Sadomasochism and Stoicism in Debbie Tucker Green’s Dirty Butterfly and Tanika Gupta’s Inside Out

Abstract

This paper sets out to articulate the reasons why Jo’s husband and Godzilla in Debbie Tucker Green’s Dirty Butterfly and Tanika Gupta’s Inside Out respectively, are sadomasochistic to their white spouses on the one hand, and why the white women, Jo and Chloe, stoically remain in their abusive situations. The study is hinged on the hypothesis that, the two black men, Jo’s husband and Godzilla, in the two texts use sadomasochism to assert their hyper sexuality and as a medium of revenge and resistance (against past black and white relational unfairness) on their white spouses who exercise stoicism to express their frustrations and emotional attachments to their virulent black sexual partners. Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial psychoanalysis is the theoretical tool employed in the interpretation and analysis of the play texts under review. The application of the tenet of the black man having an insatiable sexual desire for a white spouse or sexual partner is effective, since both texts explore the virulent sexuality and aggressive violence of two black men on two white women. The methodology employed in the analysis is an interpretative, comparative and contrastive one. The paper comes out with the findings that Jo’s husband and Godzilla brandish their sadomasochism not only to assert their psyched hyper sexuality on white women whom they had been deprived of sexually for centuries, but to also avenge themselves for past black dehumanisation by callous and racist colonialists and imperialists. On their part, the two white spouses, Jo and Chloe, manifest stoicism because they do not only depend on their black partners financially, but are unconsciously enjoying black hyper sexuality which they had been denied for centuries, lack meaningful love/marriage relationships with white men and the absence of community ethics and social responsibility. Finally, the paper argues that literature, in its critical realist tradition, contributes immensely to foreground Green and Gupta’s denunciation of sexual, physical and mental violence not only in the British society, but everywhere in the world.