Postmodern Feminist Writers

eIIlinist riters ----------------- W.S. KOTI1SWARI Postmodern Feminist Writers ThJ..s One Postmodem Feminist Wr...

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eIIlinist

riters

-----------------

W.S. KOTI1SWARI

Postmodern Feminist Writers

ThJ..s

One

Postmodem Feminist Writers

Dr. W.S. Kottiswari

SARUP & SONS NEW OELHI-Il0002

Published by SARUP&SONS 4740f23, Ansari Road Darya Ganj, New Delhi-II 0002 Tel. : 23281029, 23244664, 41010989 Fax : 011-23277098 E-mail: [email protected].

POSTMODERN FEMINIST WRITERS

t> Editors l Si

Edition - 2008

ISBN 81-7625-S21-S

PRINTED IN INDIA

Published by Prabhal Kumar Sharma for Sarup & Sons, Laser Typesening al Chitra Computers and Printed at MehTa Offset Printers, Delhi.

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DEDICATED TO My Dear Mother for Being My Guiding Light

4.l.IIeur.;r

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Preface

As a Postgraduate Teacher and Research Guide, I came across the vast fictional corpus of women writers across cultures and I was extremely impressed by the variety of themes and techniques used by these writers to foreground feminist ideology. What particularly caught my attention was the subtle way in which these writers made use of the current literary theories while attempting to critically confront patriarchy. A noticeable factor, however, is a reluctance among learners and scholars to view literary works from a theoretical standpoint. Such a theoretical approach, I feel, is necessary if one has to authoritatively assess the relative merits of a literary work especially if it happens to be a work written by a woman. Feminist writings become doubly significant when viewed in the light of works written by male authors. A perusal of the solid and immense works written by Margaret Atwood, a Canadian novelist Toni Morrison an African American novelist, Gita Hariharan and Shashi Deshpande who are Indian novelists made me think innovatively of how these writers were influenced by their respective cultures which in turn made them adopt different techniques and themes to highlight their feminist views. The title Postmodern Feminist Wri ters-struck me as appropriate since all these writers taken up for study are, iri one way or the other, strongly influenced by postmodern ideology. j

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It is the modest aim of the present book to study the major themes of these four novelists in the light of the latest

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theories. The discussion is largely illustrative and the aim has been to understand the relevance of these feminist writers' thematic concerns to feminism and po~tmodernism· both being relevant ideologies of the present century. I am thankful to SARUP AND SONS, New Delhi, for having consented to publish my book. I thank my mother, W.S.Jaya, my husband N. Sukumaran, my children Mahalakshmy and Senthil Kumar and my son-in-law Unnikrishnan for their constant support without which a work of this kind would not have been possible.

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Introduction

When Jean-Francois Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as a state of incredulity toward metanarrativ8s. he set the stage for a series of debates about the role and function of metanarratives in our discourses of knowledge. Ever since Lyotard's definition, the close consensus and differences between Feminist and Postmodernist ideologies

came to light since the metanarrative that has been the primary concern offeminists is patriarchy. This book intends to explore the much - debated problematics ofpostmodernist and feminist ideologies by examining certain key texts written by writers across cultures like MargaretAtwood, a Canadian novelist, Toni Morrison, an African American novelist, and two Indian novelists, Shashi Desbpande and Gita Hariharan. The first chapter would highlight the theoretical frameworks of PostmoderWsm and Feminism thereby pointing out the

various perspectives from which the works of the four novelists would be analysed. Chapter two and three would be devoted to Atwood and Morrison respectively while the fourth chapter would take up the two Indian novelists together. The fifth chapter would sum up the conclusion arrived at after a close examination of the works taken up for study.

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Abbreviations Used in the Book

The Edible Woman

Woman

Life Before Mao The Handmaid's Tale

Man Tale

Lady Oracle

Oracle

The Robber Bride

Bride

Alias Grace

Grace

In Search of ocr Mother's Gardens

Gardens

The Bluest Eye

Eye

Song of Solomon

Solomon

Tar8aby

Baby Night Travel

The Thousand Faces of Night

When Dreams Travel Writing from the Margin Roots and Shadows

Margin Terrors Roots

A Matter of Time

TIme

The Sound and the Fury

Fury Silence

The Dark Holds no Terrors

That Long Silence

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Contents Preface

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Tntroductjon

1 2

Theoretjcal Modules· Postmodernjsm Femjnism Nexus postmodernism jn the Canadian Context-

Margaret Atwood as a Postmodernist 3

pnstmndernjsm jn the

American

Context=

Toni Morrison as a Postmodernist 4

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Postmodernism in the Indian Context.-Gjta

Hariharan and Shashi Deshpande as Postmodemjsts

5

87

Conclusion

]20

Bibliography Index

130 137

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1 Theoretical Modules: PostmodernismFeminism Nexus

The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the women's movement ortbe 1960's. This movement was, in important ways, literary from the start in the sense that it realized the .significance of the images of women promulgated by literature and saw it as vital to combat them and question their authority. Similarly. postmodernity is characterized by smaller and multiple narratives, which question metanarratives like Patriarchy, Capitalism,liberal Humanism and Marxism. While postmodernism is against classical realism and the fierce asceticism of nineteenth century works , Feminism is against traditional representation of women. Both Feminism and Postmodemism have worked to make us understand the dominant modes of representation at work in our society. Cultural production is carried on within a social context and an ideology. If the personal is political, then the traditional separation between private and public history must be rethought. In other words, feminists bave reconsidered both the context of historic narrativ e and the politics of representation. Postmodernism can be seen as a complementary and sustaining force in feminist theory and politics_Against the absolute, unitary conception of knowledge th-a t is part ofthe

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Postmodem Feminist Wn'ters

modern episterne, the postmodernists propose a system of discourses that are historica l and contextual. Such a discourse theory demands a new way of conceptualizing truth and political action that breaks down dualistic categorizations. Contemporary Feminism also questions the concept of rationality and the unitary defmition of truth. The postmodern perception as enunciated by Derrida attempts to emphasize difference not in terms of binary oppositions but in multiplicities and pluralities. This provides a radically new way of talking a bout feminity, masculinity and sexuality. Derrida's displacement of the binary logic sets up for feminism a discourse that speaks in a mUltiplicity of sexual voices. In opening up unlimited possibilities of meanings, the woman writer exposes herself to human experience uncircumscribed by purely feminine, feminist or female experience. One of the major components of postmodernism is the decanonization of all existing mastercodes, conventions, institutions and authorities. Any text that seeks to displace the dominant discourse becomes postmodem. Postmodemism assumes different nuances in the hands of men and women writers. Decentring of woman is almost akin to the decentring of man in the postmodernist episteme in which there are no essential subjects or objects but only individuals caught in a network of historical and psychological power relationships. The dominant theme of contemporary women's fiction is the reconstruction of a new history and a private space as a way of grappling with patriarchy. Feminism has refocused attention on the politics of representation and knowledge and also on power. Decolonization as a metaphor acquires multiple dimensions in postcoloniallpostmodernlfeminist writings. It means the Ileed to liberate the self from all traditional structures. Feminist writing is characterized by the singularity and clarity of its resistance to the gender rooted aspects of any tradition that possessed it once or is now possessing it. This, in turn, leads to the construction of a private kingdom of subjective powers. It challenges authority, stereotypes, icons

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a nd sex ist values. No . expression or cultural value is privileged over the other. It is a desperate act of self definition and finding a "room of one's own". Reconstruction of meanings is brought out leading to radical definitions of freedom and selfhood. It was perhaps Jean Francois Lyotard's 1979 reflection of postmodernism as the questioning of master narratives that provoked a spark of response among feminist critics. Lyotard's model of postmodernism suggests the possibility of conjunction with the already - existing feminist project of questioning the basic masculine values of western culture which had worked to oppress women and suppress the feminine. In Gynesis, Alice Jardine has made the connection between the postmodernist "crises of legitimation" of the "master (European) narratives" and the feminist critique. It is widely recognized that legitimacy is part of that judicial domain which, historically, has determined the right to govern, the succession of kings, the link between father and son, the necessary paternal fiction, the ability to determine who is the father - in patriarchal culture. The crises experienced by the major western narratives have not, therefore, been genderneutral. They are crises in the narratiyes invented by men. (24 )

What has been for earlie r commentators a lamentable loss of mastery became, in Jardine's view, a deconstruction of falsely universalizing hierarchy of values dominated by Western middle·class white males. By undermining the master narratives, postmodernism seemed to create new spaces for pluralism, marginality and differences, values a lso stressed by feminists. Thus there is a close intersection between the three popular - isms of our time s Postmodernism, Postcolonialism and Feminism. The common basis of the three movements is in what Linda Hutcheon cal1s their shared '"'excentric" position and their firm suspicion of centralizing tendencies. The literary text's self·reflexivity has led to a general breakdown of the conventional boundaries between the arts. It is also clear that other boundaries are being challenged too, including those between genres and even those between art and what

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we call life or 'reality'. It is almost a truism today that women's writing in particular has led the way in the-new explorations of (and against) borders and boundaries.

The postmodernist questioning of totalizing structures proposed by Lyotard would seem inevitably linked to a new concept of subjectivity, one that would necessarily put into

question what Janet Paterson has referred to as the "myth of the unitary subject". Paterson sees this questioning as a central characteristic of the postmodern novel. As she puts it The act of enunciation is not only characterized by the putting into place of a narrative "I" but by a plurality of narrative voices. These voices may be cut in half, doubled, fragmented. These voices rarely produce a unified discourse. They refuse, on the contrary, to admit a single vision and a single authority and they subvert all notions of control, of domination and of truth ... (they) allow a putting inOO question at the level of saying - of notions of authority and a totalizing vision. (240)

Subjectivity in the Western libenil humanist tradition has been defIned in terms of rationality, individuality and power; in other words, it is dermed in terms of those.domains. traditionally denied women who are relegated instead to the realms of intuition, familial collectivity apd s,ubIpission. If women have not been aHow'ed access to (male) subjectivity, then it is very difficult for them to coq.test it. }V0i!len must defIne their subjectivity before they can question it, they must first assert the selfhood they have been denied by the dominant culture. Their (Feminists) doubled act of 'inscribing' and challenging subjectivity has been one of the major forces in making postmodernism a resolutely paradoxical enterprise. The critical stances of Feminists and Postmodernists are s imilar because both underline and undermine received notions of the represented subject. Parody is usually cQosidered c~ntral to postmodernism. Postmodern Brt rummages through the image reserves of the past in such a way 8S to show the history of the representations. With parody, as with any form of reproduction, the notion of the

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original as rare, single and valuable is called into question. As Linda Hutcheon puts it Parody is a typical postmod.e rn paradoxical form because it uses and abuses the texts and conventions of the tradition. It also contests both the authority of that tradition and the claims of art to originality.... It s imultaneously exploits and undercuts several recognizable traditions of the representation of women: the passive female on her pedestal is here poised for action, complete with unglamorous bathing cap; the erotic pin-up bathing bea uty now refuses to engage th e gaze of her (coDventionally male) viewer ... The unevenly hung canvas backdrop calls attention to itself 81l bacJcdrop, pointing to the entire photograph's existence 88 Construction - not 88 reflection - of woman 88 subject and also as object. By ret:a11ing the texts of the past - .o fliterature or even ofhistory - po8tmodern novels similarly use parody to question whether there can ever be such a thing as a final, definitive 'inscription' of seltbood or subjectivity in fiction . (lt38: 8)

Rel a ted to the problem of postmodernism and subjectivity has been the equally conflictual relationship of postmodemism and history. As feminists were struggling to uncover the buried traces of women's past, they were confronted with a postmodernism defined - in large part by its critics - as hostile or indifferent to history. Yet, as Linda Hutcheon has been concerned to demonstrat e, postmodernism can more convincingly be construed as an effort to reexamine the historical 'master narratives' in order to question their claims to mastery, exposing his:toriography as a human construction, not unlike the writing of fiction. This does not mean that art has lost its meaning and purpose but that it will inevitably have a new and different significance. Postmodem Parody does not disregard the context of past representation it cites but uses irony to acknowledge the fact that we are inevitably separated from that past today. Hutcheon places Parody within the greater field of irony as "the ironic use of intertextual references" (1988:146). There is continuum between the past and the present but there is also ironic difference - difference induce.d by that very history. Postmodern Parody is thus, both deconatructively critical and constructively creative. As ·a

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form of ironic representation, parody is doubly coded in political terms - it legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies.

Postmodern parodic strategies are often used by feminist writers to point to the history and historical power of those cultural representations. In feminist art, written or visual, the politics of representation is inevitably the politics of gender. The way women appear to themselves, the way men look at women, the way women are pictured in the media, the way women look at themselves, the criteria for physical beauty - most of these are cultural representations. Postmodern parody is a kind of contesting r evision or rereading of the past that confirms and subverts the power of the representations of history. Parody, it becomes clear, arises out of a paradoxical conviction of the remoteness of the past and the need to deal with it in the present. In A Theory of Parody. The 1eachings of7\ventieth Century Art Forms (1985), Linda Hutcheon concentrates on the ways that certain twentieth century art forms offer parodic a llusions to the art of the past. However, she concludes that it is wrong to define parody by its polemical relation to the parodied text (the bypotext, in Genette's terms), since many of the contemporary art works that she discusses simply do not have that polemical edge to them . Use of parody is, therefore, a particular artistic practice which can work both ways: towards the imitated text or towards the ·world'. For example in section III of The Wast/eland, Eliot makes a parodic allusion to Spenser's Prothalamion. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. Sweet Thames, run aoftly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rustle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. (Eliot 1963 :70)

Eliot's parody of Spenser has as its polemical target not the Prothalamion, but the contemporary (1920's) state of the Thames, London, and indeed civilization. Spenser's poem provides Eliot with a kind of standard by which to

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measure the ugliness of the modern world and the bridal song of the hypotext measures the sordidness of the 1920's sexual relations, indicated by the detritus that flows down the river, including 'other testimony of summer nights'. Here the parody is directed towards the world and it draws on the authority of the parodied text to establish its own evaluative stance. A major theme in feminist theory on both sides of the Atlantic for the past decade has been the demand that women writers be, in Claudine Hermann's phrase "thieves of language" or, in other words, "female Prometheus's". Though the language women speak and write has been an encoding of male privilege, what Adrienne Rich calls an "oppressor's language" which transforms the daughter to the "invisible woman" in the asylum corridor or "silent woman" without access to authoritative expression (Landy 16), women must also have it in their power to "seize speech" and make it say what they mean (Landy 16). Re-vision is the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction. For Women, Re-vision is more than a chapter in critical history; it an act of survival (Landy 18). Re-vision does not simply mean, "looking back" nor is it a mere "act of survival". Rather if refers to a re-visionist remaking of the past and re-invention of a new tradition so much so that it becomes aD act of creation, transcreation. Mythology seems an inhospitable terrain for a woman writer. In myths one finds not only deities of pure thought and spirituality who are superior to Mother Nature but also the sexually wicked Venus, Circe, Pandora, Medea, Eve etc. Whenever an artist employs a figure or a story previously accepted and defined by a culture, he/she is using myth and the potential is always present that the use will be revisionist - that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, old vessel filled with new wine; initially satisfying the · thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible. Myth belongs to "high culture" and is handed down through the ages by religious, literary and

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educational authority. At the same time, myth is quintessentially intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation etc. The mythmaking of women writers grows from a subterranean tradition of female self-projection and self-exploration. Before I move on to a detailed examination of these ideas, a brief Dote on the reason for choosing these writers. As a point of contention, the"choice of Atwood, Morrison, Deshpande and Hariharan 8S postmodernists may be questioned . This book is an attempt "to study the postmodernist tendencies that can be discerned in the works of the four writers. Such a study is a direct consequence of the notions of postmodernism that a reader brings to readings of various texts and does not conform to writers of one period only. If postmodernist elements may be found in the works of Cervantes and Sterne, it is easier to identify them in Morrison, Atwood, Hariharan and Deshpande. There is a par81lel analogy between the positions of an ethnic women writer like 'Ibni Morrison, an Indian writer like Gita Hariharan and Canadian women novelist, Margaret Atwood. These writers use a more disguised. form of subversion and they often do so by means of parody; by first recalling the (male", British, American) canonical texts of their respective cultures, both 'high' fu"ld popular, and then challenging them by undoing their status and power. Parody and Irony, then, become major forms of both formal and ideological critique in feminist fictions . Linda Hutcheon speaks of the effectiveness of Parody in her book The Canadian Postmodern by saying that the irony and distance implied by parody allow for separation at the same time that the doubled structure of both (the super imposition of two meanings or texts) demands recognition of complicity. Parody both asserts and undercuts that which it contests (Hutcheon 1988,7). Arguably, the four writers are. realists and 80 their works are incompatible with postmodernism. In ber Apperulix to The Canadian Postmodern, Linda Hutcheon

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makes an insightful remark, which may be used as a defence. According to Hutcheon, in the Canadian situation, there was no loss of faith in the realist story and "the postmodernist challenges to convention all came from within the conventions of realism itself' (1988: 205). The blurring of generic boundaries is a common device used by the four writers to question the realist conventions. One of the major components of postmodemism is the decanonization of all existing m·a ster codes, conventions, institutions and a uthorities. This warrants that any text that seeks to displace the dominant discourse, becomes postmodern. Speaking of feminist discourses which draw heavily on postmodernist strategies, Jameefa Begum asserts that -feminist discourse draws within it a configuration of rh etorical and interpretative strategies . The concept of language as fluid and mu1tiple frees it from its closed system. One of the original insights of the wamen's movement was that the personal is political, that is, the relation between experience and discourse cons titutes feminism. The consciousness of self, like class or race consciousness, is ·s configu r ation of subjectivity, produced at the intersection of experience with meaning. This consciousness of self is never absol ute or identifiable because it is constantly being reshaped, as it is grounded not only in personal history but also in the horizons of knowledge and meaning dependent on culture specifics at given moments. (145)

It is not difficult to see how feminist theory keys into the deconstructive projects of postmodernism - with its challenges to the authority oftraditionai discourses of power at every level from the concept of a !Jtable coherent selthood to established discourses of history, science and imperialism. In being relegated to the periphery, women writers have begun·to explore the nuances and multiplicities of their own natures in discourses that are open ended. All those Grand narratives of Patriarchy are now open to question from. feminist voices, which speak from the periphery. Writing as a woman inevitably makes one a postmodernist. Alienated from power stru ctures, constitutiona l rights, social recognition and crippled in

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expression with a language of which meaning is predicated by the male, the woman writer, consciously and unconsciously. renders a militancy of resistance to her creations. Writing by women becomes a political and existential act which involves decanonization; decolonization leading to the building up of alternative worlds of private power. Feminist fiction counters patriarc~al assertiveness with inconclusiveness and multiple stances. Jameela Begum sums up the critical stance of feminist writers by saying that Women writers in attempting to explore a deeper reality, are caught between two la nguages - the "father tongue- and "tbe language of the womb.· Suspended between the two they end up with a split relationship to language. This split makes the writer a fractured female identity, making it difficult to either center or to know self. The doubleness of woman's speech makes for a shattered identity that begins to write stories to express this. Language and genre consciousness become more obsessive for they a re doubly marginalized. (147)

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2 Postmodernism in the Canadian Context-Margaret Atwood as a Postmodernist

Internationally acclaimed 8S a poet, novelist and short story writer, Margaret Atwood has emerged 8S a major figure in Canadian letters. Using such devices as irony. symbolism

and self·conscious narrators, she makes brilliant use of postmodem techniques in order to explore the relationship between humanity and nature, the dark side of human behaviour and power as it pertains to gender and politics. Popular with both literary scholars and the reading public,

Atwood has helped to define and identify the goals of contemporary Canadian litera ture and has earned a distinguis hed reputation a mong feminist writers for her exploration of women's issues. Atwood is an extremely versatile writer and in every novel she takes up the conventions of a different narrative form - Gothic romance, fairy tale, spy thriller, science fiction or history -working within those conventions and reshaping them . He r writing insistently challenges the limits of traditional genres. Her novels challenge the conventions of realism while working within them . She draws at~ntion not only to the ways in which stories may be told but also to the function of language itself; the slipperiness of words and double operation oflanguage as symbolic representation and as agent for changing our modes of perception. She also

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indulges in revision of traditional fictional genres by drawing attention .to the cultural myths they embody and to the multip.le inherited scripts through which OUT perceptions of ourselves and the world are structured. Her works are a Revision in the sense that she invokes traditional narratives of 8 culture and then reinterprets them from a new perspective which offers a critique of the value structures and power relations (the 'ideological implications) coded into texts. As early as 1976 Atwood was explaining the relation between her poetry and popular a rt in such revisionist terms: "In Power Politics I was usingmyths such as Bluebeard, Dracula, and horror comic material to project certain images of men and women, and to examine them" (Conversations 42). Atwood challenges the borders between fiction aod real life and also between genres in many of her novels . Carol Ann Howells speaks of Atwood's technique in the following words Obviously revisionist perspectives have narrative consequences oot only for narrators but aiM for readera, turning our &.ttentioo towards prooesses of deconstruction and reconstruction while emphasizing the provisionality of any narrative structure. Atwood's novels are characterized by their refusals to invoke any final s uthority as their open endings resist conclusiveness, offering instead hesitation, absence 01' silence while hovering on the verge of new poesibilities. Their indeterminacy is a challenge to read,ers, for one of the problema we have to confront is how to find a critical language to describe Atwood's 'borderline fiction' with ita ironic mixture of realism and fantasy, fictive artifice and moral engagement. (to)

Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada. in 1939. Her childhood was spent in the forests and small settlement of Northern Ontario and Quebec with her parents and younger brother since her father was a field entomologist. Atwood went to School when her family .settled in Toronto and took an Arts degree with honours in English at Victoria College, University of Toronto. She went on a graduate fellowship to Radcliff College, Harvard where she studied Victorian and American Literature and began her Ph.D Thesis on 'The English Metaphysical Romance'. During the 1970's Atwood

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was extremely productive, publishing three novels, a book of short stories, five books of poetry, a book of literary criticism and a children's book. In 1969 she published her first novel The EdibJe Woman which, according to The Times critic in London, '"'stuck out above the rest like a sugar plum fairy on top of it Christmas cake.It was really with the double production in 1972 of her second novel Surfacing and her literary history Survival. A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature that she made her first serious claim for critical attention. Her third novel Lady Oracle (1976) marked the shift to Atwood's decisive identification as a novelist and it was welcomed in Newsweek as the kind of novel that makes reviewers send out fresh green sprouts; Life Before Man published in 1979 received enthusiaStic reviews in USA and Britain. In Canada Atwood was becoming a prominent figure in cultural politics. Her output as novelist, poet, critic and essayist has been prodigious, often at the rate of more than one book per year; in 1981 7hJe Stories (poems) and Bodily Harm (novel); in 1982 a collection of prose poems; Cat's Eye (novel); in 1993 The Robber Bride (novel) ete. I intend to trace her use of poStmodem-strategies in each of her novels and it would be treated in a chronological manner. Her novels might best be characterized as 'experiments' always testing the limits of theory and exceeding ideological definitions.

