Postcolonial Gothic: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Sobhraj Case
Gothic motifs are exceptionally prevalent in postcolonial fiction, even from very different locations. Classic postcolonial transformations of Gothic emanate from the Caribbean (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), Africa (Bessie Head's A Question of Power) and India (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust). In Canada, Gothic is almost the norm, whether in Margaret Atwood's comic Lady Oracle, or Anne HA©bert's HA©loise (the QuA©bA©cois tale of a vampire who haunts the Paris Metro), or Bharati Mukherjee's Asian-Canadian Jasmine. Not surprisingly, when the heroine of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women thinks of writing about Jubilee, Ontario, she promptly chooses to begin a Gothic novel. Nearer home, ghosts wander the pages of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, and J. G. Farrell begins his Empire Trilogy in a decaying Great House, complete with mysteriously fading heroine, demonic cats, and an ever-widening crack in the external wall. Further afield, what is lsak Dinesen doing on a coffee farm in Kenya in 1931 but writing Seven Gothic Tales? It is Dinesen's activity which first raises the question of the ideological consequences of the transfer of a European genre to a colonial environment. Gothic does not always travel well. As Eric O. Johannesson was swift to note, Dinesen creates a fictional Africa