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Title Rewritings: A Feminist / Postcolonial Study of Absences in Western Canonical Texts

Author(s) Mirza Muhammad Zubair Baig

Abstract This feminist and postcolonial study of the rewritings explores the absences found in the Western texts. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1968), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1987) and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) are the primary texts which have been analyzed during the study. Generally, these rewritings respond to three Western canonical texts which are Homer’s The Odyssey, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Specifically, the rewritten characters are Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre, an undocumented woman (Susan Barton) and Friday from Robinson Crusoe and, Penelope and her twelve maids from The Odyssey. The word “absences” has been taken synonymous with silences and erasures in the study and the feminist and postcolonial parallel themes of othering, identity and representation have been studied. The deconstructive reading of the texts has revealed that rewritings occupy the in-between space generated between the theoretical positions taken by Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak about the recovery of voice. Though the reversal of binaries has been noted at the level of narrative voice, yet the narration by women has also created new binary oppositions in the texts to the disadvantage of the women and the colonized people. During this process, some women and the colonized characters have been mispresented and their stories have been left-out. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s taking rewriting as a process of rerighting is “partially” applicable in case of these texts as the rewritings have partially re righted the characters. The main factors which have limited the effectiveness of these rewritings are the anxiety of influence, authorship and mispresentation shown by the rewriter and narrator, strong patriarchal and colonial set up and absence of justice for the women and the colonized characters. However, the prominent feature of these rewritings is that the narrators have neither compromised with the patriarchal and colonial acts of injustices nor have resigned to their imposed identities. The rewritings have been, however, successful in building up an alternative view for the despised characters. The newly developed erasures in the rewritings create possibility for new rewritings of these rewritings.

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2014-01-01

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