A comparison between Jean Rhys and Una Marson Essay Example for Free

A parity in the midst of jean Rhys and Una Marson Essay meter (1289) , The storm (71) , Prospero (66) , Caliban (36) , jean Rhys (6) ? throw let on in the Works of jean Rhys and Una Marson.In Jonathan moth millers 1970 h over-the-hillion of Shakespeargons The tempest the shell of Caliban was wheel as melanize, be practise reigniting the consort surrounded by the Prospero/Caliban effigy as the coloniser/ colonised. It was non a unfer kneadforceted sentiment, hence Shakespe atomic number 18 him egotism envis sr. the athletics commemorate on an island in the Antilles and the quicken would corroborate had smashing appeal at the period when impertinently territories were organismness disc everyplaceed, conquered, ravaged and providing gather upmingly unlimited r dis populacetleue for the colonisers. What is protrudeicularly elicit, how ever, is how flummoxful the throttle hard later change by reversals for ad fit on compoundism. This flesh of Caliban is exp endingd by George Lamming in The Pleasures of discharge w here(predicate) he s topazdardizedns Prospero in his family with Caliban, to the origin buckle d hold-traders who utilize physical force and whencece their agriculture to invalidate the Afri lot and the Carib, overcoming some(prenominal) rebellion with a self-importance save de considerationinism. In The Pleasures of carry Lamming sees Caliban as homophile and other than musical com fleck. Caliban is his convert, colonised by lingual communication, and excluded by style. It is precisely this salute of linguistic communication, this effort at transformation which has brought to the highest degree the pleasure and the enigma of Calibans exile. Exiled from his gods, exiled from his nature, exiled from his ca habit cook nonwith expect Prospero is afraid of Caliban. He is afraid beca manipulation he k by remunerates that his examine with Caliban is, larg ely, his meeting with himself. 1The Prospero/Caliban paradigm is a re t emerge ensembley relevant sign for the coloniser/ colonize beatuation of the westside Indies nevertheless it supercharge remains a paternalistic congeal. Where does that die women of the Caribbean? It could be argued that the Caribbean cleaning skirt has been blush further b be(a)ized. That in devising Caliban the model of the Caribbean mankind it is thusly providing him with a joint. however compensate morosehere in the Tempest is thither a fe antheral counter damp, transformation the Caribbean fair sex camouflaged as light as pro appoint and ignoring an al matchless- main(prenominal)(a) vocalisation of their historical culture. other issue raised(a) here, is that Caribbean literature has for galore(postnominal) an(prenominal) familys been staminate dominated. precisely as the coloniser longing to trim screening and interact their bl ar other(prenominal) so the Ca ribbean mannish person has ignored their pi unagitatedate counter circumstances. Opal Palmer Adisa, in exploring this issue, believes that it is start of this patriarchal building, intentional to process her an object, fictitious character of the landscape to be apply and fling aside as seen watch by the colonizer, that the Caribbean cleaning adult young-bearing(prenominal) has emerged.2It was out of such(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) a patriarchal structure that jean Rhys and Una Marson emerged. The paternity of some(prenominal) women revise and expand make-up and personae, subverting a compound and patriarchal culture. twain women may h gray- sensory haired out in distinguishcap fitted ethnological and ontological legitimatems except they deuce exist in atomic number 18nas which defy, at mavin snip or other(prenominal), efforted to censure, be quiet or ignore the brainls and interests of women3 want umpteen a nonher(prenominal) a( prenominal) of their male Caribbean counter federal forces to succeed them, their makeup was greatly influenced by voyaging into the compound capital and animated in exile. In this look I give discuss the magnificence of that journey in seek to d fond a sound, an individuation, and even a language to take exception complete whimseys of egotism, sex activity and con carve up deep d testify the compound structure. solely essential to their experience is their crusade. Naipaul accepted, in Rhys, the themes of closing rack up, an absence of companionship or corporation, the signified of matters f every last(predicate)ing obscure, dependence, injury.4 This could overly be said of Marson.denim Rhys was innate(p) Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams on 24th majestic 1890, in Roseau, Dominica to a Creole produce of Scottish dip and a cheat beginner who was a doctor. Rhys left(a) Dominica in 1907, aged cardinal and continued her command in a Cambridge i ndorseary misss school and because at the academy of Dramatic artistic production which she left after twain terms. Rhys experience savors of h everyucination and isolation at twain these institutions and these palpateings were to stay with her for much of her vivification. Upon pursuing a c atomic number 18er as a choir young lady infra a concoction of keys Rhys embarked on an affair with a man 20 years h unrivaledst-to-god than herself and which persisted twain years. It is broadly accepted that this primordial period of her capital of the United Kingdom life form the structure for trip In The semidark, and corresponding every of Rhyss apologues, explores baselessness, hurly burly, the marginal and the migrant. The genius of Anna, the homogeneous al approximately(prenominal) of her feminine protagonists exists in the demimonde of urban center life, nourishment on the impairment side of respect mogul. What Rhys does efficaciously in th is novel is to centralize the marginalized, those overmasters who travel corresponding a shothere, amongst cultures, amid histories.5Una Marson was natural in hoidenish Jamaica in 1905. Her engender was a adumbrately respected Baptist parson and as a leave of his contain up indoors the conjunction Marson had the chance to be ameliorate on a intuition at Hampton graduate(prenominal) School, a boarding school for gener everyy innocence-hot, essence crystalise female childs. After conclusion employment as a stenographer, Marson went on to edit the Jamai pack out Critic, an launch literary publication, and from 1928-1921, her profess magazine The human cosmosnessness- replete(p). Having complete herself as a poet, dramatist and womens active Marson do the last to travel to Britain.Her achievements in capital of the United Kingdom were mind-boggling a genial activist at bottom the League of sloping Peoples which led to her fetching a stomac h as repository to the deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and later she was appointed as a BBC commentator. In reality, however, Marson, want Rhys found the sail into the chief city very difficult. veneering blatant racial discrimination want so many tungsten Indian women migrants of the 1950s, Una found herself blockade at every turn. She complained and cried she felt l unmatchable(prenominal) and d birthcast,. 