COUNTERING THE DOMINANT NARRATIVES: ANITA DIAMANT’S THE RED TENT AND JO BAKER‘S LONGBOURN

Abstract

Majority of the narratives that are handed down to us orally or in written literatures have been written from the perspectives of power, whether they be the patriarchal, religious or authoritarian dominance. Most of these literatures fail to take into account the perspectives and positions of minorities, suppressed or subaltern individuals, groups or communities. In the postmodern and postcolonial literatures sometimes, we see an attempt at making an alternative reading of these discourses and presenting a point of view that was so far unheard of or unrecognized. Dipesh Chakravarty in his essay ‘Minority Histories and Subaltern Pasts’ talks about the impossibility of having a single narratorial voice about incidents and contends multiplicity of voices of recording history or pat. Linda Hutcheon too in her book A Poetics of Postmodernism talks about the possibility of multiplicity of voices and interpretations regarding historical narratives. A section on Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible, puts on record the story of rape of Dinah and resultant bloodshed. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent presents the story from the perspective of Dinah who calls it a consensual act between two lovers belonging to warring factions and unacceptability of this liaison. Similarly, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice narrates the events from the perspective of the Bennets, a middleclass family. A counter narrative by Jo Baker ‘s Longbourn looks at the events though the eyes of a house maid and alters the narrative. This paper makes an attempt to look at these two counter-narratives vis a vis the popular works that we are habitual of studying giving voice to subaltern minority characters in the main narratives.