Jabberwock 2020

Department of English Lady Shri Ram College for Women University of Delhi

About

Editors

Editors-in-Chief Akshita Ajitsariya

Pragati Sharma

Sub-Editors Anushree Joshi

Athira RajMadhuboni Bhattacharya

Saadhya MohanTrishita Das

Assistant Editors Annanya Chaturvedi

Chakrika PandeyKrishna Joshi

Meher Nandrajog

Design Editor Parul Nayar

Design Team Ambika Narang

Athira RajAvani SolankiNoor Sharma

Monishka Singh

Jabberwock is the print journal of the Department of English, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. This year’s journal has

been put together by our editorial team:

Cover Design by Parul Nayar

Editorial

What pushed us to be a part of Jabberwock was our inclination towards editing and research. Little did we know that our love for editing would be multiplied several times by the end of this journey. For us, going through a paper full of highlights and comments became a guilty pleasure, and proofreading a paper multiple times ceased to be tiring. For one year, we excitedly booked our calendars with team and author meetings, literary theory lectures, department events. We took joy in doing the smallest activities, be it writing emails or bagging slots for events from our department union or looking for a meeting spot blessed with enough sunlight during winter afternoons. For a while, even dealing with administrational work stopped being hectic because we were doing it for the last few times. Writing this editorial brings our journey in Jabberwock to an end. The idea of an independent journal meant carrying its weight and moulding it in the best possible way. Although we feel robbed of the opportunity of watching this journal take physical form at the publisher’s office, it is, nevertheless, overwhelming to see how far we have reached in successfully compiling it.

The journal consists of a wide range of papers on various themes and ideas, across mediums. The general section highlights critical issues relating to gender, race, politics and representation. It does so through a study of literature, film, television and cartoons, reflecting the need and importance of cross-disciplinary research and collaboration. It includes papers that offer new ways of reading works like Swami and Friends and Beloved, investigation of themes in Fleabag and Gossip Girl, as well as papers that highlight ideas about marginalisation and politics, through the work of Mahasweta Devi and Manjula Padmanabhan.

This year, the theme section of the journal focuses on the theme of Spaces. It includes a diverse range of both academic and non-academic pieces. They provide an expansion of our understanding of spaces and explore, what Edward Soja called, the inherent spatiality of human life. Through the past year, our relationship with the spaces around us has undergone a radical transformation. What is the reciprocal relationship between spaces and the people who inhabit them? How is accessibility to spaces understood? How does one articulate identity in various spaces? How is representation in and of spaces negotiated with? The inclusion of this theme section has been an attempt to investigate increasingly relevant social and aesthetic concerns.

We are fortunate to include pieces that delineate the discourses of multiple spaces, exposing and challenging the notions of agency, representation and human belonging. The photo essay confronts issues of visibility, accessibility and displacement while the two poems articulate the theme in original ways. One deals with the constructed nature of spaces, and the other fully utilizes the visual possibilities of the white spaces on the page (what publishers call “functional white”) to craft space and silence in an unique poetic field. Further, we have two papers that deal with relatively under-researched areas. While one attempts to understand socio-political realities through a podcast seemingly about a fictional town, the other provides a case study of how spaces are used to explicate and transgress stereotypes of women in popular culture in visual novels. Additionally, the section consists of authors navigating the meaning of spaces within Lorde’s discography as well as the relationship between personal space and city life in the urban Indian context through a critique and comparison of three films. As spaces resist singular classifications and fixed meanings, the cover design is reflective of the idea that humans are continually engaged in the collective activity of producing spaces. The act of

interpretation highlights the importance of co-production of meaning, reinforcing the plurality with which spaces are created, understood and experienced.

This journal is indebted to the year-long efforts of our fantastic editorial team. Their constant support, enthusiasm and patience, even during these tough circumstances has been commendable and a source of great encouragement. We would like to thank Parul, our Design Editor for envisioning the cover and her contributions to the layout of the journal along with Tinka, the Chief Editor of Jabberwock Online, for her generous advice and useful feedback.

We are extremely thankful to our staff advisor, Dr. Madhu Grover, for her steady counsel and support throughout the year. Her constant encouragement and feedback has been invaluable to us and we greatly appreciate her help with the journal as well as our literary theory lectures. We are grateful to Ms. Wafa Hamid and Mr. Jonathan Koshy Varghese for providing immensely helpful lectures on literary theory to the student body. A special thanks to Ms. Rukshana Shroff and Ms. Arti Minocha, who were kind enough to judge Mind the Gap, the annual student paper presentation of Jabberwock. They have been extremely generous with their time and advice, for which we are grateful. We extend our gratitude to Ms. Maitreyee Mandal, former Teacher-in-Charge of the Department of English as well as Ms. Janet Lalawmpuii C, present Teacher-in-Charge for their constant support. Further, we would like to extend our thanks to the Department of English as well as the Department Union for their fruitful collaborations and for providing a space for discussion and debate. We are grateful to Dr. Suman Sharma and the college administration for their help. Lastly, thanks to all the contributors for trusting us with their work, as well as to the readers. Your engagement with this journal remains one of its most important features and is always appreciated.

Putting together this journal has been an enriching experience, full of joy and excitement. The following compilation of pieces address our socio-political realities and responsibilities, provide a platform for discourse about contemporary as well as theoretical concerns and motivate us to expand our spatial imaginations. As we write our final words, we hope this journal encourages you all to continue discovering, engaging in and communicating newer perspectives:

That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Signing off, Akshita and Pragati

Editors-in-Chief May 2020

CONTENTS

General Section

From Khaddar to Knickers: Reading the British Raj in Swami and Friends Aarooshi Garg Department of English, Shiv Nadar University

The Mother in Hajar Churashir Maa and Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa Tinka Dubey Department of English, LSR

No Country for Young Women: Manjula Padmanabhan and the Nexus of Gender and Race

Koyna Sinha Poduval Department of English, LSR

Pondering Colour: A Study of Shades in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Saadhya Mohan Department of English, LSR

Feminism in Fleabag

Madhuboni Bhattacharya Department of English, LSR

Decoding the Genre: Reading Gossip Girl as Detective Fiction

Anushree Joshi and Saman Waheed Department of English, LSR

5

16

25

40

59

46

Theme Section

On Taking a Break from the MLA Format

Ishani Pant Department of English, LSR

That’s in a Name

Shikha Chandra Department of English, LSR

“Send Us To Perfect Places”: The Figuration Of Utopias and Dystopias in Lorde’s Discography

Adreeta Chakraborty Department of English, St. Stephens College

Doki Doki Literature Club: A Study of Women in the Space of the Dating Simulator

Ishani Pant Department of English, LSR

Hands: Queer Spaces

Athira Raj Department of English, LSR

“Welcome to Night Vale”: A Study in Contemporary Socio-Political Commentary

Chahak Agrawal Department of English, LSR

The City and Intimacy: In Search of Boundlessness within Boundaries

Aaheli Jana Department of English, LSR

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77

79

87

100

102

110

From Khaddar to Knickers: Reading the British Raj in Swami and Friends

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From Khaddar to Knickers: Reading the British Raj in Swami and Friends

Aarooshi Garg

Though R. K. Narayan may have distanced himself and his work from colonial politics of the early-twentieth century, one cannot deny the socio-political influences of the time on his novel Swami and Friends. This paper looks at Narayan’s staging of cultural interaction between the ambivalent subject and the imperialist through the colonial looking glass. It attempts to address the lacunae in existing scholarship which reads the novel solely for its literary value and instead takes up unanswered questions about the political charge of the text. By examining Narayan's use of English to show the hybrid identity of the colonised, Malgudi as simultaneously occupying a traditional and modern position, Rajam as a caricature of administration under the Raj, and models of the English public-school system as repressive institutions, this paper looks at whether a political reading of Narayan's text is possible, and more importantly, viable.

The ‘Big Three’ of Indian writing in English—Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and R. K. Narayan enjoyed significant attention from the early 1930s to 1960s, with a bulk of scholarship attuned to their call for social reform and use of the English language. The 1930s were marked by intense political agitation and a rising national movement against the colonial administration’s atrocities. Writers of the day seriously engaged with the imperial ramifications on public policy, education, civil rights, and loss of autonomy. While Anand’s caricatures of bumbling Indian babus and Rao’s emblematic preface to Kanthapura have been studied extensively, the political charge of Narayan’s corpus has largely been ignored. His child protagonists evade the gravitas expected from an India under the proverbial thumb of the British Raj, and Narayan himself famously professed disinterest in politics.

But one would be remiss to not attribute the glaring lack of research on Malgudi’s (and Narayan’s) dynamic relationship with the colonial empire to these factors acting in concert with each other. It would be erroneous, then, to continue reading political disengagement into his Malgudi of mid-1930s, because as Edward Said argues in The World, the Text, and the Critic, events remain a part of the social world and the

historical moment in which they are located and interpreted—even if they deny the influences (4).

The existing scholarship on Swami and Friends focuses on the traditional and uncomplicated universe of Malgudi besieged by modernity, the banality of Narayan’s vision and language, and its ambivalent position in the tradition of English school novels. Panduranga Rao heralds the novel for its moral and universal narrative, commending Narayan’s handling of the English language (29). While he acknowledges the radical insertion of local inflections and idioms in a foreign language, he is more interested in the simplicity and innocence of the amalgamation than its subversive nature. What Raja Rao inaugurates as a tradition of infusing the coloniser’s tongue with ‘Indian’ ways of seeing and being, is very much evident in Swami and Friends, but P. Rao abandons this line of argument to argue for Narayan’s “parable of Man” (30) and his successful representation of the cyclical nature of existence.

Indeed, the development from boyhood to adulthood must come with the subject’s political and social awakening (perhaps, in a Blakeian progression from innocence to experience), but P. Rao locates

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Swami’s growth in his endearing naivety and Malgudi’s simple charms. William Walsh makes significant contributions on the child protagonist and the hybridity of Malgudi: it is inspired by both Mysore and a pre-1914 British sensibility. While Walsh meditates heavily on the curious mixture of Indian traditions and modernity introduced by the gora sahebs, his research is invested in the confluence of the ancient with the modern. Narayan’s poignant insights into the rhythms of rural India and youth consciousness become the subject of Walsh’s scholarship, informing his analysis of the autonomous boy-protagonist navigating a world of porous boundaries.

Yet again, Swami is studied as a frivolous, small-town child instead of as a thinking citizen of the Raj, capable of peering through the imperial looking glass and eventually documenting its realities. Shashi Tharoor, on the other hand, finds little merit in the text, levelling charges of pedestrian writing and shallowness of range against Narayan in “Comedies of Suffering”. This reading remains u n c o n s c i o u s o f M a l g u d i ’s p o l i t i c a l undercurrents and Swami’s status as a colonial subject, choosing to downplay the latter as an oblivious simpleton who cannot function as a critical observer with testimonies that bear merit.

John Thieme provides a significant background to the ‘Big Three’ of Indian writing in English while studying the consequences of Graham Greene’s patronage of Swami and Friends—which made Narayan change his book’s title and rechristen himself from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan Swami to R. K. Narayan (175). Narayan’s acquiescence to this English make-over (orchestrated by Greene and publisher Hamish Hamilton) indicates a willingness, in part, to allow a manipulation of his identity to fit the perceptions of the English reading public in the 1930s. As Narayan himself has candidly remarked, he wrote for the global audience, not just the readers back home (176). Thieme argues for the novel’s political charge, seeing

the boy-protagonist as a turning-point for the staging of cultural interaction, or the ambivalent subject imagining the difficult re lat ionship between ‘empire’ and ‘periphery’ from the other side of the colonial looking glass (177).

His observations are supported by Hager Ben Driss in “Acts of Ambivalence”, where Driss proposes an ambivalent strategy of resistance in Swami and Friends by looking at Narayan’s manoeuvring of political issues of the day. He suggests that what Tharoor calls the “banality” of l a n g u a g e i s , i n f a c t , N a r a y a n ’s domestication and appropriation of English (82). The essay provides critical insights into the grandmother as a national archive, straddling the liminal zone between tradition and modernity, and Rajam as a mockery of the Indian babu, or a cultural transvestite who is neither fully Indian, nor authentically English (83).

Adding to the debates on language, R. K. Gupta and Woodcock George historicise Narayan’s authorial decision to use English. Gupta cites Macaulay and reads English in the context of effective administration and familiarization (73), while George focuses on the cultural significance of English in the South Indian context, which informs Narayan’s argument that a Hindu past and the English language were unifying factors across India (4). Unaccustomed to Hindi, Mysore and Madras Brahmins like Narayan were more i n c l i n e d t o w a r d s E n g l i s h f o r communication and publication for a variety of reasons. The colonial encounter ensured greater literacy in English and created the widest readership market.

The introduction of English in s c h o o l s a n d t r a i n i n g o f ‘ n a t i v e ’ administrators (the babus) is informed by Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education”. Macaulay’s comments on enforcing English as the official language instead of Sanskrit

From Khaddar to Knickers: Reading the British Raj in Swami and Friends

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Of Lexicons and Language: Appropriating the Master’s Speech

In his preface to Kanthapura, Raja Rao writes: “We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. The tempo of our Indian life must be infused in our English expression even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into making of theirs” (vii). With this preface becoming an unofficial emblem of Commonwealth literature (Salman Rushdie famously labelled it a “ghettoization” of non-White scholarship), a new form of English came to the fore. A domesticated form of language to answer back to the Empire was home-bred by multiple Indian authors who appropriated and altered the oppressive grammar of the coloniser. Narayan’s use of the coloniser’s tongue does not posit him as a custodian of colonial values (Driss 81), but as a colonial subject manufacturing a new hybrid identity.

This identity sought to synthesize traditional values with a foreign cultural invasion, as evident in the narrative. Narayan’s Standard English commentary is perforated by grammatically incorrect expressions of an Indian English: “If it is nothing, why this letter?” (Narayan 2) being one such instance. His decision to provide the headmaster of a public school with broken English is symbolic of a new language being forged, vested with its own set of rules and conventions that break away from its unpleasant ontological status.

Narayan’s political use of English for the text is further influenced by a South Indian context. At a time when the nationalist cause was predominantly headed by North Indians, Hindi was declared to be the tentative official language post-Independence. Non-Hindi speakers opposed this decision for its marginalisation of other languages in use. Within two pages of being introduced to

or any “native” language inform the education and public policies of the Raj (3). His insistence that English must be instituted as the only language of control and administration in India is informed by the imperial logic of the inherent superiority of English literature (3). This logic is evident in Swami and Friends when the students are charmed by Rajam’s fluency in English, while the rest of them struggle with it. This curricularization of the English language is studied by Gauri Vishwanathan who investigates the introduction of canonical English to Indian classrooms as an imperial import designed to indoctrinate, discipline, and influence (57).

Inevitably, this celebration of Englishness came with a denigration of Indian customs and values. Students were eventually meant for bureaucracy, as Macaulay had intended, and not roles in government. Another significant action that Macaulay rallies for is the curation of an elite class to mediate the colonial state’s relationship with the Indian citizens. British in allegiance and opinions, these individuals were to act as purveyors of the imperial discourse of the Raj, much like Rajam in the text.

This paper addresses these lacunae in exis t ing scholarship, fundamental ly disagreeing with readings that limit Swami and Friends to a sentimental tract on the joys of childhood or an ode to rural India now infiltrated by the in-roads of modernity and progress. This paper takes up questions still left unanswered: is Albert Mission School faithfully represented in the tradition of English schoolboy fiction, or does Narayan embed difference and mockery through the school’s functionaries and pupils? Is Rajam simply a part of Swami’s coterie, or is he reminiscent of Mulk Raj Anand’s babu—a caricature of Indian administrators doing the bidding of the Raj? The central question, of course, is whether a political reading of the text is possible and, more importantly, viable.

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Swami, the reader is made aware of English being a compulsory subject at his school. Along with Tamil, Mathematics, Scripture Reading and Geography, students are taught the coloniser’s language for a specific purpose. The idea was to train personnel “for government purposes” and to “produce senior and minor functionaries” for administrative purposes (Gupta 73). The initiation of future administrators of the Raj into the Empire’s official language became a part of the colonial project of acquiring native human resources for its rule.

Thus, Swami and his friends are left to grapple with a foreign tongue alienated from their life experiences and community. Swami’s impatience and annoyance for English is symptomatic of resistance by a subject forced to privilege an alien language of commerce and social mobility over his mother tongue. This loss of one’s own language serves as a potent allegory for the lost homeland. With the imperial state’s hegemonic imposition of English on its citizens, Swami is divorced from his mother tongue, Tamil, and thus effectively denied a narrative of independence as one expects of a bildungsroman. His identity is inadvertently bound to the Empire through the social currency that the English language carries. As English takes precedence for official business and delegation, Tamil becomes reserved for communication within the household.

The written script of English is contrasted with the orality of traditional languages. Swami’s grandmother’s narration of the tale of Harishchandra1 is accompanied by a scene of tranquil domesticity as both are found sleeping peacefully. It is not coincidental that this event is immediately followed by Swami “trying to wrest the

meaning” (Narayan 25) of an English poem. His disdain for his English Reader contrasts with the preceding scene of domestic bliss. Granny’s choice of story is significant in the colonial context as well. The ancient folktale of a lost throne has symbolic echoes with the country’s ineffectual royalty (divided by princely states) and their lost prominence under the thumb of the Raj.

It is important to note that the first instance of a Hindi dialogue occurs during the Civil Disobedience protests in the narrative. Swami’s emphatic chant of “Gandhi ki Jai” (110) marks the first complete Hindi line in the text. The revolutionary fervour of the episode underscores the text’s awareness of the ongoing political tumult. Slogans like “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, “Gauri Sankar ki Jai” and “Gandhi ki Jai” infiltrate the standard English of Narayan’s purposely distant commentary (43). Hindi becomes a weapon in the hands of the mob against the linguistic dominance of English. Rallying for homespun khaddar, the protest has real-life bearings. Lancashire cloth was mass-produced and relatively cheaper than khaddar, which was produced by a tedious and time-consuming process.

Nationalists like Mahatma Gandhi believed that the import of English cloth further consolidated the reign of the Raj, and a national denunciation of it would be beneficial to the struggle for Independence. With scenes of communal pyres of English cloth and misguided patriotism (vandalism and violence within the ranks), this episode reveals a striking awareness of Gandhian movements. Finally, Swami’s rally cry is silenced by his friend Mani: “Fool! Why can’t you hold your tongue?” (110). This suppression of nationalist sentiments is

1. According to the legends, Harishchandra was a self-righteous king who nobly gave away his kingdom and material possessions to fulfil a promise made to the sage Vishwamitra. Harishchandra’s disempowerment is self-willed, while that of Indian royalty is predominantly a result of the acquisitive ethics of the Raj.

From Khaddar to Knickers: Reading the British Raj in Swami and Friends

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enforced by deploying the Empire’s language, asserting its dominance in the text once again.

The episode’s description of injustice suffered by Indians through the mob leader’s rhetorical speech highlights the subversive potential of language:

For the rest of the evening Swaminathan was caught in the lecturer’s eloquence, so was Mani. With the lecturer they wept over the plight of the Indian peasant; resolved to boycott English goods, e s p e c i a l l y L a n c a s h i r e a n d Manchester cloth, as the owners of those mills had cut off the thumbs of the weavers of Dacca muslin, for which India was famous at one time . . .the persons who cut off the thumbs of such weavers deserved the worst punishment possible. (Narayan 111)

Delivered in English, the speech appropriates the language and wields it as a weapon against the colonial establishment. Interspersed by Hindi slogans and chants, the speech nevertheless uses English as its dominant mode. Narayan’s adaptation of Gandhi’s endorsed maxim of three monkeys (see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil) to connote the violent policemen2 is another example of ironic humour directed at the characters as well as the reader. As remarked by Max Jean Zins, the writer could “squeeze the neck of English if he so pleased” (29).

Life in Malgudi

Narayan’s fictional town, modelled on Madras, is not impervious to foreign cultural changes.3 Westernized street names like Ellaman Street and Lawley Extension (named

after Sir Frederick Lawley) are found with standardized markers of rural India. Peepal trees, flowing rivers, cattle herds, pleasant picnics, lime pickles, the Sarayu river, and mango groves are an integral part of Malgudi. However, the authenticity of this ‘Indianness’ of Malgudi is compromised by English presence through characters like Mr. Hentel4 and Mr. Retty, the “most Indianized of Europeans” (91).

Mr. Retty, we are told, is a mysterious presence whose identity remains ambiguous. The only fact known about him is that he is a ‘European’ who is fluent in Tamil, mirroring the colonial enterprise of understanding native culture and language for effective governance. Thus, Malgudi’s hybrid status is symbolic of the mixed nature of identity under the Raj—it could be simultaneously traditional and modern as Narayan comments: “I like Madras because I was born there and because in Madras the ancient and the modern coexist. Madras is both old and new” (Graubard and Narayan 236).

T h i s c o n f l i c t e d i d e n t i t y i s manifested in the clothing of the characters. Dressed in the traditional garb of dhoti and banian when in domestic environs, Swami’s father puts on a formal coat when venturing out of the household. His visits to an unnamed club are for leisure where he indulges in a recreational game of tennis. On one such visit, Swami encounters a stranger whose blazer appeals to him. The appeal of this blazer is preceded by his father’s dhoti-banian, “the dress which, for its very homeliness, Swaminathan detested to see him in” (96). Throughout the text, a hierarchy is created in matters of clothing, as the English

2. The police lathi charges the protestors, and Swami gets swept up in the scuffles that ensue. An unnamed policeman grabs him by the collar and tells him to leave the mob immediately. 3. Angus Maddison notes: “The new elite established a Western lifestyle using the English language and English schools. New towns and urban amenities were created with segregated suburbs and housing for them” (1–2). 4. The characters are briefly introduced as British officials who chose to stay back after their administrative tasks were completed.

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manner of dressing takes precedence over traditional wear considered unsuitable for conducting formal business. Swami’s attire at the club of a dhoti, coat, and cap is a clear example of hybrid clothing and identity.

Hospitality in Malgudi is determined by the quality of beverages served to one’s guests. Whether taken as a nourishing drink before leaving for cricket practice, hosting an afternoon lunch for your elite friend or recuperating after a day’s (mis)adventures, coffee is a recurring element in Swami and Friends. However, in the 1930s, coffee had greater implications than being the staple beverage of the burgeoning middle class. Grown more for export than for home use (Topik 3), the colonial government encouraged the boom in coffee plantations in South India. Receiving an abundant supply of sunlight, the semi-tropical weather in these regions was ideal for a remarkable brew that could be traded abroad.

However, the trade policies imposed by the Raj were less than egalitarian, with the native plantation workers being denied fair wages and forced to work long hours in the excruciating heat. Worker strikes were quelled by violence and an impending threat of loss of jobs and livelihood (Topik 5). Narayan’s frequent references to coffee initiate a discussion of the government’s monopoly over most of the products manufactured in India by Indian workers.5

Until the discovery of Brazilian coffee that was superior in terms of quality and cost of sourcing, the coffee industry continued to grow exponentially under the Raj.

The Best School of All6 (?)

Swami’s schooling constitutes a major part of the narrative, as do his

interpersonal relationships. Albert Mission School and Board High School have their own idiosyncrasies and dysfunctions. Run by headmasters keen on corporal punishment and teachers insensitive to the needs of their students, the schools are characterised by a regimental mode of education. Narayan’s portrayal of these models of the English public-school system with their decorum and repression of pupils criticizes7 the colonial authority. The ‘Englishness’ of Swami’s schools is evident in the prioritisation of English language, logical arithmetic operations and the study of Christian scriptures even when the largest part of Malgudi’s native population practises Hinduism.

Mr. Ebenezer, described as a “fanatic” (Narayan 3), is Swami’s Scriptures master at Albert Mission School. His zealous glorification of Christianity at the expense of Hinduism is a reference to the missionary conversion drive and the Evangelical mission. Ebenezer’s critique of Hinduism lacks reason as his monologue carries a frenzied tone:

Why do you worship dirty, lifeless, wooden idols and stone images? Can they talk? No. Can they see? No. Can they bless you? No. Can they take you to heaven? No. Now see our Lord Jesus. He could cure the sick, relieve the poor, and take us to heaven. He was a real God. Trust him and he will take you to heaven; the kingdom of heaven is within us. (4)

His imposition of a Christian God on his students is unacceptable to Swami for the simple reason that Christ is non-vegetarian

5. Maddison reports: “Later it was felt that a regime of free trade would make India a major market for British goods and a source of raw materials, but British capitalists who invested in India, or who sold banking or shipping service there, continued effectively to enjoy monopolistic privileges” (11). 6. Title of a poem by Henry Newbolt, celebrating the spirit of English public schools. 7. “Far from being politically innocent”, John Thieme argues that the novel offers “a subversive response to the colonial ethic and to the educational curriculum that was one of its lynch-pins” (180).

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and consumes wine (considered immoral in Hinduism). However, Ebenezer’s efforts to invalidate and disregard a native religion have serious imperialistic foundations. The colonial project of occupying foreign nations to adjust their ‘barbaric’ inhabitants on the English scale of civility and virtue, infamously termed as the ‘white man’s burden’, has often been justified by imperial apologists as a national duty towards humanity. To wipe out native cultures by modifying their institutions according to English standards was to elevate inferior colonies:

I n E n g l i s h , t h e w o r d ‘imperialism’ has the wider meaning of that view of national duty and policy which maintains that we are bound to uphold, even at the cost of war, and in spite of all hazards, the Empire over those vast regions which the providence of God has placed under our dominion and immediate influence. (Farrar 289)

I m p e r i a l i s m a s a “ d i v i n e crusade” (292) is stated as the moral and national duty of a Christian nation by Reverend Farrar in a seven-paged document that makes explicit connections between Christian virtues and world domination. Swami’s history lessons feature whitewashed legends of ‘explorers’ like Vasco da Gama, Clive and Hastings, effacing the ensuing violence and subjugation. The colonial propaganda of valorisation of English travellers who initially entered the mainland for trade is further highlighted by the curious lack of Indian legends and histories. “The clash of the arms and the groans of the slain” (Narayan 3), are imagined by the awestruck pupils, who refrain from speculating on the nature of these wars.

S w a m i ’s a g i t a t e d e f f o r t s a t understanding the geography of Europe as

necessitated by the syllabus are Narayan’s subtle allusions to the colonial government’s cartographic projects of demarcating and defining Indian boundaries for administrative purposes (Kalpagam 87). In a comic reversal, it is now a native scrutinizing the geography of the Raj. Swami’s observation of Europe resembling a “camel’s head” (Narayan 63) is a classic example of the author’s tongue-in-cheek mockery of the Raj. However, as remarked by Ben Driss, this event also shows the native who is forced to imbibe cultures distant from his personal spatial position: “What is significant here is the child’s complete alienation from a foreign geography imposed on him at school as a major subject” (84).

Thus, the curriculum at Swami’s schools is Narayan’s revelat ion of propagandist teaching that aimed to cultivate English values and sentiments and prepare future cogs in the great machinery of the Raj that required native assistance and subordination for survival. Swami’s unceremonious exit from both schools becomes an opportunity for Narayan to embed ambivalent acts of rebellion and defiance.

The Raj of Rajam

Rajam as the new presence in Swami’s life acts as the harbinger of crucial events. His introduction establishes his character as a call-back to the babu figure through his clothing as he is “the only boy in the class who wore socks and shoes, fur cap a n d t i e , a n d w o n d e r f u l c o a t a n d knickers” (14). His westernized garb and his fluency in the English language situate him as a representative of the new elite classes with access to an English lifestyle. He is observed to speak “exact ly l ike a ‘European’” (14) by his classmates whose tenuous grasp of the language causes them to view Rajam as a respectable authority with worldly knowledge. The fact that Rajam possesses a car at a time when the likes of

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Swami can barely afford academic accessories further reiterates his financial and social superiority. Rajam clearly belongs to:

. . . a newly rising Indian elite, a hybrid caste, as Thomas Babington Macaulay would characterise in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education”, as “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect” (par.30) . . . Rajam epitomizes the cultural transvestite, estranged both from his Indian culture and European set. (Driss 83)

Living on Lawley Extension, a posh society as compared to that of Swami and Mani, Rajam is served by multiple servants. His affluent lifestyle is reflected through his toys—miniature trains and motors, airguns, t i m e p i e c e s a n d o t h e r “ m e c h a n i c a l marvels” (29)—which are highly mechanized and modern when compared to Swami’s simple rural hoops. This stark difference seems to be Narayan’s calculated metaphor for the industrialization initiative of the Empire through the development of railways and factories in native regions. Rajam’s link to the railways is evident in his train models and the locomotive for departure from Swami’s life.

Furthering the subtle connections between Rajam and the Raj, Narayan has Rajam act as the ‘peacemaker’ in Swami’s friend circle. He incentivizes with dual purposes—to reconcile differences in the group and simultaneously consolidate his position as its official leader. Rajam’s bestowing of gifts to Swami, Mani, Sankar, Somu, and ‘The Pea’ has uncanny resemblances to the English custom of awarding superfluous honours and titles to Nawabs and Maharajas of princely states in colonized India to buy their loyalties and expand territory. The honours system promptly reduced Indian royalty to servants of

the Raj, mirrored by Rajam’s unquestioned authority throughout the text.

Rajam’s proprietorial actions contribute to his unpleasant character. Forgiving Swami for his “political activities” (126) after condemning his involvement in the Civil Disobedience protest, Rajam’s loyalties hardly seem to lie with the struggle for Independence. Furthermore, his father’s position as the Police Superintendent is that of an i m p o r t a n t a g e n t o f t h e c o l o n i a l government. It is not out of character then for Rajam to introduce Swami and friends to the sport of cricket. Pioneered by English aristocracy, its origins8 are inseparable from the Raj: “deemed a standing panegyric on the English character (Pycroft 15), [cricket] was celebrated as a civilizing power able to elevate the barbaric colonized into an English gentleman” (Bateman 122).

Brought to India in the eighteenth century by Englishmen, cricket was i m m e d i a t e l y t a k e n u p b y P a r s i communities. Word spread and soon enough a considerable (exclusively male, however) demographic of the Indian population began indulging in the gentleman’s game. After starting the Malgudi Cricket Club (M.C.C.), Rajam immediately assumes captaincy. Swami, awed by Rajam’s grandeur and influence, joins the team despite his initial aversion to the legends of Bradman, Hobbs and Tate—idols who Rajam devotedly follows. Even though Swami finds their pictures “monotonous” (129), he follows the trend of pasting their pictures in albums, as Rajam does, in a series of efforts to earn his approval.

As Feroza Jussawalla comments, Swami’s behaviour can be understood by a

8. Cecil Headlam connects the dots between cricket and imperialism: “First the hunter, the missionary, and the merchant, next the soldier and the politician, and then the cricketer—that is the history of British colonisation” (168-9).

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desire to share the colonial master’s reign of superiority: “The whole metaphor of Swami and his friends’ immersion in cricket is that of internalizing the values of the coloniser. The boys who play cricket are the ones who know about so-called British justice and fair play. To play cricket is to be like the white man, to be superior” (222).

The christening of Swami as Tate—after the famous English bowler Maurice Tate—is a significant example for the colonial overriding of native identity. Swami’s joyous declaration of “You know what my new name is? I am Tate” (Narayan 150) to his grandmother is afflicted by this association with an English subject for validation of his skills. For him, to borrow Tate’s name is to borrow his English prestige and the privilege he enjoys owing to his nationality.

Rajam’s exit from the narrative, and from Swami’s life, happens through a railway train, one of the emblems of the Empire’s progressiveness. The captain of the train, dressed like a “European boy”, immediately makes Swami feel inferior and inadequate, and he then tries to “make himself inconspicuous” (209). Swami’s sense of cultural and national inferiority manifests itself again through the means of clothing. His parting gift of Anderson’s Fairy Tales with “many unknown, unpronounceable English words” (208-09) becomes a fitting tribute to the eventful Raj of Rajam, whose final abandonment of Swami to a state of uncertainty is Narayan’s ultimate parallel to the abrupt departure of the colonial government and the consequent confusion and disarray.

On the surface, Swami and Friends appears to be a boy’s tale of navigating childhood with his friends. As one would conventionally expect from the genre of children’s literature, the text is anecdotal and moralistic in nature. Swami’s exploits steer him into an adult world that lacks protection

and often, adequate guidance. However, R. K. Narayan’s tale is far from being as politically innocent as its critics have argued. The Raj has an overpowering presence throughout Swami’s journey—from the westernized sense of clothing, street names, and amenities, to the nationwide struggle for independence invading Swami’s sheltered existence.

Swami and Friends negotiates with the colonial masters in its own way. Rajam, as a powerful influence in Swami’s life as well as the text, shares more with the Raj than just the similarities in their names. Wielding his air-gun and his smart shorts and caps, Rajam assumes the uncontested position of a leader. His fluency in the English language acts as cultural and social currency of power, for to speak like the white masters is to be better than the average, uninitiated and ‘uncivilized’ native with his mother tongue. Cricket acquires meaning beyond just a sport for leisure. Narayan’s personal use of the language of the Raj is subversive through its appropriation. The standard English of the third person commentary is matched by the Indian English of the characters, riddled with grammatical inaccuracies, symbolic of the radically disorganized and disorganizing potential of the colonized. To say that the text is not in conversation with the political unrest of its time would be a severely ill-informed misinterpretation that disregards these interventions and their attempts to probe the colonial house of cards.

Works Cited

Austin, Granville. The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation. Bombay, Delhi et al: Oxford University Press, 1979. Print.

Bansal, B.B. and Usha Rani Bansal. “Industries in India during 18th and 19th century.” Indian Journal of History of

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Science, Vol. 19 (3), 1984, pp. 215-23. Web. Accessed 1 January 2020.

Bateman, Anthony. Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolizing the Nation, Destabilizing Empire. London: Ashgate, 2009. Print.

Driss, Hager Ben. “Acts of Ambivalence: Political Resistance/Resisting Politics in R. K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends.” South Asian Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2013, pp. 79-89. Web. Accessed 23 December 2019.

Farrar, F.W. “Imperialism and Christianity.” The North American Review, Vol. 171, No. 526 (Sep., 1900), pp. 289-95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25105052. Accessed 20 December 2019.

Graubard, Stephen R. and R.K. Narayan. “An Interview with R. K. Narayan.” Daedalus, Vol. 118, No. 4, Another India (Fall, 1989), pp. 232-37. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20025271. Accessed 4 January 2020.

Gupta, R.K. “English in a Postcolonial Situation: The Example of India.” Profession, (1995), pp. 73-78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25595559. Accessed 23 December 2019.

Headlam, Cecil. Ten Thousand Miles through India and Burma: An Account of the Oxford University Cricket Tour with Mr K. J. Kay in the Year of the Coronation Durbar. London, 1903. Print.

Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. Calcutta, New Delhi et al: Asia Publishing House, 1973. Print.

Jussawalla, Feroza. “Teaching R. K. Narayan's “Swami and Friends”.” College Literature, Vol. 19/20, No. 3/1, Teaching Postcolonial and Commonwealth Literatures (Oct., 1992

- Feb., 1993), pp. 219-24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25112006. Accessed 27 December 2019.

Kalpagam, U. “Cartography in Colonial India.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 30, No. 30 (Jul. 29, 1995), pp. PE87-PE98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4403049. Accessed 23 December 2019.

Macaulay, T. B. “Minute on Indian Education.” 1835. Rita Raley, comp. History of English Studies. University of California, Santa Barbara, n.d. Web. www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html. Accessed 2 January 2020.

Maddison, Angus. Class Structure and Economic Growth: India & Pakistan since the Moghuls. Taylor and Francis Publications, 1971. Print.

Markham, Clement R. A Memoir on the Indian Surveys. London: WH Allen and Company, 1871. Print.

