Criticism (3)

Third Year, Faculty of Education, Primary

CRITICISM

THIRD YEAR

Introduction, Summaries and Commentary

By

Prof. Nabila Ali Marzouk Ahmed

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 Faculty of Education

Vision

Faculty of Education, Fayoum University is keen on attaining

development of education in levels in both the pre-university
education and the higher education. All this is currently done
with the aim of achieving a social human comprehensive and
sustainable development of the Egyptian community in its
communication with the Arab and foreign world.

Mission

It is confined in constructing the concepts and unifying the

procedures in order to create the educational specialists in all
levels, in cooperation with the university faculties, ministry of
education, public and private schools, and all other bodies
concerned with education.

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Table of Contents

Part I

Introduction…………………………………4

Aristotle's Poetics (Summary and Explanation)

…………………………..16

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Part II

Neoclassic Developments and Reactions……20

Romanticism…………………………………. 30

Metaphysical Poetry…………………………62

Part III

How to Assess a Literary Text…………… 92

From Great Expectations by Charles Dickens……… 94

―Returning the Colonizer‘s Gaze‖, Nadine Gordimer‘s

None to Accompany Me, a Hybridity in the Making…106
Model Exam…………………………………….149

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 An Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory

Before we begin our examination and study of

criticism, it is important that we define what it means. To
do this, we will look at the meaning of some important
related terms and identify some of the key differences
between traditional ―literary criticism‖ and ―literary
theory.‖ Criticism offers the frameworks or outlines that
help students and researchers in the field of literature to
understand works of art, poems, novels and plays. You look
at a work of art and read good or bad things about it and
wonder: "How do those people decide whether it is good or
bad?", "Why should they deem one work inferior to
another? And on what basis?" Well, criticism provides the
bases and criteria according to which critics can judge and
evaluate a work of art.
―Literary criticism‖ is usually defined as the act
of studying, analyzing and interpreting literature. The main
concern of a literary critic should not be restricted to the
evaluation of the literary worth of a work of literature. He
should be equipped with the weapon to defend a certain
interpretation or understanding of the literary text in
question. The main task of a literary critic is to provide an
explanation and reach a critical understanding of what a
literary text means in terms of its aesthetic, as well as
political, social, and cultural content, connotations and

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suggestions. Literary criticism is concerned with more than
the evaluation or discussion of the value of a literary work.
It rather attempts to provide an understanding that would be
considered reasonable and logical by other critics because it
is based on acknowledged literary theories. This
interpretation or understanding relies on the intended
meaning of the writer of the literary text as well as its
meaning in the light of the society that produced it taking
into consideration the cultural, political and ideological
conditions that inspired the work.

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 ―Literary theory,‖ refers to "a particular form of
literary criticism in which particular academic, scientific, or
philosophical approaches are followed in a systematic
fashion while analyzing literary texts. Traditional literary
criticism does not focus on a certain aspect of (or a
particular approach to) a literary text in exactly the same
way a literary theory does. Literary theory usually offers
certain, systematic approaches to literary works that
necessarily guide the critic through definite steps to reach
an expected interpretation. At the beginning of his critical
assessment, a researcher has to limit him/herself to a certain
"literary theory" and define the major outline of this theory
and also the concepts he/she finds relevant to his/her
analysis and interpretation. Nowadays there are many
theories that belong to disciplines or systems of knowledge
outside the realm of literature but are nevertheless
applicable to and very convenient for the understanding and
interpretation of literary texts. Examples of these theories
are Psychoanalysis, Ecocriticism, Power relations, etc. For
example, a psychoanalytic literary theorist or a researcher
who choose to interpret a literary text applying the
psychoanalytic approach will read a lot in the psychological
theories of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung or new revisions of
their theories like the theories of object relations and
feminist psychoanalysis to reach a critical understanding of

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a novel or play such as Wuthering Heights or Great
Expectations.

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A literary theorist might apply, e.g. Sigmund Freud‘s
analysis of the feelings of guilt to interpret Pip's behavior
towards his family. He might use Jung's notions about the
stages of development to explain the relationship between
Heathcliff and Catherine. A literary analysis might also be
established around the trauma theory to comment upon the
conditions and behaviors of the characters that face violent
emotional shocks during critical phases of their lives. It
might also be very useful to comment upon the psychology
of literary characters whose countries undergo wars or huge
political or social changes.

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 Literary theorists often apply disciplines that are
not directly related to literature to literary texts and this
helps them discover the real message/s included in the
literary work. Traditional criticism might therefore fail to
decipher such messages since a traditional literary critic
does not equip himself with theories and disciplines outside
the literary realm.

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 This book starts from the beginning of literary
criticism. Literary criticism starts with Aristotle, the great,
Greek philosopher who started the examination of literary
works with the purpose of extracting rules that prevail in
most works and use them to device a theory. His theory
was used for a long time as a reference to judge and
evaluate works of art. This theory was extracted from
literary texts only unlike the practices of modern literary
criticism which subjects works of art to disciplines that are
completely foreign to the genre or at least that is how they
appear at first glance. When Aristotle thought about a
theory of literature, he did not try to deduce its pillars from
any abstract theory of aesthetics. On the contrary he
investigated the literary material itself by studying and
analyzing Greek literature. Modern literature seeks the
concepts of theories that are not directly related to literature
and analyses literary texts according to the concepts they
provide. When you analyze a literary text, say a play,
according to Aristotle's Poetics, this gives you an
understanding that is completely different from analyzing it
according to modern literary theory. Take Othello, e.g. If
you give it a critical analysis relying on the Poetics, you
will find yourself concerned with the three unities, Othello
as a tragic hero, etc. If, on the other hand you assess the
play applying a psychoanalytic approach or the concepts of

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African Literature you might dive deeper both into the
characters and the world of the play. Some critics even
claim that Othello has an inferiority complex because of his
black color and refer his jealousy to his oriental nature.

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 Some critics, however, claim that there is no
significant difference between literary criticism and literary
theory and that the latter is simply a continuation or a
development of the former. Others disagree and state that
literary theory is a far more developed system of criticism
that widens the scope of intellectual involvement with
literary texts and reveal the real value of literary works.
It is remarkable, though that at the beginning of
their studies, students prefer literary criticism to critical
theory finding it much easier. Literary theory requires
students to read and thoroughly understand concepts that
belong to disciplines other than their primary field. They
also have to use the specialized vocabulary relevant to the
theory they apply and have the necessary time and patience
to get used to that specialized language. Relating the
concepts of the selected theory to the text gets students
involved in complicated arguments that requires them to
consider the text from various perspectives.
It is true that literary theory can be challenging to
master but it is equally true that it gives both the readers
and conductors of literary research deeper insights into and
broader understandings of literary texts that would not be
attained without making use of the interpretive, more
comprehensible apparatus of literary theory.

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 The book starts with a summary (By Dr.
Nabila Ali Marzouk) of Aristotle's Poetics which is meant
to get you acquainted with the basics of literary criticism as
laid by the father of the genre. I tried my best to render the
language as modern and simple as possible while also
keeping some of the Greek terms as they appear in the
original Poetics. The reason I did that is first, to preserve
some of the ancient atmosphere and second, get you to
know the meanings of these words which still pop up in
books of literary criticism. I also tried to provide examples
to explain some points that could otherwise sound
ambiguous. I interfered a little with the arrangement of the
chapters when it was found more convenient to bring the
information about the same thing closer together. That was
supposed to make it easier for you to get the whole idea of
a certain concept and also to study. This happens, e.g. while
summarizing Chapters 16-18. The chapter goes back to
information that was stated earlier, namely about
anagnorisis and plot. It was therefore found more
convenient to insert this information in the previous places
with their colleagues of the same category. You will notice
that some words are used synonymously although you do
not think of them as such, e.g. drama or tragedy and poetry,
also poet and playwright. The reason this is done is that
literary expression started with drama and drama

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meant/still means performance. A dramatic text should be
thought of in terms of performance. It is meant to be acted
out on the stage not simply written like a novel or a short
story. Drama is the first literary genre known to man and
when Aristotle wrote his Poetics he was totally unaware
that other genres would follow. Drama and plays were
written in the form of poetry and that should explain the
mixing of terms (poetry, drama, poet and playwright). A
playwright was therefore necessarily a poet and a play was
also poetry.

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 Finally I hope you make good use of this work that
was primarily intended to make Aristotle comprehensible
and at least a bit acceptable to you in spite of the huge
temporal and geographical distance that separates him from
your generation.

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 Aristotle's Poetics

(A Summary and Explanation)

An Introduction

Perhaps you all know that Aristotle was a great,

Greek philosopher but do you know what the word
"philosopher" meant while Aristotle lived? In ancient
Greece the word philosopher referred to someone who was
informed in all or almost all the branches of science and art
that were popular at the time. No distinction was yet
established between science and art and knowledge was
perceived as one huge entity that should not be divided into
specialized branches or distinctive disciplines. Aristotle
wrote in math and physics perhaps more than he wrote
about literature but here we are only interested in the part
that concerns our literary studies. The previous introduction
is only meant to explain why Aristotle approached poetry
(the literary genre that was available at his time) using the
same scientific method he used to explain and treat biology
and physics. He started by collecting all the data that was
available to him which consisted mainly of Greek plays.
His next step was to categorize them to make it possible for
him to draw conclusions by deciding on what is common
among these works and thereby deduce the rules that
govern literary writing (At that time only drama). Later he

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proceeded to analyze the results and then devise a theory,
i.e. a method to understand and evaluate literary texts
which is the core of literary criticism. He found that drama
(the available literary genre that was mainly written in
poetic form) could be divided into two types; tragedy and
comedy and announced that the former was far more
important than the latter. He therefore dedicates the better
part of his Poetics to the study and analysis of tragedy. He
states that tragedy is divided into six main elements
declaring that plot is the most important part. He gives the
criteria for measuring the success of writers in devising
good plots and satisfactory characters.
Aristotle thinks that poetry can be studied the
same way as natural sciences by relying on careful
observation that paves the road for a tentative theory that
explains the observations. However, unlike physical
sciences, art is not governed by fixed laws or regularities.
On the contrary art advances and flourishes by questioning
and shaking what has been taken for granted by previous
generations.
Aristotle's concept of art or poetry is different from
the modern concepts of these genres. For him art refers to
anything that is artificial, i.e. made by man not found in
nature. Poetry and sculpture are as much art as chairs and
clothes because they are all equally artificial. The main

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problem with studying Aristotle, however, is that we do not
have enough Greek tragedies to illustrate his ideas.
Extensive reference is made to Oedipus Rex, a most famous
tragedy written by Sophocles who was favored by
Aristotle.

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Neo-Classicism

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 Neo-Classicism

Neo-Classicism

New-classicism (also spelled Neo-classicism) is a term that

is driven from the Greek words ―νέος nèos‖ which means
"new" and ―κλασικός klasikόs‖ which means "of the
highest rank"). It refers to a literary movement that
flourished first in Rome and covered almost all branches of
arts; music, architecture, theater, etc. It was primarily
inspired by the culture and art of classical antiquity.
Although it started in Rome, it eventually became popular
all over Europe when the European students who studied
art were required to finish what was known as the ―Grand
Tour‖ which dictated that they should travel throughout
Europe to finish their education. Those students returned
from Italy to their motherlands carrying the Greco-Roman
artistic ideas and ideals that were rediscovered and
readopted.
―Neo-classicism‖ is a term used to refer to ―the
classicism of the Restoration and the 18th century period
(1660-1780).‖ During that period the writers were opposed
to the principles that governed and characterized the
Renaissance writing. Those writers rejected the emotional
and imaginative appeal as well as the bold, strong imagery
and diction that were essential aspects of the Renaissance

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period. During the period of neo-classicism, writers lost
their faith in feelings and the imagination and would only
trust the brain which took over and became in full control.
Instead of passion, they trusted good manners and instead
of eloquence, they trusted wit. The heart had no place in
their value system and was not even considered while
discussing any issue.
The term neo-classicism describes the literature that
prevailed in England from 1660 to 1780, which is known as
the Restoration period. Restoration literature is also used to
refer to English literature written after the Restoration of
the monarchy in England in 1660 following the period of
the Commonwealth. Several literary forms which are
popular in the world of modern literature started and gained
success and confidence during that period, e.g. the novel,
travel writing, history and journalism. It extends from the
death of John Dryden to the romantic period which is
marked by the publication of William Wordsworth‘s
Lyrical Ballads. The neo-classical phase is the phase that
went back to appreciating and evaluating poetry and
dramas according to rules and principles that were derived
from the worthiest ancient Greek and Roman writers and
critics. To speak more generally, the term is also used to
refer to the value system and attitudes that were prevalent
during the Age of Reason. That value system condoned

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rationality, order, clarity, decorum and order and valued
general truths and facts over particular insights and
conjectures.
Neo-classicism is a rejection of the renaissance
view that considered man as a fundamentally virtuous and
benevolent being that is endowed with a huge potential for
intellectual and spiritual development. Neo-classicism
poets and dramatists considered these views of man
―optimistic, exuberant, and enthusiastic.‖
Neo-classical critics and theorists look upon man
as a defective being of limited potential since he is
inherently sinful. Instead of the renaissance‘s celebration of
invention and experimentation, activities that are all related
to the imagination, they emphasized common sense and
restraint and were advocates of conservatism in their
religious, economic, political or philosophical views. Neo-
classicists judge the value and real beauty of art according
to how useful it can be and claim that it should be
intellectual not emotional because emotional is less
pragmatic and therefore less valuable and useful. Finally,
they considered man as the most appropriate element or
subject of art.
Neo-classical poets aspired for a high level of
literature that should be perfect, meaning that it should be
rational and polished. Therefore, they recommended certain

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rules which formed a harmonious set of principles
following which was considered more important than the
beauty of the writing which was most valued by the noble
civilizations of the past and as preserved, to a certain limit,
by the French literature and culture. English poets and
writers neglected emotions and the imagination and
emphasized the intellect, so their poetry is mostly rational.
They avoided emotionalism and rejected extravagance.
They emphasized the universal over the particular and
trusted the mind rather than the senses. They were also
advocates of idealism rather than naturalistic subjectivism.
It is noteworthy here that a poetry that neglects emotions
becomes satirical and critical. The unemotional telling of
events was therefore a basic characteristic of neoclassical
art, as well as simplicity of line, form and colour. Among
the major characteristics of neoclassical poetry are the use
of allusions, the heroic couplet, strict meter and rhyme, and
topics discussed in the public sphere. Like the subject
matter of classical works, the subject matter of neoclassical
works tended to be timeless instead of temporal as in the
dynamic Baroque works. Neoclassicists emphasized
restraint, self-control and common sense. Conservatism
flourished in various fields particularly literature and
politics.
……………………………………………………..

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Neoclassical poetry was characterized by objectivity since
the poets were absolutely against subjectivity in poetry.
They avoided giving free reign to their feelings. They
would rather dwell upon the problems, miseries and
hardships of the people they encounter. Pope and Dryden
were the leading writers, who deviated from the traditional
schools of poetry and sought guidance in the works of
ancient Greek and Roman writers.

