Fiction and Criticism towards Class Divisions and Gender Inequality

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they are not in fact is an example of hypocrisy: it is the hypocrisy of colonialism. In this sense, Alice’s tongue becomes a medium for a social criticism as her mother tongue, the language she speaks, that is, English, becomes a tool in the colonial mission⁵⁴: rulers manipulate the language. To sum up, her tongue reflects how she alienates herself from the British colonial policy: each criticism towards such a policy of her motherland is the expression of her alienation. It is a postcolonial tongue criticising colonialism, and this tongue is revealed in fiction by means of fiction, her biographical book and the cyber-game revealing her life, so fiction not only enables her to express hypocrisy in many institutions of her motherland and so her alienation but also makes her find ways of expressing her past stories.

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70). As understood from the quotation, Mrs. Vetorix makes a distinction between the male and female genders in the choice of a novel by labelling the novels as the ones for girls and the ones for boys: “school stories for girls, adventure books for boys” (25).

Besides the gender inequality, the inequality in the class system is depicted in the novels Mrs. Vetorix chooses for Alice: “[t]he bad girls, the cheats, the tattle-tales [are] always fat or [has] pimples or [are] scholarship girls. The good girls [come] from titled families and [are] beautiful and clever.” (70) That is, Alice can understand the differences between the classes, and she can see that there is inequality between the genders by means of fiction. In this way, she educates herself on various forms of discrimination by the attitude of Mrs. Vetorix, and by reading fiction, that is by reading books. The relationship between alienation and fiction in this sense is that being alienated from a society enables a character to understand his/her position in a society, and Alice’s recognition of the existence of class distinctions among Pākehās and between Māories and Pākehās and her recognition of gender inequality happens through fiction: Alice chooses books to read, and if she does not choose these particular books about colonialism that Mrs. Vetorix does not want her to read, she may not be informed about class-distinctions among Pākehās and between Māories and Pākehās and gender inequality; hence, she may not be informed that working-class Pākehās are alienated from the middle-class Pākehās because they are otherized by the middle-class ones as they are thought to be only subservient to the middle-class ones and to have a lower position that hinders intermingling of the two classes; to quote from the novel, Alice expresses her alienated position as follows:

There was a strict hierarchy in that house and I was right at the bottom. The girl they had before me was a Maori girl and they sacked her for being too friendly with the children, and for being too light fingered. That’s why they hired me,

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because I was straight out of England. They believed that I had been trained to be subservient.

“I was afraid of Mrs Pink the housekeeper. She was English too, and she really believed in the class system. She told me it was a privilege to work for the quality, and that I must never forget my place. She had a way of looking at me as if I was scum. Low class. (68)

Alice’s quotation above unravels the class distinctions among Pākehās and between Māories and Pākehās. In the house of Mrs. Vetorix, where the housekeeper is Mrs. Pink, a voice of Pākehās in the novel, Alice is hired as a servant. Her position as a working-class person delineates how she is regarded by the middle-working-class: Alice is seen as a scum, a low class, and she is subservient to the middle-class. As for the distinction between Māories and Pākehās, Alice understands that for Mrs. Vetorix and Mrs. Pink Māories and Pākehās should not intermingle; they have different positions, and a Māori cannot be a friend to a Pākehā because becoming a friend to a Pākehā blurs the boundaries between these two groups; in this regard, Māories and Pākehās belong to different social classes. Then reading fiction enables Alice to come to an understanding of her position in the society she lives in: she is alienated by middle-class Pākehās as a working-class Pākehā, and it also enables Alice to see that colonialism may lead to harsh consequences like wars and that there is class distinction and discrimination that regards the working-class female sex as bad girls and the cheats whereas the female sex of the titled class as beautiful and clever good girls. Upon seeing that British people in Britain and British settlers in New Zealand act in a hypocritical way as they say that in a colony these working-class children can have a chance to prosper themselves by means of a good marriage but they condescend them by regarding them as scums and subservient groups, Alice criticizes discrimination against working-class people and

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gender inequality. This criticism towards discrimination against working-class people and gender inequality is both unearthed via reading fiction and vocalized thanks to fiction that discriminates the groups under scrutiny: when Mrs. Vetorix gives Alice a book for a girl to read, Alice states, “It was like being brainwashed. I had swapped the wonderful books of Emain for this sort of puerile nonsense” (70). Then for Alice, the conception of fiction serving class distinction and gender inequality is nonsense. It does not reflect the real function of fiction, which is making the voice heard and finding the true self by expressing the self.

To sum up, by means of reading fiction or explaining her experiences in a book and cyberspace, Alice recognises her alienation from others, either from the British settling in New Zealand or from the New Zealander as the native of the country. In this way, she comes to an understanding of herself by understanding the limitations of the people around her and of her failing body that cannot fly towards the North and Britain as her mind does, the underlying causes of her experiences in her life, the hypocrisy in the colonial mission, and different notions like class distinction and gender inequality that determine the place of a human being in a society. It is for this reason that at the end of the novel, she develops an understanding of the necessity of being open to different alternatives to express herself as a postcolonial character having suffered from colonialism, and this expression of the self happens through fiction, both through the biographical book of her life and through cyberspace.

3. Alienation and Posthumanism: Cyberspace as a Medium to Lessen the Sense