Department of English and American Studies English Language And

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Michaela Murajdová Unheard Voices, Lost Children and the Ambivalence of Power in Selected Rewritings of Master Narratives Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D. 2015 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Bc. Michaela Murajdová Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D., for her ecouragement during the writing process, her patience and numerous inspirational remarks. I would also like to thank my friends and my parents for their continuous support during the years of my studies and their unending love. Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................5 1. Questioning Metanarratives as a Strategy of Postcolonial and Feminist Discourse .....................................................................................................8 2. Taking My Story Back: Giving Voice to the Marginalized ..................13 2.1. Female Perspective .........................................................................13 2.2. Gaps and Silences: Voices of the Doubly Colonized ......................21 3. Lost Children ........................................................................................29 4. Ambivalence of Power ..........................................................................45 4.1. The Construction of Identity of Friday in Coetzee‘s Foe and Penelope in Atwood‘s The Penelopiad ..................................................45 4.2. The Construction of Antoinette‘s Identity in Rhys‘s Wide Sargasso Sea ..........................................................................................................53 Conclusion ................................................................................................59 Works Cited ...............................................................................................61 English Summary ......................................................................................64 Czech Summary ........................................................................................65 Introduction Since the publication of Salman Rushdie‘s article ―The Empire Writes Back with Vengeance‖ in 1982 and an academic response to this article by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (1989), a new field of discourse has emerged as a part of postmodernism ‒ postcolonial literatures. Postcolonial literatures have helped bring attention to cultural differences and marginalization of people from the former colonies of the major European powers through several literary practices. These practices many a time engage in subverting the previous, rather homogenous colonial status quo of the society and one of the literary strategies is rewritings of the master narratives. These rewritings provide space for new narrators to be heard and new issues to be addressed mainly in order to point out inequality. Similarly, focus on women and their marginalization within society where patriarchal ideology has been considered dominant plays a considerable subversive role in literary feminist discourse and feminist rewritings. Patriarchal and colonial dominance in Western canon have usually complemented and supported each other through giving the power of creation as well as narrative power to white male figures and that is why their disruption in rewritings might be perceived as interconnected. In this diploma thesis, I focus on the way in which themes of giving voice to previously marginalized characters, problematized paren ‒ child relationships and the overall ambivalent nature of the novels and characters permeate three postcolonial and/or feminist rewritings ‒ namely J.M. Coetzee‘s Foe, Margaret Atwood‘s The Penelopiad and Jean Rhys‘s Wide Sargasso Sea. These novels were chosen because of a wide platform of common features when addressing aforementioned motifs: Coetzee, Atwood and Rhys chose to establish previously disempowered female 5 characters as the agents of the narratives, they engage in the discussion about how the parent ‒ child, and especially the mother ‒ daughter, relationships constituted in the creation of an uncertain identity of the narrators while leaving space for further re- interpretations through ambiguity and ambivalence of power. However, numerous differences can be also found among them which is why they offer a rich material for a comparison. In the first chapter of the thesis, which is theoretical, the topics of binary oppositions and questioning metanarratives are covered. I also mention the role of the ʻoppositional literature‘ in contesting the literary canon in question. The second chapter is divided into two subchapters. In the first one I contrast the female narrators of the rewritings with the narrators of the master narratives pointing out that such strategy might be perceived as subversive to Western literary canon. The second subchapter comments on the fact that all of the three narrative agents, namely Susan, Penelope and Antoinette, are members of the priviledged class and that the ambivalence of the novels may also lay in the fact that in the rewritings the ʻdoubly colonized‘ female and/or indigenous characters of lower class origin still lack authority over their histories. In the third chapter of the thesis the topic of dubious parent ‒ child relationship is discussed. It focuses mainly on the role the mother plays in the formation of child‘s identity and also on the ways how a distant and ambivalent mother ‒ child relationship influences the formation of postcolonial identity. The possibility of such relationship as a metaphor for colonizer ‒ colonized relationship is also proposed here. In the last chapter, I comment on the ambivalence of power and its role in the construction of specific identities of the characters in the rewritings. Moreover, death is pointed out as an ambivalent motif of physical end yet metaphorical empowerment of these characters is pointed out here. The first 6 subchapter deals with these features as portrayed in Coetzee‘s Foe and Atwood‘s The Penelopiad. The second subchapter then focuses on Jean Rhys‘s novel Wide Sargasso Sea and her approach to this topic. 7 1. Questioning Metanarratives as a Strategy of Postcolonial and Feminist Discourse It can be argued that the decline of power of ‛grand narratives‘,their challenging, questioning, even undermining (Lyotard 38) within the Western discourse is one of the key concepts of the postmodernity. Such interrogation is closely connected with the term ʻdeconstruction‘ ‒ a term coined by Jacques Derrida in his study Of Grammatology (1967). As Taylor and Winquist elaborate in Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, Derrida, inspired by his knowledge of phenomenology and (post- )structuralism claims that the biggest problem of the Western thought and philosophical tradition is the fact that people have a tendency to see the world in the so-called ‛binary oppositions‘. They elaboráte that Derrida claims that people perceive the world to be structured in these ‛binary oppositions‘ ‒ defined as pair concepts existing in constant opposition to one another in their meaning [for example black/ white; male/ female] and always attributing one of these concepts with positive and the other one with negative connotations. Also, people share and adopt these connotations amongs themselves, on the basis of a hegemonic social view and therefore it is possible to argue that these attributes are always prejudiced (Taylor and Winquist 84-5). According to Derrida, the way to overcome these prejudiced opinions is to put deconstruction into practice (Derrida 65), to realize the ambivalence of texts and other concepts and to also perceive the texts and characters within them as possible cultural metaphors, which is one of the major objectives of this thesis. The theory of the ‛grand narratives‘ is just as much important for the understanding of postcolonial and feminist rewritings as Derrida‘s ‛binary oppositions‘. Developed by the French philosopher of postmodernity Jean-François Lyotard, one of the major 8 features of the era of postmodernism is questioning of the narratives people pass on from generation to generation throughout history. Lyotard addresses this particular issue as the fall of the ‛grand narratives‘ which are, as already mentioned, the myths and stories generally perceived as universaly valid. As Seidman explains, ‟ he [Lyotard] announces a chief theme of the postmodern turn: the decline of the legitimating power ‛metanarratives‘ as distinctive of postmodern culture‖ (Seidman 5). These ‛grand narratives‘ or ―[m]etanarratives refer to foundational theories (theories of knowledge, morality or aesthetics) and grand stories of social progress which have been central to the legitimation of modern knowledge, culture, and social institutions‖ (Seidman 5). However, metanarratives have mostly reflected, until the age of postmodernity, the ideas and beliefs of the dominant part of the society. These metanarratives are often subverted in posmodernism (5). One can think of several examples of such supressed narratives that are only now getting more attention – gay, lesbian and transgender community questions the hegemonic heterosexual discourse; Capitalism

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