Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

WOMEN OF COLOUR: RECONTEXTUALISING ‘OTHERNESS’
colonialism in Brontë’s work and similar texts. 52 Said illustrates how ‘[t]he
right to colonial possessions helps to establish social order and moral priorities
at home’, 53 and is a process of ‘Othering’ that privileges whiteness
or Englishness.
Similarly, the danger for white society as presented by the Caribbean
woman is also demonstrated by the character Cecilia in Cirilo Villaverde’s
novel Cecilia Valdés. 54 The most significant problem in Cecilia Valdés
is that Cecilia, a light skinned mulata, can pass for white. This is a very
desirable position in Caribbean society, where a mulatto becomes almost
indistinguishable from a fully white person. She is very beautiful. She uses
this to improve her position in life, but it is her undoing. Due to the strict
social stratification in Cuba, she ultimately loses when her true ethnicity is
revealed. 55 This multiplicity of examples of the Antillian female as exotic
‘Other’ is deployed in many texts and assumes such a uniformity that it
comes close to forming what appears to be a monolithic representation.
Rhys illustrates that these racial differences and gender constructs
do exist, even from a Caribbean perspective. West Indian mothers and
grandmothers particularly, have fought against these stereotypes for the
sake of their daughters and granddaughters. However, this battle Antillian
women fight against is embedded in cultural resistance as they must fight
to dismantle the image of the beast of burden and also the threat of being
perceived as a scarlet woman. Often, the only solution seemingly available
to Caribbean grandmothers and mothers, therefore, is to impose strict Victorian
morals on these younger women. This imposition, however, seeks
to further marginalise them or delimit them in what they, as respectable
women, can do with their lives. 56 This is, however, loaded with cultural
specificities as the women negotiate a space within the façade of Victorian
morals so that they can free their Caribbean-self. In short, many women
insist on the appearance of virtue while permitting other behaviour under
its cover. The best way to define this in the Caribbean would be to use the
52
Culture and Imperialism (New York, Vintage, 1993), pp. 73-229.
53
Ibid., p. 73.
54
Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés: Novela de costumbres Cubanas 3 rd edition,
(Mexico, Editorial Porrúa, S. A., 1986).
55
Villaverde (1986); See also: Verena Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour
in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values
in Slave Society (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1974).
56
See: Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Girl’, in At the Bottom of the River (New York, Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1992), pp. 3-5; See also: Kincaid’s criticism of lack of
education for young women in Lucy; Kincaid also criticises the role women
and girls must live. See: Annie John (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1986), pp. 95-103.
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •