Marina Warner's Indigo As Ethical

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Amira Smoudi Marina Warner’s Indigo: Mirroring of Colonization through space and time Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2016 1 2 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature 3 4 Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her valuable advice provided for this thesis. 5 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 8 2. Indigo’s literary template: Retelling of The Tempest ............................................. 10 2.1 Parallels of characters ...................................................................................... 18 3. Reflection of colonial issues in fairy tales and myths ............................................ 25 3.1 Serafine I .......................................................................................................... 26 3.2 Serafine II ........................................................................................................ 27 3.3. Serafine ........................................................................................................... 32 3.4 Serafine’s stories: the island’s heritage ........................................................... 33 4. The impact of colonization in a mirroring structure .............................................. 36 4.1 Repeating history ............................................................................................. 37 5. Conclusion: Warner’s mirroring to interconnect colonization’s impact through space and time ........................................................................................................... 38 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 39 Resumé ....................................................................................................................... 42 Résumé ....................................................................................................................... 43 6 7 1. Introduction Marina Warner dedicated her writing career to the exploration of cultural and gender debates. The thesis is concerned with her novel Indigo or, Mapping the Waters in connection with colonialism and the reflective mechanism that the novel uses to perform the issue. For this purpose, William Shakespeare’s, The Tempest is chosen for analysis being Indigo’s literary template. Warner also uses historical facts of colonization and political and national perceptions of England and the Caribbean. Her aim to apply the colonial theme in her work lies within her family history. Indigo therefore reflects Warner’s autobiographical features as well. The major secondary sources include the study The English Novel In History, 1950-1995 by Stephen Connor, the work “Marina Warner's Indigo As Ethical Deconstruction And Reconstruction” by Eileen Williams-Wanquet, studies Britské spisovatelky na přelomu tisíciletí and “Marina Warner: Mythology, Fairy Tale and Realism” by Milada Franková and the articles “Spinning a yarn with Marina Warner” and “What next, Miranda? Marina Warner’s Indigo” by Chantal Zabus. Stephen Connor, provides a survey of Indigo and its literary template The Tempest. In depth he analyzes the relationship between the two books in terms of the plot and the resemblance of the books’ main characters. Eileen Williams-Wanquet concentrates on revisiting the past in Indigo and the autobiographical and historical references. Milada Franková explains Warner’s aim in rewriting to pursue the female stand. Chantal Zabus provides an interview with Marina Warner, who talks about her family and its imprints in Indigo. The first chapter will analyze Indigo’s purpose to deal with postcolonial history and the motive to rewrite The Tempest. Further on, it will focus on the closer parallels of the two works. The thesis will explore Warner’s dealing with The Tempest’s characters that are put into the seventeenth and twentieth century layers of the novel. Indigo offers 8 a modern retelling of the story and its characters are as well more modern due to their demythologization. Nevertheless, the rewriting goes even further as it also involves feminism and thus provides the female plot of The Tempest. The second chapter will be concerned with Warner’s mythological study. Indigo’s reflection of colonial issues in fairy tales and myths deals with three fairy tales. Each of them serves as a parallel to the characters of Indigo and includes also a general message that can be read as a moral upon colonization. The last chapter analyzes Warner’s dealing with space and time and the repeated blur of the two time periods and places. It provides the notion of repeating history via colonial issues that are continuing from the past to the present. 9 2. Indigo’s literary template: Retelling of The Tempest The masterpiece of Marina Warner, Indigo or, Mapping the Waters, deals with mirroring, considering the writer combines two different time frames and geographical spaces, as the novel evolves alternately between London in the twentieth century and the West Indies in the seventeenth century, which altogether mirror and mingle. These separate worlds are, as the story goes on, continuously connected with its characters interchanging within time, which creates a notion of revisiting the past, as well as it develops a moralistic level, due to, according to Williams-Wanquet in “Marina Warner’s Indigo as Ethical Deconstruction and Reconstruction”, “using fantasy and magic realism for an ideological purpose” (268). For this purpose, Indigo’s ‘real world’ also incorporates Caribbean fairy tales and myths. Not only does the novel include reflecting elements within the storyline, it also reflects its literary template – The Tempest by William Shakespeare, as well as historical facts (although Warner is preferably concentrated on the emotional impact that colonization brought on the society rather than the historical events), and autobiographical features. Accordingly, Warner “grounds her novel in geographical, historical, and autobiographical reality, thus connecting her readers to the world outside the page” (Williams-Wanquet 269). Marina Warner is an English writer, who is noticed for her novels, which, as Milada Franková argues in her analysis Marina Warner: Mythology, Fairy Tale and Realism, “reflect late twentieth-century literary and cultural debates and at the same time retain a realistic narrative mode and are concerned with the problems of the real world” (37). Anna Rutherford notes in the journal Kunapipi that the most significant of them is The Lost Father, which has won a Regional Prize of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (504). Warner’s work encompasses a variety of fields of interests, starting from the novels and tales, up to historical studies and literary and cultural analyses, which contains themes of culture and the gender roles, as well as fairy tales 10 and myths. Her large scale of survey is applied in Indigo, as it includes her focus on female symbolism and her study of Caribbean mythology. Kathleen Wheeler, in the study A Critical Guide to Twentieth-century Women Novelists, appreciates the variety of specialization which forms a unique style of Warner’s writing, since she “explore[s] and push[es] beyond the familiar limits of fiction” (335). However, even though Indigo enters to the fantastic world and thus shows an original postmodern structure, the contribution of the work is aimed at the readers’ absorbing of the colonial impact and its morals through the closeness to the novel’s characters. This feature is created by the effect of mirroring and also, as Franková notes, by Warner’s ability to portray the stories realistically and that the characters are ‘rooted in the real contemporary world (Franková 2012: 37). Indigo was published in 1992 as a postcolonial interpretation of the colonial efforts of England in the Caribbean during the 17th century, containing the retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as the elements of issues that colonialism had brought in the society, such as slavery, religious and cultural struggles, with the oppressed female position in the newly created patriarchal world. Warner also experiments with space and time; consequently, she creates an extraordinary storyline which is mirroring itself through and through. The story is set in two separate times and geographical spheres – the Caribbean world of the colonial expansion period and England during a part of the 20th century. The seventeenth-century period of the plot deals with the ‘witch’ Sycorax, who lives on the imaginary Caribbean island of Liamuiga and is known in the village for being well versed in herbal medicine and an indigo dye. One day she rescues Dulé – an African baby she saves by cutting the belly of his dead mother who has been washed ashore from a slave ship: “When she unfolded the young woman inside the green leaves 11 in which she was wrapped, she could feel the shape of the infant inside as she had seen in her walking dream, so she took the oyster knife and she cut through the wall of the young woman’s abdomen” (Warner 1993: 84). It has been viewed by some villagers as a rather ‘scary miracle’

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