A major characteristic of the 18th century poetry is the

focus on decorum which was considered basic and
fundamental for good poetry. Decorum was meant to refer
to literary propriety. Eighteenth century poets valued
decorum as the basic criteria and controlling element for
evaluating poetry. You might now ask, what did the 18th
century poets meant by decorum? The answer is that the
word decorum was used to refer to a specific set of rules
that were considered essential for producing good poetry.
These rules, which were strict and precise, were supposed
to guide the language, composition of style, actions and
characters in a literary work.
One of the most important rules of decorum is the
rule of symmetry which was considered universal by
classicists. No matter which genre a literary work belongs
to, it should observe the rule of symmetry which guarantees

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that the work be forever valid and absolute. A work that
observes symmetry would also be unchanging and
permanent. If a work of literature is symmetrical, it should
consist of equal sections that should clearly and obviously
correspond to one another. Classicists claimed that
principle is natural and is actually borrowed from human
life that seems to favor equality and proportion rather than
disproportion. If a poet does not follow the rules of
symmetry, his poetry is never considered good regardless
of the content or ideas.
Another feature of decorum is that there should be
no confusion between the different literary genres. Distinct
borders should be laid to differentiate one literary genre
from the other. Neo-classical writers were, therefore careful
about ―correctness‖, paid much attention to the set rules of
art and respected the stylistic decorum. The theoretical
rules of poetry consisted of the basic characteristics of the
different genres. These characteristics or properties have
been derived from prominent classical works that survived
for a long time; this survival in itself is a sign of the
excellence of these works. It should be taken into
consideration that decorum is also concerned with the
quality and propriety of the themes that should be tackled
in a work of art. Only serious and proper themes were
considered worthy topics for literature and art in general.

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Another important feature of neo-classicism is ―wit.‖ The
term ―wit‖ is considered a vague term since it is used in
different manners. In the American Heritage Dictionary
defines wit as "the ability to perceive and express in
ingeniously humorous manner the relationship or similarity
between seemingly incongruous or disparate things." A
person with great abilities is called a wit and the history of
the word it has always been used to give the meaning of
mind or intellect. Today, however, the word is connected
with amusement or surprise, a meaning which has been
attached to it starting from the sixteenth century. To the
Elizabethan, 'wit' still meant primarily 'intellect' or 'mental
capacity,' though it also had such meanings, apparently
derivative of the central one, as 'understanding,' 'wisdom,'
even 'power of imagination' (W. Lee Ustick and Hoyt H.
Hudson, "Wit, 'Mixt Wit' and the Bee in Amber).
The metaphysical poets, for example, were described as
witty because of their exceptional ability in creating
striking images which were known as ‗conceit.‖
Interestingly, the 18th century poets were considered witty
if they were capable of clever as well as clear literary
expression. The word ―wit‖ is mentioned forty-six times in
Alexander Pope‘s ―Essay on Criticism‖, which reflects how
important it was for the neo-classical poets. In some
instances, the word was contrasted to imagination and

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fancy, while in others it was connected to ridicule, satire
and humor. It should also be mentioned that the word was
employed to refer to the ability to come up with the
appropriate or exact expressions as a sign of the poet‘s
talent which, in the eighteenth century, was measured by
inventing such expressions. To sum up, ―rational capacity,
reason, ingenuity, cleverness, clarity and correctness form
the concept of wit as an essential criterion in composing
poetry.‖
Although ―Didacticism‖ is a term that was
originally used during the classical period, it was
fundamentally essential for the guidance and evaluation of
the 18th century writing who made a point of emphasizing
the didactic aspect/nature of poetry. They were of the
view that poetry should necessarily offer ethical and moral
guidance and that the primary function of literature is to
instruct people in the moral behavior. The works of
Alexander Pope present a clear, perfect model for the
didactic aspect of poetry. Most of his poems are meant to
primarily guide and instruct the reader. His poem ―Essay on
Criticism‖ is obviously didactic; it offers instructions in the
form of heroic couplets. In the previous poem, pope
explains the rules of both good literature and appropriate
criticism within the framework of a poem. His renowned
poem contains short moral and critical sayings that have

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later been considered proverbs for their conciseness and
importance. Examples of these witty sayings are ―To err is
human but to forgive is divine‖ and also ―A little learning
is a dangerous thing.‖ It is just what is expected of poetry
to instruct, advice and educate since it addresses man as its
main and primary topic. To address man is also to tackle
the human life and human society and, consequently, neo-
classical poetry was mainly an imitation of the human life
with its diverse experiences and actions. As alexander Pope
defines it, poetry is ―a mirror held up to nature‖. Only
through the imitation of the human life can poetry comment
upon it and provide instructions and also pleasures to the
readers.
In addition to providing instructions and pleasure,
neo-classical writers find that imitation leads to perfection.
Neoclassical poets claimed that a poet is more of a
craftsman than a seer. He comments upon what he sees not
just delivers or copies it to the readers and neo-classicists in
general were fond of the heroic couplets forms, which
belonged to the classical tradition and preferred them to
blank verse. That perhaps explains why they were very
careful about dealing with a proper subject matter and were
more interested in the overall form and design than in the
details. They simply followed and employed the concepts
they advocated like symmetry, unity, proportion, grace and

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harmony believing that these concepts ensured the
achievement of their objectives which were mainly to
please and educate. They looked upon man as a social
animal that needed constant monitoring and instruction.
In the domain of prose, neo-classicists preferred the
essay, the parody, the satire, the letter, the moral fable and
the burlesque. The field of drama (the theatre), witnessed a
flourishing of the sentimental comedy, the comedy of
manners, the heroic drama and melodrama. As for poetry,
the rhymed couplet was the most common verse form
which was present in its perfect form in the works of Pope.
Writers and critics have claimed that the waning of
Neo-classicism also marked the end of the Enlightenment,
while the majority believes that an artistic movement, once
it is born, cannot possibly die. It can be subject to
modifications or development but never total eclipse. The
works of several twentieth century writers, for example the
renowned twentieth-century poet and critic T.S. Eliot
evokes major principles of neo-classicism. That yearning
for the past was also considered a move against
Romanticism.
T.S. Eliot expressed a specific opinion while
comparing the two literary trends explaining that
Romanticism resulted in poetry that mainly celebrated
personal and individual emotions and relied primarily on

29
inspiration and spontaneity, while Neo-classicism had
specific set rules concerning the form and content and
required careful craftsmanship.
We can conclude by stating that Neo-Classicism
is itself a proof that artistic movements do not die since it
revived the principles of the classic movement both in its
insistence on form as represented in the many rules they
prescribed to ensure order and discipline in a literary work
and in the emphasis given to correctness, good taste and
appropriateness. They showed open respect and adherence
to the classical tradition. The neo-classicist writer is in a
continuous endeavor to strike a balance between the three
major elements that constitute the world of the human
being: body, intellect and emotions. Neo-classicism valued
social conventions and traditions over the individual beliefs
and conventions and put form in a higher place than
content. Also major among their principles is their placing
of reason in a much higher place than emotions, the thing
that mainly differentiated them from the Romantics who
were primarily too overwhelmed by themselves and their
personal emotions to mind social conventions or the
restrictions a society imposed on individuals.
…………………………………………………………

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 The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat?
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors grasp?

When the stars threw down their spear,

And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?

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Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Does the previous poem belong to neoclassicism?

Justify your answer by analyzing the poem and

deciding whether it displays features of neoclassicism.

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ROMANTICISM

33
 ROMANTICISM

It is difficult to define the word ―romantic‖ for the

simple reason that it has been employed in many
situations and for many purposes till it became almost
impossible to give it a definite meaning. Romanticism
is a word that has its intellectual, social, political as
well as literary aspects. According to the opinion of the
historians of English literature, the romantic period
―denotes the span between the years 1798 in which
Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical
Ballads, and 1832, when Sir Walter Scott died‖. By the
time Sir Walter Scott died, many prominent poets of the
previous century were either dead or no longer working.
The word ―romantic‖ is also used to refer a certain
period of English poetry that started in 1789 when
William Blake published his Songs of Innocence and
closed with the deaths of Shelley and Keats. This phase
is known as the ―Romantic Age‖ and is distinguished
by five renowned poets, William Blake, William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and John Keats.
At the beginning, the French Revolution
colored the phase with the Declaration of the Rights of

34
Man (1791- 92) which caused a radical transformation
in the social thought and attitudes. Two influential
books dominated and stimulated radical thought and
these books were: the radical thinking was particularly
obvious in two influential books: Tom Paine`s Rights of
Man (1791 - 92) and William Godwin‘s Inquiry
Concerning Political Justice (1793). Paine‘s book
defended and supported the French Revolution
especially against the war launched by writers like
Edmund Burke who attacked the Revolution in his
famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790). In his book, Godwin talked about a future
peaceful but surely inevitable social development and
transformation that will bring about a happy stage that
will witness a fair distribution of all property among the
citizens and this period will also witness an end of all
governments. Major poets like Wordsworth and Shelley
and several others were quite influenced by Godwin‘s
book. Not very much later, however, adherents of the
revolution woke up to the hideous realities of politics
and the obvious failures when the revolution and those
who led it showed their ugly faces. Among the austere
events that revealed the ugly face of reality were the
capturing of power by the Jacobean extremists, the
merciless murder of the royal family, as well as the

35
September Massacres (1972) which carried out the
execution of a great number of the nobility after they
were imprisoned and totally helpless.
Romantic poets suffered a great dilemma
when their hero, Napoleon, showed himself as a mere
violent dictator who employed the guillotine to
subjugate his people. They underwent an intense
spiritual and intellectual dilemma that was apparent in
their poetry. This dilemma and moral disappointment
was obvious in Wordsworth‘s Prelude where he
expresses the idea that the previously oppressed have
―become Oppressors in their turn, Frenchmen had
changed a war of self-defense for one of Conquest,
losing sight of all which they had struggled for…‖

The ―Romantic Era‖ is so rich and dramatic that it

outshines almost all other phases of the history of
English literature. It is incomparable in its wide scope
of literary works and the excellence of its men of
letters. It is noteworthy to mention that the adjective
―romantic‖ was not used while the romantic mode
actually began and prevailed, not even to describe the
famous romantic poets. The word ―romantic‖ was used
about half a century later by English historians. It is
interesting how these major poets were not looked upon

36
by historians as members of one group although they
themselves believed that their age was characterized by
specific traits that distinguished it from other literary or
historical eras. The romantic poets were powerfully
influenced by the spirit of the romantic age which
witnessed a prevalence of the imaginative and
intellectual modes.
In one of his sonnets, John Keats speaks on
behalf of his fellow romantics stating that they had a
feeling that ―Great spirits now on earth are sojourning‖.
These spirits enrich the atmosphere with a release of
powerful energy that creates the incentive for bold and
original experimentation. This positive atmosphere
breathes loads of creative power in the atmosphere and
paves the road for a literary renaissance. In his
renowned ―Defence of Poetry‖, Shelley states that the
literature of his age ―has arisen as it were from a new
birth‖, and that ―an electric life burn within the words
of its best writers, which is less their spirit than the
spirit of the age.‖
William Hazlitt also published a book which he
called The Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt‘s was a book of
essays which introduced a description of his early youth
when he regarded the French Revolution as ―the dawn
of a new era‖. He also describes how the events of the

37
French revolution endowed the age with a new positive
impulse that challenged the minds of poets. ―The new
poetry of the school of Wordsworth, he indicates, ―had
its origin in the French Revolution ….. It was a time of
promise, a renewal of the world – and of letters.‖ The
French revolution strongly influenced the imagination
of the romantic poets who all hailed it and its leaders
especially at its beginnings except for Edmund Burke
who openly attacked it and saw its sins. Respected
romantic figures, e.g. William Blake, Robert Burns,
William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft and
Coleridge highly supported the revolution and believed
in its integrity.
Among the most important books that explain
the romantic tradition is Wordsworth‘s Lyrical Ballads.
The first edition appeared in 1800 and a third edition
followed in 1802. In his preface to the second edition
of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explains the nature of
the new poetry by referring to some critical principles
that govern the new writing. He enlarged his critical
account about romantic poetry in his preface to the third
edition. One of the most important statements that
Wordsworth gives in his preface is the one related to his
opinion on previous poets. He claims that they stifled
poetry by obstructing its natural development with the

38
artificial principles and conventions they imposed upon
it distorting the spontaneity of the poet.
He followed these books by many critical essays that
further explained what he introduced in the Preface.
Wordsworth‘s contemporaries were divided between
hailing the preface for its artistic and critical values that
were necessary to unsettle the present traditions and
expressing their doubts concerning its content. The
preface paved the way for the emergence of novel
critical concepts and new poetic forms and subjects and
is, therefore, considered a landmark in the history of
English literature. It contains the concepts, principles
and elements the constituted the poetry and critical
theory of the romantic period. To create this coherent
whole, Wordsworth collected isolated ideas that were
expressed in poetry and organized them in coherent,
meaningful forms that rested upon valid critical
principles. These ideas, forms and principles form the
core and rationale of his valued achievement as a great
poet.
………………………………………………………….

39
 The Principles of Romantic Poetry

(From The Norton Anthology of English Literature)

1- The Concept of poetry and the poet:

Wordsworth`s definition of poetry differed from

that of the eighteenth-century theorists. Eighteenth–
century theorists considered poetry as mainly an
imitation of human life – in a frequent figure , ― a
mirror held up to nature‖ – which the poet beautifully
and artfully renders and puts into an order that is
designed to instruct as well as give pleasure to the
reader . On the other hand Wordsworth regarded poetry
as ―the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings‖ He
thus reversed the earlier theory. According to the earlier
theory the poet would derive his poem from the outer
world. He would look outside, not inside him – self,
i.e., depend on external events, surroundings and
people. According to Wordsworth the source of the
poem would be the poet himself and the essential
materials of a poem would be the inner feelings of its
author. The poet would still use external elements but
only after he has absorbed them and made them part of
his personal emotional experience, Romantic poets in
general concentrated on the mind, emotions, and
imagination of the poet instead of the outer world.

41
Blake and Shelley described a poem as an embodiment
of the poet‘s imaginative vision which is quite different
from the ordinary world of common experience.
Coleridge introduced a theory of the imaginative
process, likening it to the process of the growth of a
plant. He regarded a great work of literature as a self –
originating and self – organizing process.
The idea in the poet‘s imagination is like the
seed. The poet‘s feelings and the diverse materials of
sense– experience stand as the water which the seed
assimilates to grow. Finally the seed develops into an
organic whole in which the parts are integrally related
to each other and to the whole. Wordsworth also
represented a central literary form of English as well as
European Romanticism – a long work about the
formation of the self and how a person finds his true
identity through a bitter crisis. The writings of the
romantics would introduce a radical metaphor of an
interior journey which, when it succeeds, ends back
home. Home in this context refers to one‘s true identity.
2- Poetic Spontaneity and Freedom:

Wordsworth defined poetry not merely as the

overflow but as ―the spontaneous overflow of feelings‖.
Traditional poets and critics maintained that to write
good poetry, a poet should be aware of the rules that

41
should be applied to the kind of poetry he is writing.
But to Wordsworth the act of composition must be
spontaneous. To write a genuine poem, writing must
arise from impulse and be free from all rules and the
artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends. Keats
declared that ―if poetry comes not as the leaves to a tree
it had better not come at all.‖ Blake also indicated that
he wrote from ―Inspiration and Vision‖ and that his
long ―prophetic‖ poem Milton was given to him by an
agency not himself and ―produced without labor or
study‖. Shelley, too, insisted that the finest poetry is
the product of unconscious creativity: ―A great statue or
picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in
the mother‘s womb.‖
Romantic writers insisted on the importance of
the free activity of the imagination and the essential role
of instinct, intuition, and the feelings of the heart. These
elements were supposed to replace the purely logical
functions of the head, whether in the field of artistic
beauty, philosophical and religious truth, or moral
thinking. This replacement was essential since, as
Coleridge explained, ―Deep thinking is attainable only
by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of
revelation‖, hence, ―a metaphysical solution that does

42
not tell you something in the heart is grievously to be
suspected as apocryphal.‖
3- Romantic “Nature poetry”:

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats described

nature in such an accurate way that leaves no doubt
their keen observation, Wordsworth indicated that to
write a poem he always endeavored to look steadily at
his subject , unlike his predecessors Dryden and Poke .
But he also explained that the aim of poetry was not
description for its own sake. Romantic poetry gave so
much importance to the description of landscape that it
was sometimes called nature poetry. But Wordsworth
insisted that the ability to observe and describe objects
accurately is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
poetry. If a poet considers this ability his primary
literary need then he will render all the higher qualities
of the mind passive and secondary to the existence of
external objects. Romantic poets, even in their pomes
which are apparently stimulated by certain element in
nature show the contribution of their intellectual and
meditative faculties. Wordsworth`s "Tintern Abbey,"
Shelley‘s "Ode to the West Wind," and Keats‘s
"Nightingale" all begin with an aspect or change of
aspect in the natural scene. But this serves only as

43
stimulus to the most characteristic human activity
which is thinking.
In these poems the natural scene serves as to raise
an emotional problem or personal crisis. The
development and resolution of this problem or crisis
constitutes the organizing principle of the poem.
Wordsworth declared that ―the Mind of Man‖ is ―my
haunt, and the main region of my song.‖
Romantic poets regarded nature as active with
human life, passion and understanding. They advocated
the metaphysical concept of nature in opposition to the
views of scientific philosophers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century. Scientific philosophers regarded the
world as a mechanical phenomenon consisting of
physical particles in motion: it is a machine and God is
the great Mechanic. Coleridge wrote that ―the
substitution of life and intelligence
…. for the philosophy of mechanism, which, in
everything that is most worthy of the human intellect,
strikes Death.‖
A poet showed respond to the outer universe as a
living entity which inspires and shares the feelings of
the observer.
Attitudes which Wordsworth expresses towards
landscape, especially in Tintern Abbey, are the same

44
that could be felt towards God, a father, a mother, or a
beloved. This view, that natural objects correspond to
an inner or a spiritual world, were behind the tendency
to write a symbolist poetry. Every part of nature, a rose,
a mountain, or a cloud is regarded as having
significance beyond itself. Shelley said: ―I always seek
in what I see the likeness of something beyond the
present and tangible object.‖ Blake said that if nature
was perceived by the physical eye only and not
subjected to the imagination then he regarded it ― as the
dirt upon my feet , no port of me‖ .
4- The Glorification of the Commonplace:

Hazlitt declared that the romantic school of

poetry as founded by Wordsworth was the literary
equivalent of the French Revolution. Romantic poets
translated political changes into poetical experiments,
i.e., poems. Wordsworth declared that the aim of lyrical
Ballads was ―to choose incidents and situations from
common life, ―and to use a ―selection of language really
spoken by men, ―for which the source and model is
―humble and rustic life.‖
Wordsworth highlighted his literary practice by his
theory which insisted on elevating humble and rustic
life into the principal subject and medium for poetry in
general. His poems used the plain style, previously

45
considered appropriate only to the lowly pastoral.
Wordsworth went even further. His serious poems dealt
with the ignominious, the outcast, the delinquent. He
represented ―convicts, female vagrants, gypsies ….
Idiot boys and mad mothers‖ as well as to ―peasants,
peddlers, and village barbers.‖ Lord Byron opposed
him and insisted on the road of Dryden and Pope. He
maintained allegiance to both aristocratic proprieties
and traditional poetic decorum:
―Peddlers, ―and ―Boats‖, and ―Wagons‖! Oh! Ye

shades

Of Pope and Dryden , are we come to this ?

In a sense, Wordsworth brought about the

democratization of poetry. He effected an immense
enlargement of the reader‘s imaginative sympathies and
enriched serious literature with a range of materials and
interests which are still being explored by writers of the
present day. In his preface to lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth announced that his aim was to throw over
―situations from common life … a certain coloring of
imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.‖ He wants
to shake his readers out of the lethargy of custom and
make them re- examine and rediscover the wonder and

46
divinity of the everyday things. They should see the
elevation of the commonplace, the trial and the lowly.
For many romantic critics arousing the sense of
wonder in the ignorant and the innocent is a primary
power of imagination and a major function of poetry.
Coleridge remarked that ― To combine the child‘s sense
of wonder and novelty with the appearances , which
every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar
… this is the character and privilege of genius‖, and its
prime service is to awaken in the reader ―freshness of
sensation‖ in the representation of ―familiar objects‖.
In his Defence of Poetry Shelley said that poetry
―reproduces the common universe‖ but ―purges from
our inward sight the film of familiarity which observes
from as the wonder of our being‖, and ―creates anew
the universe, after it has been blunted by reiteration‖.
5- The Supernatural and “Strangeness in Beauty”

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge dealt with the

everyday things of the world and were keen on
achieving the effect of wonders in the familiar.
Coleridge tried to achieve wonder by violating the
natural laws and the familiar course of events. The
incidents and agents of his poems were at least partly
supernatural. In poem like the Ancient Mariner, Kubla
Khan and Christabel, Coleridge creates in the reader the

47
sense of the working of occult powers and unknown
modes of being. He uses materials borrowed from
ancient folklore, superstition, and demonology to create
an atmosphere of mystery and magic. These poems
added to the atmosphere of mystery by evoking the
distant past or faraway places, or both. Coleridge is the
master of this romantic mode and in his poems the
supernatural events have a profound psychological
import.
Another aspect of ―the addition of strangeness to
beauty‖ was the Romantic interest in unusual. They
were interested in kinds of experience that earlier
writers ignored and deemed too trivial or too aberrant
for serious literary concern. Blake, Wordsworth and
Coleridge explored visionary states of consciousness
that, although they are common among children, violate
the standard categories of adult judgment. Those poets
studied the literature of the Occult and the esoteric and
Coleridge showed a particular interest in mesmerism.
He was concerned with the world of dreams and
nightmares and distorted perceptions he experienced
under his addiction to opium. The Romantics were so
sensitive to the ambivalence and richness of the human
experience which never fails to combine pleasure to
pain either in the happiest or saddest moments of life.

48
 II

The word ― Romantic ― has been used so often and

for so many purposes that it is impossible to confine it
to any single meaning or attempt a new definition of it .
It should then be sufficient to say that it is applied to a
phase of English poetry which began in 1789 with
Blake‘s Songs of Innocence and ended with the deaths
of Keats and Shelley. This phase is called the
―Romantic Age ―and is marked by five major poets,
Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.
Those great poets naturally had their differences, yet
they agreed on one vital point: that the creative
imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight
into an unseen order behind visible things. This
particular point is what distinguishes the English
Romantics from the poets of the eighteenth century.
Eighteenth century poets, e. g., pope, Johnson and
Dryden, believed that imagination had only a limited
significance in a poetical theory. For them poetical
images were almost synonymous to metaphors and
visual impressions. For them the poet was an interpreter
not a creator. The greatness of a poet was determined
by his a ability to show the beauty of what is already
there not to create new worlds or sail into the unfamiliar
or the unseen. The Romantics, however, believed that

49
imagination was fundamental and without it poetry was
impossible. This belief in the imagination was part of
the contemporary belie in the individual self. Romantic
poets were aware of their wonderful capacity to create
imaginary worlds and could not accept the idea that
task was idle or false. On the contrary, they believed
that it was that task in particular which made them
poets, better poets than those who sacrificed
imagination to caution and commonsense.
The Romantic emphasis on imagination was
strengthened by considerations that are both religious
and metaphysical. For a century English philosophy
was dominated by the theories of Locke. He assumed
that in perception the mind is wholly passive, ―a lazy
looker on an external world.‖ Locke‘s system was
suitable to his age which witnessed amazing scientific
speculations especially those carried on by Newton.
Philosophers and scientists, both, gave mechanistic
explanations of the world, which, to the Romantics,
were an utter denial of man‘s essential value. Even the
existence of Good was justified within the realm of the
mechanical. Philosophers said that Nature is a very fine
work and there must be a God behind it. Scientists
declared that the world is a great sophisticated machine
and God is the Great Mechanic behind it.

51
 For the Romantics, religion was a question of
feelings, not reason, of experience, not argument. John
Locke did not have a very high regard for poetry and
considered it simply concerned with making up
pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in fancy.
Romantics rejected that theory which robbed their work
of its essential connection with life Locke‘s philosophy.
For them mind is their central point and main governing
factor. But because they are poets, they insist on the
imagination being the most vital activity of the mind
and the very source of spiritual energy. They believe
the imagination, therefore, to be divine and that when
they exercise it, they, in some way, partake of the
activity of God.
For Blake the world of the imagination is the
world of eternity. Any act performed by the
imagination is divine. In the imagination man‘s spiritual
nature is fully and finally realized. Blake says proudly:
This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it
is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the
death of the Vegetated body. This World of
Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world
of Generation or Vegetation, is Finite and Temporal.
There exist in that Eternal World the Permanent
Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this

51
Vegetable Glass of Nature. All Things are
comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body
of the Savour, the True Vine of Eternity, the Human
Imagination.
Coleridge, too, believed that imagination is the living
power and prime agent of all human perception It is a
repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation. Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats shared the
same principles. The danger of their assumption,
however, is that the poet may be so absorbed in his own
private universe and in the exploration of its remoter
corners that he might be unable to convey his
experience to other men and at the same time fail to
convert other men to his special creed. The Romantics
created worlds of their own, but succeeded in
persuading others that these worlds were not absurd or
merely fanciful. The difficulty they encountered,
however, was that when a man gives free play to his
imagination, he has no assurance that what he says is
true. They believe that imagination reveals an important
Kind of truth. It sees things to which the ordinary
intelligence is blind and that it is intimately connected
with a special insight or perception or intuition.
Imagination and insight are inseparable. They form one
faculty. This is the assumption on which Romantics

52
wrote poetry. They combine imagination and truth
because their creations are inspired and controlled by a
peculiar insight.
Blake and Coleridge prepared the way to restoring
the supremacy of the spirit which had been denied by
Locke. Coleridge was first a poet and secondly a
metaphysician, so, his conception of a universe of spirit
came from his intense sense of an inner life and from
his belief that the imagination, working with intuition,
is more likely than analytical reason to make
discoveries on matters which really concern man and
human life. Romantics explored the world of the spirit.
In different ways each of them believed in an order of
things which is not that everybody sees and knows.
This was supposed to help them understand life‘s real
meaning and know its real worth. Visible things are the
instruments by which we reach reality but they are not
reality. According to Blake, scientists try to destroy the
divine light which alone gives meaning to life. The
power of the Romantics comes party from the driving
force of their desire to grasp the ultimate truths and
from their exaltation when they thought that they had
found them.
The apprehension of spiritual issues is different
from the scientific understanding of natural laws. Such

53
laws and truths are properly stated in abstract words,
but spiritual powers must be introduced through
particular examples, because only then do we see them
in their true individuality. Blake was against
generalization: ―to generalize‖, he said, ―is to be an
idiot‖. For him nothing had full significance unless it
appeared in a particular form and the other Romantics
agreed with that. Their wit aimed at presenting as
forcibly as possible the moments of Vision which give
coherence and simplicity even to the vastest issues.

54
What characteristics of Romantic thought and practice

would you identify in the following poem by William

Wordsworth?

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o‘er vales and hills.

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

55
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed-and gazed but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

―Daffodils‖ is a lyrical poem written by William

Wordsworth. He is one of the major poets of the Romantic

period. Wordsworth, therefore, begins his poem with a

picture that can be considered typical of Romantic work;

that of the poet wandering alone against the background of

nature. He walks alone without a set destination ―as a

56
cloud‖. Thus from the very beginning, Romantic elements

can be detected and this makes the poem a typical

Romantic poem.

In the first stanza, Wordsworth gives a cheerful picture

of a cloud against the stars and daffodils twinkling and

dancing:

I wondered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o‘er vales and hills.

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

….

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

In fact Wordsworth makes effective use of contrasts or

juxtaposition. He wanders ―lonely as a cloud‖ when

suddenly he sees ―a crowd‖ of daffodils. The juxtaposition

here is between the solitariness of the poet and the

company of daffodils. There is also a contrast between the

cloud that is floating ―on high o‘er vales and hills‖ and the

daffodils that are dancing ―beside the lake, beneath the

57
trees‖. This juxtaposition helps to clarify and intensify the

effect of this natural picture on our senses.

Being a romantic poet, Wordsworth uses some technical

devices that give the poem its romantic atmosphere. The

poem is written in regular rhyme. The rhyme scheme in

each stanza is ababcc.

I wondered lonely as a cloud ----------------------------a

That floats on high o‘er vales and hills. ----------------b

When all at once I saw a crowd, ------------------------a

A host of golden daffodils; -------------------------------b

Beside the lake, beneath the trees -----------------------c

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. ---------------------c

This regular rhyme adds to the musicality of the poem.

Another source of music in this poem is its regular rhythm

which comes as a result of regular meter. The poem is

written in iambic meter with four feet. It is iambic

tetrameter:

58
 I wondered lonely as a cloud

There is, however a slight variation in the sixth line; it is

still tetrameter but it is stressed syllable followed by

unstressed one.

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Another source of Romantic innovation in this poem is

the use of imagery. The poet manages to draw a picture of
the daffodils ―that floats on high o‘er vales and hills‖. They
are moving in the wind by the edge of the lake. This is
called visual imagery. Furthermore, Wordsworth likens the
daffodils to stars in a good simile: ―continuous as the stars
that shine‖. Of course, the most striking simile is that of the
first line: ―I wondered lonely as a cloud‖ where the poet
compares himself to a cloud in his solitude. In addition,
under the influence of his strong feelings, Wordsworth
tends to attribute life and mind to impersonal and inanimate
daffodils. This is called personification. The daffodils are
presented as they were people. They are ―moving‖,
―dancing‖, ―tossing their heads‖ and ―jocund‖. He endows
them with more vivid life.

59
 Moreover, the Romantic strain of Wordsworth is vivid
in his choice of words appealing to nature and senses. The
poet is ―wandering lonely as a cloud‖ when he sees ―a
crowd‖ of ―daffodils‖ beside the ―lake‖ and under the
―trees‖
III

William Blake is one of the five great romantic poets.

His conception of the imagination, however, distinguishes
him and sets him apart from the other four major romantics.
According to Blake, ―one power alone makes a poet:
Imagination.‖ Although Blake was a keen observer of the
visible world, he was more interested in and appreciative of
the invisible world which, for him, was of more
importance. Blake claimed that visible, living things were
merely symbols of greater and more important things of
everlasting powers that exist in the world of the invisible.
Blake saw these valuable entities with his inner vision and
described them using the language of the visible. He states,
however, that the visible world, or what people saw was not
exactly the alternative of the real world, but ―a spiritual
order to which the language of the physical sight can be
applied only in metaphor.‖
Blake had a conviction that all living things were
endowed with a spiritual reality and that any event that
might seem ordinary on the surface level could be loaded

61
with lessons and significance. He had a conviction that
there would come a time when nature would completely
disappear and then the spirit would be free to recreate
without it. While nature still exists, man resorts to it to find
symbols that embody his ideas and emotions and find
expression of all that cannot be seen. The real function of
the imagination is to uncover the hidden realities that lie
behind the visible things. The visible world of nature,
however, offers indications and hints that must be grasped
and pursued. In the following lines,

To see a World in a Grain of sand And a Heaven in a Wild

Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And

Eternity in an hour .

In his poems, Blake uses living creatures from the

world of reality to express abstract concepts that exist in the
world of the invisible.
A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a rage.