The novel The Edible Woman was published when the women's liberation was becoming a political issue. It was a time when Betty Friedan published her polemical treatise The Feminine M,YBtique (1962) which provides a powerful lens through which her ftrSt "novel may be read. The Dovel is Atwood's imaginative response cast as comic social satire in vividly metaphorical language. Atwood effectively makes use of fantasy while delineating the predicament of a young woman who rebels against her femi.nine destiny. It exploits the power of laughter to reveal the absurdities within social conventions. Parody is used very effectively as a postmodern device in order to make the novel subversive. As highlighted

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in the Introduction Parody is one of the most effective postmodem strategies. A traditional comedy of manners has for its theme marriage and in The Edible Woman Atwood re-visioDs the traditional comedy in order to underscore and satirically expose women's continuing conditions of entrapment within their own bodies and within social myths. Under a comic mask, Atwood explores the relation between consumerism and the feminine mystique where one young woman's resistance to consuming and to being consumed hints at 8 wider condition of social malaise which the new feminist movement was just beginning to address.

The story line of. The Edible Woman is deceptively simple but Atwood bas made it very complex by using Parody effectively. It is a 1960's story of a woman's identity crisisa woman who is pressurized by societal expectations to such an extent that she starts developing an eating disorder. The protagonist, Marian MacAlpin, is a young graduate in her t~enties with an independent income. She lives in '!bronto and shares an apartment with another woman. Ainsley Tewce. Marian also has a boy friend to whom she becomes engaged. He is Peter Wollander, an ambitious young lawYer with a passionate interest in guns and cameras. On the surface she would seem to be content with her destiny with her job in the marketing firm and then her forthcoming marriage. The novel is divided into three parts - Pait I narrated in the first person. P art II in third person and Part III in the first person again. By the end of Part I, Marian becomes a helplessly dependent woman, throws away her university textbooks and prepares to think about a 'well organized marriage'. Gradually. Marian feels threatened by childbearing and gets alienated from her body. She develops a horror of the body and fears marriage, maternity or the office pension plan. She wants none of these futures and her inwa rd rebellion to feminity results in self-division which gets manifested in her inability to eat. The third section with its energetic return to a first person narrative tidies up the plot when Marian, following ber own line of metaphorical thinking, discovers a way to solve what for her is an

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ontological problem. The test is of course the cake which she bakes and then ices in the shape of a woman. However, when offered the cake, Peter flees and seeks the arms of Lucy, one of Marian's office friends. She also offers the cake to Duncan, the graduate student in English who helps her to eat it all up. Eating the cake is an act of celebration which marks the decisive moment of Marian's recovery from a hysterical illness and her return to the social order.

It is imperative to underscore how effectively Atwood offers parodic images of traditional seduction plot and the maternal principle. As a woman writer, Atwood has always been intensely aware of the significance of representations of the female body both in terms of a woman's self definition and as a fantasy object. In Conversations she speaks The body as a concept. has always been a concern of mine. It's there in Surfacing as well. I think that people very much experience them selves through their bodies and through concepts of the body which get applied to their own bodies, which they pick up from their culture and apply to their own. It's also my concern in Lady Orade and it's even there in The Edible Woman. (Conversations 187 )

Inkeeping with her concern for the female body, Atwood refers to female biological processes 1ike pregnancy, childbirth and menstruation but with a measure of comic detachment. Sexually mature female bodies are presented as grotesque and Marian looks at her friend Clara's pregnant body and the fat ageing bodies of her fellow office workers with distaste and repulsion . Not only does Marian feel threatened by child bearing bl1t she also feels alienated from her body in other ways as weH. At the office Christmas party, surrounded by the fat and ageing bodies of her colleagues, Marian understands with sh.ock that she too shares the mysterious female condition. What peculiar creatures they were; and the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in , giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, gTease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, cofTee, tomato, juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears and garbage .. . At some time she would be - or no, already she was like that too. She was one of

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Postmodern Feminist Writen them, her body the Bame, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with ita sweet organic scent; sbe felt suffocated by this thick Sarga.&o sea of feminil.y. ( WomaD 167)

While Marian bates women's biological destiny. her two Clara and Ainsley celebrate it thereby parodying motherhood. Clara, who is pregnant, appears to Marian as a "boa-constrictor that has swallowed a water melon" (Woman 31). Clara's attitude to motherhood is unmatemal; for example, Clara's metaphors for her children included "barnacles encrusting a ship limpets clinging to a rock" (Woman 36). On the other hand. Ainsley represe~ts an intellectual approach to maternity as she embarks on it as a social project with the aim of becoming a single parent. Her programme is entirely ideological and in a curious way academic and theoretical .. 'Every woman should have at least one baby'. Sbe sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hairdyer. It's even more important than eeL It fulfils your deepest femininity" (Woman 41).

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Atwood also parodies traditional seduction plot exposing the dynamics of the sexual game in all its duplicity. In The Edible Woman instead of a man pursuiDg a woman, a woman pursues a man. Ainsley pursues a notorious womanizer Leonard Slank and both pose to be what they are not. Ainsley poses as an innoCent woman while Leonard. poses as a world - weary ~en" lecher. When she reveals that she is pregnant, Slank collapses in horror. Here. too, there is a comic deconstruction of stereotypes because it is a man who is the casualty in this battle between the sexes and not a woman. The party which Marian ·and Peter host as an engaged couple represents the climax of Atwood's 'anti-comedy! I think in your standard eighteenth century comedy JOO have a young couple who is faced with difficulty in the form of somebody who embodies the rwtrietive fon:ee eociety IUld they trick or overcome this difficulty and end up getting married. The same thing h.appena in fte Bdible Wamaa GaJpt

or

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the wrong person gets married ... The comedy solution would be a tragic solution for Marian. (Conservations 10)

Atwood a)so presents a parody of lovemaking while describing the brief liaison between Marian and Duncan, a graduate student in English. The liaison begins as a parody with Duncan's complaint that there is "altogether too much flesh around here" but it ends with him stroking her 8S his face nudges into ber flesh "like the muzzle of an animal, curious and only slightly friendly" (Woman 254). In fact, Duncan and his two other male graduate friends, Trevor and Fish, form. 8 subversive trio. Atwood reverses the traditional gender roles by making these two men dedicated to the domestic arts of washing and ironing, cooking and parenting. The male protagonists in the novel speak about femininity from their own perspective revealing a surprisingly high level of masculine anxiety about this topic. Atwood experiments with split subjectivity, a prominent characteristic of postmodem art. Marian loses any sense of herself as a unified subject and begins to hallucinate her · emotional conflict in images of bodily dissolution and fragmentation. She believes that her body is "coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle( WOIDan 218). She even fantasises about her future married bliss with herself aPsent. The resolution of the novel presents the three women better than the men. Marian is independent since Peter has left her; Siank has had a nervous breakdown and is cared for by Clara like another of her numerous ch.ildren, while Ainsley has found a new father figure for her unborn child and has fulfilled ber biological mission. The final action of Marian who plunges "ber fork into the carcase, [the cake], neatly severing the body from the head- (Women 273) is 8 parody of vampire slaying with the implication that the feminine image has been draining Marian's lifeblood but will have the power to do 80 no more. Speaking of the resolution in the novel, Carol Ann Howells says that

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Postmodern Feminist Wn"ters The domestic scenario raises ODe last point which relates to the important question of female creativity. Marian haa chosen to make her protest through a traditionally feminine mode which bypasses language ... She thinks that she bad accomplished bel' purpose though, as any reader in the 1990's would note, none of the three young women - Marian, Ainsley nor Clara - has escaped from their culturally defined gender roles; they are still , producing cakes and babies. This leaves unresolved the issue of women's attempts to establish themselves 8S independent speaking subjects working creatively through writing or painting, a topic to which Atwood will return in Surfacing, Lady Oracle and Cat's Eye. (17)

Her next novel Surfacing (1970) is one step ahead of The Edible Woman because Atwood underscores the PostmodernlPoststructurallgendered quest for a new language; a split female self and a search for a unified self and also hints at blurring borders between realism and fantasy as the language shifts between realistic description and metaphors of psychological space. The novel begins like a detective story where the unmarried narrator goes back to the place of her childhood in the Quebec bush to search for her lost father who, as we later learn, has already drowned in the lake while looking for Indian rock paintings. Gradually she discovers that what she is really searching for is her own past. She is looking for those lost bits of herself buried in her repressed memories, and it is only in the wilderness that she finds a way to heal the split within her own psyche, thereby restoring her emotional and spiritual health . The stor y traces the multilayered process of rehabilitation by which a dislocated and damaged woman manages to come to tenns with her past, while recognizing that the past cannot ever to retrieved though it may be partially reconstructed through memory and fantasy. Even at the beginning of the journey, the protagonist recognizes that she has experienced a death. Like the three friends, Anna, David and Joe, who accompany her, she is completely cut off from her past. This results in a splitting of the self. Though a split self is hinted at in The Edible Woman, Atwood explores the concept of a split female self

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more elaborately in Surfacing. This is done through the device of the Mirror which is also a technique used by 'lbni Morrison to point out the split within her female protagonists. The mirror becomes a symbol of the split self and one's own reflection functions like a kind of negative doppelganger. Presumably the mirror provides a distorted image of the self, robbing one of an identity. The camera is another device which Atwood sees as revealing the split self or dopp e lganger. Cameras, like mirrors , according to Atwood's protagonist, can also steal the soul. Her most crucial discovery occurs when the protagonist dives down the lake looking for the Indian rock paintings recorded in her father's drawings. She does not find them; instead sbe sees a strange blurred image which mayor may not be her father 's drowned body, but for her it is the repressed memory of her aborted child. Fragments of memory of the abortion itself - often described in terms of amputation, cutting, splitting - causes such pain that she cannot accept their reality. In order to become an autonomous, completed self, however, the protagonist must heal yet another kind of split- that between 'good' and 'evil'. Sbe must come to terms with herself as perpetrator as well as victim. As a result, she is stil1 divided, unable to achieve any resolution of such opposite s as life and death , creation and d estruction . Marriage, to her, is more a surrender than a commitment. It is, for the woman, total immersion in the male world and thus a further division of the female self. Such procedures as refu sing to feel a nd to relate to other people, however, limit and divide the self. The protagonist longs for the ability . to fee1. Coincidental with the inability to fe e l is th e protagonist's inability to communicate. Some of the most interesting questions the novel raises are arguably linguistic ones and Atwood gives a hint of what these might be in an interview in 1986. "How do we know 'reality'? How do you encounter the piece of granite? How do you know it directly? Is there such a thing as knowing it directly without language?" (Conversations 209). Initially. the n~rrator has a deep distrust of words, seeing them as instruments of

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deception and domination rather than of communication. As a woman, she feel s 'tra pped in a language that wasn't mine" (S urfacingl06), placed in the position of victim in male power games of love and war. So h er quest for self-rehabitation is 8 J 80 a quest to find her own 'dialect' amidst all the la nguages available to her. In order to ever communicate again, the protagonist thinks t hat she must fmd a language of her own. The novel moves to the level of fantasy in the series of visions the protagonist h ~s. To be 'reborn', just to be born, the protagonist must have a 'gift· from both father and mother. She must recognize that she is a product of both the m ale and female principles. She mus t understand her pa rentage and her origins before she can understand herself. The father represents the bes t of the male principle - logic without destruction. The mother's legacy is the revelation of a drawing from the protagonist's childhood of a woman "with a round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside gazing out". The protagonist interprets the message of the drawing as an instruction; in order to be alive and whoJe s he must resurrect that part of herself which she has killed - the aborted fetus and the fertility aspect of the fema le principle. which it represents. The protagonist has united the two halves of herself, found her parentage; reconciled the male and female principles within the self. She seeks out her lover Joe and the conception itself is a religious act. It is a psychological birth a lso, a healing of the divided self. The protagonist also has a series of wilderness encounters through which she undergoes a visionary education. Having heard the other language of the wilderness, she has also realized that words are a human necessity, for to be alienated from words is to be alienated from one's fellow human beings. Carol Ann Howells, commenting on the technique a nd the title, says that The narrator has surfaced through patriarchal la nguage with its definitions 'woman" and 'victim' and she has found an appropriate form far her own story of survival within a quest narrative that mixes realism and fantasy. Yet this is a quest which is markedly incomplete and it is worth turning back now

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to examine the significance of the novel's title. 'Surfacing' is a gerund (a noun made out of a verb), indicating process and activity rather than a completed action. Surfacing charts a change in the narrator's subjective perceptions of reality. as she s hif\.s from a position of alienation and victimhood to a new sense of the vital relationship between herself as human and the land which s he inhabits, though it also signals a further stage which she has to face in coming to terms with human beings in the modern world. That is literally her next step forward. (32)

Lady Orade, Atwood's third novel is about the eating woman. It is an uneasy mixture of Gothic parody and a comedy of manners. It is also an escape novel which makes effective use of fantasy. A Gothic novel is one that revolves round fear a nd it has a specific collection of motifs and themes. There is the phenomenon of ghosts, transgressing boundaries between life and death while on the psychological level there is the erosion of boundaries between the self and the monstrous other. The protagonist Joan Foster narrates the story of hAr life. While doing so, her burts and rage appear to be un~eniably funny but behind the comedy is hidden a painful voice. Again, Atwood enjoins the readers to become accomplices to Joan's exhibitionistic exploits. She ~ffectively makes use of mirrors in an attempt to expose the fantasies of Joan. Borders between realism and fantasy are blurred from the beginning as Joan offers us multiple narratives figuring and refiguring herself through different narrative conventions. There are many stories within stories. There is the story of Joan's real life in the present set in Italy where she had escaped after her fake suicide in Toronto, Canada. Within this story is her private memory narrative of a traumatic childhood centering on her relationship with her neurotic mother, of an adolescence when she escapes to London and becomes a writer of popular Gothics, her marriage to a Canadian, her celebrity as a poet, to be followed by a threat of blackmail and her second escape from Canada to Italy. Within this narrative are snippets from Joan's Gothic romances which provide more glamorous and dangerous plots than everyday life.

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Joan, as a result oCher mother's persecution and obesity, begins to develop persecutory fears which she fictionalizes in her Gothic novels and that plague her 88 an adult in her dreams and real life. Like her Gothic heroines, she feels vulnerable and hunted down by malevolent pursuers. She takes refuge in fat lady fantasies, which in turn, give birth to her identity as the escape artist who fears exposure and thus compulsively assumes a series of identities, each

identity becoming a new trap. Joan's obesity is a visible signifier oCher thwarted and angry grandiosity and'her inner defectiveness. She starts eating with s tubbornness in order to defy her mother. She envisions herself as a fat lady in a pink ballerina costume walking the high wire, proceeding inch by inch across Canada, applauded by the people. This fantasy depicts Joan's a nxie ties about h e r fragile selfstability which is expressed as the fear of falling. Atwood, it is clear, highlights Joan's split self and crises of s ubjectivity through the fantasies s he develops. In other words, Fantasy is used as a means to depict Joan's split consciousness. After Joan has s tripped a way most of her protective covering offat, the mother-daughter battle enters a new phase and Joan leaves home, detennined to sever her connection with h er mother and to discard her pas t . She begins her life-long h abit of compulsive lying and story telling as she invents, first for h er lover Paul and later for Arthur (h er husband) and her adoring public, a "more agreeable" personal history. She imagines the men in h er life to be romantic figures populating her Gothic novels. When s he meets Paul, the Polish Count, and listens to his story, s he thinks she has met a li ar as herse lf. Arthur see ms a melancholy fi ghter and the Royal Porcupine (another of Joan's fantasy lovers) appears to be like Lord Byron. What Joan seek s from the men of her life is the mirroring attention s he n ever got from her mother hut the men she loves are also objects of fear. She splits men into dual identities: the apparently good man is a ·lurking menace, a hidden pervert and a secret killer. Men are an embodiment of Joan's split good/bad mother and her own hidden energies and killing

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rage. Joan, as a result, perpetually attempts a series of identities and becomes a writer of Gothic novels. In her workin-progress Stalked by Love, Joan fictionalizes her contrasting selves. Charlotte represents her socially complaint, conventional female self (the role that she assumes with Paul and Arthur) while the possessive, angry, powerful Felicia embodies her camouflaged grandiosity. Publicly, Joan plays the role of Arthur's self-effacing, inept, always apologizing wife; in ,secret, she becomes Louisa Delacourt, writer of Gothic novels. The novel Stalked by Love progresses according to the set formula but suddenly it swings out of control. Joan wants her heroine Charlotte to go into the maze but, much to her surprise, the plot does not conform to stereotype. It is the villainess Felicia who enters the maze. There is a further slippage of conventions in the scenario of the plot so that Joan's book begins to look less like a Gothic romance. At the maze's center, Joan - Felicia encounters her mirror selves. There she fmds the fat lady, her defective self; she also finds an embodiment of her identity as Louisa Delacourt, the middle-aged writer of Gothic novels; Joan, the self-effacing wife and Joan the powerful poet cult figure. She also discovers yet another alter-ego, Redmond who transforms into the men in her life. The most effective use of mirror symbolism is seen when Joan experiments with automati~ writing. Sitting in the dark in front of her triple mirror she imagines herself journeying into the world of the mirror. The most significant thing about an Oracle is that, it is a voice which comes out of a woman's body and is associated with hidden dangerous knowledge but that it is not her own voice . It is the Lady Oracle in Joan that compels her to endlessly construct herself, each new creation ultimately becoming a Dew trap. When Joan publishes her Lady Oracle poems and consequently becomes a cult figure, this only deepens the cracks in her fractured self. When all the plots of Joan's life converge, her current lover, the Royal Porcupine, wants her to marry him; Paul,

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her former lover, traces her and wants her back; a blackmailer hounds her; she imagines that Arthur is the persecutor sending her death threats. Hence, Joan manages, therefore,

her second escape from Canada to Italy. Her faked suicide is a signifier oCher desire to live , to rescue and repair her self. 'Ib the Italian village women , the resurrected Joan becomes an object affear. As the nove) ends, Joan determines to stop writing Gothic novels and to turn, instead, to science fiction, a process she has already begun in her comic, self-parodic depiction of beTaelf as a science fiction mODster. The effectiveness of language is also seen when Joan becomes a wieJder of words. She obliterates the mother who attempted to annihilate ber. Achieving verbal mastery over the men in her life who attempted to master her, Joan secret1y attacks her perceived attackers and becomes a hidden menace to those who menace her. She acts this out in the novel's final scene when she assaults the reporter. Carol Ann Howells speaks of the ending in the following words: The ending is deliberately bathetic, for the man who Joan fears has come for her life has in fact come for her life story. He is a reporter and Joan tells him her story, which we realise is the novel we have just been reading ... like· Jane Austen Atwood gives her plot a mischievous twist at the end: Joan revea1s tbat . sbe has not yet returned to Toronto but that she is still in Rome looking after the man whom she knocked on tbe head, 'I've begun to feel that he's the only person who knows anything about me'. Like the surface on the edge of the wilderness about to step forward, this is a suspension bridge ending. (76)

In the next novel Life BefOre Man, Atwood subtly makes use of science fiction fantasy in a seemingly realistic novel thereby shifting between realism and fantasy. As in Lady Oracle, Atwood underscores the poignancy of a young woman's imagination who secures power by indulging in fantasy. Fantasy may be thought of as a kind of imaginative indulgence which disdams the lofty idealism associated with Coleridge's definition of the imagination. Fantasy is closer

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to Coleridge's Fancy in that it is concerned with concepts, principles or ideals. Rosemary Jackson in her book Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (1981) draws attention to a tradition offantasy writing in E nglish Literature which goes back as far as the Gothic novelists a nd further into fairytale a nd folklore. Fantasy is seen to be subversive because it seeks an a lternative kind of reality. Postmodernist Fantasy writing is one which is centred on uncertainty of perception and of meaning; it is a literature which seeks solutions knowing that solutions are not possible and it is therefore a literature of frustrated desires; it is a polemical literature which engages in a kind ofunderground resistance; it is a confessional kind of literature in which the dimly discerned goal seems to be self-revelation; it is a }jterature which sets out to deliberately subvert any easy notion of objective reality and is intent on holding reality up to co n sta n t a nd unre mittin g interrogation. Jack son distinguishes fantasy proper from fairy tale on the grounds that fairytale creates a world which is safely removed from the 'rea l' world, and so does not directly threaten the real world, whereas fantasy is constantly challenging our notion of the real world. She furth e r distinguishes fantasy from supernatural writings in that most of the latter presuppose some kind of principle, plan or design whereas fa ntasy is without principle or design. Ljfe B efore Man fit s s qu a rely into thi s mode of pos tmodernist fanta sy. [t is a novel which is at once experime nta l, interrogative, confessional, polemical a nd irrationally subjective. The reality of character as a sepa rate discrete entity is also called into question. The narrative hov ers unc e rt ai nl y betw ee n realism and fan t asy interrogating the ordinary notions of rea lity and logic. The novel has a triangular plot where a wife takes a lover and later the lover commits suicide, the ma rriage breaks up, a nd the husba nd goes to li ve with another woman. The novel appea rs like a slippery text because to the characters words become the means of slipping away from the restrictions of

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real life. The novel, thus, can be considered, like Atwood's other novels, as an experiment in language. The novel uses discourses 8S intertext - in particular Charles Darwin's On the Origin ofSpecies (1859) and The Descent ofMan (1871). The setting of the novel is the Royal Ontario Museum. in

Toronto where both the female protagonists work - Lesje, the paleontologist and Elizabeth who is in charge of Special Projects and Publicity. Against the background of prehistory and the extinction of species, there are three multiple stories from three different points of view. The crucial incident that triggers the plot is the suicide

of Chris Beecham, Elizabeth's lover, one week before the narrative action begins. For the first few days there is a tight pattern of triple voices peT day but later, after the third day, the rigid structure breaks down with variations in the recurrence of voices and irregular time gaps as relationships between characters shift and memories of the past occupy relatively more narrative space. The novel spans a period of two years by the end of which the domestic plots have fragmented and reformed into different patterns. Elizabeth is seen caught in the space between the real and the imaginary since for her real time has ceased to exist after the suicide of her lover Chris. There is also a shift from first person monologue to third person narration . This technique underscores the splitting of spatial and temporal dimensions within consciousness. The space that she seems to inhabit is the fantasy space of non-meaning and absence. She imagines an abyss into which she resists falling herself though sucked towards it by the shock of Chris's suicide. Nate, her husband, is shut out from Elizabeth's life and his mind is also fixed on Chris's death. This subjective position is erratic, switching between jobs as he moves from his work in Legal Aid at a Toronto lawyer's office to become a toy maker and then back to his firm again. He tries to reinvent himself as he occupies multiple identities as husband, father, lover, son etc. He remains a resisting subject always open to new possibilities. His thoughts wander to Lesje whose image floats like a new romance in his mind .

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Lesje feels at home in fantasies which are escapist since such visions open up spaces where she feels at home while the realistic world does not giye her the satisfaction she desires. A woman of multicultural upbringing - Ukranian, Jewish and Canadian - she does not find solace anywhere. Her scientific interest makes her take active interest in the Royal Ontario Museum. She has always dreamed of making the dinosaurs live. Since her relationship with men is unrewarding, her imagined territory or, in other words, her dinosaur scenario, provides the comfort she desires. Being an escape artist, like Joan Forster in Lady Oracle, she flies to the wilderness when discomfited in social life. It is to sustain her self that she runs through the' upper Jurassic out of her living room wearing her Adidas and navy·blue sweatshirt. When she becomes pregnant with Nate's Child, her perspective on life changes and also her perspective on history. As Howells puts it, her fantasy far from being merely escapist or recreational, is a continuous reminder of the origins of human s pecies and of the possibility of savagery latent within the conventions of civilized life. Within the evolutionary story there is as much evidence of instability and regression as there is of progress, so that Lesje's narrative with its juxtaposition 'of prehistory and t.he present might be read 8 S illustrative of a continuity of irrationality and violence rather t.han of the moral evolution of the human race. (101)

Elizabeth, however, stands alone but survives the danger of being sucked into the black vacuum. She gains confidence as she stands watching a picture. The pict.ure is framed and glassed. Behind the glass, bright. green leaves spread wit.h the hannonious a symmetry of a Chines e floral rug; purple fruit.s glow among them. Three women, two with baskets, are picking. Their teeth shine within their smiles ; their checks are plum and rosy as a doll 's. (Man 315 )

Elizabeth returns to everyday life and when the novel closes "we find an optimistic Elizabeth who sees life in a positive manner. Howell speaks of Elizabeth's story as ""resistant to threats of closure just as it resists the grand narratives of science with their patterns of determinism

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based on n a tural law" (l03). The novel has mu1tivoices and deserves to be called a Postmodern text in its questioning of Grand narratives like scie nce. Even the Royal Ontario Museum has a double existence within the contiguous discourses of realism and of fantasy, a solid edifice which may at any moment disappear into scenarios of Jurassic swamps or idealized Chinese landscapes. Such slippages open

the way out of th e Museum and beyond the deterministic narratives of prehistory contained there so that we may hear the heterogeneous voices of human survivors in the prescnt in 'mid-hi story' 8 S Atwood described it - as the 'before' of the tit.le reverses its direction to point not backwards to the distant past hut forward s to the futurc . (Howells 104)

Bodily Harm is another vers ion of Atwoodian Gothic full of sinister games as Judith McCombs says in her essay on Atwood's poetic sequences at the beginning of the 1980's. "The Gothic terror and the Gothic horror, so divided and redoubled, take place in a hall of mirrors, where reality is constantly evaded and yet reflected , distorted and yet magnified n (39). Rennie is not able to decipher what goes on inside and outside her head as her narrative shifts from one crisis to another. A highly subjective narrative, the novel presents the plight of Rennie who is a woman divided against herself. The plot of the novel is not complicated in itself, although some effort must be expended in order to reconstruct the precise chronology of events from the intricate structure of the work . The protagonist Rennie (Renata) Wilford is a journalist living in Toronto with an advertising designer named Jake. She is diagnosed as having cancer and undergoes a partial mastectomy which is clinically successful, although she continues to be haunted by the fear of recurrence . She falls in love with Daniel, her phys ician, but although he partially reciprocates her feelings the affair is more a source of frustration than of fulfillment, and in the meantime the relationship with Jake comes to an end. Shortly afterwards, Rennie learns that somebody has broken into her home in her absence and before being frightened

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away by the police has been waiting faT her "as if he was an intimate". The intruder has left a rope coiled on the bed and the police warn Rennie that he will probably return. This sinister incident prompts Rennie's decision to travel to the Caribbean and write a piece about the island of St.Antoine. Among the-people she encounters here are Paul, an American involved in contraband activities and his former mistress Lora who exploits Rennie to smuggle weapons into the country on Paul's behalf. Despite herself, Rennie becomes embroiled in the turmoil of a local election, a political assassination and an aborted uprising, and together with Lora is arrested and confined to a subterranean cell in an old fort. Here she is forced to witness various scenes of brutality, culminating in the sadistic beating of Lora by the prison guards. The novel ends with the anticipation of Rennie's release through the interVention of Canadian diplomatic authorities, although there is some uncertainty as to whether this will in fact take place or is only a hopeful fantasy on her part. . Rennie is described as being almost neurotically disengaged. She is a woman living alone at the end of an affair and under threat, for her private space has been invaded by a 'faceless stranger' and the coiled rope on the bed would seem to signify the possibility of a malevolent sexual attack. This event results in breakdown of Rennie's image of herself. Much of Rennie's attitude to life is the direct legacy afher upbringing in the small town of Griswold where she was brought up by her lonely mother and grandmother. One of Rennie's earliest recollections is of her grandmother in Grisw.old prying her hands away finger by finger in punishment for some unremembered transgression. This emblematic episode of the severing of hand contact assumes its place in an elaborate pattern of images constructed around hands. The hands represent both vehicles of human contact and also instruments of manipulation and domination. Rennie is first the victim of her own body's betrayal and the diagnosis of breast cancer and her own mastectomy

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is the central trauma oCher life. The disease begins to restore in the most brutal way possible the severed contact between "surface'" and "depths", between the individual and her "roots", between Rennie and the body in which she has upto then merely been a tenant. She no longer sees her body as a unified whole but as something being undermined from within as the blood cells 'whisper and divide in darkness" (Man 100). The fear of splitting open and of collapsing boundaries, between inside and outside haunt and trouble Rennie's psyche to a great extent. It is thus symbolically appropriate that the ac~ual operation through which Daniel saves Rennie's life and at the same time initiates the process by which she awakens to an understanding oCher own real nature should be described in terms of a rebirth. When she recovers from the anaesthetic after her operation, her hand is being held by Daniel, which is seen as loving hands responsible for resuming her from death. Daniel's hands are juxtaposed with her grandmother's lost hands or the mir.aculous healing hands of the old Caribbean woman or even with the hand of the mute beggar wishing her luck. She becomes a woman divided against herself, obsessed with . loss and damage and this sense of her own body affects her relationships with men in the novel. Her evolving view as to the relative importance of surfaces and depths reveals itself in her relation with two men who represent real or potential aspects of herself - her companion Jake and her physician Daniel. Jake, an adept in the field of advertising inhabits the plane of disembodied appearances alone, manipulating images which bear no relation to the world of substance. Prior to her illness, Rennie has resembled Jake in evaluating attitudes and beliefs not according to their intrinsic validity but in terms of whether they are fashionable or not. After her illness Rennie becomes obsessed with depths.

Daniel, by contrast, lives and works at the level of depths rather than surfaces. Unlike Jake and Rennie, Daniel is virtually unconscious of himself, indifferent to his own surface or public image. She tries to trick him into an affair but is unsuccessful in t~s endeavour. Her incapacity to relate

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to Daniel on his own terms indicates her continuing failure to come to grips with the depths at which he both literally and figuratively operates. Her decision to travel to St.Antoine is explained in tenns of a search for anonymity. Paul, the American, whom she meets in the Caribbean, remains an enigma. It is Paul who serves as the agency whereby Rennie is at last restored to her own body. At first she is afraid that the scar left by her operation will repel him as it has Jake but these fears are dispelled when she perceives his actual reaction. The lovemaking scene implicates Rennie's final coming to terms with her physical self. The plot with Paul becomes very tangled and it is through her affair with him that Rennie finds herself involved in the revolutionary coup and thrown into prison. Once again the process of discovery expresses itself symbolically as a journey of descent, assuming the form of Rennie's imprisonment in a cell on the charge of "suspicion". Rennie is back in her Gothic chamber of horrors enclosed within her own subjective space like a heroine in one of Ann Radcliff's novels, "who does not gaze outward for clues capable of solving the mysteries of her situation, but inward, to the topography of dreams, to the pleasurably horrifying spectral" (Mycak 471). In the cell she is forced to witness the brutal bashing up of her friend Lora and through the window the naked exercise of political power in the prison yard. Atwood focuses on the vulnerability of human bodies, male or female and when Rennie watches the events in the prison yard the discourses of pornography and PQwer politics are fused together. "It's indecent, its not done with ketchup, nothing is inconceivable here, no rats in the vagina but only because they haven't thought of it yet ... She's afraid of men and it's simple, it's rational, she's afraid of men because men are frightening" (Man 290). The novel ends with a paradoxical statement that "She will never be rescued. She has already been rescued. She is not exempt. Instead she is lucky" (Man 300). As Howells points out

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Eostmodern Feminist Writers Rennie's narrative comes from tha t borderline territory between fantasy and rea lity 8S she sits in the prisun cell beside t he brutally battered body of a dead woman, realizing fin a lly that she is powerless and alone. Spoken from that interior s pace, her narrative is a r econstruction and a reinterpretation 8S sbe laboriously tries to fit together the fragments of ber life, seeking connection across t.he facts of Lora's damaged body and her own mastectomy, as between the overt violence which she has not s een in Toronto but which she knows is there. (124)

The book, undoubtedly. works on the post modern premise of subverting those illusory categories that distance the perceiver from the world and from herself-the contrast between depths and surfaces, mind and body, 'r and 'thou'. One can confront the Teal self that lurks within and outside t he self only through a process of radical subversion, Atwood seems to be saying through her novel Bodily Harm. As a postmodern feminist novel, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is concerned explicitly with dismantling patriarchal systems that oppress women. In an interview given in 1985, several months before the appearance of The Handmaid's Tale Atwood said. "The political to me is a part of life. It's part of everybody's life" (96). What the writer means by political here is "how people relate to a power·structure and vice versa. And this is really all we mean by it. We may mean also some idea of participating in the structure or changing it. But the first thing we mean is how is this individual in society? How so the forces of society interact with this person" (Interview :1985, 100). At the thematic level, the novel carries patriarchal power to its logical and nightmarish extreme and shows bow women live .in such a situation and create female space for themselves through various strategies. Set in 2195 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the center of the Republic of Gilead, the novel is a poignant tale that presents a futuristic, totalitarian society where women are separated into rigid, subservient roles as wives, workers, whores and where the Bible becomes a patriarchal narrative which uses religion for subjugating women. Gilead is a highly alienating

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structure of society, especia lly for women. Women a re sepa rated according to t heir function as Wives, Marthas (h ou se keepers), Handm a ids (C hild -bear e r s), Aunts (di sciplinarian ) Je ze bel s ( pro s titutes), and kept in segregation. There is constant invigilation to prevent tbe forging of relationships among women. Tbe narra tor's story is, on one level, a subversive act, because of the time in which she lived. She lives in a dystopian time when there is patriarchal state domination of inform ation. The narrator keeps a secret of her own name apart from the patronymic ·Offred' . For Offred, na rrating her own story validates existence and m akes ber exist. The narration is made ofT and on; not chronologicaUy, into a recording machine and preserved in tapes. The gaps between t he stories told in black print can, despite tbeir apparent blankness, be read in a number of ways. They a re not necessarily invisible to the reading eye. Anot her way of r eading the white spaces is to view them as being essential to the black print. The black print never acknowledge's dependence on the white s paces with which it is discontinuous and thereby made perceptible. The Handmaid is obliged to occupy the white space and to live as usual. The Republic of Gilead uses The Bible as authority for their laws. The polygamy of the Old Testament provides them with the sanction of Handma ids. In order to counter the birth rate, which is low among the ruling elite, the Handmaids ar e used to overcome a fertility crisis. The Commanders who attempt to impregnate them once a month are indifferent to their appearances. The Handmaids are permitted to consume only that which the authorities consider will enhance their he a lth and fertility. Offred who witnesses the bloody slaughter a nd dismemberme nt of women, begins to feel shock, nausea and considers them as barbarous. She is alert and occupies herself with memories of her husband and daughter and s trongly desires to escape from her present claustrophobic environment. Even within the restrictive circumstances of Gilead , Offred yearns to fall in love again and she does with the Commander's chauffeur Mick.

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However, their love story is cut short when one day Nick bursts into Offred's room accompanied by a party of Eyes (secret police) to.take her away in tbe dreaded Black van for dissidents. Her narrative ends with Offred laying herself open to all risks and possibilities as she departs from the Commander's house like a criminal.

Atwood uses Intertextuality and language games in order to disrupt the autobiography/fiction, referentiality/self· reflexivity polarities in her novel. The boundary between autobiography and fiction is disrupted both in the Cats Eye, Atwood's next novel, and The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood seems to ask how can a woman inscribe herself in a process which turns on the name, face and unified lIeye of man, a proce ss s tructured by binary opposition, doubling and divi s ion ? Wh a t complicates the r elationship between autobiography and fiction in Atwood's work is the instability of names, which continuaUy shift, frustrating the reader's des ire to locate a single proper name. The Handmaid's Tale opens with an exchange of names. Describing the handmaids who lie on their beds an d lip-read rather than speak , Offred remarks "'In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. J anine. Dolores. Moira. June." (TaJe 14). The name Offred becomes a circulating s ignifier which displays an incessant shifting. Offred may be divided into "'of' and the name "'Fred" and it can also be dismembered into another proposition "off' a nd the a djective "red". Offred becomes fascinated with the a dj ective "red" as a signifier which disrupts the signifier/signified, sign/referent correspondence. Describing the red tulips in Serena Joy's garden a nd the red smile of the ha nged man, Offred remarks, "the red is the same but there is no connection" (Tale 45). There a re intertextual connections between The Handmaid's Tale and Sylvia Plath's poem Tulips. Sylvia Plath opens "Tulips" with the speaker's words "I have given my name and my dayclothes up to the nurses / and my history to the anaesthetist and my body to sllrgeons"(Plath 160). After the subject of Plath's poem becomes divested of her name, she then

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becomes, like the heroine of Atwood's text, divested of her face, disfigured by the figure of autobiography. Language becomes a powerful weapon to wrench female space within the existing structures. She exposes the shortcomings of conventional patriarchal language and the encoded sexism in it. According to Olfred, language in the Republic of Gilead is officially forbidden because the ruling class recognizes the power of words as weapons that can free the people from bondage. In her lecture "An End to Audience" delivered in 1980, Atwood articulates thoughts which five years later became the central issue of The Handmaid's Tale. In any totalitarian takeover, whether from the left. or the right, writers, singers and journalists are the first to be suppressed ... The aim of all such suppression is to silence the voice, abolish the word, so that the only voices and words left are those of the ones in power. Elsewhere, the word itself is thought to have power; that's why so much trouble is taken to silence it. (350)

Sometimes Atwood takes up a traditionally used phrase and turns it insi de out. For example, on the night of the ceremony, the Commander takes up the Bible to read to the household . "We are expectant. Here comes our bedtime story" (Tale 98) comments Offred evoking a picture of childhood innocence but the tone is deceptive . The Biblical story of Rachel and Bilha is meant to justify the use of handmaids in bed to produce children to ageing childless commanders. The phrase 'bedtime story' becomes ambiguous. It is a story of the bedding of the Bibbical handmaid and precedes the bedding of the Gileadean handmaid. Olfred begins to break the slavery syndrome by transgressing "the uniform of language" ofGHead. She steals into her Commander's study to play the game of Scrabble. The game of Scrabble which is forbidden functions as a signifier of the power of language. She is able to ask the Commander questions. Later she is secretly presented by the Commander copies of women's magazines like Vogue, unlabelled bottle offace cream, which are forbidden to the Handmaids. She is also secretly allowed

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the use of pen to write a line in Latirl on a notepad. She is aware why "Pe n is envy" (Tale 174). Verwaayen says The strange wording "Pen is envy~ reduces Freud's infamous doctrine of penis envy to pen envy, truncating, castrating penis to pen , a s ubversion persistence at the literary level which further removes the biologically - sanctioned locus of power in Gilead to the realm of discursive construction, to the erection of discursive practices. Biology thus need not be destiny because the scripts can be rewritten, voiced over. (48)

It is now imperative to examine the final frame of the novel which is provided by the Historical Notes which introduce several crucial shifts in the narrative. After two hundred years, Gilead had become ancient history and the only traces remain in the form of scattered diaries and lectures among which are Offred's cassette tapes. These notes are a transcript of lecture given by a Cambridge Professor, Darcy Pieixoto at an academic symposium on Gileadean studies held in the year 2195. The extent to which Pieixoto u s urps Off'red's tale for his own purpose is evidenced by the fact that Offred herself is barely present in the historian's comments which focus almost entirely on discovering the identity of her Commander. His reconstruction effects a radical shift from 'her story' to 'history' as he attempts to discredit Offred's narrative by accusing her of not paying attention to significant things. Howells beautifully sums up the overall effect of the dys topian science fiction The Handmaid's Tale by saying that the abrupt shift from OfTred's voice to the historian's voice challenges the reader on questions of interpretation. We have to remembe r that The Handmaid 's Tale was Offred 's transcribed speech, reassembled and edited by male historians a nd not by her. Really the tale is their structure, which may account for some of the disruptions in the narrative. Her tale has been appropriated by an academic who seems to forget that his reconstruction is open to questions ofint.erpretation too. He is abusing Offred 8S Gilead abused her, removing the authority over her own life story and renaming it in a gesture which parallels Gilead's patriarchal suppression of a woman's identity in the Handmaid's role. (146)

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CB~S Eye (1990) also attempts to represent the female subject in the text. There are close similarities between Atwood's life and that of the protagonist Elaine Risley. Atwood has told her interviewers, for example, about the summers she spent as a child living in tents and motels while the family accompanied her father, an entomologist, doing research in the Canadian north. She is aware that her audience is bent upon biographical readings of her fiction. The novel is a highly, sophisticated expression of play with her audience's expectations. The novel combines the discourses of fiction and autobiography, science and painting. Atwood undercuts the conventional notion that autobiography privileges an autobiographical fiction as more truthful than other forms of fiction. She shows us in Elaine Risley, a painter/writer who may seem in a conventional sense to be exploring the truth of her past but who in a truer sense is creating, or writing, a past as she chooses now to see it, rather than as it might have once existed.

Elaine Risley is a painter. The novel is full ofreferences to her pictures and culminates in her first retrospective exhibition of her art. Risley having returned to Thronto, her hometown. for this exhibition provides the stimulus for her curiously doubled narrative with its 'discu,rsive' memoir version and its 'figural' version presented through her . paintings. In the story she tells of her youth, Elaine offers a retrospective of the woman she has been and the women who have been important to her as she sees herself and them. The image of the cat's eye is central since it represents a world into which she has been anowed access; at the same time, it is a world of inevitably distorted version. The focus of the early chapters is the very young Elaine Risley's struggle to find a model in the two women who are crucial to ber formative years. The child Elaine suspects that her mother bas failed her as the role model needed to help her find her way in the world. Mrs. Smeath (the mother of her friend Grace Smeath) is the Bad mother that Elaine SUBpects her own mother of being for not having prepared

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her for socialization. Mrs.Smeatb functions as Elaine's Muse. This variety of the Bad Mother generates a whole series of paintings through which Elaine vents her anger, hatred and malice . Elaine's story also brings to great detail her symbiotic relationship with her friend/persecutor Cordelia. Her paintings tell us a different story about Elaine 8S subject.

In the fmal Chapter titled 'Bridge'there is Elaine's quest fOT Cordelia. She recognizes that her art has rescued her from the spiritual death of a lifetime wasted in anger and resentment. Having recognized the power of Cordelia within

herself, Elaine can at last release the Cordelia she has made to appear in the final hours before she prepares to leave

home again.