Narayan, R.K. Swami and Friends. Indian Thought Publications, 2013. Print.

Puri, Rakshat. “Indian English and Babu English.” Hindustan Times, 1 February 1995, p. 13. Accessed 4 November 2019.

Pycroft, James. The Cricket Field. London: Longman, 1851. Print.

Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New York: New Directions, 1963. Print.

Rao, V. Panduranga. “The Art of R. K. Narayan.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 29 No. 5 (1970), pp. 29-40. Web. Accessed 10 December 2019.

Rennell, James. Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire. London: Forgotten Books, 1788. Print.

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Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber & Faber, 1984. Print.

Tharoor, Shashi. “Comedies of Suffering.” The Hindu, 8 July 2001: Features Section. The Hindu. Web. Accessed 4 November 2019.

Thieme, John. “The Double Making of R. K. Narayan.” In Critical Spectrum: Essays in Literary Culture in Honour of Professor C. D. Narasimhaiah. Ed. Satisch C. Aikant. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2004, pp. 172-191. Print.

Topik, Steven. “The World Coffee Market in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, from Colonial to National Regimes.” Proceedings of the First Global Economic History Network (GEHN) Conference, Bankside, London, September 17-20, A Millennium of Material Progress. 2003, pp. 1-31. Web. Accessed 7 December 2019.

Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Print.

Walsh, William. “Impact of the Locale of ‘Sweet Mangoes and Malt Vinegar.’” R.K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation. New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1985, pp. 58-158. Print.

Woodcock, George. “Two Great Commonwealth Novelists: R. K. Narayan and V. S. Naipaul.” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 1-28. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27543502. Accessed 29 December 2019.

Zins, Max Jean. “Whose English is it Anyway?” India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (SPRING 1997), pp. 19-31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23004629. Accessed 7 January 2020.

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The Mother in Hajar Churashir Maa and Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa

Tinka Dubey

As a Bengali woman writer, essayist and journalist, Mahasweta Devi has contributed significantly to the discourse of socio-political issues such as tribal marginalization, women’s oppression and the repressive role of the state. One work in which she explores themes along the axes of far-left politics, the position of the woman and the role of the state is Hajar Churashir Maa. Much discussion around Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Maa has revolved around its angular take on the 1970s surge in the urban Naxalite movement1 in Bengal. Its copies even made their way into jails and were widely read by the arrested Naxalites themselves. Yet, there has been a fair amount of criticism surrounding the author’s description of the movement.

In an article in The Telegraph, Ella Datta notes, “…writers like Raghab Bandyopadhyay, who wrote Comunis set in the same period of the Seventies, say that it was not an authentic document of the raw reality of that turbulent period. He believes that it sidestepped the real issues and questions raised by the unprecedented violent movement and created instead an

emotional atmosphere”. However, to view this novel merely as a political account of the Naxali te movement is to misread i t significantly—Hajar Churashir Maa is not really a novel about a Naxalite or the Naxal movement.

It is a novel about the mother of a Naxalite who is barely even aware of what the movement is, but is suddenly forced to reckon with it along with the hegemonic system it is fighting against when her youngest son is murdered. Devi never claims to provide a purely historical or objectively informed stance on the movement. In an interview with Sabyasachi Deb and Amar Mitra, she confesses, “I was never directly associated with that movement. So I wrote about an apolitical mother, whose generation was in complete darkness about their next generation” (167).

Raghab Bandopadhyay’s criticism, as mentioned in the quote above, overlooks the irrefutably central position that the mother occupies in the text. Inherent in his criticism is the assumption of the centrality of the political world outside, and a dismissal of the world inside—the world within the body and mind of

1. The Naxalite movement of Bengal was a radical resistance movement launched roughly in the latter half of the 20th century. It was initially fuelled by the peasants of Bengal fighting against the injustice they faced at the hands of landowners. Later, this movement spread amongst students in the city, and took the form of a systematic far-left revolution launched against state authorities. After the 1970s, the Indian government and administration enforced a brutal clampdown of these revolutionaries.

This paper attempts to examine the themes of politics, emotionality and marginalisation in Mahasweta Devi’s novel Hajar Chaurashir Maa, as well as its film adaptation in Hindi, Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, while providing a comparison between the two. The paper is divided into three sections, which analyse narrativization and plot development, the nature of marginalisation, and the endings as portrayed in the two modes. It seeks to understand the processes by which the film, in attempting to simplify the complex intersectional experience of the mother, and in order to impose an objective, chronological structure on the narrative, fails to do justice to her perspective.

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a woman and a mother. His comment on the predominance of emotionality in the novel is true, in a way typically linked to the criticism of the ‘womanly’ tendency that focuses only within, unable to truly gauge the complexity of the outer ‘real’ world. To value the depiction of a historically accurate or objective work is in fact related to the recognizably male tendency of legitimizing it over personal, emotional accounts.

The assumption that the political revolution of the Naxalites is thus more serious, in comparison to the ‘petty banter’ of a bereaved mother, a woman who is also socially disempowered, portrays the common mistake of valuing external, visible inequality over the inequality that informs the reality of women living within households. In the novel, Devi neither values the external over the internal nor the political struggle of the revolutionaries against the government over the day-to-day struggle of a wife and a mother in a patriarchal household. In fact, her text uses the perspective of the mother, and her own experience and emotions, to further give a different but equally poignant take on the revolution.

Bearing in mind this general tendency to reduce the value of focusing on the mother herself in interpreting the novel, this paper will look at Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa, a Hindi film adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s original Bengali novel, a n d t h e n o v e l i t s e l f , s p e c i f i c a l l y concentrating on the perspective and depiction of Sujata Chatterjee, the central protagonist and the mother. It will attempt to examine how far it prioritizes and delivers the position of the mother as a woman of the Bengali intellectual class. Consequently, this paper will also propose to examine whether

there is something about the novel that makes it uniquely successful in delivering a woman’s perspective in a way that the film simply cannot.

Narrativization and plot development

The novel is divided into four chapters—‘!"#$ ’ (morning) , ‘%&'&( ’ (noon) , ‘)*+"$’ (afternoon), ‘!,-#’ (evening), and essentially covers a series of events unfolding within a day’s time. It is 17th January, 1972, the second death anniversary of Sujata’s son Brati. 17th January also happens to be the day of his birth. This tragic potency is undercut by the fact that Tuli, Sujata’s youngest daughter is choosing to get engaged on this day. The date in which the story is located is deliberately specific, but purely for establishing its personal significance for Sujata, and not for its historical authenticity.

Further, the narrative itself is not bound to this temporal demarcation. It travels within Sujata’s memory through various experiences that have occurred during the course of her life, including the day that Brati was born, the last day that he spent with Sujata, her experiences during and following his death, her visit to the house of Somu2 and finally her visit to Nandini, the girl Brati loved, and who was also involved in the movement.

All of these major events happen on or immediately after or before 17th January, albeit in different years. Besides this fact, there is little chronological consistency or coherence in the narration of these events. They are haphazard, abrupt and sometimes even repetitive—reflective of the technique of stream of consciousness3 that prioritizes the individual memory of Sujata over the historical or chronological past.

2. Brati’s friend, another Naxalite who was killed. 3. A narrative technique, popularized by Virginia Woolf during the Modernist movement in the early 20th century. It constructs the textual narrative in the form of fluid transitions of lived experiences rather than chronology, clocked time or linear progression. Rather, it follows the back-and-forth movement of the protagonist’s thoughts through the course of the text.

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I n c o n t r a s t , t h e f i l m i s s e t chronologically, with four clearly marked timeframes—1948 (the year of Brati’s birth), 1970 (the year of Brati’s death), 1972 (the day where the story is actually located) and 1995 (a jump in the timeframe that is unique to the movie and is not present in the original novel). This change may partly be attributed to the fact that the medium of the film presents limitations in translating elements of stream of consciousness into its screenplay. Yet, the use of specific years suggests at the very onset that the film seeks to take an objective and historical approach.

The basic plot of the novel traces Suja ta’s journey in discover ing and understanding the movement her deceased son was involved in. Her transformation is facilitated by dual factors. On the one hand, it is influenced by the slow but steady disillusionment and disorientation with the reality of her family and society that is thoroughly bereft of moral standards, and on the other, by the honesty and integrity of those involved in the movement (namely, Somu’s mother and Nandini). The novel begins at her house and discusses her alienation from the rest of her family, and her closeness with Brati, who was “./- ("0” (“something different”; 14).

The middle portions of the novel cover her visits to Somu’s mother at two different points in time, and her visit to Nandini, both of w h i c h g i v e h e r s o m e c o m f o r t a n d companionship, which she is unable to feel back at home. The novel ends at her house, with the engagement party of Tuli—an e l a b o r a t e g a t h e r i n g r i f e w i t h l o f t y conversations about spirituality, peace and politics amongst people who are drunken into stupor, lacking any true understanding of the struggle or pain that political movements actually entail, or the difficulty in gaining peace in reality.

The film largely conserves this basic framework and progression, but also affects significant changes. These changes underlie

the overall tendency of making the film more centered towards having a specific take on the Naxalite movement and not allowing Sujata’s personal l ife to necessarily distract attention from this depiction. Yet, in doing so, it not only compromises on delivering the anxieties within Sujata, but also crucially impairs its depiction of the Naxalite movement.

The novel is fundamentally rooted in Sujata. Although the narrative is in third person, it weaves itself almost entirely around her existence—her physical reality, her body, her past and her present are the major and only parameters by which the rest of the social and political oppositions within the text are portrayed. Admittedly, the political backdrop of the Naxal movement depicts the brutal State repression of Naxalites but it only offers scraps of insight about the movement from the disjointed narratives of Somu’s mother and Nandini.

Significantly, both these women occupy a radically different position from that of Sujata within the society. Nandini’s conversation with Sujata provides an account of her first hand experience of police torture and an understanding of the frustration around the constant attempt to erase the traces of resistance present. Nandini re f lec ts on the courage , determination, integrity and vitality of Brati as well as the movement. She openly expresses her utter disgust for the society, questioning all those who choose to remain ignorant, including Sujata herself. The film translates this entire section from the novel convincingly.

The adaptation of the scenes with Somu’s mother, however, have some marked differences. Belonging to the lower class, Somu’s mother is acquainted with and aware of her son’s involvement in the movement. Her social predicament enables her to forge a connection with her son on the basis of their joint understanding of the

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unfairness they have been subjected to by the system. Somu, his other comrades, and Brati all spend the moments before their death in her home.

In contrast, Sujata is absolutely unaware of Brati’s involvement. She has been designated an expectedly apolitical spot as a woman of the upper class in Bengal.4 Her husband and eldest son, true to their social position, first think about securing their reputation than about Brati’s death—they work tirelessly to ensure that Brati’s name does not come up in the newspapers. Sujata slowly and seriously realises and envies the genuineness of the relationships within Somu’s family—his parents scream and wail for their dead son while her own husband and son are keen to conserve their reputation and erase Brati’s existence, a shameful mark from their family history.

Her interaction with Somu’s mother gives her only glimpses of a movement that s h e s t i l l c a n n o t q u i t e u n d e r s t a n d . Consequently, more than half of the narrative in the novel is replete with questions within Sujata’s own mind, full of anger, anxiety and mistrust about her family and the society who a r e c a u g h t u p i n l e a d i n g n o r m a l “1#2#)*"” (“natural/habitual”) lives (89). Questions such as the absence of the thousands of young men dying on the streets in the writings of intellectuals pervade her mind. These elaborate contemplations occur when she visits Somu’s mother. However, all these elements are omitted altogether in the film. The film mostly depicts scenes leading up to the death of Brati and his comrades and Brati’s last interaction with his mother when she visits Somu’s mother. Only one internal monologue concludes the scene between Sujata and Somu’s mother when Sujata leaves her house.

In the monologue, she mourns about

Brati not telling her about his involvement with the movement. In the novel too, it irks her deeply that Somu’s mother, and the parents of many others who were killed like her son were lucky enough to know about their children’s involvement while she was not. This non-disclosure cannot be attributed merely to his inability to articulate it to her. Her previous anger about society being silent about this entire issue points to her awareness about the true reason she could not understand or know her son—her society has always taught her to stay away from ‘political’ concerns, firstly because she is a woman, and secondly because she belongs to the privileged classes who can afford to and revel in scoffing at those protesting against the status quo. All this foregrounds her eventual pain in not knowing about Brati. Since the film does away with the preceding questions and anxieties within Sujata, it makes it seem like she only curses herself for not knowing about him because he didn’t say anything.

Counterproductively, the film even seems to suggest that Sujata as a mother could have prevented Brati from indulging in the movement, going in the ‘wrong direction’ had she known about him. At one point in the film, Sujata tells Somu’s mother that perhaps Brati could never tell him about his comrades and the movement because she was never around due to her job at the bank. Somu’s mother asks her, “तुम पढ़ी िलखी हो, नौकरी करती हो, अपने घर में अच्छा खाना पीना, कपड़ा लत्ता, सब ही ह,ै िफर ब्रती काह े इस िदशा में गया?” (“You’re educated, you work, you have a home with food, clothes, everything. Why then, did Brati go in this direction?”) (my trans.; Hazaar C h a u r a s i k i M a a h i n d i m o v i e

4. Late 20th century Bengali families, especially within the educated upper half of the society, believed the domain of the wife/woman should be limited to the household. The public domain, and all conflicts that occur therein, most often was entirely cut off. Women had little to no accessibility or encouragement to involve themselves in political discourse.

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00:43:38-00:43:44). The implication in their conversation posits Sujata as responsible for having failed to perform the stereotypical duties of a mother and Brati simply as a misguided, misdirected youth.

Sujata and Brati: The marginalized ‘Others’

Doing away with Sujata’s internal monologues also leads to the erasure of her socio-political similarity with Brati. In the text, Sujata’s position as a woman within a patriarchal household parallels the position of the oppressed sections within the state that Brati strongly empathises with. This parallelism is maintained throughout the novel and is crucial in developing a similarity and camaraderie between Sujata and Brati.

Even at the very beginning of the novel, Sujata sees the division within her own family as that between two different parties. She specifically uses the term “%$” or “'3” (15), both of which can be loosely translated to mean “party”, especially in a political context. She and Brati are in one party, while her husband Dibyanath and her other children are in another. In her head, this division is largely based on the dynamics of the family and her personal attachment to Brati.

In the novel, this attachment is crucially linked to the social position she occupies as a mother and wife and the societal imposition she faces in this regard. Sujata is a woman complacent with the patriarchal system she has grown up in: “4506, 7# 8+9 6# :0+/ ://, ;< 6#( )=3#, >?*/ :5+" '#;@# | )A6?@6, 6#( 0+/ "B+/# 4C ;+D /#, 4C "(# E/)6" .)F"#( :7 6I:(# G+H, 6# !&>#6# >#+// /# |” (“Firstly, whatever happens, she accepts, that is what life has taught her. Secondly, no question ever arises within her; that to question is a moral right is something Sujata has never known”) (my trans.; Devi 33). Married young into a fairly conservative Bengali intellectual family, Sujata had three children before Brati

was born. Her husband ritually and unabashedly pursues affairs with other women, which are by no means illicit, and her mother-in-law has little to censure in her son, and demands entire control over the upbringing of her grandchildren.

It is after Brati’s birth, and in his company, that some moments arise when Sujata learns to assert her own stance; what the novel specifically refers to as instances of her “)*+I# J” (“revolt”; 15) against the patriarchal system. There are two marked instances that the novel specifically delineates—one is that of Sujata sternly resisting her husband’s attempt to make a fifth child with her and the other is her refusal to leave her job at the bank despite her husband’s exhortations to her to take care of the household. Both of these instances are significant markers of sexual and economic autonomy respectively.

The film displays the first in a way that rids it of meaning—it shows the scene as a flashback when Brati asks his mother if she knows where his father goes every evening, a hint about his affair with a typist in his office. The scene, thus, becomes an instance of the strained relationship between Sujata and Dibyanath and her unwillingness to be with him because he is involved with other women. It is her first act of revolt, an act of asserting her autonomy in a household which has otherwise largely encouraged her to be silent.

Further, the film does away with the second instance completely. Her revolts are as important as Brati’s against the institutionalized system—both of them capture resistance against systemic oppression. Indeed, as mentioned before, an extension of Brati’s essence of resistance is reflected in her. The film captures Sujata’s transformation and gaining of awareness but sees her entirely as a passive recipient, when in reality, there

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is a subdued but inherent sense of revolt within her.

The film prioritizes the depiction of the brutal political reality of the Naxalite movement and chooses to look at Sujata’s transformation almost solely with respect to her awareness of Brati’s involvement in the movement, without showing her realizations about her own self. At one point in the text, she states, “K6? >#/6…G)0 >#/6#0 /# |” (“Brati knew…I did not”) (my trans.; Devi 67). This statement is loaded with a socio-political context. Brati, conscious of inequalities, could understand and know the difficulties his mother faced in a patriarchal system. His mother, unaware, could not know her son’s marginalized position in the same way.

Furthering this connection shared by marginalized entities, the novel constantly collapses the boundaries between resistance against political status quo and resistance against patriarchy. Brati, for instance, even as a child, is shown to support his mother and comfort her when she faces censure from her husband—if he ever saw her unhappy, he would stop playing and come ask her if he should fan her. Dibyanath criticizes him, calling him a “milksop” and claiming he had “no manliness” (53). Unlike Brati who despises Dibyanath and even reprimands him once when he is alive, his younger sister Tuli admires her father despite knowing of his affair with the typist, perhaps even because of it. She considers him a “'&(L +M( 06 '&(LM” (“manly man”; 52). Indeed, everyone else within the family, all of Brati’s three elder siblings have no trouble respecting him.

The admiration and pedestalization of this masculine image is something that the existing system upholds and Brati’s resistance against this ideal makes him unman ly even a s i t makes h im a

revolutionary. At one point, he tells his mother he isn’t against his father as much as he is against what he represents. It is clear then that Devi purposely mingles the marginalization of class and gender within the dominant system.

The novel also lays a considerable amount of emphasis on the struggle of Sujata with the rest of her family, representative of the Bengali bhadralok5 class at large. Bereft of true values, honesty, loyalty, integrity and love, the Chatterjee family structure is ridden with double standards and deteriorating relationships. Sujata’s husband pursues extra marital relations openly, her eldest son and the husband of her eldest daughter are alcoholics, her eldest daughter is quite unabashedly involved in relations with her brother-in-law, and her youngest daughter is marrying a sly, manipulative man. The film only mentions all this in passing, if at all, and avoids specifically depicting the ruptures between Sujata and Dibyanath. The film does not give enough space to depict Sujata’s constant alienation from and ever growing disgust towards her family. It only relays fragmentary internal thoughts that are either more impactful or contextually necessary.

The two endings

Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa tries to provide some coherence to the awareness of the mother; to try and plot it in a comprehensible manner. The confusion that the novel projects about her personal discomfort would only act as a hindrance in portraying a holistic transformation within her; it is thus no surprise that the film does not pay attention to her familial disputes with as much intensity. This tendency within the film to rationally and clearly present a progression within Sujata is a contrast to the emotional web that the novel weaves deliberately. The best way to understand this propensity to sensibly portray Sujata’s

5. ‘Bhadralok’ in Bengali translates into ‘gentleman’ or ‘nobleman’. It refers, contextually, to the upper and upper educated middle class of Bengal.

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transformation would be to compare the endings of the film and novel respectively.

To understand the ending of the novel, one must go back to its beginning. Sujata’s experience within her mind is, as has been discussed, given a great deal of space in the narrative of the novel. Similarly, facets of her body are very intricately intertwined with the narrative to further certain thematic and symbolic ideas that exist in the text. The pain she experiences in the abdomen is one such instance. On the day that the novel unfolds, Sujata is shown to experience pain in her abdomen. The narrative then travels far back in the past to connect this pain to another instance of immense bodily pain, by vividly accounting for the labour pains she experienced when she was giving birth to Brati.

This flashback scene of Brati’s birth is what intrudes in the present of the opening section of the novel, with repetitive mentions of the extraordinary pain Sujata has. Once in labour, Sujata goes alone to the hospital, unaccompanied by her husband. When the narrative finally returns to the present, there’s a short scene where Tuli asks Sujata to get her appendix checked. Following this, right at the end of the novel during Tuli’s engagement party, Sujata’s pain is shown to increase immensely. Her body physically resists from participating in a party that demeans the death anniversary of her youngest son.

She witnesses the flimsy reality of the people in the upper class, cut off from the truth of society, who pretend to know about the Naxalite movement and claim to understand how painful Brati’s death must be to her. She hears her husband talk about how close he was to his son, even though she knew perfectly well that they barely had a relationship with each other. The climactic moment comes when she must greet Saroj Pal, the chief inspector who had been responsible for investigating Brati, who had

denied his belongings, the contents of his r oom, and even h i s body t o he r. Coincidentally, he happens to be a common friend of Tuli and her fiancé and comes to the party to congratulate the couple.

Sujata’s pain increases monumentally after his visit and as she observes people dancing in a frenzy, drunk, mindless; she is disgusted with the world around her, the world that Brati has left her with. Her mental and physical revulsion jointly culminate into a bubbling feeling of everything tearing apart within her until she finally collapses on the floor, “6#('( !* .,"#( |” (“Then it was all dark”) (my trans.; Devi 120). The novel ends with her husband Dibyanath’s scream “…6+* G+')NO :P+9 :Q+H |” (“Looks like her appendix has burst”) (my trans.; Devi 120).

T h e a b d o m i n a l p a i n S u j a t a experiences marks her relationship with Brat i . Dur ing her del ivery, she is unaccompanied besides the doctor. Her husband, the patriarchal head of the house, is thus excluded, although not voluntarily, even at the beginning of the relationship between Sujata and Brati. The pain emanating within her is triggered by her memory of Brati, her son and the only comrade she had in her solitary fight with an oppressive system.

Expected code of conduct dictates that she must participate in her obligatory role within the very system that has been responsible for her subjugation and the death of her son—she must stay at Tuli’s party and forget that her son died on the same day two years ago. She must erase him as the rest of the family has, and remember him only in a manner deemed acceptable by society—by looking at him as an unfortunate ‘misguided youth’ (100).

The oppressive influence of the society is overbearingly present at the end of the novel as the enlightened discussion between family and friends about politics

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comes together with the presence of Saroj Pal, an actual authority of the state who, in his direct relation with the Chatterjee family, symbolically forges the link between the family and the state as oppressive systems. After a point, Sujata’s body refuses to allow her to bow down to this society and internally bursts, signifying not a passive but a revolutionary act that resists oppression from the system.

Its violent collapse parallels the violent death of Brati. Of course, Dibyanath only sees the effect rather than understand the true cause of Sujata’s collapse, and his comment ironically and succinctly captures the attitude of the elite class against any form of revolt or disruption that requires deeper analysis. For his logical mind, Sujata’s collapse is related to her appendix bursting and nothing more. This reductive, convenient clinical analysis closes the novel with a harsh and sardonic commentary by Devi on the bhadralok class.

The film, in addition to this ending, also provides an added glimpse at a time 23 years after the present day. This ending dramatically changes the focus and posits a conclusion drastically different from that of the novel. It situates Sujata as working in a human rights organisation, and portrays Dibyanath as much more sympathetic, both towards her and towards Brati’s memory. Sujata works with Nitu, Brati’s former colleague, who had also been involved in the Naxalite movement. Nandini comes to visit Sujata, and is working with tribals and fighting a case against Saroj Pal for the police brutality she has faced. The film ends with Nitu being shot and Sujata desperately grabbing and clutching at one of his assailants and preventing him from escaping.

Significantly, in the novel when Sujata visits Nandini, their visit concludes with Nandini markedly affirming that they would never meet again. This is not born out of spite, but is rather an acknowledgement of the drastically different positions they occupy

in society—Nandini must continue on her path against the established exploitative state while Sujata cannot truly do the same. The alternate ending provided by the film, for starters, dissolves this realistic basis entirely.

By having Nandini pursue a case, the film brings her into the folds of the legislative-administrative system. It i m p l a u s i b l y p r o j e c t s a p o s s i b l e reconciliation between far-left violent revolutionaries and the institution they have fought against. Similarly, it presents a reconciliation between Sujata and her husband, the most significant of her oppressors. This evidently shows the film’s tendency towards assimilation rather than revolt.

One might argue that Sujata’s change in profession towards human rights and her unflinching resolve to not let the killer of Nitu get away does reflect clear resistance against wrongdoings. However, it is precisely this tendency to clearly define the transformation of Sujata, from an apolitical mother unaware entirely of the system and the movement against it, to a politically conscious woman serving in a human rights organization, that the film fails to translate the essential ambivalence present in the novel.

Sujata’s realization in the novel is primarily disillusionment—there is no hope left in her for the society because she realizes how deep-rooted oppression and exploitation are. At various points in the text, she tells both Somu’s mother and Nandini that at least now, there is ‘quiet’. Yet, neither of them agrees. This repeatedly counters her inherent tendency to impose normalcy on unstable situations simply because she has the privilege to do so.

Towards the end, her disgust for her family, the system responsible for her own oppression, and by extension, the society and the state, responsible for the oppression

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of the underprivileged and the murder of her son, is so absolute that the only acceptable end for her is to collapse. Like Brati, her realization of the reality of society leaves her with only one way to revolt. There is no possibility of assimilation into such a society.

The question of Sujata having a future entails altering the entire revolutionary autonomy that the novel grants her. She is allowed to be brave in the film only so far as to not implicate the impossibility of reconciliation between the powerful and the oppressed, patriarchy and women, the state and the revolutionaries.

Hajar Churashir Maa is certainly a novel that is deeply subjective and emotional. The way Devi characterizes oppression lies outside the realms of historicized grand narratives depicting resistance. This certainly has to do with an essentially deliberate woman-centric approach that defocuses from the objective zoomed-out lens. This is precisely why its ending is abrupt, almost inexplicable, yet poignant. Thus, the resounding scream of the rebellious mother of four brings darkness, n o t o n l y l i t e r a l l y t o h e r s e l f , b u t metaphorically to this morally depraved, compassionless and ideal-less society.

The tendency of the film to conserve this and then adding another ending to provide a well-rounded conclusion at the very outset shows that it seeks to impose clarity and objectivity. It is almost a correction, made on behalf of society. By cutting the uneven edges, smoothening the bumps and erasing the overlapping narratives of the novel that make it so unsettling, the film serves just the right amount of revolution so as to make it palatable to the general society.

T h e N a x a l i t e m o v e m e n t ’ s prominence and violence necessitated the state to clamp down on it mercilessly. Yet, f o r m o s t p e o p l e t h e r e w a s l i t t l e understanding, or even reception, of the

noise created by all this confrontation. The oppression of women in patriarchy, likewise, was denied attention or acknowledgement. The mouthpiece of communicating this chaotic clamour of resisting voices is Sujata. That Devi chose the domestic sphere of the woman and weaved it together with the neglected households of the poor and the small, hidden clubs of the revolutionaries, helped her provide a very different take on the intersectional nature of oppression. This personal, emotional lens of the mother, bereft of any logical understanding or systematic thinking is not something that could be translated into a film that sought to provide the broader picture, that sought to simplify instead of communicating complexity.

Works Cited

Datta, Ella. “Word Power.” The Telegraph, 5 February 2006. Web. www.telegraphindia.com/culture/style/word-power/cid/1552988. Accessed 24 October 2019.

Devi, Mahasweta. Hajar Churashir Maa. Kolkata: Karuna Prokashani, 2010. Print.

---. “Mahasweta Devi: In Conversation with Amar Mitra And Sabyasachi Deb.” Indian Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (179), 1997, pp. 163-173. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23338305. Accessed 12 December 2019.

Nihalani, Govind. “Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa hindi movie.” YouTube, uploaded by Sarvesh Pathak, 25 October 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kor6u1tziU&t=7824s. Accessed 12 December 2019.

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No Country for Young Women:

Manjula Padmanabhan and the Nexus of Gender and Race

Koyna Sinha Poduval

This paper brings to light the work of Manjula Padmanabhan—the comic strip artist, the short story writer, the playwright. It explores how her work deals with the themes of gender and race, and their intersections. In her collection of comics, This is Suki!, she unapologetically seeks to carve out a space for women—Indian women especially—in the realm of humour and satire, which the paper shows with numerous examples. Four of her short stories are then discussed to highlight negotiations that Indian and Western individuals undergo with their respective and other cultures. Finally, her dystopian and futuristic science fiction play Harvest is described in detail to illustrate the chilling direction in which neo-colonial exploitation of the‘Third World’ might go. This paper serves well to bring recognition to an underrated creator in the arena of contemporary Indian writing in the English language.

Cartoons, caricatures and satirical drawings are intended to be rude. The point of rudeness is that it has to be offensive, like a vaccination has to employ real germs, in order to train a person’s immune system to recognize an invading virus and guard against it effectively. (“Lunch w i t h B S : M a n j u l a Padmanabhan”)

Manjula Padmanabhan has repeatedly said in her interviews that she does not call herself a feminist, because quite early on, she realized that she enjoyed very little about being female (Roy). However, ‘being female’ is something that she grapples with in all of her work, written and illustrated, as India’s first female cartoonist (the only other one being Maya Kamath) and one of the foremost woman playwrights writing in English—two exceptionally rare professions for women, especially in India. While her narratives highlight the atrocities, the everyday violence and the discrimination that women face, she does not make the simplistic point that India is a backward feudal country that treats women poorly.

Through her skillful use of irony while delving into the minds and milieu of her characters, she exposes that problems of gender are not individual but structural and are influenced heavily by the way men and women are brought up and by the idea of Tradition which is held so dear. Traditions are often rooted in the idea of nationhood, a sense of overarching history, but it is a history that women have never been a part of and all its traditions have only been used to oppress them. Padmanabhan seems to suggest that young women do not (and need not) ‘have a country’. She posits that they are much better off striving for a more critical, rational, and egalitarian identity by refusing to abide by what everybody else takes for granted—to work from within one’s feeling of ‘unbelonging’ so that one may come to conceive of a ‘habit-able’ space.

Padmanabhan’s life seems to reflect this experience of unbelonging. She was born in New Delhi in 1953, but since her father’s work required frequent relocation, she lived in Sweden, Pakistan and Thailand before coming back to India in her late teens. In an interview with Livemint, she states:

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I was self-conscious about “not belonging”—being a sort of alien. There’s an irony here: I really only felt this way once my diplomat father had retired and we were living in India full-time. It was the discovery that I didn’t feel at home in my “home-country” that led to an interest in “otherness”...It was a very easy step, to go from my actual reality to imagining worlds in which being alien is the norm […] By the time I was old enough to realize that there was no country in which I could actually feel ‘at home’ I had grown accustomed to thinking about the space between these worlds, East/West, North/South as the natural space for me to be in. Nowadays, when people ask me where I live, I say ‘The airport’. (“Writers at Work”)

In this paper, I would like to focus on one of Padmanabhan’s long-running comic strips called Suki, four short stories from her collection called Three Virgins and Other Stories (2013) and her award-winning play Harvest (1997) to explore how she exposes the absurdity of this racialized and gendered m o d e r n i t y — l a r g e l y a c c e p t e d a n d unquestioned—with incisive complexity, empathy and humour. The three central sec t ions tha t fo l low examine how Padmanabhan’s distinctive mode of engaging with gendered reality—combining a sardonic gaze with a satirical rage—runs through the three major genres in which she has excelled: first, the newspaper cartoons with which she began her career and for which she is perhaps most familiar to most Indian readers to this day; next, her relatively under-studied short stories, where

her critique of routinized gender hierarchies arguably finds the sharpest expression; and third, Harvest, the chillingly brilliant dystopian play for which she is best known internationally, in which she explores how techno-capitalist violence interlocks with ‘situated’ gender and race hierarchies in a Bombay chawl.

I

Since she has lived both in the West and the East (she has two homes—one in Rhode Island, another in New Delhi), she is acutely aware of the disparities and inequalities within each as well as between the two environs. This became especially apparent to her when she was first starting out as a cartoonist in the late 1970s. In an article that she wrote for Outlook in 2010, she explains the workings of the world of cartoon strips, the politics of Western cartoon strips in the context of an Indian audience and the glaring lack of Indian cartoon strips. She points out that Dennis the Menace1 has become such a familiarized figure that he has been used to advertise “jalebis in a small town or decorating hand-operated ferris wheels at a village mela” (Padmanabhan, “Strip the Skin”). But the opposite is difficult to imagine; we cannot imagine the Amul Butter girl selling hot dogs on an American street or R. K. Laxman’s Common Man selling t-shirts in Germany. She explains in the article that:

Neighbourhoods in these toons are squeaky clean, there’s no visible social inequality and food is a subject of entertainment, never need. The characters will belong to one ethnicity. Even if there are minor variations in race, everything else will remain

1. Dennis the Menace is a daily syndicated newspaper comic strip originally created, written, and illustrated by Hank Ketcham. Dennis Mitchell is an importuning but loveable, freckle-faced five-and-a-half-year-old boy with a famous blonde cowlick and a penchant for mischief. His long-suffering parents can only shake their heads and try to explain their son's antics to others.

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remarkably homogeneous: food habits, clothes and interior décor […] Publishing Western strips is not merely cheaper, it also permits a newspaper to dodge the issue of socially relevant humour. When Blondie throws a jar of mustard at Dagwood’s head, Indian readers are unlikely to think “Oo! Husband abuse!” But if a sari-clad, middle-class, middle-brow Indian Blondie were to follow suit, Indian readers would very likely howl with righteous disapproval. (“Strip the Skin”)

Suk i , he r eponymous comic protagonist, was approved by the editor of the Sunday Observer Vinod Mehta in 1982 in a strip called Double Talk. Suki started out as a biographical character, and the very first strip established the comic’s Brechtian metafictionality mode of estrangement,2 prompting the reader to reflect upon—rather than identify with—the conditions within which the character acts.

When the collection of strips was published as an anthology titled This is Suki!, Mehta wrote in the Foreword that he “was desperately in search of an Indian comic strip that would be positioned to sit uneasily with Hagar the Horrible giving the Viking gentleman some genuine subversion to handle” (2). Suki is a twenty year old, sassy, unruly woman; she is constantly wondering and asking questions about what she sees in the world around her and desperately trying to maintain a positive attitude about it.

The comic mode has long suffered a lesser critical reputation in comparison with the tragic. From Aristotle3 in the third century to Baudelaire4 in the nineteenth, laughter has commonly been associated with an inferior, mob-oriented disposition, and Baudelaire even went so far as to characterize it as “a damnable element born of satanic parentage” (qtd. in Morreall 87). But more recently, humour has also come to be regarded as one of the most important and successful forms of subversion against d o m i n a n t i d e o l o g y. F o r i n s t a n c e ,

2. The distancing effect, more commonly known (earlier) by John Willett's 1964 translation as the alienation effect or (more recently) as the estrangement effect (German: Verfremdungseffekt), is a performing arts concept coined by German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Brecht first used the term in an essay on “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” published in 1936, in which he described it as “playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious”. 3. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Along with his teacher Plato, he has been called the “Father of Western Philosophy”. 4. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

(Fig. 1: Padmanabhan, Manjula. Double Talk, 1)

(Fig. 2: Padmanabhan, Manjula. This is Suki!, 6)

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anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that the telling of a joke is a subversive act because the joke’s form consists of “a victorious tilting of uncontrol against control” and represents the “leveling of hierarchy, the triumph of intimacy over formality, of unofficial values over official ones” (qtd. in Vaid 127). This “subversive” aspect of humour is particularly evident among members of marginalized groups who use humour strategically to articulate and sometimes subvert their marginal or powerless status.

