Trials of Rituals: Female Bonding and the Colonial "Other" in Marianne Wiggins's John Dollar

Abstract

My claim is that by projecting backwards into the past present homophobic and xenophobic attitudes, Wiggins makes a forceful attempt in reassessing their roots in colonial literature. The context Wiggins reexamines addresses above all the silenced subject matter of interracial lesbian desire. Does this imply that John Dollar is a 'lesbian text?' What is a lesbian text, after all? The willingness to decipher a hidden subtext or to engender an ending that is not the anticlimactic hoax, which the 'failed' solution of John Dollar at first glance seems to be, envisions a lesbian narrative space of transgression. It is from this focus that I attempt to queerly read Wiggins's resignifying narrative strategies as means to undermine the master plot which, as Farwell puts it, 'is not just androcentric or phallocentric, it is also basically heterosexual' (95).