Abstract
All the characters of women in the novels by women novelists express the point of view of a woman but each with its specific context and story. What they convey is their consciousness of being unable to fully recognize the patriarchal society where they have no voice. They are "active" in the context that their feelings are communicated to us and they listen and see. As we are primarily faced with the viewpoints of women, with their focus on distance and separacy, we perceive their specific cultures as being rather restrictive and alienating. The dominant female focalizers make even more apparent the lack of male voice. In most of the women writers' novels, the female emphasis not only drives the men and their voices into the background but also leads to the creation of a matriarchal order. The impressions of the focalizers often show that they are struggling with the position given to them within this order. This is a rule of matriarchal order in the narrative realm. Nonetheless, the dominant female point of view brings forward an ideology which challenges the sex-role paradigm and even substitutes the male-dominant structures within the narrative domain with female ones.
Key Words: Point of View, Matriarchal Order, Narrative, voice, narrative strategy
Point of view means the way a story is told— the sequence or modes developed by a writer by which the protagonists, conversation, actions, setting and situations that make up the narrative in a piece of fiction are presented to the reader. The issue of point of view has always been the novelist's practical problem, and since the advent of the modem novel in the eighteenth century, there have been varied reflections on the subject in critical texts.
Narrative is observed not as an anthology of sections, but as a complete movement, the components of which may be best characterized by the term "point of view" in the most common sense— a set of perceptions, viewpoints, and concerns that comprise the mindset of someone toward the world. So this enormity, which includes but surpasses classifications, is represented not in language but in the "languages" by which different viewpoints are shared."In real life," Bakhtin remarks, "we very sensitively catch the smallest shift in intonation, the slightest interruption of voices, in anything of importance to us in another person's practical everyday discourse." (The Dialogic Imagination 201) He also says that “the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads, and paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness." (The Dialogic Imagination 278) Words, along with the values and attitudes they imply, are not simply detachable from objects that are known apart from them; the word is in the object, which is always experienced from one point of view or another. The process of becoming an individual is in large part one of learning a language of our own, freeing ourselves from automatic repetition of the words and phrases that we grew up with, choosing ways of naming from available kinds of discourse, but combining them with our own intentions so that we speak with our own voice.
The daily world's contesting languages are used to convey thoughts and attitudes. In Bakhtin's perspective, the novel's aim is to portray these languages and their distinctions in order to make them meaningful and enable them to communicate. The language characteristics that interest him are not linguistic or syntactical; they are “those aspects in the life of the word...that exceed...the boundaries of linguistics." (The Dialogic Imagination 181) Some thoughts can only be conveyed in foreign languages because of the essential association between language and the distinct codes that we live by. Bakhtin calls this shuffling of divergent languages "heteroglossia." "The words of the author that represent and frame another's speech create a perspective for it; they separate light from shadow, create the situation and conditions necessary for it to sound; finally, they penetrate into the interior of the other's speech, carrying into it their own accents and their own expressions, creating for it a dialogizing background." (The Dialogic Imagination 358) Dialog is not just an inversion of speakers for Bakhtin. His vital quality arises most obviously in disputes in life as in literature, when the way things are said becomes an object of conflict as noticeable as the topic of conflict. The other cut the phrases close, invade our own language, and we give them back as taunt or rebuttal. Another type of dialog appears in narrative passages. Parody is one of its apparent types, the author places another language next to that of the narrator and further emphasizes its features. Bakhtin argues that a strict segregation of styles characterizes oppressive cultures that mark the limit between a language that has been endorsed and any expression that varies from it. Characterized expression and thought, with which it is sometimes difficult to determine where the words of the character end and the narrator commence, is a perfect example for Bakhtin to show how different types of discourse communicate. The style of the narrator may reach into the core of the ideas of the character, colouring them with ambiguity; on the other side, the narrator sometimes seems to have picked up phrases from the character through some kind of structural contagion. Propositional differences, such as that between first-person narrators and third-person narrators, seem to be less essential than the gap between discourse styles, as the latter can wipe out the boundaries that grammar creates. Bakhtin asserts that such boundaries cannot be identified by linguistics alone. Sometimes a sentence, or just a tone or an intonation, alerts us to point of view changes or combinations. Relations between different languages and views generate "dual-voiced discourse," which makes us conscious of each other's outstanding elements.
In his description of the novel as a "hybrid" type, the implications of Bakhtin's theory appear clearly: it is "an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another." (The Dialogic Imagination 31) Conceptualized as an imitation or depiction of life that appears to be recorded, the novel above all is deprived of its language, which is put aside for analysis under the head "style": then characters and narrators are segregated from each other for normative consideration as focalizer-subject or focalized-object, discourse of the narrator or discourse of the character inside outside the mind. Bakhtin considers characters and narration as "language zones," that may express social values and obligations; he explores in one character or narrative voice the difference of affiliations which emerges from meaningful contact with the languages of others. This chaotic collection of diverse languages is not an unintended by-product of "subjects" that enter "objects;" It is the energy of social life out of which we extract the naming method which makes us individuals and constitute our worldview. "The ideological becoming of a human being, in this view, is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others." (The Dialogic Imagination 341)
Within our daily and institutional languages the term "ideology" has traditionally seemed to be an alien invader. The native habitat is political philosophy, in which it often applies to hidden agendas or causes that we don't know that contribute to false consciousness. Bakhtin makes use of this to refer to "a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for social significance," and it's similar to the ordinary definition of "point of view" in that context. What he attaches to pure conceptual examination is an understanding about how substance not only disperses the type of fiction but also represents it and of the primacy of language in any narrative discourse. Another viewpoint on the narrative scene is that of the person who never participates in the scene yet is as vital to his life as the writer; the reader — or rather the reader — who, like the critics, sees it in very different contexts.
An examination of the point of view, particularly from the predominant female point of view, requires a comprehensive theoretical terminology structure. In The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction Susan Sniader Lanser attempts to integrate gender differences into her framework. She figures out that all the narrative scholars refer to the narrator and the writer as ‘he’ and that under the male they subsume the woman writer. The patterns of literary interactions must be interpreted in comparison to the cultural values to which writers have recurred; therefore, the structure of sex roles and their conceptions of male and female play an important part. Lanser counts on elements of speech act theory and on formalist / structuralist research to establish parameters for a point of view theory that "can function at once as ideology and technique." (Lanser 63) She develops a detailed point of view poetics, adding three essential criteria, namely status contact and stance, which represents the connection of the speaker or writer to the act of speaking, to the reader and the message spoken out. These three criteria are reflected in the fictional discourse; a summary of them can provide insight into the point of view organization, which is a systemic representation of not only the artistic ideology but also of the ideology of the literary output itself. When we note that ideology is not merely a substance dumped into the text but is the very foundation of textual organization, then from the point of view we should understand the ability to either conceal or reveal their own ideological basis. (Lanser 101)
Lanser firmly believes in the relationship between point of view and social constructs: point of view represents the social life frameworks and their empathic behaviours. For Indian Women novelists’ works of fiction, the three criteria status, contact and Stance listed above will become very helpful in more precise explanations of the female point. Her notion of point of view poetics gives us with the possibility of examining the status, contact and stance of a narrator or focalizer in order to judge the text with the standards and protocols of his own place and time and to compare the semantic point of view with the literary exercise which moulded it.
The important perspective Shashi Deshpande offers through Jaya in the novel That Long Silence would be that, through self-analysis and self-understanding, women will slowly change their lives through diligence and bravery. Both Jaya and Mohan are revealed in their lives when faced with the disaster. They have fallen into rough weather, and their healthy, protected lives are swept away in a raining storm like liquid-colour. We are perceived differently by the tragedy we experience, and respond differently. It's still not clear what happened to the optimistic Mohan, but it's mentioned indirectly that Mohan is probably to be fired for negligence. He is a pragmatist and has different ideas regarding his position in society. He is puzzled when this is broken, and does not understand what to do. He tries to hold Jaya tight, in whom he is searching for a foothold in this storm. Jaya, on the other hand, thinks her entire life circles around her husband's wishes. She is at a disadvantage now that he doesn't want anything. The two, like Rama and Sita, are as if in "aranyawas." However, she is not really a Sita and can't be a Sita. They're in her Dada's home here, and that's a home-coming for her. The home-coming substantially allows her take notice of her life, evaluate her past, and question her inner world and her relation with Mohan. Now she has been like the leg of a compass, organizing all her existence on the periphery of Mohan's life and his actions. But she just doesn't want to float around Mohan in silence. Since she has abandoned "Seeta" newspaper column, she wants to sacrifice her conventional wife role model. What Jaya learns when she looks for herself is the woman who formerly existed there was the wife of Mohan, mother of Rahul and mother of Rati, not herself. In such a background, Deshpande asks a question of the relationship between husband and wife, analyzes the relationship between man and woman, and discusses relationships which are so much a part of everyday life.
