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Three Womens

Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”

Basic Argument

• Basically, middle class white women earned their emancipation on the backs of third world women
  • feminism thus a part of it: “the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism,” when its “isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo America” is made into a “feminist norm”
    • Gilbert and Gubar ignore Bertha’s Creole status, so they reproduce the narrow limits of white middle class perpective: “a common, female impulse to struggle free from social and literary confinement through strategic redefinitions of self, art, and society”
• “imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature…should not be ignored.”
• “Worlding” of the Third World happens when you regard Third World literature as something to be plumbed, “information retrieval,” thus being an empire of literature
• “to situate feminist individualism in its historical determination rather than simply to canonize it as such”

Jane Eyre

• Feminism during the age of imperialism is concerned with “creation” of a human being both individual and “individualist”
  • Two vehicles: companionate love (reproduction within domestic environment; child production) and the social mission of imperialism
  • Native females are excluded from this project, this “emerging norm”
  • We must “wrench” ourselves away from this “mesmerizing” project
• Jane: for example in the first scene we see Jane retreat with a book into a private room: where the reader and Jane are doing the same thing
• Rochester: Protests that he “has a right” to get out of his marriage in any way possible. He’s allowed to “go home again” b/c he’s done all that the world and God “require” of him
• Bertha: in Jane Eyre, her half-human half-animal existence allows Jane and Rochester to evade the letter of the law while not apparently the spirit of the law (b/c not human, Bertha doesn’t deserve the protection): “sacrifices as an insane animal for the consolidation of her sister”
  • “the terrorism of the categorical imperative…the universal moral law given by pure reason” said by Kant to be: “In all creation every thing one chooses and over which has any power, may be used merely as a means; man alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in himself.”
    • she sees this as the moment to transition ethics from religion to philosophy
    • how is it imperialist? the imperialist social mission is to turn the native into a real human “so that he can be treated as an end in himself” (cf St John Rivers and his possession of the end of the text)
• Imperialism is what lets Jane move from being a part of “Counter-families” and “illicit families” to the legal family
  • Bertha denied access to the full subject category
  • Bertha, “A figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism”
    • Jane Eyre consolidates her own identity in the same way the imperialism consolidates British identity: by a redefinition of the Other and its subsequent destruction or domination by the British; Jane makes her identity in same way that imperialism constructs British identity
    • Jane is civilized, worthy of marriage to Rochester, because Bertha isn’t (ie Because Bertha is constructed as not being worthy or a human agent)
    • hence Jane Eyre “an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism” in which native self-immolates for benefit of colonizer

Wide Sargasso Sea

• Juxtaposed to Jane Eyre
  • Whereas Wide Sargasso Sea “reclaims” Bertha’s humanity and shows how Bertha has been controlled and re-construced via imperialism (ie Rochester’s re-naming; the marriage that is just a prison “masquerading” as love)
  • Most significantly, Bertha’s actions at end of WSS show that she is placed in the book (the “cardboard walls” that she insists is not England) and then MADE TO DO what she was “Brought here to do;” that is that imperialism robbed her of her self-control and her own identity, it hijacked her, which Spivak sees as “the self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer”—which makes Bertha the “good wife” b/c she does what Rochester brought her there for—the widow sacrifice of suttee (Spivak’s other topic)
• WSS puts feminism and anti-imperialism together
• Christophine is a fascinating character in limbo between the “native” and the “faithful servant;” but she’s tangent b/c this book is about the Creole, not about the colonized
  • Due to “imperialist fracture..covered over by” the importation of alien legal system that they pretend is abstract, eternal Law; and due to imperialism consolidated by a domesticated Other, and thus never facing the real Other; Rhys can’t write about Christophine totally, completely…even while she critiques imperialism