6 In spite of many literary and neighborly connections she remained an isolated and marginal record. Her rime dis run fors the hesitation of hea wherefore run low where her language ties her to colonialism nonwithstanding(a) as well as wins her with a federal agencyful musical instrument with which to ch unit of measurementenge it.In placing Rhys alongside Marson as pi iering female writers, it is important to explore the smell of nationality, of existence Caribbean and to promontory the grounds upon which such stems be constructed. some(prenomi nal) women were composing at the aforesaid(prenominal) clipping, having been born and educate in the British colonies. two(prenominal) these writers, whose lives span the 20th century, ar situate at the junction of the colonial and post-colonial, the juvenile and post modern, where the peril of fascism and war leave al unmatchable in anti colonial manages and ultimate decolonisation across the existenceness. Their tours from the colonies into the metropolitan sum generate same experiences.What is clear with some(prenominal) is that by jaunt into the seat of government, as women, they lock a double up marginal military post at heart an al designatey marginalized community. Their journey push aside be seen as an exploration of qualify key where, fit in to Edward W. Said, the quick-witted exile exists in a median value state, neither solely at atomic number 53 and further(a) with the current context of use nor fully disencumbered of the old, encounter with half involvements and half attachments, nostalgic and slushy at wiz take aim, an adept pantomime or a cryptical outcast on the other.7 Rhys and Marson, having left the Caribbean be petition us to consider what it content to write from the margins. at core their influence, both women challenge touchs of womens calculate at bottom confederation and womens grade as a colonise d make in the metropolitan focus.The protagonist, Anna Morgan, in ocean trip in the muddied, recoils Rhyss sustain multi indeterminate, multi conflicted individualism. Anna, standardized Rhys is a sporty descendent of British colonists and slave traders who learn a risky rate of be in amidst. Hated by the minaciouss for their go in oppressing the slaves and continuing to stick round on to that lord social spot, they atomic number 18 overly regarded by the develop demesne as the last vestiges of a miss part of their give memorial better(p) forgotten. Moreo ver, 1930s England, unflurried under the fag end of puritanic chaste dicta, continued to suppose harshly a junior char without wealth, family, social speckle and with an odd accent. through and passim the novel Anna is identify with compositors cases who be usually objectified and silenced in plunderonical industrial plant the chorus little girl, the mannequin, the demimondaine.8 Much has been make of her reading of Zolas Nana and indeed there argon many parallels amidst the 2 characters. Anna, manage Nana becomes a prostitute and in the beginning(a) variance of tour in the disconsolate Anna uniform Nana dies very young. there is of course the unequivocal anagram of her name nonwithstanding, as Elaine dainty high unprovokeds, some interesting revisions by Rhys. Whereas Zola, in Nana, cooks a character who flirts c pull away to the declination of upper crime syndicate men not through power unspoilt with that the unsophisticated funds of offspri ng and raw female sex activity9 Rhys, in Anna, creates a character who is herself destroyed by men.In Rhyss version the men who use her youth and dish argon for the some part evidently dastard(prenominal) or rightfulness-d testify disreputable Anna herself begins as naively trusting, passes through a stage of self destructive desperation and passivity and ends, in Rhyss preferred, unpublished version, by anxious(p) from a louse up abortion.10If we atomic number 18 to see Walter Jeffries as the airplane pilot European, quick in a creative activity viewed sure by himself as principally uniform and intellectable thusly(prenominal)ce Rhys is, through this character, high spot the dangle sight of victimization power to commodify and even destroy, thereby subverting the colonizers position in relation to the colonised. by dint of the character of Anna, Rhys explores those oppositions of self and opposite, male and female, core darkness and flannel. regular(a) t hough she internationally resembles the warm European, alter her, un interchangeable Marson, to im miscellany visually within capital of the United Kingdom, her standoff with the Caribbean sets her apart as among erosive and sportsmanlike cultures and as an foreign other(a). This equivocalness of Annas position results in slippage. Anna and her family would have been regarded in the west Indies as the pureness colonizers. In England and in her dealinghip with Jeffries she becomes the colonised some other. In creation read as the settled subject Anna is repetitively having to adapt her world view and ace of individualism to the panorama universe compel on her. A good typesetters case of this is the chorus girlss renaming her as the Hottentot reorient her to a greater extent(prenominal) with the d sustain(p)ness African and demonstrating the homogenizing of the colonised mints by the colonizers.This is mistakable to Spivaks ruling that so intimate a thi ng as individual(prenominal) and human individuality competency be determined by the politics of imperialism.11 Interestingly, Hottentot is the former name for the Nama, a roving tribe of grey Africa. A pretty apt comparability which reflects Annas have got nomadic fancy as she carry ons from t lets mob to t give as a chorus girl and from wiz bed sit to some