Abstract
This article intends to demonstrate how female characters in Ulysses and The Blind Owl are deprived of full means of communication and expression. The connection with the concern with alienation in these two novels is that it is in the representation of female language that they show how characters—female characters and by extension women in general—are alienated from and marginalized by the masculine voices of the novels’ narrators and focalizers. It is noticeable that the narrative style of Ulysses and The Blind Owl, although very innovative and experimental, still allocates almost no space to female voices and language, with the major exception of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue. With the benefit of more recent perspectives, Molly’s narrative can be read as deriving in some ways (the lack of punctuation being one major indication) from the semiotic and subverting the established discipline of language use (the symbolic), thus, as an example of écriture féminine.
Highlights
Apart from the terminating interior monologue of Molly Bloom in Ulysses, women characters in both Ulysses and The Blind Owl are rendered silent or are involved in very few conversations.1 In other words, female characters are most of the time linguistically alienated from the narratives of the story
Theoretical explanation of écriture féminine and the semiotic-symbolic binary are not provided in enormous details
The connection with these novels’ concern with alienation is that it is in the representation of female language that these two novels show how characters – female characters and by extension women in general – are alienated from and marginalized by the masculine voices of these novels’ narrators and focalizers
Summary
This article intends to demonstrate how female characters in Ulysses and The Blind Owl are deprived of full means of communication and expression. Bloom’s narrative style is the last and perhaps the most radical of the novel’s exploration and exposition of different styles and registers, and presents a very personalized and unique insight into the character expressing herself; it reveals her as a character who had up until now remained unexplored, and emphasizes that she is an example of what Spivak refers to as the “subaltern” in a masculine world of conversations and communications Both the content and the form of this extraordinary passage encodes the depth and complexity of a female experience of being alienated from the male-dominated world (or discursive fields) of Dublin as she experiences it; it reveals the extent to which she has been misread, misunderstood and misrepresented in a narrative that has hitherto been provided by Bloom and other male characters in the novel. They might be subverting the patriarchal communicative language as they are alienated from its communication zone
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