Keywords
incest, sexual, violation, defilement, molestation.
Abstract
Muthoni Garland’s Tracking the Scent of My Mother is a novella that portrays incest as a form of sexual violation. This paper is a close reading of Garland’s Tracking the Scent of My Mother. Besides close reading, textual reading has been used to offer a critical appreciation of the text and to interrogate the connotations of the language used explicitly and implicitly in the text. Tracking the Scent of My Mother can be classified as feminist literature and hence read from a feminist eye. The theoretical approach used in this paper is feminist theoretical criticism. Feminist theoretical criticism is concerned with the woman as the ‘other’ and aims at assigning ‘self’ to the woman. The descriptions of the female self that is produced in this text is part of the context in which women live. Since this novella is narrated from a feminist eye, it provides a female’s perspective on incest as a form of sexual assault and its effects on the victim.
