Marginalized Voices in American Literature: Margins and Fringes 812693171X, 9788126931712

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Marginalized Voices in American Literature Margins and Fringes

Edited by

Sunita Sinha

ATLANTIC PUBLISHERS & DISTRIBUTORS (P) LTD

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Preface I’ve had enough I’m sick of seeing and touching Both sides of things Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody The bridge I must be Is the bridge to my own power I must translate My own fears Mediate My own weaknesses I must be the bridge to nowhere But my true self And then I will be useful The above poem by Donna Kate Rushin voices the rejection of the role as an alienated person which discusses the idea that black women always live in the liminal space between race and gender issues, and cannot pick a side—they are always explaining issues of race to white women, and issues of gender to black men. The book makes it clear that women of color—no matter their racial or ethnic identities—are banding together for the sake of democracy and human rights. Marginalization is a universal issue that has an adversarial effect upon societies around the world. The OECD report ‘Equity, Excellence, and Inclusiveness in Education’ reveals: “The challenge we face is how to ensure our education systems give every child the quality learning experiences they need to develop

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and realize their individual potential, and to do so in ways that value who they are, their language, identity, and culture. How do we harness diversity, create fairness, and ensure our learning environments engage and achieve the best outcomes for all individuals, not just a few?” In her collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects a profound sense of the various denotations of the marginal, she explores issues “such as Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology.” Marginalization at the individual level leads to an individual’s exclusion from significant involvement in society. The marginality of a person may be the result of exclusion from the society by its other members, or it may be a choice made by the individual. Being marginal may form an essential part of a person’s identity, for this makes it possible to differentiate oneself from the values of the wider society. On the other hand, being excluded from one group often opens up an access to another group. People who are identified as marginal within the traditional Western culture may be viewed as existing in “an elsewhere-within-here”. They live in a marginal reality within a society and culture, which is not, however, as strictly banned from the world of the mainstream as it could seem. Commenting on the marginal status of Man, the American urban sociologist, Robert. E. Park states, “The marginal man...is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic cultures.... His mind is the crucible in which two different and refractory cultures may be said to melt and, either wholly or in part, fuse.”

Marginalized groups often confront compound alternatives in interpreting and representing their own identities. They may choose, or feel impelled, to assimilate to the patterns and beliefs of the dominant group, thus renouncing alternative identities, or at least judging them by the standards of the dominant group and weakening the collective bonds which had defined them as a group in the first place. Alternatively, they may choose to highlight an independent separate identity in contrast to dominant norms and

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to act this out as demonstrably as possible, drawing individual pride and collective strength from such challenges. Such a move may run the risk of increasing the isolation of marginalized groups and prompting a repressive backlash from the dominant group if it feels its power is threatened. It may also produce a new set of dominant norms within the marginalized group itself, resulting in new fractures and experiences of marginalization for those members who are unable or unwilling to comply. In reality, most marginalized people steer a path between these two extremes, developing a multifaceted identity and negotiating complex relationships with a wide variety of individuals and groups.

In her collection, In Search of Our Mothers9 Gardens: Womanist Prose, Alice Walker remarks, “When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in the farthest corner. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats.” Phillis Wheatley, an American poet, spent most of her life entangled in a collision of cultures. Her poetry speaks much about colonial society in eighteenth century New England and its hierarchal relationships. As a Christian, a slave, a woman, a poet, and an African, Wheatley experienced racism on various fronts. Her poetry gives insight into marginalized groups in colonial America often quietened due to illiteracy.

The anthology opens with Billy Bin Feng Huang’s scholarly paper, “‘It’s All in My Letters!’ — On How Phillis Wheatley Has Voiced Her Protest From Behind an Epistolary Mask”. Huang tries to demonstrate that Wheatley has applied the same strategy in her letters; that is, she has built an epistolary mask, from which she has voiced her protest against enslavement. Jeffery Moser’s article, “Marginalization and Faulkner’s Melancholy: The Blues, Southern History, Black and White Consciousness, and Faulkner’s That Evening Sun", shows a deep concern about race and a keen sensitivity to the changes in art and literature happening around Faulkner, especially with regard to the movement of modernism. It studies the great and arduous struggle of Faulkner in the

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advocacy for the civil and economic rights of African Americans, and eventually, of all Americans. In their analytical article, “Wandering Jasmine: A Roped-off Life”, Carole Rozzonelli and Alessandro Monti focus on the issue of marginalization of South Asians in the United States and try to investigate the white Americans’ inability to embrace the racial difference of an Indian immigrant. Priyankar Datta’s essay, “Marginalized Voices in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye” points out that the recent trend of literary analysis on the basis of literary theories has presented diverse causes of marginalization—gender (Feminist criticism), power (Post-Colonial criticism), economy (Marxist criticism), etc. but Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye does not belong to any of these categories because its protagonist Holden Caulfield is an adolescent whose main trouble is that he does not want to grow up. This unrealistic attitude counts for his marginalization. Reena Mitra’s article, “J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye: A Modern Rendition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, tries to express how teens are marginalized in the society. It discusses how the most of American societies reject those who suffer from mental illnesses or disorders. Mitra’s second article, “Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine: An Immigrant’s Peregrination from Defiance to Resolution”, aims at discussing the marginal identities in the fiction of Mukherjee. It tries to explore the feminine anguish emanating out of their marginal status in the society. Bhaskar Roy Barman’s article, “Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of Black Myth”, examines the trauma, pain of dislocation, of rootlessness and unbelonging. Mehar Fatima’s article, “The Kite Runner: Voicing the Unheard”, tries to express human cultures, sentiments, believes, and practices of those who lived unknown and unconsciously find their voices heard through diaspora with realization of rooted identities, gains and losses of ideologies. Goutam Ghosal, in his article, “The Killers—Hemingway’s Prose Art and Social Commitment”, tries to study the plight of underrepresented people in American society—misogyny, racism, and in general a troublingly nonexistent concern for minorities, or anyone who is not white and male. Sarani Ghosal Mondal’s article, “Celie in The Color Purple: Acquiring Voice through a Womanist Quest”, explores the struggle of black women who

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rise to power and acquire a subjective voice of their own through a series of blows at home and outside. Sneha Sawai’s article, “Reclaiming Oneself: Subaltern Perspectives in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, ably delves into the complexity of being a black woman in a patriarchal racist society. It presents a penetrative insight into the black community in the United States, its utility and its colorful and bright nature in the opposition to the lethality of its situation in the world of unevenness, separation, injustice, and lack of understanding and communication between whites and blacks. We may conclude with Martin Guevera Urbina’s remark in his book, Twenty-first Century Dynamics of Multiculturalism: Beyond Post-racial America:

After centuries of marginalization and neglect, we need to cast our own movements, projects, and ideas as a battle for relevancy in the face of historical manipulation, exploitation, and oppression. We need to fight, tooth and nail, for equity in all areas of social life. One point to make clear, ethnic and racial minorities are not looking for scraps or a handout from the old paternalistic system but an equitable, stable, and leveled playing field. This study brings marginal issues to the fore and offers readings of a wide range of contemporary American literature that represent characters or communities at the margin of society.

I wish to express my gratitude to the contributors in this editorial venture, who enthusiastically contributed to this project and enriched the anthology with their perceptive papers.

I am particularly thankful to Dr. K.R. Gupta, Chairman, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd. for the confidence evinced in me and for seeing the book through the press.

Sunita Sinha

Contents Preface................................................................................

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Contributors....................................................................

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1. ‘It’s All in My Letters!’—On How Phillis Wheatley Has Voiced Her Protest From Behind an Epistolary Mask............................................................. Billy Bin Feng Huang 2. Marginalization and Faulkner’s Melancholy: The Blues, Southern History, Black (and White) Consciousness, and Faulkner’s That Evening Sun (1931)...................................................................... Jeffery Moser

3. Wandering Jasmine: A Roped-off Life..................... Carole Rozzonelli and Alessandro Monti

4. Marginalized Voices in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye....................................................................... Priyankar Datta 5. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: A Modern Rendition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn........................................................... Reena Mitra 6. Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine: An Immigrant’s Peregrination from Defiance to Resolution............. Reena Mitra 7. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of Black Myth........ Bhaskar Roy Barman

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8. The Kite Runner: Voicing the Unheard.................... Mehar Fatima

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9. “The Killers”—Hemingway’s Prose Art and Social Commitment...................................................... Goutam Ghosal

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10. Celie in The Color Purple: Acquiring “Voice” through a Womanist Quest......................................... Sarani Ghosal Mondal

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11. Reclaiming Oneself: Subaltern Perspectives in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.............................................. Sneha Sawai

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Contributors Billy Bin Feng Huang. Ph.D., is working as Senior English Teacher of Shilin Vocational High School of Commerce, Taipei, Taiwan (R.O.C.).

Jeffery Moser is completing his doctorate in Renaissance poetry and drama at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado (USA). His current research is about William Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse and the culture of print. He has also written and given presentations on the verse language and structure of Tudor poetry and about the poetry and poetics of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Carole Rozzonelli, Associate Professor of English, ITC, and Communications Law (Law of the New Information Technologies, Media and Communications Law) at the Institute for Information & Communication, University of Lyon 2, France. Former Vice-Chancellor in Communication of the University (2008-2012). Associated with the Research Centre PASSAGES XX-XXI and Le Grimh in Lyon. After specializing in the area of English language and ITC literacy, English literature and cinema, now, she specializes in Media Law, covering both traditional mass media as well as the law of the New Information Technologies. She currently lectures on English, ITC and Media Law. Speaker in conferences in France and also in international conferences on English and ITC (Bergamo, Torino, Antwerp). She collaborates with Professor Alessandro Monti and has participated in the research international series DOST on Oriental Studies with the Department of Oriental Studies, Torino, Italy. Also, she edited the series DOST Educational. She published in Italy, India and France with Loescher Editore, L’Harmattan Italia, Edizioni dell’Orso, Atlantic Publishers, Cercles Editions,

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EADTU, Le Grimh Editions. On the advisory editorial board of The Atlantic Review of Feminist Studies. Alessandro Monti, Retired Full Professor of English and Contemporary Indian Studies, University of Palermo then University of Torino, Italy. Formerly Head (for six years) of the Department of Oriental Studies (Turin). Member of the National Committee for the evaluation of University Research. Visiting Professor with the Kakatya University (Warangal). Joined the Committee for Commonwealth Studies (Delhi) replacing Mulk Raj Anand after his demise. ICCR Fellow with the Banares Hindu University. Associated with the Research Centre CESMEO for Advanced Studies in Oriental Studies, Turin. Chief Guest in Tirupathi at an International Conference on Indian Contemporary Literature. Speaker in analogous conferences in Edinburgh, Delhi, Trivandrum, Singapore, also speaker in international conferences on Indian and Sanskrit Culture (Milan, Rome, Turin). He founded and directed for 6 years the research international series DOST on Oriental Studies with the Department of Oriental Studies, Torino, editing or taking charge of more than 20 books. Previously, he edited the series Paradoxa with L’Harmattan, Italy. He published in India with Atlantic Press, Prestige, Women Unlimited and others. Internationally with Greenwood, Hong Kong University Press, University Press of America, Rodopi, Le Grimh Editions. On the editorial board of The Journal of Aesthetics (no more published, Kerala) and on the advisory editorial board of The Atlantic Review of Feminist Studies.

Priyankar Datta is an M.A. in English from the University of Burdwan. He has qualified N.E.T. At present I am employed as an Academic Counsellor of Netaji Subhas Open University (Suri Vidyasagar College Study Centre. Centre Code: C-03). He is doing my Ph.D. on the “Quest for Justice in the Selected Novels of Doris Lessing” from Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University. Reena Mitra, M.PhiL, Ph.D. (English), a gold-medallist from Lucknow University, has taught in Lucknow University itself

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and in Christ Church P.G. College, Kanpur, for over four decades. She has to her credit six internationally acclaimed books as sole author/editor and about ninety research papers published/presented at International and National conferences and seminars. She is currently working in Amity University, Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow Campus) as Professor of English.

Bhaskar Roy Barman is an internationally published and anthologized poet, novelist, short-story writer, critic, editor, book-reviewer, translator and folklorist and recipient of a good many national and international awards. He has authored and edited as many as ten books out of which six books have been published. They are: ‘Gateway to Heaven’, English original novel, Modern Short Stories: The Trap and Other Stories, an original short story collection, “Tagore in Tripura”, dealing with Rabindranath Tagore’s visits to Tripura from a literary and political perspective, Folktales of Northeast India (compiled and edited) El Dorado: An Anthology on World Literature (Edited), featuring comprehensive and research-oriented papers contributed by eminent scholars from around the world on different aspects of world literature and South-Asian Literature: Criticism and Poetry (Edited). Dr Roy Barman translated into English from Bengali a good many short stories and the translations have been published in literarily prestigious journals. He presented papers at a good many national and international seminars and is listed in 49 national and international who’s whos. He is associated with many national and international literary organizations in important positions. He has fathered “World Literature Society”, “Tripura Poetry Society” and “Sahitya Adda” (Literary Rendezvous).

Mehar Fatima, is working as Assistant Professor, The School of Law Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi. Goutam Ghosal, Ph.D., D.Litt., is Professor of English, VisvaBharati (A Central University) Santiniketan. His areas of specialization are Indian English Literature and Indian Literature. His other areas of interest are 19th century British

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and American Literature, Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. Ghosal was the Chief Editor of The Visva-Bharati Quarterly between 2005 and 2007.

Sarani Ghosal Mondal, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Sciences and DeanInter-Institutional Relations and Alumni Affairs at National Institute of Technology, Goa. She is the author of a pioneering book entitled Poetry and Poetics of Walt Whitman and Sri Aurobindo. She has also edited another book entitled Indian Responses to Shakespeare. Her areas of interest include Comparative Literature and Applied Linguistics. She had been a research associate at Indian Institute of Advanced Study. She has presented papers on Comparative Mysticism and Applied Linguistics at different universities of the US and Asia. She has also collaborated in a UGC funded project under e-Pathshala and her present research is on Sufism and Advaita Vedanta under MHRD’s seed grant. Currently, Sarani Ghosal is working on the 21st Century Teaching Pedagogy and delivered lectures on it at Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, Yogyakarta State University, Institute of Technology, Cambodia and State University of New York, South Korea. Sneha Sawai has completed her graduation from Lady Shri Ram College and post-graduation from Sri Venkateshwara College, University of Delhi. I have been teaching in Kalindi College as Assistant Professor since July 2011. She is presently doing her Ph.D. on African-American Literature from Ignou under Professor Nandini Sahu. Her area of interests rare—American Literature, Women’s Writing and Popular Literature.

1 CHAPTER

"Its All in My Letters!'—On How Phillis Wheatley Has Voiced Her Protest From Behind an Epistolary Mask Billy Bin Feng Huang

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,/ Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,/ Whence flow these wishes for the common good, (Phillis Wheatley, “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” 11. 20-22) [An epistolary novel is a] narrative in the form of letters.... The form enabled [Samuel] Richardson (1689-1761) conveniently to reveal his heroine’s private thoughts and feelings while advancing the plot. The reader, in the role of literary voyeur, could then see the shifting points of view without the intrusion of the author.

(Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz, Literary Terms, 79, italics mine)

Introduction Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) is the first published female Afro-American poet, whose poetry lays the foundation of the genre of African American literature. A black slave born in Africa (probably in today’s Senegal or Gambia), Wheatley was brought to Boston in 1761. She was purchased by John Wheatley, a wealthy tailor, for his wife, Susannah, as a companion, and was named after the vessel that had carried her to America. Out of her sympathy for this frail but remarkably intelligent

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child, Susannah taught her to read and write. Later, Wheatley came to learn about the Bible as well as some prominent English poets, like Milton and Pope. Eventually, she acquired the skills of writing poetry. In 1773, the Wheatleys helped publish her first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral., in London, which soon created a sensation, for people got irresistibly curious to see this self-taught Negro poet glorify God (Norton, 824). Recently, there has been a trend in literary circles towards a careful rereading of Wheatley’s poetry. To be more specific, Wheatley, on the surface, may seem to be celebrating God in her poetry; “however, the poet [Wheatley] wears a mask. It is beneath the surface that she chastises Christian slaveholders” (Loving, “Uncovering Subversion,” 69, italics mine). That is, in reading her poetry, it is critical that we should read between the lines to uncover her voice of protest. Unfortunately, critics decades ago simply failed to do so! As a consequence, Wheatley used to be ‘marginalized’ poet: not only was she dismissed as a minor poet but also her poetry was relegated to the secondary section in the anthology. Not until now, an era of globalization and feminism, has her poetry been reread and reevaluated. In addition to her enormously successful poetry, Wheatley has corresponded quite often with the dignitaries then. As Beckson and Ganz state, the epistolary novel enables readers to hear a character’s inner voice. Likewise, we can gain an in-depth understanding of an author by studying his or her letters properly, for after all, “a wide stock of correspondence between” two parties truly “affords us a rich window onto” the author’s mind (King and Jones, “Testifying for the Poor,” 787). In this paper, I will first study the attributes of epistolary communication. Then I will do a close reading of Wheatley’s letters. My goal is to discover how Wheatley has voiced her protest from behind an epistolary mask. Wheatley: A Marginalized Poet Before, Now 'De-Marginalized' As stated above, Wheatley is a self-taught poet whose works are mainly about extolling the Lord. Naturally, she would take the blame for catering to the Whites and turning her back on her fellow Black people. Her “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty” is a notable example:

On How Phillis Wheatley Has Voiced Her Protest

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Your subjects hope, dread Sire— The crown upon your brows may flourish long, And that your arm may in your God be strong! O may your sceptre num’rous nations sway, And all with love and readiness obey! Great God, direct, and guard him from on high And from his head let ev’ry evil fly! And may each clime with equal gladness fee A monarch smile can set his subjects free! (Collected Works, 17,11. 1-5, 11-14) In this poem, Wheatley implores God to enable George III to bask in His graces, so that his sovereign may flourish. Above all, she lauds him for repealing the Stamp Act to set his subjects free. Seemly, Wheatley has unconditionally identified with the White­ based, British empire, taking a grossly subservient attitude. It is because of such a reading of her poetry that has rendered her reproachable. For a long time, she has been “critiqued for being a poor imitator of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries, for not reflecting the black experience, and for writing in a neoclassical or ‘white’ style” (Walker, “The Defense of Phillis Wheatley,” 235). Henry Louis Gates Jr. has also noticed that “the overwhelming tendency in Wheatley’s criticism has been to upbraid her for ‘not being black enough’” (The Trials, 81). Eleanor Smith has relentlessly inveighed against Wheatley because she has turned her back on her fellow African Americans:

[Phillis Wheatley is one of those blacks] who are taught to think white and to divorce themselves from who they are. When they direct their energies, be they creative or otherwise, towards Whites, they are never consciously contributing to their own liberation or the liberation of Black people. Phillis Wheatley did not...contribute to the well-being of black people of her time. (“Phillis Wheatley: A Black Perspective,” 407, italics mine) For these critics, Wheatley’s disrepute as a traitor of her own race ought to be well-deserved. As mentioned previously, such

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prejudice against her derives from the misinterpretation of her poetry, or the failure to dig out her hidden voice of protest, to be more specific. Luckily, this error has been redressed by critics today, and as a result, she has been ‘de-marginalized.’

First of all, critics today have noted that Wheatley “must have recognized her paradoxical social position, near the fulcrum of privilege and disenfranchisement.” Hence, “Wheatley’s distinctive response to the spirit of her times was to project a reflexively race-conscious presence in her poetry...” (Harris, “Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African Canon,” 36). The analysis above can boil down to one single principle: be sure to capture her voice of protest against slavery that is hidden between the lines! A notable example would be Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America”: In the beginning of the poem, Wheatley states that it was God’s mercy that brought her “from her pagan land” (18,1. 1), and then she came to know that “there’s a God, that there’s a Savior, too” (18,1. 3). Most of all, she writes,

Some view our fable race with scornful eye, “Their color is a diabolic die.” Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train. (18,11. 5-8) Here Wheatley’s message of racial equality is more obvious. Harris sees how she “highlights the redemptive captivity in Christ” (37). In other words, as she thinks that God will put her on the “angelic train” despite her “diabolic” color, she may as well be saying that there has to be equality between her fellow people and the Whites! In other words, while Wheatley seems to be praising the Lord for His graces, but actually, she is secretly projecting out her voice for racial equality. About Epistolary Communication As stated above, an epistolary text may enable its readers to grasp the author’s most intimate feelings. Furthermore, it may also be the author’s means to subjectivize himself or herself. And it is at this point where epistolary communication becomes interconnected with the social ambiance. Meritxell Simon-

On How Phillis Wheatley Has Voiced Her Protest

Martin regards letter writing “as performative autobiographical acts of self-formation.” In addition, letter-writers work out their subjectivity through the signifying practice of self-narrating by means of their epistolary ‘I’—in dialogue with culturally embedded discourses and determined by the features of the epistolary genre (most notably the intrinsic presence of the epistolary ‘you’). Letters act as spaces where letter-writers uncritically adopt, partially or openly challenge, and individually reappropriate.. .normativity. (“Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing,” 292) To sum up, as the author commences subjectivizing himself or herself in the letter, (s)he also begins interacting with the cultural discourses in society. In an epistolary manner, the author takes his or her own stance on these discourses. Therefore, as “one of the most widely diffused print genres during the early modern period” (Altman, “Political Ideology in the Letter Manual: France, England, New England,” 106), epistolary writing “provide[s] evidence of discursive, commercial, and social conventions as well as reflecting changes in these conventions” (Mitchell, “Entertainment and Instruction,” 439, italics mine). Moreover, epistolary communication is basically an act of exchange. Peter Brooks notes that an epistolary author has to see and respect his or her addressee, because only when the recipient reads the letter will the epistolary communication serve its purpose. The writing subject (/) must always be aware of the one (s)he corresponds with (you). This I must be conscious that this you will be reading the letter as an I (“Words and ‘the Thing,’” 542). Susan Foley also emphasizes such a reciprocity

The writer reaches out to the recipient, expressing the value of that person for the writer. Explicitly or implicitly, the writer seeks reciprocation of the gesture.... Nevertheless, all letters are intended for reading by another person. The exchange of correspondence—envisaged as an “epistolary pact”...—serves primarily to construct the bonds between people. (“Your Letter Is Divine, Irresistible, Infernally Seductive,” 239-48)

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Just as Emile Benveniste observes, whenever the pronoun I is seen in a sentence, another pronoun you has to be called for explicitly or implicitly. And this is when a human experience is communicated (“Language and Human Experience,” 1-2). That is, you and I create a polarity in language, and epistolary communication simply hinges on this polarity; a letter is written to be read, which is also an underlying principle of letter writing.1 In addition, a letter writer, most of the time, will be looking forward to a reply from the recipient. This is Foley’s socalled “epistolary pact,” a notion Altman considers a necessary component of epistolary communication. In Epistolary: Approaches to a Form, Altman argues that in an epistolary narrative, the reader/addressee is expected to respond. And his or her response should be thought of as a contribution to the epistolary narrative. This is the essence of an epistolary pact (89). As a matter of fact, the concept of “epistolary pact” has a solid psychoanalytic basis: the fort-da game. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud observes how grandson derives pleasure from playing this game repeatedly, in order to overcome the loss of his absent mother (8-10). Following Freud’s theorizations about the fort-da game, Gayatric Spivak states: The unpleasure of the fort,..is...for the pleasure of the da: more pleasing than pleasure itself. This affectional asymmetricality renders the phenomenal identity of pleasure undecidable; and keeps the game forever m-complete, although Freud insists to the contrary. (“Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elie,” 30)

Spivak’s point of view is that unlike Freud’s observation, the fortda game is forever incomplete. It will go on repeating itself, for the “unpleasure” and “pleasure” is always in an asymmetrical relationship. And this asymmetrical oscillation between loss/ fort and return/d# leads to the excess of desire (Hu, “Seemly Close, Really Distance,” 72); namely, the desire never really gets satisfied. As a consequence, the player of the fort-da game will definitely repeat playing.2 This is exactly the case scenario of a letter writer: (s)he has a desire to write a letter and looks forward

On How Phillis Wheatley Has Voiced Her Protest

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to the addresses’ reply. However, his or her desire never gets truly satisfied; consequently, (s)he will keep his or her epistolary communication going on and on. There is another aspect of the fort-da game that is worth looking into: fort means “gone” or “loss;” in the case of epistolary communication, it simply indicates that the addressee is absent. In other words, there has to be some distance between the letter writer and the recipient. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be necessary to write a letter! This is another underlying principle of epistolary communication: a letter travels between a present sender and an absent recipient, and between the presence and the absence is the distance. William Merrill Decker notices that absence and distance are two key factors in the epistolary communication of the 19th century, when “separated parties more commonly created elaborate texts of their friendships” because of formidable distances and “the presence and absence of one person to another” (Epistolary Practices, 4). On the other hand, the distance denies the letter writer a simultaneous response from the addressee and postpones the satisfaction of his or her desire (Hu, 71 ).3 Most of all, distance is responsible for a major attribute of epistolary communication: the inexact communication of the letter writer’s ideas. To be more specific, acts of epistolary communication are basically “also acts of transformation because a letter’s original meaning and intention are never completely received” (Duyfhuizen, Narratives of Transmission, 49). In addition, “there is no reason to suppose that the letter means anything” to the man/recipient because he “will try to put meaning into this empty space” (Leader, “Extract From “Why do Women Write More Letters Than they Post?”,” 106). In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in commenting on Kafka’s Letters to Felice, sees such a discrepancy from the perspective of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement: But how do the letters function? Without a doubt, because of their genre, they maintain the duality of the two subjects: for the moment, let us distinguish a subject of enunciation as the form of expression that writes the letter, and a subject of the statement that is the form of content that the letter is

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Marginalized Voices in American Literature: Margins and Fringes speaking about (even if/speak about me). It is this duality that Kafka wants to put to a perverse or diabolical use. Instead of the subject of enunciation using the letter to recount his own situation, it is the subject of the statement that will take on a whole movement that has become fictive or no more than superficial. (30)

For Deleuze and Guattari, epistolary communication functions the letter writer/the subject of enunciation and the contents of the letter/the subject of the statement. We must note that the latter is sometimes insignificant because it is may not be a truthful reflection of the former’s intention of writing the letter. And this is precisely how Kafka manipulates his correspondence with Felice both perversely and diabolically.4

Wheatley's Epistolary Mask and Her Voice of Protest Before taking a close look at Wheatley’s epistolary mask, we must first take the social ambiance then into consideration: Wheatley emerged as a poet in the 18th century, when Christianity exerted its infinite influence on American society, though its internal conflicts were also beginning to surface. Puritan heritage began to be questioned but remained to be mainstream religious thinking, and Calvinism was also gradually challenged.5 At the same time, “beliefs about equality did not encompass women or blacks; women were excluded from the vote, and blacks were denied even the dignity of being considered human beings. They were property” (Literature in America, 77-90). The above is what Foucault terms “the dominant discourse;” power monitors the production of dominant discourse in order to ensure its own best interest, “...these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a [dominant] discourse” {Potuer/Knoivledge, 93, italics mine). On the other hand, Foucault also thinks that while power is producing its dominant discourses, it “always produces resistances and these resistances can be and often are positively productive.” That’s why we have various cases of “counter­ knowledges” (Shrift, Nietzsche's French Legacy, 42-44), or the so-called “resistant discourses.” The resistant discourses in

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Wheatley’s time include Briton Hammon’s A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man in 1760. Moreover, James Albert Ukawsaw Grinniosaw, a former slave, also published his A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Grinniosaw, An African Prince, as Written by Himself in 1770 (Harris, 28). These are the social realities Wheatley were confronted with while she was corresponding with the dignitaries then. Above all, according to Foucault, power is capable of absorbing resistance. Jana Sawicki explicates Foucault’s idea about the absorptive capability of power, “Foucault hoped to create the space necessary for resistance, for taking advantage of what he referred to as the ‘tactical polyvalence’ of discourses and practices....” Then she states that one of Foucault’s emphases is power’s “capacity to co-opt all forms of resistance” (“Foucault, Feminism, and Questions of Identity,” 294). In Wheatley’s case, should she join the resistant forces then, there’s a good chance that her voice of protest would be marginalized or co-opted. It’s especially so when Wheatley’s precarious social situation is also compounded by the factor of her gender. As “American society is one in which racial imperialism supersedes sexual imperialism” (Hooks, Ain't I a Woman, 122), Wheatley must have suffered the ‘double oppression’ of racism and sexism.6 Hence, it stands to reason that a blatant outcry of protest from Wheatley would be utterly futile. As mentioned above, a letter writer, within an epistolary space, tends to construct his or her subjectivities and assume an attitude towards the social discourses. It is noteworthy that Wheatley’s epistolary self is being shaped under such social conditions. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler emphasizes the simultaneous effect of a discourse which “both interpellates and constitutes a subject” (5). However, the case of Wheatley’s epistolary self is a bit more complicated. Merle A. Richmond has put it to a nicety, “[Wheatley is characterized by\ an awareness of one’s self and the relationship of this self to contemporary society” (Bid the Vassal Soar, 65, italics mine). With the contemporary society so oppressive and tyrannical,

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Wheatley, regardless of how marginalized she is, is still intent on “describing a thoroughly plausible...probability, the dignity of political liberty for all human beings” (Shields, Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation, 33), which will certainly antagonize the White-dominated society. The point is that Wheatley is very aware of this antagonistic relationship; she must know that the White dignitaries she’s writing to will never grant her the opportunity to subjectivize herself. Therefore, while presenting her true self in her letters, she builds an epistolary mask to shield it from the hostile social realities. This epistolary mask is the seemly White-friendly language in her letters, under whose veneer she is voicing her protest against enslavement. In a sense, this epistolary mask, pulling the wool over White people’s eyes, not only facilitates the construction of Wheatley’s subjectivity in her mail, but also enables Wheatley to wage war against White people’s slavery in an extremely subtle way.

Take her letter for Rev. Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) for instance. In the beginning of the letter, Wheatley says, “Rev’d Sir,—I take with pleasure the opportunity by the Post, to acquaint you with the arrival of my books from London” (175). Regarding her newly published book, Wheatley later says: Europe and America have long been fed with the heavenly provision, and I fear they loath it, while Africa is perishing with a spiritual Famine. O that they could partake of the crumbs, the precious crumbs, which fall from the table of these distinguished children of the kingdom.... I hope that which the divine royal Psalmist says by inspiration is now on the point of being accomplished, namely, Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God. (175-76)

Besides, Wheatley once wrote William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth (1731-1801), a British statesman who opposed to the Stamp Act and then played a significant role in contributing to the American Revolution:

The Joyful occasion which has given me this Confidence in Addressing your Lordship in the inclosed piece will, I hope sufficiently apologize for this freedom in an African who with the now happy America exults with equal transport in

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the view of one of its greatest advocates presiding with the Special tenderness of a Fatherly Heart over that Department. Nor can they my Lord be insensible of the Friendship so much exemplified in your Endeavors in their behalf during the late unhappy Disturbances. (166)

A perfunctory perusal of the passages in both the letters will give us the impression that Wheatley is truckling to the powerful Whites. In her letter to Rev. Samuel Hopkins, she thinks that she’s from Africa, a place “perishing with a spiritual Famine.” So, she could only “partake of the crumbs, the precious crumbs, which fall from the table of these distinguished children of the kingdom,” namely, the White celebrities. As for her letter for William Legge, she seems to be showing her admiration for him, addressing her thanks to him for what he’s done for the American people. However, these are just manifestations of Wheatley’s epistolary mask; we must, as I’ve mentioned in Section II of this paper, read between the lines. When she tells Rev. Samuel Hopkins that Africa “perishing with a spiritual Famine,” her main emphasis actually lies in this sentence, “Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” That is, Ethiopia, namely, Africa, shall be basking in the Lord’s graces, like Europe and America. So, the Africans shall be entitled to the same rights with the Whites. Likewise, in Wheatley’s letter for William Legge, her emphasis is this sentence, “I hope sufficiently apologize for this freedom in an African who with the now happy America exults with equal transport.” While she appears to be demeaning herself on the surface, she is in fact “insinuating that a Negro like her shares the equal right with the Whites to show respect to him” (Huang, “Resistance in Disguise,” 137). In conclusion, if her fellow Black people are entitled to God’s graces and human rights as the Whites are, then slavery must be condemned. This is Wheatley’s voice of protest against the White enslavement. By projecting out such a voice, her subjectivity as an advocate of her own race’s human rights can be ascertained.

It is true that Wheatley has worked out her subjectivity in her letters, and she has inveighed against the White slavery. However, she has accomplished both the objectives from behind an epistolary mask, and we readers just have to find a way

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to decode her language. All in all, it’s “an intricate rhetorical negotiation,” as Russell J. Reising has called it (“Trafficking in White,” 259). Her 1774 letter for Rev. Samson Occom (172392) is another example. First, Rev. Samson Occom was half­ White and half-Native-American, the first of his kind who published his writings. And Wheatley clearly thinks that she is more capable of relating to him than to the Whites. So, her language in this letter is less encoded: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which has reigned so long, is converting into beautiful Order, and reveals more and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other: Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian Slavery. (176) Compared with the two letters quoted above, Wheatley’s subjectivity is revealed more clearly in this letter: she is apparently playing the part as a spokeswoman of her race. And her voice of protest is a bit louder. While she is extolling the Whites for civilizing the African continent, she is delivering a message to the Whites that her people deserve to be freed from enslavement, just as the Israelites were to be freed from the Egyptian slavery. Her message becomes clearer as she later states in this letter, “God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom...and by the Leave of our Modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.... This I desire...to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so dramatically opposite” (177). Indeed, she is questioning the Whites about the absurd combination of their love for freedom and their pro-slavery attitude, but by no means does it indicate that she’s not putting her epistolary mask to good use. In this letter, she mockingly refers to the Whites as “our Modern Egyptians, ” and then “proceeds to an indictment of those would-be moderns as slave drivers who deny Africans not only their freedom but also their human desire for salvation, ‘civil and religious’” (Waldstreicher, “Ancients, Moderns, and

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Africans,” 702). Considering the fact that it appears that she’s emphatically praising the Whites for enlightening the Africans, she’s still using the epistolary mask to obviate the possibility of the Whites’ reproach. And her voice of protest is still coming from behind the epistolary mask. To a large extent, the functionality of Wheatley’s epistolary mask is contingent upon another important property of epistolary communication, that is, the ambivalence of the message delivered to the addressee. As I’ve shown, Wheatley is virtually playing an ingenious word game, disguising her otherwise radical arguments in her letters. Such an word game can be understood as what Homi Bhabha terms “mimicry,” “...mimicry represents an ironic compromise...the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite...mimicry is like camouflage...a form of resemblance...” (The Location of Culture^ 86-90). If so, the nature of her epistolary mask is mimicry, and above all, it works particularly well in the context of her correspondence. As I’ve said previously, epistolary communication is supported by a pact between the sender and the addressee, and this pact is premised on the you-I polarity. Above all, this pact will also ensure that the letter will be read. When writing to a White celebrity (yow), Wheatley (I) chooses elegant, White-accepted language. It would appear that in Wheatley’s case, this I is doubtless subservient to this yow, or that she has compromised with her formidable Other, the Whites, but actually, it is mere her camouflage. Most of all, as the you-I polarity or the epistolary pact will guarantee that her letter will be read, her linguistically veneered voice of protest will eventually be projected out. Of course, for her mimicry-plus-epistolary-pact strategy to work, her White recipients must put meanings as they see fit into the letter contents, and her literary training must also be a key factor. Khara House observes that “Wheatley’s “art” and “genius” as a black writer” enables her to “criticize...ideologies of the African slave trade and provide standards for” her fellow Africans (“Ignatius Sancho’s LETTERS OF THE LATE IGNATIUS SANCHO, AN AFRICAN,” 198). Wheatley’s 1778 letter to Mary Wooster, the wife of General David Wooster (1711-77),

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is a fine instance. Wheatley wrote this letter to express her condolences for General Wooster’s tragic death in the American Revolutionary War. Apparently, Wheatley doesn’t know Mrs. Wooster personally, for she wrote, “I am extremely sorry not to have been honour’d with a personal acquaintance with you.” She also wrote, It was with the most sensible regret that I heard of his fall in battle: but the pain of so afflicting a dispensation of Providence must be greatly alleviated to you and all his friends in the consideration that he fell a martyr in the Cause of Freedom.... I hope you will pardon the length of my letter, when reason is apparent—fondness of the subject—& the highest respect for the deceas’d.... (186)

With a casual reading, we readers might jump to the conclusion that it typifies a letter of consolation, written in standard White­ based, Christian language. This is also the meaning an average White reader will tend to put into the contents of this letter. However, as Phillip M. Richards has noticed, Wheatley primarily writes in response to her traumatic experiences as a Black slave in White society (“Phillis Wheatley,” 262). In this letter, Wheatley thinks that Mary Wooster as well as General Wooster’s other friends deserves providence because General Wooster has been martyred for the cause of freedom. While feeling sympathy for his tragic death, Wheatley has implicatively stated that her fellow Black brothers and sisters, like General Wooster, have been sacrificed in battling the White slavery. Her secret but clever equation of the dead Africans with General Wooster could be evidenced by her phrase “fondness of the subject & the highest respect for the deceas’d.” The subject matter of this letter is Wheatley’s favorite because she’d like to show her highest respect for General Wooster and her deceased African slaves, both of whom are sacrificed in the name of liberty. This is Wheatley’s message of protest against enslavement.7 She has managed to deliver it from behind an epistolary mask, which is manufactured on the principle of mimicry. And the epistolary pact stipulates that this message will arrive at the recipient. The epistolary you-I polarity is also closely connected with the other major qualities of epistolarity, such as the epistolary

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distance and the epistolary fort-da game. The former denies the addresser an instant response, and the latter makes sure that the correspondence will keep going on. One of Wheatley’s most frequent correspondents is Obour Tanner, another female Black slave from Newport, Rhode Island. Most of Wheatley’s correspondence with her deals with the subject matter of theology. That is, the distance between them compels Wheatley to write her frequently in order to fully get her ideas about God across to her. Her 1774 letter to Obour Tanner is a good example. This letter is a reply to Tanner’s previous letter, for Wheatley wrote in the beginning, “Dear Obour I rec’d last evening your kind & friendly letter and am not a little animated thereby.” Then she wrote: Assist me, dear Obour! to praise our great benefactor, for the innumerable benefits continually pour’d upon me, that while he strikes one comfort dead he raises up another. But O that I could dwell on & delight in him alone above every other object! While the world hangs loose about us we shall not be in painful anxiety in giving up to God that which he first gave to us. (181)

Wheatley’s correspondence with Tanner is full of such a theological discussion, which corroborates the view I’ve posited about the epistolary fort-da game: as the desire never gets fully satisfied, it is permanently incomplete. And in the course of the ongoing correspondence, Wheatley is able to instill the idea of her protest against slavery into Tanner. In the quoted passage above, Shields believes that Wheatley plays on the pun of sun and Son. In other words, she has “identified the sun as the supreme symbol of divine wisdom,” and it is through “the heavenly sun’s soothing warmth” that “she (and her readers) may achieve freedom” and vow never to relinquish hope (“Phillis Wheatley’s Struggle for Freedom,” 242-43). Shields’ point of view may be parallelized with the workings of Wheatley’s epistolary mask: beneath the surface of an ordinary theological argument is Wheatley’s protest against enslavement. With one letter after another, Wheatley, on a step-by-step basis, has convinced Tanner that since they are basking in God’s graces along with the Whites, God’s supreme divine power will one day free them.

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This is the belief they must hold on to; if this logic can stand, then slavery must be so diabolically perverse and inhumane that it has to be protested against.

A more obvious instance is Wheatley’s correspondence with Rev. John Thornton (1720-90). Thornton is a British merchant and philanthropist “who annually dispensed two to three thousand pounds sterling on charitable purposes” (Silverman, “Four New Letters by Phillis Wheatley,” 258). He has long-term correspondence with Wheatley. For instance, Wheatley wrote him a reply letter in 1772, stating “I thank you for recommending the Bible to be my chief study, I find and acknowledge it the best of Books, it contains an endless treasure of wisdom and knowledge.” Then, she went on to state how the Bible inspired her: I am still very weak & the Physicians, seem to think there is danger of a consumption. O that when my flesh and my heart fail me God would be my strength and portion for ever, that I might put my whole trust and Confidence in him, who has promis’d never to forsake those who seek him with the whole heart. (163)

Wheatley seems to be telling him that regardless of her poor health, God will always empower her. She is also convinced that God will never forsake her, judging from her faith in Him. By implication, she has informed Thornton that from the Bible, she has learned that God will deliver her from the Whites’ enslavement at last. By implication, she also wants Thornton to see how absurd slavery is! In 1773, Wheatley wrote Thornton to tell him of her safe return from England, “It is with great satisfaction, I acquaint you with my experience of the Goodness of God in safely conducting my passage over the mighty waters, and returning me in safety to my American Friends” (172). Then Wheatley talks to him about God, “the great Maker of all”:

Therefore, [God] disdainfs] not to be called the Father of Humble Africans and Indians; though despis’d on earth on account of our colour, we have this Consolation, if he enables us to deserve it. “That God dwells in the humble &

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contrite heart.” O that I were more &c more possess’d of this inestimable blessing; to be directed by the immediate influence of the divine spirit in my daily walk & Conversation. (17374, italics mine)

Here, Wheatley’s voice of protest against enslavement is a bit louder. She leads Thornton to acknowledge this logic: God, the great Maker of the world, has to be the Father of Africans and Indians. If so, Africans and Indians should be equally entitled to His inestimable blessings and divine spirit, just like Wheatley’s herself. Then how come Africans and Indians are still despised and denied all the divine consolations on account of their colors? Isn’t the Whites’ enslavement to blame?

In 1774, Wheatley wrote Thornton notifying him of the death of her mistress, Mrs. Wheatley, “I should not so soon have troubled you with the 2nd Letter, but the mournful Occasion will sufficiently Apologize. It is the death of Mrs. Wheatley.” Then, she went on to elaborate: She did truely, run with patience the race that was set before her, and hath, at length obtained the celestial Goal. She is now sure, that the afflictions of this present time, were not worthy to be compared to the Glory. This, sure, is sufficient encouragement under the bitterest sufferings, which we can endure. (179) On the surface, Wheatley is telling Thornton about how Mrs. Wheatley has reached the end of her life journey. However, we readers can’t help noticing the interesting choice of word, “race,” which is very likely to be a pun connoting both Mrs. Wheatley’s life journey and Wheatley’s race. Moreover, Wheatley’s referentiality has intriguingly shifted at the end of the quoted passage, “which we can endure.” All these can only lead to one conclusion: Wheatley has equated Mrs. Wheatley with her fellow Africans. This is what she wants Thornton to see: just as Mrs. Wheatley’s life journey is laborious, her fellow Africans are enduring a life full of the bitterest sufferings and afflictions because of the White enslavement; as Mrs. Wheatley has finally achieved “the celestial Goal,” her fellow Africans will one day be freed and bathing in God’s glory.

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From Wheatley’s epistolary communication with Thornton, we see how her epistolary mask has been functioning to the fullest. It rhetorically disguises Wheatley’s otherwise offensively sharp criticism of slavery. Like the case of Wheatley’s correspondence with Tanner, the distance of the vast Atlantic Ocean guarantees that Wheatley, the present letter writer, won’t get an immediate response from Thornton, the absent addressee. Thus, by no means can the contents of their epistolary communication be fully conveyed, which opens up sufficient room for Wheatley’s clever word game, or the operations of her epistolary mask. At the same time, the epistolary pact necessitates Thornton’s readings of and responses to Wheatley’s letters, which not only results in their epistolary fort-da game but also helps to make Wheatley’s voice of protest heard by him. Above all, Wheatley evidently knows how to play the epistolary fort-da game. She is fully aware that in the course of her correspondence with Thornton, there are always certain things left unsaid, which necessitates the next letter. This is how she has invited Thornton to see enslavement from multiple angles: little by little, letter by letter, Wheatley has led Thornton onto “a path straight into her interiority” while presenting him with “a radical argument for racial equality.” With the ceaseless epistolary exchange, “Wheatley shores up the depth of her own mind by granting depth to” Thornton’s (Rezek, “The Print Atlantic,” 35). In a way, it’s fair to say that the epistolary fort-da game enables Wheatley and Thornton to explore each other’s minds. It also makes it possible for her to assert her values and emphasize her reactions against the crime the Whites have perpetrated, namely, slavery.

Conclusion Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), a British African composer, actor, and writer, once wrote, “Look round upon the miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour...see slavery...hear the ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar... armed with truth honesty and conscious integrity you will be sure of the plaudit and countenance of the good” (The Letters, 31-32). Sancho sympathizes with his fellow Africans all around

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the world, and clearly Wheatley shares the same sympathy. She is inclined to use her wrings to struggle for the liberty of her race. As far as she is concerned, such a use “as a means to achieve freedom constitutes a poetics of liberation” (Shields, Preface, The Collected Works, xxx). The core of Wheatley’s poetics of liberation is her ability to sheathe her protest against slavery with White-accepted language. On the other hand, “since the seventeenth century...‘letters’ have been made to serve the law of literary genre” (Benstock, Textualizing the Feminine, 86); as literary genre, epistolary writings do have a number of attributes, such as self-formation, the you-I polarity, the epistolary pact, the epistolary fort-da game, and the imprecise communication. These attributes are the specifications of Wheatley’s epistolary mask, behind which she manages to project out her voice of protest against enslavement. Namely, epistolary communication is an enabling process for Wheatley; through it Wheatley is capable of masking her protest in White-friendly language in her letters. By making the best of epistolarity, she is given leverage in her letters to voice her protest without jeopardizing her position in the White-dominated society. NOTES 1. Interestingly, as far as Slovaj Zizek is concerned, the real recipient of a letter should be the Other, or Lacan’s so-called Symbolic Order. He takes the message in the bottle for instance, arguing that a letter always arrives at its destination, which is actually the Other/Symbolic Order instead of the other. Furthermore, when a letter is in the mail, or its sender has externalized his or her message, the Other/Symbolic Order becomes aware of the message and relieves its sender of his or her duty. See Slovaj Zizek, “Why Does a Letter Always Arrives ai Its Destination?” Enjoy Your Symptoms!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, (London: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, Inc., 1992): pp. 9-10. 2. In Seminar XI, Lacan points out that the repetition of the fort-da game is paradoxically where diversity and pleasure come from, “Repetition demands the new. It is turned towards the ludic.... But this ‘sliding-away’ conceals what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition in itself. Mari Ruti also argues that “the true secret” of the ludic is repetition repetition as a vehicle sublimation....” That is, Ruti

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3.

4.

5.

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believes that the Lacanian sublimation will basically repeat itself. See Jacques. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans by Alan Sheridan. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981): p. 61. Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012): p. 136. One of the key Lacanian concepts is Lacan’s formula of fantasy: $ O a. $ stands for the “barred subject,” O the fantasy, and a the object a, or the lack/castration. That is, the lack/castration leads to the barred subject. And the latter will seek the fantasy to substitute the former. Hu, drawing on ¿izek’s theorizations, points out that epistolary distance is crucial to the operations of fantasy. Billy Bin Feng Huang also agrees, “correspondence is actually a perfect seedbed for fantasies; the existence of fantasies is guaranteed in the writing space of correspondence because letters offer them the necessary distance.” See Jacques Lacan, Ecritis: A Selection, trans by Alan Sheridan. (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977): p. 313. Hu, 58. Billy Bin Feng Huang, “Gee! They’re All in Love with Phantoms!”—On how the Fantasies Have Constructed the Love Triangle in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit,” Cross-cultural Studies, Vol. No. 11 (May 2014): 81. In addition to distinguishing the subject of the statement from the subject of enunciation, Deleuze and Guattari stress “the impossibility of visiting” when it comes to Kafka’s correspondence with Felice. According to them, now that Kafka’s meeting with Felice is a sheer impossibility, Kafka’s correspondence “transfers movement onto the subject of the statement; it gives the subject of the statement an apparent movement, an unreal movement, that spares the subject of enunciation all need for a real movement.” To put it simply, the contents of the letter take the place of the letter writer because the letter writer will never meet the recipient. See Deleuze and Guattari, 31. The Cambridge History of American Literature has detailed the divided religious beliefs in the 18th century America. “Those who followed the intellect were the rationalists, or deists. Those who followed sensibility were...enthusiasts. Those who followed the will were the ethical reformers.... The last group constituted the Arminians....” See The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent et al. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956), p. 72. Speaking of sex or gender, Butler sees it in a Foucaultian light in Bodies That Matter, “The category of ‘sex’ is, from the

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start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a ‘regulatory ideal’.... Thus, ‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices.” See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993): 1. 7. Actually, the same voice of protest could be heard in Wheatley’s 1778 poem, “On the Death of General Wooster,” a poem she especially wrote in memory of General Wooster. In this poem, Wheatley wrote, “But how, presumptuous shall we hope to find/ Divine acceptance with th’ Almighty mind—I While yet (O deed Ungenerous!) they disgrace/ And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race?” In these lines, Wheatley clearly questions the Whites’ presumptuous attitude when they adhere to Christianity and hold African slaves in bondage. See The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, 149.

WORKS CITED Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982. ------ . “Political Ideology in the Letter Manual: France, England, New England.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 18 (1988): 105-22. Baym, Nina, et al., ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. Beckson, Karl and Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. Taipei: Bookman Books, 1995. Benstock, Shari. Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991. Benveniste, Emile. “Language and Human Experience.” Diogenes, Vol. 51 (1965): 1-17. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brooks, Peter. “Words and ‘the Thing.’” A New History of French Literature. Ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989. 537-43. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. ------. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Decker, William Merrill. Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans Dana Polan. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Duyfhuizen, Bernard. Narratives of Transmission. London: Associated University Press, 1992. Foley, Susan. ““Your Letter Is Divine, Irresistible, Infernally Seductive”: Léon Gambetta, Léonie Léon, and Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Culture.” French Historical Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring 2007): 237-67. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. and Trans. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounter with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas, 2003. Harris, Will. “Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African American Canon.” MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Fall 2008): 27-43. Hooks, Bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. House, Khara. “Ignatius Sancho’s LETTERS OF THE LATE IGNATIUS SANCHO, AN AFRICAN.” Explicator, Vol. 71, No. 3 (2013): 195-98. Hu, Chin-yuan. “Seemly Close, Really Distance: Kafka’s Letters to Felice." Wen Shan Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (March 2007): 49-80. Huang, Billy Bin Feng. “‘Gee! They’re All in Love with Phantoms!’— On how the Fantasies Have Constructed the Love Triangle in Thomas Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit,’” Cross-cultural Studies, Vol. No. 11 (May 2014): 67-91. ------. “‘Resistance in Disguise’— Rethinking the Politics of Positionality of Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry in the Dominant Discourse.” Spectrum, Vol. 13, Issue 2 (July 2015): 123-45. King, Steven A. and Peter Jones. “Testifying for the Poor: Epistolary Advocates and the Negotiation of Parochial Relief in England, 1800-1834.” Journal of Social History, Vol. 49, Issue 4 (Summer 2016): 784-807.

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Lacan, Jacques. Ecritis: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. ------. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981. Leader, Darian. “Extracts from ‘Why do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?’.” Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations. Vol. I. Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Routledge, 2003. 97-116. Loving, Mary Catherine. “Uncovering Subversion in Phillis Wheatley’s Signature Poem: “On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA.” Journals of African American Studies, Vol. 20, Issue 1 (March 2016): 67-74. Mitchell, Linda C. “Entertainment and Instruction: Women’s Roles in the English Epistolary Tradition.” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3 (2016): 439-54. Peterfield Trent, Williams, et al. The Cambridge History of American Literature. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956. Reising, Russell J. “Trafficking in White: Phillis Wheatley’s Semiotics of Racial Representation.” Genre 22 (1989): 231-61. Rezek, Joseph. “The Print Atlantic: Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and the Cultural Significance of the Book.” Early African American Print Culture. Ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 19-39. Richards, Phillip M. “Phillis Wheatley: The Consensual Blackness of Early African American Writing.” New Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Ed. John C. Shields and Eric C. Lamore. Knoxville: University Tennessee Press, 2011. 247-70. Richmond, Merle A. Bid the Vassal Soar. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Ruti, Mari. The Singularity of Being. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Sancho, Ignatius. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005. Sawicki, Jana. “Foucault, Feminism, and Questions of Identity.” The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 286-313. Shields, John C., ed. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. By Phillis Wheatley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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------ . Preface. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. By Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Shields. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xxvii-xxxii. ------. “Phillis Wheatley’s Struggle for Freedom in Her Poetry and Prose.” The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Shields. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 229-70. ------. Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008. Schrift, Alan D. Nietzsches French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. New York: Routledge, 1995. Silverman, Kenneth, Don Hausdorff, Charles Kaplan, and Robert C. Albrecht. Literature in America. New York: Free Press, 1971. ------. “Four New Letters by Phillis Wheatley.” Early American Literature, Vol. 8, Issue 3 (Winter 1974): 257-71. Simon-Martin, Meritxell. “Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing: Her Epistolary Articulation of Bildung.” History of Education, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2016): 285-303. Smith, Eleanor. “Phillis Wheatley: A Black Perspective.” The Journal of Negro Education, 43(1974): 401-07. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elie.” Diacritics, 14 (Winter 1984): 19-36. Trent, William Peterfield et al., ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956. Waldstreicher, David. “Ancients, Moderns, and Africans: Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Empire and Slavery in the American Revolution.” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 37 (Winter 2017): 701-33. Walker, Marilyn. “The Defense of Phillis Wheatley.” Eighteenth Century: Theory—Interpretation. Vol. 52, Issue 2. (Summer 2011): 235-39. 2izek, Slovaj. “Why Does a Letter Always Arrives at Its Destination?” Enjoy Your Symptoms!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, Inc., 1992. 1-28.

2

CHAPTER

Marginalization and Faulkner's Melancholy: The Blues, Southern History, Black (and White) Consciousness, and Faulkner's That Evening Sun (1931) Jeffery Moser

Little can be found in William Faulkner’s (1897-1962) writing that is not exemplary, and few, if any, of his short stories, novels, and other writings can be considered marginalized literature. In fact, most of Faulkner’s stories are about the greatness of American History, in particular, of the South. However, Faulkner’s early writings show a deep concern about race and keen, if not abiding, sensitivity to the changes in art and literature happening around him, especially with regard to the movement of modernism—even of the literary avant-garde who were effectively connecting and percolating their new ideals about writing to editors and publishers in New York, London, and Paris in the 1920s and 30s and being consummated by the likes of Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Woolf, and others, and along with an affiliation for, or strong interest in, the rising popularity of the Blues. The genre and lyrics and of the Blues especially articulate and emphasize marginalization and personal experience, and so do some of Faulkner’s stories focus on the burdens of work and the transgressions and struggles of living. Of course, Faulkner was not immune to writing poetry, and the Blues, as a music genre and musical form had originated in

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the Deep South, Faulkner’s regional home. Whether the blues was sung to ease the burden of work, for spiritual reasons or for popular entertainment, the lyrics were written to express how the musician (or culture) felt. The oral tradition of African music led to many characteristics of blues lyrics, including repetition, rhyming, improvisation, symbols and metaphors (General Blues). Hence, because of Faulkner’s focus on promoting “his South” and to have his narratives become distinguished (which he achieved in his lifetime), it is not surprising that the musical tradition developed by African-Americans from their roots in Africa came to be embraced by Faulkner as worthy subject matter in his writing and a symbolism for the very strata of history and the human condition of his native South and its space and the characters’ lives who permeate it that he aptly portrays in his prose.

In many ways, Faulkner’s literary output reflects a very compressed and constraining attempt to capture the epic expanse of the invention of America and the historic myth­ making of the United States, So Faulkner’s...offers a grand but conflicting account of place, legend, fear, self-motivation, genocide, brutality, and democratic vision. However, Faulkner was most keen on America’s greatest sin: its deplorable adoption and morally corrupt cultivation of slavery as a monumental cog to economic development and political power, rectified only by a Civil War that raged between 1861 and 1865, a little more than three decades before Faulkner’s birth. Bitterly fought between the North and the South, the Civil War was centrally prompted by the long-standing controversy and immoral economic investment in the enslavement of blacks. Therefore, if there is any silver lining to America’s courtship with the abominations of slavery, looking back upon the nineteenth century (hindsight is always 20/20), one could argue that the creativity, struggle, and resistance of generations of African-Americans produced the memorable work songs and emotional spirituals that generated the poetic Blues. The indelible imprint of the Blues, i.e. Jazz, which is an equally formidable invention like America’s version of democracy is, and together with the history of African-Americans—before, during,

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and after the Civil War—both have changed the texture and course of America into perpetuity. But out of this was derived the country’s great national wound and chronic recovery from slavery and war that surround and inspire Faulkner’s tales of ordinary men and women, black and white, who emerge on his pages, also in black and white. It is as if Faulkner intimately knew that the only hope for ink and paper would be to heal and unite racial difference and civil discord through his writing that he intended to be both a metaphor for civility and civic progress in print and as a tonic through evocative storytelling during and after Reconstruction of the South.

Consequently, the incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed, simple narrative ballads of the “Old South” serve no less as a muse for Faulkner than they become the fitting accoutrements and reflections for the experiences of his peers and of own life, being raised in Oxford, Mississippi. As a result, he artfully turned out memorable protagonists like Flem Snopes, Quentin Compson, Gavin Stevens, Temple Drake, and Emily Grierson, and other memorable characters—a host of ordinary men and women created to dominate and populate the intriguing narratives of Faulkner’s novels and short stories. Even some of Faulkner’s narrators, whether it be the youthful and come-of-age Sarty Snopes in “Barn Burning” (1939) or the perceptive nephew to Gavin Steven, Charles “Chick” Mallison in The Town (1957), Monk (1937), and other stories, are shrewd, tolerant, and observant characters and narrators, not unlike Faulkner himself, but who accompany Faulkner’s depiction of characters by the author’s own sense and fascination with the detection and description of the epic spectrum of humanity. His major characters are both shadowy and striking (Wagner 225). For Faulkner then, it is simply his genius to present a literary slice of America’s humanity, carved out of the American South and that contain personalities and events of great evil, immeasurable compassion, and spiritual goodness, and all intertwined within a complex social web and networks of troubled relationships, sacred hopes, and irreversible conflict among multiple people

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from diverse backgrounds, which Faulkner casts and recasts in his fictions. Great or small, Faulkner’s characters emerge as sharp and real, and they and their stories embody the melancholic and yearning heart and soul of the writer himself. Who cannot relate to Old Het in Faulkner’s short story, “Mule in the Yard,” as she walks “in from the poorhouse” and runs “down the hall toward the kitchen, shouting in a strong, bright happy voice” to her white employer: “Miss Mannie! Mule in de yard!” (Faulkner Collected Stories 149). Immediately, like the beginning to almost every one of Faulkner’s works, the reader is at once baptized and then kept submerged in a special tale about matters and manners of the American South, and then captivated from the beginning to the end of each tale by Faulkner’s uncanny and laudatory commentary. The audience is mesmerized and transfixed by everything that becomes unnecessary and horrible yet laudatory and correctable of Faulkner’s fictional (but all too real) charters and their world.

However, because of Faulkner’s style and the subject matter of his stories and novels, he was not always well-received. As John Basset noted, Faulkner’s choice to write about “unorthodox” characters and topics and his persistent default to craft stories around “romantic themes of flight and bravado” led some critics to claim that his stories reflected a “frenzied” style that is displeasing and his choice to advance “degenerate characters and unpalatable subject matter” lamentable (14-15). Certainly, as an emerging great author of the early twentieth century, Faulkner was not immediately a writer to be praised for his handling of the myths and makings of contemporary life. While his resonant lyricism was acceptable to many who read his works, some of his early stories are of social commentary that caught readers and critics off-guard by the boldness and bullish promotion of America’s, and in particular, of the South’s, languishing rural, quaint, and perceived backwardness, that other writers dismissed for modernism, urbanism, and intelligence. Of course, Faulkner was not a marginalized individual, but the reception to some of his early stories were marginalized

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by the critics; this was not because Faulkner deserved to be marginalized, but readers, editors, publishers, and critics (some of them) failed to understand and embrace, at first, Faulkner’s marginal characters and the deep, psychological, and political perspectives and repercussions that were promoted in his plots and that resounded off the pages by his characters, and native closeness to real lives and challenges in the South.

Even Faulkner’s careful transcription of dialogue that he assigns to some of his characters, notably poor, uneducated, and landless non-whites and oppressed and impoverished blacks, suggest that Faulkner, while an honest writer, was producing too much truth for a race-conscious American populace, still hung over after almost a half-century beyond the Civil War and post­ Reconstruction but unawakened and prejudiced, even among the literary astute in the States, if not among British readers and critics, as well (Basset 16-17).

White, male, and born in 1897, William Cuthbert Faulkner was the eldest of four sons blessed to the union of Murry and Maude Faulkner. The author’s dad came from a railroad family, and Murry Faulkner was a businessman. So when the younger Faulkner’s family moved to the economically progressive town of Oxford, Mississippi, shortly before William turned five-yearsold, for the rest of his life, Oxford, steeped in Civil War and Reconstruction history, discrimination served as the author’s principal source to inspire and embed the rich experiences that he brings alive and dramatizes in his narratives. But what Faulkner most relies upon, is a South that is recovering into perpetuity from the Civil War, which changed America and set it on an ever-perfecting course for a new nation. First, as a result of the war, slavery was abolished with the Thirteenth Amendment. While the country would not grant full civil rights to African Americans until the 1960s, ending the abominable practice of slavery that had been abolished in almost the rest of the Western world signaled a major turn for the United States. Faulkner is at the forefront of this great turn, and his writing must be understood as the great accompanist to the whole recovery and rebirth of a new South and a new

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America that refuses to let go of a segregated and dark chapter of American history. Yet, for Faulkner, it is a South and its history that hold some redeeming pleasantries and enviable romances for study and reflection amid a region and all its people, black and white, who have been uprooted and demoralized by every value and institution, from religion to education to culture and war, and with class and race consciousness of every one of the South’s inhabitants shaken. Thus, it is with little surprise and eventual literary acclamation that Faulkner created characters who are subjected to marginalization. In the settings and the themes that his short stories and novels project, the other of individuals is accented. Some of his characters face domination and oppression by a privileged group or by a disgruntled, disturbed and selfish authority figure. Accenting this topic of the other came easy for Faulkner, apparently. The predicament was familiar to him. He was surrounded by misfits and outcasts, the discriminated and underprivileged, the downtrodden and dismissed. As a result, he placed his characters in the settings that he knew personally.

In addition to mastering character development, along with other elements of fiction and drama, the logic and realism of Faulkner’s stories solidify his lucid style and the writer’s all-too consistent adherence to chronology. As we, readers, read his tales, we cannot break away from historical fiction, nor from the lyricism that dances within his dense and stubborn diction and throughout the descriptive narratives that are laced with humor, satire, wisdom, intuition, and hope. Alfred Kazin rightly states that, Faulkner illustrates “love and hatred for his region” and that the two are so “inextricably meshed that his passion is the struggle of the will against itself” (5). But in Faulkner’s stories, there is a pervading sadness, too. Therefore, this may be the actualization of a sadness embodied by Faulkner and by many in the South of his time, who were caught in the crosshairs of disparity yet hope, and who experienced a nostalgic loss, between an Old World and a New World. That is, the writer and his characters are suspended in the difficult and mesmerizing drama (or myth) of

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an Old America and a New America, changed by Civil War, and especially of an America in which blacks have been emancipated and find themselves struggling even harder to gain their equal and rightful economic and social standing among whites. As well, Faulkner’s own attempt to constantly grasp at trying to understand and apply the powers of fiction and to decide whether his stories should formalize new ideas about writing or counter prevailing social norms, provide a real challenge for him and for the literary establishment with invaluable stories that are more geared to the relaying of lessons about history and stories that extend to literary guides that seriously address the ideals and attitudes of literature’s worth and explore questions about the survivability of the self, notwithstanding skepticism about the future progress of a civil society. As we know now, throughout Faulkner’s entire life and until his death in 1962, he would be a part of, somewhat indirectly but still enveloped by, the great and arduous struggle in the advocacy for the civil and economic rights of African Americans, and eventually, of all Americans. He would die just thirteen months short of The March on Washington, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and held on the 18th of August in 1963 (Faulkner died on July 6, 1962), which would become credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and eventually, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Still, this human drama for civil and human rights as it unfolded in the 1960s during Faulkner’s last days continues to play out today, and Faulkner’s narratives adequately sustain and underline the unrecognized achievements of a great nation yet to be perfected for all people, and perhaps, of Faulkner himself, as a writer and published author who was ever-pursuing improvement and acceptance, just like so many of his imaginative and characters.

While his fictional protagonists are fixed in print and bound to a past, they are ever striving to become their personal best in the narrative. They grasp at better conditions for themselves and their family and friends while being held down by personal grievances and character flaws, by economic challenges and social inequality, and by their own doubts that challenge their

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faith and make prosperity, health, and safety nearly impossible to attain. For example, many of Faulkner’s short stories recall past conditions, but he uses present predicaments that alter back and forth between different the two times. Because Faulkner required his narratives to flow, he makes the conscientious decision to have a particular object or action become the central force that causes and defines a link to a future object or action. In one way, aside from his complex sentences and characters immersed in conflict, from Faulkner’s writing can be observed some of the influences of Ezra Pound, whose literary achievements suggest a theory that life need not be indestructible as long as literature (poetry or otherwise) is crafted in a way so that nothing gets lost in translation, and that the poet, or rather the author’s (poem) story continues to be read and retold (Stock 6).

In his early literary success, the short story “A Rose for Emily” (1930), as other scholars have noted, the aidermen’s effort to collect Miss Emily’s taxes cues the narrator to recall another scene, only 30 years earlier and when Miss Emily’s neighbors complain that a smell is coming from her property. They want the city’s fathers to do something about it. Faulkner links these two situations with the verb “vanquished” in order to describe Miss Emily’s actions: “So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.” Because “A Rose for Emily” was first published on April 30, 1930, in the issue of The Forum., a magazine which duly promoted itself as “The Magazine of Controversy.” Thus, no one should be startled to learn that Faulkner’s was launched among the literary elite and those who were uncomfortable by social and economic ills. That story takes place in Faulkner’s fictional city Jefferson, Mississippi, in the fictional southern county of Yoknapatawpha, where even ills can be sentimentalized in order to portray the more central concern of characters who may be victims, but their situations and circumstances allow Faulkner to reveal them as individuals who realistically face a moral predicament and who, may even achieve a moral victory.

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Charles Nilon has articulated that, for some of the AfricanAmericans in Faulkner’s stories, many of them “are a simple, lowly, uneducated people. Although most of them are victims of circumstances that they cannot control, their insights into their situations are unusually penetrating (and for readers, unforgettable). As victims, these characters are usually morally superior to their oppressors. Many of them achieve victories through defeat. In most of the stories, there is a chase motif in which the Negro character may use flight or evasion as a means of survival. The chase usually ends with the annihilation of the main character, but it frequently is made to symbolize the character’s moral victory” (Nilon 33). Significantly, for this essay, Faulkner’s very dark and ominous short story, “That Evening Sun” (1931), the crucifixion symbol or motif, in particular, conveys a religious sign, if not an almost Christian meaning, and thus, may enforce a moral victory for Nancy Mannigoe, even if her victory goes unrealized within the pages of Faulkner’s short story. She is the black kitchen servant who is employed by the white Compson family in postbellum Mississippi. Nancy is caught between working as a marginalized, black employee for the Compsons and their three children, and being the main provider for her own self and future family. Her greatest fear is that her common-law husband, ironically named “Jesus”, is seeking to kill her because she has, allegedly, become pregnant by a white man, a pregnancy that likely occurred from violence instead of romance.

Frantically, Nancy’s psychological state is chaotic and in dire shape, and Faulkner’s constant descriptions of Nancy having to traverse the foreboding ditch that lies between her segregated back neighborhood and the Compsons’ white neighborhood exacerbates the themes of racial division and the evil of prejudice that gnaws and tears at the conscience of blacks and progressive, forward-thinking whites (like Faulkner) alike. Even though Faulkner titles his story after a song from the Saint Louis Blues, originally composed by W.C. Handy, but popularized by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong in 1927, he, Faulkner, enlightens and informs his readers about race consciousness with contrasting references to color in order

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to push his own concerns about the destructiveness of racial discrimination. Faulkner focuses on day and night and on the different skin color of his protagonist Nancy and the narrator of his story, the youthful and white, Quentin Compson and his two siblings. He also uses contrast to heighten the peril of Nancy’s bi-racial pregnancy. In fact, she is harboring a white child inside her black womb. Finally, Faulkner’s figurative language and his repeating use of contrasting images of color between light and dark and black and white evoke ideals about judgement, either under man’s law or that of a divine authority. Thus, the “actual” ditch in the story that lies between the two segregated neighborhoods serves as a metaphor for right and wrong and for Nancy’s race, gender, vagina, which have been sacredly assaulted and sexually transgressed. Her womanhood and selfhood have been assaulted by a white man, most likely violently and through rape, and this becomes a figurative reminder of the racial “ditch” of misunderstanding and prejudice that has led to threats from her black, common­ law husband. This, too, imperils Nancy’s unborn infant’s future as much as it dramatizes Nancy’s own health and safety. As a result of Nancy’s predicament, Faulkner employs a number of blues tropes to structure the plot and to develop an overall feeling of melancholy and despair, prevailing racial stereotypes, and the varied beliefs held by whites and blacks.

Likewise, in his short story “Barn Burning”, which first appeared in Harper’s magazine in June of 1939, Faulkner emphasizes the image of fire by symbolizing the burning desire of Sartoris “Sarty” Snopes to break free from his family, especially from his domineering but wayward father Abner Scopes, a pyromaniac. The elder Snopes burns down the barn of his employer and the wealthy landowner, Major de Spain, who hires Abner as his new tenant. After the story opens inside a country store in the South and then moves to the de Spain farm, late 19th century, circa 1895, the story unfolds through the point of view of Sarty. It is difficult to know if the view is when the protagonist was a youth, or later, as an adult and looking back (like Faulkner). While the boy knows something, but not everything, about the events that transpire and the characters

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who are involved, he definitely knows his father burned down the Harris barn, an accusation and incident form the past that opens the story.

Thus, Faulkner is constantly trying to link the past with the present, and a lot happens in this story, too, as Sarty’s (Faulkner’s) voice and point of view narrate the tale. As a narrator, Sarty seems older and wiser than his character, who may be on the cusp of adolescence or about 11- or 12-yearsold. Aside from plot, the narrator and the other characters, even Sarty’s mom and his sister, are cast as characters who are achievers with a useful purpose, but what each is striving for in their life always seems to be out of reach and illusory, whether it is for self-improvement or mere survival. It is as if what burns in each character’s heart and soul can never be squelched nor come to fruition for good cause. Everything remains elusive, and so does the past and the future. Faulkner’s fictional histories and characters are tied to his present, and his readers must traverse the action and consequences that take place in both. However, these function as an unconquerable divide. Symbolically, the divide in “Barn Burning,” while not a ditch, may represent racial conflict and the pervading black (and white) consciousness that permeates Faulkner’s stories and novels.

Beyond his modern contemporaries like Pound, William Carlos Williams, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and others, writing from a niche he has established as an author who fictionalizes the American South and its history, allows Faulkner then to capture and promote a unique perspective, moment, and place that no other modernist writer effectively witnesses nor is able to recall. So instead of simply representing a certain part of the world, Faulkner’s stories actually allow him to create new meaning for those who live in the South and for those who do not. Faulkner’s world is a world striving for equality, justice, and of individuals seeking the validation of self, including class and race. And Faulkner’s plots, characters, and historical markers, with their relevant ties to the present are convincing, dramatic, poetic, and not illusory (Siraganian 126). Further, just like music and religion have an elusive and illusory nature to them, so does racial identity. And thanks to

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New Historicism criticism since 1982, we might add that, culture, plus a history of Western ideas, may also be no less delusory. It just depends on the approach taken by the author and upon the sources, or rather, on the record of events that happened long ago. Hence, for this perspective, at stake is who produces the historical record of events and then, how this is sustained and altered overtime, which ultimately influences the knowledge of socio-political events and fashions prevailing understandings and cultural norms, as well as motivates resistance and inquiry. This fits with Faulkner’s prose.

In this regard, then, it is most useful for the student of literature and culture to accept that, almost every story defies historicity, in some fashion or another. But when race and religion are involved in one’s literary studies, and of William Faulkner’s writings in particular, total critical objectivity and understanding about ignorance, prejudice, and relationships, particularly involving networks of persons of different color and the sex, become seemingly unachievable goals. Assuredly though, Faulkner’s dense style and his narrative choices make comprehension about “true” settings, characters, and tropes as fleeting as the day is to night and night is to the day, but not without possibility, too. As a consequence, the backdrop and plot in many of Faulkner’s novels and short stories must be read and understood no differently than the drama in them—Faulkner’s storytelling uses the imaginary to comment upon plot, “real” action, and history—and to instill hope. But his stories hardly pin any of these things down, or necessarily resolve and alter dire situations. The “certain” reality and entanglements that his fiction creates are tied to the transposition and transformation in print of an ideal about history, so that history, Faulkner’s history, particularly of the American South, and along with Faulkner’s precise opinions and exact criticism of history, are never settled, made stable, clarified, or kept static. Moral victory is always a possibility, even when his prose does not complete that story. Therefore, it is not that Faulkner writes novels and stories with no meaning or endings,—no—all of his stories are meaningful, have endings, and display the author’s tone and

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attitude—but Faulkner is writing for his silent readers. Their thoughts and emotions (our private thoughts and feelings), which his works trigger, determine everything that is to be understood and questioned from his stories. So, like music, i.e. the Blues, or like race and religion, Faulkner’s readers are informed and inspired because the author tasks the reader to make sense of his message by following diction and appreciating the images and knowledge about the human condition. Stereotypes, fears, desperations, disappointments, hopes, and possibilities are the rewards that his stories impart. Hence, when Faulkner wrote “That Evening Sun goes Down” (1931), eight years before he wrote “Barn Burning” and a year after he published “A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner’s mind was obviously influenced by and even more set on the Blues, the South and its past. It is typical Faulkner. But this short story in particular, incorporates a variety of literary licenses pointed at garnering an emotional response and intimacy between the reader and the main character, Nancy. She is torn between her loyalty, by law, to her black common-law husband, her role as a future mother who is expecting the child fathered by a white man, and her employment by a white family, with children who cannot make sense of the complex, adult issues that their black washerwoman faces, nor even begin to grasp the larger issues of race and injustice that weigh upon their society—“real” for them, but both imaginative and real for Faulkner and for preCivil Rights America in the 1930s.

The first two paragraphs in “That Evening Sun” describe the town of Jefferson in the present and in the past. The first paragraph, which is long, details the town’s present condition: there are paved streets and homes with electricity, but we may assume that black men still shine shoes for white men and we learn that black women still wash white people’s laundry. Only, now they transport themselves and the laundry in automobiles. His second paragraph, like the first, is one complete sentence, but it comments about Jefferson’s past: shade trees, which in the present have been cut down to make room for electrical poles, still stand, and the black women like the story’s main character, Nancy, wash for white people like the

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Comspons and carry the laundry in bundles on their heads, not in automobiles. By juxtaposing these two paragraphs, with their lengthy descriptions of Jefferson, Faulkner introduces two of his favorite themes: the difference between the past and the present, and race consciousness. But we readers have to read the entire story to understand Faulkner’s preferences to write with nostalgia, admiration, and melancholy of his former and current South and, in the case of “That Evening Sun”, about the possibilities of a new town of Jefferson, for Nancy’s future baby, and with an America yet to awaken in the light of a new day and to fully address the awfulness of racism. WORKS CITED Bassett, John, ed. William Faulkner: The Critical Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Burnett, Whit. Black Hands on a White Face: A Timepiece of Experiences in a Black and White America. Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971. ------. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Random House, 1950. Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Shorter 12th ed. Ed. by Kelly J. Mays, New York, 2017. ------. “Mule in the Yard.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1st international ed., Vintage International-Random House, Nov. 1995, 249-64. ------. “That Evening Sun.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1st international ed., Vintage International-Random House, Nov. 1995,289-309. Kazin, Alfred. New York Herald Tribune Books, 20 Feb. 1938. Nilon, Charles H. “Faulkner and the Negro.” University of Colorado Studies: Series in Language and Literature. No. 8. University of Colorado Press, 1962. Siraganian, Lisa. Modernism's Other Work: The Art Object's Political Life. OUP, 2012. Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Stollarz, Chellise. “Lyrics and Themes.” General Blues, 2012, https:// sites.google.com/site/generalbluesmc7/lyrics-themes. Wagner, Linda M. Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism. Michigan State University Press, 1973.

3

CHAPTER

Wandering Jasmine: A Roped-off Life Carole Rozzonelli and Alessandro Monti

Apprenticeship

If anybody goes travelling without a guide, every two days’ journey becomes a journey of a hundred years. Rumi (1207-73), Mathnavi III The novel jasmine (Bharati Mukherjee, 1989), deals with the too many provisional identities that the protagonist, a clandestine migrant, is obliged to assume when living in continued exile.1 The clash in the life of a runaway wanderer concerns the fragmentation between one’s own individuality and the relationship with the surrounding habitat, such as shaped by its historical and social background and one’s “needful” struggle to cope with the claim to survival, not only in the cruel fight for life, but also in the not too easy management of the emotions and wishes such as requested in a wild diasporic movement.

Historical dramatic events oblige people to quit their set courses in life, as it has happened with the family of Jasmine. At Partition her comfortable middle-class Hindu family must flee from Muslim Lahore and take refuge in the rural village of Hasnapur, deep in the middle-age heart of Punjab, as her brothers were accustomed to say. Jasmine is the fifth daughter and the seventh of nine children. She is umnarriageable, given the custom of the dowry. To make matters worse when she is seven an astrologer foretells her that she will be an inauspicious widow who will die, an exile, in a foreign land.

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The announced fragmentation in her future life is illustrated by the chronological disorder assumed by the narration. The deterministic prologue is followed rather abruptly by a breaking prolepsis that features Jasmine at twenty-four in unsophisticated rural Iowa, the last but one stage of an unrestful wandering across the United States, from Florida, to New York and, presumably, California. The chapters from two to five mix the remembrance of her arrival in Iowa with her later and progressive growing into location there, in the following three years and a half. She observes that “the farmers around here are like the farmers I grew up with. [...] A farmer is dependent on too many things out of his control [...]. They are hemmed by etiquette” (p. 11). The unmarried Jasmine is now pregnant and lives with a man who has divorced his wife after meeting her. He is the owner of the local bank and is shot in the back by someone who thinks that he has ruined him. Jasmine blames herself for that and thinks that he has been made an invalid and wounded in the war between fate and her will, but that she has saved his life by not marrying him.

Her adverse fate, such as stated by the astrologer, has made an ill-omened woman of her, who embodies although reluctantly the stereotype fixed by early Indian novel both of the seductive “beauty” and, as we will see later, of the widow seen as a “housebreaker”.2 Her supposed seductive nature or type constitutes the undeclared “dark” side of Indian feminine identity, a blame of which she does not seem to be conscious. If fault is found in an adult woman, blemish is cast upon her birth: family voice says that Jasmine has been a curse, a punishment for the sins committed by her mother in a previous life or incarnation (p. 39). Jasmine wore at birth the red insignia of the death meted out to baby daughters, “when the midwife carried me out, my sisters tell me, that ‘I had a ruby-red choker of bruise around my throat and sapphire finger-prints on my collarbone’”, a cruel birthmark impressed as a stigma by her anguished mother: to kill her was to spare the baby girl “the pain of a dowryless bride” (p. 40). At seven she will be branded on the forehead by a star-shaped

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scar, a wound inflicted for her rebellious refusal to accept her ill-starred fate.

The markings on her body evoke blood, but also stand for the dignity and the wealth lost by her family at Partition. In Hindu tradition a female is naked if she does not wear any jewels or ornaments, so such intimations of death impressed upon the body of Jasmine dress or compensate her state of nakedness. However, her inauspicious stigmas also suggest the numinous embodiment of her identity: she becomes Kali, a goddess associated with blood. Jasmine figures Kali when she kills her raper Half-Face, of which later, and when boasts of being invested with a divine power, “I so potent, a goddess”, when she sees herself as the guardian of the man that she loves in Iowa. From chapter seven to eight we are introduced to the early life of Jyoti (“Light”, the name given to her at birth) in rural Hasnapur. Although her mother complains that “God is cruel to waste brains on a girl” (p. 40), meaning that a future wife does not need to be clever, she authorizes her daughter to practice English after classes. Jyoti, not yet Jasmine, is introduced early to a double frame of reference in her life. The dazzling English books and the American films, in her opinion not too glamorous in comparison with Bollywood and the squalor in which some people, above all women, live.

Mataji is dismayed when she thinks of what is in store for her daughter, “all over our district, bad luck dogged dowryless wives, rebellious wives, barren wives. They fell into wells, they got run over by trains, they burned to death heating milk on kerosene stoves [the so-called kerosened wives]” (p. 41). As Jyoti, the girl is destined to share the sorry fate of the adharmic or oppressed married women. She will live on the despised margins of rural society, also given her “rebellious” that is untamed attitude. A young adult, at thirteen she refuses an arranged and “suitable” dowryless marriage with a widower with “encumbrance”.3 Her answer is that she wants to be a doctor with her own clinic in a big town (p. 51). However, she falls early and quickly on the emotional

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imprint that characterizes most young women, at least in the musafir (provincial) society. She falls for the voice of a man she has never seen, and marries him at fourteen, two weeks after they encounter, “ours was a no-dowry, no-guests Registry Office Wedding” (p. 75). We should not misunderstand her unconventional marriage and take it for an instance of incipient Westernization. It rather represents a breath of fresh air in the stifled atmosphere of gendered discrimination that warps the life of women. We should rather attribute their unconventional marriage to a somewhat improved and reactive attitude on the part of her husband, although strictly within the frame of domestic hierarchies.

He would open a store for electronic repair together with his wife, to the name of Vijh Sc Vijh or even Vijh and Wife, “I like having you near me when I work” (p. 89). For Jasmine, how her husband has renamed his wife, this is the turning point in their marriage, even if it does not represent a momentous step in gender equality or a complete change in the management of domestic duties and responsibilities. We should rather refer to the late nineteenth-century debate in Bengal upon the role of a married woman. She had to be skilled in every household activity, but also to be competent in a way that would allow a wife to share with her husband a basic interest and power in his activity outside home. She is asked to act in conscious synchrony with him and at the same time she is requested to be the guardian of the true Hindu values and traditions.4

She is the Indian version of the Victorian Angel of the House. The education to which Jasmine is submitted by her husband does not violate the patriarchal order or it is aimed at erasing the difference between man and woman, in conduct and power of decision, “These were happy times for us. Prakash brought home ruined toasters, alarm clocks, calculators, electric fans, and I learned to probe and heal, we lived for our fantasy, Vijh and Wife!” (p. 89). The husband still decides on his own and Prakash applies for admission to a college in the USA without telling Jasmine,

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who eventually will join him after she has attained full age. Confusion arises, insomuch the husband seems to contradict his litany that Jasmine has learnt by heart: respect is obedience, love is independence, self-reliance (p. 76). However, she is given no choice by her supposed reformist husband, who leaves her alone at home, still unripe and without any real support. Once again, marriage is obedience.

The worst is still to come. Jasmine is suddenly thrusted out from her peaceful married life. The district where they live is dangerously troubled by the murderous terrorism of the Kalsa (Sikh) Lions, who fight for Kalistan, “The Land of the Pure”. Their violence is aimed against the Hindu community, considered to be traitorous and their women immoral. Jasmine is deemed by them to be a shameless whore, because of her “reformist marriage” and her general way of behaving and dressing. Her unconventional attitudes make a target of her, just at the crucial event in her married life. She cannot leave for the States with her husband, she being still a minor, and on the eve of his depart Prakash dies in a terrorist attack meant against her. He dies to protect her. Here again the brutality of history, acting in opposition to the individual condition of “being in the world”, separates the past from the present and would destroy one’s set future. So the halfripe, just out of a marginal life, Jasmine becomes a widow, but still a strumpet for some people. A widow at fourteen she is again an unmarriageable woman with no rights, since what her husband possessed is by law given back to the absentee family of the dead man. Jasmine falls back to gendered subaltern type and decides to become a sati. By being a widow, she takes the identity of one that follows (anugamT) and self-immolates herself on the pyre to burn not the body of her husband, but the suit meant by him for America. She leaves to celebrate a rite of absence without his dead body and stages a token arena of admission to the American college that he should have joined, to fulfil the last act of obedience (anugati) for her husband and pati (master).

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She leaves on pilgrimage across Europe and the Ocean in a voyage of darkness (kalapani) and humiliating promiscuity. A starving clandestine woman, Jasmine is repeatedly raped for a morsel of food. These forcible violations of her body are the price that she has to pay in order to achieve her self-imposed mission, so as to expiate her supposed culpability for the death of her husband, an event predicted by the astrologer.

By acting so, the ill-omened widow (who should have refused marriage, since she knew the future) takes the supreme pledge: the vrat (penance) of death in dutiful atonement for her ill-fated nature. Jasmine is a self-appointed vrati (one who takes a vow), a former rebellious wife who chooses again on her own, but now within the pale of patriarchal tradition. She wants to follow her husband in death, a death by fire, in order to purify her status of inauspicious widow by becoming a dutiful pativrata^ a virtuous and faithful woman. However, her long and troubled journey transcends the obedience demanded of a woman (stridharm) extremely devoted to her husband (sati-savitri), even after his death. When Jasmine reaches Florida the inner focus of the narrative moves from the intended act of burning herself on the funeral pyre of her husband (satT horna) to the progressive growing of an untamed identity. The shift is from a ritualized and underground odyssey to the autobiography of a feminine soul (strT-caritra) viewed through a multiplicity of coexistent identities. We have used the term caritra (or character) instead of carit (auto)biography.

In Bengali literary tradition, one should not forget that Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, the standard term used for the lives of women was smrtikatha, given correctly as “stories from memory”. The apparent disorder and the forward­ backward chronological sequences in the homodiegetic voice of Jasmine accounts for the apparently spontaneous and untutored zig-zag or tortuous pace of the narrative. Smrtikatha told “stories of everybody life in the inner part of the house inhabited by women” and were instrumental “for reconstructing the social story” of the times.

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A similar effect, and perhaps aim, may be presupposed for the scenes of domestic life in India that constitute the thematic first part of the novel. The same may be said concerning the clandestine journey of the second part, that should carefully be read as an evidence or a contemporary documentation concerning what is now called “secondary migration”. In the American scenery that starts with the arrival of the underground traveller, the emphasis falls on what we would like to call atmacarit (or the biography of the soul), although this term was only used for male autobiographies. To give good grounds to our transition from the term “memory” to the term “soul” we will focus upon the evolving self of Jasmine and her individually autonomous growing into location within the American society, without forgetting or discarding, however, her spiritual legacy.5 The captain of a trawler, who contrabands clandestine migrants to the States, takes Jasmine to a dilapidated motel, a sort of dirty refuge for paperless migrants. Here he rapes Jasmine and perhaps will kill her later. However, a naked and outraged Jasmine reacts for the first time in her journey. She is not only outraged in her modesty and in her body, but the man even pollutes and desecrates the substitutive eidolon (image) of her dead husband. Half-Face tries to wear the jacket, too small for him, meant for the American college. The two joint acts of profanation (the rape and the tainted suit) cheat shame and ritual death. Jasmine decides that it “would be plenty of time to die” (p. 118), since she has not yet burned the suit and herself on the palm trees of the college campus. Her identity changes from the pious anugamT to the numinous “avenging woman” who embodies the Goddess, her internal sheath. She cleans her defiled body under the shower, as she had never cleaned it, and even enjoying the luxury of the warm jet of water: a first taste and material intimation of Western pleasant life. She purifies her soul with the prayers for the cremation that she can remember and reaches into the pockets of her salwar for the concealed knife. At first, she intends to balance her defilement with her death, but she does not cut her throat, thinking that her mission has not been fulfilled yet.

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It should be noticed that a new Jasmine is taking inchoative shape in not conflictual contiguity with the stridharmic devotee. She feels quite attracted by the improved material life in the West and simultaneously the Indian heritage in spirituality is still deeply engrained within her. She does not embody the nostalgic and uncomfortable expatriate, a type we find in the Indian community that she will meet later in New York. According to Partha Chatterjee, the sovereignty of the Indian nation is found in the inner, or spiritual, domain including “the elements of personal and family life and religion”.6

So far Jasmine has been the dutiful widow who has planned her pyre, but now she replaces the spurting blood associated with Kali for the cleansing red flames of the sati. She covers her nakedness, extends her tongue, almost to taste the flavour of blood as the Goddess does with her protruding and greedy tongue. She slices her tongue and hot blood drips from it.

She is naked again, blood is pouring from the open mouth and her knife is stabbing again and again at the raper. Now she becomes for a while Kali that fights and punishes evil on the earth, she is a fountain that gushes blood to nourish the world, she is not a murderer but the rightful slayer, she is “walking death”.7 But the blessing of death has been denied to her, whose soul has been lost in her temporary numinous metamorphosis. However, she cannot be the same any more, she is reborn through blood to a plurality of identities, “stains and sins all paid for”. She is many identities in one: the unlucky and inauspicious child of the red-scarred star, the rebellious daughter, the unconventional wife, the forlorn widow, the raped exile in darkness, the avenging fury. By including many qualities, she acquires the state of nirguntva, a nobody that becomes everyone, a wanderer in and out of herself. The soiled (“he had touched them”) fragments of her shattered married life are burned in a rusty metal bin, in the sad mimicry of a rite of cremation, whose desolation makes a marginal and invisible foreign outcast of Jasmine. At the same time, it introduces her to a mimic strategy of survival.

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The first stage of American life in the shadows leads the young woman to an unauthorized and hidden refuge for native women, whose husbands have been killed in an army massacre.

Here an old white lady takes care of Jasmine, without enquiring about her past life. She “stamps out the old Jasmine” and instructs her how to become invisible to the people around, by mimicking their outward manners and attitudes, ways of walking and behaving in public, of dressing, etc. She learns to build a proforma ordinariness for her Western persona.

