Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

SOURCE: "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 1, Autumn, 1985, pp. 243-61.

[In the following essay, Spivak examines Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Frankenstein to reveal the manner in which imperialist ideology structures the expression of nineteenth-century feminist individualism.]

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.

If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the "worlding" of what is now called "the Third World." To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of "the Third World" as a signifier that allows us to forget that "worlding," even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.¹

It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism. A basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm. It is supported and operated by an information-retrieval approach to "Third World" literature which often employs a deliberately "nontheoretical" methodology with self-conscious rectitude.

In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the "worlding" of what is today "the Third World" by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane Eyre.² I plot the novel's reach and grasp, and locate its structural motors. I read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre's reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis—even a deconstruction—of a "worlding" such as Jane Eyre's.³

I need hardly mention that the object of my investigation is the printed book, not its "author." To make such a distinction is, of course, to ignore the lessons of deconstruction. A deconstructive critical approach would loosen the binding of the book, undo the opposition between verbal text and the biography of the named subject "Charlotte Bronte," and see the two as each other's "scene of writing." In such a reading, the life that writes itself as "my life" is as much a production in psychosocial space (other names can be found) as the book that is written by the holder of that named life—a book that is then consigned to what is most often recognized as genuinely "social": the world of publication and distribution.⁴ To touch Bronte's "life" in such a way, however, would be too risky here. We must rather strategically take shelter in an essentialism which, not wishing to lose the important advantages won by U.S. mainstream feminism, will continue to honor the suspect binary oppositions—book and author, individual and history—and start with an assurance of the following sort: my readings here do not seek to undermine the excellence of the individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will incite a degree of rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, that it should produce so abject a script for her. I provide these assurances to allow myself some room to situate feminist individualism in its historical determination rather than simply to canonize it as feminism as such.

Sympathetic U.S. feminists have remarked that I do not do justice to Jane Eyre's subjectivity. A word of explanation is perhaps in order. The broad strokes of my presuppositions are that what is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of imperialism, is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and "interpellation" of the subject not only as individual but as "individualist."⁵ This stake is represented on two registers: childbearing and soul making. The first is domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction cathected as "companionate love"; the second is the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission. As the female individualist, not-quite/not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the "native female" as such (within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded from any share in this emerging norm.⁶ If we read this account from an isolationist perspective in a "metropolitan" context, we see nothing there but the psychobiography of the militant female subject. In a reading such as mine, in contrast, the effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the "subject-constitution" of the female individualist.

To develop further the notion that my stance need not be an accusing one, I will refer to a passage from Roberto Fernandez Retamar's "Caliban."⁷ José Enrique Rodó had argued in 1900 that the model for the Latin American intellectual in relationship to Europe could be Shakespeare's Ariel.⁸ In 1971 Retamar, denying the possibility of an identifiable "Latin American Culture," recast the model as Caliban. Not surprisingly, this powerful exchange still excludes any specific consideration of the civilizations of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, or the smaller nations of what is now called Latin America. Let us note carefully that, at this stage of my argument, this "conversation" between Europe and Latin America (without a specific consideration of the political economy of the "worlding" of the "native") provides a sufficient thematic description of our attempt to confront the ethnocentric and reverse-ethnocentric benevolent double bind (that is, considering the "native" as object for enthusiastic information-retrieval and thus denying its own "worlding") that I sketched in my opening paragraphs.

In a moving passage in "Caliban," Retamar locates both Caliban and Ariel in the postcolonial intellectual:

There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity: both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, although also a child of the isle, is the intellectual.

The deformed Caliban—enslaved, robbed of his island, and taught the language by Prospero—rebukes him thus: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse." ["C," pp. 28, 11]

As we attempt to unlearn our so-called privilege as Ariel and "seek from [a certain] Caliban the honor of a place in his rebellious and glorious ranks," we do not ask that our students and colleagues should emulate us but that they should attend to us ("C," p. 72). If, however, we are driven by a nostalgia for lost origins, we too run the risk of effacing the "native" and stepping forth as "the real Caliban," of forgetting that he is a name in a play, an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text.⁹ The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimizes the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in an article on history and women's history, shows us how to define the historical moment of feminism in the West in terms of female access to individualism.¹⁰ The battle for female individualism plays itself out within the larger theater of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of "the creative imagination." Fox-Genovese's presupposition will guide us into the beautifully orchestrated opening of Jane Eyre.

It is a scene of the marginalization and privatization of the protagonist: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. . . . Out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it," Bronte writes (JE, p. 9). The movement continues as Jane breaks the rules of the appropriate topography of withdrawal. The family at the center withdraws into the sanctioned architectural space of the withdrawing room or drawing room; Jane inserts herself—"I slipped in"—into the margin—"A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing room" (JE, p. 9; my emphasis).

The manipulation of the domestic inscription of space within the upwardly mobilizing currents of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in England and France is well known. It seems fitting that the place to which Jane withdraws is not only not the withdrawing room but also not the dining room, the sanctioned place of family meals. Nor is it the library, the appropriate place for reading. The breakfast room "contained a book-case" (JE, p. 9). As Rudolph Ackerman wrote in his Repository (1823), one of the many manuals of taste in circulation in nineteenth-century England, these low bookcases and stands were designed to "contain all the books that may be desired for a sitting-room without reference to the library."¹¹ Even in this already triply off-center place, "having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I [Jane] was shrined in double retirement" (JE, pp. 9-10).

Here in Jane's self-marginalized uniqueness, the reader becomes her accomplice: the reader and Jane are united—both are reading. Yet Jane still preserves her odd privilege, for she continues never quite doing the proper thing in its proper place. She cares little for reading what is meant to be read: the "letter-press." She reads the pictures. The power of this singular hermeneutics is precisely that it can make the outside inside. "At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon." Under "the clear panes of glass," the rain no longer penetrates, "the drear November day" is rather a one-dimensional "aspect" to be "studied," not decoded like the "letter-press' but, like pictures, deciphered by the unique creative imagination of the marginal individualist (JE, p. 10).

Before following the track of this unique imagination, let us consider the suggestion that the progress of Jane Eyre can be charted through a sequential arrangement of the family/counter-family dyad. In the novel, we encounter, first, the Reeds as the legal family and Jane, the late Mr. Reed's sister's daughter, as the representative of a near incestuous counter-family; second, the Brocklehursts, who run the school Jane is sent to, as the legal family and Jane, Miss Temple, and Helen Burns as a counter-family that falls short because it is only a community of women; third, Rochester and the mad Mrs. Rochester as the legal family and Jane and Rochester as the illicit counter-family. Other items may be added to the thematic chain in this sequence: Rochester and Céline Varens as structurally functional counter-family; Rochester and Blanche Ingram as dissimulation of legality—and so on. It is during this sequence that Jane is moved from the counter-family to the family-in-law. In the next sequence, it is Jane who restores full family status to the as-yet-incomplete community of siblings, the Riverses. The final sequence of the book is a community of families, with Jane, Rochester, and their children at the center.

In terms of the narrative energy of the novel, how is Jane moved from the place of the counter-family to the family-in-law? It is the active ideology of imperialism that provides the discursive field.

(My working definition of "discursive field" must assume the existence of discrete "systems of signs" at hand in the socius, each based on a specific axiomatics. I am identifying these systems as discursive fields. "Imperialism as social mission" generates the possibility of one such axiomatics. How the individual artist taps the discursive field at hand with a sure touch, if not with transhistorical clairvoyance, in order to make the narrative structure move I hope to demonstrate through the following example. It is crucial that we extend our analysis of this example beyond the minimal diagnosis of "racism.")

Let us consider the figure of Bertha Mason, a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism. Through Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole, Brontë renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater than the letter of the Law can be broached. Here is the celebrated passage, given in the voice of Jane:

In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not . . . tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. [JE, p. 295]

In a matching passage, given in the voice of Rochester speaking to Jane, Brontë presents the imperative for a shift beyond the Law as divine injunction rather than human motive. In the terms of my essay, we might say that this is the register not of mere marriage or sexual reproduction but of Europe and its not-yet-human Other, of soul making. The field of imperial conquest is here inscribed as Hell:

"One night I had been awakened by her yells . . . it was a fiery West Indian night. . . .

'"This life,' said I at last, 'is hell!—this is the air—those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can. . . . Let me break away, and go home to God!' . . .

"A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. . . . It was true Wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path. . . .

"The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty. . . .

"'Go,' said Hope, 'and live again in Europe. . . . You have done all that God and Humanity require of you.'" [JE, pp. 310-11; my emphasis]

It is the unquestioned ideology of imperialist axiomatics, then, that conditions Jane's move from the counter-family set to the set of the family-in-law. Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton have seen this only in terms of the ambiguous class position of the governess.¹² Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, on the other hand, have seen Bertha Mason only in psychological terms, as Jane's dark double.¹³

I will not enter the critical debates that offer themselves here. Instead, I will develop the suggestion that nineteenth-century feminist individualism could conceive of a "greater" project than access to the closed circle of the nuclear family. This is the project of soul making beyond "mere" sexual reproduction. Here the native "subject" is not almost an animal but rather the object of what might be termed the terrorism of the categorical imperative.

I am using "Kant" in this essay as a metonym for the most flexible ethical moment in the European eighteenth century. Kant words the categorical imperative, conceived as the universal moral law given by pure reason, in this way: "In all creation every thing one chooses and over which one has any power, may be used merely as means; man alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in himself." It is thus a moving displacement of Christian ethics from religion to philosophy. As Kant writes: "With this agrees very well the possibility of such a command as: Love God above everything, and thy neighbor as thyself. For as a command it requires respect for a law which commands love and does not leave it to our own arbitrary choice to make this our principle."¹⁴

The "categorical" in Kant cannot be adequately represented in determinately grounded action. The dangerous transformative power of philosophy, however, is that its formal subtlety can be travestied in the service of the state. Such a travesty in the case of the categorical imperative can justify the imperialist project by producing the following formula: make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself.¹⁵ This project is presented as a sort of tangent in Jane Eyre, a tangent that escapes the closed circle of the narrative conclusion. The tangent narrative is the story of St. John Rivers, who is granted the important task of concluding the text.

At the novel's end, the allegorical language of Christian psychobiography—rather than the textually constituted and seemingly private grammar of the creative imagination which we noted in the novel's opening—marks the inaccessibility of the imperialist project as such to the nascent "feminist" scenario. The concluding passage of Jane Eyre places St. John Rivers within the fold of Pilgrim's Progress. Eagleton pays no attention to this but accepts the novel's ideological lexicon, which establishes St. John Rivers' heroism by identifying a life in Calcutta with an unquestioning choice of death. Gilbert and Gubar, by calling Jane Eyre "Plain Jane's progress," see the novel as simply replacing the male protagonist with the female. They do not notice the distance between sexual reproduction and soul making, both actualized by the unquestioned idiom of imperialist presuppositions evident in the last part of Jane Eyre:

Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth, [St. John Rivers] labours for his race. . . . His is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. . . . His is the ambition of the high master-spirit[s] . . . who stand without fault before the throne of God; who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb; who are called, and chosen, and faithful. [JE, p. 455]

Earlier in the novel, St. John Rivers himself justifies the project: "My vocation? My great work? . . . My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race—of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance—of substituting peace for war—freedom for bondage—religion for superstition—the hope of heaven for the fear of hell?" (JE, p. 376). Imperialism and its territorial and subject-constituting project are a violent deconstruction of these oppositions.

When Jean Rhys, born on the Caribbean island of Dominica, read Jane Eyre as a child, she was moved by Bertha Mason: "I thought I'd try to write her a life."¹⁶Wide Sargasso Sea, the slim novel published in 1965, at the end of Rhys' long career, is that "life."

I have suggested that Bertha's function in Jane Eyre is to render indeterminate the boundary between human and animal and thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law. When Rhys rewrites the scene in Jane Eyre where Jane hears "a snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog quarrelling" and then encounters a bleeding Richard Mason (JE, p. 210), she keeps Bertha's humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact. Grace Poole, another character originally in Jane Eyre, describes the incident to Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea: "So you don't remember that you attacked this gentleman with a knife? . . . I didn't hear all he said except 'I cannot interfere legally between yourself and your husband'. It was when he said 'legally' that you flew at him'" (WSS, p. 150). In Rhys' retelling, it is the dissimulation that Bertha discerns in the word "legally"—not an innate bestiality—that prompts her violent reaction.

In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as a white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialist and the black native. In recounting Antoinette's development, Rhys reinscribes some thematics of Narcissus.

There are, noticeably, many images of mirroring in the text. I will quote one from the first section. In this passage, Tia is the little black servant girl who is Antoinette's close companion: "We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I though, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. . . . When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. . . . We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass" (WSS, p. 38).

A progressive sequence of dreams reinforces this mirror imagery. In its second occurrence, the dream is partially set in a hortus conclusus, or "enclosed garden"—Rhys uses the phrase (WSS, p. 50)—a Romance rewriting of the Narcissus topos as the place of encounter with Love.¹⁷ In the enclosed garden, Antoinette encounters not Love but a strange threatening voice that says merely "in here," inviting her into a prison which masquerades as the legalization of love (WSS, p. 50).

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus' madness is disclosed when he recognizes his Other as his self: "Iste ego sum."¹⁸ Rhys makes Antoinette see her self as her Other, Brontë's Bertha. In the last section of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette acts out Jane Eyre's conclusion and recognizes herself as the so-called ghost in Thornfield Hall: "I went into the hall again with the tall candle in my hand. It was then that I saw her—the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her" (WSS, p. 154). The gilt frame encloses a mirror: as Narcissus' pool reflects the selfed Other, so this "pool" reflects the Othered self. Here the dream sequence ends, with an invocation of none other than Tia, the Other that could not be selfed, because the fracture of imperialism rather than the Ovidian pool intervened. (I will return to this difficult point.) "That was the third time I had my dream, and it ended. . . . I called 'Tia' and jumped and woke" (WSS, p. 155). It is now, at the very end of the book, that Antoinette/Bertha can say: "Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do" (WSS, pp. 155-56). We can read this as her having been brought into the England of Brontë's novel: "This cardboard house"—a book between cardboard covers—"where I walk at night is not England" (WSS, p. 148). In this fictive England, she 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. I must read this as an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer. At least Rhys sees to it that the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as an insane animal for her sister's consolidation.

Critics have remarked that Wide Sargasso Sea treats the Rochester character with understanding and sympathy.¹⁹ Indeed, he narrates the entire middle section of the book. Rhys makes it clear that he is a victim of the patriarchal inheritance law of entailment rather than of a father's natural preference for the firstborn: in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester's situation is clearly that of a younger son dispatched to the colonies to buy an heiress. If in the case of Antoinette and her identity, Rhys utilizes the thematics of Narcissus, in the case of Rochester and his patrimony, she touches on the thematics of Oedipus. (In this she has her finger on our "historical moment." If, in the nineteenth century, subject-constitution is represented as childbearing and soul making, in the twentieth century psycho-analysis allows the West to plot the itinerary of the subject from Narcissus [the "imaginary"] to Oedipus [the "symbolic"]. This subject, however, is the normative male subject. In Rhys' reinscription of these themes, divided between the female and the male protagonist, feminism and a critique of imperialism become complicit.)

In place of the "wind from Europe" scene, Rhys substitutes the scenario of a suppressed letter to a father, a letter which would be the "correct" explanation of the tragedy of the book.²⁰ "I thought about the letter which should have been written to England a week ago. Dear Father . . ." (WSS, p. 57). This is the first instance: the letter not written. Shortly afterward:

Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition. No provision made for her (that must be seen to). . . . I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love. No begging letters, no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres of a younger son. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet . . . [WSS, p. 59]

This is the second instance: the letter not sent. The formal letter is uninteresting; I will quote only a part of it:

Dear Father, we have arrived from Jamaica after an uncomfortable few days. This little estate in the Windward Islands is part of the family property and Antoinette is much attached to it. . . . All is well and has gone according to your plans and wishes. I dealt of course with Richard Mason. . . . He seemed to become attached to me and trusted me completely. This place is very beautiful but my illness has left me too exhausted to appreciate it fully. I will write again in a few days' time. [WSS, p. 63]

And so on.

Rhys' version of the Oedipal exchange is ironic, not a closed circle. We cannot know if the letter actually reaches its destination. "I wondered how they got their letters posted," the Rochester figure muses. "I folded mine and put it into a drawer of the desk. . . . There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up" (WSS, p. 64). It is as if the text presses us to note the analogy between letter and mind.

Rhys denies to Brontë's Rochester the one thing that is supposed to be secured in the Oedipal relay: the Name of the Father, or the patronymic. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the character corresponding to Rochester has no name. His writing of the final version of the letter to his father is supervised, in fact, by an image of the loss of the patronymic: "There was a crude bookshelf made of three shingles strung together over the desk and I looked at the books, Byron's poems, novels by Sir Walter Scott, Confessions of an Opium Eater . . . and on the last shelf, Life and Letters of. . . The rest was eaten away" (WSS, p. 63).

Wide Sargasso Sea marks with uncanny clarity the limits of its own discourse in Christophine, Antoinette's black nurse. We may perhaps surmise the distance between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by remarking that Christophine's unfinished story is the tangent to the latter narrative, as St. John Rivers' story is to the former. Christophine is not a native of Jamaica; she is from Martinique. Taxonomically, she belongs to the category of the good servant rather than that of the pure native. But within these borders, Rhys creates a powerfully suggestive figure.

Christophine is the first interpreter and named speaking subject in the text. "The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, 'because she pretty like pretty self Christophine said," we read in the book's opening paragraph (WSS, p. 15). I have taught this book five times, once in France, once to students who had worked on the book with the well-known Caribbean novelist Wilson Harris, and once at a prestigious institute where the majority of the students were faculty from other universities. It is part of the political argument I am making that all these students blithely stepped over this paragraph without asking or knowing what Christophine's patois, so-called incorrect English, might mean.

Christophine is, of course, a commodified person. "'She was your father's wedding present to me'" explains Antoinette's mother, "'one of his presents'" (WSS, p. 18). Yet Rhys assigns her some crucial functions in the text. It is Christophine who judges that black ritual practices are culture-specific and cannot be used by whites as cheap remedies for social evils, such as Rochester's lack of love for Antoinette. Most important, it is Christophine alone whom Rhys allows to offer a hard analysis of Rochester's actions, to challenge him in a face-to-face encounter. The entire extended passage is worthy of comment. I quote a brief extract:

"She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She don't come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she don't come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it's you come all the long way to her house—it's you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have. Now you say you don't love her and you break her up. What you do with her money, eh?" [And then Rochester, the white man, comments silently to himself] Her voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said "money." [WSS, p. 130]

Her analysis is powerful enough for the white man to be afraid: "I no longer felt dazed, tired, half hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready to defend myself (WSS, p. 130).

Rhys does not, however, romanticize individual heroics on the part of the oppressed. When the Man refers to the forces of Law and Order, Christophine recognizes their power. This exposure of civil inequality is emphasized by the fact that, just before the Man's successful threat, Christophine had invoked the emancipation of slaves in Jamaica by proclaiming: "No chain gang, no tread machine, no dark jail either. This is free country and I am free woman" (WSS, p. 131).

As I mentioned above, Christophine is tangential to this narrative. She cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native. No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self.²¹ The Caliban of Retamar, caught between Europe and Latin America, reflects this predicament. We can read Rhys' reinscription of Narcissus as a thematization of the same problematic.

Of course, we cannot know Jean Rhys' feelings in the matter. We can, however, look at the scene of Christophine's inscription in the text. Immediately after the exchange between her and the Man, well before the conclusion, she is simply driven out of the story, with neither narrative nor characterological explanation or justice. "'Read and write I don't know. Other things I know.' She walked away without looking back" (WSS, p. 133).

Indeed, if Rhys rewrites the madwoman's attack on the Man by underlining of the misuse of "legality," she cannot deal with the passage that corresponds to St. John Rivers' own justification of his martyrdom, for it has been displaced into the current idiom of modernization and development. Attempts to construct the "Third World Woman" as a signifier remind us that the hegemonic definition of literature is itself caught within the history of imperialism. A full literary reinscription cannot easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system masquerading as Law as such, an alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the "native" as self-consolidating Other.

In the Indian case at least, it would be difficult to find an ideological clue to the planned epistemic violence of imperialism merely by rearranging curricula or syllabi within existing norms of literary pedagogy. For a later period of imperialism—when the constituted colonial subject has firmly taken hold—straightforward experiments of comparison can be undertaken, say, between the functionally witless India of Mrs. Dalloway, on the one hand, and literary texts produced in India in the 1920s, on the other. But the first half of the nineteenth century resists questioning through literature or literary criticism in the narrow sense, because both are implicated in the project of producing Ariel. To reopen the fracture without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins, the literary critic must turn to the archives of imperial governance.

In conclusion, I shall look briefly at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a text of nascent feminism that remains cryptic, I think, simply because it does not speak the language of feminist individualism which we have come to hail as the language of high feminism within English literature. It is interesting that Barbara Johnson's brief study tries to rescue this recalcitrant text for the service of feminist autobiography.²² Alternatively, George Levine reads Frankenstein in the context of the creative imagination and the nature of the hero. He sees the novel as a book about its own writing and about writing itself, a Romantic allegory of reading within which Jane Eyre as unself-conscious critic would fit quite nicely.²³

I propose to take Frankenstein out of this arena and focus on it in terms of that sense of English cultural identity which I invoked at the opening of this essay. Within that focus we are obliged to admit that, although Frankenstein is ostensibly about the origin and evolution of man in society, it does not deploy the axiomatics of imperialism.

Let me say at once that there is plenty of incidental imperialist sentiment in Frankenstein. My point, within the argument of this essay, is that the discursive field of imperialism does not produce unquestioned ideological correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book. The discourse of imperialism surfaces in a curiously powerful way in Shelley's novel, and I will later discuss the moment at which it emerges.

Frankenstein is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction (family and female) and social subject-production (race and male). That binary opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein's laboratory—an artificial womb where both projects are undertaken simultaneously, though the terms are never openly spelled out. Frankenstein's apparent antagonist is God himself as Maker of Man, but his real competitor is also woman as the maker of children. It is not just that his dream of the death of mother and bride and the actual death of his bride are associated with the visit of his monstrous homoerotic "son" to his bed. On a much more overt level, the monster is a bodied "corpse," unnatural because bereft of a determinable childhood: "No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing" (F, pp. 57,115). It is Frankenstein's own ambiguous and miscued understanding of the real motive for the monster's vengefulness that reveals his own competition with woman as maker:

I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. [F, p. 206]

It is impossible not to notice the accents of transgression inflecting Frankenstein's demolition of his experiment to create the future Eve. Even in the laboratory, the woman-in-the-making is not a bodied corpse but "a human being." The (il)logic of the metaphor bestows on her a prior existence which Frankenstein aborts, rather than an anterior death which he reembodies: "The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being" (F, p. 163).

In Shelley's view, man's hubris as soul .maker both usurps the place of God and attempts—vainly—to sublate woman's physiological prerogative.²⁴ Indeed, indulging a Freudian fantasy here, I could urge that, if to give and withhold to/from the mother a phallus is the male fetish, then to give and withhold to/from the man a womb might be the female fetish.²⁵ The icon of the sublimated womb in man is surely his productive brain, the box in the head.

In the judgment of classical psychoanalysis, the phallic mother exists only by virtue of the castration-anxious son; in Frankenstein's judgment, the hysteric father (Victor Frankenstein gifted with his laboratory—the womb of theoretical reason) cannot produce a daughter. Here the language of racism—the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission—combines with the hysteria of masculism into the idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than subject-constitution. The roles of masculine and feminine individualists are hence reversed and displaced. Frankenstein cannot produce a "daughter" because "she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate . . . [and because] one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror" (F, p. 158). This particular narrative strand also launches a thoroughgoing critique of the eighteenth-century European discourses on the origin of society through (Western Christian) man. Should I mention that, much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's remark in his Confessions, Frankenstein declares himself to be "by birth a Genevese" (F, p. 31)?

In this overly didactic text, Shelley's point is that social engineering should not be based on pure, theoretical, or natural-scientific reason alone, which is her implicit critique of the utilitarian vision of an engineered society. To this end, she presents in the first part of her deliberately schematic story three characters, childhood friends, who seem to represent Kant's three-part conception of the human subject: Victor Frankenstein, the forces of theoretical reason or "natural philosophy"; Henry Clerval, the forces of practical reason or "the moral relations of things"; and Elizabeth Lavenza, that aesthetic judgment—"the aerial creation of the poets"—which, according to Kant, is "a suitable mediating link connecting the realm of the concept of nature and that of the concept of freedom . . . (which) promotes . . . moral feeling" (F, pp. 37, 36).²⁶

This three-part subject does not operate harmoniously in Frankenstein. That Henry Clerval, associated as he is with practical reason, should have as his "design . . . to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade" is proof of this, as well as part of the incidental imperialist sentiment that I speak of above (F, pp. 151-52). I should perhaps point out that the language here is entrepreneurial rather than missionary:

He came to the university with the design of making himself complete master of the Oriental languages, as thus he should open a field for the plan of life he had marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his eyes towards the East as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention. [F, pp. 66-67]

But it is of course Victor Frankenstein, with his strange itinerary of obsession with natural philosophy, who offers the strongest demonstration that the multiple perspectives of the three-part Kantian subject cannot co-operate harmoniously. Frankenstein creates a putative human subject out of natural philosophy alone. According to his own miscued summation: "In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature" (F, p. 206). It is not at all farfetched to say that Kant's categorical imperative can most easily be mistaken for the hypothetical imperative—a command to ground in cognitive comprehension what can be apprehended only by moral will—by putting natural philosophy in the place of practical reason.

I should hasten to add here that just as readings such as this one do not necessarily accuse Charlotte Brontë the named individual of harboring imperialist sentiments, so also they do not necessarily commend Mary Shelley the named individual for writing a successful Kantian allegory. The most I can say is that it is possible to read these texts, within the frame of imperialism and the Kantian ethical moment, in a politically useful way. Such an approach presupposes that a "disinterested" reading attempts to render transparent the interests of the hegemonic readership. (Other "political" readings—for instance, that the monster is the nascent working class—can also be advanced.)

Frankenstein is built in the established epistolary tradition of multiple frames. At the heart of the multiple frames, the narrative of the monster (as reported by Frankenstein to Robert Walton, who then recounts it in a letter to his sister) is of his almost learning, clandestinely, to be human. It is invariably noticed that the monster reads Paradise Lost as true history. What is not so often noticed is that he also reads Plutarch's Lives, "the histories of the first founders of the ancient republics," which he compares to "the patriarchal lives of my protectors" (F, pp. 123, 124). And his education comes through "Volney's Ruins of Empires," which purported to be a prefiguration of the French Revolution, published after the event and after the author had rounded off his theory with practice (F, p. 113). It is an attempt at an enlightened universal secular, rather than a Eurocentric Christian, history, written from the perspective of a narrator "from below," somewhat like the attempts of Eric Wolf or Peter Worsley in our own time.²⁷

This Caliban's education in (universal secular) humanity takes place through the monster's eavesdropping on the instruction of an Ariel—Safie, the Christianized "Arabian" to whom "a residence in Turkey was abhorrent" (F, p. 121). In depicting Safie, Shelley uses some commonplaces of eighteenth-century liberalism that are shared by many today: Safie's Muslim father was a victim of (bad) Christian religious prejudice and yet was himself a wily and ungrateful man not as morally refined as her (good) Christian mother. Having tasted the emancipation of woman, Safie could not go home. The confusion between "Turk" and "Arab" has its counterpart in present-day confusion about Turkey and Iran as "Middle Eastern" but not "Arab."

Although we are a far cry here from the unexamined and covert axiomatics of imperialism in Jane Eyre, we will gain nothing by celebrating the time-bound pieties that Shelley, as the daughter of two antievangelicals, produces. It is more interesting for us that Shelley differentiates the Other, works at the Caliban/Ariel distinction, and cannot make the monster identical with the proper recipient of these lessions. Although he had "heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the helpless fate of its original inhabitants," Safie cannot reciprocate his attachment. When she first catches sight of him, "Safie, unable to attend to her friend [Agatha], rushed out of the cottage" (F, pp. 114 [my emphasis], 129).

In the taxonomy of characters, the Muslim-Christian Safie belongs with Rhys' Antoinette/Bertha. And indeed, like Christophine the good servant, the subject created by the fiat of natural philosophy is the tangential unresolved moment in Frankenstein. The simple suggestion that the monster is human inside but monstrous outside and only provoked into vengefulness is clearly not enough to bear the burden of so great a historical dilemma.

At one moment, in fact, Shelley's Frankenstein does try to tame the monster, to humanize him by bringing him within the circuit of the Law. He "repair[s] to a criminal judge in the town and . . . relate[s his] history briefly but with firmness"—the first and disinterested version of the narrative of Frankenstein—"marking the dates with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation. . . . When I had concluded my narration I said, 'This is the being whom I accuse and for whose seizure and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a magistrate'" (F, pp. 189, 190). The sheer social reasonableness of the mundane voice of Shelley's "Genevan magistrate" reminds us that the absolutely Other cannot be selfed, that the monster has "properties" which will not be contained by "proper" measures:

"I will exert myself [he says], and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes. But I fear, from what you have yourself described to be his properties, that this will prove impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is pursued, you should make up your mind to disappointment." [F, p. 190]

In the end, as is obvious to most readers, distinctions of human individuality themselves seem to fall away from the novel. Monster, Frankenstein, and Walton seem to become each others' relays. Frankenstein's story comes to an end in death; Walton concludes his own story within the frame of his function as letter writer. In the narrative conclusion, he is the natural philosopher who learns from Frankenstein's example. At the end of the text, the monster, having confessed his guilt toward his maker and ostensibly intending to immolate himself, is borne away on an ice raft. We do not see the conflagration of his funeral pile—the selfimmolation is not consummated in the text: he too cannot be contained by the text. In terms of narrative logic, he is "lost in darkness and distance" (F, p. 211)—these are the last words of the novel—into an existential temporality that is coherent with neither the territorializing individual imagination (as in the opening of Jane Eyre) nor the authoritative scenario of Christian psychobiography (as at the end of Brontë's work). The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social object-production—the dynamic nineteenth-century topos of feminism-in-imperialism—remains problematic within the limits of Shelley's text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength.

Earlier, I offered a reading of woman as womb holder in Frankenstein. I would now suggest that there is a framing woman in the book who is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor yet encircling. "Mrs. Saville," "excellent Margaret," "beloved Sister" are her address and kinship inscriptions (F, pp. 15, 17, 22). She is the occasion, though not the protagonist, of the novel. She is the feminine subject rather than the female individualist: she is the irreducible recipient-function of the letters that constitute Frankenstein. I have commented on the singular appropriative hermeneutics of the reader reading with Jane in the opening pages of Jane Eyre. Here the reader must read with Margaret Saville in the crucial sense that she must intercept the recipient-function, read the letters as recipient, in order for the novel to exist.²⁸ Margaret Saville does not respond to close the text as frame. The frame is thus simultaneously not a frame, and the monster can step "beyond the text" and be "lost in darkness." Within the allegory of our reading, the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text. It is satisfying for a postcolonial reader to consider this a noble resolution for a nineteenth-century English novel. This is all the more striking because, on the anecdotal level, Shelley herself abundantly "identifies" with Victor Frankenstein.²⁹

I must myself close with an idea that I cannot establish within the limits of this essay. Earlier I contended that Wide Sargasso Sea is necessarily bound by the reach of the European novel. I suggested that, in contradistinction, to reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins, the critic must turn to the archives of imperialist governance. I have not turned to those archives in these pages. In my current work, by way of a modest and inexpert "reading" of "archives," I try to extend, outside of the reach of the European novelistic tradition, the most powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: that Jane Eyre can be read as the orchestration and staging of the self-immolation of Bertha Mason as "good wife." The power of that suggestion remains unclear if we remain insufficiently knowledgeable about the history of the legal manipulation of widow-sacrifice in the entitlement of the British government in India. I would hope that an informed critique of imperialism, granted some attention from readers in the First World, will at least expand the frontiers of the politics of reading.

Notes

¹ My notion of the "worlding of a world" upon what must be assumed to be uninscribed earth is a vulgarization of Martin Heidegger's idea; see "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadler (New York, 1977), pp. 17-87.

²See Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York, 1960); all further references to this work, abbreviated JE, will be included in the text.

³ See Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth, 1966); all further references to this work, abbreviated WSS, will be included in the text. And see Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (New York, 1965); all further references to this work, abbreviated F, will be included in the text.

⁴ I have tried to do this in my essay "Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse" in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York, 1980), pp. 310-27.

⁵ As always, I take my formula from Louis Althusser, "Ideology an Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," "Lenin and Philosophy" and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), pp. 127-86. For an acute differention between the individual and individualism, see V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Studies in Language, vol. 1 (New York, 1973), pp. 93-94 and 152-53. For a "straight" analysis of the roots and ramifications of English "individualism," see C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962). I am grateful to Jonathan Rée for bringing this book to my attention and for giving a careful reading of all but the very end of the present essay.

⁶ I am constructing an analogy with Homi Bhabha's powerful notion of "not-quite/not-white" in his "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambiguity of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (Spring 1984): 132. I should also add that I use the word "native" here in reaction to the term "Third World Woman." It cannot, of course, apply with equal historical justice to both the West Indian and the Indian contexts nor to contexts of imperialism by transportation.

⁷ See Roberto Fernández Retamar, "Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America," trans. Lynn Garafola, David Arthur McMurray, and Robert Márquez, Massachusetts Review 15 (Winter-Spring 1974): 7-72; all further references to this work, abbreviated "C," will be included in the text.

⁸ See José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, ed. Gordon Brotherston (Cambridge, 1967).

⁹ For an elaboration of "an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text," see my "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxist Interpretations of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana, I11., forthcoming).

¹⁰ See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Placing Women's History in History," New Left Review 133 (May-June 1982): 5-29.

¹¹ Rudolph Ackerman, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, (London, 1823), p. 310.

¹² See Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London, 1975); this is one of the general presuppositions of his book.

¹³ See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1979), pp. 360-62.

¹⁴ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, The "Critique of Pure Reason," the "Critique of Practical Reason" and Other Ethical Treatises, the "Critique of Judgement," trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn et al. (Chicago, 1952), pp. 328, 326.

¹⁵ I have tried to justify the reduction of sociohistorical problems to formulas or propositions in my essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The "travesty" I speak of does not befall the Kantian ethic in its purity as an accident but rather exists within its lineaments as a possible supplement. On the register of the human being as child rather than heathen, my formula can be found, for example, in "What Is Enlightenment?" in Kant, "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals," "What Is Enlightenment?" and a Passage from "The Metaphysics of Morals, " trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (Chicago, 1950). I have profited from discussing Kant with Jonathan Rée.

¹⁶ Jean Rhys, in an interview with Elizabeth Vreeland, quoted in Nancy Harrison, An Introduction to the Writing Practice of Jean Rhys: The Novel as Women's Text (Rutherford, N. J., forthcoming). This is an excellent, detailed study of Rhys.

¹⁷ See Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature Up to the Early Nineteenth Century, trans. Robert Dewsnap et al. (Lund, 1967), chap. 5.

¹⁸ For a detailed study of this text, see John Brenkman, "Narcissus in the Text," Georgia Review 30 (Summer 1976): 293-327.

¹⁹ See, e.g., Thomas F. Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (Austin, Tex. 1979), pp. 108-16; it is interesting to note Staley's masculist discomfort with this and his consequent dissatisfaction with Rhys' novel.

²⁰ I have tried to relate castration and suppressed letters in my "The Letter As Cutting Edge," in Literature and Psychoanalysis; The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 208-26.

²¹ This is the main argument of my "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

²² See Barbara Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 2-10.

²³ See George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, 1981), pp. 23-35.

²⁴ Consult the publications of the Feminist International Network for the best overview of the current debate on reproductive technology.

²⁵ For the male fetish, see Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 21:152-57. For a more "serious" Freudian study of Frankenstein, see Mary Jacobus, "Is There a Woman in This Text?" New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 117-41. My "fantasy" would of course be disproved by the "fact" that it is more difficult for a woman to assume the position of fetishist than for a man; see Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23 (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 74-87.

²⁶ Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), p. 39.

²⁷ See [Constantin François Chasseboeuf de Volney], The Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, trans, pub. (London, 1811). Johannes Fabian has shown us the manipulation of time in "new" secular histories of a similar kind; see Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983). See also Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), and Peter Worsley, The Third World, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1973); I am grateful to Dennis Dworkin for bringing the latter book to my attention. The most striking ignoring of the monster's education through Volney is in Gilbert's otherwise brilliant "Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve," Feminist Studies 4 (June 1980): 48-73. Gilbert's essay reflects the absence of race-determinations in a certain sort of feminism. Her present work has most convincingly filled in this gap; see, e.g., her recent piece on H. Rider Haggard's She ("Rider Haggard's Heart of Darkness," Partisan Review 50, no. 3 [1983]: 444-53).

