Abstract
This book examines how the British countryside is portrayed in the works of Caribbean writers Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Grace Nichols, as well as British-Caribbean “second generation” writers Andrea Levy, Caryl Phillips, and Charlotte Williams. I explore whether these authors have found a different rural landscape to the one their predecessors encountered; how Britain’s countryside is represented before the writers see it first-hand; and how differently the authors then construct the countryside afterwards. I find that previously held (colonial and postcolonial) views of Britain’s countryside influence these authors’ subsequent perspectives, sometimes reifying a traditional and exclusive view of Britain’s countryside, but also reframing our understanding of that countryside to admit a greater multivocality. This chapter begins an exploration of the complex relationship between a former great economic, social, and political power and the new world, with special regard to the social and the countryside in Britain today.
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- 1.
In fact, the “traditional English cottage garden (transported across the Anglo imperial world) is made up of little more than ‘a collection of glorified foreign weeds’”, an “irony few wish to acknowledge” (Bressey 389).
- 2.
See later in this chapter for discussion of England and Britain , and constructing what is termed “nationhood.”
- 3.
Genre de vie is “the complex of institutions, traditions, attitudes, purposes, and technical skills of a people” and where the “same environment has different meanings for people with different genres de vie” (Martin 198).
- 4.
Sentiment towards the aesthetic of the natural world is one which, according to Kantian aesthetics, might be explained by essential “beautiful” characteristics of the natural world—the sun setting, or the blooming of a flower, for example, where determination of what is considered beautiful (and therefore also ugly) is essential and often lies in the natural world. While my examination here is less of the aesthetic of the natural world, this pure and unsullied imagining of the natural world certainly plays into the wider ideology of the rural and pastoral as being somehow more real and more authentic.
- 5.
The eighteenth-century poet William Cowper sets up another man-made versus god-made opposition in his poem The Task : “God Made the Country and Man made the town” (Book I line 749).
- 6.
Naipaul is, however, cognizant of the separation he makes. This is discussed further in Chapter 3.
- 7.
Although, as Said also points out in his later (1993) work Culture and Imperialism , “if one began to look for something like an imperial map of the world in English literature,” this connection between landscape and social relations “would turn up with amazing insistence and frequency well before the mid-nineteenth century” (82–83).
- 8.
Jean Rhys conflates England and Wales : she writes in her unpublished manuscript “Cowslips” about the Gower Peninsula, “I never knew England could be so beautiful.” I elaborate on the significance of this conflation in Chapter 2.
- 9.
Recent scholarship has also increasingly recognized Anglo Caribbean literature “beyond” Windrush. J. Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg note “Selwyn Cudjoe , Alison Donnell , Evelyn O’Callaghan , Leah Reade Rosenberg, and Faith Smith … have all persuasively argued for the recognition of a West Indian literary culture well before the postwar ‘boom’” (5). See Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago in the Nineteenth Century. Calaloux Publications, 2003; Alison Donnell . Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. Routledge, 2006; Evelyn O’Callaghan . Women Writing the West Indies : “A Hot Place Belonging to Us.” Routledge, 2003; Leah Reade Rosenberg . Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Faith Smith . Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth Century Caribbean. Virginia, 2002. fn. 10, p. 20.
- 10.
Glyne Griffith makes the similar point that writers who came to UK in 1950s and 1960s may have wanted to remove themselves from idea of rural “poverty” (285).
- 11.
This is just one way in which Black people have been erased from or suppressed in British history. For a detailed historical account of the Black presence in Britain , see David Olusoga’s Black and British: A Forgotten History. Pan Macmillan, 2016.
- 12.
Charlotte Williams names her autobiography Sugar and Slate because of this connection, and in it recounts the two economies that funded the Pennants’ ostentatious display of wealth. I discuss this further in Chapter 6.
- 13.
This “ideal” can also be seen in Victorian writer Anthony Trollope’s travel journal The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860). In his visit to Jamaica , he describes the island as “covered with wild wood and jungle – what there is called bush” (30); however, at certain intervals, there are “provision grounds” where the area has been cleared for cultivation by the “negroes” (30). It is in relation to these provision grounds that Trollope specifically mentions England, where he describes these Jamaican plots as comparatively picturesque. Although Trollope’s descriptions of the clearings are ostensibly complimentary (he indicates they are “of great beauty” (30)), it is an assumption of the text that these cultivated (i.e. English) plots of land are the areas worth commenting on or complimenting, rather than the natural “bush” vegetation of Jamaica , which gets only a brief mention. The land is being evaluated aesthetically using characteristics of Britain ’s countryside as normative or standard.
- 14.
Naipaul’s collection of short stories, Miguel Street (1959), includes a character, B. (Black) Wordsworth, who is a poet.
- 15.
Snow has special significance for other Caribbean writers: In Jean Rhys’s short story “Temps Perdi” the narrator writes that “snow ” is the only thing in England that hadn’t “disappointed” her (“Temps Perdi” CSS 257).
- 16.
Derek Walcott has also noted that he sees the English and the Caribbean languages as having many overlaps. He notes this about Piers Plowman: “I don’t think of that rhythm [in Piers Plowman] as being formal. I think that it’s very Caribbean” (“Commentary”). C.f. Chapter 4, 91.
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Johnson, J. (2019). Introduction: Constructing the Countryside. In: Topographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the British Countryside. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04134-2_1
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