The previous lines present the ―robin redbreast‖ (a visible

thing) as a symbol of a spiritual concept. He is not merely
what it appears to be, a bird, but a symbol and an
embodiment of a free spirit, all free spirits that delights in

61
the arts, in music and in singing and in all that the arts
imply. The previous lines show that a free spirit should be
respected and considers any limitations laid upon such a
spirit as a sinful act against the divine, holy live that
inhabits the universe. In other words, Blake views all the
ordinary things as ―substantial in themselves‖, but believes
that they are even more important in their capacity to stand
as symbols of greater realities that belong to the world of
the invisible.
………………………………………………………………

What features of Romanticism can you find in the

following poetic lines by the renowned romantic William
Blake?

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a rage.

………………………………………………………………

The Good are attracted by Men‘s perceptions,

And think not for themselves;

And to cage the Fairies and Elves.

And then the Knave begins to snarl

62
 And the Hypocrite to howl;

And all his good Friends shew their private ends,

And the Eagle is known form the Owl.

……………………………………………………………

He went to Church in a May morning

Attended by Fairies, one, two and three;

But the Angels of providence drove them away,

And he return‘d home in misery.

He went not out to the Field nor Fold,

He went not out to the village nor town,

But he came home in a black, black cloud,

And took to his Bed, and there lay down.

And an Angel of Providence at his Feet,

And an Angel of Providence at his Head,

And in the midest a Black , Black cleud ,

And in the midest the Sick Man on his Bed .

……………………………………………………….

63
 My mother groan‘d! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father‘s hands,

Striving against my swadling bands,

Bound and weary, I thought best

To sulk upon my mother‘s breast.

………………………………………………………………

64
Metaphysical Poetry

65
 Metaphysical Poetry

Helen Gardener on Metaphysical poetry

A paraphrase by Prof. Nabila A. Marzouk

The characteristics of metaphysical poetry

1. Concentration.
As Helen Gardener indicates, concentration is the
first and most obvious characteristic of
metaphysical poetry. As Gardener explains,
concentration is the element that holds the reader
attentive to a certain line of argument or to a
particular idea. A typical metaphysical poem is
usually tightly connected since a certain argument is
pursued and ideas are tightly woven by the logical
progression of that single line of argument. The
reader of metaphysical poetry does not have to
spend time reflecting on a certain passage, but just
to concentrate and pay attention while he reads.
Another element that makes a metaphysical poem
concentrated is its briefness and conciseness.
2. The Expanded Epigram.
If you study the poetry of John Donne (examples of which
will follow this essay), you are bound to notice that
adjectives like ―strenuous‖ and ―masculine‖ are vital to

66
describe it. According to Gardener, it is also marked by
―concentration and a sinewy strength of style‖. She also
claims that a metaphysical poem can be described as ―an
expanded epigram‖, since the classical epigram seems to
inspire most of the metaphysical poetry. We can safely say
that almost all, if not all, metaphysical poets exhibited their
skill in ornamenting their poems with witty epigrams that
added a philosophical touch to their poems. It helped
increase passion and interest in witty poetry and enhance
the reader‘s taste for this emerging genre.

3. Versification.
The forms that characterize the 17th century lyrics
are typically marked by concision and
concentration. This feature is obvious in
metaphysical poets‘ preference of shorter lines.
They would not use a line of ten syllables if they
could replace it by a line of eight syllables and
would also produce stanzas of varying length that
sound full of sense and thought or stanzas of very
short lines. The metaphysical poets preferred simple
verse form, for example, octosyllabic couplets or
quatrains or otherwise stanzas that are made and

67
 employed for a particular poem. In the latter case,
the number of the syllables, the length of the line
and the rhyme scheme add to the sense and message
of the poem.
4. Fondness for Conceits; Conceits as instruments.
According to Helen Gardener, metaphysical poetry
is also characterized by its obvious interest in
conceits. Actually, she describes this interest as
metaphysical poetry‘s ―most immediately striking
feature‖. Conceit refers to a type of comparison that
is so striking because it cares for ingenuity more
than it cares for justness. It is immediately
noticeable and attractive. Gardener states that ;
All comparisons discover likeness in things
unlike; a comparison becomes a conceit
when we are made to concede likeness
while being strongly conscious of
unlikeness. A brief comparison can be a
conceit if two things patently unlike, or
which we should never think of together,
are shown to be alike in a single point in
such a way, or in such a context, that we
feel their incongruity.
Conceits are so popular in Elizabethan poetry, but
there is a difference between metaphysical conceits

68
 and Elizabethan conceits. While Elizabethan poets
employed conceits for their own sake or as a
stylistic device to ornament their poems,
metaphysical poets used conceits for a definite
purpose which was to define something, prove a
point or persuade the reader of a certain opinion in
the course of an argument they have started.
A metaphysical poet deals with a conceit as a tool
for definition or persuasion. However, the conceit
gives an initial impression of ingenuity rather than
justice and entices the reader to admit the justness
of the conceit while also perceiving its ingenuity.
John Donne is a master of metaphysical conceit. In
one of his poems, he gives one of the most unusual,
therefore most famous metaphysical conceits where
he describes the relationship between two lovers by
comparing them to the two hands/legs of a compass.

5. The Abrupt, personal Openings of metaphysical

poems.
Raising and pursuing arguments, persuasion, and
the extensive use of impressive conceit as a basic
instrument are the fundamental elements that form
the body of metaphysical poetry. However, the soul,
philosophical core or quintessence of a

69
 metaphysical poem lies in the ability of the poet to
transfer onto his poem a vivid imagination of a
certain intense moment of experience or present a
rich, loaded situation that engenders controversy
and arguments. Vivid imagination and controversial
situations raise issues that create the need to define,
persuade and argue. While the poet essentially
stands on one side of the argument, a successful
metaphysical poem engages the reader as the other
pole of the controversy. Accordingly, a
metaphysical poet could start a poem abruptly by
instantly presenting the reader with a personal
opening where a man addresses God in an unusual
way or a person poses a question that calls for a
discussion about a certain issue, e.g., love, sincerity,
the value of friendship, etc. he might also set the
scene for argument by involving the reader in a
certain situation or directly calling us to consider or
contemplate something and give it an in-depth
analysis.
6. A Strong Sense of Actual Situations.
Gardener notes that a considerable number of
metaphysical poems are inspired by real life events
or actual happenings that could very probably be of
personal interest although, sometimes, they could

71
belong to the sphere of public interest. Surprisingly,
metaphysical poets sometimes tackle ordinary or
sometimes mundane situations and convey a sense
of actual life. In the middle of such ordinary
situations, however, the metaphysical poet comes
up with very unusual thoughts that startle the reader
who does not expect that unusual mixture of
ordinary situations and extraordinary ideas. He
wonders at how the poet could come up with such
sophisticated thoughts in such a mundane situation.
John Donne is the rightful master of inserting
brilliant extraordinary ideas in mundane situations.
Donne‘s poems, especially love poems, are entitled
to be true metaphysical creations since, according to
Gardener:
Donne is, indeed, remarkable for having
extraordinary thoughts in ordinary
situations. John Donne is, indeed,
remarkable for having extraordinary
thoughts in ordinary situations. Many of
Donne‘s love-poems have the right to the
title metaphysical in its true sense, since
they raise, even when they do not explicitly
discuss, the great metaphysical question of
the relation of the spirit and the senses.

71
7. Religious Poetry of the Metaphysical poets.
Metaphysical poets were mostly experienced men
of the world who knew about life and human nature
and attitudes. They were well aware of the realities
of life and the simplicities and complications of
everyday activities that overwhelm both men and
women with joy and concern. That awareness was
actually the source of their witty writings. George
Herbert, for instance, states in one of his poems that
he is quite aware of the ways of Pleasure, Learning
and Honor. Gardener claims that the true power and
influence of the religious poems of metaphysical
poetry comes as a result of inserting ordinary life
experience which is not typically religious into their
supposedly religious poems. In the middle of a
poem that contains a prayer, a meditation, or a
praise of God, the reader could possibly find many
instances of experience that is not in itself religious.
What the metaphysical poet does is set the scene by
creating suitable situations that call for prayers or
meditations. In one of his poems, for instance, John
Donne imagines a situation where he is riding
heading westward and from this situation arises the
religious experience. In another poem, he transfers
his prayers and meditations to the readers while he

72
is lying in his death bed. Both are ordinary life
situations that naturally bear the religious touch.
George Herbert writes a poem where he spends a
whole day praying and praising God ―but no
hearing‖, or noting his own whitening hair, or
finding after a night of weariness joy in the
morning‖ (Gardener). Henry Vaughan, too, writes
about walking while also thinking to spend the time
or while just sitting in the darkness contemplating
the tragedies of being separated from his departed
companions. The previous activities necessarily
lead him and the reader to dwell on religious issues.
Although a great deal of metaphysical poetry
depends mainly on poetical meditations on religious
matters, poets differ considerably in the way they
tackle, approach and perceive a certain religious
topic. The personal experience and individual
perceptions of each poet colors his views regarding
life and religious issues.
The individuality of poets appears clear in the
instance of George Herbert and the unique images
and conceits he creates to express his original views
about man‘s life and death. In his poem
Mortification, Herbert introduces the most familiar
theme of man‘s life and the different stages and

73
 phases it witnesses. Herbert introduces the bizarre
idea that at each stage man is unconsciously
collecting and hoarding things that he needs for his
burial. With great sympathy and compassion,
Herbert describes and comments upon each stage of
human life referring to its most characteristic
features. He describes the serene, carefree phase of
childhood, the diminishing enthusiasm and the lack
of energy and stamina in middle age and finally the
pathos and resignation of old age. While doing so,
and to make his account of the human life sound
realistic, Herbert pretends to be unable to speak
articulately because of (rheum) as a reminder of his
physical conditions and health problems that
accompany old age. Herbert uses two comparisons
that are very traditional, almost cliché; he compares
death to sleep and a bed to a grave. However, he
changes the familiar image by quickly following it
by an original, haunting one that is expressed in the
following lines:
Successive nights, like rolling waves,

Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.

Herbert concludes the poem with an old moral that is,

however, transformed and made new by the novel

74
understanding of man‘s dying life that Herbert introduces at
the end. Herbert‘s expands the reader‘s understanding of
life and how it is bound to end in death and how this
imminent death affects man‘s views and stances in all the
stages his life witnesses. Finally, Gardener expresses the
belief that the metaphysical poetry enhances the human
personality and sets it free. One of the reasons she gives for
this is that the metaphysical aspect of poetry offers the poet
a chance to emphasize and practice his individuality.

75
 Jim Hunter on Metaphysical Poetry
Metaphysical in a Literal Sense
Like Helen Gardener, Jim Hunter gives an enlightening
description and analysis of metaphysical poetry and its
major characteristics. He defines metaphysical poetry as
poetry that is ―concerned with the fundamental problems of
the nature of the universe, and man‘s place in life.‖
Accordingly, the poetry of John Donne and many of the
poets who followed him should be described as
metaphysical since their poetry tackles religious and
metaphysical topics. He considers Henry Vaughan‘s poetry
typically metaphysical because of its subject matter which
is mainly religious. In his poem The World, Vaughan says:
―I saw eternity the other night‖, etc. Metaphysical poetry is
mainly religious and religious topics are necessarily related
to the metaphysical as obvious in poems that discusses
topics about the soul, the mind or eternity.

The Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry.

1. Intellect and Emotion.
Metaphysical poetry involves both intellect and
emotion. A metaphysical poet can exclude neither
while writing his poem. Strong emotions and
powerful intellect are both needed for the
production of good metaphysical poetry which

76
 means that the soul and the brain are both creators
of a metaphysical poem.
2. The Use of Conceits.
In agreement with Helen Gardener, hunter thinks of
conceit as a characteristic of metaphysical poetry.
He views this interest as metaphysical poetry‘s
―most immediately striking feature‖. Conceit refers
to a type of comparison that is so striking because it
cares for ingenuity more than it cares for justness. It
is immediately noticeable and attractive.
Conceits are so popular in Elizabethan poetry, but
there is a difference between metaphysical conceits
and Elizabethan conceits. While Elizabethan poets
employed conceits for their own sake or as a
stylistic device to ornament their poems,
metaphysical poets used conceits for a definite
purpose which was to define something, prove a
point or persuade the reader of a certain opinion in
the course of an argument they have started.
A metaphysical poet deals with a conceit as a tool
for definition or persuasion. However, the conceit
gives an initial impression of ingenuity rather than
justice and entices the reader to admit the justness
of the conceit while also perceiving its ingenuity.
John Donne is a master of metaphysical conceit. In

77
 one of his poems, he gives one of the most unusual,
therefore most famous metaphysical conceits where
he describes the relationship between two lovers by
comparing them to the two hands/legs of a compass.
3. Concrete Imagery.
Metaphysical poets favored the use of concrete are
fond of the concrete metaphors which they employed to
present abstract issues of thought and philosophy.
Henry Vaughan‘s poems are good examples of this use
of concrete metaphors. Look at these beautiful
examples from his poetry:
1. O joys! Infinite sweetness! with what flowers,
And shoots of glory, my soul breaks, and buds!
(The Morning Watch)
……………………………………………………………..
2. But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness. (The Retreat)
……………………………………………………………..
3. I saw Eternity the other night
Like A great Ring of Pure and endless light,…. (The
World)
………………………………………………………….
4. Paradox.
The use of paradox is a frequent stylistic device that
gives power to a metaphysical poem and endows it

78
 with a form that suits its intellectual topics. In his
poem The Definition of Love, Marvell introduces
one of the most clever and intellectually challenging
paradoxes when he states that his love ―was
begotten by Despair upon impossibility‖. What
distinguishes the previous poem is the subtlety of
the poet who makes each stanza a clever, concise
conceit. In each stanza, the poet proceeds to define
his love, but with each extra definition it becomes
more evident to the reader that this love is
impossible and therefore the poet makes his point.
Another example of paradox could be seen in John
Herbert‘s poem Affliction:
Ah, my dear God! Though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
5. Conciseness.
According to Jim Hunter, ―An epigrammatic
conciseness is one of the strengths of metaphysical
poetry.‖ Metaphysical poets are characterized by
their terseness and neatness of style. They use
epigrams in their poetry in a clever way that does
not threaten the unified, tight structure of a poem.
Within the same poem, epigrams are connected and
related by means of alliteration, meter and rhyme
which are employed in such a way that epigrams do

79
 not feel or sound fragmentary. The following is an
example from Herbert‘s poetry:
Beauty and beauteous words should go together.
And this is another example from Vaughan:
But life is, what none can express,
A quickness, which my God hath kissed.
6. The Elements of Drama.
The element of drama, which appears clearly in first
lines of poems, is a very important characteristic
that distinguishes metaphysical poetry. The
following are clever examples from the poetry of
Herbert and Vaughan, of such opening lines:
I struck the board, and cried
―I will abroad‖. (The Collar)
………………………………………………………….
The harbingers are come. See, see their mark.
(The Forerunners)
They are all gone into the world of light!
…………………………………………………………….
7. The Sense of Humour.
Humor is an element that appears in almost all
metaphysical poems. Although metaphysical poetry
deals with serious, intellectual topics, humor, dry
humor, does not damage the seriousness of the

81
 topics, but perhaps makes it more reasonable and
adds to its sobriety.
8. Intelligence.
Metaphysical poetry tackles complicated
philosophical and religious topics, makes rich use of
brilliant conceits, epigram and paradox. It is also
characterized by a type of humor that gives more
focus to its seriousness especially when it makes
use of the elements of drama enriching the poem
with speech rhythms and music.
Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of
metaphysical poetry, however, is the intellectual
aspect which adds value and strength to the poems.
This intellectual aspect makes some of the poems
difficult and not easy to comprehend at first sight,
but it also makes them quite valuable as vehicles of
wisdom.
Watch the following lesson about metaphysical poetry and
then see how it applies to the poems.
http://study.com/academy/lesson/metaphysical-poetry-
definition-characteristics-examples.html
……………………………………………………..
Examples of Metaphysical Poems
Read the following poems and find out what features of

metaphysical poetry they include.

