Rewriting the East in Old and Middle English Texts: a Study in the Problem of Alterity and the Representation of the Third World Feminine
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1991 Rewriting the East in Old and Middle English Texts: A Study in the Problem of Alterity and the Representation of the Third World Feminine Glory E. Dharmaraj Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Dharmaraj, Glory E., "Rewriting the East in Old and Middle English Texts: A Study in the Problem of Alterity and the Representation of the Third World Feminine" (1991). Dissertations. 2934. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2934 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1991 Glory E. Dharmaraj REWRITING THE EAST IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH TEXTS: A STUDY IN THE PROBLEM OF ALTERITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE THIRD WORLD FEMININE BY GLORY E. DHARMARAJ A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 1991 • Copyright, 1991, Glory E. Dharmaraj All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks are foremost due to Professor Allen J. Frantzen, who created in me an interest in Anglo-Saxon and medieval texts through his dedicated teaching and tireless scholarship. He encouraged me to see medieval texts from Eastern and theoretical perspectives. He directed this work from its conception, offering his professional advice, valu able suggestions, and painstaking editing. I am also thankful to Professor Karma D. Lochrie for her feminist readings, extensive comments, and constant sup port. Thanks are due to Professor Pamela L. Caughie for her theoretical insights, narrative methods, and continued en couragement. I am indebted to Loyola University for awarding me a dissertation fellowship. To Thomas R. Logsdon, thank you for your kind technical assistance. To Raja, thank you for your intellectual com panionship and emotional support. This project could not have been possible without you. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. IMAGE OF THE EAST IN ANGLO-SAXON LITERARY TEXTS 32 III. THE ORIENTALIZED EASTERN PRINCESS 79 IV. THE EAST IN CHAUCER'S "MAN OF LAW'S TALE": A DOMESTICATED IMAGE 124 V. · THE EASTERN FEMALE AS A PALIMPSEST IN CHAUCER'S "SQUIRE'S TALE" . 168 VI. SEXUAL DISCOURSE TO COLONIAL DISCOURSE . 207 VII. FROM DISCURSIVE SILENCE TO DISRUPTIVE SPEECH 249 VIII. READING THE EASTERN FEMININE: A STUDY IN THE PROBLEMATICS OF REPRESENTATION . 285 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 327 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I am a woman. I am from the East. I write; millions of my sisters do not. I write my story as someone born in British colonial India and exposed to the master/slave and colonizer/colonized relationship. I also lived through the decolonizing phases of India and Sri Lanka. Living on two tracts is an experience of cultural doubleness. This is the perspective I bring to the study of English literature. I write. The reason why I write is suggested by this anecdote from African folklore: The story, taken from African folklore, goes like this: There was a little boy in an African village who customarily came home from the mission school with excitement about his learnings of the qay. On one particular day, he came home ... with arlook of puzzlement on his face. And when he came into his house his father inquired about this. I go to school every day and the teacher often tells us the story about this lion who they say is the king of the jungle. But this ferocious and strong beast always seems to get killed by the hunter in the story. I don't understand it. If the lion is so strong why does the hunter always kill the lion? The father responded, "Well son, until lions learn how to wrife books, that is the way the story will always end." This is an attempt to locate the lion's story, the counter- 1Taken from Grant's, "Prophetic Theology, " Kairos Covenant (131). I thank Jacob S. Dharmaraj for referring me to this. 1 2 story of the Eastern woman, which lies buried in the hunter's book in each of the texts under study. My position as a writer of this project is to show the story of the hunted as a retreated text which exists in the dominant text of the hunter: the story of the Eastern female lying buried in the "history" of English literature. I learned the history of English literature from the hunter's point of view in my undergraduate and first part of my graduate training in India. Western teachers and Eastern teachers who had been trained directly by the former taught English literary texts from the point of view of the hunter. Being a "hunted" myself in the Eastern patriarchy, I resorted to education--as did my foremothers--in order to circumvent patriarchy. Patriarchy cannot be abolished easily. But it can be circumvented. This is a Third World woman's only chance of creating a First World within herself. 2 As a Third World woman doing a Ph.D. program in a department of English in a First World university, I have to reassess my point of departure in literary studies. I am an alien to working through the materiality of the writing medium of English. English is part of my colonial vestige inserted into the East Indian curriculum by Lord Macaulay 2I am using the expression "Third World" for want of a better word in usage. Recent texts on international economics and missiology, however, use the North-South paradigm to refer to First and Third Worlds. 3 in 1835. I stand in a colonized relation to the English lan guage. My positionality is complexly derived. Historically and culturally, I belong to the oppressed. Paradoxically, through an education in English, I am intellectually liberated. This oxyrnoronic attempt at appropriating intel lectual freedom is a cultural anguish to me. Education, then, for me, is the strength of an exile. The more in formed and the more privileged the exile, that person can convert the very condition of being an exile into writing. 3 This is what I have done in the classrooms of Loyola University of Chicago. I see literature from the vantage point of an exile. I write this project as a result of this seeing. I feel the Eastern culture running through my veins and my Western-trained intellect confronting it. It is as if the Third World is standing before the First World in an act of being interrogated. I embody this cultural strain. The other is not outside. It is within oneself. It is part of your being. My silences are being interrogated by the education I have received. I speak. I write. In this process, I look at the Eastern woman closely in the texts under study. I make my writing site relevant here. It is a place of triple 3Kristeva writes about the condition of being an exile from one's family, country, and language. She argues _that "writing is impossible without some kind of exile" (Moi, Kristeva Reader 298-299) 4 colonization for me as an Easterner, woman, and a non-native speaker specializing in English literature. Utilizing precisely these margins where two cultures meet in each of my colonized existences as a vital area where I stand and speak, I set out to examine similar zones in texts. A story of the hunted does not replace the hunter's. It exists as a counterstory alongside the former in the ar chive. The story of the hunted frees itself by having an equal footing with that of the hunter. That is what I have done. To locate the silences of the Eastern female, and to place the stories of the hunted and the hunter as two voices in the same text are my endeavors in this project. The act of locating the Eastern female's story has not been solely a detached intellectual experience for me. Going through the earlier classical and Anglo-Saxon narrations for the first time, I find that the Eastern female from India is repre sented as a sensuous, violent, or even a half-human figure. I feel, as a woman from India, I too must have been subject to this imperialistic and masculinist vision at one literary point in the imaginative history of the West. From being a mere object of such a gaze, I set out to shift my position ality to speak, to write. 4 4Alloula, an Algerian sociologist, rewrites the image of the native woman on colonialist postcards in The Colonial Harem. In re-seeing the stereotypically eroticized body of the usually veiled Algerian woman, Alloula too feels that as an Algerian woman, she could not feel "indifferent" to what these 5 In this writing, I trace the Eastern female's story, which exists in a cultural, historical, and ideological net work, through what seems to be an invisible thread of the history of the textually colonized Eastern woman. I seek to demonstrate that the Old English period and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries mark the formation, development, and dispersal of the story of the Eastern woman as a figure characterized by stereotypical features like sensuousness and violence. She is deviant and abnormal, while Western ob servers are normal and rational.