There are some regular characters that keep featuring in the strip such as Miss Maidenhood (“Siren of the Middle-East”), Sweetie, Oskar (her niece) and her two classmates—Richa and Kuku. Interestingly, for a cartoon series that is largely about the travails of being female, male characters rarely appear in the frames—and when they do, Suki (and Padmanabhan) treat them with sardonic, almost gentle, metafictional humour.

Suki is arguably one of the most original cartoon strips that has appeared in the Indian press, but Padmanabhan received hate mail quite often. Male readers have called Double Talk, “Double Gawk”, “Double Bore” and an “eyesore”, but luckily

this negative backlash has not stopped her from continuing to do what she does.

Mary Crawford and other feminists h a v e n o t e d w o m e n a r e t h e o n l y subordinated group that is fully integrated with the dominant group. Perhaps women's humor poses more of a threat than the humor of other subordinated groups because of the social proximity of women and men. Humor can be used in ordinary social interaction to introduce and develop topics that would be taboo in the serious mode, while protecting the speaker from the serious consequences of having broken a taboo. This provides a unique opportunity for members of a subordinate group.

Perhaps creating humor is culturally specified to be something that women cannot and must not do precisely because women's humor undermines the social order (Crawford 153). The dominant patriarchal perspective is that women must be self-effacing, shy and above all maintain decorum—they cannot and must not create humor or joke around as this would undermine the attitudes that sustain the social order. It is precisely this “naturalized” patriarchal perspective that writers like Padmanabhan try to expose.

II

In her short stories, Padmanabhan has more space to produce uniquely insightful and sardonic narratives that expose and undermine the gendered norms that govern Indian tradition and everyday life. The first story in Three Virgins and Other Stories is called “Teaser”, first published in 1996. The story is in a third-person narrative form and delves into the mind of a young man, an eve-teaser called Rakesh whose “power reside[s] in the fork of his pants” and who “believed the power to be a manifestation of the divine, made flesh upon his body” (1). The entire story mocks Sigmund Freud’s theory of penis

(Fig. 3: Padmanabhan, Manjula. Double Talk, 16)

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envy,5 and the godly pride, superiority and entitlement men feel in having a penis.

The story takes place in the span of one morning; Rakesh wakes up to find that “the power had arisen before him and was gazing at the dawn world with its blind-slit eye” (1). In contrast to this “sign of higher approval” (2) that he feels, the mediocrity of Rakesh is made abundantly clear early on through the description of his family: “his mother nagged at him for dawdling, his father called him a lazy good-for-nothing, his elder brother teased him about some trivial thing” (2).

The main setting of the story is a double decker bus. As soon as he climbs in, Rakesh’s “highly attuned senses” (4) reveal to him that there are several “targets” (4) on board. This is not a common occurrence for he has very specific criteria for his targets. The women he seeks to eve-tease should not be sari-clad (“He didn’t think it out clearly, but if he had, he would have readily admitted that they reminded him of his mother” [4]), he detested glasses (“Not merely because they were disfiguring, but because they very often appeared in combination with a dangerous pugnacious expression” [6]) and in general he preferred tight clothes although it varied from day to day. Other factors to consider were accessibility of place, age (between 16 and 23), avoiding those who were likely to cause a commotion (“Rakesh had developed the ab i l i ty to ident i fy and avoid such targets” [7]). All of the women in his field of vision, potential target or not, are given ‘it’ as pronoun. He did not fear that he sought to inspire but a submissive reverence to the power that emanated from between his legs: “It was so little to ask. Just to sit there, just to permit him to build his heat on their fuel. It always amazed and saddened him that there were those who resisted. Those who were incensed” (6).

This acerbic irony is characteristic of Padmanabhan when she goes against dominant patriarchal narratives and talks about things that people would remain silent about. Kate Clinton, a feminist humorist, makes a distinction between masculine and feminist humour which is important to note here. Masculine humour, according to her, is “deflective. It denies responsibility, the oh-I-was-just-kidding disclaimer. It is escapist, something to gloss over and get through the hard times, without having to do any of the hard work of change. It is about the maintenance of the status quo” (39). In contrast, feminist humour “is about exposure. It is about shedding light on our experience. It is an active ethos, not a passive acceptance of an imposed status quo” (39).

It is only when he gets to the upper deck that he sees ‘it’, the confirmed target. Bare shoulders, “a confection made of thin straps and bright clingy material” (12). But an ungainly bumping halt of the bus causes him to fall into the seat like “a rag doll”, foreshadowing the pathetic end that is to come. While he is plotting on how to use the speed of the bus to lean on the target with “ever increasing insistence” (13), he feels her knee digging into his, her body turned towards him. “It was a situation so unprecedented that he was paralysed. He could do nothing at all” (13). She says something in his ear but his mind refuses to understand. Through his shut eyelids, he sees that she has a red mouth, pink cheeks, and darkly lined eyes. With a red talon of a forefinger, she touches “the curving ridge under the zip of his jeans” (13) and he empties out, the light disappears. She laughs silently and exclaims that the “silly little boy has wet his pants!” (14). The bus reaches its final stop and Rakesh remains seated, breathing slowly, staring out blankly.

5. Penis envy (German: Penisneid) is a stage theorized by Sigmund Freud regarding female psychosexual development, in which young girls experience anxiety upon realization that they do not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in a series of transitions towards a mature female sexuality and gender identity.

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would say I must never leave her and I used to wonder why she ever bothered with saying it. I never would. I never did” (173).

When he was studying in the USA, he had many affairs with foreign girls. He told each girl that he loved her, that she was the only one for him, just so they became “extra loving and caring. They would want to do all my cooking and washing and cleaning” (174). However, none of these girls understood that he was singularly devoted to his mother:

…for a man like me, even a thousand of them could not take my mother’s place in my life. They could clean and wash and cook for a hundred years, even, but when the time came for me to go back to my mother, I would forget their names before the airport bus pulled away from the kerb. I would forget their faces, their bodies, their existences. (174)

By the time he comes back home, two of his sisters are already married and one is “being shown around” (175) for marriage. The fact that her brother has just come back from the USA with a foreign degree helps her prospects, especially when he comes in person to show off his accent and clothes. However, the younger sister ultimately elopes and the mother is relieved because she can give her full attention to her darling son. He leaves the choosing of his wife entirely up to his mother and all her opinions become his own:

The girl my mother chose was not very tall, and nothing much to look at, but we had already agreed, my mother and I, that if a girl is very good-looking, she can also be very proud and cocky. The thing was to find someone who would be humble

Although we have compartments reserved for women in trains, metros and buses today, the kind of harassment that Rakesh intended to perpetrate is just as common as it was twenty three years ago when this story was written. Cases of rape and molestation are still discussed in terms of what the victim was wearing and why she thought it was acceptable to be out alone in public spaces, spaces that are considered the domain of men. When extreme scenarios of brutal sexual violence are consistently overlooked by the law, situations of ogling, inappropriate touching, groping, eve teasing, and publ ic mas turbat ion become a normalized reality that all women must learn to accept and live with. But it is through stories like this that Padmanabhan seeks to remind her readers that although this may be the current reality for many, it is neither acceptable, nor should it be thought of as ‘normal’.

In another story called “The Strength of Small Things” (1996), she reveals how men like Rakesh are brought up as young boys, the disparity in treatment between them and their sisters and what goes into cementing their mistaken sense of superiority and entitlement. It also exposes the vicious practices that occur in arranged marriages such as dowry, female foeticide and bride burning. None of the characters in the story are named, which goes to show just how common these practices are in Indian society; they require no particularisation.

The narrator of the story is a 6’2’’ engineer educated in an American university who in retrospect, has understood that small, seemingly insignificant things possess great strength. He talks a little about his childhood: while his sisters might have been starving or crying or waiting to get their hair brushed, his mother would first feed him, with her own hands, till the age of ten: “She would say that I was all she had, her big boy, her only boy. She would rub the inside of my arm and she

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and who would just quietly sit in the house and look after my mother’s needs. And mine of course, but my mother would be there to take care of me anyway. (175-76)

Twenty lakhs in cash, twenty lakhs in gold and jewellery, and a Maruti that is promised to be upgraded in two years is the dowry demanded by mother and son, along with a future sum of fifty lakhs in dollars so that the family can move to California. The mother doesn’t allow the wife to work because “when a girl earns her own living, she gets the wrong ideas about life. She must stay home and look after her husband” (176). During the first two pregnancies, the mother gets the sex of the baby checked illegally. Since it is a girl the first time, they immediately get a foeticide done. It turns out to be a girl the second time as well but the doctor warns them that it would be dangerous to kill it at this stage. The mother of the narrator asks, “Dangerous for who? Isn’t it dangerous to have daughters?” (177). They go ahead with the abortion and it turns out that the baby was actually a boy.

During the third pregnancy, the wife puts her foot down and goes to her parents’ house to prevent the loss of another baby. She has a daughter; the mother and son demand the dowry of fifty lakhs mentioned earlier from the family, without wanting to take their daughter-in-law back. They refuse and the mother decides that her son should now marry someone who has a green card6

already. The son does not think his wife’s family will let him divorce her but his mother is one step ahead of him. She decides that they will bring the wife and child back and kill them, making it look like an accident. This is the first time the son argues

with his mother; he fights, he pleads, he begs but ultimately gives in, as he always has.

His mother helps him write a loving letter to his wife, telling her how much he has missed her and that now, he only wants half the money than what was previously agreed upon. The wife returns with the now four month old baby and on holding the baby, the narrator says he would feel something “shift inside [him]” (179) but his mother prevents him from holding the baby too much lest he get attached. The wife brings the money in an old fashioned suitcase which has a complicated locking mechanism.

The plan is that on the first moonless night after her return, the mother will put sleeping powder in the wife’s coffee at night, lock her and the baby in the bedroom and leave some lit cigarettes around to suggest that it was an accident caused by the wife smoking in bed.7 The narrator has booked a flight to Delhi, pretending he has to go on a business trip. He will take the money and make arrangements for their new life. The mother will stay behind to unlock the bedroom door at the last moment to avoid suspicion.

The wife and baby are asleep, the room is locked, and the husband has the suitcase full of money but he is unable to open it. His wife had put his ticket inside the suitcase but one of the locks refused to budge. The fire is smoking, a window shatters, the baby starts crying; the husband tries to open the bedroom door but the locks have jammed because of the heat. The neighbours rush into the house to see the burning room and the mother and son with a suitcase full of cash. Ultimately, the wife and baby survive the horrific attempt made on their lives.

6. A green card, known officially as a Permanent Resident Card, is a document issued to immigrants under the Immigration and Nationality Act as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently in the United States. 7. Bride burning was a very common practice in the 20th century; the husband’s family often murdered the wife by setting her on fire because of inadequate dowry.

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afforded themselves “a twentieth century lifestyle in the midst of seventeenth century India” (82). Sally’s adjustment to India included wearing saris and keeping her hair oiled and plaited, yet “vertical slits in her ear lobes looked faintly obscene. On her forehead was a tiny bindi, like an apology” (79). The dinner that night is just as strange: there’s cucumber soup with ice cubes in it and mutton embalmed in coconut chutney—a very eccentric combination. Sen thinks to herself:

W h y a n y o n e w o u l d f e e l contrived to experiment with the tried and tested combinations of Indian food. There was, I felt, an element of cultural arrogance involved. Like interior designers who use cult-objects from New Guinea as lamp bases in fashionable drawing rooms. The underlying logic being that no-one to whom the objects were sacred would ever enter such a drawing room. Or, if they did, they would be too intimidated to protest. (80)

There is some irony in the fact that despite being a white woman from the developed West, Sally has imbibed all the most conservative, pre-colonial traditional values of an Indian wife. She believes “a good marriage is the best thing is the world for a woman” (93), that “any woman would prefer death to widowhood” (92; author’s emphasis), and she longs to burn on the funeral pyre with her husband’s body, “to join him on his last journey” (91). She wants a sati that will stand as an example for many years to come and she wants someone to help her make it “something beautiful and perfect—like in the West” (94).

Since Sen is a widow herself, Sally a s s u m e s t h a t h e r p l i g h t w i l l b e

The mother dies shortly after due to heart failure and the narrator is jailed by his in-laws family. Sitting in prison, he watches the ants, “so small and so industrious” (180). He thinks about “how it is that women, who are, after all, so much smaller, weaker, stupider, less important than men, still manage to survive in life” (180). He thinks of the small metal bar in the suitcase’s lock, the small lungs of his baby and the minor expansion through heat in the door—how in their smallness and modesty, all of these seemingly insignificant things have ultimately outmatched and overpowered him.

Two other stories in this collection raise women’s questions in an inter-racial dimension through an intermingling of the West and the East. “Hot Death, Cold Soup” and “Stains” explore relationships between an Indian man and an American woman and how the latter responds to Indian customs and ways of thinking.

In “Hot Death Cold Soup”, Sally, a seventy year old American woman calls a senior journalist called Shona Sen (narrator of the story) to Udhampur in Uttar Pradesh to cover her story—her husband Subhash has recently passed away and she wants to commit sati.8 Sen arrives immediately, to an outlandishly modern house that looks extra-terrestrial in its rural milieu, only to find that Subhash isn’t dead yet (although he is very close as he is suffering from intestinal cancer and his body is only a bundle of bones; an oxygen mask covers his entire face).

Subhash was a rich land owning villager’s son who easily won many scholarships and studied at Harvard which is where he met Sally. She describes him as a philosopher, a philanthropist, and a polymath who eventually became a successful merchant which is how they

8. A Hindu practice whereby a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband; now abolished by law.

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understandable to her; she wants none of Sen’s advice or opinions, only her support—which is much like what her marriage to Subhash was. She has no time to waste on matters such as the fact that sati is illegal.

The next day, Sen gets the chance to talk to one of the three servants in the house—Shammi. She tells her that she grew up in this house and that her mother worked here as well but died at the age of thirty. She hints at sexual relations between Subhash and her mother. Another servant, Laxman, seemed to Sen like “a piece of clockwork. Or rather, not human at all” (97) because he roamed about glassy-eyed, never seeming to acknowledge anybody else’s existence. When Subhash finally dies, and all the arrangements for the sati have been made, Sen asks Sally about Shammi’s mother to stall time. Sally admits to there being rumours around Shammi’s mother and Subhash, and that she turned her away when Subhash was on tour. But later in the story, after Laxman bursts into tears at Subhash’s death, Shammi reveals to Sen that Sally had locked her mother in a room when she was sick and bleeding, and refused to call a doctor for help. She was driven to this because earlier, every time she tried to confront Subhash, he brainwashed her into thinking that she was too Western and didn’t know her place.

The story ends with Laxman burning to death with his father, Subhash, at the funeral pyre while Sen desperately tries to buy time and distract Sally. Sally dies five months later, and Sen keeps a photo of her, not choosing to say much about her when people ask, preferring that she is forgotten.

This is Padmanabhan’s way of asserting her vision of what women should and shouldn’t fight for, what parts of history they must remember, and learn from but also let go of. Sally represents a privileged but violent reality that many Indian wives have lived in the past and continue to embody. It was not just the sari and bindi that she

adopted from Indian culture but the “whole trousseau of qualities expected of a Perfect Wife. There was Faith and Trust there, Obedience, Virtue, Hard Work, Loyalty, you name it, it was there” (119; author’s capitalization). She also seems to be suggesting that the power relations of gender run much deeper than that of race and the intersection of the two presents deeper complexities: while the First World is superior to the Third World, a Western woman may still be subordinate to the Eastern man.

Unlike Sally who is willing to work within the framework of her subordination, Sarah in “Stains” is not. The story begins with a small mark of blood on a bed sheet. Sarah has come with her lover, Deep Kumar, to his home and one morning, she wakes up to find his mother, Mrs. Kumar holding up their sheet with a small stain of her period blood as if “she feared that merely to be in the presence of such a sheet might mean eternal damnation” (190). She makes Sarah go down into the basement and wash the sheet by hand and dry it down there as well; none of which Sarah understands, because in her culture, a woman’s menses is not an impure, unholy, taboo. She begins to wonder what she is doing amongst “these people” (190).

There is a constant cultural friction in Deep and Sarah’s relationship that leads to many unresolved arguments which silently keep festering. On the drive to Deep’s house, they pass a field of cows and Sarah jokingly asks Deep if he wants to stop and say a prayer. Deep is extremely offended:

You think it’s funny don’t you? Just one more laugh riot from the cosmic joke book—the joke book in which everyone who isn’t a bible-thumping, beef-eating, baseball player is treated like a court jester.

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Everything we do, whatever we find sacred, is hilariously funny just because it’s different. (192)

She has a faint memory of her mother and aunt talking about menstruating women having to sit separately in primitive communities, because their blood was considered unclean: “Sarah wondered if that’s what Mrs. Kumar was doing—avoiding the unclean magic of a bleeding woman. Unclean. Sarah felt a current of power surge through her” (196; author’s emphasis). In a description of Sarah changing her tampon, we witness her questioning and feeling shame simultaneously: “Why don’t I ever look down when I do this? Why are all my movements so automatic? […] I shouldn’t be thinking this way! It was unseemly to look at menstrual products […] it wasn’t proper. And yet…why not?” (196). This makes the perceived dichotomy between ‘Indian’ attitudes and ‘Western’ attitudes towards menstruation more ambiguous as Sarah possessed a certain guilt and shame about it herself, which is only foregrounded by her experiences with Mrs. Kumar.

In spite of Deep’s insistence, Sarah refuses to eat the food his mother has prepared for her because she has decided she will no longer pe r fo rm fo r e i the r o f them. Padmanabhan reveals Sarah’s entitled Western ignorance as well when she notes that Mrs. Kumar s tar ted speaking to Deep in “Indian” (195). She also adds the dimension of class difference; while Deep’s father was a successful surgeon, Sarah’s father was the owner of a small garage, who barely had enough money to get his children educated. A twist in the middle of the story comes by way of Deep casually bringing up the fact that Sarah is black and because she is black, he expected her to be more understanding with his mother. He accuses Sarah of seeing his mother as an oppressor simply because she doesn’t speak much English and isn’t sophisticated but Sarah immediately rebukes him:

Deep, she’s playing a power game. Anyone can play it—you don’t have to be a man—or white, or American. You won’t see it like that, because she’s your mother and the game works in your favour. But all these little things—the making of the beds, the not letting anyone else wash dishes or cook […] it’s her way of maintaining control […] It’s clear enough to you when its Russia controlling the flow of arms to U z b e k i s t a n — o r t h e U S controlling patents in the Third World. But when it’s your mother controlling the flow of my blood onto our sheet? Oh no! Then it’s tradition! Then it’s being polite! (200-01)

Deep has no response to this so he accuses her of participating in the same racism that all other Americans do, and says “I thought you of all people would understand what it means to be an outsider. To be excluded from the mainstream” (202).

Sarah lies down for a while and focuses on the pain that she feels because of the cramps: “It was possible to look steadily into the center of pain and in some undefined way, celebrate it. It was trial by strength […] there was no victor or loser, the struggle itself was everything” (203). Deep tells her that he could never take her to India because of the humiliation that she would face there but he also thinks that the West suffers from a loss of meaningful tradition. Sarah says that they have TV, Hollywood, Superman and Star Trek; it’s just that they are not gilded with time. Deep likens a strong tradition to an intricate dance that one has to learn: “When you know all the steps by heart, you don’t have to think anymore—you are the dancer and the dance” (205). But what does it say of a strong tradition that does not value thinking

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and rethinking? Could the steps of one dance ever fit the music of another then?

Sarah packs up her bags and takes the bus back to her apartment. Deep calls her up to say that his mother is worried that she is travelling in this condition but also that she will be content with Deep marrying her. He even suggests that they might go to India. But Sarah only talks about her period, about how she wants to switch from tampons to maxi pads because she doesn’t want to hide her blood anymore: “I’ve decided that the only level of culture I care about is the kind which makes my life reasonable and intelligent. Listening to music and hanging paintings on the wall is all very well, but if at the end of the day, someone wants me to hide my blood underground and to behave like an invalid—forget it, you know?” (211). The story ends with Deep asking her if she is comparing five thousand years of civilization to [“he choked on the words” (211)] feminine hygiene products, and she puts the phone down with a resounding yes.

Subversive humour as a response to one's experience of oppression and social marginalization is a form of micro-revolution. In this case, humour engenders the creation of alternative scripts within the parameters of the prevailing social order ultimately to critique it (Morreall 256). Padmanabhan seeks to ask why women should bow down to a culture, a five thousand year old tradition that has historically and systematically oppressed, silenced and brutalized them, denying their basic rights to a human existence. With the absurd humour element at the end, she undermines the sanctity and blind respect that surrounds these traditions in the popular imagination.

III

Padmanabhan’s stories are about recognizing such injustice and violence, but also claiming one’s voice and agency by the end of it. She does this most powerfully in her 1997 Onassis Award winning play Harvest, which is set in a slum in Bombay in 2010. In this play, she presents a biomedical nightmare that reconfigures relations between whole bodies and body parts through a dubious corporation called InterPlanta Services which is in the business of organ extraction and transplantation. It enables First World bodies to violently consume Third World bodies—in return for satisfying their material needs, organs are taken from dwellers in a Mumbai slum for prolonging the lives of wealthy, white Americans. In her note before the play, Padmanabhan emphasizes that “there be a highly recognizable distinction” (2) between the [organ] Donors and Receivers, in terms of race.

Stage directions indicate “a single room accommodation” that is “bare but neat” (5). Om Prakash, his mother (Ma), his brother Jeetu (who is a male prostitute), and his wife Jaya live here. Om enters into a Faustian contract9 with InterPlanta Services in a desperate attempt to pull his family out of dismal poverty. His mother is unaware of his actions, but is horrified at the prospect of Jaya having to pretend that she is Om’s sister rather than his wife since a Donor cannot be married. Earlier in the play, Ma also suggests that Jaya is having an affair with Jeetu, which is true. Jeetu’s mother and brother have disowned him because of the work he does but Jaya takes care of him. However, one of the main requirements of InterPlanta services is cleanliness and no risk of disease which is why Jeetu is forced to leave the house and live on the streets. Before he goes, he bravely

9. Faustian contract/bargain, a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches. Derived from the legend of Faust in which Faust/Faustus—a scholar trained in theology—turns to magic and makes a perilous deal with the Devil in which he commits his soul to eternal damnation in return for power and knowledge in this life.

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states that unlike Om, he doesn’t mind being bought, but he “won’t be owned” (43; author’s emphasis).

Through a contact module provided by the company, Om’s family is put in touch with an American called Ginni who will sponsor all their material needs in exchange for organs that she may require. She is described by Padmanabhan as “blonde and white-skinned epitome of an American-style youth goddess” (48). Soon this virtual American simulation takes over their lives by governing each tiny detail such as when and what they eat. Within two months of contact, the same bare single room is “transformed into a sleek residence with gleaming surfaces, chrome, steel and glass […] there are gadgets—TV set, computer terminal, mini-gym, an air-conditioner, the works” (49). Om and Ma are in love with Ginni, they bow to all her wishes and opinions. Neither of them realizes nor wants to acknowledge the level of control the contact module exercises over them, how they are essentially being raised as fodder with pills and strange powders for food.

One day Jeetu comes back home, ridden with disease and close to death; Om and Ma want to turn him away immediately because Ginni will be furious at the health hazard that he presents but Jaya decides to nurse him back to health: “We abandoned him to the streets. The least we can do is risk our own skin when we touch him” (65). This is a crucial line not only because the daughter-in-law is speaking up on behalf of the son of the family but because Jaya will demand this for herself at the very end.

One day the Guards come into their house and take Jeetu instead of Om for an organ transplant; Jeetu returns with no eyes and giant goggles that allow him to see simulations inside his mind. Om is outraged t ha t h i s b ro the r i s now the so l e communicator with Ginni, that Jeetu gets to see her beauty and enjoy her wealth instead

of him. For the sake of one body, Ginni causes the breakdown of the whole family as each one compromises their humanity by betraying their kin for hollow, temporary material and/or sexual satisfaction. For all his morally superior talk of not being owned, Jeetu is powerless on seeing Ginni and is ready to give her whatever she wants, in the hope of some sexual contact with her “(he moves his body seductively): Just tell me what you want of me Ginni” (97). He is under the misguided assumption that Ginni will take him to the fantasy land that she inhabits, that he will be able to escape his destitution in her white arms.

So when the Guards come the second time, he is only too happy to be taken away by them. Om has the same fantasy, so he packs up and sets off to InterPlanta services in the hope that they will correct their mistake. Meanwhile, Ma is on her way to becoming a human cyborg because she has ordered the “SuperDeluxe VideoCouch model XL 5000” which has 750 channels from all over the world as well as “manual control panel, neuro-stimulator and full body processing capacities” (114), which means that her body will become one with this machine. The technology of the West has conquered this one room household in Bombay.

In the final act, Ginni is revealed to be Virgil (he only used the computer animated image of Ginni as a wet dream for the men). He explains to Jaya that the West has “lost the art of having children” (116) because:

We began to live longer and longer. And healthier each generation […] But our victory was bitter. We secured Paradise—at the cost of birds and flowers, bees and snakes! So we designed this programme. We support poorer sections of the

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world, while gaining fresh bodies for ourselves. (116)

Virgil takes Jeetu’s entire body and makes it his own; it is his fourth body in the last fifty years. Jaya’s final conversation happens with the First World voice and mind of Virgil in Third World Jeetu’s body and appearance. This becomes the living proof of the West’s artificial cannibalizing of the third world. Virgil goes on to explain that ultimately he needed Jaya’s body because they required child-bearing women. He uses his knowledge of Jaya’s deep desire to have a child, stating that although she is infertile, he can get her pregnant by artificially inseminating her. Jaya knows that he is much more powerful than she is, but she refuses to play by his terms: “Look: I’ve understood you now. I know you’re stronger than me, you’re richer than me. But if you want me, you must risk your skin to get me. Even though it’s really Jeetu’s skin—I want you to risk it!” (120). If not, she will kill herself and that will be her victory, because she’ll die knowing that a white man who only lives to win, “will have lost to a poor, weak and helpless woman” (122).

The play ends with this threat looming over Virgil, while Jaya makes herself comfortable on the couch, and “rich, joyous music fills up” (123) her room. In “The Seed and the Earth: Biotechnology and the Colonisation of Regeneration”, Indian bioethicist Vandana Shiva claims an intrusive and exploitative role for biotechnology:

Biotechnology, as the handmaiden of capital in the post-industrial era makes it possible to colonise and control that which is autonomous, free and self-regenerative—such as women’s reproductive systems. Technological deve lopmen t unde r cap i t a l i s t patriarchy proceeds steadily from what it has already transformed and used up, driven by its predatory appetite, towards that which has still

not been consumed. It is in this sense that the seed and women's bodies as sites of regenerative power are, in the eyes of capitalist patriarchy, among the last colonies (154).

By insisting that Virgil take on some risk, Jaya attempts to reverse the dominant economy in which impoverished and gendered racial subjects are compelled to be the bearers of risk, to pay for the speculative practices of global finance capitalists. In other words, she is insisting that Virgil and people like him also have a debt to pay. Indeed, by what means have he and his kind come into their wealth? (Kim 217). Given the perverse economy of gendered racial debt, Jaya’s life is not really hers anymore. The only thing she actually owns anymore is her death and she will assert that as leverage because it is her only access to power.

That such a global industry could be legally sanctioned, economically profitable, and ethically unquestioned at a time that is not too distant from the time of Harvest's actual writing would suggest that the “challenges facing humanity in the next century,” a century we have now arrived at, are vexed and multifold. Not least among these challenges is the question of what constitutes “humanity”—or the very humanity of the human itself—in such a world (Kim 217).

Jaya becomes the voice of reason (with a “J as in justice” [Harvest 91]) in a world that is so fiercely imbalanced in terms of wealth, technology and power and shows how this violent cycle may be broken. One has to stake claim over one’s own body, even if it means to die. Helen Gilbert observes that “‘the Indian donors’ (re)actions are constrained by their limited access to capital and knowledge whereas the American receivers position themselves all too easily as the ‘natural’ beneficiaries of the world’s human and material resources, [but] the play suggests that moral choices are still possible, even imperative” (5).

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IV

Both Arundhati Roy and Manjula Padmanabhan wrote their first books (God of Small Things and Harvest respectively) in the same year but while the former became a global celebrity, who mostly wrote political tracts over the next two decades, the latter remained relatively obscure despite creating short fiction (more subtly political, but political nevertheless) and feminist cartoons of great significance. There have been other Indian artists who have done exceptionally well across genres such as Satyajit Ray (cinema, drawing, children’s fiction), O. V. Vijayan (cartoons, novels, short stories), M. F. Hussain (painting, drawing, film-making) but they are all male artists and widely known.

Thus, given her wide-ranging generic repertoire, overlapping perspectives across genres , and her rather except ional achievement as an ar t i s t , Manjula Padmanabhan compels a contemporary reassessment of her significance and stature within what Pasacale Casanova terms The World Republic of Letters.10

She may not call herself a feminist, but she is deeply thoughtful and invested in many of the key issues that women artists, and activists have engaged with over the decades. In her Introduction to Three Virgins and Other Stories, Padmanabhan writes “…being published is a great way To Lose Friends and Alienate People. Or maybe that’s just me! My friends wish I would quit displaying my mental deficiencies by writing science fiction. Some fellow writers dismiss me as a failed cartoonist with literary pretensions. Other fellow writers would prefer to swat me off this plane of

10. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters—the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary and social capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. The World Republic of Letters is a marvelously stimulating look at the realpolitik of world literature and the authorities who run the marketplace of ideas.

existence…” (viii). At present, there may be ‘no country for women’ but like her cartoon personality Suki, who is stubborn about resisting pressure, Padmanabhan has not let any of the criticism stop her from being forthright and scathingly presenting what everyone already knows, and then pushing it a little bit further so that readers, may decide for themselves if this is the kind of reality that they want to subscribe to: in the East, West or anywhere in between.

Works Cited

Clinton, Kate. “Making Light: Another Dimension—Some Notes on Feminist Humour.” Trivia, Vol. 39, pp. 37-42. Print.

Crawford, Mary. Talking Difference: On Gender and Language. Sage Publications, 1995. Print.

Ghoshal, Somak. “Writers at Work| Manjula Padmanabhan.” Livemint, 24 August 2013. www.livemint.com/Leisure/ DKDlAqUKyUTCHlJgB5enoI/ Writers-At-Work--Manjula- Padmanabhan.html.

Gilbert, Helen.“Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest: Global Technoscapes and the International Trade in Human Body Organs.” Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 16.1, 2006, pp. 122-29. Web, doi.org/ 10.1080/10486800500451070. Accessed 23 February 2020.

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Kim, Jodi. “Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest.” Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1/2, DEBT (SPRING/ SUMMER 2014), pp. 215-232. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/ i24364882. Accessed 23 February 2020.

Longo, Michelina. “HUMOUR USE AND KNOWLEDGE-MAKING AT THE MARGINS: Serious Lessons for Social Work Practice.” Canadian Social Work Review / Revue Canadienne De Service Social, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2010, pp. 113-126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/41669925. Accessed 23 February 2020.

Morreall, John. “The Rejection of Humor in Western Thought.” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 39, No. 3, 1989, pp. 243-265. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1399447. Accessed 23 February 2020.

---. Taking Laughter Seriously. State University of New York Press, 1983. Print.

Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Strip the Skin.” Outlook, 1 November 2010, www.outlookindia.com/magazine/ story/strip-the-skin/267567. Accessed 23 February 2020.

---. Double Talk. Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

---. Harvest. Kali for Women, 1998. Print.

---. This is Suki!. Duckfoot Press, 2000. Print.

---. Three Virgins and Other Stories. Zubaan, 2013. Print.

Roy, S. Nilajana. “LUNCH WITH BS: Manjula Padmanabhan.” Business Standard, 14 June 2013, www.business-standard.com/article/ opinion/lunch-with-bs-manjula-

Vaid, Jyotsna. “The Evolution of Humour: Do Those Who Laugh Last?” Evolution of the Psyche, edited by D.H. Rosen and M. Luebbert, Praeger, 1999, pp. 123-138. Print.

padmanabhan-104061501006_1.html.

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The Black Arts Movement that emerged in the early 1970s was committed to bringing the Black experience into mainstream American literature. The movement sought to foster a new consciousness, with artists from the coloured1 community taking charge of chronicling their own socio-cultural history in order to carve a distinctive Black American identity. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published almost a decade after the movement in 1987, carries forward its legacy and presents how the experiences of slavery continue to burden the African-American community, years after their ostensible emancipation.

Set in America during the period of Reconstruction,2 Beloved narrates the stories of Sethe, Paul D and Baby Suggs: emancipated slave characters living in a coloured community in Ohio. The novel travels in time to venture both into their past experiences of slavery as well as their present attempts at rebuilding their lives. The plot of the novel revolves around the mythical readvent of Sethe’s dead daughter, Beloved, whose life was cut short by her own mother in a desperate attempt to protect her from the indignities of slavery. Beloved, present as the ghost of the dead baby in Sethe’s house at the beginning of the novel, briefly takes a corporeal form and re-enters their lives.

The historical context of the novel is that of the black and white dichotomy that has subsisted in the American society since the days of slavery. The problem of racial segregation, or the ‘colour line’ that W.E.B. Du Bois saw as central to the American society in his book The Souls of Black Folk, looms large in most African-American writing. However, in Beloved, what becomes interesting is not merely the significance of black and white, but also of a variety of other colours in the palette. Although the opposition between black and white remains one of the chief concerns of the novel, it doesn’t supersede the significance of the rest of the colour spectrum. Rather, as Wendy Harding suggests, the novel invites the readers to follow the example of Baby Suggs and to ponder colour (“Toni Morrison’s Art of “Pondering Colour” in Beloved”).

Baby Suggs, having been enslaved all her life, is set free in her old age. As an emancipated slave, she can choose to do as she likes with what little remains of her life, and amongst other things, she chooses to think about colour: “Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for

1. The term is used as a label for people of mixed ethnic origin, here: African-Americans. 2. In American history, the period (1865-77) that followed the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, economic legacy.

Pondering Colour: A Study of Shades in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Saadhya Mohan

This paper attempts to study the multiple colours employed in Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel Beloved and how they form a distinctive language of their own. Moving beyond the categories of black and white which reinforce an oppressive system, the author focuses on the manifestations and configurations of different colours. By bringing forth the multiplicities that they offer and by explicating on their undertones as incorporated in the narrative, the paper adds fresh perspective to objects, events and physical settings of the novel, as well as to the significance that they hold in the life of its characters.

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shade, and as a corollary becomes the most significant one in the novel. It indicates violence and is concomitant with some of the most powerful images in Beloved:

The role of the colour red in Beloved is a complex one…red serves as a highlighter for the reader, marking and intensifying the seemingly boundless influence of slavery…The colour red and the characters’ intense interaction with it are themselves a text within Beloved. They tell the story of the characters’ process of dealing with the psychological wounds inflicted upon them. (Bast 14)

The chokecherry tree on Sethe’s back, a remainder of Schoolteacher’s3 whipping of her with cowhide, is one of the most striking examples: “A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look l i k e , a n d d e r n i f t h e s e a i n ’ t blossoms” (Morrison 93). It is almost axiomatic that violence and bloodshed go hand in glove with each other. It seems only natural then, that red, being the colour of blood, is cognate with gory images. In certain instances, red evinces violence even when there is no allusion to blood.

A n i n e f f a c e a b l e i m a g e o f brutalization of the coloured in the novel, in this context, is that of the red ribbon Stamp Paid4 finds in the Ohio River. The red ribbon produces a disturbing image of the barbarity of White people against a young girl of colour: “Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck

pondering color” (Morrison 4). Breaking away from an oppressive system that enforced a monochromatic vision of things, she wishes to see what lies in the world beyond the white-black hierarchy. This new appetite for colour in the freed Baby Suggs in turn points to the barrenness of her earlier life as a slave. Her quilt stitched with two patches of orange, conspicuous in the room that was otherwise black, white and grey, is strongly symbolic of her experience.

