M33P1 Novel II - Preface For A Post-Postcolonial Criticism, Pr. Mamaoui

Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism
Author(s): Erin O'Connor

Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 217-246
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3829770
Accessed: 21-04-2020 10:33 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Victorian Studies
This content downloaded from 196.200.131.104 on Tue, 21 Apr 2020 10:33:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism
ERIN O'CONNOR
his essay takes as its point of departure the double valence of its
subject, "globalizing literary studies." In common critical

parlance, to speak of the "globalization" of literary study is to
speak of criticism that displays an awareness of literature's contingent,
historically specific relations to geography; such criticism aims to account
for the global relations embodied in the production, dissemination, and
consumption of literature. Gayatri Spivak calls this type of critical
approach "worlding"; Edward Said calls it "contrapuntal reading"; what-
ever the name, the project involves articulating the roles of history, poli-
tics, and empire in the creation, publication, and study of literature. In
what follows, I will explore a less obvious but equally significant aspect of
this project: the tendency, in efforts to expand our understanding of liter-
ature, to make that expansion contingent on a corresponding expansion
of analytical focus. "Globalizing literature" frequently goes hand in hand
with globalizing commentary about literature; indeed, much of the
project of postcolonial literary history depends on a set of globalizing
statements about literature's theoretical relation to imperialism.
Some of the more famous of these statements have run like
this: Edward Said has written that "texts are worldly" (World 4); Abdul
JanMohamed that "colonialist fiction is generated predominantly by
the ideological machinery of the Manichean allegory" (102); Fredric
Jameson that "all third world texts are necessarily [...] to be read as
[...] national allegories" (78); and Homi Bhabha that "Nations, like
narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize
their horizons in the mind's eye" (1). Paraphrasing Bhabha, Said has
written that "Nations themselves are narrations" (Culture xiii). There are
two things to notice about these formulations. The first is that they are
formulas: globalizing, read formally, is here synonymous with general-
izing. The second is that the idea of narrative licenses these generaliza-
tions about narrative. Whether invoking "fiction," "allegory,"
"narration," or the "text," each formula explains literature's extra-
WINTER 2003
218 ERIN O'CONNOR
literary dimensions as a literary process-a move that simultane

reifies the literary (as a signal mode of apprehension) and makes
ature as such peculiarly inaccessible (as narrative becomes a meta
for ideological process, it ceases to be accessible as a particular fo
writing with its own unique, irreducible ways and means). Such m
vers are embedded in postcolonial literary theory, which routi
makes "narrative" into a figure for the textual dimension of na
building, even as it takes individual narratives for exemplary alle
of narrative's role in nation-building.1 The upshot is a globalizati
literature (of the literariness of literature), one accomplish
making literary texts into allegories for non-literary processes (imp
alism, nation-building, and so on), while metaphorizing th
processes as literary forms in their own right (allegory, narra
Making literature into a small but paradigmatic aspect of a far l
system of narration has thus been one of the central tasks of
colonial literary history.
Nowhere is the tautological quality of this logic more problem
atic than in postcolonial treatments of nineteenth-century British li
ture, which has been a primary subject for such globalizing ever
Gayatri Spivak's 1985 essay "Three Women's Texts and a Critiqu
Imperialism" established a paradigm for treating the Victorian novel
local instance of widespread imperialist sentiment. Announcing th
should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British liter
without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's
mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of Engla
the English," Spivak set the tone for subsequent postcolonial approac
to Victorian culture, which tend to read the novel as a cipher for im
alist ideology (262). As Said puts it in Culture and Imperialism (1993),
novel [is] the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding
eties of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study" (xii).
nineteenth-century British novel has been taken as both a prime exa
of the "imperialist narrativization of history" (Spivak 263) and as an
inary moment in the production of that narration. Under the gu
realism, the argument goes, the nineteenth-century British novel, m
than any other cultural form, generated an insularity so tightly
that it has refused ever since to reveal its foreign policy even to its f
critics. What is needed, the argument concludes, is a literary history
can illuminate the imperialist underpinnings of narratives that
neither know they have such underpinnings, nor care.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
PREFACE FOR A POST-POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM 219
The role of literature, not to mention literary criticism, in th

postcolonial project has been variously described, defended, and
lenged by many interlocutors. It is not my purpose here to interrog
or even fully to enter, that debate. Rather, my intention is to trace
implications of that discussion for certain highly influential stra
Victorian literary and cultural studies. In recent years, it has become
self-imposed task of the postcolonial critic -by and large not a specia
in nineteenth-century literature or history-to describe the Br
novel's more worldly dimensions, to place it in a context that pro
illuminates imperialism's determining influence on its ideology a
form. In so doing, postcolonial debate has assigned a very parti
role to the Victorian novel, which, in providing a historical origin f
recognizably modern mode of imperialist thinking, has enabled
colonial studies to ground itself in both a literary criticism an
follows-a literature. What the Victorian novel is and does is as central
to postcolonial theory as nineteenth-century colonialism itself.

It is the peculiar conjunction of a pressing contemporary poli-
tics with a comparatively arcane literary history that I wish to take up
here. For if that conjunction has come to feel like familiar territory,
well-traveled ground whose theoretical pathways have by now becom
deeply entrenched in thinking about both the history of imperialism
and the geopolitics of the Victorian novel, that is exactly my point: i
should not seem at all natural, or inevitable, that the Victorian novel
would play such an extensive role in this theoretical project. That it
does is a sign not only that the novel's place in that history has been
masterfully naturalized, but also that the novel may be doing some
naturalizing of its own (the lessons of postcolonial theory teach us that
the easy assimilation of the Victorian novel into this project must be
read as a sign that the novel is somehow participating in its own co-
optation). My purpose in this essay will be to revisit the canonization of
the Victorian novel as postcolonial theory's favorite stomping ground-
the genre it loves to hate -tracking the terms of the novel's absorption
into mainstream postcolonial literary theory in order to suggest that the
success of the postcolonial project has come, at least in part, at the
expense of Victorian studies.
I approach my subject not as a postcolonial critic, then, but as
a student of Victorian literature and culture. My central concern is not
to critique postcolonial criticism per se, though something of the kind is
unavoidable here, but rather to ask what the postcolonial project has
WINTER 2003
220 ERIN O'CONNOR
meant for thinking about the nineteenth-century British nov

most basic contention is that the postcolonial narrative of lit
history has largely overwritten the Victorian novel, that it has ign
even at times denied-the genre's thematic subtleties, structura
terminacies, and genuine intellectual rigor in order to make th
into the means of establishing broadly applicable theoretical
digms. The majestic generality of positions such as Spivak's an
is after all a generic one: the assumption that culture and impe
can be adequately and responsibly thought through the novel
assumption that takes the novel to be, in form and content, a c
ical generalization of these otherwise bafflingly enormous categ
In order to uncover the terms of that generalizing impu
have chosen to center my analysis on a particularly telling momen
Victorian novel's global literary history: Spivak's "Three Women
and a Critique of Imperialism." In what follows, I will explore h
literary history delineated by Spivak defines itself against the ninet
century novel-whose officious circumlocutions supply, in Dic
words, abundant examples of "How not to do it"-even as it ta
novel as a structural template for its own counternarrative. Rather
generalizing about either postcolonial literary theory or the ninete
century novel, I hope to show how closely tied postcolonial critique
Victorian fiction -so much so, indeed, that it may even be underst
a variant of the genre it works so hard to set itself against. Argui
the postcolonial allegory of the Victorian novel's imperial relations
a striking resemblance to that quintessential imperial fiction,
Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), I propose that Victorian narrativ
provided some of the most influential postcolonial work with its g
analytical structure.
I. Victorientalism: ColonizingJane Eyre
Spivak's essay may be understood as a primal scene of

colonial reading, the place where many of the guiding assumpti
logical premises of postcolonial thinking about Victorian fictio
born. First published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry and
reprinted many times, the essay has had a distinctly worldly
setting the agenda for much subsequent postcolonial work by o
what has become the definitive postcolonial reading of Ch
Bronti's Jane Eyre (1847).2 Since then, every subsequent piece o
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Eyre and race has paid homage to it, alternately developing, re

and deferring to Spivak's claims. Just about all postcolonial w
nineteenth-century literature and culture has had to contend
Spivak's ideas in some way; her work has been instrumental in e
critics of nineteenth-century literature and culture to speak casual
what Ann McClintock calls-with representative aplom
planned epistemic violence of the imperialist project" (16). Stud
have overlooked Spivak's work have, by contrast, suffered at th
of reviewers.3 In short, this essay rules. It is the reign of Spivak's
that interests me here. In what does its rule consist?
I'll begin at the beginning, with the first sentence of the first
paragraph of the first attempt to trace the logic of a postcolonial literary
history. For that is what Spivak claims to be inaugurating when she opens
by citing what she calls two "obvious 'facts'"--one, "it should not be
possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remem-
bering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a
crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English"; and
two, "the role of literature in the production of cultural representation
should not be ignored." From these "'facts"' she makes an observation
and draws a conclusion: "These two obvious 'facts,"' she writes, "continue
to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature.

