Female identity in George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter

Abstract

As a problematic concept, identity refers to versatile complexities in its definition and it is clear that there has been an explosion about searching the concept. The question of subjectivity together with its formation process has a great importance in the revelation of one’s personality and in the representation of one’s identity. It can be said that a psychoanalytically influenced feminism and cultural criticism shows itself as a result of this process. In this context, all kinds of cultural identity forms such as ethnic, racial, gender and woman etc. are suitable to be studied in terms of essentialist or anti-essentialist concept of identity. For Etienne Wenger, who is an educational theorist, the concept of identity is related with such terms like participation, non-participation, exclusion and inclusion. He claims that one’s identity determines his/her ability or inability in terms of the meanings that shape his/her form of belonging. In George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter, Dorothy Hare is the main character in the novel and he is the clergyman’s daughter living in a small village, Knype Hill, in the county of Suffolk. Although Dorothy performs good works, and cultivates good thoughts she has to regain her life and accept sameness in Foucauldian concept of identity. In the study, Dorothy’s identity is analysed in terms of essentialist and anti-essentialist identity forms both in order to show her ability in her adaptation to society and to define her position and her problems of identity as a female in Britain in the beginning of the twentieth century .