Abstract
Set in the late 1940s in Southern Rhodesia, Yvonne Vera’s novel Butterfly Burning tells the tragic story of Phephelaphi, a young woman who tries to find her own voice and ends up burning herself. In order to express the feeling of incompleteness of the young woman, the author resorts to a form of writing based on silences, fragments and allusions. Yet what could threaten the coherence of the novel is counterbalanced by a construction that can also be called elliptical in the sense that several motifs and images draw ellipses throughout the text. Meaning is conveyed through a system of repetitions, echoes and variations that prevent it from falling apart. Through the analysis of this elliptical writing, the present paper questions the relationship between gender and postcolonial context.
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