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Analysis of charlotte bronte's jane eyre
Jane Eyre reflection of Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre reflection of Charlotte Bronte
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One of the many ways that postcolonial literature accomplishes the task of challenging the hegemony of western imperialism is through the use of a ‘canonical counter-discourse,’ a strategy whereby ‘a post-colonial writer takes up a character or characters, or the basic assumptions of a canonical text [where a colonialist discourse is developed directly or indirectly], and unveils [its colonialist] assumptions, subverting the text for post-colonial purposes’. (Tiffin, 1987) Such a revolutionary literary project is evidently realised in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a prequel that ‘writes back the centre’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys is categorical about her conscious authorial intention: ‘I immediately thought I'd write a story as it (the story of Bertha/Antoinette) might really have been.’ (Rhys, 1986) The novel revitalizes Bronte’s Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, as Antoinette Cosway, a hyper-sensitive woman who is deprived of her voice, isolated, marginalised, rejected, led to the brink of insanity and finally locked up in a room to pay the price of her ‘otherness’. It combines a stark postcolonial critique of Brontë’s novel with an ethnographic approach that highlights the issues of race and miscegenation to deal with the problem of Antoinette’s racial heritage through a more or less straightforward exposition of her background.
This essay intends to examine the implications of double colonisation of patriarchy and empire experienced by the female characters of Rhys’s novel, particularly by Antoinette Cosway. ‘Double-colonisation’ is a critical term coined by Peterson and Rutherford (1986) to refer to the condition of simultaneous oppression experienced by women in colonised communities due to imp...
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...g effect of both the dimensions and this dual oppression is more severe and painful than a singular form of oppression either colonial or patriarchal.
Works Cited
Tiffin, H. (1987) ‘Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse.’ in Ashcroft et al (Ed.), (1995) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 95–98.
Rhys, Jean (1996) Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Books
Petersen, K. & Rutherford, A. (1989) ‘Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition.’ in Napier, W. (2000) African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: New York UP, 2000. 257-267
Millet, K. (1971) Sexual Politics. London: Rupert Hart-Davis
Spivak, G., (1985) ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.’ in Ashcroft et al (Ed.) (1995) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. 269–72.
...usion that race is deployed "in the construction of power relations."* Indeed a "metalanguage" of race, to use Higginbotham's term, was employed by colonial powers to define black women as separate from English women, and that process is deconstructed in Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs. However, Brown's analysis rests mainly on the shifting English concepts of gender and race imposed on colonial society by the white elite, becoming at times a metalanguage of colonial gender. Nonetheless, Brown's analysis of overlapping social constructions is instructive for understanding the ways gender and race can be manipulated to buttress dominant hierarchies.
Compare The Successes And Failures Of Patriarchy In Colonialism, In “The Tempest”, “Translations” And “Things Fall Apart”.
Over the past few decades, research on women has gained new momentum and a great deal of attention. Susan Socolow’s book, The Women of Colonial Latin America, is a well-organized and clear introduction to the roles and experiences of women in colonial Latin America. Socolow explicitly states that her aim is to examine the roles and social regulations of masculinity and femininity, and study the confines, and variability, of the feminine experience, while maintaining that sex was the determining factor in status. She traces womanly experience from indigenous society up to the enlightenment reforms of the 18th century. Socolow concentrates on the diverse culture created by the Europeans coming into Latin America, the native women, and African slaves that were imported into the area. Her book does not argue that women were victimized or empowered in the culture and time they lived in. Socolow specifies that she does her best to avoid judgment of women’s circumstances using a modern viewpoint, but rather attempts to study and understand colonial Latin American women in their own time.
The colony is not only a possibility in the geographical; it is a mental dominance that can imperialize the entire self. Entire continents have be domineered, resources completely dried, and at colonialism’s usual worst, the mental devastation of the indigenous culture has left a people hollow. Indigenous culture is no longer that. In the globalized world, no culture is autonomous; culture cannot breathe without new ideas and new perspectives, perspectives that have traditionally come from the people who have lived within the culture. But, the imposition of dominant cultures has certainly benefited from culture’s own vulnerability, as global similarities now exist throughout most different, yet not separate cultures. Postcolonialism is imperialism with a mask on, nothing less. As Franz Fanon puts it “that imperialism which today is fighting against a s true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.”
In her essay, Lauren Onkey reveals how colonialism and nationalism victimize women in the past. Traditionally, woman is considered inferior and weaker whereas man is superior and powerful. This sexist characterization of gender is based on the assumption of sexual dominance. During the period of colonization, Colonial power deliberately describes the colonies as feminine “to justify its ‘civilizing’ mission” (160). Since then, woman becomes the symbol and property of nation. Thence, the nation assumes the right to ‘supervise’ her behavior. Richard Kearney suggests “the symbol of woman as nation as a somewhat benevolent response to colonial conquest” (160). The ‘elevation’ of woman as a symbol and property of nation is problematic at least to women because it makes self-determination inapplicable to women. In Ireland specifically, women’s issues are defined as trivial compared to the more important issues of nationalism. The Field Day group which is supposed to “rethink ideas about the nation, literature, politics and culture” fails to include the issues of women in its agenda. Onkey argues that Field Day simply ignores the creative works produced by women and topics of women, sexuality and gender are absent in most literary discourse. Female writers are also marginalized since “of over 300 writers included covering 1500 years, only 39 are women” (162).
The Colonial era spans nearly two hundred years with each settlement in the New World containing distinctive characteristics. Location in the new world is one factor that shaped women’s lives but religion and economics also played a massive role. These roles however were constantly changing and often contradicting. Since there is numerous factors that contributed to the shaping of women’s private and public roles in the seventeenth and eighteenth century it is impossible to categories all colonial woman in one group. Some historians refer to this period as the golden age of women; however, I tend to see this period as oppressive, with only few examples of women exercising social and public powers.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2000. 333-358.
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea handle women’s situations in once-colonial countries quite differently. While both novels were written by writers who are actually from cultures with colonised pasts, Rhys is more effective in conveying a more feminist angle by having a female protagonist in a post colonisation period and being a woman with similar personal/racial history herself. This, however, doesn’t mean Things Fall Apart is excused from being potentially sexist. On the other hand, it’s problematic to assume the women in two texts, who are from different far ends of the world, would have the same problems. McLeod suggests that while looking at women in countries with a colonial past as a whole is ignoring their local
During the colonial times, all of the legal rights were granted to men, leaving women to be looked at as sub-sets to their husbands. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century women were portrayed as being weak and delicate, unable to fend for anyone, not even themselves. Men were looked to in handling intellectual matters and all physical work, which in turn placed the women in a so-called “inferior” ...
Decolonial feminism is our theme this week specifically looking at how colonial influence created several of the obstacles feminisms attempt to overcome today. The articles by Lugones were somewhat confusing, however I believe both investigated colonial gender and race structures and their lasting impacts. In the first piece, Toward a Decolonial Feminism, the author states that her purpose is to "figure out how to think about intimate, everyday resistant interactions to the colonial difference" (743). By this, I believe, the author is encouraging people to see the world today but only after removing the boundaries created by colonialism. For example, she encourages us to acknowledge differences, but to not place them in competition with one another nor to value (positively or negatively) one element of identity over another, as a colonial system would encourage.
The study of gender and its historical analysis has, itself, evolved. Linda Kerber in her essay Seperate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History argues that the metaphor of a separate women’s sphere which she traces back to the Victorian era and to de Tocqueville’s analysis of America—and which may, indeed, have been useful at one point, i...
"Can the Subaltern Speak?" may be Spivak 's best-known essay; it is certainly her most controversial.Postcolonial critics, like many feminists, want to give silenced others a voice. But Spivak worries thateven the most benevolent effort merely repeats the very silencing it aims to combat. After all,colonialists often thought of themselves as well-intentioned. Spivak points to the British outlawing
Wojczak, Helena. “English Women’s History.” English women’s history. Hasting Press. n.d. Web 24 Nov 2013
“The subaltern studies is certainly related to south Asia history, as Gramsci was related to Italy, its theoretical position, of studying how the continuity of supposedly pre-political insurgency brings culture to crisis and confronts power would make post-colonial studies more conventionally political. One major difference is that the disciplinary connection of post-colonial studies is to literary criticism rather than history and the social science. Subaltern studies has not pursed oral history as unmediated narrative, and its investigation and testimony have generally confined themselves to legal
Every human being, in addition to having their own personal identity, has a sense of who they are in relation to the larger community--the nation. Postcolonial studies is the attempt to strip away conventional perspective and examine what that national identity might be for a postcolonial subject. To read literature from the perspective of postcolonial studies is to seek out--to listen for, that indigenous, representative voice which can inform the world of the essence of existence as a colonial subject, or as a postcolonial citizen. Postcolonial authors use their literature and poetry to solidify, through criticism and celebration, an emerging national identity, which they have taken on the responsibility of representing. Surely, the reevaluation of national identity is an eventual and essential result of a country gaining independence from a colonial power, or a country emerging from a fledgling settler colony. However, to claim to be representative of that entire identity is a huge undertaking for an author trying to convey a postcolonial message. Each nation, province, island, state, neighborhood and individual is its own unique amalgamation of history, culture, language and tradition. Only by understanding and embracing the idea of cultural hybridity when attempting to explore the concept of national identity can any one individual, or nation, truly hope to understand or communicate the lasting effects of the colonial process.