The Colonial Implications in Jane Eyre and Great Expectations

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature, without remembering that imperialism, understood as Englands social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. (Spivak, 1985, p, 12) Can these claims of Spivak be applied to Charles Dickens Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre and to what extent do these novelists draw from the colonial discourse in their representation of the `non- Western world? The Victorian novel has performed an important service in Eurocentric epistemologies and colonial ideologies in formulating the colonial discourse and establishing the alterity of `self and the `Other. Both Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, like most†¦show more content†¦Her racial impurity, to which her madness is attributed, is significantly placed alongside her possession of colonial wealth and fortunes, which enabled her to marry a white Englishman. In Jane Eyre, this meeting of people and diverse cultures (as represented by the marital union of Rochester and Bertha) is negotiated and guided by colonial and commercial interests, and does not result in an amalgamation of races and cultures. Instead, these racial and cultural differences are used to extend and strengthen colonial edifices and to denote the alterity of self and the Other. Thus, in Jane Eyre, the savage Other of the colonial discourse is represented by a Creole, a figure that has been brought into being by t he hierarchizing and dominating processes of commercial colonization. Jane Eyre also reflects how the formation of the Western female subject is made possible by the existence of the native object\ other. The portrayal of the character of Bertha Mason is premised upon this notion of `Othering. Bronte tends to rely on the Manichean allegory of the colonial discourse in representing the character of Bertha Mason. Furthermore, her character, which is determined by the identity politics of the West, corresponds to the stereotypical representations of native women as `demonized other which abound in the literature of the Colonial period. Rochester, in his narrative, refers to Bertha as a hideous