Displacement, Belonging and Marginalisation in Michèle Roberts's Daughters of the House and Hilary Mantel's The Giant, O'Brien

Abstract

Hilary Mantel y Michèle Roberts nacieron y fueron educadas en Inglaterra y por ello se les considera escritoras de la corriente literaria dominante; sin embargo, ambas crecieron en entornos ajenos al Reino Unido, Francia en el caso de Roberts e Irlanda en el de Mantel.

Por esta razón, en muchas de sus novelas han tratado temas que han sido tradicionalmente abordados por escritores de los márgenes, especialmente por estudios postcoloniales, tales como el desplazamiento, la marginación y la búsqueda de la propia identidad. Este ensayo muestra cómo estas dos escritoras se han acercado a estos conceptos en las dos novelas donde están más presentes: Daughters of the House de Roberts y The Giant, O'Brien, de Mantel, y cómo, a pesar de que el sentimiento de desarraigo es similar en ambos casos, hay una gran diferencia entre los personajes que sufren ese desplazamiento: la relación entre las dos culturas donde viven, Francia e Inglaterra o Irlanda e Inglaterra.

Hilary Mantel and Michèle Roberts were born and raised in England and are therefore considered as mainstream writers; however they both come from different origins outside the UK, France in the case of Roberts and Ireland in the case of Mantel. For this reason, in many of their novels they have both dealt with topics that have been traditionally approached by writers of the so-called margins, especially by postcolonial studies, such as displacement, marginalisation and the search for one's own identity. In this paper, I have tried to show how these writers have approached these concepts in the novels where they are more clearly present, Roberts's Daughters of the House and Mantel's The Giant, O'Brien, and how, even though the feeling of displacement is similar, there is a difference in the characters who suffer from displacement in both novels, which is the relationship between the two cultures they live in, France and England or Ireland and England.