Jaya is shocked by Mohan's going away and wakes up to her true position in life. Which other place than that of the place of an unwelcome woman could she have? For her, life must be lived to the complete in comparison to the others. Jaya thinks she only can possess her identity if she has Mohan with her. She travels a complete circle, from discovering her identity in solitude to her relationship with Mohan and her children. But although it's a full circle, it isn't the same stage she's coming back to. She is herself after obtaining the telegram from Mohan, "I'm not afraid anymore. The panic has gone. I'm Mohan's wife, I had thought, and cut off the bits off me, that had refused to be Mohan's wife. Now I know that kind of fragmentation is not possible." (That Long Silence 191)
Jaya opposes even the marital symbol being linked to two yoked bullocks which she herself had often employed, for she feels she would condemn herself to a lifetime of unbelief by this symbol. Now that she has confidence in herself and she could choose. The deep self-search has given life awareness that cannot be lived in a void. She knows it is her own responsibility. Until now, she had not articulated. She agrees to be on the losing end now. It's her free self, in a way. One must not live where the whole of one's life is. One has to alter, and expect that people will also alter:
... it's possible that we may not change even over long periods of time. But we can always hope. Without that life would be impossible. And if there is anything that I know now it is this: life has always to be made possible. (That Long Silence 193)
Jaya's relation with her family reflects her unclear role in the very same way the other characters in Shashi Deshpande’s other novels are linked to their families or their societies. These female characters want to be loved and respected for while, at the very same time, yearning for freedom and separacy. The Long Silence tracks Jaya's journey through a multitude of self-doubts, worries, remorse, rage drenched, and silence toward expressiveness and assertiveness. At one stage in the book, for example, Jaya learns that she doesn't really figure in the family tree that her Uncle Ramukaka had planned with great lengths and that he was so proud of. When Jaya reminds her Uncle why her name isn't included in the family tree, she gets to realize that she belongs now to the family of her husband and not to the family of her aunt. Nor her mother neither her Kakis, which is, the wives of her uncle not even her grandmother Ajji, the irrepressible woman who “single-handedly kept the family together" (That Long Silence 143), makes an appearance in the tree of the family. As somewhat of a focalizer, Jaya tells us of her inward expectations; the justification given suggests that her self-revelation, self-assessment, and longing are linked to her gender.
The portrayal of Jaya's conscience is indicative of the dual voiced discourse: the desire of a girl or woman is articulated, quickly follows its negation or limitation of fulfilment, and a much more general comment is inserted about a norm concerning girls or women. It's not specified that the limitation has its origins in the character's gender, on the contrary the assertion sounds like a confirmation of an agreed norm. A gender theory defines a gap or distortion. However the point that it is described from the female point of view, who is witnessing it profoundly, and the fact that it happens so often in a novel wherein so little happens, underlines the inconsistency between the mental state of the female and the norm represented by the status quo. One can see a challenge of the cultural values that is elicited by the ideological view of the narrator. The ideological stance of the narrator evidently does not align with the cultural text; else the inconsistency would not be so clear across the novels.
Another definition of narrative, the narrative role, often sheds some light on interactions representative of gender. The narrative role is related to the narrative participation in the stories. In the following examples the protagonists in Shashi Deshpande's three great novels--Indu in Roots and Shadows, Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors and Jaya in That Long Silence-- have suppressed their spiritual freedom to their husband's wishes. Indu is afraid that she transforms into an "ideal" Indian woman, simply following only the expectations and fancies of her husband. Sam is a doctor who is economically more stable but is unable to avoid her sadistic husband. She actually feels she is suffering the consequences of being the better of the two. "A wife must always be a few feet behind her husband" (Deshpande, Roots and Shadows: A Novel 56), she needs her girls' audience to be alert. She also quotes Seeta and Draupati as examples to make her point. In That Long Silence, Jaya is rebelled by Mohan's rudeness. She condemns the farce of cheerfulness and kindness she has to perform with his colleagues in the office and yet she complies with it. Such qualified, modern Indian women seem to take hold of the deep-rooted Indian tradition of male dominance and all these views are expressed through the female narrative voices. As it seems the voices are heterodiegetic, it may be assumed that the narrators will have information access about all the characters but it is noticeable that the narrators will restrict themselves to the female character. The pole of privilege of Lanser with its poles—"human weakness" and "omniscience" (Lanser 161) - in this regard it is helpful to show that the narrators can be put between such two poles as they are much more limited to the female characters.
