Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative
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Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative
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Overview
Discussing the canonical Caribbean narrative as it reflects national identity under the domination of English cultural authority, Belinda Edmondson focuses particularly on the pervasive influence of Victorian sensibilities in the structuring of twentieth-century national identity. She shows that issues of race and English constructions of masculinity not only are central to West Indian identity but also connect Caribbean authorship to the English literary tradition. This perspective on the origins of West Indian literary nationalism then informs Edmondson’s search for female subjectivity in current literature by West Indian women immigrants in America. Making Men compares the intellectual exile of men with the economic migration of women, linking the canonical male tradition to the writing of modern West Indian women and exploring how the latter write within and against the historical male paradigm in the continuing process of national definition.
With theoretical claims that invite new discourse on English, Caribbean, and American ideas of exile, migration, race, gender identity, and literary authority, Making Men will be informative reading for those involved with postcolonial theory, African American and women’s studies, and Caribbean literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822397236 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/07/1998 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 480 KB |
About the Author
Belinda Edmondson is Associate Professor of English and African/African-American Studies at Rutgers University at Newark.
Read an Excerpt
Making Men
Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative
By Belinda Edmondson
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9723-6
CHAPTER 1
"Race-ing" the Nation: Englishness, Blackness, and the Discourse of Victorian Manhood
In various ways West Indian discourse was constituted simultaneously with nineteenth-century Victorian debates on the essence of the English nation. Initial contact between Europe and the Caribbean formulated the terms of the relationship between the modern, mappable "Old World" and the prehistoric, unmappable "New," such that the later Victorian discourse on the region was predicated on racial and gender assumptions about the geopolitical characteristics of the Caribbean instituted in this earlier discourse. The history of the relation of the anglophone Caribbean to England is, after all, in many ways the same as that of the non-English speaking nations, even as the constitution of anglophone Caribbean discourse is based on a particularly English notion of nation and identity. Thus, while Europeanness and Englishness are distinct categories, the two functioned simultaneously to define the Caribbean in relation to the Old World. For this reason I will be concerned with establishing a dialectical relationship between the gendered and "raced" meanings of Europeanness and Caribbeanness in the first section of this chapter, before proceeding to the more critical discussion of the connection between the meanings of Englishness and West Indianness, and their "raced" and gendered meanings therein.
Mapping Difference: Europe and the Islands
When Columbus "discovered" the Americas, his letters back to Spain on what he found there, his descriptions of its geography, his assumptions about its inhabitants, defined the "New World's" relationship to the "Old." Columbus thought he had sailed to India, and hence the islands he discovered became the "West Indies," their inhabitants, Indians. Regardless of his later understanding of his mistake, the misnomers remained and fixed the Caribbean in discourse as a permanent mistake. The place did not concretely exist —indeed, could not exist — on its own terms: literally as well as figuratively. The West Indies, as the region was (and is still) called, was "somewhere else": not Europe, not Africa, not India. This "somewhere elseness" has become a central trope of West Indian discourse, with its attendant notion that the space of the West Indies is more metaphorical than it is material, and indeed, what exactly constitutes the West Indies — the Caribbean, as many prefer to call it — has always been hazy. Some of the islands — particularly the Spanish-speaking ones —are considered and analyzed as part of Latin America, and some of the countries of the Spanish Main — Belize, Guyana, in particular — are unquestionably considered by West Indians to be a part of the West Indies. The islands themselves were not really "lands," as such, but fragments of the mainland. They themselves were not even "whole."
