This thesis investigates a neglected sub-genre of women’s writing, which I have termed the literature of the boarding house. Focusing on unmarried women, this is a study of the alternative rooms ‘of one’s own’ that existed in the nineteen thirties: from the boarding house and hotel, to the bed-sitting room or single room as a paying guest in another family’s house. The 1930s is defined by the conflict between women’s emerging social and economic independence and a dominant ideology that placed increased importance on domesticity, the idea of ‘home’ and women’s place within the familial structure. My research highlights the incompatibility between the idealised images of domestic life that dominated the period and the reality for the single woman living in temporary accommodation. The boarding house existed outside conventional notions of female domestic space with its connotations of stability and family life. Women within the boarding house were not only living outside traditional domestic structures; they were placing themselves outside socially and culturally defined domestic roles. The boarding house was both a new space of modernity, symbolising women’s independence, and a continued imitation of the bourgeois home modelled on rituals of middle-class behaviour. Through an examination of novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Lettice Cooper, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and E. H. Young, this study privileges the literary as a way in which to understand the space of the boarding house. Not only does the boarding house blur the boundaries between public and private space, it also challenges the traditional conceptions of the family home as the sole location of private domestic space. I argue that by placing their characters in the in-between space of the boarding house, the authors can reflect on the liminal spaces that existed for women both socially and sexually. In the literature of the boarding house, the novel becomes a site for representing women’s experiences that were usually on the periphery of traditional narratives, as well as a literary medium for articulating the wider social and economic issues affecting the lives of unmarried women.

MA (English) / Department of English / The prevalence of patriarchal norms and the privileging of the African man in African literary works gradually led to an erasure of women‘s identities, thereby leaving them to hold peripheral positions. This has motivated African women critics to engage in linguistic and performative methodologies to restructure African women‘s status in postcolonial writings. Using feminist literary theory, Marxist literary criticism and postcolonial theory, among others, this study explores the changing images of women as depicted in a selection of Yvonne Vera‘s works, namely: Butterfly Burning (1998); Under the Tongue (1996); Without a Name (1994) and Nehanda (1993). Close reading and textual analysis are employed in examining the strategies devised by Vera to assess patriarchal attitudes that suppress women as well as reconfiguring their identities. This study is inspired by the desire to investigate the techniques employed by an African woman writer in speaking against marginalisation, exploitation and oppression of women in a postcolonial literary environment. Of primary concern to this study, is an examination of how Vera unleashes, re-writes and re-negotiates the potential of an African woman in her novels. This study distinctly shows that, as a subaltern writer, Vera reconfigures her female characters‘ identities through social and economic liberalisation. It is clear in this study that economic liberty has a great impact on the life of an African woman. This study contributes to the growing body of works that appreciates women writers‘ efforts in transforming, reifying and reinstating the image of African women in fictional works. / NRF