This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project,
displaced and dispersed into more modern forms" (262). From this
conclusion Spivak derives not a critical theory, but a critical theorem: "If
these 'facts' were remembered, not only in the study of British literature
but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of
the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary
history, of the 'worlding' of what is now called 'the Third World"' (262).
The geometry of the reasoning here is compelling. With its movement
from "'facts"' (acknowledged, by scare quotes, to be first premises rather
than demonstrable truths) to conclusions (truths to which the aforesaid
"'facts"' "attest") and back again to the hypothetical reality contained by
the "if... then" formulation of her last point, Spivak's argument has all
the compact authority of a mathematical proof. At once unassailable in
its logic and unverifiable, it is as densely intriguing as it is impossible,
finally, to prove. Spivak's "rule" thus consists in the statement of a rule;
the power of the essay is in no small part due to the certainty with which
it lays out two bold assertions (the "'facts,"') and an equally bold conjec-
ture about how awareness of those "'facts"' would change literary history.
WINTER 2003
222 ERIN O'CONNOR
Spivak demonstrates just how an awareness of these "'f

would change literary history through a concise application of her
to that "cult text of feminism," Jane Eyre, supplemented by read
Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (as 'Jane Eyre's reinscripti
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) (as an "analysis-even a deco
tion-of a 'worlding' such as Jane Eyre's" [263]). The plot of the
simple. Spivak's reading of Bronte centers on brief examinations o
select scenes: "the beautifully orchestrated opening of Jane Eyre"
supplies a spatial map of 'Jane's self-marginalized uniqueness
Bertha Mason Rochester's appearance toJane (which supplies a p
anatomy of how "Bronte renders the human/animal frontier as
ably indeterminate" [266]); and the conclusion, whose "alle
language of Christian psychobiography [. ..] marks the inaccessibili
the imperialist project as such to the nascent 'feminist' scenari
These readings are intended to punctuate Spivak's sketch of the
guiding sequential arrangement,Jane's progression from counter-f
to family-in-law to community of families: "In terms of the n
energy of the novel, how is Jane moved from the place of the cou
family to the family-in-law? It is the active ideology of imperialis
provides the discursive field" (266). The investment: around 1,800 w
(in the Gates edition, this comes to around three and a half pages,
one third of which is taken up by block quotation). The yield: a re
of Jane Eyre, a theory of "the nineteenth-century British novel" th
Eyre synecdochically invokes, and a manifesto for postcolonial
history itself.
Spivak was right about what would happen if her "'facts"' w
remembered. They have indeed not only been remembered, bu
become the guiding premises for much subsequent work on Jan
which has tirelessly dedicated itself to filling in the gaps in S
sweeping history. There are Spivak-inspired studies of Jane Eyre's
tionship to Jamaica, to India, to Ireland, and to Africa; to colo
to Orientalism, and to racism; to slavery and to sati.4 Togethe
comprise a massive effort of retroactive documentation. I
reading postcolonial readings of Jane Eyre since 1985 is virtually s
mous with watching Spivak's reading gradually get consolidat
scholars quietly assume the role of providing the context and t
reading Spivak left out. Committing themselves to supply
evidence to uphold Spivak's broadest conjectures (to producin
narrative of literary history she desires), rather than to questionin
VICTORIAN STUDIES
viability of an argument that is made without the benefit of evid

scholars not surprisingly wind up producing readings that rep
Spivak's rather than generating substantially new ones. Indeed, w
most peculiar about postcolonial work on Jane Eyre is how uniforml
tends to bolster Spivak's argument, so much so that even critics
take issue with some of Spivak's premises do so in ways that enab
most basic claims to remain intact. Susan Meyer, for instance, a
that Jane Eyre questions the ideology of imperialism before fi
upholding it, a thesis that differs from Spivak's only in order to
tune it. Building on Spivak's work rather than testing or challenging
critics have set out to defend (by developing) a version of liter
history that they have effectively accepted on faith.
It is not hard to find the reasons for this tacit collective acce
tance of Spivak's reasoning. They lie in Spivak's condemnation of
nist Victorian studies as complicit with the Victorians' imperia
mentality, and they get their urgency from their need to prove
political awareness and theoretical capability in the face of the w
accusation that can be leveled in today's academy: that of racism.
thinking about criticism, Spivak's logic is as expansively mobile as w
she is thinking about nineteenth-century British literature. As Jane
is her point of origin for theorizing literature, so that novel's most
ential critics to date, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, are the sta
point for her thoughts about criticism, thoughts she couches i
language of empire: noting that the "worlding" of Third World l
ture, its gradual recovery, interpretation, translation, and inclus
English language syllabi, has thus far been conducted in such a way t
it merely "expands the empire of the literary discipline" rather
challenging or changing it (262), Spivak directs her frustration strai
at feminist Victorian studies:
It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist

criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism. A basically isolationist admiration
for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the
high feminist norm. It is supported and operated by an information-retrieval
approach to "Third World" literature which often employs deliberately "nontheoret-
ical" methodology with self-conscious rectitude.
In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the "worlding" of what
is today "the Third World" by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane Eyre.
(262-63)
WINTER 2003
224 ERIN O'CONNOR
Spivak's stated wish is to talk about the literary critical treatment of

World literature. But her stated plan is to talk about this by talking
something else: feminist criticism ofJane Eyre. She moves from lame
the contemporary treatment of marginal literature--a treatmen
describes as a form of disciplinary imperialism -to attacking a partic
branch of contemporary criticism, the "isolationist" outlook of acade
feminism. And she moves from this toJaneEyreitself, which, by the
these two short paragraphs, has mysteriously morphed into the orig
possibly even the cause--of late-twentieth-century critical approache
Third World literature, of "the 'worlding' of what is today 'the T
World."' Aligning nineteenth-century British imperialism, "under
as England's social mission," and twentieth-century literary history, w
pursues its social mission with "self-conscious rectitude," Spivak a
that the "empire of the literary discipline" participates in the imper
project insofar as it fails to consider literature's historical relationsh
empire. Because feminist theory has, to Spivak's mind, done a great
to perpetuate, strengthen, and expand that disciplinary empire, it h
lot to answer for.
We should not be surprised, then, that the ready adoption of

Spivak's ideas about Victorian literature has been led by feminist critics
of Victorian literature: it was their political integrity Spivak specially
maligned, and it has since been their aim to show that feminism is not
after all incompatible with postcolonial critique, that feminist critics can
indeed comment knowledgeably-and appropriately-on how Bronte
and other women writers registered and responded to empire. As such,
much of the criticism that has come out of the essay has an essentially
conciliatory tone. No one argues with Spivak's claim about how the novel
operates within the ideology of imperialism. What they do dispute is her
suggestion that feminist criticism somehow replicates the patterns we see
in the nineteenth-century novel. AsJenny Sharpe has noted,Jane Eyre has
become "a contested site for establishing the relationship between femi-
nism and imperialism" (29). The observation is a revealing one. It tells us
that Jane Eyre's privileged position as a "contested site" is not itself
contested. It also tells us that there is no substantial debate about whether
a single novel can sustain such a far-reaching project. Such "contestation"

as there is centers not on whether the project is a viable one, but rather
on how best to carry it out. Feminist critics have thus made reading and
rereading Jane Eyre into a means of adapting Spivak's accusatory argu-
ment to their own ideological mission.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Instead of generalizing from carefully amassed specifics, the

postcolonial criticism that has grown out of Spivak's essay amasses
specifics in order to support generalizations that are already in place.
Contextualization is tactical, designed to support an existing thesis
rather than to gather the evidence that would allow a thesis to be
proposed. A paradox: specifying the postcolonial reading of Jane Eyre
has made Spivak's model more, rather than less, generalizable. Several
scholars have built books around theirJane Eyre essays, extending their
feminist-friendly version of Spivak's paradigm to other work by Bronte,
other Victorian novels, other Victorian genres (particularly poetry and
nonfiction prose), and even to literature from other periods.5 It is the
exemplary quality of this work that is most appealing to critics. What
Elsie Michie finds most "admirable" about Susan Meyer's Imperialism at
Home (1996) is not what Meyer has to say about the Victorian novel, but
how she "keeps both [race and gender] in view at the same time" (304).
What Paula Krebs admires about that same book is how it rises to the
challenge Spivak posed for feminist literary scholarship (110). Firdous

