AMBIGUITY OF EXPERIENCE OF GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND POWER IN INTO THE WATER BY PAULA HAWKINS

Abstract

Feminism has provided critics and researchers with a helpful methodology to scrutinize those literary works that revolve around women’s repressive conditions in patriarchal societies. Benefitting from the feminist approach to the analysis of literary works aims at forming and setting equal civil, political, financial, and societal rights for women. Depending on its cultural or political goals, feminism is viewed as a movement to attain equality for women in various areas. The present study uses a feminist technique along with Foucault’s theory regarding power to study Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. The significance of choosing Foucault is that he censures the customary manners of referring to the subject as a practical, united entity with a fixed foundation or soul; he asserts that, “Nothing in man- not even his body - is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men” (Foucault, 2012, pp. 87-88). It is also discussed that women’s oppression and difficulties form an important part of Hawkins’s writings. Women in her novels all have to struggle hard in order to gain power and overcome the limitations imposed on them due to their gender and sexuality.