domesticity and magic realist texts

7/28/2019 Domesticity and Magic Realist Texts

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the dwelling o the postcolonial novel, and the home as a orce o coloniza-

tion. In the dwelling o the postcolonial novel, this latter metaphorical “colo-

nial home” is an unspoken intertext. At the center o the postcolonial literary

treatment o domesticity, thereore, is a reversal o representation, in which

the home is no longer presented in denial o its political status to construct a

colonial ideal but is instead explicitly political. Throughout the paper, I will

suggest the implications that this reversal has, not only or colonial discourse,

but also or associated concepts o colonial and postcolonial gender politics.

Finally, through a reading o the home’s personal spaces, I will suggest that it is

the domestic space that, in the postcolonial novel, in act embodies the subver-

sion o colonial order.

colonial and postcolonial domesticity

In colonial discourse, the home can be seen as a structure both prominent

and overlooked: prominent because o ideological investment in the home

in both fction and nonfction that, at the height o colonialism, saw it take a

central place in political and literary discourse; overlooked precisely because

o the motivation behind this prevalence, meaning the house never really rep-

resented what it was but rather acted metaphorically or the colonial proj-

ect itsel—an exemplifcation o Homi Bhabha’s argument that the nation is

maintained by metaphorical and metonymic strategies.6 Such unction is sup-

ported by Alison Blunt, or whom domestic imagery was a crucial actor in

encouraging support or action against Indian mutiny where “the domestic

images o ‘houses,’ ‘wardrobes’ and ‘cravats’ appear to stand or British rule in

India.”7 The home becomes a microcosm o the colony; even increased use o

particular household items is intimately entwined with colonial expansion,

what McClintock calls “the mass marketing o empire as an organized system

o images and attitudes”:

Both the cult o domesticity and the new imperialism ound in soap an

exemplary mediating orm. The emergent middle class values—monog-amy (“clean” sex, which has value), industrial capital (“clean” money,

which has value), Christianity (“being washed in the blood o the lamb”),

class control (“cleansing the great unwashed”) and the imperial civilizing

mission (“washing and clothing the savage”)—could all be marvelously

embodied in a single household commodity.8

In this reading o colonial domestic discourse, acquisition o territory and its

association with violence are replaced with the establishment o home, and—

rather than violence—an association with the natural and timeless processes



o settlement. In keeping with this, the political role o the home—though

ever-present—is obscured. A harmonious ideal is invoked, as “the values and

behaviour inculcated in the home were considered crucial to the ormation

and maintenance o national identity, a necessary protection against less pre-

dictable social and economic changes.”9 Using the home to stand or the colo-

ny, the colonial nation’s discourse o naturalness is propagated.

Such an ideal, however, is all part o the ction. This has been exposed in

the writing o Sigmund Freud, whose discussion o “The Uncanny” (“Das

Unheimliche ”) captures that what is “homely” is always “unhomely.” The

explosion o “uncanny” events both rightening and disturbing are a result o

the repression o turmoil in the service o a desire to present a vision o natural

order.10 This is urther emphasized in the work o Sharon Marcus, or whom

nineteenth-century metropolitan homes were, despite seemingly solid bound-

aries, already “fuid spaces.”11 Domestic order, denying the colonial exploita-

tion and tension inherent in colonial settlement, was rigorously enorced in

the colonies themselves. In his study o colonial space in German South-West

Arica, J. K. Noyes oers an account o the fuid spaces underlying colonial

settlement and the stratication o these spaces through imperial discourses.

Importantly, the domestic space is not exempt rom this control. Observation

o indigenous citizens’ homes by their employers and indoctrination into nor-

malized domestic practices through a discourse o moral concern was com-

monplace: “the dwellings are to be constructed in a specic way, because they

are to be used in a specic way [. . . to enable] a strategy o surveillance and

classication.”12

Here what happens inside homes plays its part: orderly, clean, and well-kept

dwellings serve to maintain the colony’s order on the scale o the individual

amily. At least in English colonies and neocolonial America, the home ol-

lowed Victorian trends in domestic practice. Nineteenth-century domestic-

ity may have been an illusion but, as Antoinette Burton emphasizes, it was

nevertheless—indeed perhaps even more so because o this—a powerul orce,

and one inherently tied to colonies.13 Not only was the colony described in

household terms, but the household, in all its grandeur, was a microcosm orthe wealth o empire and its maintenance as “the Victorian middle-class home

became a space or the display o imperial spectacle . . . while the colonies . . .

became a theater or exhibiting the Victorian cult o domesticity that needed

constant and scrupulous policing.” The spatialized hierarchies o the colonial

home seem to enorce such suggestion, “domestic space . . . mapped as a hier-

archy o specialized and distinct boundaries,” in the same way that the colony

is divided into territories; both divisions are heavily enorced, both boundaries

naturalized by documents—architectural plans or national maps.14 That it is



only with the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we nd “hous-

ing alterations expressing privacy and class dierentiation” as standard prac-

tice suggests strong connections between domestic hierarchies and colonial

division.15

I want to suggest that the order and metaphorical unction o this home

is radically called into question by postcolonial literary representations. Such

re-visioning, I would argue, entails a two-old strategy: rst, a reclamation o

the home rom colonial metaphor to maintain the “house as house, “ rather

than seeing it as being in the service o something larger, such as nation or

colony; and second, a reinvestment o the home with chaos: an awareness o

the perpetuation o colonial models in the house stemming rom actors such

as servitude and slavery, “the violence, terror and dierence that is repressed

in everyday securing o a home” or many postcolonial citizens.16 This second

process is inextricably connected to the rst: it is in altering the mode o rep-

resentation that diversity is reinstilled in the house structure, giving the home

its own identity where it must no longer conorm to ideals o order tied to

colonial ideology.

In constructing a transgeographic discourse, many postcolonial texts might

be cited as engaging this strategy. In addition to Midnight’s Children, one might

draw upon Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small

Things, Ben Okri’s Famished Road Trilogy , Wilson Harris’s Da Silva da Silva’s

Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns, the short stories o Pauline

Melville, or the novels o Toni Morrison as examples o texts that recong-

ure the domestic space as a site o chaotic disorder—each within its own

unique postcolonial context, contexts that cover the Caribbean, the United

States, Arica, and Australasia—as well as rearming the connection to Indian

postcolonial literature.17 In Hulme’s The Bone People, or example, the socially

isolated central character Kerewin refects her isolation in the home she builds

or hersel: a linear tower, “a prison” that leaves her “encompassed by a wall,

high and hard and stone.”18 Such a home is a literal maniestation o her mar-

ginal position—as an independent woman but also as a mixed-race individual

whose whiteness alienates her rom the Maori culture she longs to be a parto. It is a space o control, a space that denies community, or Kerewin admits

she builds it because she likes “to be able to do most things or mysel.” 19 Yet

even in this imprisoning structure, there is the possibility o an alternative or

Kerewin. The home’s spiral staircase interrogates linearity and order with the

promise that “you can’t see more than a step and a hal in ront.” In the wake o

the transormation ostered by the alliance between Kerewin, Joe (a troubled

local Maori man), and Simon (his equally troubled oster son), the tower is

destroyed and, at the novel’s conclusion, Kerewin builds a very dierent sort o



home. This home will provide an alternative not only to her own xed struc-

ture but to the equally austere home o Joe and Simon, its “neat lawn bordered

by concrete paths. No fowers. No shrubs . . . typical older State house. . . .

Sparsely urnished.”20 The spiral is no longer overwritten by order in the way

that Kerewin’s own cultural identity has been obscured. Instead, it is pushed to

the oreront and celebrated. Against the isolation o the tower, the new spiral

home Kerewin builds embodies community; it is a space o inclusiveness and

o positive disorder:

Sunfowers and seashells and logarithmic spirals (said Kerewin); sweep o

galaxies and the singing curve o the universe (said Kerewin); the oscil-

lating wave thrumming in the nothingness o every atom’s heart (said

Kerewin); did you think I could build a square house? So the round shell

house holds them all in its spiralling embrace. Noise and riot, peace andquiet, all is music in this sphere.21

The spirals that or Kerewin “wind and fow together, like eddies o smoke,

eddies o water . . . make more sense than crosses, joys more than sorrow,”

become the center o the new building, challenging the violence, and the social

and racial exclusion, that precede it.22 Similarly, in Harris’s Da Silva da Silva’s

Cultivated Wilderness, a colonial home in London’s Holland Park is re-visioned

by its immigrant owner. Transorming the domestic space into an artist’s

studio, what the central character da Silva paints is a reusal to deny the home’s

political status, “a comedy o empire, a dying empire, a newborn common-

wealth.” The fuid space that is created draws in the postcolonial landscape:

the foor “shone like water,” resonating with the coastal regions o Guyana and

the rivers o Brazil. At the novel’s conclusion, what results is a new-ound post-

colonial domestic condence. For while the daemon who visits da Silva at the

end o the novel suggests “I’m never quite sure where home is,” the protagonist

is always sure o his, rejecting any sense o a “back home” to end the novel with

the capitalized reassertion “Home.”23 Despite its acknowledged hierarchies, the

home is a space o hope.

What unites such texts, however, beyond their postcolonial status, is theirengagement with one particular orm o representation: the magical-realist.

A term itsel that is subject to overuse and debate surrounding its relevance, I

use it here strategically to suggest how particular strategies that extend beyond

conventional realism imbue the home with an active presence that oers par-

ticular opportunity or subversion o colonial models. For magical-realism, I

want to argue, adds a third term to the process I have outlined above. Opened

up as an explicitly political space by an acknowledgement o its trauma, the

house may become a space o resistance, as my discussion o both Hulme and



Harris above evidences. This distinction between realist and magical-realist

strategy may be illuminated by the commentary on the home provided by R.

M. George in The Politics of Home. For George, contemporary realist Indian

novelists oer representations o domesticity that challenge the earlier use o

domesticity as national allegory.24 Yet in resisting this burden, they become

depoliticized spaces that George sees as lacking what she views as the “con-

ventionally postcolonial” quality o resistance. Against this, I want to suggest,

the magical-realist novel reuses both colonial and national metaphors as

George indicates, yet also draws upon transormative strategies that acilitate

a new orm o resistance. Freed rom the limits o both colonial and national

metaphor, the home is open to diverse meanings encompassing the fuid and

subversive. This is not to suggest that magical-realist texts avoid allegorical

elements; indeed, they are oten steeped in them. However, here metaphor is

used not to serve order or an ideal, but rather to reveal inconsistencies and

the act that the discourse o order is both inherently alse and—rom a post-

colonial point o view—immensely damaging. The usage supports Nathaniel

Mackey’s discussion o imagery in relation to Wilson Harris: “Such recourse to

metaphor betrays an estrangement, a distance, that the metaphor—the word

is derived rom a verb meaning ‘to carry over’—seeks to overcome. The use o

metaphor is then a ‘conession o weakness,’ the recognition o a chasm one

wishes to cross, to be carried across.”25

In such usage there is always a recognized gap between the house and the

colony. Metaphorical associations continually attempt to bridge this gap and

yet, in ailing to do so, only draw into clearer relie a representational chasm.

Even as house and colony are brought together, so the house breaks ree o

the colony, revealing its independence because it can never be ully attributed

to the larger structure. The metaphor o the home as colony is no longer the

mirage o a perect colonial construction; rather all metaphor is grappling or

the unspeakable and lost. Homes in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, or exam-

ple, appear to unction metaphorically as microcosms o the nation, where

the greatest home is the “noble mansion o ree India” (118). Yet the intimate

connection means they are in act metonymic, as the small and the large areinterrelated, even interchangeable, Saleem’s “destinies indissolubly chained to

those o my country” (9). Equally, in relation to Morrison’s Beloved “we rec-

ognize the implied author’s privileging o metaphor and metonym over black

dialect,”26 as well as the way in which “the text unctions on an axis that is

simultaneously metaphoric and metonymic,” without distinction between the

two tropes.27 This recognition seems to be true o representation o houses

more than elsewhere: Beloved’s central location o 124 Bluestone Road may

be read as metaphor or the slave ship. The two spaces are seemingly uncon-



nected, ullling the Oxford English Dictionary denition o metaphor as “the

gure o speech in which a name or descriptive term is transerred to some

object different rom . . . that to which it is properly applicable” (emphasis

added). Yet it is also metonymic, because there is in act an explicit connection

between the house’s meaning and the slave community. As “the implied his-

tory o the house covers the same time-span as Beloved’s ancestral memories,”

so the house also ulls the Oxford English Dictionary denition o metonymy

as “a gure o speech which consists in substituting or the name o a thing the

name o an attribute o it or something closely related .”28 This use o metonym

denes what might also be reerred to as “postcolonial metaphor.” Such meta-

phor no longer serves to uphold ideals or discourses o power, but instead dis-

solves them; it connects to that which is always ragmentary and provisional

and—because metonymy (in contrast to the colonial metaphor) “is context

bound and thereore exposes specic cultural values, prejudices, and limita-

tions”—counters the colonial metaphor o a universal ideal.29

The home is not only a space o postcolonial resistance because it is reclaimed

rom its colonial service; it is a space o postcolonial resistance because it is

instead a site o hope and awakening—not closed down into order, but opened

up to marvelous possibility. The power o this contamination o the colonial

vision should not be underestimated. Following Nancy Armstrong’s argu-

ment that nineteenth-century ction’s representation o domesticity not only

refected social orces but also had a role “in modern history,” as that which

“helped to ormulate the ordered space we now recognize as the household,”

the postcolonial magical-realist novel’s disordering o this space may be seen to

hold the same potential now: a orce not only refecting the status quo but also

oering pathways towards new experience.30

gender

One result o the division and idealization o colonial domesticity was an

explicitly gendered space, placing women at the heart o the imperial project.

The “idealized domesticity . . . o the Victorian era” not only constructed genderroles,31 it did so partly to serve colonial needs: A woman must be maintained

inside the home as a “devout maiden” and “industrious housewie,” because

through it she had her own role in the imperializing o space.32 Nineteenth-

century ction and conduct books emphasize both this gendered division o

space and the desire to order it, where open domestic space is “in need o spa-

tial and narrative closure.”33 As males are responsible or maintaining political

and public order—to overwrite chaos—so emales are responsible or echoing

this in the home and providing reuge rom the perceived turmoil o the mar-



ket place.34 Firmly establishing the metaphorical connection, in the colonies

“competent home management was part o a wie’s ‘civilising mission’”; as

the colonizer battles with territorial expansion, so his wie engages in her own

struggle against unamiliar domestic conditions.35 Such practice is evident in

the domestic manuals read by Englishwomen in India. R. Temple-Wright, an

author o several such manuals at the fn de siècle, gave advice on how to be a

good English “hostess” in India in the late nineteenth century. She instructed

her reader “never to eat Bazaar bread ,” to improve the nation “through the

improvement o the nation’s homes,” to buy pots rom “any large European

shop,” and to “buy and keep cows” because o poor local standards o herd-

raising.36 In her determination to order domestic space, Wright was vehement

on the division o the household rom the external world: “Things you must

never, under any circumstances, allow in your kitchen are—a hookah, a bed ,

and the personal apparel o the cook and his mate.”37 Yet as the eminist desire

to see women reed rom the connes o domesticity supports, a woman her-

sel could be trapped by, as much as complicit in, the perpetuation o such

space. The home interrogates the identity not only o the colonized, but also

its emale inhabitants.

What I want to suggest is that, in its repoliticization o the home, part o the

postcolonial novel’s subversion o the colonial ideal o domesticity is a coter-

minous subversion o the patriarchal connotations o that ideal. Politicized, the

split between public and private space is corrupted, and the fuid boundaries

established by postcolonial ction instead oer the opportunity or women’s

lives to be actively connected to the outside world, even when patriarchy phys-

ically connes them to the “inside.” The power centered on the home gives

women a signicant status in how colonialism is challenged. For the colonial

wie, the successul home was to be seen as a contribution to empire, so main-

taining this home against colonial inltration could be, or the colonized wie,

an act o anticolonial resistance.

What is signicant about these approaches, moreover, is that they reject the

assumption that domesticity is wholly the sphere o women and, moreover,

they reject the continued assumption even in today’s academic climate that con-trol o the home aects men only indirectly through its impact on the public

sphere. The gender implications o the colonial home do not aect women only,

and, more signicantly, the infuence o colonialism is elt by all the home’s

inhabitants. For all, the home becomes tied to colonial power relations and the

subversion o these interests is a shared aim, whether that subversion would

ultimately lead to a concomitant dissolution o domestic patriarchy or, ironi-

cally, even a reinorcement o patriarchy in a new nationalist orm. Notably,

however, while emphasizing nationalist patriarchy, postcolonial ction seems



to indicate ultimately that the ormer result is one shared by both emale and

male indigenous challenges to colonial domestic discourse. With patriarchy

indissolubly linked to the colonial project, a reversal o the latter is also a rever-

sal o the ormer. This may be at odds with analyses that emphasize a national-

ist patriarchy with equally restrictive gender politics centered upon the home;

however, it may be seen as a powerul component in the postcolonial novel’s

use o domesticity as an anti-imperial setting. While gender dierences are

indicated, remaking and re-visioning the home—re-instilling its political

status as a challenge to the colonial discourse o domesticity—largely takes

precedence over representing the complexities o gender relations outside the

colonial dynamic.

The ways in which postcolonial authors use magical realism to engage with

such issues are complex and varied, though I would argue they share this over-

arching approach, with obvious dierences o emphasis and degree. In all its

orms, such a shit in representation—away rom the service o colonial dis-

course—means that the home’s chaos and hierarchies are no longer overwrit-

ten with a space o harmony and order. I shall now discuss, as an example, how

a single text by one author— Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie—oers

one specic way into the complexities o postcolonial literary reversals o colo-

nial domesticity.

reversing the overwriting

The choice o Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to exempliy this process

is motivated by the author’s engagement with the colonial role o the home

throughout the novel, which provides clear examples o the strategies I have

outlined. In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie clearly identies the

domestic structure as central to the novel’s construction. Recalling a aded

black-and-white photograph o his childhood home in Bombay, Rushdie

recounts how the photograph motivated him to return to its subject and that,

with this recollection, “my novel Midnight’s Children was really born.”38 The

home becomes the motivation or Rushdie to attempt reclamation o his pastrom the dislocations o colonial history and migration. More than or perhaps

any other author, magical realism is crucial to Rushdie’s engagement with the

domestic space: the dwellings Rushdie provides seem to refect traditional nos-

talgic construction, seem to act as simple metaphors or the nation, but they

are quickly imbued with a antastic lie that complicates such connections. For,

as Rushdie outlines in “Imaginary Homelands,” while his project may have

begun as an attempt to recreate the past, this eort would quickly become

an acknowledgment “that we will not be capable o reclaiming precisely that



thing that was lost”39—a metaphor o allibility and ailure that resonates with

Mackey’s discussion o Harris. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is cen-

tered on the remembrance o domestic structures as a fawed corrective to the

loss and instability o colonial dislocation. Rushdie’s narrator and protagonist,

Saleem Sinai, beginning his story with the parallel remembrance o a man, his

grandather, who ater “ve springs, away rom home . . . would try and recall

his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was beore travel and tussocks

and army tanks messed everything up” (11), continued by remembering his

mother as the woman or whom moving home means waking up to believe

the sun had “come up in the wrong place” (65). Indeed, every remembrance

around which the novel revolves seemingly begins with a domestic structure:

Ghani’s house, the house o Saleem’s grandparents in Agra, all ramed by the

comic domestic machinations o “Padma, who brought me my dinner and

then withheld it” (31).

The importance o domestic space in the novel is centered on Saleem’s dec-

laration to be “remaking my lie” to be no longer “public property” (10, 77).

The situation o home as private space is central, oering Saleem the possibil-

ity o reconstructing a stable, private location. In this sense, Rushdie’s use o

the home seems conventional rather than subversive. Maintaining the sense

o home as “the only haven rom the trials o a heartless economic world,”

Rushdie seemingly repeats the colonial construction o home as politically

detached and hermetically sealed, providing resonances at the same time with

the Indian patriarchal institution o similar ideals.40 This is reinorced by the

conventional roles played by emale domestics in the novel, most notably

Padma, who longs to create a typical amily unit with Saleem and is character-

ized as the stereotypical simple, home-oriented woman, continually attempt-

ing to woo Saleem through her exhibition o her domestic qualities such as

ood preparation.

Yet in terms o the model o postcolonial domestic space I have outlined,

Rushdie situates Saleem’s search or meaning within the context o a antas-

tic and unreliable narration that reveals the articiality o idealized imagined

spaces and, indeed, the impossibility o creating this perect metaphoricalunction in denial o the home’s inltration by political concerns. In such a

way, Saleem’s endless search or meaning, his refection o the colonial need

to order domestic spaces and their histories, is itsel a denial o the colonial

project to create an apolitical domesticity and an exposure o the colonial

overwriting o the politicization o the domestic space, even as it appears to

repeat the gender roles and divisions o public and private space at the center

o this construction. Rushdie’s homes are immersed in the chaos that colonial

discourse o the home overwrites. They are spaces o “violent disorder” with



“gloomy spidery corridors” that oten suggest, rather than security, unnamed

threats (21, 22). As water rushes into the home when “there were towels wedged

against the doors and windows o the house” (59) because “things . . . have a

way o leaking into each other” (38), so what are in colonial discourse imper-

meable walls between inside and outside are disrupted, social realities invad-

ing in a way that even the narrator’s recreation cannot prevent. Rather than an

idealized space o saety, there is awareness o exclusions and divisions, homes

with “repeatedly-slammed doors” (250).

Rushdie represents the particular eect o these exclusions on women in

a way that directly calls into question those critical approaches that accuse

Rushdie o misogyny.41 In particular, Rushdie refects upon the connections

between domesticity and colonial patriarchy, and the continuance o these

connections in nationalist ideology, a refection that resonates with discus-

sions o Indian eminism, most notably Gayatri Spivak’s amous comments on

the silencing o Indian women by colonial, nationalist, and intellectual repre-

sentations o them.42 Refecting readings o Indian nationalism as a discourse

that echoes the colonial, establishing order in the home in an eort to protect

it rom colonial infuence, as a “sphere unpolluted by oreign rule,” Rushdie

shows how, or his emale characters, the home may become a prison. Mumtaz

“saw very little in those days o the ather whom she loved” because o her

marriage to a ugitive (59), Amina is “immobilized in a room in a tower” (101),

the oten ignored Padma is consigned to sitting in the narrator’s “enchant-

ed shadows” (121), and Toxy Catrack waits at “a barred top-foor window”

because o mental illness (130). For Reverend Mother the security o the home

is so hyperbolic that it becomes imprisonment, “an invisible ortress o her

own making,” complete with the colonially resonant “traditions and certain-

ties” (40). The sense o amiliarity that the home provides, its provision o

assuredness in the wake o anxiety, is ironically the eature transormed rom

comort to trauma, the sense o walking a tightrope across a precipice that is

made clear by Rushdie through his linguistic subversion: “the domestic rules

she established were a system o sel-deence . . . leaving her, like a smug spider,

to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn’t a system o sel-deence atall, but a means o deence against her sel.)” (40–41).

Ironically oten sel-enorced because o this nationalist turn, the seclusion

o women marks at once a challenge to Western infuence and a reinorcement

o patriarchal domesticity in a transerence o values resonant with wider

nationalist concerns. Thus Rushdie problematizes the simple construction o

patriarchy as colonial and the challenging o colonialism as naturally a chal-

lenge to patriarchal values.

Yet, as I have indicated, the postcolonial novel’s critique oten subsumes



gender interests into a more general concern with the colonial infuence on

home lie. This is not to deny the nationalist continuance o colonial patriar-

chal models o domesticity, but rather is an acknowledgment o the negative

eect o these models, not only or indigenous emale inhabitants but also or

indigenous males. Such awareness refects McClintock’s argument that “the

English middle-class male was placed at the pinnacle o evolutionary hier-

archy,” with the result that colonized men, as well as women, were classed as

inerior and subjugated into domestic space—their physiognomy compared

not to white males, but to the emale.43 At the same time, indigenous males

were relegated urther to a contradictory but equally damaging stereotype that

impinged upon their domestic role: the enlargement o the stereotype o the

“animal prowess o the black male” into a larger discourse, in which indig-

enous males o all races were requently cast as rapists who deled the bodies

o white women and threatened the domestic as a site o privacy and emale

purity.44 This dual subjection cannot be ignored, or it may itsel be seen as

essential to the continuance o colonial models, creating the male indigenous

anxiety that would demand a reassertion o domestic ordering by the colo-

nized male to counter coterminously both emasculation and the sense o the

indigenous threat to domestic ideals. This is what Bill Ashcrot, in his dis-

cussion o male bodies, terms the construction o the “national body,” where

imperial discourse on corporeality is simply replaced with an equally “hege-

monic image” necessitated by the identity crisis caused by the colonial domes-

tication and demonization o male indigenous bodies.45

Midnight’s Children thus presents a unied experience o oppression that

refects this complex interaction, in which the domestic is or both male and

emale—in unique ways—a site o power contestation. For all, the home is

exposed as part o neocolonial social inequalities, rather than as a haven rom

them. As Tai lives in “the insanitary bowels o the old wooden-house quarter”

(14), so Saleem is clearly aware o his own privilege, where “the brutalizing

eect o servant status” is dened by “a servants’ room behind a blackstove

kitchen” (144), “his grandather’s house containing “the low outhouse rented

cheaply to the amily o old Hamard and his son Rashid the rickshaw boy”(49), the new “ugly concrete blocks” where “we looked down on them all, on

white and brown alike” (180), and the magician’s ghetto o “higgledy shacks”

(386). There is also a strong religious element to such dierentiation, which

means that these conficts, too, are represented on the domestic scale—where

Muslims “dropped garbage on his house rom their rootops. They hurled

multilingual abuse at him rom their windows” because he was a Hindu (73).

Equally, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, racism against cross-

cultural relationships is not escaped from in the Ayemenem House, but rather



magnifed . Baby Kochamma proclaims Estha and Rahel “Hal-Hindu Hybrids

whom no sel-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry,” denied belong-

ing as she reminds them that they live in the house “on suerance . . . where

they really had no right to be”; Vellya Paapen goes to the back entrance because

“Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would.”46

At the center o this politicization is the awareness that colonial inltration

o the home cannot be denied. Personied in Major Zulkar, entering “with

a orce o teen men” to expose Nadir (62), the classic colonial utilization o

openness only to tabulate, control, and deny is evident. Nowhere is it clearer

than in Methwold’s sale o his home to the Sinai amily, an “empire in minia-

ture” that comes to represent the perpetuation o imperialism ater indepen-

dence.47 Methwold’s estate is a perect example o the colonial ordering o ter-

ritory on a domestic level, geometry and symmetry in “our identical houses

. . . conqueror’s houses . . . red gabled roos and turret towers in each corner”

(94), overwriting o identity through language as the houses are named ater

“the palaces o Europe” (95). Methwold’s “little game” (95) o selling the houses

“complete with every last thing in them” (95) marks the continued dominance

o colonial ideas o domesticity, “transerring power, too” (96), but doing so in

such a way that his patterns become part o Saleem’s own amily “talking bud-

gies[,] . . . imitation Oxord drawls” urther illustrate the colonial infuence on

nationalist principles with consequences or the construction and valuing o

home (98, 99).

In the novel’s last words we fnd the hopelessness o such invasion, but also

the reality o the home. It is a space that will never be private: “to orsake

privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool o the multitudes, and

to be unable to live or die in peace” (463), as the colonial ideal o domesticity

and all that it would obscure gradually ades into the distance and the home’s

political status is made explicit. In its bleakness, Rushdie constructs a postco-

lonial metaphor that raises explicitly the realization o the colonial metaphor’s

allibility, where the home at times comes to stand or the colony, only to make

such a connection sel-consciously constructed and to signal a need or the

return to a home qua home.

postcolonial re-visioning: home as space

I want particularly to suggest that, in such representation, it is central that

postcolonial fction does not represent the home only as a space o trau-

ma. Instead, the narrative must fnd value in the home outside the colonial

ideal—not in place o its political signifcance but precisely because o it. While

rejection o the colonial ideal may be one element o the postcolonial writing



o home, this is not its whole. For the postcolonial writing o the domestic is

not interested simply in negation but rather, in Bhabha’s terms, negotiation. 48

This is its site o subversion: where politicization o the home is not only a

negative actor prompting lament or a lost ideal but also the potential or

new interruptions, where the ideal itsel is a political orce in the service o a

colonial image, and where chaos may be productive as “what is perceived as a

‘disorderly’ house by a visitor is not necessarily perceived as such by the inhab-

itant.”49 The maniold meanings repressed in the colonial writing o homes are

now released; no longer orced to serve as colonial metaphor, home comes to

serve other purposes undermining discourses o power.

What is important here is that the politicization o the home should not

obscure its positive potential but must instead be seen as intimately connected

to it. In readings o Roy’s The God of Small Things, or example, the home’s

refection o wider political concerns is oten noted; but what is neglected

is the positive potential o the invasion o politics into the home. While the

Ayemenem House oers one model, it is in counterpoint to another home

at the center o the novel: the History House. Like Toni Morrison’s slave-ship

house in Beloved , the History House extends beyond both its physical and

temporal boundaries to encapsulate ar more signicance in terms o memory

and history than its limited structure seemingly allows.50 On the one hand, it

is, like the Ayemenem House, a space that signies oppression; it is explicitly

imperial, a “symbol o colonial authority.”51 It is also iconic o India’s com-

munal conficts, where organized power in the orm o the police orce uses

both neocolonial authority and patriarchal male physical strength. And yet the

way in which various characters interact with the house and the use to which

it is put suggest an interruption o its ocial status, and, at times, a direct

conrontation with the values it represents. In a world where the inhabitants

o Ayemenem House are “trapped outside their own history[,] . . . unable to

retrace their steps because their ootprints had been swept away” by colonial

assimilation that has made them “adore our conquerors and despise ourselves,”

reclaiming the History House means reclaiming ragments o that lost past,

replacing History—the capitalized, ocial orm—with history.52 As SimonBarnabas notes, it is outside the History House, in deance o its ocial con-

notations, that Velutha and Ammu nd “some o the most precious moments

o their togetherness”: the link between caste development and increased con-

trol over sexual relations, so present in the Ayemenem House, unravels in this

alternative domestic space.53 Such subversion is undoubtedly temporary, and

the novel’s ending, in which the house returns to its negative signication, ur-

ther entrenched because it is bought by an international hotel chain, suggests

a limited impact. And yet the act that such an interruption does take place



suggests the hope o urther disruptions and asserts the power o individuals

to change their circumstances, however limited.

In the service o this reclamation o the domestic space, Rushdie does not

reject domestic chaos but rather seizes it as a window to magical awakenings,

houses o possibility ull o “potential mothers and possible athers” (51). Most

signicantly, Rushdie may be seen to engage two distinct strategies, what I will

reer to as, rst, domestic deterritorialization, and second, domestic appro-

priation. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not discuss the home explicitly,

their concept o deterritorialization—signiying removal o xed boundaries

and the renewal o the abstract—oers opportunity to make the home into a

space we can politically “deamiliarize,” where fuid structures are outside the

colonial infuence and capable o resistance, where “the fows . . . have not been

reduced to . . . neuroticized territorialities.”54 Such positive deterritorializa-

tion is a useul way to envisage the eect o antimetaphoric strategies: remov-

ing the codes and patterns signiying conventional domestic space, avoring

instead the turmoil and tensions that the colonial ideal obscures. It is because

o this process, I would argue, that the home in the postcolonial novel explic-

itly becomes a space where negotiations o power are played out and where

critique o colonialism is clearly possible.

Such multiplicity is prevented rom evolving into postmodern ree play,

or deterritorialization may contain a “reterritorialization; we re-inhabit a

world o our making.”55 This rst step o reterritorialization may also be seen

in terms o what Perla Korosec-Seraty designates “appropriation,” where the

status o the home as contested space leaves it “capable o being mastered”

through various activities—“Ornamentation, maintenance, and housework.”56

The house is not rejected or its complexity, but reclaimed so that its politics

can be turned around and used decisively in the service o the postcolonial

cause rather than o its colonial predecessor. This may appear at odds with the

postcolonial literary endeavor to create fuidity that I have outlined earlier;

yet it is also the necessary rst step towards such liberty. What is needed is a

habitation that orms the rst step in a movement toward more fuid spaces,

where the abstract that postcolonial critics such as Ashcrot so suspect ulti-mately becomes a discourse o reedom.57

The undercurrent to this deterritorialization and appropriation is always

the opportunity or reappraisal o postcolonial interactions, particularly with

gender. Enacting deterritorializations or reversals, Rushdie removes the emale

rom the center o the home; thus Aadam Aziz’s mother “had suddenly ound

enormous strength and gone out to run the small gemstone business . . . while

his ather sat hidden behind the veil” (12). Enacting appropriations, his impris-

oned women reverse their status to become the home’s most powerul gures



and, through the no longer denied political status o this location, key play-

ers in any negotiations o power. Women seem almost magically to take their

place at the center o the narrative, moving to its core as they overwhelm the

boundaries delimited or them. Although Reverend Mother is imprisoned in

the home, it is also her “inalienable territory” (41) at a time when perhaps, in

terms o both patriarchy and colonial rule, it is the only territory available, a

space where the domestic is used to gain a sense o empowerment so that “at

the dinner table, imperiously, she continued to rule” (41). There is a particular

colonial connotation here, where use o “imperiously”—meaning, according

to the Oxford English Dictionary , “supreme or absolute rule, imperially”—

denotes that it is Reverend Mother’s own personal appropriation o colonial

rule. In situations where women cannot simply reject their role in the home,

Rushdie’s women instead appropriate the space and use their assigned role

to their advantage. And, o course, “imperiously” should not obscure the actthat this act is a dual questioning o both colonial patriarchy and its Indian

nationalist extension.

Here the postcolonial orm o narration enacts a crucial intervention:

Rushdie’s ragmented, chaotic presentation is not the mark o the migrant’s

trauma alone but coterminously an eective deterritorialization o the colonial

totalization o space, a complex interweaving o secret spaces undermining the

projected simplicity o colonial architectural construction. For when contain-

ment is combined with this chaotic setting it may be turned to serve radical

ideals rather than the conservative colonial ideal o domesticity. Nadir Khan’sconcealment “under my amily’s rugs” (48) acts against the establishment

because “things seemed permissible underground that would seem absurd or

even wrong in the clear light o day” (56). While the 1947 house may refect

colonialism, its description also continually marks resistance to imperialism.

The assertion that “this is still India” (100) indicates possibility or appropria-

tion, enacted by the Brass Monkey, whose burning o shoes and items “broken

accidentally-on-purpose” (151) obliterates with disorder the last remnants o

the mirage o colonial domestic order, and by cleaning, which, in common

with the association o appropriation with housework, means “his successors

emptied his palaces o their abandoned contents” (128), so that Methwold and

his empire pass simultaneously with its British parallel.

Although such interaction with the home clearly has gendered connota-

tions—most notably in the use o women’s domestic work as appropriation,

and in the questioning o Indian nationalist patriarchy— Midnight’s Children

shows evidence here o the wider engagement with domesticity oered by the

postcolonial magical-realist novel. In politicizing the domestic space away

rom its idealized status in colonial discourse, the domestic becomes a site o

resistance to colonial rule.



inside as outside

To this point, my discussion has ocused on the home in its entirety, as a gen-

eral structure linked intrinsically to the world outside. But I would like to

address, by way o nal comment, the importance o the spaces within thehome. Focus on these spaces orms the nal stage o the postcolonial literary

treatment o domestic space and, ultimately, is the most signicant subversion

o the home as an imperializing social structure. Enter through an undecided

doorway to an undecided room, to a Bombay bathroom, to a heavily described

white washing-chest o slatted wood, and it is here that you nd the real power

o the postcolonial house, the miniscule spaces where resistance is ultimately

and most securely held.

The postcolonial domestic is not a space o the complete structure, it is a

space o its deconstruction, its turning around and inside out: the act that thehouse may be seen as “simultaneously huge and tidy . . . with all its innite

possibilities.”58 Such a strategy is the ultimate conusion o public and private,

or the most private o spaces—the spaces o the house that visitors never

enter—paradoxically become the most contested sites: “sub-units o interior

space” where “cultural values are thus embedded,” the most private “boxes,

chests, drawers, closets,” which are the secret spaces, even more obscured than

the house proper itsel.59 It is not the small discussed here but what Frances

Armstrong has reerred to as miniaturization that enriches “by condensation,”

magniying meaning and power by creating a “magical condensed domain.”60 This is not an isolated miniature, but rather that which “has the capability

to make its context remarkable; its antastic qualities are related to what lies

outside . . . lie inside lie.”61

The implied action here is at the center o repoliticizing the home rom

its colonial ideal. Marcus makes exactly such a point in her deconstruction

o the nineteenth-century novel when she explains that “interiorization can-

not be sustained because the very activities and attributes associated with per-

ect interiorization—containment, enclosure, covering, wrapping, repression,

silence, sequestration—produce diametrically opposite eects o explosion,discharge, excess, escape, and overfow,” so that “total internalization collapses

in on itsel.”62 Rewriting the political as personal oregrounds the act that there

are some spaces the establishment cannot enter, though its infuence is always

ound within them: spaces where resistance operates or the individual. It is in

these pockets that dreams o changing the outside fourish: the neglected by

the establishment—and thereore protected—spaces o the domestic interior.

Midnight’s Children immediately oregrounds the positive importance o

the spaces within the home in an opening chapter that introduces us to “an



empty pickle jar . . . an old tin trunk” (19), an “old brass spittoon” (44) that is a

“lost receptacle o memories” (449), pepper pots that are used to plan military

coups. Indeed, just as each section o the novel begins with a remembrance

o a house, so each o these remembrances leads to an even smaller and more

personal contained space. Spaces are layered, getting ever smaller yet more

signifcant, like Russian nesting dolls, so that Saleem’s grandparents’ house in

Agra leads to “an old trunk,” which itsel leads to “this leather bag inside this

trunk” (31) in which are contained the perorated sheet o the novel’s opening;

the house on Cornwallis Road leads to a cellar, which itsel leads to a “gem-

stone-crusted silver spittoon” (58) that itsel will also later be placed within the

same tin trunk.

These spaces, characterized as open both to the narrator’s privileging o

them and to multiple meanings—Saleem’s surprise when going to the trunk

to fnd “it had not been locked in the frst place” (31)—repeat the reusal o

ideal identifcation that the postcolonial home in its generality reuses. Most

magical o these spaces are the pickle jars that allow “chutnifcation o history”

(459), contained within the home o the rame story itsel: the actory-home

that is both public and private space, so that Saleem may write “above present

and past” (194), a home that holds both the history o India and, in a Marquez-

style dénouement, Saleem’s own story. These jars are the novel itsel, a meta-

phor or the creative act o flling empty spaces, “chutneys and kasaundies . . .

connected to my nocturnal scribblings . . . the great work o preserving” (38),

an “open-sesame” (456) that “carried them back into the world o my past”

(210). The transormation within the pickle jars is, on a smaller physical scale,

the same transormation rom negative to positive space, o incongruous sig-

nifcance and capacity, that typifes the domestic structure. Its power is such

that it has been taken up by several postcolonial authors, particularly within

an Indian magical-realist context: not only Arundhati Roy’s well-known rep-

etition o the pickles moti but also Vikram Chandra’s use o magical ladoos in

Red Earth and Pouring Rain and the magical kababs o Vijay Singh’s Whirlpool

of Shadows.63

So, or domesticity, what is the result o this deerral to the small? Certainly,such personal spaces reinorce the sense o possibility within the domestic

structure as a whole: the way that “one jar stands empty” (460) must be seen

as hope as well as the novel’s resignation, witness to the “questions . . . dreams”

(461) that remain. In the wake o colonial appropriation o other personal

spaces—“testicles were removed rom sacs, and wombs vanished or ever . . .

and they drained us o more than that: hope, too, was excised” (439)—the fll-

ing o such spaces is an act o resistance, and a renewal o optimism. Such an

act typifes the two stages o postcolonial treatment o the domestic that I have



engaged with throughout this paper. Sites o personal meaning are stripped o

ideal status and made explicitly political. And, as a result o this process, they

are re-instilled with positive possibility.

Thus, the signicance o these spaces, ultimately, is that even when resis-

tance may seem impossible, they represent the act that there are always other

scales, other spaces, where survival can occur. Even within the most oppressive

domestic structure, it is suggested, a site or personal expression and deance

may be located. In The Bone People, a central part o Kerewin’s survival is a

logbook that contains a multitude o dierent expressive orms but also empty

spaces that, like the jars, oer continued hope:

The pages are mainly blank, because there are 1000 pages. There are

no headings, dates, day names. She has lled in some pages at

random with doodles and sequences o hatching. Small precisedrawings and linked haiku. Some days a solitary word. “Hinatore”

says one, “Nautilids!” another.64

As or Rushdie, such a logbook is a space within space: contained on the bot-

tom shel o a “grog cupboard,” itsel contained within Kerewin’s tower. Like the

spiral staircase, it is a mark o the possibility latent in Kerewin’s lie—obscure

and only to be revealed with the disruption oered by Simon’s entry into her

lie.65 Like Saleem’s jars, the logbook is ull o concoctions o infuences, rather

than a unied meaning. By juxtaposing Latin and Maori, Hulme destabilizes

the primacy o colonial use o language as denition; rejecting headings, dates,

and names challenges colonial scientic and Enlightenment authority with an

alternative means o expression.

Nowhere is this space o shelter seen more clearly, however, than in Saleem’s

reminiscence o the sanctuary o the bathroom that reuses the colonial ideal-

ization o domestic space: where you can be anything because it is at times an

“unclean” space that demands none o the usual deerence to domestic cleanli-

ness or purity (160). Such a level o intimacy creates a true sacred space rom

the secular, a place that violence and cruelty, even if it permeates the rest of the

house, can never enter. In the washing-chest in the bathroom o BuckinghamVilla, “servants are excluded[,] . . . school buses, too, are absent” ( 153), leading

Saleem to the powerul proclamation: “Banned rom washing-chests: cries o

‘Pinocchio! Cucumber-nose! Goo-ace!’ Concealed in my hiding-place, I was

sae . . . I could orget, or a time, my ugliness” (154).

The power o such a secure space is not simply to remove personal anxiety

but also public danger: the tumult o society that is, under transition rom

empire to reedom, in political crisis: “A washing-chest is a hole in the world, a

place which civilization has put outside itsel, beyond the pale . . . sae rom all



pressures, concealed rom the demands o parents and history” (156). Because

the basket takes on a more homely signifcance than the actual dwelling, its

status as a breach in the normal spatial order gives it a capacity ar beyond its

linear measurements. As abstract space, this is absence as positivity: a silence

o the currents o time passing and o political change, a stillness, a “pause,”66 a

gasp or breath that acilitates survival, paradoxically a “pause in movement”;

the deterritorialization that leads to the appropriation beore the urther deter-

ritorialization o leaving the home behind.67 A new kind o domestic politics

emerges in such a space, in which what matters is the possibility outside o an

ofcial history that has been revealed to bear only limited truth. This is con-

frmed by the act that it is the bathroom and its basket that are the location o

Saleem’s awakening—his transormation into an “untuned radio” (163) or the

children o midnight—and a chance at democracy. Acting as “a mirror o the

nation” (255), the space is implicitly politicized against the colonial ideal. In

such a reversal, the house becomes the outside, the public, fnally and defni-

tively removing it rom the grasp o colonial and national ideologies.

Again, Saleem’s masculinity is not an issue in this use o the home. Saleem’s

appropriation o the bathroom occurs at no expense to the home’s emale

inhabitants, denying the colonial implication o indigenous male destruction

o domestic ideals. Indeed his mother, Amina, fnds similar sanctuary in the

bathroom, suggesting a gender-transcendent relationship to small personal

spaces. Equally, the act that the bathroom is also a site o powerul anticolonial

action in its role as the site o Saleem’s psychic connection to the Midnight’s

Children challenges the emasculation o indigenous males by making domes-

ticity central to rather than at the peripheries o resistance. Regardless o gen-

der, the public space is a colonial battleground. And though the relationship

between colonialism and patriarchy doubly disenranchises women in this

public sphere, nevertheless, Rushdie suggests here, men too, when colonized,

may fnd the personal a site o signifcance. This, I would suggest, is itsel a rad-

ical statement in terms o gender that goes beyond a simplistic suggestion o

nationalist collusion in colonial patriarchy. For instead, it seems that colonial-

ism radically reconfgures the gender politics o the home. No longer simply aemale space, the home is through colonialism reconfgured as a universal site

o political resistance, extending into its most personal—and perhaps most

stereotypically emale—spaces. When Saleem enters the bathroom or pro-

duces the pickle jars, he enacts a politicization and privileging o the domestic

that calls into question the gendered division o public and private space. Even

though gender distinctions clearly still exist, they are superseded by a united

challenge to colonial rule enacted through the home. Undoubtedly, this may

raise questions about the continued silencing o women’s perspectives as con-



cerns with patriarchy give way to concerns with the colonial. Nevertheless,

the gendered mixing and disruption o public and private oered by this

may itsel be the most powerul subversion o patriarchal, as well as colonial,

discourse. Radically re-visioning the role o men within the home and therole’s signicance, it is impossible to see how nationalist patriarchy might go

unchallenged. And, indeed, as the deterritorializing and appropriating actions

o Reverend Mother, Amina, and the Brass Monkey prove, their own domestic

status only benets rom, and is not hindered by, the re-visioning o home as

an important site o anticolonialism.

conclusion

What Rushdie does with domestic space is indicative o a wider treatment o the home in postcolonial magical-realist ction. In their reversals and inver-

sions—their replacement o depoliticized order with politicized chaos, the

inversion o large and small scales so that the home itsel ultimately becomes

the public o a smaller structure—Rushdie engages a magical-realist mode o

representation that allows domestic space to transcend the colonial model.

Through motis o movement and fuidity, layering and invasion, fowing and

leaking, a new vision o the home emerges. The architecture o this new home

reuses to succumb to norms and ideals. Its layers and complexity—the very

nature o its conusion—make it a space o important protection: outside thelinear narrative o history and all that represents in colonial and patriarchal

terms, and instead within magical space. Unlike the ideal home, in which “[t]he

outside has no more meaning,” the postcolonial home is always in tension with

this outside, both echoing and challenging its prejudices because it is intensely

involved in their construction.68 Invaded by public space, the home’s gender

politics is oregrounded. Yet, at the same time, politicization creates the home

as a site o resistance or all its postcolonial inhabitants, regardless o gender.

Renewed by chaos and possibility, the postcolonial home reverses the colonial

ideal, and, with it, the assumptions and stereotypes on which such a homewas so evidently based. The space that results is, as Midnight’s Children proves,

both intensely political and capable o oering the potential or subversion.

notes

1. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial

Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17.

2. Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris



and London (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1999), 1; Yi Fu Tuan, Space and

Place: The Perspective o Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 107.

3. Bill Ashcrot, Post-Colonial Transormation (London: Routledge, 2001), 162.

4. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990),

41–42.

5. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) (London: Picador, 1982). All subse-

quent reerences to this work are cited parenthetically within the text.

6. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins o the

Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge,

1990), 291–94.

7. Alison Blunt, “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Deflement in the

Indian ‘Mutiny,’ 1857–8,” Journal o Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (2000): 406.

8. McClintock, Imperial Leather , 209, 208.

9. Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, introduction to Domestic Space: Reading the

Nineteenth-Century Interior,ed. Bryden and Floyd (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1999), 2.

10. Sigmund Freud, The “Uncanny,” trans. Alix Strachey, reprinted in The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVII ( 1917 – 1919): An

Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 217–52.

11. Marcus, Apartment Stories, 3.

12. J. K. Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse o German South West Arica

1884– 1915 (Chur: Harwood, 1992), 274.

13. Antoinette Burton, At the Heart o Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in

Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1998).

14. McClintock, Imperial Leather , 34, 168.

15. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant, Donna and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, introduction

to House Lie: Space, Place and Family in Europe, ed. Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-

Zuniga (Oxord: Berg, 1999), 10.

16. R. M. George, The Politics o Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-

Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 27.

17. Keri Hulme, The Bone People (1985) (London: Picador, 1986); Arundhati Roy, The

God o Small Things (1997) (Flamingo-Harper Collins, 1998); Okri’s trilogy consists o

The Famished Road (1991) (London: Vintage, 1992), Songs o Enchantment (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1993) and Infnite Riches (London: Orion, 1999); Wilson Harris, Da

Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis o the Clowns (London: Faber, 1977);

Pauline Melville, Shape-shiter (London: The Women’s Press, 1990); Toni Morrison,

The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), Sula (New York: Knop,

1973), Song o Solomon (New York: Knop, 1977), Tar Baby (New York: Knop, 1981),

Beloved (New York: Knop, 1987), Jazz (New York: Knop, 1992), Paradise (New York:

Knop, 1998), and Love (New York: Knop, 2003)



18. Hulme , The Bone People, 7.

19. Ibid., 107.

20. Ibid., 32, 76.

21. Ibid., 442–3.

22. Ibid., 273.

23. Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 65, 43, 52, 77.

24. R. M. George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-

Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 141.

25. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and

Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 176.

26. Bernard W. Bell, “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal

Remembrances of Things Past,” African American Review 26, no.1 (1992): 11.

27. Sally Keenan, “‘Four Hundred Years of Silence’: Myth, History and Motherhood

in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, ed.

Jonathan White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 61.

28. Carol Schmudde, “The Haunting of 124,” African American Review 26, no.3

(1992): 411 (my emphasis).

29. Keenan, “Four Hundred Years of Silence,”61.

30. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7, 23–24 (emphasis added).

31. Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the

Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.

32. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 67.

33. Marcus, Apartment Stories, 53. See also Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 59.


35. Janice N. Brownfoot, “Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European

Wives in a British Colony and Protectorate 1900–1940,” in The Incorporated Wife, ed.

Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 195.

36. R. Temple Wright, Baker and Cook—A Domestic Manual for India (1896), 3rd ed.

(Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1912), 5, 7, 41, 202.

37. Wright, Baker and Cook, 42.

38. Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” (1982) in Imaginary Homelands

(London: Granta, 1991), 9.

39. Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 10.


41. The most well-known of such critiques is Inderpal Grewal’s discussion of Shame

“Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women and Shame,” Genders 3 (Fall 1998), 24–48. This

position is reinforced by D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke who in Salman Rushdie (Hampshire:

Macmillan, 1998) criticizes the representation of women not only in Shame, but also in

Midnight’s Children, Grimus, and The Moor’s Last Sigh (see pp. 88 and 136). The position



on The Satanic Verses in relation to this issue is divided: Goonetilleke sees it as marking

a new appreciation o emale characters, but this is contradicted by Gayatri Spivak’s

comments in Outside the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 223. The most

considered response in these terms is perhaps that o Ambreen Hai in “‘Marching in

From the Peripheries’: Rushdie’s Feminized Artistry and Ambivalent Feminism,” in

Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. Keith Booker (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999), 16–49,

who deends Rushdie against earlier criticism but nevertheless argues that “his narra-

tives undermine their own (proto)eminist strains by regressing (perhaps because o a

concurrent anxiety about eeminization/emasculation) into reifcation o stereotypes

o gender and sexuality” (18).

42. This is a recurrent theme in Spivak’s work: see, or example, her recent work, A

Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), which includes a revised version o her seminal

essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak.”43. McClintock, Imperial Leather , 54–55.

44. Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside

Africa (New York: Noonday, 1995), 59. See Blunt, “Embodying War,” 407–8, and also

Jo-Ann Wallace, “‘A Class Apart’: Josephine Butler and Regulated Prostitution in

British India, 1888–1893,” in The Body in the Library , ed. Leigh Dale and Simon Ryan

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 78.

45. Bill Ashcrot, “Constructing the Post-Colonial Male Body,” in The Body in the

Library , ed. Leigh Dale and Simon Ryan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 209, 210.

46. Roy, The God of Small Things, 45, 73.47. George, The Politics of Home, 6.

48. See Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in Questions of Third

Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 117.

49. Perla Korosec-Seraty, “Experience and Use o the Dwelling,” in Home

Environments, ed. Irwin Altman and Carol M. Werner (New York: Plenum, 1985), 82.

50. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) (London: Vintage, 1997).

51. Tirthankar Chanda, “Sexual/Textual Strategies in The God of Small Things,”

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 20, no.1 (1997): 42.

52. Roy, The God of Small Things, 52, 53.

53. Simon G. Barnabas, “Ayemenem and the Ayemenem House: A Study o the

Setting o The God of Small Things,” in Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary , ed.

R. K. Dhawan (New Dehli: Prestige, 1999), 299.

54. Mark Seem, introduction to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane

(London: Athlone, 1984), xvii.

55. Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting o Home and Exile in

Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 195.

56. Korosec-Seraty, “Experience and Use o the Dwelling,” 74, 82, 75.



57. Bill Ashcrot, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001).

Considering that Ashcrot ollows his chapter on habitation with one on horizontality,

in which he argues, against his previous point, that habitation is “a process o outward-

ness” (p. 205), it is surprising that he does not recognize the limits o his spatial clas-

sifcations. We need to make space, as well as to inhabit and make place.

58. Oliver Marc, Psychology of the House, trans. Jessie Wood (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1977), 23–24.

59. Caroline Ieka, “Domestic Space as Ideology in Goa, India,” Contributions to

Indian Sociology , 21, no. 2 (1987): 308. Korosec-Seraty, “Experience and Use o the

Dwelling,” 78.

60. Frances Armstrong, “Gender and Miniaturization: Games o Littleness in

Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” English Studies in Canada, 36, no. 4 (1990): 405, 413.

61. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,

the Collection (1984) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 46, 54.

62. Marcus, Apartment Stories, 180, 198.

63. Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) (London: Faber, 2000);

Vijay Singh, Whirlpool of Shadows (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992).

64. Hulme, The Bone People, 36.

65. Ibid.

66. See Korosec-Seraty, “Experience and Use o the Dwelling,” 71.

67. Tuan, Space and Place, 138.

68. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1964), trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon,

1994), 85.

domesticity and magic realist texts

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