On The Construction Of Marijana's Subjectivity In Slow Man

John Maxwell Coetzee,an outstanding contemporary South African novelist,earned the Booker Prize twice and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.Coetzee cares about the survival of South Africans under the domination of apartheid,and the ethnic strife between South African blacks and Western European descendants.After immigrating to Australia,Coetzee extends his concern about marginal people over the whole world.Slow Man does not take South Africa as the background,but focuses on the living situations of world immigrants in the postcolonial era.It not only reveals the ethnic conflict between third-world immigrants and Western European immigrants in Australia,but also indicates the reality that women still live under the shadow of man.On the basis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial feminist critique,the present thesis examines the construction of Marijana's subjectivity in Slow Man.According to Spivak,the study on the construction of subjectivity in the context of postcolonial feminism includes analyzing one' social identities in terms of ethnicity and gender,exploring the reasons for the formation of such identities,and discovering the possibilities of constructing one's subject-position in society.First of all,the present thesis finds that Marijana is marginalized as an inferior Croatian refugee as well as a disenfranchised subaltern underthe gaze and description of West European immigrants.Besides,within the inspection of the patriarchal society,Marijana is attached to men and underestimated to be no more than a servant of reproduction.In the double oppression,Marijana cannot effectively express her minds,nor can she correctly identify her social identities.Therefore,her subjectivity gets into effacement.Then,it traces the causes of Marijana's subject crisis.For one thing,Western European immigrants under the influence of imperialism take the subject-position as granted,and regards Marijana from the ethnic minority as the subordinate other.For another thing,deep-rooted patriarchal power intrudes into Marijana's life,constructing her as the sexed subject,eliminating her feminine consciousness and robbing her labor products.Consequently,this woman shows ambivalence towards her social identities and fails to construct her subject-position.Last but not least,with the enlightenment of strategic essentialism,it discloses that Marijana takes the initiative in constructing her own subject-position in society.She recognizes her complex situations in ethnicity,retaining the Croatia way of life and managing to be a part of Australian society,which disturbs the imperialist limitation of her ethnic identities.Despite being confined to the so called second gender,she inspects deficiencies of the male subject,and strives for the legal position of being a mother as well as the equal treatment as a career woman,whichintends to deconstruct the gender binary opposition.Thus,Marijana obtains the possibilities of extricating herself from the predicament.With the analysis of Marijana's subjectivity,the present thesis aims to demonstrate that third-world women suffer from the double violence of imperialism and patriarchy in the construction of their subjectivity.And it also shows Coetzee's solicitude for women on the periphery when launching a crusade against authority as well as hegemony.Moreover,it is devoted to affording third-world women with an effective way to construct their subject-position.