Reading outside the Novel

Despite academically rejecting the notion of high literature, I find it useful to question my initial sentimental response to English literature especially when it carries early feminist underpinnings. Why do such novels seem to appeal to our human sensibility or feminist ‘subjectivity’ over others? Although I am not an English major (and therefore many of Spivak’s references were lost on me), I think that both authors seek to contextualize explicitly constructed humanistic ideas within a larger imperialist subtext. For Said, notions of space, domestic pleasures, and morality are intricately linked to the economic and imperialistic subjugation of an Other. The novel is questioned as the vehicle for imperialistic validation, and notion of the author critiqued for stylistically depoliticizing a strictly political/nationalist/imperialist project. Taking cues from Raymond William’s deconstruction of geographic space in British literature as the fabric of a larger colonial landscape, Said uses spatial demarcations within Mansfield Park to explore how language is used to centralize morality as characteristic of class, and implicitly, race. He writes, “The question is thus not only how to understand and with what to connect Austen’s morality and its social basis, but also what to read of it” (1122). This brings up several questions about how we read history and biography within the novel form. Said attempts to take Austen’s imperialistic framework for what it is, while at the same time questioning how moral themes in her text have been universalized and politically neutralized. I think here Said is looking for the middle ground between literary relativism and conflating a text to project contemporary ideas onto the past. Its all a matter of how you go about finding the connections—especially if those connections are rendered transparent as the material basis of literary meaning. After all, these examples of British Literature cannot be separated from the politics of the publishing house—the PR institution of the higher classes.