A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Black Mischief and Scoop
A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Black Mischief and Scoop

Summary/Abstract: Evelyn Waugh is commonly said to be a misogynist. However, his stance toward women was ambiguous. For, though he presents a male world in his fiction and his racialist tendencies, Eurocentricism and class consciousness almost always color his attitude toward women, he also provides the reader with some challenging roles for women. This is echoed in his depiction of the ‘sexed subaltern’ who often belongs to categories such as Oriental, colonized, non-white and underclass women. The female subaltern, then, is arguably triply colonized, this time by the author. Working from a postcolonial feminist perspective, in the present article an attempt is made to portray the complicity of racism, sexism, colonialism, and even the first world Feminism in the discourse of Western Imperialism in making the colonized women more colonized. To serve this end, representations of Wauvian women in A Handful of Dust, Black Mischief and Scoop are explored to shed light on, firstly, Waugh’s attempt to colonize all women literarily and secondly, his biased attitude toward the non-western women as alterity.

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