by Kara Wylie

Created on: June 04, 2008

Imperialist Doctrine as Motivation for English Novels
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism discusses the "imperialist narrativization of history" in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (Spivak 839). Because "imperialism" is "England's social mission" and "cultural representation of England to the English" and literature produces the "cultural representation" of the English, all texts are driven by a hidden motivation to support the existing "imperialist project" (Spivak 838). This imperialist project requires the "worlding'" of "Third World'" entities so that their cultures are "exploited" by the English and translated into British literary heritage until these "heritages" lose all identity with the original country (Spivak 838).

"Axioms of imperialism" are configured in the basic structures of the English narrative to subtly drive the motivations of the novels and uphold the established ideals of English hierarchy over the "Third World" (Spivak 839). For instance, imperialist measures are masked in "childbearing," or "domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction," and "soul making," or "civil-society-through-social-mission" (Spivak 839). One moment of "childbearing" occurs when Spivak reveals that the "family/counter-family dyad" that allows Jane to move from the "counter-family" to the "family-in-law" is dependent on the "ideology of imperialism" (Spivak 841). In order for a "good greater than the letter of the Law" to be "broached" and the romantic notion of Jane and Rochester realizing their dreams of a legal family to occur, the imperialist figure of Bertha Mason must be removed (Spivak 841). Furthermore, Bertha's destruction has to be accomplished in a way that upholds the English ideology of imperialism and the proper British superiority. Therefore, Bertha's suicide is constructed in a manner that reflects her inferiority through imperialism. First, she is dehumanized through bestial imagery, such as confusing whether she is a "beast or human being" and embellishing her animalistic traits like groveling on "all fours," growling "like some strange wild animal," having a "mane" instead of hair, and appearing like a "clothed hyena" (Bronte 289-290). By rendering "indeterminate the boundary between human and animal" in Bertha's character, Spivak argues that "her entitlement under the spiritof the Law" is weakened (843). This allows the reader to accept Bertha as subhuman and below the law,

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