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Munger, Emma

English

2007

MA

This thesis examines the late Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera's novel, Butterfly Burning, through the theoretical lenses of both postcolonial and ecofeminism. In so doing, this thesis explores socio-economic issues of race, class, and gender in colonial Africa while giving particular attention to policies of apartheid and land appropriation and their psychological impacts on the colonized population. In this vein, I argue that the experience of the novel's protagonist, Phephelaphi, is one that is defined by resistance to what some feminist critics have termed "double colonization'' wherein women are oppressed by both the colonial administration and by patriarchal values of traditional African societies.
In the dynamic that is established in the relationship between Phephelaphi and her partner, Fumbatha, Phephelaphi's body becomes a site upon which Fumbatha attempts to mimic the colonizer's exercise of authority and control. Thus, faced with both public and private modes of domination, Phephelaphi struggles to exert independence, find her own voice, and establish a sense of autonomy and self worth. Such struggles lead Phephelaphi to perform acts of violence-the heroine aborts her own child and in the final scene sets herself on fire. Rather than viewing Phephelaphi's actions as immoral or born of desperation and powerlessness, Vera's writing forces the reader to find beauty and hope in their emergence and to interpret these experiences as radical acts of resistance, self-expression, and agency.