Often important to the ways in which the characters return to their inner life is the obvious difference between men and women characters about nature. Jaya's prolonged silence in That Long Silence is the narrative of women's generations— including Mohan's mother, his sister Vimala, as well as others. It's found out in Jeeja's miseries and Nayana's hardships. It's part of womanhood— a culture and family standard that these characters have struggled to adhere to. The vision the patriarchal society pursues, finds manifestation in the consciousness of the other voice— Mohan's. There's his exhortation of her unfeminine wrath, for example— his uncloaked frustration at her uncompromising, unintentional selfishness. This would choke her into submission and silence. Jaya knows Mohan remains unperturbed by his mother's fate - "silence and surrender." (Deshpande, That Long Silence 36) She noticed depression where he saw strength. And then again in recognition of the male-oriented standard, there is a judgmental advice from Vanitamami - "if your husband has a mistress or two, ignore it, take up a hobby instead--cats maybe or your sister's children.'' (Deshpande, That Long Silence 31) The voice of Mohan is the voice of the dominant majority and the voice of Vanitamami, the one which is continuously cooperative. There really is no conversation between them, no resentment, but they give rise to a feeling of guilt which makes Jaya close in silence. Kamat will teach her how she could be real, but that's part of a secret life and she moves away from him when he dies, with a suddenness creeping on her future. Such are different and contrasting voices and Jaya recognizes her own distorted voice as she turns within. To the response, "who am I?" answers emerge which have not been presented in the predominant theoretical vocabulary. Her recollection develops a pattern in what she labels "chaotic sequence of events and non-events that made up my life." (Deshpande, That Long Silence 167) Although it has loopholes and insignificant parts, this pattern establishes the unacknowledged truth that she had concealed in herself for fear of damaging up the design.
This indicates that the anonymity and inner confinement of the female characters lead to an order that includes that of a post-colonial Indian girl or woman in the 80s and 90s. Also it represents a mindset and thinking that is characteristic of the traditional perceptions of the role of a woman. The female characters' experiences of inner privacy are accurate and they feel they can keep the majority of things to themselves. Indu's survivor position in the novel Roots and Shadows by Shashi Deshpande imposes a dichotomy of life within her. “I had found in myself," says she, "an immense capacity of deception...I hid my responses and emotions as if they were bits of garbage." (Deshpande, Roots and Shadows : A Novel 41)
Whenever the characters of men are focused, for instance Mohan in That Long Silence, they are often portrayed as the oppressive patriarch. Many of the male characters' statements reflect their desire to exercise control and display commitment. Again the narrator does not express the trait in a simple manner. By sub setting certain traits, the relation between the social environment and the descriptive analysis is formed. Jaya's indications of evolution are certainly change and negotiation in That Long Silence but every negotiation breaks down her personality into bits. Mohan asks her to satisfy the wife of the chief engineer and she agrees to his desires despite her rejection and lack of willingness, but she is shocked when Mohan accuses her of being indifferent to him, stating that he never "mattered" to her. (Deshpande, That Long Silence 118) She changes herself so much that she, who had been one of her parents' "pampered, bad-tempered only daughter" (Deshpande, That Long Silence 92), changes completely. The endless series of compromises lets her know that "it's not that life is cruel, but that in the process of our birth we submit to life's cruelty." (Deshpande, That Long Silence 102) Jaya domesticates herself and embraces the stereotyped position of a "nervous, incompetent, requiring male help and support." (Deshpande, That Long Silence 77) One can find a marked contrast between single Jaya and married Jaya whom her husband titles as Sushasini and then the same Jaya turns different again when she stops writing to express herself.
