Explain how a post-colonial analysis of any text on this module can illuminate the way in which that text encodes the politics of the race.

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Explain how a post-colonial analysis of any text on this module can illuminate the way in which that text encodes the politics of the race.

The role of Postcolonial criticism is to question and ‘undermine universalist claims that great literature has a timeless and universal significance which disregards political, social, cultural and national differences thus judging literature by a single universal standard’. (Beginning Theory: Peter Barry).  It is interested in European narration of  non-Europeans and of the relation of Europe to non-Europeans.

‘…it should not be possible, in principle, to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English.   The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored’. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of post-colonial reason; toward a history of the vanishing present, 1999, p113).

A post-colonial analysis of the text of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte will show how the text encodes the politics of race, which contribute to the plot as well as to the imagery of the novel.  

Bertha Mason, Rochester’s wife is a White Jamaican Creole, a representation of imperialism.  Despite being European she is not looked upon as such but more as one of


the indigenous Caribbean population, a ‘mixed race’.  At this time, slavery was prominent in Jamaica and supported Europe’s wealth.  Bertha being described as ‘White’ instantly brings to mind racial distinction inferring, that this should make her more acceptable as Rochester’s wife.  Rochester had to marry Bertha because the customary system of inheritance could not support both brothers. Her madness is depicted as hereditary and alludes to being linked with mixed racial origins. To prove his point, Rochester tells Jane that Bertha’s mother ‘was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum’, her younger brother   ‘a complete dumb idiot’ and that the elder brother ‘will probably be in the same state one day’.  Rochester’s remarks reflect a prejudice towards non-European culture as uneducated and uncivilized.  It is as if he is saying that one cannot expect anything else from mixed racial backgrounds.  Jane describes her first encounter with Bertha: ‘In the deep shade, …a figure ran backwards and forwards.  What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: …covered with clothing …dark, grizzled hair…’.   Bertha’s bearing is left rather vague, neither human nor animal, there is a total lack of recognition of her as a person, she does not have an identity.   ‘…it grovelled …it snatched and growled …’, imparts feelings of being captured and forced to live in a certain way and condition against ones will, being held hostage helplessly by a stronger force which, in this case is Rochester. Bertha is

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described by Jane as having a ‘…savage face. …red eyes and the fearful blackened

Margaret Fernandes                                        -2-


inflation of the lineaments!’  Both quotations reinforce a lack of identity and promote images of slavery, which was strong in the Caribbean during this time.

Bertha’s madness makes life intolerable for Rochester in Jamaica.  He sees it as an evil place describing it as ‘Hell’. He describes one particular night as ‘it was a fiery West Indian night’, expressing his tormented feelings and displayng his anxiousness to get away from what he sees as an uncivilized, debased and corrupt place, ‘…bottomless ...

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