The Political Unconscious in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations
Öz
This paper aims to explore three Victorian novels, namely Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) bringing together Marxist and postcolonial theories. While some novels written in the Victorian era deal with imperialism and the colonized overtly, in these three novels, the colonies and the colonized are dealt with indirectly as if only in-passing. However, these in-passing references are very significant because they constitute the recurrent silences, gaps, and absences in these texts, which has critical implications. In Marxist terms, it is history that haunts these texts in these gaps and silences, which means that these Victorian novels are inevitably related to Britain’s imperial history and its ideologies. What is given repeatedly at the margins or gaps of these texts demonstrates the obsessive return of the issue of colonialism though the texts seek to repress it. Exploring the return of the colonial repressed in the gaps and silences of these novels by focusing on Fredric Jameson’s conception of the political unconscious, this paper argues that these novels have twofold function: while expressing the deep-seated anxieties, fears and desires of the Victorian society by projecting them onto the non-white others, they contribute to shape a certain understanding of the colonized other and also a certain sense of national identity.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Kaynakça
- Brantlinger, P. (1988). Rule of darkness: British literature and imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
- Brantlinger, P. (2009). Victorian literature and postcolonial studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Brontë, C. (2001). Jane eyre. (3rd ed). Dunn, R. J. (Ed.). New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1847)
- Brontë, E. (2003). Wuthering heights. (4th ed). Dunn, R. J. (Ed.). New York, London: W. W Norton & Company. (Original work published 1847)
- Dickens, C. (2002). Great expectations. London: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1861).
- Eagleton, T. (1988). Myths of power: a Marxist study of the Brontës. (2nd ed.). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press. (Original work published 1975)
- Freud, S. (2003). The uncanny. (D. McLintock, Trans.). New York: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1899)
- Gilbert, S. M., & Susan G. (2000). The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. (2nd ed). New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene Yale University Press. (Original work published 1979)
Ayrıntılar
Birincil Dil
İngilizce
Konular
Sanat ve Edebiyat
Bölüm
Araştırma Makalesi
Yazarlar
Hale Küçük
*
0000-0001-6408-2322
Türkiye
Yayımlanma Tarihi
18 Ekim 2019
Gönderilme Tarihi
27 Mart 2019
Kabul Tarihi
26 Eylül 2019
Yayımlandığı Sayı
Yıl 2019 Cilt: 18 Sayı: 4