Hamlet's Ophelia: the ultimate tragic female.

The role of the female character has changed with society, the Ophelia that the modern audience experiences may be entirely different from the Ophelia experienced by Shakespeare’s contemporary audience; to suit Shakespeare to the audience’s needs and expectations a way of getting around rather out of date subjects is through the use of non spoken acting; body language, staging and word emphasis.. Although, an understanding of context is vital, we must have a perspective upon ourselves as an audience, aware of the fact we can never be objective; women’s constantly changing position in society means we project our own beliefs and attitudes towards the plays.

Due to this, ‘woman’ becomes a symbol, rather than being viewed as an individual. A woman then is always representing something, never herself. A boy actor playing a female part onstage in Shakespeare’s time meant that woman was a symbol, a representation, as she was never actually present. Thus the disguises and cross-dressing not only requires a skilled actor but an equally imaginative audience. Cleopatra, upon her death scene, by creating comic relief exclaims that she ‘shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’th’posture of a whore’ (Antony and Cleopatra V.ii. 218-20).In modern performances, however, the woman is playing woman, making the characters intended for a male actor, albeit for a female part, perhaps, feel uncomfortably real? Modern performances allow, therefore for an actress to really delve into the making and origin of a part, never seen before. Shakespeare, presents qualities, individuals, that are trapped in a world intent on categorising; as Juliet Dusinberre remarks, Shakespeare ‘saw men and women equal in a world which declared them as unequal’.

Arguably one of the most tragic female characters is Hamlet’s Ophelia.

Ophelia is often only described in reference to Hamlet, she is ‘a creature of lack’(Elaine Showalter) without a stable, definite character or personality. Wispy, unstable and, well, kind of irritating. Ophelia at times seems merely a passage for symbolic meanings. White, purity, innocence, and the fine line between female sexuality and insanity.
The play circles madness continually, with Hamlet placing himself in the centre, and Ophelia thrust in against her will.

‘For Hamlet madness is metaphysical, linked with culture, for Ophelia it is a product of the female body and female nature’. Ophelia literally deflowers herself, she ‘drowns in feeling’ in comparison to the rest of the characters around her, contending that she feels too much. Is the madwoman here a heroine? At the point of her suicide, is she the only character rebelling against the social order? She feels, despite the fact that her very self is a construction made by the men around her.

The other woman in Hamlet, Gertrude, is under similar constrictive circumstances. We cannot truly gauge her as a person, as she never appears without a man in tow. Gertrude, likewise, is an addition, a tool to move our plot forward.

Poor Ophelia has her inner feelings misrepresented or ignored constantly;

POLONIUS

What is ’t, Ophelia, he hath said to you?

OPHELIA

So please you, something touching the Lord Hamlet.

POLONIUS

Marry, well bethought.

'Tis told me he hath very oft of late

Given private time to you, and you yourself

Have of your audience been most free and bounteous.

If it be so as so ’tis put on me—

And that in way of caution—I must tell you,

You do not understand yourself so clearly

As it behooves my daughter and your honor.

What is between you? Give me up the truth.

OPHELIA

He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders

Of his affection to me.

POLONIUS

Affection! Pooh, you speak like a green girl,

Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.

Do you believe his “tenders,” as you call them?

OPHELIA

I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

POLONIUS

Marry, I’ll teach you. Think yourself a baby

That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay,

Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly,

Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,

Running it thus—you’ll tender me a fool.

Polonius scoffs that Hamlet has taken a true fancy to her, which causes Ophelia to take a step back from her earlier confidence. She shrinks back from him, suddenly not knowing what to think. The men in Hamlet want Ophelia as a puppet, to act and say on their demand. He will ‘teach’ her what to think. To be constantly treated like a blank canvas or a vehicle with which to move the action forward is enough to send any sane woman to madness. David Leverenz notes that ‘from her entrance on, Ophelia must continually respond to commands which imply distrust even as they compel obedience.’

Ophelia is eventually misled by Polonius and Laertes; who tell her to ‘be something scanter of your maiden presence. / Set your entreatments at a higher rate/ Than a command to parley.’ (Hamlet, I. iii.121-3) the use of military language, to set her ‘entreatments’, and not to discuss tactics situates Ophelia in an unfamiliar masculine domain, emotionally devoid. They, in essence, are removing all emotion from courtship, viewing it as a battle. The men in her life seem emotionally deficient. Deficient of femininity, and are sort of asking her to do the same, rid herself of emotion and plan battle, lucky woman.

Hamlet’s ‘madness’ is mistaken by Polonius for ‘the very ecstasy of love’ (II.i.100) and it is this misunderstanding that marks the destruction of Ophelia. While Lady Macbeth has the power and will to manipulate her status and fate, Ophelia’s is taken totally out of her hands. This mistaking of politics for love means that Polonius’ view of Hamlet, is that he, repulsed,

Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,

Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,

Thence to a lightness, and by this declension

Into the madness wherein he raves,

And all we mourn for.’ (II.ii.145-9)

The madness not evidence of his love for Ophelia, he rejects her. This cruel rejection pushes her further into the background. Her relationship to Hamlet is illusory, the audience experiences nothing of his thoughts or feelings for Ophelia before her death,  his preoccupations with himself and his uncle prevent Ophelia from existing in his consciousness. Hamlet’s mistrust for his mother is mistaken for mistrust of her; of women in general.

Most Notable books of 2014

The New York Times have released the top 100 books of the year. The most notable aspect of this; is the true diverse range of authors and novels - a truly refreshing sight indeed. Here, here.

Here are my top six.

The Book of Strange new Things : Michel Faber

Faber is a master of the weird; in his defiantly unclassifiable novel, a pastor from Earth is picked to satisfy an alien planet’s mysterious yen for religious instruction.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage - Hakuri Murakami

A novel of a man’s traumatic entrance into adulthood and the shadowy passages he must then ­negotiate.

Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng

In this novel, a tragedy tears away at a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio.

A Girl is a Half Formed Thing - Eimear McBride

Personal favourite! A debut, read this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/useless-prayers 

We Are Not Ourselves - Matthew Thomas

Thomas’s gorgeous family epic follows three Irish-American generations.

Euphoria - Lily King

King’s novel turns an episode in the life of Margaret Mead into a taut tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace.

Overall, a brilliant list. For the full story: see here: 100 Notable Books of 2014

Foucault: How much attention should we pay to the lives of theorists?

‘Foucault cannot be understood without understanding his early years in the communist party, his polemics against the French left, the degree to which Marx’s culture was so deeply influential on the left bank, and Foucault’s own attempts to create new left space in relation to those various tendencies and elements. That’s what a critical reception of Foucault, or anybody from anywhere, is about’ (Cornel West)

How much attention should we pay to the lives of theorists?

Foucault in his bureau.

Cornel West stresses the importance of a theorist’s own personal history in relation to a complete understanding of their works, most particularly their political history.

Barthes acknowledges that the ‘image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions…explanation of the work is still sought in the person of its producer…once the author is found the text is explained.’

In his essay ‘Death of the Author’ Barthes goes on to disprove this need to discover the writer by declaring the death of the author. The death of the author can be applied not only to fictional writing but to theoretical as well. ‘Contemporary culture’ as Barthes terms it, feels a need to ‘find’ the man behind the text to satisfy our own needs as a reader, but in looking so attentively behind the text, whilst looking for the history, it is possible to lose sight of the text itself, what the writer aimed to it to mean in its entirety.

Roland Barthes.

  It is because Foucault was so influential in many different fields of theological study that Cornel West suggests it is vital to have knowledge about his life and his political standing. To get an understanding to why his work may have been so influential, it is important to know the beginnings of his works; of what, or who, had influenced him.


 It was the student-led revolt that ‘almost toppled the French Government before itself collapsing’ in 1968 ‘and his own involvement in student unrest in Tunisia’  that made Foucault so politically active and it is clear from then on that Foucault felt very strongly about political issues; this is shown clearly through the subject choices of his work. Before the late sixties his essays such as ‘The Order of Things’ and ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’ was not as politically charged as his writings to come later on such as ‘Discipline and Punish’ and ‘The History of Sexuality’.

The social history of France around the time of Foucault’s later writings show the ‘ways in which textual processes cannot be confined within the bindings of the book’ , and because of this lack of confinement, the space in which the social, political and the textual interact, as is proposed by West, that it is important to have a basic understanding of Foucault’s political beliefs and of the French government during his lifetime.
Foucault attacks institutions and the power forces acting behind them.  This strong interest in power relations in contemporary culture can be said to stem from his teachings from Althusser, of whom he was largely influenced.

Althusser's theory of ideology.

Louis Althusser.

Althusser wrote on the Ideological State Apparatuses of which Foucault explores in ‘Discipline and Punish’ and ‘The History of Sexuality’.

Before embarking on a study of Foucault’s essay, in the case, it would seem relevant to gain an understanding of Althusser’s explanation of Ideological State Apparatus by reading his work first. Without knowing about Foucault’s education, then, J. Weeks notices a ‘rich diversity’  in Foucault’s work, his large range of publications are all connected with the human psyche; that he is ‘exposing the conditions for the emergence of modern forms of rationality especially the human sciences and comprehending the complex mutual involvements of power and knowledge’  Foucault has taken Althusser’s notions of power and taken it a step further in relating it to the history of today.  In beginning at a similar place to Foucault, with a similar knowledge of Ideological State Apparatuses we are more likely to gain a better understanding of Foucault, to see exactly what he has expanded on. In noting Foucault’s influences, the readers of his work are able to increase their own understanding of what Foucault means when he speaks of power.

It is also important to note that ‘while his earlier work saw power in terms of exclusion, from the late 1960’s he began to analyse it in terms of what it constructs rather than what it denies’  It is often felt that ‘an author’s drastic changes in style or opinion must be explained’  and to explain such changes we look first to the history. In an attempt to understand the text we reach out towards the author for background information in order to ground the text, to give it a beginning and an end with which to help interpret it. So in this case we look towards the events of 1968, assuming this has had an impact on Foucault’s outlook, his work seeming more optimistic, that one is able to use these power relations in a positive manner.
If the key essays of theorists’ are often worked upon by other theorists, i.e. Foucault’s works has been very influential in New Historicism, and expanded upon to be prominent within a whole new school of study; that the beginnings of a theorist’s work and significant life events that may greatly influence their writings are important factors to consider when studying the past, present and possible future of a theory.

        New criticism is concerned with ‘prying literature and writing loose from confining institutions’ . Said explains that New Criticism’s success was due to the fact it is anti-institutional, he explains that ‘English studies became narrower and narrower, in my opinion, and critical reading degenerated into decisions about what should or should not be allowed into the great tradition’  In a way he suggests that such institutional traditions prevent progress, that radical thinking that breaks from these is the only way to progress, ‘Galileos and Einstiens are infrequent figures not just because genius is a rare thing but because scientists are borne along by agreed-upon ways to do research, and this consensus encourages uniformity rather than bold enterprise’
‘In this view of things, expertise is partially determined by how well an individual learns ‘the rules of the game’. It was considered intellectual, then to be a well read critic; New Critics eradicate the need for ‘background’ reading, making theorists more accessible, therefore increasingly more popular.  For the New Critics, nothing outside of the text is important and in order to find what we need; it will almost always be within the text.

The way to approach a theoretical text, then, is to take example from New Criticism, approaching it in a purely formalist manner; that contextual information should be disregarded. Everything significant therefore is contained within the text itself; this approach can be applied to theoretical writing. John Crowe Ransom, for example, as a New Critic would expect those following New Criticism to treat all texts in the same manner, including that of his own.

 In determining the unimportance of the contextual aspect of the study of texts Ransom suggests that readers of ‘Criticism Inc’ should read his work in light of this.
 ‘His important work as an editor of the prestigious journal the Kenyon Review, and his friendships with many noteworthy authors and critics, Ransom was able to gain a wide and respectful hearing for his and other New Critic’s literary views and values’ . In order to have a fair hearing of his views on literature, then, Ransom had to build a status and a reputation first; his very success as a theorist was based on his previous literary history and social standing. Ransom’s work before moving into New Criticism shows his involvement with the Agrarian movement; his essays ‘The South- Old or New?’ (1928) and ‘The Aesthetics of Regionalism’ (1934) showed concerns that poetry did not reflect southern American values, however, these concerns were not replicated and the essays were not received well. In his attempt to engage with culture and society, it had not responded leaving Ransom to search in a new direction for recognition. In doing so he did the exact opposite; stressing the critical aspect to criticism, that it is not historical and that one should not look outwardly towards culture and society but inwardly to the text itself.

Gerard Gennette notes that critics tend to ‘identify the narrating instance with the instance of “writing”, the narrator with the author, and the recipient of the narrative with the reader of the work’  This is in the case of fiction, in regards to theoretical writing, in most instances, the author and narrator are the same; as is the ‘recipient of the narrative’ and the reader. Foucault questions the importance of the author/ narrator in ‘What is an Author?’; he explains that,

the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one, limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of[ works]. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.


Therefore, the life of an author should not be sought out solely to fill the work’s gaps. The author is an ideological construct and Foucault attempts to remove himself from becoming this ‘product’ with which to impose our own ideologies. Whilst acknowledging that ‘discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten’ , he wanted to remain anonymous in an article for Le Monde; Macdonald, in ‘Marx, Foucault, Genealogy’ states Foucault’s reason was ‘out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard.’  Contrary to Ransom, who achieved his ideal audience through his reputation and social connections, Foucault aims to remove himself from the text so that his audience can read him ‘for what he says (in his positive discursive dispersions), not what we think he should say’ ; the name of an author, ‘its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates’  so that as the culture shifts and changes through time, Foucault realises the statuses of writers will shifts also, hence his eagerness to be heard before being seen.


In an article in the Threepenny Review, a ‘Conversation with Michel Foucault’ the interviewer, Dillon, before showing the interview states that Foucault spoke but once about his personal life. The fact that Foucault said little about himself in an interview about his professional work is understandable, but the writer of the interview felt he had to explain why, the Foucault was a ‘private man’; there seems to be an intrinsic need to discover the man behind the text which always presents itself. Even in contemporary culture, in tabloid newspaper, useless information about celebrities is presented only to provide for this curiousness of society.
Personal facts often are, on the whole, useless for and understanding of the theorist as a theorist, not as man. Foucault himself notes that ‘we are prisoners of certain conceptions about ourselves and our behaviour. We have to liberate our own subjectivity, our own relation to ourselves’ .


Equally, Eagleton notices ‘Derrida’s own typical habit of reading is to settle on some apparently peripheral fragment in the work – a footnote, a recurrent minor term or image, a casual allusion- and work it tenaciously through to the point where it threatens to dismantle the oppositions which govern the text as a whole’  One cannot focus too closely and too intensely on one theoretical piece. Essentially, reading a footnote of a theorist’s life is what we are doing. Especially with theorists with such an abundance of publications to take just one piece without consideration of social or political influences is too extreme. In the same way that social conflict is embedded within literature, it is also embedded within theory; if a work of literature ‘embodies a particular social attitude’  then social attitudes are embedded within theorist’s writings. As Foucault’s work is mainly concerned with society, disassociation from contextual history would remove any sense it has. A critical reader of a theorist must remain critical, without slipping too far into historical context. It is the professional lives of theorists that are important, the development of their theories, not the personal; Miller’s biography of Foucault, Passion of Michel Foucault was criticised for being too personal and not at all relevant in regards to Foucault’s writings. Though a truthful account of Foucault’s life, personally, little of the content can be found to be useful for reading in parallel academically with Foucault’s own work and to be used in understanding his work.


Overall, in order to understand the past, present and future of a theory it must be understood that in the same way history cannot be fixed, neither can the writer; the Foucault in ‘The Order of Things’ is not the same Foucault in ‘The History of Sexuality’ in that as society changes, so do the views and opinions of a writer, he too, must not remain fixed. One must look into the lives of theorists, but only to the extent of professional lives, political standings and relations with other significant theorists. Ransom declares that we must ‘study literature, and not merely about literature’ this is also true in that we should study theorists, and not merely about theorists.

Bibliography

Barry, Peter Beginning Theory – An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory 2nd Edition, (Manchester University Press: Manchester 2002)


Eagleton, Terry and Drew Milne ed., Marxist Literary Theory, a Reader (Blackwell publishers Ltd: Oxford 1996)
Marx, Karl and Engels Friedrich – ‘Social Being and Social Consciousness’ pp.31


Leitch, Vincent B. ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001)
Ransom, John Crowe ‘Criticism Inc’ (1938) pp. 1108-18
Barthes, Roland – ‘Death of the Author’ (1971) pp.1466-70
Foucault, Michel – ‘What is an Author?’ (1969) pp. 1622-36
‘Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison’ (1975) pp. 1636-47
‘The History of Sexuality’ (1976) pp.1648-66


Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008)

Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000)

Newton- De Molina, David ed.., The Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot (London: University of London, The Athlone Press, 1977)

Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia ed., Modern Literary Theory 4th Edition (London: Arnold, 2001)
Said, Edward – ‘Opponents, Audiences, constituencies and community’, in Postmodern Culture H. Foster ed., (1985), pp.137-43: 155-9.
West, Alick -  ‘The relativity of literary Value’ (1937)
Eagleton, Terry – ‘Literary Theory- an Introduction’ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983) pp.133-4
Gennette, Gerard – ‘Narrative Discourse’ (1980) pp.212-27

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the Lyrical Ballad.

    

The ballad form, a narrative poem popular throughout the 19^th century, is used by Coleridge to convey the tale of a mariner’s plight to survive alone at sea, facing the wrath of Mother Nature, after the murder of an albatross. This form typically has a certain structure of quatrain stanzas of alternating three or four stress lines. This four-line structure can be seen as constricting except Coleridge uses the basic form only as a framework and often moves to six lines in each stanza.

(For more information regarding stress lines and reading a poem’s metre, click here)

 This ballad is written in the first person from the Mariner’s perspective.  This unreliable narrator, much like Nick in The Great Gatsby,  is a limiting factor as the Mariner’s own views and opinions bias the information given to both the reader and the wedding guest.

 Although an omniscient narrator would provide an unbiased account of the Mariner’s trials and tribulations, the Mariner’s journey would become less personal and the overall message aimed at the reader to ‘loveth best all things great and small’ may lose significance when lacking the Mariner’s personal response to the events taking place throughout.

 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been criticised for being archaic, Coleridge often  using made up words with no meaning (making it super difficult for the likes of us!) ; it is stated in the British Critic that words such as ‘swound’ or ‘weft’ are nonsensical and ‘could be removed without detriment to the poem’. It could be argued, however, that Coleridge used these words to convey a sense of confusion and desperation – that the Mariner was distressed, starving and unable to die.

The ballad was written specifically to be published in ‘the collection of lyrical ballads’ with William Wordsworth but The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was then rewritten by Coleridge in the second edition of ‘lyrical ballads’ in 1800. Some of these archaic words were missing from this and also a preface was added explaining the poetical concept of the collection. This could either be interpreted that the pressure from such critics forced Coleridge to delete the ‘nonsensical’ words even though they were to create a certain effect or that such criticism enlightened him to the fact that their loss would cause ‘no detriment to the poem’ and were best left out.

  Using a literary balled for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner enables Coleridge to work within a structure and recognised form as it became more popular with the rise of romanticism. Like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci is also a literary ballad, although shorter and less elaborate than Coleridge’s, it creates a sense of mystery by revealing very little information about the characters. If, in fact Coleridge’s use of the ballad form limits the reader’s interest in the tale as a whole then the same would apply for La Belle Dame Sans Merci as its structure is fundamentally the same, split into parts of quatrain stanzas and told mostly in first person from the protagonist’s point of view; the knight ‘met a lady in the meads’ this ballad also working better with an unreliable narrator to convey a certain theme or moral.

   The different parts of the rime are clearly defined and each end in a cliff-hanger to increase the dramatic effect of the poem. The separate parts work in the same way chapters do in a novel; the first part ending in, ‘with my crossbow/ I shot the albatross’ this cliff-hanger keeps the reader interested. The use of romantic imagery, for example where ‘a spring of love gushed from [his] heart’ also enhances rather than limits the reader’s interest in the Mariner’s tale. The limitations of the ballad form being a strict rhyming structure and split into clearly defined parts each with a dramatic ending does not override the poetry within and the overall storyline but instead is a technique used to portray the message Coleridge conveys to the reader.

For more information about the Ballad as a poetic device, see here. 

Extra bonus:

Iron Maiden. Need I say more. Turn it up to eleven, guys.

Essay on Gatsby? Here's a quick rundown of relevant criticism.

A brief list on the stances main critics took on Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gastby'. A great starter point to begin your own research...

Harold Bloom

• Carraway Frequently gets in the way of the story’s progress (unreliable narrator), “his consciousness dominates the novel”
• Carraway has his own dream of Gatsby the romantic hero - verging on the homoerotic.

Jonathan Fortescue

·        In the valley of ashes, Dr T. J Eckleberg’s eyes “embody an attitude of eyes-wide-open realism and modern disenchantment”

·        In chapter three with the car crash “Fitzgerald ties the recklessness of the rich to the mishandling of automobiles, foreshadow[ing] events to come.”

Joan M. Allen

• Gatsby as a Christ figure – particularly becomes apparent at the time of his death…
• “Refusing help, Gatsby carries to his pool a pneumatic mattress which will bear the burden of his dead body. He is killed about three in the afternoon, the hour of Christ's death.  Like Christ, Gatsby is left among strangers during a three-day vigil and on ‘the third day’ his true identity is resurrected with the telegram of Henry C. Gatz of Minnesota.”

Judith Fetterly

• Men compete for Daisy, Gatsby’s desire for her is enhanced by the fact that other people want her “it excited him too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes”

Maxwell E. Perkins

• The vagueness of the character of Gatsby, “the reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim”
• His physical features are not described in as much detail as, say, Tom or Daisy.

H. L. Mencken

• “Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes” the rest of the characters are “mere marionettes” lifelike, but not quite alive.
• The story has “a fine texture, a careful and brilliant finish. The sentences move along smoothly, sparklingly, variously”.
• Fitzgerald is more interested in the people with too much money and too much time to spend it, with their “idiotic pursuit of sensation”.

The Female and the Feminine in Dracula and The Woman in White.

The female and the feminine in Dracula and The Woman in White.

‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female like-ness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience’

  One must assess the distinction between the biology and psychology of gender; an individual’s gender is distinguished by their dress and outward appearances. It is not until the reader and other characters get a closer look to discover that often their psychology and personality have characteristics of both genders- it is in this way that many characters in Dracula and The Woman in White transgress traditional gender roles.

What separates the masculine and the male, the feminine and the female in these two novels and how characters, male and female often move about between them.

  Jonathan Harker declares the gender of the three vampiric women in Dracula’s castle; they are clearly ‘ladies by their dress and manner’ this assumption is soon proven wrong, he hears ‘the churning sound of [one of the women’s]  tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and [he] could feel the hot breath on [his] neck.’  Like a fire-breathing dragon she asserts her masculine power over him. This strong presence causes Harker to faint, the horror ‘overcame [him] and [he] sank down into unconsciousness’; this can be contrasted to Mina who is ‘not of a fainting disposition’. By fainting Harker’s response corresponds with a typically feminine role to pass out, the shock of his experience proving too much for him. He expresses that ‘there was something about them that made me feel uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips’ This is an example of fear versus desire that is common throughout the two novels to define masculinity and femininity, it would normally be the powerful male asserting his power and the weaker, passive female desiring him. Harker here takes on a passive role; and the masculine female takes control of the feminine male. This mechanical likeness of the ‘churning tongue’ removes any emotional connections to a woman the reader may have these women are no longer feminine, or even female, they transgress so completely out of femininity that they cannot even be classed as males, perhaps only as ‘monsters’.

   Tori Moi in Sexual/ Textual Politics coins the term ‘monster woman’ not as a reference to the literal supernatural monster of Gothic fiction but to describe the ‘new woman’ that Mina Harker and Marian Halcombe can be likened to. This ‘monster woman’ ‘is the woman who refuses to be selfless, acts on her own initiative, who has a story to tell – in short, a woman who rejects the submissive role patriarchy has reserved for her’ by remaining a single woman and taking an active role in the discovery of the identity of the mysterious woman in white, Marian does exactly this. Moi goes on to explain that ‘the duplicitous woman is opaque to man, whose mind will not let itself be penetrated by the phallic probings of masculine thought’.

Dracula, by using feminine terms to describe him – is not the masculine, phallic power Moi describes, that is more like Sir Percival, of even Count Fosco. Although Dracula invades Mina’s mind he does not control it, Dracula’s femininity allows Mina and the men to use it to their advantage. As easily as Dracula changes from old to young, he shifts from masculine to feminine. Like ‘a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk’ he maternally feeds his blood to Mina, although it has darker undertones, this image comes across as feminine; as if he is feeding Mina for her own good. Conversely Dracula has the potential to be a powerful and dangerous man, his eyes ‘blazed with a sort of demonic fury’ at the sight of Harker’s blood on his chin, he uncontrollably ‘[makes] a grab at’ Harker’s throat. Dracula is the only character who is able to change so quickly from feminine to masculine without any noticeable changing process; possibly because he lacks humanity he therefore lacks any gender stability.

 The male desire to assist a damsel in distress throughout Dracula and The Woman in White.

Hartright, upon his first meeting with Anne notes that ‘the loneliness and helplessness’ of her affected him, ‘the natural impulse to assist her and to spare her, got the better of the judgment, the caution, the worldly tact, which an older, wiser and colder man might have summoned to help him in this strange emergency’. Reason and rationality are overridden by the desire to help the weak, and the helpless; here are conflicting masculine impulses. Hartight acts upon his urge to be ‘the knight in shining armour’ that many of the male characters in the novels aspire to be. Even Mina, one of the stronger female characters, is subjected to this impulse, the men around her feel the need to protect her and do not consider that she may, in fact be able to protect herself. Dr Seward notes that ‘I must be careful not to frighten her’ immediately making the assumption that Mina conforms to the typical feminine role as Lucy does and requires, for her health, censorship. He later states ‘Mrs Harker is better out of it. Things are quite bad enough for us, all men of the world, and who have been in many tight places in our time; but it is no place for a woman’ despite her efforts to act like a man and to be part of the group as an equal, Mina’s womanly physical appearance blind the men into treating her and protecting her as a woman should be.

     In her diary, Mina does not separate the masculine and feminine but instead distinguishes between good and evil, light and dark. As she looks towards Whitby Abbey Mina sees Lucy, a ‘half reclining figure, snowy white’ and a ‘man or beast’ ‘something dark’ leaning over her in a domineering fashion. This is reminiscent of Harker’s experience in Dracula’s castle – a powerful, overbearing masculine force, bent over a powerless body - and has highly charged sexual connotations; Count Dracula is forcing himself upon her as the three women forced themselves upon Harker.  The snowy white figure of Lucy agrees with the general view that white signifies innocence. In The Woman in White the reader is in someway led to reassess such connotations – once we learn that the strange figure of the woman in white has escaped from and asylum we make links with the whiteness of an asylum, of medicinal sterility of straight jackets and padded walls. At this moment in time, for the reader and for Hartright these connotations overpower that of innocence, so as to make him become suspicious or even frightened. The reassessment of the traditional symbolic meaning of white happens in Dracula too where whiteness/ paleness instead takes on the negative meaning of bloodlessness.

     The uses of light and dark in The Woman in White draw contrasts between the women, rather than between good and evil. Anne is too white; her skin is deathly pale, and her strange habit, commented and teased by Mrs Clements of wearing all white makes other characters wary of her.  Hartright describes her as having ‘a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous uncertain lips; and a light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue’. She comes across as too weak, and too fragile; this is an extreme of the Victorian female gender role. Collins could be commenting on the position of women in society and if one should take their position as a weak passive female too far they must prepare for negative consequences. This can be compared to Hartright’s description of Laura Fairlie; she is light, beautiful, ‘her hair is of so faint and pale a brown- not glossy- that it nearly melts, here and there into the shadow of the hat’ and her eyes ‘of that soft, limpid, turquoise blue, so often sung by the poets, so seldom seen in real life’ the features damned in Anne are praised in Laura; this description could be foreshadowing her downfall when mistaken as Anne. When Laura loses her identity and becomes Anne catherick she too becomes ghostly white – brought upon by the asylum. The dark, ugly Marian has more character, she is unusual and intriguing to the reader, Hartright’s first impression of Marian is ‘the lady is dark’, he describes ‘the lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, resolute, piercing eyes’ This is a very masculine description and unlike Mina, who has to fight against her feminine appearance to prove her worth as her own person, Marian is immediately confided in by Hartright, it could be argued with help from her not-so fragile appearance, about his strange journey to Limmeridge house.

