John

MacLeod’s
Beginning
Postcolonialism
Chapter 5: RE-READING
AND RE-WRITING ENGLISH
LITERATURE
Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez
In this powerpoint presentation
you will learn about:
 The role of English literature in colonial
education and culture.
 Postcolonial critiques of canonical English
Literature: strategies for re-reading and re-
writing.
 Achebe and Heart of Darkness;
 Said’s contrapuntal reading
 Re-readings of Jane Eyre
 Rewritings of Jane Eyre
Introduction
 The re-interpretation of «classic» English
literary works has become an important
area of postcolonialism.
 It has impacted on the ongoing disputes
about which texts can be considered as
possessing «literary value» and the criteria
we use to measure it.
Introduction
 This
chapter will introduce these issues in
connection to 2 inter-related themes:
 1. the re-reading of literary «classics» in the
light of postcolonial scholarship and
experience; and
 2. the re-writing of received literary texts by
postcolonial writers.
Colonialism and the
teaching of English literature
Colonialism and TEL
 Importantconcept:
 the canon of English literature:
 The writers and their work which are
believed to be of particular value for
reasons of aesthetic beauty and moral
sense.
 MacLeod uses «classic» for this kind of text.
 The inverted commas signal that this is a matter
for debate.
Colonialism and TEL
 Theteaching of English literature in the
colonies was one of the ways in which
Western colonial power asserted their
cultural and moral superiority
 While at the same time devaluing
indigenous cultural products.
 Thosein the colonies were asked to
perceive Western nations as places where
the very best in art and learning were
produced.
Colonialism and TEL
 Rather than studying issues such as
grammar or diction, English literary texts
were presented in profoundly moral
terms.
 Students were invited to consider how
texts conveyed «truths» at once universal
and timeless, yet entirely correspondent
with Christian morality.
Colonialism and TEL
 The study of English literature became the
study of models of moral worth to the extent
that English lierature seemed most and
foremost about morality.
 This weaving together of morality with a
specifically English literature had important
ideological consequences.
 Literature implied that moral behaviour and
English behaviour were synonymous.
 The teaching of English literature in the
colonies was thus complicit with the
maintenance of colonial power.
Colonialism and TEL
 For many writers from
countries with a history
of colonialism, English
literary texts have
become not timeless
works of art, but deeply
complicit with the
colonising enterprise
itself.
Colonialism and TEL
 This
has led to questioning the value of
specific literary texts.
 Ex: Chinua Achebe & Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness (1899).
 1975: Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrad’s HD.”
 He objected to Conrad’s derogatory and
dehumanising representation of Africa and
Africans
 He pointed out that it remained one of the most
commonly taught books in academic institutions.
 He argued that Conrad’s late-Victorian racism
was being perpetuated in the classrooms.
 Colonialism and TEL
 Other writers have emphasised that the
relationship between literary “classics” and
themselves has also been a productive one.
 Writers have put literary “classics” to new uses.
Many writers enter a productive critical dialogue
with literary “classics.”
 Ex:writers from the Caribbean (George Lamming,
Aimé Césaire) have re-read the relationship
between Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare’s
Tempest as exemplifying the relationship between
coloniser and colonised.
 The literary “classics” can become resources for
those writing to articulate postcolonial positions,
by becoming points of departure.
Reading literature
“contrapuntally”
Reading literature contrapuntally

 In recent years, several

literary “classics” have
been re-read to reveal
their hidden investment
in colonialism.
 Ex:
 Jane Austen’s Mansfield
Park (1814)
 Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre (1847)
Reading literature contrapuntally

 Edward Said discussed Mansfield Park’s

relations with colonial contexts in his book
Culture and Imperialism (1993).
 He explored the relations of the novel with
Britain’s colonisation of the Caribbean
island of Antigua.
 Said argues that the Antiguan material in
the novel is not marginal but central to the
novel’s meaning.
Reading literature contrapuntally

 Mansfield Park is the property of Sir Thomas

and Lady Bertram.
 Sir Thomas’s economic interests in the
Caribbean provide the material wealth upon
which the comfortable middle-class lifestyle of
Mansfield Park depends.
 So the world of this English country house
cannot exist independent from the world
outside.
 This is reflected, for example, in the absences of
Sir Thomas, who has to attend to the problems
of his Antigua plantation.
Reading literature contrapuntally
 There are 3 consequences of re-reading
Mansfield Park in its colonial contexts.
 1. This reading bears witness to what Said
calls the “wordliness” of culture.
 This term reminds us that literary texts
emerge from and have complex
engagements with the historical, social,
and political conditions of their time,
among which colonialism is fundamental in
the 19th century.
Reading literature contrapuntally
 2. This approach both exemplifies and
encourages contrapuntal readings of literary
texts.
 Said defines a contrapuntal reading as one
which remains aware “both of the metropolitan
history that is narrated and of those other
histories against which (and together with
which) the dominant discourse acts.”
 Ex: bringing to a reading of Mansfield Park a
knowledge of the history of the Caribbean.
 Contrapuntal readings “must take account of
both processes, that of imperialism and that of
resistance to it.”
Reading literature contrapuntally

 [Link] concerns literary value. Reading texts

contrapuntally often reminds the critic of
the continuing value of the literary work
being studied.
 Ex: the brilliance of Austen’s work depends
upon the complex and subtle ways she
configures the relations between Mansfield
Park and Antigua.
Re-Reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre
 Re-Reading Jane Eyre
 Jane Eyre follows the life of a
young girl from her childhood
into the first years of adulthood.
 At the beginning of the novel
Jane is a lonely orphan in the
care of her cruel aunt and
cousins.
 She is sent to a very strict
boarding school.
 Eventually she becomes a
teacher at her school and later
she is hired as a governess to a
young French girl at Thornfield
Hall.
Re-Reading Jane Eyre
 At Thornfield Hall she falls in love with the
owner, Mr. Rochester.
 Their wedding is interrupted by John Mason,
who claims that Mr. Rochester is already
married to his sister, Bertha.
 Jane runs away and is taken in by St. John
Rivers and his two sisters.
 Later, Jane receives a legacy and returns to
Thornfield Hall, but the mansion has been
destroyed by a fire set by Bertha (who was
killed).
 Jane finds Mr. Rochester, who has been
blinded in the fire, and marries him.
Re-Reading Jane Eyre
 Colonialism and colonial locations
are crucial to the events of the
novel, particularly regarding the
economic relationships between
the novel’s characters:
 Through the Masons we are
exposed to the plantation-owning
community in Jamaica;
 Through St. John Rivers we are
reminded of the British missionary
work in India.
 Without the money made from
colonialism, there would be no
comforts in England.
Re-Reading Jane Eyre
 In 1979, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar celebrated Jane as a proto-feminist
heroine who struggles successfully to achieve
female self-determination in an patriarchal and
oppressive world (The Madwoman in the Attic).
 A few years later, Gayatri Spivak critiqued this
reading in her essay «Three Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism»:
 She claimed that Gilbert and Gubar were not
paying attention to how imperialism was a crucial
part of the representation of England to the English.
 Jane’s journey from poor orphan to money and
marriage cannot occur without the oppression of
Bertha Mason, Rochester’s Creole wife from
Jamaica.
Re-Reading Jane Eyre
 Spivak shows how the novel is
implicated in colonialism not just
in terms of economic wealth, but
at the levels of narrative and
representation.
 Bertha’s wild and violent nature
is connected to her «mixed»
Creole lineage and Jamaican
birthplace.
 She is robbed of human
selfhood; she has no voice in the
novel other than the evil
laughter and the enigmatic
noises Jane reports.
 Bertha is always connected to
Jane as an «other».
 Jane succeeds at the cost of
Bertha’s human selfhood and
ultimately, her life.
Re-Reading Jane Eyre
 The novel also strongly contrasts Jamaica
(satanic and apocalyptic) and England
(sweet and civilized).
 This kind of construction of manichean
oppositions was defined by Abdul
JanMohamed (Manichean Aesthetics, 1983):
 Manichean aesthetics refers to a system of
representations which conceives of the world in
terms of opposed categories.
 Reality is constructed as a series of polarities
which derived from the opposition posited
between light and darkness, and good and evil.
 This provides a structure of both meaning and
morality.
Re-Reading Jane Eyre
 Conclusion:
 Jane Eyre can be read as reproducing some of
the assumptions of colonial discourses.
 The representation of Bertha and of Jamaica, as
well as the economic relations of the novel,
bear witness to the relationship between Jane
Eyre and the contexts of colonialism.
 They remind us that the canonical «classical»
works of English literature did not emerge, and
do not exist, remote from history, culture, and
politics.
Jane Eyre: A postcolonial
text?
Jane Eyre: A postcolonial text?
 Re-reading classics in relation to their
colonial contexts is perhaps not very
productive if all we do is label and dismiss
those texts as ideologically corrupt or
«colonialist»
 the kind of critical response Said called the
«rhetoric of blame».
 Many literary texts can be re-read to
discover the hitherto hidden history of
resistance to colonialism that they also
articulate, often inadvertently.
 Jane Eyre: A postcolonial text?
 In Jane Eyre, we can find the possibility of
subversion is Bertha Mason.
 Critics have read Bertha’s unruly temperament
as evidence of the ultimate failure of
colonialism to control those from whom it
commanded obedience
 (Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel,
1983).
 Following Said’s model, Bertha’s unruly presence
can be read contrapuntally as resistant to the
rule of those who see her as less than fully
human, and paradigmatic of the plantation
slaves who rose against the oppressive rule of
the Jamaican slave-owners.
 During the 1830s, resistance by the Caribbean
slaves to their conditions was widespread and
there were frequent uprisings.
 Brönte was writing the novel in the 1840s.
Postcolonial re-writings
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
 Jean Rhys was born in
the Caribbean island of
Dominica in 1890 and
moved to Britain at 16.
 As a descendant of the
white slave-owning
class, her relations with
black Caribbeans was
affected by the history
of slavery in the region.
 As a Dominican-born
white woman, she could
not consider herself
«British»
 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
 In Wide Sargasso Sea,
she places Bertha Mason
centre-stage, allowing
her the opportunity of
telling things from her
point of view.
 This is not done in order to
«complete» Jane Eyre.
 The relation between the
two novels is dynamic
and dialogic:
 WSS both engages with
and refuses JE as an
authoritative source.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
The novel has 3 parts:
1. Narrated by Antoinette Cosway, who records
her childhood with her widowed mother
Annette in a large house, Coulibri, in Jamaica
just after the Emancipation Act which formally
ended slavery.
1. Tensions between black & white communities.
2. Antoinette’s mother marries Mr. Mason and the
girl is sent to a convent school.
 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
2. Narrated by an unnamed male
character who has married
Antoinette.
 He starts calling her «Bertha»
although she doesn’t like it.
 He is uncomfortable with the island
and its inhabitants, particularly his
wife’s black servant Christophine.
 Antoinette’s half brother informs him
there’s madness in the Cosway family
and links Christophine to the practice
of obeah (voodoo).
 The narrator feels he has been
«tricked» and his relationship with her
deteriorates.
 He decides to return to England
although she does not want to go.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

3. This section is set in a large house in

England. The opening paragraphs are
narrated by Grace Poole and the rest by
Antoinette.
3. She contrasts her memories of Caribbean
life with the grey of her attic cell, and tells
of her wanderings through the house at
night.
4. In the novel’s climax she takes a candle
and the keys from Grace Poole and
leaves ther room.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
 The novel’s curious structure
 The use of narrative voice is very complex.
 2 major first-person narrators (Antoinette and her
husband)
 Although her husband may relate the longest
section of the narrative, reflecting his desire to
control meaning, Antoinette’s voice
 interrupts his at the central novel’s point in part
2:
 Is the first and last narrator, making her
husband’s narrative contained inside hers.
 Neither character is fully in control.
 Meaning and definition are continually contested in
this narrative.
 This clash of perpectives is a contest of power
which is simultaneously colonial and patriarchal.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
 Rhys’s novel turns to challenge the meanings
made available in Brontë’s work by entering
into critical dialogue with it. This happens
through NAMING. Names are central to our
sense of identity.
 Antoinette’s name is constantly changing in
the novel as her family circumstances alter:
 Bertha Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester
 She is always being defined in relation both TO
men and BY men.
 Andwhy is her husband never named as
Rochester?
RE-WRITING:
Possibilities and Problems
Re-writing: Possibilities and problems
 A re-writing does much more than merely «fill in» gaps
in the source-text.
 It enters into a productive critical dialogue with it.
 A re-writing takes the source-text as a point of
inspiration and departure, but its meanings are not
fully determined by it.
 A re-writing often exists to resist or challenge
colonialist representations of colonised peoples and
cultures perceived in the source-text and popular
readings of it.
 In this way we might consider a re-writing a of
«classic» text as «postcolonial.»
 A re-writing often implicates the reader as an active
agent in determining the meanings made possible by
the dialogue between the source-text and its re-
writing.
Re-writing: Possibilities and problems
 Problems:
 A re-writing often imagines that the reader will
be familiar with the source-text it utilises.
 It’s addressed to an educated reader versed in
the literary works of the colonising culture.
 A re-writing will always remain tied to its
antecedent in some degree.
 Instead, re-writings continue to invest literary
«classics» with value by making them a point of
reference for postcolonial texts.
Before you go…
In this powerpoint presentation
you have learnt about:
 The role of English literature in colonial
education and culture.
 Postcolonial critiques of canonical English
Literature: strategies for re-reading and re-
writing.
 Achebe and Heart of Darkness;
 Said’s contrapuntal reading
 Re-readings of Jane Eyre
 Rewritings of Jane Eyre
John
MacLeod’s
Beginning
Postcolonialism
Chapter 5: RE-READING
AND RE-WRITING ENGLISH
LITERATURE
Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez