
motherland, Sinophone Sarawakian literature addresses themes that go beyond the frontiers of
the local (Sarawakian), the realm of the Sinophone and even the field of literature. For instance,
as Sarawakian writer and literary critic Tian Si (2014) points out, it often deals with issues of
great relevance, such as the ways in which ethnic groups in a disadvantageous position adapt
to modernization and globalization (p.26), the challenges faced by the natural environment,
including deforestation and water pollution (p.30), or interaction between Chinese Sarawakians
and Sarawakians of other ethnicities. Anglophone research on Sinitic-language Malaysian
literature has shown a certain degree of vibrancy in recent years, and especially since the
popularization of the concept of the Sinophone by scholar Shih Shu-mei in the mid-2000s.
However, attention to Sinophone writers and texts from Sarawak has been extremely scarce
and has focused on Taiwan-based authors such as late Li Yongping (李永平) (1947-2017) and
Zhang Guixing (张贵兴) (1956-),2 neglecting the production of authors who have always been
and are still writing from Sarawak, whose works find themselves in an unfavourable position
in terms of opportunities of publication and easiness of circulation.
Through the textual analysis of “Longtuzhu” (龙吐珠 The bleeding heart vine), a short story
written by prominent author Liang Fang (梁放) (1953-) in the mid-1980s, and which I consider
representative of Sinophone Sarawakian fiction in terms of themes and sensibility, this paper
has two aims of investigating the characteristics of Sinitic-language Sarawakian fiction and of
presenting an author, a text and, ultimately, an entire body of literature unjustly neglected by
international scholarship.
1
The Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah as well as the Federal Territory of Labuan, an island located off the
coast of Sabah, are collectively referred to as East Malaysia. While representing around sixty percent of the total
land area of the Federation, according to the 2010 Census, they were home to only twenty percent of the Malaysian
population (Department of Statistics, 2011).
2
Carlos Rojas (2007), for instance, has focused on the theme of dislocation in relation to two novels written by Li
Yongping in the 1990s, while Andrea Bachner (2010) centered a more recent study on Zhang Guixing and how,
through the Chinese script, he defies “essentialist fantasies of and about Chinese culture” (p. 177). While both
scholars critically analyze, through theoretically sound studies, these two writers and their texts, they do not
problematize their identity as members of the Sinophone community, as Malaysians and/or, most importantly, as
Sarawakians.
17
Antonio Paoliello /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
2. Sinophone Sarawakian Literature at the Margins

Before discussing Liang Fang and his fiction, however, I consider it necessary to
contextualize the literary environment in which his texts are produced and circulate. Although
Sinitic-medium Sarawakian literature belongs to the wider Sinophone literary polysystem, 3 its
relationship with Sinophone Malaysian literature and Malaysian national literature is
problematic. In fact, while it perfectly fits Shih’s (2013) definition of the Sinophone as a
concept embracing those “Sinitic-language cultures and communities outside China as well as
those ethnic communities within China, where Sinitic languages are forcefully imposed or
willingly adopted” (p.30) and it is considered a branch of the wider Sinophone Malaysian
literary system by most authors and scholars, the relationship it should have with the Sinitic-
language literature of West Malaysia is still a matter of debate (Shen, 2004, p. 605). For
instance, according to Ah Shaman (2004), since the ‘Sinophone Malaysian literature’ label
normally refers to the Sinitic-language literature of Peninsular Malaysia without taking into
much consideration the literature written in Sarawak (and Sabah), if Sinophone Sarawakian
literature is uncritically given such a label, it risks being swallowed by its West Malaysian
counterpart, especially in non-Malaysian contexts (p. 645). Similarly, Tian Si (2003) noted that,
although communication between Sinophone Sarawakian and Peninsular Malaysian writers has
improved, “the political, economic and cultural marginalization of Sarawak and Sabah has
caused resentment” among East Malaysians (p. 6-7).
While the idea of cutting the umbilical cord connecting Sinitic-language Sarawakian
literature to Chinese literature was first proposed in the 1950s when local writers began to see
themselves as Sarawakians rather than Chinese (Chai, 2016, p.2),4 its subsequent automatic
inclusion within Sinophone Malaysian literature took place in 1963, when Sarawak officially
became part of the Federation of Malaysia. Such inclusion, however, was not accompanied by
real interest in the works of Sinophone Sarawakian writers who now found themselves on the
fringes of a new literary environment. This situation of marginalization continues to this day,
as confirmed by Chan Tah Wei who argues that the number of studies devoted to Sinophone
Sarawakian writers and texts is considerably inferior to that of researches that center on the
literary output by West Malaysian authors. He also notes that, in many cases, when scholars
produce works aiming at a comprehensive approach to Sinophone Malaysian literature
3
Using Even-Zohar’s (2005) polysystem theory, I consider Sinophone literature not as a unitary literary system,
but as a dynamic, vibrant and heterogeneous set of systems “which intersect with each other and partly overlap,
using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent”
(p.3).
4
The newly found Sarawakian consciousness is evident in many texts from the 1950s, such as “Kelian de haizi” (
可怜的孩子 Poor Child), a short story written by Wei Ming (巍萌) (1933-1986) in 1956 in which the author
recounts the story of Aniu, an ethnic Chinese torn between showing filial piety by staying in Sarawak with his
parents and following his friends who were moving to China. Ultimately, the young ethnic Chinese chooses not to
leave and, with the vigour of his youth, pledges allegiance to the land by saying: “We should love the land that
gave birth to us! And we should fight for its bright future!” (“我们应该热爱诞生我们的土地，为它美好的未来
而斗争！”) (Wei, 2009, p.50, my translation). Similarly, in “Zuguo” (祖国 Motherland), a poem written in 1957,
poet Wu An (吴岸) (1937-2015) depicts a young ethnic Chinese who, while bidding farewell to his mother who
is about to return to China, professes his attachment to Sarawak: “My motherland is calling me too/ she is under
my feet, not across the sea/ Oh, this hot land of tropical landscapes!/ Oh, this stormy island hit by raging waves!”
(“我的祖国也在向我呼唤，/ 她在我脚下，不在彼岸，/ 这椰风蕉雨炎热的土地呵！/ 这狂涛冲击着的阴暗
的海岛呵！”) (Wu, 2012, p.35, my translation).
18
consistently pay no attention to Sarawak, thus provoking its disappearance from the country’s
literary map (Chan, 2006, p. 57-58).
Sinophone Sarawakian writers can fall within three main categories: those who write from
Sarawak, such as Liang Fang; those who moved to West Malaysia and thus have a closer
relation with the Peninsular Malaysian literary environment (essayist and fiction writer Kho
Tong Guan 许通元, among others); those who moved to Taiwan and whose classification or
self-identification as Malaysian writers is definitely more complex. Within this last category of
writers, the already-mentioned Li Yongping and Zhang Guixing stand out. In their case, when
their identities are discussed, they are generally and unproblematically presented as Sinophone
Malaysian writers. However, Li Yongping categorically rejected the inclusion of his own works
within the Sinophone Malaysian canon as well as the concurrent silencing of his Sarawakian
and, most importantly, Taiwanese identities. 5 Hu Jinlun, a Taiwan-based literary editor and
writer states that there are multiple reasons for Li Yongping and Zhang Guixing not considering
themselves Malaysians, ranging from the fact that they hail from Sarawak to the fact that they
were born before the Federation of Malaysia came into existence, to the fact that their literary
concerns are directed to the island of Borneo as a geographic locale as well as a state of mind,
and not to Malaysia as a geopolitical entity (Zhou, 2012).
The relationship between the Sinophone literatures of Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia
reproduces the uneven center-periphery dynamics that are also present in the wider and
multilingual Malaysian context. In fact, while the Malaysian center of Sinophone literary
activities is located on the western side of the country, Sinophone Malaysian literature is
considered marginal within the national context, since it is not written in the national language
(Malay or Bahasa Malaysia). In 1967, Malay or Bahasa Melayu, the language of the Malay
people, was officially renamed Bahasa Malaysia (the language of Malaysia) and was
officialized, through the National Language Act, as the sole national language. Accordingly,
debates on the language to be used to build the new Malaysian literary system began to heat the
cultural (and political) scene. The official discourse is clearly exemplified by Malay literary
critic Ismail Hussein’s posture. Although the scholar believes that other vernacular literatures,
as well as Sinitic-language, Tamil and Anglophone literatures can be included in the Malaysian
literary polysystem (kesusasteraan Malaysia), by defining literatures in other vernacular
languages as ‘local literatures’ (sastera daerah) and considering non-indigenous literatures as
‘community-based literatures’ (sastera sukuan), he acknowledges the dominance of Malay-
language literature (Ismail, 2006, p.35). 6 This highly compartmentalized idea of literature in
Malaysia reflects the rigid categorization of culture, society and politics that defines Peninsular
Malaysian social life. However, as Zawawi Ibrahim (2017) also notes, the multiculturalism
performed in Sarawak possesses a “more fluid character” (p.41) and “Sarawak seems to bask
in its pluralism and intercultural fluidity” (p.42).
5
Interviewed in 2016, Li Yongping stated that, as a writer, he “considers himself ‘100% Made in Taiwan’” (Qiu,
2016). In another interview which appeared on one of the main Sinophone Malaysian newspapers (Sinchew Daily),
Li Yongping categorically refused to be identified as Sinophone Malaysian, pointing out that “[he] had repeatedly
told Taiwanese literary circles that he does not have anything against ‘Sinophone Malaysian literature’ as a
concept, but Li Yongping is not a Sinophone Malaysian writer, since Malaysia is completely foreign to him and it
is a notion to which he has no direct connection.” (我已经一再一再和台北文艺界提过了，我对“马华文学”这
个名词没有意见，但李永平不是马华作家，马来西亚对我来说是一个陌生的，没切身关系的概念而已。
) (Wu & Shi, 2009, my translation).
6
For a comprehensive discussion on the relation between Malaysian national literature and Sinophone
Malaysian literature, see Paoliello (2018).
19
This structural difference between Sarawakian and West Malaysian societies is also
differently portrayed in the Sinophone literature of the two locales. Sinophone authors from
West Malaysia highlight the issues that come with the interaction between the ethnic Chinese
minority and the Malays, the dominant group that, together with other indigenous peoples, are
collectively known as Bumiputra (literally meaning ‘children of the soil’, in Malay). Therefore,
preoccupation with how the ethnic Chinese adapt to or confront the Muslim/Malay-dominated
culture is at the core of many Sinophone texts from the peninsula, such as those by highly
praised and influential writers Ho Sok Fong (贺淑芳) and Ng Kim Chew (黄锦树).7
In Sarawak, conversely, the Iban are the numerically dominant ethnic group followed by the
Malays who have recently surpassed, although by only a few thousand individuals, the Chinese.
Following the three major ethnic groups, there are other indigenous groups such as the Bidayuhs
and the Melanau. Unlike in West Malaysia, ethnic Indians in Sarawak are a numerically
negligible group (“State Statistics”, 2014). The different ethnic composition of the state
naturally leads to a different portrayal of not only different ethnic groups, but also of the ways
in which these group interact with the ethnic Chinese population. According to Chai (2016),
Sinitic-language Sarawakian literature highlights the non-confrontational coexistence among
the many local ethnic groups, while the literature by Sarawakians in Taiwan such as Zhang
Guixing “often expresses the unequal relationship between the ethnicities” (p.7). Although the
textual analysis of Liang Fang’s “Longtuzhu” will show that the depiction of interethnic
relations by Sarawak-based authors is not as unproblematic as Chai suggests, it is true that their
literature is generally more in tune with Welyne Jeffrey Jehom’s (2002) idea that in Sarawak,
“inter-ethnic interactions are more extensive” and that “inter-marriage and religious tolerance
are important features of ethnic pluralism in Sarawak” (p. 59-60). One important factor shaping
the fluidity of Sarawakian society is probably the less strict approach to religion as opposed to
the more uncompromising stance of the Malaysian government, which constitutionally grants
Islam the title of sole official religion of the country. Moreover, while all West Malaysian
Bumiputra adhere to Islam, in Sarawak, where the largest religion is Christianity, the Bumiputra
population is further divided into a non-Muslim majority and a Muslim minority (Hazis, 2012,
p.20). This also allows for greater “pluralist tolerance in inter-marriages where the people have
less limitation on mixed marriages despite differences in religion and culture.” Moreover,
“[d]iverse cultural backgrounds and differences in religious values and practices do not appear
to be a great barrier for the interaction and intermingling among the people in Sarawak”
(Welyne, 2002, p. 63). Intermarriage, in turn, can lead to the birth of ethnically mixed
Sarawakians, as is the case with the protagonist of Liang Fang’s short story, who is of mixed
Chinese and Iban parentage. “Longtuzhu” critically presents a character with a multi-layered
identity where Chineseness is denied and desired, while Ibanness is hidden only to be re-
discovered later in life, as I shall point out in the following section. Therefore, apart from its
literary value, Liang Fang’s text is also powerful and necessary since it gives voice to the Sino-
Ibans, who are normally silent and, as “a non-dominant group, [...] are struggling [their] way
up”, so as not to be “forgotten and marginalized” (Yapp & Anita, 2013, p. 24).
3. Liang Fang and “Longtuzhu”

Liang Fang was born in the Saratok district of rural Sarawak into a modest ethnic Chinese
family. The son of a tailor tracing his origins back to the Chinese province of Guangdong, Liang
7
Both authors investigate, for instance, the issue of Chinese conversion to Islam in two of their short stories,
“Bie zai tiqi” (别再提起 Don’t Mention it Again) and “Wo de pengyou Yadula” (我的朋友鸭杜拉 My Friend
Abdullah). For a brief discussion of both texts, see Bernards (2012).
20
Fang spent his childhood in close contact with the Iban people, living with his family in a rumah
panjai (longhouse), a type of traditional dwelling which due to its architecture promotes
communal living, before moving to an attap dwelling. Later on, Liang and his family moved to
a traditional Malay village (kampung). In a recent interview, Liang Fang spoke fondly of his
childhood memories, highlighting the peaceful atmosphere and sense of community that
overcame ethnic divisions in both the Iban longhouse and the Malay kampung (Deng, 2017).
After studying in Kuala Lumpur, England and Scotland, Liang Fang returned to his native
Sarawak where he worked as a civil engineer, a job which allowed him to travel statewide, thus
enriching his first-hand knowledge of both the territory and the ethnic diversity of his
birthplace.
Liang Fang is one of the most accomplished Sinophone writers hailing from Sarawak, who
has published a wide range of texts including short stories, essays and a novel. In 1994, he was
awarded the Sarawakian Chinese Literary Prize (砂拉越华族文学奖), while in 2016 he was
the recipient of the fourteenth Sinophone Malaysian literary prize (马华文学奖).
As noted by Choong (2007), one of the main characteristics of Sinophone Sarawakian
writers is the attention they pay to the description of indigenous life, being particularly accurate
in their depiction of the lifestyle of the Iban, the Sarawakian ethnic group with which the ethnic
Chinese have traditionally interacted the most (p. 407).
Such feature is also present in many of Liang Fang’s texts which focus on Iban people and
their way of life. For instance, in the essay “Changwu” (长屋 The longhouse), the author with
the eye of an anthropologist introduces the reader to the longhouse, the main symbol of Iban
culture, while with the sensibility of an accomplished storyteller takes him/her beyond the
surface, connecting this symbolic architectural element to the history and the social structure of
Iban communities (Choong, 2007, p. 408).
As far as fiction is concerned, in 1983, Liang Fang published “Senlin zhi huo” (森林之火
The fire in the forest), a short story in which, through an ethnic Chinese narrator, the writer
depicts and exalts the courage and kind-heartedness of the Iban people. A few years later, he
published “Mala’ada”(玛拉阿妲) (1989), a short story titled after its female protagonist, an
Iban girl, and portraying life in a village inhabited by both Iban people and ethnic Chinese. Far
from being an ethnographic account of life in rural Sarawak, the story follows, through the
memories of the narrating voice, the tragic life of Mala’ada as she is forced into prostitution
and trapped in a web of deceit, lewdness and violence. Through the narrator, a young ethnic
Chinese who had been friends with Mala’ada during their childhood, Liang Fang recounts the
tragedy of this young Iban woman without any type of judgement, allowing the events to speak
for themselves as the story unfolds (Peng, 1996, p. 55).
The relation between ethnic Chinese and Iban, which can be found in many of Liang Fang’s
stories and which is a key element of Sarawakian society, is also the central theme of one of
the writer’s most achieved texts: “Longtuzhu” (1984). Belonging to Liang Fang’s earlier
production, the story is thematically and ideologically complex, as it deals with multiple issues
strongly connected with the Chinese experience in Sarawak and with Liang Fang’s own
experience of growing up in a multiethnic rural milieu. “Longtuzhu”, by presenting a mixed
Sino-Iban character as the narrator of the story, explores questions such as the formation,
appropriation and denial of personal identity, the huaqiao/sojourner mentality of earlier
Chinese migrants, as well as the Chinese primitivization and marginalization of the Iban
identity. In light of what I have explained in the previous section of this paper, I consider the
text representative of Sinophone Sarawakian fiction. Moreover, as a fictional text, it examines
21
themes that, although relatable to other geographic and social environments, are addressed from
a uniquely Sarawakian perspective.
“Longtuzhu”, too, is set against the backdrop of rural Sarawak. The short story opens with
Guda, the narrator, going back to his birthplace, a remote hamlet amidst the rainforest of
northern Borneo, with the intention of taking his mother to Kuching, the capital of Sarawak
where he lives with his ethnic Chinese wife and son. The long and rough journey, which
reminds the reader of Sarawak’s marginal position within the Federation, is spatial as well as
temporal, as Guda is obliged to reminisce about his hurtful past and his uncompassionate
behavior towards his Iban mother (indai, in the Iban language). Guda is the son of an ethnic
Chinese who ruthlessly left him and his mother to return to China to his wife and family. Now
an adult, Guda arrives to his birthplace only to discover that his mother has already died. The
story ends with Guda holding a photograph of indai close to his chest and calling her name,
while tears blur his vision. According to Sinophone Sarawakian poet Wu An (1985),
by using a first-person narrator, the writer delineates a family tragedy from the perspective
of a scorned child of mixed parentage. The cruelty of the Chinese man, the unspoken and
enduring love that the Iban wife feels for her unkind husband, the sorrow, the abnegation of
motherly love, the anger of the son toward his father and his everlasting regret toward his
mother: the writer skilfully mastered the portrayal of all these characters and emotions. (p. 9)
At the beginning of the story, adult Guda describes the Iban traits that his son has inherited
from his mother in a positive light:
I thought about my son, about his strong build, his dark and healthy skin, his soft and curly
black hair, his wide and sparkling jet-black eyes, and his long wavy eyelashes, which he had
inherited from his grandmother.
我想起我的孩子，结实的身子，褐色的健康肤色，油黑柔软的卷发，黑亮而凹进的大眼睛，卷而长
的睫毛，全部遗传自他的祖母。(Liang, 1985, p. 113)8
It is only as the story unfolds that the reader is made aware of the fact that accepting his own
Iban identity has been a long and tortuous process for Guda. In fact, the Sino-Iban narrator finds
himself entangled in a complicated net of identities: as the child of a Chinese father and an Iban
mother, Guda has a fluctuating identity, which is multi-layered and problematic. His Chinese
identity is constantly denied by his father; in turn, he undergoes a process of self-denial of his
own Iban identity, while, at the same time, Chineseness becomes the object of his desire.
Moreover, his Iban identity is acknowledged, upheld and appropriated by his mother and his
Iban extended family, who have always considered him as one of them. Guda’s identity
concerns perfectly fit Geetha Reddy’s (2018) conceptualization of “identity as an active
position, rather than a passive acceptance”, although, at the same time, “the construction and
negotiation of racial identities can be limited by societal structures and practices” (p.2).
Young Guda’s negative idea of Iban identity is shaped by his Chinese father who sees both
mother and son as primitive people, not even worthy of sharing the eating table with him.
However, although the narrator acknowledges and internalizes his father’s cruel attitude, Liang
8
All translations from the Chinese original are mine.
22
Fang (1985) describes the man’s eating habit with sarcasm, thus ridiculing his sense of
superiority:
Dad had always been superior to indai and me, in every aspect. When it was time to eat, he’d
squat by himself on as stool by the table, with the crook of his arm around his knee. With a
bowl in his hand, he’d grab food with his chopsticks and would eat noisily. Grovelled on a
straw mat by the table, indai and I ladled our food from an iron plate. I tried to sit at the table
several times, but dad would stop me shouting: “Go away! Eat with your indai! You’ll make a
mess, there’ll be rice grains all over the table.”
阿爸一向就处处显得比印代与我优越。吃饭时，他一个在桌子开饭。他蹲坐在凳子上，左臂弯勾住
左膝头，手上棒着一只碗，右手的筷子夹菜扒饭，吃的稀里呼噜响。印代与我却坐在桌子脚边的草席上
，匍匐着舀着铁盘内的食物。我不止一次要上那桌子，阿爸却一再把我喝住：「下去，下去，跟你印代
吃，弄得一桌子饭粒，脏死了。」(p. 114)
Although the man treats his wife and son as the primitive Other, indai does not challenge
what she believes to be the acceptable order of things. On the contrary, young Guda does not
understand why, as the offspring of a Chinese, he cannot sit at his father’s table, hence his
disobedient behaviour.
The father is presented as a typical huaqiao (a Chinese sojourner, literally), who considers
Sarawak a temporary home. 9 Indai´s passive acceptance of things includes the
acknowledgement that, sooner or later, he will leave to go back to China:
“He has to go back to China!”
Go back to China. These words were always on dad’s lips, especially when he quarreled
with indai. He kept saying that we were a burden to him and that if he hadn’t had two more
mouths to feed, he would have already saved enough money to go back.
「他要回唐山去了！」回趟上。阿爸老挂在口边的话，尤其是与印代吵架时，口口声声说我们吧他
给拖累了，若不是多了两张口吃饭，他早已蓄足了钱回去。(Liang, 1985, p. 113)
The words hanging from the father’s lips show what Paul Siu, in a widely cited paper on the
Chinese laundryman in America, describes as the sojourner attitude. According to Siu (1952),
the sojourner “clings to the culture of his own ethnic group” and “is unwilling to organize
himself as a permanent resident in the country of his sojourn” (p. 34). When the father states
clearly his intention to leave, again, in stark contrast with his mother’s resignation, young Guda
shows resistance:
I had gotten used to his way of speaking about us, but that one time, it was different and it
looked like he really meant it.
“And what about us?”
“We can’t go!”
9
Many have analyzed the genealogy and the political usage of the Chinese term huaqiao. Wang Gungwu is
undoubtedly one of the most prominent scholars to critically examine this term and others connected to the ethnic
Chinese outside China. One of the most comprehensive explanation of huaqiao can be found in an article Wang
published in 1985. More recently, Leo Suryadinata (2017) has investigated the People’s Republic of China’s
appropriation of the term and its political usage.
23
“Indai, don't let him go! What are we going to do, if he leaves?"
“Son, what can I do? He has to leave!"
[...] He had to go home. He said that his home was there, not here.
这一切，我已习以为常。但这回，好像并不是说说而已那么简单。「那我们呢？」「我们不能去的
。」「印代你留住阿爸吧。他走了，我们怎么办？」「孩子，我该怎么留法？他非走不可！」[...] 他要
回家。他说那儿才是家。(Liang, 1985, p. 114)
Young Guda constantly fluctuates between the father’s denial of his Chineseness and the
inclusiveness of his Iban mother.
“How can I have a son like you? You are so dark! Such a native!” When he would say things
like these, indai would lower her head in silence, and keep me away from him. I didn’t inherit
his fair and slender complexion, [...] but I did carry his bad temper in me.[...]
“I am not going! I hate it there [uncle’s longhouse]. I don't want to live with those Iban
people!”, I would protest, as soon as indai opened her mouth.
“Son, you are a half Iban, too!”
“No, I am not! I am nothing!”
「怎么有你这孩子，黑黝黝的，拉仔种！」那时候，印代会低头不语，把我带开。我并没遗传阿爸
的白晢修长，[...] 我还承续阿爸的劣性。[...]
「我不去，那儿什么也不好，我不要与那些伊班人在一起！」印代一开口，我已大声抗议。
「孩子，你是半个伊班人！」
「我不是，我什么也不是！」(Liang, 1985, p. 114-115)

The father’s denial of Guda’s Chineseness also entails the refusal to share his languages with
his Sino-Iban son, thus consciously not only excluding him from the Sinitic-language
community, but also denying him the chance to claim belonging through language:
My dad would not acknowledge our blood ties, he would never speak Hokkien to me, let
alone Mandarin. And I would cry and shout, while kicking my feet on the floor.
就连阿爸也不承认我的血统，从不跟我说福建话，华语更不必说了。我哭着在地上打滚。(Liang,
1985: 115)
The father’s refusal to acknowledge his son’s Chineseness follows a pattern not uncommon
among ethnic Chinese in northern Borneo, as noted by Danny Wong (2012), who also reports
of the difficulties of Sino-indigenous people (the Sino-Kadazans of Sabah, more specifically)
to be accepted by the Chinese community (p.115).
When the narrator's father returns to China, to his socially accepted family, Guda and his
mother are left alone and poor: their only means of survival being the support of the Iban clan.
Guda’s feeble ties with Chineseness are thus momentarily severed, while those with the Iban
community are, apparently, strengthened. Nevertheless, he firmly holds onto his Chinese
heritage through education, as he is able to attend a Chinese-medium boarding school in a
neighbouring village. Pride in his own Chineseness and shame for his Iban heritage turn Guda
into the inheritor of his father’s contempt toward Iban culture, embodied by his mother. The
narrator is not caught between Chineseness and Iban identity anymore, leaving indai alone to
carry the ‘burden’ of Otherness. Liang Fang underlines this change also linguistically. The
24
pronominal usage often describing the mother-son couple (we/us) is now broken into an ‘I’
represented by Guda and a ‘she/her’ embodied by indai:
I noticed indai: she wore a thick nyonya dress and an old floral sarong, which contrasted
with the modernity of the school premises. I wasn’t happy. My classmates sent her inquisitive
looks. As I glanced at indai, her unconditional love and concern annoyed me. It was already a
dark moonless night when I told her to go back home.
“Can I stay for the night?”
“No! The teachers will scold me!”
“I’ll talk to them.”
“No! Go back!” I prompted again and again, while stuffing the black fake-leather bag and
the small parcel containing a few clothes that she had put on my bed back into her chest.
见到印代，她身着一袭粗布娘惹衣与半旧的花纱笼，与现代化的宿舍成了强烈的对
比。我并不怎麽高兴。同学们也投来好奇的眼光，我看了看印代，连她脸上那不保留
的慈爱与关怀都觉得讨厌了。「你回去吧！」我说。那时天已黑。是一个没有月亮的
晚上。「我可以在这儿住一晚吗？」「不可以，老师要骂！」「我跟老师说。」「不
要，你回去吧！」我再三催促，把她搁在我床上的黑色假皮的手袋与一小包裹的衣物
一股儿全塞在她怀里。(Liang, 1985, p. 118)
The above passage, besides showing the coldness and shame of young Guda, also sets Iban
identity and Chineseness in opposition: while Chineseness is represented by the modern school
premises, the Iban mother wears an old, worn-out sarong. The description of the scene brillianty
couples Guda’s perception of Chineseness as symbolizing modernity as opposed to Iban
culture, considered old and primitive. Completely immersed in his newly found Chinese
identity, Guda denies his Iban heritage:
A-Lin approached me saying: “You speak very good Iban!” Then he asked: “Is that your
mother?” [...] I gave him a ferocious look [...]: “No, she is not!” [...] I now hated that teacher
for he knew that I had an Iban mother.
「你的伊班话那麽好呵，那是你的母亲？」阿林走过来问。[...] 我狠狠地盯了它一眼[...]：「不是！
」[...] 我恨透那老师。他知道我有个伊班母亲。(Liang, 1985, p. 119)
Guda’s attitude toward Chineseness changes when, in his adolescence, he receives a letter
from his father who complains about the economic and personal difficulties he is experiencing
in China. Through the letter, the narrator is able to adjust his idea of Chineseness to reality, as
his father’s Chinese identity is not something to look up to, anymore. Concurrently, adolescent
Guda starts to realize that his identity is definitely more complex than the straightforward
upholding of Chineseness and denial of Iban heritage. Amidst this epiphany, the narrator is able
to relinquish his paternal figure. Conversely, the death of indai, well into Guda’s adulthood, is
felt as a painful experience of bereavement and regret.
25
The last passages of “Longtuzhu” provide a symbolic reading of the identity concerns
examined throughout the short story. Guda is given a wooden trunk that belonged to his father
and that indai had cherished through the years. On the surface of the trunk, a flying dragon rises
amidst the mist. The image of the mythological animal which clearly symbolizes Guda´s father
and Chineseness, however, is fading:
“Oh, it's a dragon. And the dragon is the creature that we Chinese people value the most.”
he [dad] said to himself with satisfaction. Then he added that he was a dragon, according to the
Chinese horoscope. But now, the trunk had been eaten by moths. The body of the dragon had
almost completely come off, and worms had swallowed up its eyes. It was now a blind dragon.
「哦，是一条龙。我们中国人最重视的就是龙。」他自顾自地说，蛮得意的样子。他说他肖龙。今
天那木箱却已蛀了，龙身脱落不少。蛀虫还蛀入龙的眼睛。那是一条瞎了的龙。(Liang, 1985, p. 121)
In the trunk, the narrator finds his own family experience and is reminded, once and for all,
of the painful divide that there has always been between his father and the mother-child couple:
On the bottom of the trunk there were two photos, one was a picture of dad, while the other
was a photo that indai and I took together when I was eight. [...] I held it close to my chest, my
nose twitched, tears encountered no obstacle and I started to cry relentlessly. “Indai…”
箱底有两张相片，一张是阿爸的，一张是我八岁时与印代合拍的 [...] 我把这一切全兜在怀里，一阵鼻
酸，眼泪像缺了的提防，再也忍不住四面狂流。「印代... .... ....。」(Liang, 1985, p. 121)
The fact that the three family members do not appear on the same photograph serves as
evidence of the unresolved tension between Chineseness and Iban identity skilfully portrayed
by Liang Fang throughout the text. Such unresolvedness mirrors the concerns voiced by Yapp
and Anita (2013) that, while highlighting the enrichment that comes with their bicultural
identity, also emphasize the difficulties in preserving their hybrid identity (page number).
Through Guda’s long path to adulthood dotted with the denial of his Iban heritage, the blind
upholding of Chineseness, his anger, his regret and his failure in judgement, Liang Fang has
portrayed a marginal subject whose marginality in Sarawakian society echoes Sarawak’s
marginality within the socio-political-cultural environment of Malaysia as well as Sarawakian
Sinophone literature within the literary field. Liang Fang, however, far from romanticizing
Guda and the Sino-Iban identity he carries within, cleverly delineates a character who, like
every human being, is liable to err.
4. Conclusion
Through the presentation of Liang Fang, one of the main Sarawak-based Sinophone writers,
and “Longtuzhu”, among his most prominent short stories written in the mid-1980s, I have
attempted at presenting not only a lesser-known literature within the global Sinophone literary
polysystem, but also a literary production that, for historic, geographic and social circumstances
is both marginal(ized) within and distinct from Malaysian Sinophone literature. Moreover,
Sarawakian Sinophone literature is also excluded from the national literary canon and, being
written in a language other than Bahasa Malaysia, it is officially considered as having value
only for and within the Chinese ethnic community, by which it is produced.
Notwithstanding this situation, I argue that, although presenting characteristics that make
them quintessentially Sarawakian such as the attention to local environment, customs and
culture, as well as the presentation of indigenous characters and their interaction with the ethnic
26
Chinese, Liang Fang and Sarawakian Sinophone literature are able to cross the border of
community-based literature and of the Sinophone.
In this paper, I have used “Longtuzhu” as an example of the far-reaching power of this
marginal(ized) literary system. In fact, throughout the text, the story is presented from a Sino-
Iban perspective, thus going beyond the cultural and linguistic community normally associated
with the Sinophone. Additionally, Liang Fang is able to traverse the Sarawakian realm and go
beyond its geographic, ethnic and social space by critically addressing the theme of multi-ethnic
identity which, although here highly contextualized, speaks globally and to many people who,
like Guda, go through several stages in the process of formation, appropriation, denial and
rediscovery of a fluid and multi-layered personal identity.
References
Ah, S. (2004). Cuican niandai wenxue de cangsang - Larang wenxue huodong de huigu yu
tantao [Changes in the literature of the golden age - A retrospect on the Rajang Basin literary
movement]. In D.W. Chan, Y. Zhong & J. Hu (Eds.), Chidao huisheng. Mahua wenxue
duben II [A Malaysian Chinese Literature Reader II: Equatorial Echoes] (644-656). Taipei:
Wanjuan
Bachner, A. (2010). Reinventing Chinese Writing: Zhang Guixing’s Sinographic Translations.
In J. Tsu & D. Wang (Eds.), Globalizing Modern Chinese Literature: Critical Essays on
Sinophone and Diasporic Writings (177-195). Leiden and Boston: BRILL.
Bernards, B. (2012). Beyond Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Recuperating Creolization in
Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian Literature. Postcolonial Studies, 15 (3), 311-329.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2012.728371
Chai, S.L. (2016 June 25-26). Sarawak Chinese Literature in Taiwan or Local Sarawak Chinese
Literature: A Perspective from Regional Experience Towards Rainforest Writing. Paper
presented at the 2nd International Conference on Interrelationship between Taiwan
Literature and Asia Pacific Humanities, Taipei. Retrieved from
http://eprints.um.edu.my/16075/ [accessed 24 January 2019].
Chan T.W. (2006). Sikao de yuanzhoulü: Mahua wenxue de bankuai yu kongjian shuxie [The
π of Reflection: Space and Sectors of Sinophone Malaysian Literature]. Batu Caves: Mentor
Publishing.
Choong Y.V. (2007). Shahua ziran xiezuo de zaidi shiye yu meixue jiangou [Local vision and
aesthetic construction in Sinophone Sarawakian environmental writings]. In Y.V. Choong
and T.W. Chan (Eds.), Mahua sanwenshi duben 1957-2007 (san juan) [Sinophone
Malaysian essays reader 1957-2007 (volume 3)] (395-424). Taipei: Wanjuanlou.
Deng, Y. (2017, August, 11). Mahua zuojia Liang Fang. Xinniao de huhuan [Sinophone
Malaysian writer Liang Fang. The cry of the hornbill]. Sinchew Shenghuozhi. Retrieved from
http://www.sinchew.com.my/node/1671452 [accessed 24 January 2019].
Department of Statistics (Malaysia). (2011). Population Distribution and Basic Demographic
Characteristic Report 2010. Retrieved from
https://www.dosm.gov.my/v1/index.php?r=column/ctheme&menu_id=L0pheU43NWJwR
WVSZklWdzQ4TlhUUT09&bul_id=MDMxdHZjWTk1SjFzTzNkRXYzcVZjdz09
[accessed on 21 January 2019]
Even-Zohar, I. (2005). Polysystem Theory (Revisited). In I. Even-Zohar (Ed.), Papers in
Culture Research. Tel Aviv: Porter Chair of Semantics. Retrieved from
27
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.112.4768&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[accessed 23 January 2019]
Fong, J.C. (2011, September 16). Formation of Malaysia. The Borneo Post Online. Retrieved
from http://www.theborneopost.com/2011/09/16/formation-of-malaysia/ [accessed 21
January 2019]
Hazis, F.S. (2012). Domination and Contestation: Muslim Bumiputera Politics in Sarawak.
Singapore: ISEAS.
Ismail, H. (2006 [1976]). Malaixiya guojia wenxue (Kesusastraan nasional Malaysia)
[Malaysian National Literature], in H. C. Fa (Ed.), Guojia wenxue: zaizhi yu huiying
[National Literature: Hegemony and Response] (33-43). Batu Caves, Mentor Publishing.
Lee, H.G. (2018). Borneo Survey: Autonomy, Identity, Islam and Language/Education in
Sarawak. Singapore: ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute. Retrieved from https://think-
asia.org/handle/11540/8240 [accessed 21 January 2019]
Liang, F. (1985). Longtuzghu [The bleeding earth vine]. In F. Liang, Yanyu shalong (113-121).
Kuala Lumpur: Nanfeng chubanshe.
Paoliello, A. (2018). Narrating Ethnic Relations in Sinophone Malaysian Fiction: “Wei xiang”
as a Case Study. LEA - Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, 7, 263-278.
doi:10.13128/LEA-1824-484x-24417
Peng, Z. (1996). Tan Liang Fang de xiaoshuo [On Liang Fang’s fiction]. Haiwai huawen
wenxue yanjiu, 2, 52-55.
Qiu, L. (2016). Li Yongping zhuanfang: nanyang guihang zhi lü [Interview with Li Yongping:
Coming back to Southeast Asia]. Retrieved from http://www.miniurl.es/18666/ [accessed on
23 January 2019]
Reddy, G. (2018).Fluidity Amidst Structure: Multi-racial Identity Constructions Across the
Life Course of Malaysians and Singaporeans, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of
Race, Nation and Culture, DOI:10.1080/13504630.2018.1499222
Rojas, C. (2007). Li Yongping and Spectral Cartography. In D. Wang & C. Rojas (Eds.),
Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (324-347). Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Shen, Q. (2004). Yulin wenxue de huixiang: 1970-2003 nian Shahua wenxue chutan [The echo
of rainforest literature: preliminary remarks on Sinophone Sarawakian literature 1970-
2003]. In D.W. Chan, Y. Zhong & J. Hu (Eds.), Chidao huisheng. Mahua wenxue duben II
[A Malaysian Chinese Literature Reader II: Equatorial Echoes] (605-643). Taipei: Wanjuan
Shih, S. (2013). Against Diaspora. The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production. In S. Shih,
C. Tsai & B. Bernards (Eds.), Sinophone Studies. A Critical Reader (25-42). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Siu, P. (1952). The Sojourner, American Journal of Sociology, 58 (1), 34-44.
State statistics: Malays edge past Chinese in Sarawak (2014, February 8). The Borneo Post
Online. Retrieved from http://www.theborneopost.com/2014/02/08/state-statistics-malays-
edge-past-chinese-in-sarawak/ [accessed on 24 January 2019].
Suryadinata, L. (2017). Blurring the Distinction Between Huaqiao and Huaren: China’s
Changing Policy towards the Chinese Overseas, Southeast Asian Affairs, 2017, 101-113.
28
Tian, S. (2003). Shuxie Poluozhou [Handwriting Borneo]. In M. Sang, F. Tian and C. Yan
(Eds.), Shuxie Poluozhou [Chirography of Borneo] (5-13). Sibu: Persatuan Kesusasteraan
Zhong Hua.
---. (2014). Shahua wenxue de bentu tezhi [The local characteristics of Sinophone Sarawakian
literature]. Batu Caves: Mentor Publishing.
Tian, Y. (2001). Shahua wenxue zai bei Sha de fazhan [The development of Sinophone
Sarawakian literature in northern Sarawak]. Retrieved from
http://www.fgu.edu.tw/~wclrc/drafts/Malaysia/tian/tian_03.htm [accessed 22 January
2019].
Wang, G. (1985). South China Perspectives on Overseas Chinese, The Australian Journal of
Chinese Affairs, 13, 69-84.
Wei, M. (2009 [1956]). Kelian de haizi [Poor child]. In N. Tian (Ed.), Malaixiya Shalayue
zhanhou hauwen xiaoshuo xuan (1946-1970) [A collection of postwar Sinophone Malaysian
Sarawakian fiction (1946-1970)] (44-51). Kuching: Persatuan Penulis Aliran Tionghoa
Sarawak.
Welyne, J. J. (2002). Ethnic Pluralism and Ethnic Relations in Sarawak. Akademika, 61 (1), 53-
70.
Wong, D. (2012). A Hybrid Community in East Malaysia: The Sino-Kadazans of Sabah and
their Search for Identity, Archipel, 84, 107-127.
Wu, A. (1985). Liang Fang de xiaoshuo ji qi yishu meili - Xu “Yanyu shalong” [Liang Fang’s
fiction and its artistic charm. Preface to ‘Yanyu Shalong”]. In F. Liang, Yanyu Shalong (7-
12). Kuala Lumpur: Nanfeng Chubanshe.
Wu, A. (2012). Cansun de weixiao. Wu An shige zixuanji [Broken smile. A collection of poems
by Wu An]. Taipei: Showwe.
Wu, Y. & H. Shi (2009, 15 March). Rensheng langyou zhaodao le mudidi: Li Yongping fangtan
[Finding a destination after a life of roaming: Interview with Li Yongping]. Sinchew Daily.
Retrieved from http://www.sinchew.com.my/node/1133404 [accessed 24 January 2019].
Yapp A. and M.A. Anita (2013, August 18). The Ethnic Identity of Sino-Iban in Saribas River
and Marup Sino-Iban, Borneo Sarawak. Paper presented at the International Conference of
ISCCO 8 (The International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas), Kuala Lumpur.
Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2342029 [accessed 24 January 2019].
Zawawi, I. (2017). Towards a Critical Alternative Scholarship on the Discourse of
Representation, Identity and Multiculturalism in Sarawak. In V. T. King, I. Zawawi & N. H.
Hassan (Eds.), Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture (35-55). Singapore: Springer.
Zhou, F. (2012). Cong ‘shijie Huawen wenxue’ de guannian kan Mahua wenxue [Analyzing
Sinophone Malaysian literature through the notion of ‘world literature in Chinese’].
Shuxiang Liang An, 41, Retrieved from https://www.xzbu.com/7/view-1606397.htm
[accessed 23 January 2019]
29
Difficulties of Constructing the Feminine Subject Resulting from