Sethe too, understands Baby Suggs’ need for colour: “Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before. Took her a long time to finish with blue, then yellow, then green. She was well into pink when she died” (Morrison 237). It is in their liberation from the system premised on the split between black and white, and their freedom to see the world free of a tinted lens, that the freed-slaves begin to notice other colours.

In addition to a general contemplation on colour, the novel also lends itself to a differential analysis of the various shades employed in it. Different colours recur in association with certain moods, events and images in the novel, forming a complex scheme of chromatic symbolism. A reading of the novel from this perspective suggests that colour itself constitutes a special kind of language in Beloved.

I

He kept the ribbon; the skin smell nagged him, and his weakened marrow made him dwell on Baby Suggs’ wish to consider what in the world was harmless. He hoped she stuck to blue, yellow, maybe green, and never fixed on red. (Morrison 213)

The occurrence of the colour red is rampant in Beloved. It is the most recurring

3. The second of the two slave masters at Sweet Home plantation where Sethe, Baby Suggs and Paul D had served. 4. Another former slave character and part of the coloured community in Ohio.

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to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp” (Morrison 213). It is because of the recurrence of red with cruelty, that Baby Suggs, while pondering colour, never wished to think about red.

In addition to physical hardships, red also brings out the emotional tribulations that the characters have experienced. When Paul D first enters 124,5 he finds himself locked in “a pool of red and undulating light” (Morrison 10). This light is projected onto him by the ghost of the dead baby, itself a reminder of past baggage. Sethe tells him that the ghost of the baby is not evil, but sad. Red here then does not underscore danger, but emotional suffering. Paul D’s walk through this pool of red light makes him vulnerable; it forces him to feel sorrow, an emotion he has forbidden himself from feeling for the last eighteen years. It marks the first step in the melting of his “tobacco tin” (138) chest to recover his “red heart” (138). It is his reunion with Sethe, and ultimately his sexual encounter with Beloved, that triggers the revival of his repressed memories; he loses his grip on the lid of the “tobacco tin” his heart had become, and reaches the peak of his emotional suffering:

“Beloved.” He said it, but she did not go. She moved closer with a footfall he didn’t hear and he didn’t hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn’t know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, “Red heart. Red heart,” over and over again. Softly and then so loud it woke Denver, then Paul D

5. Baby Suggs’ and Sethe’s house in Ohio. 6. Another slave at the Sweet Home plantation. 7. Sixo’s flame-red tongue described thrice in the novel foreshadows his fiery demise at the hands of Schoolteacher. 8. A run-away indentured white servant, whom Sethe meets in the forest on the day she flees from Sweet Home and gives birth to Denver.

himself. “Red heart. Red heart. Red heart.” (Morrison 137-138).

Thus, red, symbolising violence and pain, is a colour that all of the characters inevitably experience at some point in the novel (Harding). It highlights the torment they have all endured—rubies of blood on Beloved’s neck, the puddle of Beloved’s baby blood into which Baby Suggs slips, Sixo6 with a “flame-red tongue”7 (Morrison 25), Sethe’s chokecherry tree and Stamp Paid’s red ribbon. It is this common experience of suffering that connects them; it is their collective emotion of pain that forms an intangible bond between them. All of them have experienced red, and it is red that ties them together, best evident in the metaphor of Stamp Paid’s red ribbon.

But if red signifies pain and suffering, it also heralds healing and hope. Amy Denver,8 in describing carmine velvet to Sethe, tells her that it is “like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth” (Morrison 40-41). For Amy, reaching Boston where they sell carmine velvet was an escape to a new life. For Sethe and Paul D too, the red roses that lined the path on the way to the carnival, denote the beginning of a new life, a hope for a future as a family. They also mark Denver’s first social outing since Baby Suggs’s death. Stamp Paid’s red ribbon gives him courage; when he is standing outside 124, hesitating to enter, he “clutched the red ribbon in his pocket for strength” (217). The ribbon then like the colour red itself has a dual meaning, and exemplifies both brutality and strength.

Harding finds this dual symbolism of red paradoxical (“Toni Morrison’s Art of “Pondering Colour” in Beloved”).

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However, it can be argued that Morrison, in using red for both images of violence and hope, emphasises that in order to heal, one must experience, endure and negotiate with pain. “Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know”, Amy comments to Sethe (Morrison 92). Similarly, it is essential for Paul D to let loose his emotions, to grieve and feel agony, in order to come to terms with his past and heal. The colour red in the novel then carries both life and death in itself, exemplifying both growth and death through the chokecherry tree on Sethe’s back,9 and even more prominently in Denver suckling her dead sister’s red blood along with her mother’s milk.

II

Baby Suggs’ concentration on colour stems from her desire “to consider what in the world was harmless” (Morrison qtd. in Harding). There are certain colours in the novel which come at moments of security and solace. “Blue. That don’t hurt nobody. Yellow neither”, Baby Suggs tells Stamp Paid (Morrison 211).

Green and blue are the two most discernibly safe colours in the novel. Sethe runs away from Sweet Home after being mistreated by the Schoolteacher and his pupils. Ironically, she finds sanctuary in the hands of a white girl, Amy Denver who is a run-away indentured white servant. Sethe finds safety for the first time in the green woods with Amy, who helps her give birth to Denver. Amy nurses a half-dead Sethe through the night, rubbing her feet, cleaning her back and tying up her wounds. This incident is heavy in its cache of blue and green imagery, such as that of the shoes that Amy makes for Sethe’s feet with her shawl and leaves. Amy rubs Sethe’s feet and sings the song that her own mother sang to her. This episode of maternal care is inundated by “blue Kentucky light” (Morrison 96), which

9. The chokecherry tree combines the image of natural growth of trees with the deadening violence of Schoolteacher’s whipping.

creates the sense of an almost angelic safety enclosing the two women.

Moreover, Sethe’s water breaks on the bank of the Ohio River, telling her that the baby is alive and safe, and has made it through the difficult night. Surrounded by “spores of bluefern” (99), Sethe gives birth to Denver. As Nicole Coonradt notes, the symbol of the bluefern is important: “Often they are mistook for insects—but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future. And for a moment it is easy to believe each one has one—will become all of what is contained in the spore: will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty lasts no longer than that; longer, perhaps, than the spore itself” (99). The bluefern spores become a symbol for Denver, Sethe’s only child who will grow up safely with her mother (Coonradt 179).

Sethe’s encounter with Amy then is an event that stands out—a white woman looking out for a black woman, or perhaps more simply, a woman looking after another woman:

On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of s i l ve ry b lue . They neve r expected to see each other again in this world and at the moment couldn’t care less. But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a s l a v e a n d a b a r e f o o t whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. But no pateroller came and no preacher. The water sucked and

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Lulled into a false sense of security by the safe colours, Baby Suggs ignored her instincts telling her that something bad was about to happen, and therefore could do nothing to prevent it. Consequently, when the Schoolteacher arrived, Sethe kills her own daughter to protect her from slavery. From the day the “cheery blue sky” (179) betrayed her, and she became “as colour conscious as a hen” (46).11 Again then, as seen in the case of red, there appears to be a multiplicity in the meanings connoted by blue and green.

The imagery of the clear blue sky and the green leaves is categorically repeated on the day Beloved leaves 124: “Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky is blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves” (Morrison 308). But this time, it is for Sethe’s own safety that Beloved needs to go. Over-indulgence in the past and excessive care for Beloved has taken a toll on Sethe. Her sojourn from reality has become dangerous and needs to come to an end. This time then, the colours mark her return to safety.

III

Red, green and blue, thus stand out in a novel posited on black and white, and various shades of grey. The lens of each colour offers a new reading of the novel, with a different meaning imbued in it. Reading meaning into various shades lends fresh significance to certain symbols in the novel. It allows attachment of deeper meaning to material objects as seen in Stamp Paid’s red ribbon and Baby Suggs’s quilt, as well as to physical surroundings like the green Clearing and Denver’s boxwood retreat. It also fosters a more intricate understanding of personal

swallowed itself beneath them. There was nothing to disturb them at their work. So they did it a p p r o p r i a t e l y a n d w e l l . (Morrison 99-100)

Green, though employed generously throughout the novel, becomes most prominent in Denver’s boxwood retreat. First it was “a playroom, (where the silence was softer), then a refuge (from her brothers’ fright), soon the place became the point” (35). In its “emerald light” (34), Denver is “closed off from the hurt of the world” (35). Social isolation has made Denver lonely, and so she seeks solace in nature. When Paul D starts living with them, she feels that her mother is being taken away from her. At times like these, when Denver feels insecure, she comforts herself in her emerald closet.

Paul D too, finds comfort in trees. At Sweet Home, he had named a tree “Brother” (Morrison 260), the name itself suggesting a familial ease. He used to sit under the tree after his day’s work was done, sharing cooked potatoes with Halle, Sixo and the other Pauls.10 In addition to the personal refuges of Denver and Paul D, the green Clearing where Baby Suggs used to preach became a safe space for the entire coloured community of Ohio. It is there that they came to let loose, to cry, to comfort each other, and to heal. In the “green blessed place” (105), under the guidance of Baby Suggs, they found a cathartic outlet for their suffering.

While green and blue are presented as non-threatening and harmless, these colours defy their meaning on the day the schoolteacher comes to take Sethe away: “Baby Suggs, holy, looked up. The sky was blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves” (Morrison 162).

10. Paul D’s fellow slaves at Sweet Home plantation. 11. Sethe becomes insensitive to colours after Beloved’s death, and the novel mentions that the last colour Sethe recalls seeing is that of the pink chips in the tombstone of Beloved eighteen years ago.

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experiences of characters, such as Beloved’s death, Sethe’s encounter with Amy, and Denver’s birth—which attain an additional tinted identity of their own.

In playing with the meanings of colour, Morrison breaks the rigid matrix of the American society constructed on that fixity. The discussion on the significance of colours emphasises the insufficiency of a two-tonal system and the unstable binaries it creates. By attaching special connotations to various colours, Morrison suggests that colour resists categorisation—it is not as clear cut as black and white, and calls for incorporation of other meanings.

Works Cited

Bast, Florian. “READING RED: The Troping of Trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” Callaloo, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2011, pp. 1069-1086. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41412478. Accessed 20 October 2019.

Coonradt, Nicole M. “To Be Loved: Amy Denver and Human Need: Bridges to Understanding in Toni Morrison's ‘Beloved.’” College Literature, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2005, pp. 168-187. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25115312. Accessed 20 October 2019.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903; Bartleby, www.bartleby.com/114/. Accessed 1 February 2020.

Harding, Wendy. “Toni Morrison’s Art of “Pondering Colour” in Beloved.” Ed. Claudine Raynaud. La couleur du temps dans la culture afro-americaine, Tours: Presses universitaires Francois-Rabelais, 2005, pp. 83-93. OpenEdition Books, books.openedition.org/pufr/5408?lang=en. Accessed 20 October 2019.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage Books, 2010. Print.

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Feminism1 in Fleabag2 Madhuboni Bhattacharya

Through its focus on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Emmy award-winning series Fleabag, this paper attempts to explore the labels of feminism and political correctness along with the expectations and restrictions imposed on a woman in the contemporary world. Further, it uses Waller-Bridge’s own negotiation with her role as a content creator in the present day to frame resistance against these labels. It examines the way in which notions of feminism have been problematised in the series, through its plot, characterisation and dialogues. Ultimately, it seeks to expose the arbitrary and relational nature of this socio-political construction of categorisations, thereby subverting their definitions and meanings.

1. In this paper, ‘feminism’ is understood in its broad sense of the acknowledgement that the male point of view is generally prioritized in societies and that women are treated unfairly in these societies (Gamble vii). By feminist elements in media, one refers to the emphasis on and portrayal of women’s issues and examples of empowerment of women. 2. This essay deals with both Seasons of the television show, the first Season of which is based on a one-woman monologue play of the same name written and performed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Waller-Bridge both starred in and participated in the creation of the television series. 3. Kristen Warner in her introduction to a volume of Communication, Culture and Critique negotiates the usage and ambivalences of these terms (see Works Cited).

The labels of women-centric media, women-targeted media, feminist media3

h a v e b e e n u s e d e x t e n s i v e l y a n d interchangeably by critics and scholars. There exists a certain perception of the current era being a golden age for female creators and characters, especially in television (Perkins & Schreiber 919). But the classification of these works under these labels is unstable. Certainly, the ideas overlap considerably, but given the different implications of these labels, are all female-protagonist shows similar to each other? Should shows pertaining to women only be watched by an audience consisting mostly of women? Does all women-created, women-centric or women-targeted content have to be feminist?

Such labelling can prove restrictive for creators, and there are creators who are struggling against these restraints. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is one such creator whose Emmy award-winning show Fleabag fits

into the category of female-centric and even feminist media, even as it resists and questions such categories. She has been quite clear about how she feels about such expectations and labelling:

A lot of the time, when I was being asked about the show, it was through the prism of feminism, which was a very important part of that show for me, and the confusion the character felt—but it was one strand in the story of this character. There were so many other themes in it that I was grappling with, and so many ways that I was trying to fuck with the genre and all that kind of stuff, but it was always that… And I just started feeling like I was suddenly being moved into a different position—that it wasn’t so much that I

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was a writer, it was that I was a feminist writer—which I am, of course I am, and I’m a feminist person—but that became a category of writing, and I felt that made me want to have three glasses of wine and rail at reporters…because that’s not what I’m trying to do, and I’m proud of the fact that that’s how my work is being received, but I do think, especially with female writers who write honestly about women and their experiences, I feel like it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a feminist.’ (The Hollywood Reporter)

Fleabag is certainly female-centric in the sense that it delves deeply into the humorous and terrible (often humorously terrible) happenings of a young British woman’s life. The show deals with many themes across both Seasons: family, mental health, sex, even Catholicism as well as gender and feminism. Fleabag has an older sister named Claire, and a widower father who is to be married to the girls’ Godmother. The deceased characters who nevertheless have an enduring influence across both seasons of the show are Fleabag’s mother (never shown but often discussed) and her best friend Boo (shown only in flashbacks) with whom she had opened a guinea-pig-themed café. The show traces Fleabag’s s t r u g g l e s w i t h h e r b u s i n e s s , h e r dysfunctional family and her own psyche.

The main character, Fleabag,4 is not impervious to the patriarchy and portrayals of the disadvantages faced by women in society are not absent in the show. Although feminism is indeed a ‘strand’ in Fleabag’s story, she has a tenuous relationship with it, which therefore, serves as a source of a great deal of anxiety to her. Moreover, throughout the show, there are moments which seem to parody the modern-day practice of feminism and female empowerment, and those which seek to provide an alternative, nuanced perspective on sexual assault. The aim seems to portray Fleabag and the other characters not only as men and women, but flawed humans just like each other and everyone else.

Using instances from the show, this paper will attempt to illustrate how Fleabag critically negotiates with the issues of gender, feminism and the pressures to be politically correct5 in the modern world.

The context and its negotiation with gender

The wor ld a round F leabag— admittedly limited to the upper middle class, urban, Western milieu of London—is preoccupied with gender and women’s issues and seems to be burdened with the anxiety of being politically correct. There are a number of moments in the show where this is presented explicitly. A fleeting shot in Season 1, Episode 1 shows the headlines in the paper that Fleabag is reading on the bus:

4. She is not addressed by any name throughout the series, like some of its most significant characters (e.g. Godmother, Priest). In an interview with Decider, Waller-Bridge explains the origins of the name as a family nickname for herself, but her intention is for it to be more of a source of subtext for the character than an autobiographical reference (O’Keefe)—someone dirty-minded and with questionable morals. 5. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1997) defines “political correctness” as “conformity to a body of liberal or radical opinion on social matters, characterized by the advocacy of approved views and the rejection of language and behaviour considered discriminatory or offensive” (Knowles). In this paper, one understands it more specifically as an ideology of the contemporary politically liberal wing in the West which seeks to “sanitize the language by suppressing some of its uglier prejudicial features, thereby undoing some past injustices…with the hope of improving social relations” (Hughes 3).

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What stands out is the article on sexual assault, the questioning of the term ‘feminism’, and the mortgage ad with the incongruous nude woman (a clear example of the objectification of women in media). These are all issues that women’s movements around the world have taken up, thus bringing them to wider public attention.

The world, as it is shown in Fleabag, seems to be almost obsessed with questions o f g e n d e r e q u a l i t y a n d w o m e n ’s empowerment. But in the show, one finds that these attempts to level the playing field for women can backfire. In Season 2, Episode 3, Claire hosts an event to present an award for “Best Woman in Business” to a woman called Belinda Friers. But Belinda herself only attends and accepts because she felt it would be rude not to. She actually feels that women’s awards are “infantilizing bollocks”, “ghettoizing”, a “subsection of success” and the “children’s table of awards” (10:43-10:57). These awards are likely in place with the intention of recognizing the success of women in business, which becomes something exceptional in what is traditionally understood to be a man’s world. Fleabag seems to have this understanding, congratulating Belinda for the award and confusedly asking whether women’s awards are a good thing when Belinda expresses her distaste (10:42-10:49).

But Belinda’s stance points out that setting up a separate award for women effectively excludes them from the

mainstream and does not place them on an equal platform with men. Even Claire, while organizing the entire award presentation event, lets it slip that the award should not be “pink or anything horrifically female, she’ll [Bel inda] loathe that” (1:47-1:50) , acknowledging that there is something inherently exclusive and tokenistic about the award. Thus, the woman-in-business award becomes representative of attempts at women’s empowerment which backfire and effectively marginalize women.

The show also looks at the issue of sexual harassment at the workplace from a new perspective, through the character of the Bank Manager. He is introduced in Season 1, Episode 1, when he interviews Fleabag regarding the loan application for her café (7:07-8:58). He mentions at the start of the interview that they haven’t had the opportunity to give loans to any woman-led businesses since a sexual harassment case in the past—a case which seems to have been publicized enough that Fleabag is already aware of it. Fleabag accidentally flashes her bra at the manager during the interview because she feels warm and forgets that she was not wearing a top under her sweater, but given the company’s history, the man thinks that Fleabag is seeking to seduce him into giving her the loan. Despite her protests that she has no ulterior motive, he rejects her loan request (it probably did not help that she blurted: “No, I’m not trying to shag you, look at yourself!”). As she leaves, she calls him out for having a dirty mind—“perv”— and he responds by ca l l ing her a “slut” (7:07-8:58).

This exchange illustrates how companies have begun to take sexual harassment cases seriously, but for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways. These companies now see the mere presence of women and interactions with women as breeding grounds for sexual harassment issues and, by extension, for bad publicity.

Figure 1: Still from Waller-Bridge, Fleabag (Season 1 Episode 1 3:04)

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Due to companies’ pre-emptive reluctance and carefulness in dealing with women, in the end, it is the women who often lose out.

It is later found out (in Season 1, Episode 4) that the Bank Manager was the one who had been involved in the company’s infamous sexual harassment case, and was mandated by the company to participate in a men’s retreat/workshop called ‘Better Man’, just down the road from the all-women retreat, where Fleabag and her sister are. While the women’s retreat involves staying completely silent, the men’s retreat is for them to “reprogram” their minds, bodies, and mouths and to be respectful to women—by cathartically screaming out hateful and angry words for women (exclamations such as “slut”, “slag”, “fucking slut”) at dummy female dolls (5:50-10:00). This perhaps hints that the men feel silenced by the pressure to be politically correct in their everyday lives, and that the women feel the pressure to speak and say the right things, and that these establishments are retreats from that world. The men then practice what to say and what not to say to female colleagues. The men’s retreat is a clear commentary on how futile it is to impose feminism and political correctness upon men from above. In fact, a terrified worker at ‘Better Man’ tells Fleabag to leave for her own safety when she is spotted by the enraged, excited men at the retreat (10:15-10:30). Despite all the attempts to brainwash them, women still have to be protected from men’s true feelings.

Thus, in the show, the world seems to be making certain targeted attempts to make itself a better place for women, and these attempts are undeniably a step in the right direction—but along the way to political correctness, the real impact of such “feminist” exercises is often weak or detrimental, and the ultimate goals of gender

equality and actual empowerment of women are lost sight of.

Victims of the patriarchy

There are several elements in Fleabag that do, indeed, portray the more typical concerns of feminist media—that is, the ways in which the patriarchal norms of society oppress women. The illustration of the contribution of society in Fleabag’s problems and anxieties seems to be a deliberate exercise on the part of the creators. In an interview with All Arts, the Director of the television show, Vicky Jones, explains how she and Waller-Bridge had sought to imagine what would happen if “an intelligent young woman internalized mixed cues about s ex , empowermen t , l i be ra t ion and desirability and grafted them onto her identity?” (Edevane). What they created was Fleabag: “a character who wants better treatment for the women around her but settles for less in her own relationships, i n c l u d i n g t h e o n e s h e h a s w i t h herself” (Edevane).

Not only Fleabag, but also some of the other women in the show such as Claire and Boo are portrayed to have certain insecurities and internalized notions of themselves which are clearly a result of society’s misogyny. Body insecurity and an obsession with appearance and attractiveness are afflictions born of patriarchy that plague the women in the show. There are numerous examples: Fleabag’s description of Claire as “probably anorexic, but clothes look awesome on her” (Season 1 Episode 1 9:12-9:16), the way both sisters raise their hands at the feminist lecture in affirmation that they would trade five years of their lives for the so-called perfect body, Boo’s quadruple refrain of “I hate my body”6 and her desire to change her thighs if she could change anything in the whole world,

6. A serious-sounding statement just casually thrown in while trying on clothing for a party in Season 1, Episode 1 (13:00-13:02).

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Fleabag’s own fear of an aging body which will no longer have any supposed value because it will no longer be conventionally sexually attractive (her nymphomaniac tendencies also largely stem from this insecurity).7 The monologue about hair in Season 2, Episode 5 also highlights the importance that women are expected to give to their appearance and how women internalize such notions:

Hair is everything. We wish it wasn’t so we could actually think about something else occasionally. But it is. It’s the difference between a good day and a bad day. We’re meant to think that it’s a symbol of power, that it’s a symbol of fertility. Some people are exploited for it and it pays y o u r [ A n t h o n y t h e hairdresser’s] fucking bills. Hair is everything, Anthony. ( S e a s o n 2 E p i s o d e 5 9:28-9:45)

These insecurities are symptomatic of the society’s patriarchal, hypercritical view of women’s bodies. Fleabag insightfully points out during her emotional breakdown in the final episode of Season 1: “Either everyone feels like this a little bit, and they’re just not talking about it, or I’m completely fucking alone” (Season 1 Episode 6 22:33-22:42).

Yet, these bodily insecurities are also presented as something that women should not be shamed for having, the way the audience and speaker at the feminist lecture silently condemn Fleabag and Claire for raising their hands. Fleabag and Boo’s

conversation about their respective physical insecurities (nose and thighs) in Season 1, Episode 4 (13:55-14:32) is one of Fleabag’s happiest memories with Boo (she recalls it at the women’s retreat when they are asked to think of one of the times in their lives when they were peaceful). These insecurities are realities that women negotiate with, and the goal seems to be to lead one to question whether it is wrong for women who claim to be feminists to admit to such shallow insecurities.

On The Andrew Marr Show, Waller-Bridge remarked that one is not “supposed to say those sorts of things”—referring to Fleabag willing to trade years of her life for the perfect body—and that Waller-Bridge herself shared the anxiety with Fleabag of wanting to get things right but having “bad thoughts” and doing “things that don’t align with the message” (BBC One, 2:46-3:22). Perhaps Fleabag seeks to give women the space to have these thoughts, or at least reassure them that they are not the only ones who have them.

Another way in which the insidious patriarchy manifests in the lives of the women in Fleabag is in matters of dating, sex and other similar social interactions with men. There are a number of sexual situations in which Fleabag seems to be merely going with the flow and doing what is expected of her, rather than enthusiastically consenting to the activity, namely her non-explicit consent to anal sex in Season 1, Episode 1 and sex with Bus Rodent8 in Season 1, Episode 3. Bus Rodent, in general, has this tendency to talk over Fleabag and dominate the conversation, as is shown when he is asking her out (Season 1 Episode 1 3:51-4:03) and

7. “…I know that my body as it is now really is the only thing I have left and when that gets old and unfuckable I may as well just kill it. And somehow there isn’t anything worse than someone who doesn’t want to fuck me. I fuck everything” (Season 1 Episode 6 22:03-22:24). 8. Bus Rodent is how the cast list of the show refers to the man that Fleabag meets on the bus and subsequently dates for a little while. His front two teeth are very long and prominent like that of a rodent, hence the nickname.

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on their first date (Season 1 Episode 1 16:09-16:34).

Fleabag’s on-again, off-again ex-boyfriend Harry is perceived by her family as a nice man who is good for her. Fleabag also acknowledges his positive traits, albeit with a negative tone, as if they were her reasons for disliking him: “…he was just—really kind and supportive of my work. He’d cook all the time, run baths, hoover. He’d laugh at all of my jokes. He was really great with my family and my friends loved him. Plus he was really fucking affectionate” (Season 1 Episode 1 5:50-6:05). At first, it seems that it is Fleabag’s own low self-esteem and avoidance of real feelings that splits her up from a good man like Harry. But Harry’s subtle toxicity becomes more evident as the series progresses. He remarks at one point: “You aren’t like other girls. You can [points to head] keep up” (Season 1 Episode 2 3:59-4:04)—reinforcing the social and gendered stereotype that mental competence is a rarity among women.

Harry also has controlling tendencies when it comes to sex that he masks as romance. He is not able to give Fleabag the roughness in sex that she wants, and yet he is evidently offended when she masturbates or watches porn. He sees his right over her body as complete—he hides what he refers to as “our” vibrators (they are Fleabag’s) without asking her and decides on both of their behalves to stop masturbating (Season 1 Episode 2 17:04-17:39). For Harry, it is only natural that an individual’s sexual identity— especially a woman’s—gets subsumed when in a relationship.

Martin, Claire’s husband, is one of the characters closest to being a villain in the show, along with Godmother. He is unpleasant not only because of his individual personality traits, but also because of the

intrinsic patriarchal elements in him. For one, he is described by Fleabag as being “… one of those men who is explosively sexually inappropriate with everyone, but makes you feel bad if you take offense because he was just being fun” (Season 1 Episode 3 5:55-6:03).

He is not shown to have explicitly influenced Claire to refuse her promotion to Finland, but her feelings of loyalty to her husband, who has problems with alcohol, are what tie her down. One’s impression of him as a chauvinist is cemented in his speech in the final episode of Season 2, in which he tries to convince Claire not to leave him. He claims that he is not a bad man because he does things for the household (not for her specifically), and he takes pride in not making her feel guilty for not wanting to have sex with him (Season 2 Episode 6 7:50-10:50).

Martin is indeed shown to be a uniquely unpleasant man through his representation in the show, bordering on parodic, but this final speech echoes the modern complexity of abusive relationships, in which the bar set for heterosexual men is so low that the women are supposed to be grateful or appreciative of not having an explicitly or physically abusive, sexually-entitled husband.

But even as the patriarchal structures that define women’s interactions with these men are exposed, none of the characters are portrayed in a two-dimensional, wholly unlikeable way. Bus Rodent seems to largely be perceived as harmless, if a little ridiculous, by Fleabag. Harry, for all his flaws, still emotionally affects Fleabag when they break up for the last time, and she remains fond of him throughout Season 1. Even Martin’s struggle with alcoholism and his desperate desire to please Claire and keep

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her by his side lends nuance and shades of grey to his character.

The Bank Manager’s side of the sexual harassment case is one of the clearest attempts of the show to humanize even its w r o n g d o i n g c h a r a c t e r s a n d s h o w ambivalence within issues of gender. In the conversation between Fleabag and the Bank M a n a g e r i n S e a s o n 1 , E p i s o d e 4 (19:42-22:57), he reveals that he has been sent to the men’s retreat by his employer, because he touched a colleague’s breast multiple times at a party. There are no direct attempts to justify or explain what he has done. He expresses a desire to apologize to everyone (perhaps indicating that his crime was not only against the colleague but against women and society in general). But he goes on to give a rather personal account of his own insecurities and aspirations.9

Perhaps these lines are to prompt the audience to see him as a rounded character and an entire person rather than just a perpetrator of sexual assault. But he specifically mentions wanting to show love and affection to his wife and protect his children, especially his daughter. But it remains ambiguous if his desire to protect his daughter stems from an understanding that the actual threat to women, like his daughter, are ironically men like him. One is conflicted whether to read it as scathing self-awareness or male hypocrisy. The Bank Manager wants nothing more than to move on from his transgression, but the show can be criticized for its failure to show the converse side of the story—that is, the perspective of women who have been victims of sexual assault. Certainly they, too, would want nothing more than to move on. If both sides had been

9. He comments: “I’m just a very disappointing man” (20:47) and “I want to move back home. I want to hug my wife, protect my children, protect my daughter. I want to move on. I want to apologize to everyone. I want to go to the theatre. I want to take clean cups out of the dishwasher, put them in the cupboard at home, and the next morning, I want to watch my wife drink from them. And I want to make her feel good. I want to make her orgasm again, and again” (21:23-22:26). 10. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s interview on The Andrew Marr Show (BBC One).

shown, perhaps there could be more genuine understanding and sympathy for the perpetrator.

About this conversation, Waller-Bridge says:

…It was really important that it wasn’t a kind of anti-men message…A lot of female-centric work can be—people jump on that really quickly, like whether or not it’s kind of anti-men…It’s basically just meant to be a show about broken people, and I really wanted somebody else, who in any other way she shouldn’t probably be able to relate to, like…he’s an older man with a completely different life set up, and work and goals and jobs and everything…but they recognize something broken in each other, and that’s what helps them open up to each other. So it’s sort of about being brave enough to make a connection with someone that you otherwise might not be able to. (Waller-Bridge, “BUILD Series”)

“Bad feminism”10

The imperfect feminism of the women in the show is an assertion against the burden of being politically correct. As Priscilla Frank points out, “In Fleabag, feminism is framed not as a source of power or refuge, but as an additional standard our main character struggles to meet; yet another barometer against which women inevitably measure their inadequacy” (“TV’s Darkest New Show Depicts an Imperfect Feminism, And That’s A Good Thing”). Both Fleabag and her creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge buckle under the

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modern-day pressures to be feminists—and good ones at that:

I think it’s a feeling that a lot of women, and probably some men as well, feel like they could fall into a trap of being a bad feminist, which is somebody who doesn’t tick all the boxes of what it is to be a perfect feminist or a perfect spokesperson for the cause. And there are so many potholes in the road, it’s kind of frightening and you want to be able to say the right things. (BBC One)

Fleabag is constantly worried that s h e “ c a n ’ t e v e n c a l l h e r s e l f a f e m i n i s t ” ( S e a s o n 1 E p i s o d e 1 20:40-20:43), or that she is in it for the wrong reasons: “I sometimes worry that I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits” (Season 2 Episode 4 3:18-3:25). Her father buys the two daughters tickets to feminist lectures as a way to cope with their mother passing away (Season 1 Episode 1 9:35-9:45). It is clearly important for a modern woman in the present-day to be a feminist. However, feminism in this show is shown to have the potential to stifle women and tell them what to do and say and what not to, rather than empower them. Fleabag’s often unapologetic political incorrectness can be read as transgressions against these stifling situations, where she lets go of her anxieties about being a “bad feminist” and simply says what she is truly feeling—feelings which “may not be feminist, but they’re real” (Frank).

Parodies of feminism

There are a number of instances in the show where the modern-day practice of feminism itself is mocked. The feminist lecture that the sisters attend is called

“Women Speak: Opening Women’s Mouths since 1998” (Season 1 Episode 1). The name also serves as a contrast to the all-women retreat that the sisters go on, which is called “Women Don’t Speak.” Although there is some lofty ideal of liberation that this retreat claims to offer to the participants, in effect it seems l ike a repressive, pr ison-l ike environment where one cannot speak and must perform household chores to “find our sanctuary in the partaking of menial tasks” (Season 1 Episode 4 6:59-7:03). The lecture and the retreat together represent the various mixed messages about female empowerment that women get: to speak or not to speak, to have sex or not to have sex, to dress up or not to dress up. Both exercises claim to offer something to women by telling them to behave in a certain way, but both are essentially futile and ridiculous:

She’s being told to think things all the time…like going to that feminist lecture…this is an example of a revered feminist giving an important speech about what’s important about being feminist. And that was very important to me that I wasn’t taking the piss out of that, because it IS important, and the people that do lectures about feminism are important and revolutionary people, most of them. But it doesn’t mean that sometimes you couldn’t go to them and…just be really bored, or have a sense of humour about it, or “Don’t ask stupid questions, the answer is obvious”. And I felt like that was the secret of the show. There’s a secret bit of the female experience that I wanted to be like, “What if we just put that on TV?” And all the other women would go, ‘Yeah! Me too!’ or they would be like, ‘Oh my god, she’s

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such a bad feminist.’ (“BUILD Series”)

Fleabag’s Godmother, who is currently in a relationship with their father, is another example of a modern-day feminist gone horribly wrong: pretentious and politically correct to the point of being absurd. The repartee between Fleabag and Godmother regarding the statue of a headless, nude woman sums up the tension between the high ideals of artistic and academic jargonized feminism and the lived reality of women:

Fleabag: Poor fucker. Godmother: Yes. She’s actually an expression of how

women are subtle warriors, strong at heart, you know. We don’t have to use muscular force to get what we want, we just use our—

Fleabag: Tits. Godmother: Innate femininity. Fleabag: Tits don’t get you

anywhere these days, trust me.

(Season 1 Episode 1 22:33-22:52)

The absence of the statue (which Fleabag has stolen) at Godmother ’s “sexhibition”11 is made into a piece of art in itself, called “The Woman Robbed”—toeing t h e l i n e b e t w e e n c l e v e r n e s s a n d meaninglessness (Season 1 Episode 6 4:33-5:05). The sexhibition could on the

surface be intended to start a conversation on women embracing their sexuality even as their bodies age. But Godmother’s own explanation points in a different direction: “I think it’s important for women of all ages to see how my body has changed over the years. I think they have to have a healthy perspective on my body” (Season 1 Episode 5 13:29-13:38). The emphasis on and iteration of “my” exposes it for the narcissistic endeavor12 that it is, and one wonders if such feminism, which remains trapped by the subjectivity of the artist and restricted to the elite circles which are the consumers of such art, makes any significant advances towards empowering women.

The criticism of feminism is not to disregard the advances that it has made for women. In fact, Priscilla Frank points out:

F l e a b a g ’ s a m b i v a l e n t relationship to feminism is, in part, a sign of how far the movement has come. She engages in casual sex, owns her own café, and speaks her mind without censorship or h e s i t a t i o n―qualities which would not be possible without the tireless work of the feminist camp. (“TV’s Darkest New Show Depicts an Imperfect Feminism, And That’s A Good Thing”)

The show also does not call for a postfeminist13 discarding of basic feminist

11. Godmother is an artist, and her latest project is something she calls a “sexhibition” (Season 1 Episode 5 13:11)— an exhibition centred around her own sexuality. 12. The Godmother is the perfect example of how artists and intellectuals are often interested the experiences of the marginalized and use them for their work, without giving the marginalized any voice of their own or real importance, as we see in Season 2 Episode 6, when Godmother introduces her panel of tokenistic friends—a deaf person, a lesbian and a “bisexual Syrian refugee” (2:04-2:29). 13. The postfeminist debate “…tends to crystallise around issues of victimisation, autonomy and responsibility. Because it is critical of any definition of women as victims who are unable to control their own lives, it is inclined to be unwilling to condemn pornography and to be sceptical of such phenomena as date-rape: because it is skewed in favour of liberal humanism, it embraces a flexible ideology which can be adapted to suit individual needs and desires. Finally, because it tends to be implicitly heterosexist in orientation, postfeminism commonly seeks to develop an agenda which can find a place for men, as lovers, husbands and fathers as well as friends” (Gamble 36).

