Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism*

The contemporary writer like Jean Rhys reveals the limitations of Western feminism in the way that the dissenting voice of the colonized woman is silenced through Christophine&s;s &s;expulsion&s; from Wide Sargasso Sea. The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social subject-production, the dynamic nineteenth-century topos of feminism-in-imperialism, remains problematic within the limits of Shelley&s;s text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength. Frankenstein is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction and social subject-production. A basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm. The battle for female individualism plays itself out within the larger theatre of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of the creative imagination. In a reading such as mine, in contrast, the effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the &s;subject-constitution&s; of the female individualist.