81
No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were:

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

……………………………………………………..

Song: Go and catch a falling star

BY JOHN DONNE

82
Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

Or who cleft the devil's foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy's stinging,

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,

83
All strange wonders that befell thee,

And swear,

No where

Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,

Such a pilgrimage were sweet;

Yet do not, I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet;

Though she were true, when you met her,

And last, till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two, or three.

84
……………………………………………………

My Soul, there is a country

Afar beyond the stars,

Where stands a winged sentry

All skillful in the wars;

There, above noise and danger

Sweet Peace sits, crown'd with smiles,

And One born in a manger

Commands the beauteous files.

He is thy gracious friend

And (O my Soul awake!)

Did in pure love descend,

To die here for thy sake.

If thou canst get but thither,

There grows the flow'r of peace,

The rose that cannot wither,

Thy fortress, and thy ease.

Leave then thy foolish ranges,

85
For none can thee secure,

But One, who never changes,

Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

Henry Vaughan

86
1.

Award, and still in bonds, one day

I stole abroad,

It was high-spring, and all the way

Primros'd, and hung with shade;

Yet, was it frost within,

And surly winds

Blasted my infant buds, and sin

Like clouds eclips'd my mind.

2.

Storm'd thus; I straight perceiv'd my spring

Mere stage, and show,

My walk a monstrous, mountain's thing

Rough-cast with rocks, and snow;

And as a pilgrim's eye

Far from relief,

87
Measures the melancholy sky

Then drops, and rains for grief,

3.

So sigh'd I upwards still, at last

'Twixt steps, and falls

I reach'd the pinnacle, where plac'd

I found a pair of scales,

I took them up and laid

In th'one late pains,

The other smoke, and pleasures weigh'd

But prov'd the heavier grains;

4.

With that, some cried, Away; straight I

Obey'd, and led

Full east, a fair, fresh field could spy

88
Some call'd it Jacob's Bed;

A virgin-soil, which no

Rude feet ere trod,

Where (since he slept there,) only go

Prophets, and friends of God.

5.

Here, I repos'd; but scarce well set,

A grove descried

Of stately height, whose branches met

And mixed on every side;

I entered, and once in

(Amaz'd to see't,)

Found all was chang'd, and a new spring

Did all my senses greet;

6.

The unthrift sun shot vital gold

89
A thousand pieces,

And heaven its azure did unfold

Checker'd with snowy fleeces,

The air was all in spice

And every bush

A garland wore; thus fed my eyes

But all the ear lay hush.

7.

Only a little fountain lent

Some use for ears,

And on the dumb shades language spent

The music of her tears;

I drew her near, and found

The cistern full

Of diverse stones, some bright, and round

Others ill'shap'd, and dull.

91
8.

The first (pray mark,) as quick as light

Danc'd through the flood,

But, th'last more heavy than the night

Nail'd to the center stood;

I wonder'd much, but tir'd

At last with thought,

My restless eye that still desir'd

As strange an object brought;

9.

It was a bank of flowers, where I descried

(Though 'twas mid'day,)

Some fast asleep, others broad-eyed

And taking in the ray,

Here musing long, I heard

A rushing wind

Which still increas'd, but whence it stirr'd

No where I could not find;

91
 10.

I turn'd me round, and to each shade

Dispatch'd an eye,

To see, if any leaf had made

Least motion, or reply,

But while I listening sought

My mind to ease

By knowing, where 'twas, or where not,

It whispered: Where I please.

Lord, then said I, On me one breath,

And let me die before my death!

Henry Vaughan

They are all Gone into the World of Light

By Henry Vaughan

They are all gone into the world of light!

And I alone sit ling‘ring here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,

Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,
92
After the sun‘s remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory,

Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.

O holy Hope! and high Humility,

High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have show‘d them me
To kindle my cold love.

Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just,

Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust
Could man outlook that mark!

He that hath found some fledg‘d bird‘s nest, may know

At first sight, if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.

And yet as angels in some brighter dreams

Call to the soul, when man doth sleep:
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes
And into glory peep.

If a star were confin‘d into a tomb,

Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lock‘d her up, gives room,
She‘ll shine through all the sphere.

O Father of eternal life, and all

Created glories under thee!
Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.

93
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass,
Or else remove me hence unto that hill,
Where I shall need no glass.

94
How to Assess a Literary Text

95
 Literary Texts
From Great Expectations
By
Charles Dickens

96
 A look at extraordinary characters
By Prof. Nabila A. Marzouk
From Charles Dickens‘ Great Expectations

97
Read these passages from Great Expectations by Charles
Dickens.
She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and
I had a general impression that she must have
made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a
fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of
his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very
undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow
got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild,
good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going,
foolish, dear fellow - a sort of Hercules in
strength, and also in weakness.
Joe's forge adjoined our house, which was
a wooden house, as many of the dwellings in our
country were - most of them, at that time. When I
ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut
up, and Joe was sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe
and I being fellow-sufferers, and having
confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to
me, the moment I raised the latch of the door and
peeped in at him opposite to it, sitting in the
chimney corner.

…………………………………………………..

"My name," he said, "is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer

in London. I am pretty well known. I have
unusual business to transact with you, and I
commence by explaining that it is not of my
originating. If my advice had been asked, I should
not have been here. It was not asked, and you see
me here. What I have to do as the confidential
agent of another, I do. No less, no more."
Finding that he could not see us very well from
where he sat, he got up, and threw one leg over the

98
back of a chair and leaned upon it; thus having one
foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on
the ground.
"Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer
to relieve you of this young fellow your
apprentice. You would not object to cancel his
indentures, at his request and for his good? You
would want nothing for so doing?"
"Lord forbid that I should want anything for not
standing in Pip's way," said Joe, staring.
"Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,"
returned Mr Jaggers. "The question is, Would you
want anything? Do you want anything?"
"The answer is," returned Joe, sternly, "No."
I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he
considered him a fool for his disinterestedness.
But I was too much bewildered between breathless
curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.

"Very well," said Mr. Jaggers. "Recollect the

admission you have made, and don't try to go from
it presently."
"Who's a-going to try?" retorted Joe.
"I don't say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?"
"Yes, I do keep a dog."
"Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but
Holdfast is a better. Bear that in mind, will you?"
repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes and
nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving

99
 him something. "Now, I return to this young
fellow. And the communication I have got to
make is, that he has great expectations."
Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.
"I am instructed to communicate to him," said Mr.
Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, "that
he will come into a handsome property. Further,
that it is the desire of the present possessor of that
property, that he be immediately removed from his
present sphere of life and from this place, and be
brought up as a gentleman - in a word, as a young
fellow of great expectations."
My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed
by sober reality;
Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune on
a grand scale.
"Now, Mr. Pip," pursued the lawyer, "I address the
rest of what I have to say, to you. You are to
understand, first, that it is the request of the person
from whom I take my instructions, that you
always bear the name of Pip. You will have no
objection, I dare say, to your great expectations
being encumbered with that easy condition. But if
you have any objection, this is the time to mention
it."
My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a
singing in my ears, that I could scarcely stammer I
had no objection.
………………………………………………………………

111
 Joe is certainly a most remarkable character in Dickens'
Great Expectations. His nobility and unquestionable love
for Pip defies the materialism that otherwise gives the
novel its prominent features. Joe is a sweet, unselfish hulk
who never hurts anybody and, his generosity of heart
always serving as a shield is never really hurt by others. No
matter what his permanently out of temper wife does, he
always declares her to be "a fine figure of a woman". He
allows her to amuse herself by being unkind to him;
otherwise she would not be able to lift a finger against his
remarkable muscular power. Similarly, he allows Pip to be
careless and ungrateful and go unpunished. He never
withholds his much needed friendship, kindness or money.
Joe is a basic pole in the novel as well as in Pip's
life. He stands alone in the face of hypocrisy, materialism
and the exploitation of the week and this gives him power
over who ever attempts to intimidate him. He never finds
himself in need to pretend to be other than what he really
is. He defies Jaggers and dims out the glaze of his success
after he had defeated on his ground and turned him into a
worthless fool who was rendered ashamed of himself.
Jaggers, the embodiment of the intimidation of
money and the misuse of the law, has to withdraw his
forces and literary avoid Joe's counterattack when they
discuss money matters. A worshipper of money himself he
does not care about anything that is not "portable property"
,and as a lawyer whose real profession is to abuse instead
of preserve the law he is intimidated by Joe's values
concerning money. He realizes that placing human
relationships way over money requires a degree of spiritual
power and a feeling of self sufficiency that only an
exceptionally powerful man can enjoy. Joe is a man that
does not compromise his principles which run in his bones
and shrewd Jaggers scrutinizes an even greater hulk inside
the hulk who commands him not to ask him the same
question twice.

111
 As a lawyer, Jaggers is an expert in abusing the
law, forcing it to serve outlaws and help them get away
with whatever they have done provided that they
generously pay for the service. Jaggers' law has no
sympathy for those who have rights but are not rich enough
to pay him to secure it for them. It is because of people like
him that the attacker of Mrs. Joe was never caught although
all the signs were indicating one person. He surrounds
himself with criminals and ex-convicts who, thanks to his
exceptional manipulation of the law, were acquitted.
Actually, he uses them as trophies to remind himself and
his clients of his most impressive victories and advertise his
exceptional talents.
For the reader, Joe always appears within a hallow
of nobility. He proves that richness and ornamented
manners are not a prerequisite for gentility. He welcomes
the baby Pip in his house and heart while other suitors left
the scene as soon as they knew about his existence. Pip has
been welcome in Joe's life ever since.
Joe is a hulk who beaten and physically abused by
his wife because he would not abuse a woman. The picture
of his mother and of himself as a child being humiliated
and degraded in every possible way by his father urges him
to make it up for any wife. When Orlick shouts at him he
never responds except when his verbal abuse turns physical
and is directed at Mrs. Joe.
Joe's nobility and gentility is something in the spirit, a
God given. He has the spirit, not the life or the appearance
of a gentleman. He never humbles himself for money but
shows self-sufficiency that that preserves his dignity. When
Pip falls sick, he jumps to the rescue single handed, all
kindness, forgiveness and compassion. He never mentions
it to Pip that he paid all his debts but leaves him the receipt
to put his mind at ease. When Pip gets well, Joe leaves lest
he should be intruding on Pip's life. He is too dignified to
exist where he might not be wanted, but not too proud to
appear uninvited when he is needed.

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 Finally, Joe is a winner. He craves nothing that he
does not have and therefore is always content. We never
find him in need of money or love or planning to change
his life. It is only right that Biddy should appreciate him
and know that she is lucky to have him rather than Pip. At
the end Joe appears a symbol of contentment and stability
with happy children and a devoted loving wife.
…………………………………………………..
Now read this exceptional passage from the same novel.
She was dressed in rich materials—satins, and lace, and
silks—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a
long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal
flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright
jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some
other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less
splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks,
were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing,
for she had but one shoe on—the other was on the table
near her hand—her veil was but half arranged, her watch
and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay
with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves,
and some flowers, and a prayer-book, all confusedly
heaped about the looking-glass.
It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I
took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that
her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a
clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
―Look at me,‖ said Miss Havisham. ―You are not afraid of
a woman who has never seen the sun since you were
born?‖
I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the
enormous lie comprehended in the answer ―No.‖
―Do you know what I touch here?‖ she said, laying her
hands, one upon the other, on her left side.
―Yes, ma'am.‖ (It made me think of the young man.)
―What do I touch?‖
―Your heart.‖

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―Broken!‖
She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong
emphasis, and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in
it. Afterwards, she kept her hands there for a little while,
and slowly took them away as if they were heavy.
…………………………………………………………..

This is one of the most important passages in the history of

classical English literature and Miss Havisham is an
unforgettable literary creation. As Pip describes her, she is
"the strangest lady" he has ever seen. She is everything she
should have been but after it had been reversed, distorted
and destroyed. She is a seventy-year-old bride, shriveled
and disappointed. Her supposedly elegant, white dress is
the color of decay. As Pip notices, "she had not quite
finished dressing" and as the reader realizes, she will never,
ever do. Like a Cinderella, she one shoe on and another left
behind, but unlike she will never be sought after by a
handsome, persistent loving of dreams. Her own prince of
dreams ran from, not after her.
What the reader does not notice at his first reading and
perhaps even after several readings is that this pathetic
fallacy Dickens has created cannot possibly by true. No
woman can possibly remain in the same dress for thirty
years moving around in one shoe. No wedding cake could
last for that long especially with rats working on it.
Creating these unrealistic surroundings, Dickens manages
to successfully represent the reality of Miss Havisham's
conditions better than he would have done by being direct.
What he introduces have is the inner reality of Miss
Havisham. He turns her inside out just like a glove. True, it
is not realistic that a woman keeps the watches stopped for
so many years, but it is equally true that she stops feeling
alive after she is betrayed by her lover and her half –
brother. In a sense, this is how ill-fated lovers fell. For
them, life stops the moments they lose the beloved ones
even though it outwardly goes on. The wreck surrounding

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Miss Havisham reflects her inner feelings and
psychological conditions. She is a wreck in the inside and
she is keeping all the details which speak of her tragedy
because they are the memories she still lives on. She is,
inside her surroundings, an embodiment of the state of
people who are dying of the lack of love. She never forgets
or forgives and is determined on revenge which leads her to
the inevitable conclusion: more destruction for herself and
whoever happens to be within her reach. At the end, she is
no less criminal than those who betrayed her.
Miss. Havisham represents Dickens' ideas about the
disadvantages of the industrial revolution. She is symbolic
of the ugliness, oppression and manipulative aspect of the
Revolution which has so many victims. The rich, powerful,
manipulative woman points her domineering finger at a
poor, helpless, working child and orders him to play after
she has sipped the last drop of dignity and playfulness off
him by a horrible, unfair encounter arranged with a girl
whom she has trained to break men's hearts.
In the middle of all this shabbiness and desolation Dickens'
sense of the ridiculous is still active. When Miss Havisham
places both hands on her heart to utter what is perhaps the
most heart- breaking sentence in classical English literature
about her broken heart, Pip thinks about the young man
who was supposed to be after his heart and liver in case he
failed to achieve a certain mission. When Miss Havisham
asks him to play, a most natural thing for a child to do and
even long for he simply fails to carry out the order because
of the unnatural circumstances.
This seemingly funny situation reveals so much of Dickens'
tendency towards social criticism and exposing the
hypocrisy of grownups. Inspired perhaps by the vindictive
nature of Miss. Havisham, Pip avenges himself on both his
sister Mr. Pumblechook. Ironically, he carries out his
revenge and infuriates them by doing nothing except
adopting their policy of giving empty, unsatisfactory
answers to eager questions. This situation could perfectly

115
be placed in contrast to the previous one when Pip was
dying to extract answers which were, at that time, crucial to
him. He was ruthlessly denied the right to ask for
information and a fatal prediction was bestowed to him by
his sister.
The hypocrisy of Pumplechook is exposed when Pip gives
false information; quite the opposite of reality and
Pumblechook swallows them up simply because they
match the general traditional ideas about how fairy-tales
rich persons live. Bumplechoak looks very ridiculous
shaking his head in agreement to assure Mrs. Joe that Pip is
telling the truth just a few minutes before he has to admit
that he has never seem her. Pip draws inner satisfaction and
completes his revenge by seeing the two fools quite
satisfied with their foolishness. It is noteworthy how under
estimating a child's intelligence, grownups place
themselves under the mercy of his whims and mood. It is
also ironical that a child succeeds while grownups never
do, in having his own way and leading them by the nose.
He fathoms psychology of those two particular grownups
and realizes that, hypocrites and shallow-minded as they
are, they do not deserve the truth. A wild lie proves to be
safer and more plausible for them than the truth.
It is also ironical how the life of Miss Havisham and
several grownups are so unreasonable that a child finds it
impossible to describe it honestly and be believed. Pip can
easily predict therefore meet their expectations and views
about people and things. It is noteworthy that when Pip
tells his sister and Pumblechook about how Miss Havisham
gives her orders that he eat behind the coach they do not
find anything unnatural or humiliating about it.
Dickens is interested in highlighting corruption. Money,
social status and knowledge are sources of influence which
empower those who have them ever those who do not.
Children are abused by those they work for and even by
senior members of their own family. The novel is full of
abused children and adults who had been abused as

116
children. Pip is treated as a thing by his sister and her
acquaintances: "I often served as a missile." describing how
his sister treats him in a particular situation Pip states that:
"My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair;
Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm, as about would be
held in a boot-jack.
Pip's needs are never acknowledged. He is denied even the
right to speak or ask questions. By Miss. Havisham, he is
treated like a toy machine and is sometimes used to replace
her stick. Biddy, too is an abused child who is taken care of
by absolutely nobody in the work. She goes in torn shoes
and dirty clothes and her hands are heavy with layers of
dirt. She is over loaded with work since she has to perform
the tasks that grownups throw at her. The girl is such a
pathetic figure, tolerant, patient, persevering and not the
least resistant, not just trying to perfect what she has to do,
but help others as well.
As children, Magwitch, and Joe had been abused. And,
careless and spoiled as she appears to be, Estella, too, is an
abused child. She is the natural daughter of poor,
unavailable parents and the adopted daughter of a rather
vindictive woman who turns her into a weapon for revenge.
Her human nature is distorted to the extent that she does
not seem capable of establishing normal emotional ties with
others. She is not capable of love, not even toward Miss.
Havisham who never taught her how to be tender or
normally receive other's admiration and tenderness.
Miss Havishon, herself is a striking example of a woman
who is dying of a definite lack of love. She had been
betrayed by her half-brother and her beloved fiancée and
her relatives visit her only to assert their place as the
inheritors of her fortune.
As a start, Magwitch had been deserted by his parents very
early in life. Dickens describes him as a man who is
hugging himself, as a sign of his pining for love and care.
He is such a sad figure helping Pip to be a gentleman

117
instead of turning into another Magwitch and adopting him
in place of the daughter he could never raise.
…………………………………………………

References

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations

The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. I& II.

118
“Returning the Colonizer’s Gaze”, Nadine Gordimer’s
None to Accompany Me, a Hybridity in the Making.
―When colonizer and colonized come
together, there is an element of negotiation of cultural
meaning‖ (Huddart, 2).

―Cultural colonization‖ has proved much more influential

than territorial colonization. If the first usurps lands and
properties, Lois Tyson states that the second inculcates in
the colonized systems and values that ―denigrate the
culture, moral, and even physical appearance of formerly
subjugated people‖ (419). The cultural and psychological
influences of colonizers remain much longer after the
withdrawal of their canons and soldiers. The powerful wind
of change which sweeps away the traces of their wheels
and footprints, find indelible the traces of their manners and
attitudes. The ―dynamic psychological and social interplay
between what ex-colonial populations consider their native,
indigenous, pre-colonial cultures‖ and ―the residual effects
of colonial domination on their culture‖ (419) comes at the
heart of postcolonial studies and major related issues, e.g.,
post-colonial identity. Ex-colonized countries have so
profusely imbibed colonizers‘ culture that it became almost
impossible to distinguish it from indigenous culture.
However, it is not worthwhile for the ex-colonized to
preserve some cultural aspects and disown others on basis

119
of the nationality of these aspects. Therefore, several
postcolonial theorists claim that ―postcolonial identity is
necessarily a dynamic, constantly evolving hybrid of native
and colonial cultures‖ (422). They even go further to argue
that hybridity should not be confined to the unwilling
cultural exchange (culture transfusion) among contesting or
warring countries, but ―is rather a productive, exciting,
positive force in a shrinking world that is itself becoming
more and more culturally hybrid‖ (422).
Among post-colonial theorists, Homi K. Bhabha
distinguishes himself by a set of illuminating concepts that
pump new blood into the veins of the movement as a
whole. These concepts call for a new understanding of
cross- cultural relations and a novel approach towards
colonialism. In several instances he explains his views by
referring to other major critics, e.g., Said, Fanon and Julia
Kristeva. He disagrees with Said‘s view that ―colonial
power and discourse is possessed entirely by the
colonizer,‖ and considers it ―a historical and theoretical
simplification‖ that he challenges (Bhabha,1983,23), but,
according to Richard King, Bhabha adopts the Derridean
notion of difference which highlights the ongoing ―deferral
and differentiation of meaning within texts in order to
emphasize the inherent ambivalence of colonial discourse‖
(202). Colonial discourse is the result of a hybridization

111
process that inevitably ensues when colonizers and
colonized meet and interact in ―an agonistic space‖ (202).
King maintains that, ―Discourses, like texts, can come to
mean different things and be appropriated for
heterogeneous purposes‖ (202). Bhabha explains that we
―should not see the colonial situation as one of
straightforward oppression of the colonized by the
colonizer‖ (Huddart, 1) and cites evidence referring to the
ambivalence of the colonial situation especially that his
reading of Lacan comes in agreement with this
ambivalence. Bhabha‘s understanding of the mirror stage
sheds light on his evaluation of the colonizer-colonized
relationship. In his The Location of Culture, (1994), he
suggests that ―Like the mirror phase ‗the fullness‘ of the
stereotype-its image as identity- is always threatened by
lack‖ (77). ―Aggressivity‖ and ―narcissism‖ that are
basically entwined in the mirror stage also overwhelm the
colonial situation. This ―doubling‖ describes the
ambivalence inherent in the colonizer/colonized
relationship. There is always ―both an aggressive
expression of domination over the other and evidence of
narcissistic anxiety about the self‖ (Huddart, 29). The
colonizer‘s aggression appears in his persistent attempts to
show his superiority, but this fails to cover for the real
instability of his identity. Bhabha claims that in ―the

111
objectification of the scopic drive there is always the
threatened return of the look; in the identification of the
imaginary relation there is always the alienating other (or
mirror) which crucially returns its image to the subject.‖ A
reevaluation of stances is, therefore, vital for a reevaluation
of the whole experience within the wider scope of the
present and in relation to major issues that were not known
when colonialism was almost covering the globe. How
could the insistence on cultural difference, so deeply
engraved in the history of colonialism be adhered to in
relation to globalization? How could the world avoid the
cultural freeze/stalemate that would inevitably ensue should
colonizers and colonized hold fast to their historical
stances? Responding to these issues, Bhabha advocates
―critical thinking‖, as ―a process‖ opposed to ―theoretical
critique‖, a procedure which does not contain the truth‖
(1994, 81). He argues that ―Political positions are not
simply identifiable as progressive or reactionary, bourgeois
or radical, prior to the act of critique engagée, or out-side
the terms and conditions of their discursive address‖ (22).
This indicates that Political positions ―are always in
context, in relation to specific debates and issues, and are
not, therefore, ‗left‘ or ‗right‘ outside specific situations‖
(Huddart, 12).Critical thinking, ―just as ambivalent as the
colonial discourse‖(13), enables thinkers to destroy the

112
boundaries of the stable and the expected and therefore
attain a new perspective on traditional issues.
Bhabha believes that the ―histories and cultures (of
colonialism) constantly intrude on the present, demanding
that we transform our understanding of cross-cultural
relations‖ (Huddart, 1). Accordingly, he calls for the
adoption of new interpretations of old concepts such as
―mimicry‖ and ―the uncanny‖, besides new concepts
especially hybridization. Building on his understanding of
mimicry and stereotypes, he uses ―the uncanny‖ to analyze
the postcolonial experience. The term is ambivalent and
lends itself to various explanations, so it might be
convenient to use only the definitions that influenced
Bhabha the most, i.e., the definitions offered by Sigmund
Freud and adopted by psychoanalytic critic Julia Kristeva.
The uncanny is ―that species of the frightening that goes
back to what was once familiar‖ (Freud, 2003:124). Bhabha
uses it in many contexts to refer to ―All the hesitations,
uncertainties, and ambivalences with which colonial
authorities and its figures are imbued‖ (Huddart, 54). He
finds it particularly convenient because he believes in the
―uncanniness of culture.‖

Culture is heimlich, with its disciplinary

generalizations, its mimetic narratives, its homologous

113
empty time, its seriality, its progress, its customs and
coherence. But cultural authority is also unheimlich, for to
be distinctive, significa-tory, influential and identifiable, it
has to betranslated, disseminated, differentiated,
interdisciplinary, intertextual, international, inter-racial.
(Bhabha, 1994, 136–7)

In his writings, Bhabha argues against the

―multiculturalist‖ notion that ―you can put together any
number of cultures in a pretty mosaic‖ (1991, 82). For him,
―there are no cultures that came together leading to hybrid
forms; instead, cultures are the consequences of attempts to
still the flux of cultural hybridities‖ (Huddart, 4). Hybridity
implies that ―the colonial space involves the interaction of
two originally ‗pure‘ cultures (the British/European and the
native) that are only rendered ambivalent once they are
brought into direct contact with each other‖ (King, 204).
However, the idea of ―pure cultures‖ interacting is not
Bhabha‘s main interest which is actually ―the third space‖
resulting from that interaction and what occupies that space
which enables other positions to emerge‖ (Bhabha,1991,
211). He is more interested in the ―liminal‖, the gray area
occupying the borderline stage which is critical for the
creation of a new culture.

114
 South Africa presents a unique example of
liminality in which the colonizer and the colonized have to
live side by side even after the colonial situation is
terminated. Nadine Gordimer, a Nobel Prize winner, has
been preoccupied by the social context of apartheid for
more than forty years. She has been acknowledged by
―critics and readers alike …as an uncompromising anti-
apartheid spokesperson‖ (Dimitriu, 1). Gordimer‘s views
after apartheid are almost identical to Bhabha‘s evaluation
of the colonial and postcolonial experience. She suggests
that ―all civilizations including China and Japan have been
the result of intersections and clashes.‖ She quotes the
Congolese writer, Henry Lopes who affirms that ―every
civilization is born of a forgotten mixture; every race is a
variety of mixtures that is ignored‖ (Gordimer, 1999, 28).
Bhabha agrees suggesting that ―the scraps, patches and rags
of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a
coherent national culture‖ (1994, 722). In her first post-
apartheid novel, None to Accompany Me, (1994), Gordimer
employs the paraphernalia of everyday life to reflect either
the coherency or incoherency of a national culture in the
making. The new hybrid culture should inevitably be a
composite of the colonizer and indigenous culture.
Gordimer presents South Africa in the borderline stage
when the country has just won the freedom of the black

115
majority. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine how
far Gordimer‘s post-apartheid novel demonstrates Bhabha‘s
views in relation to postcolonialism. Attention will
particularly be given to the concepts of ―mimicry‖ and ―the
uncanny‖, being so related to each other and also
comprehensively illustrated in the novel.
The novel opens with a party thrown ―the year
the prisons opened‖ (5) - 1990. The party is given by the
Starks, white activists, to welcome their son who arrives
from London, welcome black returnees from exile, and
mark their wedding anniversary. In the airport, black
returnees appear in the costumes of their different places of
exile, ―the black leather caps of East Germany, the dashikis
of Tanzania, the Arab keffiyeh worn as a scarf‖ (36). These
odd combinations refute the idea that we can firmly draw
boundaries between individual nations. Hybridization has
never stopped. Even though these natives were away from
the colonizer, they have obviously imbibed ―patches‖ and
―rags‖ from other cultures. This initial situation of the
colonizer acting as a hostess to natives changes by the end
when the colonized manages to return the gaze.
Colonialist discourse stands on two basic
assumptions, the superiority of the European colonizers
(Eurocentrism), and the inferiority of the indigenous
peoples they invade. Apparently the colonizers equated

116
technical and military advancement with cultural and
humanitarian advancement. They saw themselves as ―the
embodiment of what a human being should be, the proper
‗self‘‖ turning the colonized into ‗other‘,‖ and ―therefore
inferior to the point of being less than fully human‖ (Tyson,
420). Indigenous cultures had been devalued for so long
that ex-colonized were left with ―a psychological
inheritance of a negative self-image and alienation from
their own indigenous cultures‖ (419). The colonizers
consolidated the idea of their superiority by creating
colonial subjects, i.e., ―colonized persons who did not resist
colonial subjugation because they were taught to believe in
[the colonizer‘s] superiority and, therefore, in their own
inferiority‖ (421). Colonial subjects are people with a
double consciousness or vision. The way those subjects
perceive themselves and the world is always divided
between two contesting cultures: their indigenous culture
and that of the colonizer. Among colonial subjects are
people who had the European culture forced upon them in
exile like the Maqomas. The Maqomas‘ lengthy stay in
exile could be measured by the age of their daughter who
was born away from home. The girl, except for color, is
more European than African which is natural considering
her being a production of the European society. Back
home, she struggles to learn what was supposed to be her

117
mother tongue. Mpho‘s in-between position is reflected in
the way she equally feels at home almost anywhere, in
London, South Africa, her gogo‘s Alexandra house and the
Starks house. It is also obvious in her appearance. Her
clothes show that she is an embodiment of the
reconciliation between the past of resistance and the
present. She ―combined the style of Vogue with the
assertion of Africa… Her hair, drawn back straightened and
oiled to the gloss of European hair, was gathered on the
crown and twisted into stiff dreadlocks, Congolese style‖
(49). Mpho is a beauty of the kind created by the cross-
pollination of history …a style of beauty [that] comes out
of the clash between domination and resistance…Mpho
was a resolution in a time when this had not yet
beenachieved by governments, conferences,
negotiations…of the struggle for power in the country
which was hers. (49)
Bhabha explains that migrants have a peculiar position.
Mpho was not literally forced into exile and for her,
―migrancy [was] upwardly mobile‖ (Huddart, 52). Her
hybrid identity is ―marked by an uncanny ability to be at
home anywhere, an ability that always might be the burden
of having no home whatsoever‖ (53). She also exhibits
what Bhabha describes as the ―uncanny fluency of
another‘s language‖ (1994, 139), being fluent in English

118
and totally ignorant of what is supposed to be her native
language (139). Sally laments: ―that‘s pretty
humiliating…have your daughter taught your language as if
it‘s French or German‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 50). Accordingly,
Mpho leads a ―half-life‖ as divided as the colonial identity,
since these ―figures of doubling and halving mark the
experience …of the migrant…in the same way as colonial
identity loses its moorings through mimicry‖ (Huddart, 53).
As a result of belonging nowhere and
everywhere, ―Propriety and impropriety become confused
and doubled‖ (Huddart, 54). A little hesitant before having
an abortion, Mpho, who sleeps in a T-shirt with a Mickey
Mouse on it, runs to her grandmother‘s house (gogo‘s
house). Gogo stands for the marginalized minority group
who act as the last defense against the total demise of
national culture. She is the nation-state trying to assert itself
as a coherent unified body by ―appealing to the historical
durability of its identity‖ (Bhabha, 1994, 772). Bhabha
suggests that ―the nation fills the void left in the uprooting
of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the
language of metaphor‖ (139). Among the strategies
followed to achieve this form of self-authorization is
―indoctrinating‖ the young in the indigenous traditions.
Bhabha calls these strategies the discourse of ―nationalist
pedagogy‖ (772). Accordingly, a nation simultaneously

