MYTH, MEMORY, AND SOCIO-CULTURAL REPRESENTATION IN THE SELECTED FICTION OF SARAH JOSEPH

Abstract

This paper examines the intricate relationship between mythical reconstruction, cultural remembrance, and feminist resistance in Sarah Joseph's major fictional works, including Aalahayude Penmakkal, Mattathi, Othappu, and Gift in Green. Employing postcolonial feminist and ecofeminist analytical frameworks, the study investigates how Joseph strategically deploys myth and collective memory as narrative instruments to interrogate entrenched patriarchal ideologies, caste hierarchies, and religious orthodoxies within Kerala's socio-cultural landscape. Through close textual analysis, the research demonstrates that Joseph's fiction transforms inherited mythological narratives and community memories into sites of feminist contestation, wherein marginalized female subjects—including Dalit women, Syrian Christian communities, and ecologically displaced populations—articulate alternative modes of subjectivity and resistance. The analysis reveals how Joseph's narrative strategies, particularly her employment of child narrators, non-linear temporalities, and corporeal language reminiscent of écriture féminine, dismantle phallocentric discourse while foregrounding women's embodied experiences of trauma, desire, and survival. The study further explores the convergence of gender oppression and environmental degradation in Joseph's ecofeminist imagination, arguing that her texts position ecological memory and women's relationship to land and water as crucial resources for political resistance against developmental capitalism.

By reinterpreting Christian theological myths of chastity, virginity, and sacrificial motherhood alongside indigenous eco-spiritual narratives, Joseph creates what this paper terms a "feminist counter-archive" that documents subaltern women's histories while challenging dominant historiographical erasures. The findings underscore Joseph's significant contribution to Indian feminist literary discourse, demonstrating how her reworking of myth and mobilization of memory expand possibilities for female agency, historical consciousness, and liberatory imagination within contemporary Malayalam fiction and beyond.