April Patrick
July 5, 2001
LITR 5734
Final Exam

Lucy, descended from slaves ripped from their African homeland, used and tossed aside on British sugar plantations, feels the need to emancipate herself from the British legacy that still attempts to subjugate her long after the abolition of slavery.  Britain has not supported Lucy’s intellectual or imaginative growth, wanting her to remain downtrodden, but it has given her a language she uses as a weapon.  “How choose between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” Walcott asks.  Lucy chooses herself and utilizes her control of the English language with brutality to widen the gaps between her and others, accentuating her individuality.

Lucy rebels against her mother as Crusoe rebels against his father.  Lucy loves her mother with a passion near hate; her mother, the greatest “romance of her life,” is an overbearing force, mirroring the British powers, from which she seeks asylum.  Her mother is a burden she can not carry.  Lucy hopes to “put enough miles between me and the place from which that letter came” and emancipate herself.  Yet, she can not stop obsessing on her mother, and as she grows to love things in Mariah, she sees parts of her mother in her. Lucy endeavors to crash the old altars, destroy the old idols just as Lucifer did.  Her rebellion is a bid for individual triumph and expression.  Crusoe, also wants individual triumph, although he aspires for economic gain.  Lucy is a gifted female of African descent who must escape the system that does provide for or allow her success to a wider place where she can fulfill her potential.  Crusoe, a benevolent colonizer, sees economic potential to be fulfilled by exploring the world.  His father tells him to be satisfied with his station in life.  Crusoe can not be satisfied must seek out a life that differs from his father’s drastically.  Lucy wants to differ from her mother and the role the British wish she would play drastically.  Her primary goal is to be unique.

Lucy uses sexual exploration as a tool for carving out her liberation. Tribes in  Africa castrate their women to prevent them from enjoying sexual power, viewing a sexual woman as a threat to male domination.  If women have sexual conquests and gain satisfaction from sex, what will separate them from males?  Without clear demarcations, how will males maintain control of power?  Lucy’s sexual exploration marks a flagrant rebellion against those restrictions for females.  She possesses the typically male traits of  sexual curiosity, desire and the boldness to express it.  Not only does Lucy engage in sexual exploration, she does not regret her actions, does not cling to her partners and does not feel debased by the encounters.  Rather, she views them with the pragmatism of Crusoe planting corn, as an experience from which to reap profit but over which to remain master.  Falling prey to the protestations of love from one of her  modest list of partners would inhibit her uniqueness and independence, preventing her from standing alone as she wishes to do throughout the book.   That is, until the last page when she wishes to “love someone so much that I could die of it,” which parallels her discovery of the potential of putting words to paper.  The “shame” she feels after writing those words comes from sadness over wishing to lose her identity, the monument she’s been erecting throughout the book, dying by joining with another person completely.   

Defoe, by making Crusoe a lone wolf, reveals a similar fear of losing oneself by meshing with someone of the opposite sex.  Of course, sexual dallying or love would interfere with Crusoe’s Puritan “gospel of work,” through which he builds self-sufficiency.  Love would interfere with Lucy’s gospel of individualism.

Lucy regards the existence in Mariah of perfect refinement with disgusted fascination, asking a dozen times, “How did you get to be that way?”   Mariah resides in an Edenic world from which Lucy prefers to tumble down as Lucifer hurtled through the clouds, cast out of Heaven. Lucy believes perfection is boring and dishonest.  Flaws and peculiarities and idiosyncrasies are the thrill of life.  Mariah is blissfully ignorant of many evils, which marks the primary condition of Eden, such as her husband’s infidelity; violence of the sort Lucy’s mother’s friend endured; poverty; or that if all the things in the world Mariah wished to save were saved, she’d probably live in much reduced circumstances.  Lucy prefers to know the grisly details, even to wallow in them with a sullen determination.   Lucy claims she does not want to be like Mariah, “celestial,” “glowing,” “golden” and “pleasant.”  She intends to cultivate a fiercer, more pungent persona replete with elements of the natural world: the dirty truth, unpredictability and diversity--which does not preclude individualism. By being an icon of individuality, she represents the value of diversity.  Britain symbolizes the opposite, highly prizing uniformity, regal manners and prescribed behavior.

