Rahmawati 1
The Complicated Relationships of the Characters in Only a Girl:
A Post-colonialism Criticism
Nanda Putri Rahmawati
“….POSTCOLONIALISM, invites you through a slightly larger door into the next
stage of history, after which you emerge, fully erect, into the brightly lit and noisy
HYBRID STATE.”
(Frantz Fanon)
Abstract
This paper analyzes Only a Girl, written by Lian Gouw, and draws on Post-colonial theory through the lens of one of the most important Post-Post-colonial thinkers, Homi K. Bhabha. Post-colonial criticism examines the relationship between the subject and the marginalized. Using Homi K. Bhabha’s works about mimicry and ambivalence, this paper is going to explore how the Chinese characters survive in Indonesia at that time. Homi K. Bhabha, in his theory of mimicry, examines how the marginalized mimic the subject. In Only a Girl, the Chinese family, as the inferior, tries to adopt the Dutch tongue and culture, which the marginalized consider as the superior ones. But on the other side, there is also ambivalence, or a love-hate feeling that the Chinese characters experience. Applying the theory to the novel will make readers think not only about mimicry and ambivalence as it exists in the novel, but also how and why those actions happened in the past and perhaps continue to happen.
