The Subversive Role of Literature within the Centro-circular Model of Western Subject-Object Dichotomy

In both Can the Subaltern Speak? and Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, Spivak urges readers to recognize their politically biased position, no matter how “neutral” they assert they are. In her analysis, the subject formation can be likened to a closed circle within an infinite two-dimensional field. The subject who is within the enclosed curve recognizes the presence of the “outside”, the Other. However, one can “appropriate” the existence of the Other only by the (Western) language, thus he or she is only able to glance at the one-sided, somewhat “subjected,” aspect of the other. If we push ahead with the circular analogy, the appropriation of the Other can be likened to a budding bulge from the circular subject into an unknown exterior; Spivak names the victim “domesticated Other” (253), who differs from the “absolutely Other” (253), invisible agent. This domestication is clearly imperialistic, and Spivak sees any kind of Western ideology, no matter how it claims to stay away from imperialism, is bound to this limitation.

From this perspective, she delicately criticizes the feminist criticism of three women’s literature texts. In the text, Jane Eyre, traditionally regarded as a prime feminist character, is reinterpreted as the Western “individualist” — thus imperialist to some extent — subject. According to Spivak, Jane eventually blends into the “family-in-law” (247) at the end of the story, and Bertha Mason is assigned a role that catalyzes this process, by victimizing itself as the constructed antagonist, the “domesticated Other.” Who is free of this violent pioneering, and simultaneously able to hint its presence to Westerners? Spivak discovers Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea and the monster in Frankenstein as the possible candidates and analyzes them as “tangential”(253) characters.

This geometric analogy, which is done in several parts in Three Women’s Texts such as “a tangent that escapes the closed circle of the narrative conclusion” (248) or “Christophine’s unfinished story is tangent to the latter narrative [Wide], as St. John Rivers’ story is to the former [Jane]” (252), can be furtherly explained by investigating the mathematical implication of circularity and tangentiality. What does the tangent line have to do with the original curve? By definition, the tangent line only meets with the original curve at a single point with an almost identical tendency of slope in the neighborhood of that point. Basic mathematics proves that any tangent line on an arbitrary point of the circle is normal — perpendicular — to the line that connects the point and the center. Furthermore, the basic mechanism of approximating the graph, generally called Taylor expansion, is the elongation of change in the infinitesimal region to the extent we want, by producing the tangent line grazing the point on the curve.

In this regard, we can understand why Spivak used the tangential analogy to indicate the “absolute Other,” instead of any unrestricted vector spreading out from the circle. The tangent line is the only one that is normal to the sight from the center; if not, the component of the central “viewpoint” is blended, and it can lead to the “budding bulge” domestication of a subject. Based on the principle of Taylor expansion, the error of approximated tangent line and the original curve generally amplifies as the approximating point on the tangent line gets farther away from the meeting point. These characteristics of tangentiality — that the direction of other is “visible”, visible at only one point, and the subject can only approximate/extrapolate the absolute others’ trace — is properly imagined by Spivak in analyses such as “She [Christophine] walked away without looking back” (253) and “the monster can step “beyond the text” and be “lost in darkness”” (259). The subject has only two choices: expanding its region to engulf the other, or glancing only indirectly at the others’ movement. Literature can work by the latter, that is, inconclusively reflecting the other by always recognizing its non-neutral position.