²⁸ "A letter is always and a priori intercepted, . . . the 'subjects' are neither the senders nor the receivers of messages. . . . The letter is constituted . . . by its interception" (Jacques Derrida, "Discussion," after Claude Rabant, "Il n'a aucune chance de l'entendre," in Affranchissement: Du transfert et de la lettre, ed. René Major [Paris, 1981], p. 106; my translation). Margaret Saville is not made to appropriate the reader's "subject" into the signature of her own "individuality."

²⁹ The most striking "internal evidence" is the admission in the "Author's Introduction" that, after dreaming of the yet-unnamed Victor Frankenstein figure and being terrified (through, yet not quite through, him) by the monster in a scene she later reproduced in Frankenstein's story, Shelley began her tale "on the morrow . . . with the words 'It was on a dreary night of November'" (F, p. xi). Those are the opening words of chapter 5 of the finished book, where Frankenstein begins to recount the actual making of his monster (see F, p. 56).

Zohreh T. Sullivan

SOURCE: "Race, Gender, and Imperial Ideology: In the Nineteenth Century," in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 19-32.

[In the following essay, Sullivan argues that though the imperial subject was constructed in monolithic patriarchal and racist terms, the multiple discourses of imperialism disrupted this construction and provided a space for the voice of the "other," as is seen in Frankenstein.]

When the Monster created by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein learns to read, his first lessons include an ordering of the world at once racist, imperialist, and sexist—an oppositional, hierarchic structure finally and ironically reenforced by his own exile away from the company of man. Looking at his first family, he learns the gendering of morality and the moral ordering of nineteenth century class, caste and nationalism: Agatha, the girl with the golden hair and "gentle demeanour" who weeps, is "unlike" common farm-house servants (102); the "strange system of human society" consists of "the division of property . . . of rank, descent, and noble blood" (115); with either money or blood, a man, he knows, might be respected, but, wonders the Monster "what was I?" The answer that some readers have found is that in his inadequacy and self-loathing, the Monster is indeed not a Man but a woman. As nameless, suffering, and powerless object, the Monster is, like Woman, an incomplete and therefore "flawed opposite of man" (Suleiman, 147); and as textual Other, he carries, like Woman, a double status as powerful destroyer and as "miserable . . . abandoned . . . abortion" (219).

What the Monster learns from his Eurocentric and patriarchal texts are the reactionary and conservative lessons befitting the angelic ladies in the novel. "Through this monster," says Judith Weissman, "Mary Shelley begins what has become another battle cry of conservative politicians for the last two centuries—the real danger in radical change is that it will destroy the nuclear family, father, mother, and children" (133). In learning his first lessons in history, government and religion, he follows stages in the construction of Imperial masculinity: he is led to admire those "peaceable lawgivers Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus" (MS, 125) also favored by Rousseau, to transcend feeling by moving from Werther to Plutarch who "taught me high thoughts . . . elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages" (124); he learns the lessons of Orientalism by opposing the "stupendous genius" of the Greeks against the "slothful Asiatics" (125), whose evidence of social power over women is seen in Safie's father, a version of the "Lustful Turk" (see ). Safie, the "sweet Arabian" must flee from Asia and the bondage of the "treacherous Turk" whose religion, we are told, forbids "independence of spirit" to women (119). The Monster learns that geography, history, culture, and religion are all gendered along polarized, language lines—the "gentle," "slothful," female, Asiatic, and Islamic are opposed to the "stupendous genius" of the Greek world and by extension of Christian Europe. The Monster's deformity poses the colonial question of racial difference and is a cultural reminder of 19th-century anxieties about the proximity and fluidity of racial and sexual Otherness. His exile, therefore, is fit reward for upstart deviants who threaten, with terror, energy, or mere difference, the enclosed domestic and national family. But the Monster's rejection by the established family of man is also a symptom of nineteenth-century cultural hegemony that insulates by separating the normal from the deviant, man against monster, and the manly from the effeminate.

I introduce this essay with the story of Shelley's Monster because its unexpected and persistent hold on the English imagination reveals the anxieties of a culture (and gender) that in its preoccupation with defense against the Other constructs the stereotype as fixed reality, fantasy and fetish. "The scene of fetishism," says Bhabha, "is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy—the subject's desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division (161ff.)." Frankenstein's "fetishized" relationship to his creature—that of man to his (female) possession and of subject to object, to be made, displayed, and dismissed—bears obvious resemblance to that of the colonizer to the colonized with all the attendant problems of alienation from "product," projection of desire and contempt, denial of subjectivity, and denial of connection or responsibility for the creature he has tried to make in his own image. Yet, the oppositional and monological structure necessary for the creation of such racial stereotypes dissolves and is problematized when the Monster is allowed to speak his story. The image and fantasy of the Other, whether monster, immigrant, Jew, or "Oriental" fueled the British conviction that their island and unitary identity was imperilled by encroaching hordes of inefficient and physically undesirable aliens (see ). That fear, compounded by popular science and pamphleteers, predicted the impending degeneration of Empire and the mongrelization of the white race. Frankenstein's refusal to produce a female creature, of course, echoes not only Prospero's fear of peopling his island with Calibans and later fears of racial pollution expressed by Eugenicists, but is psychologically necessary for defense against the hegemonic and male fear of self-loss or castration. Or, as Gayatri Spivak puts it:

"the phallic mother exists only by virtue of the castration-anxious son; in Frankenstein's judgment, the hysteric father . . . cannot produce a daughter. Here the language of racism—the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission—combines with the hysteria of masculism into the idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than subject-constitution. (255)

But the story also introduces the multiple and dialogic problems of colonial discourse in the language of the Monster, in his complicity with the lessons of patriarchy, and in the scenes of what Said would call both latent and manifest Orientalism. The Monster's introduction to the history of the world and to knowledge itself is to Patriarchy; the Orient, represented by the silent subaltern Safie, is typically described, to use Said's words, "as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem and the despotic—but curiously attractive—ruler" (Theory, 225). The Oriental female is doubly oppressed, caught between her tyrannical father and foreign patriarchy, between native and foreign imperialism. The Monster too is doubly oppressed, caught between his own rejecting father/creator yet internalizing the knowledge of the world as constructed by the race of the Father; denied as son he is, like the native Caliban, able to recover a voice that simultaneously resists yet confirms and colludes in the repressions of the State.

The construction of the Monster in the position of nameless, fetishized lack allowed to occupy center stage, to speak and then in spite of its destructive and pitiful pleas for recognition, to be exiled into frozen silence, therefore demonstrates how hierarchies of race and class, ideologies of empire, and gender oppositions are actively interdependent on one another. Critics now working on Orientalism, Race theory or Imperialism draw on feminist criticism along with psycho-analytic and cultural criticism in order to raise further questions about margins and centers, about the construction of sexual and political identity, about the connections between power, family, and nationhood and the construction of the male imperial subject. The feminist critique of representation, therefore, has problematized not only the ambivalent image of the Monster, but also of women, of Otherness, and the Imperial and colonized subject.

We probably need no reminders of how theology, science, and ideology grew increasingly interdependent during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as the Great Chain of Being evolved into the ladder of Darwinian evolution. Justifying class, race, and gender inequality by locating its cause in "Nature" rather than society or God, biology became not only the "science of the political right, but the science of those who suspected science, reason and progress" (Hobsbawm 252). And Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, now joined with his differentiation between "weaker" and "stronger" races, resulted in a racist anthropology which presumed that Western survival and Empire were proof enough of racial superiority. Empowered by language and his civilization, the European could define, erase, exoticize, and violate the people and space he entered.

The history of Imperialism is inseparable from (though not identical with) nineteenth century racism and the gender-coded moral oppositions and hierarchies which inform its judgments. Although the intersection between race, political power and gender can be traced to the earliest literary tracts on the "Other" (Said takes us back to Euripides' The Bacchae and Aeschylus' The Persians), it is to Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) that modern writers point as the father of modern racism. As ethnographer, scientist, and aristocrat, Gobineau's fear of miscegenation, democracy, and mongrelization revealed itself through his construction of an elite race as defense against the catastrophe he foresaw of the end of the human race. His Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853), considered by Hannah Arendt and others as the standard text of the century for race theory in history, sees the decay of race and the mixing of blood as the cause of the fall of civilizations. Gobineau distinguishes between the white, the black, and the yellow in terms of the relative limitations of reason, thought, and intellect in non-white races and the predominance of energy, desire, and intensity, combined paradoxically with passivity, to be found in the black and yellow races. The splitting of racial virtues according to familiar class and gender polarities was as apparent to nineteenth-century readers as it is today. By opposing the masculine instincts of civilization, organization, law, and discipline, to the feminine instincts of creativity, art, and passive receptivity, Gobineau mapped the newly emerging science of man on to earlier philosophical (Rousseau) and theological theories. Other theories of race were less sinister than Gobineau's and in some cases were directed to defending the essential humanity of other races despite their difference. But even these functioned to preserve sharp distinctions between "us" and "them" and served to police the sexual and social imagination of nineteenth-century male imperialist ideology.

Across the channel, Edmund Burke denounced the "abstraction" of human rights and the horror of the French Revolution by defending the "national" rights of Englishmen against what he perceived to be the non-existent "natural" rights of men, thereby bestowing nobility onto an entire nation as opposed to a race. Historians debate the relative claims of Carlyle and Dilke to be known as the father of British Imperialism (see and ). But both aimed to define Saxon character in terms of masculine virtues as essential to "leaders," to "heroes" and to what Dilke called that "grandeur of race." Constructions of heroic masculinity were conflated with myths of cultural origins and common inheritance in order to create a unified idea of the Imperial mission.

But while the English were creating images of newly acquired colonies as extensions of their idealized Family with Queen Victoria as androgynous protector, the "ma-baap" (Mother-Father) to native children, the working class family in England, deprived of protection against exploitation, was being subjected to an unregulated labor market with ten-to-eight-hour working days for men, women, and children. The rhetoric of fear eventually used against extended female employment in factories was not unlike that used to describe undesirable Others: Lord Anthony Ashley warned (in 1844) that women became too independent if they had the means to support families, that they were already forming "various clubs and associations, and gradually acquiring all those privileges which are held to be the proper portion of the male sex," that they were "leaders and exciters of the young men to violence," and that, when demoralized, they "contaminate all that comes within their reach" (quoted in Gallager 124). The future of England and of domestic peace, he added, rests on limiting the labor hours for factory women. By the end of the century, women found themselves in increasingly exploitative jobs in large scale manufacture or in sweat-shops such as match-making or sewing machine factories; or women returned to more underpaid and diminishing domestic industries (lace and dress-making, frame-work knitting) that sustained them before the factory age and that allowed them to work while also caring for families and homes. It was this gradual separation of home and work that encouraged patterns of gender-economic division and began a new kind of dependence and inequality between husbands and wives (Hobsbawm 198). But the growth of technology and industrialization also increased work possibilities for women and by the 1880's and 1890's, teaching and clerical and shop positions in Britain and other European countries were predominantly feminized (Hobsbawm 200ff.). Although most women stayed away from emancipation movements, those who formed the vanguard expected a new politics to transform traditional relationships between the sexes and classes, saw class and abolitionist struggles as versions of their own struggle against patriarchy, and formed a substantial part of labor unions, abolitionist and socialist movements. Queen Victoria, of course, opposed "'this mad wicked folly of 'Women's Rights'" for fear that they would, as they unsexed themselves, grow "'hateful, heartless—and disgusting"' (quoted in Miles 187).

As was the case in economics, so too were the politics of Imperialism and education dominantly masculine. The discourse of Imperialism, gendered by hierarchy and trope, mapped domestic ideology to social paternalism, repeated familiar antinomies and confirmed Victorian myths of manhood and of Empire as paternalistic enterprise that in turn informed the myths of manliness so constructed as to oppose the ordered, disciplined, rational and masculine to the chaotic, childlike, irrational and feminine. Ideas of "character" as secret keys to racial and colonial superiority were popularized by such propagandists as Samuel Smiles, whose Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1887) were enormously influential, easily assimilated, widely translated into almost every European and Indian language, as well as Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. More importantly, they sold more than any of the great nineteenth-century novels. The virtues he extolled were part of his gospel of work, discipline and physical exercise—all part of the cult of manliness and Empire:

Wonderful is the magic of drill! Drill means discipline, training, education . . . These soldiers—who are ready to march steadily against vollied fire, against belching cannon—or to beat their heads against bristling bayonets . . . were once tailors, shoemakers, mechanics, weavers and ploughmen: with mouths gaping, shoulders stooping, feet straggling, arms and hands like great fins hanging by their sides; but now their gait is firm and martial, their figures are erect, and they march along to the sound of music with a tread that makes the earth shake. (quoted in Briggs 127-8)

So too for Baden-Powell, constructor of the masculine schoolboy Imperial subject, the founder of the Boy Scouts and inventor of the patent on English character as defense for the imperiled island, the key ingredients were discipline and obedience. The hidden agenda in Baden-Powell, as Michael Rosenthal has shown us, is the self-interested voice of the middle class defending its right to established privileges while justifying the inequalities of the class system (9). The concerns of scouting extend to the rigid and specific masculine codes that inform the mythology of Imperialism. The consensus about the ideal appearance of the Englishman weeded out those who were inefficient, narrowchested, stunted, individualistic, excitable, or easily wearied (Rosenthal 131-3). The persistent myth of decadence, of a falling Empire, of an imperiled island, allowed a collusion between the Baden-Powells, the Eugenicists, the conservative politicians, and the ethnologists who conflated race degeneration, lost manhood, and loss of Empire. Men like Admiral Beresford, the Earl of Dunraven, and other well placed public figures supported, first, the Society for the Suppression of the Immigration of Destitute Aliens and then the British Brothers League that collected "all those who already shared his [William Shaw's] belief that the alien snatched the Englishman's bread from this lips, in order to agitate for a measure of restriction" (Gainer 68).

Whether written by missionaries, scientists, historians, or novelists, Imperial or colonial discourse struggles with the Other as a text upon which to project fantasy, fear, and desire. The historian Thomas Macaulay writes history using such familiar rhetorical tropes (reminiscent of Conrad's first narrator in "Heart of Darkness," who recalls early imperialists and sea pirates as "jewels flashing in the night of time") as exploits of romantic, strong masculine heroes against weak, feminine Others. Describing, for instance, a particular Brahmin Nuncomar in an essay on Warren Hastings, Macaulay writes "What the Italian is to the Englishman, what the Hindoo is to the Italian, what the Bengalee is to other Hindoos, that was Nuncumar to the Bengalees. The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to Effeminancy" (quoted in Green 32). The eighteenth-century historian Abbé Demanet uses comparable tropes: "The African appears to be a machine, wound and unwound by springs, similar to soft wax, which can be made to take on any figure one wishes . . . eager to be instructed, he fervently grabs on to whatever is given him . . . he has nothing to hold him in place" (quoted in Miller 48). Both these passages share elements common to colonial discourse: race, class, masculinity, and power seem naturally interchangeable; and the Other in each becomes an Object to be scrutinized, classified, infantilized, and marked as "female." The popular representation of Africans from 1800-1850 is predominantly one of darkness, nullity, absence, a lack. By mid-century, evolutionary anthropology had blurred the lines between ape and African, by its very denial encouraged the popular acceptance of Africans as the "missing link," and focused on cannibalism as evidence of the unimaginable depths of African barbarism. But Victorians were equally happy with the myth of African as Child, and Sir Frederick Lugard, governor of Nigeria at the turn of the century, was one of many to describe the "typical" African as "a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking self-discipline and foresight, naturally courageous and naturally courteous and polite . . . the virtues and defects of this race-type are those of attractive children" (The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa quoted in Mangan 112). George Romannes' Mental Evolution in Man (1889), Winwood Reade's Savage Africa (1863), John Lubbock's The Origin of Civilisation (1870), and Henry Stanley's Through the Dark Continent (1878) are examples of but a few of the popular texts that informed and conflated such racist and Imperialist ideas of the age.

To be perceived as blank, empty, passive, and childlike suggests a sexual, geographic, and social ordering that is at once seductive and threatening. And while the British imperialists were out finding blank spaces on maps to call their own, their novelists were metonymically engaged in other conquests—the martial conquests and wars for domestic survival. The drawing room novel of the early nineteenth-century defined itself against the intruder or alien and denied the realities of empire even as it obscured the sources of wealth that sustained its propertied heroes; and while Jane Austen was writing of Pemberly and Mansfield Park, Admiral Austen, her brother, was engaged in the First Burmese war and the eventual annexation of Burma to the British Empire.

But there was another genre of popular fiction in the age whose writers acknowledged the world of Imperial conquest, the colonial, and the colonized female even as they revealed the deepest anxieties of Imperial culture—loss of manhood, identity, and racial purity. Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason, Joseph Conrad's Mrs. Almayer, Rider Haggard's Ayesha, or She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and Kipling's native women are all products of English anxieties, primarily about erotic desire and domination, but also about sexually taboo encounters with darker races whose embrace will result in terminal boundary disintegration. Bertha, Rochester's West Indian wife, as so many readers have reminded us, is a nightmare figure, a racial monstrosity: "What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face" (Brontë, 258). Rider Haggard, however, worked his way around the problem of miscegenation even in darkest Africa: his solution was either to kill the African girl before love could be consummated (King Solomon's Mines), or to have his Europeans discover, in "darkest" Africa, a lost white civilization with an almost white female at its heart (Allen Quatermain and She). In She (1887) however, the exquisite, near-immortal, and learned queen meets with a death more hideous than any other in nineteenth-century literature. Sandra Gilbert suggests that the frightful image of the female in Haggard may also be the consequence of anxiety over a new socio-cultural phenomenon—the emancipated New Woman: Ayesha, or She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed may, she suggests, have been half-consciously modelled on other nineteenth-century works about female assertiveness and the New Woman such as Tennyson's The Princess (1847) and Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883). Conrad's Almayer (1895) is destroyed by two women—his native wife and his daughter, an unthinkable type of the new half-breed woman. Although he imagines his marriage to the native Malay will evolve into a bourgeois western family with traditional power divisions, Mrs. Almayer, the "savage tigress," with witchlike claws, instead sets fire to curtains and furniture, moves outside his house into her own hut and defies all his efforts to civilize her into domesticity. Yet, Conrad does not simply caricature her. His ambivalence towards miscegenation, imperialism, and gender roles is seen in his dialogical internalization of both the racist and anti-imperialist discourses of his time (see ). Denied speech for the major part of the novel, the native woman is momentarily, but significantly, restored into both language and history as she rejects her European husband and his civilization, articulates the forbidden wish to expel the colonizer, and is finally indulged by having all her desires met even as Almayer is allowed to die of opium and a broken heart. Even more important for this genre, Conrad allows the mixed marriage to produce a daughter who is not only beautiful, but allowed to speak, smarter than the Europeans and independent enough to choose native Malay life over western civilization.

Other colonial writers did not deal easily with the products of such miscegenation. Kipling, for instance, killed both child and mother in his greatest story of mixed marriage: "Without Benefit of Clergy (1890)." But not before he represents such a union in terms of Imperialist erotic fantasy: the woman is at once his servant, his slave and his "endless delight," able to love him even as he masters her. In his other stories, passion between Englishmen and Indian women meets with equally disastrous results: "Beyond the Pale (1888)" ends with the gruesome vision of the girl's arms held out in the moonlight: "both hands had been cut off at the wrist, and the stumps were nearly healed." In "Lisbeth" (1886), the girl who is seduced and abandoned meets a fate common to her lot: she ages badly, and we are told, marries a native who abuses her. But in spite of the scene of "white" writing and narrative control, she is not entirely silenced and recuperates her story and speech in Kim (1901). In "To Be Filed for Reference" (1888), the Oxford scholar Jellaludin Macintosh slides from marriage to his silent native wife into drugs, alcohol, and death. Dravot's desire for marriage to a native woman in "The Man Who Would be King" (1889) results in his decapitation, in Carnehan's crucifixion, and in the end of their empire. What Kipling ironically sees in this story and others is that the King's desire (for a native woman) is incompatible with the System he has constructed that denies desire. And the King must die. In the battle between nature/desire and culture/imperialism, it is the second and by extension the masculine member of the binary opposition that will survive. And the last surviving image in the story is the decapitated shrivelled head of Dravot crowned with a shining circlet of gold. In all these encounters, then, the love affair between the European and the Native plays out the larger Imperial design that insists, while using a discourse that questions that very insistence, on the need to retain moral, racial, and gender superiority. Love only appears to conquer the male who "falls;" each story reveals an ideological necessity to maintain boundaries, one that confirms the love as transgression, as an alien intrusion into the world of the Ruler; if the story contains a death, its cause is often the native woman, the eroticized object of the colonizer's fantasy life.

These works reveal the stresses and tensions of a culture in which race and gender roles are at once polarized as part of a scientific hierarchy, but also undermined by a plurality of discourses that disrupt and question its hierarchic and moral certainties. The hysterical masculinity of the dominant ideology, so constructed to see the Other only in terms of difference and threat, fulfilled its destiny by compelling recognition, subjugation and fealty; in the process, however, it produced and depended on the existence of the Other, of a system and a desire that, like Frankenstein's Monster, chose to refuse silence, and instead threatened to displace, decenter and destroy its creator.

Notes

¹ Late Mani and Gayatri Spivak draw attention to such double oppression in their studies of Sati and the silent subaltern. In questioning the "parameters within which colonial discourse works," Benita Parry, in a splendid overview, discusses some of the limitations (inadvertent neglect of the native as historical subject, of alternative traditions, of anti-imperialist texts written by national liberation movements) in the deconstructive strategies of Spivak and Bhabha.

For further reading on the social construction and experiences of female subjects in English society, see Barbara Kanner's and Susan Bailey's useful guides to resources, Sara Ellis's 19th century handbooks to women, and the historical and critical work of Catherine Gallagher, Margaret Hewitt, Eric Hobsbawm, Barbara Kanner, Steven Marcus, Wanda Neff, and Ivy Pinchbeck. Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Empire has a fine chapter on women, and Rosalind Miles's Women's History of the World has a chapter on the role of women as weapons of empire and reproduction designed to "keep the master-race pure" (166), as instruments of dominion and domination, as wives, missionaries and teachers. For other works that address the role of women in English empire, see Francis Hutchins, J.A. Mangan, A. P. Thornton and Rupert Wilkinson. Because their work studies official masculine Imperial administration, the lives and writings of real women in the British Empire await further study. Nigel Nicolson's biography of Mary Curzon (1977) though an important contribution, focuses chiefly on her role as wife of the notoriously anti-feminist Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon.

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