LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Final Exam 2003

Rosalyn Mack
June 29, 2003
LITR 5734 – Final Exam

Feminine Colonialism: The Civilizing Influence of Women

            During the first three weeks of the course the novels and our class discussions centered primarily on the male perspective, with only a brief excursion into the female contributions to the colonial and the postcolonial discussion.  I found it interesting that the women wrote two of the last four novels we read.  This got me thinking about women, colonialism and how colonialism affected its female subjects.  I also gave some thought to the women who participated as colonizers and began to see that the voices of women are under-represented in colonial literature but gaining a place in postcolonial literature.  But, what images of women are found in colonial and postcolonial literature?  And what do those images tell the reader about colonialism?

Looking at course objective three which desires to observe representations or repressions of gender in the traditionally male-dominated fields of cross-cultural contact and literature, I began to see two types of women emerging: the civilizer and the destroyer.  Of course, it’s not as straightforward as that.  What really begins to emerge is the idea of women as either upholding the social, political, and cultural order or acting outside of it, usually to the detriment of the female and those surrounding her. 

The colonial novels we read E. M. Forster’s Passage to India and Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe take an interesting approach to women and colonialism.  Forster uses women as a device to explore the nature of civility and colonization.  DeFoe pushes women to the margins of his story; mostly there are no women during the majority of Crusoe’s life.  Neither of these novels explored how women dealt with living in a colonized land or being one of the dispossessed people.  

Forster, while populating his India with women and men equally, does not truly give the women a voice.  They parrot the attitudes and behaviors of their men, never providing the compassion and understanding one usually expects from women.  They’re snobbish, racist and intolerant; middle-class women who consider themselves superior to any Indian, even going so far as to believe, as Mrs. Turton asserts, “[y]ou’re superior to everyone in India except one or two of the Ranis, and they’re on an equality” (42).  They have no depth.  They are merely foils for Forster’s political agenda. 

His women are either bitter, jaded paper gods, such as Mrs. Turton and the other wives of English officials, or naïve and ignorant like Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore.  The Indian women are represented as less than that, nearly invisible, voiceless creatures.  Women in Passage to India are more of a plot device than living, breathing entities.

Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore are the embodiment of this.  Forster uses them to highlight the difficulty in trying to understand and define the colonial experience in India.  Mrs. Moore seems to be the voice of reason looking to reestablish the humanity within the English community.  She is the conscience of the novel, pointing out the un-Christian behaviors of the supposedly civilized British.  She is doomed to failure.  Her every attempt to revive British civility as it existed in England failed and eventually she was no match for India or colonialism.  She dies. 

Miss Quested is cast as the instigator of chaos.  Her driving need to “see India” upsets the delicately balanced English-Indian relations.  Her attempts to move beyond the established and accepted social rules puts her at direct odds with that world.  Miss Quested does not understand the colonial world; she sees India as a place rich in culture and interesting people, not as a resource to be exploited.  This fundamental failure to understand the purpose of colonialism is her flaw.  She is change at a time when everyone, English and Indian, appears to be accepting of the status quo.  She is doomed to failure for the same reasons as Mrs. Moore: no one is ready to hear what she has to say. 

Even though it is Miss Quested’s actions that provide the catalyst of the story; she is relegated to the background once the action begins.  The story is not about her and so she becomes almost a side note as does Mrs. Moore.  Forster’s novel is about men and colonialism; women are important only in how they affect men’s lives.

The same theory applies to Robinson Crusoe.  Women are only presented as objects of what they can do for Crusoe.  But the lack of women on Crusoe’s island can be seen as a lack of civilization and culture.  Crusoe has to hack out an existence on the island, reverting to an almost savage existence.  He becomes the quintessential male, surviving through brute force and physical strength.  There is no arguing that a female presence on his island would have changed his behavior but how would it have changed it? 

Crusoe provided himself with food, water and shelter, the basics for human survival.  Would he have found a wider variety of food or built a better shelter?  It’s difficult to say.  If you believe that women impose some sort of civilization on man, then perhaps Crusoe would have lived differently.  On the other hand, a woman might not have been of any help with the basic survival needs and would have a detriment.  A woman on the island would change the story.

Women were not seen as colonizers.  They were an afterthought, brought into the colonized region only after the men had subdued the area.  Their absence in colonial literature mirrors their lack of voice or choice in the time period.  Men viewed women as objects to be protected and often discounted their view of the world.  They were expected to maintain the social and cultural order.  Acting outside of those expectations was a punishable event. 

This urge to punish the female who betrays the established cultural order can be seen in postcolonial literature as well, most specifically in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things.  Ineffectual, absent or corrupt men populate Roy’s world; her women are left to maintain order.  The four primary women in the story each become a different representation of the forces acting upon postcolonial India. 

Mammachi represents the old order of colonialism and female submission.  Just as she accepts the beatings of her husband, she accepts the established order.  She doesn’t fight back or seek to defend herself.  She ignores any changes that would affect her worldview.  Mammachi’s world has always been male dominated and she seems content with that, or at least resigned to it. 

