Imperialism - imperial is a policy of extending the power of a country or a State through

conquering land, colonization through force, or by religion. This is all done in the name of a
social mission to civilize the natives already known as "savages''. This is done by showcasing
a benevolent spirit of the State that it cares for the savages, wants to educate them, wishes to
give them a religion disregarding their already existing beliefs, giving them social mannerism
and cultural know-how. Through this they destroy the natives, their faith, construction or
social set up declaring it primitive, use these natives as slaves, take the political, social,
economical control of the land by declaring them incompetent and profit by annexure. But
England and its people only know that their country and its political leaders are doing a
genuine social work - civilizing the savages, under the mask of this they run their malignant
business, destroy habitats and force the western ways for gains. England and its people during
Nineteenth century believed that England as a country was on a social mission to help other
countries develop. This was based on a supermascist belief that if the Englanders are socially
high(accompanied by a racist belief) they should help the people at the lowest(this brought
apartheid). The people of England knew about this act of kindness taken up by the State and
took pride in that which also became a part of their cultural representation as facilitators,
helpers, catalysts for the growth of others. England and its people hardly knew about the dark
side of the mission which brought discrimination, slavery, racial segregation, colonization,
forceful religious conversions, massacres, interventionism in the colonized country's working
and taking control of everything. Literature was used as a tool to produce the identity of
England as a State - a giver, a provider for the other countries which were chosen for the
mission. This was one of the modern ways to validate, authenticate the success of imperial
projects.
If we could identify and recognise such policies of England, its literature, European
colonizer's cultural literature during the age of ongoing imperial conquests we could know
and we could note the worlding of the third world. Worlding is a sort of cornering, of
suppressing and oppressing the third world countries, a sort of pressing them downwards
declaring them unkempt savages who need to be civilized by first world as a responsible
master. This leads to deliberate hogging of the third world. They considered the third world
as a distant, ancient culture, conservative, abused, exploited but with richness that may be
wasted if the first world doesn't attempt to recover, discover, and interpret the third world in
the translations in English of Indian texts fostering an impression of the third world as a
signifier. This third world as a signifier makes us forget the amount of worlding that went to
finally decide the third position of the third world. What is also signified here is that England
will be the hero, the saviour, the responsible neighbour which will help to reclaim the third
world's identity now as not their own but as England's alley. Spivak talks about the colonial
set up of England. While studying Kothari we discussed that English translated and altered
the meaning of the texts, recast it to favour their narrative of goodness as heroic and the third
world in an alarming state seeking help for survival and development.
Spivak now opens the text with this statement "It seems unfortunate that the emerging field of
feminist criticism produce such axioms( principles) of imperialism.
To understand the axioms or principles of imperialism I have defined them. They are -
Axiomatics of Imperialism is the procedural othering under the mask of a benevolent social
mission, as in the case of Jane Eyre gets the centre due to a systematic periphering of Bertha.
What we do for Jane Eyre is highlight her as a protagonist, study her in isolation and consider
her the feminist heroine of this text. Now that the heroine of the English Literature is
highlighted, side by side the Third world literature is degraded or put off the light. This places
Jane in limelight and Bertha the counterpart in darkness. We will see how.
Spivak clears that she will take a deconstructive approach and take the book into
consideration and not the author. By targeting the book Spivak also points at the need of the
West to essentially put themselves as an upper hand, in a place that they would not like to
lose their dominant position, support some binaries to remain, to sustain their status of
supreme or over, over the under(third world). This supermascist superiority is at stake and
because of this risk the feminist texts were not only on the basis of the individualism that
Jane achieves that is the empowerment that she achieves but also making her the individualist
subject, the only protagonist, the heroine, negligently ignoring any other. So, the feminist
texts at that time were not only a story about a girl who achieves independence, self-
dependent but also creating the subject who is individualist- self-centerd, selfish, absolute,
ignoring any other along side which is what Jane does for herself and in the process
disregards Bertha. This is done at two registers and that is child bearing - the sexual labour
of women as reproductive vessels interpreted as compassionate love, and the other is soul
making, the very imperialist mission of making the soul of the natives, making them from
cannibals, barberous individuals to civilized citizens the task that England took up. In relation
to female individualist that Jane is shifts to the dominant position by sidelining the "native
female" Bertha who is excluded completely for Jane who is the new emerging feminist
individual while Bertha doesn't stand a chance in this discourse. If we consider Jane in
isolation her narrative pronounces her as a heroine, a female subject but Spivak's narrative
makes an effort to shift the attention from this female subject constitution that makes this
female individualist to the object formation that occurs for Bertha in opposition. The binary
as asserted by the West, "West as the Subject" then the other as an object.
The Ariel, Caliban and Propero
Prospero - the England, the master
Ariel - the native intellectual, the Britishers who came to India did oppress the farmers and
those who were uneducated but made slaves out of those who were intellectuals by teaching
them English making them Clearks, the first copies of English but not the real English, this
difference highlights the desire to keep their authority intact
Caliban - the rude, barbarous native who protests like Achebe's Okonkwo
Like Fanon said that there were natives who were dependent on the colonizers and those were
native intellectuals who held jobs in the English office. These Latin Americans(colony)
native intellectuals too are like Shakespeare's Ariel to Europe, says Jose Enrique Rodo.
Retemar reshapes this Latin American intellectual called Ariel before into Caliban.
She talks about In this triangular relationship, Caliban is constructed as the uncivilized native
Other, Ariel is the “intellectual” native Other & Prospero is patriarch & colonizer.
Construction of English women in imperialism(Jane) overlaps and bleeds into the
construction of the “intellectual other"( Bertha). Spivak calls forth to under the strategic
othering of this Caliban in the literature that legitimizes this individualism that we talk about.
Erasing the native from the narrativization and becoming the real calibans( intellectual
uncivilized who are educated but still cannot do away with the colonial mannerism).
Elizabeth Fox- Genovese informs us about feminism in the West trying to access
individualism in the early stages a kind of freedom to choose for herself, a self-reliance,
empowerment. The fight for female individualism is acted out in a superior structure formed
in the society where the merits only go the cannonised, ones standardized through the skill of
creative imagination. The English Women achieved this individualism, a reputation and
esteem in the social structure that before did not allow them space through this tool of
creative imagination in literature and writing.
It is argued that Jane herself tries to marginalize and privatize herself. She attempts to isolate
herself deliberately pushing herself into the periphery, a constructed strategy of
self-privatization or self- seclusion. Jane is glad that the weather is bad and she doesn't need
to face the world, doesn't need to go out in public and can live privately. When the family is
sitting together she withdraws herself, moves away into her marginal space. The space is used
her to show the weirdly constructed off- centered making of a withdrawing room where the
breakfast room contained the book case, a counter-made space opposite to normal set up
where she can extract herself from the world. She holds the privilege of not being compelled
to do proper things in a set space. Jane is allowed to ignore the letterpress, which is meant to
be read, which is understood as only one-dimensional aspect is needed to decipher its
meaning, for example if i say I can see rainbow that means rain has stopped, it rained before.
But to assert the creative individualist female who is now also self-marginalized, she reads
pictures (which can mean more than one thing) so that it can call for uniquely interpreted
creative analysis. If Jane is an adopted child by her aunt she is a counter-family of the
Reeds(aunt's family), if she has the cruel headmaster and Brokelhurts who own the school as
one family, Mrs. Temple and her friend Helen who support her become her counter family.
Therefore, she is always backed, supported or is able to gather enough aid in the form of
sympathy, consolation and emotional strength. If Rochester and Bertha are a legal family she
and Rochester are counter-family but through the imperial cycle of "West being the centre or
the subject" Jane gains momentum by shifting from this counter-family to being in the lawful
family of Rochester as his wife, completing the family by bearing the child of Rochester,
gaining the central position. Bertha is therefore slid aside.
How she shifts to the centre from counter-family to the in-laws family is where there is an
active ideology of imperialism playing its role in the discursive field. Spivak defines for us
discursive fields to understand axiomatics of Imperialism. Discursive fields according to her
are discrete system of signs that are based on some specific principles. "imperialism as a
social mission" too has some axiomatics. The artist(here, Bronte) taps at this discursive field
of imperialism in order to move the narrative structure, takes the assistance of axiomatic of
imperialism to produce Jane as the heroine of her buildungsroman and construct a narrative
of a British female individualist heroine, and with that others Bertha. It is beyond the simple
diagnosis of racism.
As a result of subject formation of Jane as a female individualist heroine, Bertha is
constructed to be the object produced by these axiomatics of Imperialism. Bronte leaves the
animal/human binary free in the case of Bertha so that the Jane in better state can be
highlighted for discussion, observation and attention. The pronoun used for Bertha is it she is
even called a wild animal and Jane's analysis of first impression of Bertha as a wild animal is
accepted because Bertha is muted, cannot defend. It is not only about a shift from lawful wife
Bertha to the desired Jane, not only of re-marriage and reproduction but also of Europe(Jane)
and not-yet human other(Bertha) also of soul making because the Europe(Jane) identifies the
other(Bertha) as bestial, inhumane, wild, uncivilized personality.
When Rochester believes and reasons out that he cannot do anything about Bertha's madness
and he has done whatever God and humanity would require of him, Jane is all set to move
from counter-family of extra marital affair to lawful family of man and wife because Bertha
no more stands a chance. Eagleton's analysis produces a narrative of class position because
Jane is a governess, Gilbert and Gubar calls Bertha Jane's dark double in psychological terms.
But what both miss here is the axiomatics of Imperialism running the scene. She therefore
proves that 19th century literature concieved a greater project which cannot be contained in
the nuclear family of Rochester, Jane and their child, much beyond sexual reproduction (child
bearing, that is soul marking. Here the native subject(Bertha) is actually not an animal but is
showcased an animal due to the terrorism of imperialism, the categorical imeprative(the
moral duty of West to educate the other). Bertha falls the prey to this terrorism, an epistemic
violence.
Spivak explains her use of categorical imperative where she says that it is a universal law
given by pure reason. He says that in all creation anything that man chooses and over which
holds any kind of power may be used as means, man alone and with him any rational creature
is an an end in himself. Kant describes that there are a certain behavioural traits that remain
and does not change as per the situation. This supermascist behaviour adopted by the Whites
when transforms from philosophy to politics and is transvestied in the service of State it
becomes an imperial project. This project is principled on the idea - make the heathen into a
human so it can be treated as an end in himself. This is the tangent to Jane's narrative, the
story of St. John rivers who gains the advantage of concluding the task, flashing the imperial
philosophy. The allegorical language of Christian psychobiography is used at the end instead
of the textually constituted academically private grammar of the creative imagination which
was used in the beginning. The St. John Rivers scene progresses into the fold of Pilgrim's
progress. Eagleton ignores this instead glorifies St. John Rivers for his work in Calcutta while
Gilbert and Gubar plainly focus on Novel as Jane's progress replacing male protagonist to a
female one. They do not seem to notice that it is not only about Jane having a family and
accomplishing career and family life but also the matter of soul making. And this
unquestioned idiom of imperialism.
Rivers considers his work of soul making. a great vocation, him putting all energy in
bettering the race taking them from ignorance, war, bondage, hell to knowledge, peace,
freedom and hope of heaven. But Spivak calls this imperialism, its territorial and subject
constituting project a violent deconstruction of these oppositions.
Jean Rhys decides to give Bertha Mason a life she is missing in the novel Jane Eyre. Wide
Sargasso Sea is that life. Bertha's function was to render indertiminate the boundary between
human and animal and thereby weaken her entitlement under the spirit. In the Rhys' version
of novel when Bertha attacks Rochester and he is bleeding Jane keeps Bertha's sanity and
humanity as a critic of imperialism. When confronted by Grace Poole about what had
happened, Bertha said all she heard was, "I cannot interfere legally between yourself and
your husband, proving the word legally provoked her and not her innate bestiality that
prompted her violent reaction.
Through the figure of Antoinette whom Rochester violently names Bertha in WSS, Rhys
suggests how a personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of
imperialism. Antoinette is a White Creole girl growing up in Jamaica caught between English
imperialist and the black native. Rhys inscribes some themes of narcism. The text shows
mirroring through the characters of Antoinette herself and Tia the little black girl with whom
she lived so closely that she thought she would become like her. When Tia throws a jagged
stone at her there is blood on her face and tears in Tia's eyes she felt as if she was saw herself
in a looking glass. A progressive sequence of dreams too reinforce this mirror imagery. Tia is
the racist friend who hurls insults at her, the white who bullies the white Creole Antoinette
but she finds her as the mirror of herself. Unlike ovid's metamorphosis where Narcissus
recognises his other as self, Antoinette sees her self as the other, as Bronte's Bertha and
recognises herself as the ghost of thornfield hall. When Jane explains the figure of Antoinette
as a ghost surrounded by a gilt frame she means the Narcissus's pool(where he saw himself
and fell in love with himself) reflecting selfed other so does Antoinette's pool discovers
othered self. The dream sequel ends with Tia, the other for Antoinette that could not be selfed
(though thought as a mirror image in the beginning) because of the fracture of imperialism.
Antoinette remains in between the white elite who isolate them and can't fit into the
impoverished black colony members therefore lives in inbetweeness and cannot merge into
the black Tia completely. At the end Antoinette realises why she was brought to the fictivs
England of Jane and to do what, to act out her fictive role of transforming self into the other
by setting the house on fire and killing herself only so that Jane can become the feminist
individualist heroine of the British fiction. This is the epistemic violence of imperialism that
constructs a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of this social mission of the
colonizers. Rhys saves Antoinette and sees to it that the women of colonies are not sacrificed
as an insane animal like Bertha was for her sister's consolidation.
