Water in the Construction of Michele Roberts's in-between Characters

Abstract

Water has been considered as a symbol of different and even contradictory issues: life, power, maternity, regeneration or purification, but also chaos, destruction and death. Similarly, it has also been connected with the feminine and the unconscious, topics which have been extensively dealt with by Michèle Roberts in her writings. Analogously, in many of Roberts’s works, water appears as a key element in the construction of identity for her in-between characters. Even though Roberts has had no experience related to the postcolonial world, she has dealt with topics such as hybridity and otherness in herwritings. In this paper, I will show how the element of water is closely linked with some of the most recurrent topics in Michèle Roberts’s writings, especially in the construction of a true identity for those characters who, as Roberts’s herself, belong to two different cultures and are therefore feel as foreign in both.