LITR 5831 Colonial-Postcolonial
Literature
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Ryan Smith
November 22, 2011
Definitions: Postcolonial Feminism in Beloved and Lucy
Postcolonialism, as a reasonably broad term concerned with the lingering effects of colonization, can expand to encompass topics as diverse—yet interconnected—as religion, anthropology, politics, feminism, literature, and so on. A useful way of subdividing such a variety of perspectives is by focusing on where (and how and why) power is concentrated in colonial and postcolonial situations, which in turn lends itself to an examination of the various ways groups of people are oppressed, or withheld from that power. Once these structures are understood, delving into more specific postcolonial issues is both easier and more informed.
Two relatively recent novels, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, offer valuable insight into power relations through their female protagonists. Feminism, in its various iterations, is a popular and powerful vantage point for postcolonial thought, and each of these texts presents a number of ways that colonization—and the consequences which last well into postcolonial eras—can be identified, criticized, and reacted against. Specially, it becomes clear that the human (female) body becomes a thing of commodity, an item to be owned, controlled, or abused for sexual gratification by those in power. Related to this idea is the concept of double colonization, a term which not only recognizes the racial differences of the colonizer/colonized, but focuses on the almost universal oppression of women before, during and after colonization. Ultimately, as one moves both with and through feminist perspectives, it becomes apparent that colonization works by creating a system of interlocking oppressions—such as race, gender, sexuality, class, etc.—that work together to keep the people they dominate unable to effectively counteract. The writings of both Morrison and Kincaid, as women who identify themselves with formerly colonized peoples, are shaped by this web of oppression and each responds in ways that are both scathingly revelatory and subtly hopeful.
The most concrete type of colonial oppression experienced by the women of Beloved and Lucy is physical—concerned with controlling and taking advantage of the very bodies it subjects. Sethe and her family have the horrifically direct experience of being owned by white (male) slaveholders, while Lucy and the her mother are subject to a less obvious form of domineering, that of being forced into the history and culture of Europe, after having had their culture variously erased or repressed. Women in each novel often suffer violent and/or controlling sexual abuse that is either not present or in much less drastic forms for the colonized men—the Sweet Home men taking to cows, for example, after being withheld from women indefinitely. In Beloved, a particularly disturbing form of this oppression happens when Schoolteacher and his boys restrain and violate Sethe. In her essay on postcolonialism and Morrison’s novel, Mary Jane Suero Elliot adeptly and efficiently examines the way in which colonial powers trivialize the very humanity of the colonized by controlling and abusing their bodies:
The schoolteacher observes
Sethe’s rape and makes it a discursive act, exploiting Sethe as a racial and
sexual other in order to re-write her identity as that of a subhuman creature,
bestial rather than human….In having his nephews act out, on Sethe’s body, the
constructed degradation of one racially and sexually othered, the schoolteacher
reinforces slavery’s colonial discourse through his own, simultaneously enacted,
discursivity. Sethe’s personhood, as it has been allowed to exist under slavery,
is reduced further to animality. (185)
Here, what is normally
merely implied by the racist/sexist discourse of colonialism is now acted out in
a very material way. By rape and sexual abuse, colonial powers can assert their
power in a simultaneously literal and figurative manner. We own you, says the
ideology, and that your body is a sexual commodity is evidence of this
condition. Not only are the colonized sexually humiliated and controlled, but
they are further reduced to animals, their very humanity displaced. This, of
course, is absolutely critical to maintain the illusion of the benevolence of
colonial power—for once the oppressed are recognized as fully human, the
pretense is unsupportable.
Morrison’s novel, however, not only shows the female
body oppressed, but struggling for autonomy and self-ownership.
The body is also prominent in Kincaid’s novel, in which Lucy experiences her physical self in a number of sexual encounters that work to build her sense of pride and autonomy. One of Lucy’s first important incidents is after losing her virginity; the towel they used is bloodied, and the boy responds with an arrogant—and probably false—expression of knowledge. Lucy responds: “I don’t know how but I found the presence of mind to say, ‘It’s just my period coming on.’ I did not care about being a virgin and had long been looking forward to the day when I could rid myself of that status, but when I saw how much it mattered to him to be the first boy I had been with, I could not give him such a hold over me” (Kincaid 83). Similarly, her last lover in the novel intrudes on the space of her body, and Lucy, as she does so well, expresses the situation clearly and with alarming honesty: “That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him” (Kincaid 155). Lucy, then, is able to consistently recognize when her body is being appropriated or owned by her male partners—theoretically owned, of course; we are in the postcolonial now. Each partner has equated sexual involvement with Lucy to mean ownership of her, or at least ownership and control of the act itself, which in turn implies power over Lucy. This is, in fact, one of the things Lucy hates about her mother—the willingness to submit herself to a traditional domestic life, in which sexual and gender roles always take the form of male/colonizer/conqueror, female/colonized/conquered. A life like this will never be acceptable to Lucy, who often finds herself torn about the conflicting possibilities of her sexuality. Kirsten Mahlis, in her essay on the novel, is able to identify both this conflict and Lucy’s active solution to it. “As Lucy sees it, her mother’s choice to marry a much older man who would “leave her alone” reflects her mother’s capitulation to the cultural imperative that women must marry to achieve full adulthood, as well as her mother’s denial of her own sexuality” (176). Lucy’s mother echoes the colonial pattern that is present in Beloved, which is this contradiction: women must marry—or be sexually involved enough to have children and a family—to achieve cultural acceptance, but at the same time, they are not allowed to be owners or enjoyers of their own sexual nature.
If this is the future her mother means for her, then Lucy staunchly, even violently, rebels against this limiting possibility. Continuing from the quotation above: “This exchange—a woman’s body for a man’s social capital—is precisely what Lucy rejects. She chooses, instead, to remove any hint of exchange or barter from her sexual encounters, entering these sexual relationships according to the dictates of her body as a locus of sensory pleasure” (Mahlis 176). Accordingly, she is able to move fluidly from each encounter to the next, detached and unhindered by male attempts and assumptions of power or control. She, unlike her mother, who may embody acquiescence and surrender to colonial oppression over the body, will not be conquered. In fact, Lucy would rather do the conquering herself—as when she kisses a boy just to experiment with his reactions and responses, or her objectification of males as means of sexual gratification only. These reversals, however, are temporary and probably unrealized by her partners, who are in the male-dominated mainstream. This does not sap Lucy’s strength, however, or make her apathetic to the inequalities she faces, instead, her sexual experiences serve to strengthen her sense of self-ownership. Just as she once desired to be rid of her virgin status, sexual encounters themselves become a method of maturation, and a way of gaining mystic, adult wisdom. “In the bathroom I looked at my face in the mirror. I was twenty years old—not a long time to be alive—and yet there was not an ounce of innocence on my face. If I did not know everything yet, I would not be afraid to know everything as it came up” (Kincaid 153). This passage rings of the lost innocence of Eve, which perhaps suggests reasons for some of Lucy’s suffering, but also implies the gain of the supposed fall from grace—knowledge, be it carnal, moral or otherwise. By claiming her body, and her sexual nature, as her own, Lucy crosses the patriarchal boundaries set in place for her, losing that favor, but gaining not only power of her own, but a mind that is self-possessed and capable enough to know and experience everything. “Women’s lived experiences of their bodies become powerful ways of expelling patriarchal and imperial transcriptions” (Ramanthan and Schlau 3). If bodily experience itself is a way for women to destroy colonial oppressions, then Lucy may not be the “slut” she calls herself to her mother, but a woman actively resisting the sexual entrapment allotted to her gender. In this case she speaks, young and perhaps unaware as she may be, not just for herself and her own body but for Morrison’s characters and all women under colonial (or postcolonial) oppression.
Considering feminism’s postcolonial concern with a wider focus brings us to an idea closely related to the subjugation of female bodies—that of double colonization. In the manner the term will be used here, it first refers to a group of colonized people, then proceeds to recognize and distinguish the differences in the oppressed experience between the conquered men and women. While this does not, by any means, suggest that colonized men have had a beneficial relationship with the colonizers, it does suggest that women, simply by being women, are subject to a deeper sort of oppression because it includes both race and gender. When a (white male) colonizer sees a colonized male, though he certainly sees a number of crucial differences between himself and the subject, he is at least able to identify the similarity of male-ness; this privilege, however small is not afforded to women, who then truly become “other” in every respect. This disparity can be found in Beloved, especially at the slave-farm Sweet Home, where slave-life for Sethe, although terrible for all on the farm, has a sexual level not present for the men. The men, for example, fantasize about rape, while Sethe is actually sexually abused herself. When free, she explains what happened to Paul D, one of the Sweet Home men, in a scene that puts pointed focus on a woman’s duel-natured oppressions.
