Spivak and Parry Notes

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