SOURCE: “Adam and Eve,” in El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke's Fiction, University of Western Ontario Press, 1989, pp. 131–51.

[In the following essay, Brown discusses the roles of Clarke's men and women in his fiction.]

There is a certain familiarity about the image of May Thorne at the conclusion of Proud Empires—a matronly Eve in the middle of a decayed plantation Eden. The image actually confirms John Moore's speculations, in The Prime Minister, about the basis of political power in the Caribbean. Women, Moore muses, know that they exercise ultimate power through their sexuality: “Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world … Power? Or the corruption of power?” (p.120). The question combines Miltonic loftiness with popular double entendre. Adam and Eve are seduced to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge, because in their pride they crave the power that is inherent in knowledge. More specifically, and popularly, the fruit represents carnal knowledge, which represents a power that is both creative (sexual passion as sharing and as procreation) and destructive (sex as corrupt, domineering egotism). On this latter basis, the sexual politics of personal relationships are a microcosm of that manipulative power-brokering which corrupts political idealism everywhere.

The social history of the Caribbean lends a special significance to this thematic argument. As O. R. Dathorne has reminded us, slavery and “post-slavery economics” shaped sexual roles and relationships; men were merely studs and women were simply producers of children.¹ By a similar token, slavery and colonialism encouraged a tradition of using sexual conquest as a substitute for social and political power. Clarke himself reiterates this point, with respect to men, throughout The Prime Minister and Proud Empires: political effectiveness is enhanced by a reputation for sexual prowess. In these novels, Clarke all but suggests that political power is achieved and maintained at the point of the phallus. The Welsh-born scholar, Gordon K. Lewis, makes the same point more circumspectly in The Growth of the Modern West Indies. He delicately observes that in Caribbean politics “It would be difficult to imagine a … Profumo case”—an allusion to the sex scandal which shook the British government in the sixties (p.23).

All of this leads, eventually, to Clarke's special interest in the female partner of the political stud. In brief, the public powerlessness of these women gives them a special stake in means of acquiring power indirectly. Hence, they manipulate the “sexual appetites” of their men for economic and political advantages (The Prime Minister, p.120). Sex, the forbidden fruit of popular myth and Biblical morality, is therefore linked with power, the forbidden fruit of slavery and colonialism. But even an ambitious woman like May Thorne who shuns sex is capable of using her sexuality as a kind of weapon. Hence her habitual abstinence, or “voluntary widowhood,” actually amounts to an assertion of will that reinforces her superiority to her decent but relatively ineffective husband (Proud Empires, p.197).

On the whole, then, the women in Clarke's fiction are both powerless victims and ruthless power brokers. As a result, they are really mirror images of the men who are both figures of economic or political impotence, and aggressive, corrupt pursuers of sexual and political dominance. In this context, sexual relationships are often mutually exploitative affairs which reflect tensions between various groups. Moreover, in view of the Miltonic antecedents which John Moore recalls in The Prime Minister, this cultural and political symbolism is also linked with the ethical issues which Clarke usually derives from Milton's Biblical archetypes; conventional sexual roles and relationships reflect a pervasive egotism and a corrupting obsession with power in society at large. As a result, sexual roles in Clarke's work represent personal, cultural and moral values which are of special significance to local conditions (Canada or the Caribbean) while simultaneously facilitating parallels between both cultures.

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As mothers, Clarke's peasant women are also a diverse group. Ruby Sobers's helplessness is tragically congruent with the ingrained defeatism of her village ambience. In Survivors, Stella's ambitions on behalf of her children are part of that power-oriented toughness which defines survival in her world. Indeed, if Stella's personality and tactics recall the forbidding image of the emasculating matriarch, this merely confirms that she does what all defective personalities invariably do in Clarke's social satire: she has based her choices on her culture's dominant stereotypes; and power—in relation to both sexual and non-sexual issues—defines the influential stereotypes in Stella's experience. On the other hand, the mother in “An Easter Carol” is strong and purposeful without Stella's brute force, and without May Thorne's cold-bloodedness. As yet another woman who was abandoned by the father of her child, she shares in the vulnerability that inhibits women in Thistles, but her humanity is not crippled by it. On the whole, she combines strength with a loving tenderness that belies her tough manner. Her son's upbringing, from his school education to his coveted selection to the cathedral choir, is an act of duty and love; but this is also a vicarious fulfillment in a world which offers her virtually no opportunities of her own as woman.

The fathers of Clarke's “fatherless” children are a more homogenous lot. Rufus's concern about his children's welfare is unusual, and his general inadequacy as a father is typical. These men are all the familiar studs who try to compensate for failure by exploiting women as economic and sexual conveniences. Given their irresponsibility and ineffectiveness, they are dead, for all practical purposes, to their children; and this death motif is underscored in “Leaving This Island Place,” where the protagonist's father, long “dead” to the young man's mother, is literally dying in the local almshouse. Moreover, this kind of psychic and social death is not only a commentary on their kind of masculinity; it is also a reflection of a cultural history which has encouraged that destructive masculinity. Conversely, the antithesis of these men reflects those vital energies which have managed to survive that history. Hence the strong, humane mother of “An Easter Carol” embodies a firmness of purpose and a moral integrity which have managed to survive the sexual and socioeconomic milieu.²

However, although Clarke's fiction does elucidate the specific circumstances of sexual roles and relationships in the Caribbean, the overall effect of his sexual themes is to emphasize those attitudes and traditions which cut across the boundaries of race, class and culture. On the one hand, the sexual theme dramatizes specific cultural attitudes in both Canada and the Caribbean; but, on the other hand, the final effect of these cultural parallels is the impression that these diverse cultural attitudes are themselves transcended by sexuality and sexual role-playing. The familiar figure of the immigrant maid is a good example of this. The raison d'etre of her status, even of her very presence, in Canada can only be explained by those perceptions of women which have traditionally relegated them to the cheapest, most exploitative jobs in their society. Consequently, the immigrant maid in Canada continues the same role which she has filled in the Caribbean since slavery and which Mathurin-Mair has noted in her study.³ Thus, although maids like Clarke's Bernice Leach are the major focus of racial and cultural conflicts, their experience simultaneously dramatizes the shared experiences of women in general, and the similarities between men as a sex.

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In the short stories the institution [of marriage] is more than a symptom of non-communication. It is a combat zone. “A Slow Death” (When Women Rule) is a post mortem of a marriage which ended with the recent death of the wife, but which had lost its emotional substance long before. The man's reminiscences encapsulate the years of open and suppressed hostility. In retrospect, it is clear that his marriage, like his life as a whole, has been a species of slow death. This all implies a continuous psychic violence, of the sort which Germaine Greer describes as “the mortal combat of the sexes,” and which even avowed anti-feminists like Esther Vilar call “a fight for survival.”⁴

This also explains the physical violence which characterizes several marriages in these short stories. We have moved from the occasional violence between Henry and Agatha (Storm of Fortune) and the Burrmanns (The Meeting Point) to the open warfare of “Griff!” (When Women Rule), “The Smell” and “A Short Acquaintance” (Nine Men Who Laughed). Although “A Short Acquaintance” does not involve marriage as such, it is pertinent here, because it graphically portrays the physical and psychological violence which seems endemic to sexual relationships in general—and, in turn, to a divided society. The murder of one woman by a rapist-burglar is therefore simply another example of the male brutality which another woman (the main protagonist) sees around her everyday. The latter's response to all this reflects the degree to which she herself has been corrupted by that violence: she sometimes wants to “snip off” the testicles of men around her (Nine Men, p.88).

“A Short Acquaintance” is unusual in all these stories, in that its narrator-protagonist is a woman. On the whole the stories amount to male confessionals, exposing the male hostility which Clarke links with sexual conflict. There is a deep-seated fear and hatred of women which triggers Griff's murder of his wife, and which underlies wife-beating and incest in “The Smell.” This antagonism towards women is also linked with equally deep insecurities about themselves as men. On the one hand, these men flaunt their cherished notions of sexual superiority, but on the other hand, they betray a gnawing uneasiness about the loss of sexual prowess, and the loss of women upon whom they depend more than they would ever admit.

The brittleness of the masculine ego is particularly well dramatized in “Griff!” and “Give it a Shot.” Griff's addiction to horse-racing and to womanizing is part of a deliberately fostered air of masculine power. That image is a transparent attempt to compensate for his insecurities as a social failure; but nothing exposes the emptiness of his old-fashioned male bravado like his wife's habitual smile. On the surface, the smile is an obliging subservience, in the conventional feminine manner of complementing male dominance. But when we, and her husband, discover her secret life of night-club dates, that smile acquires a new significance. It is a mask, a protective mysteriousness which effectively hides her, like Colette's femme cachee, from the husband and his world.⁵ As such it is a kind of power which mocks and nullifies her husband's absurd pretensions to dominance. This is the power of an identity which she has forged in a milieu dominated by men like himself, and which remains beyond his reach. It is untouched by his violence: that inscrutable smile of hers persists even after he has killed her, a taunting reminder of his basic futility as a conventional male.

Where “Griff!” exposes the essential futility and insecurity of the domineering male, “Give it a Shot” pinpoints his massive dependence on women. Pat's life collapses when his wife leaves him. On this point it is important to remember that she herself is a fairly conventional and limited woman. Her absence does not deprive Pat of significant moral uplift or spiritual purpose. It is enough that she is not there: men like Pat cannot function without the domestic crutch provided by their women. The combat zone is also a field of mutual dependency. As Pat's eventual decline and self-destruction demonstrate, this kind of dependency can be psychologically crippling—and this emotional handicap is dramatized by the fairly obvious symbolism of “On One Leg” (When Women Rule). Alexander's masculine bravado among his male friends contrasts sharply with his total dependence on his wife at home.

Above everything else, these male inadequacies add up to the moral corruption of the selfish ego—the legacy of the “forbidden fruit.” This is the moral emphasis that informs three of Clarke's most contemptuous studies of the male ego in Nine Men—“How He Does It,” “A Man,” and “If Only: Only If …” Joshua Miller-Corbaine's double life in the former two stories is a striking study in corrupted egotism. He deceives his wife and other women not simply for sexual gratification, but because philandering offers him a special pleasure as a kind of manipulative power. It allows him the illusion of control, just as his charade as bogus attorney invests him with social prestige and the image of power.

Here, as elsewhere in his sexual and social themes, Clarke emphasizes the reciprocal nature of roles and perceptions. Joshua succeeds in his schemes, in “How He Does It,” because in their own way the women need his illusions as much as he does. His mistress is easily persuaded that the woman claiming to be his wife is really his eccentric maid, and more pathetically, his wife tolerates his absences as long as he returns to her. Their female dependency complements his dependency on them for economic support and as props for his overweening ego. In fact, Joshua's women really duplicate his blend of dependency and manipulative power. Pathetic as she appears to be, his wife enjoys considerable power of her own as sole breadwinner. Without her he cannot even be bogus lawyer or “imaginary man.” In accepting the status quo, in “How He Does It,” she exacts a certain benefit on terms that are as corrupt as his. Conversely, one senses that the collapse of Joshua's world in “A Man” will be as catastrophic for her as it will be for him.

Beyond this, there is the implicit suggestion that as a very conventional woman, Joshua's wife derives a certain sense of “moral” superiority, as her husband's victim. This suggestion is certainly explicit in the case of one of her rivals. The retired school teacher who fills the role of lunch-time companion accepts his occasional beatings as part of a relationship of “guilt and pity,” as “trophies of war” (Nine Men, p.131). Ironically, moral postures have become crucial weapons in the morally corrupting power games between the sexes. Finally, these moral equations are further confirmed by political similarities: as women in their culture, Joshua's sexual partners are as easily seduced and corrupted by images of power as is Joshua, the black colonial from the Caribbean.

On both moral and political terms, these Canadian women are also comparable with Caribbean victims of male exploitativeness: the victims are also power brokers. In “If Only: Only if …” it is a Jamaican woman who appears to be the victim of that familiar beast of prey in the immigrant community—the male university student. However, she turns out to be an even more formidable predator herself. He battens on her for sex and home-cooking. She quickly claims him as her fiance; for in her decidedly unromantic calculations, an affair with a university student is an investment in the future, as wife of a successful professional. When he proves uncooperative, she blusters and threatens. However, level-headed businesswoman that she is, she does not squander her energies on unprofitable revenge. There are other, more promising, alternatives. When last heard of, some time later, she is married to an Italian engineering student.

The title of the story is helpful here: “If Only: Only If …” The first half expresses the male narrator's regret at what might have been, had he not allowed his British Caribbean class prejudices to cost him the investment that she represented. The second half adds a malicious note of uncertainty to the future prospects of his former benefactress: her current investment will bring worthwhile returns only if her husband is more malleable, less exploitative than the narrator. In the narrator's world the odds are against her. Finally, the reversed phrasing reinforces our early impression that the narrator and the woman are really inverted, mirror images of each other, sexual variations on those reciprocal images which elucidate cultural and political relationships throughout Clarke's fiction.

However, this kind of reciprocity also links Clarke's sexual themes with what have become feminist truisms in recent years. Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch cites the intrinsic links between female self-hatred and male contempt of women (pp.263–77). Kate Millett's Sexual Politics has discovered the same destructive principle by way of the class analogy: as a “dependency class,” women's existence, like that of any suppressed group is “parasitic to its rulers” and women therefore “identify their survival with the prosperity of those who feed them.”⁶ Similarly, Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique defines “femininity”, not merely as an exclusively female attribute, but as an institutionalized immaturity common to both men and women. This results in the mutual dependency which she observes in the consumer mass market. American business, that citadel of old-fashioned masculinity, depends rather heavily on the “feminine” image of women—desirably dependent and seductively soft—as a marketing device.⁷ Even Esther Vilar's anti-feminist thesis comes to a similar conclusion: male “manipulation and exploitation” has resulted in a system which forces women to be corrupt, and so the male exploiter becomes the “slave” of the manipulative woman (The Manipulated Man, p.133).

The parallels between Clarke's themes and the arguments of feminist activists suggest that his work shares common ground with the women's movements. Moreover, among Canadian feminists in particular, it is fairly easy to draw comparisons between Margaret Atwood's possessive male egos in The Edible Woman (1969) and Clarke's satire of masculine conventions in Nine Men and When Women Rule. Similarly, in Power Politics (1971), Atwood's poetry deals with the kind of corruption that Clarke explores in the sexual power politics of his two cultures. Now, taken together, all of these apparent affinities lead to the inevitable question: How deep or extensive are Clarke's sympathies with the feminist ideal of equality?

In general, feminism as an ideal never measures up to its promise in Clarke's fiction. It is therefore comparable with other social ideals in both Canada and the Caribbean. Indeed, the promise and limitations of women's liberation is really an allegory of limited or aborted ideals in the two cultures. As an ideal, feminism itself does not emerge as a concise or fully developed concept in Clarke's fiction—any more than it has in dozens of studies on the subject, ranging from Elizabeth Janeway's liberal vision of a vague but powerful social awakening, to Shulamith Firestone's Marxist perception of feminism as a class struggle.⁸

However, Clarke does allude to the general aims of women's movements—especially the promotion of sexual equality in public life and the education of individuals in the humane, rather than merely exploitative, perception of sexuality and sexual roles. In the process, he recreates the current level of popular consciousness in which feminism is not a precisely understood idea, but some vaguely evocative atmosphere or image of change. In The Bigger Light, this means a sense of sexual liberation, a new public candor about sex. Hence, Bernice and Dots can read and talk about sexual needs and experiences with an unprecedented openness that would have been unthinkable in their Barbadian past (pp.198–202). But one senses the old corrupt exploitativeness even here: after all, the new candor seems fairly profitable in a mass media market which hawks women's fantasies, female orgasms, and assorted bits and pieces of womanhood for popular enlightenment—and titillation.

By a similar token, the aura of female liberation and individualism in the short stories turns out to be rather ambiguous, at best. Joshua's young girlfriend in “A Man” projects an air of “considerable self will and self assurance” (Nine Men, p.144); but her expectations of Joshua—that they will live together or get married, for example—reflect the familiar dependency. In “A Slow Death” the young real estate broker is an example of the new female confidence or assertiveness that has found a productive role in business (When Women Rule). But in conspiring to defraud one of her own clients, she is a minor, but telling, example of old corruption surviving under the guise of social change. In effect, much of this later fiction suggests that the vaunted changes have been cosmetic rather than substantive, that moral and sexual conventions persist beneath much of what is popularly perceived as sexual equality and women's liberation. Here Clarke's sceptical reserve confirms the prophetic uneasiness which even an optimistic feminist like the young Germaine Greer felt compelled to voice more than fifteen years ago. Mere reaction or imitation is not real change: “It is not a sign of revolution when the oppressed adopt the manners of the oppressors and practice oppression on their own behalf. Neither is it a sign of revolution when women ape men, and men women” (The Female Eunuch, p.335).

Greer's warning could easily be the moral of “A Slow Death.” It is certainly applicable to the young professional woman of “The Discipline” where female liberation has simply added female recruits to the established conventions of racism and bureaucratic insensitivity. In short, the new equality seems to be little more than the old reciprocity in a new guise. The new, liberated womanhood looks suspiciously like the traditional femininity of old, in the absorption and manipulation of the established modes of power. This sense of moral continuities is wholly in keeping with Clarke's most characteristic perceptions of individual conduct and social institutions, ever since Survivors. It also inspires his use of “older” women in stories like “On One Leg” and “The Discipline.” They are reminders of traditions that have persisted.

In “On One Leg,” Alexander's one-dimensional masculinity is more than matched by his wife's domestic tyranny. The dependency which lies beneath his male bravado provides her with a power that she exercises with gusto—not unlike the ferocious zest with which he recounts his hell-raising youth in northern Ontario. On a psychological level, then, his physical and emotional disabilities are her one leg: it is at once the mirror of her own dependency and the tool of her imitative dominance. This is the kind of dominance that is embodied by the grandmother of “The Discipline.” Her domineering harshness is both a defensive response to, and imitation of, masculine power in her male-dominated world. Her grandson's memories of her are partly triggered by the apparent parallels between the old woman and the new professional women who control his destiny in a Toronto courtroom.

Of course, on one level these memories are suspect, in that they heighten his fearful resentment of women who exercise power. But his memories do pinpoint real similarities between the old woman and the young Canadian professionals. The latter bear all the fashionable trappings of sexual equality: they even dress and talk like the men with whom they share public offices and institutional responsibilities. However, they do not bring enlightened humanism or change to their roles. They are women imitating men, just as men (like himself) have always imitated maternal figures (like his grandmother), who, in turn, were reacting to male power with mimicry and adaptation, and so forth ad infinitum … There is no significant break with the past, only a closed, and rather vicious, psychic circle.

“The Discipline” closes with a striking image that sums up the timelessness and completeness of this trap. From inside his prison-wagon cage the narrator notices that people outside seem to grow smaller as the vehicle bears him away. They are “small people walking backwards, their faces punctuated and cut up into pieces through the perspective of the chicken wire and bars” (When Women Rule, pp.146, 148–49). His cage is a metaphor of our condition, like the distorted mirror-image of the protagonist in “Canadian Experience.” Society “punctuates” and dissects humanity, in racial, cultural, and sexual categories, while affirming its commitment to harmonizing ideals. The optical illusion of backward movement is a metaphoric comment on our most cherished notions about progress and change, from ambitious El Dorado dreams, to ideals of sexual equality and national harmony. Do we really progress? Or are our much heralded changes only illusions of progress in an essentially unchanging world?

Finally, the prison-wagon itself is the symbol of that isolation which defines the lives of Clarke's men and women. This isolation, and the broader social alienation that it represents, reinforce Clarke's scepticism about alleged progress towards social reconciliation and healing. This also explains Clarke's insistence, in this story, on that non-communication which he invariably associates with marriage and sexual relationships in general. The protagonist lives in a world of non-communication in spite of all the professional communicators who surround him (teachers, lawyers, social welfare workers, and psychiatrists). More accurately, the latter are the real source of the problem, for their bureaucratic jargon is usually unintelligible. Indeed, it is one of the story's ironies that the ideal of sexual equality, with its implied goals of human contact and interaction, opened doors to a new breed of professional non-communicators. The irony underscores the image of a society in which people are walking backwards: they have not come a long way. Moreover, the breakdown of language has additional overtones in a writer like Clarke whose own work reflects on a notable self-consciousness about language and the very idea of style. This breakdown signifies more than the persistence of sterile modes, in sexual behavior and elsewhere. It simultaneously implies some crucial diminution, or “punctuation,” of the human spirit itself, for the power of the word is the very essence of humanity.

Notes

1. R. Dathorne, Dark Ancestor: The Literature of the Black Man in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p.8. Compare Merle Hodge, “The Shadow of the Whip,” in Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, edited Orde Coombs Anchor Book Editions (New York: Doubleday, 1974), pp.111–19.

2. Compare Edith Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957).

3. Op. cit., Savacou, 13 (Gemini, 1977), 5.

4. Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man (New York: Bantam, 1974), p.132. Compare Greer (The Female Eunuch, p.308).

5. Colette, La femme cachee (Paris: Hammarion, 1924).

6. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics. Equinox Edition (New York: Avon, 1971), p.38.

7. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. Dell Edition (New York: Dell, 1970), pp. 72, 223, 196.

8. Elizabeth Janeway, Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening. Morrow Paperback Edition (New York: William Morrow, 1975); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialect of Sex. Morrow Paperback Edition (New York: William Morrow, 1975). Vern L. Bullough chronicles diverse patterns of feminism in The Subordinate Sex: a History of Attitudes Towards Women (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974).