Difference and Subversion: Ecriture Feminine and Arundhuti Roy's the God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Revelation of Feminine Perspectives

Dr. Ashok K. Saini, Ph.D. Assist. Professor of English, Department of English Language & Literature Prince Sattam Bin Abdul Aziz University Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

(About Author-Dr. Ashok K. Saini is one of faculties in the department of English Language & Literature, Prince Sattam Bin Abdul Aziz University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He reached the pinnacles of glory in his academic career when he was awarded the scholarship funded by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, for E- Teacher Scholarship Program to English teaching professionals abroad through Linguistics Department, American English Institute, University of Oregon USA. He has been member of board of examiners to adjudicate the Ph.D. thesis of various Universities. He has worked at SIET Gangoh (Now Shobhit University) & IMS Engineering College Ghaziabad as faculty in English. He has worked as English coordinator at State Council of Educational Research & Training Uttarakhand. He has published numerous dozens articles and research papers in different National and International journals. He has also dozens of books to his credit published both in India and abroad. He has been thoroughly associated with Indian Journal of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies: An International Journal of Literature, Culture & Translation, and A Peer-Reviewed International Journal of Education, Psychology and Social Sciences, as member board of editors, published in Zilina, Slovakia.)

Abstract Feminist scholars argue that disparity in writing is one of their chief means to cross-examine patriarchal ascendancy. The God of Small Things reveals the human race of Ayemenem house as full of such contraventions, both in terms of ethics as well as proceedings. Ammu and Rahel both challenges the ideals made obligatory on their very being and finds their own ways to reside. Both of them marry without the blessing of their relatives and go for divorce audaciously. Arundhati Roy in the novel has tried to critique and subvert even the www.ijellh.com 393

behavioural code and matrix of strict gendered roles. In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy reveals the very essence of Ecriture feminine. She has revealed in an apt manner how times gone by and customs always suppresses women over their right to themselves. She has refined a place for the woman by subverting linear discourse and Phallogocentric closure. Key Words Ecriture Feminine, Feminine Perspectives, Feminine Writing, Marginalization, Women‟s Identity

Introduction As women are deprived of their semantic liberty, the very act of writing reveals the possibility for a critique of language as well as patriarchal discussion. In the course of writing, women could establish their arrangement and uniqueness. Consequently, the momentous inquiry that writing poses: How is a woman‟s writing different from male writing? And what constitutes the difference? Feminist intellectuals argue that diversity in writing is one of their chief means to cross-examine patriarchal domination. The French feminist theorists like, Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, argue that women‟s language and writing are unlike textually, psychologically, linguistically and stylistically. According to Ellmann, the feminine thought and writing exhibit a rashness, daring, mockery, sudden alteration of the reckless and sly, the wildly voluble and laconic, and the capacity to undercut the established masculine mode (Mary Eagleton, 1991, 1996: 285). But critics like Mary Jacobus warn against the incipient biologism of the category “women‟s writing,” but admits that it is „strategically and politically important…‟ (Mary Eagleton, 1991, 1996: 300). Ecriture feminine is a practice of writing where the dichotomies of inside / outside, subject / object and masculine / feminine get altered. She reveals: “Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth” (“The Laugh of the Medusa,” Warhol & Herndl, 1997: 350). Critiquing the binary where the feminine is considered as lack, Irigaray seeks the likelihood of operating within the existing composition. She reveals that the feminine sexuality is marked by diversity and profusion and that it outlines women‟s writing. Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small Things reveals a specimen of Ecriture Feminine in the sense that it is potentially rebellious. Roy has transformed not only the subject matter but the way of producing meaning in her novel too. The God of Small Things reveals the world of the Ayemenem house as full of such contravention, both in terms of principles as well as dealings. Ammu and Rahel both face up to the ethics forced on their very being and finds their own ways to exist. Both of them get www.ijellh.com 394

married with no the approval of their family and go for separation intrepidly. Baby Kochamma‟s reconstruction, “which in a young girl in those days was considered as bad as a physical deformity” (Roy, 1997: 24), her joining the convent and finally return to Ayemenem, all these reveal a woman‟s own endeavour to find her own ways. Cixous in her “The Laugh of the Medusa” says, “No; it‟s up to you to break the old circuits. It will be up to man and woman to render obsolete the former relationship and all its consequences, to consider the launching of a brand-new subject, alive, with defamiliarization” (Warhol and Herndl, 1997 : 359). Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things has revealed the behavioural code and matrix of strict gendered roles. Roy goes on to critique even the institution of Christianity as it ignores the bodily realities of women. She reveals, “In the Christian institution, breasts were not acknowledged. They weren‟t supposed to exist, and if they didn‟t could they hurt?” (Roy, 1997:16). The God of Small Things comes close to Ecriture feminine in its narrative pattern. The novel makes a to and fro movement. It goes back to twenty three years and the world is shown through the eyes of Rahel, the eight years old girl. All over again it flits forth to the morbid present where the life is presented as decayed and gloomy. The narrative breaks the linear logic of male discourse in the sense that the plot does not move forward in a chronological way. This is what Cixous expresses about the woman writer as “Her writing can only keep going, without inscribing or discerning contours…” (“The Laugh of the Medusa”, Warhol and Herndl, 358). The description is characterized by short of self-possession, mutability; amusements, long- windedness and the deficiency of form. Helene Cixous considers this as an important trait of women‟s writing because, according to her, the womanly textual body is recognized by its absence of closing stages or termination. Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things has multiple texts that do not have a finite meaning. It allows itself open to various interpretations making itself extremely intertextual. In a way it goes with the post modernist premises. Stressing on women‟s polyphony, boundlessness, Irigaray opines, “Because we are always open, the horizon will never be circumscribed. Stretching out, never ceasing to unfold ourselves, we must invent so many different voices to speak all of „us‟, including our cracks and faults, that forever won‟t be enough time” (Irigaray, 1980:75). Velutha, Rahel and Estha, fit in to this marginalized category in the family or the public. Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things tries to upend their nonconformity by revealing very minutely their lives, wishes, emotions which finally culminated in passion or despair. Their marginalized history makes a rupture to the chronological history. In the words of www.ijellh.com 395

Murari Prasad, “Roy‟s text suggests a connection between its narrative strategies and the oppressive fetters, the socio-historical realities that the protagonists have to contend with. Velutha‟s identity is circumscribed by calcified social segregation; Ammu‟s subjugation is conditioned by the traditional male authority… The textual strategy, a privileged component of The God of Small Things, undercuts the dominant cultural paradigm which the narrative circulates as the weight of History against fragile threads of deviation and independence” (Prasad, 2006:160). The description is put in such an approach that the borders of the body, of subjectivity, of the text, are all put into question, where the distinction between inside and out becomes as fluid as the „Dizygotic‟ twins, Estha and Rahel. “…when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was For Ever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us” (Roy, 1997 : 2). Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things has dealt with the politics of love and desire and the transgressions by a variety of characters all the way through the novels. She reveals the Law and Lawlessness and the transgressions. The act of desiring that leads to the rebellion and transgressions in the novel has been narrated in various ways. Rahel observes, “Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn‟t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much... It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened” (Roy, 1997:31). In the words of Brinda Bose, “All histories, as we all know now, are retold in various tellings. There is no one story that endures; who tells the tale and who listens is almost as important as who broke the Laws in the first place. However, Roy wants to take us back to that particular time when the Laws were made- a Time that pre-dates all the histories she knows and will re-tell” (Prasad, 2006:95). Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things is successful in intermingling the mythic and mystic in women, the blurring the facts and fiction which has made the whole narrative formless, fluid and yet vibrant. The language of Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small Things is also sensitive to lodge latest words, phrases and modes of writing. Rahel and Estha‟s way of spelling words is very outstanding. At the funeral of Sophie Mol when the baby bat had climbed up on Baby Kochamma‟s Saree she bawled, the priests stopped their prayers and everybody asked, “What is it? What happened? When the police inspector touched Ammu‟s breast with his baton, Rahel mentions that “He tapped her breast with his baton. Gently. Tap, tap” (Roy, 1997: 8).

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On other instances also the words are united to give a sense of necessity. Words like, “Left right left”, “Sariflapping”, “Finethankyou”, “Okaythen” etc. are some of such words. The text of Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small Things is full of collocations, “fan-whirring”, “peanut-crunching darkness”, “green summer”, “deafening silence” etc. Again she splits words like “die-able”, “Lay-Ter” for later, “A Wake” (awake), “A Live” (alive), and “A Lert” (alert). In the words of Zeenath Mohamed Kunhi, “Arundhati Roy is the only woman writer who dared to bend and modulate the rhythms and structure of the English language to the needs and nuances of Indian experience. Roy by her creative use of English tries to make English a more authentic vehicle of expression of the sensibility and the consciousness of the people.” (Journal of Literature, Culture and Media, 2010, 150). Conclusion Consequently, in the novel The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy reveals the very essence of Ecriture feminine. Arundhati Roy has revealed in an apt manner how times gone by and society all the time suppresses women over their right to themselves. Arundhati Roy has reclaimed a place for the woman by destabilizing linear discussion and Phallogocentric closure. This perception of ecriture feminine as polyphonic, troublesome, rule-transcending and ever continuing has been revealed by Arundhati Roy in a touching approach. Arundhati Roy has given herself to rediscovering herself and in the process she has expressed her fidelity to what she feels, rather than telling particulars or conceiving incredibly innovative. Accordingly Arundhuti Roy’s The God of Small Things is one of the great examples of ecriture feminine establishing resourcefulness which plays a crucial role to end the domineering controls of the masculine talk.

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Works Cited: Bose, Brinda. “In Desire and in Death: Eroticism as Politics in Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small Things”. Arundhati Roy: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Murari Prasad. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2006, 87-100. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997, 347-362. ______; “Sorties”. Feminisms. Ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 231-235. Irigaray, Luce. “When Our Lips Speak Together”. Trans. Carolyn Burke. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 6, No-1, 1980, 66-68. Johnson, Barbara. “Writing”. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: Chicago University Press, [1990], 1995, 39-49. Kunhi, Zeenath Mohamed. “Subversive Language Vs Patriarchy And Colonization: An Analysis Of The God Of Small Things”. Journal of Literature, Culture and Media, vol 2:3, 2010, 142-151. Prasad, Murari, ed. Arundhati Roy: Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2006. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: Indian Ink Publishing, 1997. Saini, Ashok, K. ed., Booker Prize Winning Writers of The World : Estimation & Expression, Germany: Lambert Academic Pub. 2012. Sellers, Susan, ed. The Hélène Cixous Reader. London: Routledge, 1994. ______; Helene Cixous: Authorshio, Autobiography and Love. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Web Reference: http://www.academia.edu/2060302/_Fat_Lady_Oracle