Malaysian Gothic: The Motif of Haunting in K.S.

Maniam's "Haunting the Tiger" and

Shirley Lim's "Haunting"
Author(s): ANDREW HOCK-SOON NG
Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (June 2006), pp. 75-87
Published by: University of Manitoba
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030187
Accessed: 26-10-2017 11:12 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030187?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Manitoba is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This essay, read against the frameworks of the male and female Gothic plots, unpacks and reconfigures the motif

of "haunting" to address the interrelation between notions of sexuality, gender, and national belonging in two

Malaysian short stories.

Malaysian Gothic: The Motif of Haunting in

K.S. Maniam's "Haunting the Tiger" and
Shirley Urn's "Haunting"

ANDREW HOCK-SOON NG

Wil iam Hughes demonstrate the affinity between postcolonial literature and the
In Wil iamGothiGothic, especic, theial yrininbothtroductory
discourses'especi al y Hughes
interrogati on and rejdemonstrate in essay
ection of the "Enl ight- both to discourses' the the collection affinity interrogation Empire between and postcolonial and the Gothic rejection , Andrew literature of the Smith "Enlight- and and the
enment notion of rationality" that consigns differences (including racial otherness) to
marginal, demonized spaces (2). Smith and Hughes's collection provides an important
contribution to the comparative studies between literatures of the East and West, espe-
cial y with regard to aspects of the trasgressive and the unspeakable. Asian literature is
rich with narratives of haunting, the uncanny, and the monstrous, but lacks the trope or
a critical heritage to discuss these matters. In the case of postcolonial writing, the deploy-
ment of such a critical tool is particularly helpful: postcolonial literature straddles the lit-
erary inheritance of both its pre-colonial and colonial histories, from which a synthesis
of a post-colonial, and often nationalistic, literature is derived. Such a syncretism of lit-
erary cultures would not be without its resulting ambiguities and fissures, and this is
where the Gothic - with its emphases on liminality, ambiguity, ghosts, transgressions,

Mosaic 39/2 0027-1276-06/075014$02.00Mosaic

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
76 Mosaic 39/2 (June 2006)

and taboos - proves most useful as an aesthetic tool to illuminate the palimpsests that
become "repressed" in the process of writing the nation. Thus, rather than viewing a
Gothic reading of postcolonial writings as once again submitting Asian-ness to a neo-
Imperialistic gaze (a strategy that Gina Wisker employs in her reading of two South
East Asian women writers' work as postcolonial Gothic in the essay "Showers of Stars"),
I am of the opinion that reading postcolonial writings through a Gothic lens can pro-
vide interesting insights into the interstitial conditions, which are often fraught with
fear and confusion, of the postcolonial subject. More importantly, however, is the criti-
cal dialogue that is afforded by such a comparative study. This kind of complementary
reading will significantly sharpen the critical edges of both discourses.
Postcolonial literature within the Asian region has largely been dominated by
South Asian, especially Indian, writers. This has often resulted in the eclipsing of writ-
ers in English, both commercially and critically, from other regions of postcolonial Asia
such as Singapore and Malaysia. Thus, in this essay, I deliberately focus my analysis on
two Malaysian-born writers, K.S. Maniam and Shirley Lim. Of the two, Maniam is
arguably less known to Western readers, but even Shirley Lim (who is now an American
citizen) is better known as a scholar in Asian American studies than for her fiction,
which is predominantly set in her home country. Both writers variously deal with the
cultural anxieties faced by minority or disenfranchised groups as well and their strate-
gies of negotiations in order to assimilate. Because the notion of subjectivity is pro-
foundly captured in their narratives, it is inevitable that their works often touch on
gender and sexual issues as well.
This essay proposes a reading of two short stories by Maniam and Lim, entitled
"Haunting the Tiger" and "Haunting" respectively, from a Gothic perspective. My
invocation of the Gothic as a guiding framework is twofold. First, I look at how the
motif of haunting is reconfigured in both stories to address notions of nationalism/
gender (Maniam) and gender/domesticity (Lim). Second - and related to the heavy
investment of gender concerns in both stories - I appropriate Anne Williams's con-
cept of male and female Gothic to read these two texts and demonstrate the extent to
which they exemplify the theory. As Gothic critics since Ellen Moers (in her Literary
Women) have demonstrated, the Gothic is invariably gendered because it foregrounds
the sexual anxieties experienced by both male and female, especially when encoun-
tering their gendered-other. According to Williams, who draws on Lacanian psycho-
analysis, the predominant difference between the two Gothic forms is that, while male
Gothic reasserts a patriarchal control over the plot (114) in the attempt to repress or
silence the threatening female other, the female Gothic challenges that control in
order to rewrite the "assumptions of patriarchal culture." Hence, for Williams, the

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Andrew Hock-Soon Ng 77

female Gothic is truly subversive - even "revolutionary" (138) - because it "offers an

alternative to the 'universal' pattern of the oedipal structure, the myth that psycho-
analysis has privileged as the creator of the speaking subjects" (138-39). In my reading
of the two stories against such a framework, what becomes evident is that the writer's
gender does not determine the Gothic mode of his or her production; for, although
Maniam's story revolves around the very male theme of nationalism, it is, curiously, a
female Gothic in its emphasis on symbolic castration by an otherwise feminized land-
scape that resists the protagonists desire for belonging. The narrative insinuates an
oedipal struggle disguised as cultural identity formation. The protagonist, Muthu,
attempts, but fails, to "possess" the land (figuratively represented by the tiger) as his
strategy for belonging. In this sense, the story questions the very masculinist agenda of
nationalism and assimilation, and demonstrates that such an agenda is often ruptured
by an attending fear of failing to live up to such objectives, resulting in the subject suf-
fering a metaphorical form of emasculation. Lim s story, on the other hand, despite
foregrounding domestic issues and centring on a female protagonist, cannot be com-
fortably read as a female Gothic plot. Instead, the story works on a powerful level of
irony which invites contrasting interpretations. Rehearsing certain patriarchal assump-
tions about the family and femininity, "Haunting" seems to reinforce them by demon-
strating women's collusion with them. In the story, a woman is haunted not by some
revenant but by the house itself. This suggests a metonymical implication of the
domestic ideology that entraps, in the form of housing, the female victim. Yet, it is not
clear if the story, in the vein of the male Gothic plot, is implying women's acceptance
of their fate, or if it is a female Gothic story that reveals the terrible interpellative power
of patriarchy in entrapping women without their being aware. Evidently, both stories
carry strong Gothic resonance, and it is my intention to deploy Gothic aesthetics to
illuminate their haunted fissures and, more importantly, demonstrate how these two
Malaysian-born writers significantly rework the Gothic tale to interrogate notions of
belonging (both national and sexual) and subjectivity.

Maniam'show
howmembers
membersofwork
this often
groupofnegotiate
this depicts
theirgroup
nationalthebelonging
negotiateand
situation their of the national Indian minority belonging in and Malaysia ethnicity. and
ethnicity.
This usually leads to a painful splitting because the subject must "undergo a highly
complex and problematic process of balance and counterbalance, not between racial
or cultural groups alone, but also between a painful renunciation of his ancestral past
and an osmotic communion with the Malaysian landscape" (Wilson 420). Of course,
as Maniam's fiction reveals, this delicate negotiation is not always successfully made;
the subject's liminal state can sometimes become impossibly daunting, and resolution

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
78 Mosaic 39/2 (June 2006)

ultimately proves unforthcoming. Said coins the term "metaphorical exile" to describe
individuals who have internalized their experience of exile ( Representing 52), which
Bernard Wilson expands by further arguing that the metaphorical exile is also the
"marginalized individual [who] exists in exile in the country of his or her birth
because [ . . . ] he or she is unable to create a sense of country or nation within his or
her soul" (401). In other words, the metaphorical exile is haunted not by what is lost
but by what remains unborn, or uncreated. A case in point is Maniam's "Haunting the
Tiger," an allegorical story which tells of Muthu's endeavour to hunt down the tiger
who roams the nearby jungle with the help of Zulkifli, a sage-like Malay man. Despite
Zulkifli's solemn declaration that the "tiger I'm going to show you cannot be shot"
(Maniam 43), Muthu is determined to confront and destroy the tiger. The tiger, as the
narrative amply implies, is really a metonymy for the land, and by extension, for
belonging. To "possess" (a word which is echoed persistently throughout the story
[42, 43, 44]) it is also to possess the landscape. As few critics have pointed out,
"Haunting the Tiger" is the story of an immigrant's quest for legitimacy as a subject
within a new social environment (see: Wilson; Wicks), a view that becomes pertinent
when the story is compared to Maniam's other narratives such as The Return and In
a Far Country. For me, however, the emphasis on the story's nationalistic implication
(the detachment of the self from the old country in order to embrace and belong to
the new) has largely obscured other important aspects of the story, such as its gender
and sexual politics. In "Haunting the Tiger," Muthus Gothic Bildungsroman is not
only a quest for belonging, but also a quest to redeem his threatened masculinity. His
desire to "possess" the tiger, I argue, symbolizes a ruptured subjectivity that implicates
both nationalistic and sexual dimensions. That he fails, in the end, to even catch a
glimpse of the tiger shatters his masculine pride and legitimate belonging. A "Jungle
Gothic" (Wisker 64), Maniam's story rehearses, to an extent, the Conradian Gothic
tales of unrest where the jungle is a perilous place, "scream [ing] with lives and [shak-
ing] with dangers" (38), but which the hero must nevertheless penetrate in order to
overcome his existential uncertainty. In fact, I want to further suggest that the
(unconscious) Gothic palimpsest that is implicit in Maniam's story is Conrad's Heart
of Darkness, a point which will be briefly examined later.
At the start of the story, we learn that Muthu, when he was eight, had been trau-
matized by his mother's death: "It was not a sense of loss his mother's death brought
but a sense of loss of the self. The person he had known himself to be suddenly died"
(Maniam 37). Psychoanalytically, Muthu's experience can be understood as a failed
oedipalization; because the process of detaching from the mother to identify with the
father is left incomplete, Muthu encounters his mother's demise as also his own.

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Andrew Hock-Soon Ng 79

Muthu s metaphorical death evinces his inability to completely recast the mother as
other; the mirror stage of which Lacan speaks, when the child realizes his separate
existence from his mother and sees, for the first time, "appearing not his ego ideal, but
his ideal ego, that point at which he desires to gratify in himself" (Lacan 257) - that
is, the formation of subjectivity - remains unrealized. Not only is Muthu haunted by
his mother, he is also troubled by his unrealized self - a being without anchor.
Amorphous, Muthu assumes a shape-shifting capacity, refashioning himself to fit in
with whatever occasion is at hand. It is therefore unsurprising that he often dreams of
himself as a chameleon (Maniam 42). An example of his chameleon-like capacity is
evidenced during his initiation into conjugality: "At that other occasion, as he went
through the wedding rituals, he had felt worse [...]. The young woman sitting beside
him wasn't brought any nearer to him: she was a strangeness he had to give himself
up for, to know. He had to, he had told himself, actually jump out of his skin and be
refashioned to fit into the life with her ' (37, emph. mine). As this passage subtly implies,
Muthus shape-shifting, unlike the affirmative postcolonial hybridity that Bhabha
proposes (4) actually reveals his desperate endeavour to deny his own devoided sub-
jectivity. He shape-shifts because he is trying to latch onto an identification that can
provide him with some semblance of stability and direction. In the case of his mar-
riage, Muthu's wife assumes the position of what Ziek would term "/e traite uniare,
the unitary feature: the point of symbolic identification to which the real of the sub-
ject clings" ( Looking 75). Muthus status of being married at least gives him a sense of
a unified, "real" presence (one that is dependent on his wife) as opposed to an
inchoate one. But this attempt at "filling up the void" is fundamentally futile; the per-
sistence of Muthu s restlessness will eventually lead him into the jungle.
The narrative informs us that Muthu s decision to take up hunting is motivated
by his desire to familiarize himself with the landscape, for, as he quips, "'what better
way to know the country than to hunt down a beast that knows it well'" (Maniam 38).
This decision comes at the time when his father is increasingly insistent about return-
ing to their country of origin (Muthu is a second generation Indian in Malaysia),
which has caused one critic to read the story as fundamentally about a nationalistic
rite of passage: he reads Muthu as attempting "to break from his immigrant father's
paternal influence, and become part of his new country" (Wicks 293). Yet, as Zizek
would ask, what is the objet petite a that has set this desire in motion? For surely
Muthu's seemingly abrupt decision to "possess" the land could not have come from
nowhere (one must recall his inchoate existence hitherto this point) but must be
understood as being part of "a formal frame which confers consistency on our desire"
(Plague 39). I suggest that Muthus decision to "possess" the land is instigated by the

