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R.A ADONIS Dissertation COPYRIGHT AND CITATION CONSIDERATIONS FOR THIS THESIS/ DISSERTATION o Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. o NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. o ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. How to cite this thesis Surname, Initial(s). (2012) Title of the thesis or dissertation. PhD. (Chemistry)/ M.Sc. (Physics)/ M.A. (Philosophy)/M.Com. (Finance) etc. [Unpublished]: University of Johannesburg. Retrieved from: https://ujcontent.uj.ac.za/vital/access/manager/Index?site_name=Research%20Output (Accessed: Date). Space, Voice and Power for the Female Character in the Postcolonial Novel: A Study of The Grass is Singing, Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things REZHAAN ANDREA ADONIS THIS DISSERTATION IS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH IN FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE AWARD FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG 2017 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 1-11 1. Background to the study 2. Purpose of the study 3. A brief theoretical framework for the study: space, voice and power 3.1 The paradoxes of power and voice 4. The organization of the dissertation Chapter Two: Power and Paradox in The Grass is Singing: 12-40 Reconsidering Mary as the ‘Outsider’ of the Narrative Chapter Three: Speech and Silence in Nervous Conditions 41-71 Chapter Four: The God of Small Things and the Dissolution 72-96 of Caste and Kinship in Postcolonial India Chapter Five: Conclusion 97-101 Reference List 102-107 iii ABSTRACT ‘Space speaks of its histories, identities and conditions’ This study uses the concepts of space, voice, gender, and power to examine, question and, ultimately, challenge fixed notions of feminine identity in postcolonial social and cultural spaces. To this end, the dissertation undertakes a study of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It contends that the three novels present the (post)colonial female subject as always gendered and her resistance always curtailed. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as ideologically produced, in The Production of Space (1991), is used to investigate the production of gendered spaces in the three novels and of space as relational, that is, as connected to identity. Against this background, I argue that Ammu, in The God of Small Things, figures as the insider-outsider in the spaces that she inhabits, precisely because they are underwritten by the ideology of caste and kinship that seeks to preserve certain orders of purity and impurity, including gender and sexual purity, in the service of social and gender hierarchy. Similarly, Mary, in The Grass is Singing, finds herself co-opted into a racial “espirit de corps” (2007: 3) as a white woman but. as a woman she is an outsider in the farm space presided over by white men. Lastly, Tambudzai, in Nervous Conditions, finds her voice as her primary space, her home, slowly opens out to the contending spaces of her cousin Nyasha’s home and the convent, where, “fitfully, something in [her] mind beg[ins] to assert itself” (2004: 204). At botton, this study concerns itself with forms of containment and resistance, and with gender and sexuality as connecting tissues in the three novels’ conceptions of speech and silence. I extend my discussion through a consideration of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the economy of power, of how power is distributed in (social) spaces, and its connection to and influence on human agency. Foucault’s study is used to survey Ammu’s character as at once powerful by virtue of class and caste privilege and powerless on account of her gender; Mary Turner as both a vehicle for and a target of white male power; and Tambudzai’s character as caught between competing senses of culture and resistance. This study ultimately discusses how the identity of the (post)colonial female subject is embedded in the social, cultural and historical spaces that she inhabits. iv Declaration I, the undersigned, hereby declare that “Space, Voice and Power for the Female Character in the Postcolonial Novel: A Study of The Grass is Singing, Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things” is my original work; that all sources I have used or quoted have been properly referenced, and that I have not previously submitted this dissertation, in its entirety or in part, at any university for a degree. ___________________________________ Rezhaan Andrea Adonis 31 0ctober 2017 Date v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my darling mother, Jacquelin Adonis, my life’s constant and my provider. Thank you for your patience, love and support. I am immeasurably grateful. You embody fortitude, grace and peace. And this peace is my comfort. ‘I see parts of you in myself I never knew existed’. To my grandparents, Abraham Adonis and Martha Adonis, who raised me. Thank you for showing up when it mattered. To my sister, Ilonique Adonis, for providing a simple yet priceless happiness – laughter. To Professor Mngadi, who has contributed immensely towards the completion of this dissertation. I thank you for your guidance. A special thanks to the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) and the UJ Global Excellence and Stature (GES) Scholarship for funding my research and studies. Chapter One Introduction 1. Background to the study This study focuses on three novels, that is, The Grass is Singing, Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things, as postcolonial texts that narrate the female experience in a post-colonial social and cultural context. I argue that these novels do this by re-imagining alternative spaces in which the woman will not only exist but also cultivate her own voice. Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things, in particular, seek to register the voice of the woman in those spaces conventionally marked off as male. The core objective of postcolonial feminist discourse is to account for the female subject’s experience as distinct from that of the male in a society emerging from colonial rule. In Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, for instance, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose posit that, “Both postcolonialism and feminism are engaged in the conflict between a politics of identity and a politics of difference” (1994: 238). For the purposes of this study, post-colonial theory will be defined in relation to feminist theory’s concerns, in order to propose the ways in which post-colonial theory may address them, and how post-colonial feminist narratives subvert and revise post-colonial theory’s gender bias. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1995: 1) note, European imperialism took various forms in different times and places and proceeded both through conscious planning and contingent occurences. As a result of this complex development something occurred for which the plan of imperial expansion had not bargained: the immensely prestigious and powerful imperial culture found itself appropriated in projects of counter-colonial resistance which drew upon the many different indigenous local and hybrid processes of self-determination to defy, erode and sometimes supplant the prodigious power of imperial cultural knowledge. Post-colonial literatures are a result of this interaction between imperial culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices. 2 The erosion of imperial culture in post-colonial discourse is central to the emancipatory movement for the colonised; however, a post-colonial feminism aims at unravelling the layers of colonisation (double colonisation) to which women are subjected, in order to show how the emancipation of women is integral to eroding imperialist culture at its core. Drawing on the ‘double’ oppression faced by women in postcolonial society (colonialism and patriarchy), particular attention will be given to ‘double colonisation’ as the dual challenge that feminist critique faces in its advocacy for the social inclusion of woman across all social and political domains (see Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Postcolonial Studies Reader (Feminism and Postccolonialism), 1995: 250). 2. Purpose of the study The purpose of this study is, firstly, to examine the ways in which the three novels under consideration deploy their female protagonists as literary tropes to dislocate the binary structures by which feminine identity is conventionally constructed and apprehended. For instance, in The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner’s character does not conform neatly to the idea of ‘purity’ and ‘success’ on which the white communal (read: male) spirit – the espirit de corps – is founded; Tambudzai, in Nervous Conditions, is silenced into submission by patriarchy but seeks independence from it; and, in The God of Small Things, Ammu is of a caste of Touchables, but her acts of resistance nonetheless reveal crucial fissures in the Indian caste system in which her identity is at once subsumed and to which it poses a significant challenge. With this study, I aim to show how the social binaries used to construct feminine identities – that is, pure/impure, good/bad, normal/deviant – are ostensibly conventional and, as such, not co-extensive with individual or, for that matter, collective feminine identity. Further, I contend that these characters uniquely and individually pose the possibility for the subversion – even the erasure – of these binaries, and that, ultimately, this possibility constitutes the necessary dialectical tension in the narratives between the overdetermination of feminine identity from without and the characters’ resistance thereof. This study, then, aims to open up the space between the either and the or of the conventional binary classifications of feminine identities to which I refer above, the better to consider questions of containment and agency in the three novels.
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