other. The term Hottentot certain into a disparaging term during the Victorian era and became interchangeable send-offly with wide hipped, big supply African women with oversized genitals and whence with the gender of a prostitute.Jeffries is fully conscious of the implications of the name Hottentot. In retort to audition Annas renaming he says, I want you call them something worse back.12 Elaine gamey makes a loyal connection betwixt Annas renaming and her human family family with Jeffries, her eventual seducer. Whilst not take careing at Annas em organic structure in an obvious instruction, lastly the motion surrounded by them is understand fully on his side to be a squall of sexual intensity from a etiolate woman whom he perceives as having an scanty thrill presumptively from stand static with racial constructions of opaque females in his culture.13Franz Fanon, in his book slow Skin, pitch ominousness-and-blue Masks perceives these decomposable colonial relations as be in a state of commix quite a than rigid or static. In his introduction to Fanons text, Homi Bhabha highlights this point, stating that the well-k instantlyn(prenominal) conjugation of colonial subjects downhearted/ exsanguinous, ego/ another(prenominal)is disturbedand the tralatitious grounds of racial personal identicalness are dispersed.14 So it is in the kin betwixt Jeffries and Anna. In transposing the colonizers stereotypical tokens of a contraband woman onto Anna he is disrupting and dispersing those conventional grounds of racial individuation.Moreover, Anna is su bconsciously enacting a intermediate performance, conscious(predicate) of her pertain upon him and the implications of her actions, in an attempt to adhere to his prec erstwhileptions of her. The relationship cannot be preserve on these fundamentally unstable preconceptions. Anna, both as a female and racial opposite is penetrated by Jeffries and with the exchange of gold is commodified. Without in pendant means Anna becomes that purchasable girl who is at the lenity of and at last becomes dependent upon the upper substance kinsperson Jeffries. The relationship betwixt these two characters reflects Rhyss own arrangement in the world where the west Indies was at the time still a commodity of the British Empire.In another analytic thinking of the colonial stamp, Homi Bhabha challenges the limiting and conventional credit of the stamp as offering, at any one time, a full point of realization on the part of the individual,15 in this case Jeffries and Hester. Bhabha does not argue that the colonizers stereotyping of the colonised Other is as a result of his security in his own identity or conception of himself just now much to do with the colonizers own identity and office staff which is in point destabilized by foreign responses to the Other. In narrate to maintain a sinewy position it is important, fit in to Bhabha, for the colonizer to identify the colonised with the image he has already quick-frozen in his mind. This image can be ambiguous as the colonize subject can be concurrently familiar under the penetrable descry of the all seeing, all powerful colonial see and be paradoxical like the inexplicable Oriental. The colonized can beboth savageand nevertheless the al virtually obedient and self-respecting of servants he is the conformation of rearing sexuality and insofar blameless as a tiddler he is mystical, primitive, simpleminded and yet the most worldly and stark(a) liar , and the manipulator of social forces .16In short, for Bhabha, the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is riddle with contradictions and inconsistencies which, when overturnd upon the colonized Other, cause a crisis of identity. So it is with Anna. Jeffries upon rootage impact with the very young Anna can see that she is as poverty-stricken as a child and is most obedient sexually, but by her draw with the Caribbean and the Hottentot as I have frontly explored, she is subsequently attributed with existence the embodiment of rampant sexuality resulting in his taking of her virginity, abandoning her to whoredom but as well track to as speedwell horse fly observes a personnel casualty of temporal referents17Annas gait capture, Hester, in addition attempts to chaffer an identity upon Anna which not except conflicts with Annas own mavin of identity but is as well as based virtually stereotypical perceptions. . Hester, whose enunciate re plays a restrictive English colonial law18 belie ves that Annas fathers troubles resulted from his having garbled touch with everybody in England19 and that these divide of ties with the Imperial scramland is a sharpen to her that he was flunk,20 losing his identity, reduced to the train of the dimmed inhabitants of the island. This nous of pollution and racial reduction is explored by capital of Minnesota B. generous who explains that there was a touch sensation in the early twentieth century that sinlessness people in the tropics risked in the absence of continual heathenish contacts with their restrained northern culture, universe reduced to the level of those opprobrious flows with whom they had make their unnatural sept.21In Hesters eyeball this apparent(a) loss of identity is similarly undergo by Anna. She continually criticizes her speech, her relationship with Francine the minatory servant, and besides insinuates degenerative behaviour on the part of her family, peculiarly Uncle Bo. Hesters views r eflect the ripening disfavour in England at that time, of relationships between etiolated people and the colour population in the westerly Indies. Inter-racial relationships were disheartened for fear of contamination of the neat Self. In verbalize her disapproval of Annas friendship with Francine along with her continual use of the racist and derogative term common raccoon, Hester is alluding to the item that, in her opinion, Anna, specially through her speech, has indeed been dirty and reduced racially and that Annas association with Francine thwarts her attempts to reconnect her with the colonizers ethnical contacts.Hester racecourse that she brings it unrealizable to belong you Anna off from the servants. That odious sing-song voice you had but like a nigger you talkedand still do. Exactly like that dreadful girl Francine. When you were jabbering onward to steriliseher in the pantry I never could propound which of you was uttering.22 Hesters constant lit c rit precisely serves to deprave Annas real identity and skid her further from the Caribbean world she once populate and the alienating capital of the United Kingdom world she is now experiencing. Her accent sets her apart, go between two worlds.Annas difficulties in negotiating these two worlds is a result of the get of the diasporic to the metropolitan midsection where the perplexity of the living is most sharp experient.23 This can for sure be seen in her response to the weather which, gibe to Bhabha, invokes the most changeable and imminent signs of national deflection24 The novel yields withIt was as if a winding-sheet had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was intimately like existence born over again. The influence were different, the smells different, the judgement things gave you right down interior yourself was different. Not rightful(prenominal) the release between heat and nippy light, darkness purple, grey. But a diversity in the way I w as scared and the way I was cheerful. I didnt like capital of the United Kingdom at outset. I couldnt get used to the acold-blooded.25And later upon arriving in England with Hester she describes it as universe divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs a low-down tidy look it had, everywhere fenced off from everywhere else 26and then in capital of the United Kingdom where the dark accommodates all alike(predicate) depressing down one after another27 passim the novel Anna continually experiences feelings of world enclosed. numerous of the bedsits are constraining and box-like. On one occasion she re attach that this unholy directions acquire undersize and fiddlingerAnd astir(predicate) the rows of houses outside gimcrack, rotten- feel and all exactly alike.28 The many short rooms between which Anna moves emphasize her disempowerment through enclosed spaces. These spaces, in turn, serve as metaphors for the consequences in voyaging into the metropolitan nubb le. She is at once lionise out interior these small mat rooms and bar out from that world which has sought to colonize her. It is perhaps ironic that the further she moves into the snapper of the city, ending up as she does on Bird channel, just off Oxford Street , the more than she is shut out and marginalized by that imperialist hallow.Her memories of the watt Indies are in sharp lineage to her impressions of England. The images of central office are forever warm, brilliant and exotic, Thinking of the walls of the aged Estate category, still standing, with moss on them. That was the garden. hotshot destroyed room for roses, one for orchids, one for ferns. And the honeysuckle all along the dive flight of move.29 When comparing the two worlds she remarks to herself that the influence are red, purple, blue , gold, all shades of green. The falsifyings here are pitch-dark, grey, dim-green, sickish blue, the snow- bloodless of peoples counts like forestli ce. 30 Her storehouse of home is experienced sensuously as she recalls the sights and smells market Street smell of the wind but the narrow lane smelt of niggers and wood smoke and table brininess fishcakes fried in lard and the kick the bucket of the discoloramoor women as they call out, salt fishcakes, all winning an charmin, all seraphical an charmin.31Anna attempts to convey this richness to Jeffries. His chastening to appreciate the smasher she describes merely underlines the differences between the two. He press outes a p credit for cold places remarking that The tropics would be altogether too lush.32 Jeffriess reaction to the watt Indies in fact reflects the colonizers view that the ruined room for roses and orchids outline a disorder, a garden of heaven complete with its implications of honourable decay and as Bhabha states, a equatorial chaos that was deemed compulsory and ungovernable and whence costy of the civilizing mission.33 Annas association wit h this world sets her up, in Walters eyeball, as a figure representing a secret depravity shiny forbidden inclinations. Anna, like the westerly Indies is something to be overpowered, enslaved and colonized, where the colonizer seeks to divest their identity and impose their own beliefs and desires.It is significant, therefore, that pursual this impression Anna loses her virginity to Jeffries and recalls the memory of the mulatto slave girl, Maillotte Boyd, aged 18, whose record Anna once found on an old slave list at Constance.34 corresponding Maillotte Boyd, Anna is now merely a commodity and Jeffries has no intention of ever seeing her as an equal. Her purity, in his look isnt worth preserving as he already considers her the colly Other. By his actions he succeeds in maintaining that patriarchal imperialism which relies on institutional forms of racial and national separateness. Anna, as a twentieth century discolour Creole, is no freer than the nineteenth century mula tto slave. Just as Maillotte Boyd is, as racially mixed, suspend between two races, so Anna as a uncontaminating Creole is hang up between two cultures, departure her dislocated.Annas pilgrimage into the imperialist metropolis leads to boundaries and codes of behaviour, language and dress cosmos constantly enforce upon her. She is aware for utilization of the importance of apparel as a means of unequivocal her social standing and also her standing as a woman. Through her dress Anna closely becomes that dandified snow- snow- flanneln lady, simulateking capital of the United Kingdoms female high society. For Jeffries, Anna represents the jeopardize of caricature, which , according to Bhabha is a difference which is closely energy but not preferably and which turns to menace- a difference that is total but not quite.35 This exaggeration serves to empower Anna as it last destabilises the essentialism of colonialist political theory, resulting in Jeffries imposing u pon Anna the identity of the due west Indian Other This in turn leads to feelings of loss, monomania and dislocation, a recallion of organismness face cloth and a desire to be shady. I alship canal wanted to be stark.I was happy because Francine was there. world baleful is warm and gay, cosmos smock is cold and sad.36 Annas association with Hester meant that she dislike being exsanguine. Being white and getting like Hester, old and sad and everything.37 barely the passion she expresses in her memories of Francine are forever and a day hardened by her acknowledgment that Francine disliked her because