MY CLEANER: HELP OR FOE?

Authors

  • Gönül BAKAY Bahçeşehir University in İstanbul, Turkey. Contact address: gonulbakay@gmail.com

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2019.1.01

Keywords:

racism, clash of cultures, Uganda, London, blacks, whites, understanding, cosmopolitan.

Abstract

My Cleaner: Help or Foe? Maggie Gee’s My Cleaner tackles the problem of racism and family life in the lives of two women who intend to support or “help” each other and end up bringing out the worst in each other. Profound racism and an acute sense of class difference alienate the two women: Vanessa Henman and Mary Tendo, her cleaner from Uganda. The theoretical background of the paper is offered by the theories of Paul Gilroy.

REZUMAT. Menajera mea: ajutor sau dușman? Romanul Menajera mea a lui Maggie Gee se ocupă de problema rasismului şi a familiei în vieţile a două femei care intenţionează să se sprijine sau să se “ajute” reciproc şi sfârşesc prin a aduce ceea ce e mai rău pentru fiecare. Rasismul profund şi un act simţ al diferenţei de clasă le alienează pe cele două femei: Vanessa Henman şi Mary Tendo, menajera ei din Uganda. Baza teoretică a acestei lucrări este oferită de către teoriile lui Paul Gilroy.

Cuvinte cheie: rasism, confruntare între culturi, Uganda, Londra, negri, albi, înţelegere, cosmopolit.

Author Biography

Gönül BAKAY, Bahçeşehir University in İstanbul, Turkey. Contact address: gonulbakay@gmail.com

Gönül Bakay is professor at Bahçeşehir University in İstanbul, Turkey. Her teaching expertise covers Women’s Studies and English literature from the eighteenth century to the present. She has published several books in Turkish:Virginia Woolf ve İletişim (Virginia Woolf and Communication), Günümüz Türk Kadını Başarı Öyküleri (Success Stories by ContemporaryTurkish Women), Kadın ve Mekan (Women and Space), and Atatürkü Yaşıyanlar (Memories of Atatürk), and Simone de Beauvoir. Yașami, Felsefesi, Eserleri (Simone de Beauvoir, Her life, Philosophy, and Works). She is also the author of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Their Offspring Frankenstein (Mellen Press, 2016) and is one of the editors of the collection Trading Women, Traded Women: A Historical Scrutiny of Gendered Trading (Peter Lang, 2017). She has also published many articles in Turkish and international journals. Contact address: gonulbakay@gmail.com

References

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Dillon, Sarah and Caroline Edwards (eds). Maggie Gee: Critical Essays. Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2015.

Fischer, Susan Alice. “Faith and Grace: Maggie Gee’s Spiritual Politics.” Maggie Gee: Critical Essays, Gylphi Limited, pp. 209-229.

Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?. Routledge, 2004.

Gee, Maggie. My Cleaner. Saqi, 2005.

---. “Imagining Difference: Girl Writes Boy, White Writes Black.” M. AMENGUAL, M. JUAN and J. SALAZAR (eds), New Perspectives on English Studies, 32nd AEDEAN Conference. Edicions, 2009, pp. 12-18.

Johansen, Emily. “The banal conviviality of neoliberal cosmopolitanism.” Textual Practice, volume 29, issue 2, 2015, pp. 295-314.

Kılıç, Mine Özyurt. Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Özbatak-Avcı, Elif. “Cleaning up the “dirt”: a study of Maggie Gee’s My Cleaner” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, volume 50, issue 4, 2014, pp. 478–491.

STUDIA UBB PHILOLOGIA, Volume 64 (LXIV), No. 1, March 2019

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Published

2019-03-29

How to Cite

BAKAY, G. (2019). MY CLEANER: HELP OR FOE?. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia, 64(1), 7–22. https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2019.1.01

Issue

Volume 64, No. 1, 2019

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2019 Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia

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