{The last entry in a series belatedly continuing the celebration of Women's History Month, this week's entry will take a look at a controversial historical figure, Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi, whose life is chronicled in a 2013 biography by Jung Chang. Chang is an author of Chinese descent who currently lives in London as a British citizen.}
Historical nonfiction can make for dry reading. Many books try to be as comprehensive as possible, ignoring the individual trees in favor of the looking at the whole forest, in order to get a better understanding of the various forces at work during a specific time period in history. It is preferable then when a book can balance both an exploration of historical forces and the people caught up in them, so as to keep the reader both anchored and interested. In my opinion, English writer Jung Chang's biography of the Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi in her 2013 biography titled Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China succeeds for the most part in achieving this balance. In the process, the reader is introduced into the life of one of the more controversial Chinese leaders, the penultimate in a long line of empresses, whose tale of political intrigue contributes greatly to our understanding of Chinese modernization. In addition, with greater access to both Chinese and English sources, the author forces us to confront traditional portrayals of the Empress as a conservative force opposed to reform.
Cixi's tale evoked for me a corollary to that of fictional character Cersei Lannister from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series in the way that the former elevates herself into a position of power in the patriarchal Qing dynasty. Starting off as just a teenage concubine in 1852, one of many that the Emperor (in this case Emperor Xianfeng) kept after a long selection process, Cixi was interested in affairs of state and politics, both long considered masculine domains. Like Cersei, Cixi lived in a period in which female leadership in the public sphere was frowned upon, forcing her to take indirect measures to access the domains of power, slowly building up influence by networking first with the other women and the eunuchs of the court (lest she acted assertively enough to give people the impression she was the next Empress Wu Zetian, who had historically been seen as seizing power and ruling illegitimately). For example, as she rose through the ranks to the near-top by giving birth to a son on April 26, 1856, she entered into an important partnership with then Empress Zhen in her quest to reform her country, which she feared was falling behind the Western world.
The Opium Wars of 1839-1860 in which the British and their allies violated Chinese sovereignty and forcefully opened Chinese markets to trade was a powerful factor in her behind-the-scenes coup when she was in exile at the Summer Palace with Emperor Xianfeng. It was at the Summer Palace that her policy of "Make China Strong" (sound familiar?) began to take shape. In a series of Machiavellian maneuvers, Cixi was able to gain control over the process of Xianfeng's deathbed naming of his successor (Cixi's son Tongzhi) and the approving of imperial decrees away from a Council of Regents she regarded as wanting to continue the isolationist hardliner status quo of the previous century. This policy had nearly ruined the country and made it just another colonial outpost of the West or Japan, which had overwhelming naval power it threatened to use to occupy parts of China in the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Ruling indirectly through the male heirs (as Cersei does with her sons as Regent), first with her son and then her adopted son Guangxu and through cooperation with other high-ranking (read: male) members of the court and royal family, Cixi oversaw China's diplomatic and economic opening to the West and set the groundwork for the development of modern China's extensive rail network and military build-up.
However, like the current period of globalization and the backlashes against its universalist values, internal tensions over the intrusion of Western values into the traditional Confucian value system naturally erupted and threatened the dynasty. Various attempts to contain these forces of dissent weren't perfect, especially when in 1899-1901, under pressure from popular discontent over the reach of Western missionaries, the dynasty allied itself with xenophobic and anti-Christian segments of Chinese society to disastrous results. Beijing was once again put under foreign occupation. Dynastic support of the Boxers in an ill-advised attempt to hold off another foreign invasion damaged her reputation both domestically and abroad, damage that wouldn't be undone when she again seized power after the death of her adopted son, who was sympathetic to radical reformers who may or may not have been associated with imperial Japanese intelligence officers who sought a hostile reunification (to form a Pan-Asian nation, supervised by Japan). Recognizing the unsustainable foreign and domestic pressures resulting from the uneven, incremental opening of China, Cixi, at this point nearing the end of her life, devoted her remaining political clout towards cementing dynastic legitimacy through the introduction of a constitutional monarchy and the vote to the masses.
At this point, in the early 20th centuries, it became clear that the dynasty could no longer be sustained. Factions long-held in check by Cixi, such as the Boxers and those who sought a full-fledged republic (whether Communist or otherwise) were unleashed upon Cixi's death in 1908. The resulting political turmoil precipitated the abdication of the last emperor (then 5 years old) by the last empress, Longyu, in 1912, which created a Chinese republic. Since then, a series of reformist experiments have led to the present, in which the Communist Party seems to have become a new dynasty of sorts, their legitimacy similarly seen in terms of being able to maintain modernist reforms and guarantee continuing prosperity in an era of globalization and backlash to its pressures. (In a way, modern China owes much to Cixi, despite all her flaws and miscalculations, like that during the Boxer Revolution. Even with critical accusations of perhaps toeing the line dividing true consideration of new historical sources from historical revisionism, a point which I could see at certain points of the book-such as the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Cixi's adopted son and her second coup-Chang nevertheless does make a point for reconsidering Cixi's historical image as a conservative tyrant.)
As the saying goes, while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes. It will be interesting to see if modern China continues down the path that the Empress Dowager set for it and how it handles the tumultuous twenty-first century. In any case, Chang's biography of Empress Dowager Cixi provides valuable lessons for general readers and policymakers alike in her detailing of the historical challenges China faced in the 18th-19th centuries and that it and other developing countries (and perhaps even developed countries) continue to face today.
Works Cited:
Chang, Jung. (2013). Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. New York: Anchor Books.
Frankel, Valerie Estelle. (2014). Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity and Resistance. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers.
Friday, April 20, 2018
Friday, April 13, 2018
Book Review: Mary Beard's "Women & Power"
{In a belated, yet continuing celebration of Women's History Month, this week's entry will feature a book review of Cambridge literary professor Mary Beard's 2017 nonfictional novella Women & Power: A Manifesto.}
Professor Mary Beard of SPQR fame (2015) continues her examination of classical times and literature this time focusing on the latter's intersection with gender politics in her 2017 work Women & Power: A Manifesto, a collection of two essays transcribed from lectures she delivered in 2014 and 2017. This intriguing and powerful work examines the origin of society's suspicion, even antipathy, of powerful women by examining classical literature's fierce exclusion of women from the public circle and traces its continued influence in contemporary times, up through the tumultuous 2016 election campaign.
Not afraid to be provocative, in her preface, Beard bluntly states that "Western culture has had thousands of years of practice" in developing various mechanisms involved in the silencing of women as she begins her brief survey of Western history (Beard, 2017, p. xi). She begins in the classical era by taking a critical look at Homer's treatment of women in Odysseus, a tale of a soldier's (Odysseus) long journey home from fighting in the Trojan War and his wife Penelope's steadfast devotion to her husband in her dodging of various suitors vying for her hand in marriage.
Now, in having studied this literary work at various points from high school to college literature classes, I have always been bothered by various aspects of Odysseus, such as how its female characters were portrayed. They seemed like ornaments to the story at best, never to be heard from except in the bedroom and in other private spaces, often where they saw to the hero's (apparently well-deserved) reward of mainly sexual comfort. Beard confirms my intuitions by chastising Odysseus's son Telemachus's treatment of Penelope, who often tells her not to interrupt the adults in the room discussing current affairs (i.e. the men, including himself), including the matter of her potential spouse. In declaring public speech and action to be "the business of men," with "business" serving to qualify and make distinct the separation of serious "authoritative...speech" from the superficial and ditsy "kind of chatting, prattling or gossip that anyone-women included, or especially women-could do," Beard underlines how Telemachus serves as a continuing metaphor for how culture marks the achievement of masculine maturity in his asserting the prerogative of public functions over the passive, submissive female (Beard, 2017, p. 6).
Unfortunately, this pattern of silencing women who dare to speak out and punishing continually assertive women (who dared go outside the acceptable realms of public speech in defense of other women-not part of the public sphere traditionally-or the domestic sphere) with social ostracization and the label of a freak or "androgyne," because the authority of public speech is ultimately entwined with masculinity rather than femininity, continues to this day (Beard, 2017, p. 11). While it permeates practically every interaction in society, it is most visible in politics, where women hoping to move further up the power ladder from a baseline of basic voting rights rely on a strategy of highlighting their masculine appearances (from deepening their voices to get further from the "shrillness" of female speech to adapting the "regulation" pant-suits and otherwise adopting "tough" language) and aspects (Beard, 2017, p. 11, 54). Even the ways in which we describe women seeking power, from our metaphors of "smashing a glass ceiling" and "knocking on the door," Beard highlights the fact that there is an underlying sense of women's taking power illegitimately or otherwise upsetting the natural sociopolitical order (Beard, 2017, p. 59).
Enter in the infamous 2016 campaign. This illegitimacy of feminine power-seeking (whether we view it as such overtly or subconsciously) can translate into things like photo-shopping Hillary Clinton's head onto Medusa's, the Greek mythological figure whose hair was made of snakes and whose looks turned anyone who looked at her into stone. This was paired with Trump, photoshopped onto the statue of the Greek hero Perseus who holds Medusa's decapitated head in the air triumphantly. Very Freudian, I might add. Gotta love the dark recesses of the Internet (not).
Anyways, maybe it's time that we rethink power and who's allowed to inhabit that coveted, hallowed domain, instead of trying to force women to adapt to the near-impossible conditions of achieving a position of power in society. While Beard is not very optimistic about the chances of this redefinition happening any time soon, the question concerning the nature of power she leaves the reader with in her conclusion nonetheless is one of the most important aspects of Women & Power and worthy of further study (and application).
Works Cited:
Beard, Mary. (2017). Women & Power: A Manifesto. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Professor Mary Beard of SPQR fame (2015) continues her examination of classical times and literature this time focusing on the latter's intersection with gender politics in her 2017 work Women & Power: A Manifesto, a collection of two essays transcribed from lectures she delivered in 2014 and 2017. This intriguing and powerful work examines the origin of society's suspicion, even antipathy, of powerful women by examining classical literature's fierce exclusion of women from the public circle and traces its continued influence in contemporary times, up through the tumultuous 2016 election campaign.
Not afraid to be provocative, in her preface, Beard bluntly states that "Western culture has had thousands of years of practice" in developing various mechanisms involved in the silencing of women as she begins her brief survey of Western history (Beard, 2017, p. xi). She begins in the classical era by taking a critical look at Homer's treatment of women in Odysseus, a tale of a soldier's (Odysseus) long journey home from fighting in the Trojan War and his wife Penelope's steadfast devotion to her husband in her dodging of various suitors vying for her hand in marriage.
Now, in having studied this literary work at various points from high school to college literature classes, I have always been bothered by various aspects of Odysseus, such as how its female characters were portrayed. They seemed like ornaments to the story at best, never to be heard from except in the bedroom and in other private spaces, often where they saw to the hero's (apparently well-deserved) reward of mainly sexual comfort. Beard confirms my intuitions by chastising Odysseus's son Telemachus's treatment of Penelope, who often tells her not to interrupt the adults in the room discussing current affairs (i.e. the men, including himself), including the matter of her potential spouse. In declaring public speech and action to be "the business of men," with "business" serving to qualify and make distinct the separation of serious "authoritative...speech" from the superficial and ditsy "kind of chatting, prattling or gossip that anyone-women included, or especially women-could do," Beard underlines how Telemachus serves as a continuing metaphor for how culture marks the achievement of masculine maturity in his asserting the prerogative of public functions over the passive, submissive female (Beard, 2017, p. 6).
Unfortunately, this pattern of silencing women who dare to speak out and punishing continually assertive women (who dared go outside the acceptable realms of public speech in defense of other women-not part of the public sphere traditionally-or the domestic sphere) with social ostracization and the label of a freak or "androgyne," because the authority of public speech is ultimately entwined with masculinity rather than femininity, continues to this day (Beard, 2017, p. 11). While it permeates practically every interaction in society, it is most visible in politics, where women hoping to move further up the power ladder from a baseline of basic voting rights rely on a strategy of highlighting their masculine appearances (from deepening their voices to get further from the "shrillness" of female speech to adapting the "regulation" pant-suits and otherwise adopting "tough" language) and aspects (Beard, 2017, p. 11, 54). Even the ways in which we describe women seeking power, from our metaphors of "smashing a glass ceiling" and "knocking on the door," Beard highlights the fact that there is an underlying sense of women's taking power illegitimately or otherwise upsetting the natural sociopolitical order (Beard, 2017, p. 59).
Enter in the infamous 2016 campaign. This illegitimacy of feminine power-seeking (whether we view it as such overtly or subconsciously) can translate into things like photo-shopping Hillary Clinton's head onto Medusa's, the Greek mythological figure whose hair was made of snakes and whose looks turned anyone who looked at her into stone. This was paired with Trump, photoshopped onto the statue of the Greek hero Perseus who holds Medusa's decapitated head in the air triumphantly. Very Freudian, I might add. Gotta love the dark recesses of the Internet (not).
Anyways, maybe it's time that we rethink power and who's allowed to inhabit that coveted, hallowed domain, instead of trying to force women to adapt to the near-impossible conditions of achieving a position of power in society. While Beard is not very optimistic about the chances of this redefinition happening any time soon, the question concerning the nature of power she leaves the reader with in her conclusion nonetheless is one of the most important aspects of Women & Power and worthy of further study (and application).
Works Cited:
Beard, Mary. (2017). Women & Power: A Manifesto. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Exploring the Mother-Daughter Relationships in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s "Nervous Conditions"
{The second installment in a belated (yet continuing) celebration of Women's History Month, this week's entry will flashback to a literary analysis of mother-daughter relationships in Tsitsi Dangarembga's (2004) postcolonial novel Nervous Conditions.}
Generally, mother-daughter relationships in women’s fiction tend to serve as a focal point for the plots of these feminist texts, as a mechanism to purposefully focus on female versus male representations in the literary arena (George 40; Willey 273; Uwakweh 1995). Many of the sources in the subject area of mother-daughter relationships focusing Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga tend to be postcolonial in nature, in that they are focused exclusively on how the mother-daughter relationship serves to reproduce colonial power differentials in a postcolonial environment along with offering critical support systems in times of hardship (Willey 273). This paper serves to explore further the under-appreciated educational aspect of the mother-daughter relationship in the context of postcolonial feminist theories.
First, this paper will examine scholarly critiques and evaluations of Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. Here, there will be a focus on three critical articles first in the literature review of this novel, in which additional scholarly perspectives aside from a postcolonial critique are sampled concerning feminist theory and female sexuality (George 1998; Shaw 2007; Uwakweh 1995). In a postcolonial critique in the veins of African feminist perspectives, Verna Erna George (1998) in her piece “Putting Up Resistance: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Annie John and Nervous Conditions” makes a case for the characters Tambudzai (hereafter referred to as Tambu) and Nyasha as giving voice to themselves and their mothers as female colonial subjects seeking individuation (George 39). George extends this postcolonial tradition in her exclusive focus on how the mothers and “other-mothers” of the protagonists prepare their daughters to face a postcolonial world in ways that emphasize both survival by following the status quo, but also subtle rebellion against the established order (George 39).
Moreover, in Tambu’s central journey and Nyasha’s peripheral journey in Nervous Conditions, George sees both mothers (and “other mother” grandmothers) as cultural repositories for the Shona culture that serve as central sites of resistance to colonialism, despite the mother-daughter relationship not being as central to Nervous Conditions as it is to other Afro-Caribbean women’s novels (George 43). However, to both characters, the mothers initially represent female subjugation in a patriarchal world, as both have internalized their inferiority with respect to the men in their lives, with Tambu’s mother Ma’Shingayi counseling her to carry on the “burdens of womanhood” and Nyasha’s educated mother Maiguru recommending similar acquiescence to patriarchy in terms of prioritizing “security” over self-realization (Dangarembga 104; George 43). George explains this paradox of mothers who “seemingly acquiesce to their own subordination also subtly impart the possibility of emancipation” in the face of oppression as a necessary survival tactic common to the black mother-daughter relationship (George 39, 46).
While Tambu can rely on her mother and her grandmother for strength as she encounters oppressive colonial forces, as both warn of the “dangers of Englishness”, Nyasha, whose time in England left her unable to reconnect with the traditional Shona culture and language, is unable to buttress her identity against these forces (George 51-52). George argues that Tambu can avert the mental breakdown of Nyasha because she can adapt to colonial ways without losing sight of her cultural heritage because of her mother’s and aunt’s life experiences (George 51-52). “Whereas…Tambu look[s] toward [self] fulfillment and expansion” because of her matrilineal guidance, without similar sociocultural connections, Nyasha ultimately ends up “struggling alone with the powerful feelings [of split identities] that beset her…[and] is overwhelmed by images of entrapment” alone without the tempering lessons of subtle rebellion (George 51).
Meanwhile, Carolyn Martin Shaw in “‘You Had a Daughter, but I am Becoming a Woman’: Sexuality, Feminism and Postcoloniality in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps” argues that the mother-daughter relationship serves to counter the power of the father through the espousing of female sexuality (a common taboo) as a way for Tambu and Nyasha to subvert the patriarchal forces at work in the colonial society they find themselves in by portraying women as “independent and adult beings” (Shaw 8-10). In Shona culture, mothers and other extended family female relatives are primarily responsible for the education (primarily sexual) of their daughters, who are in turn responsible for mothering the “future” (Shaw 11). Therefore, the seeming failure on the part of Maiguru to instill a sort of puritanism in her daughter Nyasha can be read as a rebellion against Nyasha’s father Babamukuru, the mimical embodiment of Shona and British patriarchal oppression (Shaw 11).
Similarly, both Nyasha and Tambu were heavily impacted by the free expression of sexuality represented in their aunt Lucia and contrast this with their mothers’ lessons to subordinate themselves to men to survive (Shaw 16). While not having the same outright violent reaction as Nyasha to the patriarchal forces present in the novel, Tambu comes to realize the importance of sexuality as a rebellion: “The narrator’s memory of the luxuriousness of Tambu’s dance movements, her celebration of her aunt Lucia’s sexual appetite, and representation of Nyasha’s desire for bodily pleasure all suggest a well-spring of erotic power that can fuel social change” (Shaw 16). Thus, a free expression of sexuality is linked to feminist concepts of a woman’s independence and ability to define herself in terms outside of the patriarchy (Shaw 8-10). To Shaw, Nyasha’s breakdown represents her prevention of growing into a fully-realized woman through anorexia/bulimia “because she recognizes her complicity in colonialism and because she cannot prevent the onslaught of womanhood, with the attendant dangers and pleasures of sexuality” that serve to designate her as a whore in the eyes of her father (Shaw 9). In the fusion of Shona and British cultural ways, women’s sexuality is seen to have the potential to bring honor or shame upon the family and potentially compromise one’s advantage in the colonial system (Shaw 9-11). Shaw sees Nyasha’s seemingly learned outward expression of sexuality as a threat to his high status and the larger force of patriarchal colonialism (Shaw 9-11).
Not unlike George (1998), Pauline Ada Uwakweh (1995) sees the overall focus on Tambu’s women relatives as narrated by an adult Tambu a method to educate readers on the womens’ “muted challenges to the dual burden” of patriarchy and colonization (Uwakweh 78). Dangarembga achieves this by writing ‘beyond the ending,’ in which Dangarembga’s Tambu is “freeing herself from patriarchal control and the danger of cultural alienation” by attaining the “superior status of the interpreter” (Uwakweh 78).
This then allows for a closer focus on how the mother-daughter relationship seeks to subvert the double oppressions put upon them (Uwakweh 1995). In taking a closer look at these female relationships, Uwakweh classifies Tambu’s and Nyasha’s mothers as “entrapped females” who recognize the injustice of their positions, yet do not outwardly rebel (Uwakweh 80-81). Uwakweh hints that the key to successful feminist challenges to patriarchy and colonialism in Nervous Conditions is “the communal bonding of females against a common dominant power” (Uwakweh 82). While she acknowledges the “tenuous” rebellions made by both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru, such as Ma’Shingayi’s encouragement of Tambu in her efforts to fundraise to continue her schooling and Maiguru’s leaving of home, Uwakweh sees effective rebellions as mostly lacking (Uwakweh 80-83). However, like Shaw (2007), Uwakweh notes that Tambu is more able to use the education from her female kin to fight against the mental breakdown that Nyasha suffers from not being able to rebel effectively in the context of oppressive forces in Rhodesian society (Uwakweh 78-83).
Thus, while the postcolonial and feminist critiques considered look at different aspects of the mother-daughter relationship, their underlying premises are ultimately very similar in associating the relationship with forms of patriarchal and colonial resistance (George 1998; Shaw 2007). This paper will build upon the scholarly insights surrounding matrilineal education in the context of patriarchal and colonial oppressions as introduced by Shaw (2007) and continued by George (1998) by taking a closer look at the matrilineal educations present in the novel.
One finds in Nervous Conditions a similar education by the two mothers, Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru, regarding becoming individuals in a colonized society (Shaw 2007). However, their matrilineal educations are different in important ways. The two women come from different backgrounds, with Ma’Shingayi living impoverished on the family homestead and Maiguru a wealthy woman with a master’s degree and a more privileged position in colonial Rhodesia (Dangarembga 16-20). Because their socioeconomic circumstances differ immensely, Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru teach Tambu and Nyasha, respectively, very different lessons with a similar overall message. However, both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru teach their biological daughters and “other-daughters” (a twist on the concept of “other-mothers” as established in Verna Erna George’s study (1998) relating to women who are not the biological daughters of that particular mother) many lessons.
Early in the story, Tambu’s mother warns against internalizing the toxic values of the “white wizards” and their “Englishness” that contributed to her brother Nhamo’s untimely death (Dangarembga 16-18, 207). Fearing further intrusion of “Englishness” into her family, Ma’Shingayi feels a sense of impending cultural death when faced with the prospect of Tambu’s education at Sacred Heart permanently separating both her and her daughter and perhaps leading to the condition of internal colonization that Nyasha warns frequently about throughout the novel (Dangarembga 16-18, 150, 207). Instead, Tambu is counseled to be proud of her hard work in the domestic sphere, as she is still making meaningful contributions to society, even if these contributions are not what she would have otherwise chosen for herself in the productive sphere dominated by the colonizing British (Dangarembga 16-18). This is seen when Tambu feels superiority in retaining her knowledge of preparing the traditional sadza dish for family gatherings, critical culturally-connected culinary knowledge her cousin has lost that demonstrates her pride in her motherly-taught “utilitarian” self (Dangarembga 40). In other words, Tambu is taught by her mother to not resist her social destiny under both Shona and British patriarchal cultures, in which the double “burdens” of “blackness” and womanhood destine many Shona women to a life of domestic poverty (Dangarembga 16). Furthermore, Ma’Shingayi insists that “when there are sacrifices to be made, you [women in general] are the one who has to make them” in trying to dissuade her daughter from pursuing further education for herself, alluding to Maiguru’s later lament at having to subordinate self (pursuing a career) for security, both economically and physically (Dangarembga 16, 103). While not necessarily heeding her counsel on the matter, with Tambu unwilling to accept her predestined life of domesticity, nevertheless Ma’Shingayi’s warnings against pursuing further education ironically enable her daughter to have an epiphany of her own that will continue to conflict her as she continues her schooling:
Also reinforcing this dynamic of womens’ inferiority in Shona culture is Tambu’s father Jeremiah’s derisive comment upon discovering Tambu’s market fundraising scheme that, “you can’t feed books to your husband” (Dangarembga 15). Ma’Shingayi’s response that Jeremiah should let his daughter try her maize-selling plan and “let her see for herself that some things cannot be done” as “a little seed was not a large price to pay” to persuade Tambu of her futility in fighting her domestic destiny is a textbook example of subtle rebellion by a mother forcing “a space” within the limits of patriarchy and thereby making “a small blow against oppression” (Dangarembga 17; George 48).
In the end of the novel, we see Tambu coming ultimately question the values she has been taught by British missionaries throughout her education and confronting her fragmented identity between her Shona and British selves, remarking that her mother’s lessons against “Englishness” (manifested in Tambu’s uncle Babamukuru) has planted a protective “seed” of resistance against complete internal colonization by the British while taking full advantage of the opportunities afforded her by an education (Dangarembga 150, 207-208). While primarily receiving education from her biological mother, her “other-mother” Maiguru, not unlike Ma’Shingayi, teaches her subtle ways to recognize inequities and even rebel against the status quo as well, as when Tambu refuses to go to her parents’ wedding that she views as serving to give artificial “legitimacy” to her life (Dangarembga 103, 168-169). Essentially, Tambu comes to hybridize the educations that she receives under her mother (overall acceptance of social destiny, with veiled rebellions) with that of her aunt Maiguru’s (subtle deviances of the patriarchal order), which will be further explored below (Dangarembga 16-18, 200-208).
Meanwhile, Nyasha, the product of an upper-middle class Shona family in Rhodesia, receives a different education than her cousin Tambu, but ultimately comes to the same conclusions as Tambu does in challenging Ma’Shingayi’s counsel of necessary submission to one’s social destiny (Dangarembga 16-19, 91). As an English-educated woman who learned a Western version of feminism, Nyasha is thus repulsed by her mother Maiguru’s subservient position relative to her father Babamukuru, despite her academic achievements in England (Dangarembga 103). Maiguru sums up this idea rather succinctly, when she laments ‘what it is, to have to choose between self and security” (Dangarembga 103). This echoes similarly to Ma’Shingayi’s lesson that socioeconomic security can come at the price of autonomy for individual women (Dangarembga 16). Maiguru thus teaches a similar lesson to Nyasha as Tambu’s mother does for her, but Nyasha reacts on it outwardly and violently throughout the book through her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in contrast to Tambu’s outward passivity and internal battles over wanting to take full advantage of the education Babamukuru allows her access to as a way to prevent herself from becoming an “entrapped female” like Ma’Shingayi (Dangarembga 169, 192-202, 207-208; Uwakweh 79).
Additionally, Nyasha rebels throughout the book against the societal conventions assigned to Shona women by both the Shona and British colonial authorities, primarily represented by her father, Babamukuru, as she is convinced that her mother is not willing to act boldly on her own rightful self-agency in standing up to Babamukuru (Dangarembga 103-108, 145, 177). Nyasha sees her mother’s subtle rebellions in the refusals to attend the family celebrations on the homestead and her leaving of the house altogether as acts to demand further self-respect for her vital contributions to the family as not going far enough, yet respects her very much as a result (Dangarembga 103-108, 177). In educating her cousin Tambu about the finer points of colonization and assimilation, she says that the colonial authorities “made a little space into which you were assimilated, an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure you behaved yourself” (Dangarembga 182). However, Tambu (and others) would be better off by opting to not “occupy that space” at all, a difficult prospect that for Nyasha ends up bringing on a psychological and physical breakdown, as this non-occupation of space means that she does not have a foundation upon which to create and build a stable self-identity (Dangarembga 177, 182; George 1998). Tambu further criticizes this when she recognizes that like Maiguru, she has to take opportunities when she gets them to escape the “poverty of blackness” and like Maiguru, is stuck in her “investment” in Babamukuru’s household (Dangarembga 16-17, 177).
It is this equilibrium within assimilation itself in which a person was not “colonized” while still taking advantage of the opportunities provided for women in a colonial society that Maiguru ultimately represents is the primary lesson derived from both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru (Dangarembga 16, 182). This position Tambu comes to advocates because of both Ma’Shingayi’s and Maiguru’s life experiences, as she sees the best way to confront the constraining forces at work is to essentially use the education provided to her by the missionaries in order to more effectively counter these forces internally and externally, countering feminist Audre Lorde’s assertion that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house” (Dangarembga 183; Shaw 16). She is determined not to give into the creeping “tentacles” of marriage threatening to “disrupt my life before I could even call it my own” again as she finds herself in a similar situation as at the beginning of the novel in lacking sufficient funds to continue her education at the Sacred Heart convent school now because of Babamukuru’s (not her father Jeremiah’s) insistence on providing for another boy in the family after Nhamo’s death (Dangarembga 183; Shaw 16). This time, it is Maiguru who comes to Tambu’s defense:
The ultimate proof of Tambu’s “liberation” within the constraints of the colonial system is manifested by “writing the novel itself as part of her own (and by implication) other women’s liberation” as a product of her previously forbidden education, which she learns to insist upon in terms of her own further self-development (Shaw 16). This fundamental conviction on the part of Tambu is founded on the lessons of Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru (Shaw 16). Tambu’s ultimate triumph in narrating the novel in which she describes her and Nyasha’s struggle for self-independence against the backdrop of the struggles of their female extended family echoes sentiments expressed by Uwakweh (1995), who noted that Dangarembga’s use of a traditionally male literary tradition in the bildungsroman novel is a similar rebellion equivalent to Tambu’s insistence on receiving an education (Dangarembga 17, 91; Shaw 16; Uwakweh 75-77).
Conversely, Nyasha herself is not able to adopt this position out of the virtues of her English education’s espousing of a hypersensitivity to gendered and colonial injustices and the importance of individual, rather than communal, resistance to these injustices (Dangarembga 16, 182; Shaw 12). In the end, this inability to negotiate between the “burdens of womanhood” view of Ma’Shingayi and the associated traps concerning colonial education (a side effect of her English education) with the need for gradual and subtle rebellions against the patriarchal order based on the strength of female relationships like the mother-daughter bond that dooms Nyasha (Dangarembga 16, 205). Not aiding her further is her perception of Maiguru, in a much more privileged position than Ma’Shingayi, is still “trapped” in her inability to negotiate self and security by choosing to remain in Babamukuru’s household, unable to push the envelope further in her patriarchally-restricted domain (George 44).
Ultimately, because of the tension between seeming to acquiesce to oppression, yet still resist, “the normal affinity between mother and daughter and what that very affinity could mean is a source of pronounced dissonance on both sides of the relationship” for Maiguru and Nyasha in particular (George 43). While Tambu experiences this to some degree over her frustrations with Ma’Shingayi over continuing her education, Tambu is ultimately able to buttress herself better than her cousin does against the oppressive forces of society (Dangarembga 208; George 1998; Shaw 2007).
Nyasha ultimately lacks the maternally-nurtured “seed” developing in Tambu’s head by the end of the novel which caused her to “question things and refused to be brainwashed” in such a way so as to not completely isolate herself from the tainted opportunities of advancement in her life (such as further education at the Sacred Heart convent school), while at the same time retaining her ability be necessarily skeptical about the ideas she encounters (Dangarembga 208; George 1998; Shaw 2007).
In conclusion, the mother-daughter relationship as it relates to the education that mothers provide for their daughters has been underexplored in the current literature. In this paper, a literature review of the current critical thinking on the topic of mother-daughter relationships in the novel Nervous Conditions was conducted. Concurrently, Shaw’s (2007) and George’s (1998) critical pieces regarding the matrilineal educational aspect of the mother-daughter relationship as a site of resistance was used as a basis for further exploration and analysis of the mother-daughter relationship in this paper. It is my hope that the role of education in this relationship will be explored further in future literary critiques.
Bibliography:
Caton, Louis F. "Romantic Struggles: The Bildungsroman and Mother-Daughter Bonding in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John." MELUS, vol. 21, no. 3, 1996, pp. 125-42. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/467978. Accessed 26 October 2016.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. 2nd ed., Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd., 2004. Print.
Donnell, Alison. "When Daughters Defy: Jamaica Kincaid's Fiction." Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 1993, pp. 18-26. Routledge, doi: 10.1080/09574049308578142. Accessed 26 October 2016.
George, Verna E. "Putting up Resistance: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Annie John and Nervous Conditions." Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 1998, pp. 39-53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23019709. Accessed 26 October 2016.
Natov, Roni. "Mothers and Daughters: Jamaica Kincaid's Pre-Oedipal Narrative." Children's Literature, volume 18, no. 1, 1990, pp. 1-16. Project Muse, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/246199. Accessed 26 October 2016.
Shaw, Carolyn M. ""You Had a Daughter, but I Am Becoming a Woman": Sexuality, Feminism and Postcoloniality in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps." Research in African Literatures, vol. 38, no. 4, 2007, pp. 7-27. Project Muse, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/223039. Accessed 27 October 2016.
Uwakweh, Pauline A. "Debunking Patriarchy: The Liberational Quality of Voicing in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Research in African Literatures, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, pp. 75-84. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3820089. Accessed 25 October 2016.
Willey, Nicole. "Colonialism's Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid's Rendering of the Mother-Daughter Split in Annie John." Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures, edited by Elizabeth Podniecks and Andrea O’Reilly. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010, pp. 273-286. Proquest Ebrary, www. wisconsin.hosts.atlas-sys.com/illiad/gzu/illiad.dll?Action=10&Form=75&Value=2383819. Accessed 27 October 2016.
Generally, mother-daughter relationships in women’s fiction tend to serve as a focal point for the plots of these feminist texts, as a mechanism to purposefully focus on female versus male representations in the literary arena (George 40; Willey 273; Uwakweh 1995). Many of the sources in the subject area of mother-daughter relationships focusing Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga tend to be postcolonial in nature, in that they are focused exclusively on how the mother-daughter relationship serves to reproduce colonial power differentials in a postcolonial environment along with offering critical support systems in times of hardship (Willey 273). This paper serves to explore further the under-appreciated educational aspect of the mother-daughter relationship in the context of postcolonial feminist theories.
First, this paper will examine scholarly critiques and evaluations of Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. Here, there will be a focus on three critical articles first in the literature review of this novel, in which additional scholarly perspectives aside from a postcolonial critique are sampled concerning feminist theory and female sexuality (George 1998; Shaw 2007; Uwakweh 1995). In a postcolonial critique in the veins of African feminist perspectives, Verna Erna George (1998) in her piece “Putting Up Resistance: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Annie John and Nervous Conditions” makes a case for the characters Tambudzai (hereafter referred to as Tambu) and Nyasha as giving voice to themselves and their mothers as female colonial subjects seeking individuation (George 39). George extends this postcolonial tradition in her exclusive focus on how the mothers and “other-mothers” of the protagonists prepare their daughters to face a postcolonial world in ways that emphasize both survival by following the status quo, but also subtle rebellion against the established order (George 39).
Moreover, in Tambu’s central journey and Nyasha’s peripheral journey in Nervous Conditions, George sees both mothers (and “other mother” grandmothers) as cultural repositories for the Shona culture that serve as central sites of resistance to colonialism, despite the mother-daughter relationship not being as central to Nervous Conditions as it is to other Afro-Caribbean women’s novels (George 43). However, to both characters, the mothers initially represent female subjugation in a patriarchal world, as both have internalized their inferiority with respect to the men in their lives, with Tambu’s mother Ma’Shingayi counseling her to carry on the “burdens of womanhood” and Nyasha’s educated mother Maiguru recommending similar acquiescence to patriarchy in terms of prioritizing “security” over self-realization (Dangarembga 104; George 43). George explains this paradox of mothers who “seemingly acquiesce to their own subordination also subtly impart the possibility of emancipation” in the face of oppression as a necessary survival tactic common to the black mother-daughter relationship (George 39, 46).
While Tambu can rely on her mother and her grandmother for strength as she encounters oppressive colonial forces, as both warn of the “dangers of Englishness”, Nyasha, whose time in England left her unable to reconnect with the traditional Shona culture and language, is unable to buttress her identity against these forces (George 51-52). George argues that Tambu can avert the mental breakdown of Nyasha because she can adapt to colonial ways without losing sight of her cultural heritage because of her mother’s and aunt’s life experiences (George 51-52). “Whereas…Tambu look[s] toward [self] fulfillment and expansion” because of her matrilineal guidance, without similar sociocultural connections, Nyasha ultimately ends up “struggling alone with the powerful feelings [of split identities] that beset her…[and] is overwhelmed by images of entrapment” alone without the tempering lessons of subtle rebellion (George 51).
Meanwhile, Carolyn Martin Shaw in “‘You Had a Daughter, but I am Becoming a Woman’: Sexuality, Feminism and Postcoloniality in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps” argues that the mother-daughter relationship serves to counter the power of the father through the espousing of female sexuality (a common taboo) as a way for Tambu and Nyasha to subvert the patriarchal forces at work in the colonial society they find themselves in by portraying women as “independent and adult beings” (Shaw 8-10). In Shona culture, mothers and other extended family female relatives are primarily responsible for the education (primarily sexual) of their daughters, who are in turn responsible for mothering the “future” (Shaw 11). Therefore, the seeming failure on the part of Maiguru to instill a sort of puritanism in her daughter Nyasha can be read as a rebellion against Nyasha’s father Babamukuru, the mimical embodiment of Shona and British patriarchal oppression (Shaw 11).
Similarly, both Nyasha and Tambu were heavily impacted by the free expression of sexuality represented in their aunt Lucia and contrast this with their mothers’ lessons to subordinate themselves to men to survive (Shaw 16). While not having the same outright violent reaction as Nyasha to the patriarchal forces present in the novel, Tambu comes to realize the importance of sexuality as a rebellion: “The narrator’s memory of the luxuriousness of Tambu’s dance movements, her celebration of her aunt Lucia’s sexual appetite, and representation of Nyasha’s desire for bodily pleasure all suggest a well-spring of erotic power that can fuel social change” (Shaw 16). Thus, a free expression of sexuality is linked to feminist concepts of a woman’s independence and ability to define herself in terms outside of the patriarchy (Shaw 8-10). To Shaw, Nyasha’s breakdown represents her prevention of growing into a fully-realized woman through anorexia/bulimia “because she recognizes her complicity in colonialism and because she cannot prevent the onslaught of womanhood, with the attendant dangers and pleasures of sexuality” that serve to designate her as a whore in the eyes of her father (Shaw 9). In the fusion of Shona and British cultural ways, women’s sexuality is seen to have the potential to bring honor or shame upon the family and potentially compromise one’s advantage in the colonial system (Shaw 9-11). Shaw sees Nyasha’s seemingly learned outward expression of sexuality as a threat to his high status and the larger force of patriarchal colonialism (Shaw 9-11).
Not unlike George (1998), Pauline Ada Uwakweh (1995) sees the overall focus on Tambu’s women relatives as narrated by an adult Tambu a method to educate readers on the womens’ “muted challenges to the dual burden” of patriarchy and colonization (Uwakweh 78). Dangarembga achieves this by writing ‘beyond the ending,’ in which Dangarembga’s Tambu is “freeing herself from patriarchal control and the danger of cultural alienation” by attaining the “superior status of the interpreter” (Uwakweh 78).
This then allows for a closer focus on how the mother-daughter relationship seeks to subvert the double oppressions put upon them (Uwakweh 1995). In taking a closer look at these female relationships, Uwakweh classifies Tambu’s and Nyasha’s mothers as “entrapped females” who recognize the injustice of their positions, yet do not outwardly rebel (Uwakweh 80-81). Uwakweh hints that the key to successful feminist challenges to patriarchy and colonialism in Nervous Conditions is “the communal bonding of females against a common dominant power” (Uwakweh 82). While she acknowledges the “tenuous” rebellions made by both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru, such as Ma’Shingayi’s encouragement of Tambu in her efforts to fundraise to continue her schooling and Maiguru’s leaving of home, Uwakweh sees effective rebellions as mostly lacking (Uwakweh 80-83). However, like Shaw (2007), Uwakweh notes that Tambu is more able to use the education from her female kin to fight against the mental breakdown that Nyasha suffers from not being able to rebel effectively in the context of oppressive forces in Rhodesian society (Uwakweh 78-83).
Thus, while the postcolonial and feminist critiques considered look at different aspects of the mother-daughter relationship, their underlying premises are ultimately very similar in associating the relationship with forms of patriarchal and colonial resistance (George 1998; Shaw 2007). This paper will build upon the scholarly insights surrounding matrilineal education in the context of patriarchal and colonial oppressions as introduced by Shaw (2007) and continued by George (1998) by taking a closer look at the matrilineal educations present in the novel.
One finds in Nervous Conditions a similar education by the two mothers, Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru, regarding becoming individuals in a colonized society (Shaw 2007). However, their matrilineal educations are different in important ways. The two women come from different backgrounds, with Ma’Shingayi living impoverished on the family homestead and Maiguru a wealthy woman with a master’s degree and a more privileged position in colonial Rhodesia (Dangarembga 16-20). Because their socioeconomic circumstances differ immensely, Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru teach Tambu and Nyasha, respectively, very different lessons with a similar overall message. However, both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru teach their biological daughters and “other-daughters” (a twist on the concept of “other-mothers” as established in Verna Erna George’s study (1998) relating to women who are not the biological daughters of that particular mother) many lessons.
