Rushdie grants his female rebel only destructive, fever-rooted power.

Evidence

For so wedded is Rushdie’s imagination to imageries of wholesale degradation and unrelieved social wreckage, so little is he able to conceive of a real possibility of regenerative projects on the part of the people who actually exist within our contemporary social reality, that even when he attempts, towards the end of the novel, to open up a regenerative possibility, in the form of Sufiya’s flightand also her return, as Nemesis and all-devouring Furythe powers which he, as author, besrows upon her in the moment of her triumph are powers only of destruction. It is indicative of the temper of the whole novel that even her innocence, up to the point where she remains innocent of the social corruptions of Rushdie’s imagined world, is the innocence merely of the mad and the mentally retarded; she is doubtless the only one who finally obtains the energy to oppose and win, but this energy is itself rooted - literally, the novel tells usin brain fever. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 594

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rushdie’s female characters bear a sexually overdetermined representational burden absent from his male characters — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 574

Broader Connections

• Rushdie’s female characters bear a sexually overdetermined representational burden absent from his male characters #expands (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 574