Trinity Collections P4 Critics

CONTEXT about Orwell

Orwell served in Burma as an Assistant Superintendent of Police from 1922

In ‘A Hanging’ he describes how the task of having to work as an instrument of imperial justice revealed to him the ‘machinery of despotism’

Colonial Discourse: Colonial and Postcolonial Literature by Elleke Boehmer

Orwell’s self-declared purpose in Burmese Days… was to expose the hypocrisy of the British Establishment

Colonial Discourse: Rule of Darkness by Patrick Brantlinger

For missionaries and abolitionists, the African was a creature to be pitied, to be saved from slavery and also from his own darkness, his savagery

→ British colonialism rule as an altruistic pursuit

Colonial Discourse: Orientalism by Edward Said

The Orient is one of the ‘deepest and most recurring images of the Other’

‘The Orient … vacillates between the west’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in – or fear of – novelty‘

‘The Orient’ as a passive entity, ‘something one judges… something one disciplines, something one illustrates’

‘Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.’

Virginia Woolf: A Literature of Their Own

Androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition

Bildungsroman: Under Western Eyes by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Mohanty argues that we need to challenge the ‘objectification’ that occurs in the writing of western women about women in the third world – in these texts women are defined ‘primarily in terms of their object status (the way in which they are affected to not affected by certain institutions and systems)’ and are continuously presented as victims (be it of male violence, colonialism, the Arab familial system etc.)

• rejects universalising label of the ‘Third World Woman’

Bildungsroman: Peripheral Realism and the Bildungsroman by Gabriele Lazzari

Nervous Conditions appropriated the Bildungsroman and demonstrates its inadequacy for the representation of the experience of a colonised subject

Creole Modernism: Women and Schizophrenia by Elizabeth Abel

R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (1960) -> he describes the fundamental split that develops in the person lacking ‘ontological security,’ the sense that his or her identity is acceptable to others.

In Voyage in the Dark Rhys suggests that her heroine suffers from a sense of internal division between a responsive but covert inner self and a mechanical external one.

Creole Modernism: The Paradoxes of Belonging by Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell

The white creole woman is an outcast, a sort of freak rejected by both Europe and England, whose blood she shares, and by the black West Indian people, whose culture and home have been hers for two generations or more.