i The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home by Julie Hakim Azzam BA English ...

287 Pages·2007·1.06 MB·English

The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home

by
Julie Hakim Azzam
B.A. English Literature, North Central College, 1998
M.A. English Literature, Northern Illinois Univeresity, 2000

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of Pittsburgh

2007

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UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
Arts and Sciences

This dissertation was presented

by

Julie Hakim Azzam

It was defended on
September 21, 2007
and approved by
Susan Andrade, PhD, Associate Professor
Troy Boone, PhD, Associate Professor
Shalini Puri, PhD, Associate Professor
Carol Stabile, PhD, Associate Professor
Dissertation Advisor: Susan Andrade, PhD, Associate Professor

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Copyright © by Julie Hakim Azzam
2007
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The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home
Julie Hakim Azzam, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2007

Postcolonial gothic fiction arises in response to certain social, historical, or political
conditions. Postcolonial fiction adapts a British narrative form that is highly attuned to the
distinction and collapse between home and not home and the familiar and the foreign. The
appearance of the gothic in postcolonial fiction seems a response to the failure of national
politics that are riven by sectarian, gender, class, and caste divisions. Postcolonial gothic is one
way in which literature can respond to increasing problematic questions of the postcolonial
“domestic terrain:” questions concerning legitimate origins; rightful inhabitants; usurpation and
occupation; and nostalgia for an impossible nationalist politics are all understood in the
postcolonial gothic as national questions that are asked of the everyday, domestic realm. This
dissertation argues that the postcolonial employment of the gothic does four distinct things in
works by al-Tayeb Salih, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie.
First, it forms a distopic representation that emerges when the idealist project of the national
allegorical romance fails. Second, the postcolonial gothic is interested in the representation of the
unheimlich nature of home as both dwelling and nation. If colonialism created a “home away
from home” and metaphorized this spatial division in psychoanalysis through the relationship of
the heimlich to the unheimlich, then part of the postcolonial gothic’s agenda is unveiling that
behind the construction of hominess abroad lies something fundamentally unhomely. Third,
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postcolonial gothic employs a gothic historical sensibility, or a sense of “pastness” in the present.
Fourth, if the gothic is the narrative mode by which Britain frightened itself about cultural
degeneration, the loss of racial or cultural purity, the racial other, sexual subversion and the
threat that colonial-era usurpation and violence might one day “return,” then postcolonial gothic
deploys the gothic as a mode of frightening itself with images of transgressive women who
threaten to expose the dark underbelly of their own historical and political contexts.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1
1.1 WHY THE GOTHIC?........................................................................................5
1.2 HOUSE, NATION, AND THE UNHEIMLICH..............................................15
1.3 WHAT POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC DOES..................................................32
2.0 THE ALIEN WITHIN: WOMEN, THE GOTHIC, AND THE NATIONAL
NARRATIVE IN DRACULA AND SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH..............42
2.1 THE CASE OF DRACULA...............................................................................47
2.2 SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH, THE GOTHIC, AND THE
NARRATIVE OF FAILED NATIONALISM.................................................................57
3.0 “MAY IT COME BACK:” THE SOUTH AFRICAN FARM AS GOTHIC
TOPOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................................80
3.1 THE PLAASROMAN AND THE “BURIED GIANT”...................................80
3.2 LAYING THE GHOSTS OF THE PLAASROMAN TO REST: NADINE
GORDIMER’S THE CONSERVATIONIST....................................................................89
3.3 LIFE WITH FATHER: COETZEE’S IN THE HEART OF THE
COUNTRY........................................................................................................................106
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4.0 HAUNTED HOUSES OF HISTORY: ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE GOD OF
SMALL THINGS.......................................................................................................................131
4.1 HAUNTED HOUSES OF HISTORY............................................................138
5.0 GIVING UP THE GHOST OF HOME: SHALIMAR THE CLOWN AND THE
GOTHIC 174
5.1 ALLEGORY, INTERRUPTED: SHALIMAR AND THE MATERNAL AS
GOTHIC MONSTROSITY.............................................................................................178
5.2 LOVERS, CLOWNS, AND MILITANTS: THE BHAND PATHER AND
GOTHIC DISPLACEMENT..........................................................................................197
5.3 NOSTALGIA AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: AVENGING
THE MOTHER................................................................................................................207
ENDNOTES...............................................................................................................................216
6.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................236
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1.0 INTRODUCTION
What happens when the gothic, a distinctly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British mode, is
deployed in contemporary postcolonial fiction? What does the gothic allow postcolonial fiction
to say and do that it might not have access to otherwise? Why would postcolonial writers
consciously deploy a narrative mode that is not only British but also a mode predicated on the
primitive, foreign, and exotic? Given the popularity of magical realism and other experimental
narrative modes, why would postcolonial writers feel the need to turn toward the gothic, a poorly
written, hyperbolic, and conventionalized mode? The British gothic is a narrative mode that is
“antagonistic to realism,”1 shadows Romantic idealism and individualism, and provides a dark
counternarrative to the narrative of progress of modernity. In the gothic, the sins of the fathers
always visit themselves upon their children and curses uncannily redound throughout the
generations. As such, the gothic makes visible the “uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and
decadence” and displays the “underside of enlightenment and humanist values.”2 The gothic may
be fascinated with things that are old, but in its form, it is a distinctly new mode of writing. Ian
Watt remarks on the irony of the term “Gothic Novel:” “It is hardly too much to say that
etymologically the term ‘Gothic Novel’ is an oxymoron for ‘Old New.’”3 The gothic is a form of
“generic miscegenation”4 because it “poaches” elements from realism, the romance, and the
sentimental novel.
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Intuitively, it makes sense for postcolonial writers to tap into Britain’s “dark” or
“illegitimate” narrative mode with which to understand the relationship between the colonial era
and the present moment of complicated postcoloniality as one that is haunted by the specter of
the colonial past.5 In deploying the gothic, postcolonial fiction attempts to solve the lingering
historical and political problems of colonialism in terms of a European narrative mode. If the
British gothic enables a symptomatic reading of empire, gender, and sexuality, amongst other
things, then what might the gothic reveal about the postcolonial? Broadly speaking, postcolonial
gothic inquires into the uncanny relationships between colonial narratives of conquest and
unspeakable violence, public history and intimate narratives, and the persistence of nostalgia for
nation or homeland in the face of the failure of such projects.
There has been much written on postcolonial magical realism, but the subject of the
postcolonial gothic has not received much more attention than an article-length study. The
existing scholarship on the postcolonial gothic emphasizes that the postcolonial employment of
the gothic mode is first and foremost a narrative form of “writing back” to empire, and a
“palimpsestic echo”6 that articulates the unspeakable, lost, or silenced historical narratives of
colonial conquest. In the existing criticism on the postcolonial gothic, the works that are
commonly recognized as constituting the narrative form include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s
Heat and Dust, and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.7 Bernd-Peter Lange argues that:
“Gothic brings to the fore what is unadmitted in a culture by painting it across, or
palimpsestically underneath, time and space,”8 which, in the hands of postcolonial writers
articulates “the untold stories of the colonial experience”9 and “turns the tables on the unifocal
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point of view from which these alterities [of colonialism] were originally conceived and also
their role in the imposition of a hegemonic Eurocentric view.”10 On my reading, the postcolonial
gothic greatly exceeds that of a palimpsestic echo and, in fact, expands the gothic mode much in
the way that Robert Heiland’s ground-breaking reading of Jane Eyre’s appropriation of the
gothic expanded the gothic mode to include what appeared to be a straightforwardly realist
bildungsroman.11 My reading of al-Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (hereafter
Season), J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (hereafter Country), Nadine Gordimer’s The
Conservationist, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (hereafter Small Things), and Salman
Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (hereafter Shalimar) enacts a gothic mode of reading and calls for
an expansion of the category of the gothic.12 With the exception of Small Things, which is self-
consciously gothic, the other texts were selected on the basis that they spoke to significant issues
in the historical development of postcoloniality (the supposed conflict between Western
modernity and traditional Islam; the Arab defeat of 1967; the racial logic of apartheid South
Africa and the Boer romanticization of the land; the breakdown of Marxist and Communist logic
in the historically Marxist state of Kerala; the breakdown of Kashmiri tolerance and the onset of
sectarian conflict) and because they were not recognized as containing gothic elements.
What constitutes the postcolonial gothic? What does the postcolonial gothic look like?
British gothic has always been interested in architecture, homes, and other spaces and dwellings
such as haunted houses, torture chambers, jail cells, courthouses, abbeys, monasteries, and
decrepit castles. The gothic revival in Britain coincided with the architectural renovation of
Horace Walpole’s home Strawberry Hill and William Beckford’s estate Fonthill Abbey to
resemble medieval, gothic structures.13 British gothic fiction is also intensely interested in
geographic spaces. Early gothic fiction such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
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