Limitations of Language - Based on Poetic Texts of Ingeborg
Bachmann and Lia Sturua1
Salome Pataridze
PHD Student, Invited Teacher at Ilia State University

salome.pataridze@iliauni.edu.ge
APA Citation:
Pataridze, S. (2019). Difficulties of Constructing the Feminine Subject Resulting from Limitations of Language -
Based on Poetic Texts of Ingeborg Bachmann and Lia Sturua. Journal of Narrative and Language Studies,
7(12), 30-39.
Abstract
In the discourse of feminist literary studies, women’s writing is often viewed as an independent, strong branch
developing alongside the men’s mainstream literature. Feminist literature has been gradually characterized as
breaking traditions and that is why women’s texts/literature is often mentioned as a subculture. Women’s texts
highlight the unity of theme and metaphor often containing subtexts and they attempt to change their meanings
with female experience. A woman has been perceived as the other/ an object in relation to the male since ancient
times, so it was difficult for her to express her desires in the dominant discourse. In feminist studies, they often
discuss the restriction of women with characters, language, myths and history ascribed to them by the patriarchal
world and the lack of autonomy in defining “femininity”, contributing to the difficulty to identity formation. That
is why French feminism often speaks of “oppression” of feminine language. This article analyzes some lyrical
works of Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann and Georgian Lia Sturua in the context of post-structuralism and highlights
characteristics of feminine language, those deficits and impediments women face in the process of constructing
the subject as a whole.
Keywords: construction, ambivalence, language, femininity, patriarchal order
Introduction
Logocentrism emerged in the antiquity, however, it reached its apotheosis in the age of
Enlightenment. Aristotle in The Organon, using the reasoning-concerned term “logic” for the
first time, states that one can understand/gain insight into reality by means of formal logic. This
was the idea behind the western philosophical assumption that the structure of reality and the
structure of reasoning are identical, known in post-structuralism as “logocentric illusion.” This
illusion reached its peak in the age of Enlightenment with the project on an autonomous subject:
cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). With this dictum, Descartes defines existence with
1
This work was supported by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation (SRNSF) (PHDF-18-2163, Specific
Features of Feminine Narrative in German and Georgian Poetry of the Second Half of the 20th Century).
Poetic Texts of Ingeborg Bachmann and Lia Sturua
the act of thinking making “one a master in one’s house” (Weber, 1994, p.13), meaning that the
subject has control over their thoughts, utterances and actions.
Theoretical Framework
According to the logocentric illusion, language describes reality immediately, the
connection between reality and language is mimetic and language is an illustration of the given
reality. In contrast to the above, Ferdinand de Saussure stresses the autonomies character of
language. Ti him language is an arbitrary sign (there is no motivation behind why a concept is
expressed with a specific group of sounds), comprising of the signifier (sound) and the signified
(concept to which the sound is attached). The signifier and the signified are inseparably
interconnected, the signifier performing the function of “servants” of the signified. The signifier
is formed to enable the transportation of meaning. This view of Saussure is considered as a
leftover of logocentrism by post-structuralism and it makes this view more radical by declaring
that signifiers are autonomous.
If structuralists examine the processes of differences informing the creation of
dichotomies (man/ woman, nature/culture, mind/ madness, language/body ...), where one is
always oppressed by the other, and, accordingly, cultures and notions are created, as Martin
Sexl states, the Freudian concept of unconscious and Saussure’s theory on which post -
structuralists base their views, either ignore or see the repression as natural. Post-structuralists
used deconstruction developed by Derrida as a tool to critically analyze concept, meaning and
reality. However, according to post-structuralists, the subject is not free in the order of language
and signs (it does not form this order). In the universal order, texte general (Derrida), features
(characteristics) are formed which come out of control of the discourse. This may be
representation, difference or joke. Derrida describes binary oppositions not as the confrontation
between two concepts, but as the hierarchy and subordination. In binary opposition soul/body
does not combine two different elements, but it points to the same, but not the identical. As a
result, writing is visible, sensible memory (mnéme). The written than turns into painful and
inebriant invisible part of soul, memories and truth. Although poison damages and intoxicates
the body, it then helps the soul – it sets it free from the body and awakens essence/Eidos
(Derrida, 1981, p.126-127). As Derrida mentions: „The Pharmakon is the movement the locus
and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the difference of difference. It holds in reserve,
in its undecided shadow and vigil, the opposites and different that the process of discrimination
will come to carve out (Derrida, 1981, p.127).
For Jacques Derrida, writing dominates speech. Writing is the oldest form of expression.
It cannot speak, therefore it is subject to interpretation and meanings can be put forward by
means of contextual accommodation/alternation. A text is not the same in different contexts.
Language, as written, can always be reconstructed. Derrida argues that a language sign acquires
its meaning through “differing” from other signs. The meaning of the sign is never given
initially, we may determine the meaning of the sign with the following attempt, however, the
sign may be used in different contexts with different meanings. That is why Derrida speaks of
a never-ending play which does not have an organized center (qtd. in Köppe&Winko, 2008,
p.115). Accordingly, deconstructive theory on the meaning of sigs is anti-essential as it
questions the view of whether concepts may be precisely defined. According to deconstructive
model, it is even debatable, whether the world can be described “naturally” by means of
linguistic signs.
Sigmund Freud changed the understanding of a united subject by means of highlighting
dark aspirations. Lacan reconstructs Freudian views in the linguistic aspect. For Lacan, the
language is a tool of thinking to express one’s experiences. Even more, thinking and experience
31
Salome Pataridze /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
are demonstrated in the language. This statement destroys the view on the unity of the subject
and the subject is defined as split/decentralized (qtd.in Weber, 1994, p.14-15).
Human-beings are born as helpless creatures and because of this they remain
symbiotically united to the mother. To express this connection (unity), Lacan uses the concept
of “imaginary”. The Imaginary stage consists of the whole prespeech and pre-oedipal stages of
the infant and is characterized by direct satisfaction of desires. In this stage of quasi paradise,
the infant does not know the border between his/her body and that of the mother, the difference
between me and you (the outside world). In this period, the only thing the infant has is the
mother’s body. With the Mirror stage begins the process of self-recognition, referred by Lacan
as identification: “The mirror stage can be understood as one’s identification” (Man kann das
Spiegelstadum als seine Identifikation verstehen..) (Letters 1,4). The shift to the symbolic order
takes place, not of one’s own free will, but it is forced and connected to the father. Instead of a
forbidden passion (to the mother), the father offers language to the child. The father gives birth
to the subject by means of language. This equals to the public birth, whereas in the case of the
mother, the birth is physical. It is evident that Lacan does not mean a “real father”, but he refers
to the symbolic father associated with “no”. Incest prohibition is a primary taboo of society.
According to Lacan “the unconscious is structured similar to language” (qtd.in Weber, 1994,
p.17).
The conscious and unconscious are formed as the result of primary oppression (the shift
to the symbolic order). If the unconscious is structured the same way as language, then it can
be read like a text. For Lacan, metaphor and metonymy are main keys to linguistic and
unconscious texts, as they bring meanings in the text to the fore.
Lacan goes further with a provocative phrase: “La femme n’existe pas” (the woman
does not exist). He cannot see the woman’s place in the symbolic order; the woman is
understood in the pre-linguistic and pre-social understanding, where she is identified with the
mother (qtd. in Weber, 1994, p. 20). Feminine is motherly, sacrificed to the masculine culture.
Lacan assigns jouissance to the feminine, as being bounded only theoretically, it practically
exists in the unconscious and from there enters the symbolic discourse, enchants the male and
awakens the memory of the imaginary jouissance in him.
While working with the patients suffering from schizophrenia, Luce Irigaray noticed
that men do not lose their ability to speak, while women become numb and staging their pain
in physical symptoms. Based on this observation, Irigaray concludes that women cannot
express their desires in the dominant discourse and the feminist author discusses the linguistic
“oppression” of femininity. Luce Irigaray’s dissertation thesis Speculum de l’autre femme
(Speculum of the Other Woman) (1974) is significant for feminism. In this work she not only
revises the history of Western philosophy but also tries to write beyond the “Phallus” discourse
(Lindhoff, 2000, p.119). As regards Freud's theory, the woman is defined with "castration" and
is therefore presented as a defective man, giving the grounds to Luce Irigaray to state: actually,
there exists only one gender - masculine (qtd. in Lindhoff, 2000, p.119). In the all-
encompassing patriarchal order, the woman has no place to establish her own identity, as a
result, all she is left to do is to reconstruct her place by "processing" male characteristics.
Irigaray deliberately breaks syntax, aiming not to destruct language, but to transform it,
to "double vision", resulting in a definite, clear meaning accompanied with the obscure.
According to Irigaray, the woman is estranged from her unconscious, imagination and sexuality
and has no access to them. The woman has been given a task to create masculine sexuality,
imagination and unconsciousness in the society (Irigaray 1980, p.81). Discourses of western
32
theory describe elementary images of body, sex, birth and death, as well as traces of the
repressed “imaginary” in the symbolic order and provide a hierarchical value system: solid-
liquid, one-many, similar-different. In this system, the subordinated is always related to the
woman. Irigaray seeks to detect and deconstruct the images of the solid world. Her strategy is
to turn the hierarchy into giving women the value of their own, and the ultimate goal is to
overcome the hierarchy and grant the subject status to the woman.
Hélène Cixous discusses women’s fate in the patriarchal world. She thinks that the only
way out for the woman is to come out of the man’s shadow and break the silence which was
sentenced to them by the patriarchal order; through writing and finding the language of
imagination the woman shall find their self. Instead of death melody, that accompanies the
symbolic order, Hélène Cixous discusses singing the song of life/mother’s song through
feminine writing and the maternal order shall replace the paternal (symbolic) order. Women
shall listen to the feminine language in the preoedipal imagination and give cultural and
revolutionary power: „A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as
it is written, it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine
investments (Cixous, 1975, p.888).
For the theoretician, feminine writing (ecriture feminine) is singing of feminine-
motherly song as being a woman means being a body „ A woman is never far from “mother”
(Cixous, 1975, p.881). Writing with the body means giving birth to a text like a child with pain
and full, never-ending love. The primary expression of love is a lullaby, which is written with
“mother’s milk” (Cixous, 1975, p.884) and keeps the feminine connection to the song, it is the
echo of the feminine voice.
The woman reveals herself in the text and finds her identity in the very text “your self-
seeking text” (Cixous, 1975, p.889) and turns into “a new woman” breaking the silence, the
endless cosmic libido enjoys her bodily presence.
Mainly, men try to attach meanings to letters and sounds, while women describe rhythm
in texts, first they activate the textual unconscious – rhythm, the melody of language,
musicalness of letters and sounds. Feminine texts are created for sounds and are “texts for ears”
not “texts for eyes” (masculine texts). Cixous evaluates masculine texts as “the mausoleum of
words”, while feminine texts are “texts of love”. Feminine texts are metaphoric and metonymic.
They play with words, sounds, changing meanings and taking recipients to the place they were
born: unconscious fantasy and feeling. With this, the author is not a single owner of a text but
the “all-knowing author”, neither the text is plagiarism. (qtd. in Weber, 1994, p.31).
In her theories, Julia Kristeva uses Lacan’s concept of the split subject and discusses the
possibility of simultaneous existence of two components in the language: the semiotic and
symbolic, out of which, for her, semiotic is linked to the feminine, while the symbolic to the
masculine. According to Kristeva, before children shift to the symbolic order, they have
experience of voice, sound, color, rhythm and body. However, these elements are structured
and, after the transition to the symbolic order, these elements become inter-connected with
grammar, syntax and social rules and expressions acquire meanings (qtd. in Bürgmann, 1989,
p.408-409). For Kristeva, those structures are significant which either add or deprive specific
essence to texts.
With her interview with Rossum-Guyon, Kristeva questions the existence of texts that
can only be written by women: “Wenn es wahr ist, dass das Unbewusste die Negation und die
Zeit ignoriert.. dann würde ich sagen, dass die schreibweise das Gescglecht ignoriert“ ("If it is
true that the unconscious ignores the negation and the time ... then I would say that the writing
techniques ignore the gender") (qtd. in Bürgmann, 1989, p.409). According to Kristeva, the
33
masculine and feminine unconscious does not have different structures and believes that the
artwork is the result of interconnection of semiotic and symbolic libidinous polar points. It is
difficult for women to find identity in the symbolic order as for this, women either join or act
against the patriarchal world, as radicals (Kristeva, 1986, p.156).
The analysis of Lyric Texts

The poem “Erklär mir, Liebe!” (“Explain to Me, Love!”) by Austrian, German-language
poet Ingeborg Bachmann describes inner transformation of lyric I, its shift from the routine,
symbolic world to the world full of emotions and feelings. Opening lines of the poem show
emotional animal world isolated from the symbolic world. The animal world can be natural, as
animals do not use language to share emotions, the smell is enough for them:
The beetle smells the most desirable from far
If only I had its sense, I would feel it too (Bachmann, 2010, p.141)2
In contrast to the idyllic animal world, the "split" lyrical subject appears with its hysteric tones
– it either laughs, or cries. Hysteria has been considered to be a typical female disease 3.
Disorganized speech is one of the main symptoms of hysteria, when a woman cannot form her
identity due to a language deficiency. Bachmann uses the refrain “Erklär mir, Liebe” (“Explain
to Me, Love!”) throughout the poem to underline that the protagonist is lost in the language and
estranged.
Water knows how to speak,
The wave took the wave by the hand (Bachmann, 2010, p.141)4
The limit of language as the main challenge to the creator is also discussed by Ingeborg
Bachmann in her lectures delivered in Frankfurt. Language for Bachmann is not a clear
phenomenon, because the limit of language questions everything - by language the author
implies the world that enters our perception only through language. In her radio essay “Sagbares
und Unsagbares - Die Philosophie Ludwig Wittgensteins” (“The Sayable and Unsayable—The
Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein”) Bachman makes the philosopher say the sentence: And
“the limit of my world” signifies “the limit of my language.” For our reach extends only as far
the reach of our language” (Bachmann, 2010, p. 9).
In the poem “Erklär mir, Liebe!” (“Explain to Me, Love!”), the lyric I seeks to overcome
the limits of language. This is indicated by stand-alone lines of the poem expressing some kind
of protest of the lyric I: 1.“So unsuspecting, the snail steps out of its house!“5 2. „Even a stone
knows how to soften the other!!“ 6 In order for language to turn into utopia and beauty, the lyric
I does not try to change the language system, but seeks to modify forms of its usage:
Should I spend this short, horrid time
With thoughts only, and alone
Know no love and give none? 7 (Bachmann, 2010, p.143)
2
Der Käfer reicht die Herrlichste von weit
Hätt ich nur seinen Sinn, ich fühlte auch
3
Sigmund Freud's observation on his patient Dora.
4
Wasser weiß zu reden,
Die Welle nimmt die Welle an der Hand
5
So arglos tritt die Schencke aus dem haus
6
Ein Stein weiß enínen andern zu erweichen!
7
Sollt ich die kurze schauerliche Zeit
Nur mit Gedanken Umgang haben und allein nichts Liebes kennen
34
In these lines the author uses rhetoric figure and through the interrogative sentence she offers a
stylistic trick to demonstrate that the answer to the question can be found without finding the
truth, one truth may point to the other. It does not require any explanation, as by giving the
example of salamander, she concludes that one may overcome a limit, this is proved by the
existence of a limit itself. In the closing lines of the poem, an implicit dialogue appears which
is indicated by the lyric I’s answer to love:
Do not explain anything to me. I see the salamander
Go through every fire 8(Bachmann, 2010, p.143).
The Lyric I grieves over the polysemy of concepts and paradox of language in
Bachmann’s poem “Entfremdung“ (“Estrangement”). In the very opening lines of the poem,
the confusion of Lyric I is expressed by the anaphoric repetition: Bäume –Bäume (trees-trees)
(Bachmann 2010: 233), pointing to the impossibility of monosemy of concepts and
powerlessness of language.
The Lyric I cannot see “trees in the trees” but it is forced to call them the “trees”.
Femininity has the only way out of the patriarchal/symbolic order - masquerade, hysteria,
mimesis, which deconstructs the patriarchal discourse. However, these forms cannot help
women find their place, as mimesis, hysteria and masquerade chain them to the concept they
wish to break. The pain resulting from this enchainment is expressed by the so called “frame-
phrase” of the poem: „What should be done?“ (Bachmann, 2010, p.233)
The Lyric I uses the binary opposition to express its state: full-hungry (232). The
hierarchy is broken in the binary oppositions, as “hunger” is a natural state for the lyric I and it
turns to the night to kill the hunger. The night is associated with the unconscious/origin and
with the question - „ So, shall I open up, approach everything again?” (233) – it becomes clear
that the lyric I has done this many times before. However, by using the anaphoric repetition
“way-way” (Weg-Weg) (233) in a standing alone line, the lyric I concludes that there is no
way: „I cannot see a way in any way” (233).
In the poem “Wie sol lich mich nennen?” („How should I call myself?”), Ingeborg
Bachmann attempts to overcome binary oppositions as through this she may find the self:
bound-free (gebunden-frei), hard-fleeing (harter-flüchtendes), beginning-end (Beginnen-
Enden), bound- dismissed (gefesselt-entließ):
But there is still a beginning in me singing
Or the end resisting my flee,
I want to escape the arrow of this guilt. 9( Bachmann, 2010, p.247)
The concept of feminine “singing” points to the pre-linguistic period, when the woman
was identified to the mother, before culture forced her to shift to the symbolic order. The
patriarchal world/the conscious does not let her return to the origin, leading to the self-
identification problem of the lyric/feminine I. In her book Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida
delves into arche-violence discussing the anthropological observation of Claude Lévi-Strauss
in the context of writing/the written. Writing, in its part, implies violence, as the author has no
Und nichts Liebes tun?

8
Erklär mir nichts. Ich seh den Salamander
Durch jedes Feuer gehen.
9
Aber in mir singt noch ein Beginnen
-oder ein Enden-und wehrt meiner Flucht,
ich will dem Pfeil dieser Schuld entrinnen.
35
control over it and it slips out of her hands, unlike the oral “logos” which is formed by the
speaker and its meaning may be explained by the sender. While writing creates some distance
between its subject (author) and object (text). When the massage reaches the recipient, it is not
present any more. As soon as the utterance/expression is written, it kills its producer. Derrida
uses the word “liquid” to describe writing: “The pharmakon always penetrates like liquid, it is
absorbed, drunk, introduced into the inside, which it first marks with the hardness of the type,
soon to invade it and inundate it with its medicine, its brew, its drink, its potion, its poison”
(Derrida, 1981, p.152). The liquid is a characteristic of the written, for in the non-existence of
the author, writing flows from one reader to the other as liquid and, as a result, the identity of
the written is vague and equivocal. Naming is the first process of writing.
The individual is given a certain name to separate it from the other. Nevertheless, this
separation is impossible as one word may not encompass all characteristics and unique features
of a person. The lyric I does not want to look for another language: „I am not looking for another
language” however it deliberately plays with the words: „How shall I know myself?“-„I may
know myself one day“10. The word/words for self-expression must be found as a prerequisite
for self-knowing however the lyric fails to find them in the symbolic order.
A number of lyric poems of Lia Sturua describe the conflicts arising in the
cultural/patriarchal world. In the poem “Call your doctor”, the lyric I expresses the difficulty of
constructing the feminine identity. The lyric I declares itself as a guest in this world, as it has
nothing autonomous in it:
I have nothing to pay,
With a polished smile he takes off my skin
I remain: a pile of infants
Or a maternity house 11(Sturua, 2016, p.104)
The only function that the woman must acquire is the reproduction. According to
Simone de Beauvoir, in the patriarchal world, girls are brought up with binary oppositions, such
as: pervert-honest, Eve-Marry, Medea-Judith, and they are taught that they can choose to
resemble one of them; however, they were given the standard for norm (Beauvoir, 1968, p.10).
It is clear from the poem that the lyric I knows normal characteristics, it needs to do its task and
become the projector masculine fears:
How long will they fly,
If I do not harden its cover with blood? 12(Sturua, 2016, p.104)
By using the anaphoric expressions „blood-blood“, „when-when-when“(104), the

author introduces hysteric tones into the text, showing the lyric I attempting to take control over
its life and language:
10
Wie halt ich mich?-Vielleich kann ich mich einmal erkennen
11
აღარაფერი მაქვს გასახდელი,
თავაზიანი ღიმილით მხდის კანს
ვრჩები: ჩვილი ბავშვების ზვინი
თუ სამშობიარო სახლი.
12
რამდენ ხანს იფრიალებდნენ,
სისხლით ყდა რომ არ გავუმაგრო?
36
This is my blood and I know

When to put it aside
And when: "If the pain will not go away,
Call my doctor!” 13(Sturua, 2016, p.104)
With the lines “If the pain will not go away, Call my doctor!" and „overall intoxication”,
the author underlines the pre-determined place of women in the patriarchal world: if the woman
does not comply with the standards of normal, she is hysterical (requires a doctor’s attention),
and her state is evaluated as the intoxication of the whole body. According to Freud and Breuer,
hysterical women suffer from reminiscences (reminisce-sich erinnern) (Freud&Breuer, 1991,
p.31). Painful memories are replaced with accumulated symptoms, which achieves the
experienced unconscious and they appear repeatedly. Strong symptoms arise when experience
cause big changes of feelings, and the basis for the change is internal contradictions, conflicts
between the self and feelings (Lindhoff, 2003, p.140). The lyric I in the poem of Lia Sturua,
suffers from hysteria as well: it is afraid of its feelings/metaphors, metaphors bring the lyric I
back to the unconscious and cause inner conflict in it which may be expressed with the act of
self-damaging:
The metaphor works on the nail line,

If I touch it, it will mutilate me 14(Sturua, 2016, p.105)
The fear of self-destruction of the lyric/feminine I is apparent in Sturua’s poem “Love?!”

If the female voice gives freedom of expression to the written/words, it will threaten to
“mutilate” her again. The language is restricted within “frames” after the shift to the oedipal
phase. The lyric I compares words to the fire and the symbolic order tries to put it in frames.
Burning words can be put in the frames only temporarily and it endangers the established order
every day. The world described in the first part of Lia Sturua’s poem,contains features of
symbolic order:
Wars, children,
Emotions conscious and unconscious,
Church in between, or classic literature 15(Sturua, 2016, p.102)
The world described in these lines is the product of men using the argument of the fact
that mythos, religion, history, poetry were not created by women. Evenmore, even dreams are
determined by men’s dreams (Beauvoir, 1968, p.155). Accordingly, church, war, children
13
ეს ჩემი სისხლია და მე ვიცი,
როდის გამოვიყენო, როდის გვერდზე გავწიო
და როდის: „ტკივილმა თუ არ გამიარა,
მივმართო ექიმს!“
14
მეტაფორა ლურსმნების ხაზით მუშაობს,
რომ შევეხო, დამასახიჩრებს.

15
ომები, ბავშვები,
ემოციები ზენა და ქვენა,
შუაში ეკლესია, ან კლასიკური ლიტერატურა
37
(child bears father’s surname and thus culture separates the child from mother) are the main
tools for the patriarchal order.
In her poem, Lia Sturua presents two ways of women’s self-representation and existence:
1. The woman can fit to the rules of the patriarchal world and subordinate her language to
the symbolic language making herself visible in the historic reality.
If you fit
And light even a single matchstick,
Such a novel will fall down on me 16(Sturua, 2016, p.102)
2. The woman can confront the established linguistic norms and waste no shrewishness
characteristic of the gender on faded words”. This will enable her to build feminine
identity.
In the chapter “Plato’s Pharmacy” of the book La Dissémination (Dissemination)

Jacques Derrida deconstructs the dichotomic hierarchy. The author tries to overcome the
hierarchy claiming that one meaning/value includes within itself the element of the other
subordinated one. Through the deconstruction of “Plato’s Pharmacy”, Derrida comes to the
conclusion that writing is similar to pharmakon which has a double effect: It may cure the
decease and aggravate it. The ambivalent unity of the words “cure” and “poison” takes
initial in the ancient ceremony of pharmakon. In ancient Athens, pharmakos-ceremonies
took place at critical moments. It referred to the scapegoat, uncontrolled evil which should
have been exiled from the city (Derrida, 1981, p.130). This practice occurred in Athens until
the fifth century. The sacrifice(scape-goat) chosen for the ceremony was of an ambivalent
significance: it was evil, which was to leave the city, because citizens of Athens believed
that he had evil in him, on the other hand, he served as a cure for the city.
Similar to the above mentioned, in the poem of Lia Sturua, the lyric I realizes that words
may mutilate and destroy it, but unless it revives the words from the unconscious through
unleashing them from the “lowest and darkest layer of the sleep” (102), it will face a new
danger of disappearance. In the closing lines of the poem, the lyric may address itself with
the question: “Can you still?” With this indefinite question the author leaves unanswered
the limitedness of femininity and the problem of self-identity.
16
თუ მოარგე
და ერთი ღერი ასანთიც აუნთე,
ისეთი რომანი დამემხობა თავზე
38
Conclusion
The analysis of the lyrical texts by Ingeborg Bachman and Lia Sturua in a post-structuralist
context revealed the self-identification problem of femininity enchained to the symbolic order.
In the above-analyzed poems, both of the authors discuss linguistic difficulties due to which
feelings and inner conflicts cannot be described properly. This leads to the self-alienation and
problems of self-identification. The interpretation of the poems made it clear that the femininity
can become representative and visible only through overcoming masculine creation and
feminine self-destruction, and defeating the feminine identity established by the symbolic
order/mythos. Although, in the poems by Ingeborg Bachmann and Lia Sturua, the lyric I cannot
construct a new/feminine identity, it makes an attempt to find new ways for finding the new
subject, for how not to be a victim of neither the symbolic order, not the self and admit
emancipated, autonomous existence along with the hysteria.
References
Bachmann, I. (2010). Sämtliche Gedichte. München, Zürich: Piper
Beauvoir, S. (1968). Das andere Geschlecht. Sitte und Sexus der Frau. Hamburg
Brügmann, M. (1989). Weiblichkeit im Spiel der Sprache in: Schreibende Frauen, Frauen-
Literatur-Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart.(pp.395-415). Gnüg, Hiltrud &
Renate Möhrmann (eds). Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1603.
Deridda, J. (1981). Dissemination. Translated:Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press
Derrida, J. (1983). Grammatologie. Trans: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger & Hanns Zischler.
Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag
Kristeva, J. (1986). The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford
Lindhoff, L. (2003). Einführung in die feministische Literaturtheorie. Stuttgart: Metzler
Müller-Zettelmann, E. (2000). Lyrik und Metalyrik. Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte.
Band 171. Heidelberg
Nünning, A. , Nünning, V. (eds) (2002). Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies. Weimar:
Verlag J.B. Metzler Stuttgart
Sexl, M (Hg). (2004). Einführung in die Literturteorie. Wien: Facultas Verlags- und
Buchhandels AG. 88-91.
Sturua, L.(2016). Wolf’s Hour. Tbilisi: Intelekti publishing.
Weber, I (ed). (1994). Weiblichkeit und weibliches Schreiben. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgeselschaft.
მე-20 საუკუნის ავსტრიული ლირიკა -Österreichische Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts. (2010).
ინგებორგ ბახმანი . თბილისი: გამომცემლობა პოლილოგი -Tbilissi: Polylogi Verlag
39
“Silence is not Silent”: A Postcolonial Feminist Appraisal of

Women Silence in Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness
Samya Achiri *
Assistant Lecturer, Faculty of Letters and Languages, University of Oum El Bouaghi

samiaachiri@yahoo.ca
APA Citation:
Achiri, S. (2019). “Silence is not Silent”: A Postcolonial Feminist Appraisal of Women Silence in Mia Couto’s
Confession of the Lioness. Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 7(12),, 40-56.
Abstract
Most of the western feminist readings of literary texts in which third world women are at the center do
strongly confirm the biased stereotypical depictions usually ascribed to them. However, such is not always the
case of all women featured in African literature whose silences proved to be often subversive. Mia Couto’s
Confession of the Lioness accesses the post-Civil War repertoire of Mozambique from, mainly, a black female
vantage perspective. Through the focal female character Mariamar, the novel rethinks the female subaltern voices
and positions. It probes the dynamics of silence and the possibilities it instigates. From a postcolonial feminist
lens, the insights of Chandra Mohanty in particular, this paper examines Couto’s use of silence as a mysterious
force overloaded with speech. It underlines some of the female depatriarching and self-empowerment strategies,
namely narrating and writing one’s own story in the novel under study. In a village like kulumani, the atmospheric
effect of the sound of silence reverberates more than the spoken word does. Reading the text from this standpoint
is a starting point to depart the totalizing attitudes and the single story generally attributed to Africa and African
women.
Keywords: Couto, third world women, silence, postcolonial feminism, subversion, writing and narrating.
1. Introduction: Confession of the Lioness and the Politics of Postcolonial (Third