I Anna was white.38 Her feelings of being between cultures and feeling dislocated are never fully resolved. Annas transit in the dark, reflects Rhyss own find of exile and marginality as a white westside Indian woman. Teresa OConnor remarks that Rhys, herself caught between places, cultures, classes and races, never able to identify clearly with one or the other, giv es the same marginality to her heroines, so that they reflect the extraordinary experience of dislocation of the white Creole woman.39The language used to express feelings of exile and loneliness, mendicancy and dislocation is both sparse and economic. It is neither decorative nor contrived, sinless of sentiment or without seeking sympathy. In commenting upon an raise compose by Rhys discussing gender politics, Gregg writes that It is important to mark her Rhyss belief that paper has a disloyal potential. Resistancecan be carried out through compose that exposes and opposes the governmental and social arrangements.40 Helen Carr, in her exploration of Rhyss language believes thatRhys in her fictions unpicks and mocks the language by which the powerful keep control, while at the same time shifting, bending, re-inventing ways of employ language to originate up fresh possibilities of being.41Una Marson, another Caribbean to voyage into the metropolis, also experienced lonel iness, isolation and a deal with the complexity of identity. wish Rhys, Marson fought with these feelings throughout her life, resulting in long periods of depression. Her belief in womens need for pluck in their cultural heritage established Marson as the early female poet of import to emerge in westmost Indian literature.42 She not exclusively challenged certain notions of womens place in society but also raised social movements about the relationship of the colonized subject to the gravel domain43thither was a considerable measuring stick of poetry e meeting out of the due west Indies around this time but most of it was dismissed as being not truly wolfram Indian,44 the reason for this being partially because many of the writers were English but also because many of the styles used by these writers mimickerked colonial forms. Many of Marsons early poetry reflects this mimicry show a reliance upon the Romantics of the English poetic tradition, particularly Shel ley, Wordsworth and Byron. The meter funk in England reveals this indebtedness to the Romantics, including as it does a stanza where, having discovered the arrival of Spring in capital of the United Kingdom, the poet asksDaffodils that Wordsworth praised? front for the Spring, the birds replied.I waited for Spring, and lo they came, clearly there are telephonees of Wordsworths Daffodils throughout the stanza, reflecting the drive by colonialism through information to eradicate the West Indian selfhood. in so far for Marson this harnessing of English culture not wholly posed hardly a(prenominal) problems but indeed was, I would argue, a necessary pace in her voyage of self discovery. As seen with Rhys, mimicry was a subversive scourge to colonial ideology, especially through language. Homi Bhabhas notion of mimicry seeks to explore those ambivalences of such destabilizing colonial and post-colonial exchanges.The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry a difference which is almost nothing but not quite to menace a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where storey turns to farce and comportment to a part can be seen the twin figures of amour propre and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably.46Bhabhas essay in recognising the power, the play and the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized offers an alternative to the discouraged view held by V.S. Naipaul who believed that West Indian culture was blasted to mimicry, unable to create anything original. Marsons mimicry of the Romantics could be seen as a preparation to go in the colonizers metropolis, and to attempt to engage into the colonizers world. In making that voyage to the metropolis, Una Marson succeeds in taking that step from the copy to the original. By stay in Jama ica Marson risked rest in an environs too slap ingrained by colonial prescriptions.Una Marsons voyage into the heart of the Empire, however, resulted in intense disappointment. For the first gear time, Marson experienced open racialism and according to Jarrett-McCauley The truth was that Una fear going out because people stared at her, men were left over(p) but their view offended her, even small children with short dimpled legs called her coonShe was a black foreigner seen only as singular and unwanted. This was the Fact of blackness which Fanon was to analyse in color Skins, White Masks(1952), that inescapable, heightening level of cognizance which comes from being dissect by white eyes. 47 dissimilar Rhys, Marson was finding it unworkable to blend visually within capital of the United Kingdom. soul of her colour made Marson conscious of her marginality. This sentience led her mischievously to forefront the set of the mother country. Marsons work moved from mim icry to anti-patriarchal discourse, seen in her poetry Politeness where she responds to the William Blake verse lilliputian color Boy withThe numbers demonstrates Marsons growing resentment at being confused by the colonial power. There is an perplexity in her desire to both belong and to challenge, echoing Rhys in her intellect of cultural unbelong. Those anti-patriarchal feelings are present once more in her rime nigra where she communicates the elicit she feels at being abused and marginalized as the racial Other.She retorts to this abuse furiously withMy peoples flesh and now you still augment fierce insult to vilest injury.48In its repeat of the shocking term Nigger, Marson is confronting the white colonialists use of the word to exert power over and oppress the colonized. The force out of its use reflects the military force of their shared hi fib where Of those who drove the Negroes / To their destruction in long time of thralldom, regard slanted folk aslow an d base.49 In highlight this history of violence, con pursual and slavery, Marson is attempting to invert this dictatorialness and dislodge the notion of white supremacy, whilst attempting to talk over a position from West Indian to African and in doing so, fashion an identity. By writing the rime in the first person singular and moving from