However, her masquerade, more than a disguise, does not metamorphose her into an assimilated expatriate. Jasmine does not marginalize further her because of the unstifled remembrance of her killed husband. She reaches New York, where Professorji, the former professor of Prakash in India and the promotor of his intended migration, gives her full hospitality. She is wrapped into an isolating cocoon that suffocates her within the walls of a Little India that lives in the great metropolis with sulky estrangement and morose disaffection. They have chosen a sort of self-seclusion and only meet other Indians, eat Indian food and watch Bollywood “flops burnished by the dim light of nostalgia” (p. 144). Their constant refrain says, “there is so much English out here, why do we have to have it here?” (Ibidem). They complain that America is killing them. The clumsy repetition above of the word “here” meaning “out of home” in opposition to “home” sounds as an echo of the dichotomy ghare-baire^ a juxtaposition that implies uncommunicative difference in the intercultural exchange and the impossibility to cope with the Western world, its supposed materialism. Concerning women, the notion of ghare signifies a derivative “subjectivity”, that is an imitative autonomy. Such is the case, for instance, of the concession of partial companionship in working together meted out by Prakash to Jasmine, “according to men’s standards”. It is a sort of gendered moral hegemony that congeals womanhood into a subaltern role.

In Professorji’s home Jasmine reverts to Jyoti, whose t-shirts offend old people, a woman kept in selective parda, being a widow she is excluded from the matrimonial market

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that takes place in the Hindu regional neighbourhood. She has gained weight and is just forgetting English. She feels herself “immured”, as if a wall with barbed wire would cut her off from her unnamed wishes, not to be fulfilled.

The regressive and refusing nostalgia of the Indian expatriates isolates and marginalizes them. The many identities worn by Jasmine represent a breaking force (dynamis) that operates an autonomous change and establishes the condition of “being in the world”. A painful, but not aimless, wandering has led Jasmine to a Western location; to grow she needs to move away from nostalgia and regret, without forgetting her Indian roots.

She joins in her next stage an unconventional and fully sympathetic American family, after managing to obtain in a somewhat tricky way a fake green card. Professorji pretends that he is teaching in a college whilst he actually trades the hair of women from India. Jasmine comes to know and to be sure of her silence he gives money to the woman, who acquires the fake document.

In idiomatic Indian English such illegal papers are termed “fly-by-night” documents, an appellation that evokes a life hidden in the shadows, a perennial invisibility outside the pale of the law.8 So far Jasmine has been living at the outskirts of American life, in a condition of frightened mimicry, now she becomes Kate Gordon-Feldstein, a highly decorous and respectable-sounding identity that celebrates her apparently official metamorphosis. Time now to learn what it means to be an American citizen with an Indian soul. She approaches American domestic and matrimonial life, still a mystery she can but half understand, not because of a stubborn clinging to her Indian cultural imprint, but owing to her still liminal involvement with the inner and private core of Western life and psyche. In her new temporary accommodation, the third in the States, she is in-between family and the subaltern, but rewarding, role of “caregiver” in charge of the adopted girl of the couple. Not just a hired nanny but a day mummy who replaces the working mother, the night mummy. Jasmine is awakened to a new sensibility, through household and emotional education.

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No longer an unqualified refugee, Jasmine has left behind her the widow who felt no hope, the destitute and clandestine traveller, the raped avenging woman, the illegal and absconding migrant. Although in the still vicarious position of a deputy and part-time mummy she comes to know a taste of the motherhood denied in India to young widows. She becomes also emotional in her connection with the man in the house (Taylor) and falls secretly for him, who also falls for her. It should be understood that such an “eye romance” marks as it were a return to a certain feminine type, given the archetypal figure in early Indian fiction of the young widow featured as a hankering seducing housebreaker and a titila literally a butterfly but colloquially a flirtatious woman. Such characters are mainly found in the Bengali and English fiction of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

Concerning Jasmine, it should be observed that she appears to be more seductive that really seducing. Although eager to adjust and to participate to the everyday life of the family, she is not yet psychologically ready to fully understand and justify the sudden “plastic” changes and choices in Western domestic and emotional behaviours. A migrant needs stability, if not some initial fixity, not radical “twists at really happiness”. A migrant must follow preordained schemes and patterns, lest should incur into blame or social exclusion.

In spite of that, Jase (Jasmine’s improved alter ego, a new name given to her by Taylor) refuses to bunker herself into aimless nostalgia, but the fragmented narration of her changed inchoative life, moving up and down in time, even in the same chapter, tells us of a split consciousness, in which past and present people here and there come and leave, as if there were doors in her mind, always opening and closing. Remembrance moves up and down in time, without apparent order in the narrative sequence, in a way that accounts for a split consciousness and for the several identities in Jasmine: her memory brings continuously forth the accumulated sequences of a wandering life. She catalogues and compares her American experiences with her previous life, above all in marriage, to find and check

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difference in apparent similarity, so as to record them in the private archive of her mind, in proof and corroboration of the intercultural comprehension for which she is striving. It is not the simply curiosity or the estrangement felt by a migrant, but we would rather speak of some private ethnography that is simultaneous and not in conflict with the recollection of a lost past. We could also refer to a process of formative ethnology in the construction of her character in correspondence with the new habitat.

Darkness is closing again upon Jasmine when Taylor’s wife leaves both husband and adopted daughter for a married man with “encumbrance”. Jasmine cannot reason out the how and the why a wife can turn suddenly into a selfish housebreaker. A puzzled and confused Jasmine decides to move to rural Iowa, to reach a rustic and she thinks peaceful community founded in the past by Presbyterian peasants coming from Germany. She finds them somewhat similar to the sturdy Jats of her rural Punjab, as if she would relocate herself into the protective shadow of almost familiar surroundings. In Iowa a man divorcing from his wife would marry her, but she just consents to a life together. He is immediately fascinated by her exotic beauty, he calls her my rani^ whilst Jasmine feels rather attracted by a Vietnamese young boy who has been adopted by the man with whom she lives. Nothing happens between them, given that the boy keeps apart and finally will leave to live together with her migrant sister.

Curiously enough, Jasmine seems to fully embody the fictional type of the unrestful widow: a feature that seems to confirm a condition of marginalizing fixity of type with respect to the evolving rules of inclusion into a different society. In other words, the authorial imprint given to Jasmine seems to make use of a stereotyped representation of Indian femininity, by emphasizing the implied unreliability of women and of their behaviour.

In the fiction of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee men may be prone to emotional weakness: a man is left defenceless before the witching eyes of a beautiful woman; while a widow is supposed

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to be a migrant of the heart. Jasmine has migrated because of her sudden widowhood, but she renounces to be a sati and decides to accept a life in everlasting exile but also of emotional freedom. Her psyche oscillates in-between a substantially self-appointed salvific role after renouncing to embody the faithful anugami (she says she is Kali and has preserved the life of her man by not marrying him) and simultaneously wears the “ethnic” profile of the seducing widow. She has lost the protection of husband and family, so to survive she must wear many mimic personae, however, her displaced and displacing condition of nirgun (one and everybody), whose exalted personification as the embodiment of the Goddess, grounds the numinous foundation of the paronomasia that authorizes and signifies her transfers of identity. The new emotional attitude taken by Jasmine may be discussed in terms of viprlt, here an inversion of roles in the relationships between men and women. Her episodic rati (passion) is however tempered by feminine modesty. She is not at all split between two worlds and two cultures. Jasmine just wants to understand the Western ways of life, by sharing, for instance, the arrangements for Christmas. The peace of mind she has been looking for in Iowa is disrupted by the gentrification of the local rural background. Many peasants are reduced to bankruptcy and there are a few suicides. The local bank (of which her man is the owner) is blamed for that and the man is shot in the back: he becomes an invalid on a wheelchair.

Still remembering the old prophecy when she was a girl Jasmine, renamed Jane in her domestic life, after the resourceful eponymous heroine of Jane Eyre, thinks she has had in her hands the life of the man who is not her husband, even if she has been made pregnant by him. Given his disabled condition, Jasmine has been obliged to take a copulative position in which the woman takes an active role. This posture is labelled viprit-rati. These two terms illustrate the antinomic character we recognize in Jasmine. She is viprit (inverted) insomuch she stands, also metaphorically, upon the man she has refused to marry, while

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the term rati (enjoyment of love) is referred to her yielding to pleasure, even if to satisfy her man. However, Iowa is not the haven she had hoped for, both at home given the crippled condition of her man and the ruptured condition in which the peasants now live. When Taylor and the adopted daughter come back, she leaves with them for California, maybe not the last of the too many Partitions that have marked her vagrant life.

Every stage in her wandering has brought a new name to her. Born as Jyoti (Light, she has lived for a long while in darkness and exile), has been Jasmine in the flowery garden of her marriage, professionally associated with her husband in the truncated dream of Vijh and Wife, Kali in her avenging first night in America and again in Iowa, Jazzy in Florida during her mimic apprenticeship in Western clothes and behaviour. Kate Gordon-Feldstein in New York as testified by her fly-by-night Green Card, also renamed Jase by Taylor, Jane (“Plain Jane is all I want to be”) in Iowa and perhaps Jase again in California. Each name is meant for a different season, some of them explain the necessity of a subaltern mimicry for survival, some are reserved particularly for private affective language, others invest her with the avenging or salvific power of the Goddess, the inner sheath of her feminine identity.

She contrives to be the diasporic Indian castaway in a foreign land, an absconded and often puzzled observer of things, people, events that she does not always understand or meet her approval. Her mind is an archive bordering the lumber room, crowded as it is with cumbrous fragmented sequences, going backward and forward, forward and backward again, without any apparent order or scheme, excepting the stream of her troubled soul. She behaves like a scrupulous ethnograph lost in an alien land, among strange people. Jasmine is neither a novel of formation nor a story that concerns the nostalgic attitude of the migrant. Her husband wanted to go to the States in search of a “real life” and she objected “What is real life? I have a real life”.

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She could have followed her own route, start an activity of her own, without any American dream. She has been attributed many names and taken too many identities, some marginal, others of her own will and choice, although in a subaltern condition. She stands here and elsewhere, but not in a confused state of mind and soul. She is not a lost soul, rather a traveller in the dark, in perennial search not of real life but of who and what we are.

1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

NOTES Textual reference, Jasmine, New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1989. We refer to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and in particular to the novel Krishnakanta’s Will (1878), with the child widow Rohini. The term, found in Victorian English, is quite current in Sunday Matrimonials, when widows or widowers “encumbered” with children are applying for a new marriage. See, for instance, Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India. What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice, London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, Chapter 7 “Women and the Nation”, in particular section “The Trouble with their Voices”, in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 137-40. Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?” (Chapter 1), pp. 6-7 and 9, in The Nation and its Fragments, quoted. See Ajit Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force, London, Thames and Hudson, 1999 (1988), in particular “Kali as the Great Wisdom nourishing new life with the blood-nectar issuing from her severed neck”, p. 72. In Victorian English the idiom was referred to a prostitute. In Kipling it is the nickname given to a regiment.

REFERENCES Adhikari, Ramesh Chandra. “Bharati Mukherjee’s Novel Jasmine: A Saga of Suffering”, Abhinau National Monthly Refereed Journal of Research in Arts & Education, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February 2016, pp. 1-4. Web. Available at: www.abhinavjournal.com [File: pdf_75] Aneja, Anu. “Jasmine, the Sweet Scent of Exile”, Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1993, pp. 72-80. Web. Available at: JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1316424 [DOI: 10.2307/1316424]

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Bangari, Basappa Y. “Cross Cultural Issues Depicted in Bharati Mukherjee's ‘Jasmine’”, Bodhi International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Science, Vol. 2, No. 3, April 2018, pp. 53-56. Web. Available at: www.bodhijournals.com/pdf/ V2N3ZBodhi_V2N3_014.pdf Carter-Sanborn, Kristin. “‘We Murder Who We Were’: Jasmine and the Violence of Identity”, American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 3, 1994, pp. 573-93. Web. Available at: JSTOR. https://www.jstor. org/stable/2927605 [DOI: 10.2307/2927605] Chen, Tina and Goudie, S.X. “Holders of the Word: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee”, Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee, University of California, Berkeley, 1997, pp. 76-100. Web. Available at: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/vlil/bharat. htm Dayal, Samir. “Creating, Preserving, Design: Violence in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, in Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, Emmanuel S. Nelson (ed.), New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1993, pp. 68-70. Dhaliwal, Amarpal K. “Other Subjects: Identity, Immigration, Representations of Difference in Jasmine”, South Asian Review, Vol. 18, No. 15, December 1994, pp. 15-25. Gomez, Christine. “The On-Going Quest of Bharati Mukherjee from Expatriation to Immigration”, Indian Women Novelist: Set II: Vol. 3, Rajinder K. Dhawan, New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1995, pp. 71-87. Grewal, Gurleen. “Born Again American: The Immigrant Consciousness in Jasmine”, in Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, Emmanuel S. Nelson (ed.), New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1993, pp. 181-96. Indira, S. “Jasmine: An Odyssey of Unhousement and Enhousement”, Commonwealth Writing: A Study in Expatriate Experience, Rajinder K. Dhawan and L.S.R. Krishna Sastry (eds.), New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994, pp. 86-90. Lavigilante, Natasha. “La réincarnation: Alteration de la transmission dans Jasmine de Bharati Mukherjee”, Les chantiers de la création, 3, 2010, online November 2, 2014. Web. Available at: http:// journals.openedition.org/lcc/311 Mukherjee, Bharati, Clark Blaise, Michael Connell, Jessie Grearson, and Tom Grimes. “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee”, The Iowa Review, Vol. 20, Issue 3, Fall 1990, pp. 7-32. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.3908

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Monti, Alessandro. “Narrazioni di confine e identitá femminile in Bharati Mukherjee”, Per una topografía dell’altrove. Spazi altri nell’immaginario letterario e cultúrale di lingua inglese, M.T. Chialant and E. Rao (eds.), Napoli, Liguori, 1995, pp. 363-74. Padimi, P. “Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine: A Celebration of the Strength of Woman”, Indian Research Journal of Literature in English, Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan-June 2009, pp. 60-67. Padma, T. “From Acculturation to Self-Actualization: Diaspora Dream in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, Commonwealth Writing: A Study in Expatriate Experience, Rajinder K. Dhawan and L.S.R. Krishna Sastry (eds.), New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994, pp. 7785. Rang, Leah. “Bharati Mukherjee and the American Immigrant: Reimaging the Nation in a Global Context”, Master’s Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2010. Web. Available at: http://trace. tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/655 Roy, Sumita. '‘"‘Jasmine-. Exile as Spiritual Quest”, in Indian Women Novelists, Set V, Vol. 1, R.K. Dhawan (ed.), New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1991, pp. 202-09, also in The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee-. A Critical Symposium, R.K. Dhawan (ed.), New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1996, pp. 182-87. Ruppel, F. Timothy. “‘Re-Inventing Ourselves a Million Times’: Narrative, Desire, Identity, and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, College Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1, Third World Women's Inscriptions (February 1995), pp. 181-91. Web. Available at: https://www. jstor.org/sta ble/25112173 Sankar, G. and Soundararajan, R. “Immigrant Experience and Self­ identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine: A Study”, Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2017, pp. 10-15. Web. Available at: thescholedge. org [DOI: 10.19085/journal.sijmas040201] Santhanalakshmi, A. and Vinotorchali, V. “The Transformation of Immigrant: A Study on Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine”, International Journal of English Research, Vol. 2, Issue 2, March 2016, pp. 47-49. Web. Available at: www.englishjournals.com Sehrawat, Anil. “Issues of Identity and Conflict between Present and Past Values: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, An International Refereed e-Journal of Literary Explorations, Vol. 2, Issue III, August 2014, pp. 24-29. Web. Available at: www. researchscholar.co.in [File: 4--dr.-anil-sehrawat.pdf] Singh, Tanuja. “Transformation of Woman in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, The Creative Launcher: An International, Open

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Access, Peer Reviewed, Refereed, E-Journal in English, Vol. II, Issue I, April 2017, pp. 229-41. Web. Available at: www. thecreativelaucher.com [File: 35. Jasmine Research paper.pdf] Sivaraman, S. “Jasmine: A Search of Alternate Realities”, Recent Indian Fiction, R.S. Pathak (ed.), New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994, pp. 210-18. Srilakshmi, M. “Multiple Identity Transformations in Quest for Self­ empowerment in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities, Vol. IV, Issue IV, April 2016, pp. 121-26. Web. Available at: www.ijellh. com [File: 10.-Dr.-M.SRILAKSHMI-paper-final.pdf]. Sukumary, Anjana. “An Analysis of the Identity Transformations and the Survival of an Immigrant in Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘Jasmine’”, International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 70-73. Web. Available at: http:// www.ijlll.org/voll/15-X00018.pdf [DOI: 10.7763/IJLLL.2015. VI.15 70] Uzunoglu Erten, Meltem. “Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine: Cultural Conflict and Quest for Identity”, Pamukkale University Journal of Social Sciences Institute, No. 16, 2013, pp. 33-39. Web. Available at: http://dergipark.gov.tr/download/article-file/411512 [File: PAUSBED_2013_16_33_39.pdf] Wasi, M. “Bharati Mukherjee: An interview”, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Vol. 31, No. 6, June 1990, p. 36. Yadav, M. and Yadav, S. “Un-hyphenating Identity and The Assimilatory Strategies: Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, Golden Research Thoughts, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011, pp. 1-4.

4 CHAPTER

Marginalized Voices in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye Priyankar Datta

The recent trend of literary analysis on the basis of literary theories has presented diverse causes of marginalization—gender (Feminist criticism), power (Post-Colonial criticism), economy (Marxist criticism), etc., but J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye does not belong to any of these categories because its protagonist Holden Caulfield is an adolescent whose main trouble is that he does not want to grow up. This unrealistic attitude counts for his marginalization and since Holden does not find any fault in it, he voices his protest against society in general. No wonder thinking of heroes like Holden Ihab Hassan wisely observes: “The central and controlling image of recent fiction is that of the rebel-victim.” The last word of the observation—‘rebel-victim’—refers both to marginalized person (victim) and the person’s voice (rebel). As already suggested, it is the mentality of Holden which makes him marginalized. Though he is sixteen years old, he wants to remain innocent and more importantly wants the world to remain innocent. It is this absence of innocence what he himself calls ‘phony’. According to Dan Wakefield, ‘phoniness’ implies “the absence of love and often the substitution of pretence for love.” The novel’s most famous line, “If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘suck you’ signs in the world” (262) holds the key to Holden’s view of the ‘phony’ around him. It is however paradoxical that the Detroit Police

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fails to understand that this apparently controversial expression is actually directed against obscenity. He is so much absorbed in his world of innocence that many times he wonders what happens to the ducks in the lagoon near Central Park South when winter comes. What is pathetic is that Holden fails to realize that after leaving Pencey it is winter for him as he has now no place to rest. No one would be such an escapist in temperament. Since the attitude of Holden is an impractical one, one can easily equate it to madness. In fact, about his fascination for the element of madness Holden himself says, “If you want to know the truth, the guy I like the best in the Bible next to Jesus was the lunatic and all, that live in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones.” Holden is metaphorically the lunatic in the tombs by virtue of his obsession with dead Allie and James Castle and his deliberate masochistic attacks to his sensibility by coming into contact with the adult world time and again. Frank Kermode goes to the extent of saying that the novel has a “built-in-death wish”. Holden has been compared to Gatsby because the central common characteristic of both of them is adherence to a powerful and abiding illusion while the world around them is corrupt, hostile, and essentially phony. Holden also himself says, “I was crazy about The Great Gatsby—old Gatsby old sport” (183). This analogy also reinforces Holden’s marginalization. Sine Holden stands apart from others the connection between Holden’s marginalization and the existential philosophy comes into question. However, Holden typifies neither the bitter pessimism philosophized by Sartre nor the popular existentialism theorized by Camus.

Since Holden does not want to change his character and wants the world around him to change in accordance with his will, he assumes the role of a rebel—a rebel against a society of convention, immorality, and falsehood. Holden is expelled from Pencey Prep because he has failed in four of the five subjects and thus he becomes academically marginalized. Still he does not make any appeal to the school authority to consider his case sympathetically. It has to be kept in mind that this is not the first school from which Holden has been expelled. Actually, he has an unexpressed ‘voice’ of grudge against this school. Holden

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says that though the school advertises itself in the back pages of certain magazines with a picture of a guy on a horse jumping over a fence, he has never seen a horse anywhere near the school.

The period of time Holden stays in the school he keeps himself marginalized from his school mates by his deliberate efforts. For example, while the other students of the school go to the field to watch the Saturday football match with Saxon Hall, Holden is found to stand on the top of Thomsen Hill. He even says that the whole school is at the game “except me”. If James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus remains mentally aloof from games and sports, Holden is physically aloof. Then it is because of Holden “the goddam manager of the fencing team” that the game with McBurney School cannot take place. Actually, he leaves “all the foils and equipment and stuff on the goddam subway.” These are things with which Holden could have kept himself attached but deliberately does not do so. A remark by Stradlater, his old roommate at Pencey epitomizes this enforced marginalization: “You don’t do one damn thing the way you’re supposed to” (53). He fights with Stradlater only because of his feeling of jealousy for the later who has gone to date with Jane Gallagher whom he loves, though has not expressed his love as yet. He knows as well as we that there is no logic in this fighting and that Holden is sure to be beaten. Holden is not close to his parents either. To be precise though he is expelled on Saturday he decides to return home on Wednesday the day by which his letter of expulsion is sure to reach his parents. Somehow or the other Holden believes that his parents will not believe what he will say and so wants the official letter to reach before his arrival. He cannot even approve of Mr. Spencer’s calling his parents ‘grand’. Arthur S. Heiserman and James E. Miller wisely say, “American literature seems fascinated with the outcast, the person who defies traditions....” Holden seems to be marginalized from his teachers as well. There is no fault in Holden’s going to meet “Old Spencer”, his history teacher, who asked him to stop by before leaving school. However, as Spencer tries grilling Holden of his carelessness about his future, he becomes exasperated: “Look, sir. Don’t worry about me...I mean it. I’ll be all right. I’m just going

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through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don’t they?” Moreover, he does not like the attitude of self­ defense on the part of Mr. Spencer. Mr. Antolini is his old English teacher at Elkton Hills and now an instructor at X.Y.U. Antolini tells him that one may fall into disillusionment by giving up the thought that the innocent dreams of childhood will never be fulfilled or one may realize that things such as innocence selfless love, freedom from obscenity can never be provided by one’s environment. Holden is so immature that he takes the risk his own life through his refusal to grow up and his wish to keep other children from doing so. His conception of himself as a ‘savior’, nobly sacrificing himself for the sake of preserving what he takes to be the innocent and the good is thus false. However, Mr. Antolini’s own life is representative of the kind of ‘maturity’ that is shallow and phony in itself. To be precise, he has married an older woman for her money, and it is apparent that he does not love her. Then his practical suggestion concerning Holden’s future is a lame and unthinking defense of ‘applying’ oneself in school and pursuing a conventional academic career. Above all in the middle of the night, as Holden is asleep as the couch, Mr. Antolini makes a homosexual advance toward him. All this provides Holden with an emblem of the adult world where he has fallen—the world in which the true and the obscene are mixed together. “The more I thought about it, thought, the more depressed and screwed up about it I got” (253), he concludes when he wakes up the next morning in the waiting room of Grand Central Station. Thus, Holden finds none of the adult world whom he can rely upon.

The difficulty with Holden is that he is so disgusted with the adult world that he is unrealistically blind to the realities of childhood. Holden’s outrage against the obscenity is thus not unexpected. Holden frankly says, “Most guys at Pencey just talked about having sexual intercourse with girls all the time... but old Stradlater really did it.... That’s the truth” (55). He adds that Stradlater has a way of speaking sweetly to girls and making them believe that he actually cares for them. Again in a window at Edmont Hotel he sees a man and woman squirting water at each other out their mouths and observes, “Sex is something I

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really don’t understand too hot” (82). However, since Holden cannot stand at the edge of the cliff and be “the catcher in the rye”, he must fall off into adulthood. Naturally, he is shaken by his encounters with the obscene and so wants a release. That is why he begins to think of his sister Phoebe who as well as Allie symbolize innocence to him. In this connection, Robert G. Jacob observes, “For Salinger, childhood in the source of the good in human life; it is in that state that human beings are genuine and open this love for one another. It is when people become curious in their relationships to one another, become adults, those they become ‘phony’ and logical and come to love the reasons for love more than the loved person.” What is paradoxical is that Phoebe is worldlier than Holden thinks her to be. For example, she indicates that she knows quite clearly what is going on when a boy in her class by the name of Curtis Weintraub persists in following her around. What Holden must understand that once one has crossed that stage of childhood there is no backward movement. Detecting Holden’s problem Phoebe tells he does not like anything that he does not want to become anything and that he does not want to do anything. Thus, though Phoebe represents innocence to Holden, the former is already in the world of adulthood. In the midst of raising continuous ‘voice’ against the phony Holden at one moment imbibes falsehood, a sine qua non of the phony. When a lady who boards the train at Trenton and noticing the Pencey sticker on Holden’s luggage asks him if he knows her son at the school, Holden automatically adopts another personality. In fact, he tells her that his name is Rudolph Schmidt, casually tells her that her son is a very popular and respected fellow. He also explains that he is having an early departure from school because he is going to have an operation for a brain tumor. He evokes her sympathy and pleases her with his deliberate recourse to falsehood, but it is a deception. Actually, in a phony world, phoniness works. Here Holden’s action emblematic of the Biblical madman because he seems to be less in control of his actions. Thus, Holden seems to realize the essential ‘phony’ character of life itself.

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Gradually Holden adapts himself to the adult world. On the occasion of Christmas, he hears one of the sayings to the other, “Hold the sonuvabitch up. Hold it up, for Chirtsave!” (255). He starts to laugh and then is overcome by nausea. This dual reaction suggests the improvement of his response to the duality of the world. This juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane is central to Salinger’s art. These incidents suggestive of the acceptance of the ‘phony’ world set the ground for Holden’s ultimate acceptance of the adult world as real. Though he voices that he will go away, will never go back home and will never go to another school he cannot keep himself away from meeting his sister Phoebe. While waiting for Phoebe he goes to the mummies’ tomb in the Museum. He likes the rooms because it is always the same just as he wants the world to be. As he notices an obscenity written on the wall with a child’s crayon the moment of his revelation arrives. He realizes, “You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful because there isn’t any. You may think there is but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck You’ right under your nose.” He even concludes that when he dies, someone will write “Fuck You” on his tombstone. Feeling sick more at mind than at body Holden goes to the toilet where he falls down on the floor. This fall is more symbolic and less literal as it refers to the fall from adolescence to adulthood. He is no longer a marginalized voice as we see that he has left his idea of being “the catcher in the rye”: “The thing with kids is if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them to it and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off....” Thus, one notices a temperamental change on the part of Holden and he comes out of the cocoon of the harmful caterpillar and becomes a butterfly that finds positive elements in life. No wonder Holden witnesses rain in Christmas which symbolizes his rebirth as a mature and above all a realistic human being. Thus, Holden gets rid of his existence of a marginalized voice and arrives at “some pristine knowledge, some personal integrity” as Arthus Heiserman and James E. Miller say about the outcast in American literature. To conclude the psychoanalyst

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Ernest Jones accepting the story of Holden’s change of attitude says that the novel reflects “what every sensitive sixteen-yearold since Rousseau has felt and of course what each one of us is certain he has felt.” WORKS CITED Hassan, Ihab Habib. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel, Princeton University Press, 1971. Heiserman, Arthur Ray and Miller James E. J.D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff. Salt Lake City: Humanities Research Foundation, 1956. Jones, Ernest, “A Case History of Us All,” Nation, September 1, 1951. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. B.W. Huebsch, 1916. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 2004. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown and Company, 1991.

5 CHAPTER

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: A Modern Rendition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Reena Mitra

By the end of the American Civil War of 1861, the older generation of writers in America who had endeavoured to interpret and elucidate the prevalent reality of the times had all ceased to write and none remained to observe, define, and crystallize the new American truth that had emerged. The incipient avant-garde scene was an inexorable complex of the growth of cities, of industry and of a new ascendant political alliance that supplanted the egalitarian practice of the past with a kind of political gainfulness. Of the successive groups of writers who attempted to portray the contours of the post-Civil War American milieu was one that turned to the past for depicting territorial and native circumstances in a flourish of graphic delineation. Referred to as “local colorists”, the members of this group “sought to define the uniqueness of the locales of their origins”.1 They did not have a faith to subscribe to, neither the earlier romantic one nor any other, and hence, in course of time their significance paled.

One of the “local colorists”, Samuel Langhorne Clemens or Mark Twain, as he was called, rose to become a truly great writer in the history of American literature. In the many works that he wrote and is given credit for, specifically, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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(1884), he explores the nature of the American environment, natural as well as social, and identifies its effect upon man. In Huckleberry Finn particularly he brings into relief the natural freedom of life experienced while sailing on the river as compared and contrasted with the inhuman slavery man is subjected to in a civilized society. This is the conceptual point from which J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye takes off. Like Mark Twain, Salinger, too, makes repeated efforts to confront the new environment successfully and to draw inevitable conclusions from it.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has often been referred to as a modern rendition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is also believed to have been pronounced by the beat generation as its earliest manifesto and this ungovernable and intractable generation of the late 1950s and early 1960s stands by the avowed proclamations even today. One may think of the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, as a contemporary middle­ class castaway substituting the guttersnipe, Huck Finn, or may consider him a befuddled and disoriented pubescent youth still verging on the puerile, but Holden’s story remains an amusing as well as a horrifying one. The idiom used and occurrences described in The Catcher have evoked a strident outcry as vehement as the one in the nineteenth century against the indelicacy of Huckleberry Finn. Though the world of Huck was the world of Twain’s moral perspectives, the resistance against the coarseness and offensiveness of the language harnessed never diminished.

However, the righteous and principled existence of Huckleberry Finn soon came to be accepted for it was a vociferous protest against the decadent values of the nineteenth­ century American society which aroused in Mark Twain a bitter scepticism to be appeased only by more than occasional onslaughts on world affairs. Yet, very few realized the power behind the story of Huckleberry Finn with the majority of readers denouncing it as the “veriest trash”. Later came a shower of praise from men of literature like Bernard DeVoto who claimed for the novel “a vigour, a depth and a multiplicity which no other American novel surpasses...”2 and T.S. Eliot

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who referred to the character of Huckleberry Finn as “one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction”3 that continue to inspire mankind even today. H.L. Mencken, too, appreciated the essential “Americanness”4 of the novel.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is also a novel about freedom and integrity for the protagonists of both the novels, though almost a century apart, labour under similar restraints and inhibition that subject them to tremendous psychological stress. They fully represent their creators in expressing their total disregard for the prevalent values of the contemporary times and in wanting to “say my say, right out of my heart, taking into account no-one’s feelings and no-one’s prejudices” (an entry in Mark Twain’s Notebooks in September 1898).5

Giving expression to the young literary voices of the 1950s is Holden Caulfield, the principal character of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). In this novel, Salinger depicts the anxiety and disquiet of contemporary adolescents with such conviction that youngsters of the times felt that he was their messiah, one who “knew” them unerringly and one whom they “knew” equally well. Ever since, the interest in the work has remained unabated and “The Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield still survive as the voice of disaffected youth”.6

Salinger’s stories and novels in the early post-war years of the 1950s and the 1960s addressed the privations and fulfilled the needs of a new fledged progeny countering the spiritual coarseness of their culture and civilization. The narratives in his anthology, Nine Stories, portray various young individuals as misfits in their middle-class social structure and as striving for a life of simplicity and truthfulness. The yearning for their own particular type of truth is evidenced in “tender or bitter quixotic gestures”7 and these typical gestures, connote something beyond the usual derision and mushy tenderness indulged in by them. Very soon social intentions are substituted by religious acumen and subsequently, the irony of life flows imperceptibly into the silent impulse of love.

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Salinger’s short fiction apart, it is in his novel, The Catcher in the Rye that the age finds its statement of deprivation. Holden Caulfield, a runaway student of the prep school at Pencey’s with his red hunting cap freakishly positioned on his head, wanders around in New York city trying to come to terms with the untruthfulness and sham which he confronts at every juncture in life. He refers repeatedly and with repulsion to the “phoniness” lurking in everything around. This drives him to the edge and eventually lands him in a sanitorium from where he ventures to pronounce his predicament in the course of his first-person narrative. In the colloquial lingo of his injured youth, like Twain’s Huck Finn, Holden, the contemporary “picaro”, refuses to accept civilization as the road to betterment, but, unlike the former, he can see no “territory ahead”, only distractions and convulsions. Holden’s trajectory is one in which he confronts ruffians, doles out money to nuns, tries hard to scratch and erase vulgar phrases inscribed on the walls of the school he visits and keeps wondering persistently at the mystery of the disappearance of the ducks at Central Park during the severe winters when the pond is frozen. He spends hours reading a child’s notebook. Also, when Phoebe, his younger sister, asks him what he would do when he grew up, he quotes Robert Burns’ song, namely, “If a body meet a body coming through the rye”. He goes on to explain that he will be the “big” person around to prevent the multitude of children playing in the field from falling off the cliff. He will be the catcher in the rye protecting the children. The surfacial jocularity, ludicrousness and derision characteristic of this milieu are unable to conceal the desolation, the social evasions, and vacillations of society at large and the utter misery of urban life. Hypocrisy, egomania and adjustment in life are put to the test and deliberate fun alone can hold dread and terror at bay, but Holden’s vulnerability remains. The only redeeming feature in his life is his unconditional love for his sister, Phoebe, which represents perhaps his love for humanity. Huck Finn’s nostalgia for the enriching age of boyhood sentiments and feelings had certainly filtered down to Holden, who preferred the solidity of what came down to him through his senses and through his personal intercourse with life to the muddled perplexity of

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adulthood and the musings of self-analysis. He was, like Huck, again, wary of every effort to “civilize” him and dilute the spontaneity of all that came from his unswerving heart that was “instantly hostile toward bullies and all shapes of overmastering power”.8 Frederick R. Carl has categorically stated that Salinger, like Mark Twain, was concerned with mainstream America rather than with the Jewish sensibility: Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye “is a Huck Fin of sorts”.9

In recent times, there has been a major paradigm shift with regard to what the novel is and what it might be. The reader today seeks exposure to a world rendered not as causal but simply as empirical and experiential. To comprehend and cope with contemporary English fiction one needs to explore and be able to define the cultural situation of the times and devise a new terminology and a different kind of critical practice. The new kind of fiction that is being written does not insist on distilling a meaning out of it. The experience of the world portrayed in the novel is what matters most. As Malcolm Bradbury explains “the text...is simply satisfied to be, without insisting on its meaning....”10 The realm of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher is one of impressions and experiences. It is a novel of “growing-up” which is a peculiar blend of humour and horror. Holden is a confused and weird child apprehensive of the aftermath of growing up and is indiscriminately searching for camaraderie, togetherness and fraternity in all possible quarters. His confusion emanates from his discovery that the world is one of moral shades of grey rather than one of contrastive blacks and whites as also from his increasing confrontation with the adult world of falsehood and compromise which he soon comes to detest. It is perhaps for these reasons that he identifies with the adolescents around. This feeling of oneness is mutual and the adults, too, see their own past lives and experiences reflected in Holden’s. They share his strong dislike of conventionality and lies and share his repugnance for all that represents the unscrupulousness of a mercenary society and the whoredom of a world of material “facts”. The contemporary novelist, Mary McCarthy and the critic, Alfred Kazin, both “feel that Salinger

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is the apologist for the excessively sensitive plants of America”,11 that is, American children, who through a vicarious experience, realize the prevalence of rampant ugliness stalking the world and regret with Holden the loss of innocence caused by vulgarity and lewdness present even in schools for children and in august establishments like the Museum of Natural History.

The complexity of The Catcher and its severity as a piece of literary art is what attracts the adult world even today. The work, though filled with acts of imprudence and desperation, is not completely without hope and though cynical about religion is not sacrilegious in its statement. The protagonist and his creator, though apostles of immutability, and preservers of innocence, are, in the ultimate analysis, celebrants of love and life. The novel traces the trajectory of Holden’s journey from greenness and inexperience to discernment and sagacity. His innocence is best represented by his answer to his sister, Phoebe’s question as to what he would like to do when he grew up. He says he would like to be the catcher in the rye and save the children whose lives are jeopardized when they stand too close to the edge of a cliff. Holden here visualizes himself as serving humanity and this vision of service is in obvious contrast to the physical and non-spiritual life led by his parents. This contrast presumes a changeless existence in which the innocence of kids needs to be preserved just like the mummies in the Museum of National History. The implicit comparison again is with beauty made permanent in art and this is strongly reminiscent of Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” conviction in life. Holden may wishfully think of immobilizing time and holding children back from the phenomenon of growing-up and in the process being annihilated by time, but the fact remains that Time is insurmountable and will take its own willful course. Yet one has to take life in one’s stride and at the end, Holden pronounces that he has learnt to cultivate an affinity for and a concord with all of humanity for love and benevolence are the richest source of joy in life. It is this ebullience in life that Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, was felicitating in the line of his poem which becomes central to the novel—“If a body meet a body coming through the rye”.

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The Catcher in the Rye then comprises the reminiscences of a sixteen-year-old adolescent who ventures into the narration of his memoirs. His unusual gawky appearance represents his dual status in life drawn from his midway existence between childhood and adulthood and yet, strictly speaking he is excluded from both the phases of human growth and development. The novel begins with a re-play of his last evening at Pencey Preparatory School full of indelible memories of people and events of the past times. Primarily, he thinks of his dead brother, Allie, his live brother, DB, and his earlier girlfriend, Jane Gallagher. Each one of these three contribute to the making of Holden and moulding his life.

From the very first page of the novel, it is evident that there is a conflict brewing in the mind of Holden, who seems to be on the verge of a nervous collapse. His incessant smoking and his expeditious growth in height seem to have caused bouts of breathlessness that have affected his physical health which symbolizes perhaps the eventual detrimental impact on his spiritual well-being. His incorporeal needs are thus overlooked and neglected.

Holden’s criticism of others for faults very similar to his own is an indication of his confused state of mind. He dislikes classmates who tease others but does the same himself. He is averse to being sermonized by his teachers but subjects others to his own homilies. He is an inveterate liar himself but is intolerant of the sanctimoniousness and duplicity of adults. He is inconsistent in his behaviour again when he reviles the phoniness of movies but imitates whatever is dramatized in them. His own language is often full of obscenity and lapses in grammar characteristic of the speech of adults, but the irony lies in his assumed adult diction. A typical example is where he talks of Pencey’s rating as an academic institution. An overwhelming number of teenagers identify themselves with Holden particularly in terms of their fervour, commiseration, and concerns. Holden is too bigoted and illiberal towards the drawbacks of people. This intolerance is witnessed when he visits his teacher, Mr. Spencer, whose pseudo behaviour and ugliness

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repel him. Holden refers to such hypocrites as “phonies” and “hot-shots” and they are all around. A headmaster is a typical phoney for he talks politely to the parents of school children but is very indecent in his treatment of adults of less importance. Mr. Ossenburger is another such “hot-shot” who is very materialistic and never practices what he preaches. We observe in the novel that Holden himself is no less intolerant than the hypocrites and fanatics he targets. He does not try to understand Ackley’s longing for fellowship and company; rather, he is contemptuous of the lack of tidiness and order in whatever he does. Stradlater, too, he has never been inclined towards for he has already observed the former’s superficiality and his self-centred interests.

Holden observes keenly but he never sees the whole truth with regard to Ackley, Stradlater and even Mr. Ossenburger. Ackley, like Holden himself, is disorientated and perplexed but not in the psychological predicament that the latter is in. And yet, Holden does not really help him and give him the comfort and assurance he is seeking. Another adolescent problem that makes Holden what he happens to be is the tremendous height he has gained and the premature grey hair he has developed. These two aspects of his physical self are suggestive of his ambivalence, that is the consciousness of being neither a child nor an adult, though, as a child, his “intimations of immortality” that Wordsworth refers to are gradually fading. Holden resents this transition from childhood to adulthood for he wishes to remain the pristine self that he imagines himself to be and wants to have nothing to do with corruption and compromise. With growth and change taking over his life despite the persistence he exhibits in resisting the transformation, he is mystified and non-plussed. Holden tries every means to hold back time and hence, avoid change. In this context, his red hunting cap which he always wears backwards is suggestive of his longing to look back towards childhood just like his wrestling, his play-acting, his emotional outbursts and his trumped-up stories are all reminiscent of his boyhood. Holden’s enquiring from Ackley

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how he can join a monastery is indicative of his desire to exit the world of conflict and disorder to escape adolescence altogether and keep the adult world at bay. For Holden, the fact of sexuality, too, is disturbing. The inexplicable upsurge of desires in him as changes in the body creep in are intractable and hence add to his confusion. The fact that he is afraid to think of sex shows lack of maturity on his part with regard to his approach to the issue. Jane Gallagher for him symbolizes innocence and purity and yet he shows signs of jealousy when Stradlater takes her out for a date. Holden has not yet been able to come to terms with the fact that eventually knowledge will demolish innocence and virgins will lose their “chastity”.

Another theme of The Catcher is Holden’s desperate bid to communicate with someone and acquire a sense of affinity with the individual. In New York, his efforts to come into contact with another person are invariably aborted. Each time he decides to ring up someone, he promptly finds a reason not to do so. He cannot strike a rapport with the adult cab driver because of the inherent differences between a child and an adult. Holden, however, marches ahead in his journey of confusion and misery with no one to offer an understanding. Each of the phonies and perverts that people the world of adults is self-orientated and knows none beyond himself/herself. Holden experiences bipolar responses and reactions to sex but understanding has not yet come to him. Jean Paul Sartre’s belief that “Hell is other people” is what Holden subscribes to with regard to his escapades in New York. This “hell” that the French writer refers to is experienced by him in every event, big or small, from telephonic exchanges to visits to public lounges and he ends up talking to dissolute girls known for their moral turpitude. He is punished for his indiscriminate ventures by being exposed almost endlessly to the inane and pretentious language that he so detests. The girl’s attitude represents the drive of immoderation and sensualism that prevails in the adult world. In the cocktail lounge too, Holden witnesses the insincerity of the adults there. They are

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no lovers of music but wish to be seen there only for the status it grants them. Holden’s desire for a companion is further frustrated in the incident in which he meets Maurice and Sunny. When he realizes the latter’s indifference and the total absence of human sympathy in her, his sexual attraction for her ceases to exist bringing him the consciousness that love cannot be bought. Holden is now at a spiritual low and so turns to his dead brother, Allie, for resuscitation as Allie for him is an emblem of the purity and innocence of a child and instills in him a desire for religious contemplation. Sunny, one of the two tramps, has done nothing to deserve attention—she has failed to uplift him spiritually and relieve him of his psychological pressures. Holden’s pursuit of the ideal in a world where perfection is at a premium only aggravates his problems of adolescent life. A knowledge of the contrast between the ideal and the real becomes increasingly oppressive for him in the course of the novel. Allie, his deceased brother, Phoebe, his sister and Jane Gallagher his girlfriend, represent for him an absolute picture of perfection. His endeavour to communicate with Allie in an imagined and delirious conversation reveals to us his pathetic state of mind. In Jane perhaps he does not have implicit faith but fervently hopes that she has not changed over time. At the back of his mind, however, is the apprehension that she may have outgrown her love for him. So, he wants to live by the sweet memories of his past association with her rather than confront her probable apathy towards him now. The Catcher in the Rye follows subsequently Holden’s search for love and understanding in the massive urban expanse of New York and his consequent recession into physical and mental distraction at being frustrated in his quest. Holden is continually confronted with the phoniness of the world. His faith that art strives for truth is repeatedly belied as materialism and deceitfulness govern art.

Holden eventually turns to four individuals for mutuality and communication. The first is Sally Hayes, a girl he cussedly and deliberately seeks, fully conscious of the fact that he has

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little in common with her. Despite his urge to communicate his inner feelings to her the response from Sally is disheartening as she is unable to understand him and appease the storm within him. She cannot connect. The second person he approaches is a school mate called Carl Luce, who frustrates his hopes of an “intellectual” exchange as Holden, at the very outset, rubs him the wrong way and puts him off his stride. Luce states that the love between man and woman should be physical as well as spiritual and Holden readily agrees but Luce hurts him by calling him sexually and mentally immature. He indubitably represents man’s disregard for feelings of love and compassion.

In his quest for peace, Holden moves to Central Park. There he revives his search for the more intriguing questions of human life. His thoughts turn to death, but death is still as unbearable to him as it was at the time of his brother’s death. Christian theology brings no comfort to him. His preoccupation with death leads to his fixation about what happens to the ducks in the winters. His search for an answer is symbolic of the mysteries of the world that have tantalized mankind since time immemorial. What leads Holden back to life and the light of the city is his sister, Phoebe, and not philosophical musings. It is his love and concern for her that bring him back “home” from the wilderness. He now becomes acutely conscious of his mission in life, the mission of preserving the innocence of childhood from being marred by the unscrupulousness of adult existence. He believes that this is a vocation far better than the other ones including that of his father who is a lawyer. The psychological injury that he now nurses has been caused largely by his family that never gave him love and understanding. Phoebe alone understood him and tried to reach out to him. His other brother, D.B., he feels betrayed him as he deserted him in opting for a career in Hollywood.

Holden now is apprehensive of the future and looks back to the past for succour and reassurance. He wants to keep the children forever so that their innocence is not lost. He wants to give them the attributes of the exhibits of the Museum of Natural History and make them immutable and timeless. Like pictures

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on the Grecian Urn depicted in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”12 these children will be preserved beyond destruction. Holden, however, has to be more pragmatic in his approach. He has to surrender his role as catcher and fervently opt for the road to Christian belief, knowledge, wisdom, and maturity. At the house of Mr. Antolini, his former teacher, Holden is again in confrontation with beauty and ugliness unrecognizably blended. Mr. Antolini, a specimen of human life is also an admixture of good and bad. The commendable side of Mr. Antolini’s character is his genuine concern for mankind. He was the only who ran to pick up the boy who had jumped from the window to meet his death in an attempt to escape the harassment and ragging that his seniors had subjected him to. Besides, he made every effort to communicate with Holden. The ugly aspect of Mr. Antolini’s characters, however, is revealed to Holden when the former gives evidence of being a homosexual and makes supposed sexual advances towards the latter. Holden is horrified and flees from Mr. Antolini’s house post haste.

Holden soon takes the initiative of running away from home and from New York so as to avoid confronting his parents and facing further problems in life. This inclination to run away is a typically adolescent one and the vision he nurses of leading life in the West is even more puerile; while trying to visualize his stay in the West he comes across a disconcerting expression written on the walls but is unable to erase it. This ineffectuality in dealing with evil is what depresses the boy most. Disillusioned, he eventually gives up the idea of travelling to the West. To be really mature, he needs to realize the impracticability of his being a “catcher”. Children must learn through falling and not be deprived of the chance to make an effort. The realization that being a “catcher” will deprive a child of learning how to combat the aggressive, dirty, and corrupting world around makes Holden decline the temptation to assume the role. The credit for every child lies in living with the horrifying realities of existence and yet not submitting to them, abandoning them and rising above them. Holden now realizes the significance of Phoebe’s insistence on the actual words of

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Burns’ poem—“It a body meet a body coming through the rye”. The emphasis on the word “meet” suggests the idea of acceptance of life rather than a renunciation of it or running away from it. Holden’s reluctance to face life has now changed into a readiness to come to grips with reality and confront all that comes his way. Rain, which earlier caused uneasiness to Holden, is now welcome. Also, the carrousel proposes to him the idea of permanence for it plays the same old songs it has been playing down the generations. Individual children come, growup and pass away but the phenomenon of childhood remains a precedent to maturity. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, first theorized that the principle of flux or change was the only permanent fact in life and ever since then creative artists and theorists have been referring to the relative transcendence and permanence of things in life. Great American writers’ life F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner have also expressed their views, professedly or tacitly on the doctrine of mutability that has since Heraclitus become a preoccupation with many writers. Holden, too, representing Salinger, has had his share of despair and elation and has now come to accept the fact of evolution and change. His new-found receptivity is akin to religious faith and a joyous acceptance of life as an endowment from God. The Catcher in the Rye is incontestably an illustration of the therapeutic effect of lived experience. NOTES 1. David D. Anderson (ed.). “The Vision of Reality”. Smoke and Sunshine. Introduction, Part 3. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1971, 253. 2. Benard DeVoto. Mark Twain's America. United States: Greenwood Press, 1978. 3. T.S. Eliot. Cited in “Introduction ”, Penguin Classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Peter Coveney. www.penguinrandomhouse. ca/penguin-classics-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn. 4. H.L. Mencken. Cited in “Huck Finn’s America” by Andrew Levy. Financial Times.

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5. Mark Twain. Cited in “The Art, Humour and Humanity of Mark Twain” by Minnie M. Brashear and Robert M. Rodney. Biography and Autobiography, 2012. 6. Brianne Keith. American Lit. 101. U.S.A.: Adam’s Media, 2017, 213. 7. Ihab Hassan. Contemporary American Literature, 1945-1972: An Introduction. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973,43. 8. Robert Spiller et al. (eds.). Literary History of the United State: History. New Delhi: Amerind Publishing Co., 1972, 931. 9. Frederick R. Karl. “Black Writers—Jewish Writers—Women Writers”. American Literature. Ed. Boris Ford. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1988, rpt. 1991, 570. 10. Malcolm Bradbury (ed.). “Introduction”. The Novel Today. Great Britain: Fontana, 1977, 12. 11. James F. Light. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: A Critical Commentary. New York: Barrister Publishing Co., 1966, 16. 12. John Keats. “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918. London: Oxford University Press, 1900, rpt. 1957, 745.

6 CHAPTER

Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine: An Immigrant's Peregrination from Defiance to Resolution Reena Mitra

With the Cimmerian hues that have prevailed in India in the recent past and with factors like religious fundamentalism, the disintegration of the traditional joint family, primarily in the urban quarters, the rapidly mounting erosion of values among the middle class of society and the latter’s flagrant materialism, all having been issues of grave concern, the country has confronted adversities and suffered defeats of immense magnitude. Yet, the total picture of the present predicament does not vindicate an absolute Jeremiad, a story of lamentation with no hope whatsoever. To bring relief from the tenebrosity there is now a massive wave of progressive self-awareness and confidence in society at large and writers in particular in spite of the numerous problems looking us in the face. Indian English literature as compared to other literatures in India is perhaps better equipped to register and foreground the latter-day developments and challenges as it has the indisputable advantage of its medium itself being a global language. A significant observation that is of consequence here is the fact that the front-runners of this relatively new literature are those who constitute the Indian diaspora and are wellacquainted with Western literary theories and modes like those of post-modernism and magic realism. Such writers give a fresh orientation to literature, specially to fiction, which is our main concern here. Fiction today is considered not as a rendition of

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an imaginary and fabricated narrative replete with fantasy, fable and legend but as a literary improvisation that is categorically “not fabulist”. As Arundhati Roy proclaimed when being interviewed by Sunil Menon after the publication of her very recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness:

...fiction is a kind of truth that is probably truer than something you can only write with evidentiary facts.... Fiction is the only way to do it, to tell the truth. Or to try and tell it.1 This is the kind of work one looks for today with stories or communications coming in short parables wrought in irony and sagacious comprehension of life around with layers unfolding to reveal more and more of truth. With Arundhati Roy we would like to believe that

...a novel is like a prayer almost. It’s layered, not something to be consumed. It’s a universe that you present.2 And the universe, the cosmos, enfolds the characters in the novel, particularly the protagonist, who becomes an indelible emblem of the truth to be disseminated.

A sizeable wedge of contemporaneous writing in English today comprises works of fiction by women who characterize their writings with percipient and clear-sighted acumen epitomizing their kind alone and who offer a sharp-witted insight into an extensive and diverse gamut of experience vital for a comprehension of life around. A literary handiwork is a product of both real and imaginative experience and is indisputably determined by the past or the prevailing social proclivities. Bharati Mukherjee, a diasporic writer of Indian origin, is now, with all her achievements in the world of fiction­ writing, including the National Book Critics’ Award in America in 1988, vehemently claimed as an Indian prodigy writing in English. This postulate, however, is largely vindicated by the fact that in almost all her works, the protagonist happens to be an Indian and more specifically, a woman struggling to attain space for herself and trying to make peace with her surroundings. Tara, the pivotal character of her first novel, The Tiger's Daughter, written in 1972, confronts a cultural conflict between

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her desired world at home in India and her present predicament in New York in America.

After the publication of Darkness (1985), a collection of short stories, Bharati Mukherjee began grabbing eyeballs and drawing the attention of critics for her verisimilous and perceptive portrayal of immigrants trying to extricate themselves from the mesh of traditions and to re-cast their lives. The eponymous protagonist of her novel, Jasmine (1989), a character very close to her heart, wishes to challenge her fate and “to reposition the stars” (Jasmine^ 240) rather than conform to the conventional mode of thought that predetermines one’s future. The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), another anthology of short fiction, consists of eleven short stories and in them, too, we witness the almost intractable problems of migrating to America to pursue and realize a dream, the American dream. Victor Ramraj clearly distinguishes between diasporic and immigrant writing. The former, according to him is more likely to be absorbed in and preoccupied with one’s lost or “imaginary homeland” (to use Salman Rushdie’s term). The latter, he believes, is more inclusive and broad-based and could refer to any work that focuses on the contemporary encounters of an individual in his/her present adoptive country. Bharati Mukherjee evidently belongs to the latter category. Throughout her writings we observe a restive, sanguine efflux of the immigrant experience. She was obsessed with the idea of the interaction of cultures and their consequent mutual mutability. Mala Pandurang, in her write-up on Vikram Seth, names Bharati Mukherjee and Rohinton Mistry as highly trained professionals who have “settled” in their destination society outside their natal regions for purely personal reasons and hence, there is no categorizing of this diasporic Indian minority community in terms of common progenitors. Living in diaspora savouring the rather pungent taste of the migrant experience has endowed many a writer with the ability to validate the diasporic identity. New vistas have unfolded and new visions been perceived from immigrant predicaments which are now celebrated as generators of new epistemes to cater for and

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conform to the cultural syndrome established by an increasing number of global shifts and migrations. Several critical terms and theories have been valorized with the notion of diasporic/ immigrant/exilic writing and new concepts have emerged. Aspects of enquiry have evolved to enrich contemporary studies in culture and distinctions are now made between one diaspora community and another. The stance of each of these communities is enunciated and dramatized in terms of the depiction of the fictional characters in the works of these immigrant or diasporic writers. The prevailing analogy of the act of migration has been one of transplantation but the trauma involved in the process of uprooting has been mitigated by novelists like Bharati Mukherjee by the thrust on relocation. The probable cataplexy has been cleverly averted and the “shock of arrival,”5 as C. Vijayasree puts it, has been adeptly toned down to bring about a happy acceptance of life under the given/chosen conditions. Migration blues were initially characterized by problems in adjustment, a nostalgic longing for home, incapability with regard to “connecting” with India on subsequent visits and a schizophrenic apprehension of a split identity belonging nowhere. An exploration of this psycho-cultural space is the central thematic content of novels portraying the immigrants, particularly the Indian immigrant, in Indian fiction in English. Bharati Mukherjee, the voice of the Indian diaspora in North America, is perhaps the oldest and most prolific of writers of fiction in English. She rivets our attention on the sense of alienation and the cultural changes brought about by the immigrant experience. The internal culture conflicts that surface in the lives of immigrants are focused on in most of her novels written in a career ranging over almost five decades. Various issues like the gendered approach to the diasporic encounters, the power struggle within the diaspora, self-assertion of sexual minorities among the immigrants, etc., emerge to explore and analyze the sweeping observations made with regard to diaspora population. However, what is particularly significant in the present deliberation on Bharati Mukherjee’s novel, Jasmine, is the confident foregrounding of women’s experience of migration

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and the subsequent sense of disruption in life, the state of dis­ connect and the desperate bid to relocate. For women immigrants, she knows through her own flight path that this rupture and climacteric assume an extra edge of gravity as for them, this living in diaspora is a question of being subjected to a kind of double distancing, being twice removed from the accepted and the natural. They are “expatriates” in more ways than one. Back home, having been ostracized in terms of gender already, they face a dual excommunication when the shift away from one’s native land requires another series of acts of adjustment and compromise for holding on to dear life. Survival thus becomes a painful endeavour to contend with hostilities prevailing at home and abroad. For Bharati Mukherjee, it is indisputably the aesthetic central trope for delineating the experience of migrant women. The global North immigrant women’s writings reflect radical changes in the socio-cultural relationships of their female protagonists as compared to the assured security of those women who remain entrenched within the familial set­ up back home. The former who, for whatever reasons, shift to alien and unfamiliar surroundings abroad find it difficult to ignore the impending fear of decimation when they realize that the mould of their old native character is not compatible with the new social environment they have, in most cases, opted for. Problems of acclimatization are faced by both men and women migrants but the latter’s ordeals are far more severe and their displacement and its depiction in the literary works of women may be clearly identified as emanating from personal experience. The individualities of writers as well their female creations as immigrants and integral members of diasporic communities are worked out in terms of race, gender, class, language and location, gender being the dominant factor for women.

A considerably large number of women from the global South migrate to the United States of America, the United Kingdom or some other country in the global North renouncing the invulnerability of their support systems at home to accompany a spouse or pursue a dream. Barriers are confronted at every step-in terms of climatic conditions, social propriety

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and even the dress code. This thrust on punctilious behaviour in the West often takes a psychological toll on the newcomers. Bharati Mukherjee, the novelist from Calcutta in India who followed her spouse, Clark Blaise, to Canada and then to the U.S., was initially subjected to all the various stages of an immigrant woman’s battle with orchestrating a new culture and environment and containing within herself her almost intransigent psychic estrangement. What saved her from being a wreck was the wisdom that dawned upon her to give up her resistance to everything “alien” and negotiate an acceptance and assimilation of the prevailing punctilios and way of life in her adoptive country. Dimple Dasgupta in her novel, Wife (1975), is a typical example of this kind of a woman, who is placed rather low in patriarchal hierarchy and longs to emigrate to the U.S. or Canada to acquire freedom from the Calcutta flat where the joint family system prevails. However, even after moving to another country she remains “a pitiful immigrant” plagued with insomnia, despondency and revulsions. Her final act of retaliation to her husband’s endless verbal abuse comes when she kills her husband, emblematically putting an end to male supremacy. So, with unqualified acts of self-assertion Dimple sheds her intimidation and learns to empower herself.

