The Saga of Saying and Unsaying: A Reconnaissance of Woman Characters in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (Published)
It is a recurring feature of his work that women are invoked to prove a point about social injustices and inequities, and then effectively demeaned … by the writing itself.” (17) This is how, Catherine Cundy concludes about the delineation of women characters in Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and Shame, and this forms the base for their dual, split-personalities in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh too. This paper aims to identify the dual elements in woman characters with special reference to The Moor’s Last Sigh, and also aims to deconstruct the mystery behind them. It also explores the causes and origins of these dualities with reference to the views of psychoanalysts, Simone de Beauvoir, Ajay Skaria, Nicole Weikgenannt, Chandra Mohanty, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Aloka Patel, Catherine Cundy, and Justyna Deszcz. It also analyses how oppression of women becomes the root-cause for the existence of dual elements in them. The dualities in Aurora Zogoiby, Epifania, Belle and Aoi Ue of The Moor’s Last Sigh are examined under the light of J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” to deconstruct the alignment and design of those dualities.
Keywords: A Made Woman, Creative Courage, Creative Despair, Self-Erasure, Separate Development