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tenets. Misha Kavka points out that the term “postfeminism” implies that feminism has ended and that there has been a historical break to divide the period of feminism and the period after it—but that is not the case in the real world, and it is certainly not the case in Fleabag, in which both feminism and issues that it deals with are rooted in the reality of the time, within the lives of layered characters who are impacted by, and in turn impact, the aforementioned issues. But Fleabag seeks to show us the problems with the practice of a feminism that is prescriptive and restrictive that it no longer remains something for women to turn to and be helped by in their struggles. It is not in this modern-day, performative feminism of lectures, workshops, and exhibitions that Fleabag finds any sort of comfort.

Is Fleabag a feminist?

There are some rather unconventional ways in which Fleabag asserts her own power as a woman, and thus can be said to practice her own brand of feminism, regardless of whether she herself calls it thus. For example, there is a scene in Season 1, Episode 2 in which she is walking to her café and feeling attractive, and she anticipates that a man walking in the opposite direction is going to catcall her. She makes the controversial statement, “Oh, God, he can’t believe how attractive I am. Kind of worried I’m gonna make a sex offender out of the poor guy” (Season 1 Episode 2 6:00-6:05).

This is a clear departure from the feminist narrative of sexual harassment being more about power than attraction,14 and women being vict ims15 rather than

provocateurs of it. But by keeping up this witty monologue of anticipating what he is going to say and judging the quality of the catcall he is able to come up with, she makes a mockery of him and takes back the power in the situation. She does not feel victimized, vulnerable, or humiliated, which is what catcalling normally does to women. She has turned the gaze on the gazer. Even if it is only within her internal monologue, she has to an extent destabilized the power relations that would otherwise have manifested in such a context.

Fleabag also does not shy away from using female-specific profanity for both herself and other women. Many feminist scholars have pointed out the patriarchal, misogynistic roots of female-centric curse words. She refers to Godmother as a “cunt” (Season 1 Episode 1 21:51), which Eleanor Morgan in her article for The Guardian finds “refreshing, and rare, to watch a woman use the c-word like a bullet” (“Rage revolution: TV needs far more seething, devastating women like Fleabag”). She happily responds to the yells of “SLUTS!” from the men’s retreat with a cheery “YES?” (Season 1 Episode 4 3:00-3:07). This acceptance of female-centric profane language certainly can be seen to empower her in the situations that she uses it —in the first to vent her anger stemming from her extreme dislike of the antagonistic character, and in the second to take the venom away from a female-centric insult by not being offended by the term.

Fleabag’s sexual preferences could also provoke censure from feminists. Throughout the series, she expresses the

14. “…rape is not a random unpremeditated act but a form of violence by the powerful on those who are powerless, poor and disadvantaged” (Desai and Patel). 15. “The image that emerges from feminist preoccupations with rape and sexual harassment is that of women as victims…This image of a delicate woman bears a striking resemblance to that fifties ideal my mother and the other women of her generation fought so hard to get away from. They didn’t like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn’t like the fact that she was perpetually offended by sexual innuendo. They didn’t like her excessive need for protection. She represented personal, social, and psychological possibilities collapsed…But here she is again…Only this time it is feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her” (Roiphe).

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desire to be fucked rather than made love to, treated like a “nasty little bitch” (Fleabag, Season 1 Episode 1 6:27-6:37) and being told what to do by the Priest16 (Season 2 Episode 4 23:53-24:05). Certain feminists might say that such submission is a surrender of agency. Catharine MacKinnon, in her theory of gender, has understood sexual submissiveness in women to be a result of social conditioning which defines femininity through sexual submissiveness, thus leaving no room for the idea of a woman's independent sexual preference for submission.17 In the particular case of Fleabag, one may concede that her sexuality is strongly impacted by her low self-worth and damaged psyche (see footnote 7). Regardless of the reason for why her preferences are the way they are, asserting her desires and demanding what will give her real pleasure seems to be its own sort of female empowerment.

Priscil la Frank comments that “Fleabag is a feminist character in that she actually resembles a complex and imperfect human being, itself still a rarity for women onscreen. But within the world of the show, whether or not Fleabag as a person qualifies as a feminist, even a bad one, remains questionable” (“TV’s Darkest New Show Depicts an Imperfect Feminism, And That’s A Good Thing”). She goes on to talk about how the endless analysis of every one of her actions and statements to determine whether it is feminist or not shows how ridiculous the whole exercise of labelling and categorizing is.

Conclusion

Fleabag is a show which is both feminist and critical of feminism. In exploring the contexts and manifestations of feminism, it also explores its limitations. It grapples with

gender, among many other themes, in a way that shows the different facets of gender issues in the modern, Western world (at least to the extent that London can be considered representative of such a world).

When asked in an interview if Fleabag’s problems were gender-specific, Waller-Bridge responded:

They were to a certain degree in that they feel that they were coming from my personal impulses, and I am a woman…so in some ways, it does feel like the fact that she is a woman is integral to the show and her story…But I have often thought how the story would be received if it was exactly the same, and the same attitude and tone, and if it was a man playing it, but I’d like to hope that it would still stand up, ’cause I was aiming for a kind of story about a human in the end, but it is also defined by the fact that she’s a woman, because it’s her experiences. (Wal le r-Br idge , “BUILD Series”)

The ambivalence in Waller-Bridge’s answer clearly reflects the position a modern woman like Fleabag might want in society: to be recognized as a woman and have those gender-specific problems understood, but also be seen as not only a woman but a human being like any other.

Thus, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s seems to refrain from endorsing any one

16. In the confessional booth, Fleabag rants about how she wants someone to tell her how to live her life, and then begs the Priest to tell her what to do. On the one hand the speech refers to how religion can give direction to life which seems essentially pointless. But the Priest responds by telling her to kneel, and then they proceed to kiss heavily, making what was till then only sexual overtones of the scene into something more explicit (22:38-26:02). 17. For a review of literature on traditional sexual roles—i.e. male dominance and female submission—from a social psychological perspective, see the work of Diana Sanchez et al (Works Cited).

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specific stance on gender issues in Fleabag in order to be able to show the nuances of the characters with more clarity and examine them from multiple fresh perspectives. The characters are gendered individuals (men and women) who face the world with different perspectives, considering its advantages and disadvantages from their respective positions. But at the same time, what the show attempts to highlight is that they are all just broken people with flaws and redeeming qualities—all intensely human.

Works Cited

BBC One. “Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the return of ‘Fleabag’.” The Andrew Marr Show, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0733wbf. Accessed 10 March 2019.

BUILD Series. “Phoebe Waller-Bridge Discusses Her Amazon Show, ‘Fleabag’ | BUILD Series.” YouTube, 12 Oct 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bp-sWaMPVU.

Desai, Neera and Vibhuti Patel. Indian Women: Change & Challenge in the International Decade. 1975-85, Popular Prakashan, 1990. Print.

Gamble, Sarah. “Introduction”, “Postfeminism.” The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, edited by Sarah Gamble, Routledge. 2006. Print.

Hughes, Geoffrey. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.

Kavka, Misha. “Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What Is the ‘Post’ in Postfeminism?” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2002, pp. 29-44. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4149214. Accessed 12 October 2019.

Knowles, Elizabeth. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words. Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

MacKinnon, Catharine. Toward a Feminist Theory of State. Harvard University Press, 1989. Print.

Morgan, Eleanor. “Rage revolution: TV needs far more seething, devastating women like Fleabag.” The Guardian, 29 August 2016, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/aug/29/fleabag-tv-needs-far-more-seething-devastating-women. Accessed 23 February 2020.

O’Keefe, Meghan. “‘Fleabag’ Star & Creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge Explains Why A Raunchy Show Needs A Lot Of Heart.” Decider, 16 September 2016, decider.com/2016/09/16/fleabag-phoebe-waller-bridge-interview/. Accessed 7 February 2020.

Perkins, C and M. Schreiber. “Independent women: from film to television.” Feminist Media Studies. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1667059. Accessed 31 October 2019.

Roiphe, Katie. The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. Hamish Hamilton, 1994. Print.

Sanchez, Diana T., et al. “Eroticizing Inequality in the United States: The Consequences and Determinants of

Frank, Priscilla. “TV’s Darkest New Show Depicts an Imperfect Feminism, And That’s A Good Thing.” Huffington Post, 10 May 2016, www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/fleabag-feminism-television-women_n_57f2a9aee4b024a52d303f77?ri18n=true. Accessed 12 October 2019.

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Traditional Gender Role Adherence in Intimate Relationships.” The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 49, No. 2/3, 2012, pp. 168-183. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23249142. Accessed 24 February 2020.

The Hollywood Reporter. ““Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s ‘Fleabag’ is NOT Autobiographical! | Close up With THR.” YouTube, 10 June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PYpMDCJOMA.

Waller-Bridge, Phoebe, creator. Fleabag, Season 1, Two Brothers Pictures, 2016. Amazon Prime, www.primevideo.com/detail/0OB9NDUVQKFRSYRSCHT2A784TI/ref=atv_srdef_c_unkc__2_1_2?sr=12&pageTypeIdSource=ASIN&pageTypeId=B01MZGXK48&qid=1570886268.

Warner, Kristen J. “Value Added: Reconsidering Women-Centered Media and Viewership: Guest Editor’s Introduction.” Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 12, Issue 2, June 2019, pp. 167-172, doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz023. Accessed 24 February 2020.

Decoding the Genre: Reading Gossip Girl as Detective Fiction

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Introduction

In 2007, Gossip Girl, a television series created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage was released, based on but drastically different in context from the book of the same name written by Cecily von Ziegesar. This paper, instead of comparing the two counterparts of the story in its different media, focuses on the television series and attempts to categorize it within the genre of detective fiction, despite its usual categorization as a teen-drama series, or more popularly, a ‘chick flick’. The paper also attempts to prove that the series feminizes the genre by blurring the conventional lines of masculinity and femininity, through the crime it portrays and its investigation.

Using the television series Gossip Girl as the primary text, this paper attempts to prove the existence of a rigid social order in the world of Gossip Girl, which is disrupted by the practice of gossip, used as a potent weapon and thereby similar to the convention of crime in the popular genre of detective fiction. The disruption of the existent order and the violent repercussions of gossip render the propagating entity Gossip Girl as a criminal. The curiosity that drives viewers to find the true identity of this entity, ultimately

revealed as Dan Humphrey, is in tandem with the reader-response theories, the writing styles and features (such as burying clues, having a wide range of suspects and creating red herrings) that drive the formula of detective fiction writing. The paper relies on two types of sources for evidence: the critical material based on the genre of detective fiction and direct comparisons drawn between the show and other stories which belong to the genre.

Popular Literature, Detective Fiction, and Gossip Girl

The first question that arises from the hypothesis is the following: what makes the series and the genre coincide or overlap at any stage? The answer to the question can be found in the understanding that the readers/viewers have associated a sense of popularity with the genre of detective fiction. Leslie Aaron Fiedler, in his essay, “Towards a Definition of Popular Literature”, states:

At its worst, therefore, which i s t o s a y, a t i t s m o s t shamelessly eli t ist , such criticism has moved towards the theory that there is an

In an attempt to understand the television series Gossip Girl as an example of detective fiction, the paper explores how gossip is used as a potent weapon to disrupt the social order present in the world of the series. The order is perpetuated through spaces such as the high school along with the persons and relationships within these spaces. Meanwhile, the ‘crime’ is the disruption of this system, the disturbance in the lives and the world of the wealthy Upper East Siders—therefore rendering the Gossip Girl, Dan Humphrey, a ‘criminal’. Lastly, the paper goes on to discuss the use of techniques like red herrings, the popularity of the genre and its association with a female audience. It illustrates how the key elements of detective fiction can be found in Gossip Girl, and how the show can be seen to feminize the genre.

Decoding the Genre:

Reading Gossip Girl as Detective Fiction

Anushree Joshi and Saman Waheed

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inverse relationship between literary merit and market-place success…Clearly, what we consider ‘serious novels’ or ‘art novels’: works, say, by Henry James or Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or James Joyce, are indistinguishable, before the critical act, from ‘best-sellers’ or ‘popular novels’ by Jaqueline Susanne or John D. MacDonald, Conan Doyle or Bram Stoker. (33-35)

This distinction between high-art and popularity is common for the discourse on the genre of detective fiction and that on the series, Gossip Girl. The genre has been considered a guilty pleasure or even a ‘vice’ by writers such as Wystan Hugh Auden:

Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.” (qtd. in Franks 406)

The analogy of addiction, used by Auden, to describe the control and influence the genre has over its readers, is suitable for

the way in which the viewers perceive Gossip Girl, as showcased elsewhere in various publications. For the Golden Age Queen, Agatha Christie, the popularity of her writing was often used as a factor of criticizing it by distinguishing it from ‘quality literature’ of the period when she wrote. Her popularity found itself soaring due to her ability to grasp the readers of all kinds and with a variety of tastes. Andrew Taylor, in his article, writes: “It will give p l e a s u r e e v e n t o u n s o p h i s t i c a t e d readers” (“Agatha Christie: The Curious Case of the Cosy Queen”).

The following statements from the publications which reviewed the series Gossip Girl during its original premiere, carry the same claims. San Francisco Chronicle reported, “…this series nails what it sets out to do for the CW and a certain segment of the audience. It may not be weighty and important television, but it was never intended to be (and it does its job better than its older counterparts on other networks)” (Goodman). Boston Globe similarly stated, “Your feelings about “Gossip Girl” will depend on just how guilty you are willing to feel about your guilty pleasures. It can be entertaining to watch adults throw around money, attitude, and alcohol on soap operas; it can be grotesque to s e e t e e n a g e r s d o i n g t h e s a m e things…” (Gilbert). The Village Voice reported on the popularity of the series:

On January 26, 2012, in honour of the series' 100th episode, New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited the set and proclaimed the date as Gossip Girl Day, “Gossip Girl has made New York a central character. While Gossip Girl is drawing fans in with its plot twists, the show also attracts many of them to visit New York, contributing to our incredible 50.5 million visitors last year. In fact, the

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The first space, which acts as a manifestation of this order, is the educational system portrayed in the series. The high-school, as a space, is deeply rooted in the desire and nearly unapologetic necessity of hierarchical order. Several characters, during the course of the series, advocate this in their actions but a hard-hitting statement by Nelly Yuki2—a person who does not enjoy the same kind of benefits like “popularity among peers”—showcases that the order has infiltrated the psychologies of the people systematically enough to make them perceive it as ‘natural’. Yuki comments, “What would high school be without hierarchy?” (“The Goodbye Gossip Girl” 04:04-04:08).

This hierarchy physically manifests itself in the fact that the girls sit on the Met steps according to their positions in the present Queen’s eyes. The Queen sits at the top whereas her friends, or her ‘minions’, sit on the steps below her. This hierarchy is very rigid, and nobody else can sit beside the queen on the same step. It is up to the Queen to decide who enters her circle of elite friends. It so happens that usually, only those people who have ample resources and powerful connections are able to make their way in. This sort of social order is so deeply entrenched in most of the girls at school, that they are unable to fathom a school without a Queen. They need somebody to administer them, throw orders at them and almost control them. They are like a swarm of bees who fly towards whoever they think is the “Queen Bee”,3 and who can give them more access to popularity.

The adults in the world of Gossip Girl

economic impact of Gossip Girl and other television shows and films that are made in New York really can be felt directly in all five boroughs,” he said. (Levin)

The Crime and the Social Order

The popularity, however, in and of itself, is not the basis for the categorization. The significant question to ask is this: if Gossip Girl is, in fact, detective fiction, then what is the ‘crime’?

Any crime, by virtue of being a crime, disrupts at least one kind of constructed order. In the genre of detective fiction, that order could be judicial and moral, disrupted by something such as a murder. This form of violence, not sanctioned by the State, is disruptive of an order that guides that particular society. In Gossip Girl, then, the crime is the disruption of the constructed social order, which disturbs the lives of that particular society—the world of the Upper East Siders.1

The order in the series is enforced through spaces (public and private), persons and the relationships among them during different periods in the story. Even the representations and portrayals of characters lower in the social hierarchy from the perspectives of other people in higher positions are of significant interest, since it enlightens the viewers about the highly restrictive and diligently unaccepting nature of this order. This is reflected by their attitudes and behaviours towards people from the lower strata of the social hierarchy or as Dan constantly refers to himself, to the ‘outsider’.

1. It denotes the wealthy residents of the upper class posh area of New York. In the show, this label is associated with social capital, along with economic wealth, and though one may physically transcend the geographical barrier to move from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, it is much more difficult to transcend the connotations of social class and to find a place within that class. 2. A high-school student at Constance (the female division of the high school attended by the main characters of the series. The male division is named St. Jude’s) and a recurring character in the series. She is also a minion in Blair’s group. 3. A title used for the character of Blair denoting her higher hierarchical status in the group of friends.

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uphold this system, as it is through their monetary power that social position gets assigned to them and their children as well. Class positions are not based on a method of free access in this world, since even if one has merit in the class-conscious high school of Gossip Girl, they do not find themselves gaining access to the closed circle of Manhattan’s elite. The social order deplores romantic as well as platonic relationships that transcend the designated class positions. Rufus Humphrey4 and Lily Rhodes,5 in numerous flashbacks within the series, share a romantic relationship, which suffers largely due to their different class positions in the society they live in. Their relationship, during their youth, is disapproved of by Celia Rhodes, Lily’s mother, who represents an older generation’s ideology of classism. They marry different people, from their own respective classes.

The parties also showcase this class system, wherein the entry is invite-based, and invitations are given to only those who belong to the upper strata of the society. This also acts as a metaphor for the class-based entry into the circle of the Upper East Siders. In the first episode of the series, Chuck and Nate are on their way to the school, while Dan is standing in the same bus. Chuck, having seen Dan previously but not registering his social position in the world where everyone occupies a fixed one, asks him in a tone of perplexity, “Are you following us or something?” (“Pilot” 10:10-10:18). The very title used to refer to Dan throughout the series, including his first introduction to the viewers, is “Lonely Boy” (“Pilot” 01:42). This emphasizes the rigidity of the system in which Dan, despite attending the same school and exuding meritocratic capabilities better than the others, is not welcome into the circle.

There is an evident geographical divide that demarcates the different class positions. Brooklyn is a relatively penurious space, in

comparison with the world of fancy hotels, extravagant parties, and designer dresses found in Manhattan. The former is incessantly denigrated by the upper-class position holders who reside in the latter. It is clear that if the world is based upon class systems—of economic, social, and political power—then Gossip Girl reflects a microcosm of that world.

This order signifies both a site of disruption and a motive for the same disruption—like a social crime in the world of Manhattan’s elite. In the last scene of the series, we see certain new people who bear a sense of physical and behavioural resemblance to the protagonists of the story like Serena, Blair, Nate, Chuck, etc. While the face of every other character is shown to us, the character resembling Dan remains faceless, because he is seemingly irrelevant due to his relatively lower-class position when it comes to the existent social hierarchy.

Facelessness seems to indicate not only irrelevance, but a sense of universality in this social hierarchy where some kind of outsider is always attempting to fit in. The voice of the entity, Gossip Girl, in the background says, “There will always be someone on the outside, wanting to get in” (“New York, I Love You, XOXO” 37:38-38:38). It brings home to the readers the point that this rigid social system based on the principle of exclusion, despite merit and capabilities, is bound to be threatened when another ‘outsider’ is motivated by their desire and necessity to ‘get in’.

Thus, with the rigidity of this kind of social order, any attempt towards its disruption acts in tandem with the definition of a social crime. The entity, Gossip Girl, actively uses the propagation of unethically derived information to cause several disruptions in the social order. The

4. Dan Humphrey’s father and a recurring love interest for Serena’s mother in the series. 5. Serena’s mother and a recurring love interest for Rufus in the series.

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dissemination of rumours and private secrets, disregard of privacy and confidentiality, discussions on lives to the point of defamation that causes actual, substantial damage created by Gossip Girl wreaks havoc in society in ways similar to a crime in a murder mystery.

In the first episode, when Gossip Girl releases the blast (of information) on its website that Serena has returned to the city, it is a usage of the in medias res6 technique of unfolding a story. But the significant point to notice is how this piece of information disrupts the order in the high school. It induces reactions from the people present at the party (organized by Blair’s mother, Eleanor), which, as previously shown, is a space for the portrayal of the class-based social order of Manhattan’s elite. As does the performance of a crime, this piece of information creates a tangible threat among the crowd. Blair takes Nate, her boyfriend, into a room to sexually consummate their relationship (“Pilot” 01:34-04:44). This is a literal seclusion created by Blair to shield their relationship, and the seclusion is caused not by Serena’s return, but by the information of it released by Gossip Girl. The threat of this information reaching Nate before he and Blair consummate their relationship is sealed in her mind. She fears revelation, used by Gossip Girl as a powerful tool—comparable to a potent weapon—to cause disruption and wreak havoc in individual and communal lives.

Similarly, at another party7 in the same episode, a blast about Serena entering the party without being invited is released. It is a place where she is neither invited nor wanted. Her presence causes a disarray at that gathering and everyone starts talking about her. Most of the people there are unwillingly driven into an unsettled state of mind, as they are unable to decipher the

reason for her presence, since Blair clearly does not want her there. The relationship dynamic of Nate and Blair is thrown into a state of disorientation as Blair suspects that Nate has invi ted Serena (“Pi lo t” 38:04-39:17). Thus, we witness yet again, the formidable capability of Gossip Girl to wreak havoc at a perfectly normal party of Manhattan’s elite crowd simply by releasing information.

The analogy of gossip as a weapon can be carried forward by looking at the reactions of the characters when Serena encourages them to attempt finding out the real identity of Gossip Girl. Nelly Yuki says, “Messing with Gossip Girl? Think of the consequences” (“The Goodbye Gossip Girl” 09:08-09:12). They are threatened by the ability of Gossip Girl to disrupt the order of their lives in the public space by revealing the information it has access to related to their lives in the private space.

Gossip Girl, in the true fashion of a criminal afraid of the revelation of their identity, threatens the crowd and indulges in the manipulation of their weaknesses by exploiting this privilege of information. Shifting the blame upon Serena, the blast says, “Since she had to find out the truth about me, I’m going to tell you the truth about everyone. Every gossip bomb I’ve got is about to drop. And if you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with her” (“The Goodbye Gossip Girl” 20:24-22:00). Their secrets—private and disruptive of the order in their social and personal lives—are outed by Gossip Girl as a sign of warning to abandon the mission of investigating their true identity.

Another instance of disruption comes in the episode “All About My Brother”, when Dan supposedly sends in a tip (of information) to Gossip Girl about

6. It is a narrative technique which refers to the practice of writing without a preamble into the midst of things. 7. It is called “Kiss on the Lips”, and it is an annual party organized by Blair Waldorf.

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Jenny’s boyfr iend,8 Asher be ing a homosexual. When Jenny confronts Dan about it, he very deftly says, “You wouldn’t listen to me. I needed to get your attention somehow” (“All About My Brother” 20:00-20:30). This, in turn, leads to disturbance in a social gathering where everyone, once again, is affected by the blasts that Gossip Girl releases. It hampers with Jenny’s social standing and jeopardizes her relationship with her peers and her friendship with Eric.9 It also causes emotional distress for Jenny, just as it happens when a crime is committed in a conventional detective story.

The violence that ensues in the social order through its disruption caused by Gossip Girl, takes a physical form in the series. A notable incident in the series that emphasizes the power of Gossip Girl’s weapon of information to cause physical damage and guide the society towards an outbreak of chaos, is when Gossip Girl releases a tip sent to its website. The tip states, “Looks like the Virgin Queen isn’t as pure as she pretended to be. If Blair Waldorf lied about that, what else might she be lying about? Who’s your Daddy, B? Baby Daddy that is? Two guys in one week? Talk about doing the nasty, or should I just say, B-ing nasty?” (“A Thin L i n e B e t w e e n C h u c k a n d N a t e ” 19:59-20:11).

Violence ensues between Chuck and Nate, in accordance with the title of this episode—“A Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate”. It is Gossip Girl’s weapon of information that causes a physical violation of the line when Nate attacks Chuck and says, “You son of a bitch, I ought to kill you” (“A Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate” 21:21-22:05). The physical aftermath of the utilization of its weapon by Gossip Girl is also aggravated by its psychological and social impact: the life-long friendship

between the two, Chuck and Nate, as well as Blair’s social image suffers as a consequence of this revelation, adding to the disruption of social order.

Reader-Response Theory

The elucidation of the reader-response theory is very critical in trying to establish the fact that Gossip Girl is, in fact, a series that lies in the realm of detective fiction. The theory is essentially based on the principle that the reader is as important as the author in determining the relevance of a text. It is the interpretation of each and every reader that imparts to the text its true meaning. The audience would interpret a scene as they want to. In a way, the interpretations also portray how the mind of the audience actually works. Jennifer Monteiro states:

In 1989, Wolfgang Iser in the preface to his work Prospecting- a c o l l e c t i o n o f c r i t i c a l a n d theoretical essays opines:

If a literary text does something to its readers, it also simultaneously reveals something about them. Thus, literature turns into a d iv in ing rod , l oca t ing ou r dispositions, desires, inclinations, and eventually our overall makeup. (158)

The response of the reader is significant mainly because it shows the extent up to which the readers have involved themselves in the narrative and how willing they are to look for the clues that are silently dropped by the author in the storyline. If the readers fully dedicate themselves towards finding a solution for the ensuing mystery and begin to pay attention to minute details, it leads to a certain sense of competition between the author and reader as to who

8. She is the sister of Dan Humphrey and acts as a recurring rival to Blair. 9. He is Serena’s brother and a recurring character in the series. In Season 1, he is also suspected of being Gossip Girl.

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would be successful—the author in concealing the culprit, or the reader in unmasking them. This, therefore, leads to a clash between the intellectual capacities of the author and the reader. If the reader is able to reach a conclusion before the actual climax in the plot, it seems as if the author has failed himself/herself, because they could not build an interesting plot, while on the other hand, if the reader is unable to establish a valid inference, there is a certain disappointment.

As Emanuela Gutkowski points out, “In traditional detective stories the reader is proud to reach the solution via his or her logical capabilities; the author, on the other hand, has the “duty” to astonish him or her with an end that is unexpected but possible at the same time” (51). This is exactly what happens in Gossip Girl. In the first episode, the narrator (Gossip Girl) says, “And who am I? That’s one secret I’ll never tell. You know you love me. XOXO, Gossip Girl” (“Pilot” 06:00). This is when the viewers’ curiosity heightens, leading to a desire to discover the real identity of Gossip Girl. It is followed by the process of looking for evidence throughout the show that might help in revealing the identity of this unknown entity Gossip Girl. But the creators, too, have a responsibility to derail this intellectual investigation and manipulate the viewers in a way that their minds start working in a new direction altogether, like the use of red herrings.10 In this regard, Stephanie Savage, the executive producer of Gossip Girl, in an interview with Kristin Dos Santos revealed:

We never really entertained any other ideas of who Gossip Girl was. It was whether we were going to reveal it. Interestingly, in the pilot episode, the test audience thought that Dan was Gossip Girl. We actually had to re-edit one of our sequences. It's

when he's on the computer looking at Gossip Girl, the way it was edited that he was typing as the voice was coming up, people thought that they were being told that he was Gossip Girl. So, we actually had to re-edit that sequence. (Santos)

Hence, it can be said that this clash often results in intellectual gymnastics on the part of the readers, where they have the temptation of being proven right and they focus all their attention on the plot which, in turn, contributes to how the genre is perceived and how it evolves according to the readers of its subject matter. As shown in the latter sections of this paper, the criminal, Dan, also acts as an author within the story in a meta-narrative fashion. Since the identities of the criminal and the author juxtapose with each other, the intellectual gymnastics for the readers is that they also perform the role of detectives invested in the quest of unveiling the layers of truth and fiction within the criminal-author’s story and finding the ultimate truth of their identity. In her essay, Britta Martens has summarized the same proposition by stating, “If the criminal of the detective formula is an author, then the detective is a reader” (203).

Judicial Mistrust and Private Endeavours

A poignant factor in the production of most (popular) detective fiction is how the texts within i t perceive, and more importantly portray, the role of the judiciary and the sanctioned authorities of legal and ethical control through the plot, characters, narratives, and/or tonality while referring to the aforementioned in any manner of interest. The notable feature in this regard is this: if the State-sanctioned methods of legal, social, and ethical control were adept in maintaining that order and control through the definitive procedures defined within the judicial and

10. It is a clue or a hint that is introduced to mislead and distract the audience.

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executive apparatuses, then there would be no essential logic in involving a figure like that of a detective in a process of investigation.

The intrigue of the story in this genre, as stated previously, lies in its ability to entice the reader/viewer into a fictitious world where truth and lies need to be actively distinguished by the detective/reader from a variety of stories and secrets associated with a range of suspects and their motivations of indulging in the crime, in the first place. Therefore, a story that follows procedures thoroughly, where the sanctioned authorities like the police force come to the scene of the crime and engage with it like any other unremarkable event in their professional lives would render the genre, in most stories, mundane and unexceptional.

Thus, the stories of the genre have private persons—from outside the positions of such sanctioned seats of authority—taking matters into their own hands. In case of imminent and evident threats to the order, these private persons start an investigation of their own accord. To do this, however, the existent justice system must be in the background, never overshadowing or masking the extraordinary ordeal undertaken by those private persons in the process of investigation and the completion of the clue-puzzle mystery. A common way to do so, for instance, in the works of writers like Agatha Christie is to portray the system in an incompetent light. It could also point to the tendency of judicial mistrust in Christie’s works, as noted by Danny Nicol in his essay: “It has even been suggested that Christie is a ‘radical conservative thinker’ who gives her novels a Burkean subtext in which justice rarely comes from the state but from the actions of private persons” (Hari qtd. in Nicol 6).

Other writers too, across settings and

times, have the tendency to portray a larger-than-life entity with an excellent capability for genius, or a methodology of undefeatable precision, so that the readers experience almost a sense of vicarious thrill due to the a c t i o n s a n d s h a r p n e s s o f m e t h o d incorporated in the character of the detective figure.

Gossip Girl, with reference to the aforementioned, is almost a world where the frequent disruption of order, propounded in the majority of cases by an activity of Gossip Girl through its “blasts”, is either neglected by the persons of legal authority or is investigated by them with such a degree of incompetence that the intervention of private persons is almost inevitable. For instance, throughout the series, alcohol consumption by minors in public places like The Empire, The Palace,11 and in the settings of formal gatherings is not even frowned upon, let alone punished by any legal instruments. In the very first episode, the party organized at Blair’s residence shows high-school students w i th a l co h o l i c b ev e r ag es , mak in g conversations with adults. In the same episode, Chuck, a minor, propositions smoking marijuana to Nate, his peer, by asking him if he (Nate) wishes to accompany the former in getting “some fresh air”. The Pilot also shows Serena, being served multiple martinis at the hotel where she and her mother are residing, owned by the Bass family (“Pilot” 16:20-18:23). They are never asked for identification, and always surpass the codes of conduct set for the maintenance of legal order.

In the f irst season, Jenny is responsible for the theft of expensive attire designed by Blair's designer-entrepreneur mother. When the police authorities enter the scene of the crime due to the security alarm, Jenny suffers no repercussions through the instrument of the law as she successfully misleads them into believing that she is Blair,

11. These are the names of the hotels located in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

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the daughter of the owner, and not a thief. She is not asked for any form of identification at this point, and nor is she questioned further, and the police officers take her word at face value, despite the fact that a breach of security has, in fact, occurred (“Dare Devil” 33:41-34:28). This sets a trend for the six seasons of the show where minors indulge in unlawful behaviour and bear not even a reprimand, let alone consequences, from the judicial forces.

The deliberate competence of private persons in engaging with information and investigation pertaining to disruption of different forms of order (social and legal), is emphasized upon in another incident within the series, when Dan—a minor in high-school—is engaged in a sexual relationship with his teacher at St. Jude's. It is through a Gossip Girl blast that the piece of information surfaces in the first place, for which the tip is sent in by another student at the school. The crime of statutory rape, despite being public through the website of Gossip Girl, is never punished by the bounds of law. Though the teacher is suspended from her service at the high school due to the socially and ethically unacceptable nature of the relationship, the authorities of law and judiciary never surface to act on the information in any manner.

In the last episode of the series, titled “New York, I Love You, XOXO”, Chuck and Blair are trying to evade the police checkpoints while escaping the site of Chuck’s father’s, i.e., Bart Bass’ death. The notable part of the scene is this: a man who owns several renowned hotels in Manhattan and thus possesses economic as well as social capital in the city of New York has died under suspicious circumstances, by falling off the building of his own hotel, and the police security in the closest vicinity of the site of investigation is minimal to the extent that they stop vehicles for checking the persons inside, but they do not bother to

either look into the backseat or open the trunk of the cars (“New York, I Love You, XOXO” 03:50-04:40). Chuck Bass, as a person of interest in this death, is missing from the scene of the crime, and there is no persistent effort showcased on the part of the police force to find his whereabouts.

Two young girls recognise the friends of the missing couple—Chuck and Blair— and propagate the information further, which ultimately leads to Chuck and Blair being detained by the police (“New York, I Love You, XOXO” 25:38-27:40). It is again through the actions of private persons that the process of judicial investigation is driven. The power of the law is yet again evaded by the couple as they manage to get married just in time, so that the spousal privilege safeguards Blair’s silence of her witnessing the death of Bart. Judicial authorities, in this representation, appear to be easily beguiled by the characters, exposing the incompetence of these authorities in the world of crime, thrill, and active endeavours of private persons in the realm of unconventional investigations.

Buried Clues, Range of Suspects, and Writing Style

Gossip Girl’s identity is established gradually, from the first episode itself. The story of Gossip Girl has such a simple, lucid, and free-flowing language, that even the most overt of the clues may go unnoticed. The glamour and vanity of the high society language used by Manhattan’s elite make us lose track of the seriousness of the actions, while the grounded, almost objective perspective offered by Dan, draws our attention away from the fact that he could also be a potential suspect for Gossip Girl. This is in consonance with the writing style of Agatha Christie, who used plain and simplistic vocabulary to mask her clues. Andrew Taylor, in an article “Agatha Christie: The curious case of the cosy queen”

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published in the Independent UK writes, “Her puzzles are rarely dull and over-complex….The best of them not only fool the reader but, afterwards, they give us the supreme pleasure of thinking that “I should have got that myself ”” (Taylor).

Gossip Girl employs the strategy of burying clues and raising red herrings to derail the viewers, as well as the characters within the story, from coming closer to the identity of the true criminal. In the finale of the series, the public revelation of Gossip Girl’s true identity—Dan Humphrey—comes to the forefront, but attentive viewers would notice in retrospect that the revelation has been methodically present but just beyond reach throughout. The first and one of the most important clues, is in the initial scenes of the first episode. A Gossip Girl source sends in a tip that Serena van der Woodsen has returned to the city and has been spotted at the Grand Central Station. While the blast about Serena (having returned to Manhattan) is released after the tip, the one about Dan (being spotted looking at Serena) could not have been known unless he had penned down the blast himself.