       Harvey Peter Sucksmith, in the introduction to the Oxford University Press publication of The Woman in White explains the reason for, in his view, one hero and two heroines; he draws a parallel between Hartright and the author’s own personal experiences - ‘we can see now why there are two heroines inn the novel but only one hero, for Collins achieves psychological validity with this trio by representing in Victorian terms what have been called the anima and the shadow, that is, here, the Victorian male’s idealised image of women together with much of a contradictory nature that is excluded from that ideal. Collins, the man who later lived with two women, depicts a hero who experiences the dual nature of women’. Sucksmith suggests that Collins simplifies woman into two forms for the sake of clarity for the reader. This can be taken that in this case one woman with both attributes would not be effective; that men may be able to freely display both sides of their nature, but women, in order to make sense in a Victorian novel and in society, must be separated into two characters. Stoker on the other hand, creates Mina of whom Helsing exclaims has a ‘man’s brain – a brain that a man should have were he much gifted- and a woman’s heart’ This perhaps is a better image of the ideal ‘new’ woman who happily displays feminine and masculine attributes.

    The mouth is often described as both cruel and voluptuous in Dracula; ‘all three [vampire women] had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips.’ These images of pearls and rubies connote richness and abundance, as if Harker is attempting to dress up the bad, masculine imagery in feminine jewellery. The word voluptuous is often repeated by Stoker, and becomes a word loaded with dark, sexual connotations. Lucy, at the beginning of the novel ‘so sweet and sensitive that she feels influences more acutely than other people do’ becomes evil and voluptuous - Stoker uses this word to describe Lucy as many as four times within two pages, ‘the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty and the purity to voluptuous wantonness’. The site of the burial place is a place of transgression from the feminine to the masculine for Lucy; it is at her tomb that Lucy re-awakens as a vampire. Her whole appearance changes, without any maternal instinct she preys on small children and is an aggressive hunter, as if she has been re-born; Lucy’s eyes, the windows to her soul, ‘the beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, blood stained mouth grew to an open square….as if ever a face meant death- if looks could kill- we saw it at that moment’. The transformation is quick and is a movement from extreme good to extreme evil. There is a link between the transition between life and death, between masculine and feminine at a place of burial, this verifies Victorian stereotypes of the weak women in neither novel do any male characters die so never get chance to move across from femininity to masculinity or vice versa as harshly as Lucy.

     The tomb and the grave, is a key setting in both novels, it is a place where the lines between life and death are blurred. It is where the body of Anne Catherick is buried, but as Laura. At the climax of the novel; the supposed dead Lady Glyde appears next to her very own grave – the dead and the living (the very same person) standing side by side. This is where the physical and the psychological play a part; Laura is identified as Anne by her clothes, by her appearances only. Marian and Hartright therefore become ‘accomplices of mad Anne Catherick, who claims the name, the place and the living personality of the dead Lady Glyde’  Laura has completely lost her identity; she claims ‘they tried to make me forget everything’ although her insistence of her true identity is pushed aside and ignored over her appearance- she is in Anne’s clothing therefore must be Anne. Collins draws light upon the thin line between the sane and insanity. Insanity has a strong historical link with females, female stepping out of place in society were reported as having hysteria and that the label of insanity more often than not were restrictions put on by men to keep unruly women in line which can be seen in Sir Percival’s treatment of Anne. Harker once again becomes the feminine male, he reported as hysteric and  labelled mentally ill and thus questions himself, ‘I feel my head spin round, and I do not know if it was all real or the dreaming of a madman. You know I have had a brain fever, and that is to be mad’. Harker’s so called brain fever places doubt in the reader’s mind; fact and fiction becomes intermingled, at this point in the novel even the reader is led to question the authenticity of Harker’s diary. It is the only source of information that Mina and the reader have to rely upon. It is at this point in the novel that the reader instead of using Harker as the assertive, trustworthy voice – turns to Mina.

 The main female characters often become frustrated with their gender throughout the course of the novels.

Both Mina and Marian become angry at their sex for restricting them, they are well aware of the social implications of being female in Victorian society. Nobody is more aware of the divide between the sexes than Marian, she orders Hartright not to ‘shrink under’ his feelings for Laura ‘like a woman’ but to ‘tear it out, trample it under like a man’, angry at Hartright for not using his male advantages. After all she would be expected to shrink under her feelings, though when she does, when she cries ‘miserable, weak, women’s tears of vexation and rage’ she is angry at herself for showing signs of weakness out of sheer frustration that her sex allows her to do nothing else. Gentle Laura, noticing her sister’s lapse of strength ‘put her handkerchief over my face, to hide for me the betrayal of my own weakness- the weakness of all others which she knew that I most despised’ Marian is an alternative of womankind; she defines a different type of femininity to that of the Victorian stereotype. Susan Balée suggests an alternative opening line to The Woman in White: that Hartright is instead a man with a woman’s patience and Marian is a woman with a man’s resolution.

   Dracula and The Woman in White are interested in examining what lies beneath appearances of gender, Collins adopts a more obvious approach by splitting two versions of the female in Laura and Marian – both in appearances of fair and dark and in characteristics, mentally weak and strong. Stoker combines these in the character of Mina – he does have a stereotypically feminine female that is Lucy who transgresses from being extremely feminine to extremely masculine. Both authors question the Victorian masculine and feminine roles and how males and females fit into them, and if there is any room for manoeuvring.

A little help from...

Stoker, Bram – Dracula (Penguin Popular Classics: 1994) London.

Collins, Wilkie – The Woman in White ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford University Press: 1975) New York and Toronto.

