Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
term ‘saving face’. It is fine to break the boundary between the Victorian
and the Caribbean as long as no one will see the person in the act. At
times, however, a seeming acceptance and imposition of these strict morals
is apparent, but it may be a mere façade for a different way of life.
Jamaica Kincaid’s work provides excellent illustrations of Caribbean
women imposing these strict morals on their daughters. 57 Kincaid also criticises
the ridiculous nature of these restrictions and how truncating they are
for women and young girls. 58 She also criticises the double standard that
exists. In her work she illustrates how the mother is constantly besieged
by negative energies and unpleasant attacks from other women whom
the father may entertain. Caribbean daughters and granddaughters are
thus caught in a double-bind. 59 They must be good women which means
being so called model wives and mothers, which indicates submission to
patriarchy, or they are considered to be loose women. In ‘Reputation and
Respectability Reconsidered’, Jean Besson explores the contradictions evidenced
in Afro-Caribbean society:
Women are one of the strongest forces for respectability. [...] By and large
[...] it is women who think and act in terms of respectability, it is women,
far more than men, who conceive of the future as respectability. If they
themselves cannot become respectable, then perhaps their children will
be. There is a constant tacit approval of respectability and a deliberate
working on its behalf. 60
Besson goes on to cite many others who consider Afro-Caribbean women
the perpetuators of this colonial double-standard that will only serve to
further marginalise or alienate and dislocate their daughters, and perhaps
their sons, as seen in Kincaid’s work. Besson points out:
Ideally, the woman is passive and enduring. Her world is restricted; her
place is home. [...] A woman’s domain is one of the formalized morality
and codified legality. Church membership is important to her and marriage
is her fulfilment. The woman does not seek to build a reputation
on the basis of personal exploits. She seeks rather to fashion a mantle
of respectability. 61
57
See: Jean Besson, ‘Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered: A New Perspective
on Afro-Caribbean Peasant Women’, in Janet Momsen ed. Women and
Change in the Caribbean. op. cit. p. 21.
58
For more observations on the role of women as cultural bearers See: Bush,
(1990), op. cit., p. 153. Bush quotes from Herskovitz’s observations.
59
See: Ferguson (1992).
60
Jean Besson, ‘Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered: A New Perspective
on Afro-Caribbean Peasant Women’, she quotes from Peter Wilson (1973:
234), p. 18.
61
Besson, p. 19, She cites Robert Dirk’s research in the British Virgin Islands.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 307