Azim justifies devoting four out of seven chapters in The Colonial Rise of
the Novel (1993) to Bronte by asserting that Spivak's reading "can be
extended to the nineteenth century as a whole" (173). Just as Spivak
equates Jane Eyre with the novel, so such books make the novel equiva-
lent to Jane Eyre, whose story becomes an allegory for the story of the
genre to which it belongs.
The exemplary utility of Spivak's argument holds for less
explicitly feminist work as well. Spivak's use of a minor, undeveloped
plot line as a sign of a major ideological subtext has become common
currency in postcolonial literary criticism. In Culture and Imperialism,
Said works from this basic model, doing unto Mansfield Park (1814)
what Spivak did untoJaneEyre. Reading the novel's marginal treatment
of Antigua-the West Indian source of Sir Thomas Bertram's wealth-
as evidence that Austen is "repress[ing] a rich and complex history"
that she "would not, could not recognize" (93), Said opens his
renowned study with a reading that owes its rationale and basic form to
Spivak. Clearly taken by the aggressive elegance of her model, Said
speaks of the potential for such readings to open up our understanding
of domestic novels; he is particularly exercised about the interpretive
possibilities of Great Expectations (1861)-his comments about which
inspired the Australian novelist Peter Carey to undertake a creative
version of the by-then stock critique. In 1997, Carey published Jack
WINTER 2003
226 ERIN O'CONNOR
Maggs, a novel about Great Expectations's Bertha Mason figure, the t

ported convict who uses his ill-gotten colonial gains to fund
conversion into a "gentleman."6 Coming at Jack Maggs prim
through postcolonial theory and only secondarily through Dick
(whose novel Carey first read through Said's lens), Carey is decid
if unwittingly- Spivackian in the way he expands a thoroughly dome
novel's "exotic" subplot into an entire work of postcolonial fict
Most recently, critics have begun giving Spivak's model a mater
twist by focusing on the place of exotic goods and materials in dome
fiction. Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853), with its India-rubber ban
silk turbans, and green tea; and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (
with its eponymous Indian diamond, have lent themselves read
such readings.8 Less obviously congenial novels have also yielde
surprising amount of analytical plunder. Elaine Freedgood has rea
"Negro head tobacco" that is smoked in Great Expectations as the key
the novel's discourse of race. And, as if to bring Spivak's project
home, she has also turned her attention toJaneEyre, treating the no
fine mahogany furniture as the decadent spoils of deforestation
slavery abroad.9
As these examples suggest, Spivak's model has become the b
model for doing postcolonial readings of nineteenth-century n
Whether developing Spivak's formulations or adapting them for
applications, whether close reading marginal ethnic characte
talking up passing mentions of imported things, critics have been bu
carrying out ajob whose parameters were set years ago by Spivak
Spivak need no longer be formally cited (Said, for one, fails to ackno
edge her influence on his work) speaks to how thoroughly
approach has influenced the postcolonial project-and it is indee
project, a group effort, cooperatively and collectively pursued. When
comes to assessing the Victorian novel's relation to empire, critics
bypassed debate in favor of a collaborative attempt to realize the pot
tial of a certain style of thought-to produce what Spivak gran
quently describes as a "narrative in literary history of the 'worlding
what is now called 'the Third World"' (262). The project
succeeded: we have indeed produced such a narrative; that narrat
Spivak's, and has not changed substantially since she first sketch
out nearly two decades ago. That this should be the case becomes all t
more troubling when one reflects that Spivak's argument is m
polemical than it is historical, that it is finally more an argument ab
VICTORIAN STUDIES
what literary history should say, than about how literary history oug
be done (or to be more precise, it is an argument about how to
literary history in such a way that it conforms to a predetermined
of what literary history should say).
The rote character of this branch of Victorian studies might
read as an analytical type of the leveling that has been seen to accom
the colonialist spread of Western mass culture, the devastating lo
tradition, ritual, and belief that has become one of the principal
cupations of postcolonial writing. Cultural imperialism may even be
to find its interpretive analogue in the critical imperialism of postco
literary studies, whose profitable investments in the Victorian novel
be read as a textual instance of reverse colonization. As such, the she
uniformity of this work should alert us to the possibility that some
akin to Said's Orientalism is at work here. Call it Victorientalism-the
mining of a distant, exotic, threatening but fascinating literature to

produce and establish a singularly self-serving body of knowledge else-
where, a body of knowledge that ultimately has more to tell us about the
needs of its producers than about its ostensible subject matter.
Spivak initiates this Victorientalist endeavor by making Jane Eyre
the object not of analysis, but of analytical expansion. I've argued that the
power of Spivak's reading comes less from compelling interpretation
than from the compulsive momentum of synecdoche: Jane Eyre is the
nineteenth-century novel is nineteenth-century culture is where imperi-
alism is imagined; therefore, Jane Eyre is where imperialism is imagined.
So, too, are Gilbert and Gubar equated with feminist literary criticism,
which is in turn equated with the "empire of the literary discipline." The
movement of the essay is one of pure growth, as one nineteenth-century
novel becomes the nineteenth-century novel, as the nineteenth-century
novel becomes all nineteenth-century culture, and as nineteenth-century
culture becomes the ideology of imperialism. In this way, Spivak makes
generalization the means-and end-of globalizing literary studies:
"worlding" literature is a process that takes place by thinking globally-
expansively, broadly, sweepingly-about texts. Spivak's is an argument
predicated on the fantastic reach of marginal details, such that particular
moments in one particular text yield-even seem to demand-broad
conclusions about the place of the novel in literary history and, crucially,
the place of literary history in the history of imperialism.
The message of Spivak's incremental synecdochal logic is clear:
in their failure to connect Victorian stories to empire, critics have
WINTER 2003
228 ERIN O'CONNOR
perpetrated an irresponsibly insular literary history.'0 And, by e

sion, what is needed to make literary criticism more worldly is
Victorian studies (one populated at least in part by scholars from
fields). We must talk of the general, generalizing epistemic viole
this sort of literary criticism, which has had two particularly dama
effects-it has appropriated the Victorian novel (the specific ca
Jane Eyre is, in Spivak's logic, paradigmatic of Victorian novel
general), and it has colonized the critical imagination of the Vic
anist, whose finest hour seems to be the moment when she becomes
Spivak's research assistant. (In more peevish moments, I have reflected
that if the case of Jane Eyre is representative of anything, it is representa-
tive of the ease with which both the nineteenth-century novel and the
specialist in nineteenth-century literature can be used as the proving
ground for one strand of late-twentieth-century theory.)
Spivak's relentlessly synecdochal reasoning thus amounts to a
profoundly territorial mode of thought. If it raises legitimate questions
about what constitutes a "field," about who qualifies to work within a
field, and about who has the authority to decide what direction a field
should take, it also behaves in a manner that is utterly, unrepentantly
symptomatic of the problems it presumes to expose. Indeed, one could
argue that Spivak's essay has done to Victorian studies something very
like what she argues the Victorian novel has done to imperialism.
SubjectingJane Eyre to the very sort of "information retrieval approach"
(262) that she accuses politically naive critics of bringing to the study of
third world literature, Spivak may be said to have exchanged one set of
oversimplifications for another: in order to produce her account of the
nineteenth-century novel's "worlding," particularly as it relates to ques-
tions of feminism, individualism, and empire, she has chosen to
simplify, and so objectify, the novel itself.
Looked at in this light, the power Spivak's essay has had over
both Victorianists and postcolonial critics seems almost inexplicable.
Her reading is spare, imprecise, full of unsubstantiated claims and
almost devoid of detailed textual analysis. It pronounces without
proving, and takes its own pronouncements as proof. It is also, as we
have seen, singularly hostile to Victorianists (we ought not to be misled
by the disclaimer, "my stance need not be an accusing one" [264]).
Possibly it is only the trained Victorianist who would take exception to
such a state of literary critical affairs-I am well aware that what I view
as a scandalous reduction might be viewed by less interested others as
VICTORIAN STUDIES
merely an accurate representation of the role Victorian literature and

culture played in the establishment of an ideology of empire so perva-
sive that it ceased to be visible as such. It is nevertheless my aim here to
trouble that perception. This is criticism as rescue mission, a shameless
attempt at recuperation whose fondest wish is for people to stop seeing
the Victorians as bad guys, and stop reading-or neglecting to read-
Victorian novels as bad books. But there are theoretical payoffs here as
well, for both the critic of Victorian literature, whose practice desper-
ately needs to become disembarrassed of its burden of conscience, and
the postcolonial critic, whose practice, as regards the Victorian novel,
could stand to become a bit more embarrassed, a bit more willing to
listen to what that novel has to say about precisely the relation it has
been seen as mystifying.
The end result of Spivak's hostile takeover of a genre, a history,
and a criticism is thus finally to encourage territorial thinking within
literary studies. My own response to the essay serves as a salient
example. To this day I feel a personal affront when I read or teach
Spivak's essay, an uncomfortable sense that someone from outside has
dared to tread on my field with such infinite condescension, has dared
to pass judgment on the critical practice of Victorian studies, and,
moreover, has dared to do so with so little ultimate authority-the
authority provided by a singularly skimpy and partial reading of a single
novel that presumes to call itself a reading of an entire genre, culture,
and politics; whose claim to cultural analysis is, in other words, that of
sheer bravado alone. There is a majesty to it, one that can only be called
imperial (calling Victorian literary studies imperialist is, after all,
Spivak's own colonizing gesture). It is a move that casts the field as a
fundamentally backward area, incapable of governing, or thinking, for
itself, and hence in need of enlightenment from beyond. And it is a
move whose power is revealed by the fact that we have yet to see it for
what it is. Victorian literary criticism has never fully registered the
burden of its own colonization. (The false consciousness of the Victori-
anist, who too often imagines that this civilizing mission is good for the
field, attests to this point.) Of course, it might be argued that the essay's
wholesale reproductions are themselves subversive deconstructions-
the empire writing back, or the master's tools dismantling the master's
house.'1 But such an argument is complicated by the fact that Spivak's
essay does less to deconstruct the Victorian novel than it does to recon-
struct it as a resource ripe for misrepresentation. There is a degree of
WINTER 2003
230 ERIN O'CONNOR
appropriation in Spivak's approach that replicates at the level of

odology the "axiomatics of imperialism" that are her subject.
II. Interlude: Minute on Methodological Mission
In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay delivered his infa

"Minute on Indian Education," a hortatory speech endor
English curriculum in Indian schools. "I have no knowledge of
Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct esti-
mate of their value," he said; "I am quite ready to take the Oriental
learning at the valuation of Orientalists themselves. I have never found
one of them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European
library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" (721).
Macaulay's idea was that a Westernized curriculum would teach Indian
students to identify with European values, and so to identify with the
project of imperialism: we must "do our best," he continued, "to form a
class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we
govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in
taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect" (729). Spivak's equally
concise "Minute on Jane Eyre" partakes of a similar missionary brevity, a
moralistic zeal whose urgent desire for reform takes shape as the
leveling of nineteenth-century British culture into a single representa-
tive, and singularly provincial, class of writing: the domestic novel.
Authorizing an English syllabus designed to train its students to recog-
nize the invidious ways and means of empire, Spivak makes the
nineteenth-century novel the object of a sort of intellectual imperi-
alism, a native structure that, in embodying the distinctly unworldly
qualities of its culture, needs to be rescued by the civilizing mission of
the postcolonial critic, whose transformative exertions oddly resemble
those of the missionary work they critique. (Where Macaulay envisions
an Indian population eager to assimilate, so Spivak expectsJane Eyre to
yield to the totalizing logic of her reading, itself a moral treatise that
finds in the novel an exemplary ignorance to be tamed and, presum-
ably, trained through an unrelenting course of [de]constructive criti-
cism.) As with Macaulay's native, so with Spivak's novel: neither is
politically viable, and both are infinitely in need of moral and intellec-
tual enlightenment. In this manner, the Victorian habit of making
natives responsible for their own domination finds its postcolonial echo
in a theoretical invective that sees in the nineteenth-century novel the
VICTORIAN STUDIES
imaginative origins of our present world crisis and believes its own
flung criticisms to contain the seeds of change.
There is something inhuman in the suggestion of an eq
lency between postcolonial management of the nineteenth-ce
novel and nineteenth-century administration of empire-as
"native" were only ever a body of words, or as if the novel could s
the kinds of oppression that people can. But without reducing
to popular fictions, or elevating fiction to unreasonably anthro
phic heights, I do want to suggest that if there has been a cas
postcolonial theory's revisionary effort, that casualty has be
nineteenth-century British novel, which has, in the missionary ha
political criticism, come perilously close to being delivered of
existence (I call this special brand of extermination genrec
such, it is the very inhumanity of my own claim that matters here
are not people (neither are they ciphers for culture or imper
and hence the violence that can be done to them-and the truths that
can be extracted from them-must be measured differently than we

have yet done. The point of my analogy, then, is not to compare novels
to "natives," but rather to compare their historical construction as
apposite Others: where the novel presumably helped cast the native as
Other, so the postcolonial critique of othering frequently treats the
Victorian novel as its epistemological Other, as a metonymic embodi-
ment of all that the revisionary project officially and expressly resists. To
paraphrase Spivak: my reading does not seek to undermine the post-
colonial project. But it will, if successful, incite a degree of rage that that
project should have assigned both the Victorian novel and its critics so
abject a script.'2
The dynamic here leaves me wondering-not so much about
Spivak's intent, but about the effect for Victorian studies of readings
like hers. There is disrespect built into any argument that presumes to
categorize so quickly, particularly one that categorizes in order to
dismiss. And to the extent that Spivak's essay has proved to be a forma-
tive one for postcolonial literary studies, especially for work on the
Victorian novel, it has proved to be formative of a condescension that
manifests itself as an assumption that the Victorian novel is a simple
thing indeed, a largely symptomatic repository of "culture" that is by
definition always also an "allegory of empire."'3 One might go so far as
to say that the complexity of this branch of postcolonial thought
depends on what it perceives to be the profound simplicity of the Victo-
WINTER 2003
232 ERIN O'CONNOR
rian novel, which, for all its wordy variety, always seems t
telling the same old story. Since Spivak's manifesto first mo
logic, the nineteenth-century novel has been put to work in th
of an interpretive mission whose enabling premises include
assumption that the Victorian novel needs-like some re
native (Conrad reminds us that he, too, is "simple" [33])--t
definitively in its place.
Any style of thought that takes as its starting po
contemptible simplicity of its subject should be categoricall
The postcolonial approach derived from Spivak's cond
account of Victorian literature is no exception. The novel
than her paradigm admits. It knows more than the model gives
for. It can even tell us a thing or two. Criticism's scapegoa
society's, are what they are for a reason. In accusing the Victor
of not knowing enough about its own ideological investment
happily-and conveniently-managed not to know how very
knows about us.
III. Victorientalism Revisited: Conrad's Map
One thing the novel knows about is the shape of our current
quest for moral restitution. After all, the story I have just told about post-
colonial theory's appropriation of the nineteenth-century novel bears a
striking resemblance to the work that, perhaps more than any other, has
become synonymous with the nineteenth-century literature of empire:
Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness. Heart ofDarkness originates in Marlow's
memory of a map: "when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I
would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose
myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many
blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly
inviting on a map [. . .] I would put my finger on it and say: When I grow
up I will go there" (11). Like an interpretive analogue of Heart of Darkness,
the postcolonial project sees the nineteenth century as a kind of
uncharted analytical territory, as so much space to be claimed, filled in,
and used. One of Marlow's "blank spaces on the earth" (11), it is "a white
patch for a boy [or a critic] to dream gloriously over" (12). And like
Africa, "the biggest-the most blank, so to speak," of all the spaces, it is
not really blank: filled in over the years by history and criticism the way a
map is filled in with "rivers and lakes and names" (11-12), the nineteenth
VICTORIAN STUDIES
century has "become a place of darkness," an era whose massive expe

ture of ink has only worked to obscure the truth at its heart: the "ob
but obfuscated "fact" of imperialism.
The methodological territoriality I am outlining here is m
than metaphorical (or, rather, more than my metaphor). Indee
finds its explicit rationale in the notion of "critical cartograph
central trope in postcolonial thinking about nineteenth-century
ture and culture.14 Mapping the field has been a massive group e
To name a very few contributions: Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishn
(1996) seeks the origins of modern thinking about race in ninete
century writing about empire; Paul Carter's Road to Botany Bay
outlines the importance of exploration to the symbolic consolidat
Australia during the nineteenth century; and Franco Moretti's A
the European Novel (1998) brings the mapping impulse home, tra
relations between fiction and region in Britain and continental E
Even Spivak speaks of "plotting"Jane Eyre's "reach and grasp," as if
novel were a stretch of land and she its self-appointed surveyor. Wh
want to note here is how the imagery of cartography casts the c
enterprise as a form of travel writing, a graphic record of the c
journey into imperialism's historical heart of darkness, the ninet
century. "Cartography," after all, indicates an exploration under
with the aim of charting; it suggests both that the nineteenth ce
has not been mapped (or, that the existing catalogue of landmar
incomplete and misleading), and that it is there-like Marl
Africa- to be mapped, to be filled in with the interested, intere
details of a scholarship whose progressive vision will render it n
navigable.
"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest
beginnings of the world" (35), Marlow recalls; going back to the nine-
teenth century puts the critic in touch with the origins of modern impe-
rialism. Where the Congo reveals the prehistoric present of imperial
Africa ("We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking posses-
sion of an accursed inheritance" [37]), the nineteenth century yields a
specifically transhistorical insight into the workings of imperial
ideology. Both give the traveler access to "truth -stripped of its cloak of
time" (38), and both thus supply their own rationale: they enable
"deliberate belief' (38). The result: an imperialism and a criticism with
"An idea at the back of it [...] something you can set up, and bow down
before, and offer a sacrifice to" (10). Armed with a moral ambience that
WINTER 2003
234 ERIN O'CONNOR
conceals the appearance of self-interest, the critic is, like Mar

of the new "gang of virtue" (28), there to improve the field by fo
it to yield up a wealth of new information about how imperialism
The idea is that processing and marketing that wealth-packag
theories, articles, and books-will, in a manner of speaking, d
cate the past, make it a safe place to visit and so reduce its po
threaten the present. As ambitious as this project is, its success is
anteed. As with Conrad's defenseless Africa, so with postcolon
unresisting nineteenth century: "Anything can be done in this co
[. . .] nobody, here, you understand here, can endanger your p
(34). There is no opposition, only a continuous extraction of in
tion-a steady trickle of ideology-flowing out of the depths
seemingly infinite and infinitely renewable resource, ninete
century writing. The whole makes the critic come off, like the ki
gentler imperialist Conrad mocks, as "an emissary of light, so
like a lower apostle" (15).
AbdulJanMohamed has shown that when narratives about co
nialism do not know themselves, they tend to take on the form
Manichean allegory. Projecting their hopes, fears, and beliefs onto
subject matter, such narratives tell us far more about the writer's
sism than anything else: "Instead of being an exploration of th
Other," JanMohamed writes, "such literature merely affirms
ethnocentric assumptions; instead of actually depicting the outer
of 'civilization,' it simply codifies and preserves the structures of
mentality" (84). Ironically, postcolonial critique is at times a M
allegory on the order of those it seeks to criticize - one whose sugg
familiar plot follows the allegorical contours of the greatest i
narrative of all. As a result, the power exerted by postcolonial
Manichean allegory is such that at times the critic can afford, like
to rely on extremely rickety argumentative machinery. Marlow n
rivets to patch together his leaky boat (30-31); Carolyn Port
observed that the "riveting anecdote" often holds together the
work she calls "colonialist formalism," a type of boilerplate his
whose precarious claims are propelled-like Marlow's steamer-
by a combination of conviction and hot air (261). The Bertha Maso
in Jane Eyre is one such riveting anecdote. When Spivak identifie
active ideology of imperialism" as Jane Eyre's "structural mot
sealed the postcolonial argument about nineteenth-century literatu
launching an invective whose long-winded elaborations have k
VICTORIAN STUDIES
model afloat for the past fifteen years. Keeping the model afloat
collective undertaking has been so consuming that it has not b
possible to look carefully at the world it traverses. So with Mar
continuous hunt for dead wood to fuel the steamer: "when you h
attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface,
reality [...] fades" (36).
In the midst of Marlow's unreal voyage, there is discourse
comes from all sides. There is the immaculate accountant ke
immaculate accounts: "of faultless appearance (and even slig
scented) perching on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote" (22). Th
the General Manager whose inscrutable speeches convey his
power: "Once when various tropical diseases had laid low almost
'agent' in the station he was heard to say, 'Men who come out
should have no entrails.' He sealed the utterance with that smile of his
as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his

keeping" (25). There is the bird-loving mechanic who "would rave
about pigeons" (31). There is the "gabbl[ing]" harlequin (53). And of
course there is Kurtz, whose legendary eloquence identifies him with
language itself: "I never imagined him as doing, but as discoursing"
(48). Together they create an atmosphere- "an air of plotting" (26) -
that imprints itself on Marlow's mind as a disembodied babble: "all of
them were so little more than voices [. . .] the memory of that time itself
lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense
jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean without any kind
of sense. Voices, voices [. . .]" (49). Marlow's image of African space is
finally a linguistic one. As visual memory fades into darkness-always
darkness-all that remains is a sense of the place as speech, a vast
chatter dominated by the unforgettably articulate Kurtz: "The man
presented himself as a voice" (48).
The postcolonial "map of Englishness" charts a similarly incor-
poreal cacophony, a corpus of writing that reaches out from the past and
speaks with the insensible authority of voices that, in outliving their
owners, have transcended time. There are the travel writers, the Galtons,
Kingsleys, Livingstones, Spekes, and Stanleys whose workmanlike pros
brings the interior home to untraveled readers. There are the speaker
and pamphleteers, the Carlyles, Macaulays, and Mills whose diatribes on
the "Nigger Question," "Indian education," and so on find their fictional
echo in Kurtz's own passionate contribution to the Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs. Loudest of all are the novelists, the
WINTER 2003
236 ERIN O'CONNOR
Austens, Brontes, Conrads, Dickenses, Haggards, Kiplings, and

sons whose stories anchor the imperial imagination. (I think
Austen as a ladylike incarnation of Conrad's tidy accountant, keepi
own precise accounts on that famous little bit-two inches wi
ivory.) Together they are a noisy bunch, discoursing endlessly
void, their words all that remains of the mentality that made the w
own. Binary in form and alienated in affect, the Manichean all
postcolonial critique is more interested in power than insigh
revealing of the critic than of the critic's subject. Doing the work
gory in the name of doing theory, postcolonial criticism attends t
nineteenth century so discursively, so obscurely, so self-servingly
"the reality [...] fades" along with our ability to gain access to it.
As words obscure the heart of darkness, removing men fro
overwhelming reality, so casting the past as language allows c
avoid recognizing their relation to it. Conrad himself warned
language could wall off comprehension in the colonial context
such linguistic distancing is a means of survival, it is also a me
of lies. The "immense jabber" of postcolonial criticism's jargon
such walling off; it is the scholarly way of making sure the "reali
fades." It has thus been possible not to notice that Marlow's
into the heart of darkness and contemporary critical ventur
Victorian literature follow a similar route. There is the voyage in
also a trip back; there is the ethical rationale for the progra
extraction of resources; there is the ramshackle vehicle of that
tion; there are the voices floating out of time. There is also
Marlow finds Towson's (or Towser's) guide to navigation, An
into Some Points of Seamanship. Postcolonial criticism finds Jane
novel that may at first seem, like Towson's guide, strangely out o
in such a context, but that operates along similar lines for s
reasons. Towson's book is, like Bronte's at the moment of Conrad's
writing, half a century out of date. And like Towson's, Bronte's book
provides in its very obsolescence "the delicious sensation of having
come upon something unmistakably real" (39) in the midst of a
confusing wilderness. What's "real" about Towson's book is the earnest-
ness with which it sets about its task: "you could see there a singleness
of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work
which made these humble pages thought out so many years ago lumi-
nous with another than a professional light [...]" (39). As far as post-
colonial theory is concerned, what's "real" aboutJane Eyre is "the active
VICTORIAN STUDIES
ideology of imperialism" Spivak reads there: at the heart of the fairy

of feminist individualism lies a "singleness of intention" so vivid tha
makes Bronte's well-thumbed pages "luminous with another th
professional light." Spivak is clear on this point: Jane Eyre is not
seen as a work of art, but as an inquiry into some points of ideology
Homi Bhabha has called the discovery of the English book
the "wild and wordless waste" of the exotic landscape the inaug
moment in the literature of empire (163).1 So, too, with the critique
the literature of empire, which finds at the scene of colonialism
Bible, as Indian missionaries sometimes did, nor a manual, as Marl
did, nor even Conrad's novella, as V. S. Naipaul did, but Jane Ey
which, in serving as a guide to nineteenth-century literary repre
tions of empire, functions as both an interpretive Bible (the sto
stories, the book of books) and a primer on navigation, the book
in plotting the essential trajectory of nineteenth-century fiction, m
it possible to find one's way around any domestic novel.'6As a fam
favorite book, a novel everybody always already knows, Jane Eyre is
perfect point of reference for nineteenth-century literary repre
tions of empire.
Marlow begins his yarn with a caveat about where stories
their meaning: "The meaning of an episode was not inside like a k
but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a
brings out a haze" (9). The observation is as apt for Bronte's nove
is for Marlow's own narrative, not least because of Jane Eyre's r
literary history's analytical reprise of Conrad. As my argument
should demonstrate, much of the meaning of this episode in p
colonial literary history comes not from Jane Eyre's "kernel," from
deep inner workings (these are so far removed from the scene t
has not even been necessary to touch on them), but from its position
a Great Book; Jane Eyre can become the urtext of postcolonial critic
because it is already an urtext twice over, a canonical novel that
a "cult text of feminism." As Marlow's story owes its significance to
philosophical reflections that illuminate-however hazily-his tr
the Congo, so Bronte's novel is lit up from the outside by an au
authenticity that is as exploitable as it is ultimately nonexistent. Wa
Benjamin used the term "aura" to describe the singular quality o
work of art in the era before mechanical reproduction, but the n
is nonetheless particularly apt here. Like Marlow, Benjamin un
stands a work's aura as something distinct from its essence: "To p
WINTER 2003
238 ERIN O'CONNOR
object from its shell," to attempt to get at the underlying ker

meaning, is "to destroy its aura" (223). The entity we know as "Jan
was-and still is-very much a product of mass production, a
publishing phenomenon whose immediate and ongoing success is
inseparable from its vast and speedy distribution, its extremely public
reception, its continuous editions, and its prominent presence on
English literature syllabi at both the high school and college levels. But,
in the dim half-light of a literary history that seeks it out as an exemplary
instance, it has acquired an aura of representative meaning, a meaning
that erases the story in the moment of raising it up. As Jane Eyre comes
to indicate "the Victorian novel," it loses its specificity as story; the
specific terms of Bronte's plot are significant only insofar as they stand
in for the generic features of all Victorian novels. Similarly, as the novel
in turn is seen to supply information about the "axiomatics of imperi-
alism," it loses its generic specificity as novel and becomes instead a
means to produce a particular "narrative of literary history," one that,
in moving from one novel to "the novel," and from "the novel" to
"narrative" to "history," achieves the paradoxical feat of appearing to
think textually without actually thinking very hard about texts.
We have seen how the methodological territoriality governing
Spivak's argument proceeds by synecdoche (the critic's way of
expanding the boundaries of her argument), such that the Victorian
novel, as it is embodied in this Victorian novel, provides the starting
point for reimagining both the meaning of Victorian fiction (as a heart
of darkness needing to be enlightened) and the mission of literary crit-
icism (as missionary work). And we have seen how that critical revision
in turn becomes the means of imagining how the analysis of Victorian
novels might become the basis for a new type of historical under-
standing. I want now simply to note how the effort to theorize the Victo-
rian novel as a crucial player in the development and dissemination of
imperialist ideology has effectively cast that novel-none too subtly-as
the one familiar touchstone in the confusing enormity of the recent
past, the "something unmistakably real" (39) that momentarily relieves
the feeling that one is being pulled "away from the truth of things
within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion" (17). Like
Towson's Inquiry, that "amazing antiquity" nearly lost in a "heap of
rubbish," the novel offers "the shelter of an old and solid friendship," a
consolation whose most salient feature is the irrelevance of its subject
matter to the task at hand (39). Towson's Inquiry can't tell Marlow the
VICTORIAN STUDIES
first thing about navigation; its disquisitions on "the breaking strain

ship's chains and tackle," replete with "illustrative diagrams and
sive tables of figures," have less than nothing to do with getti
broken-down steamer up the treacherous course of the Congo, w
at any moment arrows might fly, slaves might rebel, fuel might ev
rate, fog might fall, and shallows might crush the hull. What matte
Marlow, as to the crazy harlequin before him, is simply the fact tha
a book, that there is something, anything, to read at the heart o
heart of darkness. Bronte's novel possesses a similarly symbolic relat
to the postcolonial project. At the risk of seeming heretical, I will si
assert: Jane Eyre has just as little to tell us about the imperial imagin
as Towson's Inquiry had to tell Marlow about seamanship; wher
one is full of a "simple old sailor ['s] " outdated information, so the
is full of the dated imaginings of a provincial spinster. But as an art
as a domestic novel that brings the colonies home, it is, like the Inqu
"an extraordinary find" (39), a novelty capable of sustaining a theory
the novel itself.
In reading Conrad's novella as an allegory for the postcolonial

critic's relation to nineteenth-century studies, I have done some vulgar
analogical mapping. But that is my point: it is a vulgar cartography
indeed that plots a single Victorian novel as imperialism's heart of dark-
ness, that makes its well-known pages into a guide whose consoling pres-
ence in the "empty immensity" of the past licenses an entire
interpretive practice. Like the ideology it attempts to explain, this
strand of postcolonial critique is "not a pretty thing when you look into
it too much. What redeems it is the idea only" (10). My allegorical turn
is not motivated simply by a desire to turn the tables; after all, turning
the tables on a project that is itself in the business of turning tables
would only bring us back to where we started. Rather, my reading is
motivated by a desire to foreground just how closely tied postcolonial
theories of nineteenth-century narrative are to the forms and functions
of nineteenth-century narrative. If it seems strange to cast postcolonial
criticism as a collective retelling of Heart ofDarkness, it should not: there
is no reason to suppose that the latest chapter in an interpretive narra-
tive framed by the Victorians would be immune to the powerful struc-
turing influence of Victorian narrative. The fact that the definitive text
of the nineteenth-century literature of empire practically narrates post-
colonial critical engagement with that literature confirms that there is
no such immunity. Nursing a strangely uncritical, strangely Conradian
WINTER 2003
240 ERIN O'CONNOR
interest in "brooding" over the novel's "inscrutable inten

(Conrad 33), the scholarship aimed at demystifying Victorian
ture's ideological complicity with empire is itself an integral part o
narrative tradition it seeks to expose.
IV. Coda
The silencing gestures of the scholarship I have describe

scream the need for a genuinely post-postcolonial criticism, an earne
effort to conceive of the Victorian novel's relationship to empire th
would, above all, resist the twin temptations to berate the novel (f
having bad politics) and to badger the critic (by prescribing a proper
politicized reading practice). Such a criticism would refuse the reflexive
urge to seek paradigms for reading (as if works of art were interchange
able parts, and as if thinking responsibly about literature could be done
by recipe). Such a criticism would thereby avoid the distressingly
common practice of using individual works of literature to illustrate theo
retical principles or to stage exemplary approaches-a practice that
reverses the right relation between text and critic by reducing literatur
to a resource for devising new theories. Finally, such a criticism wou
reassess, as honestly and dispassionately as possible, the project of post-
colonial criticism as it has been practiced over the last two decades.
A. S. Byatt has written of the "fatal family likeness" (2) tha
plagues so much contemporary criticism. That likeness is in no sma
part due to the rise of paradigmatic thinking about literature's ideolog-
ical investments, of the idea that reading literature critically shoul
yield insight into how to read literature for political ends. Th
distorted, distorting idea that literary criticism should be abo
modeling politicized styles of thought is not confined to postcoloni
criticism; it prevails in Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and queer cr
icism, too. It is, indeed, simply the way of our fraught, unhappy field.
would argue, too, that it is a major reason why our field is as fraught a
unhappy as it is. A post-postcolonial criticism would-could-he
launch a much-needed process of disciplinary reform, one that wou
begin by acknowledging the damage agenda-driven scholarship has
done to the fragile, increasingly embattled field of literary study.
The paradigm is the vehicle of literary critical politicization; it
is the means by which literature has been made to participate in
variety of progressive interpretive projects. The paradigm recruits liter
VICTORIAN STUDIES
ature to its cause by simplifying and distorting, by reducing literature t

formula. Take it away, and literary criticism can begin to address t
complexity that several decades of paradigmatic thinking have delibe
ately and devastatingly obscured. Citing the radical theoretical mov
ments of the 1980s as a cause of profession-wide stagnation, Mark
Taylor is eloquent about the need to abandon old formulas, to learn t
think about systems and processes not as that which may-must-be
simplified into models and paradigms, but as that which must be under-
stood as complex: "A complexity that can be reduced to simplicity is no
complexity at all" (60). It's a paradox we would do well to learn to li
with and work within: sometimes the best way to manage complexity is
to let it be simply and unapologetically complex.
This is a realization that has yet to penetrate Victorian studies,
despite the fact that Victorian studies has been the scene of some of the
most rigidly formulaic thinking to come out of the humanities in recen
years. Some scholars have begun to question the governing paradigms of
the field, most notably Amanda Anderson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.'7
But as a rule, critics of interpretive paradigms have tended to avo
concluding that paradigms are themselves the problem; instead, the
make their analysis of faulty paradigms into the basis for proposing new
ostensibly improved ones. Anderson, for example, devotes her mo
recent book to promoting "detachment" as an alternative to the popular
theoretical rubric of "cosmopolitanism," while Sedgwick concludes h
remarkable skewering of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that dom
nated 1980s and 1990s criticism by recommending a new-age psychoana-
lytic approach derived from Silvan Tompkins's little-known cyberne
work on shame.18 But as the far-fetched quality of Sedgwick's pecul
solution shows, the quest for a perfect paradigm is a quest for a method
ological grail. For too long, too many critics have devoted their careers t
seeking that which does not-and cannot-exist. It's time to recogni
how the interpretive prescriptions that lie at the heart of contemporary
criticism have forced intellectual stasis on a field in the very moment o
attempting to open up new imaginative and analytical possibilities. M
own sense is that the future of Victorian studies-and of literary study-
depends on our willingness to abandon the static security of paradi
matic thought and to search earnestly for more dynamic, less script
ways of reading, writing, and teaching about literature.
Looked at in this light, a truly post-postcolonial criticism would
be part of a larger effort of reclamation. It would aim to restore literatu
WINTER 2003
242 ERIN O'CONNOR
to its rightful place at the heart of literary studies, treating it not

embarrassing adjunct to theory, not as a crutch for armchair activism
as so much undifferentiated "text," but as a unique, irreducible art f
with a rich and colorful history. In other words, such a criticism w
understand the dedicated, unapologetic study of literature as a v
worthwhile, eminently respectable end in itself. A post-postco
contribution to that effort of reclamation would begin by divorcing
project of globalizing literature from the tactic of globalizing about
ature. It would instead adopt a more humble and searching explo
of particularities; it would be far more closely and open-mind
engaged with the details of author's lives, beliefs, and writing patte
with the specificities of events and the unpredictable paths of
impact; with the complex inner workings of individual works. The a
this criticism would be not to generalize; not to make sweeping
and to proffer grandiose theories; not to conflate knowing
containing, classifying, and controlling; but to honor the
complexity of literature, of history, and of the uncertain, shifting
tionship between the two by allowing the material we work on to gu
the way we work on it. A post-postcolonial criticism of this sort wo
more work. It would be work fewer people could do well. But it wou
be work whose outcome is not utterly predictable and therefore eth
suspect. It would in short be genuine scholarship rather than clever
sanship, honest inquiry rather than advocacy masquerading as inquir
would have dignity, and it would have substance. It would allow us to
things we have not already seen. It could even produce new know
Who knows where it could lead?
University of Pennsylvania
NOTES
I would like to thank Christine Cooper, Caroline Levine, Andrew Mi

members of the Delaware Valley British Studies Association, and two anonymo
for Victorian Studies for their generous comments on various incarnations of
More fundamentally, I would like to thank Maurice Black, without whose co
insight, and support this essay would never have been written.
'An example of the wholesale reproduction of these framings in sub
postcolonial work: in Culture and Imperialism, Said simply quotes Bhabha's p
justification for conflating "culture," "imperialism," and "the novel" (xiii).
2The essay has a complicated itinerary. Originally published in a special
Critical Inquiry in Autumn 1986 (vol. 13, no. 1), it has become a classic in both
VICTORIAN STUDIES
and postcolonial studies. Reprints and extracts have appeared in Gates, ed., Race,
and Difference; Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, eds., The Feminist Reader: Essays i
and the Politics of Literary Criticism; Diane Price Herndl and Robyn Warhol, eds., Fe
An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism; Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,
Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader; Fred Botting, ed., Frankenstein; Bart Moore
Garreth Stanton, and Willy Maley, Postcolonial Criticism; and finally in Spivak's o
reprise, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Pre
critiques of Spivak's essay, see Benita Parry, "Problems in Current Theories o
Discourse" and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Critical Fanonism."
3For a representative example, see Chris Bongie's review of Thomas Ric
Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire.
4Jane Eyre's ethnohistory includes the following: May Ellis Gibson, "The S
or Suttee: Bronte's Jane Eyre"; Penny Boumelha, "'And What Do the Women D
Eyre,Jamaica, and the Gentleman's House"; Laura E. Donaldson, "The Miranda
Colonialism and the Question of Feminist Reading"; Susan L. Meyer, "Colonialism
Figurative Strategy ofJaneEyre"; Elsie B. Michie, "'The Yahoo, Not the Demon': He
Rochester, and the Simianization of the Irish"; Joyce Zonana, "The Sultan and th
Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre"; Sophie Gilmartin, 'The
Bride, and the Widow: Sacrificial Woman in the Nineteenth Century."
'See Sharpe's Allegories of Empire, Meyer's Imperialism at Home, David
Britannia, Azim's The Colonial Rise of the Novel and Perera's Reaches of Empire for
of this work.
6Michael Noonan's Magwitch (1983) anticipates this project.

7Information aboutJack Maggs's origins comes from a talk delivered by C
the University of Pennsylvania, Fall 1998.
'See, for example, Jeffrey Cass's "'The Scraps, Patches, and Rags of Dai
Gaskell's Oriental Other and the Conservation of Cranford" and Ashish Roy's 'Th
lous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone."
"See "Mahogany Furniture as Sadistic Souvenir: Deforestation and Slavery
Eyre" and "What Goes Around: Negro Head Tobacco and Aboriginal Genocide
Expectations."
"'Spivak's essay is thus in part a critique of Gilbert and Gubar's concep
woman writer and her dark double. Others have taken this cue: Said positions C
Imperialism as a book Raymond Williams might have written, but did not. Gika
ofEnglishness also claims to be a correction of Williams's insular cultural history
'These catchphrases are from Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, and Helen T
collection The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature an
Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House."
"Spivak's own phrasing: "my readings here do not seek to undermine the
lence of the individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will incit
of rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, that it should produc
a script for her" (263).
'"This phrase-originally Kipling's-has become a central one in postc
criticism. Sara Suleri opens The Rhetoric of English India with a discussion of it,
the title forJenny Sharpe's book on the subject, and it is, as we have seen, a form
for critics as diverse as FredricJameson and AbdulJanMohamed.
WINTER 2003
244 ERIN O'CONNOR
"The phrase is Gikandi's. For an elaborate unfolding of this concept, see

Maps of Englishness.
l5See Bhabha's "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence
Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817" for a fine account of that parad
colonial scenario, the discovery of the English book in the wilderness of empire.
'6Conrad's story is more important to postcolonial criticism as an image of i
rial ideology itself than as a model of how Victorian literature took up questi
empire. WhereJaneEyreexemplifies the structural importance of imperialism to d
fiction, Heart of Darkness has come to stand as a cipher for imperial ideology (as S
it, Conrad's novella "beautifully capture [s]" the "imperial attitude" [ Culture 22]).
17See, for example, Anderson's "Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures
Politics of Post-Structuralism" and the introduction to The Powers of Distance: Cos
tanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. In "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Read
You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You," Sedgwick
oughly challenges the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that she helped to establish a
has dominated progressive criticism since the 1980s.
"8See "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading" and "Shame in the Cybern
Fold: Reading Silvan Tompkins."
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Amanda. "Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: The Politics o

Structuralism." 21 Cultural Critique (Spring 1992): 63-95.
. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Prin
Princeton UP, 2001.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffith, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: The
Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reade
York: Routledge, 1995.

Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Belsey, Catherine, andJane Moore, eds. TheFeminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the P
of Literary Criticism. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Benjamin, Walter. 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Ill
tions. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-52.
Bhabha, Homi. "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Auth
under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817." Gates, "Race" 163-84.
Bongie, Chris. Rev. of Imperial Archive: Knowledge and theFantasy of Empire, by Thoma
ards. Victorian Studies 38 (Spring 1995): 463-69.
Botting, Fred, ed. Frankenstein. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.
Boumelha, Penny. "'And What Do the Women Do?': Jane Eyre, Jamaica, an
Gentleman's House." Southern Review 21 (1988): 111-22.
Byatt, A. S. The Biographer's Tale. New York: Knopf, 2001.
Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Cass,Jeffrey. "'The Scraps, Patches, and Rags of Daily Life': Gaskell's Oriental Other
Conservation of Cranford." Papers on Language and Literature 35 (Fall 1999): 41
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton, 1972.

David, Deirdre. Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. Ithaca: Corn
1995.
Donaldson, Laura E. "The Miranda Complex: Colonialism and the Question of Feminist
Reading." Diacritics 18 (Fall 1988): 65-77.
Fraiman, Susan. 'Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism." Crit-
ical Inquiry 21 (Summer 1995): 805-23.
Freedgood, Elaine. "Souvenirs of Sadism: Mahogany Furniture, Deforestation, and
Slavery in Jane Eyre." Talk delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, 17 April,
2001.
. "What Goes Around: Negro Head Tobacco and Aboriginal Genocide in Great
Expectations." Talk delivered at the Marxism 2000 Conference, University of Massa-
chusetts, Amherst, September 2000.
Gates,Jr., Henry Louis. "Critical Fanonism." Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 457-70.
--, ed. "Race," Writing, and Difference. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1985.
Gibson, May Ellis. "The Seraglio or Suttee: Bronte'sJane Eyre." Postscript 4 (1987): 1-8.
Gikandi, Simon. Maps ofEnglishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York:
Columbia UP, 1996.
Gilmartin, Sophie. "The Sati, the Bride, and the Widow: Sacrificial Woman in the Nine-
teenth Century." Victorian Literature & Culture 25.1 (1997): 141-58.
Herndl, Diane Price, and Robyn Warhol, eds. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and
Criticism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric. "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Social
Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65-88.
JanMohamed, Abdul. "The Economy of Manichean Allegory." Gates, "Race" 78-106.
Krebs, Paula M. Rev. of Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women 's Fiction, by Susan L.
Meyer. CLIO 28 (Fall 1998): 110.
Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." This Bridge
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldua. Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1981.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. "Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education."
Macaulay, Prose and Poetry. Ed. G. M. Young. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957. 721-29.
McClintock, Ann. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New
York: Routledge, 1995.
Meyer, Susan L. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1996.
. "Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre." Victorian Studies 33 (Winter
1990): 247-68.
Michie, Elsie B. Rev. of Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction, by Susan L.
Meyer. Modern Philology 97 (1999): 304.
. "'The Yahoo, Not the Demon': Heathcliff, Rochester, and the Simianization of
the Irish." Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian
Woman Writer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 46-78.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Garreth Stanton, and Willy Maley. Postcolonial Criticism. London:
Longman, 1997.
Noonan, Michael. Magwitch. New York: St. Martin's, 1983.
WINTER 2003
246 ERIN O'CONNOR
Parry, Benita. "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse." Oxford

Review 9 (1987): 27-58.
Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novelfrom Edgeworth to Dickens.
Columbia UP, 1991.
Porter, Carolyn. "History and Literature: 'After the New Historicism."' New
History 21 (Winter 1990): 253-72.
Roy, Ashish. "The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins' The Moonst
Literary History 24 (Summer 1993): 657-82.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're
noid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You." Novel Gazing: Que
ings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-37.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Readi
Tompkins." Critical Inquiry 21 (Winter 1995): 496-522.
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minn
Minnesota P, 1993.
Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Gates, "Race" 262-80.
Zonana,Joyce. "The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane
Eyre." Signs 18 (Spring 1993): 592-617.
VICTORIAN STUDIES

M33P1 Novel II - Preface For A Post-Postcolonial Criticism, Pr. Mamaoui

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

M33P1 Novel II - Preface For A Post-Postcolonial Criticism, Pr. Mamaoui

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism

Author(s): Erin O'Connor

subject, "globalizing literary studies." In common critical

literary dimensions as a literary process-a move that simultane

The role of literature, not to mention literary criticism, in th

to postcolonial theory as nineteenth-century colonialism itself.

meant for thinking about the nineteenth-century British nov

I. Victorientalism: ColonizingJane Eyre

Spivak's essay may be understood as a primal scene of

Eyre and race has paid homage to it, alternately developing, re

to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature.

Spivak demonstrates just how an awareness of these "'f

viability of an argument that is made without the benefit of evid

It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist

Spivak's stated wish is to talk about the literary critical treatment of

We should not be surprised, then, that the ready adoption of

a single novel can sustain such a far-reaching project. Such "contestation"

Instead of generalizing from carefully amassed specifics, the

challenge Spivak posed for feminist literary scholarship (110). Firdous

Maggs, a novel about Great Expectations's Bertha Mason figure, the t

mining of a distant, exotic, threatening but fascinating literature to

perpetrated an irresponsibly insular literary history.'0 And, by e

merely an accurate representation of the role Victorian literature and

appropriation in Spivak's approach that replicates at the level of

II. Interlude: Minute on Methodological Mission

In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay delivered his infa

can be extracted from them-must be measured differently than we

III. Victorientalism Revisited: Conrad's Map

century has "become a place of darkness," an era whose massive expe

conceals the appearance of self-interest, the critic is, like Mar

as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his

Austens, Brontes, Conrads, Dickenses, Haggards, Kiplings, and

ideology of imperialism" Spivak reads there: at the heart of the fairy

object from its shell," to attempt to get at the underlying ker

first thing about navigation; its disquisitions on "the breaking strain

In reading Conrad's novella as an allegory for the postcolonial

interest in "brooding" over the novel's "inscrutable inten

The silencing gestures of the scholarship I have describe

ature to its cause by simplifying and distorting, by reducing literature t

to its rightful place at the heart of literary studies, treating it not

I would like to thank Christine Cooper, Caroline Levine, Andrew Mi

6Michael Noonan's Magwitch (1983) anticipates this project.

"The phrase is Gikandi's. For an elaborate unfolding of this concept, see

Anderson, Amanda. "Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: The Politics o

York: Routledge, 1995.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton, 1972.

Parry, Benita. "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse." Oxford

Вам также может понравиться