The Chicana Narrator as Healer: Reconciliation in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God
The Chicana Narrator as Healer: Reconciliation in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God
This article argues that the narrator of Ana Castillo’s So Far From God is a postmodernist ontological narrator whose project is to heal the Chicana mestizaje’s identity through storytelling. Through the privileging of the female identity, returning to oral history and uncovering of subjugated Native American female origin myths, the narrator attempts to reconstruct the female identity. Although the narrator is not fully characterised, unlike other female protagonists in the novel, this essay aims to explore how the narrator is one of the female figures in the novel, and similarly, how she attempts not only to bring about the displacement of the male figure and reposition of the female, but also acts as a healer for her community.
Keywords:
female identity, healer, oral history, origin myths storytelling,
___
- Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. U of Chicago P, 1961.
- Castillo, Ana. So Far from God. W. W. Norton, 1993.
- Delgadillo, Theresa. “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance: Hybrid Spirituality in Ana Castillo's So Far from God.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 1998, pp. 888–916. doi:10.1353/mfs.1998.0108.
- Gillman, Laura, and Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas. "Con un pie a cada lado/With a Foot in Each Place: Mestizaje as Transnational Feminisms in Ana Castillo's So Far from God." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 2, no. 1, 2001, pp.158–175.
- Lawson, Hilary. “Stories about Stories.” Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Postmodern World, edited by Lawson and Lisa Appignanesi, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989, pp. xi–xxviii.
- Marshall, Brenda K. Teaching the Postmodern. Routledge, 1992.
- McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen, 1987.
- Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2006.
- Teubner, Cory S. “Double Negatives, Present Absences and Other No-Nos: Dialogic Community Action in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God.” Mester, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 67-80. doi:10.5070/M3401010133.
- Wong, Hertha D. “First-Person Plural Subjectivity and Community in Native American Women's Autobiography.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, U of Wisconsin P, 1977, pp. 168–178.
- Başlangıç: 2021
- Yayıncı: İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Araştırmaları Derneği / English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey
Sayıdaki Diğer Makaleler
Thomas Shadwell’in The Libertine Oyununda Abartılan Libertinizmin Bir Eleştirisi
From Androgynous to Hybrid Cybernetic Bodies: Salvation or More Subjugation?
Ruinscapes and Subversion of Temporalities in 'For the Mercy of Water'
The Chicana Narrator as Healer: Reconciliation in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God
“Pocket full of seeds”: A Review of Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics