Voicing the other : female narrators in the fiction of J.M. Coetzee and Albert Wendt

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the use of a female narrative perspective in the fiction of J.M. Coetzee and Albert Wendt. The novels chosen for this purpose are distinctive, within the corpus of their works, in that they are dominated by a female consciousness. In Coetzee and Wendt the deployment of a female narrative perspective is not about defining new language games, nor is it about playing new games with old rules; rather, it is a device to unmask what is understood as ‘reality.’ Their female narrators are used to show how conventional understandings of reality condemn us to see through certain frames, including the ones that constrain the authorial sensibilities of the writers in question. Offering their particular brand of resistance, Coetzee’s self-reflexive fictions seek separation from a personal and cultural heritage moulded by colonialism; while for Wendt, the project of decolonization in the Pacific demands that the indigenous and the local be reinterpreted. At the same time, as male writers trained in the western (academic) tradition, both have inherited a culture of privilege and patriarchy. Their use of a female narrative perspective is thus plagued with contradiction and ambiguity, presenting them with an irresolvable problem of authorship. As a result, the rigid traditions that their female narrators intend to subvert are nevertheless reproduced and reinforced through language, which their fictions explore as an ambivalent medium of expression. These fictions expose the forms of authority made possible through language. This not only adds to the problem of representation for the writer but also presents the reader with the difficulty of interpretation. Yet, the only way freedom may be sought is by calling attention to the linguistic labyrinths of reflecting mirrors, and the perplexing twists and turns that form the pattern of the writers’ aesthetic lives. The recognition of one’s confinement brings with it a kind of freedom paradoxically intertwined with the discovery of boundaries and the possible breaking of barriers. So the desire of these novelists’ to take on a female sensibility primarily communicates an engagement with the limits of their own personal, cultural and gendered experience. Further, for these writers, the deployment of a female perspective relates to larger questions of postcolonialism and the processes of decolonization pertaining to politics, culture and the psychological unfolding of the once colonized sensibility. So, in the selected novels, gender acts as a privileged medium for examining existing hegemonies. Through an interrogation of the compulsions imposed by habit and an implicit failure of imagination, which hinders our understanding of the other, the author, and possibly the reader too, is temporarily freed from his imprisonment within the limits of representation.