The website had been in vogue, as it is later revealed, since Serena and her peers were in the ninth grade, but there had not been a single blast about Dan. He was probably waiting for an opportunity to introduce himself to Gossip Girl as the “Lonely Boy”, and he found a golden one, when Serena, whom he probably loves, returns (“Pilot” 01:35-01:42). It is a buried clue that the blast focuses on the “Lonely Boy” who is unrecognized by this circle. It is literally Dan building himself into the narrative as Gossip Girl, by associating himself with Serena’s return.

In the same episode, when Gossip Girl is talking about herself, the frame shifts to focus upon Dan’s face with his laptop. It can be observed, throughout the season, that

everyone reads the blasts on their phone while Dan does so on his laptop. This is indicative of the fact that he was probably administering a website, and that it would have been easier to post the blasts using his laptop. The writing as well as the cinematography of the series utilizes buried clues as a typical formula used in the genre. Another clue in the same episode is observed when Chuck and Nate are on their way to the school while Dan is standing in the same bus. Chuck states, “Are you following us or something?” (“Pilot” 10:10-10:18). This scene has a prophetic note to it, as Dan literally does follow the lives of everybody, while revealing critical personal information about them.

In another episode, Nate says, “Gossip Girl said it was about us”. The ‘it’ here refers to a book being published by an anonymous author (“Memoirs of an Invisible Dan” 08:25-08:35). The author, as is told to the viewers but not the characters previous to this scene, is Dan Humphrey. A question that most people forget to ask amid the expectation of a consequence to this revelation is this: if Dan is the only person who is aware of the existence of the book and the characters it is based upon, who else could have informed Gossip Girl that the book was about them?

Another significant clue buried beneath the excitement of chaos ensuing in a social gathering of Manhattan’s elite, is found in the episode titled “The Goodbye Gossip Girl”. Serena tries to fool Gossip Girl by falsely stating that she knows her true identity, threatening her by asking her to meet or else the identity would be publicly revealed (“The Goodbye Gossip Girl” 27:15-27:50). Dan appears, along with everybody else from the high-school, when Serena and Nate are waiting for Gossip Girl. While everyone else says that it was a message from Gossip Girl which asked them to be present at the venue, Dan is the only

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person who says, “I Loopt12 you” (“The Goodbye Gossip Girl” 29:10-29:31). This is an integral clue which, if nothing else, portrays to the viewers that Dan is significantly interested in following the lives of the group, especially Serena.

Another device pertaining to the genre of detective fiction is the use of red herrings. Red herrings are essentially clues or pieces of information that drive the reader/audience away from the original path of investigation. Rebecca Michelson states:

Christie uses red herrings and dummies to draw attention away from the murderer. In the process, the innocent characters in Christie’s novels lose their identities, subordinated to Christie’s all-important plot. Innocent individuals exist to mask the murderer, to draw attention away from other—guilty—individuals. (6)

Gossip Girl uses the same trope of red herrings to distract us from the actual identity of Gossip Girl. Eric van der Woodsen, Serena’s brother is thought to be Gossip Girl and there is a blast regarding the same. Serena herself at one point believes that Eric is the one who has been managing the infamous website.

In the same essay, Michelson also studies the relationship between the individual and the crime by quoting Franco Moretti: “The perfect crime—the nightmare of detective fiction—is the featureless, de-individualized crime that anyone could have committed because at this point everyone is the same” (qtd. in Michelson 12).

This de-individualization relates to an important feature in the formula of the genre, where the range of suspects who could have

committed the crime, due to the various possible motives, is vast and each of their motives is sufficiently compelling to draw the readers as well as the other characters/investigators to believe their guilt. In Gossip Girl, the idea of this de-individualization and the creation of a wide range of suspects is employed in such a manner that the thrill of investigation is increased manifold in the story for the characters, and for the readers/viewers. In “The Goodbye Gossip Girl”, when the readers and the characters of Serena and Nate are of the mind that the true identity of Gossip Girl would be revealed, almost everyone who has been a possible suspect, i.e. the students in the high-school, is brought to the scene through a deceptive message (“The Goodbye Gossip Girl” 29:10-31:20). It is this physical assemblage of the group in that setting which serves as a reminder of the possibility that the identity of Gossip Girl could be concealing, and be concealed behind, any of them.

It is interesting to note how Dan, since the very beginning, hides himself in the background and goes unnoticed by everybody. He utilizes his identity of a “nobody” to his benefit. If we consider the first episode itself, when Serena meets Jenny at a store, Dan who had been with Jenny all this while, disappears so that Serena does not see him, thereby concretely establishing his aforementioned sense of a lack of identity (“Pilot” 14:41-15:09). He wants to build himself into the narrative on his own terms, suiting his dual yet juxtaposed identity of criminal-author.

Thus, the features of conventional stories of detective fiction can be found in Gossip Girl, where the lucidity of the writing, combined with its language that indulges the viewers into a world of glamour, relatability, and vanity at once, successfully buries the clues. The range of suspects in

12. Though the series never clarifies the fact, it is highly probable due to its usage here that Loopt is an app or a website that tracks people’s geographical location.

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Gossip Girl, along with these buried clues and red herrings, add to a sense of thrill that is the ultimate takeaway for the viewers.

Criminal as an Author

The act of hiding the clues within the writing is not solely restricted to the writers of the series Gossip Girl only—at least, not directly. In her essay, Britta Martens remarks: “In detective fiction, the criminals resemble authors in that they plot first their crimes, and then false stories of the crimes, by eliminating clues or planting false ones that initially lead the investigator(s) and the reader to construct a logical, but wrong, plot” (202). Dan literally writes a book based on the lives of his peers, and he titles it Inside (“Memoirs of an Invisible Dan”). The dichotomy of criminal and author blurs itself numerous times in the story as, like an author, he chooses to selectively reveal and conceal information according to what suits his motives, as a criminal.

The episode’s title “Memoirs of an Invisible Dan” symbolizes the motive of the criminal, Dan—to eliminate invisibility and become a part of the social circle seemingly beyond his reach—to write himself into the lives of those people. Blair says, “It is a memoir masquerading as fiction” (“Memoirs of an Invisible Dan” 14:40-14:44). He conceals the information that he is Gossip Girl by twisting the ending of the book in that particular version mirroring the manner in which he, as the criminal, has been concealing his identity and his true motives.

Another way in which Dan’s identities as criminal and author intertwine can be seen in the incident where Gossip Girl assigns titles to different people in the high-school, during their graduation ceremony. While the titles for others: “class whore” for Nate, “coward” for Chuck, etc., have a negative connotation, the title attributed to Dan, as his alter-identity Gossip Girl, of “the

Ultimate Insider” showcases two things: first, it lacks any form of inherent negativity, and second, it is how Dan perceives himself. There is a hint of a smile on Dan’s face as his title is revealed, showcasing how it is not negatively perceived, unlike the other titles (“The Goodbye Gossip Girl” 08:08-08:40). His book and his title, both rely on the idea of the ‘inside’ where Dan, the person and the author, builds his self into the world through Gossip Girl, the criminal. It reminds one of Dr. Sheppard from Agatha Christie’s third in the Poirot Series—The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the criminal (Dr. Sheppard) writes the story of the crime, and is also the narrator who selectively reveals information.

Feminization of Detective Fiction

After categorizing Gossip Girl as a story in the genre of detective/crime fiction, it is also integral to note how it adopts the genre in a way of feminizing it, against the overshadowing, contemporarily popular images of masculinity found in the television adaptations of detectives like Sherlock Holmes. With respect to this idea of feminization of the genre, Susan Rowland wrote:

This is not the seeking out of an essentially feminine crime fiction to place against an e s s e n t i a l l y m a s c u l i n e predecessor. Rather, it is to explore how women writers may disrupt the ways in which femininity and masculinity have been previously construed as mutually exclusive and mutually constitutive. Such relative structures have historically taken the form of the masculine assuming culturally desirable qualities of reason, intelligence, objectivity, judgement, action

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and heroism, leaving the f e m i n i n e , b y s t r u c t u r a l d e f i n i t i o n , t o s i g n i f y i r ra t iona l i ty, foo l i shness , subjectivity, passivity and the need for masculine guidance. (24)

Gossip Girl has employed this very idea by utilizing the medium of gossip as a weapon of choice, as stated previously. The very title of the series, Gossip Girl, points to the systematically established association between the feminine, i.e. the titular girl, and the act of gossip. Gossip, as an act, has been historically associated with femininity. It is easily observable that throughout the show this conventional idea of gossip being a feminine domain, thereby Gossip Girl being a female, has been propagated. The characters have internalized this idea to such an extent that the pronouns they use for referring to Gossip Girl are always feminine. They associate the third-person feminine pronouns with the entity of Gossip Girl, without considering the possibility that Gossip Girl could be a website managed by a masculine figure.

Similarly carrying forward the historically feminine nature of gossip, the propagation of ‘gossip’ is related to two things in popular imagination: a vain and d i s t o r t e d m e d i u m o f p r o p a g a t i n g information, and a domain that relies upon the conventionally designated feminine traits of emotional manipulation and aggravation of information. Hence, when gossip is used as a medium of disrupting the social order and when it acts as a tool for propagating legal crimes in the series, it is an act that feminizes the nature of the crime, i.e. its methodology to the core.

Dan frequently uses the stereotype that gossip is essentially a feminine act to mask himself as the true criminal. He is quick to say he does not “read Gossip Girl”

and that “it’s for chicks” to dissociate himself from the very act of engaging with gossip, even if it is through reading it (“Pilot” 08:23-08:27). There is a tinge of irony in k n o w i n g t h a t t h e c r i m i n a l , w h i l e acknowledging gossip as feminine, utilizes it to his advantage in committing the crimes. It adds to the essential idea that the existence of such dichotomous stereotypes is, truly, not natural but a social construct.

The creators of the series, in assigning the true identity of Gossip Girl to Dan, thus subvert two important notions of mascul in i ty as wel l as feminini ty, simultaneously. The first is the idea that the man, a being of reason, action, heroism, and objectivity, would not indulge in the socially designated frivolous act of gossip—he is superior to that. The second idea, prescribing to the stereotypes about femininity, is that it can only be irrational, weak, passive, and inferior to man, since it is the distant nature of gossip, literally hiding behind a virtual screen, which serves to guard and protect the man, Dan. In moving towards the use of gossip as a potent weapon, Gossip Girl takes away the demureness and fragility, with a lack of intellectual merit, ascribed to women.

It reminds one of the resourceful nature of Caroline from Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd who uses gossip as a method of investigating, through the assistance of various resource-persons stationed around the town (Christie 158). It is interesting to note that the woman, Caroline, utilizes gossip as a way to resolve the crime, while the man, Dan, uses it to cause the crime and create general disruption. The subversion of conventionally assigned gendered traits sheds light on the constructed nature of these traits, and acts to break through the machismo and heroic courage required to commit the crime as a man. Dan is manipulative of information and is interested in the propagation of information

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to suit his interests—both of which are associated with the feminine nature.

Conclusion

Thus, through the aforementioned evidence, this paper has established the existence of a rigid social order in the world of Gossip Girl, which is disrupted by the act of gossip used as a potent weapon, thereby being similar to the convention of a crime in the genre of detective fiction. The disruption of the existent order and the violent repercussions of gossip render the propagating entity—Gossip Girl—as a criminal, and the curiosity that drives the viewers to find the true identity of this entity, ultimately revealed as Dan Humphrey, is in tandem with the theories of readers’ response that influences the formula of detective fiction writing. The paper, in its next section, propounds the theory that the series feminizes the genre by blurring the conventional lines of masculinity and femininity through its crime and its investigation.

Works Cited

“All About My Brother.” Gossip Girl, Developed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Performances by Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Kristen Bell, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley and Yin Chang, Season 1, Episode 16, The CW, 2008, Netflix.

“A Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate.” Gossip Girl, Developed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Performances by Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Kristen Bell, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley and Yin Chang, Season 1, Episode 13, The CW, 2008, Netflix.

Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. HarperCollins, 2013.

Print.

“Dare Devil.” Gossip Girl, Developed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Performances by Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Kristen Bell, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley and Yin Chang, Season 1, Episode 5, The CW, 2007, Netflix.

Fiedler, Leslie A. “Towards a Definition of Popular Literature.” Super Culture: American Popular Culture and Europe. Edited by C.W.E. Bigsby, pp. 33-35, Bowling Green University Press, 1975, Ohio. Print.

Franks, Rachel. “A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction.” M/C Journal, Volume 17, Number 1, 2014, www.journal.media- culture.org.au/index.php/ mcjournal/article/view/770. Accessed 13 August 2019.

Gilbert, Mathew. “Snarky rich kids make for fun ‘Gossip’.” The Boston Globe, www.archive.boston.com/ news/globe/living/articles/ 2007/09/19/snarky_ rich_kids_make_for_fun_gossip/. Accessed 7 September 2019.

Goodman, Tim. “Review: Rumors shape upper-class teens’ lives in ‘Gossip Girl’.” SFGate, www.sfgate.com/ tv/article/Review-Rumors-shape- upper-class-teens-lives- in-2502659.php.

Accessed 7 September 2019.

Gutkowski, Emanuela. “An “Investigation in Pragmatics”: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” A Journal of Detection, Volume 29, Number 1, 2011, p. 51. DOI: 10.3172/CLU.

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29.1.51. Accessed 7 September 2019.

Levin, Sam. “Mike Bloomberg Hangs With ‘Gossip Girl’ Cast.” The VillageVoice, www.web.archive.org/web/ 20120128222327/http:// blogs.villagevoice.com/ runninscared/2012/01/ mike_bloomberg_42.php. Accessed 7 September 2019.

Martens, Britta. “Dramatic Monologue, Detective Fiction, and the Search for Meaning.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Volume 66, Number 2, 2011, pp. 195–218. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl. 2011.66.2.195. Accessed 13 August 2019.

“Memoirs of an Invisible Dan.” Gossip Girl, Developed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Performances by Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Kristen Bell, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley and Yin Chang, Season 5, Episode 4, The CW, 2011, Netflix.

Monteiro, Jennifer. “Decoding the Role of the Reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Study in Popular Culture.” The Criterion, Volume 5, Issue 5, October 2014, p. 158. www.the-criterion.com. Accessed 22 August 2019.

“New York, I Love You, XOXO.” Gossip Girl, Developed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Performances by Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Kristen Bell, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley and Yin Chang, Season 6, Episode 10, The CW, 2012, Netflix.

Nicol, Danny. “‘Bad Business’: Capitalism and Criminality in Agatha Christie’s Novels.” The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal, Volume 17, Issue 1, p. 6. DOI: doi.org/10.16997/eslj.230.

“Pilot.” Gossip Girl, Developed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Performances by Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Kristen Bell, Leighton Meester and Penn Badgley, Season 1, Episode 1, The CW, 2007, Netflix.

Rowland, Susan. “Gendering the Genre.” From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. Edited by Clive Bloom, p. 24, Palgrave, 2001. Print.

Santos, Kristin Dos. “Gossip Girl Finale: Dan Was Almost Revealed in Episode 1—and More Surprises You Didn't Know!.” E!. www.eonline.com/de/news/ 372400/gossip-girl-finale-dan- was-almost-revealed-in- episode-1-and-more-surprises- you-didn-t-know. Accessed 13 August 2019.

Taylor, Andrew. “Agatha Christie: The Curious Case of the Cosy Queen.” The Independent, www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/books/features/ agatha-christie-the-curious-case- of-the-cosy-queen-2032999.html. Accessed 13 August 2019.

“The Goodbye Gossip Girl.” Gossip Girl, Developed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Performances by Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Kristen Bell, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley and Yin Chang, Season 2, Episode 25, The CW, 2009, Netflix.

Spaces

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I'm walking A L L O V E R The apartmentlooking t h windows r and o u balconies g h Trying to find outWhere the sun rises from – East and West being [ T o o L a r g e ] For me to fully grasp right now... it doesn't matter that I missed the

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t t g t n u n u i r i r n of day from night to write this | | The sun rises daily. At least Two more times Two In my life I'll be up to see it. At least Two more times Two I will do something I have already done before. Starting with breakfast.

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Has the moon ever bowed down To the rippling shores? When the silver shafts of Luna Dance to the rhythm of the placid waves, Then the panorama of the tranquil land Allays the tornado at the heart.

They complement each other so well; Like red to rose, lustre to pearl, Melody to music. Then why, I wonder, is one A child of the heavens, The other, a stretch of earth?

God placed them, I was told, At the moment of creation, One above, the other below, Both necessary so But not one is menial, none is low.

The entirety of His masterpiece, they said, Is modelled out of Magic dust, a marvel. Everything, they said, in His cosmos is A miracle worth revering. Then how am I a creature so ignoble That they evade my shadow, spurn my will, Force me to eat dead meat, command me to carry night-soil, Shirk away from my presence And call me words I don’t recognize?

My identity is taboo.

My mother told me to hide my name. It apparently contained

That’s In A Name

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An epithet which distinguished me Not in a dignified fashion.

I was characterized, and placed At the lowest echelon of a pyramid Which God didn’t create; I was pushed down to depths Of hell, which Satan didn’t own. But these spaces created by humans Just like me, The dissimilitude lay in a name they had But I didn’t possess.

So I tried hiding myself, And who I was, as I feared They’d repudiate my being Because of where I was born.

But those eyes pierced my existence every time With looks of suspicion that I dreaded. Was I being paranoid? The same spaces of cultivation for others Became a terror-farm for me Where I was a trespasser.

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A veritable cultural behemoth, Ella Yelich-O’Connor, now known widely to the world as Lorde, has produced an influential body of work in the span of a few years. It is deeply preoccupied with a young woman’s experience of having inhabited alternative spaces within the larger dysphoria and dystopia of youth, abstemious fame, and a vastly alienating modern existence. In “400 Lux”, one of the most poignant tracks of her debut album Pure Heroine, the 16-year-old Lorde sings: “I love these streets where the houses don’t change / Where we can talk like there’s something to say” (12-13). Streets that evoke the inscrutable familiarity and nostalgia of home as well as those that are bathed in the haunting glow of nocturnal r eve l ry, conf igu re f r equen t ly and consistently in Lorde’s music. This recurrent phenomenon is rooted in her sustained engagement with spaces—geographical, urban, emotional, socio-political, utopian, dystopian, temporal, and phantasmagorical.

For the purposes of this paper, the appearance of various spaces engendered in Lorde’s music and the location of her persona as well as that of those who are young in these sites will be examined. This paper will attempt to interrogate her characterisation of spaces in terms of two categories: utopias and dystopias; following which, it will undertake an engagement with

those spatial configurations that invalidate any categorisation.

The Utopian Space in Lorde’s Literary Imagination

The vision of the utopia—an ideal world conjured upon the sturdy bedrock of internal cohesion, or a wistfully unreal realm whose systemic perfection is all-encompassing—is one that originally emerged in association with political theory and philosophy. The ambitious dream embedded within the imagination of such a space, was the figuration of a social order tha t seamless ly ensures quot id ian contentment and sustainable security of the individuals that shape its being. In many ways then, the utopia was the realisation of a collective happiness.

However, in the context of a more interiorised understanding of the utopia, an individual’s subjectivity, brought to life by the sheer intensity of unique, esoteric experiences, configures his/her deeply personal imagination and articulation of the utopian space. These multiple, secret utopias exist in synchronicity and in conflict with larger structures that may be dystopian in their extreme divergence from the ideal, or merely burdened with ordinary blemishes and mundane imperfections.

“Send Us to Perfect Places”: The Figuration of Utopias and Dystopias in Lorde’s Discography

Adreeta Chakraborty

The paper critically investigates the discography of the singer-songwriter Lorde, highlighting the spaces it explores and navigates. Focusing on her albums, Melodrama and Pure Heroine, it seeks to understand the articulation of spaces within the utopian and dystopian framework, while exploring instances where the spaces invalidate any categorisation. This interrogation of spatial configurations is also premised upon particular autobiographical experiences and characteristics from Lorde’s life. Borrowing from Foucault’s theorisation on spaces, the paper will attempt to understand how Lorde’s music engages with the meanings as well as purposes of spaces, and the lack thereof.

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Employing song structure, theme, sound, and verse, Lorde explores the space of experiential reality that being young opens one up to. On one hand, the 16-year-old singer of Pure Heroine revels in the feeling of reckless abandon that comes with her age—the teenager in the album seems fit to seize the world by its horns and unearth its deepest secrets about authentic, untrammelled human sensation. On the other, she is constantly trapped in the simultaneous psychedelic spirals of heady excess and premature grief, arising out of the familiar exercise of anticipating the loss of youth. In “Ribs”, she articulates these anxieties with striking poignancy: “This dream isn’t feeling sweet / We’re reeling through the midnight streets / And I’ve never felt more alone / It feels so scary, getting old” (17-20). Later, she adds: “It drives you crazy, getting old” (4). In Lorde’s emotional universe, the space of youth is a psychosomatic and restless mirage that threatens to dissolve into oblivion. Her negotiations with this space, therefore, are frequently governed by this looming fear of dissolution.

However, there are moments where she is serenading the experience of being young, writing paeans to its thrills. These are moments when she seems to be completely submerged in the indeterminacy of the quality of this experience. In “Perfect Places”, one of the most celebrated tracks from Melodrama, she says: “I hate the headlines and the weather / I’m nineteen and I’m on fire / But when we‘re dancing I’m alright / It’s just another graceless night” (6-9). These four lines seem to encapsulate a tempestuous tour de force of her heady, conflictual engagement with youth. The sound and the beat implore her to revel in the “fire” and understand it as the fullness of lived experiences.

This reaching out for a transcendental human sensation whose sheer scope is too magnificent to be articulated is the privilege of youth, although there is a strange desolation and a persistent anxiety in this exercise. The

space is a constantly shifting cornucopia that forces Lorde to ceaselessly re-adjust her emotional responses. Only in a state of heightened immersion (intoxication is always a metaphor for such headlong submersion into the well of intensity)— when the persona in the song is dancing almost in a Bacchanalian fit, losing track of the threats posed to her youth by the inevitable ebbing of spatio-temporal realities—does she feel alright. For all the complexity of such a series of experiences, this transition into intoxication gets easily normalised and turned into the quotidian norm, the cornerstone of perplexing teenage experience—just another graceless night, which those who fecklessly declare “we are young and we’re ashamed” (“Perfect Places” 27-28), are accustomed to reliving customarily.

This experience of youth also comes t i ed wi th a cond i t ion o f spacelessness, a willful abandonment of, or being abandoned by an anchoring in space. In “Perfect Places”, she says, “if they keep tellin’ me where to go / I’ll blow my brains out to the radio” (14-15). There is an impulse for movement, away from the present location, but that impulse causes chaos, disarray, and disillusion in the absence of any self-direction. Any semblance of direction that does approach the young mind is from an external source—“they” are telling her where to go—and is therefore alien. It invites frustration, and incites indignant rebellion in the form of an obstinate disavowal of imposed directionality and linearity.

With this spacelessness, this temporary suspension—almost akin to a limbo—comes the illusion of timelessness. Pure Heroine’s “400 Lux” begins with “We’re never done with killing time / Can I kill it with you?” (1-2). Although songs like “Ribs” are acutely aware of the relentless passing of time and ebbing of youth, a reckless transcendental urge also

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informs much of her music. There is a drive towards rendering temporal constraints immaterial—the young people in her music are ceaselessly, perhaps unconsciously, boasting about having vast amounts of time to squander. This leads to the construction of a utopian space where time ceases to be a sinister death-knell reminding one of its inescapable presence.

In Lorde’s music, there is an actualisation of the dream of performing an escape, achieving true emancipation from the contours and boundaries that time delineates and demarcates. This world, is therefore, timeless in the sense that the anxiety of transience does not bear upon the persona’s consciousness; one always feels like one has all the time in the world. However, it is a self-conscious timelessness insofar as it is aware of its illusory nature for the purposes of constructing a dream. The voice, thus, engages in a pretence that sustains the utopia.

Teenagers in Lorde’s songs seem to be embracing great dangers, throwing themselves towards a vortex of intensity for a glimpse of a pure and authentic sensation. The theme of nihilistic hedonism that is commonly associated with youth is seen frequently in her music. In “400 Lux”, she sings: “You drape your wrists over the steering wheel / Pulses can drive from here / We might be hollow, but we’re brave” (9-11)—lyrics which illustrate young people’s lack of concern for consequences and their “brave” urge to inhabit the tumultuous vigour of the moment, unmarred by mediocrity, tendency to be forgotten, or dullness. The people who populate these songs create a world which is

almost anarchic in its lack of regard for regulations, a world whose touchstone is an ideal of hedonistic excess.

However, there is something deeply nihilistic about this rebellious repudiation of laws that ensure one’s safety and protection. It illustrates the fact that these young people care little about things such as longevity and are not ill-adjusted to the idea of early extinguishment. This kind of a death drive (Thanatos), often expressed through multiple images of violence in her music, mingled with a hedonistic urge predicated upon sexual liberation and creativity (Eros), is rooted in one’s understanding of the universe as a meaningless space where one might as well live on a larger-than-life scale while one is alive.1

Moreover, this manifestation of timelessness and transcendence is rooted in temporal measures insofar as it is conscious and aware of the existence of a broader framework of time, which can be conquered b y d o c u m e n t a t i o n , i t e m i s a t i o n , aestheticisation, and museumisation. In “Writer in the Dark”, she sings: “Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark / Now she’s gonna play and sing and lock you in her heart” (8-9). More significantly in “The Louvre”, she tells her lover: “They’ll hang us in the Louvre / Down the back, but who cares? / Still the Louvre” (26-27). In his essay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, Michel Foucault classifies museums as “heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time” (5).2

Our understanding of spaces is susceptible to fervent dynamic shifts. These

1. The concepts of Eros and Thanatos are borrowed from Freud’s work on life and death instincts. In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he concludes that all instincts fall into one of two major groups: Eros (sexual instincts, or those that deal with basic survival, pleasure, and reproduction and/or creativity) and Thanatos (the death instinct, channelled through aggression and violence) (358-373). 2. Foucault conceptualises heterotopias as places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the “real sites...are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (3). A museum would be an example of such a site in the sense that it is an existing physical space which performs and/or actualises (utopian) transcendence. He goes on to add: “Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (3).

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sites often, therefore, transcend the categories of utopias and dystopias even if they are articulated through the vocabulary of such binary opposition, because despite that opposition, there is simultaneity of existence, which gives rise to a heterotopia. “The idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organising in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place” (Foucault 7), illustrated by her obsession with the Louvre in this song, is directly associated by Foucault with a persistent preoccupation with modernity.

The Appearance of the Dystopian in Lorde’s Work

However, all these spaces that Lorde constructs as the home of the young consciousness are characterised by images and idioms of violence, which hearken back to the theme of Thanatos. In “Glory and Gore”, the chorus is replete with references to warriors and gladiators: “You could try and take us / But we’re the gladiators” (12-13). The milieu that the cut-throat popular music industry manufactures, is likened to an arena of war; a veritable batt lefield where one must relentlessly fight for legitimacy and elusive cultural relevance and thus, Lorde says: “Now we’re in the ring / And we’re coming for blood” (26-27). Gigantic sharks, evoking an almost atavistic horror, haunt “Green Light”: “Those great whites, they have big teeth / Oh, they bite you” (5-6). Images of a graphic road accident pervade the song structure of “Homemade Dynamite”—after a bout of rash driving, Lorde surmises that the persona would end up “painted on the road, red and chrome, all the broken glass sparkling” (20-23).

These songs configure violence as a destructive, annihilatory impulse, a searing brightness in the dazzle of youth that blinds and affects an assault on the senses. Explosions constantly appear throughout the course of Melodrama . In “The Louvre”, Lorde

deliberately elides the difference between an explosion and her own heartbeat. “Can you hear the violence? / Megaphone to my chest” (12-13) she sings, before announcing her plans to make party music out of her own emotional eruptions: “Broadcast the boom, boom, boom, boom / And make ’em all dance to it” (14-15). “Homemade Dynamite” also ripples around the refrain “Blowing shit up like homemade d-d-d-dynamite” (15). With an almost pyromaniacal zeal, Lorde half-jokingly makes the sound of a bomb detonating at the end of the song, shaping in the process an unsettlingly miscible concoction of violence and indulgence, danger and excess.

In “Perfect Places”, Lorde sings, “I’ll blow my brains out to the radio” (15)—a moment of silence falls and she makes an ominous “ch-ch” noise like a gun cocking, before the chorus kicks in. These images of bloodshed, ferocity, malevolence, and strife contribute to the creation of a dystopian space within Lorde’s musical universe. Whether she is talking about being in love, or being young, or being dizzyingly successful and famous, her explorations of each experience is undercut by a steady strain of dystopian unease and discomfort in inhabiting the space. No place or space can become a home to this restless psyche. She seems to be valorising a certain kind of movement and progress, as opposed to stasis and finding meaning within the spaces that such a shifting sense of belongingness necessarily and constantly generates.

In “Green Light”, when she sings, “I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it” (16), she is seeking sanction for such motion. As Foucault says, “a thing’s place...[is] no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing...[is] only its movement indefinitely slowed down.. .extension is subst i tuted for localisation” (4). The aesthetics of constant movement and flux—the car being a

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powerful motif in her songs, seen in “400 Lux”, “Green Light”, “Tennis Court”, and most significantly “Supercut” (“in your car, the radio up”), to name a few—is rooted in this notion of extension which Foucault explains (2). Spaces are defined as points in the journey towards and search for newer spaces; Lorde glorifies the act of “never not chasing a million things that I want” (“Tennis Court” 4).

Despite the constant frustration of a relentless search for home, Lorde does not shy away from imagining what it means to be inhabiting a utopian space, within the existing cultural zeitgeist, shaping her own utopias in the process. Although, in “Royals”, she declares that she lives in a “torn-up town” where there is “no postcode envy”, she also asserts that a visualisation of a utopia is possible, reinforcing her ability to inhabit a phantasmagorical, dream-like space that positions itself beyond material constraints and immediate realities as she sings in the same song, “We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams” (7).

The figuration of this utopia is also entrenched in an understanding of spaces as socio-economic entities. It is a raggedy bunch of teenagers who are the protagonists of these songs, “who have―not yet lost all our graces” (“Team” 2) and who “will never be royals” (“Royals” 11). A searing class consciousness informs her characterisation of the spaces she has access to. Although she aspires to vertically advance in terms of these material indicators, she is also aware that “what this palace wants is release” (“Team” 24). For all her ambition, and starry-eyed valorisation of flamboyant success, Lorde’s persona recognises the embedded misery in obscene luxury. In “Royals”, she almost takes pride in saying, “that kind of lux just ain’t for us / we crave a different kind of buzz” (13-14).

Her imagination of utopia, while cognizant of socio-economic indicators and

other tangible elements, however, lends itself to an abstraction far removed from the realm of possibility as well as from the dystopia of reality. This is a space where the persona in her music can seek some semblance of anchoring away from a poisonous social milieu and cultural ethos that govern the entertainment industry.

I n “ B u z z c u t S e a s o n ” , s h e articulates this conceptualisation or vision repeatedly: “Explosions on TV, and all the girls with heads inside a dream / So now we live beside the pool, where everything is good” (6-7). In the same song, she expresses a desire to “never go home again” (17). In the wake of the construction of such a space where everything is detached from the harrowing news cycle, she sings again: “The men up on the news, they try to tell us all that we will lose / But it’s so easy in this blue, where everything is good” (14-15). Everything in this utopia seems to be functioning in serene, cerulean harmony.

Utopia, therefore, is not home, nor is it tending towards home. Lorde’s writing identifies it as a state of being or a space that renders the need and longing for home, forgettable and dispensable; taking away the crippling centrality of a powerful yearning to belong, and liberating one in the process of such a movement. It is a space that essentialises freedom at the cost of estrangement from existent conventions, systems and opaque realities. This idea achieves full fruition in the concluding verse of “Buzzcut Season” when she sings: “Nothing’s wrong when nothing’s true / I live in a hologram with you” (10-11). The persona has clearly discovered a world that is not bogged down by spatiality, temporality, morality, objectivity, and rationality; she has unearthed a space of isolation with her lover.

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The mention of living in a hologram with one whom she is serenading, configures an image of imperfect stasis, as a hologram is just a simulacrum, or “make-believe” and “hyper-real” as Lorde puts it, in the same song. The creation of this suspended space is predicated upon the rejection of the outside world, the bewildering chaos outside the organised symmetry of her hologram. This kind of assertion also foregrounds one of Lorde’s major themes―the ability that teenagers and young people possess to shape newer, better realities. Yet, angst and frustration, a prominent motif in the new millennium, loom on the horizon of these fabr ica ted spaces , threa tening the i r disintegration.

Other Spaces in Lorde’s Music

Sometimes, however, Lorde retreats from abstractions, fanciful departures, and comes back to real-time spaces (which are not restricted to the persona’s haunts but also constitute the autobiographical elements in her music), and finds belongingness and beauty, madness and melodrama there.

“400 Lux” is a song that also gives us a temporal location, though it is not explicitly stated. 400 lux is the amount of light a sunrise or sunset on a clear day gives off (lux is the SI unit of luminance), and the entire song reflects its placement within the liminal space of daybreak and twilight. This liminality is an o r g a n i s i n g p r i n c i p l e o f L o r d e ’ s conceptualisation of spaces. Although she uses the vocabulary of utopia and dystopia in terms of binary extremities, her voice is situated within a space that is seeking an identity. She conveys this by curating a sound that is mellower and distinct in character from the fierce drumbeats embedded in the aural extravaganza of Melodrama. For all its maximalism, verbosity, and amplification of space, however, the latter album justifies the caveat given at the outset: “we told you this was melodrama” (“Sober II” 7).

Another space that has come to increasingly assume shape in Lorde’s music is that of the city. In “Tennis Court”, she says, with a childlike zeal for exploration and novelty: “Pretty soon I’ll be getting on my first plane / I’ll see the veins of my city like they do in space” (14-15). In Melodrama, the city has become a formless beast breathing down the neck of the woman’s broken heart at times, and accentuating the heady intoxication of her youth. It is a breathless space of excessive revelry, highlighted in “every night I live a n d d i e / f e e l t h e p a r t y t o m y bones” (“Perfect Places” 1) and a space of hostility, exposure, and violence as well, illustrated in the “gun-fights” and “lime-lights” of “Sober II”.

It is also a theatre of extreme alienation and vulnerability, as illustrated in “Liability”, when she’s “crying in a taxi” (2), with the urban vista zooming past her vision. The exposure of vulnerability is accentuated by the location of the scene—a space as public as a New York cab.

In terms of her experience in, with, and of the city, and even otherwise, much of Lorde’s music is heavily situated within the psych ic l andscape o f f ema le vulnerability and solitude. The persona’s rebellion against the culture industry’s labelling norms is predicated upon her assertion and exhibition of the hole in her heart caused by the disillusionment with one’s milieu. She reiterates her alienation from “all the glamour, and the trauma” (20) in “Sober II” and yet refuses to be afraid of exhibiting “the fucking melodrama” (21).

Locat ing hersel f wi thin this emotional oeuvre, however, she does not restrict herself to her gender identity. A gendered expressive mode or positionality only acts as a subtle underpinning in most of her work that resonates with a vast base of young people, whom, by her own

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admission, she is eager to represent. In an interview with Jon Pareles of The New York Times, she comments: “I’m trying to make something people my age will care about, trying to keep my peers feeling like I’m doing something for them or representing them in some way” (17). Lorde, therefore, strives to forge a sense of community as well. Her musical persona, while wallowing and revelling in isolation by turns, also seeks and craves human touch, company, love.

She has said in an interview to The Independent that Melodrama traces the emotional experience, inclusive of highs and lows, of a house party (3)—indicative of a desire to capture the variegated sensations that one has access to within the contours of that space. While sometimes the persona feels alienated within a space of excessive exposure, there are moments when she craves a sense of belongingness to a space, the kind of space that is characterised by population. It is a space which is rendered all the more powerful in the context of a unity forged among a disillusioned generation of young people, as she unabashedly claims in “Perfect Places”: “All of our heroes fading / Now I can’t stand to be alone / Let’s go to perfect places” (19-21).