Novels by Shashi Deshpande have aphoristic styles, with the present contrasted with past flashbacks. Deshpande practices a methodology analogous to that of regional Indian movies. The story travels from past to present, building the context by minor details and collecting for detailed examination of one single moment of experience. Deshpande mentions the following: "Maybe that is the way I work, the way all my novels finally come through. I come to the end of one incident, but then I have to go back because it links on to something else. I'm interested, I think, with what we do with our past as well as what our past does to us." (Interview: Shashi Deshpande Talks to Lakshmi Holmström 25) The story fits the alternate trend of third-person narrative and first-person narration in the case of The Dark Holds No Terrors. Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence, and The Binding Vine are first-person narratives with the narrator going back to the past to come up with solutions to her current issues. Therefore the past and the present are closely linked together. While the story progresses, the narrator appears to be shifting from a certain state of mind to a more optimistic state. However, this is not a development of the kind of "bildungsroman" or "innocence to experience" primarily because the protagonist is not growing up in the way that an 'educational roman' heroes do. The success lies solely in the appreciation of her condition by the protagonist, and her determination to improve it. Within Shashi Deshpande's novels, where most of her characters are authors concerned with the act and art of writing, the impact of postmodernism reflects in the meta-fictionality. Most of her works use postmodern structuralism to highlight concealed gender ideologies. Deshpande's approach fuses modernist, post-modernist and conventional storyteller methods. For example, the discursive, autobiographical quality of indigenous narratives whose impact Deshpande recognized as shaping the mind of every Indian (Interview: Shashi Deshpande Talks to Lakshmi Holmström 24) is expressed in the structure of That Long Silence. Jaya tells at the conclusion of her autobiographical narration, "All this I have written--it's like one of those multi-coloured patchwork quilts the kakis made for any new baby in the family." (Deshpande, That Long Silence 188)
Publishing one's own ideas, emotions, and memories creates a more personal connection between both the reader and the writer. This interaction between reader and first person is labelled "overt" in Lanser's language. While an "I" narrator maintains subtle communication, other narrators maintain no contact whatsoever. Lanser defines multiple dimensions of the narrator's contact; for instance, "narrative self-consciousness" against "narrative unconsciousness" or "confidence" versus "uncertainty." (Lanser 179) As for Jaya, it could be said that an environment of narrative self-consciousness emerges within the narrative universe.
Almost all of the female protagonists in the works described so far are interpreted through the omniscient and the first-person perspectives to the full with their inside out. While the men characters' lives don't change, it does seem or at least the narrators don't think it's important enough to mention them. Through the confined or almost non-existent male perspective, this attitude transmitted to us sheds light on the gender-determined society and its restrictive patriarchal structure, particularly strong in India during the time.
The political positions of the narrator tend to align with the societal norms, that is, the patriarchal paradigm is portrayed as the norm. And, the fact that most of the characters perceive male dominance as paralyzing— they are beyond words— questions this male dominance. As said by Lanser, the text of culture is thus opposed on the axis of coincidence. Juri Lotman borrows "Culture Text" and is described as "the world view operating in a given time and place." (Lanser 56) Moreover, only the reader knows about the uncaring attitude of the female protagonists towards such patriarchal standards, and the empathy that this awareness generates imposes the reader's affection for them. This favourable relationship between the protagonists, the narrators and the readers adds to the challenge of the text in culture because the readers generally take the main characters aside.
The female protagonists in Shashi Deshpande’s novels take on the identity of tourists from various places and that refers to their role as spectators and passersby. We are conscious of the distance and isolation that time will trigger from their loved ones, and for many of them time appears to become a huge burden of consciousness. There is no question that time is tied to transition and separation. Thus, they are reactive to the time as they are always with the past and present. Their recollection dictates their disposition towards the present and they know in most situations that recollection is sometimes sensitive to the moment of living. Some of the other characters appear to be trying to understand the flow of time, but they prefer to be living for the moment in general, with little recollection of the past.
In the novels, the narrators and the female protagonists appear to pursue a journey that welcomes them into a new world of life and gives them insights. But opposed to the starting journey of a male hero, the journey doesn't require exploits like fighting with nature, exploring new land, combating enemies, etc. Most of these things are particularly relevant to male heroes who, with the aid of other and older friends, develop maturity and search for identity. Invocation also means getting acquainted with something that helps people to gain insights into a new realm of life. The other characters serve partly as helpmates for the main characters, in order to obtain these insights. Even though there are subtle and noticeable disparities in sensitivity and awareness among them and all participate in various ways to the initiation of the main characters.
Therefore, the narrative strategy employed in the works of Shashi Deshpande shows the contrary of what the female characters really do. The prevailing female perspective and the exploration of the inner self of the female characters offer evidence that the writer clearly wants to change the "silence" even if only on the narratological level. The narrator's social identity, that is sometimes a third-person narrator, who is not a character in the book, is due to literary traditions linked to the female social identity of the author; therefore we assume that the narrator is a female one. The connection between the narrator and the narratee is created by the narrator's broad statements regarding women. Trying to reach the narrator's identity issue, Lanser lists a number of factors that define social identity, amongst which she calls gender "the most universally central to linguistic activity in Western culture" (Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice 166) due to gender differences in Indo-European languages. Gender is accountable for sex differences in daily life when it comes to cultural interaction. "Sex is important to the encoding and decoding of narrative voice." (Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice 166) Lanser demonstrates narrative structures that represent gender-determined thinking: we assume a male authorship in a text not clearly identified as written by a male author and only when we find a female name on the cover page do we anticipate a female narrative voice. The narrative approach with its relationship between the identity and beliefs of the protagonist and the text of culture shows how an explicit analysis of a cultural norm takes place. Particularly the frustration with certain gender roles of some of the female characters is expressed through the narrator, who mostly uses her own language and expresses it by making a somewhat generalized statement.
Dorrit Cohn remarks on the use of the narrated monologue in her description of narrative styles for expressing consciousness in literature, "The narrated monologue is a choice medium for revealing a fictional mind suspended in an instant present, between a remembered past and an anticipated future." (Cohn 126) The illustrated monologue is an instrument often used by women writers to expose the minds of a female character in particular. Most male authors who deal with male adulthood "adopt the adolescent response to experience" and frequently write in a fragmentary style of prose that is a mixture of "actual accuracy and blurred emotional fervour." (Tanner 215) However, the female writers use rather a different narrative strategy: they blend the articulated monologue with bits of remembered dialogue and frequent reference to the psychological theory of interaction — like something seen or heard that activates a recollection or renders a certain aspect of its life perfectly clear to the protagonist. According to Douglas Messerli, for most women protagonists, their behavior towards their history is "not completed, finished, dead, but is something living and forceful because it shapes the present and defines it." (Messerli 226)
In almost all of the novels Shashi Deshpande reappears to the theme of isolation and confinement. It is used to indicate the lack of freedom and the middle-class women's constrained life as well as to represent the isolation and alienation that often exists in a marriage. In Roots and Shadows, Indu wishes, in the aftermath of an unhappy marriage relationship, that she is stuck in a dark room without an escape. (Deshpande, Roots and Shadows : A Novel 10) Jaya, trapped in a similar circumstance in That Long Silence, does indeed have a vision in which she considers herself "walking between rows of houses, so close to one another that there is a sense of claustrophobia." (Deshpande, That Long Silence 85) In The Dark Holds No Terrors Sarita is seen scribbling "one circle entwined in another '' (Deshpande, The Dark Holds No Terrors 22), at the peak of her dispute with Manu. The circles further indicate a confined space, with no way out leading to the marriage of Sarita's dead end situation.
In short, the novels of Shashi Deshpande are cries of outrage against the kind of treatment given to a woman in our society and her effort to give another version of the truth from the point of view of a woman. These are also harsh criticisms of the current conditions of our social structures, such as marriage or families, and the manner in which these undermine development and individual's free expression. All such establishments put individuals in compartments such as wife, husband, brother, sister, daughter, son, etc and block free human interaction. Most of these considerations raise questions about "marriage" and "family" and these demonstrate the understanding of the limitations that female characters might have. This mindset is expected to draw the attention of the reader. The theoretical narrative position of such texts challenges the interpretation of society because a particular viewpoint is conveyed implicitly by the women characters as primary focalizers. Dogmatic approach deals with the authority of texts which rely on the value placed on the position and on the value of the person who takes the position. The extremes of the pole are independent ideology and strengthened ideology. If more than one voice and more than one medium show it, the most thoroughly articulated ideology is expressed. Therefore, if in the narrative structure the role of the person expressing a particular view is pretty dominant, he or she has more authority. Consequently, authorial narrators typically show more authority than fictional characters and focalizers have more authority than non-focalizers. It is difficult to differentiate between a more dominant voice and a subordinate voice, when there are many voices on the same level. The authority of our texts relies on the focus ascribed to the ideological narrative and the focalization of characters such as the female protagonists.
Works Cited