Female identity in George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter

Year 2016, Volume: 2 Issue: 4, 1200 - 1206, 01.10.2016

Ayla Oğuz

https://doi.org/10.24289/ijsser.278995

Abstract

As a problematic concept,
identity refers to versatile complexities in its definition and it is clear
that there has been an explosion about searching the concept. The question of
subjectivity together with its formation process has a great importance in the
revelation of one’s personality and in the representation of one’s identity. It
can be said that a psychoanalytically influenced feminism and cultural
criticism shows itself as a result of this process. In this context, all kinds
of cultural identity forms such as ethnic, racial, gender and woman etc. are
suitable to be studied in terms of essentialist or anti-essentialist concept of
identity. For Etienne Wenger, who is an
educational theorist, the concept of identity is related with such terms like
participation, non-participation, exclusion and inclusion. He claims that one’s
identity determines his/her ability or inability in terms of the meanings that
shape his/her form of belonging. In George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter, Dorothy Hare is the main character
in the novel and he is the clergyman’s daughter living in a small village,
Knype Hill, in the county of Suffolk. Although Dorothy performs good works, and
cultivates good thoughts she has to regain her life and accept sameness in
Foucauldian concept of identity. In the study, Dorothy’s identity is analysed
in terms of essentialist and anti-essentialist identity forms both in order
to show her ability in her adaptation to society and to define her position and
her problems of identity as a female in Britain in the beginning of the
twentieth century.

   

Keywords

Female, Identity, Essentialist, Anti-Essentialist, Participation, Non-Participation, Ability, Clergyman, Sameness

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