“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it…Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.” “They used cowhide on you?” “And they took my milk.” “They beat you and you was pregnant?” “And they took my milk!” (Morrison 19-20).
Not even Paul D understands the double colonization that Sethe is trying to express. Each went through dehumanizing cruelties, but Paul D finds it difficult to relate to anything other than the raw physical violence that he accustomed to. In accordance with double colonization, Sethe was whipped and raped, as she is both a slave and a woman. As another example, after finally escaping Sweet Home, Paul D wanders the country, presumably working here and there for money, food and shelter. Sethe, however, is sought after because of her value property—her children. Once the nightmare of her almost-recapture is finished, she—in contrast to Paul D’s relatively decent way of making a living—must sell her sex in return for the very tombstone to bury her baby.
While the colonial Sethe is violently oppressed by duel mechanisms, the postcolonial Lucy is less dramatically—and more subtly, but certainly not less actually—limited by such imperial power. An example from Kincaid’s novel is Lucy’s connection Paul Gauguin, which she discovers is ultimately superficial. After comparing herself to him, and considering his apparently manly heroism, she thinks: “I was not a man; I was a young woman from the fringes of the world, and when I left my home I had wrapped around my shoulders the mantle of a servant” (Kincaid 95). Even though she feels as if she understands and identifies with Gauguin’s yearnings, Lucy realizes that her gender limits her from living the same kind of life; instead of a romantic artist’s life of adventure, travel, etc., Lucy starts her journey as part of an inherently lower class of human being—women—and as the kind of woman Gauguin might paint—someone from the fringes of the world. From this perspective, we are able to include even the renowned artist in the colonial/postcolonial power structures. Ian Smith, for example, draws an explicit line between Modern critical theory—embodied by T. S. Eliot—and current (or post-modern) trends that bring women, and especially women with histories of oppression, to the forefront. “Kincaid’s Lucy is, above all, a type for the novelist herself, keeping in the forefront the issues of composition as they affect not only the male writer of Eliot’s definition. In a significant sense, the novel announces another epochal transition—the post-1968 emergence of women writers of color” (807). Thus, even the rigid academic trends that may retain colonial structures can be penetrated by the assertion of self worth of Lucy—of course possible because of writers such as Kincaid and Morrison, not to mention the scores of other valuable women authors.
Moving even further outwards, we start to see that colonial and postcolonial power is not limited to focusing on the female body, or on a double colonization that oppresses women from two angles. Power structures maintain these techniques, among a number of others, in a complex system of interlocking oppressions that work together—sometimes knowingly, sometimes coincidentally—to subjected and limit the people they aim to control. In relation to the body, Samantha Kwan describes the reality this way: “Women’s more extensive and intensive experiences of body oppression can be interpreted as part of a disadvantaged status caused by the intersection of multiple systems of oppressions” (156). As part of her focus, Kwan ignores further levels of oppression that include class or religion, but her recognition of interlocking oppressions is nonetheless useful.