Early in the story, Tambu’s mother warns against internalizing the toxic values of the “white wizards” and their “Englishness” that contributed to her brother Nhamo’s untimely death (Dangarembga 16-18, 207). Fearing further intrusion of “Englishness” into her family, Ma’Shingayi feels a sense of impending cultural death when faced with the prospect of Tambu’s education at Sacred Heart permanently separating both her and her daughter and perhaps leading to the condition of internal colonization that Nyasha warns frequently about throughout the novel (Dangarembga 16-18, 150, 207). Instead, Tambu is counseled to be proud of her hard work in the domestic sphere, as she is still making meaningful contributions to society, even if these contributions are not what she would have otherwise chosen for herself in the productive sphere dominated by the colonizing British (Dangarembga 16-18). This is seen when Tambu feels superiority in retaining her knowledge of preparing the traditional sadza dish for family gatherings, critical culturally-connected culinary knowledge her cousin has lost that demonstrates her pride in her motherly-taught “utilitarian” self (Dangarembga 40). In other words, Tambu is taught by her mother to not resist her social destiny under both Shona and British patriarchal cultures, in which the double “burdens” of “blackness” and womanhood destine many Shona women to a life of domestic poverty (Dangarembga 16). Furthermore, Ma’Shingayi insists that “when there are sacrifices to be made, you [women in general] are the one who has to make them” in trying to dissuade her daughter from pursuing further education for herself, alluding to Maiguru’s later lament at having to subordinate self (pursuing a career) for security, both economically and physically (Dangarembga 16, 103). While not necessarily heeding her counsel on the matter, with Tambu unwilling to accept her predestined life of domesticity, nevertheless Ma’Shingayi’s warnings against pursuing further education ironically enable her daughter to have an epiphany of her own that will continue to conflict her as she continues her schooling:
My mother said being black was a burden because it made you poor, but Babamukuru [uncle, husband of Maiguru) was not poor. My mother said that being a woman was a burden because you had to bear children and look after them and the husband. But I did not think this was true. Maiguru was…altogether a different kind of woman from my mother. I decided it was better to be like Maiguru, who was not poor and had not been crushed by the weight of womanhood” (16).
Also reinforcing this dynamic of womens’ inferiority in Shona culture is Tambu’s father Jeremiah’s derisive comment upon discovering Tambu’s market fundraising scheme that, “you can’t feed books to your husband” (Dangarembga 15). Ma’Shingayi’s response that Jeremiah should let his daughter try her maize-selling plan and “let her see for herself that some things cannot be done” as “a little seed was not a large price to pay” to persuade Tambu of her futility in fighting her domestic destiny is a textbook example of subtle rebellion by a mother forcing “a space” within the limits of patriarchy and thereby making “a small blow against oppression” (Dangarembga 17; George 48).
In the end of the novel, we see Tambu coming ultimately question the values she has been taught by British missionaries throughout her education and confronting her fragmented identity between her Shona and British selves, remarking that her mother’s lessons against “Englishness” (manifested in Tambu’s uncle Babamukuru) has planted a protective “seed” of resistance against complete internal colonization by the British while taking full advantage of the opportunities afforded her by an education (Dangarembga 150, 207-208). While primarily receiving education from her biological mother, her “other-mother” Maiguru, not unlike Ma’Shingayi, teaches her subtle ways to recognize inequities and even rebel against the status quo as well, as when Tambu refuses to go to her parents’ wedding that she views as serving to give artificial “legitimacy” to her life (Dangarembga 103, 168-169). Essentially, Tambu comes to hybridize the educations that she receives under her mother (overall acceptance of social destiny, with veiled rebellions) with that of her aunt Maiguru’s (subtle deviances of the patriarchal order), which will be further explored below (Dangarembga 16-18, 200-208).
Meanwhile, Nyasha, the product of an upper-middle class Shona family in Rhodesia, receives a different education than her cousin Tambu, but ultimately comes to the same conclusions as Tambu does in challenging Ma’Shingayi’s counsel of necessary submission to one’s social destiny (Dangarembga 16-19, 91). As an English-educated woman who learned a Western version of feminism, Nyasha is thus repulsed by her mother Maiguru’s subservient position relative to her father Babamukuru, despite her academic achievements in England (Dangarembga 103). Maiguru sums up this idea rather succinctly, when she laments ‘what it is, to have to choose between self and security” (Dangarembga 103). This echoes similarly to Ma’Shingayi’s lesson that socioeconomic security can come at the price of autonomy for individual women (Dangarembga 16). Maiguru thus teaches a similar lesson to Nyasha as Tambu’s mother does for her, but Nyasha reacts on it outwardly and violently throughout the book through her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in contrast to Tambu’s outward passivity and internal battles over wanting to take full advantage of the education Babamukuru allows her access to as a way to prevent herself from becoming an “entrapped female” like Ma’Shingayi (Dangarembga 169, 192-202, 207-208; Uwakweh 79).
Additionally, Nyasha rebels throughout the book against the societal conventions assigned to Shona women by both the Shona and British colonial authorities, primarily represented by her father, Babamukuru, as she is convinced that her mother is not willing to act boldly on her own rightful self-agency in standing up to Babamukuru (Dangarembga 103-108, 145, 177). Nyasha sees her mother’s subtle rebellions in the refusals to attend the family celebrations on the homestead and her leaving of the house altogether as acts to demand further self-respect for her vital contributions to the family as not going far enough, yet respects her very much as a result (Dangarembga 103-108, 177). In educating her cousin Tambu about the finer points of colonization and assimilation, she says that the colonial authorities “made a little space into which you were assimilated, an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure you behaved yourself” (Dangarembga 182). However, Tambu (and others) would be better off by opting to not “occupy that space” at all, a difficult prospect that for Nyasha ends up bringing on a psychological and physical breakdown, as this non-occupation of space means that she does not have a foundation upon which to create and build a stable self-identity (Dangarembga 177, 182; George 1998). Tambu further criticizes this when she recognizes that like Maiguru, she has to take opportunities when she gets them to escape the “poverty of blackness” and like Maiguru, is stuck in her “investment” in Babamukuru’s household (Dangarembga 16-17, 177).
It is this equilibrium within assimilation itself in which a person was not “colonized” while still taking advantage of the opportunities provided for women in a colonial society that Maiguru ultimately represents is the primary lesson derived from both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru (Dangarembga 16, 182). This position Tambu comes to advocates because of both Ma’Shingayi’s and Maiguru’s life experiences, as she sees the best way to confront the constraining forces at work is to essentially use the education provided to her by the missionaries in order to more effectively counter these forces internally and externally, countering feminist Audre Lorde’s assertion that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house” (Dangarembga 183; Shaw 16). She is determined not to give into the creeping “tentacles” of marriage threatening to “disrupt my life before I could even call it my own” again as she finds herself in a similar situation as at the beginning of the novel in lacking sufficient funds to continue her education at the Sacred Heart convent school now because of Babamukuru’s (not her father Jeremiah’s) insistence on providing for another boy in the family after Nhamo’s death (Dangarembga 183; Shaw 16). This time, it is Maiguru who comes to Tambu’s defense:
People were prejudiced against educated women. Prejudiced. That’s why they said we weren’t decent. That was in the fifties. Now we are into the seventies. I am disappointed people still believe the same things… All I know is that our daughter Tambudzai is not a decent person now, she never will be, no matter where she goes to school. (184)
The ultimate proof of Tambu’s “liberation” within the constraints of the colonial system is manifested by “writing the novel itself as part of her own (and by implication) other women’s liberation” as a product of her previously forbidden education, which she learns to insist upon in terms of her own further self-development (Shaw 16). This fundamental conviction on the part of Tambu is founded on the lessons of Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru (Shaw 16). Tambu’s ultimate triumph in narrating the novel in which she describes her and Nyasha’s struggle for self-independence against the backdrop of the struggles of their female extended family echoes sentiments expressed by Uwakweh (1995), who noted that Dangarembga’s use of a traditionally male literary tradition in the bildungsroman novel is a similar rebellion equivalent to Tambu’s insistence on receiving an education (Dangarembga 17, 91; Shaw 16; Uwakweh 75-77).
Conversely, Nyasha herself is not able to adopt this position out of the virtues of her English education’s espousing of a hypersensitivity to gendered and colonial injustices and the importance of individual, rather than communal, resistance to these injustices (Dangarembga 16, 182; Shaw 12). In the end, this inability to negotiate between the “burdens of womanhood” view of Ma’Shingayi and the associated traps concerning colonial education (a side effect of her English education) with the need for gradual and subtle rebellions against the patriarchal order based on the strength of female relationships like the mother-daughter bond that dooms Nyasha (Dangarembga 16, 205). Not aiding her further is her perception of Maiguru, in a much more privileged position than Ma’Shingayi, is still “trapped” in her inability to negotiate self and security by choosing to remain in Babamukuru’s household, unable to push the envelope further in her patriarchally-restricted domain (George 44).
Ultimately, because of the tension between seeming to acquiesce to oppression, yet still resist, “the normal affinity between mother and daughter and what that very affinity could mean is a source of pronounced dissonance on both sides of the relationship” for Maiguru and Nyasha in particular (George 43). While Tambu experiences this to some degree over her frustrations with Ma’Shingayi over continuing her education, Tambu is ultimately able to buttress herself better than her cousin does against the oppressive forces of society (Dangarembga 208; George 1998; Shaw 2007).
Nyasha ultimately lacks the maternally-nurtured “seed” developing in Tambu’s head by the end of the novel which caused her to “question things and refused to be brainwashed” in such a way so as to not completely isolate herself from the tainted opportunities of advancement in her life (such as further education at the Sacred Heart convent school), while at the same time retaining her ability be necessarily skeptical about the ideas she encounters (Dangarembga 208; George 1998; Shaw 2007).
In conclusion, the mother-daughter relationship as it relates to the education that mothers provide for their daughters has been underexplored in the current literature. In this paper, a literature review of the current critical thinking on the topic of mother-daughter relationships in the novel Nervous Conditions was conducted. Concurrently, Shaw’s (2007) and George’s (1998) critical pieces regarding the matrilineal educational aspect of the mother-daughter relationship as a site of resistance was used as a basis for further exploration and analysis of the mother-daughter relationship in this paper. It is my hope that the role of education in this relationship will be explored further in future literary critiques.
