English 223 Lecture 3 Wide Sargasso Sea Fritz Eichenburg, 1943
F.H. Townsend, 1847
Feminist Imperialism Imperialism. n. The principle or policy of empire; the advocacy of holding political
dominion or control over dependent territories (OED)
“Through Berta Mason, the white Jamaican Creole,
Bronte renders the human/animal frontier as
acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater
than the letter of the Law can be broached”
-Spivak, 249
“In the deep shade, at the further end of the room,
a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was,
whether beast or human being, one could not, at first
sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it
snatched and growled like some strange wild animal:
but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of
dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and
face […] ‘That is my wife,’ said he”
-Jane Eyre 328
Mary Wollstonecraft
famously compared women
to slaves.
“An immoderate fondness for
dress, for pleasure, for sway are
the passions of savages; the
passions that occupy those
uncivilized beings who have
not yet extended the
dominion of the mind, or
even learned to think with the
energy necessary to
concatenate that abstract train
of thought which produces
principles” (187)
“Christophine […] cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the
European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native. No perspective critical
of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already
historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates
the imperialist self […] Immediately after the exchange between her and the man, well before the conclusion,
she is simply driven out of the story, with neither narrative nor characterological explanation or justice. ‘Read
and write, I don’t know. Other things I know.’ She walked away without looking back.”
[…]
Attempts to construct the ‘Third World Woman’ as a signifier remind us that the hegemonic definition of
literature is itself caught within the history of imperialism. A full literary reinscription cannot easily flourish
in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system masquerading as Law as
such, an alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the ‘native’
as self-consolidating Other” (254)
Next Week and Essay Ques=ons •  For Beloved, read Part I •  Essay 1 – 3000 words Due: Tuesday November 11th at noon