Both texts present liminal individuals in conflict …show more content…
H. Adlai Murdoch constructs the nineteenth-century, French collective identity as metropolitan and colonising, subsuming diverse individuals ‘beneath the protective and instructive umbrella of French culture’. This identity assumes a ‘binary difference’ between what is French (‘self’) and what is not French (‘other’), creating oppositional, exclusive categories: metropolitan and African, coloniser and colonised, and black and white. This ‘otherness’ is also highly gendered, with the male/female and masculine/feminine binaries othering the female/feminine. When individuals blur these categories, they become liminal. Valeria Sobol defines the liminal personae as ambiguous, paradoxical, and resistant to categorization. In Katya Hokanson’s assessment of Russian identity, she observes this issue of liminality in the Russian borderlands (as in the frontier of A Hero of Our Time), noting previous literary attempts to separate Russian identity from the Oriental other. For instance, Peter Scotto explains the justification of Russian imperial identity predicated on the otherness and savageness of those conquered: ‘In