Spivak and Parry Notes

Wide Sargasso Sea
Walcott, Emery, Spivak and Parry
Terms: Spivak’s “axioms of imperialism” (child bearing and soul making); worlding
(individuated “selving”); Parry’s evocation of postcolonial counter-discourse
Derek Walcott, “Jean Rhys”: a West Indian poet interested in exploring the way he is /
is not African
Mary Lou Emery, “Modernist Crosscurrents”: interested in looking at Rhys working
at the intersections of multiple identities: woman writer, West Indian author, European
modernist
“In some ways white Creoles experience a double dose of a quintessential aspect
of Caribbean experience, the marginality of living in between cultures . . . Living
in between two cultures, belonging to neither completely, characterizes what
sociologists have called the ‘marginal man’: ‘one who is poised in psychological
uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds; reflecting in his soul the
discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds” (165)
on the one hand, this can lead to a “moment of self discovery when they reject
possession by either” (165)
“Rhys’s identity as a white Creole West Indian writer, then, is an unstable one –
although that instability may make her all the more part of the heterogeneity of
Caribbean cultures” (166): descended from the white planter class of which [she]
is ashamed, and yearning towards a black culture that rejects [her] and Britain,
which dismisses her
Wide Sargasso Sea “cannot give the protagonist a home; rather it places her
divided identity within the cultural and historical context of its division, enabling
a reconceptualization of the very concept of identity” (167)
Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (originally
published in 1985 when not enough attention was paid to the history of imperialism
in British literature not directly addressing the question; for Spivak (as well as
Edward Said) imperialism is omnipresent, perhaps most significant when it is an
unquestioned presence
Gayatri Spivak weds here an attention to deconstruction, feminist literary criticism,
and radical postcolonial subjectivity that privileges indeterminacy over identity
politics
As suspicious (in some ways) over postcolonial writers eager to see themselves as
either the idealized “Ariel” or as a revolutionary “Caliban” because both involve

assuming an identity constructed from the “axioms of imperialisms”; the
unassimilated “native” (799-800)
“claiming to be Caliban legitimizes the very individualism that we must
persistently attempt to undermine from within” (800)
Sees in the Anglo-American feminist exaltation of individuality and agency a
dangerous corollary in imperialist ideology which underpins (and is created by)
nineteenth-century English literature
Spivak contesting feminist assertions about literature that ignore the “fact” of
imperialism and the ways in which many nineteenth-century women writers exalt
individualist agency without acknowledging the ways in which such an agenda
supports the imperialist project: from the post-colonialist perspective white women
are not necessarily separate from structures of power that oppress, but rather part
of those structures
Spivak interested in tracing out the ways that Jane Eyre (a canonical text of
female individualism) depends upon the “axioms of imperialism,” which readers
then uncritically celebrate (798)
a larger critique of our privileging of the “female subject”; a “worlding” which
relies upon the simultaneous "unworlding" of the "Other"
addresses the text and not Bronte herself; “my readings here do not seek to
undermine the excellence of the individual artist” (799)
“the readings will incite a degree of rage against the imperialism 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” (799)
argues that the imperialist project insists on either "childbearing" or "soul
making" both of which are dependent upon excising the "native female" (799)
reads opening scene as indicative of Jane's "self-marginalized uniqueness"
with the reader as "accomplice" (800)
Reads Jane as having to move from “counter family” (and outsider) to “family-inlaw”;
a move that requires the immolation of Bertha, whose “Otherness” leaves her
subject to be excised from her marriage to Rochester; "other" because she exists on a
human/animal frontier (801); notes that the novel insists upon "a good greater than the
letter of the Law"; a "divine injunction"
The novel achieves both child bearing (i.e. Jane) and soul making (St. John),
which maintains the male/female and public/private binary (803

Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea
Notes that Rhys keeps Bertha’s “humanity” and “sanity as a critic of imperialism,
intact” (803)
But argues that Rhys confines Bertha within the script of imperial identity: “Rhys
makes Antoinette see her self as Other, Bronte’s Bertha” (804)
In doing so she allows Jane her idealized “feminist individualism” (804); a
necessary sacrifice
Reads it as a Narcissus story: Antoinette cannot be mirrored by Tia, nor can Jane
be mirrored by Bertha: “the Other that cannot be selfed, because [of] the fracture
of imperialism” (804)
And [Rochester] as a victim of a failed Oedipal exchange, without the
achievement of the patronymic (805)
Sees the representation of Christophine as articulating the boundaries of its own
discourse (806)
While she functions as a critic and occupies the space of “commodified person,” she
leaves the novel without achieving change or reform
This marks the text, for Spivak, as imperialist since “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” (807)
If Christophine achieved selfhood, the novel could not criticize
imperialism (would also be elevating individualism)
Spivak poses a particularly interesting reading of Frankenstein because she argues, in
effect, that the novel doesn’t celebrate agency but rather questions the very possibility of
a unified subjectivity
The Creature – as she reads him – is evidence of the impossibility of marrying
theoretical reason, practical reason, and aesthetic appreciation (categories of the
self posited by Emmanuel Kant – a nineteenth-century philosopher)
her reading also suggests that we become what we are treated as – the
Creature is treated as “monstrous”, hence he becomes a “monster”
interested in the way in which the novel fails to represent the unified subject so
celebrated in Western literature – at the same time she credits Mary Shelley with
little credit for this achievement; the text is seen as working autonomously –

separately from the putative “author” – the text emerges out of a set of
social, political, and aesthetic forces that the author “channels” more than
“controls”
Spivak is explicitly uninterested in the author’s intention; she is interested in the text’s
“usefulness” in exploring the dynamics of individualism and imperialism (810-811)
Spivak reads the novel as a type of re-writing of The Tempest only here the
“Other” (the Creature/Caliban) refuses to be “selfed” (as Safie has been or
Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea); he cannot be brought under the law [and we
can tell here, that Spivak is rooting for the Creature – she celebrates his
refusal to be brought under the rule of law]
in a persuasive reading of the novel’s conclusion, Spivak argues that (in fact) the
Creature’s fate remains utterly unknown – “lost in darkness and distance”
further supported by the fact that we don’t have evidence of Margaret Saville (the
ideal English female subject) receiving the letters – the frame is open (268)
In a revised version of this essay, Spivak reads these texts as “supplements” of each
other because each contains what the other lacks; her refusal to treat the intentionality
of the author as well as her use of the term “supplement” reveals yet another critical
dimension to her work ; a postcolonial feminist, she draws upon deconstruction as
well
Benita Parry, [Two Native Voices in Wide Sargasso Sea] (from “Problems in
Current Theories of Colonial Discourse” pub. 1987)
Takes explicit issue with Spivak’s deconstructionist response to identity, particularly at
the end of the excerpt:
Spivak’s deliberated deafness to the native voice where it is to be heard, is at
variance with her acute hearing of the unsaid in modes of Western feminist
thought . . . in her own writings [she] severely restricts (eliminates?) the space in
which the colonized can be written back into history, even when ‘interventionist’
possibilities’ are exploited through the deconstructive strategies devised by the
post-colonial intellectual. (250)
Antoinette must (in Spivak’s articulation) be sacrificed to Jane’s “subjectconstitution”
and Christophine cannot be heard at all
In only recognizing Antoinette as playing “the part of the woman from the colonies”
who is silenced and “unselved,” Spivak (according to Parry) misses the opportunity
to hear Christophine, a “native” agent

In Spivak’s account “a black female who in WSS is most fully selved, must be
reduced to the status of a tangential figure, and a white Creole woman (mis)
construed as the native female produced by the axiomatics of imperialism” and
sacrificed to them (248)
According to Parry, “Christophine subverts the Creole address that would
constitute her as domesticated Other, and asserts herself as articulate antagonist of
patriarchal, settler and imperialist law” (248)
Does so in her refusal of a patronymic and husband; in her protection of
Rochester and her articulation of his economic, social and political power; and in
her use of obeah
Parry interested in examining the assertion of a “counter-discourse” (249) in
response to hegemonic interpellation (“worlding” in Spivak’s terms):
In Spivak’s reconstruction, Christophine’s departure from the story . . . is without
narrative and characterological explanation or justice. But if she is read as the
possessor and practitioner of an alternative tradition challenging imperialism’s
authorized system of knowledge, then her exit at this point appears both logical
and entirely in character. (249)
Christophine “knows from experience that her powders, potions and maledictions
are effective in the West Indies, undoes through its excess the rationalist version
valorized by the English, while at the same time acknowledging the boundaries to
the power of her knowledge” (249)