“There is something inhuman in the suggestion of an equivalency between postcolonial management of the nineteenth-century novel and nineteenth-century administration of empire–as if the “native” were only ever a body of words, or as if the novel could suffer the kinds of oppression people can.”<\/p>\n
The above passage from Erin O’Connor’s attack essay in retaliation to Spivak’s own essay is, as the title of this post suggests, asinine. I’ll begin this by saying that I could be 100% wrong on what Erin is trying to say here, but based on the tone and wording that she chooses to use, it kinda seems like she’s trying to say that Jane Eyre can’t possibly possess an inkling of postcolonial feminism simply because she isn’t real. And to make such a statement is, to be quite honest, pretty ignorant of her.<\/p>\n
Books and writing, as with many other art forms, have long been used as ways to express and bring attention to oppression. Erin is doing the exact same thing in her essay, which attacks Spivak for unknowingly attacking her own ideas. Is it logical to say that Jane Eyre doesn’t experience real oppression because she isn’t a real person? Technically, yes. But what about Charlotte Bronte? She was certainly very real, and was most certainly, along with many other women at the time, a victim of female oppression. It is entirely possible–and in fact, even pretty much confirmed–that Bronte wrote a lot of herself into the character of Jane Eyre.\u00a0Now, be that as it may, there is a little bit of merit to Erin’s argument. The native in question is, I assume, Bertha, or rather, what Bertha represents: colored women being mistreated by white society. Erin feels that the “native” is being reduced to “a body of words,” that their stories are being overshadowed\/transformed into something different by the white feminism of Jane Eyre. As aforementioned, there is merit to this argument; but not enough. To call a comparison between Jane Eyre’s treatment of postcolonial feminism and society’s treatment of postcolonial feminism “inhuman” is absurd.<\/p>\n
Primarily, this is because Bronte wrote this story as a piece of postcolonial feminism: her voice as a woman made heard through literature, in 1847. It was quite a different time.\u00a0Jane Eyre<\/em> is a reflection of the postcolonial feminism of the times. By calling a comparison between the two “inhuman”, as Erin seems to be wont to do, appears (to me, at the very least; I would like to stress that this is an opinion based off of a personal interpretation) to be contradicting her own argument of\u00a0Jane Eyre<\/em> not being explicitly feminist. Because, if we think about it, it’s really not.\u00a0The novel would rather have us uphold Jane over Bertha, and Erin, it seems, wouldn’t have us do that; she would have us place them on the same level. A noble and justified pursuit, to be sure. It is also something that we, as educated readers in the 21st century, are already capable of doing. To attack Spivak as she does, and then to go and contradict herself as she does here, only goes to show Erin’s lack of understanding of not only Spivak’s argument, but her own, as well.<\/p>\n *Sorry for the rant-y tone, but Erin O’Connor’s essay really ground my gears. I had to say something.*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “There is something inhuman in the suggestion of an equivalency between postcolonial management of the nineteenth-century novel and nineteenth-century administration of empire–as if the “native” were only ever a body of words, or as if the novel could suffer the kinds of oppression people can.” The above passage from Erin O’Connor’s attack essay in retaliation … Continue reading Move Over, Bertha: The Only Crazy Person Here Is Erin O’Connor<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3463,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138876,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2017","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}