| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系碩士班 === 101 === Arundhati Roy's award-winning debut The God of Small Things arouses heated controversies because it tackles various socio-politically sensitive issues, such as the prevalence of Caste hierarchy, the gender inequalities, the Communist hypocrisy, and the sexual transgressions of the "Love Laws." Aijaz Ahmad criticizes the novel for being historically and politically incorrect, reducing the political struggles of the subaltern characters to an escape into "erotic utopia." On the other hand, Graham Huggan sees Roy as a writer who strives to become an literary celebrity in the era of global consumerism to markets her "tourist novel" of exotic inter-caste romance. My thesis aims to refute and counter-balance the criticisms of Ahmad and Huggan under the premises that "reality" is a matter of interpretation, that authorial intention is unknown, and that commercial logic is often beyond writers' control. Moreover, with a detailed textual analysis, this thesis proves that the subaltern characters' postcolonial resistance is made possible via the recontextualization of the interlocking social structure and the meanings of their seemingly trivial acts of transgressions.
Chapter One focuses on the interlocking social structure from outside the novel to within. I will prove that despite Ahmad's criticism of Roy's using sexual escapism as the solution to political struggles, the subaltern characters' acts of (sexual) transgressions can produce meanings to destabilize the social structure. Chapter Two deals with Roy's narrative strategies through which she allows her subaltern characters to speak in her novel, refuting Huggan's criticism of Roy's catering to Western readership with "aesthetic decontextualization" of exotic codes.
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