The Allegory of the Iron Fist: Transnational Ecofeminism in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Monica Ali makes extensive use of ecologically themed parallelism in her novel Brick Lane (2003). Ali uses this parallel structure to engage ecological, health, and social problems in East Pakistan, Bangladesh, and London. The parallelism serves to construct a larger ecological framework within which the migrant experience in London is brought into relief critically, complicating the assumption that Brick Lane focuses on the heroine’s “private world”. The article suggests that the novel is an allegory of development, within which images of metallic-projectile force against the female body are metonymic of the text’s ecofeminist practice.