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Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home

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Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home by Julie Hakim Azzam B.A. English Literature, North Central College, 1998 M.A. English Literature, Northern Illinois Univeresity, 2000 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Pittsburgh 2007 i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Arts and Sciences This dissertation was presented by Julie Hakim Azzam It was defended on September 21, 2007 and approved by Susan Andrade, PhD, Associate Professor Troy Boone, PhD, Associate Professor Shalini Puri, PhD, Associate Professor Carol Stabile, PhD, Associate Professor Dissertation Advisor: Susan Andrade, PhD, Associate Professor ii Copyright © by Julie Hakim Azzam 2007 iii The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home Julie Hakim Azzam, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2007 Postcolonial gothic fiction arises in response to certain social, historical, or political conditions. Postcolonial fiction adapts a British narrative form that is highly attuned to the distinction and collapse between home and not home and the familiar and the foreign. The appearance of the gothic in postcolonial fiction seems a response to the failure of national politics that are riven by sectarian, gender, class, and caste divisions. Postcolonial gothic is one way in which literature can respond to increasing problematic questions of the postcolonial “domestic terrain:” questions concerning legitimate origins; rightful inhabitants; usurpation and occupation; and nostalgia for an impossible nationalist politics are all understood in the postcolonial gothic as national questions that are asked of the everyday, domestic realm. This dissertation argues that the postcolonial employment of the gothic does four distinct things in works by al-Tayeb Salih, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie. First, it forms a distopic representation that emerges when the idealist project of the national allegorical romance fails. Second, the postcolonial gothic is interested in the representation of the unheimlich nature of home as both dwelling and nation. If colonialism created a “home away from home” and metaphorized this spatial division in psychoanalysis through the relationship of the heimlich to the unheimlich, then part of the postcolonial gothic’s agenda is unveiling that behind the construction of hominess abroad lies something fundamentally unhomely. Third, iv postcolonial gothic employs a gothic historical sensibility, or a sense of “pastness” in the present. Fourth, if the gothic is the narrative mode by which Britain frightened itself about cultural degeneration, the loss of racial or cultural purity, the racial other, sexual subversion and the threat that colonial-era usurpation and violence might one day “return,” then postcolonial gothic deploys the gothic as a mode of frightening itself with images of transgressive women who threaten to expose the dark underbelly of their own historical and political contexts. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1 1.1 WHY THE GOTHIC? ........................................................................................ 5 1.2 HOUSE, NATION, AND THE UNHEIMLICH.............................................. 15 1.3 WHAT POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC DOES .................................................. 32 2.0 THE ALIEN WITHIN: WOMEN, THE GOTHIC, AND THE NATIONAL NARRATIVE IN DRACULA AND SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH.............. 42 2.1 THE CASE OF DRACULA............................................................................... 47 2.2 SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH, THE GOTHIC, AND THE NARRATIVE OF FAILED NATIONALISM ................................................................. 57 3.0 “MAY IT COME BACK:” THE SOUTH AFRICAN FARM AS GOTHIC TOPOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................... 80 3.1 THE PLAASROMAN AND THE “BURIED GIANT”................................... 80 3.2 LAYING THE GHOSTS OF THE PLAASROMAN TO REST: NADINE GORDIMER’S THE CONSERVATIONIST .................................................................... 89 3.3 LIFE WITH FATHER: COETZEE’S IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY........................................................................................................................ 106 vi 4.0 HAUNTED HOUSES OF HISTORY: ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS ....................................................................................................................... 131 4.1 HAUNTED HOUSES OF HISTORY ............................................................ 138 5.0 GIVING UP THE GHOST OF HOME: SHALIMAR THE CLOWN AND THE GOTHIC 174 5.1 ALLEGORY, INTERRUPTED: SHALIMAR AND THE MATERNAL AS GOTHIC MONSTROSITY............................................................................................. 178 5.2 LOVERS, CLOWNS, AND MILITANTS: THE BHAND PATHER AND GOTHIC DISPLACEMENT .......................................................................................... 197 5.3 NOSTALGIA AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: AVENGING THE MOTHER ................................................................................................................ 207 ENDNOTES............................................................................................................................... 216 6.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................... 236 vii 1.0 INTRODUCTION What happens when the gothic, a distinctly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British mode, is deployed in contemporary postcolonial fiction? What does the gothic allow postcolonial fiction to say and do that it might not have access to otherwise? Why would postcolonial writers consciously deploy a narrative mode that is not only British but also a mode predicated on the primitive, foreign, and exotic? Given the popularity of magical realism and other experimental narrative modes, why would postcolonial writers feel the need to turn toward the gothic, a poorly written, hyperbolic, and conventionalized mode? The British gothic is a narrative mode that is “antagonistic to realism,”1 shadows Romantic idealism and individualism, and provides a dark counternarrative to the narrative of progress of modernity. In the gothic, the sins of the fathers always visit themselves upon their children and curses uncannily redound throughout the generations. As such, the gothic makes visible the “uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence” and displays the “underside of enlightenment and humanist values.”2 The gothic may be fascinated with things that are old, but in its form, it is a distinctly new mode of writing. Ian Watt remarks on the irony of the term “Gothic Novel:” “It is hardly too much to say that etymologically the term ‘Gothic Novel’ is an oxymoron for ‘Old New.’”3 The gothic is a form of “generic miscegenation”4 because it “poaches” elements from realism, the romance, and the sentimental novel. 1 Intuitively, it makes sense for postcolonial writers to tap into Britain’s “dark” or “illegitimate” narrative mode with which to understand the relationship between the colonial era and the present moment of complicated postcoloniality as one that is haunted by the specter of the colonial past.5 In deploying the gothic, postcolonial fiction attempts to solve the lingering historical and political problems of colonialism in terms of a European narrative mode. If the British gothic enables a symptomatic reading of empire, gender, and sexuality, amongst other things, then what might the gothic reveal about the postcolonial? Broadly speaking, postcolonial gothic inquires into the uncanny relationships between colonial narratives of conquest and unspeakable violence, public history and intimate narratives, and the persistence of nostalgia for nation or homeland in the face of the failure of such projects. There has been much written on postcolonial magical realism, but the subject of the postcolonial gothic has not received much more attention than an article-length study. The existing scholarship on the postcolonial gothic emphasizes that the postcolonial employment of the gothic mode is first and foremost a narrative form of “writing back” to empire, and a “palimpsestic echo”6 that articulates the unspeakable, lost, or silenced historical narratives of colonial conquest. In the existing criticism on the postcolonial gothic, the works that are commonly recognized as constituting the narrative form include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.7 Bernd-Peter Lange argues that: “Gothic brings to the fore what is unadmitted in a culture by painting it across, or palimpsestically underneath, time and space,”8 which, in the hands of postcolonial writers articulates “the untold stories of the colonial experience”9 and “turns the tables on the unifocal 2 point of view from which these alterities [of colonialism] were originally conceived and also their role in the imposition of a hegemonic Eurocentric view.”10 On my reading, the postcolonial gothic greatly exceeds that of a palimpsestic echo and, in
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