The Emergence of the New Woman - Book Report/Review Example

Subversion of Victorian stereotypes may have given rise to the New Woman also sought to silence her within the maddening attic of isolation and disrepute. Bertha Mason, the popular postmodern figure of Feminist criticism from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte finds an entire counter narrative dedicated to her in Jean Rhys' postcolonial metanarrative, "Wide Sargasso Sea" - a pastiche that explores issues of gender, race and identity within the framework of deconstruction of 'White, Male Western Discourse'. The legacy of Enlightenment1 and its attendant cult of Reason mingled with Foucault's assessment of it finds perfect illustration in Rhys' novel, while Pygmalion becomes a revolutionary cry for feminism amidst a Victorian rigidity of patriarchal discourses of religion, economics and history. If Shaw is unconsciously exploring issues dear to feminism, then Rhys is psycho-sexually and politically discussing its impact today. George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" first appeared in 1912. It was first performed in 1913; and was published in 1916. It's a comedy that dramatizes the social arrangements (institutions or languages) that enforce relations of power between man and woman. Shaw's play was originally based on the classical legend from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" about Pygmalion, who falls in love with his own sculpture, Galatea. In the myth, Venus/Aphrodite gives life to the statue signifying Liza, who of course fails to live up to her standard of a "statue" (performance, silence and as per the instructions of patriarchal "linguistic" ideologies). First she's shown to be a poor, illiterate flower girl, with an accent that wouldn't allow her to achieve a better position. Higgins's profession is ironically suitable in getting the function quite clear: he is the male tutor, who must intervene within the chaotic but free realm of Liza's consciousness and make her a "real" woman through the performatory acts that must naturally define her gender. He usurps the position of the "logos"2 and marginalizes Liza through discipline and punishment the fate that must constitute her race. Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea" let's the "Other"3 mingles into voices of proletariat, feminist, colonized and the hybrid cultural crisis within his Caribbean novel, where problems of identity are interrelated beyond the obvious faade of society or politics. The psychological split of the colonized or that of the "subject" beyond the intelligible demands of language and discourse defines the absence that marks the book. Bertha Mason fails once again. Rhys re-invents Bronte's misrepresentation of Creole women and the West Indies and thus Antoinette's feelings of displacement and complete subjugation and her attempts at freedom appear typically as 'madness' in the eyes of the colonizer (male), since his discourse only labels the dominated colonized people (feminized in their docile submission and silence) and their "primitive" or "savage" actions as uncivilized. Antoinette's subjugation through the marriage first comes when it becomes negotiated completely by the men in both side of the family. Rochester's father and brother, Antoinette's stepfather and, subsequently, her stepbrother, Richard Mason all orchestrates Antoinette's marriage and eventually Rochester's experiences with her sense of freedom at Granbois, begins to symbolize his lack of power as expected of Victorian man, where he sees Antoinette as an "alien". Rochester's decision to re-name Antoinette (as Bertha) becomes significant as he attempts to construct Antoinette to the Victorian and the Empire's masculine demands so as to establish a gendered, social "hegemony"4 between them. He finally manages to silence her by physically displacing her, denying her sexual pleasure and denying her identity. At this point in the novel, Rochester's role as colonizer and Antoinette's as colonized within the marriage are fully realized. Rochester, in the position of power, has successfully taken possession of Antoinette's wealth, property and identity. Antoinette is usurped from her own narrative of regional identity to another discourse, where she did not know how to address her feeling again. She is completely relegated to the periphery of madness, which Foucault says, was a process of cultural confinement5 whose function did not serve any function of a society that largely was constructed as per the State discourse which implicitly links clues to gender identity and sexual orientation to its marginalization since Victorian times, for Women in particular, who could not cope with the cruel oppression in any and every was possible. Madness was the only escape from such stultifying silence. It was also an instrument for society to bury her words alive within the realm of insignificance, which constituted madness. Foucault6 also argues that madness during Renaissance had the power to signify the limits of social order and to point to a deeper truth. This was silenced by the Reason of Enlightenment. Thus if Jean Rhys' textual scope assumes such "feminist" knowledge already