Challenging Boundaries in Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January: A Postcolonial Feminist Study

Abstract

This study examines Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019) through the lenses of Homi K. Bhabha and Simone de Beauvoir. Harrow uses fantasy to critique colonialisation and celebrate women's resistance. The role of women in fiction and adventure literature has often been marginalised and overlooked. The novel presents the parallel story of January Scaller and her mother, Adelaide Larson, as they navigate their path under the rule of Mr. Locke, an Englishman who created an archaeological society. The society of Locke collects antiques and crafts from other worlds and closes and destroys the doors they find. The research involves close textual analysis, guided by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Homi K. Bhabha's hybridity and 'Third Space' theories. It analyses how January, as a mixed-race individual with black skin, faces exploitation in Locke's household and how her father has been subjected to Locke's insatiable colonial greed. It examines how January exists in an in-between space and how doors symbolize a third world where the world intersects. Boundaries dissolve, allowing January, Julian, and Adelaide to defy social constraints and redefine their identities. The present study concludes how Hybridity and the concept of 'the other' reveal the resistance and transformation of marginalized identities against colonial and societal constraints in The Ten Thousand Doors of January.