Anne Spooner English 200 Section 001 Final Paper THE SPECTER OF SOPHIE MOL In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Estha and Rahel are haunted by the memory of their cousin, Sophie Mol. Even though they had only known her for a total of two weeks, her death invades their minds for the next twenty three years. In this novel, the disjointed time expressed through the anti-chronological nature of the novel and the ambiguity of Sophie Mol’s character demonstrate her haunting of Estha and Rahel. In his work The Specters of Marx Jacque Derrida explores the ideas of a specter and how it impacts those haunted by it. Using the example of the ghost of Hamlet’s Father in Shakespeare’s play, he demonstrates the specters impact on those it is haunting through how the specter impacts those it is haunting, and how the haunted is impacted by the specter. I will attempt to analyze the specter of Sophie Mol using the aspects of specters presented by Derrida. A Specter is a ‘ghostly apparition, a haunting or disturbing prospect’ (ask.com). The specter of Sophie Mol in the God of Small Things only appears through her effect on Rahel, Estha and their family. She is not a living physical apparition until page 161, 155 pages after her funeral. Even though proclaimed dead by Rahel’s sharing of her funeral, she proceeds to impact their lives for the next three hundred pages. Rahel and Estha never are able to shake off her death and the constant memories of the events surrounding when she died. She does indeed symbolize a ‘haunting’ AND ‘disturbing prospect.’ The reminder of Sophie Mol brings back the day that Estha condemned Velutha (“Chilodhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt” (Roy 303)) and when Estha was

Returned (“On the station platform Rahel doubled over and screamed and screamed” (Roy 309)). The loss of Velutha, the loss of Estha, both as a child and the physical separation from Rahel, is not the most pleasant memeory to have, and if Sophie Mol is a reminder of that, she would be ‘haunting’ them if they cannot get over what happened on that night. She is a catalyst for the separation of Estha and Rahel. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of the king has already made an appearance to the characters, but not to the audience. They are first introduced to the ghost when it returns. According to Derrida, “…a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and going because it begins by coming back” (Derrida 11). This helps to create a disjointing of time as the beginning of the play starts with an anticipation of a return. Derrida describes this as, “everything begins by…the waiting for this apparition. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated…everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play” (Derrida 4). The beginning of the God of Small Things begins in a way that implies a waiting for something to happen. The novel starts out: “…hot, brooding month…the days are long and humid…river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangos…they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, flatly baffled in the sun” (Roy 3). By beginning with a death, a confused on at that, Roy leads the reader to wonder if there will be a larger one in the novel. Roy creates a sense of disjointed time, also, through the chronology of the plot, which appears to be a perfect image of a rubber ball that is thrown against the wall: all over the place. Here is a basic rundown of how the first chapter progresses time wise: begins with Rahel returning home at age 31, goes to Estha and her birth, to Sophie Mol’s

funeral when she is six, two weeks later, twenty-three years later, back to when Estha was returned, etc. This was very confusing to me on my first read, and that is intentional and adds to the idea of the mixed time as a result of the haunting of Sophie Mol. As in Hamlet, the first chapter tells of Sophie Mol’s funeral; Rahel has already experienced the plot climax of the novel, and as readers we are know that something has happened, but there is an element of confusion due to the invisibility of Sophie Mol and her death; the readers don’t know who she was or how she died. The story does not continue as a flashback of six year old Rahel, but as a mix of conscious from six year old Rahel and thirty-one year old Rahel. We are presented with the impact of Sophie Mol’s specter before we are presented with the creation of Sophie Mol as a specter. Through this disjointing of time, the specter of Sophie Mol is always in the forefront of our conscious. Derrida says that the “ghostly would displace itself like the movement of history. Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe” (Derrida 4). The mark of the haunting of Sophie Mol is shown partly through this disjoined time that Roy uses for the novel. Another aspect that Derrida assigns to a specter is the idea of invisibility to the one who sees it. This concept is a little tricky, as the ghost/specter can physically be seen, but as to its identity, it is unknown. Derrida uses the example in Hamlet of the visor. “This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it its there…we will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us” (Derrida 6-7). The king’s ghost wears a full suit of armor with its visor down, lending to the confusion as to whether it is really the king or an imposter. “The armor lets one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level of the head and beneath the visor, it permits the so-called

