Spaces of Detention: Incarceration as a Means of Maintaining Normativity in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water and Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot
Absztrakt
The objective of this paper is to present that the spatial and temporal dynamics underlying Faces in the Water (1961) and The Golden Chariot (1995) mirror very similar social tendencies concerning the disproportionate gender power structures. The two narratives share insanity as a central theme that, in both novels, is depicted as the response to the oppressive treatment of the individual by their respective societies—Frame’s New Zealand society that is highly influenced by Western culture, and Bakr’s Egyptian society. However, due to cultural discrepancies, the novels portray the incarceration of women with a fragile state of mind in systematically different ways. Although both the prison and the mental institution are places reserved to separate those who diverge from social norms, the way, how a community or society treats its women, who are regarded as disturbed, by locking them up either in an asylum or in a prison implies diverse modes of maintaining normativity. On the one hand, in Faces in the Water, transgression of gender roles raises the dilemma of the conceptualisation of madness and sanity. On the other hand, in The Golden Chariot, the strong patriarchal system seems to be more willing to sentence a woman to prison for the subversion of the apparently sacred power structure between man and woman than to acknowledge, and consequently deal with mental instability. The overarching motif of the analysis is the various notions of space, which shall support my contention that the spatial metaphors of both novels reflect on oppressive socio-cultural forces—like subjection, subordination, and the internalization of gender expectations—and defective identity formations that either lead to or are already marked as mental illness.