Amy Breazeale

Exploring the use of Colonial and Post-Colonial Dialogue

The dialogue in colonial and post colonial novels exemplifies “self and other” which humanizes the narrative. The dialogue between Crusoe and Friday and Mariah and Lucy illustrate this idea of “subject to object” and “master to slave” to equalizing and humanizing conversation. Friday gains humanity throughout the novel although at the beginning he was told not asked. The reader begins to see the roles change from master and slave to human to human interactions. Crusoe becomes Friday’s father figure and begins humanizing, equalizing dialogue when he asks him about his culture.

Mariah and Lucy’s relationship defines humanizing dialogue all through the course of the novel. Although their relationship can be considered to be like master to slave because of Lucy’s employment to the family she is often praising the authenticity between the two. Their relationship according to Lucy often reminds her of a mother daughter relationship. Lucy often refers to how much she loved Mariah when she reminded her of her mother like her hands.

Colonial and post-colonial novels often are characterized with reactions and references from other texts.  Intertextuality refers to the defining of texts by using other works either by borrowing or referencing. Jamaica Kinkaid’s Lucy and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe both connect to form and mold the meaning of each novel. In both novels there is a strong theme of parental expectations in which the reader can connect the protagonists’ past home life and their influences.

Mariah introduces Lucy to a French painter whose past she is emotionally connected with.  “He had been a banker living in a comfortable life with his wife and children, but that did not make him happy; eventually he left them and went to the opposite part of the world, where he was happier. I don’t know if Mariah meant me to, but immediately I identified with the yearnings of this man; I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven,”(95). Lucy relates to the painter’s past because they both have migrated to find themselves instead of being told how to live their life. She understand how he feels leaving everything he knows because she too has ran away from her homeland and what she considers safe.

  Like Lucy, there is a parallel with how Crusoe has rejected the life that he was born into and instead goes against his family and builds a life of his own. Crusoe’s fathers heeds this advice to his son that, “…It was men of desperate fortunes on the one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortune on the other, who went abroad upon adventures; that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world” (2) Crusoe’s father tells him to stay in his homeland and be middle class although upon landing on the island he is basically King. Instead of settling for what their parents expected, Lucy and Crusoe both have higher goals for their lives. Lucy was considered a “girl of whom certain things were expected” (133).  Although in the year that she left her homeland, that “girl” had gone out of existence which is similar to Crusoe situation at home.  Both characters distinguish themselves from their parents at the age of nineteen. Another example of intertextuality is Crusoe’s forced conversion to new ideas is similar to the experience that Kinkaid’s protagonist in “A Small Place”. The characters are subject to changing everything that is familiar to them just like colonialism. In many colonial and post-colonial texts there are many references and occurrences of intertextuality used by the authors’ that help shape the story.

With the information I have learned and will learn from this course I will explore the use of intertextualiity in my own classroom to expand my students’ path of knowledge. By utilizing more than one novel, this learning process will facilitate the growth of students’ awareness of connections between texts. Often students do not understand the point of why we are reading the assigned text and how it relates to them. For example, integrating two works such as Richard Peck’s short story “Pricilla and the Wimps” and Jerry Spinelli’s novel Loser. Students’ can refer to specific common ideas as well as emotions and themes in these two novels while relating the commonality of the texts to their own lives.  Both works are from the perspective of adolescents who experience bullying in school.  Like adult readings, students have an easier time reading and comprehending information when they can relate to the texts.

Dialogue is a very important aspect of narrative that is often overlooked in the classroom. With help from this course, I would like to integrate exploration of both textual and actual dialogue in the novels, short stories, and poems we investigate in the curriculum.  Often dialogue that is represented speech as in a drama, screenplay, or interactive speech in a novel is overlooked. Not only will students be exposed to other forms of communication they will be able to define why the author utilized each type of dialogue.

To explore into to deeper levels of knowledge in colonial and post-colonial literature I want to research more about the arts and society during this period. I believe that art influences both emotions as well as thoughts in society. For example, in Lucy we see that a French painter made a connection and impression on her perspective of life. A book that peeks my interest on this subject is Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. In my research posts I would like to define the art movements during this period and how it affected the literature.