Bharati Mukherjee’s eponymous novel, Jasmine (1989), has as narrator and protagonist, an illegal immigrant to the U.S. When the astrologer’s prognostication that the seven-year old Jyoti would become a widow at seventeen is actualized, Jyoti, already having been re-christened Jasmine by her husband, Prakash, with the help of her brother acquires fake papers to go to the U.S. She surreptitiously moves out of her village, Hasnapur in Punjab, to go to America, professedly for self-immolation on the campus of the institute where her husband was planning to study before he was suddenly killed by a Sikh terrorist. For Jyoti, now Jasmine, illegal entry into America brings with it the concomitant of rape—she is “raped and raped and raped” (/. 127). Once in, she kills the man who raped her. Subsequently, action in the novel moves at a vertiginous speed, event following event, with little time to devote to emotions and sentiments. Jasmine takes root in America re-inventing and rediscovering

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herself there successively as Jasmine, Jazzy, Jase and Jane. The American dream she realizes, is only the pursuit of a mirage, an ever-receding horizon, never to be attained. This adolescent Punjabi girl gains access to Florida where she subjects herself to a concatenation of transformations not because Taylor, the man she then loved wanted her to change but because she herself wanted to adopt the culture and environment she was engirdled in and feel like one of “them”. She ingenuously admits. .... I changed because I wanted to. To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in a bulletproof vest, was to be a coward.... I bloomed from a diffident alien with forged documents into adventurous Jane.6

This clearly reflects the efforts at adjustment of an immigrant who has survived the hostilities of the alien culture and is all out to embrace her milieu. The superciliousness of the natives, the hurtful humiliations and the initial racial assaults are forgotten and Jasmine is at pains to belong to her place of residence now. Her awareness of time and change make her conscious of the need to adapt herself to the present. We see in her, as in her creator, Bharati Mukherjee, a conscious effort to get her life started anew but glimpses of an Indian mulling over customs and values that were once cherished are not totally absent. Parthasarathy rightly avers that “exile”, self-imposed or otherwise makes one realize that “roots are deep.”7 Jasmine, however, tries to convince herself that “my transformation has been genetic” (J. 222). The novelist, too, unlike Stephen Gill who got embroiled in the adjustment conflicts, never experienced “an immigrant consciousness at work.”8 Her writing became a mode of coping with her new environment in America. Bharati Mukherjee, in her Interview by The Boston Globe in 1993, categorically stated that America had changed as much as she had in the course of the continual interaction between the two and it is this mutability of the two cultures—American and Indian—that enthralled her imagination all through her writing career. Her statement at the Interview is fully revelatory of her attitude towards America as her country of adoption:

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While I have changed in the thirty years in this country, it has also had to change because of the hundreds of thousands of people like me, forcing the culture, moment by moment, into something new—I am looking for that new, constantly evolving thing.9

Speaking favourably of Americans, who she felt were totally unbiased in their attitude towards her and always gave her a fair deal without trying to assess her in terms of preconceptions, she added, I blossomed because people did not have preconceived notions of who I was and what I could do.... It was an enormous transformation in my life.10

In her seminal essay, “Two Ways to Belong in America”, Mukherjee, endorsing her views expressed in the Interview by The Boston Globe, wrote: “I need to feel like a part of the community I have adopted.”11 Underwriting the centrality of the theme of immigration in her fiction, Bharati Mukherjee, in her autobiographical pronouncement for her reference work, Contemporary Authors (2005) wrote: “The narrative of immigration is the epic narrative of this millenium.”12 Moving from place to place—India, England, Switzerland, and later Canada and U.S.—endowed her with an abundance of experience which strengthened her understanding of and insight into the immigrant’s predicament immeasurably and she was able to accept readily the present day actualities of multiculturalism. In several of her novels including Jasmine,) a young girl, invariably constrained by her patriarchal culture, ventures into the unfamiliar by choice or by compulsion. In the crisis that takes shape, a metamorphosed self or a series of selves emerges as in Jasmine and the pressing questions of identity project “WHO AM I?” writ large before the mind’s eye. Coursing through her trajectory of change Jasmine expresses her doubts to herself:

...I feel at times like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride I’m on.... Down and down I go, where I’ll stop, God only knows. (J. 138)

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In her early days in the U.S. it was the questing after identity that plagued Jasmine most. But even earlier this perplexity of choice had been introduced into her life by her husband, Prakash, who had already new-named her Jasmine to “show me off” (J. 77) as she said, to his friends. He was, like them, a “disrupter” and a “rebuilder” (J. 77). He wanted to demolish the Jyoti she had been in Hasnapur and make her “a new kind of city-woman” (/. 77). The schizophrenic existence prevailed and she “shuttled between identities” (J. 77). Eventually, however, she realized, “That Jyoti is dead” (J. 96) and reborn, “reborn several times” (J. 126)—reborn as Jasmine for Prakash, as Jase for Taylor, as Jane for Bud and as Kali for Half-Face who dared to taint her Indian self and besmirch her righteousness and morality as a married and widowed woman from the conservative Orient. In Darkness (1985),13 Bharati Mukherjee’s anthology of short stories, we witness the discomfiture of immigrants at having to straddle two cultures diametrically opposed to each other in terms of ethics, values and social propriety. Severing the fetters of tradition and re-casting their lives in accordance to the mores and customs laid down by the adoptive social entity of the alien global North is not a painless task for them. To endorse Mukherjee’s reflections on immigrant lives we have her own categorical views as expressed in her Interview by Sonia Chopra. She talked about her native and subsequently adopted cultures and the collision between the two as affecting deleteriously the characters in her novels and short stories. On being asked about herself as an ethnic writer she emphatically clarified her stance, I am an American writer of Indian origin.... I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of making a home here. I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia and expatriation.14 In Jasmine, she brought to life a character very dear to her heart. Jasmine, like Mukherjee herself, wanted to be the architect of her own life rather than adhere to the conservative world that predetermined one’s astral influence and marked one’s destiny. The modern American concepts of the adoption of a child and of widow re-marriage were both initially unacceptable to Jasmine

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who came from a quarter of the world where a non-genetic child could never be conceived of. But, Taylor’s adopted child, Duff, who represented the concept of adoption was readily espoused by Jasmine. Also, Du was adopted by Bud and Jasmine/Jane. This, symbolically, was perhaps an indication of her resistance to Western concepts wearing off and of her embracing all that America and the West stood for. The past was never revived or even remembered lest it became overpowering. The implied piece of advice was “Let the past make you wary, by all means. But do not let it deform you” (J. 131). Jasmine let go of her past, the intrusive past that tended to pull her back and threatened to mar her present happiness. Simone de Beauvoir’s irascible grievance in 1948 was,

.... This humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him, she is not regarded as an autonomous being.... She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.15 Alice Jardine, in a kind of response to this and in an act of resounding self-assertion defined Feminism as a righteous protest, “a movement from the point of view of, by and for women”16 where the male point of view is totally immaterial. It is this that the protagonist of Mukherjee’s Jasmine abides by. She proves herself as a self-governing individual, free-standing and unattached to what Chaman Nahal calls “the dependence syndrome.”17 Jasmine is a celebration of a woman’s empowerment visible in the choices made by her at critical junctures in her life independently of any male assistance. Confronted by an unabated spate of adversities back home at Hasnapur in Punjab and in the U.S., her adoptive motherland, she assumes virtually the incarnation of Kali, the Goddess of Strength, who is able to stand up to and resist all the savagery that infiltrates into her life. “If I had been a boy...” (J. 39) remains her regret from the earliest days in her life for “daughters were curses” (J. 39). She knew:

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.... A daughter had to be married off before she could enter heaven, and dowries beggared families for generations. Gods with infinite memories visited girl children on women who needed to be punished for sins committed in other incarnations. (J. 39) Jasmine’s aunt had prevailed upon her parents to accept a marital alliance with a prospective groom in the city as ...big-city men prefer us village girls because we are brought up to be caring and have no minds of our own. Village girls are like cattle; whichever way you lead them, that is the way they will go. (/. 46)

In the feudal societies, as in Hasnapur, Jasmine knew that a woman was “still a vassal” (J. 77) and never called her husband by his first name. Only pronouns were used to address her husband but Prakash had encouraged her to be modern by not lapsing into the feudal Jyoti. And yet, at the slightest pretext, “Prostitutes! Whores!” (J. 93) is what women were called. This is what Sukhwinder called her when he arrived to gun Prakash down. Jasmine’s ordeals can be interpreted at two distinct levels— that of an immigrant from India to the Global North, “a spiritual vagabond in the world today” (The New York Times) and that of an adolescent girl from the East trying to synthesize in herself the two diverse cultures of India and America. The mantra for peace seemed to her a merger of everything she had experienced in life, a co-existence of her past and her present with the past receding and the present gaining ground.

The novel Jasmine, then, traces Jasmine’s journey of the Self, or “Selves” shall we say? Her trajectory of life has been for her an indelible learning experience, enlightening her at times of crisis to surmount the dilemmas that stalked her. Her success lay in wading through humiliations and disappointments to arrive at the calm of reconciliation with resistance now having been relegated to the background. NOTES Interview. “A Novel is Like a Prayer: A Layered Universe.” Interview of Arundhati Roy by Sunil Menon. Outlook, June 12, 2017. 56.

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Interview. “A Novel is Like a Prayer.” Outlook, June 12, 2017. 58. Ramraj, Victor. “Diasporas and Multiculturalism.” An Introduction to Post-colonial Theory. Eds. Childs Peter and Patrick Williams. Europe: Prentice Hall, 1997. Pandurang, Mala. Vikram Seth: Multiple Locations, Multiple Affiliations. Series ed. Jasbir Jain. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2001. 17. Vijayasree, C. “Survival as an Ethic: South Asian Immigrant Women’s Writing.” In Diaspora. Ed. Makarand Paranjape. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2001. 131. Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New Delhi: Penguin, 1989, rpt. 1990. 185-86. Parthasarathy, R. Rough Passage. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977. 17. Dhawan, R.K. (ed.). Writers of the Indian Diaspora. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2001. 14. Interview of Bharati Mukherjee by The Boston Globe, 1993. Mukherjee, Bharati. “Two Ways to Belong in America” http/www. researchgate net/publication/264882367 Mukherjee, Bharati. Contemporary Authors. Autobiography. Series 3. Ed. Adele Sarkissian, 2005. Mukherjee, Bharati. Darkness. Toronto: Penguin, 1985. Interview of Bharati Mukherjee by Sonia Chopra. March 28, 2002. Bookreporter.com Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. Parshley. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983. 86. Jardin, Alice. Gynesis: Configuration of Women and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. 20. Nahal, Chaman. “Feminism in Indian English Fiction.” Indian Women Novelists. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1991. Vol. I. 30.

7 CHAPTER

Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of Black Myth Bhaskar Roy Barman

The paper aims to deal with Roots by the celebrated American author Alex Haley. It is a blend of fact and fiction which the author himself has characterized as a ‘faction’ by telescoping ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. This term already exists in the dictionary, though. It reads as if it is a quasi-fictional piece, though Alex has projected it as a non-fictional piece. But the book reads fictional and commands an immense worldwide readership despite a controversy clinging about it. It is worthwhile to take ourselves into an interesting interview with Alex Haley, the author of Roots dealt with in this paper, by Scott Ross, which will help us to dip into the novel. I shall discuss Roots as a novel, because it contains all the essential features of a novel.

The interview I am alluding to is featured on CBN.com under the title “The Roots of Racism: A Conversation with Alex Haley.”

Asked by Scott Ross where the ‘roots’ of racism come from Alex Haley says, “...if you go back to before mankind came out of the cave, there was hatred. We are really talking about the same thing. Racism and hatred are synonymous. But then, as far as I know, as far as I’ve studied or heard or picked up, it seems that this type of thing is a curse against mankind.” He further says that there’s neither a religious group, nor a nationalistic group or a tribe, or a grouping of people of any consequence “who have not, at one or another time, been the object of hatred, racism,

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or who has not had people against them just because they were them.” Whenever he went out of his country (America) to any other country he was bombarded with embarrassing questions, the first question related to his name and to his authoring of the book Roots, He gradually grew weary and irritated at having to answer these questions repeatedly in the countries, in the cities he visited. Scott asks him whether he is trying to pinpoint an issue of the heart and opines at the same time that they—we do also—judge by outward appearance and by virtual observations. Haley agree by saying that one of the predominant factors is the use of the word ‘virtual’ and goes on to say, “You see when all the people came from Europe, the different enclaves of people, every single one, if you go back and read the journals of the time, it will shock you, I guarantee you, to see what the top journals were saying about the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, when they came over, one by one.” We should not linger farther on the long conversation between Scott Ross and Alex Haley. We rather get to the crux of the conversation by quoting what Alex Haley says in reply to a query of Scott Ross’s.

“The thing I find myself often thinking about, is trying to get away from the immediate, relatively small objective at hand and look at the bigger picture. I find myself continuing to react to what is happening to this country as we go through all these shenanigans we go through, we are still the greatest country on earth. But we are diminishing. One of the ways we are diminishing is we are permitting so many of our young people, who are of various colors, black, white, brown whatever, not to realize their potential for education. We are crippling them when they are still four and five years old, by the type of school they go to, by the atmosphere of discrimination and prejudice they come up against, by other things, which keep them from becoming the contributors to society they could be. We don’t know, some little black boy or girl, growing up in the inner city, might grow up and cure cancer for all of us, if we let them do it.” It was in 1977 that Roots bagged a Pulitzer prize and a National book award, a ‘special citation’ in both cases. After the novel had bagged theses two prestigious prizes Haley was

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sued for having lifted parts of it from a 1967 novel. The African and significant elements of the family history detailed in the novel were straightened out the following year in 1978. Haley found himself compelled to settle the lawsuit out of the court. No evidence, when investigated, could be unearthed for parts of the nineteenth-century story. Had Haley said at the outset that the book was purely a fictional work there would not have arisen any doubt about its authenticity. Says John Dukdale in his article “Roots of the Problem: The Controversial History of History of Alex Haley’s Book” (website), “His appendix stresses how far he went to corroborate his family’s ‘oral history’ via documents found in 50-odd archives over 12 years of digging, while acknowledging that ‘most’ of the dialogue and incidents are a ‘novelised amalgam’ of knowledge and hunch.” It should be borne in mind that the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots synchronized with the broadcast of the ABC miniseries adaptation, a twentieth-century multimedia event and as a result of this synchronization Kunta Kinte that Alex Haley has protagonized in Roots became a household name and refashioned the way for Americans to dwell upon the legacy of slavery. Published in 1976 at the time when the USA was closeted with its bicentennial ceremonies, Roots proffered, by representing American history from the perspectives of Haley’s black characters a counter narrative to appease the hunger of American audiences for a clear and transparent picture portrayed in the novel. Roots achieved at that time the Tsunami­ sized popularity, not because it was a novel written superbly, but because it was a work of history, though it was tainted by a controversy. The controversy did not diminish the popularity of the book, though. Rather it steered the attention of the people who had heard so much of the slavery, round to it.

We should take into account how Alex Haley reshuffles the narrative of genealogy of his family into a novelistic commentary on the nature of historiography itself. This paper strives to expatiate in detail on the nature of historiography which verges on hyperrealism. Before doing so, I should like to synopsize the tale told in the novel.

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The action of the novel Roots revolves round the kaleidoscopic vicissitude of the life flung upon Kunta Kinte sold out to America and the novel treated us to the story of Kunta Kinte, a young man stolen from The Gambia when he is just seventeen years old, and sold out as a slave and of seven generations of his descendents living in the United States. He has spent his childhood, fenced in by love and traditions in Juffure, the village sustained on farming, and has spent it through occasional bouts of poverty. “Little Kunta basked... every day in his mother’s tenderness. Back in her hut each evening, after cooking and serving Omoro, Binta would soften her baby’s skin by greasing him from head to toe with shea tree butter and then—more than often not—she would carry him proudly across the village to the hut of Grandma Yaisa, who would bestow upon the baby still more clucking and kissings. And both of them set little Kunta to whimpering in irritation with their repeated pressings of his little head, nose, ears and hips to shape them correctly” (Roots, p. 13). He like other people of Juffure has grown used to occasionally going hungry. One day in the morning, he, when cutting wood for making a drum, is carried off by force in order to be sold out to a certain John Waller. He has had to undergo a harrowing journey across the Atlantic before being sold out to John Waller. Kunta makes attempts four times to flee the harrowing life, but each time got caught. At the fourth time he has part of his right foot cut off and is re-sold out to William Waller, brother of John Waller. In the words of Alex Haley, “I realized by this time that Grandma. Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, and Cousin Georgia also had been griots in their own ways. My notebooks contained their centuries-old story that our African had been sold to ‘Massa John Waller’, who had given him the name ‘Toby’. During his fourth escape attempt, when cornered he had wounded with a rock one of pair of professional slave-catchers who caught him, and they had cut his foot off. ‘Massa John’s brother Dr William Waller’, had saved the slave’s life, then indignant at the miming, had bought him from his brother” (Roots, pp. 635-36). He is employed at the house of William Waller to tend his garden and occasionally drive his master’s boggy. He marries Bell, a slave in his master’s

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house. Kizzy, a daughter, is born of them and they together make her as happy as they can afford to. Kizzy happens to be close friends with Anne, daughter of William Waller. Because of her close friendship with Anne it is rarely that she suffers from cruelty and torture. But her happiness does not last long. She connives at her beau Noah, a field hand, running away by forging a travelling pass. Noah is caught and confesses to having been helped by Kizzy in fleeing. This revelation results in Kizzy being sold away to Tom Lea, a farmer and chicken fighter, and subsequently being raped and impregnated by him. She gives birth to George. George grows up to be his master’s, that is, his father’s chicken fighting trainer and a philanderer. He is nicknamed Chicken George and earns a fame for his expensive taste for alcohol and because of his sporting an iconic bowler hat and a green scarf. He marries Matilda and they give birth to six sons and two daughters. Tom, one of the six sons, becomes a very skilled blacksmith and marries Irene, a half-Indian woman. It so happens that Tom Lea loses all his money in a cockfight and incurs a huge debt. He sends off Chicken George to Europe for several years to help pay off the debt and sells a majority of other members of the family to the Murrays. The Murrays, known for their kindness, treat the family with kindness. At the end of the Civil War the Murray slaves decide to relinquish the sharecropping for their former masters and leave North Carolina for the town of Henning, Tennesse looking for new settlers, destined to be a happy family. Their daughter Cynthia is married to Will Palmer, a successful lumber businessman and their daughter Bertha happens to be the first in the family to go study in a college where she bumps into Simon Haley later to become a professor of agriculture, and they marry each other. Their son is Alex Haley, the celebrated author of the book under the discussion in this paper. In this book Alex Haley tells about his journey back to Africa to search for his roots in Juffure, the very village where Kunta was born more than two hundred years ago. Says Alex Haley, “In the twelve years since my visit to the Rosetta Stone, I have travelled half a million miles, I suppose, searching, sifting, checking, crosschecking finding out more and more about the people whose respective oral histories

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had proven not only to be correct, but even to connect on both sides of the ocean” (Roots, p. 636).

It sounds strange and acerbic for the novel dealing with a search for authentic origins to find itself trailed along by the after-effects of the lawsuit referred to earlier and the controversy that resulted from it, which incriminated him in an accusation of having manipulated the novel’s own literary and historical origins. This accusation does not, so to say, or, rather should not blind us to considering the manner adopted by Alex Haley, I repeat, to refashion the narrative and the genealogy of his family into a commentary on the nature of historiography itself in order to create a counter history by widening the master narrative from a subaltern’s perspective in a situation of something opposed to history in the conventional sense. It is worth in this connexion alluding to the comments by Michel de Certeau on the concept of novelizing of history in ‘Historiography (that is, ‘history’ and ‘writing’).’ “It bears within its own name the paradox— almost an oxymoron—of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse. Its task is one of connecting them and, at the point where this link cannot be imagined, of working as if the two were being joined” (website). Roots poses a need to link the story of the saga to the cultural impact of the phenomenon so as to enable it to demonstrate an interlinking of fictional narratives and historical narratives. Chapter 8 of Roots dwells in detail upon the visit to Juffure of an itinerant marabout, “a very old man, walking with the help of a wooden stuff and bearing a large bundle on his bald head,” and as the villagers gathered around him to watch him perform an ecstatic ritual, “he walked over to the baobab and set down his bundle carefully on the ground. Abruptly squatting, he then shook from a wrinkled goatskin bag a heap of dried objects—a small snake, a hyena’s jawbone, a monkey’s teeth, a pelican’s wing bone, various fowls’ feet, and strange roots. Glancing about, he gestured for the hushed crowd to give him more room; and the people moved back as he began to quiver all over—clearly being attacked by Juffure’s evil spirits” (Roots, p. 28). “The magic man’s body writhed, his face contorted, his eyes rolled wildly as his trembling hands struggled to force his

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resisting wand into contact with the heap of mysterious objects. When the wand’s tip, with a supreme effort, finally touched, he fell over backward and lay as if struck by lightning. The people gasped, but then he slowly began to revive. The evil spirits had been driven out. As he struggled weakly to his knees, Juffure’s adults—exhausted but relieved—went running off to their huts and soon returned with gifts to press upon him. The magic man added these to his bundle, which was already large and heavy with gifts from previous villages, and soon he was on his way to answer the next call. In his mercy, Allah had seen fit to spare Juffure once again” (p. 29). Haley intersperses his novel with such incidents with a view to enlightening his North American readers as to the degree of atmospheric verisimilitude peculiar to his Africa particularly because the descriptions of such rituals bespeak their ethnographic expectations. Of particular interest and significance is the scene just described, inasmuch as the Kinte ancestry, the central theme on which is built the text leads us back to Kunta’s grandfather and namesake, Kairaba Kunta Kinte, the holy man said to have driven the evil spirits out of Juffure on a previous occasion. Kunta’s Grandma “Yaisa’s hand gestured towards a pile of books on the shelf besides her bed. Speaking slowly and softly, she told Kunta more about his grandfather, whose books she said those were.” Further on, the novel continues, “In his native country of Mauretania, Kairaba Kunta Kinte had thirty-five rains of age when his teacher, a master marabout, gave him the blessing that made him a holy man, said Grandma Yaisa. Kunta’s grandfather followed a family tradition of holy men that dated back many hundreds of rains into Old Mali. As a man of the fourth kafo, he had begged the old marabout to accept him as a student, and for the next fifteen rains had travelled with his party of wives, slaves, students, cattle and goats as he pilgrimaged from village to village in the service of Allah and his subjects. Over dusty foot trails and muddy creeks, under hot suns and cold rains, through green valleys and windy wastelands, said Grandma Yaisa, they had trekked southwards from Mauretania” (Roots, p. 21). The Kinte lineage which marshals the attention of the readers of Roots fades into the distance of ritual of fertility and exorcism.

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The question which is likely to significantly crop up at the reference to the belief in the supernatural powers manifested by the itinerant marabout centres on whether Alex Haley has introduced this event, intending to beguile Western audience into accepting as true the supernatural ritual that the itinerant marabout has performed. The author has brought in this incident to showcase the belief cherished and fostered fervently by the people of the time of the author’s ancestor Kunta Kinte. It does not, if we could just fathom his real intention in the succeeding events, mean to say that he advocates it. Nowhere in the novel there occurs any intervention by supernatural agency. Kunta Kinte addresses prayers several times to his God, but his god does not see fit to respond to his prayers. Though the author does not show any supernatural intervention, he introduces the Juffure chapters into the novel; he tells in them of the Mandinka belief system surcharged with a seriousness and attention in detail in order to sort of allure the readers of the novel into the community of believers who have inherited the tradition of a magical relation to their livelihood, that is, a magical connexion between the body and the earth, as is evident in the way the body of the itinerant marabout is lying on the ground, writhing, his face contorted and his eyes rolling widely. There is displayed in the writhing of the itinerant marabout, followed by the arriving of the rain clouds, which purports to be the evidence of the power of collective belief, a commingling of a historical hypothesis and a functional truth. I quote in this context Randy Laist, reference his article Alex Raley’s Roots and Hyperreal Historiograhy (website) as saying, “The people of Juffure organize their history in relation to such magical meteorological interventions, and by nesting his own history into this non­ Western historiographical paradigm, Haley suggests an essential affinity between his understanding of American history in 1976 and Kunta’s understanding of Juffure’s history in the 1750s.” I could not help resisting the temptation of reproducing what Randy Laist says apropos of the impact of Roots on his mind, as follows: To the extent that we admire Haley’s Mandinka villagers and despise his slave traders, we become receptive to the

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possibility that the aboriginal “mythical” understanding of history is preferable to the Western model of history in all the ways that Haley’s idealized Mandinka society is preferable to a society structured around trade in human chattel. The representation of the Mandinka belief system in the opening chapters of Roots establishes the theme of alternative modes of historiography as a structural element of the narrative as well as of Haley’s genealogical project itself, (website) We cannot bring ourselves to deny the fact that Alex Haley, a famous American biographer and scriptwriter, has pioneered, by writing the novel Roots, in writing a book or novel from a black perspective and no one previous to him had dared attempt it. This 639-page novel is a saga of horrible tales of the genealogy of Alex Haley’s family which begins with the kidnapping of an African boy sold out in United States of America as a slave in the mid 1700’s. He strives to trace his ancestry back to Africa and in his tracing of his ancestry, he encompasses in his discussion the seven American generations, starting with his ancestor Kunta Kinte. Roots opens our eyes, so to say, to how alike, if we care to get down to the bottom of the racial differences which man has himself created, all human beings look.

Roots is construed as a saga of an American family, since it shows beyond doubt Haley’s endeavour to generalize search for roots; it is not restricted to African Americans only; it is a search of every one for their roots and Haley struck a chord that Roots is not a saga of his family, but it is the symbolic saga of a people. It catapults the readers who happen to read the novel into an orgy of trying to understand their own selves and lives, delving into this generalized saga. Reading through the novel we find ourselves equipped with the impression that Alex Haley gives us to understand that every place is inhabited by three groups of people, the first group being that of people walking around, working and sleeping, the second group being that of ancestors and the third group being that of people yet to be born or waiting to be born.

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These lines focus a torchlight on the triumph of meaninglessness of existence experienced in the deep roots and bonds of culture and relationships.

Roots concerns itself with Alex Haley’s search for his roots, his identity. In order to dig into seven generations one after another he has to travel back to Africa, the place of his origins. In the novel he weaves, couched in a lucid language, a yarn of the lives of the seven generations and of their having endured hardship in eking out their existence. The novel, surprisingly enough, begins and ends in Africa. The novel tells of a young boy of the name Kunta Kinte who, living a pleasant and carefree life, suddenly finds himself transported, encaged, and enduring an unspeakable hardship and misery on his voyage, to America and sold out as a slave at a slave market. Unaccustomed, as he is, to living such horrible and miserable life flung upon him, he longs to return home and prays God to help him return home, but his God sees fit not to respond to his prayer. Though Kunta tries to hold on to his African identity which defines him, his African identity has been snatched away by giving him a slave name Toby to redefine his identity. He makes vain attempts four times to flee from the inhuman torture. Gradually he grows habituated to this filthy life, but he never lets go of his pride of origins and African tradition and culture. REFERENCE Haley, Alex. Roots, published in Picador by Pan Books Ltd., Great Britain, 1977.

8 CHAPTER

The Kite Runner. Voicing the Unheard Mehar Fatima

Too often, stories about Afghanistan center around the various wars, the opium trade, the war on terrorism. Precious little is said about the Afghan people themselves— their culture, their traditions, how they lived in their country and how they manage abroad as exiles. —Khaled Hosseini A powerfully evoked story of Amir, a young boy, his father Baba, Hassan, his best friend, and a servant who is a member of the abused tribe find narratives of the marginalised in the story The Kite Runner. Amir’s betrayal of Hassan twice, forcing him to leave the family home followed by his own exile along with his father has been drawn from the lived experiences that calls to relate to the readers the moment of fear, guilt, and redemption. From Kabul to California, after a difficult escape from Afghanistan, Amir remains bound to the burden of his sin. His prompt success as a novelist and settling down in a good marriage could not rescue him. Making amends for the injuries caused made him return to his native city, Kabul in 2001. This pilgrimage for atonement becomes a text to be read and interpreted in new ways with a sense of association drawn.

Khaled Hosseini is an expatriate who lives in the U.S.A. Perhaps, he is the first novelist who took to writing about the conflicts, wars, crises, and confusion that was happening in his country, Afghanistan. Hosseini could liberate through literature thereby portraying the lesser known facts and fictions of the marginalised in his work.

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Kite flying is a culturally specific sport, traditionally rooted in a healthy competitive bonding. Amir, the protagonist and Hassan, his best friend but an inferior Hazara, they learn to see the world through the symbolic reference of the flying kite. Innocence and loss of innocence happened simultaneously for Amir. It is during his childhood that he does wrong to Hassan, betraying him and the mutual love they shared. Khalid Hosseini, the novelist truly realised that such a simple childhood experience could be a subject of great art.

The legacy of Exalted pride is wounded when Hassan is sent away and by the exile of the narrator into the land of opportunities and new beginning. Ironically, the very land of opportunities and new beginning devices war and destruction for those who fail to abide their self-centred norms. If it is Karma that makes the protagonist return to his land to undo the wrongs he did in the past in order to gain salvation, what is to be believed of the nation that strikes the war on terror on the civilians of which the readers await. The diaspora is used to refer to “the forced dispersal and displacement” of people (Agnew, 2005:3). Suraiya Sulaiman observes in her article “The Notion of Homeland, ‘Imaginary Homeland’ and Wounded Memory in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner” that, for this reason, the most well-known approach to diaspora is probably concerning the concepts of homeland and nostalgia. Psychologically, people in diaspora are those who experience the loss of home and yearn to come back to their original place either in the physical sense or in terms of psychological attachment. James Clifford (1994:305) propounds that the salient characteristics of diaspora comprise “a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, and alienation in the host (bad host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship” (cited in Agnew, 2005:3). This might be because the feeling of homelessness and exile are “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” (Said, 2006:439). Therefore, the remembrance of the past has a tendency to protect an immigrant from the feelings of loss, fear, and insecurity in his/

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her new country of residence. In addition, an immigrant needs to draw on the past as a springboard in order to define the present and establish one’s self and future in the new land.

The world saturated with media stories was waiting in mixed anticipation about a part of the world, which was imaginary, exotic, and wild than real. It is difficult to say how truly the Afghanistan has been represented by Hosseini through the pages of moving tale of brutality, compassion, sin, and redemption, but undoubtedly, it has made the invisible visible to the people of the West. This book is an important global read, especially for the US who learns to believe that immigrants on exile in their land, come from somewhere who hold integral and internal importance as a proud ethnic group, historically and culturally rich and so they are somebody with identity. Soviet-Afghan War (1979-89), the brutality practiced by soldiers—making of terrorists, resistance and subsequent exile, nationalism, ethnic cleansing.

America as graveyard to bury memories and mourn. Amir says, “For me, America was palace to bury my memories. For Baba, a place to mourn his” (129). A comparative study with Americanah^ where Chimamanda explores possibilities in the US in exile, experienced subsequent loss of innocence. Islamic values have been portrayed as imbibed in the Afghan citizens of true and brotherhood before Monetary gains and losses; trade and commerce. Hosseini narrates:

“It turned out that Baba had had no cash on him for the oranges.” He’d written Mr. Nguyen a check and Mr. Nguyen had asked for an ID. “He wants to see my license,” Baba bellowed in Farsi. “Almost two years we’ve bought his damn fruits and put money in his pocket and the son of a dog wants to see my license!” “Baba, it’s not personal,” I said, smiling at the Nguyens. “They’re supposed to ask for an ID.”

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“I don’t want you here,” Mr. Nguyen said, stepping in front of his wife. He was pointing at Baba with his cane. He turned to me. “You’re nice young man but your father, he’s crazy. Not welcome anymore.” “Does he think I’m a thief?” Baba said, his voice rising. People had gathered outside. They were staring. “What kind of a country is this? No one trusts anybody!” “I call police,” Mrs. Nguyen said, poking out her face. “You get out or I call police.” “Please, Mrs. Nguyen, don’t call the police. I’ll take him home. Just don’t call the police, okay? Please?” “My father is still adjusting to life in America,” I said, by way of explanation. I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID. But I didn’t tell them. I thanked Mr. Nguyen for not calling the cops. Took Baba home. He sulked and smoked on the balcony while I made rice with chicken neck stew. A year and a half since we’d stepped off “the Boeing from Peshawar, and Baba was still adjusting.”

