Silencing Women’s Voices Through Patriarchal Language: Dale Spender’s Man Made Language Applied to Burnt Shadows

Abstract

This article aims to explore Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows (2009) by applying Dale Spender’s feminist linguistic theory of Man Made Language (1980). Spender argues that language is written by men, for men and around men to reflect male dominance and to marginalize women’s voices. By the analysis of different female characters in the novel, this research highlights how women are linguistically and socially positioned as widows, outsiders, wives and “others”. This study also investigates how women can resist these limits by use of multiple languages. This article is a contribution to feminist criticism which analyzes South Asian Anglophone fiction through the lens of Dale Spender’s theory of Man Made Language (1980) which is relatively an underexplored area.