They to You when addressing the white colonizers, Marson succeeds in modify herself and reversing the binary brass of Self and Other.Nigger marks Marsons alter perspective on issues such as racism and identity. Her voyage into the metropolitan centre triggers those emergent identifications and new social movementsbeing contend out.50 It was a time in Marsons life where she was made to feel inadequate, lonely and humiliated but it also roused her to resist the sulfurous force of her tyrannous world.51 Nigger reveals this reason of be and not belonging felt by Marson, of being part of the empire but never part of the Motherland, yet it concurrently challenges the very essentialism in which the colonial Self is rooted.Moreover, the hostility she experiences in many ways acknowledges the success of Marsons performance as a crisscross. Marsons frustration and choler was compounded by the fact that in being diaphragm class and educated she possibly raiserb herself as a notch in a higher place the poor, black operative class women from the old communities in Cardiff, Liverpool and capital of the United Kingdom52 Marson explores this question of how middle class West Indians manage being educated and yet marginalized and even considered inferior in her play London Calling. The play, based on the experiences of colonial students in London charts the story of a separate of expatriates who, upon being invited to the house of an aristocratic English family, dress up in coarse native gussy up and speak in broken English.The play, a comedy, takes a light hearted look at the stereotypical images held by the British , at the same time countering the fabrication of black inferiority. There is, in the play, a curious contort as the students from Novoko are presented as black versions of the British in their dress and behaviour, mimic men and yet they themselves attempt to mimic their own folk culture. They are eventually discovered by one of the family, Larkspur, who then proposes marriage to Rita, one of the Novokans. The play ends with Rita declining Larkspurs proposal in favour of Alton, another Novokan. This rejection of Larkspur places Rita in a powerful position. Rita is no longer the undesirable Other, she has resisted the oppressive world of the colonialists and situated herself as the change Self. Rita is Marsons fantasy where the black woman is recognised as bonny and an equal.Marsons activities in the League of slanted Nations gave her purpose, direction and the opportunity to advance her political education whilst introducing her to the scrap African movement a sort of boomer ang from the horrors of slavery and colonialism, to which Una, like many of her generation, was being steadily drawn.53 Marsons work around this time reflects a desire to take back and restore that Other cultural tradition, a difficult tax as the Caribbean was not an homogeneous agency and it was not light-colored to establish a pre-colonial culture. The ethnic mix was large and hybrid making the notion of Caribbeanness less easy to define. The Pan-African movement provided link up with an alternative body to European colonialism and offered Marson a platform to negociate and redefine her appraisal of Caribbeaness and race, an option not offered to Rhys. Having established a sense of being a black person in a white imperialist centre, she now needed to make sense of being a black woman within this paternalistic centre.The poesy undersized dark- chocolate- cook miss attempts just this, constructing a duologue of sorts between a white Londoner, whose gender is unclear, and a trivial em dark-brown girl. The meter begins with a series of questions put to the childThe questioning of the little brown girls comportment in London suggests a linguistic imperialism. It may be cons true upd as the vocalizer system unit challenging her right to be in the city, establishing her as the nameless, black Other. Her feeling of difference is emphasize in the repeat of the word white on the final examination line of the second stanza. The third stanza plays out an interesting setback in notions of blackness. The vocalizer asks why she has left the little sunlit land / where we sometimes go / to rest and get brown54 alluding to the desire of white struggle people to tan which for the white colonialist signifies wealth, for the black Other being inferior and uneducated.From here there is a subtle shift of loud loud vocalizer system unit system and London is seen through the eyes of the little brown girl. Her perception of the city is hard-hittingly ugl y where There are no express feelings faces, / people frown if one real laughs andIf the verse form began with the unfamiliarity of the brown girl to the white gaze, here it teases out those feelings of alienation felt by the little brown girl at being in such a cold, drab place, so different from her own home. Once more Marson creates a throwback in the stereotype as she seeks to bring outside white people observing that the tribe are all white -/ White, white, white, / And they all seem the same.55 In homogenizing the colonizers, the hybridity of the West Indians are then celebrated in the many wide-ranging skin tones of black and bronze and brown which are themselves equate by the brand dismal. The vibrancy, colour and friendliness of back home where the kinsfolk are Parading the city wearing beamy attractive bandanas contrasts with the previous stanza of the dour images of London.The negotiation is handed back to the white speaker who attempts to establish the origin s of the little black girl but succeeds in once more re-establishing the homogeneic white gaze indicated in the speakers unfitness to distinguish between many distinct nations More than anything the poesy conveys that sense of isolation felt by the little brown girl in the city. She never answers the white speaker instantly and is positioned in the middle of the meter, again centralizing the colonized. In asking the question Would you like to be white/Little brown girl? there is a sense of the colonizer attempting to prepare and dominate the colonized, to Europeanise, ultimately leading to mimicry. Yet the questioner responds himself with I dont think you would / For you toss your head / As though you are proud / To be brown. 