World) Feminism
Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness (2012) has become accessible to the readers of
English after having been translated from Portuguese by David Brookshaw in 2015. Couto’s
forward to the novel reads as follows:
In 2008, the company I work for sent fifteen young people to serve as field
officers during a program of seismic prospecting in […] northern
Mozambique. During the same period and in the same region, lions began to
attack people. Within a few weeks, there were more than ten fatal attacks.
This number increased to twenty in about four months [...]. Hunters were
urgently needed in order to provide protection […]. Two experienced hunters
*
University of Oum El Bouaghi, PB 358, Oum El Bouaghi 04000, Algeria
Confession of the Lioness
[…] traveled to Palma […]. In the meantime, the number of victims had
increased to twenty-six […].
[…]. It was suggested […] that the real culprits were inhabitants of the
invisible world, where rifles and bullets were no use at all. Gradually, the
hunters realized that the mysteries they were having to confront were merely
symptoms of social conflicts for which they had no adequate solution. (2015:
ix-x)
In this forward, the writer stresses from the very onset the gloomy and mysterious atmosphere
which pervades the novel and reflects profusely that of the real context. The novel is a witness
to a series of bewildering facts that overwhelm the small village of Kulumani in which the
victims of the attacks brought forth in the quote appear to be only women. This magnifies the
ambiguity surrounding the nature of the beasty creatures and the society as a whole.
Having two separate narrators through two seemingly interconnected diaries, this text examines
the resistance of the local culture to any kind of modern meddling. It covers the post-Civil War
era and its traumatic consequences on the intra-social relations and the local human character.
Couto’s reproduction of this incident is not accidental, for the assassination of women
ingeminates the victimization women endure at the hands of their society and its beliefs. By
dint of a discourse which fuses poetic language, magical realism with the African myth and
ritual, Couto profoundly investigates the possibilities lying beneath the dynamics of silence
through the black female protagonist Mariamar. Mariamar sets fire on the stereotypical
renderings of African women by turning the power of silence into her own favor in defiance of
the patriarchal cultural norms. Thus, as a postcolonial text, with its implicit challenging tone,
Confession of the Lioness fits into the postcolonial feminist calls to step out the mainstream
attitudes incarcerating women in the same orbit. It repudiates the totalization and the
universalization of female concerns and sufferings by unraveling a unique female experience.
Postcolonial feminism, also acknowledged as third world feminism, often accounts for the
negligence of gender issues in the postcolonial theory, and the absence of the postcolonial in
feminism. For this very reason, many scholars believe it “originates from internal ideologies
and socio-cultural factors [of the ex-colonized countries]” and not a product of the first world
(Jayawardena 2008: 233). Viewing this, the ‘politics of location,’ the historical and
geographical distinctiveness of the third world, is accentuated in this theory. Robert Young
succinctly sumps up its quintessence:
Postcolonial feminism has never operated as a separate entity from
postcolonialism; rather it has directly inspired the forms and the force of
postcolonial politics. Where its feminist focus is foregrounded, it comprises
non-western feminisms which negotiate the political demands of nationalism,
socialist feminism, liberalism, and ecofeminism, alongside the social
challenge of everyday patriarchy, typically supported by its institutional and
legal discrimination: of domestic violence, sexual abuse, rape, honour
killings, dowry deaths, female foeticide, child abuse. Feminism in a
postcolonial frame begins with the situation of the ordinary woman in a
particular place, while also thinking her situation through in relation to
broader issues to give her the more powerful basis of collectivity. It will
highlight the degree to which women are still working against a colonial
legacy that was itself powerfully patriarchal - institutional, economic,
political, and ideological. (2003: 116)
With her groundbreaking essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses” (1986), Chandra Mohanty overtly abhors the Eurocentric discourse of
41
Samya Achiri /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
western feminism that champions the single story often told about Africa and its women. She
delineates three basic practices whereby third world women are rendered as one powerless
group: ‘homogenization’, ‘essentialization’, and ‘representation’. Of paramount importance is
the first practice of homogenization. Without taking into consideration the local specificities of
this part of the world, “the resultant homogenization of class, race, religion, and daily material
practices of women in the Third World can create a false sense of the commonality of
oppressions, interests, and struggles between and among women globally” (Mohanty 1991: 68).
Briefly stated, women all over the world, with miscellaneous experiences, are never the same.
Consequently, ‘patriarchies’ can in no way be identical.
Mohanty believes that women, in this postcolonial era, are prone to a ‘double
colonization’1, or silencing, at the hands of men and imperialism jointly. The latter manifests
itself remarkably through the ex-colonized man and the discourse of mainstream feminism. In
this discourse, women are characterized as victims of male violence, colonial process, Arab
familial system, economic development process, and Islamic code, and thus they are reduced
to and essentialized as a one homogenous group (Mohanty 1991: 57). In the version which
comes out in Feminism Without Borders, Mohanty stresses this by adding the category of
“universal dependents” (2003: 23). She also criticizes the label “third world woman” ascribed
to these women through underlining the “effects of various textual strategies used by [western]
writers that codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western” (1991:
52, emphasis added). The whole process which involves discourse and knowledge production
of the reductionist, one-sided, western feminism on women is subsumed by Mohanty as
“discursive colonization” (1991: 15). Of course, these politics of ‘knowledge production’,
deemed as a form of “cultural imperialism”, are questionable since “women of Africa” are
depicted as a “homogenous sociological grouping characterized by common dependencies or
powerlessness” (Mohanty 1991: 59). One token of this strand of colonization, essentialization,
is western literature through which postcolonial women are purloined of their peculiarities, and
hence their voice, whether in terms of representation or critical appraisal. It is apparent that
with Mohanty, heterogeneity, difference acknowledgment, is celebrated over homogeneity.
Silence is often limned as ““the right speech of womanhood” — the sign of woman’s
submission to patriarchal authority” (Hooks 1995b: 337). Postcolonial feminist interventions
are concerned with those silences as individual or collective phenomena. At a more nuanced
level, patriarchy is exhibited through depriving women not just of the right to speak or to
express one’s self but also every single right. At a broader level, as a collective experience,
silence can be captured in the blindness towards the experiences of women, especially their
agency and history, from those postcolonial countries. This is done by means of ignoring their
productions, I refer precisely here to creative writings, the complication of the process of
publication and most weightily the reception of their writings and initiatives within primarily
their mother countries. This last point deters female voices to reach larger audiences overseas
as feminist writings are often “invisible” or “excluded from African literary criticism”
particularly (da Silva 2004: 129).
In line with this, Gayatri Spivak answers the rhetorical question of her essay “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” (1988) by asserting that “the subaltern cannot speak” (1988: 308). This
answer ignites an intensely vigorous debate in which ‘to speak’ is often misread as to ‘talk.’ To
clarify this, she states in The Spivak Reader that any ‘speech act’ involves “a transaction
between the speaker and the listener” (1996: 289). The female subaltern is equally silenced and
disregarded; so, she is not heard. The act of speaking, in consequence, turns into a simple act
1
This term appeared officially in: Petersen, Kirsten Holst and Anna Rutherford, eds., (1986). A Double
Colonization: Colonial and Post-colonial Women's Writing. Oxford: Dangaroo Press.
42
of talking. bell hooks also , resounding Spivak, locates the real struggle not in the emergence
from the state of “silence to speech” but in constructing “a speech that compels listeners, one
that is heard” (Hooks 1995b: 337-8). Subsequently, the resistant act of speaking is
accomplished through ‘talking back’ 2 to the multifarious domineering powers that dehumanize
women, be they local or universal, traditional or modern. This way, the act of speaking would
be an “expression of moving from object to subject, that is the liberated voice” (Hooks 1995b:
340).
The subaltern’s effaced voice raises the problem of representation or “who speaks for
whom and whose voices are heard” (Weedon 2007: 290). Any initiative to represent women,
by experts of the ex-colonized world or western academia, may risk silencing them more and
more in many considerations. On the one side, it can widen the Manichean binary ‘us’ and
‘them’ (Spivak 1988: 274), and on the other, it can plunge the whole process of voice
emancipation in ‘epistemic violence,’ Spivak’s concept that echoes in essence Mohanty’s
‘discursive colonization.’ Western epistemology is often Eurocentric, so it “cohere[s] with the
work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of
learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever” (Spivak 1988: 295).
To this end, Spivak proposes that these experts would “unlearn [their] privileges” (1996: 4).
This is a two-fold operation which involves (a) casting aside privileges accorded by race,
gender, class and western scholarship to be able (b) to get integral knowledge of the specificities
that constitute womanhood in different locations. Reflecting the crux of this, Confession of the
Lioness typifies Mia Couto’s rootedness in the local culture and impartiality by allowing two
native narrators, male and female, to trace the possible within the impossible.
In literary studies, postcolonial feminist criticism transcends the fetters of “western
academia” by being “necessarily eclectic” (Navarro Tejero 2013: 254). It contemplates the
heterogeneity of third world women that is the interplay and the impact of a long array of factors
on them in the texts unfolding their marvelous experiences. The cultural beliefs in particular
are punctuated, for what is a patriarchal attitude from a western feminist stance can be a pious
belief to the African woman. The resistant thrust of this criticism endeavors to resist,
decolonize/ liberate and most importantly empower women. This is what distinguishes this
approach from other feminisms. This objective is, as referred to earlier, hard-achieving, yet the
“postcolonial feminist discourse strives to create the space for this “counter sentence” [voice]
to be spoken by the “gendered subaltern”” (George 2006: 216).
The postcolonial feminist discourse is a counter discursive space which “is encoded in
the practices of remembering, and of writing” (Mohanty 1991: 38). Writing, then, is not a
simple passive act of telling. Rather, it is a medium whereby women become active agents in
light of the hegemonic discourse of the west which exposes them as powerless creatures by way
of shared experiences. Mohanty describes writing and its distinctive contours as:
[A] discursive context [...] on storytelling or autobiography (the practice of
writing) as a discourse of oppositional consciousness and agency. Again,
these are necessarily partial contexts meant to be suggestive rather than
comprehensive—this is, after all, one possible cartography of contemporary
struggles. And it is admittedly a cartography which begs numerous questions
and suggests its own gaps and fissures. However, I write it in an attempt to
‘‘pivot’’ the center of feminist analyses, to suggest new beginnings and
middles, and to argue for more finely honed historical and context specific
2
bell hooks’ term.
43
feminist methods. I also write out of the conviction that we must be able and
willing to theorize and engage the feminist politics of women, for these are
the very understandings we need to respond seriously to the challenges of
race, class, and our postcolonial condition. (1991: 39-40, emphasis added)
In this context, Mohanty warns against the universalization of women experiences, and Gloria
Anzaldúa warns against the universalization of women writings. Anzaldúa sees threat in the act
of adhering to the “universal” in the discursive productions, writings, of women from the third
world at the expense of the “particular”, “feminine” and the “historical” (1983: 170). Silence
in these narratives is not always a form of subjugation, for it can be “a will not to say or a will
to unsay and as a language of its own” (Minh-ha 1990: 372-373). Clearly avowed then, silence
is a personal, voluntary alternative and a different performance from that of silencing.
In postcolonial feminist criticism, silence derives as a form of resistance to contest the
patriarchal discourse and practices. It investigates the possibilities of voicing the gendered
subalterns embedded in silence. Being in a state of silence and a position of marginality is not
necessarily analogous to weakness. This state carves out “a site of creativity and power, that
inclusive space where we [women] recover ourselves” according to bell hooks (hooks 1995a:
343). With this insight, this paper will explore how Mia Couto engages explicitly, through
Confession of the Lioness, in this project of recuperating the shadowed voices. His scrupulous
depiction of women from Mariamar’s home village distinguishes silence as machinery from
silencing as a machination. The paper, on this ground, underlines two female depatriarching
and self-empowerment strategies, namely narrating and writing one’s own story, which impart
sound to silence.
2. Mozambican Women as “Third World Women” / “Gendered Subalterns”:
Confession of the Lioness carries the confessions of the main female character and
narrator Mariamar Mpepe about her village kulumani, one of the rural villages after the formal
end of the Civil War that devastated Mozambique throughout 15 years (1977-1992) following
just 3 years of independence. Mia Couto maps kulumani as a microcosm to adeptly broach
broader mysterious issues. In the first page of the novel, kulumani is depicted as a village
captivated with “illusions” and “certainties” that are passed on from one generation to another
(Couto 2015: 3). A society which has myths as its code of conduct is certainly mystic. Two
myths appealing strongly to human existence are brought to light in chapter one: the myth of
creation and death. “God was once a woman”, the narrator declares (Couto 2015: 3), and the
sky was woven by women (Couto 2015: 4). As to the dead, “they are all ordered to turn over in
the belly of earth” in the same night (Couto 2015: 8).
One reason locking up kulumani “in the margins of the world” (Couto 2015: 80) might
be the above. Yet, the colonizer also ruins the society dreadfully, and the Civil War rubs salt to
the wound as “all people came back from the war dead” (Couto 2015: 80). All that is heard
right throughout this rural area is silence. Fear inhabits the houses of kulumani instead of its
people. This village is diagnosed by its administrator “as having a cancer called envy” (Couto
2015: 108). The social angst, already ingrained by the colonizer, next to the chasm
characterizing the intra-social relationships are patent culminations that the novel storifies. The
wise, blind, old man, the only real man in kulumani in the eyes of the administrator’s wife,
asserts that the lions the expedition is looking for “emerged out of the last civil war” (Couto
2015: 82). Saying so, he spurs a strong reference to the real war, alluded to here as a simple
hunt expedition, to be waged against the social devils, the lions, inherent in this society. The
fear the elders have towards the newly arrived expedition at this juncture should not sound
strange hence.
44
At the kernel of Mia Couto’s novel lies his vision of the necessity of retrieving gender
issues to the fore of the post-colonial scene in Mother Africa. He proffers much importance to
the different facets of oppression and repression in this backdrop. The victimization African
women endure is best expressed by Hanifa Assulua, Mariamar’s mother, upon stating that the
war ends and brings peace only to men since “women will wake up every morning to a
timeworn, endless war” (Couto 2015: 103). One of the victimized characters of her society, she
has many occasions to disclose familial, wifehood, besides social patriarchy. To start with,
being a local of kulumani obliges her like all women to call her husband ‘ntwangu’ out of
respect, for here wives never address their husbands by their names. Even in the same family,
women and men cannot eat together, and thence the hunter reflects surprisingly once he gets
the chance to share the meal with the administrator’s wife. Additionally, household activities
are feminized, so it is very shameful for men to approach the simplest tasks like their drink
preparation. In relation to daughterhood, Mariamar recounts pathetically how she begs her
father “not to go with the administrator [Florindo Makwala]” in order to “sleep over there in
his house” (Couto 2015: 162). To the father, Genito Mpepe, doing such a favor to Makwala
would allow him to regain his respect! The mother has nothing to do except preparing her
daughter to this meeting “in silence” (Couto 2015: 163). Other than unbosoming the miserable
conditions of Kulumani, the confessions transmitted through Confession of the Lioness are
Mariamar’s self-revelations of her sufferings.
At another level, the novel indicts the conservative ideas about women in these
postcolonial societies as one of the prevailing sources of women victimization. From the
colonial times till the post-Civil War era, women “had always been contained, kept in
shadows”, Mariamar says while referring to her mother (Couto 2015: 10). Practices like
decision making and participation in public occasions, for instance, are male issues. In this
vein, the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí reiterates Mohanty’s use of the concept
of ‘double colonization’ by writing about the double oppression, “European domination” and
“indigenous tradition” (at the hands of African men), of African women in particular (1997:
122). Vidya Maria Joseph, likewise, regards gender discrepancies as being the end result of the
“collaboration” between the “native elite groups” and the “patriarchal imperial regime” (n.d :
5). To say it differently, patriarchy is an oppressive apparatus whereby the ex-colonized man,
the elite, exercises his robbed power over the weakest subjects. The novel figures such a type
of double oppression under which the inhabitants are dwarfed in the presence of their
administrator, the neo-colonial exemplar of the village. The incident of submitting Mariamar
to him without knowing his intentions is a vivid illustration of this. Both kinds of oppression,
familial or social, lead to a long-term psychological torture which is eloquently summarized by
Hanifa as “[p]ains pass, but they don’t disappear” (Couto 2015: 147).
The dramatization of women silencing reaches the zenith with the incident of the maid
of the administrator’s wife, Naftalinda. It scrutinizes robustly the elimination of any attempt to
challenge the patriarchal practices. Daringly, Tandi the maid disrespects the tradition that is
predominantly male-centric and passes by the camp of the boys’ initiation, one of the basic
rituals women have no access to. Twelve men rape the girl, and no one accepts to treat her even
the nurse in spite of all the efforts of the first lady of the village to achieve justice and revenge
for her maid. “Who has the courage in kulumani to rise up against tradition?” Naftalinda
suggestively wonders (Couto 2015: 114). She recites how this cruel act, a rational punishment
according to men, kills the soul of her maid. This incidence questions the transparency of the
judicial system in the postcolonial countries through which contentious judicial cases
associated with gender-based issues are not given priority by the colonial/imperial regimes and
45
“left to traditional religious interpretations” (Joseph n.d: 5). This paradoxical attitude of these
regimes, that are supposed “to save brown women from brown men” (Spivak 1988: 306),
certifies the viscerally patriarchal nature of their initiatives and discourses alike.
A further prejudice that plagues women is matriarchy. Like all the female characters
in Couto’s text, Mariamar is a gendered subaltern in view of the practices laid out earlier. Yet,
what is really soul-killing to her and her sister Silencia, the last victim when the novel opens,
is revealed at later episodes. It is the rape the father bedevils his daughters with whenever he
is drunk. Rather than sympathizing with her daughters, Hanifa puts the onus on Mariamar and
avenges herself as a woman with a ‘taktuka’ 3 performed in reverse. Mariamar’s life is given to
the lifeless tree, and she becomes in return alive without a soul. In the novel, patriarchy and
matriarchy are equally exhibited as detrimental powers. In regards of this, the African woman
is not only doubly but thrice colonized. Next to the male and colonial/imperial dominance, she
is under the coercion of other women who are more privileged in varying terms, kinship in this
case. The effects of this matriarchy cannot to be minimized; they are evidently as harmful as
that which results from patriarchy while taking its psychological affliction on Mariamar into
consideration. The novel showcases Mariamar and her mother as victims of the father. The
mother should have supported her daughter; nevertheless, in such a turbulent context, no one
can expect the reaction of the other. Matriarchal practices in post-colonial societies can be seen
as indirect manifestations of patriarchy. In clearer words, patriarchy toughens matriarchy. It is
already stated that colonialism blindly drives patriarchy to the extreme, so it is logical to assume
matriarchy as a progeny of patriarchy by which disempowered women, like Hanifa, exert their
anger and disgust on less disempowered women, her daughter in this novel.
Describing the anxieties that women of kulumani are constantly pulled between, the hunter
situates them “between a serpent's spittle and the devil's breath” (Couto 2015: 135). This biform
suffering calls to attention Spivak's conception of the ‘gendered subaltern’, the subaltern woman, which
is for the view that women are silenced and caught in the midst of perplexing binaries: “patriarchy and
imperialism” on the one hand, “tradition and modernization” on the other (Spivak 1988: 306). Taking
this and the above into account, Kulumani is a ‘third world’ and its women are ‘gendered subalterns.’
3. Cartographies of Resistance and Empowerment:
Despite highlighting the experiences of disempowered women in Mozambique,
Confession of the Lioness harbors also some modes of resistance and empowerment pertaining
to women in Africa generally and Mozambique particularly. A close reading of the novel
demonstrates two distinctive, yet differing, ways to subvert hegemonic patriarchy.
3.1 A Loud Voice of Dissent:
This mode of direct confrontation with the male counterpart is represented by
Naftalinda whose marriage to the administrator opens up a space for expression to her unlike
many women. The social constraints besieging women are defied through the ritual of ‘shitala’,
the elders’ meeting, in which the issue of the lions that haunt the village is being discussed.
This woman interrupts them, something forbidden by tradition, by asserting that “[t]he enemies
of Kulumani are right here, they’re in this assembly!” (Couto 2015: 86). Without fear, she
advances to accuse the male assembly for being responsible for the incident of her girl maid,
already referred to earlier. In the following passage, a conversation with her husband at that
3
According to the novel, this is a ritual which is supposed to extract life from an animate creature (a tree in this
case) and breath it into in a lifeless/sick body like that of Mariamar.
46
meeting, Naftalinda shows a great challenging spirit by delving into the very problem of this
village:
Comrade First Lady, please, this is a private meeting … [the administrator]
Private? I can’t see anything private here. And don’t look at me like that, because
I’m not scared. I am like the lions that attack us: I’ve lost my fear of men.
Naftalinda, please, we’re meeting here in accordance with age-old tradition,
Makwala pleads.
A woman was raped and almost killed here in this village. And it wasn’t the lions
that did it. There’s no longer anywhere I can’t go. […]
Mama Naftalinda, you’ve got to ask to speak, Florindo Makwala warns.
The floor’s mine, I don’t need to ask anyone. […]
You pretend you’re worried about the lions that take our lives from us. But I, as
a woman, ask you: What life is there left to take from us? (Couto 2015: 86-7)
Naftalinda unveils an “age-old” sexist social system reclining on the legitimacy of
tradition to perpetually silence women. Because of this, the meeting amounts to a riot in a
“world where the living and the dead need translation in order to understand each other” (Couto
2015: 87). This is a world where men are ‘the living’ and women are ‘the dead’. Illustrative of
this is Spivak’s evaluation of the act of speaking of the ‘gendered/sexed subaltern’. Since there
is no listener, as the elders do not care at all, the speech of Naftalinda turns into an act of talking.
The woman has “no space [guaranteed by her society] from which [she] can speak” (Spivak
1988: 307). John Mc Leod’s interpretation of Spivak’s view recalls this scene: “the subaltern
cannot speak because their words cannot be properly interpreted. Hence, the silence of the
female as subaltern is the result of a failure of interpretation and not a failure of articulation”
(2000: 195). On another level, conversely, this venture from the first lady shakes the hegemony
of kulumani males and humiliates them. It furthermore releases the female voice from the
“despotic” (Couto 2015: 135) act of silencing.
Public speech delivery is another initiative seeking justice against patriarchy that the
novel projects. Besides attempting to avenge her maid, Naftalinda’s provocative speech in the
funeral aims basically to urge Kulumani women to rebel against this sexist retarding traditional
system. If red from a generalized rather than a particularized standpoint, however, this speech
emanates into a poignant call to all women to decolonize themselves from the psychological
self-enslavement leading them to be the slaves of male dominance. The exemplification of both
psychological attitudes is incarnated in the very disappointing reaction of the few women who
attend the funeral and retreat one by one in silence. Though this audacious step from this woman
does not meet something tangible, she succeeds to ingrain in her husband suspicion about the
nature of the lions that attack the village even during daytime, and “their intentions are almost
human” ! (Couto 2015: 151).
Strongly germane to the previous counteraction is the use of body as a weapon. Light
is spotted on the female body as a locus of enslavement and simultaneously resistance in two
basic senses. In offering her naked body intentionally to the lions to compel her husband to
bring justice to her maid and all women alike rests Naftalinda’s, the novel’s, reference to
African ‘body politics’, a very thought-provoking topic of discussion. Generally speaking,
Naftalinda possesses a body which is often sorted as vulnerable in the eyes of her society, yet
her bravery reclaims sound to the female body especially when considering that none of
Kulumani’s males dare to undertake this heroic experience. As a woman, the administrator’s
wife avowedly expresses her private needs such as having a beautiful body like Mariamar’s.
She confesses that sexuality is her underlying aim behind this endeavor, something that her
husband, as it is the case of all men, does not give a concern to. She avers: “I want to be
devoured, but I want to be devoured in the sexual sense. I want a lion to make me pregnant”
47
(Couto 2015: 167). Importantly, this incidence probes the peculiarities of the female
subjectivity and what constitutes it in this context. Commonly believed are the stereotypical
beliefs of, especially, gender victimization often accorded to African women; nevertheless, this
gesture substantiates their activism in the social life as far as human rights emancipation is
concerned. Above all else, they are human beings who can articulate their sexual desires like
western women. Mohanty believes that women experiences and needs all over the world are
not the same; consequently, their subjectivities can never be the same. Moreover, in this very
act of sacrifice, be it from Naftalinda or Tandi, the idea of martyrdom is genuinely rooted. Both
cases are no different from the Indian Sati women, widow burning, to whom the ritual becomes
a willing conscious act to revolt against the society’s misrecognitions.
Substantial achievements of this cartography of resistance are nothing to mention, yet
a voice, better say an atmosphere, of dissent reverberates in kulumani. Not only this, the
administrator succumbs to his wife’s determination and resigns his current job to become a
teacher again. A tribute to his maid is also paid by writing the report of her rape. With this
challenging step, Naftalinda procures a new appreciation of life as an ‘active agent’ in her
society even partially, and she, most importantly, vocalizes the dead Tandi. In the same way,
Alexander and Mohanty write against the unsound generalizations upholding the image of the
powerless creature assigned similarly to all women from postcolonial societies by insisting that
women “do not [necessarily] imagine themselves as victims or dependents of governing
structures but as agents of their own lives” in which they reproduce “the terms of one's
existence” continuously (1997: xxviii). So, such a type of direct contest to the society of
Kulumani bestows its, if not extrinsic, intrinsic result i.e. psychological empowerment.
3.2 Speaking through Silence:
Mariamar is Natftalinda’s counter figure as far as resistance in Confession of the
Lioness is concerned. While the second resorts to direct means in her long-way battle, the first
prefers to overturn the desolate atmosphere of the village to her own favor. Silence becomes
her subversive power that is put in a stark opposition with silencing. This section underlines
the importance of silence as a power that spawns possibilities of living and empowering rather
than speech.
3.2.1 Narrating H (i/er) story:
In postcolonial feminist criticism, ‘storytelling’ is deliberated as an act which
engenders a space to reconstruct one’s self as well as an opposing discourse as, already
mentioned, thought by Mohanty. In Feminism Without Borders, she retraces the story of Yance
Ford, an African American student at Hamilton University, and her idiosyncratic project “This
Invisible World” to exceptionally unfurl consciousness concerning her experience. Mohanty
appraises the following in this project:
her consciousness of being colonized at the college, expressed through the act
of being caged like “animals in a science experiment,” and the performance
of liberation, of active decolonization of the self, of visibility and
empowerment. Yance found a way to tell another story, to speak through a
silence that screamed for engagement. However, in doing so, she also created
a public space for the collective narratives of marginalized, especially other
women color. (2003: 206, emphasis added)
In view of this, Couto institutes a fertile ground for Mariamar to pierce her silence by being the teller
of a narrative which venerates women’s issues. Undeniably, it is a chance to voice out her own
concerns, share her ideas, and assess the while-post Civil War repertoire of her country without being
overwhelmed through a narrative plot that conjures up the gist of Yance’s project. Though Confession
48
of the Lioness is told through two participating narrative perspectives, Archangel Bullseye the hunter
and Mariamar, Mariamar’s proves more resonant with its vibrant renderings of the Mozambican
female experiences: psychological and historical. By shifting from the first to the third person narrator,
Mariamar swings the narration in the direction she likes: the novel becomes her testimony, and we
become her own listeners.
Therefore, Mariamar casts light on the personal h(i/er)story alongside the collective
one. Crucially, precedence is given to recapture these two dimensions of history, that of
women and children specifically, to the mainstream history of Mozambique. The Civil War no
doubt has a damaging impact on the society in its entirety. The poor children of Kulumani had
to familiarize themselves, like adults, with war. They “asked their legs to help them run away
in the face of gunfire, faster than bullets”, Mariamar narrates perceptively (Couto 2015: 90).
This was their daily routine. “In a world of explosives and blood”, this activity of hiding in the
bush was their enjoyable game (Couto 2015: 90). War taught them to “invent silent pastimes”
(Couto 2015: 90, emphasis added). Mariamar was one of those children who learned to even
“shout voicelessly” (Couto 2015: 91). Without saying, women represent the most mal-treated
group under all the circumstances, whether in times of war or peace. They have to bear the
pressures and the subjugation of their husbands. Under this tragic atmosphere, decision making
is a male act par excellence all the time.
Mariamar’s version, as Mia Couto puts it, of the events in the novel re-incarnates the
concept of ‘gendered history’ that is fundamental to postcolonial feminism. This theory
advocates the female voice in all the domains including the history of colonization as well as
the struggle for decolonization which is usually male-centric as it is the case of the postcolonial
discourse. Chandra Mohanty, in “Under Western Eyes,” demonstrates how third world women
have diverse histories compared to western women. Thus, she , in “Cartographies of Struggle,”
sketches out Third World feminists’ call for the rethinking and “rewriting of history based on
the specific locations and histories of struggle of people of color and postcolonial peoples, and
on the day-to-day strategies of survival utilized by such peoples” (1991: 10). Even in the same
geographical setting, people have different experiences and particularities, yet the generalized
version of history is usually bereft of them. For example, testimonies of women who have
significant stories and ways of involvement in the struggle of their countries are generally
overlooked despite the momentous issues they point to. Securing a position in the existent
reductionist history is one of the facets of ‘speaking through silence.’ In this sense, Mariamar’s
attempt to provide a revisited feminized version of the history of her nation is a salient
mechanism of empowerment to enter the realm of visibility.
Evidently, Confession of the Lioness adverts explicitly to an elite-male discourse and
practices case in point that pays no respect to the sacrifices of women as active, daring partners
and agents in the struggle against the Portuguese colonizer and during the Civil War era. The
safety of tradition is the impetus of this discourse. Their reaction to the incident of the lions, a
human catastrophe not because all the victims are so far women but because it is one of the
“political objectives” of the administrator in the first class (Couto 2015: 54), is an outright
verbalization of this. Assuredly, Mariamar’s move, telling history from a female vantage eye,
is an endeavor to correct the gender bias towards masculinity observable in the nationalist
discourse after independence and to fill in the abysses of the conventional version of history.
Likewise, Ann McClintock rightly deplores the African nationalist discourse of being male-
centered by denying women’s political agency (1995: 15). Thus, the creation of a counter-
discursive space of expression to contest this epistemic violence engulfing their ‘Voice’ is a
necessity. The text accordingly attests to Mohanty’s view of storytelling as a traditional
discursive practice central to what is known in African literature as orality in its subversion of
the discursive colonization, even orally, of this discourse. Couto’s novel celebrates orality as
49
an African-based version of discoursing deeply grounded in the ontological African worldview

which hinges on myths, legends, African magical realism and the like. Worth mentioning here
is that by juxtaposing both discourses, male and female, the writer gives prominence to
Mariamar’s narration as a counter discourse. Storytelling can considerably lend consciousness
raising of darker corners in the experiences of women from postcolonial societies.
Mariamar’s personal ‘story’ runs in parallel with that of her country; she cannot detach
herself from it, for it is a central aspect of her identity politics. Her story accentuates the role of
the aforementioned ‘politics of location.’ She suffers from silencing; however, in many cases,
silence emanates as her own alternative. Transcendence to her own world, a form of
detachment, allows her new opportunities and freedom to survive. Pertinent to the process of
the protagonist’s narration are the motifs of memory (remembering) and dreams through their
utility to recuperate the past with its glaring and destructive sides. The narrative’s use of the
third person pronoun in many cases to come to grips with the memories and dreams of Mariamar
outstandingly sustains the impression that they are the reader’s property and not hers.
The narrative adopts two narrative perspectives relatable to Mariamar. The first is her
current view as a woman of 32 years old, and the second is the 16-year old adolescent’s
perspective. The memories unleashed via the adolescent’s eye thematize the lack of equal life
opportunities when children of ex-colonized societies are compared with their western
counterparts at multiple scales. Economic and health conditions are set forth through the first
paralysis of the child Mariamar and her diseases without being consulted by doctors or without
having the necessary equipments to facilitate her life, simply because she belongs to a rural area
far from the center of life wherein the sophistications of the traditional medicine or the church
are all what is in hands. Life is taken from her legs, yet she was “never […] [her] own prisoner”
(Couto 2015: 92). Other children used to carry her on their backs “scrambling around joyfully”
(Couto 2015: 93). All in all, she “enjoyed a childhood delegated to [her] by other children”
(Couto 2015: 93). After two years in the church, the Civil War ends and she stands on her feet
again. A close reading of Mariamar’s story reflects also a psychological void caused by the cold
treatment of her parents as a genuine production of this mysterious society, so that when she
first meets the hunter who saves her from the rapist policeman, he becomes her savior. In
addressing her parents using their names without titles throughout most of the novel,
Mariamar’s emotional detachment from them is indirectly exposed. Though “[o]nly the
landscape seemed to interest him [the hunter]” (Couto 2015: 38), their first arranged meeting is
the corner stone on which this girl fabricates her dreams, love fantasies and wonderings on the
one side and her despair on the other equally.
The very intimate human aspects— memories, dreams and imaginations of the
protagonist— mirror the influence of the politics of location in this novel. Her memories are
not mere recollections of past events, for she envisages out of them spaces of introspection and
retrospection on the impact of geography as well as the politics of gender with its multilayered
strata of issues. A good example is the reminiscence of the retaliation conducted by the mother
which causes Mariamar’s second paralysis since poison cripples her body, senses and soul. She
“only had one faculty left: […] the power of hearing” (Couto 2015: 144, emphasis added).
After falling in the River Lideia in her way to attend the first death anniversary of her uncle
Adjiru, she miraculously regains health. When intertwined with and nurtured in nature,
Mariamar’s memories paint authentic natural images. Nature, this pure primitive world, is
crystallized as a source of life and freedom from the shackles of her society, her father, and her
body confinement. Given its healing sway, she finds in the river more particularly an urge to
fly. The hunter watches her as the river, fire and music transform her into “a queen” via dancing
(Couto 2015: 121).
50
The fact of being adjacent to the flora and fauna of her land endows Mariamar with
many powers. Aside from telling, she is graced with the ability of hearing. Her strong senses
strangely enable her to hear unearthly voices that others cannot hear. Couto’s use of some
magical realist elements entrusts Mariamar with a unique potential to communicate herself
fluently. In one of the episodes of the river, a lioness emerges and “greets [her] with a sisterly
respect […] a sense of spiritual harmony” (Couto 2015: 40). Suddenly, a voice flows out of her
breast. It is the voice of her recently dead sister Silencia who pleads for accompaniment. The
accordance between the lioness and the protagonist is not strange inasmuch as it implies the
lioness’ traits set in her. After attempting to save the administrator’s wife from the teeth of the
lioness, Mariamar’s confessions of how she “grow[s] in strength and size and force[s] the
lioness to back off” (Couto 2015: 169) strengthen the point. Nearing the end, she, besides the
river, plainly describes the process of “transmutation” she undergoes all this time: “it was the
dark that showed me what I had always been: a lioness. That’s what I am: a lioness in a person’s
body” (Couto 2015: 181). The darkness this woman signals here is not necessarily a time-
related aspect but a human-related social disease that dissolves the very fabric of such societies.
In this short quote, Mariamar calls upon all muzzled women to use life impediments to their
own favor to extricate the powers they have.
Now, whether physically or spiritually, Mariamar is a lioness whose fate is to speak out
against the injustices done to African women by telling her own story that is theirs in a way or
another. Symbolically, Mariamar’s uncle Adjiru, her spiritual grandfather at the same time, has
always yearned to hear the story of the queen of Egypt from her mouth. He prophesizes that she
will be “the one who’s going to tell stories” (Couto 2015: 67), not only stories but peculiarities.
In her account of her birth story, physical and mythical, Mariamar dwells on the significance
of nature, African mythology and spirituality in the life of the African woman:
A tiny leg ascended from the dust and turned on itself like some tumbling
spar. Then the ribs, the shoulders, and the head appeared. I was being born.
The same convulsed shudder, the same helpless cry of the newly born. I was
being delivered from the belly from which rocks, mountains, and rivers are
born. (Couto 2015: 180)
Integrally, this is what constitutes the female African subjectivity/womanhood and its
uniqueness. Mariamar’s task in this novel is no exception from the task of the postcolonial
feminist literary critic who is deemed to identify these aspects in the artifact of the continent.
To conclude this section, Mohanty’s view is of great use. ‘Remembering’ is a form of
resistance that embraces agency as mentioned in the first section. She adds succinctly: “[t]he
very practice of remembering against the grain of “public” or hegemonic history, of locating
the silences and the struggle to assert knowledge which is outside the parameters of the
dominant, suggests a rethinking of sociality itself” (1991: 39). Accentuated more, “history,
memory, emotion” are denoted as “significant cognitive elements of the construction of critical,
self-reflective, feminist selves and that in the crafting of oppositional selves and identities”
(Mohanty 2003: 8). To trigger the effectiveness of such a counter-cognitive practice, i.e.
remembering, Confession of the Lioness underlines the strong bonding between it and the act
of telling/ narrating. Said otherwise, for remembering to become a resilient weapon, it must be
energized by telling.
3.2.2 The “Monster’s Words” 4, the Lioness’ Words:
4
This is Gloria Anzaldua’s expression which appears in “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women
Writers.”
51
If narrating/telling is power, then writing/recording as Mariamar expresses in many

occasions is more empowering. In this novel, they are inextricably tied; the former is not
complete without the second. Unlike the hunter who openly admits his intention to write his
diary in his version of the events, Mariamar exposes her diary, or notebook, only in the last
chapter when he comes to escort her to another city under the request of the administrator’s
wife. Writing in Confession of the Lioness is an essential discursive performance to both males
and females. The novel contains three male figures related to writing: the writer of the hunt
delegation, the hunter and Mariamar’s uncle as her prime teacher. In consistency with the whole
atmosphere of the novel, writing is depicted as a mysterious sacred force which eschews all
categorizations. The actual process and its details — when, where and how it takes place— are
not as crucial as its outcomes. The act gratifies the internal sensations of the protagonist more
than anything else. This is what Gloria Anzaldúa christened as ‘organic writing’. She
demarcates this ‘level’ saying that “[i]t's not on paper that you create but in your innards, in the
gut and out of living tissue - organic writing I call it” (1983: 172).
In relation to this last point, Hooks defines ‘writing’ as “a way to capture speech, to
hold onto it, to keep it close” (1995b: 338). Writing, in this respect, becomes another facet of
speech, another weapon against silencing, another channel to produce noise and transmit voices
to all kinds of deaf ears. hooks’ personal experience epitomizes greatly that of Mariamar, the
only female writer in Kulumani that the novel identifies. A possible reason that hinders
Mariamar from the revealment of her notebooks can be found in hooks’ essay “talking back”:
The fear of exposure, the fear that one’s deepest emotions and innermost
thoughts would be dismissed as mere nonsense, felt by so many young girls
keeping diaries , keeping and hiding speech, seems to me now one of the
barriers that women have needed and need to destroy so that we are no longer
pushed into secrecy or silence. (338)
In a place like Kulumani “where the majority of folk are illiterate, people find it
strange that a woman knows how to write” (Couto 2015: 65). More surprising is that a man like
uncle Adjiru has always been Mariamar’s reference figure, support, and first teacher in view of
this context. What is not surprising is that all the locals conceive this strange skill as the pure
offspring of the mission in which she passes two years. However, she corrects this fallacy in
her diary by relating her basic learning to the very local primitive context:
[m]y schooling dates from before [the mission]: If I learned to read, it was
thanks to the animals. The first stories I heard were about wild animals.
Throughout my life, fables taught me to distinguish right from wrong. To
unravel the good from the bad. In a word, it was the animals who began to
make me human. (Couto 2015: 65)
In this passage, there is a straightforward hint to the role of African heritage and nature in
molding the imagination and human aspects of the Mozambican/African female character. The
whole learning process, writing in particular, is itself distinctive as it is profoundly entrenched
in nature like the act of narrating. The continuation of the above quote corroborates its
uniqueness:
From the bush, he [the uncle] would bring little trophies that he gave me:
claws, hooves, feathers. He would leave these remnants on a table by the front
door. Underneath each of these adornments, Adjiru Kapitamoro would write
a letter on an old piece of paper. An e for an eagle’s feather, a g for a goat’s
hoof, an m for munda, the word for an arrow in our local language. That was
52
how the alphabet paraded before my eyes. Each letter was a new color through
which I looked at the world. (Couto 2015: 65)
Beyond hopes and dreams, the rich natural world of Mozambique, flora and fauna
together, fosters basic schooling and molds worldview. To combine letters to form writing is to
open prospects, “new colors”, to approach world affairs as this passage indicates. In this
context, African feminine writing takes its significance from nature which exalts its
rudimentary components, bones and residues of animals here, over artificial material like paper.
In other words, without the bones of animals, paper would mean nothing. For this writing
distills its tenor from nature, it becomes organic writing. This recourse to the origins is a source
of empowerment rather than disempowerment given that it yields ways of being and becoming.
A reinforcement of this claim is Mariamar’s presentation of herself as a woman who learns to
face lions since her early childhood. She feels triumph when she manages to shape the name of
the beast: “[f]or the first time in my life, I was coming face-to-face with a lion. And there the
beast was, written on the paper, kneeling at my feet” (Couto 2015: 66). In this stance, the
psychological relief flowing from writing is emphatic.
In view of Mohanty’s concept of ‘double colonization,’ the role of uncle Adjiru can
be seen as a bizarre contribution to the construction of Mariamar’s personality. Yet, his wide
knowledge, farsighted life perspectives and deep consciousness lead him to get the girl involved
in exploring the world of literacy. Thus, Mariamar’s process of learning is based on deep
willingness rather than enforcement. Adjiru succeeds to steadily instill in her the consciousness
of writing as “a dangerous form of vanity [that] fills the others with fear” (Couto 2015: 66).
Such a confession from a man in the male-based society of Kulumani cements in Mariamar a
strange love and attachment to writing. Not surprisingly then, the novel reifies writing as a
sacred ritual which forges gradual maturity; it equates literacy with maturity and consciousness.
Being literate is a premise to the real world of womanhood. Accordingly, Mariamar has never
received a truncated appreciation as a woman who has not passed the traditional ritual of
initiation to womanhood, like the other Kulumani women, from her uncle. The whole ritual is
needless since the “women [she] would become was already within [her]” (Couto 2015: 95)
considering her education. Writing in light of all this enables ‘talking back,’ and ‘talking back’
is a pivotal “rite of initiation” (hooks 1995b: 340). On this basis, writing becomes the female
rite of initiation that all women should pass through to enter the realm of womanhood and the
struggle to free women that Confessions of the Lioness induces.
Far from reading between the lines, Mariamar’s writings are not devoid of overtly-
formulated confessions confirming her vigilance of the abovementioned assets of writing. Just
as “[b]ooks brought [her] voices like shade in the open desert”, writing “saved [her] from
madness” the atmosphere of Kulumani may cause (Couto 2015: 64). The word is personified
as an animate creature; “[a] word drawn on a piece of paper was my mask, my charm, my home
cure” (Couto 2015: 65). It is her “very first weapon” (Couto 2015: 66). Without ignoring its
dangers, if gripped with misuse, the word can transform the woman into “someone else […] no
longer being able to return to [herself]” (Couto 2015: 65). The first section of this paper has
already pinpointed some of the dangers the third world woman might be trapped in by means
of her discursive productions: the universalization of the particularities of her experience and
the standards of her writing exactly.
Undoubtedly, Couto’s text underpins the utility of African female writing, as opposed
to orality, in abating the wings of silencing inflicted by the different centers of patriarchy
through discursive colonization essentially. The closing pages of the novel coalesce this weapon
with the African concept of time. Hanifa translates her exhausted daughter’s gesticulations to
the hunter as: “she says the only clothes she has are this notebook” (Couto 2015: 191). Her gift
to her daughter establishes the solid relation between this text, the notebook, and its context,
53
‘the politics of locations and time’ in this case by virtue of offering the necklace that is
considered as the family’s “ancient thread of time. All the women in the family counted the
months of their pregnancy” on it (Couto 2015: 192). The gesture restores some of the lost
brightness to Mariarm’s eyes, for the concepts of fertility and womanhood are encoded in this
instrument. Literally, Mariamar holds her h(i/er)story on the one hand and the whole feminine
thread of time on the other. In so doing, Confession of the Lioness lays a firm platform for the
idea of female genealogy as a decolonizing strategy in the sense of being a shield of female
heterogeneities and epistemologies. Being outside the circle of time, i.e. timeless without the
trope of history that shapes us, is to risk losing identity.
The process of writing and rewriting in the Third World is not meant only to be
“corrective to […] masculinist history” (Mohanty 1991: 34). It becomes most outstandingly
“the context through which new political identities are forged […] a space for struggle and
contestation about reality itself”, as Chandra Mohanty opines (1991: 34). In writing, Mariamar
stumbles on her ‘self’ and ‘voice.’ The female voice, with its metaphoric sense and forms, can
resound without a sound because it is a channel in itself and “a new way of communicating
rather than an already formed language” (Minh-ha 1989: 39). The postcolonial feminist Gloria
Anzaldúa, in her essay “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers”,
propels women to write by charting the gains of this compelling discursive site of
empowerment. She best summarizes the epitome of the essay by contending: “I write because
I’m scared of writing but I’m more scared of not writing” (1983: 169).
4. Conclusion
Reading Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness from a postcolonial feminist view
considerably opens many prospects to penetrate the equivocal experiences, and heterogeneities,
of women in postcolonial Mozambique. The novel is subversive taking into account its
challenging tone to the stereotypical renderings and readings of African women. Thus, it is
resistant to the ‘discursive colonization’ of the propagandist western discourse and its claims
of homogeneity and common experiences. It also contests the ‘epistemic violence’ evident in
the western scholarship. Such a production and the like is, in Mohanty’s terms, “clearly an
important discursive site for struggle” that “constitutes an increasingly important arena of third
world feminisms” (1991: 32).
Couto’s oeuvre, like the one under study and The Tuner of Silences (2009), is known for its
reliance on the dynamics of silence, for the possibilities that lie in silence can be more effective
than speech itself. Silence creates a space for another language that permits the articulation of
the ‘counter sentence’. In Confession of the Lioness, silence is presented as a mysterious force
intertwined with the local landscape and myths. These features endow the female protagonist
with the strength to destabilize the precepts of her home village through being the teller and
writer of her story despite all the obstacles. This step is the writer’s answer to Mohanty’s call
to surpass all the presuppositions surrounding Third World women inability to represent
themselves and deny their agency. Narrating and writing are forms of ‘discursive resistance’
carried out against the ‘discursive colonization’ of the patriarchal and imperial discourses
together. Both pave the way for African women to reach larger audiences, inside and outside
the continent, to speak out against the ‘single story.’ By this, they complete the standards of the
speech act, i.e. the speaker and the listener, or the act of speaking. Springing basically from
silence, narrating and writing are two depatriarching and self-empowerment strategies available
to women in this context.
To sum up, Mia Couto’s treatment of silence as an aspect of communication as well as
disruptive force of the dominant discourse is really appealing. In regard of the above, he is
qualified to be considered a ‘postcolonial feminist.’
54
References
Alexander, M. J, and Chandra T. M. (1997). Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements.

In Alexander, M. J., and Chandra T. M. (Eds.), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies,
Democratic Futures (pp. xiii-xli) . New York: Routledge.
Anzaldua, G. (1983). Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. In
Moraga, C. and G. Anzaldua (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color (pp. 165-174). Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press.
Couto, M. (2015). Confession of the Lioness. (David Brookshaw, Trans.). New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 2012)
da Silva, M. I. (2004). African Feminists towards the Politics of Empowerment. Revista de
Letras (Literatura de Autoria Feminina), 44(2), 129-138.
George, R. M. (2006). Feminists theorize colonial/postcolonial. In E. Rooney (Ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (pp. 211-231). Cambridge:
Cambridge U P. hooks, b. (1995a). Marginality as Site of Resistance. In Ferguson, R. ,
M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha and
C. West (Eds.) , Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (pp. 341-344) . New
York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art . hooks, b. (1995b). Talking Back . In
Ferguson, R., M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha and C. West (Eds.) ,
Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (pp. 337-340). New York: The New
Museum of Contemporary Art .
Jayawardena, K. (2008). Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. New Delhi: Kali.
Joseph, V. M. (n. d). Issues in postcolonial feminist criticism. Kuvempu University Journals of
Language and Literature: 1- 7 [PDF File].
Landry, D. and G. Mac Lean (Eds.). (1966). The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge.
Mc Leod, J. (2000). Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mc Clintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest. New York: Routledge.
Minh-ha, T.T. (1989). Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Minh-ha, T. T. (1990). Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking
Questions of Identity and Difference. In G. Anzaldua (Ed.), Making Face, Making Soul/
Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Feminists by Color (pp. 371-375). San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books.
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing
Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mohanty, C. T. , A. Russo and L. Torres (Eds.). (1991). Third World Women and the Politics
of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
55
Navarro Tejero, A. (2013). Postcolonial Feminism: Teaching how to avoid prejudices about
Muslim women in an ESL classroom. In Rodríguez, L. and A. Roldán (Eds.), Relaciones
Interculturales en la Diversidad (pp. 253-260). Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba.
Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In Nelson, C. and L. Grossberg (Eds.),
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271-313). Hampshire: Macmillan
Education Ltd.
Weedon, C. (2007). Postcolonial Feminist Criticism. In Plain, G. and S. Sellers (Eds.), A
History of Feminist Literary Criticism (pp. 282- 300). Cambridge: Cambridge U P.
Young, R. J. C. (2003). Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press.
56
A Nietzschean Reading of Androgyny in Virginia Woolf’s To the

Lighthouse1
Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız *
Lecturer Dr., School of Foreign Languages, Fırat University
yalinmedre@hotmail.com
APA Citation:
Ayyıldız, N.E. (2019). A Nietzschean Reading of Androgyny in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Journal of
Abstract
Both Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf are of the opinion that a human being is comprised of two
opposite selves. They are, in Nietzsche’s terms, the Apollonian deriving from Apollo, the sun-god associated with
self-control, rationality and order, and the Dionysian named after Dionysus, the wine-god, representing passion,
irrationality, and chaos. In Woolf’s understanding, the human mind is composed of masculine and feminine
characteristics. From their perspectives, the patriarchal Victorian culture brought the Apollonian self forward the
Dionysian one and associated ‘woman’ with the Dionysian and feminine traits such as emotion, passion and chaos
but ‘man’ with the Apollonian and masculine properties including reason, self-control and order. Nietzsche notes
in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) that an artist creates a high-quality art out of the balance between his Apollonian
and Dionysian selves, and Woolf claims in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that the fusion of an artist’s masculine
and feminine minds is prerequisite for creativity. Therefore, both of them necessitate for a great artist to produce
free from gender traits and call for the androgynous mind. Thus, this paper explores the intersection of Nietzsche’s
Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy and Woolf’s theory of androgyny in To the Lighthouse (1927).
Keywords: Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse.
Being a Woman Artist in the Victorian Age

Patriarchal Victorianism constricted women and men to clear-cut separate spheres;
women to the domestic sphere and men to the public one. Women were expected mainly to be
‘good’ wives and mothers and strive for being so when they were adult. Therefore, they were
brought up to be an “angel in the house” or the “household fairy” which were popular Victorian
concepts attributed to women. Confined to the domestic life, women were kept away from
politics, military, commerce as they were stated to be lack of “logical thought to best effect” in
contrast to men (Rowbotham, 1989, p. 6). Accordingly, they were considered to belong in “the
more passive, private sphere of the household and home where their inborn emotional talents
would serve them best” (Rowbotham, 1989, p. 6). As the reason for this, the Victorian
philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) stated in his preeminent work The Subjection of
1
This article is an extended version of the conference paper presented at the 8th International Conference on
Narrative and Language Studies held in Trabzon, Turkey on May 2-3, 2019.
*
School of Foreign Languages, Fırat University, Elazığ, Turkey
57
A Nietzschean Reading of Androgyny in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Women (1869): “I believe that their [women’s] disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order
to maintain their subordination in domestic life because the generality of the male sex cannot
yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal” (1963, p. 485). Woolf also notes: “It would be a
thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men” (2015, p. 64).
Evidently, the conception of the domestic sphere where women were attributed paved the way
for rationalizing that women could not deal with art. Moreover, the “domestic focus of women’s
lives, to be narrowly limited to home and family, was justified and given ideological unity in
the nineteenth century by a range of arguments, resting on women’s nature, on God’s
ordinances, on the evidence of past and present societies” (Rendall, 1985, p. 189); for instance,
the claim that women were weak and inferior to men was asserted by Victorian scientists
arguing that women had smaller, thus less efficient brains than men did (Showalter, 1977, pp.
76-77). The physicians and anthropologists also put forth that women could not use as much
mental energy as men; thus, they “would divert the supply of blood and phosphates from the
reproductive system to the brain, leading to dysmenorrhea, ‘ovarian neuralgia,’ physical
degeneracy, and sterility” (Showalter, 1977, p. 77). Thus, men had more opportunities to
succeed; for instance, had access to better education and a variety of careers, in comparison to
women, who were anticipated to go just for the status of an angel or a fairy by learning how to
draw, sing and dance well.
The academic lesson the Victorian women had was limited to the basic knowledge of
modern foreign languages, with the exception of household chores duties (Rowbotham 99)
because they were not believed as knowledgeable as men. As the main Victorian concern about
girls to learn how to behave and express themselves in a “proper way,” they were urged to read
didactic fiction to learn how to act out their domestic roles in the society by keeping them away
from the public sphere and rationalizing their position in the society. In this regard, many
Victorian novels such as Belinda (1801) and Patronage (1814) by Maria Edgeworth may be
claimed to have been ‘fictionalized conduct books.’ The women who could not take control of
their passion and behave in accordance with their gender roles were called “heinous” and
“monstrous” (Daniel 39). Accordingly, women who were eager to learn more were despised
and announced to be “blue-stockings” who “were considered unfeminine and off-putting in the
way that they attempted to usurp men’s ‘natural’ intellectual superiority” (Hughes page
number).
Virginia Woolf elaborated on women’s literary development in her renown work A
Room of One’s Own (1929), which is also the primary text of this study. Based on two lectures
about women and fiction, which Woolf delivered to female students in Cambridge in 1928, A
Room of One’s Own has been taken as a key text for feminism since then (Marcus, 1983, p. 43,
Minogue, 2012, p. 6, Roe and Sellars, 2000, p. 217, Snaith, 2007, p. 101). Throughout literary
history, women have been “the other” in the works of men writers who used the pen as their
“metaphorical penis” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1996, p. 91). Therefore, as observed by Woolf, the
woman was “an odd monster,” “a worm winged like an eagle,” and “the spirit of life” (2015, p.
33). Even “the best woman,” in her words, was thought to be “intellectually the inferior of the
worst man” (2015, pp. 39-40). Woolf observed that men were neither indifferent to women
writers nor their supporters, rather, they discourage female writers constantly, and “it was
impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare” (2015,
p. 34). Claiming that the domestic duties held women back from creating art, Virginia Woolf
stated that the Victorian conception of “angel in the house,” which urged women to be
“sympathetic,” “charming,” “unselfish,” excellent in housework, self-sacrificial, “pure,” and
without “a mind or a wish of her own,” needed to be killed (1979, p. 59) because the Western
culture was patriarchal, history is his-story, literature is phallocentric, language is man-made,
and “[s]cience,” Woolf claims, “is not sexless; she is a man, a father...too” (1979, p. 8). Because
58
Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
of the mentioned claims confirming the pacified status of women in society, women were
commonly thought to lack essential characteristics to be a good author. Even if they attempted
to write, they were doomed to create in a certain way and subjected to the verbal inhibitions
reinforced by critics (Showalter, 1977, p. 25). Women were claimed to be no other than
imitators of men writers, and they were excluded from the world of literature which men
dominated in the nineteenth century. Therefore, to overcome patriarchal obstacles requires
women writers to get rid of the masculine mode of writing.
Woolf’s Androgyny: A Way out of Patriarchal Pressures to the Great Art
Woolf considered the psychological pressure of the patriarchy on women as a threat to
women writer’s creativity. She observed that whenever women felt like writing, they would
have to do it in the common sitting-room, where they were “always interrupted” (2015, p. 49).
Women’s poverty was another reason, for Woolf, that limited women writers’ creativity.
Correlating intellectuality with money, Woolf quoted Professor of Literature called Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch claiming that “intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry
depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred
years merely, but from the beginning of time” (2015, p. 77). Therefore, she underlines that a
woman writer needs her own room and money to create art.
Deriving from Woolf’s observations, there were various reasons hindering women
writers from writing. Nonetheless, as noted by Elaine Showalter, the Victorian age is often
referred to as the period of great women writers such as Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mary Shelley
(1797-1851), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865),
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Emily Brontë (1818-1848), George Eliot (1819-1880), and Anne
Brontë (1820-1849) (1977, p. 3).
Considering the presuppositions pertaining to women in the period, it is understandable
that the Victorian women writers challenged the notion of the domestic sphere and faced a large
number of obstacles to be able to become professional writers. Through the title character of
Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë, through Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights (1847),
Emily Brontë and through Maggie in The Mill on the Floss (1860), Eliot and through the title
character of Aurora Leigh (1865), Browning, fictionalize women as neither angelic nor
monstrous, but possessing traits which the Victorian society would consider being both
masculine and feminine. They embody compassion, passion, love and anger simultaneously.
Thus, the authors indicated that women could not be confined to be an angel or a monster, and
they defied the notion of gender roles through their heroines. They answered the question raised
in The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar indicating that pen is not “a metaphorical
penis” (1996, p. 91). To put it another way, they prove that it is not prerequisite to be a man to
become a qualified author and deconstruct the association between authorship and gender.
Evidently, women writers do not have to repress their femininity to write. About this point, the
English activist author Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827-1891) noted that “the larger-
natured a woman is, the more decidedly feminine she will be; the stronger she is, the more
strongly feminine. You do not call a lioness unfeminine, though she is different in size and
strength from the domestic cat, or mouse” (2001, p. 44). Furthermore, Charlotte Brontë became
frustrated when she was looked down on because of being a woman writer, and she wrote to
George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), an English critic of literature as follows: “You will- I know-
keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex ... come what
will- I cannot when I write think always of myself- and of what is elegant and charming in
femininity- it is not on those terms or with such ideas I ever took pen in hand” (qtd. in Barker,
2006, p. 261). Moreover, she confronted the critics who based their criticisms about Jane Eyre
59
on Brontë’s femininity. To illustrate, in her letter to a critic that wrote that he would appreciate
the book unless it had been written by a woman. Charlotte conveyed her anger in her response
to him as follows: “To you I am neither Man nor Woman- I come before you as an Author only
it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me- the sole ground on which I accept
your judgement” (qtd. in Barker, 2006, p. 256). Charlotte’s outburst of anger was towards not
only the critic but also all the male critics excluding women from the literary world. Apparently,
gender, which is culturally constructed rather than biologically determined, became women’s
obstacle in the field of art.
In Woolf’s understanding, women can write well when their minds are free from their
gender and coercive expectations of the patriarchal society. As a positive creative force for a
way out of gender discrimination and stereotypes in art, Woolf proposes androgyny for women
artists. The word “androgyny” derives from the Greek “andro” meaning male and “gyn”
referring to female. It is defined as “a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes,
and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned” (Heilbrun,
1993, p. x). Indeed, the concept of androgyny dates back to Plato who states that “the original
human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not as they are now, but
originally three in number; there was man, woman and the union of the two, having a name
corresponding to this double nature, which has once a real existence, but now is lost... the word
‘androgynous’” (http://classics.mit.edu.plato/symposium.html). However, Woolf’s conception
of androgyny pertains not to sex but to mind. It is “destruction of the duality” (Moi, 1985, p.
14) of masculinity and femininity. Thus, she deconstructs essentialist binary thoughts of
masculine and feminine characteristics. In A Room of One’s Own, she conceives the fusion of
male and female triggered by the sight of a man and a woman getting into a taxi together.
Wondering whether “the two sexes in the mind” can “live in harmony together, spiritually co-
operating” (2015, p. 71) to get “complete satisfaction and happiness” (2015, p. 71), Woolf
presents an image of true androgyny as follows: “If one is a man, still the woman part of the
brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge
perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous” (2015, p. 121). In this regard,
androgyny neutralises the gender of the writer in which his/her subject is constructed (Fayad,
1997, p. 59); thus, androgynous mind presents especially women writers “a way of rejecting
biological determinism and undoing the privileging of the masculine over the feminine”
(Hussey, 1995, p. 5) by proving that there is no distinction between masculinity and femininity
in mind, and it is the patriarchy which distinguishes between them to render men superior to
women by causing women “to either sacrifice her personality or remain as a negative “other”
existing within the male” (Harris, 1974, p. 175). Thus, androgyny may be evaluated as a way
of liberating women from the negative forces, which the patriarchy imposes on women. In this
regard, for Woolf, “[i]t is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be a woman-
manly or a man-womanly” (2015, p. 75).
Asserting that people are born as androgynous; however, man predominates over
woman in man’s brain whereas woman predominates in woman’s brain in time through the
patriarchal norms of people, Woolf confirms De Beauvoir’s famous quote that “one is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman” (283) and Foucault’s argument that gender is a product of
socially and culturally institutionalised binary discourses (1977, p. 26). According to Woolf,
only when the harmony between feminine and masculine is maintained may the ideal state of
being be achieved. Accordingly, to sustain the androgynous mind with an ignorant sense of sex
is the key to be productive for artists because sex-conscious writing enables the reader to
consider who has written rather than what has been written. Therefore, Woolf states that “[i]t
is when this fusion takes place that the mind if fully fertilised and uses all its faculties. Perhaps
60
a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine”
(2015, p. 71).
While some critics such as Carolyn Heilbrun (1993) and Nancy Topping Bazin (1973),
regarding androgyny as a balance supplying people with a satisfying pattern of life (p. 38; p.
201), favour Woolf’s theory of androgyny. On the other hand, the others including Julia
Kristeva, who considers androgyny as “the maximum intransigence” rather than “some
reconciliation” (1980, p. 459) and Elaine Showalter accusing her of escaping from fixed gender
identities under the cover of androgyny draw attention to its self-destructive nature, thus, find
Woolf as a failure (1977, p. 264). However, just like Charlotte Brontë who was quoted above,
Woolf also never fled from her femininity, rather, persevered it by rejecting the gender traits
imposed on it.
Although Woolf’s conception of androgyny seems to be female-centred, it also covers

male artists whom she urges to have an androgynous mind keeping the balance between the
manly side and the womanly side of their minds. She notes that “the mind of an artist, in order
to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be
incandescent, like Shakespeare’s mind,” Coleridge’s poetry and her sister’s painting” (2015, p.
42). As may be inferred from her expressions, Shakespeare and Coleridge were among the
greatest sample of an androgynous mind owners, thus, their works have survived until today.
Elaborating especially on Shakespeare’s androgyny, Woolf states that his poetry “flows from
him free and unimpeded” (2015, p. 42). If ever a human being gets “his work expressed
completely,” according to Woolf, it is Shakespeare (2015, p. 42). For Woolf, not only men
artists but also women ones should give birth their works out of their androgynous mind. She
exemplifies Mary Carmichael who “mastered the first great lesson: she wrote as a woman, but
as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages [are] full of that curious
sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself” (2015, p. 67). Accordingly,
Woolf calls all artists, may it be men or women, for writing with androgynous mind to be
creative. To think androgynously provides freedom to think creatively beyond liberal biological
determinism.
A View of Nietzschean Apollonian-Dionysian Dichotomy from Woolf’s Theory of
Androgyny
Living in the Victorian period, both Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Woolf
questioned the spirit of Western civilisation and presented a critical approach to it through their
philosophies. Concerning the masculinity of the Western culture, Nietzsche adopts a non-
Western point of view in relation to masculine and feminine dichotomy by opposing to the
usage of woman and the feminine or man and the masculine synonymously as the latter ones
are archetypal instead of biological and anthropological (Neumann, 1969, p. xxii). Therefore,
while accusing Nietzsche of misogyny, one should not miss the point of his being a severe critic
of the Western culture. The feminine traits associated with women in the Victorian period may
be ranked as instinct, unpredictability, sensuality, playfulness and nurturing while the
masculine ones associated with men were considered to be positive qualities negating
femininity such as seriousness, rationality, orderliness, de-sensualization, productivity. Then,
eliminating feminine traits in favour of masculine ones is a kind of “exchange of strength for
weakness” (Hatab, 1981, p. 334). That is why Nietzsche considers man to be “sick 2” (1966, p.
62). Moreover, Woolf states that art is supposed to “have a mother as well as a father” (2015,
2
“There is among men as in every other animal species an excess of failures, of the sick” (1966, p. 62)
61
p. 134). Regarding Nietzsche and Woolf’s points of view, the dualities, from reason/instinct,
masculinity/femininity to head/body should be equated to free artists’ mind from biologism and
essentialism. It seems to be good especially for women writer as it would liberate them from
phallogocentrism saturating just men’s egos as art requires a comprehensive feeling of both
sexes; artists should think in a woman-manly manner or man-womanly manner. Woolf states
that women writers should have “the state of mind most propitious for creative work”, “where
no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed” (2015, p. 42), instead of a void of sexless
absence. Thus, what both Nietzsche and Woolf underline not forgetting artists’ own masculinity
or femininity or having a single-sexed mind, instead, connecting all the masculine and feminine
traits to transcend the culturally established dichotomy of sex and gender constraining from
their own creativity. Therefore, what they are chasing is to create out of inter-stitched male and
female minds through androgyny with “full range of character traits” (Secor, 1974, p. 140) as
androgyny provides equality of style which enables the artist to deconstruct and destabilize
traditional patriarchal gender roles.
Although it was Woolf who set the theory of androgyny, it may be claimed that in one
of his key works The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche had fed the seeds of androgyny sown
by Plato. That Nietzsche asserts that artists should equalise Apollonian-Dionysian binaries
inherent in their natures to create qualified works draws parallelism with Woolf’s notion of
androgyny as a necessity to balance feminine and masculine traits to be creative. This
perspective triggers the study which aims at providing a Nietzschean evaluation of Woolf’s
androgyny through her masterpiece To the Lighthouse (1927).
Nietzsche claims that people are inherently embodiment of the Apollonian and
Dionysian selves even though one of them often predominates the other one in people. These
comprise two opposite sides of human beings. While the Apollonian, named for the sun-god
Apollo, represents self-control, order, rationality, isolation, and perfection, Dionysian, called
after the wine-god Dionysus, represents passion, self-forgetfulness, irrationality, chaos, and
intoxication. Inspired from Greek mythological gods, Nietzsche claims that these binaries are
inherently in combat with each other to preside over one another though they are both in need
of each other to be efficient. On the other hand, considering the cultural characteristics of the
masculine-feminine dichotomy, the masculine refers to consciousness, light, knowledge and
construction while the feminine figures unconsciousness, darkness, mystery and destruction
(Hatab, 1981, p. 338). In this regard, the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy may be matched
with the masculine-feminine distinction. Thus, in Woolf’s approach, the Apollonian and
Dionysian behave like feminine and masculine traits of the human mind requiring both of them
to be influential. However, as people are constructed by the culture to which they are born, one
side of this dichotomy is always repressed in patriarchal societies. In man, the feminine side is
suppressed whereas the masculine side is under pressure in women. In patriarchal thinking, the
femininity and the Dionysian go hand in hand and so threatful that they are suppressed by the
masculinity, in Nietzschean terms, the Apollonian, which is favoured. Furthermore, that
Nietzsche states that he is familiar with women because of his “Dionysian dowry” and calls
himself the “first psychologist of the eternally feminine” (2005, 105) asserts the point that the
Dionysian self is closely linked to the feminine side of the human mind in Woolf’s theory of
androgyny. In this context, Nietzsche gives voice to the Dionysian / feminine self, suppressed
by the Western culture which elevated the Apollonian/masculine self. Therefore, the allegation
of his misogynist identity should be revised.
Moreover, Heilbrun claims that androgyny derives from the spirit of Dionysus as the
god Dionysus is described as a man with a feminine manner. He quotes Thomas Rosenmeyer
as follows:
62
Dionysus, who is Euripides’ embodiment of universal vitality, is described variously by

chorus, herdsman, commoners, and princes. The descriptions cannot be defined. He can
perhaps be totalled but the sum is never definitive; further inspection adds new features
to the old. If a definition is at all possible it is a definition by negation or cancellation.
For one thing, Dionysus appears to be neither woman nor man; or, better, he presents
himself as woman-in-man, or man-in-woman, the unlimited personality. (1993, xi)
Evidently, Heilbrun suggests that the ancient Greek Dionysian cult which was originally a
women’s cult but later included men represented the worship of the feminine principle (Hatab,
1981, p. 338). Therefore, Nietzsche’s recognition of the primordial feminine principle,
Dionysus, as the spirit of art indicates his objection to the predominant masculine principles in
Western art and culture. While his contemporaries despised women artists, as mentioned by
Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, Nietzsche stated in The Gay Science: “Woman is so artistic!”
(1974, p. 317).
In Nietzsche’s understanding, the Dionysian embodies a flow of unrestrained energy
which knows no disciplines and boundaries set by the Apollonian. Drawing attention to the
suffering, revealed by excessiveness of the Dionysian, Nietzsche pictures a Dionysiac festival
as follows: “Excess revealed itself as truth. Contradiction, the bliss born of pain, spoke out from
the very heart of nature. And so, wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked
and destroyed” (47). Thus, it draws an artist or a human being into a drunken frenzy which
brings his own end. It is the Apollonian aspect that supplies him with enough strength to form
the Dionysian to becomes creative rather than destructive. On the other hand, the Apollonian
self also necessitates passion to be creative thus the Dionysian self in a coherent unity. Thus,
they balance each other as the centripetal and centrifugal forces do just like femininity and
masculinity.
In regards to art, Nietzsche regards sculpture as the Apollonian while music as
Dionysian. For him, tragedy is born out of the union of these two principles as the ultimate
expression of art, life and culture. He states: “the intricate relation of the Apollonian and the
Dionysian in tragedy may really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus
speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus” (130). In
Nietzsche’s approach, Dionysus personifies self-transcendence whereas Apollo embodies
individuation. The Greeks made use of both forces well; the cultivation of form and meaning
was sensed in the plastic and poetic arts, and form-shattering annihilation was practiced in the
mystery cults (Hatab, 1981, p. 335). Regarding that tragedy as the highest form of art, Nietzsche
claimed that it exemplified how the Apollonian and Dionysian may be balanced in a harmony
in art. In Hatab’s interpretation:
The tragedies could affirm individuation and form (the poetic reflection of the hero) and
yet recognize the priority of the annihilating power of flux (the hero’s doom). In other
words, the tragic world-view held form (the Apollonian) to be “appearance” (a temporary
ordering of a primordial chaos) which must consequently yield to a formless power (the
Dionysian) symbolized by the priority of destructive fate in the drama. (1981, p. 336)
For Nietzsche, tragedy died with the Greek comedy playwright Euripides as he paralysed the
equilibrium between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles. Nietzsche posits that everything
has failed to be tragedy and been nothing other than mockery since then. Nevertheless, an artist
is supposed to strike a balance between his innate Apollonian and Dionysian natures to produce
a qualified piece of work; in parallel to the harmony between feminine and masculine sides of
the human mind in Woolf’s perspective. In other words, what an artist does need to have is a
63
“creative, incandescent, and undivided” mind (2015, p. 71) which is the ideal creative force of
an artist.
A Nietzschean Approach to Lily’s Strive for Androgyny in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is regarded as one of the masterpieces in modernist
fiction (Pease, 2015, p. 1). Comparing her own works in her diaries, Woolf notes about the
novel: “My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books, fuller than J.’s R. [Jacob’s
Room] & less spasmodic, occupied with more interesting things than Mrs D. [Mrs. Dalloway]
& not complicated with all that desperate accompaniment of madness. It is freer and subtler I
think” (117). The novel of which even its author is proud revolves around the Ramsay family
and their guests in the summer house on the Isle of Skye. It is striking that apart from the
metaphysical philosopher Mr. Ramsay, most of the guests are artists; Lily Briscoe, a modernist
painter, Charles Tansley, a young philosopher, William Bankes, a botanist, and Augustus
Carmichael, a poet. Among them, Lily Briscoe seems to be entrapped in her femininity, thus,
have difficulty in culminating her painting; however, later she succeeds in her strive for
androgyny thorough inspiration she gets from Mrs. Ramsay who is a good social artist
balancing opposites among her family members and guests. Therefore, the study aims at
focusing on Lily to depict her struggle for androgyny as a woman artist.
At the beginning of the novel, Lily is portrayed as a female artist who is frustrated with
the patriarchal force on the female body, reflecting her anger through her observation of long-
suffering Mrs. Ramsay who devotes her life to her eight children and selfish husband. Mrs.
Ramsay seems to be a product and perpetuator of the Victorian patriarchy as she is happy to
live in accordance with the patriarchal culture. Mrs. Ramsay does not respect Lily’s career as
an artist and believes that it would be better for her to focus on marriage because “an unmarried
woman has missed the best of life” (Woolf, 1992, p. 215). Thus, she suggests that Lily’s art
would not be taken seriously as she is single when she thinks about how “she would never
marry; one could not take her painting seriously” (Woolf, 1992, p. 191). However, Lily refuses
marriage as a reaction to the patriarchy that attempts to pacify her by playing upon her body.
Thus, she confirms Judith Butler’s point asserting Nietzsche 3 and Foucault4 who draw attention
to the relationship between the performance of power and body: “Cultural values emerge as the
result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed a blank page; in order for
this inscription to signify, however that medium must itself be destroyed” (1990, p. 166).
Accordingly, Lily prefers challenging the power on her body by remaining single and thinks:
“I’m happy like this” (Woolf, 1992, p. 309). Her feeling “an enormous exultation” with the
thought that she would never marry anybody” (Woolf, 1992, p. 310) affirms Woolf’s point
about the difficulties of continuing marriage and art simultaneously. Therefore, Mrs. Ramsay
who is busy with various domestic tasks and depends economically on her husband does not
seem to be a good model for Lily. Although she feels angry with Mrs. Ramsay’s altruism
towards her children, husband and even her guests, Lily discerns in time Mrs. Ramsay’s
strength characterised with her capability of balancing masculine and feminine or the
Apollonian and Dionysian forces, and indeed, this competence renders Mrs. Ramsay as a social
artist. Therefore, annoyance and criticalness towards Mrs. Ramsay are replaced by admiration
and fascination.
3
Nietzsche claims that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added
to the deed- the deed is everything” and points out that gender identity is constituted through performativity of
body (1969, p. 45).
4
Michel Foucault states that “the body is the inscribed surface of events.” (1977, p. 148) and asserts that the
body is used as a medium of the cultural source to hegemonize through gender.
64
The Ramsay’s summerhouse appears to be Mrs. Ramsay’s androgynous art studio which
gathering opposites in harmony. The house has a soul with Mrs. Ramsay’s essence. Mr. Ramsay
says that she “fills the rooms with life”: “she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all
aglow; bade him take his ease there, go in and out, enjoy himself” (Woolf, 1992, p. 206). She
sets the house for creativity out of opposites. She prepares private rooms where men can write,
and Lily can paint. Lily observes that while consolidating her little son James who is eager to
go to the lighthouse across the bay from their home but disappointed by Mr. Ramsay who says
that the bad weather will not allow this, Mrs. Ramsay achieves stabilizing these opposite father-
son characters artistically. She is capable of dissolving James’ “private code, his secret
language” (Woolf, 1992, p. 181). She functions like Dionysus while blowing out her son Cam
the power of imagination by transforming an animal skull in her shawl into “a bird’s nest…a
beautiful mountain” (Woolf, 1992, p. 264). She also reminds Lily that art is to make “the
moment something permanent” (Woolf, 1992, p. 299) by turning a boring day into a beautiful
memory as Lily thinks that “she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out
of that miserable silliness and spite ... something ... which survived, after all these years,
complete ... and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art” (Woolf, 1992, p. 298). She is
also a feminine/Dionysian alluring force on people around herself. For instance, [w]ith James,
she becomes the icon of the Madonna and Child framed by the window that Lily tries to
incorporate into her painting; alone, she becomes an object of desire, for Lily and the others as
well as her husband” (Ronchetti, 2004, pp. 68-69). Her daughter Prue feels proud of her mother
viewing her as unique, “the thing itself” (To the Lighthouse 174). Even misogynist Mr. Tansley
finds something alluring in her and feels “extraordinarily pride” (Woolf, 1992, p. 189) while
wandering around with her.
She also has Apollonian sides as an appreciator of physical beauty in men and women.
It is so strong that it abstains her from dismissing the gardener called Kennedy as she finds him
“so awfully handsome” (Woolf, 1992, p. 227). Moreover, although even she and her husband
are opposite characters, their marriage seems to be in harmony due to Mrs. Ramsay. She always
compensates for Mr. Ramsay’s Apollonian self which is overwhelmed by his dark, sensual
feminine/Dionysian side. She knows that what Mr. Ramsay who always thinks that he is “a
failure” (Woolf, 1992, p. 207) is “sympathy…, to be assured of his genius” (Woolf, 1992, p.
206). Mrs. Ramsay’s influence on his balancing his Apollonian and Dionysian part is evident
at the end of the novel. Even if she dies, he decides to take his children James and Cam to the
lighthouse, which reminds “penis” (Maze, 1997, p. 89), therefore, masculinity because of its
appearance standing like an Apollonian sculpture discouraging access and control and
encouraging isolation in a well-built shape. Obviously, the arrival in the lighthouse refers to his
reconciliation not only with his James but also with his Apollonian/masculine self. Thus, his
Apollonian self enables him to bring order into the chaos he has caused in James by
disillusioning him because of his earlier dominant Dionysian self.
After all, Mrs. Ramsay is a great artist who gathers two opposite sides around a dinner
table including masculine characters comprised of Charles Tansley, Augustus Carmichael,
William Bankes as well as Mr. Ramsay, and feminine ones consisting of Minta, Lily as well as
Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay stabilizes the balance between the opposite sides during the dinner.
Among them, Lily, who does not feel comfortable with either of these opposite sides because
the male ones and the female ones such as Mrs. Ramsay and her daughter Minta who are
obsessed with marriage seem to be products and perpetuators of the patriarchy feeding on
feminine and masculine traits, which she opposes. However, they all stand for the masculine
part of her brain she needs to reconcile with to succeed in her art. She is in a struggle for
androgyny. More concretely, Lily is preoccupied with her painting during the dinner, and then
she figures out how to continue the painting she has started. Lily decides to move the tree in
65
her painting. In order to keep that image in her mind, she puts the salt cellar “down again on a
flower in the pattern in the table-cloth” (Woolf, 1992, p. 241). Maze regards the salt cellar as a
phallic symbol because of its shape and “function of pouring out a white stream” (1997, p. 89).
Moreover, as flowers are regarded as the symbol of the vagina (Maze, 1997, p. 89), the act of
putting the salt cellar on a flower may be interpreted as an initial imaginative act for combining
the male and female sexes in harmony, thus, an act for androgyny.
It is ten years later after this recorded image on the dinner table that Lily achieves
figuring out her androgynous mind in her painting. She sits outside between the time-worn
summer house and the lighthouse while painting. She is not inside the house anymore because
she feels “no attachment…no relations with it” (Woolf, 1992, p. 288). The house is closely
associated with femininity, the domestic space. Thus, her feeling distanced from there indicates
her impersonality in which she has succeeded by moving from her feminine side towards her
masculine part. Therefore, on the other side of her stands the lighthouse representing, as Maze
states, masculinity as a symbol of the penis (1997, p. 89). It has also an Apollonian statue-like
shape. Therefore, as pointed out by Emery, Lily’s position “between the femininized house and
the masculinized lighthouse” indicates her androgynous space (1992, p. 229). She has often felt
disrupted with the essence of Mr. Ramsay because whenever “he approached…ruin
approached, chaos approached. She could not paint.” (Woolf, 1992, p. 289). Now, Mr. Ramsay,
spreading an excessive Dionysian aura is away to his Apollonian side, towards the lighthouse.
Moreover, she silences Charles Tansley’s repetitive words in her mind: “Women can’t write,
women can’t paint” (Woolf, 1992, p. 214) that make her paintbrush “heavier and went slower”
(Woolf, 1992, p. 297). She thinks that he says so to feel better about himself as parallel to
Woolf’s statement that women function like mirrors “reflecting the figure of man at twice its
natural size” (2015, p. 26). To put it differently, women who are regarded as inferior to men,
reassure men’s self-confidence by reflecting men their potential and superiority. Accordingly,
the looking-glass vision is essential to men as they may die without this “illusion” (2015, p.
26). Therefore, women occupy an essential part of men’s life even though they refuse
discerning or expressing. This way of thinking, which Woolf celebrates, indicates the
androgynous nature of her mind helping her abstaining from discouragement of the men around
herself.
Evidently, through Mrs. Ramsay’s social artistry, Lily’s perspective of men has changed
a lot, and she has attained a new stage in her femininity as an impersonal artist. As Ronchetti
notes, “[a]rt in the form of painting and life in the form of Mrs. Ramsay’s psychological legacy
to Lily cooperate to stimulate her personal growth as well as her artistic creativity” (2004, p.
69). Lily creates her modernist painting by disrupting the conventional patriarchal obstacles
impeding women’s creativity. She paints Mrs. Ramsay, standing beside trees and the summer
house. Maze points to the fact that the mass on the right consists of trees which are “always a
potential image of male sexuality” (1997, p. 97) while the mass on the left side consists of the
house which has strong female connotations. Therefore, indeed, Lily combines the feminine
and masculine, the Apollonian and Dionysian in her androgynous mind. She dissolves the
question of “how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” (Woolf, 1992, p.
218) “which had tied a knot in her mind” (Woolf, 1992, p. 296) ten years earlier. That Lily
culminates her painting by drawing “a line there, in the centre” (Woolf, 1992, p. 334)
connecting the masses on the right and on the left indicates her achievement of androgyny by
building a bridge of harmony between two opposite parts of the mind, each of which is
supplementary for one another. Thus, both Lily and Mr. Ramsay feel peaceful in the end as the
feminine/Dionysian and the masculine/Apollonian parts of their minds “live in harmony
together, spiritually cooperating” (2015, p. 97).
66
Conclusion
The Victorian phallocentrism maintained the urge on masculinity by suppressing

femininity in the society for years. Challenging the gendered construction of the Western
culture, both Nietzsche and Woolf presented a positive force for modern artists through
androgyny. With regards to portraying a woman artist’s striving in this way, To the Lighthouse
is a significant work. At the beginning of the novel, Lily stands for the feminist voice raised
against patriarchal binary thought in life and art. Woolf indicates through Lily that femininity
is not enough in challenging phallocentrism, and she calls for androgyny as a positive force.
The author presents her Mrs. Ramsay as a social artist equalising the Apollonian and Dionysian
forces around herself and an inspiring source for Lily who achieves androgyny at the end of the
novel. Accordingly, artists, may it be female or male, can produce the best piece of art as much
as they can strike a harmony between their Apollonian, which refers to the masculine side of
the human mind in Woolf’s terms, and the Dionysian self, corresponding to the feminine part .
References
Barker, J. (2006). The Brontës: A life in letters. London: Folio Society.

Bodichon, B. L. S. (2001). Women and work. 1857. In Candida Ann Lacey (Ed.), Barbara
Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham place group Vol. 3. (pp. 36-74). New York:
Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990). Subversive bodily acts. In Gender trouble. (pp. 101-163). New York:
Routledge.
Daniel, C. (2006). Voracious children: Who eats whom in children’s literature. New York:
Routledge.
De Beauvoir, S. (2010). The second sex (Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany Chevallier,
Trans.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Emery, M. L. (1992). Robbed of meaning: the work at the center of To the lighthouse. MSF
Modern fiction studies 38 (1), 217-234.
Fayad, M. (1977). Aliens, androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of representation
in The left hand of darkness. In Mosaic: A Journal for the interdisciplinary study of
literature 30 (3), 59-73. Retrieved on December 12, 2018 from
https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40167343
Foucault, M. (1977). Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In Michel Foucault, Donald F. Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Trans.), Donald F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter memory,
practice: Selected essays and interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gilbert S. M. & Gubar, S. (1996). The madwoman in the attic. In Mary Eagleton (Ed.), Feminist
literary theory: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Harris, D. (1974). Androgyny: The sexist myth in disguise. In Women’s studies 2, 171-184.
Hatab, L. J. (1981). Nietzsche on woman. Southern journal of philosophy 19 (3), 333-345.
Heilbrun, C. G. (1993). Toward a recognition of androgyny. 1973. New York: Norton.
Hughes, K. (n.d.). Gender roles in the 19th century. The British Library. British Library Board,
Accessed January 10, 2019. Retrieved from http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-
victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the19th-century#sthash.uFd1Juyz.dpuf.
67
Hussey, M. (1995). Virginia Woolf A to Z. New York: Oxford UP.

Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art. Léon S.
Roudiez (Ed.). Alice Jardine, Thomas Gora, and Léon Roudiez (Trans.). New York:
Columbia UP.
Marcus, Jane, ed. (1983). Virginia Woolf: A feminist slant. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Maze, J. R. (1997). Virginia Woolf: Feminism, creativity, and the unconscious. Westport, Conn:
Greenwood Press.
Mill, J. S.. (1963). The subjection of women Millicent Garrett Fawcett (Ed.). London: Oxford
University Press.
Minogue, S. (2012). Introduction to A room of one’s own. A room of one’s own. By Virginia
Woolf. London: Wordsworth Editions, 5-25.
Moi, T. (1985). Sexual/Textual politics: Feminist literary theory. London: Routledge.
Neumann, E. (1969). The origins and history of consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2005). The anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, twilight of the idols. Aaron Ridley (Ed.),
Judith Norman (Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
---. (1966). Beyond good and evil. (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
---. (1992). The birth of tragedy (1872). In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. (W. Kaufmann, Ed. and
Trans.). Modern Library, 1-144.
---. (1974). The gay science. Walter Kaufmann (Trans.). New York: Vintage.
---. (1969). On the genealogy of morals. (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
Pease, A., ed. (2015). The Cambridge Companion to “To the Lighthouse.” New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Plato. Symposium. (B. Jowett, Trans.). Retrieved on January 20, 2019, from
http://www.classics.mit.edu.plato/symposium.html
Rendall, J. (1985). The origins of modern feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United
States, 1780-1860. New York: Macmillan.
Roe, S., & Sellars, S., eds. (2000). The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge:
Ronchetti, A. (2004). The artist, society and sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s novels. New York:
Routledge.
Rowbotham, J. (1989). Good girls make good wives-guidance for girls in Victorian fiction.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Secor, C. (1974). The Androgyny Papers. Women’s studies: An interdisciplinary journal 2 (2),
139-141.
Showalter, E. (1977). A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP.
Snaith, A., ed. (2007). Virginia Woolf Studies. Hampshire: Palgrave Advances.
Topping Bazin, N. (1973). Virginia Woolf and the androgynous vision. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
68
Woolf, V. (1980). The diary of Virginia Woolf. (A. O. Bell, Ed.) Vol. 3: 1925-1930.
London: The Hogarth Press.
---. (2015). A room of one’s own. 1929. (D. Bradshaw and S. N. Clarke, Ed.). West Sussex:
Wiley Blackwell.
---. (1992). To the Lighthouse. 1927. Collected novels of Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To
the lighthouse, The Waves. Ed. Stella McNichol. London: Macmillan. 177-335.
---. (1979). Women and writing. (Michile Barrett, Ed.). New York: Harcourt.
69
Reality and Fantasy in British Children’s Fantasy Fiction:

Protagonists at the Cross Roads
Mehmet Galip Zorba*
Akdeniz University
galipzorba@hotmail.com
APA Citation:
Zorba, M. G. (2019). Reality and Fantasy in British Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Protagonists at the Cross Roads.
Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 7(12), 70-77.
Abstract
Fantasy fiction is often discussed as a dichotomous entity rolling between hard reality and mere imagination. In
such a shallow conceptualization, the former represents the reader’s world while the latter serves as a reflection of
imagination. These two may seem contradictory, yet many researchers acknowledge that fantasy needs reality in
order to depart from it, suggesting a reciprocal and codependent relationship. Hence, although many fantasy books
are initially set in the real world, protagonists travel to secondary worlds so that the fantastic aspect starts evolving.
Keeping this reciprocal relationship in mind, this study analyzes the initial settings and entrances of the secondary
worlds in British children’s fantasy fiction, namely by reading, L. Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, C.
S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It
is seen that, the initial settings in the works studied are situated either in the real world or in a place in which a
realistic setting is dominant. The results of this study show that the protagonists, except for Harry Potter, often
find darkness and danger in the secondary worlds. Thus, it can be inferred that Harry is an exceptional protagonist
as he finds “sunshine and excitement” when he first enters his secondary world, making him a distinctive character
among the others.
Keywords: English literature, fantasy literature, children’s fantasy fiction, secondary worlds
Introduction
Fantasy literature has become a popular genre in the last two decades, as readers look forward
to the release of new episodes or volumes of the series. Despite its commercial popularity,
within academia, the study of fantasy literature “is relatively recent and in some ways still
underdeveloped” (Levy & Mendlesohn, 2016, p. 1). In fact, the number of significant critical
texts related to fantasy is less than ten and some scholars continue to focus on defining and
defending fantasy. Although a consensus has emerged among many critics such as Rosemary
Jackson, Kathryn Hume, Colin Manlove on the nature of the concept (Levy & Mendlesohn,
2016), Zipes (2015) enunciates that fantasy is “ambiguous in literary criticism and children’s
*
Dr., Akdeniz University, Faculty of Letters, English Language & Literature, Turkey.
70
Reality and Fantasy in British Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Protagonists at the Cross Roads
literature”. Furthermore, he also argues that fantasy “has been treated as a genre, a style, and a
narrative technique” and more importantly “no comprehensive definition of it has been
established so far” (pp. 180-181). Therefore, what is literarily inherent in fantasy fiction is open
to discussion in theory and the genre remains worth studying in all aspects.
Etymologically, the word ‘fantasy’ is derived from the Latin word ‘phantasticus’ which means
‘to make something visible or to manifest’ (Jackson, 1981; Huck, Hepler & Hickman, 1993).
Today, in daily language the word fantasy connotes unreality and imagination, thus it can be
inferred that a fantasy is nothing but a product of imagination. However, this paves the way for
a larger problem in the context of literature simply because such an understanding assumes that
fiction is nothing but the product of an author’s imagination no matter how realistic his or her
portrayal is. According to Rabkin (1976, p. 8):
“one of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced
by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted. The
reconfiguration of meanings must make an exact flip-flop, an opposition from up to
down, from + to –”.
In other words, for many, what distinguishes fantasy fiction from other genres is its distance to
reality. As Short et al. (2014) simply put, the term fantasy fiction (also known as modern fantasy
and fantasy literature) refers “to the body of literature in which the events, the settings, or the
characters are outside of the realm of possibility” (p. 128). In a similar vein, Manlove (1999)
defines fantasy fiction as “'fiction involving the supernatural or impossible” (p. 3). To be more
exact, Harvey (2003) comprehensively defines fantasy fiction as follows:
“Fantasy is an attempt to create a complete, imaginary worlds with its own creatures,
cultures, and lands that are governed by their own set of physical laws and guided by
their own morals and principles” (p. 13)
Despite the fact that fantasy is often explained or described in terms of its relationship with
imagination and reality, some others articulate that fantasy cannot exist without reality. Hume
(1984), for instance, approaches to the genre from a different perspective and underlines that
fantasy needs reality so as to depart from it. According to Hume (1984, pp. 20-21), all literary
works are “the products of two impulses”; one of these being mimesis which is “the desire to
imitate reality”, and the other one is fantasy which is defined as “the desire to change the givens
and alter reality”, thus “fantasy is any departure from the consensus reality”. Similar to Hume
(1984), Jackson (1981) underlines that “the fantastic cannot independently exist of that ‘real’
world” (p. 12). She further explains that any subject matter is linked to reality although the
fantastic subverts it whereas the mimetic imitates it.
“They proceed to break the assumption of realism by introducing what is unreal. They
pull the reader from the apparent familiarity and security of the known and everyday
world into something more strange, into a world whose improbabilities are closer to the
realm normally associated with the marvelous” (p. 20)
Many fantasy fiction writers firmly ground their stories in reality before gradually moving into
fantasy (Huck, Hepler & Hickman, 1993), thus it is not surprising that the real world is often
preferred as the initial setting in many fantasy books (Zipes, 2015). It is often portrayed as a
departure point from which the protagonist somehow enters to the secondary world. Keeping
this reciprocal relationship between fantasy and reality in mind, this study analyzes the initial
settings and entrances of the secondary worlds of protagonists in British children’s fantasy
fiction to understand the close relationship between the initial settings and the secondary
worlds. Protagonists traveling to the secondary worlds were chosen as the focus of this study
to spate the fantasy from reality. To this end, five major British fantasy books were selected,
71
Galip Zorba / Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
namely, L. Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

(1937) and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), C. S. Lewis’ The
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), and J. K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997). Results of such studies may shed light on reality and
fantasy relationship as it pertains into theoretical work on fantasy literature.
The First Steps into the Unknown
Stepping into the unknown is not a unique characteristic of fantasy fiction. As Campbell (2004)
states, although there are a considerable number of stories told or written all around the world,
there is actually a single story one of whose patterns is stepping into the unknown. By stepping
into the unknown, the hero goes beyond the limits of the known world. Campbell’s description
of the unknown is open to interpretation, yet what is certain about his description is there are
two worlds; the hero’s world and the unknown world. In the context of fantasy fiction, there
are two different worlds as well. The first one is called the primary world which is the reflection
of the real world from the author’s perspective whereas the second one is called the secondary
world which reflects the author’s imagination. Accordingly, the first one involves limits,
possibilities and what is familiar whereas the second one incorporates the unknown and
impossibilities.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with a scene set in a riverbank in Oxford, England,
yet Carroll prefers an abrupt transition to the secondary world. Therefore, almost no description
about the primary world is given to the reader in the first scene as Alice is described as
“beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on bank, and of having nothing to do” (p. 7)
and when she is about to die of boredom, she sees a well-dressed white rabbit with pink eyes
who murmurs about being late. Alice sees him jump down a hole as she starts to chase him.
Undoubtedly, it is not an ordinary rabbit hole as Alice’s fall takes a very long time to complete.
Carroll (2010) describes this action as follows:
“Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she
went down to look about her […] First, she tried to look down and make out what she
was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything […] Down, down, down. ‘Would the
fall never come to an end ?’ ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time ?’ she
said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that
would be four thousand miles down, I think’[…]” (Carroll, 2010, pp. 8-9).
At last, she safely sets foot on the ground once again, showing her first steps into the unknown
as she finds “herself in a long, low hall lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof” (p. 10).
This opening scene fits well into the traditional opening scenes of many fantasy tests which, as
mentioned before, start in the real world ad then followed by a travel to the fantastic, thus the
unknown one.
A similar travel to the unknown can also be seen in the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Like Carroll, Lewis also gives readers almost no description of the real world in the beginning.
Four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are sent to the house of an old family friend
living in the countryside of England. While exploring the house, they see a big wardrobe in one
of the rooms and Lucy decides to get into it although the other three leave the room as they
think there is nothing interesting in the room. While Lucy is moving forward in the wardrobe
to “find the back of it”, she finds “herself in the middle of a wood at a night-time with snow
under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air” (p. 7). Taking her steps into the unknown,
Lucy comes across with a faun named Mr. Tamnus as she turns back to the real world following
72
the same path to tell the others what she has found in the wardrobe. Then, Edmund, Peter and
Susan enter Narnia, following the same path in order to experience what this new setting offers
to them.
What is noteworthy in both of these literary works is that the secondary worlds in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Narnia are hidden, and the only way to enter
these worlds is by passing through hard-to-find passages. Although these worlds are somehow
linked to the primary worlds, this is not ‘a world-within-a world’ situation as can be seen in the
Harry Potter series. To give an example, when Lucy’s travel begins, it is summer in England
whereas when she steps in Narnia it is winter. Thus, rather than structuring his text in a world-
within-a world fashion, Lewis sends his characters away to a world of fantasy through not only
spatial but also temporal means. Mendlesohn (2008) categorizes both Carroll’s and Lewis’
fantasies as portal-quest fantasies “in which a character leaves his or her familiar surroundings”
and “passes through a portal into an unknown place” (p. 1). What is more, as Campbell (2004)
underlines, what the hero finds beyond the known world is darkness and danger. Hence, the
first thing both Alice and Lucy find in the unknown is darkness while Alice faces danger after
consuming sweet liquid and a piece of cake, in The Chronicles of Narnia, Lucy is in danger of
being kidnapped by Mr. Tamnus, a faun, who is the first person with whom Lucy meets in
Narnia.
Initial setting as the unknown is given in a rather different way in Tolkienian fantasies which
are considered to be the examples of high fantasy. Although it was Lloyd Alexander who coined
the term in his comparative study on fantasy fiction and heroic romances, it was actually
Zahorski and Boyer’s (1978) study titled The Fantastic Imagination: An Anthology of High
Fantasy that developed this term (Stableford, 2009). High fantasies are “set in otherworlds,
specifically secondary worlds” and such fantasies “deal with matters affecting the destiny of
those worlds” (Clute & Grant, 1997, p. 466). As described by Clute and Grant (1997), the
majority of Tolkien’s fantasies are set in in Middle-earth. With an aspiration for creating a
mythology for England (Chance, 2001), Tolkien skillfully merges the major characteristics of
epics, legends, quest stories and myths into a single pot with creating new races, entities and
languages so as to make Middle-earth more believable, coherent and consistent as a fantastic
land (Noel, 1977). From Mendlesohn’s (2008) standpoint, The Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings are portal-quest fantasies although each work seems be characterized by a quest initiated
by the protagonist.
The initial setting both in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is Hobbiton, the Shire, which
is in many ways regarded as the idealized portrayal of the English countryside (Pearce, 1998;
Hunt, 2001). Tolkien (2003, p. 30) describes hobbits as little people who “are inclined to be at
in the stomach”, “dress in bright colors, wear no shoes, have long clever brown fingers, good-
natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs” and he also describes the Shire as follows:
“[…] there were now many houses of wood, brick, or stone. These were specially
favoured by millers, smiths, ropers, and cartwrights, and others of that sort; for even
when they had holes to live in. Hobbits had long been accustomed to build sheds and
workshops.” (Tolkien, 2004, p. 10)
In the opening scene of The Hobbit, Bilbo suddenly takes a call to an adventure from a
mysterious wizard named Gandalf who brings thirteen dwarves to Bilbo’s hobbit-hole. Soon,
Bilbo sets out on a journey to the Misty Mountains with the dwarves and Gandalf. When the
company passes the known limits of the Shire, they find themselves in an ominous atmosphere:
73
“Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no
inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher
and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if
they had been built by wicked people. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that
day had taken a nasty turn… Somewhere behind the grey clouds the sun must have
gone down, for it began to get dark.” (Tolkien, 2003, p. 65)
As Hume (1984) explains, fantasy needs reality so as to depart from it. Accordingly, the Shire
represents reality what lays whereas beyond it represents fantasy just as all those supernatural
and impossible events occur outside the Shire. Furthermore, just like Alice and Lucy, what
Bilbo primarily finds in the unknown is darkness and danger as Bilbo and the company are
caught by a group of trolls.
In the first book of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien’s story line leads Frodo into the
unknown and fantastic in a gradually escalating manner. The trilogy opens at Bilbo’s and
Frodo’s birthday party during which strange events begin such as Bilbo’s unexpected
disappearance in the middle of the crowd. Bilbo sets out on a long journey leaving everything
he has to Frodo, including the One Ring. Although Frodo is not aware of the power of the Ring,
Gandalf becomes suspicious and leaves the Shire to investigate the Ring. When he comes back
after seventeen years, he does one last test, throwing the Ring into the fire to ensure that it is
the One Ring. Shortly after that, Gandalf and Frodo decide that Frodo has to leave the Shire
because he is in grave danger there, yet he leaves the Shire after several months. When it comes
to Frodo’s first steps into the unknown, a similar pattern can be seen. Tolkien locates the Old
Forest on the edge of Buckland, the Shire, and the forest is surrounded by a barrier called the
Hedge so as to protect the people of Buckland from the attack of hostile tress. It is the place
where the unknown for Frodo begins as darkness and danger await him beyond the Hedge.
Merry Brandybuck’s detailed account clearly portrays the tempestuous and perilous nature of
the Old Forest in a way to show its break from the real world:
“But the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what
is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers.
They watch you […] But at night things can be most alarming […] I thought all the
trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible
language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the
trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in.” (Tolkien 2005,
p. 110)
As the company moves forward in the Old Forest, the trees begin to attack them. An old tree
pushes Frodo into the water and tries to catch him with its roots. In addition, Merry and Pippin
are also trapped by another old tree named the Old Man Willow. Fortunately, Sam saves Frodo
in person while Marry and Pippin are saved by a supernatural figure named Tom Bombadil,
exemplifying an amalgamation of human of reality with supernatural fantasy.
Similar to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Narnia, the initial setting
in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is Privet Drive No. 4, London. As Gamble and Yates
(2002) state, the Harry Potter series is a different type of high fantasy set in a unique space, an
alternative world with a unique additional characteristic:
“The alternative world is a world-within-a-world, marked off by physical boundaries.
This seems to most closely match the world of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter novels.
Although there is an invisible barrier that Harry has to pass through in order to board
the Hogwarts Express, the school is still in our world. Muggles and wizards inhabit
74
the same space, although there are some areas that muggles cannot access because they
do not have the necessary powers.” (Gamble & Yates, 2002, p. 103)
Obviously, Rowling creates a world-within-a world type of fantasy and the secondary world is
under the Muggles’ noses but they cannot see anything related to this world. There are no
hidden portals or secret passages to the world of witches and wizards as can be seen in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland or The Chronicles of Narnia; those witches and wizards are among
us, or Muggles. However, Rowling does not amalgamate these worlds. Just the opposite, there
are still boundaries between them as what separates these two worlds is magic. However,
Mendlesohn (2008) asserts that the Harry Potter series is an example to intrusion fantasy in
which “the fantastic enters the fictional world, it is the bringer of chaos, and fantasy and reality
are often kept strictly demarcated” (p. xxii). Hence, Westman (2011) defines the Harry Potter
series as hybrid fantasy because:
“Rowling is much more interested in how fantasy provides perspective on everyday
experience and the individual's place in society. Her inclusion of certain genres like –
bildungsroman along with the school story – align her primarily with the domestic (or
low) fantasy of authors such as E. Nesbit […] as well as authors like P. Pullman and
J. Stroud, who are also interested in the intersection of the personal and political within
quotidian experiences. The result of Rowling’s strategy is a hybrid fantasy” (p. 100).
Harry’s path to the unknown begins with his acceptance letters from Hogwarts. Yet, as sson as
action starts in the beginning of the novel, Rowling emphasizes that there is something special
and unusual about Harry. Despite Vernon’s efforts to prevent Harry from reading the letters, he
fails when Hagrid brings Harry’s acceptance letter in person. From Mandlesohn’s (2008)
standpoint, this moment can be interpreted as fantasy as the bringer of chaos for the muggles.
As Hagrid takes Harry to the Leaky Cauldron which is “very dark and shabby” wizarding pub
in London (Rowling, 1998, p. 68) in whose backyard Hagrid taps the bricks in the wall three
times.
“The brick he had touched quivered – it wriggled – in the middle, a small hole appeared
– it grew wider and wider – a second later they were facing an archway large enough
even for Hagrid, an archway onto a cobbled street that twisted and turned out of sight
[…] The sun shone brightly on a stack of cauldrons outside the nearest shop.”
(Rowling, 1998, p. 71)
Thus, unlike Alice, Lucy, Bilbo and Frodo, Harry does not find darkness and danger in the
unknown. On the contrary, he finds sunshine and excitement because he belongs to the world
of witches and wizards, that is; the world of the fantastic. Just like his deceased parents, Harry
is a wizard, and thus he feels at home when he is in the secondary world. Rowling portrays this
contrast throughout the series. In the primary world, Harry is no one; he does not have a real
family; he does not have any friends; he is not wealthy whereas in the secondary world, he is
one of the most famous people. The Weasleys treat him as if he was a family member; Ron and
Hermione become his true friends, and he also learns that he has inherited a small fortune from
his parents.
Conclusion
For some scholars fantasy literature is still criticized on the grounds of being formulaic, childish
and escapist (Hunt & Lenz, 2001). It is further stated that as an academic field of study, it needs
time to mature in its methodological and conceptual assets. Therefore, there is strong need for
studies in fantasy literature apart from defining and defending the genre from a readership
75
standpoint. Fantasy and reality are often discussed “as if they were at opposite ends of a
spectrum but a good fantasy is deeply rooted in human experience” (Gamble & Yates, 2002, p.
101). In short, fantasy needs reality to exist. However, as Manlove (2003) states, the reason
why fantasy fiction writers prefer the real word as the initial setting of their books may not
always be related to bend reality; these reasons may vary depending on authors’ impulses to
create their fantasies along with the messages that they want to convey. For instance, the rules
of the Victorian society are radically thwarted in Carroll’s secondary world which may also be
regarded as a dream world (Herring, 2010). Therefore, Carroll is often criticized that he has no
particular direction in his writing as some parts in his works are digressive (Manlove, 2003).
Furthermore, Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia, and Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of
the Rings elaborately employ fantasy as an effective agency for change, renewal and liberation
in order to restore the world or a certain place into its former state, suggesting the codependency
of the two worlds described above.
Whatever reasons fantasy fiction writers have, reality and fantasy are often contrasted through
primary and secondary worlds. In addition, secondary worlds are often portrayed as exciting
but mysterious and dangerous places where the impossible can happen. This study examined
the initial settings in relation to the very first steps of the protagonists studied into the unknown.
Prominent examples of British children’s fantasy fiction were selected for textual analysis, and
it can be concluded that the modus operandi of the authors in question within this study is to
initiate their fantasies either in the real world or in a place in which a realistic setting is
dominant, and lead their protagonists who is a part of the real world to the unknown only to
find darkness and danger. Such a travel to fantasy is often presented in line with the
monomythic structure in which the protagonist slips into a tempestuous realm, leaving his
secure and tranquil environment. Thus, Harry appears as an exceptional protagonist who finds
sunshine and excitement when he first steps into his secondary world. This is most probably
because of the fact that Harry originally belongs to the secondary world unlike the other
protagonists analyzed, making him a unique character among the others. Thus, theoretically
speaking, what separates reality from fantasy in British children fantasy fiction can easily be
found in the beginning of the novels studied as protagonists depart from a setting that is
originally situated in reality.
References
Boyer, R. H., & Zahorski, K. J. (1978). The fantastic imagination: An anthology of high fantasy.
USA: Avon Publishing.
Campbell, J. (2004). The hero with a thousand faces. USA: Princeton University Press.
Carroll, L. (2010). Alice’s adventures in wonderland. USA: Simon & Schuster.
Chance, J. (2001). Tolkien’s art: A mythology for England. Kentucky, USA: University Press
of Kentucky.
Clute, J., & Grant, J. (1997). The encyclopedia of fantasy. USA: St. Martin's Griffin.
Gamble, N., & Yates, S. (2002). Exploring children's literature. UK: Sage Publishing.
Harvey, G. (2003). The origins of Middle-earth for dummies. New Jersey 2003.
Herring, S. (2010). Supplementary materials. In C. B. Johnson (Ed.).Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (pp. 269-314) USA: Simon
& Schuster.
Huck, C. S., Hepler, S., & Hickman, J. (1993). Children’s literature in the elementary school.
Ohio, OH: Brown & Benchmark Publishing.
Hume, K. (1984). Fantasy and mimesis: Responses to reality in Western literature. USA:
Routledge.
76
Hunt, P. (2001). Children’s literature. UK: Blackwell.

