Mingling and Metamorphing: Articulations of Feminism and Postcoloniality in Marina Warner’s Fiction

Abstract

Like two feisty goddesses at an antique repast, Mary Douglas and Marina Warner recalled, over lunch in 2001, Elias Canetti’s reason for not liking a book: ‘It hasn’t any transformations in it’.¹ Our two deities motioned that this rule should prevail in contemporary fiction. Transformation, altered states, metamorphing, shape-shifting loom large in today’s scientific developments — from stem cell research to genetic engineering — and in contemporary culture, which has produced mutants, replicants, aliens, cyborgs and clones.² Such metamorphic avatars also imbue Warner’s novels, which interweave two dominant movements of the twentieth century: postcoloniality and feminism. Both movements question the very concept of history and the way it foregrounds the point of view of the winners and of the male sex.³ Yet, beyond such redressing of wrongs, Warner further links female oppression and the oppression of the colonised. She also explores the ambiguity of female intercessing, womanly interstices and other chinks, which inevitably weaken ‘his story’ and enrich her story through fiction and myth.