But he could not tell. “On to freedom. On to safety” (110) remain only anticipatory. A disturbing historical account in the contemporary setting, conflict between the old and new, real-imaginary and more real, and post-colonial penetrates through the dual experiences of Amir and Baba, on behalf of the Afghan community, the Russian War, rise of Taliban, War on terror, change of lives, immigration, exile. Redemption, prejudice, forgiveness, religion, identity, and belongingness become symbolic. Ashcroft (1998) stated:

“Postcoloniai is used to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to

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the present day”, he argues that “there is a continuity of preoccupation throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression”. It is to know how Hosseini dealt with Afghanistan’s historical progression and the issue of otherness, the effect it continued to have on Amir and Baba, his portrayal of Islam in Afghanistan and its perception and interpretation by the West along with the rest of the world. Among many important themes marginalisation and denigration of the ‘other’ remain poignant for our study. The conflict between ethnic groups, tribal, and sectarian in Afghanistan form the root cause affecting Afghans’ psychology and their social, cultural, economic values. In words of Edward Said (1994), “tribalism is fracturing societies, separating peoples, promoting greed, bloody conflict, and uninteresting assertions of minor ethnic or group particularly” (23). The word tribalism existed much before colonisation, but the colonial policy of “divide and rule” exploited the differences to keep apart people who could live together despite that segregation. In The Kite Runner^ Khalid Hosseini also tried to present Islam as assimilating religion with positive energy breathing in and out in the people than the other. Huntington (1996) said that, “People are always tempted to divide people into us and them, the in-group and the other, our civilization and those barbarians”, he also added that, “scholars have analyzed the world in terms of the Orient and the Occident, North and South, centre and periphery...the west and the rest”. As part of political conspiracy, rivalry between Islam and Christianity, aided by the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre and propaganda against Islam, the religion, the West began to see Muslims as the ‘other’. The Kite Runner showed Islam on one hand as a religion based on mercy and redemption, and on the other as a tool used by extremists to work on their terrorist undertaking.

Enzensberger (1994) comments: As long as the country was occupied by Soviet troops the situation invited interpretation along cold war lines: Moscow was supporting its surrogates, the west, the mujahideen. On the surface it was all about national liberation; resistance

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to the foreigners, the oppressors, the unbelievers. But not sooner had the occupiers been driven off then the Civil war broke out. Nothing remained of the ideological shell...the war of everyone against everyone else took its course...what remains is the armed mob. (22) A view about tribalism and ethnic conflicts that accentuate what Edward Said (1994) has described as “Residue of Imperialism”, colonialism in this case, arguing that the colonizer if he didn’t create the cleavage between tribes, he dug it further in a “divide to rule” policy. Pashtun-dominated Taliban emerged as a major challenge to the Rabbani Government who was seemingly a Russian puppet government, which is a policy of indirect rule used by the ex-colonizer shortly after the independence of the ex-colonized countries. In 1996, Taliban seized control of Kabul and introduced hardline version of Islam which defended the ethnic cleansing, especially against the Hazara in the name of Sharia. So, writes Kelthoum: When the USA declared the war on terror, what was called a “Just war”. Although according to Tzvetan Todorov (2010):

No war is just or good, but it is sometimes impossible to evade war—either because war has been imposed by an invader who threatens your most cherished values..., or because our consciousness as human beings, will not leave us in peace, given the intensity of the suffering imposed on other peoples. (205) It has been observed that 1.5 million lost their lives and more than five million Afghans abandoned their homes and went into exile. The Afghan diaspora and study of the ‘other’ and therefore, marginalised has been an important topic of study and discussion in order to perceive our contemporary time.

In the novel, Amir, the protagonist found an old history book by an Iranian named Khorami, where: A chapter dedicated to Hassan’s people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted and oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had “quelled them with unspeakable violence.” The book said

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that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from their lands, burned their homes, and sold their women. The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi’a. The book said a lot of things I didn’t know, things my teachers hadn’t mentioned. Things Baba hadn’t mentioned either. (9)

A clash between identities; personal and cultural, national and universal, issues of double consciousness, hybridity and otherness, where The Kite Runner as a post-colonial novel deals with the resistance to colonialism, their ideologies and legacies as ongoing effect after having gained independence. This process of building boundary and social classification and stratification made elite possible or what Fanon labeled the “national bourgeoisie”. Therefore, a social stratification is created, an uneven distribution of wealth is performed, capitalism is established, and so does ethnic conflicts take place. Subsequently, otherness is created which, according to Lisa Onbelt (2010), “has also been associated predominantly with marginalized people, those who by virtue of their difference from the dominant group, have been disempowered, robbed of a voice in the social, religious, and political world”.

Stephan Morton (2003) writes: Throughout the history of western culture and thought, there are certain people, concepts, and ideas that are defined as ‘Other’: as monsters, aliens or savages who threaten the values of civilised society, or the stability of the rational human self. Such ‘Others’ have included death, the unconscious and madness, as well as the Oriental, non-western ‘Other’, the foreigner,.... In the structure of western thought, the ‘Other’ is relegated to a place outside of or exterior to the normal, civilised values of western culture. (37) It has been noted that a superior or dominant social group marks the inferior with descriptions that points them out as unfortunate, deprived of their voices and identity. This uncertainty, shifting of centre like landslides coexists with racial

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and ethnic groups within as well as outside the affecting sphere. It becomes a vicious circle. Hazara in The Kite Runner, who represent racial, social and religious ‘Other’, were distanced. However, in the opinion of Stephen Chbosky, “Alienation is a powerful force, one that moves humans toward the negative impulses of self-pity, vulnerability, and violence, but that can also result in the positive results of deep introspection and intellectual independence.” Therefore, by resisting power and oppression, the suppressed have been finding voices as loud enough to be heard and comprehended. According to Sophia (2011), “Husseini’s book balanced between revealing details of Afghan life and subtleties of its culture customs and writing, a story that reflects universal themes of betrayal and redemption, it has succeeded in bringing a sense of Afghan humanity to the western reader” (132). Islam, the religion used by extremist, Taliban is based on ignorance and misinterpretation of religion. Hosseini writes, “What mission is that? Stoning adulterers? Raping children? Flogging women for wearing high heels? Massacring Hazaras? All in the name of Islam?” (249).

Kelthoum observes that: The tolerance of Islam is displayed by Amir’s repentance and return to God by praying and fasting after being away from what Islam really is. Actually, Amir’s getting back on the truck, when he felt hopeless, rose suspicions among the readers about the banality of this action and its irrelevance to the story and events. Hence, Husseini wanted to show, first, that Amir after all is a human who commits mistakes, regrets them then tries to correct them. Even though he did that just when he found himself in a desperate need for “providence”, as the majority of people do, so he returned to God only when he lost hope.

Second, he also wanted to point out that Islam as a religion is not about punishing the guilty or restricts the individual’s freedom by forbidding things as Baba has taught his son or Taliban concretized. Amir, then, discovered that his father was wrong about many things, especially the concept of

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Islam and the relationship between a person and God. He found out that it is also about giving people more than a chance for redemption, by returning to God, by “being good again” which is a reference to a Koranic verse “Say if you love Allah, follow me so Allah will love you and forgive your sins and Allah is the forgiving and merciful”. (Surah Al Imran, verse 31)

It is also to ask and understand the question that whether Hosseini’s work go beyond the horizon of expectation or not? Perhaps, yes, because his readers’ responds are unexpectedly different. He writes in his foreword to the lOth-anniversary edition that: You can imagine my astonishment, then, at the reception this book has received worldwide since its publication. It amazes me to get letters from India, South Africa, Tel Aviv, Sydney, London, Arkansas; from readers who express their passion to me. Many want to send money to Afghanistan; some even want to adopt an Afghan orphan. In these letters, I see the unique ability fiction has to connect people, and I see how universal some experiences are: shame, guilt, regret, friendship, love, forgiveness atonement. (Hosseini) And we can see how the virtues get affected. As there was nothing to judge Hosseini from any previous work offered, he went on to make a tremendous remark with his debut novel, The Kite Runner.

Hans Robert Jauss emphasises that relationship of literature and audience is conditioned to its historicity, society, and ideology; thereby the writer has to be conscious of the milieu of his contemporary period. This suggests that, a work may lose its importance when the change materialises in social environment, or it so happens that the writer creates such work that it has undistinguished universal appeal so that it caters to the taste and need of forthcoming generations and posterity to come.

When, the new horizon of expectations has achieved more general currency, the power of the altered aesthetic norm can be demonstrated in that audience experiences formerly successful works as outmoded and withdraws its appreciation. Only in

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view of such horizontal change does the analysis of literary influence achieve the dimension of a literary history of readers and do the statistical curves of the bestsellers provide historical knowledge (LHC, 26-27). The Kite Runner is by no means an apology to the West or the rest of the world. It is not to find a passport for his people and nation as untarnished, innocent, and guiltless and to accept that the USA invasion has been only as a response to the 9/11 attack. He is only trying to put things in a certain order that the ‘other’ may be comprehended through a tale of innocence, loss, where its regain is through sense of association, reminiscence of the past, class and social conflicts; literary techniques of metaphor, symbolism, and foreshadowing. There is a scope for collective sympathy for the victimised and vision for a change, a positive change, perhaps another chance to be good again; something to redem and paradise to regain. REFERENCES Agnew, Vijay (2005). Introduction. In Vijay Agnew (ed.), Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 3-21. Agnew, Vijay (2005). “History and Identity”. In Vijay Agnew (ed.), Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 111-13. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen (2006). The Post­ Colonial Studies Reader (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikhail K. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Mikhael Holoquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bhabha, K.H. (1998). Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Brah, Avtah (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge Cohen, Robin. (2008). Global Diaspora: An Introduction (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Collins, K. “The Logic of Clan Politics: Evidence from the Central Asian Trajectories”, World Affairs, Vol. 56, No. 2, 2004, p. 239. Edwards, Janette (2008). Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation: The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The

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Kite Runner. Retrieved September 28, 2013. http://www.mterdisciplinary.net. 3. Fish, Stanley (1978). Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hall, Stuart (1994). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: University of Columbia Press, pp. 392-403. Helly, Denise (2006). Diaspora: History of an Idea. In Haideh Moghissi (ed.), Muslim Diaspora: Gender, Culture and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3-22. Hosseini, Khaled (2003). The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books. Huntington, P.S. (1996). The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order. NY: Simon and Schuster. Islam—A Western View, retrieved from Dar ul Iman-Islam, www.chisti.org/western. htm on May 29, 2014.

Iser, Wolfgang (1978). The Act of Reading: An Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and London: John. Hopkins University Press. Kfir, I. “The Role of the Pashtuns in Understanding the Afghan Crisis”, Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2009. Kelthoum. “The History of Otherness in The Kite Runner.” Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, University of Algiers 2, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Department of English. 2013/2014. Lau, L. and Mendes, A.C. (2011). Re-orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics. NY: Routledge. Marton, S. (2003). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge. Mishra, Vijay (2006). The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora. In Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 445-50. Morgan, Mathew J. (Ed.) ( 2009). “The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment”. NY: Palagrave Macmillan. 8. Rushdie, Salman (2006). Imaginary Homelands. In Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 428-34. Said, Edward (2006). The Mind of Winter. In Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (2nd ed.), London and New York: Routledge, pp. 439-42.

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Said, W.E. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. ------. (1977). Orientalism. NY: Vintage Books. Sulaiman, Suraiya: “The Notion of Homeland, ‘Imaginary Homeland’ and Wounded Memory in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner”. International Islamic University, Malaysia. Tzvetan, T. (2010). The Fear of the Barbarians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Verma, Raj Gaurav. “Locating Reader Response Theory in Jauss’s Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”, Language in India. Vol. 13:5. May 2013.

9 CHAPTER

"The Killers"—Hemingway's Prose Art and Social Commitment Goutam Ghosal

Ernest Hemingway foresaw his career as a writer from his school days in Oak Park, Illinois. He read profusely at school with a view to honing his skill as a writer. Michael S. Reynolds, in his book, Hemingway’s First War: The Making of a Farewell to Arms,, informs us that Ernest borrowed 1088 books from his school library (12), which is an indication of his seriousness as a reader of books even as a school student. He was a naturally gifted user of words and sentences, while his wide reading made him more competent as an artist of prose. Cabling reports for Kansas City Star gave him a forced training in brevity, which helped him become a leading short story writer in world literature. “The Killers” was written, most probably, in 1926, which reflects the terrible lack of law and order in the Chicago of the 1920s. My paper will highlight Hemingway’s prose artistry along with his human concerns as a committed writer, a virtue long denied to him till the early 1950s, when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, As a matter of fact, Hemingway had a born commitment to society and humanity in general, an aspect he probably inherited from his brave grandfather, whom he worshipped for his courage and commitment. He disliked his father because of his cowardly suicide and his mother, Grace Hemingway, because of her authoritarian role in the family. He grew up amidst the blood and horror of the First World War and a fall of human values following the years of war, an era which appeared to T.S. Eliot as a waste land.

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Much of the doubt about Hemingway’s commitment to society and Man rose from the mistake of seeing him as a self-centered writer, the wrong sight in reading his narratives as personal fatalism, as stories of death and doom and despair owing from a personal failure to cope with the circumstances around him. It was an absolute misreading of his art and the man behind the art. Commentaries like the following, by John Walsh, speak of his psychological crisis but they also hide his concern for earth due to a loss of focus in linking his suicidal motives with his vision of a clean world: Death took up residence at the heart of Hemingway’s life, a constant spur to his creative imagination, a constant companion, a dark, secret lover. Themes of violence and suicide informed his stories from the start. His letters are full of references to his future suicide. And when not contemplating his own death, he was putting himself into danger and combat as though to hasten it. Wars, rebellion, bull-running in Pamplona, big-game hunting in Africa, fishing in Havana—they were all his way of throwing himself before the Grim Reaper. “I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish,” he told Ava Gardner, “so I won’t kill myself.”1

If this was actually his world view, it was also his incapacity of finding an earth of his dream, which he found in the love of Brett Ashley always returning to Jacob Barnes in search of her true love suppressed by her outer vital and sexual impulses, which drive her from one man to another in The Sun Also Rises or in the love of little Manolin for Santiago, or even in Nick Adams growing up in Nature discovering the deeper secrets of true living. In Dateline: Toronto, Hemingway expresses his disgust for the lawlessness created by the fascist mass under Mussolini. The following is a post from June 24, 1922:

Their continued lawless tactics cost the Fascists a very real popularity too. After the war it was impossible for the wife of a merchant, a manufacturer, or a professional man to go about in any public places in northern Italy without being liable to insults of various kinds, from having her hat torn

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off and her face scratched to being hissed as a “borghese”. Anyone buying a first- or second-class seat in an Italian train was never sure that they would not be thrown out of it by some worker with his dinner pail who had decided that he would ride first class on a third-class ticket. Gangs of hoodlums would swarm into a train as it stopped in some northern Italian town and after throwing the “borghese” out of the first-class compartments would gaily enter and ride a few stations, cutting all the red plush out of the seats as souvenirs. (174-75) Perhaps he was disgusted with the world around him in the 1920s, when Nick was slowly growing up as a mature teenager. Behind the creation of “The Killers”, there lies the sensitive self of the writer himself, who is unhappy with his growing knowledge of the world. The most helpless figure in the story is Nick, who is an outsider in this small town called “Summit”. He is presented as a teenager unaccustomed to violence. All the other characters have the power to adjust with the happenings in the lunchroom; Nick is helpless, restless, peaceless, which is not told by the narrator but indicated. And this indication is not easy to catch. That is why Hemingway’s simplicity is widely known as a deceptive stylistics. Carlos Baker rightly observes that he learned to “get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth” (168). It is the truth of a chaotic inside of Nick and to tell that the language is deftly manipulated with certain keywords and repetitive devices. In “The Art of the Short Story”, Hemingway gives out a part of his secret: A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit.2 “The Killers”, read from this viewpoint, is a masterful construction and creation, where the stylistic tricks are employed

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to reveal the helplessness of Nick, who has two moments of awkwardness. The first is when the killers leave the lunchroom and George wishes Nick to go to caution Ole Anderson despite Sam’s (the cook’s) objections. Let us observe how carefully Hemingway writes his dialogue, after a brief narration, to tell and to indicate: The two of them went out the door. George watched them, through the window; pass under the arc-light and across the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team. George went back through the swinging door into the kitchen and untied Nick and the cook. “I don’t want any more of that,” said Sam, the cook. “I don’t want any more of that.” Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before. “Say,” he said. “What the hell?” He was trying to swagger it off. “They were going to kill Ole Anderson,” George said. “They were going to shoot him when he came in to eat.” “Ole Anderson?” “Sure.” The cook felt the corners of his mouth with his thumbs. This is the first response of the cook to violence, which he dislikes from the very core of his being. The 1920s were absolutely unsafe for the “niggers” with the call to kill everywhere floating in the air of Chicago.

“They all gone?” he asked. “Yeah,” said George. “They’re gone now.” “I don’t like it,” said the cook. “I don’t like any of it at all.” “Listen,” George said to Nick. “You better go see Ole Anderson.” “All right.” “You better not have anything to do with it at all,” Sam, the cook, said. “You better stay way out of it.” “Don’t go if you don’t want to,” George said.

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“Mixing up in this ain’t going to get you anywhere,” the cook said. “You stay out of it.” “I’ll go see him,” Nick said to George. “Where does he live?” The cook turned away. “Little boys always know what they want to do,” he said. “He lives up at Hirsch’s rooming-house,” George said to Nick. “I’ll go up there.”

Sam, the cook, is a “nigger”, a derogatory term in use for the blacks in America in the 1920s. Naturally, he suffers from an obvious nervousness expressed by his stress on “I don’t want any more of that.” George is slightly more active, pushed by an urge to save Anderson. Nick, the echo-soul of the writer, is an active agent of goodness, a teenager with an inherent commitment to society. He has just seen what society is, what death is, what it means to be mean and evil. But he has no nervousness at this moment at least. The dialogue sequence saves plenty of the narrator’s words and that is an asset for Hemingway the artist. The “arc-light” is focusing on the killers; it focuses on a society where death or the end of all is the central metaphor. Nick will also pass through these arc-lights later as he goes to caution Anderson. The killers are shown through George’s eyes as members of a “vaudeville team” projecting a sardonic humour in George. The colour of their dress had already been described as “black” earlier in the narration. Black stands for death, evil, and nothingness. In Hemingway: Expressionist Artist, Raymond S. Nelson draws our notice to Hemingway’s use of colour as unspecific, meaning that he does not give us much of the shades of colour in his efforts to express his emotion, which is often not related to the intellectual mode. Referring to “The Big TwoHearted River”, Nelson speaks of Hemingway’s expressionistic colour painting. “All colours in the story were like that: white, red, black, brown green and so on. There were no suggestions of shade; there were no gradations in tone” (ix). Here too, as also in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the black has no shade. It is the ancient or canonical black standing

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for the ominous things. “His face was small and white”—here also, as Nelson suggests in his reference to other stories, the white is not particularized. And surprisingly enough both “black” and “white” stand for death. Hemingway told Gene Tunney, “That story probably had more left out of it than anything” (Flora, 139-40). What was left out? One might well ask. What was left for the reader’s guess was, perhaps, the interest in the psychological crisis in Nick Adams. The latter half of the story’s structure is built on Nick’s action and his emotional responses and his will to do something for Anderson and finally his sad departure from the town called “Summit”. Let us give a look at a slice of this part and try to investigate into Nick’s consciousness: Outside the arc-light shone through the bare branches of a tree. Nick walked up the street beside the car-tracks and turned at the next arc-light down a side-street. Three houses up the street was Hirsch’s rooming-house. Nick walked up the two steps and pushed the bell. A woman came to the door. “Is Ole Andreson here?” “Do you want to see him?” “Yes, if he’s in.” Nick followed the woman up a flight of stairs and back to the end of a corridor. She knocked on the door. “Who is it?” “It’s somebody to see you, Mr. Andreson,” the woman said. “It’s Nick Adams.” “Come in.” Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Andreson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prize-fighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick. “What was it?” he asked.

The first response of Anderson is a relaxed query. And the same air of resignation is there in the following dialogue sequence.

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The fact that he is formally dressed to go out is a symbol of his preparedness to exit from the world.

“I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.” It sounded silly when he said it. Ole Andreson said nothing. “They put us out in the kitchen,” Nick went on. “They were going to shoot you when you came in to supper.” Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything. “George thought I better come and tell you about it.” “There isn’t anything I can do about it,” Ole Andreson said. “I’ll tell you what they were like.” “I don’t want to know what they were like,” Ole Andreson said. He looked at the wall. “Thanks for coming to tell me about it.” “That’s all right.” Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed. “Don’t you want me to go and see the police?” “No,” Ole Andreson said. “That wouldn’t do any good.” “Isn’t there something I could do?” “No. There ain’t anything to do.” “Maybe it was just a bluff.” “No. It ain’t just a bluff.” Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall. “The only thing is,” he said, talking toward the wall, “I just can’t make up my mind to go out. I have been in here all day.” “Couldn’t you get out of town?” “No,” Ole Andreson said. “I’m through with all that running around.” He looked at the wall. “There ain’t anything to do now.” “Couldn’t you fix it up some way?” “No. I got in wrong.” He talked in the same flat voice. “There ain’t anything to do. After a while I’ll make up my mind to go out.”

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“I better go back and see George,” Nick said. “So long,” said Ole Andreson. He did not look toward Nick. “Thanks for coming around.” Nick went out. As he shut the door, he saw Ole Andreson with all his clothes on, lying on the bed looking at the wall.

The arc-light showing through the bare branches of a tree is once again a weird focus on death—a man is doomed to die. There is no court, no Police in the town; it is a free zone. Young Nick has a feeling for the man doomed to death. He is still not quite mature enough to understand that that particular society (the Chicago or the America of the 1920s) has no law and order. If a man wants to kill another man, he can kill him. The victim is absolutely defenseless against a cruel society. As he walks out of the lunchroom, Hemingway’s cool bare narration hints at the fatalism in the situation with the sinister image of “three”— Nick crosses three houses on the way to the rooming house of Andreson. Hemingway uses the old-world supernaturalism of the “Three”. Carlos Baker was the first to tell us about Hemingway’s use of the sinister “threes”, “sixes” and “nines” as the symbols drawn from the old epics in his book Hemingway: The Writer as Artist with reference to the fascist planes coming down to the mountain hide-out of Robert Jordan. Reading Hemingway’s brief narrative style is a detective work; one cannot afford to miss any word in the dense texture of his prose including the terse dialogues, which bring out the exact consciousness of the characters. Nick is in crisis, in a grave psychological crisis—and his speeches take us straight into what Sri Aurobindo would have called the subliminal self of a human being, the subtle planes in man “behind” the waking consciousness. The subliminal and the subconscious are made one in western psychology. But, as per the Indian psychology or the Upanishadic distinctions, the subconscious of Freud is “below” the waking self and the subliminal is “behind” the surface being of man, the annaamoya (physical), the pranamoya (the vital) and the manomoya (the mental overmind), which Sri Aurobindo names in The Life Divine as the inner physical, the inner vital, the inner mental

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and the inmost self. These four inner persons constitute the “subliminal” in Man (425-26). Nick’s speeches are an upthrow from his subliminal self, which suffers from the fate of Ole Andreson. He has a depressive sickness and frustration in his failure to do something for the doomed prize fighter. The inmost being of Nick Adams comes out to the surface in his dialogues to Andreson. There is a cry from inside the deepest centre of the teenager’s being to save him. And this is just a prelude to Hemingway’s thought about Meditation 17 of John Donne, which he later quotes in the flap jacket of For Whom the Bell Tolls: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Hemingway echoes it in the last chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls through the interior monologue of Robert Jordan: “Each one does what he can. You can do nothing for yourself but perhaps you can do something for another” (408). It is this feeling of a socially committed writer that goes out from the inner and the inmost beings of Nick in his dialogue with Ole Andreson. Notice the desperate urgency in Nick’s speeches: “Don’t you want me to go and see the police?” “I’ll tell you what they were like.” “Isn’t there something I could do?” “Couldn’t you get out of town?” “Couldn’t you fix it up some way?” Nick’s next speech is all about his failure to do something for the man in danger. He is helpless, beaten by the defeatist stoicism of the man lying before him. Now he feels he is a small boy and perhaps George, a grown-up man, might help! “I better go back and see George,”

This might be the interpretation of what Hemingway had left out in the story: the chaotic insides of Nick indicated through his brief but urgent speeches to Ole Andreson, because he cannot just take a man die whatever might have been his past. Even if Hemingway was not supposed to know—and he was not a practising psychologist like Sri Aurobindo or Jung—the word “subliminal”, he was seeing it perfectly through his own

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development as a boy, whom he tries to objectify through Nick. The story is a masterpiece of art and commitment from a young writer distressed by a war affected planet and the brutal killings he saw before his eyes in America and Europe. NOTES 1. https://www.independent.co.uk/ by John Walsh, Accessed on Saturday 11 June 2018. 2. https://www.theparisreview.org/letters.../the-art-of-the-shortstory-ernest-hemingway 19 Dec. 2018. WORKS CITED Aurobindo, Sri. The Life Divine. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972. Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton University Press, 1972. Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Edited by William White, Charles Scribener’s Sons, 1985. ------. Men without Women. Penguin, 1956. Joseph, Flora M. Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, 1989. Nelson, Raymond S. Hemingway: Expressionist Artist: lowata State University, 1979. Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway's First War: The Making of a Farewell to Arms. Princeton University Press, 1976.

10 CHAPTER

Celie in The Color Purple: Acquiring “Voice" through a Womanist Quest Sarani Ghosal Mondal

This is the book in which I was able to express anew spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for granted as a child; a chance for me as well as the main character, Celie, to encounter That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving and to say: I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear you everywhere I am.... (from the Preface written for the Tenth-Anniversary Edition of The Color Purple)

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) explores the struggle of black women, who rise to power and acquire a subjective voice of their own through a series of blows at home and outside. It may be seen as Celie’s waking into a new consciousness, as she becomes a spiritually stronger being from a victimised moral woman, who had always considered herself a sinner for no fault of her own. Not only Celie, but also all the major and minor female characters, like Celie, Nettie, Shug, Kate, Sofia, and Squeak, acquire a voice of their own through suffering and exploitation and gradually they form a strong bonding to overturn the politics of patriarchal family dynamics, where women are meant to be beaten. Sofia tells Celie, “he don’t want a wife, he want a dog” (62). This is an evidence of their growing awareness.

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Even though the novel offers a very pessimistic picture of black community, the final note is of optimism, hope, and harmony. The narrator resolves the conflict of gender at the end, where we witness a peaceful reconciliation between Celie and her husband. It might seem queer and a bit absurd to the readers that despite the abuses and physical torture hurled upon her, the protagonist forgives her husband and returns to her family from Memphis. Walker’s final message in the novel is ‘family reunion’, which is being celebrated on 4th July. The metaphor of reunion refers to Walker’s theory of womanism. She had coined the term in her seminal work entitled, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose in 1983. The concept of womanism challenges the popular assumptions of feminism, which deal with the problems and difficulties faced by the white women. On the contrary, womanism is inclusive in nature as it focuses on the issues of both black men and women. According to Walker, the vision of a black feminist is all-encompassing. She embraces “the wholeness of an entire people, male and female” (Mukhopadhyay, 138). One may say that it is more of a reaction to white feminism, which addresses only the issues of white women. Womanism does not consider masculinity as a potential threat. In the contemporary Afro-American society, black males were the victims of racial discrimination as much as their female counterparts. The novelist, therefore, takes the broader perspective and urges for a healthy family environment sans any sexual oppression. A black woman’s suffering is double-edged: racial discrimination and sexual oppression. Alice Walker’s womanism can be considered as a response to both. She envisions a woman, who is empowered to counter these social evils with a message of black solidarity, which, of course, is a residue of Harlem renaissance of the 1920s. Lois Tyson in her book Critical Theory Today (2006) argues that Afro-American literature focuses mainly on the socio-political and economic circumstances that women live in. She also points out that Alice Walker has represented three types of women: the “suspended woman”, who is weak and submissive; the “assimilated woman”, who looks for acceptance in the white society; and the “emergent woman”, who is relatively vocal

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compared to the other two categories and speaks for herself (Tyson, 394). Celie evolves to the emergent category from the submissive by virtue of her progressive awareness over the span of almost three decades.

Keeping these issues in mind, the paper seeks to examine Celie’s journey of emancipation from a kind of inferno to the paradise of love, union and harmony, which fulfills her womanist quest of independence and contentment within the matrix of family. The narrative progresses through a series of undated letters exchanged between Celie and Nettie, which establish the authenticity of their collective voices. It also offers a sense of spontaneity in spite of an overall “errant” narrative structure. According to Steven C. Weisenburger, the errors are “interpretative opportunities” (258). The letters explicitly present varied issues of sexual and racial exploitations, which would not have appeared to be so intense if the novelist had adopted omniscient narratology. The unedited and errant letters of teenaged Celie project her lack of formal education resulting in ignorance. Celie writes to God secretly about her abject condition and experiences of suffering in a very submissive tone. The act of writing letters to God is her means of coping up with unwanted early pregnancy by her stepfather followed by a loveless marriage with a widower with three children. Her letters to God amount to a kind of pathological experience. One may see it as a submissive strategy of protest. The epistolary mode of narration makes it dialogic in nature, which reminds us of Bakhtian polyphony. Each of the female voices in the novel has its perspective. The novelist has endowed them with a mind and voice. They involve themselves in the narration. None of the female character is flat in the novel. They grow to maturity along with time as the narration covers almost three decades. Celie often quotes in her letters the dialogues exchanged by the other female characters. The collective voice of all the female characters does not contradict with the larger interest of the author, as we see, Shug believes in material independence. Nettie desires to acquire knowledge. Celie wishes to live well. All these culminate into Celie’s ultimate emancipation. The plurality

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of consciousness helps Celie to strengthen her position in the oppressive set up. As Celie grows into maturity, her tone slowly changes from submissive to subversive. Celie’s progressive awareness of her ‘individualistic self’ offers a note of coherence despite its errant structure. It is a bildungsroman portraying the journey of an impoverished black girl, who becomes an entrepreneur despite her psycho-sexual harassment and abject poverty. Apparently, she appears to be a meek housewife, who does not protest against any form of sexual, physical, and psychological abuses. However, there is an undertone of protest, which is evident in her letters, where she addresses her husband, “Mr.”. This may be explained as a silent strategy of revolt against her husband, “Mr. Albert”, who is just like any other man representing the stifling patriarchal values without any gesture of empathy. The gender denoting term ‘Mr.’ is enough for Celie to address him as there lies the politics of power and ‘lack’ of it. The sense of lack among the women motivates them to withstand the oppression with courage and dignity. Meanwhile, Shug Avery, a singer and her husband’s ex-flame enters the scene. Her temporary refuge in Celie’s house upturns the politics of power. Her very presence introduces the metaphor of subversion. Shug values material independence over anything under the sun. She epitomises the principles of the first wave of feminism as expounded by Virginia Woolf. ...you will admit from your own experience that to depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. Recall the joy with which you received your first guinea for your first brief, and the deep breath of freedom that you drew.... (Woolf, 131)

Virginia Woolf, time and again, speaks of the value of material independence as that gives an ultimate feeling of liberation. Michéle Barrett explains the key message in Woolf’s seminal essays entitled, “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas”: Woolf argued that the material impoverishment of women’s lives—including those of middle and upper class women who had an affluent lifestyle but no real control over, or

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ownership of, money—accounted for their lack of creative expression. (Barrett, xii) It is quite convincing as any form of creativity needs freedom. In the dynamics of gender politics, the creativity of a woman is stifled as it offers a castration threat to the male counterparts leading to an imbalance of the power structure of oppressor visà-vis oppressed. Along with Shug, Sofia, Nettie, Squeak, and Kate form a choric voice to counter the vulnerability of women in the household. Kate, the sister-in-law, visits her brother and she requests him to buy Celie some clothes and requests Celie: “You got to fight them, Celie...I can’t do it for you” (22). Afterwards, Sofia, the daughter-in-law, also urges Celie to protest. “You ought to bash Mr.head open.... Think about heaven later” (40). In both the examples, we witness a rebellious tone. They exhort Celie to come out of her usual submissive appearance to strike a blow to deconstruct the age-old patriarchal order. Celie is not yet ready to speak out for herself. Shug Avery finally breaks Celie’s wall of silent resistance through an unconditional gesture of love. According to Charles L. Proudfit, Shug provides a “holding environment” and she also works as an “auxiliary ego” for Celie (Proudfit, 26).

...and to Shug’s facilitating Celie’s sensual awakening to adult female sexuality and a healthy emotional life. This “female bonding”, which occurs over an extended period of time, enables Celie—a depressed survivor—victim of parent loss, emotional and physical neglect, rape, incest, trauma, and spousal abuse—to resume her arrested development and continue developmental process that were thwarted in infancy and early adolescence. (13)

Shug’s presence in Celie’s life is a turning point as she serves both as a mother figure and an object of gratification resulting in a secret lesbian relationship, which is linked with the broader question of black emancipation. ...same-sex relationships sustain and nurture the lives of countless black women, as well as by its acceptance of vulnerability and mutual dependence as fundamental conditions of human relationships. (159)

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Shug provides her an emotionally secure and supportive environment to grow into a more conscious being. She urges Celie to attend her music show. Celie’s husband immediately says: “Wives don’t go to places like that” (69). The step son Harpo says: “It just a scandless, a woman with five children hanging out in a juke joint at night” (77). In response to such patriarchal comments to protect the virtue of a woman, Shug proclaims, “A woman need a little fun, once in a while” (78). By virtue of her profession, Shug moves to different places for her shows and often fulfills her fantasy with strangers. Critics like Philip M. Royster in his essay entitled, “In Search of Our Father’s Arms: Alice Walker’s Persona of the Alienated Darling”, say: “Shug successfully corners of emotionally crippled Celie for sexual purposes and manipulates her into sitting on the porch while Shug chases around the country after her sexual fancies” (Royster, 368). It is difficult to accept Philip Royster’s argument that Shug is manipulative and she makes Celie sitting on the porch and she travels around. Shug is instrumental to Celie’s socio-psychological development and subsequent spiritual awakening. Shug makes Celie aware of her own sexuality. Poor Celie sees her image for the first time in the mirror after Shug’s instruction. It alludes to Lacan’s mirror phase. One notices Celie’s psychological development, which starts with her mirror reflection and she becomes aware of her ‘self’ and physiology. All these years, during her phases of growth from childhood to girlhood, she was not conscious about her subjective existence and the looks. The consensual lesbian sexual relationship with Shug makes Celie emotionally stable. She starts feeling special about herself and her physical attributes.

Together, Celie and Shug demonstrate a model of sexual vulnerability and mutual dependence that has them working together consensually toward self-love rather than relating hierarchically—an interaction different from Albert’s masculinist relationship with Celie. (Lewis, 163) Albert’s interaction with Celie reflects the matrix of power dynamics, where Celie is reduced to almost nothingness. When Celie announces that she is going to accompany Shug to Memphis; Albert gets furious and snubs her with all his meanness:

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You ugly. You skinny. You shape funny.... All you fit to do in Memphis is be Shug’s maid.... You not that good a cook either.... Maybe somebody let you work on the railroad.... (186) Albert has a natural belief that he can hold back Celie within the four walls of the household by breaking her confidence because he is in need of an unpaid maid. By now, suffering has made Celie assertive. She is no longer going to accept any form of injustice towards her. She shouts back with equal strength and confidence: “I curse you...until you right by me, everything you touch will crumble” (187). However, Celie herself is surprised by her newly discovered power of articulation. She thinks that it comes from the trees (ibid.). The metaphor of ‘tree’ is a very striking image here as it is an ancient symbol of physical and spiritual nourishment, fertility, and endurance. Celie like an ancient tree endures all sorts of pain and injury inflicted upon her. Yet she is alive. She asserts that she is still there like a tree, firmly rooted and providing supportive environment to all irrespective of any prejudices and reservation. Albert cannot really chide her by saying that she is just nothing. Her final emancipation takes place in Memphis, where she starts stitching trousers with Shug’s socio-economic and psychological support. You not my maid. I didn’t bring you to Memphis to be that. I brought you here to love you and help you get on your feet.... (191)

With Shug’s continued encouragement, Celie becomes an entrepreneur with her start-up business in the dining room at Shug’s home. “You making your living, Celie, she says. Girl, you on your way” (193). At this point of time, she concludes her letter to Nettie by mentioning the address of her shop. She finally stops addressing to God. By then, along with her economic independence, she is transformed into an enlightened being. With the help of Shug’s company, she learns that God is everywhere. Shug instils the principles of American transcendentalism in Celie. The movement had begun in the

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1830s with a focus on individual’s perception of God that went against contemporary religious dictate. The principal thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson spoke of realising God in solitude amidst Nature (web). Shug tells Celie: They come to church to share God, not find God.... God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come to the world with God...the feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all...God love everything you love...God love admiration.... (176-77)

Before Shug’s arrival, Celie harbors a notion that God is a white male entity and she would be liberated from the shackles of oppression in death. She tells Sofia, “This life soon be over.... Heaven last all ways” (40). It is somewhat her passive acceptance of life like a traditional God-fearing woman. Peter K. Powers describes it a “masochistic” notion of God (Powers, 71). At another point, Celie utters that God is her husband. Powers quotes Rosemary Ruether’s argument that the notion of masculine God derives from the politics of societal hierarchy. Man has the direct access to the masculine God, may be the Christ, who is supposed to be the savior. The salvation of humanity lies in death. Candice M. Jenkins explains Celie’s submissive attitude during her pre-Memphis days as a kind of “salvific wish”. She conforms to patriarchal ideals and accepts the tyrannical behavior of her husband just to maintain the sobriety of black household. This attitude was quite common among the middle­ class Afro-Americans in the Victorian era. It was, in fact, a response to the stigma of deviance, which was attached to the women (Jenkins, 973). A woman has no right to express her sexual choices and desire. She has to act according to the dictates of the societal codes. Shug deliberately deviates from the codes and Celie initially takes recourse to prayer and letters. Her sojourn to Memphis is her rebirth into a new consciousness. She strongly embraces the ideals of transcendentalism, i.e. cosmic consciousness and personalized vision of God. Shug liberates Celie from the oppression. The color purple also symbolises liberation or freedom. Celie thinks of stitching a pair of trousers

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for Sofia with one leg red and another purple (195). Both the colours denote passion, desire, and freedom. There is a marked change in Celie’s language between her pre-Memphis and post­ Memphis days. Her articulation becomes coherent and bold. She returns to her family as a new woman.

I smoke when I want to talk to God. I smoke when I want to make love. Lately I feel like me and God make love just fine anyhow. Whether I smoke reefer or not. (199)

Celie’s rebellious words are empowered by her economic and spiritual emancipation. She speaks for herself. She is aware of the fact that God is not someone to be institutionalised. The essence of Truth can be felt at every moment if one is open to receive the bliss. It is new-age spirituality, which is against the orthodox customs and rituals. It is more of a private and intuitive realization of the Divine or what Emerson calls “Oversoul”.

Along with her spiritual realisation, she becomes a part of the larger economy like Shug. Powers aptly cites the remarks of Margaret Walsh and Laren Berlant, who sees in Celie’s journey towards emancipation a fairy tale: “Ugly duckling become swan” (Powers, 83). She takes her business a step forward and proclaims boldly, “I tried to work on some new pants I’m trying to make for pregnant women...” (230). This may be seen as an effort to emancipate her race. The metaphor of “carrying woman” traditionally indicates domesticity and lack of movement beyond the private sphere. According to Peter Powers, it is indicative of consumerism. The trousers are commodities and the buyers are faceless consumers (Powers, 83). This argument may not be acceptable from Celie’s perspectives. She begins the second phase of her life as an entrepreneur, when her duties as a mother to Albert’s children are over. Through Shug, she understands that pregnancy and raising kids do not mean an end of a fulfilling life. It is just a phase when the woman tastes the glory of motherhood and completeness. Simultaneously, the would-be mother has every right to flaunt herself in trousers outside the domestic sphere. Walker’s womanism accepts the life of a woman as a whole: the daughter, the wife, the mother, and their negotiation with the private and public spheres, which

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ultimately forges a win-win situation for them. The metaphor of “pants” blurs the dichotomy between the private and public. The movement becomes easy in trousers.

Celie’s final liberation from all the imposed sociopsychological bondages takes place on 4th July. That is the day of American independence. Walker deliberately concludes her narration on this day suggesting another level of liberation, when the black community strengthens its internal solidarity in family reunion, which symbolically projects their collective independence in domestic space that includes both men and women. It is an alternative vision of freedom through womanism. Celie concludes the final letter by signing “amen”. In the context of the metaphor of “amen”, Powers aptly explains: ...the ultimate human achievement is not in the individualism...individual human significance manifests itself in the development of human community.... (Powers 87) Celie, of course, acquires a voice of her own by virtue of her progressive realisation, which happens as all the surrounding women Kate, Sofia, and Shug form a choric voice to raise awareness in Celie. Mary Agnes unconsciously imbibes the nonconformist spirit of Shug and Celie and aspires to be singer.

Celie’s is an exemplary journey for all the women of the community. The men also learn to admire the women of the household through Celie. The story of Nettie and Samuel forms the sub-plot, which has an analeptic function as it highlights the essentials of family values and equilibrium. The binary opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed is missing here in the family dynamics. Even Tashi and Adam too forge a similar balance like their adoptive parents. The message of the novel is the universality of God and human relations. “Amen” literally means let it be so, which recognises the concluding note of family reunion alluding to harmony, love, mutual respect, and trust. Society is the enlargement of an individual. Individualism cannot survive unless it addresses the issues of the collective. The individual ego has to be expanded to include all irrespective of gender, class, and creed. Celie’s fulfilment as a woman lies

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in embracing the principles of womanism, which Walker has described with clarity in the Preface to In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens:

A woman who loves other women sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or non-sexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist...traditionally universalist.... (Walker, xi)

Celie, as a spokesperson of Walker, embodies and represents all these by returning to her roots from Memphis. Her (Walker’s) quest for womanism also augments her spiritual awareness towards the feeling of oneness, which is why critics like Weisenburger describes Walker “humanist”, however, she has gone a step ahead of it with her innate spiritual realisation. The inclusive nature of womanism derives from Walker’s own belief system, which she had learnt from the history of her community. “What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective” (ibid., 5). Critics like Louis H. Pratt opine that one of the major shortcomings in the novel is that the novelist has deliberately sketched her male characters weak and they are presented to the readers through the eyes of women (Pratt, 43-44). Pratt’s view is difficult to accept in the context as it is more of an exploration of the relationship between men and women in the black society. The otherness of the female characters in the novel is valorized in relation to their male counterparts. Keith Byerman explains it quite aptly that the novelist has deployed the strategy of phallogocentric argument to bring out the conflict and the imbalance of power (Byerman, 324). From the very beginning, we witness that the women are either objectified or exploited to gratify the libidinal impulses of the male members. Despite being a feminist, Walker’s approach is forgiving, not radical. She calls for a transformation of consciousness of the male folks of her community for a healthy heteronormative set up with equal space.

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WORKS CITED Barrett, Michele (ed.). “Introduction. ” A Room of Ones Own & Three Guineas. Penguin, 1993. Byerman, Keith. “Desire and Alice Walker: The Quest for a Womanist Narrative”. Callaloo, No. 39, Spring 1989. 321-31. Jenkins, Candice M. “Queering Black Patriarchy: The Salvific Wish and Masculine Possibility in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 48, No. 4, Winter 2002. 969-1000. Lewis, S. Christopher. “Cultivating Black Lesbian Shamelessness: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple”. Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 66, No. 2, Fall 2012. 158-75. 20 Nov. 2018, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/41763555 Mukhopadhyay, Arpita. “Introduction.” Feminisms. Edited by Sumit Chakrabarti, Orient Black Swan, 2018. Powers, Peter Kerry. “Pa is not our Pa: Sacred History and Political Imagination in The Color Purple.” South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, May 1995. 69-92. Pratt, Louis H. “Alice Walker’s Men: Profiles in the Quest for Love and Personal Values”. Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1989). 42-57. Proudfit, Charles L. “Celie’s Search for Identity: A Psychoanalytic Developmental Reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 1991. 12-37. Tyson, L. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Garland Publishing, 2006. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose. Phoenix, 1983. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Phoenix, 2014. Weisenburger, Steven C. “Errant Narrative and The Color Purple.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 1989. 257-75. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225256?seq=l#page_ scan_tab_contents. The following link on American Transcendentalism was last on 28/11/2018 [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ seen transcendentalism/]

11 CHAPTER

Reclaiming Oneself: Subaltern Perspectives in Toni Morrison's Beloved Sneha Sawai

Debates over marginalization have always occupied a pivotal place in literary discourses. The contrast between the haves and the have-nots, the privileged and the neglected, the powerful and the distressed have played a crucial role in understanding the complex layers of social reality that gets projected through various forms of literature. A separate branch of critical theory named ‘Subaltern Studies’ gained prominence in literary field since 1960’s. The word ‘Subaltern’ was coined by Italian Marxist Antonio Francesco Gramsci and comes from the Latin words ‘sub’ which means below and ‘alternus’ which means all others. It refers to anyone who belongs to a lower rank or has a lower status in society. In critical theory and postcolonial discourse, the term ‘Subaltern’ refers to people who are marginalized and who are socially, politically, economically, and geographically outside hegemonic power structures. Marxist historians who were influenced by Gramsci used the term ‘subaltern’ to denote the proletariat or the lower class. However, there was a major shift in the application of the term in the subsequent years. Various theorists such as Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, and Gyanendra Pandey have deployed the term for wider meanings and began to include several subordinate groups such as poor people, dalits, blacks, women, children, migrant workers in urban areas and tribal people.

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On one hand, where theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Guha debate about whether the subaltern have the agency to speak or not, on the other hand, we have several writers attempting to question the existing hierarchy and give voice to the marginalized people. As pointed by Guha—“The tradition of oppression and exploitation predicted on that (dominant/ subordinate) relationship was only as pervasive as the counter tradition of defiance and revolt. These were reciprocal terms which conditioned and reproduced each other cyclically over the centuries” (The Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India). Creating consciousness among the subalterns and to constantly question the dominant ideologies and history has been a major preoccupation of the African-American novelist Toni Morrison. Her novel Beloved (1987) is an excellent example of exploring and addressing the problems of being at the margins. Based on the story of an African-American slave Margaret Garner who killed her daughter to protect her from the cruel life of slavery (a story that Morrison came across in a newspaper clipping “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed her Child” published in the American Baptist in 1856 during the course of her editorial work for the Black Book at Random House). Morrison attempted to reconstruct and rewrite AfroAmerican history from the perspective of the marginalized mother. Through her novel Beloved, Morrison explores the debilitating effects of the social structures of race and gender on African-American community which includes men, women, and children. The novel provides an alternative historiography by giving voice to the repressed feelings of the African-Americans. She calls her writing as “archaeological explorations” which has a political agenda—“I am not interested in indulging myself in some private exercise of my imagination...yes, the work must be political.”

In order to understand the political significance of Beloved, it becomes important for the readers and scholars to study the discourse of history of that time. Set in the Reconstruction Era, the novel looks back to the historical period of slavery, slave trade (when Africans were transported to the New Land) and the

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1850’s (when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed). The novel not only attempts to provide alternative history but also questions and interrogates the knowledge circulated by the dominant discourse of history which was essentially Eurocentric. Morrison endeavors to counter the mainstream Eurocentric history by giving voice to the victims. Instead of looking at historical factual details as recorded by the dominant white historians, Morrison looks at history from the emotional viewpoint of the blacks. Through the use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, Morrison probes into the psyche of the black characters and attempts to reconstruct history through their fragmented memories and flashbacks. Memories which are considered to be unreliable and inauthentic are given prime importance in the text to recover history which is both personal and national. Unlike slave narratives, the story is not told to us from the perspective and experiences of one character but from various characters belonging to the same community. Through these shifting perspectives, the author tries to encapsulate the history of the brutal victimization of the blacks not only in the past but also in the present.

Helene Moglen in her essay “Redeeming History: Toni Morrison’s Beloved” discusses how the novel explores the racist ideologies that are formed in the society through the binary opposition of the self and the other and how the ‘other’ serves as an instrument in the construction of the self. By giving a psychological insight into her characters, Morrison depicts how the past experiences form an integral part of their personal identity. The black characters are shown to be struggling to form a new identity even after their emancipation. Paul D, for instance, is unable to get away from his previous identity that was given to him by his master Mr. Garner. He insists on calling himself ‘Paul D Garner’ and struggles with the concept of manhood “the last of the Sweet Home Men” that was given to him by his master. The novel therefore is not just about revising and recovering history through the acts and consciousness of the African-Americans but is also about the necessity of establishing a new social identity for the blacks. Through the narrative technique of stream-of-consciousness, Morrison depicts how

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characters belonging to the three generations (slave trade, the 1850’s and the Reconstruction Era) are struggling to deal with their repressed painful memories of the past which results in complete loss and disorientation of the self. They use different strategies to deal with their painful repressed memories which lead to their alienated or marginalized existence. Baby Suggs, for instance, ponders over different colors in order to forget her past. To Sethe, “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” Paul D on the other hand locked his memories in a “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be” with its “lid rusted shut.” Having knowledge of the past becomes important even for Denver who belongs to the Reconstruction Era and who has never had a firsthand experience of slavery. She feels anxious to understand herself and the people around her who constantly talk about their past. By depicting characters struggling to deal with their past Morrison emphasizes on the mental conflict that the subaltern face. Even though they are free they are shown to be victims of their past which haunts them. Confrontation with the past in order to form a new stable self therefore becomes a very important theme in the text. A confrontation with the past not only allow characters to move on in future but also empowers them to understand their individual being and associate significant meaning with oneself. The ghost Beloved therefore becomes an important character in the text who is not only the physical manifestation of Sethe’s dead daughter but also becomes a symbolic representative of the haunting past both personal and national. She represents the collective memory of ‘Sixty Million and More’ (epigraph) Africans who died during the Middle Passage which was conveniently overlooked and neglected by the dominant white historians. She represents a whole lineage of “dead and the angry” people who were obliterated by slavery and whose stories were “disremembered and unaccounted for.” As Emma Parker points out “her memory of the Middle Passage indicates that she is an ancestral spirit, the spirit of the memory of her African ancestors, rather than simply the ghost of Sethe’s daughter.” The horrific experiences and massive deaths of the slaves during the Middle Passage from Africa to America “was not a story to pass

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on” and so Morrison undertook to recreate the past through the ghost Beloved. Further we see that it is through the character of Beloved that characters such as Sethe, Paul D, Denver, Stamp Paid, Ella and others are able to confront their past. Beloved’s provocation to Paul D—“I want you to touch me on the inside part and call me my name” is not only sexual provocation but is also for confrontation with his past that Beloved embodies in flesh and blood. Paul D’s sexual encounter with Beloved restores his “red heart” and human emotions to him. Similarly, the presence of Beloved makes other characters reflect and confront their past. In the essay “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Reading on Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (1992), Linda Krumholz regards Beloved as a process of psychological healing and recovery which forces its characters to confront and remember the past. It is only through this confrontation that characters are able to reclaim their identity and their cultural heritage. Arnold Rampersad in his discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) describes this recovery of history as both national and personal necessity—“[Du Bois’s] point of view is clear. Admitting and exploring the reality of slavery is necessarily painful for a black American, but only by doing so can he/she begin to understand himself or herself and American and Afro-American culture in general. The normal price of the evasion of the fact of slavery is intellectual and spiritual death. Only by grappling with the meaning and legacy of slavery can the imagination, recognizing finally the temporality of the institution begin to transcend it.” Morrison not only projects the realistic and horrifying picture of the oppression that the blacks suffered during slavery when “men and women were moved around like checkers” but also depicts the atrocities and challenges faced by them as marginalized people in the contemporary America where they are “free”. As Stamp Paid points out—“Eighteen seventy-four and white folks were still on loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken; necks broken.”

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Through the depiction of the brutality perpetrated by the whites, Morrison questions the functioning of the racist stereotypes and questions the notion of freedom granted by America. As Stamp Paid puts it—“White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin were a jungle.... The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread.”

Morrison condemns not only the institution of slavery but also the educational institution of the United States of America that propagated racist ideologies through the character of the school teacher. According to Krumholz, school teacher’s pedagogical and interpretive educational methods are morally bereft as it adopts a ‘Manichean opposition’—“put her [Sethe] human characteristics on the left, her animal ones on the right.” Using the framework provided by the new historicists and cultural materialists one can say that Morrison demonstrates how hegemonic discourses, definitions, and historical methods are constructed in a society. They are neither arbitrary nor objective instead they are tools of propagating hierarchy. When Sixo tries to defend himself from the charge of theft the school teacher beats him “to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.” Beloved forces its readers to question the authority of the hegemonic discourses which forms the basis of a racist society. This critique of the hegemonic discourse is further illustrated through the historical representation of Sethe’s act of killing Beloved. Paul D finds it difficult to comprehend why Sethe’s picture is published in the newspaper clipping shown to him by Stamp Paid— “THAT AIN’T her mouth.. .Paul D slid the clipping out from under Stamp’s palm. The print meant nothing for him so he

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didn’t even glance at it. He simply looked at the face, shaking his head no. No. At the mouth, you see. And no at whatever it was those black scratches said, and no to whatever it was Stamp Paid wanted him to know. Because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear. A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro’s face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby or outran a street mob. Nor was it there because the person had been killed or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of ordinary—something white people would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps.” Paul D’s refusal to accept that the picture in the newspaper clipping was that of Sethe is a reflection on the nature of historical documents that were circulated. It was the hegemonic group who decided what would “qualify” as important news and supervised the information recorded in historical documents. Through the use of the newspaper’s clipping, Morrison raises several questions concerning the representation of slaves in the “official” historical documents. The authenticity of the “official” version of history is further questioned by the author when she attempts to provide three different versions of Sethe’s act of killing Beloved. According to the white school teacher Sethe’s act of killing her daughter was a “testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred.” Her act of killing her daughter was seen as a reinforcement of the racist stereotypes by the school teacher. For Stamp Paid however Sethe’s act was a “rough response to the Fugitive Bill” which resulted due to the “meanness” of the community who did not warn her about the school teacher. But for Sethe, killing of Beloved was a way to “put my babies where they’d be safe.” Having experienced the atrocities of slavery Sethe believed that the only way to secure safety for her kids was

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by putting them to death. It throws light on the psychological impact of the brutal life of slavery where the whites did “not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you.... Dirty you so bad you [can’t] like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.” By providing alternative versions of the same event, Morrison questions the “official” historical facts and provides insight into subaltern reality which often gets distorted by the dominant group.

The historical and pedagogical practices prevalent in the US are further critiqued by the use of the African-American oral and literary tradition. Morrison incorporates the African conventions of storytelling in her narrative to deconstruct traditional history. According to Rafael Perez-Torres, “the decentered and residual tradition of storytelling within Beloved is mediated through the complex and decentered form of the postmodern novel.” The story of Sethe is narrated by various characters each adding new information through their fragmented memories. The story is repeated and remembered through the consciousness of various characters providing a multiplicity of perspectives and historical positions. This kind of non-linear and fragmented recounting of the past challenges the notions of objectivity in the creation of history. The oral tradition of storytelling and singing songs becomes an important mode of reconstructing past and resistance in Beloved.

Morrison’s Beloved not only looks at the racist aspect of history but also depicts the sexist attitudes prevalent not just outside the black community but amply present within the community. By giving voice to African-American women who are doubly marginalized (on the basis of their gender and their race) Morrison critiques the patriarchal structure of the society. In an interview, Morrison said, “I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other as both black and white men do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving loving way. They are writing to repossess, rename, reown.” Black women not only face oppression at the hands of the whites but also from black men of their own community. This

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gender disparity is clearly depicted in the relationship between Paul D and Sethe. Paul D is introduced by Morrison as “the last of Sweet Home Men” who becomes the epitome of selfcontained masculinity. He, like all other ‘Sweet Home men’ is encouraged by Garner’s illusion to inherit masculine attitude according to the patriarchal standards. However, with the arrival of the school teacher he realizes that they were “Sweet Home Men only at Sweet Home” under the supervision of Mr. Garner. This shatters Paul D in the wake of the realization of the reality of slavery and results in his identity crisis. Even though he feels proud of Sethe for being able to successfully run away from the plantation, he feels the need to mark over her and to take charge of the house. For him the idea of a normal family centers around a man. In order to validate or “document his manhood and break out of the girl’s [Beloved] spell” and re-establish his identity he wants Sethe “pregnant”. This is a clear indication of the patriarchal hierarchy that existed within the community.

Morrison also explores the complexity of black women experiences through her female characters. The experiences of black female are shown to be very different from that of its male counterpart. One of the most important themes of the text is the theme of motherhood and rape. Morrison depicts how slavery destroyed not only families but also individual beings. Throughout the novel, Baby Suggs laments about not been able to keep her children with her—“Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some negro’s grief.... You [Sethe] lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don’t you. I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased.... Eight children and that’s all I remember.” Like Baby Suggs’s fading memory of her children, Sethe too has a very faint memory of her mother. She recounts how she never got the opportunity to spend time with her mother. All she remembers is the mark of a cross and a circle that was branded on her mother’s body with which she associates her mother. The basic right of the child to be nursed by its mother was also denied to her. “By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright, they worked by its light.

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Sunday, she slept like a stick.... Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was.... She didn’t even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember.” What we get to see is objectification of slave mothers who were classified as “breeders” (as pointed by J. Brooks Bouson) as opposed to mothers whose children could be bought and sold. The harrowing experiences of slavery scarred black women both mentally and physically robbing them of their idea of self. All female characters are shown to be dealing with the trauma of rape. Sethe’s repetitive emphasis on her stolen milk signifies the psychological impact of rape that justifies her act of killing her daughter. The novel is not just about a single mother Sethe who killed her daughter to save her from slavery instead it mirrors the acts or crime of the “thirty women” who gathered near Sethe’s house to exorcise the ghost. Like Sethe, Sethe’s mother and Ella could not fulfill their duty of being a mother as in an act of defiance they refused to nurse their babies begotten from rape. It is their shared guilt that makes all thirty women to gather at the end of the novel to help Sethe and to confront their forgotten past. The horror of rape is also portrayed through Beloved’s interior monologue where she describes the experiences of the Middle Passage during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Beloved represents African-American history of women who endured the hardships during the Middle Passage where “institutionalized rape of enslaved women began.” Beloved remembers and recounts their horror—“we are trying to leave our bodies behind...dead men lay on top of her...[s]he had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light.” Morrison’s Beloved therefore provides a saga of black women’s suffering and their subaltern experiences.

The novel is also replete with strong female characters who try to resist and challenge the patriarchal power. Baby Suggs becomes an important female character who questions the power hierarchy by choosing a name for herself. She refuses to call herself Jenny which was a name given to her by her master. She asserts her individuality by taking up a name that her husband used to call her after getting her freedom. She also becomes a spiritual leader for her community “an unchurched

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preacher” and dismantles the notion of spirituality and slavery propagated by the Church. She urges her community members— men, women, and children to “reclaim their body”. Through the character of Baby Suggs, Morrison urges both black men and women to reclaim and “prize” their bodies, their wounds, and their past. “She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glory bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.... ‘Here,’ she said, ‘in this here place, we flesh: flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.’” Morrison uses her writing to reclaim the history of the black women and urges women to reclaim their bodies and their past. By discussing the experiences of the African-American mothers Morrison constructs a new narrative of Black history. She rejected the formulation of a homogeneous identity of the Blacks and emphasized on the differences prevalent within the Black society. The novel not only subverts the negative stereotypes constructed by the white writings that were dominant but also counters the stereotypes promulgated by the Black men. It established a new identity for the black women and resisted to the male domination prevalent in the society.

Morrison’s Beloved, therefore, deconstructs the traditional discourse of history and critiques the larger power structures prevalent in the society by giving voice to the blacks. Bell Hooks considers this black subjectivity as—“an oppositional worldview, a consciousness, an identity, a standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanization but as that movement which enables creative, expansive self-actualisation” [Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (1990)]. WORKS CITED Barnett, Pamela E. “Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved.” PMLA, Vol. 112. United States of America: Modern Language Association, 1997. JSTOR. Web. 10 December 2018.

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Bloom, Harold. Toni Morrisons Beloved. United States of America: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. Harris, Trudier. “Escaping Slavery but Not Its Images.” Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Krumholz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, Vol. 26, Indiana: Indiana State University, 1992. JSTOR. Web. 8 December 2018. Moglen, Helene. “Redeeming History: Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Cultural Critique (No. 24) Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. JSTOR. Web. 8 December 2018. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. UK: Vintage, 2005. Pal, Sunanda. “From Periphery to Centre: Toni Morrison’s Self Affirming Fiction.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 29. India: Economic and Political Weekly, 1994. JSTOR. Web. 9 December 2018.