Unhomely Homes: Postcolonial (Re)Locations and Self-Fashioning in Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Chang-Rae Lee

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Unhomely Homes: Postcolonial (Re)Locations and Self-Fashioning in Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Chang-Rae Lee UNHOMELY HOMES: POSTCOLONIAL (RE)LOCATIONS AND SELF-FASHIONING IN JOSEPH CONRAD, JEAN RHYS, AND CHANG-RAE LEE By JUNG-HWA LEE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2008 1 © 2008 Jung-Hwa Lee 2 To my Mom 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest gratitude goes to the members of my dissertation committee who have shown me what it takes to be a good scholar and teacher. R. Brandon Kershner, my advisor, supported this study from the beginning and generously provided professional and personal advice. I admire his love of life and commitment to literature. Leah Rosenberg asked me hard questions and helped me articulate ideas at various stages of drafting. Pamela Gilbert constantly reminded me of the importance of gender in this study. Jessica Harland-Jacobs, my outsider reader, brought a fresh perspective to this dissertation and provided invaluable comments. This study would not have been possible without their expertise, commitment, encouragement, and friendship. I wish to thank my old teachers and mentors in Korea who inspired me to pursue graduate study in English; friends in Korea and the U.S. whose numerous e-mails and phone calls helped me keep my sanity for the past seven years; colleagues at the University of Florida who read my draft at different stages of writing; and finally my family, especially my mother, for supporting my decision to come to the U.S. and always believing in me even when I doubt myself. I was fortunate to be generously funded departmentally and otherwise. I am grateful to the University of Florida and the Gibson Endowment Fund for Grinter Fellowship and Gibson Dissertation Fellowship. The Department of English and the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures also financially supported me through Teaching Assistantships and Research Assistantships. Without the financial support, this study could not have been finished in a timely manner. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 1 WRITING OUT OF (A) PLACE .............................................................................................9 Postcolonial (Re)locations........................................................................................................9 The National and the Transnational........................................................................................15 The Private and the Public......................................................................................................21 Fashion-able Selves ................................................................................................................23 Unhomely Homes ...................................................................................................................29 The Map..................................................................................................................................30 2 JOSEPH CONRAD’S RE-MAPPING HOME ......................................................................33 Introduction.............................................................................................................................33 Reconcilable Differences: Poland and England in A Personal Record..................................45 The English Review and the Russian Connection............................................................46 J. C. K: The English Book and “The Inexorable Past” ...................................................52 “Pro Patria!”: Genealogy and Geography in Under Western Eyes ......................................64 The Impossible Lineage ..................................................................................................66 Mapping “the West”........................................................................................................72 3 JEAN RHYS’S HOME IN-BETWEEN.................................................................................83 Introduction.............................................................................................................................83 Crossing the Racial Line in Wide Sargasso Sea.....................................................................92 “New Ones Worse Than Old Ones”................................................................................93 “This Book Should Have Been a Dream” .....................................................................104 “I Was at Home And Not at Home”: “The Imperial Road” .................................................109 Mourning the White Creole...........................................................................................110 The Return of the Native ...............................................................................................122 4 CHANG-RAE LEE’S IMMIGRANT PLOT .......................................................................128 Introduction...........................................................................................................................128 The Bildung and the Peril in Native Speaker........................................................................136 The Problem of Bildung and Double-Speaking.............................................................137 The Perilous State: “Yellow-peril: neo-American”.......................................................144 Asian American Male Authoring..........................................................................................151 Authoring, Fathering, Homing ......................................................................................153 Women at Home............................................................................................................159 5 5 CODA...................................................................................................................................167 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................173 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................183 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy UNHOMELY HOMES: POSTCOLONIAL (RE)LOCATIONS AND SELF-FASHIONING IN JOSEPH CONRAD, JEAN RHYS, AND CHANG-RAE LEE By Jung-Hwa Lee August 2008 Chair: R. Brandon Kershner Major: English This study discusses the paradoxically complementary relation between being out of place and writing out of a place in the work of three distinct twentieth-century migrant writers: Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Chang-rae Lee. Drawing on a diverse range of scholarship, including postcolonial studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and historical approaches, I consider what it means to be dis/placed in the twentieth century that is characterized by the dissolution of old imperial powers, the emergence of the U.S. as a new empire, the birth of new nations, and mass migration. Re-conceiving “home” as multiple (re)locations instead of root, this study posits that “home” and displacement are not opposite but mutually constitutive terms in the spatial imaginings of Conrad, Rhys, and Lee. I adopt the idea of self-fashioning as a productive alternative to the dichotomy of assimilation versus resistance, or the “good” subject versus the “bad” subject, which is too simplistic to fully account for the complexity of postcoloniality. This dissertation brings into clearer focus the writers’ ambivalent relationships to dominant cultures by recognizing their complicity in dominant cultures, on the one hand, and their critical interventions in those cultures, on the other. Conrad, Rhys, and Lee fashion themselves and cope with displacement by negotiating culturally available options and their agency in varying ways. 7 After Chapter 1 lays out theoretical concepts and key terms, Chapter 2 reads A Personal Record and Under Western Eyes to re-evaluate the popular characterization of Conrad as “homo duplex,” split between his Polish past and English authorship. I argue that, contrary to the popular assumption, Conrad cognitively re-maps his Polish heritage and English authorship as ultimately reconcilable elements of his self by actively appropriating the umbrella term “the West,” which gained a new significance in the early twentieth century. This chapter complicates Conrad’s relationship to imperialism by emphasizing that his ambivalent attitude towards British imperialism should be examined in the context of his Polish past as well as his antagonism against Russian imperialism. The next chapter contrasts Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’s most acclaimed novel, and “The Imperial Road,” her rejected manuscript that describes her homecoming. This chapter contends that being a white Creole woman located in-between the Caribbean and England, Rhys tries to “home” herself by alternately and provisionally placing herself in opposition to white Englishmen and Afro-Caribbeans. I approach Rhys’s conflicting racial attitude in terms of tactics of self-fashioning and foreground her agency that has been overshadowed by the much debated passivity of her female characters.
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