Description
Book SynopsisCultural Representation of the Second Wife: Literature, Stage, and Screen, is a multifaceted, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural work that provides insights into the realities of second wives the world over. This book allows the reader a three-dimensional view of the second wife experience. It asks: What does it mean, and what does it feel like, to be a second wife in a polygamous union or in a monogamous partnership? Is there a difference? Together, the writers in this book cleverly create an in-depth study of the subject through the productions referred to in the title, to offer a different approach to the popularly held views of the second wife. The book addresses the intricacies, customs, practices and lifestyles of the various Eastern and Western cultures and demonstrates the abilities of the Humanities to connect and interrelate with other disciplines as well as with the reader’s own world.
Table of ContentsForeword
Mark Hoffman
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Jo Parnell
Chapter 1. Toxic Patriarchy: Raise the Red Lantern and Chinese Concubinage
Andrew Howe
Chapter 2. The Second Wife According to Assia Djebar, Fawzia Zouari and Their Novels A Sister to Scheherazade, and The Second Wife
Christa Jones
Chapter 3. Polygamy and Socio-political Configurations in the Egyptian Cultural Imaginations
Azza Harras
Chapter 4 Secondary Spouse: Ekwefi as Second Wife in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Harry Olufunwa
Chapter 5. Unmasking the Realities of Polygamy: the Figure of the Second Wife in Changes: A Love Story (1993), Ada: A Victim of Fate and Cultural Circumstances (2014), and Mariah (2002).
Shalini Nadaswaran
Chapter 6. Poppaea Sabina, second wife to the Roman Emperor Nero
Jane Bellemore
Chapter 7. “I am Mrs de Winter now”: Gaslighting, a deadly paradox, and Hitchcock’s second wife.
Kathryn Keeble
About the Contributors
