The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali's Brick Lane

Abstract

Monica Ali's phenomenally popular debut novel Brick Lane has often been accused of reinforcing rather than challenging stereotypes of cultural otherness. Interestingly, literary critics who have championed the novel have not sought to deny that it employs stereotypes, but rather to emphasize its sense of knowing irony in doing so. Critically analysing debates which have attempted to assert that Brick Lane either propagates or ironically subverts cultural stereotypes, this article scrutinizes the valency of the kinds of “postmodern” readings of the novel which have thus far prevailed. I argue that the major concern of the novel is not the destabilization of stereotypes but the celebration of the potential for adaptation in both individuals and societies. I argue that Ali employs stereotypes as counterpoints in order to further emphasize her protagonist's final integration into contemporary British society, and that the novel might usefully be understood as a “multicultural Bildungsroman”.

Moda, subalternidad y ecofeminismo en clave socio-literaria: Brick Lane, de Monica Ali

“…La historia de Hasina, marcada por la explotación física, económica y sexual, ofrece un retrato de Daca que no ha estado exento de críticas y que, como apunta Michael Perfect (2008), es mucho más desolador y represivo que el que aparece en el propio estudio de Kabeer. Por el contrario, Londres emerge como la ciudad de las oportunidades y, revirtiendo en cierto modo las conclusiones a las que llega Kabeer en su estudio, v en Brick Lane, son las mujeres asentadas en Londres (Razia y Nazneen) y no aquellas localizadas en Bangladés (Hasina) las que consiguen finalmente un empoderamiento individual y económico prolongado a través de su participación en el sector textil (Perfect, 2008, p. 118).…”

Epistolary craft and the literary field

“…The aspirations of the novel are sedimented in this original title. Ali appears to take the "seven seas" reference directly from Kabeer's The Power to Choose, a study which she acknowledges at the back of her novel (415), and which, as Michael Perfect (2008) has shown, influences the content of the published narrative. Kabeer names her sixth chapter "Across seven seas and thirteen rivers" (2000: 193-229), and adds a footnote to describe how the phrase comes from a collection of Bengali children's stories called Thakur Ma-er Jhuli.…”

“…The few comments that have been directed at Hasina's letters tend to broadly accept the assumptions that have historically accompanied the reception of epistolary narratives, viewing the letter as a transparent window onto the soul of the letter writer. Hasina's letters are often cited as evidence of her "helplessness" and the way in which she primarily functions as a stereotype of an oppressed, uneducated Muslim woman (Hiddleston, 2005;Perfect, 2008;Sandhu, 2003), and readers tend to assume that the letters offer an enticing insight into the intimate world of two Bangladeshi women. Some critics mistakenly describe the language of Hasina's letters as a "pidgin" English (Chakrabarti, 2004;Sandhu, 2003), and there is even a tendency to assume that Hasina is "illiterate" or "semi-literate" (Cormack, 2006;Mullen, 2004), when the narrative repeatedly describes Hasina's writing process, from Nazneen's concern about her sister's uncharacteristically hurried "scrawl" (37), to Hasina's frequent references to her own writing process (47; 121; 128; 129; 134; 137; 142).…”

2000s: Expansion and change

“…Emphasizing the ways in which the novel draws attention to the dominant discourses and stereotypes that mediate the public understanding of British Muslims, Hiddlestone offers a nuanced account of the rhetorical significance of the novel's shifting frames of representation; in her argument, such a technique works to complicate attempts to read the novel as a realist representation of Brick Lane. By contrast, Michael Perfect's (2008) essay on Brick Lane focuses on the significance of the novel's generic codes. Specifically, Perfect reads Nazneen's integration into British society as an example of what he calls the multicultural Bildungsroman.…”