The Past Still Present: Gender, Racial Identity, and Double Colonialism in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/journal.v9i1.1839Keywords:
Gender, racial identity, double colonialism, post colonialism, hybridity.Abstract
The themes of gender and racial identity and their treatment in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea fundamentally inform both novels in uneasy ways that this essay argues hold enormous contemporary importance. In particular, the authors’ use of the framework of colonialism produce what, when read from postcolonial perspectives, necessarily creates tensions in the novels between characters that represent the colonists and those of the indigenous characters. These tensions are analyzed through postcolonial theories of hybridity and notions of Other to consider the impacts of these tensions and whether these still exist. However, aligned with these gender and racial tensions is the way the novels’ treatment of gender specific consciousnesses, in terms of racial identity, become evident as female characters are made to suffer a double sense of oppression within post-colonial narratives, a condition which I term here “double colonialism,” a condition which this essay further argues still lingers today.
References
Acheraiou, Amar. (2008). Rethinking postcolonialism: Colonialist discourse in modern literatures and the legacy of classical writers. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ahmad, Aijaz. (1992). In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso.
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, & Tiffin, Helen. (2002). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in postcolonial literatures. London: Routledge.
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, & Tiffin, Helen. (1995). The post-colonial studies reader. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (2004). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994, 2005). The location of culture. New York: Routledge.
Bronte, Charlotte. (2006). Jane Eyre. London: Penguin.
Chapman, Michael. (1996). Southern African literatures. London: Michael Chapman.
Fanon, Frantz. (2008). Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto Press.
Fister, Barbara. (1995). Third world women's literatures: A dictionary and guide to materials in English. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1998). The history of sexuality: The will to knowledge. London: Penguin, 1998.
Gregg, Veronica Marie. (1995). Jean Rhys's historical imagination: Reading and writing the Creole. Chapel Hill, NY: University of North Carolina Press.
Gilbert, Sandra M., & Gubar, Susan. (2000). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hall, Stuart, & Du Gay, Paul. (1996, 2003). Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage.
Lessing, Doris. (2007). The grass is singing. London: Harper.
Parry, Benita. (2009). Aspects of peripheral modernisms. ARIEL, 40, 1, 2009, 27-56.
Makdisi, Saree. (1992). The empire renarrated: Season of migration to the north and the reinvention of the present. Critical Inquiry, 18 (4), 804-820. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343831> accessed: 10.03.19.
Makdisi, Saree. (1995). “Postcolonial” literature in a neocolonial world: Modern Arabic culture and the end of modernity. boundary 2, 22 (1), 85-115.
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/303663 > accessed: 10.04.19.
Parry, Benita. (2009). Aspects of peripheral modernisms. ARIEL, 40 (1), 27-56.
Rhys, Jean. (2001). Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin.
Said, Edward W. (1994). Culture & imperialism. London: Vintage.
Said, Edward W. (2003). Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Savory, Elaine. (2008). Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Showalter, Elaine. (1995). A literature of their own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing. London: Virago.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1995). Can the subaltern speak? In: Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, & Tiffin, Helen (Ed.), The post-colonial studies reader, Abingdon: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).