The psychic life of the nation: Literature, culture, and the critique of ideology

My dissertation is a study of the interrelationships among national ideology, group identification, and racial fantasy in the works of British and white Anglophone writers from 1772 until the present day. Through a reading of both historical documents and literary narratives, I argue that the figure of the racial Other emerges as a symptom of the difficulties and tensions involved in the formation and maintenance of a national identity. My first chapter, "The Psychic Life of the Nation" lays out my theoretical parameters by examining Enoch Powell's campaign against black immigration to England in the 1960s. Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary critiques of ideology, I show how Powell's apocalyptic nightmare of alien hordes swamping England's shores is prompted by a fear of English cultural and social disintegration under the stress of imperial decline. Chapter Two, "Abroad at Home: Despotism and the Domestic in Jane Eyre," explores how Charlotte Bronte draws upon images of the West Indian slave, the Turkish harem, and the Indian ritual of sati (widow immolation) as a means of critiquing England's domestic oppression. Locating Bronte's novel within a cultural tradition extending back to a 1772 decision outlawing slavery within England's borders, I argue that her imagery presents gender and class oppression as a foreign contaminant that pollutes the natural liberty of the English soil. My third chapter, "Between Two Deaths: Mourning and Empire in Wide Sargasso Sea," examines how Jean Rhys's representation of racial and national difference reflects the cultural malaise experienced by the white minority after the end of slavery and colonization in the West Indies. Chapter Four locates J. M. Coetzee's retelling of Robinson Crusoe in Foe within the context of the impending demise of apartheid. I suggest that Coetzee's imaginative recreation of what many consider to be the first novel can be read as an attempt to rework the Ur-racial fantasy that undergirds the English literary tradition and whose various permutations were explored in the previous chapters. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the uses and abuses of psychoanalysis for the study of literary and cultural formations.