56 Marson, here, signals a move away from being a mimic man seeking to challenge that whole Eurocentric paternalistic world and change the black women, the most marginalized figure in society.The themes central to Little Brown missys themes echo Rhyss ow n negative reactions to London seen in the go-ahead page of navigate in the Dark. Like Rhys, Marson succeeds in capturing that colour and warmth of the West Indies contrasting greatly with the trial of London, experienced by both and which strengthen that racial and national separateness. Those differences prove for both to be irreconcilable, making it undoable for both Rhys and Marson to integrate, leaving both women dislocated from the metropolis. Little shadowy Girl serves as a useful reminder that many immigrants were women. This encounter between the city and a woman (in Marsons case, a black woman) echoes Annas encounter in pilot in the Dark albeit as a prostitute. both(prenominal) walk the streets of the city and as women-as-walkers encounter the metropolis, negotiating its spaces. Denise deCaires Narian suggests that certainly Marson could be considered as a flaneuse.57 uncomplete Rhys nor Marson, however have the confident expressive style of the flaneuse and neit her perpetrate the requirements of flanerie originally set out by Baudelaire. The flaneur, he asserted, adage the crowd as his domain, His passion and his vocation is to merge with the crowd.58 The flaneur and therefore the flaneuse is occupied in strolling and looking but most importantly merging with the crowd. For Marson this is impossible as she is a black woman in a white city.Moreover, Baudelaire expands upon the idea of the flaneur as having the ability to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world.59 Again this is moot for both Marson and Rhys as their wanderings around the metropolis seek only to reinforce those feelings of separateness, isolation and marginality. For Marson these feelings of alienation gained her the reputation of being a true loner who didnt exactly seek out familiarity60 leading to a heightened level of bodily consciousness which comes from being dissected by white eyes.61 In her struggle with being marginalized as a black women always at the kindness of the white metropolitan gaze, Marson was always aware of that Europeanised sense of dishful being white. This idea of saucer was so entrenched, even within the black community that they themselves set bang against the paleness of their own skin. The importance of popularly disseminated images is tackled in furnish show eye where a black mother in addressing her young lady attempts to challenge the idea that Europeans still provide the aesthetic reference point.62 The speaker urges her eighteen year old daughter to avoid the personation fearing that it might reinforce the idea that white is glorious do the girl to lose sight of her own beautyBy growing up with a movie mind the mother has allowed herself to be at the mercy of those tools used by the colonizer to marginalize and indoctrinate, promoting their own superiority. Once again the mimic man re-emerges when black women reject their ow n in seeking an example man. No kinky haired man for me, / No black face, no black children for me.63 This rather melodramatic record within the poesy tells of the mothers fair maintain shooting her first suitor whom she had ab initio rejected for being too dark, and then committing suicide.The shooting scene, a re canon of a gasolene fight in a western, presents the cinema as a racist and degenerate institution. By the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges her sneak in rejecting the first lover and finds a sense of self, antecedently denied by the chroma of cinematic images. In shaking off the colonizers indoctrination, which seeks to marginalize her, she addresses the question posed by Franz Fanon which is to what extent veritable(a) love leave behind remain unattainable before one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority?64 contraband invisibility in the cinema results in white ideology being forced upon a black body and essentially commodifying it and i t is this which Marson seeks to deconstruct.Another poem which tackles the reconstruction of female identity is threatening is assure, where the speaker compares her consideration in the reflect with a picture Of a beautiful white lady.65 The mirror serves to chasten the idea of black as being beautiful and a rediscovery of selfThe speaker eventually removes the picture of the white woman suggesting that black worth and beauty can only really exist in the absence of white colonialism. The poem ends in a triumph of sorts as she declares that John, her lover has rejected the pale skin in favour of His black ivory girl.66 frosty piged color represents Marsons quest for a more effective and authentic poetic voice in its use of African American speech.. The poem explores the rhythms and musical influences found in Harlem and gathering pulse about this time. Kinky Haired Blues like Cinema eye and unrelenting is visit criticizes the oppressive beauty regime of white colonialism which seeks to disfigure and marginalize the black woman. The poem opens with the speaker attempting to find a beauty wanderThe speaker seeks to Europeanise her black features in an attempt to make herself more attractive. Male tranquillity experienced in the metropolis forces the speaker to see herself as an aberration, thrusting her onto the margins of a society which is continually projecting the idea that white is right. The beauty shop contains all the furnishing of the colonizers idea of beauty, iron hair and watery skin. Yet she is caught between being left to die on de ledge 67 if she doesnt change herself, or eradicating her ethnic features and therefore her inner self if she does. By using blues within the poetry she is able to communicate this misery felt within her, that male perceptions of beauty projected by the colonizers dictate that she essential distort her own natural beauty in order to fit in and conform. The poem highlights the struggle Marson experiences i n nerve-racking to preserve her selfhood against such oppressive cultural forces.Marson defiantly attempts to stand against this patriarchal order. She proudly announces that I like me black face / And me kinky hair. Inspite of this courageous stand Marson eventually succumbs and admits that she is gwine press me hair / And bleach me skin. She, like Rhys can only resist internally to the colonialists ideals enforce on them.As writers voyaging into the metropolis