Caste, Trauma, and the Politics of Love: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things breathes despair. The narrative jumps back and forth between the past and the present, mapping out the tragic downfall of the Ipe family, whose members suffer the fatal consequence of the forbidden love affair between Ammu and Velutha, a transgression of the Love Laws. The Love Laws, a term coined by Roy, refers to the implicit social discrimination and sexual regulation of the caste system in India. The enforcement of the caste system delimitates people’s everyday life, restrains their personal freedom and potential, and further punishes those who attempt to temper with it. Focusing on Estha’s and Rahel’s inability to work through the trauma inflicted by Ammu and Velutha’s transgression, Roy structures her novel in terms of the “return of the repressed,” with reiterated traumatic scenes, fragmented passages, and ungrammatical phrases, etc., serving as both catalysts to trigger traumatic memories of unresolved familial conflicts and indictment of the oppressive power of the Love Laws. Other than demonstrating the disciplinary force of the Love Laws, Roy also proffers a different view to explore the underside of love as love is not merely a pure affection but it also involves the lovers’ calculating move to flee from the suffocating life each is respectively leading. Chapter One of this thesis elaborates on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussion on the subaltern agency to deal with Velutha’s and Ammu’s struggle to defy and escape the defiled social order and the psychic anxieties their subversive act of transgression has provoked in the dominant class. Even if their rebellion against the Love Laws fails to solicit the response from the dominant class, Roy, in dramatizing the terrific consequence of the society’s collective failure to listen to their mute demand for recognition, invites the reader to rethink the ethical possibilities of listening to the subaltern other, and to comprehend the urgency of such an ethical project. Chapter Two takes Cathy Caruth’s and Greg Forter’s perspectives on trauma as a point of departure to trace the characters’ traumatic experiences back to the two deep-rooted social evils, class antagonism and gender oppression, prevalent in the Indian society. The impossibility of redemption suggested in the young generation Estha’s and Rahel’s symptomatic responses to their previous generation’s trauma articulates Roy’s spirited critique of India’s social system, in which trauma unfortunately becomes a cultural legacy tormenting the Indian people from generation to generation. Chapter Three discusses the politics of love by juxtaposing Anthony Giddens’s assumption of the pure love relationship with Roy’s three tales of love. By doing so, I propose to contend that, whereas Giddens’s investigation of the human intimacy explains what intimacy should be, it fails to clarify why intimacy turns into hatred and how it becomes a justification for acts of violence. The three tales of love in Roy’s novel, by contrast, unveil the dark side of love and unmask its excess, proving that love is the “incalculable” something that goes beyond instincts and law. The excess of love which can transform the lovers either to be better or to be worse, displays itself as the true nature of the interpersonal relationships among people.

Date of Award	2010
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shuli Chang (Supervisor)