The book, Subversion in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Angela Carter and Michele Roberts: A Thematic and Stylistic Study, scrutinizes established premises about gender on which Western philosophy, myths and religion are based. The three contemporary British women writers whose works have been selected for analysis, together span almost a century of feminist theorizing about the status of women in society, and the means of constructing pathways for their liberation.
Though women have been writing subversively for centuries now, both within and without patriarchal enclosures, the literature of subversion in its contemporary flagrant exterior is chiefly a product of the failure of the British counterculture and sexual revolution to liberate women from the straitjacket of over-determined media images. The colonization of women’s identity through external determination of their roles within the social matrix and the entrapment of their bodies within the male gaze are the chief concerns of these writers.
The book opens with a justification for the endeavours of the feminist women writers to subvert the gender status quo and an illustration of the misogynistic belief systems on which the treatises written by giants like Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Descartes rest. It examines Western psychoanalytic thought and literary canon that reveal similar somatophobic, phallocentric and misogynistic attitudes. An examination of the works of Freud, Lacan, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, etc. through the gender lens brings to fore dichotomous portrayals of women who wear either halos or horns.
The narrative strategies employed by Jean Rhys, Angela Carter and Michele Roberts for supporting their aim of subversion have also been examined in the book. It reveals their ingenuity in using lexis, syntax, semantics, graphology, tone, genre, form, narrative voice, silences and intertextuality as means of deconstructing ideological mansions. The texts abound in ambiguities, aporias and multiplicities which invite the reader to co-create meaning.
Richa Goyal, Ph.D. (English Literature), University of Rajasthan; M.Phil. (ELT), Banasthali University; CELTA—Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults—Cambridge; and M.A. (English Literature and Language), has taught English literature, stylistics, linguistics, English writing skills and communication skills at graduate and postgraduate levels for eight years.
Dr. Goyal’s research interests include contemporary British and Indian Literature, language analysis, and current trends in English Language Teaching. She has published many research papers in these domains. She has guided numerous M.Phil. dissertations on translation studies, ambiguity in language, designing textbook for language students, stylistic studies, kinesics and paralinguistics in language pedagogy, linguistic deviation, and postcolonial studies. In the field of translation studies, Dr. Goyal’s published translation work includes one novel, a play, and a collection of short stories.