The British, “official” or upper-class claim of superiority by virtue of pleasant manners often belies a capacity for hateful acts committed under sly auspices of good intentions, akin to “insults couched in good English, which, of course, made it a double insult—the insult itself and the fact that Chako thought he wouldn’t understand it” (Roy). The colonials used the necessity of spreading Christian ethics as a ruse for their economic exploitations which exhibited nothing in the way of Christian ethics.  The politest, most reserved people can be capable of a cold, calculating cruelty.  In Passage to India, the British jump at the chance to condemn Aziz and then despise Adela for telling the truth.  In God of Small Things, Baby Kochamma, preoccupied with appearing to do what’s proper and customary while seething with improper hostility inside, delights in the opportunity to blame Velutha for rape.  The officials take sadistic pleasure in pulverizing Velutha.  In Lucy, the most upper-class of characters, Louis the lawyer, the ever-ready Capitalist, always on the phone with his stock broker, kisses and fondles

his wife’s former best friend, who also values appearances over truth, in his family’s home, managing to abandon his marriage while convincing Mariah it’s her fault. 

Underdog characters, such as Lucy, bear the truth.  Before Rahel and Estha have been tainted thoroughly, they stand outside “the play,” contrasting it with their natural, uninhibited behavior.  Rahel rushes up to “untouchable” Velutha and jumps into his arms, hides behind the “dirty” curtains and plays on the “dirty” cement kangaroos in the airport, forgetting that the “public” person is  respectable, dignified and remembers station.  Ammu yells (note the hypocrisy of standards for the ruler, who can be quite rude and disrespectful, and the ruled, who is told, disrespectfully, not to be rude) at Rahel to never “disobey me in Public again,” illustrating the extreme emphasis placed on appearances.  In “public,” where they might be observed, they must appear to be as near-perfect as possible, performing their roles properly in “the play.”  By the end of the book, after the two innocents have been utterly despoiled and Baby has convinced Estha to identify Velutha as guilty, their honesty vanishes.  Estha lies to Rahel, saying it was not Velutha in the room.

Roy ends with the beautiful romance of Velutha and Ammu to highlight the sadness of a caste system (rather than a meritocracy), wherein Velutha, the only pure character in the story, is born bad and stays bad. The death of four good characters (Velutha, Sophie Moll, Estha and Rahel) and the twisted coupling of Rahel and Estha demonstrate the end result of perverting truth in favor of the offical version.

Dear April,

I lost my way somewhere near the end, but I hung on to your elbow until then, and was glad to have done so. One expects more organization, and eventually the essay pays the price for its absence. Yet one may give up those satisfactions for the sake of a couple of the very sharp intertextual readings you perform here. The first concerns Lucy’s use of love in ways parallel to Crusoe’s work ethic. By all means look out for some feminist theory to help you develop this idea. You want some help from some other pioneers, because the idea strikes me as being simultaneously dangerous and empowering—dangerous because it might reduce women to sexuality, empowering because it violates “good manners” and all its repression for the sake of liberating what is, after all, a real power. The “good manners” issue was your other great moment, especially your retrieval of Chacko’s use of them to legitimize cruelty. Our texts have been such a rich source of such shared themes, that we could continue this course indefinitely.

Regarding my quibbles about your organization, it may help you to know that I quibble with myself over how much to quibble. Under no circumstances do I mean to sound condescending (though that’s a rather Chacko-like sentence). But the way you’re writing now is somewhat in the vein of “the brilliant undergraduate” rather than “the disciplined graduate.” Brilliance is always fun and throws off sparks that penetrate momentarily into the darknesses that discipline agrees to maintain. But the downside is the “momentarily” part—ideas tend to flash rather than being developed into a steady illumination. This does not question the quality of the insights I praised above, but as I move from one subject to another, or as I reach the end of the essay, I have to ask, what does it add up to? What do I carry out? This larger point that a good organization can fabricate tends to have a life beyond the notion.

Given your globe-trotting tastes, I can only guess your academic plans, but given your collegiality and brilliance (if overmuch, substitute “liveliness”), I’d welcome the chance to work further with you. If that happens, let’s confer as convenient on your writing project and maybe work on some lessons regarding overall essay and paragraph organization. You write very well, considering that it appears that you haven’t received much intensive training along these lines. (If my stereotypical impressions of Bennington and similar schools are at all accurate, brilliance counts for much, and “discipline” reeks of repression.) But my point is less to condemn your earlier education and inclinations than to suggest that, with a little instruction, your writing could take some giant steps forward in quality and confidence.

Quick FYI: the practice you describe concerning African women’s sexuality is usually described as circumcision rather than castration.