If we cannot, then, fix the West Indies in material terms, we must address the region in cultural terms —what defines West Indianness? Indeed, it is this particular question which has forever vexed West Indian intellectuals, and has become, as I intend to argue, the central paradigm of West Indian discourse and narrative. In this section I will analyze how early European narratives of the islands established an enduring trope of "Somewhere Elseness" through a discourse of geographical "feminization." This image of the West Indian space as amorphous, sensual, and chiefly metaphorical established the terms of the discourse of Victorian England with its West Indian colonies. In particular it put into motion the assumption that the rhetoric of Englishness and civilization must be of necessity contrasted to (Caribbean) Blackness, which was not so much primitivism (such as African Blackness) as failed or lacking civilization. This relationship with Victorian England in turn affected the first generation of West Indian writers in their efforts to define West Indianness, in which geographical unreality, cultural lack, and racial inferiority all converged to define the terms of writing.
The question of what constitutes the New World —the Americas — has always been debated. José Martí was perhaps the first intellectual leader of the colonies to define the Americas as Latin America and the Caribbean, and not the Europe-identified United States. As Hortense Spillers argues, Martí's treatise on the Americas reveals that geopolitical entities are at heart not real; cultural parameters of the entire region are in constant flux, determined variously —and I would add only — in language. The West Indies, even more than Latin America, is representable only as a discursive metaphor, being as it is a series of islands and the mere periphery of the so-called Mainland. Depictions of the region consequently have emphasized this feature in such a way as to associate the geography with a subordinate relationship to the Mainland (usually meaning the United States or Europe).
Margarita Zamora notes that the Columbian texts of discovery of the "Indies" are a series of "tropes of difference" which reveal a "hermeneutical strategy of feminization and eroticization that ultimately makes gender difference the determining characteristic of the sign 'the Indies'." It is the place itself, these texts imply, which is the root cause for the feminine traits of its inhabitants, the "Indians" — their "natural" passivity, effeteness, beauty. (As we shall see, the later inhabitants — the blacks — though not perceived in quite the same eroticized and passive terms, were similarly feminized by their sensual and childlike qualities.) It is the rich beauty of the islands, the heat, and the abundance of fruit and vegetables, which have spawned lazy, sensual people. Later writings by Rousseau and others, which argued that climate and ecology had a constitutive impact on culture and character, merely continued the ideas established in the Columbian texts, except that these ideas now came to embrace the Creole population of the region. Despite the Creoles' ancestral affinities with Europe, mere whiteness was no proof against the savage and sensual influences of the hemisphere; Creoles, too, were by nature now "different" (though, of course, not so different as the Indians and the blacks, whose savagery was genetic).
Benedict Anderson asks the intriguing question, "why was it precisely creole communities [of Latin America] that developed so early conceptions of their nation-ness — well before most of Europe?" He believes the answer is to be found in the sense of a shared community of interests opposed to those of Europe, fostered by newspapers. Through this, he argues, the Creoles were in effect able to reconstruct a past, perceived to be non-existent by the metropole (in that a creole was a completely new species of citizen, having none of the traditions of Europe), in order to effect a community of interests which then could act with a view of itself in essentialized terms. The early English Creole community mostly regarded itself as English, however, and as such Anderson's theory does not work as well in the anglophone context. Certainly white anglophone West Indians have never occupied the prominent place in the struggles for national independence to the degree that white Latin Americans have; indeed, in the anglophone Caribbean the most influential nationalists have come from the black and brown constituencies. The Spanish Creoles' sense that they inhabited a land with no antecedents could arguably have set the stage for a nationalist discourse which could be completely self-generated against the metropole. This idea is useful for the anglophone context because West Indianness, as I will argue later, is fundamentally created out of not-Englishness, in geographical as well as social terms.
According to Zamora, the Columbian texts followed the Aristotelian principle of difference: that is, deviation from the male principle in the universe constituted imperfection, and the less the offspring resembled its father the more deviant it was considered to be. Femaleness, then, was the first step toward monstrosity. The region —with its lack of borders, its wild abundance — and its pretty, passive inhabitants, were natural candidates, according to European thinking of the time, for "natural slavery" or subjugation. Accordingly, Zamora concludes, in that femininity was synonymous with exploitability, the rhetorical feminization of the term "Indian" became the natural contrast to the now-masculinized term "Spaniard" —or more accurately, we might add, "European."