The painting exhibition has the same kind of provisionality 8S The Handmaid's Tale where Offred's narrative transcribed from her tapes is presented as the editor's version rather than as her own, The individual paintings offer a disruptive commentary figuring events from a different angle, It can be termed 'subversions', While her narrative remains incomplete, her paintings offer a different figuration, acting as a kind of corrective to the distortions of memory and offering the possibility of the theoretical solutions. Elaine also transcribes the words of ber dead brother Stephen who grows up to become a theoretical physicist and is later killed by terrorists. Both he and Elaine are engaged in trying to reconstruct the past; he through physics and sbe through memory and imaginative vision. His discourse from theoretical physics provides the conceptt;.al framework for her paintings. Hf'r late paintings share a common structural feature. Through different spatial patterning and different time dimensions each painting contains several styles of representation while more complex representations of space - time and vision are developed in 'Unified Field Theory'. Here the figural presents oppositions as co-existing on the same plane: the past and the present, ' 8 vision' and 'vision' the sacred and the profane, science and

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art, the universal and the particular. It is significant to analyse the intertextual reference in the novel. Most of the readers sense the irony in Atwood's borrowing the name of one of Shakespeare's tragic heroines, but there are also implications of a transfer being transacted here. Cordelia of King Lesrreminds us how the innocent are swept up in the destruction of war and civil disorder and perhaps also that the innocent embody the redemptive power of love. At the same time, it is the refusal of Lear's single faithful daughter to speak, just as much as her sisters' hypocritical flattery, which sets in motion the machinery of conflict and destruction by which she and her family are overwhelmed. In this sense, Elaine, perhaps following her mother's example, is somewhat like Cordelia; choosing silence of martyrdom rather than risk the anxiety and guilt of selfassertion. While women in The Handmaid's Tsle slip in and out of names, women in Cat's Eye become involved in an exchange of names. The name Cordelia becomes emptied of its meaning only to be filled with another. That the proper name is not a static signifier which corresponds only to the bearer of that name becomes apparent early in Atwood's novel. The sense that Cordelia and Elaine are changing places emerges early in Gat's Eye. It is notAtwood's character Cordelia but rather the narrator, Elaine, who begins to resemble the Cordelia of King Lear. In response to King Lears demand that Cordelia compare her love for him with that of Goneril and Regan, Cordelia simply utters the word "nothing". At the beginning of Cat's Eye.it is Elaine who answers 'nothing'to Cordelia's question' "what do you have to say to YOUfself?" (Gats Eye 41). The parallels between King's Lear's daughter Cordelia and Elaine Risley's friend Cordelia again become disrupted when Elaine responds to Cordelia's "what do you think. of me" with "Nothing .much" (Eye 254). Significantly, neither Cat's Eye nor The Handmaid's Tslecloses with the centred lIeye. Instead, both works close

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with the figure of Echo, the voices which are silenced by oculocentric works. At the end of The HlUldmaids Tale Professor Pieixoto asse rts that the meanings conveyed by those voices are lost, for they are "imbued with the obscurity of the m a trix out of which they come" (Tale 324). Cat's Eye similarly closes with the image of echoes, which the eye cannot see. Meditating on the stars, the narrator remarks: "If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago, a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing (Cats Eye 421). By closing Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale with reverberating ecl:lOes,Atwood decanters the central image of both works, the eye. In The Handmaid's Tale perhaps the most predominant image is that of the single winged eye. Not only does the eye constitute the central image of Cat's Eye, but it also becomes closely associated with the center. The deferred echoes of light at the end of Cat's Eye rupture a correspondence between sign and

referent. Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale both remain openended. Not only does the echoing voices· at the end of each novel suggest a process ofinfmite regression, but the voices . engage what Derrida calls "the ear of the other'"(51). Indeed, in Atwood's work the play between "'" and "you" pronouns, between singular and plural, between voices and silences, continually involves the reader's participation in both hearing and producing the text. As Howells puts it Through the multiple modes of narrative representation Elaine, like Offred or Cordelia, 'slips from our grasp and flees'. By telling the reader so much Atwood has paradoxically exposed the limits of autobiography and its artifice of reconstruction. The best Elaine Rinsley or Margaret Atwood can offer is a Unified Field Theory from which inferences about the subject may be made, but the subject herself is always outside in excess, beyond the figurations of language. The 'I' remains behind the 'eye'. (160)

The Robber Bride (1993) incorporates a whole range of traditional motifs like vampires, spells, soul stealing and

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body snatching. However, in this mutant form of female Gothic romance, Atwood twists and reverses the traditional Gothic plot since, unlike the Gothic romance, there are no rescuing heroes, no tombs, mazes or haunted houses. As Howells puts it "The Robber Brideis a postmodemist fiction which exploits the shock effects that occur when Gothic fairy tale migrates into totally different genres like the failed family romance, the detective thriller and documentary history" (77). Atwood argues that Hi story is always a "construct" since it is a combination of different kinds of textual evidence like social documentation , private memory narrative and imaginative reconstruction. As Hayden White says "The narratives of history always reconstruct the available facts of the past for readers in the present according to congenial ideological perspectives and identifiable literary patterns like the quest of the hero or fables of decline and fall" (83).

The Robber Bride centres round Zenia about whom we learn through the multiple narratives of her three friends, Antonia Fremont known as Tony, Roz Andrews and Charls. Zenia acquires meaning only through the multiple narratives of these three friends. Tony is a military historian, Roz is a successful business woman and Charis is a New Age mystic. These three friends live in Toronto and they organize a meeting on 23 rd October 1990 at a fashionable Toronto restaurant called the Toxique. Tony points out the postmodern self-reflexivity of the narrative who has a historian's belief in the power of explanations but also realizes the impossibility of accurate reconstruction. The novel opens with Zenia's Gothic reappearance in the restaurant five years after her memorial service and then pictures the life stories of all the three so that Zenia can be tracked down and finally ends a week later in the Toxique where the final crisis occurs. Tony's section of memory narrative is titled 'Black Enamel'. She recounts her memories of meeting Zenia as a student in the 1960's and also speaks of how Zenia attempted

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to rob her oCher money, her professional reputation and her beloved husband West. Through the section titled 'Weasel Nights' Charls' unhappy childhood as a victim of sexual abuse is pictured. Her memories of Zenia point to the 1970's when there were hippies and draft dodgers in Canada. Her happy family is disturbed when Zenia seduces her American husband Billy which leads to his disappearance. Roz's section is titled The Robber Bride and her flashback is similar to that of her two friends. She speaks of her childhood, marriage, motherhood, her successful business career till Zenia interferes, seduces her husband Mitch who eventually commits suicide. A traditional Gothic figure survives as a powerful force in this novel which is about contemporary social reality in the 1990's Toronto. Atwood has reassembled parts of old legends and fairy tales in order to create her female monster who damages the lives of three women. What is noticeable in the novel is the way in which Atwood has made use ofintertextuality, a postmodern device. Zenia is a powerful 'other' who represents three different things to the three women. She is presented as a fairy tale figure in The Robber Bridegroom by the Brothers Grimm in Roz's story. "The Robber Bride, thinks Roz. Well. Why not? Let the grooms take it in the neck for once. The Robber Bride, lurking in her mansion in the dark forest ... The Rubber Broad is more like it - her and her pneumatic tits" (Bride 295 ). To Charis she is like the figure of Jezebel in the Old Testament. Charls used to choose revelatory passages from the Bible at random a nd when she confronts Zenia, she connects her to J e zebel. "She realized it as soon as she got up , as soon as she stuck her daily pin into the Bible. It picked out Revelations seventeen, the chapter about the Great Whore" (Bride 420 ).

Tony, on the other hand , always associates Zenia with war and courage. While Zenia mostly takes on' a demonic dimension in the novel, Thny gives her another dimension, which is that of a guerrilla figh ter. He associates her with

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the medieval French Cathar Woman warrior, Dame Giraude, who in the thirteenth century defended her castle against the Catholic forces of Simon·De MontfeTt. She was fmany defeated and thrown down a well. Thny's view of her is one of admiration. "Zenia is dead, and although she was many other things, she was also courageous. What. side she was on doesn't matter; not to Thny, not any more. There may not even have been a side. She may have been alone" (Bride 469-70). The novel is also a fantasy novel which examines the fantasies that underpin real life and fiction. Female sexuality has led to male fantasies and it can be said that Zenia inhabits that fantasy territory. "The Zenias of this world ... have slipped sideways into dreams; the dreams of women too, because women are fantasies for other women, just as they are for men. But fantasies of a different kind" (Bride 392).

She is the 'Other' woman since she is everything one wants to be and everything they fear. She represents their unfulfilled desires and is their dark double having multiple identities. She remains a mystery right throughout the novel. She lives in the stories of others which are all stories of seduction, betrayal and humili ation . She belongs to two different fictional discourses, that ofrealism and of fantasy. She exists both as a character in the realistic fiction and a lso as the "projection of three women's imaginations. She represents their unfulfilled shadow selves. It is imperative to note that the three women cannot let Zenia go in spite of the fact that they have been tricked and robbed by Zenia of men , money and self-confidence. They need her so much that Ze nia is resurrected back to life. Even when Zenia commits suicide, the three friends stand looking at her and even after they have scattered her ashes in Lake Ontario at the end, their stories are still about Zenia. The novel is also an expe rimentation with s plit subjectivity as is the case with Atwood's other novels. All the three women suffer from split subjectivity which is

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Postmodem Feminist Wn°ters

signaled in their doubled or tripled names. All the three suffer from a split and Zenia operates on this edge of desire and lack which is the borderline territory of the marauding Gothic Other. The novel is Atwood's powerful comment on History. When Tony repeats 'Zenia is history' it does not mean that she is dead and out of the way but that her story will continue to be retold in different versions and repeatedly speculated upon. The final image of Zenia is given by Tony in her

ambiguous elegy. "She's like an ancient statuette dug up from a Minoan palace: there are the large breasts, the tiny waist, the dark eyes, the snaky hair, Tony picks her up and turns her over, probes and questions, but the woman with her glazed pottery face does nothing but smile" (Bride 470). AB Howells sums up the effect of the novel Atwood takes up Gothic conventions and turns them inside out, weaving her illusion like any magician making us see what s he wants us to see, as she transgresses the boundaries between realism and fantasy, between what is acceptable and what is

forbidden. Of course these are fictions; Lady Oracle and The Robber Bride are illusions created by Atwood's narrative art, but they speak to readers in the present as they challenge us to confront our own desires and fears . Atwood, like the old Gothic novelists, like Joan Foster and like Zenia, does it with mirrors. (85)

AHas Grace, Atwood'~ next novel published in the year 1996, critiques the historical novel and the detective story. Her combination of a realistic narrative with fantastic intertexts is typical of the contemporary genre that Hucheon has labeled "historiographic metafiction. Atwood parodies the fictional conventions of the historical novel and the detective story. Alias Grace is a historical novel in that it deals with questions of historical consciousness in a historically conditioned situation on the levels of author, narrator, characters or action. The novel is about a historical figure Grace Marks and Atwood supplies abundant historical data about social reality and scientific life in nineteenth century Canada and also gives a survey of the text's documentary apparatus and extratextual sources that provide material for the novel. Jt

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The novel fictionalizes the "true story'" of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant who, at the age of sixteen, worked as a maid in the household of the gentleman Thomas Kinnear. Together with the stableman James McDermott, she was convicted of the murder of her e m pioyer and his housekeeper! mistress Nancy Montgomery. McDermott was hanged but Grace (alias Mary Whitney) escaped death because of her lawyer's brilliant defense. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but Grace was .initially sent to a luna tic asylum in Toronto after several fits of hysteria or "madness". Though convicted of the crime, Grace pleaded not guilty and her guilt has never been proved. In Atwood's novel there is a psychoanalyst and detective Dr. Simon Jordan who tries to discover the truth about Grace during psychoanalytic sessions. The novel integrates real, that is, historical persons with fictional persons. Both the historical and the fictive Grace are products of discourse. Grace's story, based on historical events, is a fictional COOBtruct. Grace's memories (ber narrative construct) form the basis upon which Simon hopes to discover the "true story" of what happened at the time of the murder. Grace provides Simon with a wealth of material details about her life, as a poor Irish im.migrant who entered Canada in the 1840's yet the historical and the fictitious Grace remain enigmatic in spite of these biographical facts. It is worth examining the way Atwood uses the detective genre as a subtext and subverts it. The formal features of a detective story are present. There is a crime and an inquest. The susp~t is Grace and the interpreter is Simon Jordan who acts as a detective. The novel is also an anti-detective novel since .the author refuses to satisfy the expectations of the reader interpreter. Simon knows that Grace has had fits of madness in the asylum and attacks of hysteria in the presence of doctors. Simon starts the session asking her to ten her tale. However, Grace, while pretending to obey that rule that Simon imposes on her; controls herself and

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a ' dialogic relationship between a realistic, a fantastic, and a poetic literary discourse parallels the central theme in the novel, the dialogue between the self and the self as "other". The "other- or the unconscious is excluded from the dominant cultural order and is situated outside rational discourse . Manifestations of the unconscious in the fantastic and visionary realm are unrecognized and unrecognizable within tbe frame of reference, within which Simon Jordan operates and within that adopted by the dominant culture. Atwood brings to light that which had been pushed into the margin of society. She wants to make the unseen visible, without, however. claiming to replace one type of truth by another. (446-447)

Atwood's novels are, undoubtedly, revisionary narratives. By using language as a subversive weapon , the wOIJ?,en characters in Atwood's novels create 8 female space for themselves. The novels project Atwood's double vision through which she manifests power politics at every level.

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transforms her memories into an acceptable narrative. Simon wants her to affirm the official (his) story, whereas Grace says she would like to be seen "'face to face" (Grace 379) meaning that she wants recognition as a subject with a story and a voice of her own. Sbe resembles Offred in The Haiuimsid's TaJe who counters the official language and ideology of the totalitarian regime with her personal (underground) voice. Grace attempts to provide Simon with' a deceptive chronological account with a clear, linear plot while Simon performs the role of 8 positivist detective who wishes to find out the hidden and essential facts of the murder. However, he fails because the solution provided in the novel involves the acceptance of the fantastic. The voice of the dead Mary Whitney admits having committed the murder of Nancy Montgomery. Simon is at a 108s since no rational explanation can be given for the supernatural events in the novel. Here Atwood reverses the roles of victim, criminQl and detective. The author is the criminal; the detective becomes the patient while the role of detective is given to the reader. .

Grace suffers from a multiple or dissociative identity disorder as she dissociates into Grace Marks, the dominant personality and Mary Whitney the secondary and lost part of he rself. Images and metaphors are used profusely to represent the repressed memories of Grace. The content of Grace's unstructured, chaotic inner world escapes easy definitions. She remains, therefore, enigmatic to Simon. The suppressed part of Grace is embodied by Mary Whitney, her deceased friend and secondary personality. Mary is Grace's double suggesting that Grace suffers from split subjectivity. Mary's spirit remains invisible, trapped and at war with Grace. As Hilde Staels puts it Atwood undercuts the realist code of the nineteenth century by interspersing conventions Gfrealism with fantastic and PGetic intertexts. She interrogates Simon Jordan's positivistic, monological perception Gf reality and his homogenizing discourse, which reduces a complex r eality and denies the multiplicity of the subject. The narrative form that establishes

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3 Postmodernism in the American Context-Toni Morrison as a Postmodernist

This chapter would highligQt the remarkable achievement ofThni Morrison, the African American novelist, by pointing · out her postmodem techniques, which provide Dew directions to African AID.erican women's discourses. The first part of this chapter would briefly describe the black women's literary tradition in order to place Toni Morrison in the right perspective, the second part would bring out the crucial differences between white feminism and black feminism and the third part would concentrate on the theoretical frame work which would help understand the split subjectivity of the Black female and then proceed to a detailed examination ortbe various postmodem strategies employed by Morrison in her novels. . Black women's literary tradition can be traced back to Phillis Wheatley in the eighteenth cehtury down to the boom period - the seventies and the eighties' with its remarkable talented writers like Paule Marshall, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor. W9men writers took it up as their duty to discover black women's self entrapped in the white society. Barbara Christian explains how difficult it has been for black women writers to achieve such an overtly self-centred point of view because of the way in which they have been conceptualized by both black. as well as white society. She say~

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The extent to ·which Afro-American women writers like Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Alexis De.Veau, in tbe seventies and eighties have been able to make a commitment to an exploration of self, as central rather than margina1 is a tribute to the insights they h:.ve called in a century or so of literary activity. (234 )

Early Mrican-American women novelists like Frances Harper, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen wished to please the white readers by creating a lady-like version of the heroines whom the Americans are expected to respect even though they are black. Ann Petry in her novel The Street (1946) presented women and mothers struggling against the social and economic hostilities stacked against them. 'One notable exception to this trend in early African American . women writers'works was Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were watching God (1937). She was one of the first black women writers to attempt a serious study of the black folklore and folk history. The major themes that emerged in the novels of Hurston were search for black woman's selffulfillment through community, quest for the ideal relationship between man and woman, black sisterhood and significance of fidelity in interpersonal relationships. However, there was a definite shift in the African..: American women's writings towards the process of selfdefinition beginning with Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha (1953). Maud Martha heralded the long awaited moment in African-American literary history .which was to establish the authenticity of ~lack women's true self by placing her life in the context of black cultur~ and community. The African American women's literary tradition took a qualitative leap into the worlds of ontological transmutation of black women's existential conditions in America with Paule Marshall's first novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1981). Marshall's women speak to their own self and try to articulate that self with a great force. During the sixties there was a perceptible change in the attitude of writers On account of the black women's renaissance initiated by Paule Marshall. This radical change in the late sixties manifested

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especially in the works ofAlice Walker. Alice Walker prefers to call herself a 'womanist' because 'womanism', in her opinion, expresses women's concerns better than feminism. It appreciates "women's culture, women's emotional flexibility ... and women's strength" (Gardens xi). She is committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and the triumpbs of black women. What she professes in theory is practiced in her novels The Third Life o[Grange Copeland (1970) and MeridisD (1976).

By the m.id~seventies,African~American women writers like Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison,Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara and Gay) Jones had not only defmed their cultural context as a distinctly Mrican-American one but also probed many facets of the interrelationship of racism, sexism and classism in their society. These three factors signify the tra umatic conditions under which African-Americans lived in white America. The y are systems of societal and psychological restrictions that have critically affected the lives of blacks in general and Africa n-American women in particular. Right from the days of slavery, the blacks, irres pective of sex ha d realized the cruel realit;y of racism. Sexism, more oppressive physically and mentally, was cause of grievance to the black women who were sexually exploited by both the black and white men. Just as blacks as a group were relegated to an underc1ass by virtue of their race, 80 were women relegated to a separate caste by virtue of their sex. Confronted on al1 s ides by raci a l and sexual discrimination, the black woman has no friends but only liabilities and responsibilities but, within the separate caste, a standard of women was designed in terms of a class definition . The idea l southern lady image of eighteenth century America was obviously a white, beautiful rich woman who did not work. The ideal concept of woman in the society, then, is not only racist and sexist but also classist. Since black women were, by nature of their race, conceived of as lower class, they could hardly approxlmate the norm They had t.o work; most could not be ornamenta1 or withdrawn from the world; and, according to the aesthetics of this country,

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they were not beautiful. But neither were they men. Any aggressiveness or intelligence on their part, qualities necessary for participation in the work world. were constructed as unwomanly and tasteless. (Christian 72)

Thus. African American women could not achieve the standard of womanhood on the one hand and on the other. they were biologically females with all the societal restrictions associated with that state. In short. the black women in America were made victims of triple jeopardy r acism, sexism and classism. There are crucial differences between white feminism and marginalized feminism. Alice Walker's defmitions of "womanist" supplanting "feminist" indicate that Walker celebrates a diversity of individual experiences while she simultaneously preserves African·American folk culture and values. White feminism is critiqued for excluding the presence and voices of marginalized women. Women of color, although they also defy a patriarchal dominance just as white feminists do, perceive the white female movement as another form of racialized repression thus causing them to disavow their advocacy for feminism. The lack of subjectivity attributed to African-American women in white feminist discourse is the major critique rendered by women of color. Morrison and other women·ofcolor writers fundamentally share with white feminists the same concern for recuperating the neglected subjectivity of their ancestors from patriarchal oppression. While the racial and economic condition imposed by mainstream society created many female - headed African-American families, it also fabricated the myth of a black matriarchy to reduce its fear of black women who took over the "male" responsibility of sustaining a family. The dominant society needed to undermine the confidence of the black women in their ability to be emotionally and financially independent. So they labelled them as deviant matriarchs who symbolize 'the 'bad' Black mother' who "allegedly emasculates (her) lover and husband" (Collins 74). The other stereotypical role is the tragic mu1atto who represents the conflict of values

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that blacks face as a conquered people. Although she

physicalJy combines features of both races, she is illegitimate and suffers from an identity crisis. The task of an Mrican~ American womanist is to deconstruct these controlling images and retrieve the subjectivity of women of color long hidden under the mask s of stereotypes and thereby to defy the reductivene s~ of sexual and facial oppression. Morrison attempts to chal1enge the political, social, racial and gender hierarchies in American literary discourse . By placing a woman at the center of her novels, she takes a historical approach in order to reconstructAfrican-American culture and history in slavery. She takes a postmodeni stand in altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream hi storians. By doing so, s he legitimizes the discredited past and presence of marginalized African American women. Instead of western logocentric abstractions, Morrison prefers the powerful vivid language of women of color, such as the vernacular tradition of African American narratives. This latter tradition has preserved the values and history of its culture. She reinscribes the received notion of slavery and history from a black female perspective. She is committed to authenticating and reconstructing the history of African Americans who were forbidden access to literacy and were overlooked by mainstream historians. She has attempted· to establish a space for African Americans, advocating the accommodation of the African-American literary tradition in the canon. Without employing a technically speciali zed language, Morrison transforms political conditions into a rich aesthetics, thus implying a theory of reinterpreted literature and revised history based on African American folklore and stories. Her characters emerge from the periphery, looking for ways to center their complex significance in literary discourse. In order to understand the theme of split subjectivity, a postmodern feature of Toni Morrison's works, it is imperative to examine the contingencies under which the black female self shapes itself. The American blaek is weighed down by a double burden as helshe is buffeted by two cultures, the

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Western culture and hislher black heritage. Hislher adjustment to the dominant culture is, therefore, marked by a conflicting pattern of identification and rejection. It is a well-known fact that the self-image of the blacks is fundamentally related to a colour-easte system. Black writers have time and again dealt with the crucial question of the interaction of the black self with society. The black self, it is generally seen, suffers form conflicting pulls in its desire to conform to mainstream coc;les and at the same time to reject them. The black American lives a precarious existence forced, as helshe is, to confront images, both positive and negative, which sift through hislher mind; some images are retained and make a lasting impression while others are discarded. In either case, for an evaluation of himaeWherself, the black American peers into mirrors constructed by those who . represent power and influence. W.E.B. Dubois's remark that the black man has been forced to see himself through the eyes of the dominant society expresses this dilemma . . According to Du Bois, the Blackman is gifted with 'second sight' and this double-eonsciousness results in his baving "two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one black body" (1961: 16-17). Such opposing concepts wreak irreparable havoc on the black psyche. DuBois describes the poignancy of the resulting frustration. ]t is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world paBsing and speaks to it; spew courteously and persua~ively. showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression and development; and bow their loosening from prison would be a ma~r not simply of courtesy, sympathy and belp to them but aid tAi alJ the world ... It gradually permeates tbe minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear, that some thick sbeet of invisible glass is between them and the world . They get e:r.eited, they talk louder, and tbey gesticulate. Some of tbe pa.88ing world stop in curiosity ... They still either do not hear at aU, or hear buL, dimly and even what they bear they do not understand. Then the people within may become hysterical. (1968:130)

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Postmodem Feminist Writers This theme - the theme of split subjectivity - assumes shape and form in 'lbni Morrison's novels. Morrison's success as a great American writer lies in her recognition that her double - consciousness can never be, perhaps never should be, integrated into a single vision. Indeed, she is in the truly remarkable position of being able to articulate with near impunity two cultures - one black, the other white American. By orchestrating this sense of connectedness between cultures rather than attempting to dissolve the differences, Morrison's successful career appears to have transcended the permanent condition of double·consciousness that amicte her fictional characters. Morrison's novels can also be analysed for its exhaustive use of myth since her novels are rooted in folklore and myth that both inform and transform the consciousness of her readers. In this she is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is re·visionist. She engages in a vigorous critique of the relationship between "the folk" and American culture thereby proposing a revision of received notions of gender, class and race. Morrison attempts to achieve cultural transformation in three significant ways - first she attempts to fill the cultural void that she perceives to be existing in the wake of historical transition. The void is in the lives of those black Americans who seem to have lost the oral tradition of story telling that once sustained a sense of community and enriched their lives. Second, she attempts to endow commonplace people, places and stories with the mythic grandeur and significance of archetypal narrative and ritual to redeem or tescue neglected literary material and the cultural vaJ\.tes on which it is based. The myt!lic impulse incorporates myth as the "shifting reality" (Strauss 3) that Claude Levi·Strauss reminds us it is. Thirdly, she attempts to make narrative a dynamic vehicle for preserving, transmitting and reshaping the culture in affirmative ways that celebrates the past, that give continuity with the present and that offer faith in human potentiaL Rather than mere mythical allusion, Morrison accommodates mythic archetypes to modem realities.

