Banani Biswas

This study attempts to discern the meaning of unspoken works related to both African and African American women as presented in the novels of the leading African American writer, Alice Walker. Therefore, the discourse of the silence is central to the study. It deploys different concepts from linguistic and critical theories and offers a close reading of relevant parts of the texts to grab the discursive void, evaporating the very generic experience of African originated women in America or elsewhere. Correspondingly, it contributes to Black Feminist discourse by registering into academia the systematic discussion of ignored, collateral experience of Black women. The study concedes that in mainstream academia the absence of discussion regarding Black women’s suppression, oppression, and commodification is, in fact, multi-patterned primarily caused by the intersectional systems of racism, sexism, and classism which Walker delineate with. Exploring and naming out that silence generating factors, this paper gives words to the traumatic wound conserved deep in the collective unconscious of Black women as a whole. While exploring those reasons, it argues that pulling those women’s issues off the discussion is more a politicised venture than anything else of western academia.

The paper aims at studying the patterns of the male fantasy in Robert Coover’s erotically charged short story, “The Babysitter”. The story centres on the image of a Babysitter stepping into a bathtub for having a shower while the phone in the living room rings, driving her out of the tub to answer it by the time the towel wrapping her pulls off giving a view of her naked body. In a rapid succession of one hundred and seven fragmented paragraphs, this image vividly recurs in and rolls up through the fantasies to fantasies of its male characters, blurring and overlapping these, creating fresh new versions of the story from the Babysitter being raped to the Babysitter saved from being raped. The study examines a clear line of development in the fantasies of each of these characters. Considering age, sexual orientation, experiments, adjustment and satisfaction, personality, and other socio-cultural variables, it (re)conceptualizes their fantasies as falling into certain patterns like ob...