Dissertation

Unruly subjects: Nationhood, home and colonial consciousness in Olive Schreiner and Jean Rhys

Raiskin, Judith L

1989

Overview

This dissertation examines the relationship between national subjecthood and literary subjectivity. Adding a feminist perspective to current theories of colonial discourse, I focus on the writings of two colonial women writers: Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), born in South Africa and writing at the height of British colonialism, and Jean Rhys (1890-1979), born on the Caribbean island of Dominica and writing during the upheavals of decolonization. Educated as British subjects but considered outsiders to the metropolitan centers of culture, raised as whites with the ideology of racial superiority but excluded as women from political and economic agency, Schreiner and Rhys interrogate at the same time that they sustain the racial, sexual and political discourses of their times. Schreiner, for instance, recognizes the relationship between the literary representation of Africa as \"otherworldly\" by English travel and adventure writers and the political and economic dominance of the colony by England. Yet, her own attempt to \"de-exoticize\" the African landscape in The Story of an African Farm and her essays on South Africa, is itself part of the shifting rhetoric that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, conflates the Victorian ideologies of Empire and Domesticity, and begins to claim South Africa as \"home\" for the ever-expanding English \"family.\" Caught between British and Afrikaner nationalisms, Schreiner is perhaps the first South African to explore the psychology of white racism; nevertheless, she incorporates much of nineteenth-century \"race science\" and anti-Semitic literary traditions into her depiction of Blacks and Jews as \"revolutionary martyrs.\" Jean Rhys further complicates the dichotomy between \"colonizer\" and \"colonized\" by insisting on the fluidity of racial and cultural categories and of the power inscribed in them. Her novels, particularly Wide Sargasso Sea, and her short stories offer a critique of cultural colonialism and an interpretation of homelessness and exile that explores the connection between political and sexual exploitation. Through close readings of the texts by both of these writers I offer a strategy of reading that recognizes the conflicts between their political, racial and sexual \"locations\" in order to account for both the submerged contradictions and the challenging insights of their writing.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: African literature / Caribbean literature / Gordimer, Nadine (1923-2014) / Lessing, Doris May (1919-2013) / Literature / Modern literature / Rhys, Jean (1894-1979) / Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012) / Said, Edward / Schreiner, Olive (1855-1920) / South African Studies / Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946) / Womens studies / Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)
• ISBN: 9798644998418