contained within the critical eye of the reader, then Shaw's drama reflect the innocence of the display of this whole process of discipline and education and thereby acts out stages of her development though Liza. These rigid gender binaries stifling the self-concept of a proletariat female subjectivity seeking solace in another proletariat man, probably just to escape the class construct that she is thrust into both due to her sex and her new found consciousness. The open end of the story is also symbolic since it suggests not only the possibility of Liza choosing between Higgins or her old unrequited lover, but another possible space that may have been left unexplored for new feminism or the new woman that she becomes. Antoinette's ethnonational identity is determined by a historically informed cultural pessimism bordered on the essence of multiple marginalizations like Liza that controls women within the terrifying parameters of stigma. Liza strictly elaborates on the new feminism of the era, which Ibsen ushered in with the role of Nora (in "A Doll's House", 1879) who banged close, a door that resounded throughout Europe7 and walked out on a perfectly ideal setup of a fathering husband and rewarding motherhood that was critically balanced on her socio-economic and moral submission to patriarchal patronization. Liza's educated world becomes an illusion of a reality that Professor Higgins chalks out for her and she fails to critique it from a transcendental position apart from her pre-Oedipal (symbolically) or chaotic social position of a cockney girl. Bertha's dream about her red dress comes to symbolize the waking nightmares that she has come to inhabit. As Bertha says of her dream, "It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now". Her rebellion to break away from his influence thus remains incomplete within the scope of the play or maybe completes her failure, like all discursive languages, which carry patriarchal subjectivity that makes the concept of a female discourse, a very disputed idea. In its simple dimension the play merely talks about Higgins who sees no consequences in his experiment for Liza; she is merely a means to an end. Liza's motive in seeking training is to improve her station in life-a challenging task. The primary internal conflicts include Liza's struggle to find her identity and Higgins's struggle as a social misfit in general again layers the complicacy of the tale. Higgins refuses to acknowledge every part of his own identity (again a strong feminist implication here); he limits the scope of his existence to his work (another horrific patriarchal way of objectifying the feminine subjectivity). Western discourses of feminism come to direct rebellion with the native ideas of feminism that do not share its centre in European idea of feminism. Bertha's imprisonment within - the double confinement of domestic and colonial space must also be seen to be part of a larger cultural framework, in which the narratives of imperial-ism and literary history overlap and according to Gayatri Spivak's reading of Rhys's text, Bertha, the white Jamaican undergo a process of self-othering in order to allow for a particular hegemonic reading of the canon of Western literature8. Thus, recognizing that "This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England," but rather an imagined space "lost" between two worlds (Rhys 104), Bertha realizes what she must do. In the words of Spivak, "she must play out her role, act out the transform a psycho-sexual execution of her self' into that fictive "Other", set fire to the house and kill herself so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction. Textual dis-placement and cultural re-mapping inherent in such forms of literature that crosses genres, plays, and mixes up literary genealogies, is especially suited to feminist critiques of imperialism and patriarchy that have effectively revises, this notion of the "madwoman in the attic"9 paradigm. They converge again when both Shaw and Rhys share motherless main characters who form close surrogate attachments with other women (Antoinette/Bertha with Christophine and Grace Poole, Liza with Mrs. Higgins) and who undergo symbolic re-naming when exchanged between men. The feminism in Shaw and Rhys thus move between fine lines of Victorian "New Feminisms" that had its imperial centre with white European women and the feminism of Rhys that explores possibilities of a doubly displaced Creole woman who not only represents the "Other" of the colonial woman feminists, but also must chalk out crucial rebellion that is unique to her experience in the postcolonial context. Works Cited 1. Dreyfus, Herbert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition. (University of Chicago Press, 1983) 2. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. 3. Hicks, Stephen R. C. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) 4. Kristeva, JuliaDesire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980 5. Krutch, Joseph Wood. "Modernism" in Modern Drama: A Definition and an Estimate. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1953. Page 9 6. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12 .1 (1985): 243-61. Read More