Abstract
‘Sofia, Sofia, what are you thinking?’ asks the husband of his unfaithful wife in Jhabvala’s short story ‘Desecration’ (first concluding the collection How I Became a Holy Mother, later concluding the collection of reprinted stories, Out of India). Of course, she cannot answer; to do so would risk ‘changing his look’ of ‘tender respect’ — the respect that requires her to live apart from the vulgar society of others, to remain in elegant, splendid isolation with him. However, the strain of never revealing herself, of managing to ‘bear it by herself’ proves finally impossible. Her suicide is a response to the isolation ordained to the romantic heroine, and all who would imitate her.
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Notes
From Françoise Basche, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel (New York: Schocken Books, 1974) p. 166.
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970) pp. 440–72.
In Roger Lax and Frederick Smith, The Great Song Thesaurus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
See H. Adlerfer, B. Jaker and B. Nelson, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality: The Scholar and the Feminist. Towards a Politics of Sexuality (Barnard College, New York, 1982).
Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (New York: Harper Colophon, 1981) passim.
The term ‘Female Gothic’ is coined by Ellen Moers in Literary Women: The Great Women Writers (New York: Anchor Books, 1977) ch. 5.
Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969) p. 200.
Jessica Benjamin, ‘Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination’, in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983) p. 282.
René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965) p. 176.
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© 1989 Laurie Sucher
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Sucher, L. (1989). Dangerous Quest. In: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20239-3_2
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