IMPERIALISM, THATCHERISM, AND RESISTANCE IN EDWARD BOND'S THE WOMAN: ACTING BACK TO THE CENTER

Abstract

Edward Bond is one of the greatest dramatists of post-war period. During the 1970s, one dramatist who tried to inaugurate a form of historical drama, which used history as a means of representing political circumstances of contemporary Britain, was Edward Bond. In 1978, with The Woman, he seemed to have achieved his goal. He uses the history of the past to reveal the political, social and economic situation of his own time in order to make a change. Bond's The Woman is a critique and an attack on imperialism, neo-liberalism, and Thatcherism, but a revived version in the modern sense of the word. For this reason, I decided to work on The Woman to analyze how he criticizes his society and the imperialistic ideas dominant in western societies. As mentioned before, the main focus of this study is to read and interpret Bond's The Woman in the light of imperialism and see how colonized people, especially women, reject the imperial legacy by resistance and acting back to the center. The Woman contains numerous suggestions that Trojan War was an imperialist one which happened over economic interests and political competitions were at stake. Bond aims to have a deconstructive writing of the misogynist prejudgments and reveal that human civilizations and institutions collapsed due to imperialist and hegemonic political practices.