Where do I go with Spivak? This is mostly over my head reading, which is not something I usually (or have ever, the truth be told) say, but I'm going to try to read into his work and try to form something useful that I can take from the piece. If my understanding of it lacks any utility, then maybe I'll at least find something coherent to write about from Spivak. The fault, I'm sure, lay upon myself and my own limited understanding of the period, the vocabulary (which I slowly rectify), and my unfamiliarity of the other works he quotes, rather than any deficiency with Spivak's writing.
Spivak begins by saying "It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English." He also says that writers played a role in that, and that these facts are ignored. If we were to only look at these facts, "we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the 'worlding' of what is now called 'the Third World.'"
Spivak continues, later, by declaring the point of his essay, which is that "the discursive field of imperialism does not produce unquestioned ideological correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book." As he says in other words, even though a reader could certainly read Frankenstein from an Imperialist viewpoint, the book does not go without questioning the English belief that imperialism is a moral imperative.
Referencing Frankenstein's episode with the female creature that he destroys, Spivak shows a relationship between it and racism as "the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission." As I see it, Spivak shows us that Mary Shelley is relating Victor to England's overinflated sense of duty in conquest. Frankenstein refuses to create the female counterpart to his primary creation because the new creature could very well end up with a taste for children, despite having created the first creature and having nothing to do with it, causing it to thirst for vengeance. Victor's conquest was that of natural law, just as England and Europe conquered, say, Africa. England believed themselves capable of taking on the responsibilities of those people, and failed.
To use Africa as the example, we should note that after that conquest, the Europeans ravaged the landscape, forcing the people there into reliance on the care of its masters. With imperialism, the English believed that they were doing the people in favor, providing them with the means of advancement and evolution, for they believed the inhabitants of those lands to be a lesser race. This is the darks side of imperialism that Spivak relates.
In Frankenstein we see the same thing occurring. Frankenstein rushes into the creation of the beast, for he believed it could be done. When he saw what he had done, he has no more sense of responsibility for the thing, but rather runs from it. This irresponsibility causes the creature to turn on him, and furthermore it causes the creature's miserable state of being. This could easily be said of some of the places conquered in the name of imperialism. Once the English were there, the conquered places were ignored, which (after the time of Shelley's writing, of course) lead to their withdrawal and even today we see the ramifications of misplaced civic duty and the birth of racism toward the believed "lesser races."
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Ayoder, you express in this post your difficulties with Spivak, but I think you captured the "essence" of her ideas very well. When Spivak first came on the scene, many critics were troubled by many of Spivak's statements about literature, especially, as you quote, "It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English." The idea that literature did not exist in a "vacuum," but in a specific cultural context was actually a very controversial view in the 80s and 90s. As we saw in class, many students mimicked the criticisms lodged at Spivak, arguing, for instance, that a text such as Frankenstein is not *about* imperialism and makes no direct references to it. However, you show in this post the way in which an ideology such as imperialism can speak "through" a text, and that the same philosophical ideas and world-view that drew the British to "civilize" Africa were the same forces at work in Frankenstein's creation. While it's important to note that this is just *one* way of reading a text, I hope that you will continue to see how imperialism is at work in other novels we read, especially WH and Dracula.
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