Her sister-in-law, Baby Kochamma, goes beyond acceptance; she becomes the enforcer of social order.  Watching and notating every slip by Ammu and Rahel, she waits for the opportunity to punish both.  Her bitterness drives her actions.  She becomes Ammu’s enemy, whether out of spite or jealousy is difficult to tell.

Ammu and Rahel are opposite sides of the same coin.  Ammu, the lawbreaker, gives birth to Rahel, the chaotic force in the story.  Ammu acts on her own behalf and reaps only momentary benefits from those actions.  Her love marriage goes wrong; her affair ends in violence and death.  Seemingly, the lesson is that women should have no choice in their lives. 

But Rahel as a child makes her own choices.  They are often inappropriate and quickly punished but they are hers.  When she reaches adulthood, Rahel’s choices aren’t much better made, but she is the only female in her family who seems disconnected and outside the stifling caste system and social order of India.  Sadly she is also disconnected from most people.  The price for her freedom of choice is isolation and a sort of soul death that echoes her mother’s physical death and her twin brother’s silence.  There is still no room for a woman’s voice, even in postcolonial India.

Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy is perhaps the closest postcolonial women have come to having both a voice and a choice.  Lucy, unable to remain in the postcolonial environment of her childhood, leaves to shape a new life for herself.  Unfortunately she has no option but to enter a master-servant position if she wants to escape her colonial roots.  This isn’t a change from the colonial worldview she just escaped from and she knows it.  Consequently she strikes out at her boss, Mariah, often seeking to inflict some of the hurt she’s felt.  It doesn’t always work because it’s misplaced. 

Ironically, Lucy sees Mariah as a victim of colonialism too; what seems to infuriate her is that Mariah doesn’t seem to realize she’s a victim.  Mariah views the world as a place she belongs with things the way they’ve always been.  She is the product of the colonizers; to Lucy she is a colonizer.  Mariah is the “victor who can claim to be the vanquished also” (41) because she’s a woman and forced to rely on men to provided for her but she’s also a white woman whose ancestors colonized America.  Mariah’s books on women’s issues indicates that she’s aware of her oppression as a female but not of her colonial oppression.  It is an interesting dilemma both for Lucy and the reader.

Like Ammu and Rahel, Lucy strikes back at a social dynamic that does not offer enough choices.  Unlike them, her fight is personalized and directed at her mother.  Lucy’s feelings of betrayal are understandable, her mother buys into the colonial idea that men take action and women wait at home.  Lucy is angry that she is not offered a future beyond what she already knows and reaches for more.  But, like all the other women we’ve studied, she must pay the price for freedom from the colonial yoke.  She too becomes isolated and empty. 

For Lucy, moving beyond the colonial world she knows means stepping into a void and creating a new identity.  Of all the female characters we’ve seen, only she seems prepared, even happy, to do that.  Neither Miss Quested, Ammu, nor Rahel tried to recreate themselves.  Ammu had moments when she would become someone else, someone outside her expected roles, but those were temporary and transient.  Lucy has begun the process of becoming someone new even at the cost of severing her connections with the old, in this case her mother.  She happily makes that cut.  She recognizes that to escape the colonial stigma she must learn a new way to live.  It’s a lesson that Ammu and Rahel, our other postcolonial women, were unable to learn.

The most interesting thing about all four novels is that they highlight the suppression of female self-actualization.  The women presented can move within their societies but they cannot grow beyond the expected roles.  Those women who seek more, Miss Quested, Ammu, Rahel and Lucy, find themselves abandoned and alone, outside the social structure and unable to reenter.  They become outcasts. 

These women all have one thing in common: youth.  They are young and believe that they can break away and shape their own lives, free from the constraints of colonial and postcolonial social and cultural regulation.  Youth allows them to see the flaws in society and gives them the courage to dream that they can make the world over and reshape it into the place they want it to be.  Youth also blinds them to the consequences of attempting to make those changes.

From Miss Quested’s demands to see India and know Indians to Ammu’s love marriage and out-of-caste affair to Rahel’s marriage and move to the United States, and especially Lucy’s bitter rejection of all things that remind her of her mother; these are all actions of women seeking to carve out their own space and find their own voices. 

But the women who uphold the status quo do not fair much better.  Mrs. Moore, Mammachi, Baby Kochamma and Mariah all lose a piece of themselves as the price for conformity.  They accept the roles society gives them, knowing the price they must pay for it.  They have no voice and no choice either.

In the end, colonial and postcolonial literature creates a picture of women as victimized by colonialism whether they are members of the colonizing group or the “natives.”  While female power can be found within colonialism it is most often expressed as an offshoot of male power.  Women who attempt to seize power, even if it’s just over their own lives, are dangerous and silenced. 

The literature gives us only two kinds of women, participant or victim, there is no room for a third.  However postcolonial writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and, to a certain extent, Arundhati Roy are forcing a third image into the discussion, the woman who is neither victim nor participant, but a changeling, moving away from colonialism and into a new world where she shapes her own future and is removed from the past. 

Start time 9:45 p.m.

Break 11:50 p.m. – 12:05 a.m.