In Henry James's The Golden Bowl, although Maggie Verver is in love with her husband, her silence, regarding his affair, is quite enigmatic. However, in the theory of masquerade, which Joan Riviere proposed in a 1929 seminal essay, this idea was deconstructed. According to the theory of masquerade, women submit to the social codes by wearing a mask of womanliness while at the same time surreptitiously following their own phallic desires. Therefore, even their typically virtuous act of silence can be understood as a womanly disguise which is inherently a masquerade. This paper aims to analyze Maggie's silence, despite the infidelity and betrayal shown to her by her friend and husband, in order to demonstrate how, according to Riviere, her silence and quietness are not signs of victimhood in the patriarchal society but only tactics which she consciously uses to empower herself and achieve what she wants by the end of the novel. In light of the theories of Joan Riviere, this paper intends to illustrate how (in the context of James's narrative strategies) Maggie comes to empower herself without radically intimidating the value structure of the Jamesian patriarchal society and by the use of silence as a mask of womanliness.
The study intends to examine three major plays of Sam Shepard –True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind– to explore the underlying reasons for the characters’ social transgression in the light of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intimate revolt. Notwithstanding that all the characters feel alienated from reality and other members of society, there is a marked divergence between male and female characters in the approach they adopt to revolt against the societal norms so as to transform their lives. The findings suggest that while men seem less likely to revolt against the rules of patriarchy, it is predominantly women who embark on revolting against the psyche-numbing society to bring jouissance to their once-predetermined meaningless lives. The study comes to the conclusion that by reconnecting with their personal desire and preserving their individuality in a society that hegemonizes its subjects’ identities, women engage in what Kristeva calls ‘intimate revolt’ and become the forces of power and change in the modern world.
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