Amal Sarkar
Volume-XI, Issue-III, April 2023
Volume-XI, Issue-III, April 2023 | ||
Published Online: 30.04.2023 | Page No: 99-105 | |||
The Female Revenge: A Study of Bessie Head’s The Collector of Treasure Amal Sarkar, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jatindra Rajendra Mahavidyalaya, Amtala, Murshidabad, West Bengal, India | |
Colonialism has been a destructive force of nature that has affected colonized peoples at
different level and literature has been a reflection of this dark part of human history, among
which short stories reveal almost exactly what larger literary genres maintain in terms of
ideology and culture. Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasure” speaks of the gracious,
merciful women (house wives) who seem to be searching for scrapes of happiness and their
earnest desire to live a peaceful life in a damned, insufferable male dominated world where
most of the people became desperate and libertine after independence due to the effect of
colonialism. Almost all the female characters in the story “The Collector of Treasure”,
Dikeledi, Kebonye, Otsetwe, Monwana and Galeboe except Kenalepe protest against the
discriminative patriarchal society which has been treating them as inferior to man. This
essay attempts to shed light on how the simple amiable affectionate tolerable women (like
Dikeledi) become so violent, terrible and revengeful and the murderers of mariticide by
estranging the genitals of their husbands. This was an attempt by the oppressed women who
were shackled by their own negative image, by centuries of interrogation of ideologies of
patriarchy and gender hierarchy. The revolt of the female against the male by cutting of the
genitals of their voluptuous husbands by the female characters is seen as a de
(con)struction of phallocratic society. | |
Keywords: Patriarchy, Revenge, Conflict, Womanhood, Sex, Violence, Castration, colonialism. |