Bibliography:
Caton, Louis F. "Romantic Struggles: The Bildungsroman and Mother-Daughter Bonding in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John." MELUS, vol. 21, no. 3, 1996, pp. 125-42. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/467978. Accessed 26 October 2016.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. 2nd ed., Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd., 2004. Print.
Donnell, Alison. "When Daughters Defy: Jamaica Kincaid's Fiction." Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 1993, pp. 18-26. Routledge, doi: 10.1080/09574049308578142. Accessed 26 October 2016.
George, Verna E. "Putting up Resistance: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Annie John and Nervous Conditions." Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 1998, pp. 39-53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23019709. Accessed 26 October 2016.
Natov, Roni. "Mothers and Daughters: Jamaica Kincaid's Pre-Oedipal Narrative." Children's Literature, volume 18, no. 1, 1990, pp. 1-16. Project Muse, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/246199. Accessed 26 October 2016.
Shaw, Carolyn M. ""You Had a Daughter, but I Am Becoming a Woman": Sexuality, Feminism and Postcoloniality in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps." Research in African Literatures, vol. 38, no. 4, 2007, pp. 7-27. Project Muse, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/223039. Accessed 27 October 2016.
Uwakweh, Pauline A. "Debunking Patriarchy: The Liberational Quality of Voicing in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Research in African Literatures, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, pp. 75-84. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3820089. Accessed 25 October 2016.
Willey, Nicole. "Colonialism's Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid's Rendering of the Mother-Daughter Split in Annie John." Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures, edited by Elizabeth Podniecks and Andrea O’Reilly. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010, pp. 273-286. Proquest Ebrary, www. wisconsin.hosts.atlas-sys.com/illiad/gzu/illiad.dll?Action=10&Form=75&Value=2383819. Accessed 27 October 2016.
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: A Critical Analysis of Jane and Bertha
{In a belated, yet continuing celebration of Women's History Month, this week's entry will flashback to a literary analysis of the novel considered to be a Victorian feminist classic (Charlotte Brontë’s (1847) Jane Eyre) and a postcolonial response and critique to the latter, Wide Sargasso Sea.}
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, widely regarded as a feminist classic in the European tradition, provides a rich psychological profile of Jane Eyre in the Bildungsroman genre. This female Bildungsroman, adapted from a traditionally male literary template, provides the reader intimate access to Jane’s internal struggles as she progresses from childhood to a self-realized adult (Crutchfield). Bertha Mason, otherwise known as Antoinette Cosway (and the first wife of Edward Rochester) to readers of Jean Rhys’ critical novella to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, features prominently in the supernaturally-infused plot, especially in terms of Jane’s contention with the gender discrimination inherent in 18th century Victorian England. I make the argument that Bertha Mason is an outward expression of Jane’s (and to some extent Brontë’s) inner self that she must hide (or lose) in order to become effectively integrated into the society of the time. Moreover, I argue that Bertha’s death at the end of Jane Eyre is purposeful, so as to deprive Jane of her defiance to Victorian society while giving the appearance of gender equality. I make this argument through a close analysis of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the character of Bertha is portrayed and explored with marked differences.
In order to better facilitate a close-reading of Jane Eyre, it is helpful to provide a brief description of the context in which Brontë writes the novel. Victorian England severely restricted the roles of women, as women were regarded as incapable of complex thought and physically fragile (Newman 3-13). Moreover, the ideal Victorian woman was docile, physically beautiful, graceful, and largely confined to the domestic sphere (that is, if she was of a sufficient socioeconomic class; lower class women often had to leave the house out of the need to meet the prerogatives for basic survival) (Newman 3-13). Meanwhile, Great Britain was active imperially, having established colonies in the Caribbean, such as in the West Indies, and we see its influence throughout both narratives in consistent references to slavery, rebellion, and yearnings for freedom (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13). The aftermath of slavery in the British Empire in the Caribbean in which Rhys focuses her novel on, demonstrates parallel tensions between the development of Jane and Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, and it can be argued that Antoinette is a critical refiguring of Jane (Crutchfield).
As a child, Jane is described by her aunt, Mrs. Reed, as fiery and otherwise rebellious for a child (especially of her gender), implicitly invoking the social training of obedience and docility in female children (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13). This fire is similarly expressed in Rhys’ narrative of Antoinette’s home of Jamaica and the vibrant landscape there, which symbolically embodies Antoinette’s true self (Rhys 103). Rhys’ allusions to Brontë’s red room in Jane Eyre, in which both protagonists face similar prison-like conditions as imposed on them by society, is telling. Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in Mr. Brocklehurst’s first meeting with Jane and her aunt, when Mrs. Reed expresses hope for Jane, through careful and strict teaching at the Lowood School, to come to embody the key Victorian ideals of femininity: “‘I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects…to be made useful, to be kept humble’” (Brontë 45). However, from an early age Jane expresses her inner passions regarding social justice and women’s autonomy, often pushing back against societal prescriptions surrounding gender and class, but never fully able to escape their constraints (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13).
Moreover, Jane is very vocal about the unjust lack of love that Mrs. Reed regards her with, in a sense arguing that it is this compassion that every human being, regardless of class, is entitled to (Brontë 28-39). It is through her experiences at the Lowood School in which these ideals, her accompanying fiery disposition, and her human yearning for love and acceptance are nearly quenched by the instilling in her of the qualities of a proper Christian young lady (a lofty standard symbolized by Miss Temple), including humility, submission, and devotion to God and any other superior such as a future husband (Brontë 65-90). Similar to this narrative in Jane Eyre, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette (before being rechristened Bertha), also undergoes a similar indoctrination at her convent school, but nevertheless feels a similar inner disquiet, commenting at one point that “my needle is swearing” and paradoxically asserting that she “felt bolder, happier, more free” but “not so safe” within the walls of the convent (Rhys 30, 34). To me, this shows her identification and connection with the natural beauty of her home island, in which she instinctively understands that it represents her unbound self (Crutchfield; Rhys 30, 34).
Similar molding and indoctrination of women into happy acceptance of the domestic sphere happens to both Jane and Antoinette at the common nexus of the husband or male authority figure (Crutchfield). Much like Rochester seeks to mold Jane into his ideal version of a docile Victorian woman, “this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon [Bertha],” the Rochester of Rhys’s novel re-christens Antoinette as Bertha, giving her an anglicized name (Brontë 290; Rhys 81). This renaming is a prelude to his further attempts to wipe away core aspects of her identity, such as by taking away her previous wardrobe (including the symbolic red dress) and isolating her from the other residents at Thornfield (Brontë 290; Rhys 112). This loss of identity and innocence is summed up as Antoinette muses about her appearance and the lack of a mirror: “Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away” (Rhys 107). To me, the renaming and the withholding of a looking glass (uncertainty of identity) symbolizes to me the destruction wrought on colonized nations by the male colonizer figure (Brontë 290; Rhys 81).
Despite finding friendship and acceptance from fellow classmate Helen Burns, Jane still feels a sense of psychological isolation and continually describes the Lowood School as a prison that restricts her from exploring the outside world as she pleases, developing a similar agoraphobic fear of the outside world as Annette (Brontë 65-90; Rhys 30-34). Jane laments in Chapter 10 that:
For me, this signals events to come, such as the imprisonment of Bertha Mason in the attic at Thornfield Estate, in which Jane’s inner turmoil comes to boil when she confronts Rochester about his possible engagement to Blanche Ingram (before encountering Bertha), in which she decries the socioeconomic and patriarchal barriers to their equality in love and expresses her inner disquiet whereby snapping at Rochester, “Do you think I am an automaton—a machine without feelings?” (Brontë 252). To me, this alludes to Bertha’s parallel frustrations at Rochester’s remolding of her identity. Similarly, Bertha’s psychological suffering in Wide Sargasso Sea, partially from a similar upbringing in which she too searched for love (primarily from a matriarchal figure, like her mother Annette) begs comparison to Jane’s growing unease with her life situation and the fires that remain burning inside of her (Brontë 116-117). Moreover, despite the best efforts of her teachers and Mr. Brocklehurst, whose shaming of Jane’s accidental drop of her slate (an incident that highlights her outsider status and the evils present in her childhood defiances) serves to define her as “not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and alien,” Jane merely internalizes rather than expunges this “alien” fire (Brontë 75). It is this mindset where Jane escapes her limited sphere of existence to a new place as governess: Thornfield Estate.
Thus, this overwhelming theme of imprisonment (having gone from the “red room” at Gateshead to Lowood School beforehand) continues at the Thornfield Estate in which Jane is now governess to Mr. Edward Rochester’s illegitimate child Adéle (Brontë 95-105). Brontë’s frequent allusions to slavery seem to become even more frequent as Jane acutely feels the socialized feelings of inferiority in comparison to the strong male figure of Mr. Rochester, the master of Thornfield estate (Brontë 95-105). For example, when Rochester attempts to give Jane new dresses and jewels, Jane remarks that Rochester smiles “such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched” (Brontë 269; Thomas 57-58). In between these emotionally confusing encounters with Rochester, she feels trapped by the dark, gloomy surroundings of the Gothic estate and expresses this paramount longing for freedom that both she and Rhys’ Bertha feel:
This previous passage is notable in the respect that it shows the vitality of Jane’s self, particularly her inner self, her vivid imagination correlating very nicely to the parallel psychological landscape and physical hometown of Antoinette/Bertha, which is described in vivid, fiery tones that to Rochester are anathema to his own sense of self, almost to the point of seeming unnatural or “demonic” (Brontë 116-117, 290; Rhys 103). However, Jane’s and Bertha’s cold, prison-like surroundings in England serve as a foil to their fiery natures that both have tried to conceal for better or worse (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13; Rhys 107). England, described by Bertha, is “cold” and anathema to her inner fire (Rhys 107). This ominous feeling continues when she expresses that she and Rochester must have “lost our way” to England, the manifestation of her nightmares, “this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it” (Rhys 107).