Hunt, P., & Lenz, M. (2001). Alternative worlds in fantasy fiction. London: Continuum.
Jackson, R. (1981). Fantasy: The literature of subversion. NY: Routledge.
Levy, M., & Mendlesohn. (2016). Children’s fantasy literature: An introduction. UK:
Manlove, C. (1999). The fantasy literature of England. UK: Palgrave.
Manlove, C. (2003). From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s fantasy in England. UK:
Cybereditions
Mendlesohn, F. (2008). Rhetorics of fantasy. USA: Wesleyan University Press.
Pearce, J. (1998). Tolkien: Men and myth. London: Ignatius Press.
Rabkin, E. (1976). The fantastic in literature. USA: Princeton University Press.
Rowling, K. K. (1998). Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone. USA: Scholastic Press.
Short, K., Lynch-Brown, C., & Tomlinson, C. M. (2014). Essentials of children’s literature.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Stableford, B. (2009). The A to Z of fantasy literature. USA: The Scarecrow Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2003). The hobbit. UK: Harper Collins.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2005). The lord of the rings. UK: Harper Collins.
Westman, K. E. (2002). Specters of Thatcherism: Contemporary British culture in J. K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In J. L. Mickenberg & L. Vallone (Eds.). The Oxford’s
handbook of children’s literature (pp.93-112). USA: Oxford University Press.
Zipes, J. (2015). The Oxford companion to fairy tales. UK: Oxford University Press.
77
Female Homosocial Desire in Sarah Fielding’s: The Governess, or

Little Female Academy (1749*
Nilgün Müftüoğlu1 Mustafa Zeki Çıraklı2

nmuftuoglu@ktu.edu.tr mzcirakli@gmail.com
APA Citation:
Müftüoğlu, N. & Çıraklı, M.Z. (2019). Female Homosocial Desire in The Governess, or Little Female Academy
(1749). Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 7(12), 78-90.
Abstract
This paper attempts to investigate the same-sex relationships of female characters in Sarah Fielding’s The
Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749) as represented in a controlled homosocial setting where homosocial
desire is satisfied. This study refers to the concept of “homosocial desire” offered earlier by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick to analyse the female characters within the scope of homosociality and explores how “homosocial
desire” is exemplified by the patterns of behaviour and discourses that female characters represented through a
condensed milieu of subjective manifestations as well as instructed morals. The study argues that female
homosocial desire is the primary motive in the acts, behaviors and decisions of female characters searching for a
private medium in which they achieve transparent communication with mutual affection by constituting a
community of intimacy between the same sexes. The study concludes that released, aroused, gratified or satisfied
homosocial desire can be a power of transformation from chaos to harmony, which indicates the healing nature of
fulfilled homosocial desire.
Keywords: Sarah Fielding, Homosocial space, Female Homosocial Desire, The Governess or Little Female
Academy
Introduction
There is a great deal of literature as to the key elements of 18th century social patterns and
codes even though some of them have put the situation in relatively pejorative terms. Hartmann
(1997, p. 104) particularly underlines the following elements from the 18 th century:
heterosexual marriage, the incarceration of women to domestic world, women’s exclusion from
occupational sphere and institutions within a patriarchal social structure. The eighteenth-
century social settings, however, were structured by homosocial elements as well as
* This paper, including significant revisions and new discussions, is mainly based on the research carried out as
part of the following PhD study: Müftüoğlu, Nilgün. Indications of Male and Female Homosocial Desire in
Behaviour and Discourse of the Characters in Sarah Fielding’s Fiction, Thesis supervised by M. Z. Çıraklı,
Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey, 2018.
1
Lecturer Dr., KTU, School of Foreign Languages, 61080, Trabzon, Turkey
2
Assoc. Prof. Dr., KTU, Faculty of Letters, Department of English Language and Literature, 61080, Trabzon,
Turkey.
78
Female Homosocial Desire in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749)
heterosocial features. The fictional settings in Sarah Fielding’s novels represent these historical
and social realms of the eighteenth-century England, providing modern readers with a critical
understanding of same-sex relationships at the time. In this paper, therefore, what counts as the
core of the arguments regarding the 18th century is that certain principal elements of the
eighteenth-century social structure in England were based on homosocial relations.
Sarah Fielding’s Little Female Academy brings together significant elements of
homosociality. In The Governess, the setting is a boarding school, “the number of which
multiplied rapidly from the mid-century” (Hill, 2013, p. 47). In these schools, girls are educated
to be fine ladies (Barker-Benfield, 1992, p. 164). The historical author addresses and advises
the prospective ladies (the implied authors) to achieve “Love and Affection for each other”
(Bree, 1996, pp. 60-61). Yet, The Governess gets beyond “becom[ing] referential and didactic
for readers” (Hunter, 1990, p. 93) implying an undercurrent potential of the homosocial circles.
Considering the relationships among the girls in the narrative and the female characters
portrayed in their stories, it may be argued that the attaining of “true happiness” at this “little
female academy” represents a fruitful fictional setting to exemplify female homosocial desire
that is revealed to manifest itself in the acts, expressions and discourse of these characters and
to transform the mental states of these characters repairing and reforming their sociality.
Historical Background: Female Homosocial Settings
The eighteenth century is accepted as a period of “enormous growth and change” in England
(Lipking & Monk, 2000, p. 2045) considering private and social settings pertaining to male-
dominated life. Still, eighteenth-century England is a world that is dominated primarily by men,
as Porter states (1990, p. 22). In spite of the existence of certain women clubs “devoted to
rational conversation” (Porter & Roberts, 1996, p. 50) in the eighteenth-century, the socio-
cultural background of female characters remained within restricted female homosocial
settings. Women were confined to the domestic world of their houses or boarding schools as
represented in the fictional world of The Governess or Little Female Academy.
Sarah Fielding’s realistic portrayal of social life and characters in her fiction is amalgamated
with her moralist concerns like other popular novelists of the era such as Richardson, Fielding
and Defoe. The Governess, or Little Female Academy portrays a purely female homosocial
environment in a boarding school with its nine girls who receive education from their
governess, Mrs. Teachum, an obsessed lady representing a paradoxical matriarchal status with
authority and privacy aimed at conserving homosocial harmony between these little women.
Moreover, the friendships that develop among these girls along with the ones they establish
with Mrs. Teachum and two other women out of the school reveal homosocial desire that is
stirred, stimulated and preserved in these female characters. Embedded stories told by the girls
in the frame narrative promote and support female homosociality that plays an important role
in the plot. It is seen that female homosocial desire is the primary motive in the acts, behaviors
and decisions of female characters in The Governess and that the informal homosocial space
created by Mrs. Teachum transforms “rational conversation” into comfortable yet decent and
secure communication.
Female homosociality is portrayed as a means for the psychological and educational
development of females. This also secures the possibility and opportunity of a collective
activity among women. However, providing “both the intellectual and the moral development
of girls” (Percy, 2009: 80), the boarding school for girls begins to be popular for the families
of the middle class for the education of their daughters (Hill, 2013, p. 47). In these schools,
girls are educated to be fine ladies and “to the display of consumerism in deportment, music,
and dance” (Barker-Benfield, 1992, p. 164). Being taught by female teachers, keeping company
with girls and being busy with traditionally feminine subjects create a totally female homosocial
environment in the schools. The traditional conviction that “boys brought up together become
79
Nilgün Müftüoğlu , Mustafa Zeki Çıraklı /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019,
comrades” (Blosser & Bradley, 1997, p. 60) manifests itself differently at the boarding schools
for girls. Female homosociality at the boarding schools in Sarah Fielding’s novel gets beyond
mere comradeship.
Although the eighteenth century English fiction, as Todd (1980) states, focuses on the
romantic relationship between a man and a woman (p. 1), female friendship and same-sex
socialization among women is also among the most common themes (Faderman,1981, p. 103)
providing material for the development of the main and sub-plots in the novels. Female fictional
characters of this period are portrayed to enjoy the company of other women and to occupy
themselves with troubles and well-being of the other female characters. Female friendship
affords them to “retire together, away from the corruption of the man-ruled ‘great world’”
(Faderman, 1981, p. 103) and “provide[s] them with the understanding and acceptance that they
expect but do not always receive within marriage” (O’Connor, 1992, p.73).
In Women’s Friendship in Literature, Janet Todd (1980) categorizes fictional female
friendship into five: sentimental, erotic, manipulative, political and social (pp. 3-4). The
sentimental one is described as “a close, effusive tie” which “aids and saves, providing close
emotional support in a patriarchal world” contrary to the heterosexual romantic relation which
is likely to cause trouble (p. 3). While there is “physical love” in erotic friendship, manipulative
friendship, as Todd states, is the one in which “one woman uses another, controls her and joys
in the control” (p. 4). In political friendship, women take action together in order to protest
against “the social system, its institutions or conventions” (p. 4). However, social friendship
does not require women’s collaboration to act against society rather it makes their integration
into the society easier (p. 4). Social friendship help women eliminate the danger of being lost
in society and secure a place for themselves among males. In short, no matter which type of
friendship is developed among women, it can be stated that they all serve female homosociality
in one way or other.
Female friendship provides women with “having fun together,” and “total support”
(Coates, 1996, p. 23). For instance, in Richardson’s Clarissa, Anna is portrayed to give Clarissa
advice about her romantic love relationship that is full of sufferings, misunderstandings and
distresses. In the presence of Anna, Clarissa “can momentarily forget the feminine image she
must create for a man and relax from the strenuous demands of romantic love” (Todd, 1980, p.
2). Moreover, Sophia in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding receives the help of her cousin, Harriet
when she sets out for a travel to London in order to find her beloved, Tom. As for Sarah
Fielding’s The Governess, the plot is based on story-telling of a group of girls in the garden of
their school and thus having fun.
Female friendship’s popularity among women also depends on the fact that women could
“be themselves” and could have “a safe place where the imperative to ‘be nice’ does not prevail”
(Coates, 1996, p. 25). Women do not have to perform the roles given by men in domestic and
social spheres. Furthermore, their friendship is based on an “uncommercial, peaceful, and
equal” (Todd, 1980, p. 47) homosocial relationship. And since there is no trade going on
between them, there is no managing conflict. Therefore, they have peace and harmony. Both
need the other’s love, affection and understanding. It is company of the other they exchange
between themselves. They are not governed by hierarchical heterosexual codes to maintain their
friendship. They do not bother themselves with the expectations and norms of patriarchal
society. However, all these can be observed in intimate, emotional and strong female
friendships.
What is more, female friendship presents a secure and comfortable space for conversation
between female friends. These conversations may sometimes be the only means to share their
experiences, thoughts and worries. For instance, in Tom Jones, when Sophia and her cousin
80
Harriet come together, Harriet talks about her unsuccessful marriage and how she has been
misled about the character of her husband, Mr. Fitzpatrick. Sometimes women may be observed
to talk just to talk because having a talk means spending time together and providing a chance
to enjoy each other’s company. They can fall into a conversation just for its own sake or just
for pleasure since they do not have to consider “rules or taboos” but they are “free to go
anywhere” (Coates, 1996, p. 64).
Some married women attach more importance on their friends than their husbands “in the
sense of providing advice, sympathy, intimacy or simply sharing a way of looking at the world”
(O’Connor, 1992, p. 84). For instance, in A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), Sarah Scott
narrates the story of Miss Melvyn and Louisa Mancel whose friendship is interrupted by Miss
Melvyn’s new husband who does not accept the presence of a more beloved one than himself
in the house (Faderman, 1981, pp. 104-105). The friendship between these female characters
resumes only after the death of the husband. This example can be representative in terms of
demonstrating the place of female friendship among women.
Female friendship, as Todd (1980) suggests, is “the only social relationship we actually
enter in the novel and the only one the heroine actively constructs” (p. 2). Having a friend
especially outside the family has undoubtedly something to do with the phenomena of society
and its paradigms. That kind of friendship enables the women to make a step out of her family
and enter society. Particularly in friendship, women take active participation both in choosing
her friend to be (Todd, p. 2) and in the process of establishing the relationship. However, in the
case of marriage, it generally turns out to be the family who makes necessary decisions and
choices about the so-called partner or the man himself who decides that he is the right person
for the woman (Todd, p. 2) and who does not leave any place to the woman to make a decision
for her own. For example, Richardson’s Clarissa chooses her friend, Anna, on her own but is
forced to accept a man as her husband (Todd, p. 2).
Theoretical Background: Female Homosocial Desire
It was Lipman-Blumen (1976) who provides a definition for the term “homosocial” (1976)
as “the seeking, enjoyment, and/or preference for the company of the same sex” (p. 16). She
does not fail to differentiate it from the term homosexual since they are not interchangeable.
The term homosocial “does not necessarily involve (although it may under certain
circumstances) an explicitly erotic sexual interaction between members of the same sex” (p. 16,
emphasis in the original). Sedgwick (1985), offering the term “homosocial desire,” analysed
certain male characters from a number of texts of English literature. She states that she employs
the word “desire” similar to “libido” in psychoanalysis. Freud explains “libido” as “the force
by means of which the instinct, in this case the sexual instinct, as, with hunger, the nutritional
instinct, achieves expression” (p. 729). “Libido” is the name given to the “investments of energy
directed by the ego towards the object of its sexual desires” (p. 730). Here, the energy is directed
towards object or lack. Socrates states one desires something that he does not possess: “If it
isn’t lacking, you can’t desire it, surely” (Plato, p. 39), which is reformulated by Lacan as
“desire” is something that “is produced in the beyond of the demand” (Lacan, Ecrits, p. 201).
In Kristevan terms, homosocial space turns into a womb of the mother, a maternal realm for the
characters. In that respect, Sedgwick’s “desire” functions in the same way as Freud’s “libido,”
which provides the vital energy and the force for human behaviour. Similarly, “desire” will
afford a similar energy and force for human relations. However, the force in desire does not
have to be a sexual one as it does in libido. Sedgwick (p. 2) suggests that it is an “affective or
social force” and a kind of “glue . . . that shapes an important relationship.” From a social
perspective, as Foucault suggests “one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple
reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and lack on which it is predicated” (Foucault,
History of Sexuality Vol. 1, p. 81). This means that there is no already present desire that power
81
represses rather it is the power itself that generates desires (Stoler, 1995, p. 165). In this respect,
Foucault’s power functions like Hegel’s desire. However, he again finds the word “desire” itself
problematic since he associates it either with lack or repression (Kelly, 2013, p. 119). He prefers
to use the word “pleasure” instead of “desire” as he finds pleasure “an empty concept that can
have new meanings applied to it” (Kelly, 2013, p. 119) and a concept that is “not over-coded
to the same extent” (Kelly, 2009, p. 146) as “desire” which already embodies certain medical
and naturalistic implications and suggestions (Halperin, 1997, p. 93). Then, Foucault’s
consideration of desire as a concept “over-coded” with associations can enable to analyse the
naturalistic implications and suggestions lying behind homosocial desire in Fielding’s
characters. Homosocial desire, in this context, refers to libidinal energy behind the motives and
behaviours in the same-sex relationships.
This study, referring to the terminologies of Sedgwick, attempts to trace the elements of
“homosocial desire” among the female characters. To achieve this, following Terry Castle “who
revises Sedgwick’s paradigm in order to theorize a way of defining ‘lesbian fiction’, and to
theorize the question of how desire between women can be imagined and represented” (Herndl,
p. 487) in her “Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction” (1993), this
study raises the question “what happens …when female-female bonding enters the picture”
(Herndl, 1997, p. 488). Therefore, the homosocial circles where women “teach, study, nurture,
write about, march for, vote for, give jobs to, or otherwise promote the interests of other
women” (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 3) will determine the scope of the analysis in this study.
Female Homosocial Desire as Represented in The Governess
The Governess is said to be intended for moral purposes and moral teaching but it also
promotes “[l]ove and Affection” and “Happy society” (Fielding xiii, qtd. in Bree, 1996, p. 62).
Mrs. Teachum (technically governing the plot but is not the protagonist) is the one who plays
the crucial role in the development of such “a society that is both feminocentric and complete”
(Bree, 1996, p. 63-64), namely a homosocially structured society in which she lives with nine
girls. Having lost her husband and then her two children, Mrs. Teachum may be claimed to
represent the female figure that is deprived of all her responsibilities and duties as wife and
mother, responsibilities and socially imposed duties. During the nine years she has lived with
her husband, Mrs. Teachum feels pleased to comply with “instructions” that Mr. Teachum gives
while “improving his wife”, particularly the ones “concerning the education of children” (The
Governess, p. 7). This part of Mrs. Teachum’s life presents a woman who is inferior to man as
she is educated through his instructions. Although it seems that she does not have to perform
her duties as a wife any more upon the death of her husband, she is observed to preserve her
femininity while presenting a caring and devoted mother. She thinks that she has to “conquer
her grief, in order to apply herself to the care of these her dear husband’s children” (The
Governess, p. 7). It may be argued that the verbal indicator “husband” demonstrates that Mrs.
Teachum regards care of her children as a duty towards her husband. However, the possible
homosocial relationship that can be developed between Mrs. Teachum and her “two little girls”
fails when she loses them. Interestingly enough it is at this time that she loses her money that
will support her in the future and she decides to open a boarding school for girls. In this respect,
it may be stated that Mrs. Teachum has to be deprived of all social bonds reinforced earlier by
her heterosexual relationship. As in the case of Lysistrata in which avoidance of heterosexual
intercourse ensures homosocial nature of the desired community of pleasure, Mrs. Teachum
feels “delighted in pleasing them” (The Governess, p. 13). Therefore, absence of a heterosexual
bond in Mrs. Teachum’s private life and content of education in her tutoring serve for female
homosocial desire. Moreover, the past lives of each girl are suggestive in terms of representing
female homosocial desire and stimulating this desire during their stay at the boarding school.
82
First person storytelling is an important motif and the stories told by the girls are marked
with different earlier homosocial bonds. Only one of them, Polly Suckling, cannot narrate any
life story since she is brought to school at the age of five and she hardly remembers her past.
Firstly, Miss. Jenny Peace’s homosocial bond with her mother before she is brought to this
boarding school plays a role in her homosocial desire, which manifests itself in the creation of
a character that tries to maintain and promote female homosocial harmony among the girls
throughout the novel. For instance, at the very beginning of the novel, she is presented to “try
to convince her fellow pupils of the need to acknowledge their faults, participate in the
restoration of harmony . . ., and build on this harmony to seek their individual moral
improvement” (Bree, 1996, p. 62) upon a quarrel over an apple among the girls. As for her
homosocial bond with the mother, it is observed that Jenny loses her father while she is still a
baby and is brought up by a mother she describes as “the best woman in the world, and to whose
memory I shall ever pay the most grateful honour” (The Governess, p. 29). The lack of a father
figure around, thus, secures an undisturbed homosocial circle between the daughter and the
mother besides Jenny’s developing a strong affection for her mother. Jenny’s deep affection
with her mother’s stories show that such tales provide a secure space for the girls. Jenny’s only
concern is presented as providing her mother with a company that evokes the feelings of luck
and joy in the partner. Here the verbal indicator “companion” suggests that the relationship
itself, homosocial one in this context, is considered more essential. Jenny states that she takes
this decision upon her mother’s speech on restoring her “usual cheerfulness” (The Governess,
p. 33). Jenny’s complete obedience to her mother’s desires shows that Jenny concerns the
homosocial bond with her mother more than her own concerns and thoughts. Moreover, she is
not observed to feel resented at her mother’s command, rather she considers “[t]his little
incident” as “a lesson to me in governing my passions” (The Governess, p. 33). This glimpses
at Jenny’s homosocial desire for her mother. She expresses her happiness at such a bond as
follows: “. . . and no girl could be happier than I was during her life” (The Governess, p. 33).
She owes her “instruction, amendment, and improvement” to “this good mother” (The
Governess, p. 33), namely to this homosocial bond. However, while their homosocial bond is
being determined by a discourse of “fault” executed by the Governess (with the capital letter)
their homosocial desire is more likely to be repressed by the mimicry of male discourse: In a
scene where Jenny is trying “to convince her fellow pupils of the need to acknowledge their
faults, participate in the restoration of harmony . . ., and build on this harmony to seek their
individual moral improvement” (Bree, 1996, p. 62) upon a quarrel over “an apple” among the
girls. Thus, it can be stated that Jenny’s homosociality is punctuated with the internalised moral
teaching.
Although Sukey, Lucy, Patty, Nanny and Betty have limited homosocial relations in the
past, they are observed to feel no homosocial desire and to go through a miserable life until the
restoration of homosocial harmony at school. In other words, they find happiness in their
intimate and harmonious relationship for which they are driven by homosocial desire. Miss
Dolly Friendly’s homosocial desire, however, can be observed in her relationship with Molly,
her sister. Dolly describes her feelings about Molly as “very strong affections” (The Governess,
p. 69). Her fondness for her sister is to such an extent that she is concerned only with Molly’s
pleasure: “. . . all my delight was to please her; and this carried to such a height, that I scrupled
no lies to excuse her faults and whatever she did, I justified, and thought right, only because
she did it” (The Governess, p. 69). The verbal indicators “delight” and “please” present a female
character that derives satisfaction and pleasure from another woman’s satisfaction and pleasure.
Dolly’s emotional dependency on her sister can be interpreted as an outcome of her homosocial
desire. This homosocial desire in Dolly, however, affects Molly’s psychological development
negatively, which can be detected in her growing “so very humoursome” and her “crying only
because she did not know her own mind” in addition to her not considering “what faults she
83
committed” (The Governess, p. 69). Moreover, Dolly still harbours the same desire and states
that she is motivated by that same desire when she gets involved into the quarrel narrated at the
very beginning of the novel. Therefore, it can be claimed that Dolly’s former female homosocial
desire for her sister has an effect on her current homosocial relations at school.
The homosocial educational setting provides an informal space in which the girls satisfy
homosocial desire liberating their repressed feelings. After the quarrel over the possession of
an apple at the very beginning of the novel, peace and harmony is restored among the girls who
are portrayed as follows:
They all sat looking pleased on their companions; their faces borrowed beauty from
the calmness and goodness of their minds; and all those ugly frowns, and all that ill-
natured sourness, which when they were angry and cross were but too plain in their
faces, were now entirely fled; jessamine and honeysuckles surrounded their seats,
and played round their heads, of which they gathered nosegays to present each other
with. They now enjoyed all the pleasure and happiness that attend those who are
innocent and good (The Governess, p. 24).
The descriptions offered for the girls as “looking pleased on their companions” and preserving
“beauty from the calmness and goodness of their minds” reveal physical manifestation of their
homosocial desire for each other. The verbal indicators used by the omniscient narrator
“pleased”, “calmness” and “goodness” that are used to refer the emotional state of these
characters demonstrate satisfaction they feel at fulfilling their homosocial desire. However, the
most significant signs of desire and pleasure are manifested through the flowers suggestive of
intimacy and closeness. The jessamine flower, for example, associates “love and romance”
(Flower Meaning) while honeysuckle means “devotion and lasting bonds” (EHow). Thus, it is
seen that they enjoy and experience “all the pleasure and happiness” as well as homosocial
harmony. This homosocial harmony is portrayed in the following scene wherein Jenny brings
a basket of apples for the girls to eat:
These she placed in the midst of her companions, and desired them to eat, and enjoy
themselves; and now they were so changed, that each helped her next neighbour
before she would touch any for herself; and the moment they were grown thus good
natured and friendly, they were as well-bred, and as polite, as it is possible to describe
(The Governess, p. 24).
Homosocial desire can be instigated or stimulated through the relaxing informal homosocial
space at school transforming the behaviours and attitudes of the characters. They reveal a
progress from antisocial inconsiderateness to individual decency. The female characters
become more caring and politer towards each other through the satisfied homosocial desire and
achieves restoring harmony. The verbal indicator “friendly” points to social interaction among
the characters and shows that the characters are getting socialised repairing their relationship
with language that signals rational development. The 18th century context was therefore to a
great extent concerned with rational development and “maturity” of the characters. The
significance of The Governess is due to its emphasis on the female homosociality that paves
the way for such maturity. The scene where the girls are portrayed to go for a walk in the garden
after the prayers on a Monday morning shows the progress and improvement:
The fine weather, the prospects round them, all conspired to increase their pleasure.
They looked to one another with delight; their minds were innocent and satisfied;
and therefore every outward object was pleasing in their sight (The Governess, p.
147).
84
The verbal indicators used to describe the scene as “pleasure,” “delight,” “satisfied,” and
“pleasing” demonstrate that the female characters satisfy their homosocial desire. Their
derivation of satisfaction from this homosocial circle inherently presents each entity
surrounding them as attractive and lovely. And they enjoy this homosocial environment so
much that they do not let “any disposition that was made to their judgments” cause any
resentment to grow among them (The Governess, p. 132) with a fear that their homosocial
harmony may be disturbed. Their displeasure at such a disturbance can be observed in their
reactions upon the appearance of “a troop of soldiers riding by, with these instruments of music
playing before them” (The Governess, p. 126) and the arrival of the dancing master. Both of
them are not welcomed by the girls. While Miss Dolly Friendly expresses the following, “I had
rather hear how she escaped (for that I hope she will) than see all the soldiers in the world” (The
Governess, p. 126), the girls are portrayed to “have wished not to have been interrupted” (The
Governess, p. 127) after the dancing master arrives. This can be interpreted as their desire for
the maintenance of their female homosocial environment and thus satisfy homosocial desire.
Satisfaction of homosocial desire in this context is significant in terms of establishing
loving and caring bonds among the girls at the boarding school, which is constantly referred
throughout the novel. For instance, Miss Jenny’s following speech after the quarrel – a turning
point for the girls – is full of references to homosocial desire:
‘My dear friends and schoolfellows, you cannot imagine the happiness it gives me
to see you thus all so heartily reconciled. You will find the joyful fruits of it. . . . Now
if you will use as many endeavours to love as you have hitherto done to hate each
other, you will find that every one amongst you, whenever you have anything given
you, will have double, nay, I may say eight times (as there are eight of you) the
pleasure, in considering that your companions are happy. What is the end of quarrels,
but that everyone is fretted and vexed, and no one gains anything! Whereas by
endeavouring to please and love each other, the end is happiness to ourselves, and
joy to everyone around us. . . .’ (The Governess, p. 23).
The use of possessive pronoun is significant: Jenny’s address to the girls as “My dear”
demonstrates her possessive and friendly attitude towards them. “My”, Jenny shows that there
exists a bond between her and the girls. And as a natural requirement of this bond she concerns
their sorrow and troubles as if they are hers. Therefore, she is seen to unable to express her
pleasure at seeing the reconciliation achieved among them. In this context, reconciliation means
the maintenance of harmony and peace in a female homosocial circle. Jenny defines the
psychological advantages of such a reconciliation as “joyful fruits” that may be associated with
happiness and pleasure. And she points out that the happiness of others brings more pleasure
and one can become happy by making others happy and by loving them. In this respect,
considering that the verbal indicators “companion” and “each other” refer homosocial bonding,
it can be argued that satisfying homosocial desire will bring peace and happiness to the girls at
school.
Exchange of objects among the girls in a homosocial space signposts a relatively deeper
sense of mutual emotive bond between the characters beyond rational economical concerns
even though not comparable to “faith, reliance, dependence and trust among the heroes in
myths” (Classen, 2010, p. 21). For instance, at the beginning of the novel, Jenny does not mind
spending “out of the little pocket money she was allowed” (The Governess, p. 24) for the sake
of her friends at school. In this respect, Roulston’s argument on the relationship between Miss
Melvyn and Miss Marcel in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall is suggestive. Roulston (2010) states
that the exchange of money between female friends, not being current in the eighteenth-century
fiction, demonstrates “two women [who] see themselves more as an emotional and economic
partnership than just a friendship” (p. 199). Then, a similar interpretation may be offered for
85
the friendship that Jenny intends to develop with the girls, and it may be claimed that Jenny
tries to create such kind of partnership with the girls. As Verini (2016) suggests as to the
significance of female solidarity, such friendship is brought together with selflessness. For
example, she brings a basket of apples so as to provide the girls with the message that it is not
objects but people who make life peaceful or miserable (The Governess, p. 24). Having aroused
homosocial desire in the female characters, Jenny is also portrayed to express her delight at
seeing the community all in peace and harmony. For example, when she sees “all her scholars
walk towards her hand in hand, with such cheerful countenances”, she decides to “mention to
them her pleasure in seeing them thus altered” (The Governess, p. 34). The description of the
girls holding each other’s hands and smiling can be interpreted as a manifestation of a satisfying
and pleasing homosociality. The physical contact between the girls suggests a close and
intimate social relationship. And Jenny is portrayed to enjoy this picture depicting a harmonious
homosocial circle. The following scene is one other that depicts her in pleasure:
But seeing them so much altered in their manner of talking to each other, since the
time they made their little remarks on her story of the giants, filled her whole mind
with the most sincere pleasure; and with a smile peculiar to herself, and which
diffused a cheerfulness to all round her, she told her companions the joy their present
behaviour had inspired her with; . . . (The Governess, p. 132).
That Jenny derives “sincere pleasure” from the homosocial harmony indicates her pleasure by
means of articulating her feelings of joy at their peace. Moreover, a unique expression of
pleasure she wears on her face raises cheerful smiles on the girls’ faces. This mutual satisfaction
from the other’s pleasure can be explained as a manifestation of homosocial desire
overwhelming mere homosocial structure, which transforms a kind of homosocial bond to a
kinder bond.
However, it is not only Jenny who expresses her enjoyment in this female homosocial
circle. The girls also are portrayed to enjoy their homosocial bond with Jenny herself. For
instance, the scene in which Jenny leaves the girls to talk with Mrs. Teachum may be considered
to offer a clear illustration of homosocial desire harboured in these girls: “. . . Miss Jenny desired
them all to go thither without her, and she would soon follow them; which they readily
consented to; but begged her not to deprive them long of the pleasure of her sweet company”
(The Governess 95). They define Jenny’s companionship as “sweet company” and feels pleased
to be in the presence of her. The verbal indicators “beg”, “deprive”, “pleasure” and “company”
all serve the manifestation of homosocial desire in these characters. For instance, the verbal
indicators “pleasure” and “company” suggest that the girls derive satisfaction from being
accompanied by Jenny, namely from the homosocial bond they develop with her. Furthermore,
the verbal indicator “derive” shows that Jenny’s leave causes the loss of a pleasant company,
and their firm request for this loss not to last long is provided by the verbal indicator “beg”. For
this reason, Jenny finds them in “quite impatient of this short absence” (The Governess, p. 95).
In this context, Jenny’s absence refers to the loss of a homosocial bond, a loss that stimulates
their homosocial desire and makes them demand her return impatiently. They even do not dare
to oppose “any proposal that came from Miss Jenny” (The Governess, p. 95) probably in fear
that they can damage the relation between them. Moreover, these girls who cannot stand being
away from Jenny even for a short time are portrayed to shed tears at the news of Jenny’s leaving
(The Governess, p. 176). In this respect, it may be claimed that the farewell scene is suggestive
for the desire to preserve their relationship with Jenny. Miss Dolly Friendly’s following speech
can be considered as an expression of the feelings of all the girls: “And must we lose you, my
dear Miss Jenny, no we are just settled in that love and esteem for you, which your goodness
so well deserves?” (The Governess, p. 176). Dolly is seen to refer to Jenny’s departure as a loss,
which can be regarded as an indicator of homosocial desire considering that one desires what
86
he or she lacks. In this context, Dolly and the other female characters are to lack Jenny’s
companionship. Therefore, there is a repeated reference to this loss. For instance, a similar
speech to Dolly’s is delivered by Polly Suckling: “Indeed, indeed, Miss Jenny, you must not
go; I shall break my heart, if I lose you: sure we shan’t, nor we can’t, be half so happy, when
you are gone, though our governess was ten times better to us than she is” (The Governess, p.
177). Polly reveals her desire for the maintenance of Jenny’s company and her delight in this
companionship while she points out the impossibility of happiness in her absence. Therefore,
these girls are presented to regard the days when they receive a letter from Jenny “better
employed” than the rest (The Governess, p. 179). The intimateness and strength of the bond
between them can be clearly interpreted from the following narration:
All quarrels and contentions were banished her house; and if ever such thing was
likely to arise, the story of Miss Jenny Peace’s reconciling all her little companions
was told to them; so that Miss Jenny, though absent, still seemed (by the bright
example which she left behind her) to be the cement of union and harmony in this
well-regulated society. And if any girl was found to harbour in her breast a rising
passion, which it was difficult to conquer, the name and story of Miss Jenny Peace
soon gained her attention, and left her without any other desire than to emulate Miss
Jenny’s virtues (The Governess, p. 179).
Desire is directed towards the bond itself, which refers to the presence of Jenny in her absence.
The bond signifies the very lack 1in this context as can be seen in the responses of the girls once
Jenny’s name is articulated. This shows that the girls desire to preserve intimacy and emotional
bond in the absence of the desired object. In other words, Jenny still occupies an important
place for them even if she is physically absent. In this respect, it can be argued that Jenny acts
as a sign for the homosocial desire stirred in the female characters. The verbal indicators
“cement,” “union,” “harmony,” and “society” all can be interpreted as a reference to repressed
form of energy. First, the verbal indicator “society” indicates the presence of a social formation
among the girls at school. This social formation requires social engagement, connection,
cooperation, interaction and relationship among them, which inherently brings about
homosociality in its structure. Moreover, the verbal indicators “union” and “harmony” suggest
a pleasing and satisfying gathering that is made stronger by means of using a conduit, namely
Jenny herself. The verbal indicator “cement” points to the presence of a bond that is to be
strengthened. Thus, Mrs. Teachum’s school is “mentioned throughout the country, as an
example of peace and harmony” (The Governess, p. 179). In accordance to peace and harmony
among these nine female characters, there is also a representation of homosocial desire by
means of the relationship between these girls and their governess, Mrs. Teachum.
The bond between Mrs. Teachum and her students can be argued as an example to
manifestation of homosocial desire, rather than a bond between a governess and her students.
For instance, at the very beginning of the novel, Mrs. Teachum is portrayed to be a governess
“who delighted in pleasing” (The Governess, p. 13) her students, and she brings a basket of
apples with this intention. In return, these girls appear eager “to obey her commands” when
“they understood their governess’s pleasure” (The Governess, p. 92). This mutual concern for
the other’s pleasure can be interpreted as a manifestation of homosocial desire. In particular,
Jenny is presented to comply with Mrs. Teachum’s instructions willingly: “Miss Jenny always
with great cheerfulness obeyed her governess” (The Governess, p. 113). Here the words
“cheerfulness” and “obey” are interestingly brought together. First, the libidinal energy is
released through “cheerfulness” and then, secondly, it is regulated or controlled by the
governing superego asking for “obedience.” Here, the girls’ display of their love and affection
1
Given in Lacanian terms, but keep in mind that the homosocial desire is based upon Freudian libidinal energy.
87
for their governess shows her maternal and paternal role at a time. Informal setting elements
like flowers in the fields brings about homosocial harmony between the girls and Mrs.
Teachum. Such peaceful and happy community is due to the satisfied homosocial desire as
implied in the scene: “And as she now saw, by their good behaviour, they deserved that
indulgence, she took the little dumpling by the hand, and, followed by the rest, walked towards
the house . . .” (The Governess, p. 113). This scene wherein Mrs. Teachum is seen to hold this
girl’s hand suggests libidinal energy release as well as physical contact between the characters.
Moreover, the picture of Mrs. Teachum and the girls’ walking towards to the “house” can be
read allegorically: Return to secure realm of homosocial circle.
Conclusion
To conclude, The Governess explores the manifestation, representation and satisfaction of
homosocial desire in female characters. The narratives themselves are offered to celebrate
female homosociality and thus to maintain female homosocial harmony among the girls at
school by means of stimulating homosocial desire. Hence, (a) Sarah Fielding’s Little Female
Academy brings together significant elements of homosociality, teaching and storytelling, (b)
Sarah Fielding’s realistic portrayal of social life and characters in her fiction is amalgamated
with her moralist concerns, (c) Mrs. Teachum, an obsessed lady representing a paradoxical
matriarchal status with authority and privacy. The homosocial space is governed by Mrs.
Teachum, who on the one hand stimulates homosocial desire by her selfless, devoted, merciful,
generous and “invisible moderation;” on the other hand, carefully determines this space through
her controlling, securing, maintaining and decent “Guidance.” (d) When released, aroused,
gratified or satisfied, homosocial desire reveals a power of transformation from sadness to
happiness, chaos to harmony. What is maintained by the critics and intended by the historical
author is the recuperation from antisocial selfishness. The reason behind this cure is the
fulfilment of homosocial desire.
References
Aristophanes, Lysistrata. The Eserver Drama Collection, Retrieved from
http://drama.eserver.org/plays/ classical/ aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. Dec. 2016.
Barker-Benfield, G.J. (1992), The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century
Britain, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Blosser, Philip and Marshell Carl Bradley, (Eds.) 1997, Friendship: Philosophic Reflections on
a Perennial Concern, University Press of America: United States of America.
Bree, Linda (1996), Sarah Fielding, Twayne Publishers: New York.
Classen, Albert (2010), Introduction, Albert Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Eds.), Friendship
in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, (pp. 1-184), De Guyter: Berlin.
Coates, Jennifer (1996), Women Talk, Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.
Defoe, Daniel (1994), Moll Flanders, Penguin Books Ltd.: London.
Edwards, Jason (2009), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Routledge: London.
Faderman, Lilian (1981), Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between
Women from the Renaissance to the Present, William Morrow and Company, Inc.: New
York.
88
Fielding, Henry (2012), The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Penguin English Library:
London.
Fielding, Sarah (1994), The Adventures of David Simple, 1969. Oxford University Press:
United Kingdom.
_____________ (2002), The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, Blackmask Online.
_____________ (2002), The Governess, or, Little Female Academy [1749], Tradition
Classics: Hamburg.
Fleming, Patrick C. (2013), The Rise of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature, the Novel and
The Governess, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 46 (4), 463-477.
Foucault, Michel (no date), Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books:
New York.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Libido’s Attachment to Objects”, Retrieved from paws.wcu.edu/pcoyle
/TheoryFreud.pdf
Hartmann, Heidi (1997), The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More
Progressive Union, In Linda Nicholson (Ed.), The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist
Theory, (pp. 97-122), Routledge: New York.
Halperin, David M. (1997), Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford University
Press: USA.
Heath, Stephen (1992), Flaubert: Madame Bovary, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Herndl, Daniel Price (1997), Desire, In Robyn R. Warhol & Diane Price Herndl (Eds.),
Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, , Rutgers University Press:
New Jersey.
Hill, B. (2013), Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology, Routledge: Oxon.
Hunter, J. Paul (1990), Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English
Fiction, W.W. Norton & Company: New York.
Kelly, Mark G. E. (2009), The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault, Routledge: London.
________________ (2013), Foucault’s History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Vol.1,
Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh.
Lacan, J. (2006), Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, (Trans. Bruce Fink), W.W.
Norton & Company: New York; London.
________ (2001), Ecrits: A Selection, (Trans. Alan Sheridan), Routledge: New York; London.
Lipking, L. & Monk, S. H. (2000), The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, In M. H.
Abrams & Stephen Greenbalt (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume
1, 7th ed., W.W. Norton Company: United States of America.
Lipman-Blumen, Jean (1976), Toward a Homosocial Theory of Sex Roles: An explanation of
the Sex Segregation of Social Institutions, Signs, 1(3), 15-31.
89
O’Connor, Pat (1992), Friendships between Women: A Critical Review, Harvester Wheatsheaf:
Hertfordshire.
Percy, Carol (2009), “Learning and Virtue: English Grammar and the Eighteenth Century Girls’
School”, In Mary Hilton & Jill Shefrin (Eds.), Educating the Child in Enlightenment
Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices, Ashgate Publishing: England.
Plato (1994), Symposium, (Trans. Robin Waterfield), Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Porter, Roy and Roberts, Marie Mulvey (Eds.) (1996), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, New
York University Press: New York.
Porter, Roy (1990), English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin Books: London.
__________ (1994), London: A Social History, Hamish Hamilton: London.
Roulston, Chris (2010), Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France,
Ashgate Publishing: England.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire, Columbia University Press: New York.
Taylor, E. Derek (2009), Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and ‘The
Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton’, Ashgate Publishing Limited: England.
Todd, Janet (1980), Women’s Friendship in Literature, Columbia University Press: New York.
URL, “Jasmine Flower Meaning” (n.d.), http://flowermeaning.com/jasmine-flower-meaning/
(20.03.2017)
URL, “What is the Meaning of Honeysuckle Flower?” (n.d.),
https://www.ehow.com/facts_6754712_meaning-honeysuckle-flower_.html (20.03.2017)
Verini, Alexandra (2016), Medieval Models of Female Friendship in Christine de Pizan’s The
Book of the City of Ladies and Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe, Feminist
Studies, 42(2), 365-391.
90
Review Article
Autobiographical Elements in Behn’s Oroonoko, Shelley’s

Frankenstein and Woolf’s Orlando
Sinem Çapar1
Ege University
sinem929292@gmail.com
APA Citation:
Çapar, S. (2019). Autobiographical Elements in Behn’s Oroonoko, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Woolf’s
Orlando. Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 7(12), 91-97.
Abstract
Biographies are classified as diverse kinds of the genre that is combined with various elements. Aphra Behn’s
Oroonoko, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Aphra Behn becomes the first professional
woman writer, Mary Shelley is considered to be the foremother of science fiction and gothic genre, finally pioneer
feminist writer Virginia Woolf created a fictional, gender-bending biography that paid tribute to the British
literature. These three significant women writers have become pioneers throughout three centuries. This article
reviews the autobiographical elements in Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818) and Woolf’s Orlando (1928) considering the sociocultural backgrounds of each period in
Britain as well as regarding the authors’ contributions to the British literary canon.
Keywords: Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, women writers, autobiography
Introduction
In order to understand and analyze the Western literary canon, one needs to comprehend
the importance of the life writing as a genre and as a concept. Life writing developed within
different aspects of literary methods and ideas. The first literary texts which are biographical
are sagas of the great kings and heroes like Hercules or Odysseus from early history. These
heroic epics are intended to inspire and warn others while memorizing the past and illuminate
the present, which becomes a reflective aspect of biography or historical writing (Glendinning
1994). Since, until the end of the seventeenth century, biography as a genre was considered to
be a part of history. But in the contemporary literary understanding, biography is classified as
a diverse genre that is combined with various elements in it. This article intends to analyze the
autobiographical elements in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) while considering
1
Research Assistant, Department of English Language and Literature, Ege University, Faculty of Letters,
Department of English Language and Literature, 35040, İzmir, Turkey.
Autobiographical Elements in Behn’s Oroonoko, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Woolf’s Orlando
the sociocultural backgrounds of each period in Britain and their writers as a woman and their
contributions to the British literary canon.
1.1. Historical and Theoretical Background
Before analyzing these three literary works, it is important to explain the chief
characteristics and examples of the life writing so as the biography. According to Ira B. Nadel
in the article “Narrative and the Popularity of Biography”, biography uses fiction as a medium
in order to arrange and present the material as a work of art: “Biography is a veritable fiction.
One can confirm its facts through documents and records but the arrangement and presentation
of material is often impelled by fictional, i.e., novelistic, impulses” (Nadel 1987). For instance,
in order to give a brief example of life writing, the memoirs are records of events and the
incidents are recorded according to a person’s own life or of a person whom he or she has
known. It is different from an autobiography because it is less formally organized. Life writing
uses materials like letters, reminiscences, journals and diaries in order to narrate the text. The
written story as an autobiography or a biography requires a certain period of time and a definite
person as the main character in the text. As an another example of one of the sub-genres of life
writing, mock biography is defined as an imitation of life while using biographical methods and
creating make-believe autobiographies or biographies. In the “Glossary of Terms in Life-
Writing by Donald J. Winslow, Part II”, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is defined as the
most remarkable example of a mock biography because it ridicules traditional methods of
biographical techniques. (Winslow 1978). On the other hand, according to Victoria
Glendinning in her article “Biography: Choice and Gender” Woolf’s Orlando can be considered
as a fantastical biography, which is an inspired flight of a love-letter to Vita Sackville West
(Glendinning 1994).
In the article entitled “Reading in the Content Areas: Fictionalized Biographies and
Diaries for Social Studies” by Dee. C. Storey, it is asserted that fictional presentation of
biographical texts or diaries of a real person which is narrated in the first person narration,
brings history to life on a more personal level than other nonfiction materials. Accuracy and
authenticity becomes the main concerns in these representations and the first person narration
is used as a medium for creating an air of reality and intimacy while the third person narration
creates a distance in literary works which used biographical elements in the text (Storey 1982).
Writerly authenticity requires transcending the boundaries between the self and the other and
as a reader, one reads biographical works their own perspectives concerning the context of the
period that includes the belief systems, prejudices, limitations of gender and age. This kind of
biographical reading becomes reflexive and reflective because it includes these limitations of
different periods or different people whom understand biographical elements in various
meanings. While the writer narrates the biographical elements in the text, he or she actually
investigates the society’s ideological subtext and searches for a meaning of the self and the
other in that sense. Because, once a reader begins to read a book which has biographical
elements in it, he or she begins to realize the dynamics of society that is similar or different to
his or her own ideological background (Glendinning 1994).
2.1. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave. A True Story
According to Ina Schabert, both factual and fictional biographies are made up, thus they
both can be considered as fictions. They both base their plot on biographical facts but fictional
92
Sinem Çapar /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
biographies “create” lives from facts like Woolf’s Orlando while the author of the factual
biography emphasizes the biographical data and particularity of actual events (1982,7-9).
Factual autobiographical elements can be traced in Aphra Behn’s short novel Oronooko: or,
the Royal Slave. A True History (1688). Oronooko is published in the second part of the
seventeenth century during the Glorious Revolution or Bloodless Revolution in Britain. During
the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, the king James II was dethroned. His protestant daughter
Mary and her husband William of Orange became the successors of the British throne with the
joint monarchy who were crowned as Mary II and William III. This revolution symbolizes one
of the keystones in the British political history since it remarks the victory of the Protestant
opposed to Catholic succession. Moreover, during her lifetime Aphra Behn was considered to
be a spy for Charles II. Josephine Donovan in her book Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-
1726 reminds the reader what Virginia Woolf said about Aphra Behn in A Room of One’s Own:
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn…for it was she
who earned them the right to speak their minds” (Woolf 1957, p. 91) and concludes that Aphra
Behn was the first professional woman writer in English who certainly becomes a pioneer for
the English women’s literary tradition (1957, p. 91).
On the other hand, in order to begin analyzing the autobiographical elements in the
Oronooko, one needs to look Behn’s text itself. In Vernon Guy Dickson’s article “Truth,
Wonder, and Exemplarity in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”, Dickson searches for a truth within
Behn’s work and claims that Behn emphasized the importance of recording the history of a
great man like Prince Oronokoo whose character can be served as a medium for showing the
ideal example for “nobleness” and “heroism”. That is the reason, Behn recommends Prince
Oroonoko to her sponsor due to his exemplary personality (1988, pp. 573-575):
This is a true Story, of a Man Gallant enough to merit your Protection; and, had he
always been so Fortunate, he had not made so Inglorious an end: The Royal Slave I had
the Honor to know in my Travels to the other World; and though I had none above me
in that Country, yet I wanted power to preserve this Great Man. (p. 3)
While narrating this “true” story as becoming an “eye-witness” (p. 4) of it, Behn shares
both factual details and moral description of the truth as a concept. She uses the truth to
transcend the actual meaning of it and creates a fictional meaning which serves for her moralist
and royalist perspective. She gives references from the society she lived in as she mentions
“England’s withdrawal from Suriname in 1667” and describes the culture and people vividly in
the colony (Dickson 2007).
Furthermore, her vivid descriptions of the colony and the British society she lived in
raised a question about the autobiographical elements of Oroonoko. Similarly, Robert L. Chibka
asks a question about Aphra Behn’s life’s impact on Oronooko in his article "Oh! Do Not Fear
a Woman's Invention": Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko": “Do we in
the twentieth century so fear the presence of a woman’s invention that the autobiographical
basis of a work of fiction takes on moral overtones none would think to apply to the product of
a man’s invention?” (1988, p. 512). Chibka continues his argument that Behn’s situation can
be regarded as the reflection of the sexism in the career choices in woman who dared to write
as a professional writer. Chibka also mentions Virginia Woolf’s so as the second wave
feminists’ focus on Aphra Behn who tries to find a precursor of a strong woman of letters in
the English literary canon. So, Aphra Behn as a professional woman writer becomes a
93
storyteller who draws a general description for the mixed kind of colonial society while the men
from the colonies were in charge with religious matter and administration. The autobiographical
elements in Oroonoko are apparent, since this work of art is critically argued for a long time,
whether it is real or not and the literary critics and the historians use this short novel as a source
for understanding Aphra Behn’s period as it is argued in the article “ ‘Others’, Slaves, and
Colonists in Oroonoko" in the Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn: “While Behn scholars
argued for decades about whether Oroonoko was based on first-hand experience, historians
drew on its passages as a valuable collateral source” (Lipking 2006, p. xvii).
2.2 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Secondly, similar to Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley becomes another important woman
writer in the British literary canon who lives nearly after one and a half century later. Shelley’s
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) can be considered as an another example of
a literary work which has autobiographical elements in it. Rebecca Baumann in her book
Frankenstein 200: the Birth, Life, and Resurrection of Mary Shelley’s Monster describes
Frankenstein as Shelley’s “own entirely unique intellectual child” in which she combined
various elements of different genres like autobiography, travelogue, ghost stories etc. :
Mary Shelley, almost from her birth, was a voracious reader, and Frankenstein is a mad
experiment of piecing together autobiography, travelogue, ghost stories, folklore, and
sorts of science, philosophy, and poetry that she had read, discussed with her circle of
eccentric friends, digested, and repurposed into her own entirely unique intellectual
child. (p. xvii)
So, considering this quotation above, it can be derived that Mary Shelley similar to
Aphra Behn, becomes a pioneer literary figure who dared to write in the literary field which
was generally male-dominated. Shelley wrote Frankenstein in an early age of twenty-one and
she felt inadequate as a writer. The first and the most important autobiographical element in her
novel is the parallel between herself and the monster itself. As she expressed in the
“Introduction" of Frankenstein that her husband can embassy his ideas with a brilliant imagery
and well-adorned language, but she produced a work which is her “hideous progeny”. Similarly,
Devon Hodges in her article “Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel” asserts
that Shelley’s inadequacy is embodied in the monster: “But the monster becomes the one who
is neither fully inside nor outside the culture while feeling the misery of it. Like Shelley herself,
the monster does not desire to be a rebel, they both desire to conform to the expectations of
society” (1983, p. 161). Likewise, throughout her lifetime, Mary Shelley as a woman in a
patriarchal society, tried to be accepted as a person since being a woman equates being an alien,
a monster or the other. She was a woman writer who also felt the monstrous burden of being an
alien in the literary field, that is the reason Shelley’s novel challenges the privileged position
of the man in the patriarchal system, but it also narrates the anxiety of a woman like Shelley
who tries to take a part in this alien system (1983, pp. 160-163).
As an another important autobiographical element, Nora Crook in her article “Mary

Shelley, Author of Frankenstein” in A New Companion to the Gothic discusses the importance
of the family relations throughout Mary Shelley’s lifetime and its effect on Frankenstein. As
both her parents are important literary figures, social philosopher and novelist William Godwin
and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, she felt the pressure of being related to Godwin and
94
Shelley family. Her mother died after giving birth to her, similar to the monster in the book,
she was an orphan. In the book, also Walton’s sister whose name is Margot Walton Saville has
the same initials as the author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The monster’s first victim is named
as William, who has the same first name as her father, her infant son and her half-brother. Also,
Mary Shelley’s first baby died prematurely and there are parallels between Victor’s revision on
Walton’s ship and Mary Shelley’s real dream of snuggling her dead baby by the fire and trying
to bring the baby back to life (2012, pp. 111-112). To sum up, Mary Shelley’s own alienation
as a woman, writer, her orphanage, miscarriages and her dead children affects her writing in
Frankenstein that is the reason the reader can trace the autobiographical elements in the plot.
2.3. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando A Biography (1928)
Finally, it is my intention to analyze Virginia Woolf, similar to Aphra Behn and Mary
Shelley, who becomes one of the pioneers of British literary canon as a woman writer in the
twentieth century. She was an exceptional writer who used stream of consciousness as a
modernist writer and throughout her lifetime, she was a devout advocate of feminism and
androgyny of the human mind. She used androgyny and the gender fluidity as a medium to
create her fictional autobiography Orlando: A Biography (1928). In her book Writer’s Diary,
Woolf herself explained the reason behind the writing process of Orlando:
Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering, impulse. I want
fun. I want fantasy. I want (and this was serious) to give things their caricature value.
And still this mood hangs about me. I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the
women's movement, in the same vein. The vein is deep in meat least sparkling, urgent.
(p. 134)
Considering this quotation, it can be derived that Woolf attempted to create a

carnivalesque atmosphere in the book while creating her own fun and fantasy. She used British
history as the setting in the plot and the reader traces nearly three-hundred-year period of
Britain, which includes Renaissance, Enlightenment,Victorian period and Edwardian Era.
In Orlando, Woolf uses parody, irony and her text has metafictional elements. The text
consciously forces the reader to question the patriarchal narratives and its values both in fact
and fiction. While creating Orlando as an example of a fantastic biography, Woolf used definite
autobiographical elements from her lover Vita Sackville-West’s history. For instance, in the
book, the male biographer sees a portrait of Sackville-West and he observes Orlando’s shapely
legs, handsome body and candid face while feeling lucky for finding such a captivating subject
to narrate (Boehm 1992):
Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such
a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From
deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following
after, till they reach what ever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando,
to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. (p. 14-15)
In Orlando, Woolf parodies the traditions of biography while questioning gender

conventions in this tradition which limits the historical biography to the male gender. In the
plot, the protagonist is male until the end of the seventeenth century. Orlando’s sex change can
be a symbol for “the entrance of women into the literary canon” as Gubar and Gilbert asserted
95
(qtd. in Boehm 1992). This experimental biography is based on Woolf’s life, especially her
lesbian partner Vita Sackville-West while Woolf experiences the different style of writing of
the life of a man and that of a woman (Wiley 2004). To sum up, in the book, the reader
experiences the fluidity of gender identities while Woolf subverts the dominant male tradition
in the fictional biography. As she noted in A Room of One’s Own that “biography is too much
about great men,” she subverts androcentric paradigms in this literary tradition while using her
lesbian lover’s life.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, these three significant women writers have become pioneers throughout
three centuries in the British literary canon. They used autobiographical elements in their
works: Behn’s Oroonoko, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Woolf’s Orlando while struggling to
survive in a patriarchal society and they tried to raise their own unique voices as authors. Aphra
Behn, Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf’s fictional and gender-bending biographies still
encourage and spirit women through their personal development as well as contributing to the
British literarary canon.
References
Baumann, R. & Mitchell, J. (2018). Frankenstein 200: the birth, life, and resurrection of Mary
Shelley's monster. Indiana University Press.
Behn, A. (1988). Oroonoko, or, the royal slave: a critical edition. Adelaide P. Amore (Ed.), U
P of America.
Boehm, B. A. (1992). “Fact, fiction, and metafiction: Blurred gen(d)res in ‘Orlando’ and ‘A
Room of One's Own.’” (pp. 191–204). The Journal of Narrative Technique. 22, (3).
Chibka, R. L. (1988). “‘Oh! do not fear a woman's invention’: Truth, falsehood, and fiction in
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko.”(pp. 510–537). Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 30,
(4). Retrived from www.jstor.org/stable/40754873.
Crook, N. (2012). “Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.”(pp. 110–122) A New Companion to
the Gothic. doi:10.1002/9781444354959.ch7.
Dickson, V. G. (2007).“Truth, wonder, and exemplarity in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko.”(pp. 573 -
594)SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. 47, (3). doi:10.1353/sel2007.0024.
Donovan, J. (2013).“The nineties generation: A feminist prosaics” (pp. 79–95). Women and the
Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726. Palgrave Macmillan.
Glendinning, V. (1994, May). “Biography: Choice and gender.” (pp. 63-72). RSA Journal, 142,
5449. Retrived from www.jstor.org/stable/41376456.
Hodges, D. (1983, October).“Frankenstein and the feminine subversion of the novel.” (pp. 155-
164) Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2 (2).
Lipking, J. (2006) “‘Others’, slaves, and colonists in Oroonoko” (pp.166-188). The Cambridge
Companion to Aphra Behn. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd (Ed.), Cambridge U P.
96
Nadel, I. (1987). B. “Narrative and the popularity of biography.” (pp.131-141). Mosaic: An

Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. 20 (4). Retrieved from
www.jstor.org/stable/24777653.
Schabert, I. (1982). “Fictional biography, factual biography, and their contaminations.”
Biography. (pp.1-16). 5 (1). doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0805.
Shelley, M. W. & Hunter J. P. Frankenstein. (2012). W.W. Norton.
Storey, D. C. (1982, April). “Reading in the content Areas: Fictionalized biographies and
diaries for social studies.” (pp. 796–798). The Reading Teacher. 3 (7). Retrieved from
www.jstor.org/stable/20198101.
Wiley, C. (2004, August). “‘When a woman speaks the truth about her body’: Ethel Smyth,
Virginia Woolf, and the challenges of lesbian auto/biography.” (pp. 388-414). Music and
Letters, 85( 3, 1). doi:10.1093/ml/85.3.388.
Winslow, D. J. (1978). “Glossary of terms in life-writing, part II.” (pp.61–85). Biography, 1
(2). doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0215.
Woolf, V. (1957). A room of one's own: Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Woolf, V. (1975). A writer's diary. The Hogarth Press.
Woolf, V. (1998). Orlando. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
97
Review Article
Depiction of Sensuous Beauty and Love in Marlowe’s Hero and

Leander
Kübra Baysal1
Dr., School of Foreign Languages, Yildirim Beyazit University,

kbaysal@ybu.edu.tr
APA Citation:
Baysal, K. (2019). Depiction of Sensuous Beauty and Love in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Journal of
Abstract
Inspired by ancient poets through his Renaissance education, Christopher Marlowe recounts the story of two
youthful lovers, Hero and Leander, in his titular work. Mainly focusing on the sensuous beauty and sexual naivety
of the lovers, the poem accentuates the importance of physical appearance and the concepts of love, morality as
well as fate in the Renaissance tradition. Preserving the original story in the romantic part of the poem, Marlowe
indeed makes some alterations in the details and leaves the story unfinished which is completed by George
Chapman after Marlowe’s death with the addition of the tragic part. Within this context, referring to Greek
mythology and noted Roman poets, Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” displays a love story carved out
as a combination of the ancient corpus and the Renaissance values, which eventually puts forward a new approach
to the well-known romantic story.
Keywords: Renaissance love tradition, Christopher Marlowe, Greek mythology
“Hero and Leander” is a reinterpretation of the original love story from Greek
mythology from the distinct perspective of the Renaissance poet and playwright, Christopher
Marlowe. It reflects the romantic beginning and the tragic ending of the love story involving
two young lovers fighting for their love against all odds.
The poem starts with the praise of the lovers’ beauty. Hero is a virgin and a nun in the
service of Venus enchanting all males in her city, Sestos, which is a strait on one side of
Hellespont. On the other side, Leander is a very handsome youth living on the other side of
Hellespont, Abydos, stirring up emotions in both males and females. Hero and Leander see one
another during a festival dedicated to Adonis, Venus’s lover and fall in love instantly thanks to
an arrow of love shot by Cupid as follows:
1
Ayvalı Mahallesi, Gazze Caddesi No:7, 06010 Etlik-Keçiören/Ankara
98
Depiction of Sensuous Beauty and Love in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander
And in the midst a silver altar stood,

There Hero sacrificing turtles blood,
Vaild to the ground, vailing her eie-lids close,
And modestly they opened as she rose:
Thence flew Loves arrow with the golden head,
And thus Leander was enamoured. (2006, I, 157-62)
However, Leander cannot convince Hero to leave her sacred life and to quit her vow of
chastity to Venus. Hence, Hero goes home to her tower alone whereas Leander has to go across
the water to Abydos. When Leander’s father sees him, he realises that Leander has fallen in
love and forbids him from seeing Hero again, which pushes Leander to swim across the sea to
meet Hero once again. Nevertheless, he is taken by Neptune in the sea as he mistakes him for
Ganymede, the beauteous youth and cupbearer to Zeus, and instantly desires to keep him for
himself. As he sees that Leander is indeed a mortal who is about to be drowned, Neptune brings
Leander back to the surface and saves him although he harasses him to be his lover afterwards.
Leander manages to escape from Neptune and appears in front of Hero’s room. Seeing a naked
and dripping wet Leander, Hero is both surprised and embarrassed. She tries to hide from him
in her bed, but she is soon convinced to bring him inside the bed to keep him warm through the
success of Leander’s eloquence (Cantelupe 1963, 296). In the bed, they are indulged in the acts
of love although Hero is reluctant to leave her virginity. At last, they are overpowered by their
emotions and decide to consummate their love. At this point, Leander’s convincing
argumentation and Hero’s own internal conflicts lead them to the passionate side of love
(Norwood 1950, 9). As the dawn breaks, Leander must return his home swimming across the
sea while he is expected by an angry and disappointed Neptune. These incidents comprise the
romantic part of the poem composed by Marlowe. Furthermore, in Chapman’s part, as Leander
swims towards Sestos another night after many nights with Hero, he cannot see the lamp which
is supposed to be lit by Hero each night to guide him towards his destination, he is taken by the
stormy sea and gets drowned. Seeing Leander’s dead body, Hero joins him and the poem ends
in a tragic way.
As mentioned earlier, the poem consists of two main parts, written by Christopher
Marlowe and George Chapman. The division is made by Chapman after Marlowe’s death. The
poem is generally considered a fragment due to the original myth itself, which is exemplary for
the following works. Thus, it is assumed that the poem should have a tragic ending, not a
romantic one as observed in Marlowe’s part. Chapman’s part is sometimes criticised for being
overtly didactic and his “sestiads” are found faulty in terms of style (Sinkhorn 1966, 1). For
many modern critics, the two-part structure presents two contemporary possibilities for the
ending of the poem and two different styles. Besides, it is discussed that Marlowe might have
deliberately left the poem in a romantic mood and never finished it to evade the gloomy end of
the story (Campbell 1984, 242, 247). Another perspective about the romantic part of the poem
which belongs to Marlowe is that he possibly made use of the romantic tradition as part of his
satire. His intention is “to satirize a literary world of overdone, romantic distortions of life”
through the use of humour and mockery (Lenihan 1969, 27).
As per the style of the poem, it is made up of sestiads referring to Sestos, similar to the
Iliads referring to Ilium in the Iliad. The love story which first appears in Virgil’s Georgics in
European literature is later adapted by Ovid and Musaeus (Ovid 1996, 10). However, some
Renaissance scholars argue that Marlowe’s version is more purified and distinct from the earlier
versions. As C.S. Lewis states, Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” surpasses other poems handling
99
Kübra Baysal / /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
the Greek myth, as a superior Ovidian work, even more successful than Shakespeare’s Venus
and Adonis (Cheney 2004, 11). Impressed by Ovid and Musaeus, Marlowe succeeds to adapt
their styles with significant changes and renewals. In this respect, Marlowe’s part of the poem
is considered more novel and innovative than Chapman’s part through their distinct styles:
After studying Hero and Leander, however, one would have to conclude that the
appeal of the classics was different for Marlowe and Chapman. Captivated by the
pagan joyousness and erotic playfulness of Ovid's Amores, Marlowe clearly had
these same Ovldian characteristics in mind when writing Hero and Leander.
Chapman, on the other hand, was drawn more to the restraint and desire for order
typical of the classical mind. (Sinkhorn 1966, 90-91)
In the same line, although the theme of the original myth is tragic, its manner is comic,
which is utilised by Marlowe in the first part of the poem to add sensuousness and “erotic
sensibility” in a way Renaissance literature has never included (Cantelupe 1963, 298).
Furthermore, Marlowe dwells on the beauty inspired from the classical atmosphere of Musaeus’
poem. Therefore, in the early parts of “Hero and Leander”, Marlowe clarifies his source of
inspiration as follows: “Amorous Leander, beautiful and young/ Whose tragedy divine Musaeus
sung” (I, 50-51). Nevertheless, Musaeus is impressed by Homer’s form himself, which once
again underlines the Greek origin and aspects of Marlowe’s poem (Norwood 1950, 15).
To illustrate more on the Ovidian influence in Marlowe’s poem, Marlowe makes use of
the Ovidian eroticism and calls forth a fresh perspective into the poem. He is highly impressed
by Ovid’s works, especially Amores, which draws parallelism with his “Hero and Leander”
(Bush 1929, 760). Marlowe is known to have translated the work when he was a student.
Although he refers to the erotic quality of Ovid’s work he manages to achieve a nice balance
between sensuality and conciseness in the poem, which brings about an almost Chaucerian
narrative (Cubeta 1965, 505). In and in-between the lines, there are layers of meanings
foreshadowing the future incidents as seen in the physical depiction of Leander and the
assumption that he shall be loved or desired by others aside from Hero (Heaney 1992, 37): “His
body was as straight as Circe's wand;/ Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand./ Even
as delicious meat is to the taste,” (I, 61-63). Then again, Marlowe utilises Ovid’s ekphrasis in
the description of Venus’ glass which displays the ancient tradition and importance of the work
of art and the artist (Mitsi 2007, 2, 9). Besides, Marlowe utilises physical descriptions and
sensuous beauty in the Ovidian fashion and cherishes the imagistic aspect of the Roman poetry.
Yet, he emphasises Hero’s clothes more than her body, which differs from the Ovidian tradition
(I, 9-14). The depiction of clothes yet serves for another purpose as it refers to another love
story, the myth of Venus and Adonis. Another difference seen in Marlowe’s poem is his stress
on sexuality and morality at the same time. He displays Hero and Leander’s passion for one
another, which is already prophesied at the beginning of the poem as something ill-omened
through the line “true love’s blood” (I, 32). Thus, Marlowe’s poem stands aloof when compared
to Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses in terms of eroticism (Cubeta 1965, 504). Finally,
“Hero and Leander” is distinct from Ovid’s works as it also appreciates the beauty of a man,
rather than a woman, which demonstrates homoeroticism. Through the use of a classical myth,
the poem pictures beautiful boys and men desired by other men and gods (Mitsi 2007, 9).
Marlowe expresses how Leander affects other men in these lines underscoring his beauty:
[h]ad wild Hippolytus Leander seen,

Enamour'd of his beauty had he been:
His presence made the rudest peasant melt,
100
That in the vast uplandish country dwelt;

The barbarous Thracian soldier, mov'd with nought,
Was mov'd with him, and for his favour sought.
Some swore he was a maid in man's attire,
For in his looks were all that men desire. (I, 77-84)
Accordingly, sensuous beauty is another issue Marlowe lays emphasis in the poem as a
Renaissance poet. Renaissance Period defines, universalises and exalts beauty in the most
abstract and general terms, and promotes the “worship of the body” (Pater 1980, 4). Similarly,
the lovers, Hero and Leander are both described beautiful and appealing to the eye. It is through
this physical perfectness that the romantic and the following tragic story of the poem can leave
such a deep impact on the reader. Marlowe justifies the concept of “love at first sight” through
lovers’ beauty and physically attractive characteristics (I, 167-174) and underlines the
significance of sight in love. Along with beauty and sight, possibility of generation and creation
through their relationship is also implied in the “Neoplatonic justification of physical love”
(Walsh 1972, 38). Hero’s beauty is exhibited in a portrait in which she is mistaken for Venus
by Cupid for her excellent beauty:
Some say, for her the fairest Cupid pin'd,

And, looking in her face, was strooken blind.
But this is true; so like was one the other,
As he imagin'd Hero was his mother;
And oftentimes into her bosom flew,
About her naked neck his bare arms threw,
And laid his childish head upon her breast,
And, with still panting rock, there took his rest. (I, 37-44)
Cupid takes Hero for a mother and nestles in her bosom, which proves her beauty once
again and presents the suggestion that she shall be loved for her beauty soon. Her beauty is such
an asset that it places her on a level above the goddesses and makes her a more important person,
which is narrated by Musaeus in a likewise manner (Norwood 1950, 14). Even her ankles gleam
below her robe and she is depicted as such:
Nor that night−wandering, pale, and watery star

(When yawning dragons draw her thirling car
From Latmus' mount up to the gloomy sky,
Where, crown'd with blazing light and majesty,
She proudly sits) more over−rules the flood
Than she the hearts of those that near her stood. (I, 107-112)
Hero’s beauty is even more effective on those who have seen her even more so than
Cynthia, the moon goddess controlling the ebb and tide. In a way, she is likened or even
depicted to be superior to Cynthia herself. In the same line with Hero’s beauty, Leander is
depicted in a portrait parallel to Hero’s, which in a similar fashion links his beauty to Adonis’s
bisexual figure (Walsh 1972, 37). He is so beautiful that he is desired for “sexual sport” by
101
Cynthia and Jove. Cynthia wants him to be “her sphere” whereas Jove thinks of him as beautiful
as Ganymede, his cupbearer and desires to drink his “nectar from his hand” (I, 59-62). Likewise,
when Leander gets into the world of men, he arouses emotions in them and they are confused
about his sex and identity in the way Neptune was (Walsh 1972, 36). His body is depicted so
elaborately that Leander emerges as the embodiment of perfection and proportionate beauty
praised in the Renaissance culture:
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly;
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back; but my rude pen
Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men,
Much less of powerful gods: let it suffice
That my slack Muse sings of Leander's eyes;
Those orient cheeks and lips, exceeding his
That leapt into the water for a kiss
Of his own shadow, and, despising many,
Died ere he could enjoy the love of any. (I, 66-76)
Leander’s physical appearance is so overpowering that even the narrating persona feels
like his words and poetry cannot suffice to depict this beauty which has lured men and gods
alike. Furthermore, Leander despises most of his admirers and does not respond to their love
until he encounters Hero, a virgin fleeing away from his charms. He is unable to persuade Hero
to be his beloved in heart and flesh despite his beauty in body as well as shape and male strength.
However, it is through his eloquence that he succeeds in his plans. Through aphorisms, he
covers the truth and confuses Hero, who is already debating with herself about remaining a
virgin or not (Cantelupe 1963, 296). Similarly, the messenger god, Hermes puts forth a similar
situation. He falls in love with a shepherdess, tries to seduce her in the rough way, but gets
rejected. He tries to catch her roughly and scares her away. Right then, the shepherdess reminds
him that maids can be won only by pleasing words, not by force (I, 419-20). Thus it can be
safely argued that the rhetoric used by Leander and not-used by Hermes puts forth the power
of words and the importance of art in winning over the minds and hearts of people. It is through
Leander’s “self-representation” and words that Hero is able to understand and appreciate him
(Weaver 2008, 401).
In a similar vein, “Hero and Leander” portrays the erotic and sensuous side of love.
Even though some critics regard it as an escape from real life, eroticism is applied to the
narrative to create a pretext for the moralistic and comical/satirical parts of the poem (Miller
1953, 158). First of all, Hero is a nun worshipping Venus, which creates a comical atmosphere
and leads towards eroticism. In these parts, Marlowe plays with the “ltalianate-Ovidian
tradition” through mockery for satirical purposes (Lenihan 1969, 24). Likewise, because the
poem celebrates Eros and physical love, it demonstrates lovers’ transition from inexperience to
experience in the physical acts of love. In addition, the preciousness of Hero’s virginity is
symbolised with a fort to be climbed up and conquered by Leander. There are ambiguous erotic
indications about the fort and the jewels. In this respect, Hero’s virginity can be interpreted to
be as difficult to achieve as a high tower in which she lives and as precious as gems (Banerjee
1973, 49). So, Hero and Leander struggle over their emotions and resist one another’s beauty,
102
which depicts a situation referring to the Neo-platonic side of sexual love and the significance
of beauty. They are succumbed to passionate desire which is neither fruitful nor blessed.
Remarking the slight possibility of generation and the continuation of species as a result of the
physical acts of love, the poem pictures their first unification driven by their desires.
Nevertheless, they are rather inexperienced and naïve in sexual love as Hero has fashioned
herself as an unattainable lady in the service of Venus whereas Leander has been arrogant
towards love. Yet, soon after he discovers his feelings and convinces Hero for a sexual
relationship, which brings about comical scenes humanising them in the readers’ regard (Walsh
1972, 35).
Finally, emphasising the interference and importance of fate in humans’ lives, Marlowe
brings two contradicting forces into his poem: Fate and Love to create order out of chaos
(Braunmuller 1987, 60). Marlowe’s speaking persona points out the workings of fate as follows:
It lies not in our power to love, or hate,

For will in us is over-rul'd by fate.
When two are stript, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect.
The reason no man knows; let it suffice,
What we behold is censur'd by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight? (167-76)
Thus, it is fate that defines humans’ lives, gets to decide whoever wins or loses in life
and makes the ending of Hero and Leander’s love story. Since the beginning of the poem, Fate
foreshadows the doom of their love. Hero and Leander are vulnerable and weak in the face of
fate. In the beginning of the poem, it is denoted that Hero is one of a kind and she shall suffer
for this:
So lovely−fair was Hero, Venus' nun,

As Nature wept, thinking she was undone,
Because she took more from her than she left,
And of such wondrous beauty her bereft:
Therefore, in sign her treasure suffer'd wrack,
Since Hero's time hath half the world been black. (I, 44-50)
In these lines, it is emphasised that Hero is so beautiful that she has to compensate for
that with her doom and suffering. Moved by Fate and her own desires, Hero involves with
Leander and lights the lamp each night while Leander swims across the sea, which becomes
like a monotonous ritual of love. However, one night the light is extinguished by the stormy
wind and Leander is drowned by angry waves, which proves the intervention of fate (Norwood
1950, 9). His death is described in full detail and his fight to the bitter end is not a nice scene
to imagine. It is George Chapman, who opts for the tragic ending with the lovers’ death which
is already predicted in Marlowe’s part in the poem. In other words, as their story began, it was
103
already obvious that their end would be tragic (Tjarks 1981, 161): “On Hellespont, guilty of
true love's blood,/ In view and opposite two cities stood,” (I, 32-33). Even the place the lovers
consummate their love is associated with Acheron (I, 189), the river of pain in Greek
mythology, which once again notifies the lovers’ grievous story.
In conclusion, Christopher Marlowe makes a novel re-interpretation of the Greek myth,

“Hero and Leander” in his poem through accentuating sensuous beauty and erotic love along
with morality and the intervention of Fate. Setting forth the extremely beautiful couple and their
romantic involvement, he leaves the poem unfinished, which is taken over by Chapman with
his tragic ending, leaving the lovers devastated in the face of Fate for their extreme charms and
passionate desires. Chapman’s addition keeps the poem true to its origin whereas Marlowe’s
account posits the poem among the most accomplished versions of the story.
References:
Banerjee, C. 1973. “‘Hero and Leander’ as Erotic Comedy” The Journal of Narrative
Technique, Vol. 3, No. 1: 40-52.
Braunmuller, A. R. 1987. “Marlowe's Amorous Fates in Hero and Leander” The Review of
English Studies, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 113: 56-61.
Bush, D. 1929. “Notes on Marlowe's Hero and Leander” PMLA, Vol. 44, No. 3: 760-764.
Campbell, M. 1984. “’Desunt Nonnulla’: The Construction of Marlowe's Hero and Leander as
an Unfinished Poem” ELH, Vol. 51, No. 2: 241-268.
Cantelupe, E. B. 1963. “Hero and Leander, Marlowe’s Tragicomedy of Love” College English,
Vol. 24, No. 4: 295-298.
Cheney, P. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge University
Press.
Cubeta, P. M. 1965. “Marlowe's Poet in Hero and Leander” College English, Vol. 26, No. 7:
500-505.
Heaney, S. 1992. An Oxford Lecture: On Christopher Marlowe's “Hero and Leander” Harvard
Review, No. 1: 35-39.
Lenihan, W. S. 1969. “Marlowe's Hero and Leander: theme and form” Retrospective Theses
and Dissertations. 16091. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/16091
Marlowe, C. 2006. “Hero and Leander” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th
Edition, Volume 2, 1004-1022. New York, London: Norton.
Miller, P. W. 1953. “A Function of Myth in Marlowe's ‘Hero and Leander’” Studies in
Philology, Vol. 50, No. 2: 158-167.
Mitsi, E. 2007. “Violent Acts and Ovidian Artifacts in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander” Classical
and Modern Literature, Vol. 27 No. 2: 1-16.
Norwood, F. 1950. “Hero and Leander” Phoenix, Vol. 4, No. 1: 9-20.
Pater, W. 1980. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: the 1893 Text. London: University
of California Press.
104
Sinkhorn, J. B. 1966. “Comparative study of Marlowe's and Chapman's Hero and Leander”
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/1847
Ovid. 1996. Heroides XVI-XXI. (ed. E.J. Kenney). Cambridge University Press.
Tjarks, L. 1981. “Tragic Fate in Marlowe and Chapman’s Hero and Leander” BRNO Studies in
English, Vol. 14.
Walsh, W. P. 1972. “Sexual Discovery and Renaissance Morality in Marlowe’s ‘Hero and
Leander’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 12, No. 1, The English
Renaissance: 33-54.
Weaver, W. P. 2008. “Marlowe's Fable: ‘Hero and Leander’ and the Rudiments of Eloquence”
Studies in Philology, Vol. 105, No. 3: 388-408.
105
Review Article
The Oriental Phobia: A Postcolonial Reading of The Thing About

Thugs
Mustafa Büyükgebiz*
Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University

mustafa.buyukgebiz@alanya.edu.tr
APA Citation:
Büyükgebiz, M. (2019). The Oriental Phobia: A Postcolonial Reading of The Thing About Thugs. Journal of
Abstract
European Enlightenment created such categories as ‘civilized vs. uncivilized’ or ‘west vs. non-west’. With
European colonial expansion, these ideas were identified, expanded and reworked. Colonial enterprises of
European nations generated stereotypes of outsiders and some characteristics were attributed to these groups of
‘others’ such as laziness, aggression, violence, greed, sexual promiscuity, bestiality, primitivism, innocence and
irrationality*. Thus, postcolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha refer to the
colonized as the colonial other. Tabish Khair mainly focuses on some of widely debated subjects of Postcolonial
Literary Theory such as otherness, identity and discontent in colonized cultures. In this sense, his novels provide
a perfect basis to analyse and understand the psychology of the colonized immigrants and their discontent. To put
it in a nutshell, with the help of postcolonial studies, this paper will study the concepts of discontent, anarchy,
otherness, and ethnic and religious terror by focusing on the “colonized” characters appeared in Tabish Khair’s
2010 novel; The Thing About Thugs. By the same token, theoretical and narrative reflections of postcolonialism
will be explored in the novel.
Keywords: Postcolonialism, otherness, discontent, discrimination
Through the history of mankind, there have always been oppressors and oppressed.
According to Marxist understanding of class and race, the struggle is inevitable and the story
of mankind has been shaped by these clashes of societies and social classes. Marx and Engels
referred to this situation in The Communist Manifesto by pointing out that “the history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx & Engels, 2018). In this respect,
it is also sensible to hold the issue of postcolonial discontents from a Marxist point of view.
However, Marxism is sometimes seen as insufficient to understand race and gender oppressions
since it mostly focuses on class distinctions and analyses them by means of production and
reproduction. Thus, Race, Gender and Class (RGC) studies widen this perspective and make it
available to analyse racial and gender oppressions from a Marxist point of view, and it is
*
Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, School of Foreign Languages, Kestel Campus, 07450, Antalya, Turkey.
106
The Oriental Phobia: A Postcolonial Reading of The Thing About Thugs
believed that “it would contribute to raise awareness about the reality and the importance of
class and the extent to which neither racial nor gender oppression can be understood in isolation
from the realities of class exploitation” (Gimenez, 2001)
In this respect, the aim of this article is to analyse Tabish Khair’s The Thing about Thugs
and Night of Happiness in terms of class conflict, colonial and postcolonial representations of
class identity and identity crisis by referring to specific quotations from the novels and
theoretical discussions about the issue. The Thing about Thugs will be read from the
perspectives of racial and class identities and racial otherness. The work will also refer to some
theoretical issues like how class and racial identities are constructed by tracing supports and
evidences in the aforementioned novel.
The Thing about Thugs, which was first published in 2010, is a novel set in the late-Victorian
London. The narration of the novel constitutes a series of notes and writings by the characters.
The plot story begins in a Bihari village in the colonized lands of ‘Hindoostan’. Captain T.
Meadows searches for local men with skull deficiencies to develop his phrenological researches
back home in England and comes across with Amir Ali, an exposed member of a Thugee cult.
Amir Ali changes his identity and pretends to be a Thug to escape from family enemies.
Thugee is an ancient traditional way of robbing wealthy travellers in the vast lands of India by
winning their trust and offering shelter. It has its own customs that are passed on to sons from
fathers. It appears to the colonial forces as an opportunity to legalize their claims about the
inferior and savage nature of the colonized and they use it to prove their superiority by using
so-called scientific methods of phrenology, or the study of human skull and its effects on human
behavioural attitudes in other words.
In the nineteenth century -when the novel’s plot is also set - the dominant scientific theory of
studying biology was Lamarckian that is “based on the assumption that organisms actively
adapt to their environments by acquiring characteristics (both physical and behavioural) that
over a period of time become inherited” (Paul, 1981). This out-of-fashion scientific tendency
of the nineteenth century should be taken into account seriously since it is vital to understand
racial attitudes of the time and how they legitimize racism. These Lamarckian assumptions on
acquiring physical and behavioural characteristics propose that people and communities living
in both cultural and natural ‘poor’ environments are destined to pass this ‘poverty’ on their next
generations. Thus, over centuries, these communities face biological degenerations that reflect
their cultural and natural poverty. This nineteenth century assumption leads us to the idea that
“a consistent Lamarckian interpretation implied that all deprived populations, including the
proletariat, would be genetically lamed” (Paul, 1981).
In the novel, Lamarckism shows itself in the form of a pseudoscientific branch; phrenology. It
became quite popular as ‘a new scientific branch’ through the first half of the nineteenth century
and “since 1823, the number of phrenological societies had grown from one to twenty-four”
(Parssinen, 1974: 1). There was a strong enthusiasm among upper-class and young scholars of
the time. The reason of such enthusiasm may be hidden in the description of phrenology.
The basis of phrenology is the belief that psychological characteristics of an

individual are determined by the size and proportion of controlling organs in the
brain. A person with a highly-developed 'veneration' organ, for example, will
probably be extremely religious. Furthermore, the size of these organs can be
discovered by noting the shape of the skull and, especially, any protuberances, since
the cranium corresponds closely to the shape of the brain beneath. Consequently,
107
Mustafa Büyükgebiz /Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12
an individual's character can be discovered from a careful examination of his head.

(Parssinen, 1974)
This new type of science was a perfect opportunity to prove the inferiority of the colonized.
The need for scientific proof on barbarism of the colonized and the aim of legalizing colonial
oppression lead the colonizer to examine the skull samples of mostly colonized criminals.
Today, there are various different skull samples in the Medical School of the University of
Edinburgh and ‘among the skulls are seven from India, which were originally presented to the
Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1833’ (Wagner, 2010). Wagner expresses that these skulls
are labelled as ‘Thug’, which means that they were accused of being criminals in colonial times,
executed by the colonial authority and their skulls were brought to be analysed for their
deficiencies (Wagner, 2010).
Khair refers to this fact in the beginning of the novel. Lord Batterstone, who is from ‘the
Society’ and the villain of the novel, buys skulls with deficiency from a middle-class man, John
May. He is particularly interested in extraordinary-shaped skulls and willing to pay high
amounts for them. ‘But I need the, ahem, the top of the Thing before the next meeting of my
Society, ready to be exhibited. Do you understand? Ready to be exhibited and demonstrated,
and as exceptional as you have made me believe’ (Khair, 2012)
From the quotation above, the reader understands that they refer to the skulls as ‘the Thing’ in
the novel which also represents the ignored identity of the owner of the skulls. Throughout the
novel, there are various examples reflecting the colonizers’ attitudes towards the colonized.
Lower class people – especially from different nations and mostly from the colonies- are seen
as objects rather than individuals.
Amir Ali, the protagonist of the novel, is brought to London from his homeland by Captain
Meadows as a phrenological research subject since the shape of his skull is not proper, which
means that he is a proof of racial inferiority. Also, Captain Meadows is willing to write about
the Thugee cult in India and Amir Ali introduces himself to Captain Meadows as an ex-Thug.
He seems to be comfortable with the idea that he is destined to be a criminal and accept that he
is inferior while talking to Captain Meadows.
Amir Ali knows he will be a research subject in Lord Batterstone’s The London Society of
Phrenology, and he is exhibited various times there as a ‘living skull’. Except these exhibitions,
he tells his background to Captain Meadows as a Thug.
It is not only phrenology in the novel that reflects race discrimination and colonial
understanding, but also race and class distinctions are clearly pointed out by Khair. Various
dialogues and monologues in the novel assert that racist attitudes of the time are accepted both
by the colonizer and the colonized. In a conversation between Major Greyper and Captain
Meadows, Major states that it is a hopeless activity to civilize the colonized people. Captain
Meadows trusts Amir Ali as an ex-Thug and he feels that Amir Ali regrets his past cruelties and
tries to be a civilized man. He criticizes Captain Meadows about his trust to Amir Ali and says
that it is too dangerous to keep him in his house. At the end of the conversation, by referring to
Amir Ali, he says ‘Leopards and spots, you know, leopards and spots...’ (Khair, 2012).
Lord Batterstone has also the same attitude towards other races. In his Society, he tries to
convince people about the inferiority and cruelty of Asian people by giving so-called scientific
and also religious evidences. He asserts that God’s workmanship is slight in creation of human,
and strongly denies the idea that a Caucasian shares the ancestor with a lower class Negro. He
108
argues that the brain and its organic quality are different in every race. Races cannot be in same
quality and some of them are destined to be inferior.
In the novel, race discrimination is seen in all levels of society, not only in upper-class. The
lower-class working people of the society also discriminate other colonized races. Nelly
Clennam, the cook in Captain Meadows’s house, apparently reflects her hate towards Amir Ali
because of his race and background as a Thug. She says that ‘it would be said by many that to
harbour a nigger, lordey, a cannibal in the kitchen was not only a danger but an act of verging
on the unchristian...’ (Khair, 2012). Although she is a lower-class servant, she sees Amir Ali
inferior than herself because of his race.
In the Nineteenth Century, it is only possible for the people who belong to Western upper-class
society to have a stable and accepted identity. Wherever they go in ‘the Empire’, they are always
regarded as lords and gentlemen. However, it is not that easy for other community members to
preserve their social titles. Amir Ali is one of these noblemen of the Orient. He is mostly called
out as ‘nawabzada’ by the people from his homeland. In a letter of Amir Ali to Jenny, Haldi
Ram shows his respect to him as a nobleman of India by saying that ‘Forgive us for interrupting
your journey, not even providing you with a decent breakfast, for what can we poor people
serve to a gentleman like you, son of the noble Syed Zahid Ali sahib, nephew of the learned
and gracious Mustapha Ali sahib’ (Khair, 2012: 52). Without any evidence or witness, Amir
Ali is seen as the savage beheader, or ‘the Head Cannibal’ with their words. Daniel Oates, a
newspaper agent in London, grows suspicious of Amir Ali just by commenting on his physical
appearance. He says ‘I must confess that with his pointy moustache, flowing tresses and dark,
shifty eyes, he looks the very part of a vindictive murderer, a practitioner of barbarous,
unspeakable rites’ (Khair, 2012: 91). The main reason of this easy condemnation lies in class
consciousness of the society. Gimenez states that ‘[...] it is likely that, whatever individuals’
conception of who they really are might be, their behaviour is routinely interpreted in different
terms by their peers and by those who are located high in the hierarchical structure, in position
that give them the power to make decisions affecting other people’s lives’ (Gimenez, 2001).
Major Greyper has also the same attribution towards foreigners. As it is discussed in the
previous pages, phrenology is a tool to build a colonial other and make it accepted by the society
by using science. However, there is no need to have such a scientific proof to identify a criminal
according to Major Greyper. Khair asserts that
Major Greyper had nothing against phrenology, but he did not need to feel the skull
of a man to know whether he was a criminal: you could tell from any scoundrel’s
background, language, gait, clothes, eyes, from so many things. Criminality always
revealed itself: only the blind refused to see it. (Khair, 2012)
These racial preconceptions are repeated in various concepts throughout the novel. People
create an Oriental monster in their fantasies and one of the examples of this situation is Amir
Ali’s walking on the streets of London with his elaborate Indian dress ‘with a turban and a
flashy cummerbund over his kurta and angarkha’ (Khair, 2012). Amir does not feel comfortable
with this dress on the streets because ‘once, a group of drunken youths who besieged and
berated Amir Ali for being an Oriental despot who kept women like cattle in his harem’ (Khair,
2012).
However, there are not only blacks and whites in this issue. There is also a ‘grey area’ where
Marxist class consciousness shows itself. Amir Ali’s Oriental appearance may be seen as a
thread but its elaborate style, which separates him from other lascars and poor immigrants,
109
sometimes leads to confusion. When Amir Ali dresses firmly, he sometimes – but not so often-
gets different reactions from people. This is what the reader experiences when Amir comes
across a policeman on the street on his way back from a meeting in the London Society of
Phrenology, after being exhibited as a living skull. Khair expresses the confusion of the
policeman when he sees Amir Ali with an elaborate Indian dressing, which Gunga exaggerates
by saying he has been ‘adopted by the Queen of England’ (Khair, 2012). It is a moment of
hesitation for the policeman about how to react.
The policeman walks past in his blue frockcoat. Solid and dour, he eyes Amir Ali
ambivalently, unable to choose between his natural deference for rich clothing and
a native suspicion of foreigners. At the last moment, he tips his hat to Amir, and
Amir reciprocates with a low, very Oriental, very ornamental bow. (Khair, 2012)
This ‘moment of hesitation’ also directs us to the fact that the culture of discrimination is not
only on the level of race. The main source of it is certainly the social class conflict. John May
and Lord Batterstone meet in a bar for their secret skull trade in the beginning of the novel.
Both May and Batterstone are white Englishmen. However, their class difference is so obvious
that Khair narrates this fact by focusing on May’s unsteady accent. While he talks to
Batterstone, who is ‘a gentleman from birth and by deportment’, ‘John May, who had spoken
rather clear English to the barman, apologizes in an accent burdened by the inferiority of some
impossible-to-identify dialect’ (Khair, 2012).
The same John May, who is portrayed as an inferior in his conversation with Batterstone, slowly
transforms into a gentleman while he is walking through the poorer sides of the city. Khair
criticizes this transformation with his mocking narration. He describes the streets May walks
through, and refers to the poor people on the streets as ‘bundled figures’. They are trying to
avoid the attention of a patrolling policeman, ‘whose job it is to ensure that those who have
houses sleep secure in their possessions – which may only be done by evicting from the city
limits those who do not have houses’ (Khair, 2012).
Except John May’s miserable efforts to climb the stairs of the social strata, Khair also gives a
clear description of Lord Batterstone’s unquestionable charisma and authority on the same
page, letting the reader compare the sharp difference between him and John May. After the
meeting of the two, Batterstone leaves there with a ‘smart fly’ ‘pulled by a horse that is
conscious of its superiority on these streets’. He does not need to transform according to the
place since ‘he remains what he is everywhere’ unlike the lower classes of the novel. His
superiority is apparent ‘in the cut of his clothes, the tone of his voice, the fashion of his views,
in the very colour of the blood that pulses through his veins and has pulsed through the veins
of his ancestors for twelve generations, all bearing with absolute conviction the self knowledge
of one family name and many honorary titles’ (Khair, 2012).
Another occasion that the reader feels the steel blade of class conflict in the novel is Lord
Batterstone’s speech in the Society. Although the speech is full of racism and unproven,
dogmatic ideas even for white Englishman members, nobody in this ‘scientific’ atmosphere
dares to object Lord Batterstone. Captain Meadows, known for his opposing ideas, is thinking
of objecting for a fraction of a second, but he quickly changes his opinion. It is really risky to
object to an upper-class nobleman as a middle class gentleman.
When we look at all these racial and class distinctions from a wider scope, it is also possible to
add that immigrants are oppressed because upper-class members of the society have their
reasons of their colonial gains, and lower and middle-class people need to oppress to leave aside
110
their social inferiority by proposing another subaltern. Daniel Oates provides a perfect example
to this situation as a character in the novel. He is one of the few people who criticizes and
discriminates immigrants in London with great enthusiasm. Khair reveals the reason of it in his
work.
The world of Captain Meadows and Major Greyper and other such born
gentlemen.The world that has allowed him entry, though only through a side-gate.
But he is a defender of that world; he defends it with the fanaticism of the new
convert. (Khair, 2012)
All these racial and class discriminations allow us to analyse colonial representations of
identity. By focusing on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, colonial
stereotypes and identities can be unfolded. As it is discussed in the previous chapter, colonial
discourse reshapes the identity of the other as barbaric, ignorant and strange, and this identity
is considered as something which is outside the western culture and world. This understanding
of colonial subject both creates otherness and also a threat for western hegemony.
The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is also quite complex in the novel.
This complex relationship is perpetually pointed out by Khair mostly in the dialogues between
Captain Meadows and Amir Ali. The tone of superiority is deeply felt in the sentences of
Captain Meadows. Especially, in the beginning of the novel, he is the true representative of
colonial prejudices.
Some colonized subjects show complicit tendencies while some of them resist being colonized.
However, colonial discourse must supply a single frame for all colonized subjects to create a
stereotype. The dense and varied cultures of the colonized lands do not mean much for the
colonizer. All aspects of these cultures have the same quality that they are uncivilized and cruel.
There is nothing to learn from these cultures since western knowledge is enough to discover
and understand everything. Captain Meadows expresses his feelings about the cruelty of these
cultures in his speech to Amir Ali. He says ‘Reason is not a tyrannical God like Allah, or a
bloodthirsty demon like Bhowanee; Reason does not speak in my ears but gives me ears to
listen with’ (Khair, 2012).
Captain Meadows is not the only person who expresses colonial prejudices in the novel. As it
is stated above, Daniel Oates has also strong prejudgements about the Orient. He suggests that
‘the Orientals are a sensitive and excitable race, and mental exaltation is not only very common,
it usually borders on insanity’ (Khair, 2012). Western Orientalists develop prejudices about the
Orient as Oriental cultures are ignorant, weak, barbaric, and in need of being ruled by the
superior culture of the Occident. With the help of the global monologic atmosphere, the
Occident defines the Orient from a narrow point of view and bends the truth. There are two
things important in evaluating a knowledge related to the Orient; its credibility and service to
colonial deeds. For this reason, Amir Ali states that ‘truth and credibility are two different things
most of the time’ (Khair, 2012).
It is mostly stated by Edward Said and other critics of Oriental studies that there is a mystified
image of the Orient in colonial and postcolonial discourses. The West is always interested in
conceptualizing Eastern cultures with exotic and romantic themes. The main reason of this
tendency is to picture the Orient as something related to the past and history. It is satisfying for
the westerners to see the Oriental cultures being stuck in the past and have nothing to do with
modernity and civilized West. By doing this, the Occident corroborates its superiority over the
111
Orient since modern and civilized West cannot be compared to the underdeveloped and
uncivilized Orient (Said, 1978).
This clash between the appearance and reality may also be observed in colonized identities. It
is really hard for these people to build consistent identities since they struggle between what
they really are and what they are expected to be by the society. The case of Amir Ali and his
story as an ex-Thug stand for a good example to this clash in the novel. Khair uses the letters
of Amir to Jenny as a tool to reveal Amir’s psychology as an immigrant, and in one of these
letters, Amir confesses his real purpose of claiming to be a Thug. He says he sometimes feel
guilty because he intentionally fools Captain Meadows with his invented memories. However,
he also adds ‘I would not say I have lied to him, for I have told him what he wanted to hear’
(Khair, 2012). Just like his exaggerated style of dressing aforementioned earlier, his memories
are also garnished especially for Captain Meadows. He describes the situation as a mutual profit
because he says ‘the barter was fair enough: He got his Thug; I got my revenge’ (Khair, 2012).
Thanks to his invented story, he makes Captain Meadows report his family’s murderers as the
Thugs to the authorities, and the Company arrest them before they know it.
In The Thing about Thugs, Khair gives us a clear social portrait of the time by focusing on
colonial deeds of the western society. This colonial atmosphere leads to several sociologic and
individual problems. What makes The Thing about Thugs significant as an anti-colonial text is
that ‘Khair employs some metafiction and uses multiple perspectives to offer a broad social
critique of the era's class and race divisions’ (Singh, 2013). Hence, the colonial effects on
society are better understood.
References
Gamez-Fernandez, Cristina M, ve O. P. DWIVEDI, (2014) Tabish Khair: Critical
Perspectives. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Gimenez, Martha E, (2001) “Marxism, and Class, Gender, and Race: Rethinking the
Trilogy.” Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 8, No. 2, 23–33.
Khair, Tabish, (2012), The Thing about Thugs. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Marx, Karl, ve F. ENGELS, (2018), The Communist Manifesto. Clydesdale Press.
Mondal, Anindita. “Postcolonial Theory: Bhabha and Fanon.” International Journal of Science
and Research (IJSR), vol. 3, no. 11, Nov. 2014, pp. 2965.
Parssinen, T. M., (1974), “Popular Science and Society: The Phrenology Movement in Early
Victorian Britain” Journal of Social History, Vol. 8, No: 1, 1-20.
Paul, Diane, (1981), “In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in
the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1, 115-138.
Said, Edward. W., (1978), Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Singh, Varsha, (2013), “The Midnight’s Grandchildren: Articulating the Postmodern Spirit in
English Fiction of India Analyzing Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs.” The
Criterion An International Journal in English, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1–5.
Wagner, K. A, (2010), “Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in Early
Nineteenth-Century India.” History Workshop Journal, Vol. 69, No. 1, 27-51
112

Autobiographical Elements in Behn's Oronooko

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Autobiographical Elements in Behn's Oronooko

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Editors of the Issue

ISSN: 2148 – 4066 (Online)

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Please find submission guidelines for NALANS at www.nalans.com

Phone: +90 462 377 35 49

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Acquisition & Production Editor

Dr. Marie-Laure Ryan, Independent Dr. Osamu Takeuchi - Kansai University,

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Heteroglossia and Multicultural Uniformity in Rushdie’s Novels .......................................................... 9

A Nietzschean Reading of Androgyny in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ................................... 57

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – June 2019, Volume 7 – Issue 12

From the Editors

Copyright © Journal of Narrative and Language Studies & Authors

Rachid Boujedra, Auto-Fiction, and the Interplay of the Aesthetic

Keywords: auto-fiction, female identity, loyalties, Rachid Boujedra, writer intuitions

"Ma blessure symbolique, c'est le rapport au père extrêmement violent, ce salaud

"J'érigeais l'érection en système verrouillé d'automutilation, à tel point que, dans

Achour, Christiane. (1990). Dictionnaire des oeuvres algériennes en langue française,

Heteroglossia and Multicultural Uniformity in Rushdie’s Novels

Prof. Dr., English Language and Literature, Pamukkale University

Keywords: heteroglossia, multiculturalism, hybridity, identity

At the Margins of the Margins: Liang Fang and Sinophone

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

2. Sinophone Sarawakian Literature at the Margins

3. Liang Fang and “Longtuzhu”

「我不是，我什么也不是！」(Liang, 1985, p. 114-115)

Difficulties of Constructing the Feminine Subject Resulting from

PHD Student, Invited Teacher at Ilia State University

Keywords: construction, ambivalence, language, femininity, patriarchal order

The analysis of Lyric Texts

Und nichts Liebes tun?

By using the anaphoric expressions „blood-blood“, „when-when-when“(104), the

თავაზიანი ღიმილით მხდის კანს

ვრჩები: ჩვილი ბავშვების ზვინი

სისხლით ყდა რომ არ გავუმაგრო?

This is my blood and I know

The metaphor works on the nail line,

The fear of self-destruction of the lyric/feminine I is apparent in Sturua’s poem “Love?!”

როდის გამოვიყენო, როდის გვერდზე გავწიო

და როდის: „ტკივილმა თუ არ გამიარა,

რომ შევეხო, დამასახიჩრებს.

ემოციები ზენა და ქვენა,

შუაში ეკლესია, ან კლასიკური ლიტერატურა

In the chapter “Plato’s Pharmacy” of the book La Dissémination (Dissemination)

ისეთი რომანი დამემხობა თავზე

“Silence is not Silent”: A Postcolonial Feminist Appraisal of

Assistant Lecturer, Faculty of Letters and Languages, University of Oum El Bouaghi

1. Introduction: Confession of the Lioness and the Politics of Postcolonial (Third

an African-based version of discoursing deeply grounded in the ontological African worldview

If narrating/telling is power, then writing/recording as Mariamar expresses in many

Alexander, M. J, and Chandra T. M. (1997). Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements.

A Nietzschean Reading of Androgyny in Virginia Woolf’s To the

Being a Woman Artist in the Victorian Age

Although Woolf’s conception of androgyny seems to be female-centred, it also covers

Dionysus, who is Euripides’ embodiment of universal vitality, is described variously by

The Victorian phallocentrism maintained the urge on masculinity by suppressing

Barker, J. (2006). The Brontës: A life in letters. London: Folio Society.