Jane Eyre, Uğultulu Tepeler ve Büyük Umutlar’da Siyasal Bilinçdışı

Yıl 2019, Cilt: 18 Sayı: 4, 1242 - 1254, 18.10.2019

Hale Küçük

https://doi.org/10.21547/jss.545533

Öz

Bu çalışma
Marksist ve kolonyal dönem sonrası teorileri birleştirerek üç Viktoryen romanı,
Charlotte Brontë’nin Jane Eyre
(1847), Emily Brontë’nin Uğultulu Tepeler
(1847) ve Charles Dickens’ın Büyük
Umutlar’ını (1861) incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Viktoryen dönemde yazılmış
bazı romanlar emperyalizm ve sömürüleni açık bir şekilde ele alsa da bu üç
romanda sömürgeler ve sömürülen direk olarak ele alınmaz ve sanki geçiştirilir.
Ancak bu geçiştirmeler çok önemlidir çünkü bunlar, bu metinlerde kritik bir
anlam taşıyan ve sürekli olarak tekrarlayan suskunlukları, boşlukları ve
eksikleri teşkil etmektedirler. Marksist bağlamda, bu metinlerin boşluk ve
suskunluklarında beliren şey tarihtir, yani bu Viktoryen romanlar ister istemez
Britanya’nın emperyalist tarihiyle ve onun ideolojileriyle ilintilidir. Bu
metinlerin marjinlerinde veya boşluklarında sürekli olarak ele alınan konular,
metinler bunu bastırmaya çalışsa da kolonyal bastırılanın geri dönüşünü
göstermektedir. Fredric Jameson’un siyasal bilinçdışı kavramına odaklanarak bu
metinlerdeki boşluk ve suskunluklarda ortaya çıkan kolonyal bastırılanı
inceleyen bu çalışma, bahsedilen romanların ikili bir işlevi olduğunu öne
sürmektedir: bir yandan Viktoryen toplumun yerleşmiş kaygı, korku ve arzularını
beyaz olmayan öteki üstünden anlatırken bu eserler belirli bir sömürülen öteki
ve aynı zamanda belirli bir millî kimlik algısı oluşturmaktadırlar.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Siyasal Bilinçdışı, Sömürgecilik, Emperyalizm, Jane Eyre, Uğultulu Tepeler, Büyük Umutlar

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

The political unconscious, colonialism, imperialism, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations

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)
• Jameson, F. The political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act. London, New York: Routledge, 1983.
• Macherey, P. (2006). A theory of literary production. (G. Wall, Trans.). New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1966)
• Meyer, S. (1966). Imperialism at home: race and Victorian women’s fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
• Michie, E. (1992). From simianized Irish to oriental despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and racial difference. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 25(2), 125-140. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346001
• Said, E. W. (1994). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage.
• Spivak, G. C. (1985). Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), 243-261. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469
• Von Sneidern, M. (1995). Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool slave trade. ELH, 62(1), 171-196. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030265