The embittered and slightly mad Rochester recognizes this fire in Antoinette, seeking to take away from her that vitality in a bid to regain control over his identity as male colonizer whereby taking her back to England; here, Rhys seems to draw the reader’s attention to the similarities in the “man’s” treatment of Antoinette and Brontë’s Rochester’s treatment of Jane (Crutchfield; Rhys 103). In fact, Rochester’s subconscious aversion to a woman on a plane of equality with himself manifests itself outwardly in the scene in which Jane comes to the attic and discovers the existence of his first wife, Bertha. He states his preference for a submissive woman in his choice of Jane as “a change after that fierce ragout,” whereas Bertha was “a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (Brontë 290; Rhys 55). It is in Rhys’ novel that the reader understands that part of Rochester’s preference for Jane stems partly out of the fact that Bertha was hinted to have possessed unusual sexual cravings unbecoming of a Victorian woman (Brontë 290; Rhys 55).
Moreover, in the buildup to the climax of Jane Eyre in a seemingly unconscious revolt on Jane’s part, there come to be very alarming happenings at night in Thornfield, from the setting on fire of Rochester’s bed, the tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, and the stabbing of Mr. Mason (Gilbert 796). This revolt is unconsciously expressed by Jane, who cannot sleep one night prior to her wedding: “I could not sleep—a sense of anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising; seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful under-sound; whether in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred…” (Brontë 279). This “gale” and “mournful under-sound” parallels Bertha’s entrance into her room and tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, before Jane is fully cognizant of her presence (Brontë 279-281). A terrified Jane describes Bertha, whose identity was similarly fractured under patriarchal attempts to expunge her deviance, through such descriptors as “hyena” and notes “her bloated” and ultimately alien features (Brontë 290). In other words, Jane is terrified to recognize the innate similarities between both women, but later in the book, Jane comes to a peaceful acceptance of herself whereby sympathizing with Bertha, saying that “she cannot help being mad” (Brontë 297). Later, when meeting Bertha in the attic, Jane is forced to confront the fact that Bertha is her avenging self, who in physically resisting Rochester is showing “virile force in the contest” because of her “stature almost equaling her husband” (Brontë 290). Here, Bertha is Jane’s agent who is able to attack Rochester’s betrayal of his promises to Jane for equality in marriage (Brontë 290). As Gilbert eloquently puts it in her critical piece “Plain Jane’s Progress”:
Thus, when the reader reaches the point in Jane Eyre in which Thornfield Estate is discovered to have been burned down by Bertha (who also perishes in the fire, despite Rochester’s attempts to rescue her), Jane is understandably horrified (Brontë 414). This horrible realization is only furthered as she realizes the outcomes of her tempestuous dreams while at Thornfield, in which Jane questions a former Thornfield servant, in which Jane “feared now to hear my own story” in his description of the “lunatic” and her kindling of first Jane’s bed before the whole estate (Brontë 416-417). In other words, unconsciously she recognizes Bertha as the agent of her unconscious (Gilbert 796). It is this same foreboding that Rochester feels when he encounters “a paved road” in the forest in Rhys’ Granbois (his and Bertha’s imagined honeymoon house) leading to the “ruins of a stone house” where at the back of the house was Jane Eyre’s “tree of life,” described here as “a wild orange tree covered with fruit, the leaves a dark green” (Brontë 414; Rhys 62).
Rochester’s dread is his dread for when both women in his life will defy him in order to retain or regain their sense of socially-fragmented identity, as Bertha does in her rediscovery of Antoinette at the end of Rhys’s novel, whereby she sees the red sky with “all my life in it,” evoking memories of her childhood and giving her the strength (and clarity) to make the liberating decision to burn down the house (Brontë 414; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Antoinette expresses this feeling of freedom at regaining her identity whereby expressing that “the wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings” that might “bear me up” and away from the Thornfield attic that was the scene of her psychological trauma (Rhys 112). Similarly, Jane’s attempt at running away (both physically and metaphorically) from Thornfield after discovering the existence of Bertha reflects a sense of regained agency on Jane’s part in her conscious decision to remove herself from Rochester’s emotional manipulations and false promises of equality in marriage (Brontë 290-294; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Jane’s prior struggle between rationality and passion is emulated in descriptions of her wrestling with the decision to leave, lamenting how her “conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but slipped her dainty foot in the slough…of agony” (Brontë 294).
Tellingly, if one accepts the interpretation that the psychologically fragmented selves of Bertha and Jane are a united whole, then Bertha’s sacrificing herself to fire at Thornfield estate represents the fact that Jane essentially had to sacrifice the socially-ostracized self in order to maintain her place (and feel some sort of peace) in Victorian society (Gilbert 798). While Gilbert sees this as necessary in order for Jane to truly reach her self-actualization at the end of the Bildungsroman plot, in a sense, Jane still is sacrificing an essential part of herself in her quest for equality in marriage with Rochester (Gilbert 802-804). It is Jane’s inability to completely come to terms with Bertha’s sacrifice, upon which Jane Eyre closes (Brontë 438-441). Nevertheless, Jane masks the missing part of herself and consents to being Rochester’s wife, convincing herself of the equality of their union because of her being (seemingly) “independent…as well as rich” and her “own mistress” (Brontë 423). What Jane doesn’t recognize in her seemingly fairy-tale ending is that her perceived equality was a mask to disguise void where the part of her that she had to sacrifice to be accepted into society again as an “equal” used to be (Gilbert 802-804).
In the end, Jane never fully escapes from the red room that is reminiscent of the societal trappings upon which Jane and her double Bertha are imprisoned in and must find some way to escape (Gilbert 783). Perhaps Brontë never was fully to escape the confines of Victorian femininity herself, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” that the killing of Bertha, the designated Other, is the only way for Jane to achieve this self-realization in an age of English patriarchal imperialism (Spivak 251). Spivak scathingly explains that “she [Bertha] must play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’ into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” (Spivak 251). In other words, this sacrifice of Jane’s Other self in favor of conforming to the dictates of Victorian society leaves us with the sense that achieving gender equality is an ongoing process and may not be achieved to perfection (Spivak 251).
Works Cited:
Crutchfield, Susan. “Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Women Authors Class Discussion, 27 and 29 September and 4 October 2016, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI. Lecture.
Gilbert, Sandra. "Plain Jane's Progress." Signs, vol. 2, no. 4, 1977, pp. 779-804. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173210.
Newman, Beth. Introduction. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, 1847, Boston/New York: Bedford St Martin’s Press, 1996, 3rd ed., pp. 3-13. Print.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea, Introd. by Francis Wyndham, 1999, New York: W.W. Norton, p. 1-18. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985. pp. 243-61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469.
Thomas, Sue. "Christianity and the State of Slavery in Jane Eyre." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no.1, 2007. pp. 57-79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40347124.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, widely regarded as a feminist classic in the European tradition, provides a rich psychological profile of Jane Eyre in the Bildungsroman genre. This female Bildungsroman, adapted from a traditionally male literary template, provides the reader intimate access to Jane’s internal struggles as she progresses from childhood to a self-realized adult (Crutchfield). Bertha Mason, otherwise known as Antoinette Cosway (and the first wife of Edward Rochester) to readers of Jean Rhys’ critical novella to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, features prominently in the supernaturally-infused plot, especially in terms of Jane’s contention with the gender discrimination inherent in 18th century Victorian England. I make the argument that Bertha Mason is an outward expression of Jane’s (and to some extent Brontë’s) inner self that she must hide (or lose) in order to become effectively integrated into the society of the time. Moreover, I argue that Bertha’s death at the end of Jane Eyre is purposeful, so as to deprive Jane of her defiance to Victorian society while giving the appearance of gender equality. I make this argument through a close analysis of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the character of Bertha is portrayed and explored with marked differences.
In order to better facilitate a close-reading of Jane Eyre, it is helpful to provide a brief description of the context in which Brontë writes the novel. Victorian England severely restricted the roles of women, as women were regarded as incapable of complex thought and physically fragile (Newman 3-13). Moreover, the ideal Victorian woman was docile, physically beautiful, graceful, and largely confined to the domestic sphere (that is, if she was of a sufficient socioeconomic class; lower class women often had to leave the house out of the need to meet the prerogatives for basic survival) (Newman 3-13). Meanwhile, Great Britain was active imperially, having established colonies in the Caribbean, such as in the West Indies, and we see its influence throughout both narratives in consistent references to slavery, rebellion, and yearnings for freedom (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13). The aftermath of slavery in the British Empire in the Caribbean in which Rhys focuses her novel on, demonstrates parallel tensions between the development of Jane and Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, and it can be argued that Antoinette is a critical refiguring of Jane (Crutchfield).
As a child, Jane is described by her aunt, Mrs. Reed, as fiery and otherwise rebellious for a child (especially of her gender), implicitly invoking the social training of obedience and docility in female children (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13). This fire is similarly expressed in Rhys’ narrative of Antoinette’s home of Jamaica and the vibrant landscape there, which symbolically embodies Antoinette’s true self (Rhys 103). Rhys’ allusions to Brontë’s red room in Jane Eyre, in which both protagonists face similar prison-like conditions as imposed on them by society, is telling. Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in Mr. Brocklehurst’s first meeting with Jane and her aunt, when Mrs. Reed expresses hope for Jane, through careful and strict teaching at the Lowood School, to come to embody the key Victorian ideals of femininity: “‘I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects…to be made useful, to be kept humble’” (Brontë 45). However, from an early age Jane expresses her inner passions regarding social justice and women’s autonomy, often pushing back against societal prescriptions surrounding gender and class, but never fully able to escape their constraints (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13).
Moreover, Jane is very vocal about the unjust lack of love that Mrs. Reed regards her with, in a sense arguing that it is this compassion that every human being, regardless of class, is entitled to (Brontë 28-39). It is through her experiences at the Lowood School in which these ideals, her accompanying fiery disposition, and her human yearning for love and acceptance are nearly quenched by the instilling in her of the qualities of a proper Christian young lady (a lofty standard symbolized by Miss Temple), including humility, submission, and devotion to God and any other superior such as a future husband (Brontë 65-90). Similar to this narrative in Jane Eyre, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette (before being rechristened Bertha), also undergoes a similar indoctrination at her convent school, but nevertheless feels a similar inner disquiet, commenting at one point that “my needle is swearing” and paradoxically asserting that she “felt bolder, happier, more free” but “not so safe” within the walls of the convent (Rhys 30, 34). To me, this shows her identification and connection with the natural beauty of her home island, in which she instinctively understands that it represents her unbound self (Crutchfield; Rhys 30, 34).
