National allegories, personal stories [Ressource électronique] : the use of domestic narratives in India and Algeria / Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

Ph. D. : Littérature : University of Florida : 2008

Bibliogr. p. 127-134

This project focuses on differences in nationalist discourse regarding women and the way female writers conceptualized the experience of women in three contexts. These three contexts are: the middle class Muslim reform movement, the Algerian revolution, and the Partition of India. During each of these periods male scholars, politicians, and revolutionaries discussed women and their behavior, bodies, and dress. The ideology common throughout these disparate events was that women were best served when they were ensconced within their homes and governed by male family members. Threat to national identity was often linked to the preservation of womanly purity. Yet for the writers of this study, Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991), Assia Djebar (1936- ), and Khadija Mastur (1927-1982), the danger to women was not in the public sphere, but within a domestic hierarchy enforced by male privilege. In their fictional texts, each writer shows how women resist, subvert, and challenge the normative behaviors prescribed in masculine discourse. They highlight the different ways women negotiate their own agency, however limited, among expectations of colonialism and native patriarchy. These texts demonstrate distinct literary viewpoints of nation, home, and women's experiences at particular historical moments. The ensuing chapters include examinations of short stories within the frames of specific time periods: colonial India during the 1930s, the Algerian revolution from 1954-1962, and the Partition of India in 1947. The specific texts reveal how fiction provided a socio-cultural space for female writers to contest traditional systems of power. Selected stories focus on the voices and experiences of women who existed as limited cultural icons in the nationalist discourse