119
struggles to define itself in terms of its ―contemporaneity‖
and also in terms of its relevance to the present world that
does not have much resemblance to life in the past (772).
For Mpho, gogo represents a ―nostalgic … vision of the
community‖ who could offer an alternative to the one
solution that Sibongil (Sally), her mother, imported from
Western culture (Huddart, 52). The combination of Mpho,
now with an African ―doek tied over her fancy hair style…
ironing on the kitchen table,‖ and her gogo ―peeling
potatoes into a basin on her spread lap,‖ is an uncanny
apparition that confronts Sally with how far she has moved
away from traditional African thinking and principles
(Gordimer, 1994, 185). The uncanny ―is a way of
reviving… past life, of keeping it alive in the present‖
(Huddart, 53). This explains Sally‘s furious reactions at the
slightest hint of a repetition of the humiliations of the
colonialist past. The uncanny is not something that we can
control or access directly-the feeling of uncanniness is
essentially an involuntary recurrence of the old and
familiar. This involuntary quality suggests that the uncanny
would better have remained hidden- what retutns to haunt
you is actually something you do not want to face again.
(Huddart, 55)

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In European clothes, a ―hound‘s-tooth tweed suit and
knotted silk scarf,‖ Sally imposes European thinking and
European ways of life against gogo‘s weak resistance. ―We
are not white people,‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 185) is gogo‘s sole
justification and defense for her stance against the abortion
of Mpho‘s baby.
Sally‘s westernized manners emphasize her
departure from her Africanness and ―her stance before all
that was familiar to [Didymus]‖ (Gordimer,186) and his
mother. Gogo‘s modest kitchen utensils pose a striking
contrast to Sally‘s modern European kitchen. These
utensils, however, stood as Didymus‘ ―childhood
reassurances against hunger in many lean times‖ (186,187).
They stand for the security of the nation and the warmth of
his indigenous culture against the loneliness and coldness
imparted by the kitchen of his wife where a cold meal left
in the oven or the microwave informs him that his wife will
not be home for lunch. Frued uses the uncanny to explain
―the feeling we get when experiences of childhood that
have been repressed return to disrupt our everyday
existence‖ (Huddart, 52). It is also ―what alienates or
estranges us from whatever we thought was most properly
our own‖ (56). For Didy, the revival of these memories
embodies the disturbing fact that there is no place now
where he can feel at home. ―The uncanny,‖ Bhabha

121
suggests, is also the ―unhomely‖ (1992, 144). He calls it
―vernacular cosmopolitanism, which opens ―ways of living
at home abroad or abroad at home‖ (2000, 587). Sally
states facts that drive her message home; ―We‘ve been
alienated from what is ours… You (her Daughter) were
robbed of your birth that should have been right here…
Take back your language‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 50). Her
powerful presence finally wins the battle and reminds
Mpho ―of what their long life away from home made of
her‖ (186). The daughter, too, has her definite form of
hybridity that she should achieve. ―Once home,‖ she
realizes, ―the new world had to be made of exile and home,
both accepted‖ (186). This view agrees with Bhabha‘s
rejection of rigidly-defined identities built upon a national
form. He does not entirely reject the idea of a national
identity, but he suggests that this identity should be open to
change, to embrace ―rags‖ and ―scraps‖ from other
cultures. ―The strategy of self-authorization,‖ according to
Bhabha, ―coalesces, not around the antagonism between
self and other (home vs abroad, us vs them), but through
the constitution of an ideological subject whose withinness
is itself divided‖ (Hale, 667).In this situation, Sally and
Mpho act as colonial subjects who glorify the colonizer‘s
traditions against their own.

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 Gordimer presents situations where ―self and other
are locked together‖ (Huddart, 30), i.e., where the
colonized forcefully looks back at the colonizer threatening
his sense of self. She emphasizes the colonized‘s agency
through mimicry (30).Colonial subjects adopted the
colonizer‘s tastes and lifestyle which they were taught to
find superior to their indigenous culture. From Bhabha‘s
view,
[C]olonial mimicry is the desire for a
reformed, recognizable other, as a subject of difference
that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that
the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an
ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must
continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.
(1994, 86)

Colonial ideologies stand on the assumption that ―there is

structural non-equivalence, a split between superior and
inferior which explains why any one group of people can
dominate another at all‖ (Huddart, 40). Colonial discourse,
therefore, desires the colonized to be ―extremely like the
colonizer, but by no means identical‖ (40). A shade of
difference should always be there as a reminder of the
colonial mission. Bhabha maintains that mimicry ―is not
slavish imitation, and the colonized is not being assimilated

123
into the supposedly dominant or even superior culture‖
(39). He believes that the agency of colonized peoples ―has
often been underplayed when it does not fit our usual
expectations of violent anti-colonial opposition‖ (2). If the
colonizer depends on this shade of difference to prove his
superiority, then the strife to prove their sameness, on the
part of the colonized, is a form of resistance, neither
disavowal of the self nor slavish imitation. On the other
hand, this desperate attempt to highlight and prove a
distinction between himself and the colonized renders the
former significantly anxious about his identity. This anxiety
reveals a gap in colonial discourse- ―a gap that can be
exploited by the colonized, the oppressed‖ (4).

Gordimer forwards situations where the colonized

defies the colonizer and mocks the imperial institution.
The position of Vera, the white activist, as a house owner
and a generous hostess to blacks irritates Sibongile.
Sibongile exhibits symbols of a double consciousness
obviously as a direct result of her twenty years of exile.
Back home, she prefers to spend the transitional period
before she gets a house of her own as a guest in the house
of her white friend rather than that of her mother-in-law.
Again, she is infuriated at being given a room in a hotel
that had previously been used by poor whites. It evoked

124
uncanny memories of past humiliations. Double
consciousness causes an unstable sense of self which is
markedly heightened in exile. Sally is furious at the idea of
being treated as a guest in her own country, yet, ―she and
Didy have moved away from that cheek-by-jowl existence
they were at home in, the old days, Chiawelo‖ (Gordimer,
1994, 48). She has obviously been familiarized to the
European standards of everyday life which happen to be
different from the past Chiawelo standards ―when there was
no choice‖ (48). Vera‘s place with two bathrooms, ensuring
a degree of privacy even for guests, is chosen over the
Alexandra house where gogo still has to ―go out of the
house across a yard to a toilet used by everyone round
about‖ (51).The Starks‘ house represents many
compromises that Sally reaches in her way to reestablish
herself as a citizen of a South Africa that has to be equally
the nation of both excolonizer and excolonized. She acts as
a mirror that faces Vera with her reflection that is
extremely, but not exactly like her. Gordimer here agrees
with Bhabha‘s view that the ―key to the subversion of
colonial discourse… can be found in the subversive
mimesis of the colonialist by the colonized native‖ (King,
203). This view explains how Bhabha‘s notion of hybridity
serves to offer examples of ―an anti-colonial subversion‖
from within (203). Gordimer emphasizes the colonized‘s

125
agency through mimicry which she introduces as a strategy
of ―subversion that turn[s] the gaze of the discriminated
back upon the eye of power‖ (Bhabha, 1985, 35). This
poses the question of whether the colonizer deliberately
uses mimicry as a means of resistance. Sally and Vera meet
twice for lunch, once while Sally had not yet established
herself in her country and another after she had. In their
first meeting she shows up ―elegant in black suede boots
draped to the knees‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 46) and instead of
talking about the real issue, that of being treated as a guest
in her own country, she shoots her indignation at the
restaurant menu. Vera, feeling perfectly at home, asks for
―whatever was the special for the day‖ (46). Sally, pining
for the at-home feeling and pining for choice, scrutinizes
the menu with the premeditated purpose of finding it short
of what she craves-fish. The menu helps her open up and
move on to the point: ―Lousy; everything is lousy, not even
possible to get what you wanted to eat‖ (47). But after
Sibongile is established in a new house and also in the
Executive Committee of the new government, she attempts
to stand her grounds as the hostess in her country. She
invites Vera to a restaurant of her choice where she feels at
home and is perfectly known to the waiters. She wallows in
exact, meticulous food selections and specifications and her
orders convey confidence and power. Asserting her

126
position as a hostess, when coffee arrives, Sally ―arrange[s]
the cups and pour[s] it measuring her words with the flow‖
(131). Sally and Vera have similar, though not identical
purposes and missions. She is a female political activist
who relegates her personal life, not her femininity, to the
background. In this respect she is nothing like Vera who is
so neutral to her femininity that she looks almost like a
man. Advancing to the position she has longed for in the
political life, Sibongile usurps the seat and the attention she
is entitled to by advertising her ―undocile femininity‖ (78).
Her rejection of the male appropriation of power is evident
―in the way she used her body: coming into conference…
on high heels that clipped across the floor, no attempt to
move discreetly‖ (78) in a conference room or a political
discussion. Sibongil causes a stir in the political life similar
to the ―stir of legs and seats as perfume marked the
progress of her breasts and hips to her place‖ (78).

Sibongile and her husband adopt and present two

different attitudes towards mimicry and also various
degrees of adapting to the new circumstances. Separation
from the homeland causes the colonized to feel caught
between two cultures while belonging to neither. The
colonized finds himself ―arrested in a psychological limbo
that results not merely from some individual psychological

127
disorder but from the trauma of the cultural displacement
within which one lives‖ (Tyson, 421). Didymus is the
embodiment of the phenomenon which postcolonial critics
refer to as ―unhomeliness‖ (421). To be ―unhomed‖ is
different from being ―homeless‖ (421). To be unhomed ―is
to feel not at home even in your own home because you are
not at home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis had
made you a psychological refugee, so to speak‖ (Tyson,
421). In exile, Didy spends twenty years struggling for the
rights of his people risking his life and liberty. However, he
comes back home to a country that adopted a way of life
very similar to that of the ex-colonizer. In a drastic
opposition to his expectations, he is relegated to the
sidelines while his wife, also unexpectedly, soars to the
heights of black political life. This variance in political
status and switch of roles between Sally and Didymus is
also reflected in the details of their everyday life. In the
mornings, Sally ―would be snatching up files, briefcase,
keys…while [Didy] was dipping bread in coffee‖ (75).
When she comes back, the ―thick atmosphere of the world
of discussion and negotiation came from her hair and skin‖
(75) and Didymus ―scented it as a dog sniffs the shoes of its
master to trace where he‘s been‖ (75). In bed, Sally‘s ―body
beside him invaded the whole bed‖ (125).

128
 Didymus is ―a time warp‖ (39). He cannot break
the bond with his old self as a fighter and cannot transcend
the past. Sally is disgusted at his reluctance to insert
himself in the new life which has to embrace the past and
the present, black and white. Accordingly, his ―whitening
curls sat like the peruke of a seventeenth- century courtier
worn stately on his black head‖ (39). What actually
infuriates Sally is her husband‘s ―slavish imitation‖ of the
colonizers‘ ways in order to gain their regard. In spite of his
long history as a fighter, Didy fails to stand his grounds
when colonization comes to an end. Starting her political
career, Sibongile is totally against compromise. The
reasons Didymus gives for imitating whites prove that for
him mimicry does not transcend ―slavish imitation.‖
Why do you think we turn up in suits and ties
instead of the Mao shirts and dashikis the leaders in
countries up North wear? So that the Boers on the other
side of the table will think there is a code between us and
them, We‘ve discarded our Africanness, our blackness is
hidden under the suit-and-tie outfit, it‘s not going to jump
out at them and demand. (77)
Sally‘s response reflects that she adopts mimicry as a
means of resistance and that the change of her appearance
or ways of life is inevitable since all cultures are apt to
change, even without colonization, as a result of cultural

129
contact. According to Lois Tyson, many postcolonial critics
argue that ―postcolonial identity is necessarily a dynamic,
constantly evolving hybrid of native and colonial cultures
(422).‖ They even assert that ―hybridity… does not consist
of a stalemate between two warring cultures but is rather a
productive, exciting, positive force in a shrinking world
that is itself becoming more and more culturally hybrid‖
(422). Sally vehemently contradicts Didymus‘ opinion on
the ground that these items of etiquette should be neglected
on purpose to convey a bold, clear message informing ex-
colonizers that ―there is no respect due to them‖ (Gordimer,
1994, 76). Sally, however, appreciates the value and
convenience of a message conveyed by clothes and never
fails to dress herself appropriately for a formal occasion or
―public exposure‖ (182). Invited to a reception party by a
new embassy in Pretoria, she appears ―confident and
attractively…in African robes and turban‖ which she
wears, not out of personal nationalistic motives, but ―for
such occasions.‖ (238). Sally still finds time and energy to
dress herself properly for an important appointment even
while terribly worried about her only daughter. She
consents to the idea that there should be ―nothing showy‖
(183) about her, but finds it part of her duty as a politician
to be ―a walking billboard for home products‖ by wearing
garments and jewellery designed and made in their own

131
country‖ (238). Still, Sally has to reach a compromise by
meeting the expectations of all the parts concerned. Her
appearance reflects her successful hybrid identity when she
matches ―carved wooden bracelets‖, African style, to
―tailored skirt and jacket‖ (238). She considers it necessary
to neglect her personal taste that ―must be subordinate to
the cause‖ (183).
Sally is not as tough as she usually shows herself.
Like her husband, she is haunted by insecurities that are
related to the past of colonialism. She is contradicted on her
way home by black female street sweeper who works as an
alter ego facing her with ―the probability that gave her an
internal cringe‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 52). As Freud confirms,
―as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to
confirm … old discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of
the uncanny‖ (2003, 154). Sally knows very well she could
have been that woman. There is a definite sense of ―the
return of the dead‖ (154). Adults certainly arrive at ―a
proper sense of self‖, but for Freud, ―this self never gets rid
of…inappropriate…beliefs or attachments…the uncanny…
remains a partial presence in what is appropriate‖ (2003,
154). ―Waken suddenly, shaken alive into another light,
another existence. Sally is drawn over to her other self,
standing there, the one she started out with, this apparition‖
(Gordimer, 52).

131
 Oupa is another example of a colonial subject
whose double consciousness is heightened by the forced
double separation from his homeland, once to the Robin
Island and another from his village to the city in search of a
job. Back home, Oupa migrates so swiftly between
identities. In the city, he is a free, young man who befriends
his white boss and political activist, Vera, and falls for
Mpho, the London girl. Vera blames herself for not
connecting his westernized appearance to an affair with
Mpho. ―When the young man came to her office wearing a
new lumbar jacket, brown suede…and asked …whether a
current play was to be recommended‖, she should have
guessed for herself that that London taste was a sign of a
relationship with the westernized girl (Gordimer, 1994,
103). Surprisingly Vera discovers the other face of Oupa
when she meets his village wife and kids who are still heart
and soul immersed in the indigenous culture. Oupa does not
seem to strike a balance between the present and the past
and it is not a coincidence that the flat he takes in the city
had been occupied twenty years before by a victim of
racism. He himself ends a victim of colonialism and the
lack of ability to form a new self based on a hybrid culture.
So, hybridity could face challenges within the construction
of the same person ―whose withinness is itself divided‖
between two cultures, choices or self and other (Hale, 667).

132
 Oupa‘s wife represents the colonized‘s struggle
to negate the colonizer‘s stereotypical opinion of the
indigenous culture. Fastidiously cleaning their houses and
kitchen utensils, black women are actually striving to
negate the idea that poverty and dirtiness are equivalent to
blackness. Consequently, a black woman removes the
blood and the remains of a human brain from her doorstep
with the same logic she scrubs away the remains of a
cooked cattle brain from her pan, thus erasing the material
evidence of a devastating attack of which she herself is a
victim.
On the other side stands the colonizer whose
response reflects the hesitation he experiences in reaction to
the colonized‘s solid returning of the gaze. Bhabha always
raises the issue of the colonized‘s agency. He maintains
that ―objectified figures of the colonized are more than just
objects‖ (Huddart, 45) and returning ―the gaze‖ shakes the
colonizer‘s sense of self by reminding him of that fact.
Bhabha argues that neither the black person nor the white
are complete in terms of their sense of self when it is
considered within the context of the colonial discourse. In
one of Vera‘s parties an English man shows up ―in a
catfish-patterned dashiki‖ while a ―small black woman
wearing the western antithesis of her white husband‘s outfit
satin trousers and a string of pearls in the neck of her

133
tailored shirt, stood by looking up now and then to others in
the manner of one watching the impression he was making‖
(Gordimer, 1994, 145). The woman explains that his
―clothes does not make him a black man‖ and that she is his
party piece…so they can be impressed he‘s married a
black.
Don‘t you know I‘m his passport? I‘m his
credentials as a white foreigner. Because he can produce
me, it means he‘s on the right side That gets him in
everywhere. (Gordimer, 1994, 145)

The behavior of that white young man shows that he is

experiencing difficulties regarding his sense of self. He
needs the support of the colonized to appear whole in front
of a post apartheid South Africa and ironically it is he who
mimics the colonized, not only in appearance, but also is
his political tendencies. In his ―Of Mimicry and Man‖,
Bhabha uses a psychoanalytic concept ―the scopic drive‖,
to explain mimicry as ―a visual strategy‖, thus connecting it
with the stereotype. The scopic drive highlights one of
Lacan‘s concepts, ―camouflage‖, ―which refers to blending
in with something in the background that none the less is
not entirely there itself‖ (Huddart, 46). Bhabha declares
that he uses these psychoanalytic concepts to clarify how
mimicry exceeds the colonial authority. The visual aspect

134
of mimicry proves that colonial and racist discourses
cannot be separated, something which he reiterates by the
rewriting of his famous formulation: ―almost the same but
not quite‖ which became ―almost the same but not white‖
(Bhabha, 1994, 89).
Mimicry, as Bhabha explains it, is ―an
exaggerated copying of language, culture, manners and
ideas‖ (39). In this way mimicry is also ―a form of
mockery‖ (29), not servitude since exaggeration is also a
sort of difference. Bhabha‘s postcolonial theory is therefore
―a comic approach to colonial discourse‖ (Huddart, 39). In
his theory he undermines and even mocks the pretensions
and allegations of colonialism. Zeph Rapulana is an
example of mimicking the colonizer aware of his
insecurities. He always appears neatly handsome in elegant
European clothes. His status in his rural community is
secured by ―neat clothes‖ (Gordimer, 122). This
appearance, however, infuriates Odendaal, the white
farmer, who considers it boldness and an attempt on the
part of a black to be his equal. Odendaal actually feels
insecure at seeing a black, so similar to him, shaking awry
the beliefs that justify his position as a colonizer and with
them his sense of self. Rapulana shakes Odendaal‘s
selfhood by not conforming to the stereotypical picture he
cherishes for a black, his preconceived picture of the

135
colonized. As a colonizer, Odendaal wants his stereotypes
to be fixed.
Vera, the white activist embodies Gordimer‘s
undergoing a ―phase of increasing literary self-
consciousness‖ (Head, 46). In other words, Vera is striving
to answer Gordimer‘s ―perennial question: where do whites
fit in?‖ (46). In this novel the question is posed in two
parts, ―where do whites fit in? and where blacks?‖ (46).The
division of the question is itself a comment on a hitherto
straggling hybridity. Hybridity should not indicate an
exchange of positions or a replacement of the colonizer by
the colonized. Thus Gordimer employs ―technical
adaptations that…run in tandem with her investigations of
the adjustments required of all groups in the new power-
sharing, with its attendant political complexities,
compromises, and ambiguities‖ (46).This feature of
hybridity is explored through the themes of ―space‖ and
―sexuality.‖ The theme of space is ―a major preoccupation
of Gordimer‘s‖ (47). In previous novels her presentation of
―geopolitics‖ has been wrapped in symbolic or
mythological hints, but in None to Accompany Me, issues
are presented more literally by the outspoken Vera who,
nonetheless, is equally capable of denouncing the white
extremists‘ idea of ―ultimate laager‖ (47). She explores
―the theme of rural and urban‖ control as ―an index of

136
repression‖ and as ―a focus of political resistance‖ since
apartheid was based on ―zoning‖ (47). Gordimer‘s stance is
that finding a utopian impulse in the values of indigenous
black community, should not ―eschew the actualities of
deprivation in the peripheries of South African
urbanization‖ (47). The idea that a hybrid culture is still out
of reach is emphasized by Gordimer‘s ample reference to
who should control a certain space and whether this is done
in harmony with other bits and rags of everyday life. Space
and architecture is one domain where blacks fail to achieve
mimicry to the extent of ―almost the same, but not quite.‖
Practical politics and how it is translated into tangible
change in the life of blacks can be reflected in the treatment
of urbanization.
Huddart maintains that psychoanalysis is so
vital to Bhabha‘s work because ―postcolonial criticism is
itself a project aiming to analyze the repressed ideas and
histories that allowed the West to dominate so much of the
world‖ (52). He explains saying that ―the colonized nations
offer striking resources that transform our rigid sense of the
grand narratives of modernity and… an uncanny echo of
histories that modernity might prefer had remained hidden‖
(52). The ―uncanny,‖ in the case of Gordimer‘s female
characters, seems to act as a positive element endowing
them with the power to move forward, in the case of Sally,

137
or confront and reform the past, in the case of Vera. The
uncanny is connected to what Freud calls ―repetitious
compulsion,‖ which refers to ―the way the mind repeats
traumatic experiences in order to deal with them‖ (55). In
this sense, the feeling of ―uncanniness is… the feeling you
get when you have a guilt-laden past which you should
really confront, even though you would prefer to avoid it‖
(55). When whites seek to absolve themselves of past
injustices by offering blacks flats in classy suburbs
evidence of these injustices prove indelible. The
confrontation between Sibongil and her mother-in-law,
when the latter denounces black traditions thereby
announcing an affinity with western ways of life is highly
diminished in value when examined in context. The
encounter takes place in a house with its broken-pillard
stoeps and dust- dried pot-plants, battered relic of real
brick and mortar with two diamond-panedrotting windows
from the time when Alex was the reflection of out-of-
bounds white respectability, yearned for, imitated, now
standing alone on ash-coloured earth surrounded by shacks,
and what had once been an aspiration to a patch of fenced
suburban garden now a pile of rubbish where the street
dumped its beer cans and pissed, and the ribcages of
scavenging dogs moved like bellows. (Gordimer, 1994, 50)

138
The past keeps coming back haunting the present and
moulding it in the very shapes that the guilt- ridden person
is striving to forget or at least avoid. The reason that
Bhabha uses the uncanny is that ―it is possible to compare
the childhood of an individual with the beginnings of a
modern western history: in both cases, something is
repressed but inevitably breaks through the veneer of
civilization‖ (Huddart, 52). The neighborhoods where
Gogo and Oupa live is also an example of the failure to
create a hybridity between the European modes of structure
and the African ways of life. The ample description of
squatter camps and the neighbourhoods where black people
live is a proof of this failure. Mimicry fails in the field of
architecture when it depends on ―the adoption of trappings
without attention to the material underpinnings‖ (Head,
48).The projects of housing blacks in suitable apartments
built after European styles collapse proving Gordimer‘s
rejection of the imposition of Eurocentric modes of art and
architecture on the realities of African life. Gordimer‘s
definite rejection of Eurocentrism is also reflected in Vera‘s
anxiety at the end of the novel at a possible romance
between her grandson and Mpho although she assures him
that her fears are not related to their difference in colour.
The writer is obviously concerned lest certain European
cultural modes should be ―potential limitations on black

139
African experience if not put to some new hybridized
purpose‖ (52).
The way Vera reacts to the gradual replacement
of whites by blacks is quite consistent with her attitude
towards apartheid. Apart of Vera feels that that house of
hers was ―acquired dishonestly.‖ It was her ―loot by
divorce‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 304). She got the house through
her first in-laws who did not know whether ―they…were
part of Europe or part of Africa.‖ (304)
Vera‘s shaken sense of self makes her convert the
patio ―meant for white tea parties… to a study where
strategies for restoring blacks to their land were worked
out.‖ (293). She allowed the Maqomas to ―pragmatically
[make] use, as of right-and this was recognized
unembarrassedly by the Starks- of the advantages [the
house of] the white couples had‖ (39). Alone in the house,
Vera has a feeling that they (herself and the house) are like
―old partners in a crime‖ (304). To get rid of this feeling
and redeem her sense of self, Vera gives up her position as
a hostess to become the tenant of a small annex to the
house of a black activist and capitalist- Zeph Rapulana. On
Sundays, she serves him, an act rich in symbolic value, for
it rebalances the century-old injustice the blacks have
suffered, and puts everybody in his or her right place- the
black, who is the original owner of the land, as the

141
landlord; the white, who is a guest and passerby in Africa,
as his tenant.(Vivan)
According to Dominic Head, Gordimer‘s
heroines prove that ―a public role can be allied to personal
need and expression‖ (49). The expression of Vera‘s
sexuality ―fits her political commitment. This kind of
politics of the body has always been important for
Gordimer, and it has, of course, a special relevance in
South African fiction‖ (50). In the 1950s, trans-racial
relationships were banned, so exploring these relations
sheds light on the issues of resistance and hybridity. Free,
especially adulterous, sexual relationships in Gordimer
have a liberating influence on the involved parties. The
utter failure of the Oupa/Mpho episode proves that
hybridity could also be a black- black issue especially for
blacks who spent considerable time away from their native
community exiled in different places. Head maintains that
throughout her career, ―Gordimer has been preoccupied
with how such cultural hybridity can be achieved for
postcolonial Africa in general and South Africa in
particular‖ (50). On the other hand Vera‘s affair with Otto
Abarbanal inspired feelings of pride and freedom, but never
betrayal while it lasted. This intimacy helps her overcome
her revulsion at the knowledge that he is a ―Hitler baby‖
and helps him exorcise the Nazi experience. For Gordimer,

141
―sexual expression and transgression flout the biological
policies intended in the racist social structure of South
Africa; and the biological hybridity implied in free
sexuality indicates, by extension, a cultural hybridity‖ (50),
in agreement with Bhabha‘s view about the hybridity of
cultures as a ―mixedness‖ or even ―impurity of cultures‖
(Huddart, 4). He applies this ―mixedness or ―impurity‖ to
the sense of identity for colonized and colonizer. He
explains that as subjects ―we both create and are created‖
because our identities are constructed partially by the
choices made by other people whose identities are also
constructed by the choices we make (14).
Often in Gordimer‘s novels ―political
commitment goes hand-in-hand with free (especially
adulterous) sexual expression‖ (Head, 50). Considering the
fiasco of the Mpho-Oupa episode, which, certainly not
haphazardly, is also situated in One-Twenty-One, this free
expression could be seen to denote a failing rather than a
successful hybridity. This is another case where the ―the
domestic and historical spheres invade each other‖ and
―uncannily, the private and public become part of each
other‖ (Bhabha, 1994, 9). Having an illicit affair while
unaware of the hardships of black neighbours indicates a
separation rather than a merging of cultures. It almost
empties the episode of positive significance and again

142
raises the issue of ―almost the same but not white,‖ as
Bhabha rewrites his statement (89). Vera receives uncanny
signals from One-Twenty-One that remind her of past
injustices on the domestic and historical levels. That flat is
where she betrayed her husband and spent her time
neglecting her daughter who grows up into a man-hating
lesbian. Unaware of ―the squalor of the subletting above
Otto‘s bed,‖ Vera almost echoes Mehring of The
Conservationist who embodies a ―parallel between
geographical and sexual acquisition‖ (Head, 51). This idea
is further strengthened when a parallel is also made
between Oupa‘s failure to keep One-Twenry-One and the
fiasco of his extramarital affair with the westernized girl.
Freud is specific when he explains how the uncanny works
in such cases when a guilt-ridden person is forced to
confront a reminder of the past. For him, ―any repression is
necessarily incomplete, and so any past is just about to
break through into the present. For psychoanalysis, the
traces of past beliefs and experiences remain present in the
mind‖ (Huddart, 55). Before she has to confront all this
Vera perhaps believes that she is a self-sufficient person,
but she cannot be unless she confronts the past and builds
her hybrid identity not excluding the colonial experience.
In this sense the uncanny is ―something that might inspire

143
us to reevaluate our identities [it] opens a space for us to
reconsider how we have come to be who we are‖ (65).
Concluding her novel, Gordimer, gives her
statement about the wished for hybridity indicating that
man has been striving to achieve it for much longer than he
thinks. She hopes ―the violent brotherhood of Cain and
Abel can be transformed into the other proclaimed
brotherhood only if it is possible to devise laws to bring
this about‖ (1994, 316). White and black, East and West
should find new ways to deal with each other on equal
bases putting in mind that they do not have to be the same
or almost the same. Barbara Temple-Thurston indicates that
according to the novel, ―cultural as well as social harmony
is [still] extremely difficult to achieve‖ (Sakamoto, 3). Itala
Vivan, however, believes that the situation that Gordimer
creates at the end with her white heroine keeping her limits
as a tenant of the annex to a black man‘s house is a good
start. This situation ―allows her to build a new and original
position in the South Africa world by putting the white
writer (and her heroine) at its margin. It is as if the white
intellectual had understood that that it is now time for her
to listen to blacks and be at their service‖ (Vivan). The
important thing at the end is that Gordimer finds it possible
to move beyond the restrictions of race and colour in
discussing her characters especially the young. The

144
classifications of black and white, oppressed and oppressor
have no future in South Africa. Everyone is everywhere
doing everything. Ivan and Ben (white characters) move to
London where they fit better, but so does Mpho. Adam, son
and grandson of white people, leaves London to Africa
where he seems to blossom. The boy lives his life
beautifully dating girls regardless of race and almost
innocent to the knowledge of black and white. The writer
and her characters seem to have developed the ability to
move beyond the past.

145
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 Fayoum University Second Year
Model Exam I
………………………………………………………………

Answer ONLY THREE of the following questions:

1. In his Poetics, Aristotle highlights the differences

between tragedy and epic poetry. Explain in detail.

2. "Plot" is the soul of drama. Explain in detail giving

ample reference to the types of plots, when they are usually
employed and the type Aristotle praised.

3.Metaphysical poetry has certain characteristics that give it

its unique taste. Explain.

4. ―The term ‗Neo-classicism‘ refers to the classicism of

the Restoration and the 18th century period (1660-1780)‖.
What are the main features of Neo-classicism?

5. Apply the principles of metaphysical poetry to the

following lines by Henry Vaughan:

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv‘n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov‘d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl‘d.
…………………………………………………….

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 Model Exam II
Answer the following questions:
1. "The tragic hero" is a concept that Aristotle emphasized
and explained. Comment with reference to Oedipus Rex.

2. According to Aristotle, there are different types of

anagnorisis (recognition) which are not of equal dramatic
effect. Explain with reference to Oedipus Rex.

3. In his essay of Dramatic Poesy, John Dryden makes an

attempt to restore the honor of English poets. Comment
explaining weather his attempt was a successful one.

4. To which movement of poetry do the following lines by

Henry Vaughan belong? Find features that express the
poetic principles.

But life is, what none can express,

A quickness, which my God hath kissed

153