Reclaiming the ‘Self’: self-objectification and victim-survivors’ bodies in Margie Orford’s The Eye of the Beholder and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater
- Authors: Landsberg, Zoe
- Date: 2025-04-25
- Subjects: Self-objectification , Self in literature , Victims in literature , Detective and mystery stories History and criticism , Magic realism (Literature) , Sex crimes in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Master's theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/478453 , vital:78188
- Description: Self-objectification is conventionally viewed by objectification theorists as a negative process that is pursued by victims as a result of experiencing sexual violence. What makes self-objectification particularly negative is that it confirms that the victim feels alienated from their body following their harrowing experience. In this thesis, I argue that Margie Orford and Akwaeke Emezi depart from this view of self-objectification. Instead, through the protagonists in their respective novels, The Eye of the Beholder and Freshwater, Orford and Emezi offer a positive revision of self-objectification by articulating it as a necessary process in a victim’s journey toward reclaiming their body and, with it, their concept of ‘self”. To make this argument, I begin by drawing on Western existential phenomenology and African ontology to develop what is referred to as the basic relational view of the ‘self’ which understands the ‘self’ as the connection point between one’s body and one’s subjecthood. Applying this understanding of the ‘self’ to the selected texts, I show that it is the connection between each protagonist’s body and spirit that is disturbed by their experience of sexual violence. Initially aligning with the negative view of self-objectification, Orford and Emezi confirm this disturbance through their protagonists’ pursuits of self-objectifying behaviours. However, using Elaine Scarry’s artist–artifact model and Russel W. Belk’s articulation of the ‘extended self’, I demonstrate that it is by means of self-objectification that the protagonists are presented as able to reestablish a meaningful connection to their violated bodies and thereby reclaim their disrupted concepts of ‘self’ as they journey towards survivorhood. In this way, through the victim–survivor journeys of their respective protagonists in The Eye of the Beholder and Freshwater, Orford and Emezi inscribe the process of self-objectification with an unorthodox duality where it is not a wholly negative process, but rather one that is pivotal to a victim’s survival. Thus, I conclude in this thesis, Orford and Emezi offer a positive revision of self-objectification, a revision that has not yet been studied in the scholarship on the selected primary texts. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Literary Studies in English, 2025
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The interface of history and fiction in Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the plagues, Ingrid Winterbach’s To hell With Cronjé, and Etienne van Heerden’s The long silence of Mario Salviati
- Authors: Wyrill, Beth Alexandra
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: Brownlee, Russel -- Criticism and interpretation , Winterbach, Ingrid -- Criticism and interpretation , Van Heerden, Etienne, 1954- -- Criticism and interpretation , South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism , South African fiction (English) -- 20th century -- History and criticism , African fiction (English) -- 21st century -- History and criticism , Brownlee, Russel -- Garden of the plagues , Winterbach, Ingrid -- Niggie -- English , Van Heerden, Etienne, 1954- -- Swye van Mario Salviati -- English , Historical fiction -- History and criticism , Magic realism (Literature)
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2323 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015517
- Description: Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.
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