Class and Gender in Irish and Indian Postcolonial Domestic Fiction

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2017 Narratives of Fracture: Class and Gender in Irish and Indian Postcolonial Domestic Fiction Sreya Chatterjee Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Chatterjee, Sreya, "Narratives of Fracture: Class and Gender in Irish and Indian Postcolonial Domestic Fiction" (2017). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 5337. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/5337 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. 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Narratives of Fracture: Class and Gender in Irish and Indian Postcolonial Domestic Fiction Sreya Chatterjee Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Lisa Weihman, Ph.D., Chair Dennis Allen, Ph.D. Gwen Bergner, Ph.D. Marilyn Francus, Ph.D. Keya Ganguly, Ph.D. (External) Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2017 Keywords: Ireland, India, Postcolonialism, Gender, Domestic Novel Copyright 2017 Sreya Chatterjee ABSTRACT Narratives of Fracture: Class and Gender in Irish and Indian Postcolonial Domestic Fiction Sreya Chatterjee The world system, core-periphery, and combined and uneven development – all concepts originating in sociology and economic history have enjoyed a fresh resurgence in literary studies (Moretti 2001, Casanova 2007, Deckard et al 2015). This dissertation studies the novel as a “global form,” and explores its conceptual engagement with, as well its inflection by, the changing core-periphery relationship in a globalizing world. I focus on five Irish and Indian women novelists, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnston, Mahasweta Devi and Kiran Desai. Arguably, India and Ireland occupy anomalous and analogous positions in the literary world-system. As a growing cultural-economic power, India is often considered, unfairly according to some critics, to be the representative example of the postcolonial world; such a characterization often obscures the particular and diverse histories of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. On the other hand, despite being a part of Great Britain and Europe, Ireland is often situated, controversially, as a postcolony within the “West,” on account of its long colonial occupation by the English. By employing a comparative, world-systemic approach between Indian and Irish fiction, I seek to destabilize the West/non-West binary and instead emphasize the shifting relationships between the core and the peripheries shaped by non- monolithic, distinct kinds of colonialism. Fiction plays a significant part in registering as well as shaping the experience of uneven, postcolonial and peripheral modernity. Specifically, I argue in my dissertation that women’s “domestic” fiction, far from being an apolitical, “private” corpus as they are often carelessly labeled, plays a significant role in the literary articulation of postcolonial and peripheral unevenness. The focus on the family in these fictional texts serves to illuminate the interplay between and imbrication of the domestic, the familial and the private with the (gendered) national and the transnational. The authors in this dissertation deserve attention, especially, because through such “domestic” and “private” topics as marriage, coming- of-age, sibling relationships and family history, they are able to uniquely elucidate the lived experience of peripheral modernity. Each of the chapters offers a reading of some aspect of the domestic, the familial and the private realms; these women novelists provide a global, and not simply metropolitan, account of domestic fiction, not only in terms of content, but also through formal innovations in their chosen genres of fiction. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 Narratives of Fracture: Class and Gender in Irish And Indian Postcolonial Domestic Fiction CHAPTER TWO 25 Thwarted Marriage and the Anglo-Irish Big House: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Molly Keane’s Good Behavior CHAPTER THREE 72 Youth and the Bildungsroman in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 and Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows On Our Skin CHAPTER FOUR 130 Making It Big: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss As A Novel Of Globalization CHAPTER FIVE 168 Invoking Troubled Histories: Anne Enright’s The Gathering As A Celtic Tiger Novel CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY 210 iii Page 1 INTRODUCTION NARRATIVES OF FRACTURE: CLASS AND GENDER IN IRISH AND INDIAN POSTCOLONIAL DOMESTIC FICTION In a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the border between home and world becomes confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other. Homi Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation” In his text, the writer sets up house … In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia Domestic space appears as a recurring trope in postcolonial literature, representing a site where the continuous and uneven incursions of history shape everyday lived experience. With its continually shifting relation to the nation and the world, domestic space is fictionalized as alternatively liberatory and repressive: where the fault lines of historical change are most clearly visible. Gendered constructions of domesticity typically emphasize the physical space of the home as feminine,1 thereby validating the divide between the private and the public.2 These 1 In his seminal study on colonial and postcolonial Indian history Partha Chatterjee speaks of the controversial nationalist resolution of the women’s question in India. In the nationalist formulation, Chatterjee argues, the ‘home’ came to be identified as the “spiritual” sphere based on the relegation of women as bearers of “tradition”. The public sphere in which female participation was discouraged became the “material” sphere of masculine social exchange. See “The Nation and its Women” in The Nation and its Fragments. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Page 2 imbrications embody the internal contradictions of decolonization that expose the interconnected aspects of domesticity and postcolonial nation formation. This dissertation studies women’s domestic novel from Ireland and India as a “global” form, exploring its conceptual engagement with politics, gender and the nation in a globalizing world-system. Moreover, by comparing India and Ireland, this dissertation initiates a conversation between earlier, 1980s paradigms of postcolonial studies and later, post-2000s debates around core and periphery in world literature. Drawing from recent world literature scholars such as Franco Moretti (2001) and others, I deploy the concepts of core and periphery to frame together the ex-colonial, peripheral spaces of India and Ireland.3 This is a necessary corrective, I would argue, to the stark neglect of Ireland in a prior moment of the institutionalization of postcolonial studies in the 1980s: a historical moment in which India, on the other hand, is discussed rather prominently.4 India and Ireland are both peripheral, in distinct ways, to the capitalist world-system. Not only that, core and periphery offers a useful model of illustrating the analogous relation between the public and the domestic in these contexts. The ideological construction of the public as the site of postcolonial nationalism tends to extract from, and dominate the domestic realm (exactly like the core’s appropriation of the colonial peripheries), while simultaneously disavowing and downgrading the centrality of the latter. Reminiscent of the workings of Empire, such a process is deeply gendered and classed, as much as it is based on an engendering of dependency. Women’s 2 Homi K. Bhabha defines the domestic as “unhomely” spaces that narrate the gendered and non- linear trajectory of the postcolonial nation. See Bhabha’s “Introduction: Narrating the Nation” in Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. 3 Moretti’s formulation can be usefully summed up as follows: “foreign form, local material – and local form … and it’s precisely in the third dimension that these novels seem to be most unstable” (65, emphasis in original). 4 The rise of postcolonial studies is usually marked from 1978, which saw the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Over the next two decades, India plays a particularly outsized role in theorizations of the postcolony, with leading scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee and others. I discuss this history in greater detail below. Page 3 writing, focused on the supposedly dependent and actually disavowed domestic realm is especially committed to rendering such doubly peripheral sites visible, thereby offering a powerful challenge to elite,

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