Similar molding and indoctrination of women into happy acceptance of the domestic sphere happens to both Jane and Antoinette at the common nexus of the husband or male authority figure (Crutchfield). Much like Rochester seeks to mold Jane into his ideal version of a docile Victorian woman, “this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon [Bertha],” the Rochester of Rhys’s novel re-christens Antoinette as Bertha, giving her an anglicized name (Brontë 290; Rhys 81). This renaming is a prelude to his further attempts to wipe away core aspects of her identity, such as by taking away her previous wardrobe (including the symbolic red dress) and isolating her from the other residents at Thornfield (Brontë 290; Rhys 112). This loss of identity and innocence is summed up as Antoinette muses about her appearance and the lack of a mirror: “Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away” (Rhys 107). To me, the renaming and the withholding of a looking glass (uncertainty of identity) symbolizes to me the destruction wrought on colonized nations by the male colonizer figure (Brontë 290; Rhys 81).
Despite finding friendship and acceptance from fellow classmate Helen Burns, Jane still feels a sense of psychological isolation and continually describes the Lowood School as a prison that restricts her from exploring the outside world as she pleases, developing a similar agoraphobic fear of the outside world as Annette (Brontë 65-90; Rhys 30-34). Jane laments in Chapter 10 that:
I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world: school-rules, school-duties, school-habits…and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences and antipathies: such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough…I desired liberty…change, stimulus… (93)
Thus, this overwhelming theme of imprisonment (having gone from the “red room” at Gateshead to Lowood School beforehand) continues at the Thornfield Estate in which Jane is now governess to Mr. Edward Rochester’s illegitimate child Adéle (Brontë 95-105). Brontë’s frequent allusions to slavery seem to become even more frequent as Jane acutely feels the socialized feelings of inferiority in comparison to the strong male figure of Mr. Rochester, the master of Thornfield estate (Brontë 95-105). For example, when Rochester attempts to give Jane new dresses and jewels, Jane remarks that Rochester smiles “such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched” (Brontë 269; Thomas 57-58). In between these emotionally confusing encounters with Rochester, she feels trapped by the dark, gloomy surroundings of the Gothic estate and expresses this paramount longing for freedom that both she and Rhys’ Bertha feel:
Who blames me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards…and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it--and certainly there were many and glowing…It is in vain to say human beings out to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they can find it…Women…feel just as men feel…they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation… (116-117)
This previous passage is notable in the respect that it shows the vitality of Jane’s self, particularly her inner self, her vivid imagination correlating very nicely to the parallel psychological landscape and physical hometown of Antoinette/Bertha, which is described in vivid, fiery tones that to Rochester are anathema to his own sense of self, almost to the point of seeming unnatural or “demonic” (Brontë 116-117, 290; Rhys 103). However, Jane’s and Bertha’s cold, prison-like surroundings in England serve as a foil to their fiery natures that both have tried to conceal for better or worse (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13; Rhys 107). England, described by Bertha, is “cold” and anathema to her inner fire (Rhys 107). This ominous feeling continues when she expresses that she and Rochester must have “lost our way” to England, the manifestation of her nightmares, “this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it” (Rhys 107).
The embittered and slightly mad Rochester recognizes this fire in Antoinette, seeking to take away from her that vitality in a bid to regain control over his identity as male colonizer whereby taking her back to England; here, Rhys seems to draw the reader’s attention to the similarities in the “man’s” treatment of Antoinette and Brontë’s Rochester’s treatment of Jane (Crutchfield; Rhys 103). In fact, Rochester’s subconscious aversion to a woman on a plane of equality with himself manifests itself outwardly in the scene in which Jane comes to the attic and discovers the existence of his first wife, Bertha. He states his preference for a submissive woman in his choice of Jane as “a change after that fierce ragout,” whereas Bertha was “a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (Brontë 290; Rhys 55). It is in Rhys’ novel that the reader understands that part of Rochester’s preference for Jane stems partly out of the fact that Bertha was hinted to have possessed unusual sexual cravings unbecoming of a Victorian woman (Brontë 290; Rhys 55).
Moreover, in the buildup to the climax of Jane Eyre in a seemingly unconscious revolt on Jane’s part, there come to be very alarming happenings at night in Thornfield, from the setting on fire of Rochester’s bed, the tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, and the stabbing of Mr. Mason (Gilbert 796). This revolt is unconsciously expressed by Jane, who cannot sleep one night prior to her wedding: “I could not sleep—a sense of anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising; seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful under-sound; whether in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred…” (Brontë 279). This “gale” and “mournful under-sound” parallels Bertha’s entrance into her room and tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, before Jane is fully cognizant of her presence (Brontë 279-281). A terrified Jane describes Bertha, whose identity was similarly fractured under patriarchal attempts to expunge her deviance, through such descriptors as “hyena” and notes “her bloated” and ultimately alien features (Brontë 290). In other words, Jane is terrified to recognize the innate similarities between both women, but later in the book, Jane comes to a peaceful acceptance of herself whereby sympathizing with Bertha, saying that “she cannot help being mad” (Brontë 297). Later, when meeting Bertha in the attic, Jane is forced to confront the fact that Bertha is her avenging self, who in physically resisting Rochester is showing “virile force in the contest” because of her “stature almost equaling her husband” (Brontë 290). Here, Bertha is Jane’s agent who is able to attack Rochester’s betrayal of his promises to Jane for equality in marriage (Brontë 290). As Gilbert eloquently puts it in her critical piece “Plain Jane’s Progress”:
Bertha…is Jane’s truest and darkest double: the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead. For as Claire Rosenfield has pointed out, ‘the novelist who consciously or unconsciously exploits psychological Doubles’ frequently juxtaposes ‘two characters, the one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalizing the free, uninhibited, often criminal self.’ (796)
Thus, when the reader reaches the point in Jane Eyre in which Thornfield Estate is discovered to have been burned down by Bertha (who also perishes in the fire, despite Rochester’s attempts to rescue her), Jane is understandably horrified (Brontë 414). This horrible realization is only furthered as she realizes the outcomes of her tempestuous dreams while at Thornfield, in which Jane questions a former Thornfield servant, in which Jane “feared now to hear my own story” in his description of the “lunatic” and her kindling of first Jane’s bed before the whole estate (Brontë 416-417). In other words, unconsciously she recognizes Bertha as the agent of her unconscious (Gilbert 796). It is this same foreboding that Rochester feels when he encounters “a paved road” in the forest in Rhys’ Granbois (his and Bertha’s imagined honeymoon house) leading to the “ruins of a stone house” where at the back of the house was Jane Eyre’s “tree of life,” described here as “a wild orange tree covered with fruit, the leaves a dark green” (Brontë 414; Rhys 62).
Rochester’s dread is his dread for when both women in his life will defy him in order to retain or regain their sense of socially-fragmented identity, as Bertha does in her rediscovery of Antoinette at the end of Rhys’s novel, whereby she sees the red sky with “all my life in it,” evoking memories of her childhood and giving her the strength (and clarity) to make the liberating decision to burn down the house (Brontë 414; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Antoinette expresses this feeling of freedom at regaining her identity whereby expressing that “the wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings” that might “bear me up” and away from the Thornfield attic that was the scene of her psychological trauma (Rhys 112). Similarly, Jane’s attempt at running away (both physically and metaphorically) from Thornfield after discovering the existence of Bertha reflects a sense of regained agency on Jane’s part in her conscious decision to remove herself from Rochester’s emotional manipulations and false promises of equality in marriage (Brontë 290-294; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Jane’s prior struggle between rationality and passion is emulated in descriptions of her wrestling with the decision to leave, lamenting how her “conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but slipped her dainty foot in the slough…of agony” (Brontë 294).
Tellingly, if one accepts the interpretation that the psychologically fragmented selves of Bertha and Jane are a united whole, then Bertha’s sacrificing herself to fire at Thornfield estate represents the fact that Jane essentially had to sacrifice the socially-ostracized self in order to maintain her place (and feel some sort of peace) in Victorian society (Gilbert 798). While Gilbert sees this as necessary in order for Jane to truly reach her self-actualization at the end of the Bildungsroman plot, in a sense, Jane still is sacrificing an essential part of herself in her quest for equality in marriage with Rochester (Gilbert 802-804). It is Jane’s inability to completely come to terms with Bertha’s sacrifice, upon which Jane Eyre closes (Brontë 438-441). Nevertheless, Jane masks the missing part of herself and consents to being Rochester’s wife, convincing herself of the equality of their union because of her being (seemingly) “independent…as well as rich” and her “own mistress” (Brontë 423). What Jane doesn’t recognize in her seemingly fairy-tale ending is that her perceived equality was a mask to disguise void where the part of her that she had to sacrifice to be accepted into society again as an “equal” used to be (Gilbert 802-804).
In the end, Jane never fully escapes from the red room that is reminiscent of the societal trappings upon which Jane and her double Bertha are imprisoned in and must find some way to escape (Gilbert 783). Perhaps Brontë never was fully to escape the confines of Victorian femininity herself, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” that the killing of Bertha, the designated Other, is the only way for Jane to achieve this self-realization in an age of English patriarchal imperialism (Spivak 251). Spivak scathingly explains that “she [Bertha] must play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’ into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” (Spivak 251). In other words, this sacrifice of Jane’s Other self in favor of conforming to the dictates of Victorian society leaves us with the sense that achieving gender equality is an ongoing process and may not be achieved to perfection (Spivak 251).
Works Cited:
Crutchfield, Susan. “Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Women Authors Class Discussion, 27 and 29 September and 4 October 2016, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI. Lecture.
Gilbert, Sandra. "Plain Jane's Progress." Signs, vol. 2, no. 4, 1977, pp. 779-804. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173210.
Newman, Beth. Introduction. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, 1847, Boston/New York: Bedford St Martin’s Press, 1996, 3rd ed., pp. 3-13. Print.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea, Introd. by Francis Wyndham, 1999, New York: W.W. Norton, p. 1-18. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985. pp. 243-61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469.
Thomas, Sue. "Christianity and the State of Slavery in Jane Eyre." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no.1, 2007. pp. 57-79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40347124.
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