Reading Racial and Social Backgrounds between the Lines in Philip Roth‘s The Human Stain
Reading Racial and Social Backgrounds between the Lines in Philip Roth‘s The Human Stain

Summary/Abstract: Roth has explored throughout his work the intricate relationship between appearance and essence, between social pressure and personal freedom. His characters constantly address the misconceptions regarding the Jewish heritage. Starting from the Foucauldian premise that Power is not something that can be owned but it is a ―force relation‖ exercised through discourse and that the body is a site of power, I intend to analyze the complex interplay of misconceptions emerging from concocted, fake identities and the power relations that are hidden beneath the structures of racial, social and gender meta narratives. Characters switch discursive practices in order to get assimilated into the American society or simply to question prescriptive notions of identity. By engaging in a close reading of the novel, I intend to show that in this novel Roth aims at destabilizing and ironically challenging our notions of reality and hegemonic ideas concerning the social status of Afro-Americans,Women, and even the behavior of the Upper Class or of the Academic Milieu. Thus, structural notions that are instrumental in reading people: White/Non-white, Upper/Middle Class, High Culture/Low Culture, Respectable/Non-respectable, the Public/The Private Sphere are constantly challenged in a novel where ―the visible is never easily or simply a guarantor of truth‖ (Rottenberg 39).

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