Conclusion

Throughout her d i scography, therefore, Lorde seems to be reaching out for even the faintest, phantasmagorical silhouette of meaningful space. The persona in her music seems to mourn the anticipated loss of a utopian construction of youth, visualising its absence after having lived under its succour and enchantment. Spaces in absentia are lacunae in Lorde’s musical consciousness, as she sings in “Ribs”: “It’s not enough to feel the lack / I want ‘em back, I want ‘em back” (39-40). However, this frustration with absentia is doomed to persist when one is confronted with the possibility of inhabiting a utopia.

The word itself comes from the Greek word ‘outopia’ meaning ‘no place’, though its similarity to another Greek word ‘eutopia’ meaning ‘the good place’ gives rise to the essential conflictual duality that informs our understanding of such a space to this day. These nebulous spatial dimensions, which are often “placeless places” (Foucault 6) constantly throw Lorde’s musical persona into confusion, and push her to re-evaluate the meanings, value judgments, and analysis that she assigns to spaces.

At the end of Melodrama, she sings: “All the nights spent off our faces / Trying to find these perfect places / What the fuck are perfect places anyway?” (32-34). As Foucault says, “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (4). The question that Lorde asks in the song, therefore, is eternally open-ended and so many of the spaces that she inhabits with gladness and discomfort are generated in the quest for the answer.

It is the legacy of existential questioning and purpose that Lorde bequeaths to her listeners, but the only space that she consummately occupies is that of her deep felt subjectivity, an emotional and artistic core that invites others to partake in the depth and breadth of its space. In “Supercut”, therefore, she powerfully appeals to her lover, her listener: “wild and fluorescent, come home to my heart” (28).

Works Cited

Battan, Carrie. “On Melodrama, Lorde Learns How Messy Adulthood Can Be.” The New Yorker, 19 June 2017. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/on-melodrama-lorde-learns-how-messy-adulthood-can-be/amp. Accessed 30 September 2019.

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www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/arts/music.lordes-royals-is-class-conscious.amp.html%3f0p19G=3248. Accessed 2 October 2019.

Empire, Kitty. “Lorde: Melodrama Review-Maximum Overwrought.” The Guardian, 18 June 2017. www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/18/lorde-melodrama-review-maximum-overwrought-green-light-liability. Accessed 1 October 2019.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, March 1967. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Dover Publications Incorporated, 2015. Print.

Hermes, Will. “Review: Lorde’s “Melodrama” Is Fantastically Intimate, a Production Tour de Force.” Rolling Stone, 16 June 2017. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/review-lordes-melodrama-is-fantastically-intimate-a-production-tour-de-force-200314/amp. Accessed 25 September 2019.

Leszkiewicz, Anna. “Violence, Intimacy and Glory: The Contradictory Cocktail of Lorde’s Melodrama.” New Statesman America, 20 June 2017. www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2017/06/lorde-melodrama-lyrics. Accessed 1 October 2019.

Lorde. Pure Heroine. Universal, Lava, and Republic Records, 2013.

---. Melodrama. Universal, Lava, and Republic Records, 2017.

Pareles, Jon. “Lorde’s “Royals” Is Class-Conscious.” The New York Times, 26 December 2013.

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in Europe and the United States to designate playful behaviour and artefacts, playfulness has increasingly b e c o m e a m a i n s t r e a m characteristic of our culture. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind in this context is the immense popularity of computer games…(Frissen et al. 75)

With this cultural impact in mind, the paper proposes a critical study of Doki Doki Literature Club as a case of adaptation of the visual novel genre and the tropes it employs to represent female characters. DDLC is primarily presented in the form of the visual novel, however, it also subverts elements found in the dating simulator format.2 This paper studies the use of adaptation as a means of subversion in association with narratives of gender and mental health t h r o u g h b o t h f o r m a l a n d t e x t u a l transgressions.

The rising popularity of video games i n t h e l a s t f e w d e c a d e s a n d t h e diversification of the field have made analysis of their production, content creation and reception critical to the study of modern culture. In the Introduction to the book The Video Game Theory Reader, Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron trace the growth of home computer systems in the late 1970s and the early 1980s which encouraged the rise of video games as a popular form of media (4).1 Over time, video games became a more integral part of the cultural existence of society. Valerie Frissen, de Mul and Raessens in their essay, “Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity”, have reinstated this point:

A spectre is haunting the w o r l d — t h e s p e c t r e o f p l a y f u l n e s s . W e a r e w i t n e s s i n g a g l o b a l “ludification of culture”. Since the 1960s, in which the word “ludic” became popular

Doki Doki Literature Club: A Study of Women

in the Space of the Dating Simulator

Ishani Pant

The visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is a case study on how spaces are used in order to explicate and transgress stereotypes available in popular culture. Borrowing from Beauvoir’s analysis of the position of the female, this paper shows how the tropes of female characters in popular Japanese dating simulators, manga, anime and visual novels are adapted to the horror genre in order to present the issues of stereotyping, categorisation and boxing of the figure of the female, who is trapped within the two dimensional space. The paper analyses this use of spaces to understand this brand of subversion and thus presents the use of glitches and fourth-wall breaking within the experience of the game as instances of how space is used to retell the established story of the male high school protagonist in search of a harem of available girls.

1. “In 1991, Marsha Kinder’s Playing With Power: Movies, Television, and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles treated video games on a par with other media...Instead of being treated as a special case or a marginal form of “new-media”, the video game was regarded as a cultural object that fit into a larger social and economic context” (Wolf and Perron 5). Stories and characters in film and television were being transported into the video game world since the mid-1970s, however by the 1980s, this began to change as the reverse movement slowly began (Wolf and Perron 5-6). 2. Dating simulators are a sub-genre of simulation games which involve interacting with characters with the objective of entering into a romantic relationship with one or several of the characters. These games first appeared in the Japanese game market.

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The Visual Novel and Dating Sim Format

The visual novel is a popular medium which makes use of the digital format, making it a video game in all technicality. It is often confused with the dating simulator format, given that both visual novels and dating sims are highly popular in Japan and certain genres of visual novels are often marketed as dating sims in the US market. However, the visual novel focuses more on plot and characterisation than most video games. Prior to the 2010s, the majority of localised Japanese visual novels, which were exported to the US market, were those with sexual and/or violent themes, much like the pattern followed by anime shows which were popularised in the early 1990s. The rise of digital distribution platforms like ‘Steam’ have allowed a greater variety in visual novel content and a wider outreach (“Visual Novel”). This context becomes important to our understanding of DDLC given how it attempts to question the entire culture of visual novels. The fact that the meanings of visual novels and dating sims are often used interchangeably is something DDLC uses to its advantage while creating a horror genre game that inverts the audiences’ expectations on multiple levels.

Wolf and Perron have noted that “algorithm, player activity, interface and graphic” are “the elements at the heart of what makes the video game a unique medium” (4). The interface is essentially “the boundary between the player and the video game itself”, “between input and output”, such as the screen and other input devices, as well as on-screen graphical elements which allow player activity (Wolf and Perron 15). The algorithm, on the other hand, controls the “representation, responses, rules, and randomness” of the game, including the

graphics, sound and gameplay, i.e. the “simulation of the diegetic world” (Wolf and Perron 16). The interface is played around within DDLC through glitches and breaking of the fourth-wall.3 The player on the other side of the screen is made aware of their experience as separate from the protagonist occupying the space of the game. The acknowledgement of the interface as a boundary of communication between two distinct spaces also pushes us to understand how spaces occupied by the characters become important to their means of communicating. While the algorithm of the game cannot truly be changed, the game goes to great lengths to simulate an experience in which the algorithmic formula is also undermined.

Nickianne Moody has used Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to understand the role of popular culture in establishing a “political consensus, an arrangement whereby the subordinate class accepts the worldview of the dominant class as common sense” (173). There is a struggle to shift the hegemony and popular culture becomes a space “for imagining radical change”, although the temporary resistance will ultimately give way to the dominant ideology once again (Moody 173). DDLC as a video game adapts the idea of radical changes contained within a mainstream narrative by breaking the form of the narrative itself. DDLC is a free game available on ‘Steam’ and the developer, Team Salvato is an independent developer, allowing for a greater space to radicalise content while providing greater access.

One must then ask, what is the intention of adaptation as subversion in DDLC? Simone de Beauvoir in the introduction to The Second Sex writes:

3. Glitches refer to how the game appears to physically break down through broken images, static on the display screen, broken audio and distorted text, and so on. Fourth-wall breaking refers to a technique in which a character within the text or game dismantles the illusion of the text/game as separate from the reader’s/player’s reality. The character may attempt to communicate with the audience beyond the text, make references to the audience’s reality, etc. as part of the process of fourth-wall breaking.

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In truth, nature is no more an immutable given than is historical reality. If woman d iscovers herse l f as the inessential and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself...Women—except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences—do not use “we”; men say “women,” and women adopt t h i s w o r d t o r e f e r t o themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects.4 (28)

The scope for adaptation originates from this analysis of the female position. Women become self-aware that subversion is possible, which brings the audience to the plot of the game exploring the self-awareness of Monika and the consequences incurred. Monika, the president of the Literature Club, is made self-aware and proceeds to influence the algorithm of the game, change the script, and even delete the character files of the other characters, namely Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki in order to achieve a happy ending with the protagonist. She attempts to break out of the video game world and enter the world of the player, on the other side of the screen. Her position as a gendered character can be analysed as part of the adaptation of textual tropes, while her role in the game becomes a means of adapting the tropes of the digital format itself.

Monika’s self-awareness is intrinsically linked to how she exists within the space of the game. Her feeling of containment and desire to break out of the game and enter the ‘real’ world, raises the question of how spaces

overlap. The spaces under observation are multiple, and exist across the real and the virtual, the male and the female, the personal and the social. It is by playing the game that these spaces are complicated for the player and the power-play that occurs within these inseparable spaces is exposed.

When one starts playing the game, one sees spaces within the virtual world through the screen, as it becomes more than just an interface. The screen acts as a reflection of the physical world, and one’s ability to travel between the two is how the game explains the gendered nature of the spaces explored. The player is no longer allowed to live in ignorance or use the space of the game as an escape from the actual horrors of their own reality.

To understand how the dating simulator and visual novel formats are adapted in DDLC, we must first understand the digital space they occupy. The digital space is experimented with by the creators of DDLC in their adaptation of the dating sim. Glitches, breaking of the fourth-wall and the loss of the player’s control within the game are part of the subversion of form, which makes use of space as it combines “real-time game play with a navigable, on screen diegetic space; the first to feature avatars and player-controlled surrogates that could influence onscreen events; and the first to require hand-eye coordination skills…” (Wolf and Perron 11).

One plays the game from the perspective of a faceless high school student who is convinced by his childhood best friend, Sayori, to join the Literature Club as an after-school activity. On joining the club, the player finds that it consists of three other “incredibly cute girls”,5

4. “They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women” (de Beauvoir 28). 5. “....Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being...the male sees her essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so she is it in the Absolute” (de Beauvoir 26).

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Monika who writes experimental poetry, can access game files from within, communicates with the player on the other side of the screen, consequently plays with the poetic space, the space of the game and the space of the ‘real’ world, and ultimately attempts to play with the spaces of the female and male spheres by entering into a relationship with the player. Her attempts at transgressing spaces are what lead the game to glitch and break down.

The first instance of glitching begins after Sayori commits suicide, an unexpected turn in an otherwise innocuous game.6 Earlier, when Sayori had confessed her love to the player, he had the option of rejecting or accepting it. Both options lead to her suicide, obliterating the player’s ability to avoid certain consequences by making the ‘right’ choice. This is due to Monika’s control over the game. It is suggested in the prologue of the game that Sayori has been closely associating with Monika and been more in touch with her feelings, revealing Monika’s influence.

When the protagonist enters Sayori’s room to find her hanging from the ceiling, the previously cheerful music changes to an eerie version of the tune and the screen glitches repeatedly. “An exception has occurred” (DDLC) is displayed on the screen. The player’s control is completely suspended as the scene unfolds; they cannot skip or save this par t of the game. “This isn’t real...There’s no way this can be real...This isn’t some game where I can reset and try something different,” the protagonist’s dialogue reads (DDLC). Ironically, while the player can try another route, it will lead to the same consequence. The game screen displays the word “END” and the game resumes. The player then continues to play the second part of the game, which is a mirror reflection of

establishing the dating simulator aspect of the game (DDLC). The lengthy prologue allows the player to become closely acquainted with at least some of the girls, while communicating with all of them. Given the setting of the Literature Club, one is given assignments of writing poetry to impress the girl of one’s choice.

As the game progresses, the player’s decisions are meant to bring the protagonist closer to the chosen female and it is assumed that the game will have a predictably happy ending; the end goal being that the single protagonist enters into a romantic relationship. It is this space of the relationship that has been complicated within the game. de Beauvoir has pointed out how “the couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: cleavage of society by sex is not possible. This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other” (29).

However, biological and sexual needs such as the desire for heirs, which creates male dependence on the female, have not allowed females to negotiate their social liberation. It is within the context of the master and slave dynamic of reciprocal need that de Beauvoir locates the female and male relationship. The male does not reveal his need for the slave and the slave internalises their need for the master out of dependence, ultimately favouring the oppressor over the oppressed (de Beauvoir 28).

The virtual world and the real world are no longer valid categories for the individual who has internalised the misogyny found in contemporary virtual and real spaces. Therefore, a character like

6. On the previous day, Monika’s “writing tip of the day” was “Sometimes you’ll find yourself facing a difficult decision...when that happens, don’t forget to save your game!” “...or when something unexpected might happen!”, a seemingly irrelevant dialogue which foreshadows Sayori’s death and the breakdown of the game (DDLC).

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the first part, however Sayori has been completely erased7 from the memory of the g a m e a n d t h e g a m e n o w g l i t c h e s continuously. The characters of Yuri and N a t s u k i a l s o s l o w l y d e s c e n d i n t o uncontrollable madness8 as their seemingly minor flaws are magnified.

The first poetry assignment post Sayori’s suicide, in the second act of the game also undermines one’s abilities to make decisions. The formula of appealing to the g i r l of one’s choice now has new consequences because the girls are no longer the sedated versions of themselves, i.e. the versions espoused by the tropes. During the first poetry sharing session, Yuri and Natsuki who previously disagreed slightly, break out into a major conflict. Dialogues in the game are also distorted at certain junctures to emphasise the slow decay. The ‘history’ of the game which contains all the dialogues exchanged does not show the distorted texts either.

During the argument, Yuri’s and Natsuki’s faces glitch. Monika appears and covers the dialogue panel, leaving no room for making any choices such as ‘skip’ and ‘save’. The protagonist of the game is told to choose between Yuri and Natsuki, however their choices are invalidated and the screen keeps closing in every time the player clicks on one of the options, until Monika’s face fills the screen. The protagonist’s inner monologue expresses anxiety at having to choose and the dialogue is in distorted script. He also has no control over the speed of the text.

Earlier, the poetry assignments involved the player choosing twenty words from twenty different sets of words containing options which appealed to either Sayori, Yuri or Natsuki. As the player chooses the words, a miniature Chibi graphic9 of one of the girls would react to the word, showing her preference for it. In the second poetry assignment in the glitched game, the protagonist has to choose twenty words to create a poem, as before, however at the fifteenth word, the option of choosing a word is given but it appears in a distorted and foreign script. Clicking this leads to a different, blank space on the screen where the assignment continues but the Chibi characters are replaced with a distorted, pixelated image of Yuri and Natsuki morphed together in the shape of a block. This visually represents the horrifying consequences of the choices and also presents the traumatised space in which the female characters exist.

During poetry sharing the next day, Natsuki’s poem is just a page filled with broken script and she later violently reacts to the protagonist spending more time with Yuri. “Yuri is a sick freak”, Natsuki says as her image glitches, her eyes bleed and she has a crazed smile (DDLC). “PLAY WITH ME!!!” she says, “play” being a potent phrase which Sayori had used earlier when telling the player to “play” with everyone when she was depressed right before her suicide. “Play” implies the fact that the characters are aware they exist in a game, and perhaps this is the cornerstone of their madness (DDLC). Natsuki’s neck cracks and the word “END” appears on screen in distorted text, however this is not the actual end and the game

7. The game resumes from the main start screen and Sayori’s image is distorted to look like Monika with bits of Yuri and Natsuki’s likeness. The ‘Start game’ option is in broken, incomprehensible script, as is Sayori’s original dialogue because she has been erased. 8. Yuri and Natsuki disagree about writing styles and there are escalating glitches as Natsuki calls Yuri an “edgy bitch” (DDLC). Yuri attacks Natsuki’s premature behaviour and Natsuki reveals Yuri’s self-harm tendencies. The on-screen images of the girls are no longer cheerful and instead display their ‘real’ emotions. After the fight, Natsuki runs out crying, and Yuri breaks down. Later on, Natsuki vomits at the sight of Yuri’s decayed corpse. The female characters are no longer contained within their perfect images. 9. Chibi can be translated as ‘little’ in Japanese. Chibi characters are stylistic portrayals in anime and manga which depict characters in a caricatured manner, through exaggeratedly childish and stereotypically cute features.

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continues. Ironically, the protagonist has no means of expressing what he has witnessed, or no awareness of it, though the player is continuously experiencing it from the other side of the screen.

During the third poetry sharing session in the glitched game, Natsuki uses her poem to communicate with the player, saying that she is worried about Yuri’s aberrant behaviour. She is aware that Monika wants them to ignore Yuri’s dilapidating mental health and asks the player to not tell Monika about this exchange. Before the protagonist can react, Natsuki’s facial features are erased and she says, “I changed my mind...If you would spend more time with Monika, all these problems would go away...Just think of Monika from now on...Just Monika” (DDLC). A pop-up option is displayed on the screen with “Just Monika” and our only choice is “OK”, clicking which causes the game to restart. Later on, when the protagonist is meant to choose which character to help for the school festival preparations, the cursor can physically only select Monika’s name. “Yay, you picked me!” Monika exclaims, although it is evident that the player had no choice (DDLC).

Finally, it is Yuri’s death which triggers the last part of the game. She confesses her obsession with the protagonist, and proceeds to stab herself repeatedly irrespective of the player’s response. A nonsense script plays continually as the entire weekend passes within the time of the game world and the protagonist is trapped in the clubroom with Yuri’s rotting corpse. On seeing the corpse, Monika is unperturbed, and reflects that she didn’t realise the script was “broken”. She then deletes Natsuki’s and Yuri’s character files and states that they will now “stop existing” (DDLC). The game restarts once again, and the player is transported to an empty classroom, outside

which he sees explosions taking place, while he appears to be floating in outer space.

Monika sits in front and addresses the viewers directly on the other side of the screen,10 acknowledging that the player and the protagonist are different entities. This is the primary instance of fourth-wall breaking in the game, a technique which questions the entire model of the dating simulator and later reduces the player’s agency as an acting figure. Other instances are dispersed throughout the game in which Monika indicates her self-awareness, which act as a means of foreshadowing. At this juncture, the save option is unavailable, and when clicked, displays the words “There’s no point in saving anymore. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere” (DDLC). Monika continues to address on the screen in a one-sided confession and explanation of her self-awareness. The only way to proceed with the game is to delete her character file, which exists outside the temporary world of the game and in the real world of the computer.

Rony Kahana points out that this is the only real agency the player exercises in the game, by actively deleting Monika (“Doki Doki Literature Club and breaking the fourth wall”). The game resumes, only to follow a plot narrative in which Sayori as the new president has become self aware, and Monika who was apparently not completely deleted by us, deletes the entire game, “I’m sorry I was wrong. There is no happiness after all,” Monika says (DDLC). Ultimately, the player’s only choice is taken away when Monika comes back to protect them (Kahana). “Error : Script file is missing or corrupt. Please reinstall game”, is displayed after the credits end, and the only option is “OK” (DDLC). Kahana also points out that “having the game put you in moments of distress when it takes away all sense of agency actually creates a positive experience. It is no longer trying to fool you into thinking

10. “I’m not even talking to that person anymore...that ‘you’ in the game, whatever you want to call him,” Monika says (DDLC).

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As far as the discussion on spaces within the scope of the plot is concerned, the protagonist spends time with the characters in specific, isolated spaces, representing the relationships cultivated with each girl. Natsuki and the protagonist read manga in a corner of the classroom and later on, so do Yuri and the protagonist. When the protagonist visits Sayori’s room, the atmosphere is completely transformed and it is within that changed space that we hear of her depression for the first time. Each character and the gendered narrative of romance becomes intrinsically linked to particular spaces. All these spaces exist within the larger space of the game, and the primary space remains that of the Literature Club and its allotted classroom. Furthermore, the player is given access to the internal space of the female world11 which induces claustrophobia through horror, visualised12 primarily through glitches and unexpectedly graphic imagery. Monika psychologically traps13 the player in a space that emulates the spaces in which women are often trapped in relationships:

Monika follows the script of an abusive and controlling partner while doing nothing more than treating you the way any dating sim player would treat the love interest in one of these games...Early on in the Monika scene, she attempts to guess your real name by reading the name of

you can make a difference on the outcome and also gives you a new goal—to regain control, something we assume we have in interactive experiences” (Kahana).

In DDLC, the words the players choose while writing poetry to impress the female characters allow the chosen character to open up a little more than usual as the game progresses. These seemingly minor choices are meant to impact the game later on in major ways, however the game does not allow one to understand the link between one’s actions and their consequences. While the player attempts to ascertain patterns, and make certain choices in order to steer the game, the game refuses to comply in the typical manner by yielding results that allow the protagonist to gain leverage with a particular female character. The complete unpredictability between the player’s actions and their consequences creates a sense of helplessness and horror:

If the horror of the game up to the death of Yuri and Natsuki w a s t h a t i t g a v e d i r e consequences for acting like the typical dating sim player/protagonist, then the horror of the game afterwards is that it reflects the typical player/protagonist of the dating sim back at you. In games with branching narratives, we often decide the direction of not just the player character's life but the lives of those beyond them. (gamer_152)

11. “Everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that “femininity is in jeopardy”; we are urged, “Be women, stay women, become women.” So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity” (de Beauvoir 23). The idea of femininity as an experience is complicated by DDLC when it provides the player with the horrific experience of having one’s identity effaced and contextualises it within the space of the dating sim and the misogynistic tropes it contains. 12. Certain other visual changes in the glitched game include how the character images become increasingly graphic at moments of duress. In one scene, the screen is covered with a red, pulsating film with cracks in the corner. These further augment the horror elements. 13. Monika confesses her love to the player, and the player has no dialogue. She asks us out on a date but the only option on the screen is “Yes” (DDLC).

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a directory on your hard-drive. We must understand this not as some cool horror novelty but as a way the game builds a frightening and direct link between Monika and the player. By having Monika acknowledge the player directly, the game signals that it's using its criticism to address the player and not just the protagonist. (gamer_152)

From the point at which the player receives the ‘content warning’ of the game till the end, they are made aware of the horror of existing as a two-dimensional character in a predetermined plot, both through visual and textual cues.

Adaptation and Intertextuality

Adaptation becomes a means of cultural assertion when we view the subversion that DDLC employs in the content of the game. The intertextual references enhance the game’s self-referentiality and make the player aware of the subversions taking place in an insidious but deliberate manner.

Some of the most popular textual tropes employed in the visual novel are shared by anime, manga and light novels. These include the trope of a “bottle episode”14 the “featureless protagonist”, the trope of multiple endings being achievable through different routes often taken by making even slightly different choices, the trope of the “groundhog day loop”,15 “harem genre”,16 “the ordinary high-school student”

as protagonist, the “prolonged prologue”, and finally, “story branching” which allows for multiple routes and narratives to co-exist within the same plot (“Visual Novel Tropes”). DDLC categorically subverts each of these tropes by making use of them in diametrically opposite ways to how they are generally intended.

Poulain de la Barre, a 17th century feminist writes, “Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party...Those who made and compiled the laws, being men, favored their own sex, and the jurisconsults have turned the laws into principles”17 (qtd. in de Beauvoir 30-31).

This characterisation of textual control of the male writer can be extended to the genre of the visual novel, anime, manga, and dating sims. The protagonist himself is characterised from the start as a high school student who spends his time on games and anime, a reflection of the intended audience, as well as a reference to the genres the game subverts. The space of the Literature Club itself becomes a scene of intertextuality as the characters write to communicate and express. The inner thoughts of the female characters, and the first signs of their breakdowns occur through the medium of the poetry they share with the protagonist.

The space of the Literature Club colours one’s entire perspective of how the game tells its story. The use of poetry as a form of expression and as a means for the female to assert her occupation of space, is particular to the game’s attempt at creating

14. Bottle episode is a trope in visual novels which contains the plot to a specific geographical location. For example, the classroom is the scene of action throughout most of DDLC. 15. The groundhog day loop is a trope in which events within the visual novel repeat themselves. In DDLC, when the game restarts and repeats the same sequence of events, albeit with some aberrations, the groundhog day loop is employed. 16. The harem genre trope usually depicts a male protagonist romantically associated with several female characters who dedicate their efforts towards attaining his attention. 17. “…Religions forged by men reflect this will for domination: they found ammunition in the legends of Eve and Pandora….Since ancient times, satirists and moralists have delighted in depicting women’s weaknesses” (de Beauvoir 31). The use of tropes in the ancient world provides evidence of the historical baggage that women carry as tropes are adapted in novel and modern ways to fit patriarchal needs.

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depth for the female character. Additionally, the fact that the game uses the trope of the high school dating sim plot is relevant to how educational institutes as spaces are often gendered in their conditioning, while appearing to be safe spaces. They create atmospheres in which adolescents perpetuate learned behaviours. The source of their learning can range from popular media, like dating sim games which are easily available online, to performed behaviours they note in the world around them. Thus, the educational institution becomes an experimental ground for the young high school student to explore these new influences.

As far as generic adaptation goes, DDLC adapts the genres of romance and horror. Both these genres are referred to intertextually within the game. Natsuki’s preferred read is “Parfait Girls”,18 a manga in which the four female protagonists fight over a new male member who enters their ice-cream shop. This plot parodies the plot of DDLC, until DDLC takes a darker turn. We are made aware of the constructed and fictional manner in which such plots exist. It also shows the conditioning of the female characters within the game. The other text referred to in the game is “Portrait of Markov”, a horror novel19 that Yuri is reading that references the genre of horror. “It’s the kind that challenges you to look at life from a new perspective...When horrible things happen not just because someone wants to be evil, but because the world is full of horrible people and we’re all worthless anyway,” Yuri says about the novel (DDLC). Much like “Parfait Girls”, this too is a reflection of DDLC itself, and how the game is aware of the adaptations it makes.

Gendered Narratives and Tropes

Why do women not contest male sovereignty? No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view. Where does this submission in woman come from? (de Beauvoir 27)

The dating sim format contains characters who provide manufactured consent to all the decisions within the game, and the romance is meant to cater solely to the needs of the player. The relationship is, thus, always fictional, unequal, heterosexual by default, and encapsulates men’s ideas of what women should be like in relationships when they play these games (gamer_152). The retelling of gender roles in DDLC effectively undermines the age-old tropes and also explicates the ways in which these tropes have dire repercussions on the mental health of women.

In DDLC, the male protagonist enters a completely female space and it begins to fall apart. However, it is important to note that the entire existence of the space is contingent on the male protagonist’s participation, interaction with it and validation of it. When the protagonist shows hesitation at joining the club, all four girls

18. The protagonist is highly dismissive of this genre of Manga, although ironically he reenacts it in the video game reality. Natsuki says to the protagonist, “Consider this a lesson straight from the literature club. Don't judge a book by its cover.” The cover of the Manga incidentally shows four girls in “animated feminine poses”, much like the cover of DDLC. 19. Yuri’s favourite novels are those which “build deep and complex fantasy worlds” with “deep psychological elements”. “Isn’t it amazing how a writer can so deliberately take advantage of your own lack of imagination to completely throw you for a loop?...Surreal horror is often very successful at changing the way you look at the world, if only for a brief moment,” Yuri remarks. This is precisely what DDLC intends to do through its adaptation of the dating sim as a horror game.

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appear highly dejected. In the glitched version, the male protagonist is essential to the existence of the Literature Club because a club requires four members to be official, and Sayori no longer exists to take that place.

The protagonist in the game is by default a male high school student. In the course of the game, he becomes a provider of experiences for the women who latch onto him. They do not seem to have a life outside the Literature Club and the time they spend with the protagonist. What little the viewers know about the girls’ personal lives is problematised to create character depth as a means of subversion. Even during poetry assignments, when the female characters are depicted as Chibi graphics in the margins of the screen, they are infantilised and literally marginalised.

Later on, one finds out that all the girls are programmed to confess their love to the protagonist, while Monika has to watch from the sidelines. It is this which drives her to make changes in the game as a means of attaining her happy ending. She amplifies the worst aspects of each character to dissuade the protagonist from spending time with them. The ramifications of the amplification show how the dating sim format is flawed to begin with, that while the girls clearly have depth, it is suppressed and later inevitably implodes.

The four female tropes of Japanese popular culture are represented in the game by the four female characters. Monika is the Yandere, Sayori is the Dandere, Natsuki is the Tsundere and Yuri is the Kuudere.

Monika fits into the trope of the “Yandere”, a female who is “lovesick” to the

point of insanity, driven by an extreme obsession that leads to abnormal behaviours and even violence, although initially appearing “perfectly cute and harmless on the surface” (“Yandere”). All of Monika’s poems are about her realisation of self-awareness that she exists in a game. However, her idea of accessing a higher existence becomes linked to romantic relationship20 with the player on the other side of the screen. The existential angst she feels at having free will, in a world where all others find purpose in a unidimensional struggle to woo the protagonist, is what underlies her entire character.

She appears as part of the trope of the Yandere, but the complexity she shows is far greater because it reveals how her self-awareness is perhaps caused by the fact that the gamescript didn’t give her the same unidimensional purpose21 of chasing the protagonist. In the glitched version of the game, Monika tries to talk to the protagonist alone and says, “Sometimes I feel like you and I are the only real people here” (DDLC). In one scene, the words “Can you hear me?...Tell me you can hear me” pop-up on s c r e e n , f o l l o w e d b y “ P l e a s e h e l p me” (DDLC). The obsession Monika displays is not that of a typical Yandere, but that of a fully formed human being trapped in a flat world, much like the existence of women in a patriarchal society.

Natsuki fits into the trope of the “Tsundere”, “an outwardly violent character” who alternates between “two distinct moods: tsuntsun (aloof or irritable) and deredere (lovestruck)” (“Tsundere”). Natsuki’s behaviour as a Tsundere is more complex than just the presence of conflicting feelings

20. In “Hole in Wall” she writes, “A hole of infinite choices / I realise now, that I wasn’t looking in. / I was looking out. / And he on the other side, was looking in” (DDLC). 21. In the poem “The Lady Who Knows Everything” she writes, “A beautiful lady who has found every answer / All meaning, / All purpose...And here I am / A feather”. The speaker searches “day after day” while knowing that “Legends don’t exist”, but it reassures her when all else fails. The speaker falls like a “dry quill”, the lady catches her, only to say “I have found every answer, all of which amount to nothing. / There is no meaning / There is no purpose...Your legend does not exist” (DDLC).

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will very likely decrease” (“Dandere”). Sayori also occupies the trope of the best friend to the protagonist. However, one later learns that she suffers from severe depress ion and much of her cute carelessness that the protagonist easily criticised were actually behaviours resulting from her depression, such as the inability to come to school on time, forgetting meals, etc. This opens up the question of mental health and how the stereotyping of women not only destabilises their mental health but also how existing mental health issues have no space to be discussed in. “What reason is there to do anything when I fully know how worthless I am,” says Sayori (DDLC).

This explains the perpetuation of tropes throughout history as the “myth of the Woman, of the Other, remains precious for many Reasons; they can hardly be blamed for not wanting to lightheartedly sacrifice all the benefits they derive from the myth: they know what they lose by relinquishing the woman of their dreams, but they do not know what the woman of tomorrow will bring them” (de Beauvoir 34). DDLC as a cultural reflection subverts modern tropes prevalent in popular media.

The only solution the dating sim offers is that of a relationship with the p ro t agon i s t , 25 l e ad ing to Sayor i ’s confession, “I like you so much that I want to die” (DDLC). It is after this point that the game begins to glitch because Sayori commits suicide irrespective of the protagonist’s response. The game does not give the protagonist the satisfaction of being the saviour figure and one realises that mental health issues cannot be resolved

of romance. For starters, she comes from a home with an abusive father who often does not give her food and money. In the glitched game, Monika tells us that Natsuki is “petite” due to malnutrition, a horrifying comment on the social perception of the female body. She has deep-set self-esteem issues22 and insecurities, and due to the flawed dating sim format, she must seek their resolution through the protagonist (DDLC).

Yuri feeds into the trope of the “Kuudere”, a character who appears “apathetic and awfully pragmatic” but wears a “frosty mask that protects her tender, delicate f e e l i n g s d e e p u n d e r n e a t h t h e facade” (“Kuudere”). Yuri appears to be distant and intellectual but becomes highly passionate when it comes to literature. Her poems are dark and reveal her self-harm tendencies.23 Despite her intellectuality, she is a highly sexual character,24 another trope which views females as entirely sexualised beings and finds satisfaction in turning the shy, enigmatic girl into a figure of the male gaze. It is important to note that female sexuality in the dating sim is not a means of asserting agency but a means of satisfying the male protagonist. Her physicality is perhaps what leads to self-harm in the extreme version of it. Monika tells the protagonist in the glitched game that Yuri’s self harm isn’t a result of depression, but something she gets a “high” from, possibly even sexually.

Lastly, Sayori fits the trope of the “Dandere”, a character who is usually quiet but “will suddenly become talkative and sweet and cute when alone with the right person...If they’re with a group that they’re comfortable with, then the shyness factor of said dandere

22. In her poem “Eagles Can Fly” she writes, “People can try, but that’s about it”. The poem “Amy Likes Spiders” follows a narrative of social ostracisation and reveals her own self-loathing. In the glitched game, a special poem is unlocked “Things I like about Papa”, which is possibly written by Natsuki, and recounts several parental abuses (DDLC). 23. Yuri’s poem “Raccoon” refers to the urge to cut herself through the metaphor of feeding a raccoon (DDLC). 24. While sharing poems in the glitched game, Yuri smells our poem and asks to keep it, “I’ll even touch myself while reading it over and over...I’ll give myself papercuts so your skin oil enters my blood stream”, she says with a crazed expression (DDLC). 25. Sayori’s poem “Dear Sunshine” refers to her depression and her subsequent dependence on the protagonist as she writes, “If it wasn’t for you, I could sleep forever” (DDLC).

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simply by accepting Sayori’s confession, or by entering a romantic relationship (gamer_152).

Conclusion

The position of the female within the world of the virtual novel and dating sim is also the position of the female in the world without. That is why DDLC as a case study of adaptation becomes relevant to our understanding of gender narratives. Whether the game is able to truly subvert an established narrative and form is not as important to this paper’s analysis as are the ideas that it raises simply by attempting to do so:

We declare happy those condemned to stagnation, u n d e r t h e p r e t e x t t h a t happiness is immobility… Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely...by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open f u t u r e . E v e r y t i m e transcendence lapses into i m m a n e n c e , t h e r e i s degradation of existence...it takes the form of frustration a n d o p p r e s s i o n . . . E v e r y individual concerned with jus t i fy ing h is ex is tence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to transcend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her

transcendence will be forever t r anscended by ano the r essen t ia l and sovere ign consciousness. (de Beauvoir 36-7)

The concepts of transcendence and immanence given by de Beauviour perfectly conceptualise the existence of women in both the virtual and ‘real’ world, revealing the ways in which the fourth-wall has always been an illusion, poorly maintained.