In our novels, this web of colonial/postcolonial
power is presented a number of different ways. For example, the women in
Beloved are bound not just by race
and gender, but by class as well. Amy Denver, Sethe’s rescuer, is a white, young
woman; the novel’s narrator notes about them that “a pateroller passing would
have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a slave and a
barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute old baby in the
rags they wore” (Morrison 99-100). The implication here is that Sethe and
Kincaid’s novel also approaches the idea of interlocking oppressions from several angles. Early in the book, Lucy notices that Mariah, her employer and friend (see the inevitable disparity?) doesn’t seem to realize that “the other people all sitting down to eat dinner all looked like Mariah’s relatives; the people waiting on them all looked like mine” (Kincaid 32). The distinction is clear and painful to Lucy, and entirely nonexistent to Mariah, so while the two women may share certain limitations, others—in this case, both race and class—are limited to Lucy’s experience. Issues of class and race arise repeatedly in Lucy and Mariah’s relationship. Mariah tells an unimpressed and somewhat flabbergasted Lucy about her fraction of Indian blood; it is also difficult for her to understand that her material comfort may be inhibiting the comfort of others around the world—perhaps from people like Lucy. It would them seem as if interlocking webs of oppression not only layer barriers upon barriers, but simply by their compartmentalizing nature, separate human beings from each other, in the possibility of shared suffering. Lucy and Mariah might have been able to discuss the oppression of women frankly and to some purpose if it weren’t from the class and race differences that seem to get in the way of open communication. There are also problems, however for women who appear to have all of the same interlocking oppressions working against them. A particularly frustrating issue for Lucy is her recognition of the limitations placed on her postcolonial women, specifically her mother.
Each time a new child was born, my mother and father announced to each other with great seriousness that the new child would go to university in England and study to become a doctor or lawyer or someone who would occupy an important and influential position in society…And whenever I saw [my mother’s] eyes fill up with tears at the thought of how proud she would be at some deed her sons had accomplished, I felt a sword go through my heart, for there was no accompanying scenario in which she saw me, her only identical offspring, in a remotely similar situation. (Kincaid 130).
Kindling her complex maternal emotions, Lucy is aware that her mother, despite being described as identical to her—not only here but throughout the novel—is simply an enabler, or passive observer, of colonial/patriarchal conventions. The boys are educated and sent off into the world obtain money and power (“influence”), girls are left to domestic affairs, sex and babies. They exist for the sake of the men, and for their pleasure, not for their own sake, or pleasure. Education, in this case gendered, can thus be added to seemingly endless list of ways in which systems of power oppress and restrict. Whatever her mother’s reasons—whether multiple oppression stupor, traditional fatalism, or something more pitiable—Lucy refuses to play out this kind of life. The sword drives a wedge between the two women that appear irreparable and, difficult or not, Lucy is prepared to live a life fully autonomous and unregulated/uncontrolled by any structures that would limit, abuse or control her.
As we’ve moved outwards from the politics of female bodies under colonial and postcolonial rule, towards the double colonization that subjugates women from two or more fronts, and finally to a vast, complex system of complimentary means of domination, the trend has been to add oppressive layer upon oppressive layer. And while we have seen the women from both novels resist in various ways, a focused plan to destroy the system once and for all seems to be lacking. A hopeful interpretation of such a bleak reality is presented by Susan Friedman, who writes, “At times, this discourse expresses a kind of interminable negativity evident in the pile-up of oppressions, with its implicit hierarchization of suffering. But this discourse has also developed a dialectical analysis whereby the multiplication of oppression creates its antithesis, a multiple richness and power centered in difference” (17). The blessed irony here is that the very systems for discerning and punishing difference, can, if reversed, be made to encourage and reward the very diversity that has been historically repressed. The women discussed here, and therefore all women burdened with the lingering weight of imperial power, have already made significant steps towards a realization of this type of reversal. The narrator of Beloved, when relating one of Schoolteachers inhumanities, claims that “definitions belong to the definers—not the defined” (Morrison 225). This is no doubt true, but by its very logic, a possible change is implicit. Redefining how we define is a good start.
Works Cited
Elliot, Mary Jane Suero. “Postcolonial Experience in a Domestic Context: Commidified Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” MELUS 25.3/4 (2000): 181-202. Print.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “‘Beyond’ Gynocriticism and Gynesis:
The Geographics of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism.”
Kwan, Samantha. “Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body Privilege in Everyday Life.” Feminist Formations 22.2 (2010): 144-66. Print.
Mahlis, Kristen. “Gender and Exile:
Morrison, Toni. Beloved.
Ramanathan, Geetha, and Stacey Schlau. “Third World Women’s Text and the Politics of Feminist Criticisms.” College Literature 22.1 (1995): 1-9. Print.
Smith, Ian. “Misusing Canonical Intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth and Colonialism’s ‘Absent Things.’” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 801-20. Print.
