!Culture/identity Essay Plan

God of Small Things and Portrait of the Artist

What is the underpinning tragedy of ‘God of Small Things’? (point and evidence)

The existence and breaking of the ‘love laws’

which are rooted in the deeply entrenched Indian caste system and social hierarchy, which forbid breaches in convention

The love laws denote “who should be loved, and how. And how much”

Point and evidence about the destructive, unjust nature of the love laws

• focus on people who don’t fit into the spaces the laws say they should

• banana jam introduced in chapter 1 - prefaces the narrative

• according to the food authorities (“FPO”) the banana jam was “too thin for jelly and too thick for jam”, therefore it was illegal for them to sell it as it was “an ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency”

• ∴ saying Ammu and Velutha can’t love each other because Velutha is an “Untouchable” is just as ridiculous as not being able to sell the banana bread

dilution of culture in God of Small Things (point and evidence)

• illustrated through the experiences of the “Hotel People” who manufacture a cultural experience for their Western guests

• “Ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos”

• use of violent lexicon to verbally enact the feeling of violation and distortion of culture

What is the effect of Joyce disentangling Stephen’s Catholicism from his Irishness?

• reimagines identity as dynamic rather than inherited

• situates Stephen as a figure who embodies the modernist imperative to live within, rather than deny, contradiction