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
80 Mosaic 39/2 (June 2006)

same "formal frame of consistency" that led to his marriage; that is, Muthu is on a
quest to find the self of which his mother's death has dispossessed him; or, to rephrase
it in line with the spectral interpretation I am proposing, Muthu is trying to exorcise
the mother's ghost that prevents his "self" from forming.
It is not surprising, then, that in "Haunting the Tiger," the idea of self is also heav-
ily invested with notions of masculinity. The maternal spectre must be banished in
order for Muthu to achieve legitimate belonging within the Symbolic. Also, marriage
cannot save Muthu because, as noted, its stabilizing factor is still premised on the
female as the unitary feature. Muthu is thus emasculated because of the dependence
on his wife for his subjective position. The story metaphorically casts the jungle as a
feminine other that the male hero must penetrate and conquer in order for him to
attain a subjective position and assert his belonging. Here is where the story's nation-
alistic theme and sexual politics are most evidently imbricated, and where the female
Gothic plot is strongly foregrounded. Legitimate belonging is primarily a masculine
pursuit at the expense of the feminine. But the female other in "Haunting the Tiger"
cannot, in the end, be subjected and returns in full force to pre-empt whatever
attempts by the Symbolic to curtail it. Initially, Muthu s targets were wild boars. But
his gun s phallic symbolism quickly loses its potent allure when, during one hunting
incident, he realizes how ineffectual the weapon is (Maniam 39). Interestingly, this
recalls Ziek's observation that "the phallic signifier is [ . . . ] an index of its own impos-
sibility." Its presence already implies "a certain fundamental /oss," or a lack. (Sublime
157). The gun may be Muthu's initial recourse to swaggering masculinity, but the fan-
tasy of its power is quickly subverted by the jungles "silence of impenetrability"
(Maniam 39). To possess the tiger becomes Muthu's final attempt at establishing him-
self in both a spatial and sexual sense: to finally "know" (and therefore belong to) the
land and achieve (male) subjectivity.
Underscoring Muthu's struggle to belong is his contention against the immi-
grant's status as consistently "arriving." Yet, the implicit point in "Haunting the Tiger"
is precisely that the immigrant can never definitively arrive (this theme is consistently
echoed in many of Maniam's works, most evidently in the collection, Arriving . . . and
Other Stories). Even Zulkifli, who has (he claims) lived on the land "for centuries" (42),
would not assert his "right" to ownership because, as he declares, the tiger/land can-
not be possessed by anyone (43). What this implies is that the landscape would wel-
come and accommodate immigrants as long as the latter revere, and do not seek to
possess, it. The only legitimate owner of the land is itself ("The tiger roamed this land
before man's mind learned to remember" [44]). To desire belonging, one must be
"housed," or "possessed," by the land; Muthu almost crosses this important threshold

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Andrew Hock-Soon Ng 81

of revelation, only to pull back at a definitive moment: "Branches and leaves shiver and
perhaps through a trick of the moonlight filtering in, Muthu sees the jungle close in on
him in orange bands and black stripes. His skin begins to burn; he feels his clothes are
no more there on his body. The light scars the land put on him, some months back, are
opening up. He is flowing out towards the stripes, helplessly, when with a cry of
anguish, he wills his consciousness into action" (46). Muthu's desire to belong is
premised on a penetrative attempt to conquer and "know" the landscape. From a psy-
choanalytical viewpoint, it could be argued that his refusal to be "penetrated" is sug-
gestive of the fear of having his masculinity besieged, and thus of becoming feminized
in the process. This hints, once again, at an exclusionary ideology that is inherent in
nationalism. Said observes that "Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a
place, a people, a heritage" ("Reflections" 176), as opposed to the solitary experience of
the exile who is deprived of a "communal habitation" (177). But using "Haunting the
Tiger" as a case in point, such a brand of nationalism always already proscribes an exilic
experience for various disenfranchised groups. Women and immigrants are especially
vulnerable because, while the former, by virtue of their gender, already vexes national-
isms masculinist agenda, the latter, who bring with them their own cultural makeup,
disrupts the singularity of nationalism s hegemonic history. In Maniam s story, it seems
that the landscape opposes such a homogenizing proclivity (and thus refuses national-
ism), and thus directly counters Muthu s ideal for belonging.
There is a point in "Haunting the Tiger" when Muthu's father confesses his error
in coming to Malaysia in search of a new life and identity. His declaration of "Theres
nothing there [...] I was mistaken" (39) strangely echoes Kurtz's famous pronounce-
ment of "The horror! The horror" (Conrad 111); both men have come to realize their
devoided subjectivities in the face of an "impenetrable" landscape. Like Marlow who
resists Kurtzs fate, Muthu initially refuses to admit his unhoused status by recasting
his struggle to belong as an aggressive, masculine performance of hunting and own-
ership - only to be confronted with the "uselessness" (Maniam 39) of his endeavour.
In this sense then, Muthu is closer in spirit (and fate) to Kurtz; for unlike his father,
who projects his own nothingness "out there," Muthu comes to acknowledge that the
void is within him. As he admits in his later years, he has become "nothing." Always
fearful of falling "into a dark deep hole" (46), Muthu ends his days precisely in such a
situation. In Maniam's story, the jungle becomes the space of the Lacanian Real, which
confronts Muthu with his own emptiness. Muthu may adopt a chameleon-like strat-
egy to ignore his own void, but futility is inexorable. In the end, Muthu becomes that
which he has spent a lifetime avoiding - a figurative ghost who does not belong to the
land which houses him. He now literally "haunts" the tiger.

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
82 Mosaic 39/2 (June 2006)

Shirleydomestic
domesticGothic
Lim's tale
Gothic storyan tale
within Asianrepresents
context. Inwithin an a Asian
this story, Jennydifferent context. kind In of this haunting, story, Jenny one and that her reworks husband, the
and her husband,

Jong Ann, have recently moved into his family home, and although she initially luxu-
riates in the peacefulness and relative ease of her domestic existence (because her
mother-in-law and servant, Toh Peh, perform all the household chores), she soon
becomes disturbed by what she believes to be ghosts. As a result, she begins losing her
appetite and becomes almost anorexic (Lim 130-31). Jenny invites her friend, Su
Weng, over to verify the haunting but Su Weng cannot detect anything numinous.
During that visit, Jenny suddenly falls ill and blacks out; when she is later revived, she
learns that she may be pregnant and that Toh Peh has passed away. The enigmatic con-
clusion, in which Jenny comforts her grieving husband with the words, "But she was
old [ . . . ] . We'll find a new servant soon" ( 141 ) provides an important clue as to how to

approach the nature of "haunting" suggested in this story. As it is my intention to read

Lim's narrative from a (male) Gothic perspective, I will intermittently draw a compar-
ison with another domestic Gothic tale, Charlotte Perkin Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-

paper," to demonstrate the way in which both narratives represent the entrapment of
domesticity disguised as "homeliness." Like in Gilman's story, so interpellated is Jenny
by the ideology of domesticity that she will, in the end, embrace her hauntedness.
According to Kate Ferguson Ellis, the female Gothic subverts the domestic ideol-
ogy of the "prelapsarian purity" of the home (Ellis ix); instead, it focuses on the "vio-
lence done to familial bonds that is frequently directed against women" (3), a view
which Tanya Modleski seems to share when she argues that "[in] Gothic novels, the
woman often suspects her lover or her husband of trying to drive her insane, or try-
ing to murder her, or both" (60). Certainly, Gilman's narrative epitomizes such a
Gothic convention. As Michelle A. Mass notes, Gilman's protagonist ultimately suc-
cumbs to her insanity by assuming the position of the entity that haunts her from
behind the yellow wallpaper because "she cannot alter the environment that trauma-
tises her. Her attempts to modify it by increasing her independence of voice and
movements are fruitless. Instead she recreates and relives her situation via the wallpa-
per, still holding to the letter of the law on what it means to be a good girl and a good
wife" (35). For all three theorists, the female Gothic exposes the insidiousness of
domestic ideology and the victimization of women. Here, the husband is the Gothic
villain who has designs on his wife's life, usually disguised as a benevolent regard for
her wellbeing. In Gilman's narrative, the protagonist's husband, John, who is also a
physician, convinces his wife that she is suffering from a "temporary nervous depres-
sion" and that she should be confined in her room for convalescing (Gilman 141). The
protagonist, of course, believes him, but she also suspects that his show of kindliness

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Andrew Hock-Soon Ng 83

may belie a villainous attempt at her sanity and life. As Mass observes, the protago-
nist in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is deeply interpellated in a "web of authority" that
inextricably links "family relationship" to "religious, legal, medical and educational
systems," which construct her as undeniably hysterical (36). Rather than see her
insanity as a mode of escape from the Symbolic, I am more convinced that her com-
plete mental collapse only reinforces her Symbolic construction.
A somewhat similar situation is experienced by Jenny in Lim's "Haunting."
Although less terrifying than Gilman s story, Jennys encounter with spectres is no less
desperate. In some ways, Lim's story is more sinister because the placidity of its con-
clusion belies Jenny's total acceptance of her fate. Rather than revealing the entrapment
of women within a patriarchally derived domestic ideology, this story seems to reassert
this ideology and demonstrate women's collusion with, and approval of, it. For Jenny
does not merely conform to the patriarchally sanctioned version of femininity but
actually comes to desire it. Before arriving at this critical juncture, Jenny represents a
version of the "new woman," as opposed to her mother-in-law whom she sees as epit-
omizing the ideal Peranakan female: submissive, obedient, silent. The Peranakan peo-
ple are Chinese whose lineage can be traced back to the Malaccan Sultanate in the
fifteenth century. These early settlers subsequently adopted the lifestyles of the local
Malay community, transforming, in the process, aspects of their own culture, especial-
ly in terms of food and dress. Yet, despite the Peranakan people's cultural affinity with
the Malays, they remain ethnically Chinese and continue to abide by strict Confucian
ethics and codes of conducts. For example, of a nyonya ("woman" in Peranakan parl-
ance), anthropologist Khoo Joo Ee writes that she is a "highly domesticated creature";
as a girl, she must remain "ignorant of the outside world," confined more or less all
the time to the home, and thought not to be "inquisitive." When she marries, she will
be trained "to cope with a variety of household and social tasks [ . . . ] a managing
director par excellence " of the domestic realm (122). And of course, as a mother, she
must bear a male offspring to finally secure for herself the position of the respected
matriarch of her husband's household (123); failure to do so would entail her relega-
tion to a secondary position if (or usually, when) the husband marries another. In this
way, the nyonya is subjected to the "three dependencies" described by Confucius:
dependence upon her father as a girl, her husband after marriage, and the eldest son
after the death of her husband." She is also to serve her parents-in-law "respectfully
and carefully, and with absolute obedience" (Zhan 276). Thus, even though the
Peranakan Chinese may have become culturally syncretic, they are still to a large
extent subscribed to a Confucian domestic ideology, especially when it comes to sex-
ual and gender role allocations.

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
84 Mosaic 39/2 (June 2006)

In "Haunting," Toh Peh is also most probably the mother-in-law's servant from
young. A wealthy nyonya would grow up chaperoned by a servant girl of a similar age
who more or less accompanies her mistress to the end of their days. Later, when the mis-
tress produces offspring (preferably male), they would together nurture the children
into adulthood, but always remain in the background. Jenny notices, for example, that
the two women do not take their meals with them (Lim 138), and are mostly ensconced
in the kitchen: "The kitchen, the last room on that wing, was a primitive, poorly-
lit room; it contained no modern appliances, only some charcoal clay burners and a cold
water tap in a concrete sink. It was as if the men who built the house had given no
thought to their women and had provided them with only walls, a roof, and a hole for
a window, from which they expected the most delicious and nourishing food to appear"
(136). Here, the spatial confinement metonymically suggests the ideological and socio-
cultural limitations suffered by Peranakan women. Adopting the role of the domestic
par excellence, the nyonya and her servant have effectively been denied an individuality
of their own. So powerful is their coercion by the Symbolic, and so thorough is their
domestication, that they are no longer able to adopt any differentiated positions.
Remarkably, it is when Jenny decides to "rebel against the domestic arrange-
ment" that she begins to hear "the whispers from the house" (138). Jenny tries to trace
the source of the whispering, which always invariably leads her to her mother-in-law s
bedroom, or the kitchen. The whispering unfailingly "turns out to be only the mother
and Toh Peh talking" (134). Educated and modernized, Jenny initially feels marginal-
ized by the two women who, despite their kindly treatment, "would never let me
cook" (139). In a sense, Jenny's "marginalization" has various implications: it could
signify the two women's complicity to prevent Jenny from infiltrating their traditional
citadel and disrupt the domestic arrangement with which they have been long famil-
iar; it could also signify the mother-in-law's fear of being "ousted" by Jenny as her
replacement; finally, it could be read as a kind of rite of passage. Jenny is made to feel
"useless" so as to dissolve her "new woman" attitude and to gradually initiate her into
a traditional domestic embodiment. In the case of the latter, the food metaphor is
deployed to suggest such a "dissolution." While the mother-in-law's dietary provision
is lavish ("Every evening there are about five or six fresh dishes"), Jenny sinks into
anorexia because she "can't stand the taste" of the Peranakan dishes (139). Jenny's
refusal to eat may imply her unwillingness to submit to the domestic arrangement,
and for that, she must suffer. Her subsequent feeling of not being welcomed is not,
however, occasioned by her mother-in-law. In fact, as Jenny herself admits, "I think
she likes me; anyway, she smiles at me when we meet" (133). Her source of unwelcome
lies elsewhere.

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Andrew Hock-Soon Ng 85

It is Su Weng who first provides an inkling as to what the source of the haunting
may be: as she aptly senses, the house "was sort of quiet, like it was empty. Or like it
was waiting for someone ' (139, emph. mine). In the end, Jenny realizes that it is not
the house that is haunted, but that the house is haunting her:

She knew she would not be able to tell either of them [Jong Ann and Su Weng] what had
become suddenly clear to her as she slept that afternoon, when her helpless body, void, her
mind had listened, gathering the eddies and ghosts of sounds and sifting through them for
their significance, for she had recognised the whispers. They were saying "You", "You", "You."
It was the house giving voice to a welcome for her, despite the mothers remoteness, Toh
Peh's coldness. Like a child with a mind of its own, it was calling. If the house was haunt-

ing her, Jenny thought, it was only a playful and tender tug for her attention. (140)

It is interesting that Jenny's revelation coincides with the discovery that she may pos-
sibly be expecting, and with Toh Peh's death. It is as if the house has all this while been
preparing her for this moment when she will assume the matriarch's place. Jenny's
pregnancy and Toh Peh's replacement will firmly establish her domestic position, dis-
placing the mother-in-law in the process. But what is evidently suggested in the nar-
rative is that within a traditional Chinese home, there is only one acceptable role for
women: as a domestic. Whether as matriarch or servant, a woman must live in obei-

sance to her menfolk until death. Jenny's mother-in-law, who faithfully serves her
household all her life, must now cede her place to her daughter-in-law, who will carry
on the tradition. What becomes of the mother-in-law is left unsaid, but Toh Peh's

death and replacement implies her replacement, and eventual death, as well. Indeed,
Modleski's assessment of the female Gothic's revelation of women's fear of becoming

like their mothers, of sharing the same fate and, in a more important sense, of becom-

ing their mothers (70), is completely circumvented in "Haunting." Jenny's decision to

help Jong Ann replace their dead servant suggests that she has now assumed the
matriarch's position within the domestic sphere, and, by extension, has submitted to
its ideology. In this sense, not only has she become her mother-in-law, the narrative
suggests her total willingness as well.
Like "The Yellow Wallpaper," Lim's story palpably suggests that the domestic ide-
ology haunts women with the shadow self of patriarchal femininity. Women who are
interpellated by such an ideology cannot consider a differentiated vantage point
because they are thoroughly immersed in their construction. Any inclination for
escape is quickly arrested, leaving the woman with merely a vestige of the subject that
she can possibly become, but will never attain. That the narrative ends with such a

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 86 Mosaic 39/2 (June 2006)

"comforting" scene only belies its deeply menacing ideology. Not only has the house
successfully domesticated another potentially dissenting woman, it has even appointed
her as the next guardian of patriarchal tradition, thus disguising her entrapment as
privilege. Foucault once deliberated that "power is strong because [...] it produces
effects at the level of desire - and also at the level of knowledge" (59). If this point is
recontextualized to read Lim's story, it will reveal that Jennys interpellation is total
indeed. When the disempowered is made to believe that she shares in the knowledge
of ideology's power, and that her position within that ideology is desirable, that is
when power is most compelling. It is in this regard that it becomes difficult to say if
"Haunting" is scripted along the lines of the male or female Gothic plot.

Given literature
literature the variouswith
is fraught is fraught
momentspostcolonial
of tension with moments nations'
and disorientation of tension
that force languagefractured and histories, disorientation it is not that unusual force that language their
to turn to discursive violence in order to "speak" them. The Gothic is inherent in such
linguistic violence. It is interesting that, despite deploying a similar motif, Maniam and
Lim both have very different things to say about haunting. I read Maniam's story as sug-
gesting that the struggle for belonging fundamentally relegates the (male) subject to a
spectral space because the landscape resists ownership. Thus, the subject experiences his
homeland as unheimlich because he has un-housed himself. In Lim's tale, on the other
hand, the female subject's unheimlich encounter is the result of her initial resistance to
comply with the domestic ideology of the Chinese patriarchal household. The house
gently coerces her into submission with insinuations of potential power and status; she
is won over in the end, but the narrative's ambiguous treatment of the mother-in-law sug-
gests the understated victimization that awaits the protagonist. Both stories rework the
Gothic tale of haunting to address ideological issues that involve sexual politics to a sig-
nificant degree. While haunting is represented as emasculating in Maniam's story, thus
compelling my reading of it as, subtly, a female Gothic story, in Lim's story, the gendered
agenda is more ambiguous. On the one hand, haunting in Lim's narrative could
emblematize the subtle potency of the Symbolic; on the other, it may be reiterating,
albeit ironically, the (unconscious) entrapment and silencing of women within the
domestic ideology that provides scant opportunities for escape or resistance.

WORKS CITED

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture . London: Routledge, 1994.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.

Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana
of Illinois P, 1989.

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Andrew Hock-Soon Ng 87

Foucault, Michel. "Body/Power." Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings , 1972-1977. Ed.
Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York:
Pantheon, 1980. 55-62.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1899. Gothic Short Stories. Ed. David Blair.
Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Ed. Ltd, 2002. 141-55.

Khoo, Joo Ee. The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1996.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.

Lim, Shirley. "Haunting." 1981. Life's Mysteries: The Best of Shirley Lim. Singapore: Times Books
International, 2001. 130-41.

Maniam, K. S. "Haunting the Tiger." Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from Malaysia. London:
Skoob Books, 1996. 37-46.

Mass, Michelle A. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992.

Modleski, Tanya. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Said, Edward W. "Reflections on Exile". Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2002. 173-86.

Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. "Introduction: The Enlightenment Goth

Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Eds. A. Smith and W. Hughe
2003. 1-12.

Wicks, Peter. "Another Malaysia: Maniam's Short Stories." Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader
Ed. Mohammad A. Quayum and Peter C. Wicks. Petaling Jaya: Pearson, 2001. 290-97.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Wilson, Bernard. "Memory, Myth, Exile: The Desire for Malaysian Belonging in K.S. Maniam's The Return ,
'Haunting the Tiger' and In a Far Country " Textual Practice 17.2 (2003): 391-412.

Wisker, Gina. "Showers of Stars: South East Asian Women's Postcolonial Gothic." Gothic Studies 5.2 (2003):
64-80.

Zhan, Heying Jenny. "Chinese Femininity and Social Control: Gender- Role Socialisation and the State."
Journal of Historical Sociology 9.3 (1996): 269-89.

iek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1992.

ANDREW HOCK-SOON NG teaches contemporary literature and f

Malaysia. He is the author of Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemp
essays have appeared in Exit 9, South East Asian Review of English, W
Commonwealth Essays and Studies.

This content downloaded from 203.78.9.149 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:12:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms