Download English 223 Lecture 3 Wide Sargasso Sea

English223
Lecture3
WideSargassoSea
Fritz Eichenburg, 1943
F.H. Townsend, 1847
Mary Wollstonecraft
famously compared
women to slaves.
“Women may be
convenient slaves, but
slavery will have its
constant effect,
degrading the master
and the abject
dependent”
“Before marriage it is their business to
please men; and after, with a few
exceptions, they follow the same scent, with
all the persevering pertinacity of instinct.
[…]
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. And that
women from their education and the
present state of civilized life, are in the
same condition, cannot, I think, be
controverted” (187)
“For feminist individualism in the age of imperialism, is
precisely the making of human beings, the constitution
and ‘interpellation’ of the subject not only as individual
but as ‘individualist.’ This stake is represented on two
registers: childbearing and soul making. The first is
domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction cathected
as ‘companionate love’; the second is the imperialist
project cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission.
As the female individualist, not-quite/not-male, articulates
herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the
‘native female’ as such is excluded from any share in this
emerging norm” (244)
“How is Jane moved from the place of the counter-family
to the family-in-law? It is the active ideology of
imperialism” (247)
“Through Bertha 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” (249)
FeministImperialism
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
1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women
1833 Slavery Abolished
1847 Jane Eyre
1958-78 process of Dominica becoming
independent from Britian
1962 Jamaican independence from Britain
1966 Wide Sargasso Sea
“Our garden was large and beautiful as that
garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew
there. But it had gone wild. The paths were
overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed
with the fresh living smell. Underneath the
tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was
green. Orchids snaked out of reach or for
some reason not to be touched. One was
snaky looking another like an octopus with
long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves
hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the
octopus orchid flowered – then not an inch of
tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of
white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see.
The scent was very sweet and strong. I never
went near it. All coulibri Estate had gone wild
like the garden, gone to bush. No more
slavery – why should anybody work? This never
saddened me. I did not remember the place
when it was prosperous” (6)
Mary Wollstonecraft
famously compared
women to slaves.
“Women may be
convenient slaves, but
slavery will have its
constant effect,
degrading the master
and the abject
dependent”