Trinity Collections Prep Paper 4

Colonial Discourse: Flory’s interactions with ‘native’ Burmese culture

Flory’s reaction to the ‘pwe-dance’: Orwell’s depictions of native Burmese culture

Initially ‘grotesque’ and ‘ugly’, had ‘something sinister in it’

‘when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see behind it! … Whenever you look closely at the art of these eastern peoples you can see that – a civilisation stretching back and back, practically the same, into times when we were dressed in woad.’

Colonial Discourse: Stereotypical characterisation of Ma Hla May

How is Ma Hla May portrayed in the text?

• manipulative and materialistic

• Clear example of Orientalist stereotyping and Orwell’s eroticisation of the colonial subject

  Introduction:

  • Compares ‘her tiny, straight slender body’ and ‘her oval face’ to that of a ‘grotesquely beautiful’ doll’s

  • ‘Exotic native woman’ who smells of of ‘sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil and jasmine’

  • Passive cipher → she ‘lay and let him do as he wished with her‘

  • Erratic and overly emotional (undermines her agency) → ‘Suddenly she burst into a furious tirade. Her voice had risen to the hysterical graceless scream of the bazaar women when they quarrel’

Colonial Discourse: Flory (and by extension Orwell) as voices that expose the hypocrisy of British colonial rule

Referring to the myth of British colonialism as altruistic → ‘the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them’

‘The official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets’

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own

• ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’

• ‘women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves’

• ‘Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?’

Virginia Woolf: Orlando

• ‘Orlando had become a woman’

• ‘in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity’

• ‘clothes are but a symbol of something that hid deep beneath’, with Orlando’s metamorphosis determining her ‘choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex’

• ‘in every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and it is often clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above’

Bildungsroman: Intersectionality of Tambu’s black female identity

‘these days it is worse, with the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other’

Bildungsroman: Maiguru’s experience as representative of the repression of women to the domestic sphere

Described as Maiguru’s ‘deprivation’

‘does anyone realise, does anyone appreciate, what sacrifices were made? As for me, no one even thinks about the things I gave up’

Bildungsroman: Nyasha as representative of the incompatibility of Western feminist ideology and the lived experience of women in postcolonial Rhodesia

Nyasha is a ‘victim of her femaleness’

Condemned to ‘whoredom’

‘It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition… all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness‘

Her disordered eating functions as a symbolic act—she physically consumes and rejects the very structures that seek to govern her, illustrating the psychological toll of her liminal identity. Her breakdown, as depicted in the novel—‘she was thin and pale, with her head drooping on her neck like a dried-out flower’ (

Literature and War: Anderson’s dream in Regeneration

Anderson finds himself ‘naked’, being ‘chased by my father-in-law who came towards me with a big stick’ which ‘had a snake wound round it’ and ‘tied up’ with ‘a pair of lady’s corsets… like a strait-waistcoat’

Anderson’s response to the dream → ’I suppose it is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?’.

Literature and War: Yealland’s disciplinary therapies

Described by Rivers as ‘oral rape’

Recurring image of the ‘horse’s bit’ in Rivers’ dream → tool for control

‘You must speak but I shall not listen to anything you have to say’

Creole Modernism: racialised slurs used by the people of the West Indies to describe the white creole identity

‘White cockroach’

Creole Modernism: Anna’s dissociation during her abortion as the culmination of her psychological fragmentation

‘I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again’

Creole Modernism: Rochester’s attempt to impose his prescribed sense of ‘Englishness’ onto Antoinette through the eradication of her identity

‘Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name’

Creole Modernism: physical displacement as representative of Anna’s fragmented identity

‘It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known.’