Narrating Silence in Pat Barker’s Feminist Retelling of Homer’s

Since time immemorial, women have been silenced by patriarchal societies in most, if not all, cultures. Women voices are ignored, belittled, mocked, interrupted or shouted down. The aim of this study examines how the contemporary writer Pat Barker breaks the silence of Homer’s women in her novel The Silence of The Girl (2018). A semantic interplay will be conducted with the themes in an attempt to show how Pat Barker’s novel fit into the Greek context of the Trojan War. The Trojan War begins with the conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greece. Homer’s The Iliad, a popular story in the mythological of ancient Greece, gives us the story from the perspective of the Greeks, whereas Pat Barker’s new novel gives us the story from the perspective of the queen- turned slave Briseis. Pat Barker’s, The Silence of the Girls, written in 2018, readdresses The Iliad to uncover the unvoiced tale of Achilles’ captive, who is none other than Briseis. In the Greek saga, Briseis is the wife of King Mynes of Lyrnessus, an ally of Troy. Pat Barker as a Postmodernist writer, readdresses the Trojan War in his novel through the representation of World War One, with dominant ideologies. The novel illustrates not only how Briseis’s has tolerated and survived her traumatic experiences, but also, how she has healed and composed her fragmented life together. Homer’s poem prognosticates the fall of Troy, whereas Barker’s novel begins with the fall Lyrnessus, Briseis’ home that was destroyed by Achilles and his men. Hence, Pat Barker uses intertextuality in her novel, engages both the tradition of the great epic and the brutality of the contemporary world. She revives the Trojan War with graphic pictorial vividness by fictionalizing World War in her novel. Through her novel, she gives Briseis a voice, illuminates the passiveness of women and exposes the negative traits of a patriarchal society.

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

This chapter examines men's involvement in birth control from a feminist political-economic perspective. Fertility, and hence women's body, is still a focus of political struggles today. In the late 1990s, the international community of population policy recognized a concept of women's reproductive rights and adopted a rights-based discourse in place of a language of economic efficiency. At the same time, they advocated for men's participation in family planning and burden sharing between couples. This gender-sensitive new policy was effective in achieving more successful contraception in patriarchal societies where men are decision-makers in many aspects of social life. Yet, from a feminist perspective, such a policy could threaten women's reproductive rights if gender relations remain patriarchal. A close examination of Turkey's fertility decline suggests that the process was led by men who increasingly aspired to have small families which they could manage to look after as wage-earning fathers. In other words, it was realized without women's empowerment. A case study of Kurdish women conducted in Eastern Turkey where fertility rate was significantly higher than the national average indicates a positive impact of men's involvement on effective birth control. Yet this study also suggests a risk of undermining women's empowerment and autonomy. The promotion of men's involvement in family planning can reinforce men's control over women's bodies and endorse birth control without women's empowerment again, unless it is consciously designed in the context of reproductive rights.

Using Pat Barker's World War I trilogy and recent historical and feminist studies as a lens through which to view masculinity in A Farewell to Arms illustrates the way that medicine in the novel functions as a "technology of gender." The narrative strategies in the novel, the reticence to tell, and the silence about pain reveal the strictures placed on modernist masculinity. Frederic Henry's maladies in the novel are a result of war ideology as much as of his war injuries; his drinking in the novel becomes a kind of self-medication, one designed to help him stop feeling.

Julian Barnes (b. 1946) is an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who received considerable praise in 1984 with the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot, a book that, together with A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), defies categorization. Barnes belongs to a generation of British writers (including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Swift) who came to prominence in the 1980s at a time when suspicion toward the main tenets of realism, foundational grand narratives‚ and the figure of the stable and reliable narrator led many authors to disrupt and subvert conventional modes, favor historiographical metafiction and postmodernist skepticism‚ and experiment with narrative strategies. Thus, a number of scholars have examined Barnes’s work through the prism of postmodernism on the grounds of the metafictional dimension of some of his books, his transgression of realist strategies and reliance on various forms of intertextuality, and his mistrust of truth claims and fondness for fragmentation, polyphony‚ and generic hybridity. Several of his books (fictional and nonfictional) have been analyzed for the way in which they challenge the borders that separate existing genres, texts, arts‚ and languages and, thereby, oscillate among novel, essay, biography‚ and meditation. However‚ the restrictive label of postmodernism can apply to only part of Barnes’s production‚ as other novels published throughout his career are inscribed within a more conventional and realistic framework—in particular, such early books as Metroland (1980), Before She Met Me (1981), and Staring at the Sun (1986)—and his most recent production is marked by a less ironic and subversive mood and a more personal, subdued‚ and melancholy tone, for example in The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize; The Noise of Time (2016); and The Only Story (2018). Barnes has also been praised for his art as an essayist and a short-story writer. Drawing from a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, scholars have examined such recurrent themes and concerns in Barnes’s work as memory, art, love, longing, death, or Englishness. They have also probed his self-reflexive questioning relating to the evasiveness of truth, the irretrievability of the past, the construction of national identity‚ and the relationship between fact and fiction.

Feminism has no unanimous acceptance in Africa, so women who are associated with it are regarded as deviants or radicals who have chosen to kick against the norms and traditions of traditional Africa. This study explores the plight of suppression and exploitation experienced by women and also revealed the dangerous and difficult situations that often reduce women to mental wrecks. Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela is the focus of this essay, as the novel accounts for the entrapment and subjugation of women caused by traditional laws and customs, as well as their determined effort to survive in a patriarchal culture. Njabulo examined the lives of five South African women in post-apartheid South Africa, who had to wait indefinitely for their absent husbands. This essay attempts to create awareness of the need for societal reforms in order to improve the lot of women in patriarchal societies and encourage cooperation between women in order to stand up to the challenges of life and assert their individual worth and value, as espoused in the novel. This study concludes that the subjugation of women by patriarchal societies is to the detriment of the family and society at large. Thus, there is a need to re-evaluate and redefine gender roles in African societies in order to establish mutual understanding and relationships between the genders.

Venus rising, Furies raging: bodies redressed in contemporary visual art

This thesis discusses the experience and the aftermath of the First World War and the way it problemitised ostensibly secure masculinities and femininities, and family relationships, as depicted by some Commonwealth women authors over three generations. With a particular focus on the character of the psychologically wounded returned soldier, I contend that the authors’ depictions of the home-front aftermath of the First World War challenge the dominant constructions of gender which existed at the time of the war, and that such subversions have a specific relationship to each author’s historical and social positionality. I analyse why the returned soldiers are represented in the manner that they are and the significance of this representation in the trajectory of women’s writing. Some of the novels are set during the First World War, while others take place many years after the Armistice. The novels are discussed chronologically and grouped according to the period at which the texts were written. In all the novels, the characters’ notions of their identities and their world are challenged to various degrees. The home fronts where struggles continue are in New Zealand, Australia, Southern Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), and Britain. The female authors studied in this thesis write about the pervasive condition that was named shellshock, its manifestations and its rippling domestic effects, as symptomatic of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist systems in crisis. The first chapter addresses the representation of returned soldiers in novels by first-generation First World War authors, those writing at the time of the war and in the years immediately following. Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) are read as war novels that highlight and critique the association between shellshock and the exhibition of “unmanly” behaviour; the effect that expectations of manliness had on those soldiers who were victims of shellshock; and how the past and present trauma experienced by the returned soldiers is filtered, perceived, and absorbed by the female characters in the novels. The narrative point of view is most-often female and this consequently facilitates my discussion of how women characters perceive men’s bodies in trauma. Non-Combatants and Others is the centre of the chapter’s discussion as it poignantly depicts the extent of the social malaise that the First World War highlighted. The second chapter considers tense and traumatic pasts in the autobiographies and autobiographical fiction of Doris Lessing and Janet Frame, both of whom were daughters of First World War returned soldiers. In this chapter I suggest that their fathers’ war service and the trauma both men sustained shaped each author’s understanding and consequent depiction of war’s inexorable infiltration of the domestic sphere. In considering each author’s depiction of the war, I explore how its presence crystallised pre-existing gender conflict. Both authors spent their formative years, the 1920s and 30s, in households seething with resentment and financial hardship and shadowed by grief. I propose that, in writing autobiographical fiction – Lessing’s Martha Quest (1952) and Alfred and Emily (2008), and Frame’s Towards Another Summer (written in 1963 and published posthumously in 2007) – both engaged in a therapeutic act. In doing so, each author re-imagined her father’s history and its bearing on her life as a means of mitigating her own trauma as a daughter of violence. Chapter three is a comparative reading of the returned soldier and war-wounded characters in the eleven novels Frame published during her lifetime. In considering these characters and the significance of their presence in her work, I suggest that Frame’s writing is haunted by the emotional debris of war. In creating returned soldier characters, Frame wrote against the glorification of war – which served to reinforce notions of the triumph of imperialism, and was endemic in Britain and its former dominions – and also about the “sex war” that had taken place since much earlier times in the patriarchal family. The final chapter of the thesis explores contemporary representations of returned First World War soldiers in Pat Barker’s Another World (1998), Life Class (2007), and Toby’s Room (2012) – three of Barker’s war novels in which the narrative point of view moves between women and men and combatants and non-combatants – and Brenda Walker’s The Wing of Night (2005). The shell-shocked soldiers of Barker and Walker are characters that represent their authors’ contemporary knowledge of, and perspectives on, the interplay between expectations about gender roles and war-induced psychological trauma. This study highlights how the novels imagine and articulate the haunting significance of the returned First World War soldier characters’ trauma in the lives of other characters, and in the light of what each author suggests about the way the First World War produced a heightened sense of the problematics of conventional masculinities and femininities.

