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Victorian Studies 46.1 (2003) 97-105



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Let's Post-Post-Post "Victorientalism":
A Response to Erin O'Connor

Patrick Brantlinger
Indiana University


Erin O'Connor's "Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism" is clever, provocative, and, like all good literary satires, fun to read. I'm not sure she meant it to be entirely satirical, but that's how I'd prefer to read it—all in good fun. Not only is it amusing and provocative, but also—again, like all good satires—thoroughly reductive (humans as Yahoos). Indeed, it is reductive in just the same way that it accuses postcolonial criticism of being reductive. The key problem with taking its more serious points seriously is that it reduces postcolonial criticism to a single text, Gayatri Spivak's 1985 essay on Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. O'Connor's disagreements with that essay may be valid, but she does exactly what she claims Spivak does by extending those disagreements to postcolonial criticism in general (even as she inveighs against generalizations).

It may be true that various Victorianists have chimed in with Spivak to discover imperialism and racism—the postcolonialist's version of "the heart of darkness," according to O'Connor—in Jane Eyre. But is it really the case that Susan Meyer, Deirdre David, Elsie Michie, and the others O'Connor mentions are simply, abjectly copycatting Spivak's argument? Meyer may only be "finetuning" Spivak, as O'Connor contends (223), and yet Meyer writes: "I find problematic [Spivak's] analysis of the workings of imperialist ideology and its relation to feminism, both in general and in Jane Eyre" (65). David seems [End Page 97] more accepting of Spivak's analysis, yet she is hardly a party to what O'Connor calls Spivak's "hostile takeover" (229) of Victorian fiction. Rather than treating Jane Eyre dismissively, David calls Brontë's heroine "a symbolic governess of empire" (80), and notes that she succeeds in the "reformation of the colonizer rather than the colonized" (85). Perhaps it does get tiresome to have yet another go at Bertha Mason's racial hybridity or at St. John Rivers's missionary designs on India, but there is a bit more originality and diversity in the approaches of Meyer, David, and the others than O'Connor allows. Also, what good would it do simply to ignore the imperial connections in Jane Eyre? It's not that Spivak and the others are inventing those connections out of whole cloth. The questions should be, what and how much to make of those connections? In Spivak's case, the main question is how the imperial connections relate to the "feminist individualism" that Jane is so often seen as embodying. This seems to me a perfectly reasonable question, and in raising it Spivak—in my view, at least—does not seem unduly condescending, much less "hostile," to Brontë's novel, or to the Victorian novel in general.

I agree with O'Connor that if answering such questions were to lead to dismissing Jane Eyre as an irredeemably flawed expression of imperialist or racist ideology, the result would be as ludicrous as its opposite: pretending that the novel's imperial connections don't exist. O'Connor seems to believe, however, that the appreciation of great works of literature is incompatible with all forms of ideological critique: "The distorted, distorting idea that literary criticism should be about modeling politicized styles of thought is not confined to postcolonial criticism; it prevails in Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and queer criticism, too" (240). Apparently, those who believe that criticism, literature, and culture are inherently political have made a huge categorical error. This leads to O'Connor's all-too-familiar lament about "the damage agenda-driven scholarship has done to the fragile, increasingly embattled field of literary study" (240). Hey, Erin: it's been "embattled" for some time now—at least since the 1960s!—but it's still doing pretty well. As some version of a feminist and at least a "post-postcolonial" critic, however, O'Connor...

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