“Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” by Gayatri Spivak, 1985
Summary:
In this essay Spivak examines three works by women, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, as a way of demonstrating (among other things) that literature written in an imperialist framework does not subvert imperialism simply because it is written by women. Spivak reminds us that imperialism was England’s “social mission” and “a crucial part of the cultural representation” of England to itself, particularly during the nineteenth century. Because this is a “fact,” it ought not be disregarded in the consideration of nineteenth century literature, and to ignore it amounts to furthering the “imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms” (896). Her primary concern in this article is to expose the imperialist “worlding” at work in Jane Eyre, to examine Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre’s “reinscription,” “…and Frankenstein as an analysis—even a deconstruction” of Jane Eyre’s worlding (896).
Spivak first identifies “what is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of imperialism” as “childbearing and soul-making” (897). In other words, the woman in imperialist society is tasked with creating humanity/humans--through sexual reproduction and also through imperialism’s “social mission”: to civilize the Other. Spivak does not take a position of blaming women for their complicity in imperialism but instead explicates their place in the patriarchal imperialist hegemony by way of drawing an analogy from Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s “Caliban.” “Caliban” subverts the colonizer/colonized binary, by positing that Caliban and Ariel, despite their disparate natures, are nonetheless equally in the control of Prospero, the “foreign magician.” In this triangular relationship, Caliban is constructed as the uncivilized native Other, Ariel is the “intellectual” native Other, and Prospero is patriarch and colonizer. Spivak suggests that the construction of English women in imperialism overlaps and bleeds into the construction of the “intellectual Other”—both are “not quite/not male” (897).
Spivak points out Jane Eyre’s “self-marginalized uniqueness” within the “family/counter family dyad” around which Bronte’s novel is structured. Spivak contends that Jane’s progress from being of the “counter family” (Other) to being of the “family” (Self) mirrors and reproduces “the active ideology of imperialism” (899). Spivak argues that this process is imperialist because it is constructed through imperialist ideology, made apparent in a number of dichotomies she calls attention to that underpin the novel—legal/illegal, human/animal, madness/reason, England/not-England, etc. Jane must displace Rochester’s mad, animalistic, foreign wife Bertha Mason in order to take her place in the family—that is, asserting her personhood--in imperialist terms. The discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea as a reinscription of Jane Eyre, in which Rhys attempts to reimagine Bertha/Antoinette as intelligent (Ariel) rather than without reason (Caliban), serves to clarify and focus Spivak’s observations about the imperialist framework within which Jane Eyre operates. Her analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea dwells on the role that language, voice, and text (signifiers) have in both aiding and impeding one’s project of individualizing. She suggests that a woman/Other cannot arrive at a sense of self without reproducing imperialist constructions. She writes, “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” (904).
Spivak concludes her article with a discussion of Frankenstein as a counterpoint to the imperialism embedded in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. She calls Frankenstein “a text of nascent feminism…[that] does not speak the language of feminist individualism” which relies on “the axiomatics of imperialism” (905). Though present, imperialism, she argues, is merely incidental in Frankenstein. Spivak contends that the novel avoids imperialist ideology by subverting the binaries which “world” Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. She writes that the novel “is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction (family and female) and social-subject production (race and male). That binary opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory” (905-6). Another main point of her dissection of Frankenstein is to make not of the fact that, here, neither Frankenstein’s creature nor women fit into the Caliban/Ariel/Prospero schematic that governs the previously discussed novels. In Spivak’s words, “the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text” (909). Thus we can see yet again that the function of woman and Other overlap and intertwine in imperialist discourse.
Important terms:
Binary opposition
Feminism
Imperialism
Individualism
Other
Self
Signifier/signified
Social mission
Soul making
Subject/subjectivity
Worlding
