Gender Tensions, Taboos and Textual Acts in Melina Rorke’s Autofiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT After reclassifying Melina Rorke’s so-called autobiography, Melina Rorke: Told by Herself (1938), as a work of autofiction, this article argues that despite the transgressive nature of the text for a 1938 publication, various gender tensions underscore and subvert the narrative. Rorke’s textual transgressions include scripting the forbidden female body, casting herself as hero of her own story and fabricating most of the life narrative she claims is autobiographical. Utilising Dorothy Driver’s theoretical conceptualisation of South African literatures as male-dominated and aligning women with nature and men with culture, this article illustrates that Rorke textually reconfigured her female hero protagonist to align with both nature and culture. Yet, Rorke’s alignment with nature, through her writing of the taboo female body, is beset with ‘gender-related tensions’. Once nature and culture coalesce in the fractious image of Rorke as ‘the Florence Nightingale of the Anglo-Boer war’, being both militant and domestic, she is seemingly unable to effortlessly align with cultural spheres. Finally, this article suggests that Rorke consciously constructed this textual representation of her protagonist and that the ambiguities and ambivalences associated with this portrayal is more considered and purposeful than readers would initially assume.