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TÜRKİYE CUMHURİYETİ ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ BATI DİLLERİ VE EDEBİYATLARI (İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI) ANABİLİM DALI HAUNTED INTERACTIONS: TRACING THE NARRATOR IN POSTCOLONIAL NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION Yüksek Lisans Tezi Seda Bahar Pancaroğlu Ankara-2020 TÜRKİYE CUMHURİYETİ ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ BATI DİLLERİ VE EDEBİYATLARI (İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI) ANABİLİM DALI HAUNTED INTERACTIONS: TRACING THE NARRATOR IN POSTCOLONIAL NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION Yüksek Lisans Tezi Seda Bahar Pancaroğlu Tez Danışmanı Prof. Dr. Ufuk Ege Uygur Ankara-2020 T.C. ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Müdürlüğü’ne, Prof. Dr. Ufuk Ege Uygur danışmanlığında hazırladığım “Haunted Interactions: Tracing the Narrator in Postcolonial Neo-Victorian Fiction” (Ankara.2020) ” adlı yüksek lisans doktora/bütünleşik doktora tezimdeki bütün bilgilerin akademik kurallara ve etik davranış ilkelerine uygun olarak toplanıp sunulduğunu, başka kaynaklardan aldığım bilgileri metinde ve kaynakçada eksiksiz olarak gösterdiğimi, çalışma sürecinde bilimsel araştırma ve etik kurallarına uygun olarak davrandığımı ve aksinin ortaya çıkması durumunda her türlü yasal sonucu kabul edeceğimi beyan ederim. Tarih: Adı-Soyadı ve İmza For my father… TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................................................................. ii INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 3 CHAPTER I: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK .... 8 1.1 Neo-Victorian Fiction ................................................................................................ 8 1.2 Narratology ............................................................................................................... 25 CHAPTER II: BERTHA RECONSIDERED: WIDE SARGASSO SEA ................. 36 2.1 Jean Rhys and her narrative style .............................................................................. 36 2.2 Narrative Style in Wide Sargasso Sea ...................................................................... 39 CHAPTER III: MAGWITCH REINVENTED: JACK MAGGS .............................. 59 3.1 Peter Carey and his narrative style ............................................................................ 59 3.2 Narrative Style in Jack Maggs .................................................................................. 64 CHAPTER IV: HEATHCLIFF REVISITED: THE LOST CHILD ........................ 82 4.1 Caryl Phillips and his Narrative Style ................................................................. 82 4.2 The Narrative Style in The Lost Child ...................................................................... 87 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 102 WORK CITED ............................................................................................................ 107 ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ 120 ÖZET .......................................................................................................................... 122 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Professor Ufuk Ege Uygur, who supervised my work, for her guidance and the numerous advice she provided me with throughout the whole process of writing. I am deeply grateful for her constructive feedback and inspirational suggestions. Her recommendations and instructions have enabled me to assemble and finish the thesis effectively. I would like to thank the members of my committee for their valuable feedback. I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Şebnem Toplu who sparked my interest in post-colonial studies with her ingenious teaching. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Şenol Bezci for opening a whole new world to me through his expertise in Narratology. My sincere thanks to my colleagues and friends Burcu Kabadayı, Emre Çelik and Helin Başak for their support and tolerance. They have always encouraged me and never complained despite their exposure to every single detail of my thesis. My special thanks also go to my dear friend Metin Torlak for being the best study buddy ever and Pınar Boz for our long stimulating phone conversations. I am also grateful to Ceren Seçilmişoğlu for being a great friend. I would like to thank my family for their incessant support, especially, my sister for always raising the bar. She has been a role model, mentor, editor, and a shoulder to cry on. Above all, I would like to thank my loving husband, Mehmet Pancaroğlu for his patience during many hours of writing. He was always there cheering me up and stood with me through the good and bad times. I could not have completed my thesis without his support and encouragement. ii INTRODUCTION “Every text is haunted, every story is a ghost story, in the sense that all texts are haunted by the ghostly echoes of their predecessors” Srdjan Smajiċ Although Queen Victoria died over a 100 years ago (January 22, 1901 to be exact), the traces of her reign and the values of the society did not cease to exist. On the contrary, there has been a spree of narratives adding spice and zest to the world of literature with their pursuit and recreation of “the Victorian”. Contemporary met Victorian; techniques and textures intertwined with discourses and ideologies, and the concept of Victorian shifted from a historical period into a tool. By positioning the Victorian into a contemporary context, these works generate a fusion of familiarity as well as alienation. Whether this combination is harmonious or completely discordant remains a controversy. Kate Mitchell, the author of History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages, once raised the question: “Can these novels recreate the past in a meaningful way or are they playing nineteenth-century dress-ups?”(2010: 3) thus, interrogating whether these novels-in- question create enhanced cultural narratives corroborated by multidimensional mosaics or just cloak a story behind Victorian costumes for publishing or commercial reasons with an attempt to establish reputation under the wings of this remarkable era and the widely- esteemed fictions it had produced. Another important question that is of particular concern to this study is whether these works were meant to be “meaningful dress-ups”. What is questioned here is the possibility of a purposeful mimicry that does create a meaningful composition denoting further motives than aesthetic or fictive concerns to the extent of political criticism and deconstruction. In this respect, this study aims to address the question of the power of narration in terms of reproducing discourse. In the forthcoming chapters, the usage of neo-victorianism regarding individual and collective lieux de mémoire will be scrutinized through the postcolonial rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre; Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations; Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights; The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips. The ways in which these authors address the problem of colonial experience will be explored through a close examination of the stylistic texture and thematic structure of these works. Since neo-Victorian studies are relatively new, the existing research fails to provide a comprehensive examination on the ways in which neo-Victorian novels represent postcolonial experience. The aim of this thesis is to fill these gaps by concentrating on echoes of trauma behind the postcolonial responses to Victorian classics. Through a case study of three Neo-Victorian rewritings with a focus on the narration style, the manipulation of discourse will be scrutinized. By incorporating narrative theories into Neo-Victorian, the study aims to dismantle the postcolonial discourse beneath the rewritings and comprehend the strategies through which they challenge former representations and articulate new voices. Every society has the tendency to gaze back in history whether in a nostalgic perspective assigning a positive attachment or in a traumatic manner immersed with resentment or in a restorative engagement; acclaiming and eliminating traces of their heritage. The perception and conception of the past is a relative issue highly associated with the status quo of generations. The representation of the past and the transmission of memory, accordingly, is shaped by the particularities of the existing norms and conditions as well as politics (Certeau, 1975). The retrospective gaze towards the Victorian 4 Literature offers a vast playground rich in politics, national values and judgments as “the novel of all genres, the composite novel of its epoch, which highlights the cannibalizing, ever-broader, all-encompassing and all-assimilating nature of the novel” (Gutleben, 2001: 223). Through transformations in both form and content, postcolonial rewritings respond to the dominant discourse of colonialism. The interaction between the two narratives -Victorian and Postcolonial- creates a multiplicity of perspectives and voices in the narration thus deconstruct the conventional historiography and reconstruct the colonial trauma. Looking back to the foundations and commemorating does not only help envision the past but also enables to establish a ground for a new pluralistic literary landscape. Within the scope and theoretical framework of

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