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Preface
The present thesis is a comparative analysis of the novels of two
significant sub-continent contemporary female writers, Kiran Desai and
Monica Ali, from the perspective of feminist consciousness so as to trace the
female identity and female struggle in their works and situate the modern
female consciousness in the sub-continent as against the western feminist
concept. Although the status of woman in society has differed from culture to
culture, from country to country and from age to age and in many societies and
cultures, as in Indian culture, she has been given a high place, at least
theoretically, one feature common to almost all the patriarchal societies is that
woman was always considered inferior to man and was excluded from all
centres of power. Her only identity was her sexual identity and her body was
considered a source of pleasure for the male. She was confined within the four
walls of the house; there was no education for her, no participation in centres
of power and she was subjected to wide ranging marginalizations. The woman
was thus subjected not only to marginalizations but also to consistent subject
deprivation.
An increasing awareness of the injustices done to women gradually
gave rise to the feminist movement wherein the women raised their voice
against marginalizations and patriarchal oppressions. The term ‘feminism’ was
coined in France in the 1880s by Hubertine Auclert to criticize male
domination and to make claims for women’s rights and emancipation promised
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by the French Revolution. Since then it has always been used as an umbrella
term to describe those people who speak, write, fight or feel the need to do so
against the oppression faced by women and caused by patriarchy on social,
cultural, political, economic, literary and ideological grounds.
Feminism is essentially a transformative practice which aims at least
three things – articulation, analysis and intervention. Feminism not only
influenced real life and culture but also creative literature, literary theory and
criticism. The Women’s movement resulted in the emergence of a number of
feminist novelists and poets in the West. The emergence of a large number of
women writers in almost all the countries of the world, including India, is
largely a feature of the twentieth century but it was in the Victorian Age that
women came to occupy canonical position in literature. The contemporary
feminist research has been successful in rediscovering and rehabilitating a
number of writers even before Jane Austen. Elaine Showalter studied the
female literary tradition by going beyond Jane Austen, the Brontes and George
Eliot to look at a hundred and fifty or more of their sister novelists and saw
patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition which correspond to
the developmental phases of any sub-cultural art. In her book on English
women novelists, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Bronte to Lessing (1977), she designated these three phases in the following
manner :
1.
The Feminine Phase (imitation of male writers, 1840-1880).
2.
The Feminist Phase (Protest, 1880-1920).
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3.
The Female Phase (Phase of self-discovery-turning to the female
experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist
analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature - on going
since 1920).
Contemporary women’s writing in English has moved away from the
confines of domesticity to engage with the historical, political, cultural and
economic dimensions of the public space. Recent years have witnessed women
writers from different regions of the world gaining better visibility in the
literary domain. A distinctive body of contemporary writing by women is
engaged with issues of caste, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, ecology and
gendered violence. With the prestigious Booker Prize to Arundhati Roy for The
God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (2006)
and the Pulitzer Prize to Jhumpa Lahiri for Interpreter of Maladies (2000),
women writers’ creativity has received international recognition.
The impact of gender on postcolonial studies was belated but there is
now a growing body of work that seeks to define post-colonial feminism(s) and
to revisit, if not revive, ideas of a transnational or global feminist solidarity.
The ongoing key debates within this highly contested field focus on a wide
range of postcolonial diasporas and postcolonial locations including Africa,
South Asia, the Caribbean, the South Pacific and the Middle East. A panorama
of literary texts by contemporary women writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Assia
Djebar, Zoe Wicomb, Kiran Desai and Monica Ali deal with issues like
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interrogating feminisms, representation of ‘the’ nation, war, language, home
and belonging, motherhood, sexuality, orality, intertextuality and migration.
Kiran Desai and Monica Ali are two significant and exciting new voices
within the context of contemporary postcolonial fiction. Although they come
from different countries, India and Bangladesh respectively, they have much in
common. From being acclaimed as South Asian Diaspora authors to
communicating through their novels the racial, class and gender discrimination
confronted by their characters, building bridges between the First World and
the Third World, employing history as basis for their arguments and having
won awards for their texts, the two young female contemporary authors –
Kiran Desai and Monica Ali – have indeed contributed most valuably to the
canon of postcolonial literature. They have also given glimpses of feminist
consciousness in their novels which is the focus of the present doctoral
investigation.
In order to comparatively analyse the novels of Kiran Desai and Monica
Ali from the perspective of feminist consciousness, a comprehensive but
uncomplicated scheme of chapter division has been followed. Chapter (I) is
introductory and expository in focus and presentation. There is a brief
discussion of the concept of feminism followed by a synopsis of Kiran Desai’s
and Monika Ali’s respective novelistic careers, influences on their lives and
thought processes and a brief introduction to their fictional works. Chapter (II)
– ‘Female Voice in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard’ is devoted to an
analysis of Kiran Desai’s debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, from
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the point of depiction of the female characters. Chapter (III) – ‘The Inheritance
of Loss and the Loss of Female Voice’ deals with an analysis of Kiran Desai’s
Booker Prize winning second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Chapter (IV) –
‘Marginalization of Women in Monica Ali's Brick Lane’ focuses on feminist
consciousness in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Chapter (V) – ‘Kiran Desai and
Monica Ali : A Comparative Study’ attempts to comparatively analyse the
fictional works of Kiran Desai and Monica Ali from the perspective of feminist
consciousness. The last chapter – Chapter (VI), has been conceived by way of
conclusion and summing up.
Lucknow
Date :
(Abhinav Kumar Singh)
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