Engendering Prostitution: Reading Prostitution as a ‘Magico-Realist’ Agent in Gabriel Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores Bilal Mohammad Post Graduate Student, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India Email id: mohammadbilal20023@gmail.com
Online Published on 26 February, 2024. Abstract The dominant culture views prostitution as a commercial act of engaging in sexual contact in exchange for favors such as money or other high-end goods and is considered a profane and immoral activity. Despite working in one of the oldest professions, the prostitute community faces various levels of marginalization by society’s dominant group. Marginalization is believed to be a multidimensional, multi-causal, and historical process, fundamentally questioned and challenged through literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, renowned for challenging and undermining the accepted beliefs of hegemonically approved societal ideologies, incorporates prostitution into several of his writings, including the novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores. This paper, differentiating from major critical research, analyzes how the novella portrays prostitutes as “magico-realist” agents, highlighting Marquez’s counter-ideology that challenges traditional views of prostitution. The objective of this paper is achieved by shedding light on how prostitution in the novella bridges the real and the unnatural. The magico-realist portrayal of prostitution, experienced by the narrator through random sexual hook-ups, magically transforms the gelled ninety-year-old narrator from a cold casual sex-seeker to an earnest romantic lover. Additionally, the paper explores how a girl prostitute breaks away from past notions and serves as a bridge between the past and present narrative, facilitating the interchange between the magical and the real. Top Keywords Prostitution, Magic-realism, Sex-seeker, Romantic lover. Top |