Interrogating the Self: Colonialism and Female Identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives

Abstract

This article analyses the representation of identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives. It is an autobiographical text focusing on issues of guilt, complicity and entanglement that resonates with a literature of shame, as recently identified in postcolonial studies. Vita, the protagonist, expresses how she is creatively blocked by her guilt as a beneficiary of apartheid and this is mirrored in her relationship with Royce where she is a beneficiary of his powerful and wealthy patronage. Vita’s story, highlighting feminist issues of complicity, is also a metafictional device that represents the writer’s feelings about her post-apartheid, colonial identity. In a series of confessional letters between herself and Royce, Vita maps her journey to selfhood. My paper critically examines the literary and deconstructive features of Dovey’s text in which a rite of passage is represented as a textual interrogation of self.

Keywords:

• Dovey
• novel
• feminist complicity
• post-apartheid identity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rose Symonds

Rose Symonds completed her MA in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, under the supervision of Prof. Cheryl Stobie. This article is an edited version of a chapter of the dissertation.