Works Cited

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley. Penguin, 1972. Print.

Frissen, Valerie et al. “Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity.” Contemporary Culture, edited by Judith Thissen, Robert Zwijnenberg and Kitty Zijlmans. Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Print.

gamer_152. “Just Monika: An Analysis of Doki Doki Literature Club.” Giantbomb. 3rd March, 2018, www.giantbomb.com/profile/gamer_152/blog/just-monika-an-analysis-of-doki-doki-literature-cl/116819/. Accessed August 2019.

Kahana, Rony. “Doki Doki Literature Club and breaking the 4th wall.” Medium, 4th January, 2018, medium.com/@ronykahana/doki-doki-literture-club-1734b97d122. Accessed August 2019.

Moody, Nickianne. “Feminism and Popular Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, edited by Ellen Rooney. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.

Tvtropes. “Dandere.” Tvtropes, tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VisualNovelTropes. Accessed 20 January 2020.

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---. “Kuudere.” Tvtropes, tvtropes.org/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ VisualNovelTropes. Accessed 20 January 2020.

---. “Tsundere.” Tvtropes, tvtropes.org/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ VisualNovelTropes. Accessed 20 January 2020.

---. “Visual Novel.” Tvtropes, tvtropes.org/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ VisualNovel. Accessed 20 January 2020.

---. “Visual Novel Tropes.” Tvtropes, tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ Main/VisualNovelTropes. Accessed 20 January 2020.

---. “Yandere.” Tvtropes, tvtropes.org/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ VisualNovelTropes. Accessed 20 January 2020.

Wolf J. P. Mark, and Bernard Perron. “Introduction.” The Video Game Theory Reader. Routledge, 2003. Print.

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The moment in which two people transcend the set rules of gender and sexuality and let themselves be with each other, defines itself into a connection of two souls in a cosmic way beyond our comprehensibility. Souls, with no names, with no labels attached to them. They take the form of hands, longing to be with each other.

Featured are two such people navigating the spaces that exist within gender and sexuality, exploring their fluidity and discovering their complexity. Against a tender red background, their hands negotiate the space between them to find their way to each other, breaking the heterocentric borders created with respect to sexual identities and gender roles. The red emphasizes the passion and the desire the two hands are trying to negotiate with and understand.

Space is not only a geographical/spatial coordinate, but rather an entity whose borders are defined by those inhabiting it. It is shaped both individually and by collective histories. Social, popular and visible spaces a r e domina ted by pa t r i a r cha l and heteronormative identities, which reinforce the invisibility, marginalisation and social oppress ion of the non-conforming, antinormative, ‘queer’ identities. Thus, carving out distinctive spaces for queer expressions and experiences has a destabilising potential as they disrupt the stability of heteronormativity and systems of gender binaries. In resisting fixed and definitive boundaries, queer spaces envision

Hands: Queer Spaces

Athira Raj

“Queer intimacies are radical expressions of desire that open up traditional definitions and categories, and they invite us into understanding our humanity in new ways.” ― Mihee Kim-Kort

a potential to constantly transgress heterocentric structures of sexual identity and gender roles.

The space that the featured two individuals inhabit is one that is private and safe, where the expression of their identities is not scrutinized and/or invalidated. By creating a space for expression, they are, in their own way, breaking the psychological, personal and social restrictions imposed by the society.

In articulating a queer space for themselves, they are redefining the ideas of love and desire as they digress from what they have been constantly made to normalise. In doing so , they dep ic t the poss ib i l i ty o f transgressing, reshaping and reclaiming spaces.

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The exploration of a fictional narrative solely through audio, excluding audio books that stem from physical prints, is a relatively novel concept. It is the potential of the auditory method in presenting stories that creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor sought to tap into, by producing a podcast that is fictional, presenting itself as an alternative to the physical book. “Welcome to Night Vale” follows the story of a town in an undisclosed location to the south of the United States, in the form of updates by a community radio host—Cecil Gershwin Palmer.

Utilizing elements of magical realism in the construction of the setting, the premise of the story informs the listeners that the town in question is an amalgamation of conspiracy theories and supernatural events that exist within its space but are not issues of concern. The story can be placed in the genres of horror, mystery and comedy and the events that take place within the narrative often have supernatural elements which are glossed over by the deadpan nature of the commentary:

Traffic time, listeners. Now, police are issuing warnings about ghost cars out on the highways, those cars only visible in the distance reaching unimaginable speeds leaving destinations unknown for destinations more unknown. They would like to remind you that you should not set your speed by these apparitions, and doing so will not be considered “following the flow of traffic”. However, they do say that it’s probably safe to match speed with the mysterious lights in the sky, as w h a t e v e r e n t i t i e s o r organizations responsible appear to be cautious and reasonable drivers. (Palmer “Episode 1”)

The narrative that is created within the setting of the story borders on the absurd and can trace its roots to the existing dramatic traditions of surrealism1

and theatre of the absurd,2 wherein one of the primary sources of absurdity becomes

“Welcome to Night Vale”: A Study in Contemporary Socio-Political Commentary

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The paper explores the parallels between the podcast “Welcome to Night Vale” and the socio-political realities of the modern world. It seeks to decode the absurdist and supernatural components of the fictional narrative in an attempt to understand it as a mirrored depiction of real world issues of democracy, governance, work, economy and education. Lastly, it highlights issues of existentialism using the metaphysical aspects of the podcast. In doing so, the paper intends to reconcile the fictional universe of the podcast with the realities of the universe in which it is produced.

1. An avant-garde cultural movement that started in the early 20th century featuring the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. 2. A theatrical movement inspired by the Surrealist movement, which explores the idea of existentialism and the absurdity of human existence through employing disjointed and meaningless dialogues, plots that lack logical development etc.

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the breakdown of communication and irrational situations. For instance, when announcing the community calendar, Cecil mentions “Wednesday has been cancelled due to a scheduling error” (Palmer “Episode 3”). The statement presents a ludicrous claim—the idea that a day of the week could be arbitrarily cancelled. The existence of many such instances throughout the podcast lend to its absurdity. It is within these notions of the absurd that its links to the surrealist literary movement lie.

The podcast becomes a space for the surreal and for the absurd. As Louis Aragon states in Le Paysan de Paris, “The vice called Surrealism is the disordered and impassioned use of the image as a drug, or rather the uncontrolled provocation of the image for itself and for what it brings in the domain of representation by way of u n f o r e s e e a b l e p e r t u r b a t i o n a n d metamorphosis: for each image, each time, forces you to reconsider the whole Universe” (80). Every aspect of the podcast forces the listeners to reassess what they know of the universe within which Night Vale is placed. However, the observations and inferences made by the podcast, in reference to its own reality and events, are surprisingly astute and relevant to the real world in which it is received. By utilizing a new medium of communication, “Welcome to Night Vale”, under the guise of supernaturalism and deadpan comedy, offers a space for social and political satire. Thus, the fictional city of Night Vale becomes a physical manifestation of a larger commune of humanity dealing with ideological struggles and negotiating with what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

The basic narrativization of the story is done in layers, with each layer becoming reminiscent of a reality that the show intends to present. The narrator of the show is a community radio host, reaching out to his own local community in a limited setting,

and hence expects the listeners to already be aware of the rules of this fictional reality. However, there is a metaphysical aspect to his characterization that makes h im prov ide sub t l e de ta i l s and explanations to events, setting and characters that would otherwise be unnecessary to the fictional listeners of N i g h t Va l e c o m m u n i t y. T h e s e explanations always feel organic in their execution as most of them verge on being almost cautionary reminders to the residents who live in a city which deals with government surveillance and intrusive policies that seek to control every aspect of the citizens’ lives.

This is further elucidated by the existence of the city’s local governing body—the C i ty Counc i l , wh ich comprises of leaders elected through a corrupt electoral system and presents itself as a unanimous collective that often holds not only immense power over the city’s legislation but also the private lives of its citizens. But what makes these reminders especially sinister are their real-world ramifications that could be in fe r r ed by b reak ing down the metaphorical, supernatural or absurd elements in them:

Listeners, we are proud to have Big Rico’s as a sponsor of our show. You will not find a better pizza joint in all of Night Vale than Big Rico’s…Even the City Council offers its ringing endorsement of Big Rico’s…All Night Vale citizens are mandated to eat at Big Rico’s once a week. It is a misdemeanour not to. (Palmer “Episode 3”)

What seems to be an almost absurd mandate by the City Council that

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margarita glasses and bar code scanners—and I don’t want to get my fellow reporters in any trouble with the Sheriff’s Secret Police” (Palmer “Episode 8”). It is also representative of a governing body that attempts to ensure its subjects are not exposed to information that can become a threat to its hold on power:

Listeners, we are currently fielding numerous reports that books have stopped working... The scientists are studying one of the broken books to see if they can understand just what is going on here. The exact problem is currently unclear, but some of the words being used include “sparks”, “meat smell”, “biting” and “lethal gas”. For your own safety, please do not attempt to open a book until we have more information on the nature and cause of these problems. The City Council has released only a brief statement indicating that their stance on books has not changed and that, as always, they believe that books are dangerous and inadvisable and should not be kept in private homes. (Palmer “Episode 3”)

The advisory against books as supposed dangerous objects represents a greater problem of access to knowledge, which comes under the control of the government and the problem of suppression of information and knowledge which takes place at the governmental level.

Another element of the story is its constant attempt to highlight the problem of surveillance and censorship that exists in the 21st century. The podcast itself becomes party to this idea as it hides its intentions and themes behind the genre of fiction and horror, presenting the reality of Night Vale

governs the city of Night Vale can also be read as a comment on the existence of a government within a capitalist framework as well as a critique on lobbying and its effect on government policy. What is also mentioned in the sponsor spot is the fact that other pizza joints in the city have been d e s t r o y e d i n a n “ u n s o lv e d a r s o n case” (“Episode 3”), which can be seen as referential to big, government supported franchises pushing local business into bankruptcy. The story then becomes a comment on real-world issues but uses the absurdity and the irrationality of its plot to highlight similar levels of absurdity that exist in the real world. These are overlooked by a population that has become habituated to their own reality, one that would seem as ridiculous to someone who is not aware of how the world functions.

Instances of this can be seen in various ways in the real world. From an oddly placed product placement in a film to so-called anonymous donations to political parties that become a front for lobbying during elections in countries across the globe, these instances rely heavily on the social acceptability of such endeavours and fail to point out the obvious fallacy in their implementation, thus presenting an absurd real i ty that has somehow become normative. The idea that propaganda could be used to make people work against their own self-interests has been exploited by political entities that aim to become political leaders of democratic nations and there is a parallel drawn to that within the podcast by the presence of Night Vale’s City Council.

The City Council becomes the primary governing body in the fictional town and notably employs bizarre, almost draconian legislation to keep its citizens in check: “I, of course, can only thank those journal writers anonymously here on the air, as the Night Vale City Council long ago banned writing utensils—along with

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and the routine lives of its citizens as the true horror of the story, rather than relying heavily on scare tactics. It also seeks to demonstrate the difficulties of journalism within such a political system. It exposes how the media becomes both the source for information as well as propaganda and how the news itself is diluted to ensure it is palatable to the authorities as well as the intended audience. Any possible object or idea that stands in opposition to the status quo or the stance of the one in power is immediately ostracised. The insidious nature of such attempts relies more on re-education and fear mongering, rather than efforts that could potentially incite a counter-movement.

The podcast also presents the reality of working within a machine-like structure—rarely bothering with the individual, intent only on protecting vested interests and cutting losses wherever possible. It also ensures that the brunt of any possible loss or backlash falls on the public faces of such corporations and not on those that actually run it and are responsible for decision-making. The employer-centric nature of organisations highlights the issues the modern job-market presents to a newer generation of potential employees, as well as a work c u l t u r e t h a t d o e s n o t a l l o w f o r subordination or even questioning of the decisions of the management:

Here at the radio station it’s contract negotiation season with the station management again!…Now, obviously, I’m not allowed to go into details, but negotiation is tricky when you’re never allowed to g l i m p s e w h a t y o u ’ r e negotiating with…Station management stays inside their office at all times, only communicat ing wi th us

through sealed envelopes that are spat out from under the door like a sunflower shell through teeth. Then, in order to respond, you just kind of shout at the closed door and h o p e t h a t m a n a g e m e n t hears…Look, I’ve probably said too much. I can see down the hall that an envelope just came flying out. I pray it’s not another HR retraining session in the Dark Box. Uugh! But what can I say? I’m a reporter at heart. I can’t not report. (Palmer “Episode 3”)

While “Welcome to Night Vale” can be seen as an inference of the political scenario of the 21st century democratic structure, it also allows a space for social commentary as it explores various themes that attempt to reconcile with the society as it exists in today’s times. The protagonist, o r the nar ra to r Cec i l , i s open ly homosexual. However, his existence within the LGBTQ+ spectrum is rarely made the topic of discussion or debate. It simply becomes another aspect of Cecil’s characterisation, noticed only when discussing his relationship with the city’s s c i e n t i s t , C a r l o s . T h i s k i n d o f representation in media is rare as, even today, most television shows and films allow for homosexuality only to exist in characters where it inhabits their entire personality and hence, becomes a self-congratulatory endeavour. The podcast, in contrast to that, does not allow for Cecil to be defined as anything other than a radio show host to the listeners, with occasional glimpses into his personal life. These glimpses not just revolve around his sexual orientation, but also his fears, thoughts and personal opinions about issues plaguing Night Vale, expressed within the framework of his management and the City Council.

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mourning his loss. (Palmer “Episode 5”)

Deaths of individuals within the show are often taken in a disturbingly light-hearted manner, but this running gag is suggestive of a far more unsettling reality in which internships often become a front for exploitative practices by the employers.

Moreover, education and the socio-political structures existing in the school also become an arena for comment and critique by the creators as they deal with issues of curriculum and what become so-called reforms in the sphere of education. The kind of calamities that seem to strike the school’s PTA meetings are perhaps a reference to the involvement of parents in the politics of the Parents-Teachers Association and how that has devolved from its original intent to another sphere of power-play. The PTA exists in order to provide a space to discuss parental concerns with the school body as well as enact various policies that would make the schools a better place for the students. It is supposed to run parallel to the school administration. However, in Night Vale, the PTA becomes extremely influential and stops being a space for discussion but rather another arena of petty politics and banal issues amongst parents:

The PTA meeting rescheduled for next Tuesday at 6:00 PM. That meeting will continue to address the important issue of backpacks, and whether or not they are causing autism…There will also be a memorial service for the 38 parents and teachers who lost their lives in the attack—followed by a raffle. Remember, winners must be present at the time of the drawing to claim their prizes. (Palmer “Episode 4”)

There are also attempts to highlight the hypocrisies that are taken as given in society. For instance, there is a constant reference to the Sheriff’s ‘Secret Police’, s o m e t h i n g w h i c h b y v i r t u e o f i t s nomenclature should not be known to the people of Night Vale. Various atrocities are attributed to this organisation but they are accepted as the way of life for citizens of Night Vale, something that holds multiple real-world implications of police brutality and violence that are acceptable in the name of security in society.

Other instances of the same include the reference to “Shape in Grove Park that No One Acknowledges or Speaks About” (Palmer “Episode 5”), a structure in a park in the city that is somehow a Night Vale landmark and yet is never acknowledged other than when there is news of its potential removal. Perhaps, it mirrors the society’s obsession with historical and culturally significant structures and the apathy that comes with their existence, especially in terms of appreciation, maintenance and upkeep.

Another running comedic element within the narrative is the mortality rate of interns at the Radio Station. The deaths of various interns in multitudes of ways often have comedic undertones and intend to lighten the heavy and eerie notes of the show:

Leland, our newest intern, recently brought me a cup of c o f f e e … A f t e r b r i e f consideration…I have decided to accept the Council’s offer, because they are trustworthy leaders looking out for our better future, and also because Leland just got vaporized by a strange red light emanating from the station entrance…To the family of Leland, we thank you for his s e r v i c e t o t h e c a u s e o f community radio, and join you in

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normative structures in society. The importance of school as a space for propaganda is explored by these references to the Night Vale school district. It is also telling of the kind of society that exists t o d a y, w h e r e i n n e w s r e g a r d i n g disappearances and surveillance are taken matter-of-factly and are naturalised, yet news regarding the football season against a rival city’s team elicits an intense reaction out of the narrator:

Finally, earlier we reported a death toll of zero when, in fact, the number is closer to 38. We regret these errors. It’s almost football season, and the Night Vale Scorpions are gearing up for a defense of the high school division title. But really, as long as we beat Desert Bluffs, fans and Hooded Figures alike will feel just fine. Coach Nazr al-Mujaheed told reporters he’s particularly excited for the progress junior quarterback Michael Sandero made during the off-season…But, if Night Vale is going to beat their bitter rivals this year, and stave off the g o v e r n m e n t - a d m i n i s t e r e d pestilence following a losing season record, Sandero will have to improve his accuracy…he’s ready to take on Desert Bluffs, which is probably the worst team ever. God, they’re dreadful. (Palmer “Episode 4”)

The narrative also deals with questions of existentialism,3 supported by the metaphysical nature of Cecil’s character and his breaking of the fourth wall4 to address the listeners of the podcast directly rather than the fictional listeners of Night

In one segment of the radio show, Cecil discusses the changes that are made to the elementary school curriculum. In its own characteristic style, the changes seem almost too absurd to be confused with any kind of real-life parallels:

In response to parent feedback, history class will focus more heavily on textbook readings and traditional exams, rather than live ammo drills. Geology is adding a new type of rock on the grounds that it’s been a while since anyone has done that. The new type of rock is “vimbee,” and it is categorized by its pale blue colour, and the fact that it is completely edible. Points will be awarded to the first student to discover a real-world example of i t . Math and Engl i sh a re s w i t c h i n g n a m e s . T h e i r curriculum will stay exactly the same. Astronomy will now be conducting stargazing sessions only with blindfolds on every participant, in order to protect them from the existential terror of the void. (Palmer “Episode 5”)

What is significant about these seemingly random changes to curriculum is the ability of the administration to make changes to what is being taught in schools and therefore, what it is that children grow up learning. On one hand, it could be a completely harmless change that is insignificant in the larger scheme of things. On the other, it could be laced with an agenda to ensure that only a certain kind of education and learning is promoted in the society, exhibiting the ease with which those in power can change and modify facts to their convenience, as well as create new

3. A philosophy within which the experiences and questions associated with the thinking, acting, feeling and living individual occupy a central position. 4. The fourth wall is a theatrical convention in which an invisible fourth wall is presumed to exist between the performers and the audience to emphasise the performative aspect of a play.

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Vale. These moments not only seek to enhance the eerie nature of the show, but also present interesting nuances into questions of one’s existence. It also speaks to the power of imagination and the belief in the system of suspension of disbelief:5

Now that I think about it, I have also never bothered to actually check whether this mic is attached to any sort of recording or broadcasting device. And it is possible that I am alone in an empty universe, speaking to no one, unaware that the world is held aloft merely by my delusions and my smooth, sonorous voice. More on this story as it develops, I say, possibly only to myself. (Palmer “Episode 5”)

The statement, said in a moment of weakness for the character, presents a self-aware entity in the narrative, as it is, in fact, not a radio show and therefore will not have broadcasting devices in the recording process. The world created by the narrator is indeed held aloft only through the collective imagination of the creators of the show and the listeners, as they paint their own images of the scenes being described to them. The city of Night Vale exists only in the mind of those who interact with the story being presented here and the existence of it relies solely on those who choose to listen to the podcast. In that, the assertion that Cecil is possibly talking only to himself perhaps reflects more of the insecurity of the creators and the artists, that no one will be interested in or appreciate their creation.

Night Vale becomes an arena, a space for the creators to talk about issues in a way that entertains but also forces those who listen, to reconcile with their own reality. The

absurdity of situations involving the supernatural becomes even more sinister as the real-world implications of the same become apparent. It is then that the true horror and mystery of the podcast is revealed, which is not the paranormal, but the parallels that the audience will inevitably draw to their own existence.

Works Cited

Aragon, Louis. Le Paysan De Paris. Gallimard, 1926. Print.

Fink, Joseph and Jeffrey Cranor. “Pilot.” Welcome to Night Vale. Spotify, 15 June 2012, open.spotify.com/episode/6zs79bz9Nb0lXhoHtGDudJ. Accessed 9 February 2020.

---. “Glow Cloud.” Welcome to Night Vale. Spotify, 1 July 2012, open.spotify.com/episode/0hbAUeRZNeJwWCJ4hO9cYN. Accessed 9 February 2020.

---. “Station Management.” Welcome to Night Vale. Spotify, 15 July 2012, open.spotify.com/episode/0MNp7EI2vn1pul9TVVQdaF. Accessed 9 February 2020.

---. “PTA Meeting.” Welcome to Night Vale. Spotify, 1 August 2012, open.spotify.com/episode/77uYIlMKWbYt5uiIGbizbU. Accessed 9 February 2020.

---. “The Shape in Grove Park.” Welcome to Night Vale. Spotify, 15 August 2012, open.spotify.com/episode/6kEnq9IBDj55L8HxiRQY3s. Accessed 9 February 2020.

Matthews, J. H. “SPECTACLE AND POETRY: SURREALISM IN

5. It is the intentional avoidance of the logic of critical thinking for the sake of enjoyment or ‘catharsis’ in theatrical traditions.

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THEATRE AND CINEMA.” The Journal of General Education, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1975, pp. 55-68. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27796490. Accessed 9 February 2020.

“WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.” WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE, www.welcometonightvale.com/. Accessed 9 February 2020.

Wilson, Angel. “Why Welcome to Night Vale Is Important.” The Geekiary, 29 October 2013, thegeekiary.com/why-welcome-to-night-vale-is-important/4211. Accessed 9 February 2020.

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The City and Intimacy: In Search of Boundlessness within Boundaries

Aaheli Jana

This paper looks at the urban, ‘mechanised’ self, weaved within the idea of shrinking personal spaces and growing industrialism in city-centres through a close analysis of three Indian films (one set in Kolkata, two in Mumbai). Rising populations in a free-market economic order that already fosters competition leads to isolation and detachment of the individual. At the same time, the crunch for space creates difficulties in nourishing intimacy and the development of personal relationships. The essay attempts to highlight the physical and psychological repercussions of this infringement on personal spaces in modern city life, which is alienating and fast-paced. It presents analysis, critique and comparison of the three films to see the portrayal of individuals’ struggle to claim intimate spaces in their urban Indian contexts.

Development has become a norm of the society and an essential requirement in the rhetoric of progress. To accommodate the notion of development with the accelerating population of a country like India, a lot has b e e n i m b i b e d — i n d u s t r i a l i s a t i o n , urbanisation, privatisation—all amidst a great sense of deprivation. It is a deprivation of personal space, of a human touch. As spaces begin to shrink, individuals struggle to reclaim a sense of intimacy which, more than a physical touch or proximity, is a mat ter of togetherness , f r iendship , belongingness and companionship. It is something that the city’s fast-paced lifestyle is deprived of. With a loss of intimacy comes a loss of belongingness, which has led to people feeling desolate even in crowded, fast-paced cities.

Almost every metropolitan city in India is saturated with high-rise buildings, a dense network of roads, houses crammed together and multiple public places for relaxation and recreation. However, there is hardly any space that one can call one’s ‘own’, which could be a space where one finds intimacy, individuality and the freedom to express, detaching oneself from mechanised living. There is a relentless search for a space that allows individuals a moment of togetherness.

The mechanised lifestyle of people in the ci ty has affected personal relationships and intimacy, turning homes into factories and individuals into machines as the public space overpowers and encroaches upon personal space. Individuals face the struggle to sustain and also seek companionship and a space that is boundless. But in the city, boundlessness presents itself with the aspiration of infinitude embedded in the realities of everyday life. The search then becomes a pursuit of boundlessness within the boundaries of city life.

An attempt to understand this pursuit of space that exists in contemporary urban India can be made by examining three films—a Bengali film titled Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta, and two short films in Hindi, titled The Affair and The Embrace, directed by Hardik Mehta and Veena Bakshi respectively. The idea of s p a c e s a n d t h e i r p h y s i c a l a n d psychological manifestations in city life can be explored by sifting through the layers that distinguish the three films.

The first film, Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) traces a day in the life of

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a working couple living in Kolkata,1 struggling to come to terms with the economic recession, inflation and their own eroding romance. The film subtly portrays the silence that pervades the two spaces—work and the domestic—to create a language of its own. Asha Jaoar Majhe is almost entirely silent except for ambient sounds, such as the buzzing sound of the printing machine where the male protagonist works and the national anthem sung by school children in the morning when the female protagonist goes out to work (Asha Jaoar Majhe 4:28-4:40), which become the music of their everyday life. Although the characters in the film do not converse with each other, they communicate through a process made possible through the language of silence. A torn pair of trousers kept on the bed indicates a request for mending (45:54) while a missed call acts as a morning alarm (1:01:52).

The verbal muteness of the characters in the foreground is juxtaposed with voices in the background—sometimes in the form of a news report, a protest speech, or a Geeta Dutt song being played on the radio. These paint the world of the couple in contrast. This verbal muteness becomes a symbol of their persistence to live and make a living in the rat race of city life. The scene where the male protagonist cycles to work is supplemented with chants of “Lorai! Lorai! Lorai! Chayi!” (“Fight! Fight! Fight! Let’s fight for our right!”; 48:10-48:20) coming from a gathering protesting against the sudden shutdown of a mill and the suicide of a mill worker. The protagonists are also faced with the uncertainty of their job in the recession-hit city, but their struggles, sacrifices and anxieties are silenced in their daily cycle of existence.

Another interesting use of ambient sounds can be seen in two different scenes where two Geeta Dutt songs “Tumi Je

Amar” (“You are only mine”) and “Nishi Raat Banka Chand” (“Dark night, crescent moon”) are being played on a radio in the couple’s neighbourhood. Both the songs, which are considered iconic romantic songs, seem a little misplaced with the mundane living of the protagonists. However, it shows a stark contrast between the ideal and the real. The idea of cinematic romance and companionship glorified in music and films seems far removed from the couple’s monotony of life. They see the moon, ever romanticised in songs, but through the window caged by a net (54:41-54:51).

T h e f i l m d o e s n o t v e r b a l l y communicate any details about the characters in the film. The viewers are simply allowed to invade the two spaces that they occupy—the personal space of the couple and their individual workspaces. What initially feels like an invasion gradually becomes an exploration of the intricacies of everyday life. The filmmaker does not bother with any other usually relevant details like their names. Till the latter half of the film, even the relationship between the two main characters is only implied. Minute visual hints, like a ‘bindi’ stuck on the mirror and the cosmetics placed next to the wallet, indicate that the man shares the house with a woman, who is probably his wife. The image of two different soaps in a small soap case (Asha Jaoar Majhe 10:51) indicates that despite sharing a small space, they have their individual preferences.

Through the visuals of the city, the film reflects the monotonous mechanized lives led by the couple. The female protagonist works a day shift and the male protagonist works a night shift. All their activities revolve primarily around the bare necessities of life, like taking a bath, eating, drying out clothes etc., indicating a mundane form of existence, within which creativity

1. The film does not mention any specific year or period. However, the mention of economic recession indicates that the film depicts Kolkata post 2000.

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and novelty die a natural death. This is also evident in the furnishing of their domestic space—no books or DVDs find place in their one room house, nor are their walls adorned with paintings. For the couple, a wall clock is also a matter of great luxury. Anything that is of no practical purpose does not find a place in their household.

For a film depicting city life, it is incongruously slow. The couple remains oblivious to their fast-paced surroundings. Their public spaces are not parks, lakes or the iconic Victoria Memorial. Their spaces are decaying neighbourhoods of Kolkata: narrow lanes, tram lines, broken buildings. They are seldom shown outside their work or home environment. The only time of leisure depicted in the film is a short tea break that the man takes when he sips tea at the dead of night in a dark lane (58:08). With shortage of work and increasing unemployment, it is the ‘survival of the fittest’. It is mere survival—working, eating, and sleeping. The couple work round the clock, day and night to manage the expenses of city life. The only trip outside of the home that the couple makes is one to the market to buy essentials. Creativity, leisure, and recreation have no place in the relentless pursuit of better living. Despite having a physical space, the paucity of time restricts them from aspiring towards intimacy.

The two spaces—work and domestic—converge to such an extent that the rules of work in the factory persist at home. It functions as an egalitarian household. Their household work too occurs in shifts as the man goes to work at night and the woman in the day. Quite similar to the factory, an equal division of labour is practiced for every activity, even for offering prayers. There are no gendered chores in the household. She washes the clothes, he dries them; he buys the fish, she cooks it. The merging of the

domestic and the professional world can be visualized in the scene where the sound of grains and pulses being poured in a jar becomes identical to the sound produced in the manufacturing unit of a factory (51:32-51:48).

A closer look at the title reveals the boundaries between the two spaces—domestic and professional—and how individuals negotiate with them. The title Asha Jaoar Majhe means ‘between arrivals and departures’, thus indicating a fleeting moment of togetherness—a short time gap between the man arriving from his work and his wife going to her workplace. The scene unfolds like a distant dream where they visualise their space for intimacy amidst the romance of mis t enveloped woods (1:15:30-1:16:41). It is their personal space, their momentary escape from the constant demands that the city imposes on them. It is a creation of a space, no matter how ephemeral, arising out of the spaces that govern their lives—home and work. Their room remains the same, the furniture remains the same but it is the feeling of togetherness that transports them to the woods. Time, in that space, seems to wait patiently till reality strikes and it is time for the wife to go to work. It is a transitory moment of bliss before mundanity sets in.

The next film, The Embrace, depicts the journey of a newlywed couple belonging to the lower middle class, trying to find a space for themselves in the crowded city of Mumbai. The couple live in a one-bedroom chawl2 with the husband’s parents, an elder brother, and his wife and children.

For the elderly father, the house is a souvenir of a childhood where he and his siblings grew up, a house which he does not wish to renovate. The younger generation, both the brothers and their wives, secretly desire separate rooms for themselves.

2. A large building divided into many separate apartments, offering cheap, basic accommodation (Oxford Dictionary).

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Generation gaps like this often result in a different understanding of personal space and privacy across generations, leading to a paucity of mental space rather than physical space alone. Thus, in the film, the lack of space does not result in any overt familial discord, but it exposes that there is some discomfort for all, especially for the new bride Shalaka, who is accustomed to spacious houses back in her village.

The family shares a common space, with areas partitioned only by curtains. The oldest member of the family, the father, sleeps on the balcony while the mother sleeps with the grandchildren. In forgoing the roles of husband and wife and adopting the role of grandparents, they occupy the common spaces like the living room and the balcony while their earlier allocated space in the house is now given to the younger couples. The most ‘privileged’ of them is the younger son and the wife who get most of the personal space in the house, though it is only a small area in between an almirah and a rack of utensils. Here, lack of space, and the resultant attempts to make the most of that which is available, leads the family to display a great deal of understanding for one another.

The ‘embrace’ that the title refers to takes place when the couple, in their bid to find privacy, are on their way to a cinema hall and get separated in traffic. The husband, Siddharth, runs frantically to his anxious wife and hugs her tightly, forgetting, for a moment, their concerns about privacy and publ ic scrut iny (The Embrace 14:12-14:35).

Unlike the last scene of union in Asha Jaoar Majhe, this union is rooted in reality rather than fantasy. However, much like the last scene from the former, it is also the resolution of their quest for their intimate space. Their embrace forms a space of warmth and togetherness that is away from the demands imposed upon them by society.

The third film, The Affair, begins with the couple’s moment of togetherness and goes on to unveil the struggle which, though subtly depicted, is still as persistent as in the first two films. Also set in Mumbai, the film is a witty take on modern relationships in metropolitan cities of India. This short film of five minutes begins with a woman waiting for someone near the seaside. A man arrives and the two begin to get intimate, but they are constantly interrupted by phone calls from the man’s workplace. The lady leaves in anger. The man returns home to his tiny flat that houses his wife, child, mother, father, and siblings. His daughter points to a stain on his collar which is a lipstick stain. The man tries to wash it off stealthily and his wife comes in. When she helps him remove the stain, it is revealed that the wife is the same woman whom he had met outside.

The complete title of the film is The Affair: The City Keeps Its Secrets. It introduces the idea that individuals seek new ways to adapt to the encroachment of spaces, be it at home or at work. The vast population of the city retains its anonymity. The couple’s ‘affair’ is just an attempt to seek out their own space and reclaim their identity amidst the roles they play throughout the day.

The aspect of the home is significant in this film. Sometimes shared spaces of the home dominate personal space, leaving no scope for privacy and intimacy. This privacy is regained by the couple in a public, collective space like the seaside. Their anonymity comes across as a privilege to utilize the collective space. They become one of the many couples in a crowd. The couple resorts to engage in newer roles to escape the monotony of a space-crunched family life.

The three films are different in their presentation. Both the short films (The Embrace and The Affair) are more explicit and outspoken and fast-paced owing to their time constraints, whereas the film Asha

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Works Cited

Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love). Directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta, performance by Basabdatta Chatterjee and Ritwick Chakraborty, For Films Production, 2015. Amazon Prime Video, www.primevideo.com/detail/0RV5FXZ3D6TBCUADW08LQYC3AK/ref=atv_sr_def_c_unkc__1_1_1?sr=1-1&pageTypeIdSource=ASIN&pageTypeId=B06ZYDK36F&qid=1580821763. Accessed 4 February 2020.

Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. “Reconstructing atmospheres: ambient sound in film and media production.” Communication and the Public, Vol 2 (4), 2017, pp. 352-364. Web. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2057047317742171. Accessed 31 January 2020.

Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel. Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution. New York, 2018. Print.

The Affair. Directed by Hardik Mehta, performance by Khushboo Upadhyay and Amit Sial, 2017. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsvfqKuJJJg. Accessed 3 February 2020.

The Embrace. Directed by Veena Bakshi, performance by Ruchi Malviya and Sunny Kaushal, 2019. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMvNk8x6eNQ. Accessed 4 February 2020.

Jaoar Majhe is subtle, slow, and aesthetically oriented. The short films are set in present-day Mumbai, while the latter film depicts Kolkata during the times of recession.

However, all three films explore the concept of spaces shared by individuals, whether at work or at home. Sometimes these shared spaces are aspired for and also required because of a need for freedom, like in The Embrace and The Affair, or because of the need for companionship, like in Asha Jaoar Majhe. The films explore the struggle of individuals to seek personal spaces and find intimacy amidst the social, political, or economic chaos manifested in the city. It is a huge effort to find, amidst a city belonging to everyone and no one, a space one can call one’s own. As depicted in the three films, city life does impose a physical restriction on personal space or a space for intimacy, but the limitation is also created by the subjective boundaries of time, attitudes and monotony.

Individuals attempt to overcome these boundaries through a momentary escape. The protagonists of the three films find their escape either in a fleeting moment of fantasy, the warmth of a touch, or a time spent in anonymity. This moment, though transitory, brings back a feeling of security, warmth, and comfort, all of which are synonymous with the idea of personal space. This personal space becomes a space shared with close companions, a space characterised by u n d e r s t a n d i n g , s e n s i t i v i t y a n d synchronisation of the minds of the occupants.

As the city continues to offer opportunities to thrive but imposes challenges to live in, the pursuit of a shared space becomes a shared dream for many, a factor that binds individuals together. Like the protagonists of the three films, intimacy for some people lies in their struggle to sustain it. This struggle often strengthens companionship and this companionship, in turn, results in creation of a kind of boundlessness within boundaries

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