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Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye which was published in the year 1970 is a literary translation ofW.E.B. DuBois' theoretical premise - Double consciousness - as formulated by him in The Souls of BlacJc Folk. The central character, Pecola's means of achieving peace - doublevoicedness - is Morrison's means, through the complexity of her narrative structure, of positioning her novel in relationship to other Afro-American texts that explicitly explore structural means of merging two antithetical "selves". In The Bluest Eye Morrison presents the detrimental effects of the way white culture prevents African American girls from developing their own identities. The Lorain of 1941 is almost an industrial incarnation of the wastelandish underground where blacks like ebolly and Pauline Breedlove are pathetically relegated to a bidden, self-diminutive existence. Pecola, their daughter, infers from ber daily experitmces that her distinctive features as an African American do not fit the standards of white aesthetics and that her "ugliness" isolates her at school as well as at home. The pictures of white girls produced by the media make Pecola obsessed with blue eyes, especially those eyes of Shirley Temple and Mary Jane which are presented as perfect beauty by society. Offering a critique of mirrors and reflection, Jacques Lacan notes that "the mirror image could seem to be the threshold of the visible world" (Lacan 3). He envisages the mirror stage as having a clear function in growth because it gives form to the inchoate, disembodied image of the earliest months of life. This specular image both reifies and alienates the self or, in the process of recognizing oneself, it even enables identification of another as potentially compatible (Lacan 3). Like many contemporary black women writers, such as Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Paule Ma rshall, Morrison too believed in the anxiety black girls/women feel about what their mirrors tell them. She holds that girls growing up black and female in a white society often

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experience the malady of internalizing the belief that an aesthetically pleasing image is what constitutes the necessary precondition fOT receiving love and security. Pecola suffers from such a split consciousness. Sbe is enraptured with the blue eyes of Mary Jane on the candy wrapper. For Pecola, an approving mirror is equivalent to an approving mother. From the beginning, Pauline Breedlove's mirror reflects to b er daughter her own sense of inferiority, which in t urn , Pecola radiates back to ber. The reverence for whiteness. which is P eeola's most valued possession, is passed on to Pauline through the intergenerational mirror by her mother. She tells Pecala "So when I sees it (the baby), it was like Jooking at a picture of your mama when she was a girl. You knows who she is but she don't look the same" (Eye 99). Pauline's mother worked as a maid for a white family and by internalizing'its moves, allowed herself to be encased in the glass coffin. The intergenerational mirror has' already fractured Pauline's psyche and placed her beyond redemption. She resists any concept of internal wholeness based on cultural autonomy, believing that salvation will come from outside.

Contrary to her dream of a life full of affection, caring and peace, Pecola is raped and impregnated by her father ebolly who does not know any more effective way to express familial love toward his daughter. Devoid of mirrors reflecting primary iden~cation, Cholly's sense of self is not only wavering but also even fraught with simplistic notions that life is just a matter ofligbt over darkness, power over powerless and male over female or. father over daughter, to be precise, The brutal rape robs Pecola'a.eXisting sense. of autonomy by forcing ber to gaze into the same mirror he himself was forced to gaze into during his childhood days. She visits Soapbead Church, a minister who advertises that his holy powers heal people's troubles. Following his advice that she should poison bis landlady's dog, Pecola acquires her blue eyes in im,agination. an experience of mental disintegration, which totally segregates her from reality and deprives her of the ability to communicate with others. In

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her insanity, she escapes from her miserable unfulfIlled life, convinced into the delusion that she has the bluest eyes. Although at the end she looks into a mirror and admires t he false reflection, this fabrication foreshadows her failure. In her imagination, the split self produces her imaginary friend. She talks obsessively and nervously about her eyes with the friend who sustains her fantasy. She tries to see the blue eyes with the support of the imaginary fri end, delusively arriving at a blurred sense of reality and consciousness. The blue eyes promise Pecola's liberation from an unbearable reality becoming the mechanism for coping with ber t rauma, her loneliness, the rape by her own father and the consequent pregnancy. Morrison provides textual ambivalence by portraying the world c..f relationshlp in the McTeer family. As opposed to Pauline's, the mirror that Mrs. Mc'Ther holds out to her daughter provides enough sustenance and security to her daughter Claudia. Claudia develops a voice that surfaces from the crisis of adolescence and blackness. In spite of the stress and tension that she" encounters in white society, Mrs. McTeer displays the "love, thick and dark as Alga Syrup .. . sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base - everywhere ... " (Eye 14). The voices of her mirror transform Claudia's blues into sweet, exotic songs. Claudia narrates She would sing about bard times, bad times and somebody done - gone - and - left - me times. But her voice was so sweet and her ainging eyes so melty I found mys elf longing for those hard times , yearning to be grown without a thin di-i-ime, to my name ... Mis ery colored by the green s and blues in my mother's voice took all of the grief out of the words and left. me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable it was sweet. (Eye 24)

Mrs.McTeer does not succumb to societal indoctrination. She is able, therefore, to sustain her daughter's gaze. In Claudia, one fmds what Lacan calls a perfect "dialectical synthesis" of the internal self and the external reality. The symbiosis with self and community is what Claudia has

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inherited from the positive reflections of her maternal mirror. By mirroring one another, the McTeer family especially the

mother, endows her daughter with a sense of identity and self-worth, something that Pecola does not know. A consideration of the mythic archetypes in the novel exposes Morrison's innovative use of myths to underscore the tragic plight ofAfrican-American women. She re-visions myths in almost all her novels. She makes Use of the Demeter - Persephone myth. Demeter, the ancient Greek goddess, is in charge of the earth's fertility and its seasons; she is a major face of the Earth mother and her bond to her daughter Persphone symbolises loving, cosmic on-goingness, a feminine ground of being. In The Bluest Eye Pauline is no Demeter nor Pecola a Persephone signifying a nurturing ground of authentic being. Thus the myth is deconstructed by Morrison since in the African American context nature is not a primal force that can nurture and rejuvenate. The chief narrator of the novel, Claudia and her older sister Frieda plant marigold seeds the year Pecola's father Cholly rapes her. In the prologue, Claudia says that the earth, like Peco)a, refused to grow the planted seeds and at the end she closes the novel with the image of Pecola wandering, lost in madness at the edge of the town among refuse and sunflowers. The ungrown, sterile, marigold seeds symbolize Morrison's sense of the earth as untrustworthy. Nature is amoral and cares not at all if higher developed creatures.go mad or become extinct. There is no affirmation of life in the novel The life urge and spring reappear but they are for Claudia connected with the ache of whipping, not the resurgence of beauty.

Toni Morrison describes The Bluest Eye as a novel "about one's dependency on the world for identification, selfvalue and feeling of worth" (Gaston 197). In The Bluest Eye? black girlhood assumes tragic propensities when it borrows identity models from the mandates of white culture and from the· malevolent parental mirrors as welL As Gilbert and Gubar put it "To be caught and trapped in the mirror rather

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than a window ... is to ~ driven inward, obsessively studying self images as if seeking a viable self. This inward search is necessitated by a state from which all outward prospects have been removed" (37). Now, to seize upon and maintain B foreign image - inappropriative mental image of the self seals the individual in the wBstelandish soil of psychic underground, B terrain characterized by grotesque isolation and fragmentation. Pecola, thus, becomes a split subject unable to understand the gap between her reality and imagination.

Su/a (1973) is Morrison's detailed study of female subjectivity. Here she presents a woman who transcends the limitations imposed by society. In other words, she becomes a floating signifier defying any classification. She is emotionally isolated from other people. Both she and her friend Nel are growing teenagers and solitary little girls. They resemble each other in their emotional isolation from other people. Their a lienation from the large society paves the way for Sula's rebeUion against the set norms which a woman is supposed to follow in the black community. She remains at best a social outsider, as she defies the role she is supposed to play socially. Morrison shows how power relations can have a bad effect on the community as a whole. The look of white society, supported by a ll kinds of material domination, not only freezes the black individual but also classifies all blacks as alike, freezing the group. The position of the black woman is doubly difficult. Womanhood, like blackness, is other in this society. Pecola in The Bluest Eye is the epitome of the victim in a world that reduces persons to objects and then makes them feel inferior as objects hut not all outsiders become objects. Sula is one character who asserts herself strongly. She is one who refuses to submerge herself in a role. She is 'free' in the Sartrean sense of being her own creator. She has internalized the look of the community, Bottom, which reveals to her the idea that she is an outsider. Sula returns the Look by defying the society.

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While Th e Bluest Eye deals with the theme of split subjectivity, Sula explores the theme of a radically new black femininity. While doing so, Morrison makes her novel take on the hue of a postmodem novel since it subverts the binary oppositions black male I black female, past / present, Individual / Community etc. As Madhu Dubey significantly puts it Rather than merely combining, Sula plays feminism and nationalism against each other, staging the encounter of these two ideologies as a dynamic contradiction. In a difficult double move, the novel assumes a Ceminist perspective to clarify the Jimits of nationalis t ideology hut withdraws from a full development or its own feminist implications. (70)

It is necessary to examine the black Nationalist discourse and the importance of the black man in perpetuating the discourse. The Black man is seen as the object of racism and the black female is always assigned the subsidiary role of healing the black man's damaged masculinity. In other words, the black Nationalist discourse projected the black man as sufferer and the black woman as nurturer. BulB reverses or subverts this 'master' narrative. The novel neatly fits into what Linda Hutcheon terms as the predominant characteristics of postmodernism. As Hutcheon says It is easy to see, then, that., postmodernism in its broadeSt. sense is the name, we give to our culture's 'narcissistic' obsession with its own workings - botb past and present. In academic and popular circles today, books abound that ofTer us new social models, new frameworks for our knowledge, new analyses of strategies of power. This phenomenon does betray a loss of faith in what. were once the certainties, t.he 'master' narratives of our liberal humani st cult.ur e. But that loss need not. be a debilitating one. In postmodern literature, as in architecture, it bas meant a new vitality, a new willingness to enter into a dialogue with history on new tenns. It has been marked by a move away from fIxed products and structures to open cultural processes and events. There has been a general (and perhaps healthy) turning from the expectation of sure and single meaning to a recognition of the value of difference and multiplicity, a turning from passive trust in system to an

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acceptance of responsibility for the fact that a rt and theory are both actively 'signifying' practices - in othe r words that it is we who both make and ma ke sense of our culture. (1988:23)

Sula opens the space for a new articulation of black masculinity and fe mininity. SuJa "offers a view of female psychological development that defies traditional male centred interpretations of female development and calls out for an expansion of the woman·centered paradigm" (Gillespie 23). Nel·Sula's union is, first and foremost, a great challenge to Black Aesthetic, which insisted on black m a le·female relationships as necesSllry for the development of the Black race. Nel from whom Sula receives security, love and identity, constitutes Sula's other half. Their relationship is given a ·typical, romantic flavour by Morrison. To Sula, Nel is 'the closest thing to both an other and a seW (Sula 119). Their fantasies are described a s 'Technicolored visions .' Nel imagines herself in a fairy· tale heroine's posture of waiting passively for a prince. while Sula is imagined as the active prince galloping on a horse. Thus Sula takes on masculine principles. Therefore, Sula is adventurous like a male while NeJ is cautious and consistent. While Nellistlessly observes the conventions of the society, Sula flouts the conventions. Howeve r, Sula·Ajax e pisode points to the "noyel's capitulation to heterosexual conventions" (Dubey 74). It can also be said that sexism counts most in Morrison's potra it of Sula. With Ajax, Sula becomes like the other black women and lapses into the expected role of the black woman 'a s nurturer. When Sula seduces Jude, Nel's husband, the friendship between Nel and Sula gets ruptured and even aggravated. While Sula's seduction of Jude brings out her rebellious' nature, Sula's capitulation to Ajax "appears to be a compromise gesture that gives heterosexuality its due" (Dubey 74). When Ajax leaves her, Sula becomes aware that tJ:tere are no more new experiences in store for her and dies of a mysterious wasting disease. Even her ending is given a twist from the conventional ending. She feels proud that she is different from the other women in the Black community. As she tells Nel before she dies "I know what every Black

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woman in this country is doing. Dying just like me. But the difference is, they dying like a stump. Me. I'm going down like one of those redwoods" (Suls 143).

Sula, thus, represe nts unrestricte d and multiple perspectives in the novel. Morrison endows her with a birthmark, startlingly a ppearing on the eyelid, that calls attention to Sula's original powers of perception. The most noticeable opposition in the novel is that between the past and the present. Sula's new black feminity upsets this relationship. This is seen in the conflict between Bottom, the black community where the novel is set, and Sula. While Bottom clings to an absolute, static vision of the past, Sula perceives the present moment as pure possibility and by rejecting the community attempts to derme for herself a new identity in contradistinction to the values of the community. The Bottom, situated high upon the hills, is ironically designated. The naming of the Bottom denotes white man's lack of sympathy and concern for the survival of blacks. The Bottom presents a version of re9.1ity that closely resembles a cyclic repetition of the historical injustices perpetrated upon blacks. Sula's philosophy is pitted against that of her . community. She views time as a medium of ceaseless change and views self as sheer risk and imaginative possibility. She rejects traditiona l notions of family, eschewing marriage, babies and grandparental care. Her return to Bottom after a ten-year absence marks no symbolic reintegration into the community and her central position within it serves mainly to offset a total inner detachment both from others and more disturbingly from herse lf. Her growth traces a gradual decentering from the :cole of.a ctive participant to that of passive observer, and from there to conscious self-exclusion. This process can be traced from the episode where she actively faces down Nel's tormentors by cutting offher finger through Chicken Little's drowning where she is both initiator, swinging him a round and then helpless onlooker as his body flies out over the water to the day when she stands by. watching with passive complicity. as her mother bums to death and culminating when, at her best friend's wedding,

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she refuses even the implicit involvement of the observer, turns her back and leaves Medallion. The novel also reverses the traditional association of Black male with power. Morrison concentrates on womencentred households thereby inflicting a serious blow on the black male psyche. Eva is the founding matriarch and queen of the line. She establishes the value of this line. When we meet her, she is already in late middle age and the reigning deity in her household of daughter (Hannah), granddaughter (Sula) and various, adopted, interchangeable and peripheral male figures. We see in -a flashback what Eva has overcome in order to survive and give her children life. She was deserted in 1895 by a man, who was abusive and childish but she and her three children face starvation. In order to feed her children, she has mysteriously sacrificed a leg and regularly thereafter receives money to live on. She loses her left leg which reflects the loss ofthe symbol-making, intuitive side of the feminine, the softer, gentler values of the feminine. She is strongly, fiercely, rationally and rQughly protective until the end of her life. She lives on the top floor of the house. She returns to her virgin state after Boy Boy, her husband, leaves; men remain amusing toys to her, but all her life energy is spent in establishing a home. She scarcely ever descends to the lower floors of the house but sits on a throne-like wagon device to receive her faceless, nameless and interchangeable suitors. They surround and worship her but they are weak forces of the masculine. Eva kills her other two children. Her son Plum is the one male figure that Eva iives autonomy, a face, a future and that she allows herself to love with her full heart. She assigns her one son Plum the role of the moving dynamic hero Prince who will sally into the world and conquer it. Like the town's mad prophet Shadrack, Plum loses his masculine impetus, his initiative, in the white man's army. Shadrack returns mad. Plum comes home a drug addict. Plum wants to be contained again by his mother and sleeps his life away in a bedroom directly beneath hers but when he comes of age, Eva kills her beloved son. Speaking of the way the males and females die in the novel , Demetrakopoulos says

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Postmodern Feminist Writers Whether a character dies by fire or by wate r is crucial thematically; for in this novel , the apocalypse seems to come from within. All of Eva's progeny die by fire. Eva burns Plum's bedroom with him in it; when Sula i s a teenager, Hannah catches fire and Eva leaps from an upstairs bedroom trying to suve bel'. Morrison implies that Eva smothers Ha nna h in the ambulance because Hannah is 80 horribly disfigured . Later 8S the adult now in charge, Sula threatens Eva with fire to get her out of the house and into an old people's home. Sula dies of a terrible fever that com es on her after s he fall s in love for

the first time in her life. The Peace females thus die of a double dose of the masculine element of fire; the Peace males, of the feminine element of water. It is important to see that Plum has a lready s unk into the depths of the unconscious, has been drowned by drugs , before Eva burns him. The a dopted males die of literal water; the Dewey and Tar Baby a re drowned on Nationa l Suicide Day. Ea rly on, S ula drowns Chicken Little. It is as if the sexes are 80 polarized. That each dies of the other's basic e lement. The contrasexual, the oppos ite gender, is so unknown , so undifferentiated that it becomes demonic and killing. The whole Peace line dies of it. (57)

Sula's subjectivity i s brought into clear focus by contrasting her with her friend Nel. Nel is Everywoman. She is forced to repress parts of her selfby her mother Helene Wright. When ten-year old Nel goes with Helene to bury Helene's pious grandmother, Nel meets her own still beautiful prostitute grandmother. Helene lets her mother Rochel1e know that she does not want to have anything to do with her. Rochelle accepts this and leaves, but not without a tight, hard, anguished final embrace of her grand daughter Ne\. The fear that her mother's blood may resurge in Nel and destroy her makes Helene drive Net's young feminine imagination underground causing the young woman to repress many parts of herself that struggle to emerge. It is imporlan't to see that"the women in Nel's family contain and connect with adult males. Helene's husband Wiley Wright is scarcely ever home because he is a seaman; he is peripheral both in the actual home and psychologically. Jude's name reveals his much more central role in Nel'slife as a Betrayer.

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Morrison makes us understand that Jude has his own reasons for bitterness and hatred that make him betray Nel - the pressures of being a Black man kept from promotion because of white men. He abandons his family. It is Nel who ends up as sole parent; she cleans houses to support the three children who for many years become her life. Nel and Sula represent the two sides of the coin that stand for the total human personality. Both of them are Morrison's favourite characters since they are symbolic of the good and the evil persistently present in the society. Morrison says "Yet she (Sula) and Nel are very much alike. They compliment each other. They support each other. I suppose the two of them together could have made a wonderful single human being. They are like a Janus' head"(Parker 253). In SuJ8~ Morrison creates a female character who makes individualism supreme over the collective. As Karan Stein says "the truest heroism lies not in external battle, as in the wars which destroy the novel's men, but in confrontation with the self' (149). Morrison continues to experiment with traditional Western notions of identity and wholeDess in her Dext novel Song of Solomon. Patricia Waugh in Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern observes that the death of the self is characteristic of all postmodern fictions. Waugh also says that for those marginalized by the dominant culture, a sense of identity as constructed through impersonal and social relations of power (rather than a sense of i.dentity as the reflection of an inner -essence-) bas been a major aspect of their self-concept long before pos tstructuralists and postmodernists began to assemble their cultural manifestos. (1989:3)

Apart from analyzing split subjectivity, SongofSO/omon is, in many ways, a postmodern novel since Morrison indulges in deconstructioD at many levels. She deconstructs the implicatioDs of Christianity and the Bible which was used as a controlling tool to regulate the behaviours and feelings of the Blacks, deconstructs the white man's language and most importantly combines the mythic sense of meaning

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with the concrete situation of the blacks. Morrison plays variations on the mythic Icarus story in order to project the situation of the blacks in White America. In other words, through Intertextuality and Irony as a mode of signifying on the ancient myths, Morrison projects the dilemma or the double-consciousness of the blacks. Song of Solomon is essentially the story of Milkman Dead's search for and discovery of meaning in his life. The two parts of the novel correspond to the fundamental realities with which he must come to terms: his community and his family history. Part I treats bis current relationships with others and thus represents the present. Part II which treats Milkman's confrontation with the incoherent and fragmented stories that others share with him about his ancestry, represents the past. In Part I we learn that he was born the day after the black community's insurance man, Mr.Smith, committed suicide in an apparent attempt to fly from the roof of the hospital. The song that is sung at the time of his "flight" is actually the song of the myth of the flying African, the puzzling song that Milkman will later have to decipher if he is to understand the story of his ancestors. We then learn of the loveless marriage of his parents, Macon Dead II and Ruth, of the contrived circumstances that led to his conception, of his mother's unnatural act of nursing him well into his fourth year, of the neighborhood gossip's discovery of this act as the origin of his losing his birth name, Macon Dead III and being given the nickname "Milkman" (S%mon 15) and of his father's position as the most "'propertied Negro" (S%mon 20) in town. We also learn of his eccentric Aunt Pilate, of her daughter Reba and of Reba's daughter Hagar, al1 of whom Macon calls a "collection of lunatics" (S%mon 20 ) because they embarrass him.

In Part I we learn of Milkman's alienation from his two sisters , Magdalene, called Lena, and first Corinthians, of his alienation from almost everyone but his close friend Guitar Bains, the leader of a quasi~political gang, and of his prolonged but di sinterested love affair with Hagar, his

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cousin. In ~ddition, we learn of his parents' respective guiltridden attempts to explain the past to him, of his decision to end his affair' with Hagar, and of her subsequent monthly attempts to kill him. Most important, at the end of Part I we learn of his attempt, with assistance from Guitar, to steal a bag from Pilate which his father leads him to believe contains his inheritance of gold, of his discovery that this bag contains only human bones and not gold, and of his subsequent decision to leave home and head south in part to search for the gold but primarily to flee from, the urban milieu and the responsibilities and entanglements offamily, friendship, and love so that he could "live his own life (Solomon 2). This decision becomes the impetus for Milkman's journey to the TUral home of his ancestors, a journey which is narrated in the six short chapters of Part II. His journey takes him first to a small Pennsylvania town where he inquires about Circe, the midwife who cared for his father and aunt when their mother, Sing, died in childbirth. His inquiry leads him to a group of men who share their memories of Macon Dead in a series of storytelling rituals. He then finds Circe, the dreamy witch -like figure who helps him make sense of the fragmented versions he got from Macon and Pilate, and who tells him the location of the cave where his grandfather's body had been dumped . Unsuccessful at finding either the body or the gold in the cave, Milkman decides the gold must be in Virginia, the state from which his grandparents had migrated to the North. Once he arrives in Shalimar, Virginia, his search takes on all the characteristics of an initiation rite into manhood. He participates in a verbal battle known as the "dozens", he defends himself in a physical knife and bottle challenge, he becomes a member of a hunting expetiition, he experiences genuine sensuality for the first time, he deciphers the hidden meaning of his ancestral song, he endures the betrayal of friendship, and he discovers that his true inheritance is not gold but a legacy of his great-grandfather's heroic flight from oppression back to Africa. ]n the process of dIscovering that there is no gold to be found, he le~rns that the bones Pilate

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claim s are her inheritance are actual1y the bones of her fath er, who was killed by whites when he tried to save his farm . Part II ends with his journey to Michigan just long enough to get Pilate , whom he takes back to Virginia to give her fathe r 's remains a proper burial, with his recitation of his ancestr a l song to Pilate just before she dies, and with his ambiguous yet symbolic gesture of reunion with his friend Guitar at the end of the noveL A brief synopsis of the nove] does not bring out the complex postmodern strategies Morrison uses to project the situation of Blacks in White America. Christianity, which was not the native religion of African Americans, was imposed upon them as a controlling tool to regulate their behaviour and feelings. Morrison uses biblical names to illustrate the effect of the Bible on the lives of black people. Althou gh the names of the principal women in Song of Solomon are biblical, these names are ironic counterpoints to the situation of their biblical namesakes. Morrison's Rebecca, instead of being the exemp]ary wife, never marries and has one lover after another. Magdalena called Lena is not a reformed prostitute; s,h lf never takes a lover a nd remains in her father's house. First Corinthians who accepts the love of a working class man, Porter, is scorned by her father, instead of being celebrated like the Corinthians in the Bible. The way Macon Dead names his two daughters shows his lack of interest in them without either expectation or affection. He names the girls Magdalena called Lena and first Corinthians by blindly selecting names from the Bible without considerin g their implications. Moreover, the daughter's inability t o articulate the cause of the emotional detachment from the father and their displacement from the neighbourhood parallels the lack of knowledge of their names. Neither father nor daughters attempt to determine the meaning of their names and understand the Mrican American milieu that constitutes their most significant cultural reaHty.

The complicated nexus of names form the crux of the identity theme that runs' throughout the novel The best

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example is Pilate's name . Pilate is described as one who literally wears her name; it was chosen in accordance with an old African·Amencan tradition of selecting a newborn baby's name from the bible. Her father who could not read or write selected the name his finger pointed to first. Even though the midwife tried to advise him against the "Christ killing Pilate" (Solomon 19), he persisted partially out of confusion a nd melancholy over his wife's death at childbirth. At the age of hyelve, Pilate removed the paper that bears her name from the Bible, folded it up, and placed it in a tiny brass box which she wears as an earring. The fact that she wears her name suggests the value she places on her identity over her possessions - a quality that distinguishes her from her brother Macon. Her role as herbalist and conjure woman who saves Milkman's life is an ironic comment on her name. All the novel s of Toni Morrison try to show the machinery of myth, the ways that meaning can modify experience. She insistently raises questions about mythic or symbolic readings of life, often showing even the best intentioned at meaning going astray. She adapts the myth to the black historical context, reconciling freedom with factity on both individual and collective levels. The multiple perspectives not only qualify the myth by showing that any specific situation may be a different myth for each of the characters involved since each sees himself at the center of it; they a1so make the myth's relevance clear by showing the same problems manifested in many cases, so that Milkman's solution is for all Song of S%man more explicitly displays Morrison's intention to the image of flight to free the protagonist from a confining encirclement. The story begins with the failure of Robert Smith's attempt to fly from the top of No Mercy Hospital. He is known as a black insurance agent and later in the novel turns out to be a member of the Seven Days, the secret radical group which takes violent and merciless revenge on white people. Although his comrades assert that killing the same ntimber of whites as blacks

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murdered by whites is the only way to retaliate against racism, he appears to hesitate to believe in the dogma ortha Seven Days and fInally takes his life instead of depriving other innocent people of theirs. Morrison connects Smith's flight with Lindbergh's suicide fOUT years-earlier which drew a bigger crowd.

Milkman's birth occurs at the Hospital the day following Smith'. failed fantasy of flight. From childhood Milkman i. fascinated with the dream of flight but he is kept away. from the possibility of flight due to his vanity. When Milkman observes a peacock which alights on the roof of a building spreading its tail and questions Guitar why it cannot fly, the latter says "Too much tail, All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly. you got to give up the shit that weighs you down" (Solomon 179-80). It means that Milkman has to give up his material possessions and arrogance to free his spirit for flight. His quest begins with his separation from bis urban community in Michigan and his initiation into the rural Ip.ndscape, first of Pennsylvania, then of Virginia. His reflections on the airplane are of his lifelong preoccupation with flying. He reflects on bow the plane ride exhilarated him, encouraged illusion and a feeling of invulnerability. High above the clouds, heavy yet light, caught in the stillness of speed, - sitting in intricate metal become glistening bird, it was not possible "to believe he had ever made mistake, or could ... This one time he wanted to go solo. In the air, away from real life, he felt free, but on the ground, when he talked to Guitar just before he left, the wings of all those other people's nightmares flapped in his face and constrained him" (S%mon 220).

Momson juxtaposes "the African American folklore of a flying Mrican" with the Western myth bfIcarus in order to show a racialized connotation of flight which differs from the Western concept. Icarus fell fatally, because of his pride. Flying is restricted to African Americans and hence the African Americans created the myth of a flying hero which

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~ a "fictional strategy that is one step removed from realism in its referential relationship to everyday experience ... myth rewrites the rules of the social order" (Thomas 246).

Morrison also rewrites Greek myths. On Milkman's arrival in Danville, he meets people and asks for Circe, the midwife who brought Macon and Pilate into the world. Unlike the Circe of Greek myth who turns the men of Odysseus into swine, Circe in Song ofSolomon is more like a prophetess or sibyl. Milkman understands that Circe is like Pilate, a "healer, deliverer..(who) in another world would have been the head nurse at Mercy'" (Solomon 2(6). She is the one who directs Milkman to the cave that once held his grandfather's remains and tells him that his grandfather's real name was Jake and not Mason. She becomes a spiritual midwife to Milkman. . Mi1lk.man is drawn closer to the past and his roots in Shalimar, the birthplace ofhis graodparent.. In this mythical place, Milkman associates himself with the local people who love hunting. Throughout his stay in Shalimar, pronounced. "Shalleemone", (Solomon 261) Milkman hears children singing. The children in Shalimar sing a slightly different but similar :version of Pilate's verse "Solomon ,done fly, Solomon done gone I Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home" (Solomon 307). He realizes the mystery of his' ancestry that Sugarman in Pilate's song: ·0 Sugarman done fly /O Sugarman done gq'n e ... .. (Solomon 9) is a tran!:3figuration of his great grandfather Solomon or Shalleemone as pronounced by local people. Solomon, an African slave, decided to flyaway home back toAfrica leaving his wife Ryna and twenty children. He tries to take his youngest child Jake with him but drops him soon after he gets in the air. Milkman realizes that "these children were singing a story about his own people" (Solomon 304). In the last scene of Song of Solomon, Milkman soars from the Cliff, embodying the dream of flight of African Americans. Moreover, Iris transformation into mythic dimensions indicates that he has overcome the difficulties

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arms actual life, expelling his social and cultural limitation. Milkman's flight is depicted in the image of a fleet and bright lodestar. He empowers all African American slaves who ran away from slavery, heading for the North following the lodestar. Moreover, not only African-American sla ves but other travellers in different times and other places also relied on that star a8 a landmark because it universally indicates the north. The lodestar sustains hope for aU human beings. Milkman's realization of flight, his sudden knowledge that "If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it" (S%mon 341), also encourages the dream of anybody from any other cultural or racial group.

In Tar Baby Morrison deeply examines the "doubleconscious ness" so well explained by W.E.B. DuBois. Apart from s h attering mirrors and patriarchal language, s he also decon structs the Biblical Fan myth by imbuing it with an Mrican American pers pective. Jadine Childs, a Sorbonne educated" dilettante comes to the island called Isle de Chevaliers for an extended vacation from her world of modelling, film and theatre. She is s upported and brought up by the white businessman, Va lerian Street, who sees to it that she gets assimilated into the Street family. With an Art degree at the Sorbonne and her love for painting, Jadine dismisses African art which is never discussed in her Eurocentric art class. She denies African heritage and withdraws h e rself from African-American autonomy thereby uprooting herself from her origins. She suffers from psychological conflict. The ~rror which society provides her with is so dis torted and prejudiced that it blinds her insight. Her behavioural patterns, dress language associations and ideology are all those of the ruling class. Her fiance is a wealthy European Parisian who will bring her wealth and unquestioned status. Her allegiance is [J)(Sre to the Streets whom she regards "like family almost" than to Ondine and Sydney who slave for her. It is this attempt, to be other than herself, that causes Jadine's insecurity throughout the novel. In Tar Baby. Morrison deconstructs the stereotype of the black woman and reinscribes an autonomous black female,

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introducing a woman free from th e negative influence of mirrors. A woman in a yellow dress, a magnificent ·Mrican woman whom Jadine encounters at a supenna rket in Paris is not intimidated by her reflection in the glass door. Her right hand holds three eggs and her left. arm is fold ed over her waist. She floats through the glass door with dignity. Her pride, dignity and beauty attract everyone . Here, Morrison refutes the manipulative power of the mirrors by creating the yellow woman . Unlike Jadine, who internalizes capitalist white values, Son reflects a people - class mentaJity. He is at once aggressive and passive, logical and intuitive, carnal and spiritual. Son attempts to launch a political educa tion campaign, his primary target be ing Jadine, and his indirect target being the entire Street housebold. For tbe Mrican mas se s , he ha s a special love, despite his fee li ng of "disappointment nudging contempt for the outrage J ade and Sydney and Ondine exhibited in defending property and personnel that did not belong to them from a black ma n who was one of their own" (Baby 124).

ln, Jadine and Son, Morrison accentuates the extreme differences in their cultures. While Jadine represents the best of white culture, Son represents the best of black culture. Morrison subtly uses Christian symbolism. The Isle De Chevaliers with its beautiful flowers is similar to Milton's descrip~ion of Eden in Paradise Lost. Son's entrance into the island threatens the peace and harmony of an already flawed world. While in Eden, man's abuse was the forbidden fruit, in Tar Baby Morrison points out the violation of the rights of others. The greenhouse which Valerian Street owns becomes symbolic of his attempt to recapture something that he has lost. He spent most of his time in the greenhouse because "it was a nice place to talk to his ghosts in peace while he transplanted, fed, air layered, rooted, watered , dried and thinned his plants" (Baby 14). Unlike Valerian, who ravages the natural system of the island with modern technology for his exclusive use, Son who has great

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knowledge not only revitalizes plants but also encourages the residents to express their feelings. When Son comes to the island, he undergoes a ritualistic cleansing, a baptism and new beginning when he escapes his ship and swims through "blood~tinted" water to the island. As some critics have noted, Son becomes something oCa parody of the Christ figure, a man who is wrapped in a fine pair of silk pajamas in place of "straddling clothes" put in the 'manger' of the guest room, and welcomed as the white god's surrogate only son.

Terry Otten considers Son to be a serpent in the Garden of Eden but gives a different interpretation to his character. Otten brings out the deCoDstructive impulse in Morrison by

saying that More than the conventional tempter in the garden, Son is the manifestation of the black pariah in Western Culture, the terrorizing black male, the supposed rapist of white woman_ 1b Margaret and the whitewashed blacks at the estate he represents the 'Swamp nigger' a black 'beast' who jeopardizes a distinctly white Eden_ He is the rebellious black who will not hehave according to the rules or values of the system, and it is precisely on such grounds that all the characters except Valerian Street judge him. (Otten (4)

Son who is the intruder in Valerian's discordant household, serves as a nurturer and conservator of life and music. He brings to life Valerian's plants by simply shaking it. He is a man of the soil and nature. This is the reason why he is unable to survive in New York where both he and Jadine go. While the city makes her feel very happy, Son gradually loses his ability to heal, followed by a decrease in his emotional expression. He is not only physically trapped in their small New York apartment but psychologically as well without any external outlet. While Jadine is too self-conscious and self-sufficient, Son represents the community. She refuses to understand Ondine's (who serves in the Valerian household) worry about encroaching old age and her wish to live with Jadine (her niece). She says "Please don't need me now, not now. I can't

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parent now. I cannot be needed now. Another time, please I have spent it all. Please don't need me now" (Baby 280). Jadine evades personal responsibility and ignores Mrican American practice of caring and nurturing. Ondine tells her JadiDe, a girl has got to be a daughter 61'8t... She bave to learn that ... And ifshe never learns how to be a daugbter; she can't never learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child: good enough for a man - good enough even for the respect of other women. Now you didn't have a mother long enougb to learn much about it and I thought I was doing right by sending you to all them schools and so I never told you it and I should have. You don't need your own natural mother to be a daughter. All you need is to feel a certain way, s certain careful way about people older than you are. (Baby 281)

Ondine, though she works for white masters, still remembers the importance of matriarchal tradition which considers each individual as a whole person. Son, unlike Jadine, treasures his birthplace, Eloe, as a repository oftbe

past. Moreover, the "original dime", the first money he has earned and the icon of his past to which he is possessively and emotionally attached suggests his retreat into the confming past. It is to Eloe that he takes Jadine in order to create in ber a sense of black tradition. Jadine confronts racial ghosts in Eloe - all the black women in her life in the dark outside the door. The night women were not merely against her ... not merely looking superior over their sagging breasts and folded stomachs, they seemed somehow in agreement about her and they were out to get her, tic her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it ofT with their soft loose tits. (Baby 262)

Both Son and · Jadine are perched fixedly in the extremities of their positions, unwilling to temper them, the two now only pose ultimate to each other. Son needs Jadine to direct him toward material achievement in life and Jadine needs Son to give her a feeling of security and belonging. Jadine fails to resolve the cultural conflict and personal fragmentation. Son, on the other, does emerge as one who

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gets back to his roots so as to be in touch with himself. Hence he becomes close to achieving wholeness in the end in spite ofa contradiction of his cultural life s tyle. Like a pos tmodern novel, the e ndin g is left ope n-ended in which Morrison meshes opposites rather than pit them against each other in an effort to communicate the intertwining nature of things. Like all her other novels, she makes effective use of biblical and theological myths to underscore the pa ssage from innocence to experience. Although Son may be compared to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, as Terry Otten does, he is seen as redolent of the black nationalist mal(: activists of the 1960's and like Guitar in Song of Solomon he is the terrorizing black male stereotype of Western culture and challenges the blacks and whites on the island to fac e truths abou t themselves. As Otten puts it It is not the criminality of desire but self·denial that he exposes. In s hort, Son enter s paradise like the biblical serpent, articulates J adine's forbidden desires, muted by her counterfeit identity and ge found widely in literature, les8 attention has been paid to specific analyses of its implication in concrete settin$s. Not only do women diverge in terms of how race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability effect their experience, other factors such as historical context and geographical location also need to be part of the framework of feminist analysis. Postmodernism too is about difference in a number of senses - it can be disjuncture between objects of perception and the meanings these have as symbols of representation. As put forth by Derrida, it can refer to the multiplicity of voices, meanings and configurations which need to be considered when trying to understand the social world and which negate the possibility of any particular authoritative account and it can also relate to the multitude of different subject positions which constitute the individual.

In the works ofGita Hariharan and Shashi Deshpande we see a multilayering of postmodern - feminist differences. What these feminist stories bring out is that subjected to a multitude of forces, often contradictory, the women in India not unlike women elsewhere, have begun to move toward self perception, self expression and selfdetennination, slowly indeed and not entirely against tradition, within the family bindings. The western concepts of equality, individual rights and personal choice would challenge and dismantle the Indian family structure, which is based on sharing and

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accommodation. Deshpande and Hariharan's works dwell on this "difference- of postmodern feminism. Vmey Kripal, while diffenmtiating Indian postmodemism with Western Postmodernism, avers that ... while the same themes of geDder relations and self-identity, history, political and social reform, have been add.reaaed in the Indian English novel since the 1920's, the technique has changed dramatically since the 1980's. Again although the Indian novel haa been influeDced by the dominant literary trends and theories prevalent in the west, novelists have invariably adapted them or chosen out of them eclectically to suit representations of their society. Thus, the 1980's novelists may have been iDfluenced by CUlT8nt postmodernist writing and poebltructura.list modes of thinking but their noveLe can, by no stretch of the imagination, be described as postmod.ernist in the Western sense. The postmodern novels of the Euro.American world are a continuation of the modern novel and carTY to the extreme ita contratraditional experiments particularly those with language. (Kripal 30)

Gita Hariharan's first Common Wealth Award winning novel The Thousand Faces of Night may be read as revisionist myth-making program in which the novelist attempts to renew the whole community of women through representation of myths. The Thousand Faces of Night could be described as, what Malashri Lal calls "a narrative of split consciousness" (l09). She maintains that there is a paradigm of the 'Law of the threshold' in the Indian context that implies a strong sense ofthe 'inside' and 'out there'. She adds that men have partaken of both the worlds. The la w allows 'multiple existences' for men, a single for women and '8 step over the bar is an act of transgression. She observes that '"women have long been complicit in such gendered roles" (Lal l09). After spending a few years in America, Devi comes to India to live with Sits, her widowed mother. While returning home she had to leave behind the memories of Dan, a black American, for a better life in India which her mother promises she sure would fmd . The main story of her life is written by Devi herself and into this frame a number of other

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stories are incorporated; the legends of the mythical heroines narrated to Devi by h er grand mother; the stories of wives of saints and other pativrats8 recounted to Devi by her father-in-law and real life experiences ofsctual women either observed by Devi directly or narrated to her by her house keeper Mayamma. This commonplace story of marital discord and woman's quest for identity outside marriage is turned into a remarkable rendering of the collective struggle of women for self-liberation through the author's play with narrative structures -framing texts within texts, with texts overlapping in curious ways; her carnivalesque accumulation ofintertexts ranging from the tales from the Mshabharathato folk stories and herdeft. interweaving of these with the lives of real women. Hariharan's narrative voices strike a powerful chord in contempora ry literature returning to the multi-dimensional vibration of voices unfolding within a vast mythic social time space. (Vijayasree 177)

Devi becomes familiar with god-like heroes and heroines from tbe stories of ber grandmother. Devi's

grandmother's narration is a kind of revisionist mythmaking in its own right - sbe does not dwell on the more prominent figures of the Hindu myths - Sita, Savitri or Anasuya-oft.en celebrated as paragons offemale virtue. She retrieves marginal figures like Gandhari, Amba and Ganga. When Devi questions her grandmother about her mother Sita who is seen holding a veena in her hand in a photograph, the latter tells her the story of Gandhari. Gandhari is an example of a woman who turns her anger against herself. Gandhari, the mythical figure in MahsbhsTSta was gi\'en in marriage to the Prince of Hastina pur, Dhritarashtra. Though initially she was impressed by the relmement of culture and riches of the people of Hastinapur, later she became very angry on knowing that she was married to a blind man. In her anger she tore ofT a-piece of cloth and tied it tightly over her eyes. "She embraced her destiny - a blind husband with a self-sacrifice worthy of her royal blood" (Night 29). Devi's mother Sita resembles Gandhari. She skillfully plays veena and is also well trained as a daughter-in-law. One day the same music invites the anger of her father-in-law

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when he fmds all things undone in the prayer room. In her anger Sita pulls away the strings of her veena and never plays it again in her life. She cuts )lerself off from the link with the past in order to be a perfect housekeeper, a blameless wife. The attainment of these goals too is rather superficial, as over the years of her intense struggle, Sita bas distanced herself from her "dreamer" husband and "elusive" daughter. Another figure in the Mahabharata who could be regarded as the incarnation of penance is Amba. When Bhish.ma went to KlI:shi he heard of a Swayamvara at the king's palace. He went to the palace to get a girl for his stepbrother, Vichitravirya. He abducted all the three beautiful princesses, Amba, Ambika and Ambalika from the swayamvara. Nobody could stop them including the King of Salwa who was about to be garlanded by the elder princess Amba. Devi questions her grandmother why they did not stop him. Her grandmother answers "Once he (Bhishma) had laid his manly hands on her shoulders, Devi, she was no longer a girL A woman fights her battles alone" (Night 36). Amba pleaded with Bhishma to let her go but the king ofSalwa rejected her saying that it was Bhishma who had a rightful claim over her as he had won them aU in the Swayamvara. Amba returned to Bhishma and asked him to marry ber but he rejected her because he had taken the vow of celibacy. She tOok offence and with the desire to take revenge on Bhishma went to the forest to perform penance. Siva, pleased with her penance, touched her garland and promised her that whoever wore it and fought Bhishma in a battle would be able to kill him. She threw the garland around a pillar in King Drupada's court and went to the forest to meet her death. She was born again as Drupada's daughter Shikhandi. She was brought up as a son and later at the Battle of Kurukshetra she wore Amba's garland and went to the battle to see Bhishma's death. Devi parallels Amba's story with Uma's story who is Devi's cousin and a common girl. Uma gets married in an affluent family. On one occasion, Uma's father-in-law in a drunken condition

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kisses on her lips. She comes away from that house to stay with her grandmother till the old woman's death. Urna is unlike Amba since she does not have her fighting spirit. The mythical stories become 80 much a part of her life that Devi thinks of herself as the very incarnation of all the avenging deities. If at all she is wronged she would be the mythical Devi -lik.3 avenger. The illusory life orDevi comes to an end when she is married off to Mahesh after her return from America. He bas an executive job and enormous riches. When Devi wishes to take up a job, he says that a woman has much work to do at home as he cannot accept her liberty. Mahesh thinks that marriage is only "'s necessity, a milestone like any other. It's a gamble (Night 49). Devi reels cheated like Gandhari. slighted like Amba. She seeka solace in the presence of her father-in-law Baba, a retired Sanskrit scholar, who tells her few stories that are supplementary to her grandmother's stories. "Her stories were a prelude ·to my womanhood,· an initiation into its subterranean possibilities. His define the limits. His stories are for a woman ... an exacting touchstone for a woman, a wife" (Night 51). Baba tells her the story of Muthuswamy Dikshitar who had two wives. Dikshitar's second wife asked for jewellery to match her beauty. He said that when the goddess Lakshmi was with him, why should he care for unworthy mortals. The same night goddess Ambika, in her glittering jewellery came in her dream. Overwhelmed with the sight of the goddess sbe forgot her desire for ornaments. The story was intended to show how a woman subdues her wishes for the sake of her husband. Devi fmds solace in ~be story of Mayamma, the old house~keeper in Mahesh's house. Sbe narrates the story of her own life, which is a tale of tears and traumatic experiences. She is forced to undergo ten years of penance to get a son but the son grows into a wastrel SOD. Finally he dies. Mayamma then learns the strategies of survival and as she herself puts it '*1 have learnt bow to wait, when to bend by back, when to wipe tbe rebellious eyes dry" (Night 126).

