Whiteness and women's writing in the Caribbean

• Main Author: Sumner, Karen Elizabeth
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1998
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; British and Irish literature; Caribbean literature; Ethnic studies; Minority & ethnic groups; Sociology; Womens studies
• ISBN: 0612323293; 9780612323292

In this thesis I examine a number of intersecting concerns: women's writing, Caribbean literary and historical texts, and whiteness as a social/cultural/racial category. I look at travel literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and novels and autobiography of the twentieth century, all written within a Caribbean context. I focus specifically on white writing, and argue that whiteness is an historically and culturally constructed identity that intersects with gender, class, and colonialism. My fundamental premise is that whiteness, like gender, is performed within literary texts in ways which require careful analysis. I reject the notion that "race" is a special category that designates people of colour, and instead pursue the ways in which whiteness functions as a racial identity, a perceptual vantage, and a discursive practice within colonial and postcolonial writing by women, but also the ways in which whiteness tends to be rendered invisible, uncoded, "natural." Whiteness, as the invisible norm, draws its ideological power from its proclaimed transparency, from its self-elevation over the very category of race. I attempt to make whiteness visible by probing its various representations within colonial and creole Caribbean literature written by white women. The authors studied in this thesis are Janet Schaw, Mrs. Carmichael, Esther Hyman, Phyllis Bottome, Eliot Bliss, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, and Jean Rhys. All are white women who lived in, and wrote about, the West Indies. In the texts written by travelers or novelists born in England (Schaw, Carmichael, Hyman, Bottome), whiteness is not privileged or identified as a racial identity, though its various meanings, often expressed in terms of gender, class, and national ideologies, are evident. In the texts written by white creole women born in the West Indies (Bliss, Allfrey, Rhys), the significance of whiteness as a cultual and racial identity is explored by the authors in a self-conscious manner. White creole writers within a Caribbean context are racially self-aware in ways that colonialist writers are not. The study of all of these authors, however, contributes to the critical examination of whiteness that is emerging within colonial, postcolonial, and feminist studies.