Prospero's daughters: Language and allegiance in the novels of Rosario Castellanos and Nadine Gordimer (Mexico, South Africa)

The novels of Rosario Castellanos, Balun-Canan and Oficio de Tinieblas, and Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter confront two kinds of social inequality: the situation of women in patriarchal societies and that of Indians and Blacks whose oppression is rooted in the persistence of colonial relations. In the dissertation I explore how Castellanos and Gordimer thematize a social situation analagous to their own, that of privileged white women at odds with the dominant values of their societies. Through this contradictory situation they illustrate and analyze the workings of competing discourses and the ways individuals are called on to identify with or resist these forces.; Chapter One presents a number of theoretical formulations about writing by women and by others from non-hegemonic groups that all treat such writing as "double-voiced discourse."; Chapter Two considers Castellanos as "resisting reader" of the generally accepted discourse about women and culture in her essay Sobre cultura femenina (1950) while Chapter Three situates Castellanos' narrative in relation to Mexican indigenismo considered as ideology, social practice and aesthetic practice.; In Chapters Four and Five I read Castellanos' novels as they consider the use of language as instrument of domination and as means of resistance, and how different cultural ways of interpretation shape conflict. Balun-Canan enacts a way of reading the utterances of women and Indians as palimpsests, a figure of "double discourse" in which the voices of the silenced can be heard. Oficio looks at how the Indian and ladino communities each interpret and act on events through different narrative models; the novel itself rewrites other accounts, both oral and written, Indian and ladino, of the "caste war of 1867."; Gordimer's seventh novel Burger's Daughter is a highly self-conscious, explicit examination of the theme of the conflicting demands on a woman's allegiances made by family, country, gender, and racial conflict. Chapter Seven considers the set of competing "readings" of Burger's Daughter generated by its censorship case and published as What happened to Burger's Daughter. Gordimer's own reading and response to the censors are good examples of "double discourse."...