Woolf, Virginia – Orlando (Oxford World Classics: 1998) Oxford.

Moi, Tori -  Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (Routledge: 1999) London and New York

Jacobus, Mary – Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Columbia University Press: 1986)

Balée, Susan – ‘Wilkie Collins and Surplus Women: The Case of Marian Halcombe’ Victorian Literature and Culture. (Cambridge University Press:1992) Vol. 20 pp.197-215

Miller, D.A – ‘Cage Aux Folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White’ Representation, No.14, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century pp. 106-136 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928437.

Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie – ‘Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”’ Frontiers: Journal of Women Studies (1977) Vol. 2, No. 3 pp.104-113

Craft, Christopher – “Kiss me with those red lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ Representations No8. (1984) pp107-33 http:/www.jstor.org/stable/2928560

A Passage to India and Midnight’s Children: Representations of India.

 

‘The orient was almost a European invention and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing: in a sense it had happened, its time was over’ Said, Introduction to Orientalism.  Said speaks of the Orient as ‘European invention’ with nostalgia, not the true India, as a place, a country. The ‘exotic’ ideal, nostalgic from a western point of view, from an eastern, excitement perhaps over the end of the ‘orient’ and the birth of an India. Said is assertive as the Orient as a construct; the colonisers relaying back to the homeland  exotic tales and artefacts.

 I want to look at representations of India before and after the Empire, changing, uncertain conditions through Forster’s A Passage to India and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

There is a running theme throughout both of the difficulty of grasping India’s true identity; a hybrid identity because of imperialism – should it accept its imperial past and embrace? Or revert to India’s history before colonialism? Rushdie calls for the re-discovering of a totally new India, taking into account of its rich and varied, often turbulent history. Cronin, in Imagining India states that ‘to write about India in any of its vernaculars, even in Hindi its national language, is inevitably to divide it’.

In A Passage to India there is the idea that the subaltern is being spoken for. Forster assumes the position of an unbiased narrator but I shall show that many factors come in to show otherwise. It is a novel about the coming together of cultures, examining the relations between east and west, and interracial relationships. Inevitably when one has power over the other it causes suffocation, suppression.

Forster shows India to have an unknown identity, a mystery for the Western colonisers who find it difficult to comprehend, therefore must create their own construct ie The Orient, a construct with which they have more control.

The western reaction to the ‘Indian experience’

 India is conveyed in spiritual terms, the British women experience India within the Marabar caves, these women represent the space inbetween, they are not as such the coloniser, the british other more sympathetic towards the east. They are the ‘other’ belonging totally to neither, though often on the verge of the coloniser. Forster, perhaps shows through India’s massive spiritual influence on the West, critiques the west’s lack of spirituality? Each of the three sections of the novel have a spiritual significance: Mosque, Caves and Temple. The caves are a particularly significant section, though, as they involve a full on confrontation to the coloniser, confronting their own sense of self and spirituality. The caves come the closest to represent Forster’s vision of India; they are a mysterious entity, of which the whole of which cannot be grasped at once, something that Rushdie hints at in Midnight’s Children. They embody darkness and danger, shelter and safety, mystery and ancientness, with a history before time.

The Mosque, Caves and Temple are all sacred; each section occupied mostly by British thought, the true Indian narrative is oppressed.

Sharpe, in The Unspeakable Limits of Rape exposes the ‘real crime of imperialism to be an abuse of power that can only lead to its demise’ predicts the end of the empire by showing the tensions between the two nations and a time of unrest. The myths surrounding the ‘mutiny’ are then linked with the alleged rape of Adela; the gap in the narrative is permeated with tales from the rebellion. All at once she becomes the victim of the rebellion, she becomes the publicity surrounding it and becomes the myths that that became of it represent it. It is not Adela as a woman abusing her position of power but her nation, the colonisers who surround her; she, like Aziz, becomes a victim of this power struggle, caught inbetween. Thus, in the process of securing international power, the British put in danger their own kind. The minor sacrificed for the greater good. Adela’s perceived experience in the caves is pounced upon, like a group of vultures, waiting for an excuse to cast the native in a negative, dangerous light. This works to further the distance between the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of the novel, the nations pushed apart where characters are forced to take sides. Fielding’s decision to stand by his Indian friend is seen as a betrayal of his race, of his ‘women and children’.

Adela, for the British, is a symbol of innocence and womanhood, a moral compass for the English; the supposed objectification of her body thus causes disruption in society, ‘each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in the private life’ As an individual, she fades into the background whilst revenge, anger and the symbol of a ruined British woman shine in the foreground. The narrative here begins to move away towards sensationalism, rational thought is abandoned much like the ‘tales of terror’ brought to England concerning the events of 1857 had little or no historical basis, Fielding is told to look towards them for an impression of the Indian character. The horrific mutinies work as a myth to steer negative attention away from an image of a weak England, of weak Englishmen. Adela’s allegations are a symbol for the counter-insurgency of the nineteenth century; a fear that Britain was losing its grasp upon the empire and actively fought, through education of British children, to remain powerful and influential.

Quentin Bailey touches upon this, stressing the importance of education in rebuilding a British ego, damaging the image of the east in the process. The power of the empire taught to children so as to keep the British ego in place. This instance is in fact a reaffirming of power hidden as a cry for revenge, to restore the lost honour of the British.

British identity prevails over and above Indian identity in A Passage to India, with a British author, inevitable. The India of the title is the western view, it has no claim of its name on its own, an ironic title, a passage of England to the country of India. Ronny’s education is described that ‘wherever he entered mosque, cave or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the fifth form, and condemned as a weakening any attempt to understand them’ He remains the coloniser, one of those seeking to make a Britain within India without allowing for any change to themselves or their ideals. Both Ronny’s stubbornness as an Englishman, his politics and his lack of spirituality that becomes an obstacle to friendships. This reluctance is a barrier for all interracial relationships in the novel.

    The caves are described as such: ‘there is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit; the walls of the circular chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaid with lovely colours divides the lovers’.

Adela struggles to cope with a confrontation of her spirituality in the caves. Upon entering she is struggling with her role as a wife, thinking about her forthcoming loveless marriage, so troubled by this role she rejects it and chooses not to fulfil the role of coloniser. Once in the cave, her fears, her conscious and unconscious confront her in the expanse of nothingness. Adela responds to her experience in the caves physically while Mrs. Moore, spiritually. What Adela sees as a muddle which disorientates her, Mrs. Moore sees as a mystery, not to be solved, but to be accepted. Mrs. Moore’s experience in the cave confronts her idealistic belief in goodwill and the friendliness of the world, in the vast nothingness of the cave she sees and accepts that with the good there is evil, with something there is nothing and vice versa. In doing so Mrs. Moore, in a sense, becomes a spiritual being, more in tune with India than any other British person; both women are confronted by the sense of oneness but it is Mrs. Moore who, though troubled by it, comes to understand that ‘everything is anything and nothing something’ her spiritual presence lurks in the corners of the narrative after her death. Her name remains an echo until the end.

Midnight’s Children makes use of magic realism to give the reader an alternative experience of reality, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Rushdie breaks away from western traditions, so prominent and tied down in A Passage to India. The novel favours the fantastic as a way to show reality more truly; it deals with oppressive colonial forces by rejecting the western way of constructing reality, it is a reaction to the limiting realism of western thought. Rushdie tells us that ‘an oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the middle to the end of a story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or in loops, it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then takes you off again, sometimes summarized itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the storyteller appears just to have thought of, then it comes back to the main thrust of the narrative’

Because of this, the fantastic is distinctively Indian. Rushdie’s conscious concern is with depicting an India both in past, present and a possible future. The magic realism, the powers of the Midnight’s Children, are used to separate the birth of a new nation from reality and history of British India. Through miraculous events, Rushdie emphasises the possibilities of India in its independence.

Several cultures exist at once in India, including those moulded by western images that conflict with and merge with the Indian ‘there were Radna and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not affected by the west) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn’ by using a multitude of cultural references he highlights the fact that India’s independence does not erase the colonial influences upon the nation. Rushdie also stresses that with independence, with the birth of a new nation, India must almost ‘invent itself’, create a new identity separate from the previous shared one weighed down by colonialism. The whole novel is a reconstruction and reinvention of the self, in a time of fluctuation the emphasis is on the present therefore history becomes subjective, it becomes myth, memory. Truth is not privileged so cannot be limiting. Saleem explains how the past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred. Here once again western rationalism is being subverted.

Within this plurality of cultures, Rushdie explores the boundaries of a national, cultural and religious identity. The birth of a child coinciding with the birth of the nation means that the child is not fixed firmly in either period of time, he simultaneously belongs to both, or rather he belongs in the undecided space in-between, where a nation has ended, but a new one is yet to begin. Saleem speaks of the rest of the midnight children as ‘a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity’, that he saw no point in dividing them. The children were seen as one, one monster who is a coming together of parts; viewing all the children as one is was the closest he could get to a full  identity.  The children, including Saleem encapsulate everything and nothing at the same time. For all the midnight children, it is impossible to be one thing; an attempt to do so results in a many headed monster. Saleem describes how, ‘I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have seen done, of everything done to me…To understand just one life, you’ll have to swallow the world’ he embodies multiplicity with a ‘Hindu mother, English father, brought up Muslim by a catholic ayah’ a product of culture, of nature and nurture every child is saturated with familial and cultural history before he even exists. Saleem, as a man is a metaphor for India, struggling for an identity of his own through a complex history. In creating a character so ‘handcuffed to history’, Rushdie explores the responsibilities of the first generation of a post colonial nation, seeing it as both a privilege and a curse.

With A Passage to India it is an attempt to represent something that he could not something that he could not understand.  Rushdie is a part of India, intrinsically linked. As well as Saleem, his history is continued down the family, familial and cultural history walk hand in hand. He embraces the past, embraces western influences all of which coagulate to produce him as a person.

Orientalism works to highlight the differences between the east and west.  For the western Forster, India is a muddle, and mystery. At the time of writing, Forster has a clear authority over the Orient, can we experience Forster’s India without prejudice?

Saleem explores his origins, cultural and familial, whilst Adela explores an unfamiliar India. Midnight’s Children is a coming of age for India, we witness the process of re-invention, Rushdie analyses the history of his country in segments.

Until next time, JT.

Bailey, Quentin – ‘Heroes and Homosexuals: Education and Empire in E. M. Forster’ Twentieth Centuy Literature 48, 3 pp.324-343

Cronin, Richard - Imagining India. (London: Macmillan Press, 1989)

de la Rochère, Martine Hennard Dutheil - Origin and Originality in Rushdie’s Fiction (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999)

Forster, E. M. – A Passage to India (London: Penguin Books, 1985, c1924)

Parry, Benita - Materiality and Mystification in ‘A Passage to India’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31, 2 1998 pp.174-194 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346197  [accessed 1/10/09]

Rushdie, Salman – Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1981)

Rushdie, Salman – Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta Books, 1992)

Rushdie, Salman – East, West (London: Vintage Books, 1995)

The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2007)

Rushdie ,Salman India Today (Interview, 1997) http://www.india-today.com/itoday/18081997/rushdie.html [accessed 02/11/10]

Said, Edward – Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978, 2003

Shape, Jenny – ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency’ Gemders 10 1991 pp.25-46

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(New York, Austria: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995)

Bhabha, Homi K. – ‘Race’ Time and the Revision Modernity postcolonial criticism (Longman, 1997) moore- gilbert, Stanton and maley eds.

Gorra, Michael – After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1997)