father to see and speak” (Derrida 8). The one being addressed or addressing the specter cannot identify the specter because of this layer between them. Even with this layer, though, the specter is still able to see who it is they are communicating with due to the slit in the visor. In the novel, the family tries so hard to get Sophie Mol to love them because of her white skin and her nationality to the point that they try to be more ‘white’ then they actually are: ‘Do you know who Ariel was?’ Baby Kochamma asked Sophie Mol. ‘Ariel from The Tempest?’ Sohpie Mol said she didn’t. ‘“Where the bee sucks there suck I”?’ Baby Kochama said. Sophie Mol said she didn’t…This was of course to primarily announce her credentials to Margaret Kochamma. To set herself apart from the Sweeper Class. (Roy 138) In this quote, it seems like Baby Kochamma is trying to prove her worth to Sophie Mol and Margaret Kochamma through her knowledge of Shakespeare, but she picks the most random quote from The Tempest and follows it with another one: “In a cowslip’s bell I lie.” Clearly not the most profound that Shakespeare has ever written, proving not her worth, but her ignorance of what she is talking about. The fact that Sophie Mol doesn’t know what Baby Kochamma is talking about is besides the fact. But they fail to realize that Sophie Mol only wants them to be themselves. The feeling that they need to prove themselves brings the feeling that they are being watched by her, even before she comes. “This spectral someone other looks at us we feel ourselves being looked at by it, out side of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part…” (Derrida 7). In the novel, Rahel expresses her feelings that Sophie Mol has been watching and judging them. She calls the day Sophie Mol

arrives “the culmination of the What Will Sophie Mol Think? week” and “the Day of the Play” (Roy 130) suggesting that every day was focused on making sure that Sophie Mol would like them, even if it meant acting out everything and not being who they really were. Going the other way, they are not able to figure out Sophie Mol’s character, as they only know her for a fortnight, and we don’t get very much about her character. She, therefore, remains invisible to us in the way that the ghost of King Hamlet is invisible: we are unable to identify her. This ignorance of Sophie Mol seems to add to the ‘spectralness’ of her character. Because they do not know who she really is, they seem to be forced to create who she was in their minds, and this creation takes on the spectral form that haunts them twenty-three years later. “It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence…if it is living or if it is dead” (Derrida 6). We aren’t really sure if Sophie Mol is living or dead at the time that we are learning about her. Because of the disjointed time, the non-chronological order that the novel adopts makes it confusing and hard to tell if Sophie Mol is really alive at the time of the novel, or if the narrator chose to cut up the plot and play fifty-two pick up with the pieces, putting them in order of the ones she picked up. The notion that Sophie Mol is haunting Rahel and Estha is rather discomforting. Having the death of a little girl remind one of the death of a loved friend, the exile and death of a mother, and the separation from your two egg twin, brings along a lot of emotional baggage that would make one cry. Estha and Rahel begin by trying to please their specter while it was alive, and seem to continue to do this even after it is dead

though their reliving and clinging to what happened, it doesn’t seem to even let them forget as they are constantly reminded by the fact that Estha was returned, Ammu exiled, and they were never forgiven by their family for what happened to Sophie Mol or with Velutha. Using Derrida’s theories on specters helps to decode the role of Sophie Mol in the God of Small Things. His ideas on the disordered time created by the specter, its invisibleness to those it is haunting, and the desire to follow its injunctions through pleasing the specter all shed light on how the characters are impacted by Sophie Mol and the remembrances of what happened at History House.

Works Cited: Derrida, Jacques. “Injunctions of Marx.” Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the New international. Kamuf, Peggy trans. New York: Routledge. 1994. pp. 3-31. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York, New York: Random House. 1998.