Arundhati Roy¡¦s debut novel The God of Small Things, set in a small village called Ayemenem in the southwestern India state of Kerala, where Roy was raised, tells a story of the Ipe family. Nestled insides the centre of the family chronicle spanning from the country¡¦s colonial period to its independent present is a heartbreaking tragedy resulted from a profane romance involving a transgression of the Love Laws that takes the reader¡¦s breath away. Love Laws, an oxymoronic term Roy creates for her novel, points toward the cultural basis upon which Indian society addresses its traditional and strict control of caste segregation and sexual discrimination. In the cross-border tension caused by the conflict between human desire and Indian socio-political constructs that suppress individual liberty Roy does not only depict the social reality in India but also proposes a scathing critique of the multilayer social restraints on Indians¡¦ bodies and minds. Individual bodies attached to the culture, first of all, are the vehicles of various cultural signs that allotted according to the caste difference and gender asymmetry; at the same time, bodies are the specific location where the infliction of society¡¦s power to discipline and to punish takes place. Body contact that pursues forbidden love as relief from the social oppressions leads to the ultimate penalty, death, which can destroy the body and also scar the witness¡¦s mind. Focusing on two innocent children¡¦s difficulty in piecing the memory fragments together to come up with a belated response to the tragedy and their melancholy fixation about the lost beloved, Roy tries to reveal the lingering effect of trauma and the symbolic death happening to the victims who can¡¦t work through the trauma but trapped by it instead. Roy deliberately provides the novel a traumatic structure consisted of aesthetic poetics, sensual narratives, ungrammatical phrases, repeated images, fragmental passages, etc., to convey a literary experience of trauma to the reader as if they are dealing with trauma when reading the novel. Through discussing the Love Laws from a historical perspective, Roy purposes to suggest that the major trauma in The God of Small Things doesn¡¦t belong to a particular age or place. All Indians in the past, the present and the coming future share the same trauma because the Love Laws have already been a significant part of Indian culture and the practice of Love Laws will continue to traumatize Indian people from generation to generation. Besides tackling the Love Laws as the cause of Indians¡¦ national trauma by presenting the oppression of laws, the novel also offers a remarkable point of view to discuss the cruel nature of love when love is employed as a conditional reward for the obedient in the rhetoric to command, to regulate, to threaten, to bargain, and to inspire loyalty. People¡¦s unceasing desire to win and to give love, against our common belief in love¡¦s sublime value, may bring about hurt, pain, fear, jealousy, mistrust, quarrels, etc., all of which can make a deep cut in any human relation or even cause more serious destruction what is generally considered as the consequence of the exercise of the power of law in its tug of war with love.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0728107-203723 |
| Date | 28 July 2007 |
| Creators | Chen, Po-hui |
| Contributors | Chun Fu, Shuli Chang, Kim Tong Tee |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0728107-203723 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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