The aim of this research is to perform a psychoanalytic analysis of Pat Barker's, The Silence of the Girls, with an emphasis on how the novel depicts trauma, silence, and the feminine experience. It also aims to study lack and desire as well as frustrated behavior of female characters of the novel. Specifically, via the lens of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, the study aims to reveal how Barker's story challenges and subverts the patriarchal framework of Homer's Iliad by providing voice to the hitherto silenced female characters. Recounted from the viewpoint of Briseis, a Trojan princess who becomes Achilles' concubine, The Silence of the Girls is a version of Homer's Iliad. The book addresses themes of trauma and silence by reorienting the narrative from the normally male-dominated story to the experiences of women. This study uses a close reading of the book to examine the protagonist's journey. Using Lacan's theories of the Symbolic, the Real, and the Mirror Stage, the study investigates how silence in the story serves as a coping strategy for trauma as well as a means of resistance against patriarchal tyranny. The analysis shows that by giving voice to oppressed female characters, Barker's story successfully subverts the patriarchal rhetoric of the original epic. It illustrates how silence in the book is a calculated form of defiance against patriarchal systems that aim to silence the feminine voice, as well as a sign of trauma. This study advances our knowledge of how trauma, silence, and gender interact in modern literature, advancing both Barker's research and Lacanian psychoanalytic studies.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often regarded as a cornerstone of English literature, reinforcing colonial ideology through its narrative of exploration, conquest, and civilization. However, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) challenges this foundational narrative, using intertextuality, postmodernism, and metafiction to expose the silences and erasures within colonial discourse. This study critically examines Foe through postcolonial and feminist perspectives, drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) to reveal how Coetzee subverts the imperialist and patriarchal assumptions of Defoe’s text. Employing a comparative textual analysis, this research positions Foe within the broader landscape of postcolonial literature and intertextual theory. Through Said’s contrapuntal reading, the study explores how Coetzee deconstructs Defoe’s narrative authority, particularly through the reimagined voices of Susan Barton and Friday. Spivak’s concept of subaltern silence is central to the examination of Friday’s muteness, illustrating how Coetzee critiques the marginalization of colonized subjects in both historical and literary contexts. The findings reveal that Foe is not merely a retelling of Robinson Crusoe but a radical revision that dismantles the myth of the self-sufficient European man while highlighting the epistemic violence imposed on women and indigenous figures. Coetzee’s use of narrative fragmentation, unreliable narration, and metafiction disrupts the traditional colonial framework, emphasizing the instability of historical knowledge. This study argues that Foe serves as a politically charged reconfiguration of literary history, challenging dominant narratives of empire and authorship. By interrogating colonial storytelling and questioning whose voices are heard and whose are erased, Foe becomes a powerful act of literary resistance, creating space for alternative histories that reclaim the voices of the silenced.

Abstract: Margaret Drabble is a famous British female writer. Her novels are based on her personal life experiences and provide a three-dimensional depiction of the modern knowledge women’s survival difficulties and development prospects from a literary perspective. It delves deeply into the women’s social identity and role positioning, attempting to find a way out for modern knowledge women in the society’s new era. Drabble’s novels construct literary narrative discourse, based on the individual development and on the growth of women’s group, always taking the search for feminist issues as the theme of creation, with a typical feminist color. From the perspective of feminism, this study deeply analyzes Drabble’s literary creation. First of all, this paper starts from Drabble’s historical background and personal experience, and probes into how these background factors deeply affect her novel creation. Secondly, in exploring the characteristics of Drabble’s novels, the study pays special attention to how she highlights feminist themes through delicate literary narration. In addition, this study also focuses on the feminist thought contained in Drabble’s novels. Drabble firmly emphasizes the importance of women’s independence and self-awareness, and advocates that women should bravely break away from the patriarchal society’s shackles and actively pursue equality and freedom.

One of the major works within feminism is the novel Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847. Jane Eyre is claimed as one of the greatest and most popular works of English fiction. It is one of the most read, appreciated and discussed pieces of literature of the western world. Jane Eyre is a novel that narrates the story of protagonist’s growth and internal development on her search for a meaningful existence in the society. The purpose of this study is to examine self-actualization and identity in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. This research shows the women’s status in the era of Patriarchal England of nineteenth century where they were living under men’s control and they were discriminated in a patriarchal society. This study analyzes Jane’s personal journey and her quest for independence, equality, self-esteem and identity viewed from a feminist perspective. This research paper also presents the social class issues and gender prejudices on women oppressions in maintaining the socio-economic independence and building an identity and equality through self-actualization of the protagonist Jane. This research applies the feminist literary criticism and Marxist feminism approaches to demonstrate the patriarchal and gender barriers that women had to cross over in order to achieve their identity, independence and equality in the society. Secondly, it reflects the patriarchal traits and gender codes along with class oppression that oppressed most women considering them as dependent and object of men. Finally, it represents women struggle breaking the social codes and values to finally reach her autonomy, building self- identity. This research is helpful in conveying different ways through which women can overcome oppressive and sexist societal norms and make themselves heard by participating in social issues and challenging patriarchal (male-dominated) society full of biasness in order to achieve social-independence, equality and build an identity.

This study aims to explore the concept of feminism in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a short story that explores the theme of loneliness and oppression of a woman through a feminist perspective. The study is qualitative in nature and uses textual analysis as an approach. The protagonist, a woman, is confined to her room and treated as an invalid by her husband, who is a doctor. She is not allowed to engage in activities that would stimulate her imagination and creativity, leading to feelings of isolation and loneliness. Through the protagonist's experience, Gilman critiques the patriarchal society of her time, where women were denied agency and considered inferior to men. In this story, all these things have been felt by the main character who has miraculous imagination. She found a painting and feel that there is a woman who has been strangled by the painting. She has crawled to get out of that painting but she failed. Indirectly she found herself in that woman who has been imprisoned in the painting. She is the living example of the oppressed creature in the clutches of patriarchal society. The yellow wallpaper in the story symbolizes the limitations imposed on the protagonist and other women of her time, highlighting the patriarchal control and oppression they face. In conclusion, The Yellow Wallpaper portrays the loneliness and isolation of women in a patriarchal society through a feminist lens.

This paper examines poems written in English by Tanzanians from a feminist perspective. Specifically, the paper examines how Tanzanian poets in English handle feminist ideas. It interrogates how the poets address issues of human rights, dignity and equality from a feminist perspective in a predominantly patriarchal society. Through a feminist lens, the paper also delineates how the poets depict the reaction of women against masculinity and often female-gender insensitive traditional cultural beliefs which continue to subjugate and marginalise women. The paper contends that despite being ignored in terms of scholarship, Tanzanian poets in English have been preoccupied with the question of gender equality, which helps to define and place their contribution to literary and gender discourse in Tanzania. The paper concludes that Tanzanian poets in English have rhetorically been fostering the feminist agenda to undermine prevalent patriarchal norms and values. Keywords : Feminists, patriarchy, Tanzanian poets in English, masculinity, identity

This research article focuses on W. B. Yeats' poetry from the feminist perspective taking the ideas of Simone De Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter. This paper observes that W. B. Yeats has supported women issues in his poetry. His poetry presents the women‘s pathetic condition in patriarchal society and sometimes his poetry gives rebellious character to the women. Despite being a male, Yeats has able to suspend male ego in many of his poem. He believes that for the better world men and women should have equality. In this research paper I have selected W.B Yeats' poems entitled The Living Beauty, A Prayer for My Daughter, Leda and the Swan, The lady's First Song, The Heart of the Women, That Crazy Girl, The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love and “Crazy Jane Talks with Bishop to analyze with feminist perspective . In the selected poems, Yeats raises the voice of women who are suppressed by patriarchy. As a qualitative research, this researcher has purposively selected the poems of W. B Yeats and analyzed them by applying feminism as a tool.