Wide Sargasso Sea attends to Rochester and the analysis of his character. Rhys calls him the
victim of patriarchal inheritance law of entailment rather than his father's favouritism so as a
younger child he is sent to colonies to buy a heiress. In discussing Antoinette's Identity in
relation to Rochester the patrimonial, she becomes the Oedipus (symbolic). As in 19th cent
the subject-constitution represented child bearing and soul making in 20th cent alllows West
to plot the itenary of the Subject from Narcissus to Oedipus. In the scene of wind from
Europe Rhys substitutes the unsent letters to father. Some are not written but in mind some
are written and not sent. In Oedipus relay one thing that is secured but not provided by Rhys
to Rochester of Bronte is the name of father. His last letter shows the loss of patronymic as he
talks about a few books and says the rest(including unsent letters) is eaten away, quite
destroyed.
We can surmise the distance between the two novels by noticing the unfinished story of
Christophine which is the imperialist tangent to Rhys'version like St. John's narrative is that
to Jane Eyre. Christophine is not symbolized as the "native" who is often oppressed because
she is not from Jamaica instead she is from Martinique belonging to the category of a good
servant. She is the first interpreter and speaking named subject in the text. Christophine's
broken English suggests she is not learned, a commodity gifted as a wedding present. She has
some few important roles to play, it is her who recognises the class difference created by race
as she says that black ritual practices are culture specific and cannot be used by Whites as a
cheap remedy for a social evil in this case Rochester's lack of love for Antoinette. She makes
Rochester realize that it was he who begged to marry her who came after her, she just loved
you gave her everything but you were here for money Rochester the white man. Christophine
knows she is small before the law but acknowledges equality by saying freedom is for all and
she is a free black woman.
Christophine cannot be contained by a text written in the interest of the Creole woman rather
than a native one. No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the other into self because
the very idea of imperialism is to turn absolutely other into domesticated other to consolidate
the imperialist self. After speaking her mind for Antoinette she is driven away from the
narrative without a proper direction or exit, without a characterilogical explanation or justice.
Attempts to construct third world woman as a signifier remind us that the hegemonic
definition of literature is itself caught in the history of imperialism. Spivak says that a full
literary reinscription cannot flourish in the imperial fracture.
Frankenstein is about the origin and evolution of man in the society and does not deploy the
axiomatics of imperialism. There are imperialist sentiments in the text but the text doesn't
give in to the discursive field of imperialism that produce unquestioned ideological
correlatives to narrate the book in favour of a hegemonic master or colonizer.
Frankenstein is not a battle ground for male and female individualism articulated in terms of
sexual reproduction (family and female) or social subject production (race and male). This
binary is undone as the lab relies on an artificial womb so the duty of the female as
reproductive vessel is undone. Frankenstein's enemy is God maker of man and his competitor
is female maker of children. It is not that death of mother and bride directly associate to his
monstrous homoerotic son to his bed. Monster does not have a childhood, it is his miscued
understanding of the real motive for monster's vengefulness that reveals competition with
woman as a maker. Like a mother or a parental figure he understands it is his duty to take
care of the creatures and decides to not give them a partner. The woman in making placed in
the lab is not a bodied corpse but a human being. The logic behind this signifies her prior
lively existence than the death which Frankenstein gives her after abortion. The man's
arogance as a soul maker makes him take the position of God and vainly negate the
physiological merit of woman's body. If to withhold phallus from female is male's fetish then
to withhold womb from male can be female fetish. The phallic mother means a womb in the
male is only by the virtue of the castration anxious son, in Frankenstein the father cannot
produce a daughter only the sons. Here the language of racism the dark side of imperialism as
social mission combines with masculine histeria into the idiom of sexual reproduction. The
roles of female and male are displaced and reversed. Frankenstein cannot produce daughter
because she can produce ten folds and the race of devils will be threat for whole humanity.
To discard a singular theotrical reason she makes use of Kant's three types of characters as
childhood friends - V Frankenstein force of theotrical reason and natural philosophy, Henry
Clerval the practical force or moral relation of things and Elizabeth with aesthetic judgement-
the aerial creation of poets Linking concept of nature and freedom that promotes moral
feeling. Henry belived because he knows many languages and has knowledge feels can
materially help English colonization through enterprise. This is imperialism in the novel.
At the end Frankenstein's story ends in death. The monster confesses his guilt towards his
master attempts to immolate himself. At the end he says he is lost in darkness and distance
which is neither territorializing individual imagination ( in the beginning of Jane Eyre) nor
the authorative scenerio of Christian psychobiography at the end. The most powerful
suggestion in WWS that JE can be read as the orchestration of self-immolation of Bertha
Mason as good wife which she links to widow sacrifice in Indian tradition