LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 22:4 April 2022
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Representation of Mother's Death in Peter Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Musaib Junejo


Courtesy: www.amazon.com

Abstract

This paper aims at representing the mother's death in Peter Handke's novel A Sorrow Beyond Dreams written in 1972. The novel is semi-autobiographical which depicts his own mother's suicide and death and is considered as one of his finest works. Handke has used imagination, dialogues, thoughts, emotions and description of characters and events as real events and they are shown as historical fiction. Throughout the novel Handke has portrayed the story of his mother's life and death which starts in a small village of Austria, where women's lives are full of poverty and hopelessness. Handke through a statement for his mother: "a girl's future was a joke" shows his mother's later experiences: like her marriage without love, her broken dreams, and her life in a society where her true feelings and personality are denied by people of society.

On one hand, Handke shows the repression and hopelessness of women in Austria, and on the other hand he shows the strong and courageous side of women. When his mother leaves her home at the age of 15 to pursue her career, she tries to be free from repression courageously, illegally crosses the borders, reads literature, and involves herself in politics, after all she suffers from a psychological illness and calmly commits suicide which is the actual purpose of Handke behind writing A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. This paper explores women's empowerment through the life of Handke's mother and women's sufferings and death through the death of Handke's mother in his finest novel A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.

Keywords: Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Mother's Death, empowerment, sufferings and struggles of women.

1. Introduction

The lives of women in Austria were full of poverty and hopelessness. They were always suppressed, repressed and neglected by society, their feelings, emotions and personality were also neglected by society for which women's future and career was a joke, they were bound in a loveless marriage, their dreams were shattered and their life was dominated by a forceful society. Though there were some women like Peter Handke's mother who bravely tried to break the norms and customs of society. In order to pursue their career they left their home at very young age and involved themselves in politics as well but their struggles were also shattered by their psychological disturbance because of the pressures of society which brought them to end their life. They were affected by the relationship between the pressures of society and their own psychological disturbance when social and political pressures brought depression, fear, rigidity and self-blame in them.

The life, struggles and death of Austrian women are depicted by Peter Handke in his finest work A Sorrow Beyond Dreams in which he has represented his own mother's life and death story through the character of an old woman who at the age of 51 commits suicide, though he has not used the name of her mother as well as the woman's character, he has shown the character by using "She" but it clearly represents the whole life and death story of his own mother who also commits suicide after struggling a lot. So, the novel is known as semi-autobiographical and is considered as one of his finest works by some critics.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Musaib Junejo
M.Phil. Scholar
University of Sindh, Jamshoro
musaib.junejo@scholars.usindh.edu.pk
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