LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 10 : 1 January 2010
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         K. Karunakaran, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.

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The Dysfunctional Women in Mary Gordon's
The Other Side

Raichel M. Sylus, M. A., M. Phil.

Women's Literature and Women's Interior Journey

Mary Gordon is a powerful novelist who vividly recapitulates, vehemently portrays, and complies with women of her era in all aspects. She was the 2008 New York State Author.

Women's literature is not just literature written by women about women, "it should deal with women's experience from within" (345) says Elizabeth Janeway in an essay on 'Women's Literature' in Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing.

The "interior journey" that a woman undertakes is different from those of men. Amidst all these cacophonies, she is all the more entangled in the webs of powerlessness, victimization, failure to love and failure in being loved, loneliness, longing, defeat and alienation as a process of her interior journey.

This turns the individuals and the family to be disoriented. It is this assigned status to women that Gordon talks about in this novel, The Other Side,how the families are non-harmonious because of women. The bourgeois family reframes the primary identity of a woman. The discrimination, acknowledgement, power, freedom and understanding start from the four walls of the family.

The Other Side

Mary Gordon's fourth novel The Other Side is nothing out of the ordinary.Yet it stands apart. It is a narrative in 5 parts where the action takes place within a limited time span of one day - August 14, 1985.

Gordon uses the flashback technique to portray the lives of four generations of the MacNamaras.

The entire family is gathered together in one place to bid eternal goodbye to the aging Ellen. The paper takes into account only the women characters for its study. In one sweep, she delves deep into the recesses of the Irish immigrants, Catholic women, misery, failure and victimization of the women characters. Gordon was living under the restrictions of a strict Catholic background, but does not present any solutions for her fellow women. She describes their plight, thereby giving voice to her own frustrations.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf, Powers and Jane Austen, she has etched herself as a woman novelist, not of the Victorian era but of the present age.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Linguistic Purism and Language Planning in a Multilingual Context | The Problems of Teaching/Learning Tenses | Language and Literature: An Exposition - Papers Presented in Karunya University International Seminar | Similes in Meghduta - The Absolute Craftsmanship in Language | Culture of the Tamil Society as Portrayed in Ponniyin Selvan | Deconstructing Human Society: An Appreciation of Amitav Ghosh's Sea Of Poppies | Enabling Students to Interpret Literary Texts Independently by Enhancing their Vocabulary | Coping with the Problems of Mixed Ability Students | Displaced Diasporic Identities - A Case Study of Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz | English Language Teaching in Developing Countries Error Analysis and Remedial Teaching Methods - An Overview | Diaspora Literature - A Hybrid or a Hybridized Product? | Anita Desai's Journey To Ithaca - A Manifestation of Vedantic Knowledge | A Study on the Physiological, Psychological and Spiritual Perspectives of Different Selves in a Self with Special Reference to Yann Martel's SELF | Conveniences and Complexities of Computer-Aided Language Learning | The Danger Lurking Within: The African American Woman in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye | Practices and Paradigms of Using Multimedia and Language Laboratory for Teaching Communication Skills to Technical Students | English: A Blessing in Disguise - A Study of Chinua Achebe's Technique of Hybridization | Language Teaching - The Present Day Challenges | Is Literature a Viable Medium for ESL Acquisition? | The Lord of The Rings : Galadriel, The Light Of Middle-Earth | Teaching Reading - A Challenge in Itself | The Silent Way | Translator as Reader: Phenomenology and Text Reception - An Investigation of Indulekha | The Dysfunctional Women in Mary Gordon'sThe Other Side | Utopia and Dystopia, Conflict Between Two Extremes - An Appraisal of Anita Desai's Cry, The Peacock | Reading 'god' Backwards | The Comic Vision in the Stories and Sketches of R.K.Narayan | My Responses to The English Teacher | 'Fall from Grace into Grief': Putting into Perspective the Outrages of Terrorism in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown | Style and Language in M. G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song | Affirmation of Life in Lloyd C. Douglas' Magnificent Obsession | Effectiveness of Group Investigation Model and Simulation Model in Teaching English | A Mathematical Treatment of Feministic Literature for the Prediction of Social Trends | Multiple Intelligences and Second Language Learning | Amitav Ghosh's The Circle Of Reason - A Study of Diaspora | The Role of Multimedia in Teaching Writing in English | A PRINT VERSION OF ALL THE PAPERS OF JANUARY 2010 ISSUE IN BOOK FORMAT | HOME PAGE of January 2010 Issue | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR

Raichel M. Sylus, M. A., M. Phil.
Department of English
Avinashilingam University for Women
Coimbatore - 641 043
Tamil Nadu, India
raichelmsylus@yahoo.co.in

 
Web www.languageinindia.com
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