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Devi's interest in life is renewed with the arrival of Gopal, a classical singer. Sbe decides to move out of the house of Mahesh "seeking a goddess who is not yet made" (Night 95). Sbe accompanies Gopal's troop but, as months pass, she no longer enjoys his concerts and becomes restless of this life too. Her initial fascination for Gopal wanes since she discovers that he is a flirt. Her life bas come full circle with Devi choosing to come back to her mother to begin her life afresh. As she nears her house, she hears the music of a veena. Sita plays the veena for her self·satisfaction and waits for Devi to return to her. Sita too is reborn as she retrieves her lost self by returning to her music. As Vijayasree points out The mothers of Devi's rebirth are, thus, manifold. Besides her mentors, there are many other women whose lives ofTer new and useful lessons to Devi. She draws on her biological matrilineage as well as s piritual and mythical heritage. The invisible energies of the ancient goddesses - Devi, Kali and Saraswathi among others as well as genetic inheritance from all women who lived in the past ages and experiential wisdom of her own contemporaries - all these contribute to the eventual psycho.spiritual growth of the protagonist. (181)

When Dreams Travel is a typical postmodem novel in whicb Parody is effectively used. Hariharan incorporates the past into the present by resorting to the past tale of The Thousand and One Nights which according to the Encyclopedia En'tannica (1974) [Vol.IX] ~s a collection of stories of uncertain date and authorship ... AB in much medieval European literature, the stories - fairy tales, romances, legends, fables, parables, anecdotes, and exotic or realistic adventures - are set within a frame story. Its scene is Central Asia or "the islands or peninsulae of India and China ... tbe tales' variety of geographiea1 range of origin - India, Iran, Egypt, Turkey and possibly Greece - make single authorship unlikely ... By the 20'" century Western scholars agreed tbat The Nights is a composite work consisting of popular stories originally transmitted orally and developed during several centuries, with mnterial added somewhat haphazardly at different periods and places ... "

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The novel uses The Thousand Bnd One Nights as Inte rtext. The novel can be terme d Historiographic Metafiction as it signifies on History. It refutes the natural or commonsense methods of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction. It also refutes the view that only history has a truth claim by ssserting that both history and

fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems. Such novels self-consciously remind us that while events did occur in the real empirical past, we Dame and constitute those events as historical facts by selection and narrative positioning. Both History and Fiction are linguistic constructs. Both are intertextual and they deploy the texts of the past within their own complex textuality. The inoortext used here foregrounds the feminist issue from a fresh perspective. The story is based on the cruelty and hypocrisy of a male king Sharyar who married a virgin every night, deflowered her and then executed her the next moming. This was going on for sometime till he married his vam's daughter, Shahrzad. She turned out to be a perpetual storyteller who kept the Sultan in tenterhooks. At sword point she was forced to create new stories in the grim nuptial bed of the palace dungeon. She talked with a sword hanging over her head "If she coUapses, the roof could cave in" (TrsveI7). The novel When Dreams Travel starts at a point of time long afterwards The Arabian Nights (another name for The 1001 Nights) ends with the Shahryar's happy married life and Shahrzad returning to a life of domesticity. This ending is absurd, according to Hariharan The mistake, of course, is.to imagine that a happy ending is possible when you have survived a ,shipwreck in a sea of blood. Shahryar should have killed himself in remorse, or at least renounced the city and the world, become a mad hermit in the desert. And Shahrzad? Can life continue static, people with little events, commonplace milestones, after martyrdom . (Travel 105·6 )

Hariharan, therefore, resurrects Shahrzad and gives her a voice. In the initial text she was silenced by patriarchy. Art was suppressed and there was no way out for a woman

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to come out of patriarchal. norms. Hariharan "interrogates the patriarchal assumptions of the original tale and of the culture in which the tale is.embedded, through a subversive use of the devices of metafiction, intertext and magic realism in order to foreground her feminist discourse in the postmodern context" (Kundu 151). The technique used by Hariharan to dismantle patriarchal structUres is similar to what Rushdie does in all his novels. Rushdie reads the Indian political scene from a poststructuralist perspective adapting certain strategies of the post-modernist novel and fashioning a new technique for his fiction. Vmey Kripal opines that Indian society with its traditionaJ, feudal, patriarchal structUI"Ela (consolidated further during the period of colonization) seems to offer sample materials and scope to a novelist desirouB of subverting and dismantling power structures. Official versions of his tory, patriarcha l versions of womanhood . class/caste versioDs of the s ubaltern are the discourses that are being contested and undermined by the post 1980's Indian English novelists. For example. history - writing is seen as ideological and official history seen to serve those in power. The marginalized protagonist challenges the hegemony of the state and even as the official version is offered. it is simultaneously subverted by other available, public versions. (27)

Hariharan does precisely this. Writing of tradition and destabilizing it, turning it on its hea d and installing an alternative has given a new freedom to her technique and style. Dunyazad, the younger sister ofShahrzad, on learning about the death of her elder sister, undertakes a long journey from her husband's kingdom, Samarkhand to S~abad. The moment she reaches the place her mind is activated by the past and the present. Dunyazad meets Dilsad, a slave girl and the two tell stories to each other for seven nights and days. As they tell stories, Shahrzad is revived. But Shahnad. like her own story is 8 survivor. The travelling tale undergoes a change of costume, language and setting on its way. It adapts itself to local conditions. to this century or that, a pennanent fugitive from its officious parent, legitimate history. And Shahrzad - s he too has learnt the lessons of the tales she told. She in now a myth that must be sought in many

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Dilshad and Dunyazad. the slave girl and the younger queen, the two silenced women in the source text. listen to each other's stories through seven days and nights. They recreate their individual past, the terror and sadness. By telling horrible tales which are sometimes funny they bring the past alive. Once Dilshad had wanted to literally "'steal" the stories of Shahrzad, the golden volumes (74). but she got it as a reward for helping the prince to dethrone the old king. The novel concludes with a vision of Shah.rzad - now aD old woman-who is annoyed when the stories are attributed to her

over the subsequent years . Sbe remembers, witb some reluctance, one or two stories that bave trickled back to her with the obligatory postscript. 'This story. these words, Shahrzad told the Shah in their marriage bed.' She cannot place the story. A feature or two seem familiar, it is true; or a swift. twist of irony. Could she have forgotten the rest? These stories, her illegitimate children. (7mvel24)

Shahrzad is the creator and artist who is the author of these stories. She at one point, even wants to disclaim these stories and tell them "Go away she wants to say. I've never seen you before" (Travel 274). Her act of storytelling itself is seen as a desperate struggle of the imprisoned genius to channelise its creativity, to achieve a feminine ecriture but in the original tale she was suppressed as it was told and written by male orators in an orthodox culture. Hariharan wants to project her creativity and imbue her with power. Bhattacharji spe.a ka of the organization of the novel The organization of this novel is a delight. in it8elf. For instance the second of its two pa.rtB "'Seven Days and Seven Nights·, is in seven chapters, each with two stories. There is obviously a stem maker in charge of the material who deliberately creates holes in her own umbrella narrative. Is a man'a narrative different from a woman's? Can there ever be right narrative? la knowledge always conveyed through clear and logical language or is a mystifying and mysterious style 88 useful? Like a good storyteller, Hariharan prods readers into finding their own answers. (11)

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Her ·s hort story collection, titled The Art of Dying stresses on the strategies women adopt to assert themselves. In this collection Hariharan resists and renegotiates the ideologies of gender inequaliti$!s. She defies codes of convention and revolts against the patriarchal orientation by projecting the incomplete and the marginalized into positions of prominence. The title story The Art of Dying pictures the day-to:day existence of women who are involved in the usual activities of'wifmg' 'childbearing' etc. While to the male eye it is a peaceful life, to women it is a negation of self. They desire for change, even pain which would help them to define themselves. Hariharan reveals the hidden, unsaid and unrevealed miseries of women in the stories titled 'Forefathers' and 'The Closed Room.' In the former story a daughter waits for her father's death who is the lord of his daughters. Desperately one of them asks the crow, her oracle, to tell her how long the "Cunning Tyrant" of a father would continue to live and make her the nursemaid. The story also points out the sufferings of women in the house who lack privacy and even dressing and sleeping are communal activities. In the latter story we meet a woman who, like a true wife, is a faithful healer but is denied the role of creator by her husband. In 'The Reprieve' Nagaraj Rao, the taciturn 'provider', the senior advocate and the head of a large joint family suddenly discovers himself thinking lasciviously of his late wife and their sex life. All his life he had but thought about himself, his comforts and discomforts. He did not even remember what he and his wife had talked about, how she had slept and where and what actually she had looked like for she was so distant and always wore a restrained look she has been tutored to assume as the mistress of the house. Thus like other postmodernist writers, Hariharan makes effective use of irony and leaves the stories openended with multiple perspectives. One has to probe for the subtext hidden in the main text. Doubts and uncertainties, passion and unsuspected guile surface again and again in the stories as they set about with great courage to tum the traditional conservative Indian life

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Postmodern Feminist Wn"ters upon its back, revealing a 8urprisingly soft. underbeUy. Here men and women, aged and dying, or dejected and burnt-out, reminisce about failure, about incompetence, about inability to cope, not with a sense of guilt anger, but with a kind of detached awe. (Pande 4)

There are also stories in which woman's desires remain uncurbed. In 'The Remains of the Feast' a ninety year old dying grandmother, now living the last days of her life could not resist the temp~tion of the heart and the craving of the tongue. She yearns for forbidden foods - garlic, chillies, meat, Coca cola. All along she has been living a life imprisoning her natural longings. She now breaks the shackles of a Brahmin widow. She smuggles biscuits, sarnosas, cakes and ice creams made by non-brahmin hands. She realizes her destiny and fulfills all her needs before ber death. Bhargava compares Haribaran's sbort fiction to resistant texts and adds that Narrating is never an innocent act and the narratives that frame a situation allow writers w dramatise the results of the telling. And this no doubt gives a signal to tbe reader tbat the tale told can and s bould react on bislber own life - tbat literature is not inconsequential. Jus t as narration is not innocent so, too is the fonn of narration. Women's short fiction is a mode of resisting and renegotiating the ideologies of gender inequalities. The short story replicates the partial and the incomplete constructs of the women writers. Just as women, it is an intense, concentrated and a complex interweave of tbe peripberal or the palimpsest. One is reminded here of Vidya Rao's intriguing glimpse of an alternative model of the self based on a morpbology of tbe specifically female body in ber 1990 a rticle 'Thumri as Feminine Voice.' Thumri is 8 small intimate form of singing (erotic romantic). It. is constructed in the male gaze and articulates fe male desire 8S patriarchally constructed. Rao argues tbat it contains a subversive edge, to be found in its structure and form . The space witbin tbe form appears to conform with traditionally feminine allocations of space in society. So also with tbe sbort story, whicb works on a small canvas, with a limited repertoire, a smaller number of scales and in an enclosed space. And yet the sbort story. like the 'Thumri' can expand the space available to it, not linearly but laterally, not outwards but inwards, relentlessly questioning the established and accepted structures. (77-78)

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Sbashi Desphande's works can be read as falling within a broadly postcolonial-postmodern feminist framework. Although she does attempt to examine various ideologically encoded binaries such as speech I silence, modernityl tradition, male/female, oppressor I victim, central I marginal, majority I minority etc. the politics of this strategy often seem to be problematic. SusbeiJa Nasta in ber discussion of the intersections of feminism, gender and postcoloniality observes "Language is both source and womb of creativity, a means of giving birth to new stories, new myths, of telling the stories of women tb~t have been previously silenced, it can also become a major site of contest, a revolutionary struggle" (xiii). Language has the potential to stage a 'revolutionary struggle' and become a site of contestation precisely because it is also the meaDS of social control and cultural domination. In a multilingual country like India, English can be seen both as an 'escape' from the overarching gender discourses say in Hindi or Marathi and also as a limiting factor fOT one who reads the work and how it is received . Shashi Deshpande and Gita Hariharan use English as their language of creativity and self-expression. While it is not a dazzlingly post-modem or avant-garde use of the language, it is one that articulates previously suppressed voices - those of middle-class women trapped between the conflicting demands of traditional expectations of a woman's role and the search "for self-fulfillment and identity. The Indian WOI:lan writer must struggle to overturn patriarchal, racist ideologies, constructs and systems of representation not only in an international context, but also at home in subverting and deconstructing indigenous male writings and traditions. . A number of complex issues are involved in the uneasy intersections of postcoloniality I postmodernity and feminism. Nasta contends that negotiating these intersections must involve more than simply setting up a series of bin~ry oppositions and sites of contestation. It is not only a que8tion of redressing the balance; the reclamation is more than simply shifting the ground of a Benes

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Postmodem Feminist Writem of opposition. and areas of struggle: whether male/female, colonizer/native, black/white, feminisUwomanist, postcolonial! poststructural, third worJdJfirst world, traditional literary canons/counter-discourses and forms - strategies of resistance are necessary which subvert and question the dominant 'father tongue' hut more critical is a need to break. through the notion of a literature of opposition set up by the kind of dialectic (mentioned above) and make space (or the expression of a 'multiplicity of perspeCtives' and literary poetics. (xvi)

In his analysis of two sorts of hybrid ties, Radhakrisbnan a rgues that there is 8 difference between metropolitan hybridity and po.,;:+colonial hybridity. Postcolonial hybridity involves a painful 'inventory of one's self' (753) that is, the self must be excruciatingly produced to inhabit many discursive positions. This is seen in Deshpande's work upto a point and is perhaps her way of trying to articulate her subject position and identity without claims to 'authenticity'. Througb a foregrounding of split subjectivities and selves, Deshpande is able' to theorize I make visible I legitimize the hybrid selfthrougb subversions of institutionalized and systemic erasures. The attempt to map out strategies of resistance in an Indian context is . clearly visible in Deshpande's work. She tries to examine and deconstrUct the binaries. Nasta posits that postcolonial women writers often write novels of "becoming" (xix-xx) where the voices of women from all sectors of the society are explored; voices which often link and bridge the oraVliterary mode and which frequently use a multiplicity of vision as a means of telling the story of a previously unwritten history or culture. The protagonistinarrator is almost always a woman and the woman herself is not merely a passive recipient, according to Carlston, of an identity created by these forces. Rather she herself is part of the historicized, fluid movement and she therefore actively contributes to the context within which her position can be delineated ... (thus the position of a woman) can be actively utilized as a location for the construction of meaning, a place from where meaning is constructed, rather than simply a place where meaning can be discovered (Carlston 236). Deshpande creates spaces from and into which silenced voices can emerge.

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The idea of intertextuality and the means by which women are discovering strategies to give voice to 'her stories' and redefine the nature of woman as subject becomes crucial to this strategy. In remapping and writing 'ber story' a new dynamic is created which repositions the reader in relation to the text. Intertextuality. reconstruction and 're-vision' are used to discover 'her stories'. She engages in demythologization of archetypes like Sita and Savitri through her protagonists' search for self-identity and selfexpression. Deshpande not only deals with the topic of women as marginalized figures but also implicitly examines fiction written by women. She bas created for us, according to Palkar, "imaginative .female historiography" (170). An Indian who writes in English belongs, at the very outset, simultaneously. to two different traditions - one of language, the other of culture. Both -language and culture - are living presences ~d together they produce a text, which is."written in a social context" (Ashcroft 298). Experience. bQth sensuous and emotional, imagination and fancy, intellectual inheritance·and engagement, all of these go into the act of writing. These are experienced and felt in a soci~ environment. In order to apprehend them and respond to them, one needs a language. One also needs a language to relate to temporality and futurity. George Steiner in his essay. '"The Language Animal" has observed that man and language are correlates; they imply and necessitate each other; statement of self, formation of identity, reciprocity all take cognizance of the other, which in the case of writing is the reader I listener" (66-72). Thus there is a primary relationship between the three adjuncts - culture, language and narration to access the meaning. A writer should tell a story which reflects the cultural social reality with all its visible aspects like relationships, segregated spaces, modes of behaviour as well as the invisible aspects like attitude to time, moral values, philosophical undertones, echoes of myths and oral narratives etc. In Writing from the Margin Deshpande looks at this category of writing as an act of translation.

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Postmodern Feminist Wn'ters I have known fOT a long time now through my own writing, that when we write in English, we are, in effect, translating. I know this when I find that in the course of a dialogue I find myself, unconsciously, of course, translating the words of a non-English s peaking person from Kannada, or Marathi or Hindi into English ... I remember Vikram Seth's remark about the Hindi translation of his A 8w"table Boy that tbe book bad gone back to its borne. Which is exactly the way I felt when my novel Tha t Long Silence was translated into Marathi and into Kannada. (Margin 37)

Roland Barthes has distinguished between the readerly text - one which is easily accessible to interpretation - and the writerly text - one is much more complex and polysemic and eludes easy categorization. Thni Morrison in Playing in the Dark has projected another concept, that of 'writerly' reading - an act of reading which goes behind the stage to explore the faUing together of the 'meaning in place, an act of reading which looks at the absences, the dark corners and the hidden clues. She writes My early assumptions S8 a reader were that black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of White American writers ... But then I stopped reading 8S a reader and began to read as a writer. Living in a racially articulated and predicated world, I could not be alone in reacting to this aspect of the America n culture and historical condition ... Yes, I wanted to identify those moments when American literature was complicit in the fabrication of racism, hut equally important, I wanted to see when literature exploded and undermined it. (15-16)

'Writerly' reading works at several levels. It begins to look closely at the use of language, its changing shades, the strategies, which the writer has employed to accommodate his imaginative leap and 'the manner in which the unconscious has surfaced through the written text. As a 'writer >reading' Morrison writes I came to realise the obvious: the s ubject fabrication of an Mricanist persona is reflexive and extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the i:ears and desires that reside in the writerly oonscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this. (17)

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The use of a language other than the mothe r tongue or the 'spoken' tongue of the society one lives in, is in ltself a narrative strategy. ]t, at once, shifts the divisions between readerships; it also simultaneously opens out spaces for communication between the two cu ltures of the two languages and writers cross over from one to the other in different and at times highly individualized ways. ]n Shashi Deshpande's case there is a meeting of two worlds - the language of reading among the urban readership and the emotional world of everyday experience. "My readers were people who read English, but lived their personal and emotional lives, like ] did, in their own languages." (Margin 32). Somewhere in some way, this meeting of two different categories has to become meaningful; one of the two or both of them have ·to lean to accommodate the other in order to reduce the 'foreignness' and 'isolation' of the language and to locate it in the vitality of a living society to pull both in the same direction.

~

Deshpande writes a variety of Indian English that is rooted in the ambience of regional cultures, those of the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. The culturally specific words and sentences sit easily and naturally in her body of work. Her search for the location of a self outside the contested territories of conservative discourses slowly subverts the binaries and transcends to a dimension where the woman is matured and free to understand herself and her ·Shadows'. She uses the narrative forms developed by men to express masculine values, to emancipate the artist and the feminine spirit. She never uses her writing as a mode of resistance. Words never come to her to express a radical break and declaration of self and independence. The contested terrain of her narrative is full of echoes and voices of a submerged life. In the process she is remapping a. new region from the perspective .of the oppressed and the marginalized. She does make attempts to go beyond the limitations imposed upon her by carving out a distinct way of narration, to confront her protagonist With the new hidden dimensions of her own self with its distinct identity on the

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edge of a complete breakdown. Spa writes a narrative of a feminine self that can stay away outside the frame of a traditional accommodative self, created by religious, nationalistic and feminist love to be governed by a male desire and not bothered by multiple 8ubjectivities in tUDe with the current critical thinking. Split subjectivity is the theme of Desphande's novel The Dark Holds No 'lBrrors. Sarita, the central character, tries to re·discover her true self. The novel begins by going back to the beginning which is already well past, in the middle age life of the protagonist, a life which Sarita constantly describes as a pose or 8S a role she has been playing all these years. Sbe understands the futility of marriage and what happens to a woman who assumes fmsncial power. The economic and social power that Sarita wields as a successful doctor paradoxically causes her marriage to a college lecturer husband to go to pieces.

