| This study examines social change in Mauritius from the 1950s to present day as expressed in the poetics of space in three contemporary novels: At the Other End of Myself (A l'autre bout de moi) by Marie-Therese Humbert, Pagli by Ananda Devi, and Blue Bay Palace by Nathacha Appanah. It draws from the hypothesis that, although Mauritian society has evolved since the 1950s and social institutions are now more flexible, there still exist walls between and within social communities. The study begins by placing the novels in their literary, theoretical and social context. It then identifies the mechanisms of women and minorities' seclusion through an analysis of their jailer (the community-oriented society), of their prisons (island, villages, houses), and of the meeting places of forbidden mixed couples (roads, crossroads, hotels, ruins, nature, car, Aunauth's house). Women reject patriarchal law through their search for escape strategies, such as dreams, love, hate, rebirth and the subaltern's act of speech. The novels express this confinement/escape dialectic through a poetics of space that opposes solid elements (houses and walls) representing the patriarchal and atavistic society, to liquid elements (rain, mud, sea) representing means of escaping or destroying that society. |