Thus, the European concept of "Europeanness" became tied to its geographical as well as political difference from the Islands; the West Indies were "somewhere else," but Europe was in Europe. The concept of regional identity, then, became a trophy of sorts, based on a unique relationship of domination and inflected with gendered assumptions. That is, the epistemic status of nationhood and culture literally depended upon inhabiting the dominant side of the hegemonic equation. Yet it is important to emphasize that colonies were not merely the oppressed "Other," but were also involved in what for lack of a better term could be called a familial relationship with the "Parent" country. The European powers also attempted to transfer their culture, language, and political structures to these colonies, and in this exhibited a desire to recreate themselves in their colonies. Yet, at the same time the colonies were also fixed in this relation as the not-Europes instead of the "New World." This was perhaps most true of the West Indies, with its lack not only of cultural but also of geographical identity. Therefore, the question of regional identity becomes the critical factor in assessing the notion of West Indianness.
The identity of the region was often discussed in terms of the gender, familial, and, most importantly, the racial makeup of its inhabitants, and this is why the issue of the "race" of the geographical space of the nation is crucial to any discussion of West Indian — and indeed, any form of— nationalism. In nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century discourse, "race" and "nation" were interchangeable terms, such that one's racial affiliation bespoke, de facto, one's national affiliation, a conflation which still vexes discussions of nationalism and "national interests" today. Formulated thus, every "race" of people must have a corresponding land of its own. Consequently, the issue of land ownership, and the concomitant "race-ing" of the land, becomes a permanent feature in the discussion of citizenry and independence. In the nineteenth century the whites of the Caribbean, as owners of plantations and the means of commercial production, were identified (at least materially) with the soil, and less so with the people of the region. If, as Ileana Rodríguez suggests, nationalism in the Caribbean is linked to modernity, and modernity in the region is linked to modernization through the acquisition of and "civilization" of the land, then the inability of West Indian blacks and nonwhites to "mark" the land through ownership and exchange produces a crisis of nationalist discourse. If identity depends upon material exchange, the nascent black middle class —the primary proponents of anglophone West Indian nationalism — had to "own" something other than the land or commerce in order to produce the nation in its own image. That "something," as we shall see presently, was the "purchase" of the manners, habits, and positioning of the English gentleman class through the acquisition of Victorian models of intellectual authority and knowledge. The struggle for West Indian self-definition became fundamentally tied to the use and manipulation of key ideas embedded in the actual language of Englishness itself.
Peter Hulme has suggested that the process by which the indigenous words "hurricane" and "cannibal" became blurred in the English lexicon, signifying the same ideas of savagery in reference to the West Indies, laid the groundwork for the discourse of the plantation, which "recognised only two locations, inside and outside, white and black, and which was itself to provide a central image for the class struggle of industrial Europe." The "discourse of the plantation," as Hulme terms it, also became a critical component of English rhetoric, so that what came to be understood as West Indian discourse was, as I shall presently attempt to show, intimately bound up with English nineteenth-century discourse about England as well as about its colonies.
Race and Manhood
Thus, the region was already commodified, gendered, and placed in object relation to Europe. However, there was also a familial relationship — inasmuch as the English had properties and relatives in the region, it is important to note that the slave- and cargo-bearing ships went both ways. Englishness and blackness (blackness in its broadest sense, referring to the darkskinned subject peoples of Britain such as Africans, West Indians, East Indians) as essential qualities became fixed in the English lexicon during this period. Understanding how Victorian England perceived its West Indian colonies is critical to any discussion of the first generation of West Indian writers, because they wrote both from and against Victorian cultural tradition. In particular, the question of the individual's relationship to the community, the individual's responsibility to the community, and what constituted the community (that is, what constituted England), and indeed what constituted an individual, were critically laid out in Victorian discourse. All of these issues converged in the Governor Eyre controversy of the 1860s.
Governor Eyre was the governor of Jamaica at the time of the riots of 1865 in Morant Bay. Interestingly, he had come to Jamaica from Australia, where he had earned praise as a defender of the aboriginal peoples against white racism and genocide. Moreover, the white upper classes of Jamaica cordially disliked Eyre because he was not an aristocrat, though after the rebellion in Morant Bay broke out they came to regard him as the nation's savior. The blacks of the area, though freed thirty years before, were being thrown off their lands because they had not paid taxes on them. This led to a confrontation at the courthouse and a subsequent insurrection in which several whites were killed. Governor Eyre promptly instituted martial law and sent British troops out to quell the disturbance. The British troops slaughtered the blacks, in the process killing a prominent brown instigator, as Eyre perceived him: George William Gordon, an educated mulatto Baptist preacher, married to a white woman, who had spoken out against the unfair, racist land laws. The incident created a furor in England, particularly among the abolitionists and other "friends of the Negro." Eyre was subsequently investigated by a specially appointed commission, but aside from having to resign was not otherwise punished.
The significance of the Governor Eyre controversy lies in the debate it engendered among Victorian intellectuals. The most famous of these was the stormy encounter between Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill in "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question" and "The Negro Question," respectively. The issue of whether Eyre acted properly was underwritten by the subtext of how the Victorians should accommodate blacks in the new social order, and how this affected the already changing face of English class relations. As Catherine Hall observes, the key issue between the two men and their followers was the definition of proper English manhood; both offered substantially opposed notions of English manhood, but both depended on a sense of difference from women and blacks. Later West Indian discourse, we shall see, was founded on an interpellation of these two differing yet fundamentally linked notions of manhood and nationhood.
Also key to the Carlyle/Mill debate are the positions they took over what roles individuals and governments should play in the running of the nation. Despite the difference in their political positions, the attitudes of both men toward political change were derived from their fundamental belief in the ability of the intellectual — the "Man-of-Letters Hero," to coin Carlyle's phrase — to make social change. In his essay "On Liberty" Mill emphasizes the role of individual self-improvement and free enterprise as the means by which the nation could achieve its full potential, while Carlyle, reflecting his curious blend of authoritarian tendencies and inchoate socialist sensibilities, attacked the concept of laissez-faire capitalism as anticommunity.
These two positions can be said to mark the parameters of the issue; and indeed, both contributed to the tension reflected in subsequent West Indian literature and discourse on what constitutes a community and how the individual reflects or contributes to that community. What the Carlyle/Mill positions demonstrate very clearly is that the categories of "liberal" and "conservative" ideologies were irrevocably fused to the extent that they lose meaning in the Victorian context—at least as they extent that they lose meaning in the Victorian context—at least as they pertain to issues of race and colonialism—given that what we understand to be an imperialist position such as Carlyle's on the Governor Eyre case was contradicted by his liberal—radical, even—positions on domestic policy with regard to the Irish and the English working class. Or, correspondingly, when we attribute to Mill the liberal position for his defense of black West Indians this does not account for his assumption that "the liberal theses he expounded in On Liberty (1859) and Representative Government (1861) did not apply to Indians or to other 'lesser peoples'."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making Men by Belinda Edmondson. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixWriting the Caribbean: Gender and Literary Authority 1
Part I. Making Men: Writing the Nation 17
1 "Race-ing" the Nation: Englishness, Blackness, and the Discourse of Victorian Manhood 19
2 Literary Men and the English Canonical Tradition 38
3 Representing the Fold: The Crisis of Literary Authenticity 58
Part II. Writing Women: Making the Nation 79
4 Theorizing Caribbean Feminist Aesthetics 81
5 The Novel of Revolution and the Unrepresentable Black Woman 105
6 Return of the Native: Immigrant Women's Writing and the Narrative of Exile 139
Notes 169
Bibliography 205
Index 221