The Power to Name by Stephanie Newell

Author:Stephanie Newell [Newell, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Literary Criticism, African, Books & Reading, History, Africa, General
ISBN: 9780821444498
Google: BYmGAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2013-07-15T01:41:53+00:00

For reasons best known to me, however, I have not as yet published the [latter two]. In the tale “Loving and Liking,” I endeavoured to prove that though we are only “Black Englishmen” we have correct ideas of the meanings of the two words, to love and to like . . .

In the other story, “Municipality,” I endeavoured to have this burning question of the day fully dissected in a discussion between some very principal factors, although that tale was also a love story.43

Erne’s Friend takes for granted the belief that the value of creative writing lies in the ethical debates that stories will stimulate among readers, without the interventions or presence of an identifiable author. Akin to parables, stories thus function as didactic and discursive tools, created by authors to lever open and expose the moral core of “burning” social issues such as marriage by ordinance, romantic love in Africa, the creation of a colonial municipality, or the education of women. Perhaps this is why readers rarely commented directly on stories or expressed curiosity about the identities of authors. The preference of readers to debate the moral issues raised by the story, rather than to comment on the content and form of individual narratives, indicates the existence of a literary culture in which the publicness of literature was conferred by the avoidance of attribution. A search for “real” authors seems misplaced in such a context, and as a sign of its futility, such searches frequently lead the researcher further into a labyrinthine paper trail of pseudonyms: a hunt for the author of Erne’s Friend, for example, runs dry at “The Czar,” author of “Cruelly Treated” in 1889.44

Bearing in mind that women as well as men can express patriarchal views, the three early works of fiction discussed in this chapter illustrate a dilemma common to feminist literary scholarship: although the desire to discover an author’s gender is problematically essentialist, there are many reasons—integral to the texts and extraneous to each story—to suppose that Marita; or The Folly of Love, Adelaide of Adelaide Street, and Guanya Pau: A Story of an African Princess were indeed all written by men. Internal evidence includes the masculine positionality of each narrative. Extraneous evidence includes the author’s name, as in Joseph Walters’s case, or information about the author, such as the editor of the Western Echo’s reference to the “native gentleman” author of Marita; or The Folly of Love.45

Lady Clifford’s choice of the genre of the letter for her genderdivided schoolchildren’s competition reflects the outward-oriented, proselytizing character of literacy in Britain’s colonies—the need for a full “correspondence” between writers and readers. One could argue that the printed material discussed in this section—for and about African women—contributed to the production of the very differences in theme and preoccupation that caused women’s writing to be neglected and labeled irrelevant in subsequent decades.46 As with Lady Clifford’s writing competition, however, the African-authored texts examined earlier reveal the extent to which gender was produced and monitored in colonial societies

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