Identity
7.2 Identity
As mentioned at the beginning of this book, narrative is the fundamental way by which we humans make sense of ourselves and our world. Our own identity is little more than a narrative, a story that we tell ourselves and others about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. But our identity is also constructed by others, as they tell stories about us and place us in the context of social narratives over which we generally have little control or influence. The complex dynamic of identity and alterity, how we construct ourselves, but also how we construct others and how we are constructed by them, is therefore an essential aspect of narrative in all its forms.
In modern times, prose fiction has become a privileged vehicle for the construction of individual and collective identities, as well as for the construction of the different others that sustain and demarcate social identification. Only through narrative fiction can we share (or think we share) the subjective experience of another individual, access his or her thoughts, and participate from within in his or her life decisions. This illusion created by fiction is a powerful way to reinforce identification with a given in-group, as well as to approach and try to understand out-groups. But the same illusion can also contribute to distance readers from out-groups that are portrayed in ways that reinforce social stereotypes and negative biases.
A crucial theme in many short stories and novels is precisely the social process of defining oneself and others, particularly in relation to two important dimensions of subjectivity: gender and ethnicity.
Gender refers to the set of characteristics that differentiate males and females. Beyond objective characterization of gender, however, human beings develop their own gender identity based on subjective and social factors. These same factors are often reflected in the themes of short stories and novels, particularly in the depiction of male and female characters and the different roles or psychological traits that narrative discourse assigns to them. As most stories have been written by men, generally from an androcentric perspective, they have tended to cast women in subordinate or dependent roles, often presenting them as ambivalent objects of male desire and repulsion.
This construction of the female other in narratives mostly written by males can be seen, for example, in William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, where women are characterized as either angelic creatures like Emmy Sedley or as dangerous temptresses like Becky Sharp, a dualistic and imaginary representation of femininity that serves to support patriarchal values and discourses.
Fig. 7.2 ‘Young Woman Drawing’ (1801), oil on canvas by Marie-Denise Villers depicting an independent feminine spirit (possibly a self-portrait), Public Domain
Before the twentieth century, only a few female writers, such as Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot, had the courage or the opportunity to break social restrictions and conventions in order to produce short stories and novels that represented female subjectivity and agency in their own right, even if they often had to do so by complying with the dominant world views of a patriarchal society (see Fig. 7.2). It is only with the development of identity politics that women, as well as other minority groups such as LGBT people, have been able to use prose fiction to openly explore themes of gender identity and sexuality, or simply to speak with their own creative voice about themes that had traditionally been the sole prerogative of heterosexual men. A novel like Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, for example, mixes personal, professional, literary, political, and feminist themes into a fragmentary narrative that aims to replicate the fragmentation of female consciousness amid social and individual struggles.
Ethnicity is another important theme in modern narrative, as numerous short stories and novels have attempted to reflect on the dynamics of power, oppression, and resistance in the context of colonialism and other interethnic dynamics. We should not forget that prose fiction, at least in its modern form, originates to a large extent in European culture at precisely the same time as Europeans were beginning a worldwide expansion that allowed them to achieve economic, military, and cultural hegemony at the expense of other peoples. Revealing an entrenched ethnocentrism, the European narratives of this period often portray these ‘others’ as inferior, docile, or underdeveloped, sustaining in more or less explicit terms the colonial project of Western powers.\(^{ 5}\) One example of this kind of legitimization can be found in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, whose themes of oriental sensuality, exoticism, and corruption reflect and strengthen a stereotypical and objectifying view of Middle-Eastern and non-European others.
As the process of decolonization gave way to a postcolonial and globalized world, previously colonized and other non-Western peoples have been struggling to recover their own identity and sense of agency (see Fig. 7.3). And they have often done so by writing stories where they represent themselves as subjects, telling stories with themes that are relevant and meaningful for them, and expressing those themes from their own individual and collective perspective. This is the case, for example, in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a novel dealing with the destructive consequences of Western colonialism in Africa from the point of view of the colonized.
Fig. 7.3 Mural of Frantz Fanon, author ofThe Wretched of the Earth, Public Domain, https://www.flickr.com/photos/montrealprotest/19582249739
References
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3 On this point, see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ (TED Global, July 2009), $ https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story$
4 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
5 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979).