Female misrepresentation in selected peripheral pieces: glimpsing into Native Son, Beauty is a Wound and The Lonely Londoners

Abstract

Women have been used as accessories in different novels and play for a long time. The female characters have been serving the role of mute or passive speakers in different literary pieces. Most of the time, they were portrayed as decorations or as objects for male pleasure. However, over time, female characters have gained their voices in literature to an extent. Now, they are sexualized indirectly to serve the purpose of the literary pieces. In Native Son, while the focus was given on sympathizing with the male protagonist that his heinous activities like raping two women were subdued. Again, in Beauty is a Wound, the female characters are seen being the victim of rape and violence over and over again and this action of the rapists has been justified by showing their background story or gaining resolution over time. Also, in The Lonely Londoners, most of the female characters are shown as mute characters without much character development. This paper aims to show how women have been victimized by different male authors of different times. However, this paper will focus especially on the viewpoint of the marginalized writers; Black, colonized and immigrant writers. This paper will try to dissect the reason behind their fixed perspective on women and how their marginalized background is connected to these kinds of representations of women in their writings. In these literary pieces, it has been noticed that the female characters are always presented in a way that causes visual pleasure to the readers. Because of the background of the writers, they could have had an inferiority complex which led some of them to use females this way to increase their readers. Some of them only presented the truth of the females they witnessed occurring to their female counterparts. Also, some of them thought conquering women was the way to gain freedom from colonial power. Either of these can be responsible for this misrepresentation of the females in these selected pieces and this thesis will try to identify the most prominent reason.