Sarita, like Sula in Morrison's novel ofthe same ~ame, is fed up with the norms and values set up by the society. She becomes a transgressor of the norms and wishes to explore the potential hidden within her self. Her mother has accused her of her brother Dhruva's death "why didn't you die? Why are you alive and he dead?" ('/errors 34-35). That he is a boy is important to her mother. Further, her father has not taken any particular interest in her studies or development; as a man "He had never exhibited what he didn't have ... neither love, nor anger, nor dislike" ( '!errors 33). His "indifference" may be considered as an indirect express10n of patrjarchy that is emotionally injurious. In her many acts of violation of societal norms, Sarita defies her parents in studying medicine and becoming a doctor, defies them to marry Manohar and then breaks away from domesticity as she cannot take his sadism any more. In the next phase ofSaru's life, one finds her a successful career woman enjoying the recognition of her individual 'identity'. She becomes the object of admitting attention of her neighbours who come to her regularly for advice and

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help. Saru's gradual change in attitude towards Manu and their marriage corresponds with her change in attitudes towards sex. She finds the aggressive, virile masculinity a mere facade and the recent beard a mask to hide something. In due course, she feels utterly humiliated at the thought of being used and reduced to insignificance. She sees sex as a dirty word and the experience a terror, an inhuman insult to her personality. Her husband becomes a monstrous sadist inflicting inhuman torture on his wife. She fears disintegration. There is this strange new fear of disintegration. A terrified consciousness of not existing. No. worse. Of being just a ventriloquist's dummy, t.hat smiles, laughs and talks only because of the ventriloquist. The fear that without the ventriloquist., I will regress, go back to being a lifeless puppet, a smirk pasted on its face. Perhaps my ventriloquist. is my profession. For. as long as there is a patient before me, I feel real. Between patients there is nothing. (Thn"ors 22)

In front of her patients, Sarita pretends to make notes but only makes endless entwining circles on a piece of paper or cuts up the paper into little bits and seeing them falling down feels that they are bits of her mind falling down. Her brief stint of adultery with Padmakar Rao, her classmate and now a colleague, reflects not only the fall of her character but also her maniac obsession with self. Such an arduous journey for self-assertion must tell upon her psychic health considerably. She now has to find another recluse for convalescence and introspection. She realizes how in her quest for freedom to be herself, she has merely exchanged one role for another. She knows that somewhere on the way she has lost contact with her real selfwhich now lies obscured ifnot completely lost. She must peel away the multiple roles in which she has swaddled herself before she can arrive at the truth about herself. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the text begins, Sarita waits outside the old home, like Sudama in rags waiting outside the palace gates of Lord Krishna and Rukmini. Thus, back in her old home, Sarita slowly develops

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the courage and the trust in her self to relive all the myriad items of loss and humiliation that she had sustained and suffered through her childhood. The novel shows Deshpande's meaningful and creative re-interpretation of myths. By radically treating traditional myths she generates feminis t meanings. The divided woman syndrome is given concrete representation in the novel. The story orthe possession ortbe woman by the Devi belongs to common folk mythology of South India. She is unable to connect the divided woman's condition which she witnesses in the temple with her own predicament. She sees a woman who acts mad when possessed by the goddess in the temple. As Devi, the Goddess, possesses the woman, so too is Sarita possessed by her mother. Her relationship with her mother is ambivalent. The reason for this dates back to a time when she and her brother Dhruva had left h,ome to explore forbidden territory and without her mother's knowledge. Dhruva accidentally got drowned. Dhruva in Srimad Bhagavathamahapuranam is a symbol of the respected child who is ignored by his father. Deshpande wents to say that a female child's position is unlucky when compared with this symbol of neglect. Her mother curses Sarita since she feels that she is responsible for her son's death. Like Dhruva, Duryodhana is another symbol of rejection in the Mahabharata. He is discontented and envious because his cousins, the Pandavas, are preferred above him in various ways. Duryodhana hiding in the lake at the end of the Kurukshetra battle is similar to Dhruva's drowning in a pond and Saru's state of being possessed in the water of the mother's womb. Ancient myths may project only male sufferers and Deshpande seems to point out the patriarchal setup which highlighted only males relegating females to a subordinate category. Saru's search for understanding of her mother is a search for her own feminine side and for the reunification of her split self. Her journey is from a hostile attitude towards the mother as the creative essence of the feminine. She

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achieves her balance by communicating through the personal mother, reaching up to the Mother Goddess: Devi , Shakti, De meter, Ishtar, Is is; wh a teve r the name, sh e is the archetypal Great Mother. Roots and ShadolVs assumes importance as a novel which deeply explores the third world women's individual subjectivity. Indu, the protagonist, is caught between culturally determined stereotypes of carriers of tradition and continuity and that of the liberated deviant in the western world. Dina M.Siddiqi, a scholar from Bangladesh, looks at "transnational ~eminism " in Bangladesh. Much of what she has to say about Banglades h ha s echoes in the Indian situation a well. She feels that though there has been a shift a way from the homogenizing tendencies of liberal feminism in favour of cultural re lativism, certain basic questions remain unanswered. She fmds the current multicultural agenda of American feminists limited to the "production and consumption of a multi·colour, all inclusive catalogue of women's lives elsewhere ... the effect of which is ... to reinscribe gender as the primary axis of inequality(5). She finds "history, pontics and power- relationality" absent from such analysis (5). Instead she vouches for a historically informed. culturally specific analyses of condition of women, one loca~ within the history of modern imperialism and which cautions against the unreflective use of hegemonic epistemological frameworks ... The foregrounding of history, as transnational feminist practices insist upon, points to the impossibility of completely s eparating the discursive from the material aspects of reality, of discussing contemporary gender relations without confronting the spectre of Empire in whatever form - colonialism, globalization structural adjustment or the sa.-called war on terror. (18)

Thus the essential woman cannot be unravelled independent of the forces that ge~erate it, but from within the very constructs that fashion it, the confluence of forces from which subjectivities emerge. The novel Roots and ShadolVs deals with a woman's attempt to assert her individually and realise her freedom. It depicts how it brings her into confrontation with the family, with the male world

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and society in general. The novel revolves round a Brahmin family who live together in the ancestral bouse built years ago by Indu's great grandfather. The family is ruled once by 8 tyrant Akka whose impending death occasioDs a conglomeration of dispersed family members and amongst them is Indu, distant for more than ten years·to the drama that is enacted in the great Indian institution of the Hindu undivided family. Indu in the novel is an example of a "postcolonial hybrid", Hybridity, in the Indian situation, goes beyond apparent east-west binaries of mainstream western episterne to ~corporate complex cultural intersection of regional, linguistic, caste, class and gender affiliations" (Sarbadhikary 146).

Indu is caught between two worlds - the familial past she had rejected and the middle class metropolitan space she inhabits. She leaves home at the age of eighteen to marry the man she loves. She plays the role of wife to perfection to keep her husband Jayant happy and satisfied. Despite her reluctance, she continues the frustrating job of writing for the magazine just to keep Jayant satisfied. Her public sphere . is unsatisfactory because her profession as a journalist is a continuous process of compromise , trapped into the compulsion to shower adjectives on society dames and spinning deceitful narratives for public consumption. Fleeing the familial trap of tradition and religiosity she has landed herself into another; the almost pathological middle·class compulsions to be upwardly m olbile in a materialistic society. Indu occupies a liminal midd.le~lass space. We can, as she realizes " .. . flatter ourselves that we've escaped the compulsion of the past: but we're still pinioned to it by little things" (Roots 34). Indu returns home on being summoned ' by Akka, the domineering matriarch as she is on her deathbed. Akka has made her the sole heiress of her property and the household atmosphere becomes charged with resentment by the family members. Indu wakes up to her role as the new family matriarch. She no longer had "any desire to mould people to change them, to reform society" (Roots 15). So Indu decides to dominate 88 much 88 Akka

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had, but more discriminately and judiciously. The crucial point is to decide between Mini's marriage and the selling and subsequent dismantling of the family home, to use Ak.k.a's money for the benefit of those within the family or .those on its periphery. In both counts Indu sidesteps the trappings of emotion and sentiment. She conducts her cousin's Mini's marriage after explaining to the girl the aftereffects of marriage. Indu is surprised to hear about Mini's acceptance to the proposal in spite of the fact that the boy had "heavy, course features and crude mannerisms" (Roots 3). Mini decides to marry him because she is left with no choice and she can do nothing about it. The house is sold since she feels that it had already outlived its entire life. Though a painful decision, she takes it boldly. Contrary to Indu's promise to Naren not to help Vithal, he is the first to benefit from Akka's money. Indu's process of self-knowing is through what can be termed as multiple practices of self ways of knowing and governing ourselves that are inherited

from historical traditions and also through a defiance ofthoae very traditions. "The subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, .. . througb practices of liberation, offreedom ... starting of course from a certain number of rules, styles and convention that are found in culture" (Sawicki 288). Indu assumes the role of aggressive sexuality. Her physical relationship outside marriage with Naren becomes a defining moment in her life. She decides she would not leU Jayant a bout N a ren ... That was not important. That had nothing to do with the two of us and our life together. But there were other things I had to tell him. That I was resigning from my job. That I would at last do the kind of writing I bad always dreamt of doing. That I would not, could not enrich myself with Akka's money. That I would, on the other hand, pay for Mini's Wedding. (Roots 187)

Indu's travails are an assertion of the self beyond the restrictive structures of familial and social norms. The India presented in the novel is one in which new subjectivities are emerging. Indu's uncompromising and paradoxical feminine self longs for self-expression. It finds its roots in the bome

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and with her husband. In the end comes the realization that freedom lies in having the courage to do what one believes is the right thing to do and the determina tion a nd tenacity to adhere to it. That alone can bring harmony in Jife. Indu's experiences teach her that one should listen to the voice of one's conscience and be faithful to it. Freedom within marriage is possible if one dares to do what one believes is right and tenaciously follows it. This alone can bring harmony and fulfillment in life. She has confronted her real self and she knows her roots. Indu discovers the meaning of life in her journey to individuation.

A Metter of Time (1996) and Smell Remedies (2000) a r e resistant texts . At its core, however the resistant phenomenon is important primarily because it questions and seeks solution. In the's e two nove ls the author poses a problem, questions it, fights it and then works towards acceptance and reconciliation. Resistance is a symbolic mode of action. Resistance is never enacted in a vacuum and is governed by larger socio-cultural constructs and hence in reading resistance in literature, the entire structure within which the action takes place is to be taken cognizance of. A Matter of Time weaves an intricate pattern of relationships within an extended family spanning across generations. Manorama, Kalyani, Sumi and Aru belong to four generations of the same family, each representing a specific mode of experience. Manorama is the typical product of patriarchal value system for she resented the birth of Kalyani, her daughter, as she wanted a son. She forces a marriage between two unwilling panners, her d~ughte r Kalyani and her younger brother Shripati. Kalyani-Shripati marriage is at the centre of the novel. Three children are born of this marriage - Sumi, Premi and Madhav, a mentally retarded child. Kalyani's real tragedy begins when her four year old son Madhav is lost at the railway station Shripati doesn't talk to Kalyani for the next thirty years and even sends her back to her parent's home . He returns only after his mother-in-law Manorama urges him ·on her deathbed to

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return. Sumi faces the same plight when Gopal wa lks out of the marriage. After Glpal's desertion, Shripati, Sumi!s father, brings Sumi and her three daughters to Big House - their parental home . Sumi tries to work out a strategy to withstand the shock and the emptiness left behind by Gopa) . Aru her eldest daughter is different from her mother since she fights for the rights of women while Sumi tries to retain self-identity. The novel opens with a graphic but somewhat saddening description of the 'Big House' named 'Vishwas' with roots deep into the historical past where the future drama 'will be enacted. It is to this house that Sumi returns with her three daughters after Glpal's desertion. Their story helps to unravel the history of the bouse and its three generations of m aster and mistr esses. Th e Big House stands as a symbol of patriarchy. It was built "by a man not just for himself but also for bis sons a nd sons' sons" ( Time 3).

Part I titled 'House' begins with a line from the Brhadaranyaka Upanisbad "Ma itreyi- said Yagnavalkya "Verily I am about to go forth from this state (of householder)." The author questions the entire patriarchal value system through this noveL While in the ancient myth and in modern life a man leaves the household, it is impossible for a woman to leave her house. While Gopalleaves because he cannot cope with the household activities, Sumi cannot. She, burdened with three daughters, explores ways of coming to terms with the painful reality and going on in life. She tries to get ajob and learns to ride a scooter and above a ll , discovers the writing talent within her and produces a play for her school children. Kalyani - Shripati, Sumi - Gopal in the novel contrast with Maitreyee and Yagnavalkya in the Brhad arany~a Upanishad. This reiterates Deshpande's view that ... myths are both necessary and relevant. to huma n lives, they come out. of some human need ... We are looking for a fresh knowledge of ourselves in them, trying to discover what. is relevant to our lives today. We don't. reject the ideals, but w~ know we can't approximate to these pictures of ideal womanhood. And we will not. bear any guilt. that we cannot. do

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More important than knowing what we are not is to know what we are, what is possible for us? (Deshpande 1997: 8)

80.

Part II, "The Family" points to the craving for son in Indian families. The family becomes complete when a Bon is born, a woman feels fulfilled as the mother of a male child. Part III "The River" shows the flow of time. The epigraph is from the Katha-Upanishad where Yama 8sks Nachiketa not to probe the mystery of death. "Whatever desires are hard to attain in the world of mortals, ask for all those desires at they will "0 Nachiketa, (Pray) ask not about death" (Tim. 181). The epigraph highlights Nacbiketa's questioning not Savitri's who had an equally strong argument with Yama. The author is hinting at the male - orientation of the culture and she effectively uses irony by opening the section with a male who questions about abstract things like death and presenting females who excel the men by their innumerable achievements . While the males in the nov el think of existential philosophy and such other abstract ideals, the females become assertive individuals shouldering the family burden with great poise and commitment. Sumi becomes self-assertive. Kalyani gets back her identity;Aru celebrates her eighteenth birthday and becomes the focal point of the novel. She asks a legion of questions and slowly she gets her answers. Gopal, her father, has an unexplained existential drive and he leaves everything behind, including a happy family, in his quest for the self while her grandfather Shripati locks him self up against all communication because of frustration, anger and despair. For him, nursing his suffering self is far more significant than caring for his wife.

Aru voices her resistance more vociferously than the others. Aru and her sisters cannot take in their grandmother's placid a ttitude and even their mother Sumi comes under their bitter cynicism. To them, it is important "that you speak out, state the truth, that you stand up and defend yourself, that you refuse to be misjudged" ( Tim e 143). Small Remediesis a multidimensional novel with death at its foreground, music at its background and the complexities of existence as its thematic basis. Here

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Deshpande explores complex postmodern narrative strategies. There are four narrative frames of the novel. First of all there ' is the narrative frame involving Madhu's proposed biography of Savitribai Indorekar. t:he second strand is Munni's story; Baiji's (Savitri's) child born out of wedlock. The third and the fourth strands are those of Savitribai Indorekar and Leela. The Epigraph to the novel indicates at the beginning. Father of the earth, Protect us; Father of the sky Protect us; Father of the great and shining waters, Protect us; - To which God shall we offer our worship?

This prayer from the Rig Veda speaks of the human dilemma. The small remedies that are external to us; "the Ganeshas in the riches, the decorated Thresholds, the mango leaftorans, the Oms, the Swastikas, the charms and amulets - all to keep disaster at bay, to stave off the nemesis of a jealous god" ( 11me 81) are but desperate remedies. Human beings have to find their own strength to stand ftrlll and that strength lies within. In the Prologue the reader is told, "This is Sam's story. Or rather, Joe's story as related to us by Som. To me the two men, narrator and object are equally part of the Story, to remember is to think of both of them" (11me 1). The novel explores the relation between memory and mimesis. The narrative is woven of several interrelated stories mapping a larger network of relations offering genealogies of characters justifying their human and existential contexts. There is profuse intertextual references and the reader is invited to make sense of the complex network of texts. Virginia Woolf is a major presence in the text. Lily Briscoe's effort to paint Mrs. Ramsay in time, coinciding with the narrative ending with Lily finishing her frequent1y deferred painting job, matches with Madhu coming to terms with Bai's biography.

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Postmodem Feminist Wn"ters

The novelist adopts the structure of a biography within a biography. Madhu the protagonist, has been commissioned by a publisher to write a biography on a famous c1assical s ing er, Savitribai Indorekar, doyenne of the Gwalior Gh ara oa. This s tory takes Madhu to BhavanipuT. Madhu cannot begin the book because the strands become complex and get more and more complicated. On the one hand, there is an effort to separate each s trand from the intermingling of many both hidden and lost and on the other, the attempts to retrieve Borne vital information from Savitribai who zealously guards them as very personal that poses a real problem for bringing the narrator into transparency. Madhu wants to clear the controversies surrounding Savitribai's reputation. She wants to reconstruct Savitribai's reputation. She wants to reconstruct Savitribai's public image. A rebel Brahmin bride, s he elopes with her Muslim tabla accompanist and has a daughter from him. Now she wants to recreate her past in such a way that the revised and reconstructed links give greater clarity to her fadin g image. Madhu discovers that Baiji's (Savitribai ) life is intertwined with other lives. Chandru who commiss ions Madhu's project wants to be a doctor of hearts to both Madhu (who has lost her son) and her husband Som. Madhu's story ofBai an.d her daughter Munni and lover Ghulam Saab does not match the way Bai wants the story recorded. Baiji's reluctance to acknowledge Munn i (the child borne out of wedlock) forces Madhu's memory along a track that is at once ghastly and dangerous. It is Munni who figuratively and literally pres ides over the intersections of Madhu's past life as a s mall town doctor's daughter a nd her immediate present as a doctor's wife and Adit's mother in Bombay. One s tory is therefore linked with another. Madhu's story is Sam's story. Munni's story is Arlit's story because both a re kil1ed in the communal violence that stirred up after Babri Masjid's demolition . The incident that Madbu wants to exciude from her life involves a sexual encounter that she has with Dalvi, a friend of ber father long before s he met

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80m. 80m thinks this as an act of betrayal and is tonnented by the thought of his wife's sexuality. When Madhu thinks of 80m's response to th e inc i dent, Deshp~nd e u ses intertextuaJ citations from Faulkner's The Sound and the Furry. Madhu's imaginary conversations with her son remind us of confession sessions before Mr.Compson. "Father I have committed incest F a ther I h a ve- (Fury 116). Madhu's interpretation of Sam's pain is almost an ironic reversal of Quentin's perverse obsession with the underbelly of his sister's sexuality in Faulkner's novel. Madhu's images of Baiji, of Guhulam SaQh and Munni, of Joe and Leela and Som and Adit cannot stand apart from one another. Everything is related to everything else. With flashback and stream-oC-consciousness techniques, Bai's story gets written. It is Leela's biogra phy as well. Savitribai and Leela were the rebels of their time; hoth dare d to dream and to achieve freedom . Both surmounted the hurdles and achieved what they wanted the freedom to 1>e'. Lee la is a communist and a very independent woman. As a Leftist, she is against Gandhi's Ahimsa and Satyagraha. She does not believe in caste and marries Joe who is outside her caste. Though a die-bard communist supporter, she becomes a victim of the gross gender discrimination practiced in the communist party. In Small Remetj.ies Madhu as a prospective biographer is supposed to rework Bai's repetitions of her life and times through a retrospective linguistic ordering. As a writer who is given to re-gathe ring facts, the biographer enlists the authority oftbe biographical subject.. Madbu is already under her subject's power and her biographer's status is already suspected.

Desphande believes that the Indian mythic mode does not really provide women with a strategy for liberation from male hegemony. The Indian mythic image of women most prevalent in the literature of the time was that of the pativrata tradition - the Sits, Sati, Savitri image of the silently suffering, sacrificial wife, mother and daughter. A

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critic like Dorothy Spencer recognizes the phenomenon and comments on the subservient role played by women over the ages. It seems dear that in women as wife.., are dealing with a literary ttadition. Sita., Savithri, Sh_knnth • l • - At any rate, they ...,...,ptify the ideal and th......... ..aety'a valuea - that -. husband is a woman.'. god- - how Sita .ubmitted to Rama; abe followed him into the wiJ.ten.e. and afterwards. Whea be baniahed. her, abe tuiued and went without one word., though abe was i n.....,."t. (Shirwadkar 49)

Jaya in That Long Silence describes her situation after Sita. The crisis in the novel erupts when Mohan, the engineer, is implicated in a corruption case involving some of the high_ranking officials. He and his wife Jaya who is the central character and the narrative voice, move to an unfashionable quarter of Bombay to ...k anonymity. Her situation, Jaya says, is like -Sita following her husband into exile, Savitri dogging death to r eclaim her husband, Draupadi stoically sbaring her husband's travails ...• (Silence 11). This limbo of waiting allows Jaya to reflect on her own life and come to terms with ber various roles 88 daughter, sister, wife,mother, daughter-in-law, friend and writer of genteel 'feminine' news paper pieces. Despi~ her marriage to Mohan and subsequently becoming the mother of two children, she is lonely. Her husband cannot understand her feelings as a result of which she is tom from within. Jaya realizes the split in herself. Sbe realizes that she has another self that she has forgotten: she was her husband's Suhasini ~e soft smiling placid motherly woman. A woman who lovingly nurtured her family. A woman who coped (Silence 15). She is different from Jaya or any other middle-class housewife lost in the trappings of a comfortable life; away from the problem of the rest of the wor1d; she is like Sits. the woman of the weekly column that Jaya writes and which she detests. Such roles do not offer her the promises and the intimations of a fulfilled life . She is far away from -rile job I wanted to take , t he baby I had

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wanted to adopt and the anti·price campaign rd wanted to take part in- (Silencs 120). Perhaps she had not cared to pursue these ambitions on her own eventhough she accuses Mohan fOT ber faj1jngs Jaya toeaes between several selves without taking care to listen to tho prompting of her own true station in life and u1timately emerges victorious instead of submerging herself in the protective shadows of such

characters 88 8ila or Snbasini At the end we find Jaya as a fully evolved consciousness and at the threshold of a new life different from the ones articulated through the cherac:ter of Site and Suhaaini. She bas matured to write her own autobiographical narrative, teIling the story of the development of a self' and anarrative. She refuses to 8IlCCUIDb to any preaeribed role model and thwarts any attempt to limit, circumstance or inhibit her life. Ber "ability to gather the fragments of her life in a cohered narrative ultimately lifta her up above the common run of people. Vmay Kripal avers that lle

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