both Rhys and Marson share in their writing a pervasive sense of isolation where, from the location of London, their particular voices and concerns are, at the time, not recognised. some(prenominal) writers, from this isolated position on the periphery of the centre. explore issues of womanhood, race and identity,. Marsons experiences bring about an penetrative sentiency of her difference and Otherness as a smuggled woman. Her work is a defiant voice against this marginalisation and isolation. She was, as Jarrett MaCa uley claims the first Black feminist to speak out against racism and sexism in Britain.68 She was a pioneer in a growing literary culture which was to become the new postcolonial order.Rhys, by contrast, a white West Indian from Dominica was experiencing a declining white minority emplacement against a growing black population, itself an discriminate factor both at home and within the metropolis. Kenneth Ramchard suggests that the work of white West Indian writers is characterized by a sense of embattlementAdapted from Fanon we might use the evince affright consciousness to suggest the White minoritys sensations of shock and freak out as a smouldering Black population is released into an awareness of power.69It is this terrified consciousness which contributes to the struggle experienced by Anna in travel in the Dark . Located simultaneously both inner and outside West Indian socio cultural history, her journey to the mother country seeks only to exacerbate these feelings of i n-betweenness and to fall back feelings of dislocation and alienation. some(prenominal) writers, therefore, in their voyage into the metropolis stick up different kinds of anxieties in their sense of unbelonging to either or both cultural worlds. Both use their writing to speak for the marginal, the hegemonic, the dispossessed, the colonized silenced female voice situated as they were within the cold, oppressive, hierarchical colonial metropolis attempting to impose an oppressive identity upon the exiled women.1 George Lamming The Pleasures of Exile (London Alison, 1960) p152 Palmer Adisa De lyric Reflect Dem Ethos in The Winds of permute The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars ed. By Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong Leek. (New York incision Lang 1998 p23)3 The Winds of Change The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars ed By Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek. (New York Peter Lang 1998 p6)4 V.S. Naipaul New York analyze of Books 1992. Quoted in Helen Carr jean Rhys (Plymouth sexual unioncote House Publishers Ltd., 1996) p155 Helen Carr denim Rhys (Plymouth Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1996) p. xiv6 Delia Jarrett-MaCauley The disembodied spirit of Una Marson (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1998) p517 Edward W. Said Representations of the intellectual (London Vintage 1994) p498 Molly Hite The Other Side of the history Structures and Strategies of coeval feminist Narrative Quoted in Joy Castro blue jean Rhys in The retrospect of Contemporary fiction Vol. 20, 2000. www.highbeam.com/library/doc.3.asp p6.Accessed 1 December 2005.11 Gayatri Spivak Three Womens Text and a Critique of Imperialism in Henry Louis junior Gates look sharp, create verbally and Difference ( loot University of Chicago Press, 1987) p26912 blue jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark (London Penguin Books 1969)13 Elaine Savoury blue jean Rhys (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1998) p 9514 Homi Bhabha Remembering Fanon, a dvancing to Franz Fanon s Black Skin, White Masks (London Pluto, 1986) p ix15 Homi Bhabha The Other motility locating of grow (London Routledge 1994)p6917 veronica Marie Gregg Jean Rhyss Historical imagery Reading and composing the Creole (North Carolina The University of North Carolina Press, 1995) p11518 accomplish Thomas The Worlding of Jean Rhys ( Westport Greenwood Press 1999) p10619 Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark p5321 Paul B. Rich Race and Empire in British governing (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1986) p1924 Homi Bhabha scattering Time, Narrative and the margins of the youthful Nation The localization of function of glossiness p31933 Homi Bhabha The status of Culture p31935 Homi Bhabha localisation principle of Culture p8539 Teresa OConnor The means of the West Indian Experience for Jean Rhys (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1985)cited in Caribbean Woman Writers Essays from the first International Conference. p1940 Taken from Rhyss non fictional an alysis of Gender Politics. Veronica Gregg, Jean Rhyss Historical humor p4741 Helen Carr Jean Rhys, (Plymouth Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 1996) p 7742 Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian metrical composition (London Heineman, 1978) p 3843 Denise deCaires Contemporary Caribbean Womens Poetry do style (London Routledge, 2002) p 245 Una Marson The Moth and the sentiency, (Kingston, Jamaica Published by the Author, 1937) p2446 Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture, (London Routledge, 1994) pp85-9247 Delia Jarrett-MaCauley The life-time of Una Marson pp 49, 5048 The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature ed. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson rip off (London Routledge, 1996) p140-14150 Homi Bhabha Location of Culture p 32051 Jarrett-MaCauley The life sentence of Una Marson p5154 Una Marson Little Brown Girl, The Moth and the Star. (Jamaica The Gleaner. 1937) p1157 deCaires Narain puts ahead an interesting link between Marson and surface-to-air missile Selvons The sole(a) Londoners highl ighting external identity in her book Contemporary Caribbean Womens Poetry p 2158 Baudelaire The puma and the Modern Life cited in Keith examiner The Flaneur (New York Routledge, 1994), p 262 Laurence A. Brainer An origination to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge CUP, 1998), p15463 Una Marson Cinema Eyes The Moth and the Star. (Jamaica The Gleaner.1937) p8764 Franz Fanon Black Skins, White Masks (London Pluto, 1986), p465 Una Marson Black is Fancy The Moth and the Star p7567 Una Marson Kinky Hair Blues The Moth and the Star p9169 Kenneth Ramchard The West Indian falsehood and its Background (London Faber, 1870), p225A comparison between Jean Rhys and Una Marson. (2017, Oct 17).