SOURCE: "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 1, Autumn, 1985, pp. 243-61.

In the following essay, Spivak examines Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Frankenstein to reveal the manner in which imperialist ideology structures the expression of nineteenth-century feminist individualism.

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.

If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing...