“Resisting the ‘Master Narrative’: An Examination of Literary Resistance”
As we know, William Shakespeare did it best. The conflict between Caliban and Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest aptly represents the struggle between the marginalized and those marginalized due to Western imperialism. We see this when Caliban fights back against Prospero, who arrives on Caliban’s island and enslaves him. Where Caliban is unsuccessful in his uprising against Prospero, subsequent literary figures are. These characters include Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, the runaway slave in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”, Molly Ivors in “The Dead”, and Joss Moody in Trumpet. All these characters challenge those who attempt to control them and triumph against their oppressors.
In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Bertha resists Mr. Rochester’s oppression by escaping the third floor where she is held, and fights back by attempting to burn him. Bertha doesn’t accept her imprisonment and escapes her confines on multiple occasions. During these periods of freedom, Bertha doesn’t leave Thornfield, instead, she chooses to fight her oppressor. by setting the curtains in Mr. Rochester’s room on fire while he sleeps. Bertha doesn’t succeed in killing Mr. Rochester but she does triumphs over him Mr. Rochester and her oppression when she burns down Thornfield and kills herself. Burning Thornfield, Bertha destroys her prison and the power that Rochester hads as a wealthy land-owning man in one fell swoop. But Bertha’s resistance goes further than thisat when she kills herself. This act freed her from Rochester, who had a claimhad claim over her autonomy as her husband;, but it also freeingd her from herself. Bertha wasn’t just a prisoner to Rochester; she was a prisoner to her insanity and through death she freed herself.
Bertha isn’t the only one who achieves freedom through death. In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”, the Runaway Slave chooses death over a return to slavery. Death is the Runaway Slave’s final act of resistance, but it isn’t the first. The Runaway Slave kills her child and runs away in addition. On the surface, the Runaway Slave killing her child might not seem like resistance against the Slavers who own her. However, this child is a result of the Runaway Slave being raped by her owners, making the child both black and white. This means that when the Runaway Slave kills her child, she is killing a white child, which is a form of resistance against her owners. While the child is alive, the Runaway Slave says that the child “Was far too white, too white for me,” (XVII, 115) but when she kills and buries it, “All, changed to black earth, – nothing white, – / A dark child in the dark!” (XXVII, 185-186). Alive, the child belongs to the Slavers, but in death, the child returns to the Runaway Slave as a “dark child”. So, in addition to killing the white child, the Runaway Slave takes back ‘ownership’ of her child, resisting the Slavers yet again. As per her name, the Runaway Slave escapes her owners and runs to Pilgrim’s Point. There, the Slavers catch up to her and instead of surrendering and returning to a life of imprisonment, the Runaway Slave chooses to have the Slavers kill her. She chooses freedom in death rather than slavery in life.
The Runaway Slave and Bertha allow themselves to be killed/kill themselves to avoid returning to slavery. They avoid a life dictated by others, the Slavers and Rochester, and take back their autonomy by deciding if they live or die. Another key similarity between the Runaway Slave and Bertha is that they don’t just fight for their freedom but manage to take down their oppressors too. When Bertha burns down Thornfield, she is fighting for her freedom but also hurts Rochester by destroying his wealth. Similarly, the Runaway Slave hurts the Slavers when she kills the white child and regains her child. This differs from Bertha’s actions because, comparably, what Bertha does has a more significant impact on Rochester than killing the child would have on the Slavers, but, symbolically, it is imperative.
Unlike Bertha and the Runaway Slave, Joss Moody in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet doesn’t physically confront those who oppress him. Joss is dead, so he can’t confront Sophie Stones as she attempts to rewrite the narrative of his life and his gender identity. However, Joss still manages to resist her attempts at rewriting his life. Sophie attempts to change Joss’s story to fit her narrative that Joss is a woman who dressed up as a man and deceived everyone. She wanted to make it seem like Joss was tricking everyone, rather than the truth, which is that Joss was a trans-man. When Sophie calls Big Red, the drummer in Joss’s band, she asks him “‘Don’t you mean the girl’s a genius?’” after Big Red refers to Joss as a guy(148). Big Red tells Sophie that he didn’t care about any of that and that it was the music that mattered but Sophie doesn’t care. All she cared about was a portrayal of Joss as a woman pretending to be a man. Colman is the proxy through which Joss and Sophie fight. Sophie attempts to use Colman as a tool to pioneer her narrative. Colman is hurt by the discovery of his father’s past and is influenced by Sophie. He believes her when she sells a story of Joss deceiving his friends and family. Similar to Bertha and the Runaway Slave, Joss does not accept Sophie’s oppression and fights back. Joss comes to Colman in a dream, as a girl, and they end up in a house that is filling with water. Colman realizes that “He is going to have to save her from drowning”(260). In this dream, the water is the narrative that Sophie Stones is spinning about Joss, which Colman saves the little girl from. He then leaves Sophie and goes to his mother in Greenock, ending her book and narrative of his father. Joss puts an end to Sophie’s manipulation of his life story when Colman leaves and triumphs over her when Colman tells Sophie (259) that “He’ll always be daddy to me.”, rejecting the story that Sophie created. Though different because he doesn’t physically fight Sophie, Joss successfully pushes back against her efforts to control him and his narrative.
Joss and the Runaway Slave resist the oppression of white imperialism by embracing their cultures. Joss embraces his father’s culture by playing Jazz, a style of music that can be traced back to African-American communities. Not only does Joss play Jazz, but he chooses Jazz over the Scottish folk songs that his father used to sing to him. This speaks to the intentionality of Joss’s choice. Joss grew up listening to his father sing the songs of those who marginalized him but chose to connect to his father’s ‘true’ culture by playing Jazz. In addition to this, Joss put out an album called “Fantasy Africa”(208); Joss isn’t shy about his African roots and puts them on full display in his career. Just like Joss, the Runaway Slave finds a way to resist by embracing her culture through music. After killing her child, which was another act of resistance, the Runaway Slave says that she “sung/ The song I learnt in my maidenhood” (XXVII, 188-189). When the Runaway Slave says that she learned the song in her “maidenhood” she is referring to a time before she was assaulted by the white Slavers, from which her child resulted. The assault has a secondary meaning of an infiltration of white culture, meaning that her maidenhood refers to a time before she was subjected to white culture. Essentially, the Runaway Slave was singing the songs of her culture. The action of embracing their cultures fights the effort of the Western imperialists to force assimilation upon them.
In James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Molly Ivors resists the British subjugation of Ireland through Gabriel. Gabriel represents the British control of Ireland because, like Molly, he has Irish heritage but accepts the British attempts at control and seems to prefer the British culture to the Irish, saying that “Irish is not my language”(32). Molly calls Gabriel a “West Briton”, which is a derogatory term for an Irishman who is not sufficiently nationalist and does not subscribe to all the tenets of the Irish nationalist movement (page 31, footnotes). This cuts Gabriel to the core, leading to him being increasingly agitated as the conversation continues. In addition to the insults that Molly hurls at Gabriel, Joyce uses double entendres in their interactions to represent the metaphorical battle between the two. The dance that Molly and Gabriel speak during is called a lancer, which is a quadrille for eight or sixteen pairs, but it is also a member of a military unit.
After the dance, Gabriel “retired to the embrasure of the window”(34). An embrasure is the recess of a door or window but is also part of a military structure that opens to allow for the firing of a canon. While Gabriel never fires this metaphorical canon at Molly, it is clear that they are engaging in a figurative war for the British control of Ireland and Molly wins. In addition to the conflict between Molly, Gabriel also attempts to play the role of the ‘superior culture’ with Lily. Lily tells Gabriel that she is done with schooling and he thinks that because of this “we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?”. Lily responds in the negative, saying “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you”(23). Rather than the Irish/British conflict that Molly and Gabriel represent, Lily and Gabriel personify the conflicting thoughts of Romantics and those who believe in the Victorianistic way of life. Lily representing the romantic view, doesn’t believe that she needs a husband while Gabriel subscribes to the Victorian ideology of the ‘angel in the house’. Lily resists this thought process and Gabriel’s assumptions by saying that all men are palavers, a conversation with the enemy. Unlike his agitation with Molly, “Gabriel colored as if he had made a mistake”(23), after Lily’s retort and it seemed to affect him for the rest of their interaction. Gabriel represents the dominant ideology, that both Molly and Lily resist to maintain their way of life. They both resist his efforts to force his ideology upon them but to different degrees. While Molly seems to enrage Gabriel, Lily seems to evoke actual regret from him.
Molly and Joss both resist the efforts of the English to dominate their culture. Molly’s resistance is more head-on when compared to Joss’s. Where Molly confronts Gabriel about his British sympathies and therefore confronts the colonizer, Joss chooses a more passive avenue by speaking Gaelic and embracing his African roots by playing jazz. Molly directly confronts the colonization through Gabriel, who is a personification of it. Gabriel is an Irish man who distances himself from Ireland. He even goes so far as to say “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!”(32). Not only does Gabriel resent his own country/culture, but he also embraces the British culture. Molly calls Gabriel out on his British sympathies, directly confronting the British domination of Irish culture (with Gabriel being Britain by proxy). Instead of confrontation, Joss chose to resist the British culture by embracing his own. In a recollection of Joss, Colman spoke about how “My father clung on to his (Scottish accent). Determined that everyone would know he was Scottish”(51). Like Molly, Joss was proud of his culture and did everything to make sure that people knew where he came from. Maintaining his Scottish accent in London let everyone know that Joss was Scottish and proud of it.
All four characters resist the efforts of those in power to control them and take back their power in the process. Some, Bertha and the Runaway Slave, physically fight back and lose their life in the process. And in the ultimate power move, Bertha manages to take down their oppressor with them. Others take a less aggressive approach but still directly confront those who want to impose their views, Molly Ivors and Lily. While others are forced to resist through proxies because they are unable to do so, Joss Moody. All the characters take different routes to getting their power back but, unlike Caliban, manage to do so in the end.
