LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Final Exams 2008

Essay 2: Compose a dialogue between our four novels since the midterm. (Objectives 1, 2, and 3 + others)

Karen Daniel

Voiceless and Choiceless: the Oppression of Women
 in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature

In some ways Colonial literature seems to be synonymous with male literature.  When we read Forster, Passage to India and Defoe, Robinson Crusoe rarely do we see women truly involved in the stories, and when they are, it is not normally a positive portrayal.  Colonization, like the gender relations of the time, was all about dominance and submission.  If the dominators, or the colonizers, were the all-knowing and important people, then that made those being colonized weak and unable to take care of their own needs. If the colonized people didn’t have anything worth listening, then certainly females didn’t either, so why give them voice? 

As we journeyed in Post-colonial literature via Singh, Train to Pakistan and Kincaid, Lucy, women gained more voice, but not always in positive ways.  Certainly Lucy gives women a voice, especially the main protagonist, but that voice seems mixed up and lost much of the time, and is often still centered on analyzing the actions and intentions of men. In Train to Pakistan the women are not exactly given voice, however, they are present, though, as Georgeann Ward stated in her 2005 essay, “female characters are used almost exclusively to highlight the vulnerability of post-colonial India during the Partition Riots.”

As Objective one states, it is interesting to read all of these novels in conjunction with one another to show that whether authors deprive women of voice by eliminating them from the story, showing them only as extensions of the more important men, or, as in the case of Lucy, forced them into exile as the only means to find identity, it is clear that all of the women are victims of colonialism.

In Passage to India, Forester uses his female characters to show the best and the worst of Colonial society.  While they appear to have a voice and be a force in the story, the women are representative of the multiple factions of society that existed in their culture.  The military wives, such as Mrs. Turton, are so obnoxious and horrifying as to be comical.  They believe they know what is best for everyone, much like the Imperialists, yet are incapable of doing anything really worthwhile, especially since most of the time their help is unwarranted.  They are a parody of the men they are married to and are even more horrifying as they are also useless in the grand scheme of Indian society.  On the other hand, Ms. Quested, the newcomer, starts off naively feeling that she can do good, yet is quickly brought over to the other side as she becomes more educated as to the true nature of the Indians; while Ms. Moore, refusing to buy into the colonial social structure, is considered undesirable.  Forester hardly gives them positive voice, and in fact, womanhood up as the epitome of weakness and ignorance.  When Aziz takes the women on a picnic, he is more concerned about bringing the right food than in protecting their safety.  This very feminine tendency ends up being his downfall when something actually happens to Ms. Quested.  In her presentation, Dawlat Yassin states:

 Mr. Heaslop’s racism [is] made clear in his distinction between the ways Westerners’ [pay] attention to details in everything while Orientals do not: “Inattention to details; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race. Similarly to meet in the caves as if they were the clock at …”At the time the reality is that Dr. Aziz does not forget about the collar stud, rather he gives it to a friend out of oriental generosity, and  when he plans the expedition he does pay attention to each and every detail.

However, Aziz did not actually pay attention to every detail—he forgot the most important consideration—the safety of the women, something no intelligent, Anglo man would ever forget.  These characters are perfectly set up to represent Colonial society—the useless colonizers who believe they are helping everyone by interfering, the ignorant natives who only need to learn that the ways of the colonizers is best, especially as they are unable to make good decisions and protect themselves, and finally the rebels who refuse to toe the line and need to be eliminated in order for things to run smoothly. 

Singh takes a different approach in Train to Pakistan, the book we read in conjunction with Passage to India.  There are not really any women with strong voice in his novel; instead the majority of the time the women we see have just experienced a great loss and were helpless to stop it.  Throughout most of the book, they are watching the men they love and need make horrible mistakes and/or suffer dire fates.  The women are constantly crying, screaming, begging, exiled, raped, and losing loved ones in moments of chaos.  Women didn’t have political influence or importance; however, they were the ones left behind to deal with the fallout after the colonizers left. They were voiceless and choice-less.

The other colonial text we read, Robinson Crusoe, truly gives women no voice as they are practically non-existent in the novel. At the beginning, his mother vocalized her desires that he not travel, yet we don’t hear him lamenting her dismay, only the wishes of his father.  Defoe truly succeeds in taking voice away from Colonial women as they are not even present to give it.  They are simply unnecessary. Crusoe doesn’t need a woman to dominate anyhow—he has Friday for that.

Finally, in Lucy, we begin to see women who are able to make choices and have dialog, both politically and socially; however, Lucy is not as independent as she seems at first.  Much like the natives who chased away the colonizers, Lucy is still so driven by trying to lose her oppressive past that she is incapable of going on and bettering herself.  Throughout the novel she continues to assert her hatred of her mother, yet Lucy’s mother is a metaphor for her post-colonial upbringing—a residual of all that she hated about being forced to exist in a society which meant nothing but oppression for her.  Though Lucy has a voice, it is almost as if she spends more time speaking for her mother and the other oppressors than speaking for herself, although she doesn’t see this. 

Of all of the characters, Lucy is the one who tries the hardest to break free of her colonial bonds, but perhaps she is just the one more likely to be able to achieve the freedom she desires.  If she were to stop obsessing about her mother and the oppression she represents, she would be able to do more, but at least she is able to voluntarily go into exile.  This is probably not so easy for the women of Africa or India.  Even when women seem to have power, it is really only through their men.  Whether they are the colonizers or the colonized, none of these women truly discover the power to be independent.

The most compelling part of this course, and the most difficult for me, was to find the open-mindedness to read all of these texts as if they had lessons to teach, rather than as personal attacks on my own way of life.  I think reading them in conjunction with one another helped in this regard, although the one continuing theme in the works was the idea that nations like the US that move in and “help” other countries are seldom welcome, and seldom successful. I think Colonial and Post-colonial literature bring value to the table, in part because it is easier to realize this in terms of a story rather than, for example, listening to someone lecture on it.  If nothing else it is certainly harder to tune out the voices of the characters in the novels we read, or the lack of voices; whichever the case, these novels contain important messages about the oppression of all women affected by colonialism.