Article 1

An analysis of bullying in schools as presented by two

Ugandan novels
Mary Naula*, Manuel Muranga, Cornelius Wambi Gulere and Joseph Jakisa Owor

Department of Languages and Literature, Faculty of Education and Arts, Uganda Christian University, Uganda.

Received 4 August 2018; Accepted 2 October 2018

This paper analyzes the depictions of bullying in schools in two selected Ugandan novels:
Goretti Kyomuhendo’s The First Daughter (1996) and Mary Karooro Okurut’s The invisible
Weevil (1998). The study is about the vices that education transmits to the learners depending
on the socio-cultural and political context. One of them that education transmits is the
bullying of fellow students. Bullying is both physical and verbal violence and it can affect the
emotional, social, and physical wellbeing of students (and staff). The study adopts a
qualitative content analysis of two Ugandan novels to give interpretation of the text data. We
have used qualitative content analysis to identify the theme and the main characters in the two
novels and made interpretations. Content analysis helped us understand bullying as practiced
in schools. The study found that the schools presented by both novels see bullying as severe
and traumatizing. Both boys and girls are bullied, and it affects their emotional, social, and
physical wellbeing. This behavior is probably a result of global influence in our school system.
Traditional Ugandan education was characterized by close social, ethical, collective
orientation and ensured progressive character development of the child. Some of the values
transmitted in traditional Ugandan education included community-orientation, love and
respect for others. The vice of bullying is likely to have originated from the formal type of
education which is more individualistic oriented. We recommend that a more effective
education system for Uganda is one that combines or inculcates the traditional values of
community-orientation, love and respect for others with elements of modern education.

Key words: Bullying, school, education, violence, Ugandan novels, Kyomuhendo, Okurut.

INTRODUCTION
This paper analyzes the depictions of bullying in schools in two selected Ugandan novels: Goretti Kyomuhendo‟s

The First Daughter (1996) and Mary Karooro Okurut‟s The invisible Weevil (1998) ji. Education transmits values,
knowledge and attitudes which bring about desirable changes in the way one thinks, feels and acts (Mbiti, 1981; Ocitti,

*Corresponding author. E-mail: owornaula@gmail.com.

Author(s) agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License 4.0 International License
1993). Education is crucial for the preservation or destruction of people‟s values. Ugandan traditional education was
informal, and values were acquired by the young from elders in the society.

64 Int. J. English Lit.

According to Aghamelu (2017), Bullying in schools is a form of violence, which can be physical or psychological.
Aghamelu also argues that physical violence is the infliction of painful injury by the use of instruments like whips, rape
and fists. Psychological violence involves the use of hostile behaviour such as words to cause emotional damage or
harm to the victim.

With the infiltration of globalization and formal education in Uganda, the basis of Ugandan ethical values, including
indigenous education, was greatly undermined and replaced with foreign values, including the vice of bullying.
Globalization has weakened this phrase so strong! It is better to state:

Globalization has somehow weakened the Ugandan indigenous values of love, kindness, honesty, hospitality and
community orientation (Igboin, 2011; Okot p‟Bitek, 1967; Omolewa, 2006). It has strengthened greed, selfishness,
intolerance, disharmony, pride and loss of community spirit (Omolewa, 2006; Idang, 2015; Kyalo 2012; Igboin, 2011;
Iguisi, 2014), which culminates into vices like bullying in schools.

Thesis

Bullying in some schools in Uganda seems to be the norm in the education system.

Problem statement

Excessive bullying is evidence of the drop in educational values in some Ugandan schools. It has resulted in students‟
fear, bitterness, depression and revenge in the real world with the consequence of long lasting depression in the lives
of students (and teachers). This study is a virgin area because it has not been widely studied and there is hardly any
research on Ugandan novels

Purpose
 Roetto 22

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Kyomuhendo and Okurut portray bullying in two Ugandan Novels.

Scope

This study analyzes the depictions of bullying in two selected schools in Ugandan novels: Goretti Kyomuhendo‟s The
First Daughter (1996) and Mary Karooro Okurut‟s The invisible Weevil (1998).

LITERATURE REVIEW

Bullying in schools may be a global phenomenon. A study in South Africa by Ndebele and Msiza (2014) revealed that
bullying manifests itself in screaming at others, kicking, beating, calling names, hurting and forcing others to do what
they do not like. A study in United States by Hymel and Swearer (2015) found that bullying takes many forms: physical
harm, verbal jeering and threats, exclusion, humiliation, and rumor-spreading, cyber bullying using texts, e-mails, or
online mediums. A study in Kenya by Ndetei (2007) reports that bullying takes place in the dormitories, playgrounds,
corridors and on the way to and from school.

The reviewed literature above shows that research on the form and location of bullying are diverse. The review
includes both developed and developing countries. Uganda being a developing country makes a good case for study
and particularly the literary study of bullying which has hardly been handled.

Raskauskas and Modell (2011) found out that bullying is one of the biggest problems that children face in schools and
it leads to health risks. Al-Raqqad et al. (2017) observe that bullying is both physical and verbal violence and it can affect
the emotional, social, and physical wellbeing of students (and staff). Addei (2014) argues that bullied students fear
coming to school because they feel unsafe and this reduces their chances at academic success. Brank et al. (2012) found
out that victims of bullying are anxious, shy, and weak and their performance in school is poor. A study in Nigeria by
Omoteso (2010) found effects of bullying to be: fear, loneliness, depression and lack of confidence. A study in US by
Hawker and Boulton (2000) found that students who are bullied suffered from anxiety, loneliness and depression.

From the foregoing, bullying is reported to have varied negative psychological impacts on students both in developed
and developing countries. However, there are hardly any studies on the effects of bullying on the students in the
Ugandan context and especially as portrayed by the Uganda novels.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Postcolonial theory is a literary critical approach which deals with literature written in countries that were once
colonized to counteract the assumed supremacy of the colonizers. This theory is more suitable for this study because
Uganda is one of the countries which was colonized by the British and was subjected to several inhuman treatment; its
culture, religion, education, governance, food, language, etc were considered inferior. This theory also deals with
literature written by citizens of colonizing countries that takes colonies or their peoples as its subject matter.
Postcolonial theory became part of the critical toolbox in the 1970s. Some of the proponents of this theory are Frantz
Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha. Post -colonial literary theory is used to explain, predict, and
understand phenomena (Swanson, 2013), in this case the theme and characterization in the two Ugandan novels. One
 Roetto 23

of the major proponents of the postcolonial literary theory: Edward W. Said, published his path-breaking book,
Orientalism in 1978, and created a new way of theorizing how the imperialist West constructed the colonies as
abnormal cultural and political objects, needing the civilizing efforts of the master races. Concentrating on Asia, Said
analyzes ways in which the Europeans undermined non-Western culture, defining European culture as „normal‟ and
Asian (and African) culture as „other‟. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is another proponent of postcolonial theory who is
considered "one of the most influential postcolonial intellectuals” and known for her book Can the subaltern speak?
Another well -known promoter of the postcolonial theory is Homi K. Bhabha, well known for coiling words like mimicry,
hybridity, and ambivalence. Each of these proponents contributes to the explanation of how the West through
colonialism and neo-colonialism has negatively impacted the otherwise friendly and harmonious non-western
communities and their cultural values.

METHODOLOGY

Research design

This paper used a case study design and selected two Ugandan novels to analyze the portrayal of bullying. It also employed qualitative research approach
which required us to read the texts several times, code and generate concepts from which the main theme was derived. The main theme is bullying but
several characters were also identified. According to Creswell (2005), the main purpose of qualitative research is to investigate and analyze a
phenomenon, which in this case is the depiction of bullying in the two Ugandan novels. To Yin (2003: 23) case study research is as an empirical inquiry
that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context. According to Creswell (2003) case study design is in-depth, intensive enquiry
reflecting on a rich and lively reality and exploration of a bounded system.

Biography of the authors

Goretti Kyomuhendo
Goretti Kyomuhendo, born in 1965, is a Ugandan novelist who participated in the inaugural International Literature Festival in Berlin in 2001. She was
born and grew up in Hoima District, Western Uganda. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English Studies in 2003, from the University of Natal,
South Africa, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing 2005, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Her first novel, The First Daughter
(1996) was well received in Uganda, earning some regional – East African - attention as well. Her second novel, Secrets No More, (1999) won the
National Book Trust of Uganda Award for 1999. Her third novel is Waiting: A Novel of Uganda's Hidden War (2000).

Mary Karooro Okurut

Mary Karooro Okurut was born in Bushenyi District, Western Uganda in 1954. She graduated from Makerere University with the degree of Bachelor of Arts
in Literature in 1977 and in 1981 she got a Master of Arts in Literature. Between 1981 and 1993 she was Lecturer at Makerere University‟s Department of
Literature. She took up employment as the press secretary to the Vice-President of Uganda from 1994 until 1996. Between 1996 and 1999 she served as
Commissioner, Education Service Commission in the Ugandan Ministry of Education. From 1999 until 2004, she served as the press secretary of the
President of Uganda. In 2004 she entered elective Ugandan politics. Her literary publications include: The Curse of the Sacred Cow (1993), The
Adventurous Sisters (1993), The Invisible Weevil (1998) and The Official Wife (1997), The Blood Brothers (2003), Potiphar’s Grand Daughter
(2013) and The Switch (2016).

Brief summary of the two novels

 Roetto 24

Kyomuhendo’s The First Daughter

The main character of the book is Kasiimire. Her father is Kyamanywa and her mother‟s name is Ngozi (Abwooli). Kyamanywa is a polygamist. He is the
only man who has taken his children to school. He treats his wives and children well and in return for total obedience. His word is not questioned. He is a
hard working man (Kyomuhendo, 1996:6-7). Kyamanywa has special love for Kasemiire because she is a responsible young girl, beautiful like her mother.
Kasemiire means beautiful. Kyamanywa sees only beauty in his children. They have chocolate-brown complexion as their mother. The more Kyamanywa
thinks about his daughter Kasemiire the more he feels the desire to take her to secondary school. She has passed highly the Primary Leaving Examination
and the father is thinking of where to get the money and send his daughter to school (Kyomuhendo, 1996: 10).
Although Kasemiire‟s mother is not educated, she desires that her daughter goes to school. She knows that Kasemiire will be a great woman and that
she will achieve this through education. She does not want her daughter Kasemiire to be a victim of early marriage like her. Abwooli‟s father is a
polygamist and drunkard who has a habit of marrying off his daughters at an early age so that he drinks the bride-price (Kyomuhendo, 1996: 11). He
marries off his daughters in exchange for the bride price which he spends on drinking sprees in bars.
Kasemire gets her admission letter to go to secondary school. When the father tells Abwooli (Kasiimire‟s mother) about this decision, she is very excited.
She goes shopping for her daughter, to Kasemiire‟s great surprise. She did not expect her mother to have kept any money for her. Kasemiire remembers
that her mother has been saving this money from weaving the mats and the baskets, and she says that she will repay her back one day (Kyomuhendo,
1996: 26-27).
Kasemiire is escorted by her father to school. The headmaster checks on the admission list and finds Kasemiire Jacent, is the best girl they have received
with the total marks of 295 out of 300. The headmaster is impressed by her performance and he encourages her not to relax. He says that most girls tend
to give more time to the boys than to the books (Kyomuhendo, 1996: 29-31).
Kasemiire is given Nightingale dormitory; she is escorted to the dormitory by her father and is received by the matron. After the matron has checked her
suitcase and is satisfied with everything, Kasemiire is ushered into her room. Two of the girls are already in the room but none of them says a friendly
word to Kasemiire. They all stared at her coldly. After sometime, a group of girls appear, all squeezed into the room. One of the girls who look to be their
leader

Article 2

“What a Lark! What a Plunge!” The influence of

Sigmund Freud on Virginia Woolf
Heather Roetto

Department of Fiction, Antioch University, Los Angeles, United States.

Received 12 December, 2015; Accepted 14 June, 2019

To what extent did Sigmund Freud influence Virginia Woolf? Although they shared an
advocacy for truth by means of stream of consciousness narration and free association, Woolf
claimed to have had only superficial knowledge of Freud. Even if this was true, she could not
help but be aware of his theories of psychoanalysis through the media of her day or by way of
her publisher Hogarth Press, which published Freud. As Woolf looked closely at her own
mental illness through Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway, it would seem that Freud’s
theories of hysteria, depression, and psychosexual development took shape within her pages.
However, it was not until Woolf admitted to reading Freud after his death that she used his
 Roetto 25

knowledge to delve into the traumas of her past, which argues that perhaps Freud had more of
an impact on Woolf after all.

Key words: Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, mental illness, and Mrs Dalloway.

INTRODUCTION
Virginia Woolf

She was one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century. She was a writer (of the literary kind), a
feminist, a publisher, and she suffered from numerous bouts of mental illness.

Sigmund Freud.

He was one of the most celebrated psychologists of the twentieth century. He was a writer (of the academic kind), a
one-time cocaine addict, a neurologist, and he was the founding father of psychoanalysis. Even in these short
descriptions, a writer‟s mind can draw multiple connections between the two: the victim and the savior, the feminist
and the chauvinist, the shut-in and the partier, but the connection between Woolf and Freud was more than what can
be generated through their backgrounds. They knew each other in the most intimate way artists can know one
another through their work and through each other. As such, this affiliation left its mark on Woolf whether she was
aware of it on a conscious or a subconscious level.

While Woolf initially dismissed Freud and then grew to understand his work, Freud‟s impact can be found in her
writing of Mrs Dalloway, which was a break away from

E-mail: heather.roetto@gmail.com.

Author(s) agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License 4.0 International License
22 Int. J. English Lit.

the traditional fiction structure of its time. Within the novel, Freud‟s theories and techniques start to take shape,
showing similarities between the two in not only the methodology Woolf used to write Mrs Dalloway, but in the
analysis of its main characters as well.

In addition to these similarities, Freud‟s impact was not restricted to the fictional world of Woolf‟s creation, but of
her real world as well. Woolf was an advocate for writing true to life and much of her life went into her writing. For
this reason, Freud may offer insight into Woolf‟s most intimate struggles, how she managed her mental illness, and
what might have been the underlying reason why she walked into a river with a large rock in her pocket on March 28,
1941.

The favorite

Sigmund Freud was destined for infamy, even at birth. After researching town records, historians discovered Freud‟s
true date of birth of March 6, 1856, which was two months earlier than previously thought. Mostly likely, Freud‟s
mother was already pregnant with Freud before she married; a fact his parent‟s went to great lengths to keep it
secret (Hergenhahn, 2001: 458). Freud was not only a “love child,” but also his mother‟s darling, her little
1
 Shang 27

“Sigi,” and she predicted that one day he would be a great man (Appignanesi and Zarate, 1979: 5). All that love and
adoration from his mother went right to Freud‟s ego (an aspect of the mind, he would later analyze) and turned him
into somewhat of a “momma‟s boy.” Anything “Sigi” wanted, “Sigi” received; including insisting that his sister, Anna,
cancel her piano lessons because Freud did not like the noise while he studied (Reef, 2001: 17). Freud later argued
that there was immense psychological benefit in being a mother‟s favorite by stating, “A man who has been the
indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often
induces real success” (Appignanesi and Zarate, 1979: 5).

Freud was certainly a success despite multiple false starts, which included an advocacy for the use of cocaine. After
experimenting with the drug, Freud realized that it cured his feelings of depression with seemingly no side effects. He
was so convinced of the drug‟s benefits that he sent packets to his sisters and Martha Bernays, his fiancé, who he
thought could use a little color to her cheeks (Hergenhahn, 2001: 460). He also encouraged his friend, Ernest von
Fleischl-Marxow, to take cocaine because, at that time, Fleischler-Marxow had become unintentionally addicted to
morphine in his attempt to alleviate pain associated with tumors in his hand (Reef, 2001: 41). Believing cocaine to be
harmless, he successfully turned Fleischler-Marxow away from morphine and, subsequently, Freud wrote three
articles praising the use of the drug. When Fleischler-Marxow started suffering from a drug-induced psychosis
after consuming increasing quantities of cocaine, Freud started to doubt his earlier belief that the drug was without
side effect. Shortly thereafter, Freud stopped his use of cocaine and withdrew his endorsement of the drug. Although
Freud was successful in curing his friend of his morphine abuse, Fleischler-Marxow later died a cocaine addict
(Hergenhahn, 2001: 460). Following Freud‟s cocaine debacle, he became interested in human behavior after studying
hysteria with Jean Martin Charcot, a neurologist at the Salpêtrière asylum. It was at this point that Freud began to
question the popular beliefs of hysteria as a physical illness and instead hypothesized that it was rooted in the psyche.
As if spurred on by his mother‟s prophecy, Freud followed his theory and his path eventually led him toward the field
of psychology where he would later become the founding father of psychoanalysis, a term Freud coined in 1896.
Psychoanalysis became a recognized branch of psychology, which strove to uncover the hidden secrets in the
subconscious mind that created disorders in the conscious mind, and had several famous followers, including Carl
Jung, Alfred Adler, and Anna Freud (Appignanesi and Zarate, 1979: 17-40).

Always Beautiful, But Never Pretty (Nicolson, 2000: 5) “What‟s it like to be a child?” Virginia Woolf had once
asked Nigel Nicolson, the son of her long-time friend Vita Sackwell-West, as they spent an afternoon catching
butterflies.

“Well, Virginia, you know what it‟s like,” Nicolson had said. “You‟ve been a child yourself.”

“It‟s not much use thinking back to my childhood because

little girls are different than little boys.”

Woolf‟s answer must have surprised Nicolson because it prompted him to ask, “But were you happy as a child?”
(Nicolson, 2000: 1-2)

Although Nicholson was not able to recall what Woolf had answered that day, Woolf‟s childhood was tainted with
the early death of her parents, mental breakdowns, and sexual abuse. Unlike Freud‟s upbringing, Woolf was in
constant competition for parental attention among her siblings and half-siblings, totaling eight children in all. This was
in addition to the constant presence of extended family members coming in and out of the household.
 Shang 28

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882 as Adeline Virginia Stephen. She took her place in a family of beauties
that could trace a maternal history going back to the inner courts of Marie Antoinette (“Virginia Woolf”:

2012: 2). Woolf‟s mother, Julia Stephen, modeled for PreRaphaelite artists Edward Burne-Jones and G. F. Watts and
photographer Julie Margaret Cameron, Woolf‟s aunt (Hussey, 1995: 267). Julie Stephen‟s demanding schedule, which
also included the management of the household and the children as well as modeling, made quality time that Woolf
was able to spend with her mother nearly obsolete. Even in the few moments between mother and daughter, Woolf
wrote almost with an audible sigh, “someone was always interrupting” (Briggs, 2005: 37).

If it was from her mother that Woolf received her beauty, then it was from her father that she inherited her love of
literature. Leslie Stephen was a man of letters, articles, and a critic, who saw in Virgina a protégé and his literary
successor (Hill, 1981: 351). Intent on overseeing his youngest daughter‟s instruction in the literary arts, Leslie Stephen
guided Woolf‟s studies in history and biography, although Woolf would have rather preferred a formal education
instead of “mooning about alone among my father‟s books” (Nicolson, 2000: 10). Nonetheless, this early training not
only influenced Woolf later as a writer, but also guided her path as a novelist (Hill, 1981: 351). Although Leslie
Stephen was often viewed as rigid and detached, Woolf was partial to her father over her mother (Hussey, 1995:
271). Leslie Stephen‟s mention of his “little Ginia” in his letters to Julie Stephen, one in which he expressed his
opinion that Woolf would do well as an author (Hill, 1981: 351), may have suggested that the two shared a similar
sentiment toward one another. Yet despite this initial connection, Woolf‟s view and her affections of her father
would later change (Nicolson, 2000: 7).

By all accounts, Woolf‟s early childhood, which was full of books and storytelling (Briggs, 2011: 111), was fairly
idealistic until her home life dramatically altered with the death of her mother in 1895 when Virginia was 13 years old.
Leslie Stephen was unable to recover from the loss. Therefore, management of the household fell to Woolf‟s half
sister Stella, who died two years later (Briggs, 2011:
12-13) and left Vanessa Bell, Woolf‟s elder sister, with the responsibility of the home (Nicolson, 2000: 10). It was also
around this time that Woolf had her first mental breakdown and her relationship with her father began to dissolve.
Woolf started experiencing feelings of “rage and frustration” toward her father as time passed on and she felt more
and more like a prisoner in the home (Nicolson, 2000: 9). When Leslie Stephen died in 1904 from abdominal cancer,
Woolf, now 22 years old, experienced a subsequent breakdown and underwent professional care. During her
treatment, Woolf attempted suicide by jumping from a second story window. The window was too low to cause her
serious harm and Woolf eventually recovered from her breakdown (Brigg, 2011: 38). Despite all this, Woolf must have
felt a sense of tremendous relief following the death of her father. Unlike Woolf‟s mother, whose death was
unexpected and sudden, her father‟s decline was a slow, agonizing process for not only him, but her entire family. “If
only it could be quicker,” Woolf had written to her friend, Violet Dickerson, two months before Leslie Stephen passed
away (Nicolson, 2000: 15). Consequently, it was only after the death of her father that Woolf experienced the
freedom to pursue her own interests, especially those involving her ambitions as a writer, evidenced by Woolf‟s
reflection in the following passage:

Father’s birthday. He would have been … 96, like other people one has known: but mercifully was not. His
life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable
(Hussey, 1995: 271).
 Shang 29

Shortly after Woolf recovered, she moved with her sister, Vanessa Bell, and her brothers, Adrian and Thoby Stephen,
from their childhood home at Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury where Woolf met and married Leonard Woolf on August
10, 1912 (Briggs, 2005: 21). Woolf wanted to have children, but Leonard Woolf did not think that she could physically
or mentally handle having them given her history of mental illness. Instead, Leonard Woolf wanted Woolf to focus on
other things that could fulfill her. This train of thought resulted in Woolf completing her first novel, A Voyage Out
(Briggs, 2005: 41), and later cofounding Hogarth Press (Nicolson, 2000: 63).

Even though Woolf had listened to her husband and abandoned the idea of children, it was a decision she
regretted. Interestingly, Woolf did not blame her mental illness, but rather she blamed her weakness for not being
able to control its effects on her. Woolf had written, “A little more self-control on my part, and we might have had a
boy of 12, a girl of 10: This always rakes me wretched in the early morning hours” (Briggs, 2005: 41). Woolf‟s
realization of her ability to have some semblance of control over her mental health would become important later in
her life.

The Freud/Woolf Standoff

When Freud came into notoriety with his past cocaine addiction, his theories about sons wanting to take sexual
possession of their mothers and the daughters of their fathers, and claims that sex was the root cause of every
psychosis known to man, Woolf was far from impressed.

Matter of fact, she called him an imbecile.

We are publishing Dr Freud, and I glance at the proof and read how Mr. A. B. threw a bottle of red ink on to
the sheets of his marriage bed to excuse his impotence to the housemaid, but threw it in the wrong place,
which unhinged his wife's mind, and to this day she pours claret on the dinner table. We could all go on like
that for hours; and yet these Germans think it proves something besides their own gull-like imbecility (Briggs,
2005: 3).

Woolf not only believed Freud‟s theories meritless, she also did not think it would be taken seriously by the public.
She had commented to Roger Fry, a long-time friend, that she only expected Freud‟s books to sell because the
psychologist had cancer2 (Broughton, 1987: 24 Int. J. English Lit.

152).

Leonard Woolf, on the other hand, was already a big follower of Freud, having read the psychologist‟s work since
1914, and gave no thought to paying £800 for

Hogarth to publish Freud‟s manuscripts in England. When it finally arrived, Woolf described Freud‟s volumes of
writing as “dumped in a fortress the size of Windsor Castle in ruins upon the floor,” with Miss Higgs, their assistant,
“undaunted and garrulous above the battlements” (Briggs, 2005: 3).
 Shang 30

Despite Woolf‟s complaints, Hogarth Press published Freud‟s work in 1924 (Broughton, 1987: 152) and Leonard
Woolf reported to the New Weekly of being

“rather proud of having in 1914 recognized and understood the greatness of Freud and the importance of what he
was doing” (Briggs, 2005: 2). Interestingly, Leonard Woolf did not mention to the New Weekly the manner in which
he discovered Freud, which happened to be by chance. During that time, Leonard Woolf was continually researching
mental illness to assist Woolf in eradicating her depression. In that investigation, he had happened upon Freud and
his budding new field of psychoanalysis. For whatever reason, Leonard Woolf did not see Freud‟s theories as a
possible explanation to Woolf‟s illness, but saw potential in the psychologist nonetheless (Briggs, 2011: 46).

Even with Leonard Woolf‟s immense interest in Sigmund Freud, Woolf refused to take any notice of Freud‟s work
unless it was the occasional glance at the proofs (Broughton, 1987: 152). She called it “Freud‟s fiction,” because it
bundled the emotional and the inner psyche into a matter of sex. It filtered everything down into its simpler
explanations, instead of exploring the complexity of thought. Woolf wrote, “They would say she kept her sorrow,
suppressed her secret-her sex, they‟d say the scientific people. But what flummery to saddle her with sex!” (Briggs,
2005: 3) Since Woolf struggled with her own body image in addition to sexuality (Briggs,

2011: 37-39), it was no wonder that “sex” would not be a sufficient argument for her. Woolf had posed the question
of “how far should [novelists] allow themselves to be influenced by the discoveries of the psychologist?” (Broughton,
1987: 152) Undoubtedly at that time, she would have answered, “Not at all.”

The Freudian slip

Although Woolf may have insisted that she never read or studied any of Freud‟s work and that she was completely
ignorant of it, she could not fight the avalanche that was Sigmund Freud. She still heard about his theories if only, as
Woolf stated, “merely from superficial talk” (Broughton,

1987: 152). Even though the first of Freud‟s sevenvolume collection had yet to be published by Hogarth Press,
Leonard Woolf had started negotiations for his work by 1921. By this time, Woolf was well aware of Freud and
his theories long before she penned, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” on February 20, 1924.
Although Freud was responsible for several theories that contributed to the field of psychoanalysis, the two main
theories that will be explained for the intention of this paper will be that of hysteria and depression.

By this time, Freud had already developed the seduction theory,3 which was an idea that underlying all repressed
memories was latent childhood sexual trauma from either a parent or other adult and that these repressed memories
turned into hysteria after puberty (Appignanesi and Zarate, 1979: 39). Hysteria was a popular diagnosis for women at
that time. Symptoms of hysteria included acting erratically and/or experiencing unexplained ailments (paralysis,
inability to speak, memory issues, etc) in the absence of other overt physical causes (Appignanesi and Zarate, 1979:
17). It was believed that the cause of hysteria was due to a dysfunction in the uterus; however, Freud was the first to
argue that it was a psychological issue of traumatic origin (Hergenhahn, 2001: 464).

As far as depression, Freud theorized that depression was the result of loss, such as in the case of losing a loved
one, combined with subconscious residuals of hatred toward the deceased. When individuals were unable to direct
their hatred toward the departed because they felt immense guilt by doing so, they directed it toward themselves.
This internalization of hatred caused depression and it did not matter if the loss was real (an actual death) or
 Shang 31

imagined (losing the lottery). Freud theorized the resulting depression would be the same as long as the individual
was unable to process the guilt associated with feelings of hate (Comer, 2001: 202). When this occurred, the
individual would regress to the anal stage, which was one of Freud‟s five stages of psychosexual development, as a
coping mechanism. The anal stage generally occurred roughly between years 1 to 3 and consisted of biting, spitting,
and defecating while the mood alternates between affection and aggression (Appignanesi and Zarate, 1979: 142).

The talking cure

In treating patients, Freud was particularly fond of a technique called free association. Through free association, the
patient rattled off whatever came to mind while Freud connected the thoughts into a central idea (Hergenhahn,
2001: 464). The trick of free association was to find the theme of the patient‟s thoughts and then to keep digging
until that theme revealed the hidden trauma (Comer, 2001: 56). It was only when the underlying trauma was brought
to the surface, the subconscious becoming conscious, that the patient was able to work through the trauma and
return to a sense of normalcy.

Woolf may or may not have realized that she also employed a very similar technique to Freud‟s free association
while she wrote Mrs Dalloway. Woolf was an advocate of recounting the accuracies of real life as seen through the
characters. Internal monologue or stream of consciousness narration was one method to do so because it would
“record the atoms as they fall upon the mind …[to] trace the pattern … which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness” (Briggs, 2005: 132). By eliminating the narrator and allowing the character‟s thoughts to come at will
without restriction, as with Freud‟s free association, the complexity of life was better able to come through the text.
When this occurred, the character‟s life became a reflection of real life in all its confusion, muddiness, random
connections, and so on. This, to Woolf, came closer to truth and Freud would have likely agreed.

Mrs Dalloway

Initially, Mrs Dalloway was to be written as a play rather than a novel. The plot, Woolf had devised, would consist of
two people who were unaware of the other, but whose paths would eventually intersect although they would never
physically meet. To Woolf, that was “the real exciting part” because it represented real life in all its uncertainties and
broke away from the conformities of fiction at the time (Briggs, 2011: 130).

The result was the novel based on the character, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, who had appeared in several of Woolf‟s
earlier works. Mrs. Dalloway was initially introduced in Woolf‟s first novel The Voyage Out, and then again in the
short story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.” After that, the character morphed into a novel with a storyline centered on
a mid-June day in 1923.

Although the novel primarily focused on Mrs. Dalloway, who was a party-throwing socialite, there was a darker
character tainting London that infamous day: Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war hero in the midst of a
psychotic break. By that time, the War Office Committee had already published a report on the effects of men
returning from World War I. Collectively known as “shell shock,” these effects manifested in such symptoms as
tremors, heightened startle response, ravings, and catatonic states (Coffman, 1986: 224). Treatment for shell shock
 Shang 32

varied widely by rank, such as rest cures4 for officers or, for lower ranked soldiers, cigarette burns and electric shocks
(Briggs, 2005: 146).

For the purposes of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf intended for both these characters in the novel to create a sense of
contrast. Woolf said of Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith that, “I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide: the
world seen by the sane [Clarissa Dalloway] and the insane [Septimus Smith] side by side” (Briggs, 2011: 142). Although
Woolf intended for the characters to be a “study,” Mrs Dalloway and Septimus Smith share several similar
characteristics with Woolf‟s background, especially during the times when she had also hovered in the worlds of both
the sane and insane. For this reason, and as other scholars of Woolf have commented, Mrs Dalloway offered the most
insight to Woolf‟s mental illness. Furthermore, Woolf‟s analysis of the cause behind Septimus Smith‟s breakdown
mirrored the current psychological theory of her day, particularly Freud‟s theories concerning loss, sexuality, and
repressed memories.

The psychoanalysis of Septimus Smith

Septimus Smith had problems. He rambled to himself, saw things that were not there, including dead people; heard
birds speaking Greek, and had to hold onto his wife‟s hand so that he would not fall from the couch into a pit of
flames. By all accounts, Septimus Smith had all the classic symptoms of hysteria and had regressed to the point that
“nothing could rouse him,” going beyond being
5
“in a funk,” as his physician, Dr. Holmes, had put it .

If Freud could have inserted himself into Mrs Dalloway, he would have had Septimus Smith lay down on his
infamous couch, probably with a railing so his patient would feel better, and let Septimus Smith freely prattle on,
which he had a tendency to do anyway. Using free association, Freud would have jotted down whatever key words he
could extricate from Septimus Smith‟s word salad. At some point, Freud would have uncovered that Septimus Smith
was extremely upset about the death of his friend, Evans, and instead of acknowledging his grief; Septimus Smith was
becoming increasingly emotionless and apathetic.

… when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or
recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very
reasonably. The War had taught him … for now that it was over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had,
especially in the evening these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel (Woolf, 1981: 86-87).

After revealing the source of Septimus Smith‟s breakdown, Freud would have further discovered that Septimus Smith
had a clear disdain of sex with women, calling it a filthy business, while indicating that his relationship with Evans was
little more than an intense camaraderie than anything overtly romantic. “He [Septimus Smith] drew the attention,
indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name … it was the case of two dogs playing on a hearth rug … they had to
be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other” (Woolf, 1981: 86). Freud would
have concluded that it was not that Septimus Smith had no feelings, but that he had too much and could not fully
26 Int. J. English Lit.
 Shang 33

handle them. Septimus Smith had loved Evans. When Evans had died, Septimus Smith realized that he would

“be forever alone” because of it (Woolf, 1981: 145). For this reason, the loss of Evans was a traumatic blow that
Septimus Smith was unable to process.

Septimus Smith‟s feelings of abandonment had turned into anger toward Evans for dying. Since Septimus Smith
could not admit the nature of the relationship or his feelings of Evans leaving him, certainly not to his wife, he turned
the anger onto himself. Once this happened, his anger transformed into depression and he regressed into the anal
stage. And in the end, it boiled down to sex.

Had Freud been in the novel, he would have started working with Septimus Smith on addressing the loss of Evans
and the feelings associated with it. He would have had Septimus Smith relive the relationship and examine each
emotion like a scientist studying a germ stain under a microscope. Eventually, Freud would have gradually pulled
Septimus Smith out of his hysteria and he would have grown less and less dependent on his wife, Lucrezia Smith.
Following treatment, Septimus Smith would have gone on to live the rest of his days with Lucrezia Smith (or not), but
he would have, at least, been able to sit in a park in peace without worrying about the birds talking to him.6

Unfortunately for Septimus Smith, Freud was not a character in Mrs Dalloway. Instead, Septimus Smith first
received treatment by Dr. Holmes, who thought there was “nothing at all wrong with him,” pumped him full of
bromide (a sedative), and told Septimus Smith to get a hobby. When that did not work, Lucrezia Smith took her
husband to Sir William Bradshaw, “who had never had time for reading,” and as a result was likely unaware of
Freud‟s theories of hysteria, depression, and psychosexual development. Sir William Bradshaw diagnosed Septimus
Smith with a breakdown, stating that it was a “moment” of depression, not depression itself, and that all Septimus
Smith really needed was a rest cure (Woolf, 1981: 97). As it turned out, the rest cure was a failure. It did not address
Septimus Smith‟s underlying issue (the loss of Evans) and it took his mental illness toward the breaking point.
Septimus Smith started to view those trying to help him, like in the case of Dr. Holmes, as enemies and the act of
suicide was no longer an option but a necessity.

He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings-what did they want? Coming down
the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it to you!” He
cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs.
Filmer’s area railing (Woolf, 1981: 149).

The double lives of Virginia Woolf

E.M. Forster, a friend of Woolf‟s, had made the comment that Mrs. Dalloway was “written from [Woolf‟s] personal
experience” and there were many characters, circumstances, and events that rang true to Woolf‟s history. Although
this may be true, the main difference between Mrs. Dalloway and other memoirs hidden in fiction like Sylvia Plath‟s
The Bell Jar was that, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf explored the threads of her experiences to their finality. For this
reason, the work was a fictional creation of Woolf, but the similarities within the novel are important to note.
 Shang 34

One of these similarities were the characters Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway, who Woolf stated were
“doubles” of each other (Howard xi, 1981). Although this may be true, these characters could also be viewed as the
double images of Woolf. On one hand, we had Woolf as Clarissa Dalloway, the “lady at ease” and the London socialite
with her duties of the house, her two servants, and the mundane details associated with being a wife (Briggs, 2005:
136). Clarissa Dalloway also represented the artist in the act of creation, which in this case was the construction of the
party that both started and concluded the novel (Lord, 1999: 38). On the other hand, we had Woolf as Septimus
Smith, the “creative soul” that suffered from spells of debilitating depression. In the novel, Woolf made a point that
these two characters would never physically meet, as mentioned before, and this idea would come into play in
Woolf‟s life as well. Just like with multiple personality, which is clinically known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, the
individual personalities would be unaware of each other even though they are expressed through the same person
(National Alliance on Mental Health 2001). The part of Woolf that represented Septimus Smith and that of Clarissa
Dalloway would also never meet because when Woolf became Clarissa

Dalloway, Septimus Smith would be hidden and vice versa.

Since Woolf was an advocate to writing true to life and she intended Mrs. Dalloway to be a study of insanity and
suicide, it could be argued that she buried into Septimus Smith her own experiences with mental illness. In the novel,
the symptomatology of Septimus Smith‟s breakdown included hallucinations,7 extreme states of excitability,8 and
bouts of anger.9 Woolf‟s mental illness was also documented with such events as birds communicating in Greek (an
event Septimus Smith also experienced), Edward VII uttering obscenities within the foliage, Woolf insulting those
closest to her, and a subsequent suicide attempt by leaping from a window (Nicolson, 2000: 19). In deleted lines from
the original manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf added other similarities between herself and Septimus Smith. For
example, Woolf had described that her mental illness made her “mind squint so badly” and that Septimus Smith
“squinted too.” She later went on to explain, “it was his [Septimus Smith‟s] eyes that were terrible” therefore
changing “squinting” from a metaphor that depicted her mental illness to a physical symptom (Briggs, 2011: 146).

One of the more interesting moments in Mrs. Dalloway was when Mrs. Dalloway heard of Septimus Smith‟s
death and, although she never knew him, Mrs. Dalloway commented:

The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three,
she did not pity him, with all this going on … But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like
him-the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad he had done it; thrown it away (186).

Here, the two worlds of the characters blurred, where one life rippled into the other, and the curtain between them
could no longer keep the personalities separated. Of further interest was that Clarissa Dalloway agreed with
Septimus Smith‟s decision. At this point, it could be said that these two characters were no longer doubles of each
other, but of one clear mind. This idea would contain certain prophetic fingerprints in Woolf‟s future, but before her
own two worlds blurred together on March 28, 1941, Woolf would first step into her own past with the aid of
Sigmund Freud.

“Dr. Freud Gave Me a Narcissus” (Bell, 1984: 202).

Floriography was a popular method of communication in Europe when words were unable to express true
sentiment. Red roses symbolized passionate love, dandelions stood for loyalty, and blue violets represented
 Shang 35

faithfulness (Victorian Bazaar, 2000; 1-11). Freud must have put his own spin on this tradition because when Woolf
sat in his study one blustery day on January 28, 1939 at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Freud presented to her a narcissus
flower, which could have been interpreted as: “Madame, I am afraid you are beyond all clinical help.” Since Woolf
did not read or feign any desire to read any of Freud‟s work, she would have had no idea that Freud had coined the
term “narcissistic” for individuals whose psychoses lay beyond the reach of psychological intervention and, in
essence, were untreatable (Appignanesi and Zarate, 1979: 130).

In Woolf‟s diary, she described the meeting between her, Leonard Woolf, and Freud as a “difficult talk. An
interview” while Freud sat “in a great library with little statues at a large scrupulously tidy shiny table” and “we like
patients on chairs” (Bell, 1984: 202). As for Freud, who described himself as “infamous rather than famous,” Woolf
portrayed him as “a screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey‟s light eyes, paralysed spasmodic movements,
inarticulate: but alert” (Bell, 1984: 202).

Although one could imagine an interesting range of discussions that Woolf and Freud could have had together, the
main topics of conversation were the impending war with Germany (World War II had not officially started yet), the
actions of Hitler, and Freud‟s recent relocation to England from Austria with the aid of his benefactor Princess Marie
Bonaparte (Bell, 1984: 202). Freud had asked both Virginia and Leonard Woolf,

“What are you going to do? The English-war” (Bell, 1984: 202), but the talk of war and Freud‟s account of fleeing
Austria must have felt like dour subjects to Woof, who commented, “all refugees are like gulls with their beaks out for
possible crumbs” (Bell, 1984: 202). In the end, the one and only face-to-face meeting between Sigmund Freud and
Virginia Woolf was, more or less, uneventful, leaving Woolf with this impression of Freud: “Immense potential, I mean
an old fire now flickering” (Bell, 1984: 202).

“Now I’m Going to Read Freud”(Bell, 1984: 266). Freud was notorious for his love of cigars and he was rarely
photographed without one in hand, but his longterm addiction to nicotine eventually led to his death. He developed
oral cancer and underwent repeated surgeries, 33 in all, including one that required the use of “the Monster,” a
contraption of metal that separated his oral and nasal cavities (Reef, 2001: 112). Freud was wearing “the Monster”
the day he had met Woolf on January 28, 1939.

When Freud realized that he was never going to recover from another reoccurrence of cancer, he had asked his
physician, Max Schur to help him commit suicide. Starting on September 21, 1939 and over the course of two days,
Schur gave him 21 milligrams of morphine and Freud died on September 23, 1939. The day following Freud‟s death,
Woolf appeared seemingly unaffected, writing in her diary: “Freud is dead, the stop press says. Only these little facts
interrupt the monotonous boom of the war” (Bell, 1984: 238). Nonetheless, it was shortly following Freud‟s death
that she took an interest in his work, which was also around the same time that she was working on Roger Fry: A
Biography. Of note, Woolf had been going through Roger Fry‟s letters and had come across a reference to herself as
being anal.10 This reference may have been the catalyst that propelled Woolf in rethinking her objection to Freud‟s
work, at the very least, to find out precisely what her friend, Fry, had meant by that term (Broughton, 1987: 156).
Regardless of Woolf‟s motivation, her diary entries show it was at this time that she started reading Freud, whom she
had published nine years before.
 Shang 36

Saturday 2 December 1939. Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference. to give my brain
a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new
things.
Break the rhythm and c (Bell, 1984: 248).

Friday 8 December 1939. Shopping-tempted to buy jerseys and so on. I dislike this excitement. Yet enjoy it.
Ambivalence as Freud calls it. (I’m gulping up Freud) (Bell, 1984: 249).

Saturday 9 December 1939. Freud is upsetting: reducing one to whirlpool; and I daresay truly. If we’re all
instinct, the unconscious, whats all this about civilisation, the 28 Int. J. English Lit.

whole man, freedom, and c? (Bell, 1984: 250).

Thursday 27 June 1940. I tried to center by reading Freud (Bell, 1984: 299).

Of particular interest, the 1940 sections of Woolf‟s memoir A Sketch of the Past are seeped heavily in selfanalysis,
which she had wrote after reading Freud (Briggs, 2005: 369). In spite of the love/hate relationship she experienced in
his work, Woolf made at least two psychological discoveries in her own personal history. The first was that her novel,
To the Lighthouse, was an exploration of her feelings toward her mother. Woolf had concluded that it was only
after she had thoroughly explored her feelings through the character Mrs. Ramsey, who like Julia Stephen was a
mother of eight; she stopped being haunted by them. This was evidenced when Woolf wrote, “I suppose that I did for
myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in
expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest” (Briggs, 2005: 5).

The second was addressing her childhood anxiety over her body and the sexual abuse she experienced by her half-
brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth. When

Woolf was a child, she felt compelled to stare at herself in the mirror and saw “a horrible face … the other face in the
glass” and expressed confusion of her “tomboy nature” compared to her mother, who was beautiful and whose
likeness was sought after by artists (Briggs, 2011: 352). Julia Stephen became an impossible ideal to achieve, and thus,
Woolf used anorexia to punish her body for matters beyond her control (Briggs, 2005: 37).

Already stricken with a fragile body image, Woolf went on to recount the sexual abuse she underwent by her
halfbrothers. In A Sketch of the Past, Woolf described an incident when Gerald Duckworth lifted her onto a marble
slab and “his hand explored my private parts” when she was around six to seven years old (Briggs, 2005: 352). As far
as George Duckworth, who was the primary perpetrator of the abuse, Woolf depicted his behavior as “little better
than a brute‟s” (Nicolson, 2000: 12). Some have argued that Woolf‟s childhood sexual abuse was the source of her
mental illness, whereas others have minimized Woolf‟s disclosure, going so far as to indicate that it did not happen.
Quentin Bell, Woolf‟s nephew, had said, “In recollection, Virginia made more of a drama of the affair than the facts
 Shang 37

justify” (Nicolson, 2000: 13) and Nigel Nicolson, the same boy Woolf had spent the afternoon catching butterflies and
talking about childhood had said, “The allegation is far-fetched” (Nicolson, 2000: 12). Regardless of what others
believe, Woolf had indicated that these experiences “had spoilt her life for her before it had fairly begun” (Jouve,
2000: 3) and felt that it was important to recount the traumas she had kept secret.

The psychoanalysis of Virginia Woolf

Roger Fry had already concluded that Woolf was anal (Broughton, 1987: 156), but if Freud had been given the chance,
there would have been no doubt that he would have also unearthed Woolf‟s childhood sexual abuse, history of
anorexia, and her conflicted relationship with her mother and her father through therapy. For these reasons, he
would not have been the least bit surprised that Woolf suffered from periods of depression among other psychotic
neuroses. After all, Freud had already hypothesized at least two theories in his earlier work in psychoanalysis that
could have likely explained the contributing factors to Woolf‟s mental health and this explanation would have similar
findings to the earlier psychoanalysis of Septimus Smith.

Due to his research on hysteria, Freud may have theorized that the first issue was that Woolf had been unable to
process the sexual trauma of her childhood. Since Woolf‟s mental health treatment primarily consisted of rest cures,
her past abuse would have been left untreated and repressed in her subconscious. In doing so, the memories of her
abuse would have festered into Woolf conscious, waking mind, creating unintended physical effects, such as
insomnia, incessant talking, and acts of violence (Briggs, 2005: 45).

Second, further analysis would have revealed that two of Woolf‟s mental breakdowns occurred shortly following
the deaths of her mother and her father. Documentation of Woolf‟s earlier childhood revealed that the relationship
she had with her parents was maybe not so much abusive but conflicted to say the least. If this was true, then Freud
may have speculated that Woolf harbored feelings of hatred toward her parents that she was unable to properly
express, but felt nonetheless. She would have experienced guilt at having these feelings about her mother and father
and, with that in mind, Woolf did report feeling immense guilt following her father‟s death because she believed she
had not done enough for him (Briggs, 2011: 38). If Woolf were unable to process the guilt associated with her
underlying feelings of hatred, Freud would have concluded that she would internalize the depression and her psyche
would begin the rapid regression into the anal stage of development.

Another key point was that Woolf experienced a severe mental breakdown after completing her novel The Voyage
Out, but she also encountered subsequent depressive symptoms each time she completed a novel (Briggs, 2005: 41).
Here, Freud would have explained that the loss was “symbolic,” and despite its imagined basis, the resulting
breakdown would have created the same real symptomatic effect. “It is the novel which has broken her up,” Jean
Thomas, the proprietor of Twickenham nursing home had written “… [Woolf] could not sleep and thought everyone
would jeer at her”

(Briggs, 2011: 41). Woolf‟s dread of criticism over her work, although only perceived criticism, created the
symbolic loss and the feelings of hatred associated with losing something important to her. Unable to direct these
emotions, her anger and loss turned inward, perpetuating the depression.

“L. is Doing the Rhododendrons …” (Bell, 1984: 359) 11 Woolf must have thought of the manner of her suicide
long before she had undertaken it. In an eerily prophetic statement by Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, “Suddenly he
[Septimus Smith] said, „Now we will kill ourselves,‟ when they were standing by the river (66),” Woolf had placed a
 Shang 38

large rock in her pocket, walked into the Ouse River on March 28, 1941, and drowned. Three weeks had passed
before some children playing by the river eventually discovered her body on April 18, 1941 (Nicolson, 2000: 190-191).

Woolf believed she had some measure of control over her mental illness and took steps to manage her symptoms.
For instance, she knew that after finishing a novel, she often began to suffer signs of depression, so she ensured she
had a new project that she could immediately start work to distract herself from the encroaching depression (Briggs,
2005: 395). This method had seemed to work for Woolf as evidenced by her numerous accomplishments as a writer,
but this begs the question: What happened to Woolf in 1941?

She left no clues in her suicide note about the reasons behind her decision, only writing that she “feel[s] certain that
I am going mad again … And I shan‟t recover this time” (Nicolson, 2000: 189). Nonetheless, the reason behind
Woolf‟s decision may be found in the argument Septimus Smith made to his wife, Lucrezia Smith, to commit suicide
in Mrs Dalloway:

He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see
them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything.
He knew the meaning of the world, he said (66).

Around that time, Nazi Germany was in the height of its power, food was being rationed, and bombs were raining on
Woolf‟s beloved London. Her despair during this time was evident in her comment, “We have no future” (Briggs,
2005: 397). What was more, Woolf had connected her last major breakdown to World War I despite it occurring a
year before the war started, so it may seem that the encroaching threat of invasion by the Nazis triggered her fear of
facing another debilitating breakdown (Briggs, 2005: 398). Also of note was Woolf‟s awareness of the number of
other novelists, playwrights, painters, pacifists, and poets who had committed suicide around that same time, some
whom were her friends (Briggs, 2005: 398-399). As Septimus Smith had argued, Woolf may have been experiencing
the wickedness in people.

Not only was Woolf dealing with a greater societal upheaval, but personally she was suffering with an extreme
case of writer‟s block. Concerned, Woolf had commented both to her doctor and to a friend of her difficulty with
writing (Nicolson, 2000: 187) and had further questioned around December 1940 if she would “ever write again one
of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure?” (Briggs, 2005: 395) Whether it was the socio-political
environment that caused her writers block or it was her writers block that intensified her worry of the political-social
environment, the two combined appeared to be more than Woolf was able to bear, giving her the certainty that, this
time, she was not going to recover.
In addition, there has been recent speculation that Freud might have been linked to Woolf‟s decision to commit
suicide. Since it was well known that Woolf had read Freud by the time of her death, it had been hypothesized that
Woolf may have connected the potential Nazi invasion to a “bodily invasion,” similar to that of the sexual abuse
Woolf had experienced as a child (Jouve, 2000: 3). Woolf‟s inability to relive that childhood trauma and Freud‟s later
denial that hysteria stemmed from childhood sexual abuse, may have given Woolf a sense that her experiences were
not validated and/or believed by one of the greatest psychologists of her time. These feelings bred into a steadily
deepening sense of doom in combination with the threat of another (physical) invasion (Jouve, 2000: 3). Although this
was only a theory made chiefly by Woolf scholar Louise De Salvo, it is still of interest that the influence of Freud over
Woolf could potentially continue even into her death.
 Shang 39

The influence

Despite their backgrounds, Sigmund Freud had an impact on Virginia Woolf, both as a writer and as an individual.
Although Woolf claimed to be completely ignorant of Freud‟s work in the beginning, she could not help but be aware
of his theories by way of her publisher Hogarth Press, which published Freud; or through the media. As it were, Woolf
had acknowledged to having a surface knowledge of Freud from publisher proofs and idle conversation. While that
could be the extent of it, the frankness of her opinions, such as in the case of Mr. A.B. throwing the bottle of ink,
might indicate that perhaps she had a deeper knowledge of Freud‟s work than she was willing to admit at that time.

Regardless of how much Woolf may or may not have known, it is of interest that the two shared a similar technique
of finding truth. Freud‟s free association and Woof‟s stream of consciousness narration were both methods of
arriving at truth, whether that truth was a patient‟s repressed memory or the inner motivations of a character.
Possibly it was because both Freud and Woolf were interested in truth that Woolf‟s conclusion of Septimus Smith‟s
mental illness in Mrs Dalloway mirrored 30 Int. J. English Lit.

that of Freud‟s theories of hysteria, loss, and depression. Going further, it could be speculated that the truth that
Woolf so desperately sought in Mrs Dalloway was the one that rippled into her earlier experiences and offered the
first clue to the cause of her breakdowns: loss.

When Woolf did decide to study Freud, she was able to further extrapolate the source of her loss by selfanalyzing
her experiences with her parents and the sexual abuse by her stepbrothers. By doing so, this gave Woolf an outlet to
address her own underlying trauma, which was “her frankest exploration of memory, her boldest journey into the
interior” (Briggs, 2005: 369). For these self-discoveries, she owed to Freud, who at the very least, gave her his
understanding of psychoanalysis to explore the past12. Perhaps it was for this reason that she had changed her
opinion a bit on the late Freud when she wrote: “By analysing themselves, with help from Fr. Freud, these writers
have done a great deal to free us from nineteenth-century suppressions”

(Broughton, 1987: 153).

In the end, the extent of Freud‟s influence over Woolf can only be speculated. On some level, he had an impact on
Woolf as shown earlier, but perhaps his influence stretched as far as effecting the decision of her death as others
have hypothesized. Ultimately, only Woolf would know for sure and if she were asked of Freud and his influence on
her life, perhaps she might just laugh and

13 say, “What a lark! What a plunge!” .

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS

The author has not declared any conflict of interests.

 Shang 40

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Lord CM (1999). “THE FRAMES OF SEPTIMUS SMITH: Through Twenty Four Hours in the City of Mrs. Dalloway, 1923, and of Millennial London: Art is a Shocking
Experience.” parallax. 5(3):3646.

National Alliance on Mental Illness (2001). "Dissociative Identity Disorder." National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI, 2000. Web. 8 May 2012.
Nicolson N (2000). Virginia Woolf. New York: Viking. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/reviews/001217.17sween
et.html
Reef C (2001). Sigmund Freud: Pioneer of the Mind. New York: Clarion Books.

Victorian B (2000). "Language of Flowers." The Victorian Bazaar. N.p, Web.3 May 2012. <http://www.victorianbazaar.com/meanings.html>.

Woolf V (1981). Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company. <http://www.enotes.com/authors/virginia-woolf

1
Sigi was Sigmund Freud’s nickname given to him by his mother. 2 At the time of Woolf’s comment, Freud was undergoing one of several series of oral cancer
(Reef 112).
3
Freud later recounted the Seduction Theory because of his patients’ numerous accounts of sexual abuse by their fathers. Freud found it impossible that
these men, primarily respectable men, could be the sole reason for the overwhelming amount of hysteria cases. Instead, he attributed his patients’ memories to
fantasy (Reef 62).
4
Rest cures were an isolation-based therapy where patients were placed on bed rest for up to eight weeks (Allen 2).
5
Freud argued that men and women could suffer from hysteria; but, this idea did not resonate well among his male colleagues (Appignanesi & Zarate 23).
 Shang 41

6
Septimus Smith’s favorable prognosis was, of course, a best-case scenario where they are no other underlying issues affecting his mental health. Despite
his best efforts, Freud was unable to cure everyone as in the famous case of Anna O (Appignanesi & Zarate 32-33).
7
Septimus Smith had numerous visual hallucinations, including seeing the deceased Evans and a woman’s head in the ferns (66).
8
While in such a state, Lucrezia Smith commented that Septimus Smith would want her to write down his thoughts, which she said were “perfect
nonsense” (67).
9
Reflecting on the difficulties of her marriage, Lucrezia Smith criticized that Septimus Smith could “say hard, cruel, wicked things” (65).
10
When Woolf came across this reference, she had been reading letters from Fry addressed to her sister, Vanessa Bell. At the time that Fry wrote the letters, he had
referenced Freud several times and expressed his reactions and thoughts to the psychologist’s theories and concepts, including Freud’s descriptions of “anal”
personalities (Broughton 155-156).
11
This was the last line in Woolf’s diary dated March 24, 1941, four days before committing suicide.
12
While Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis were both innovative and thought provoking for their time, they have since been the object of criticism and debate:
Namely because the nature of psychoanalysis makes it difficult to independently research and verify for effectiveness. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Freud
offered a major contribution toward the ongoing evolution in the field of psychology and his work continues to have value in present day (Comer 58-59).
13
This line of attributed dialogue was taken from the first page of Mrs.
Dalloway.

Article 3

Five novels that have different themes but have a

similar idea
Everybody knows the concept of “desert island books”, the novels you might pack if you were going
to be marooned on a desert island. Thanks to the pandemic, many of us are indeed now marooned,
except that instead of lazing on palm-fringed beaches, we’re in lockdown – in urban apartment
blocks, suburban terraced houses or village homes.

A good book can help us forget about the world around us and also substitute our longing for
pastures greener. It can take us from our sofa to the beaches of Thailand (as in Alex Garland’s The
Beach) or to the streets of New York (as in Paul Auster’s City of Glass).

So, as someone who researches and teaches literature, I’ve chosen five novels that allow me to be
elsewhere in my mind, whether that’s a glorious English countryside setting, the streets of a
European metropolis, or the urban sprawl of an unnamed Indian city.

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day tells the story of Stevens, the aged butler of Darlington Hall, and his ill-
judged life choices that saw him being involved, albeit only on the fringes, with British fascism in
the interwar years.
 Shang 42

Beautiful English countryside. Amazon

This allusion to British fascism in particular is something that makes this novel stand out: it is a
subject matter not often discussed or even taught.

But at the moment, I can particularly take solace in Ishiguro’s beautiful descriptions of the
countryside that Stevens – unused to the freedom of travel – encounters during his journey across
south-west England:

What I saw was principally field upon field rolling off into the far distance. The land rose and fell
gently, and the fields were bordered by hedges and trees … It was a fine feeling indeed to be
standing up there like that, with the sound of summer all around one and a light breeze on one’s
face.
As the lockdown drags on, this is a feeling I am longing for.

W.G. Sebald: The Emigrants

This collection of four novellas is predominantly set in England and Germany but also offers
glimpses of the US, Egypt, Belgium and Switzerland. Focusing on a different protagonist in each
novella, Sebald portrays how the long shadows of the second world war have affected individuals –
but also how Germany has engaged with its troubled past.

A gentler images of pre-war Germany. Amazon

His descriptions of the town of Kissingen’s illuminated spa gardens, with “Chinese lanterns strung
across the avenues, shedding colourful magical light” and “the fountains in front of the Regent’s
building” jetting “silver and gold alternately” conjure up images of times gone by and a town as yet
untroubled by the scourge of antisemitism.

Sebald’s narrative is a collage of fiction, biography, autobiography, travel writing and philosophy.
His prose is so full of quiet beauty and eloquence that it always helps me forget my surroundings
and enter a quiet and contemplative “Sebaldian” space.

Patrick Modiano: The Search Warrant

A journey through Paris. Amazon

The Search Warrant pieces together the real-life story of Dora Bruder, a young Jewish girl who went
missing in Paris in December 1941.

Modiano attempts to retrace Dora’s movements across Paris and his book is full of evocative
descriptions of quiet squares and bustling streets where she might have spent some time.

In comparison with the Avenue de Saint-Mandé, the Avenue Picpus, on the right, is cold and
desolate. Treeless, as I remember. Ah, the loneliness of returning on those Sunday evenings.
From the first page it is clear that the city of Paris assumes the status of a character – and as readers
we can follow the narrator’s (and Dora’s) movements on a map.
 Shang 43

If we are familiar with Paris, we can picture where they are. By tracing Dora’s possible steps,
Modiano evocatively recreates the twilight atmosphere of Paris under occupation.

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance is a sprawling narrative that takes the reader all the way to the Indian subcontinent.

India in all its chaotic glory. Amazon

Set initially in 1975 during the emergency government period and then during the chaotic times of
the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Mistry’s novel focuses on the lives of four central characters whose lives are
on a downward spiral, from poverty to outright destitution and, ultimately, death.

Mistry does not whitewash the reality of urban poverty in India. His narrative does not hide away
from disease or overcrowded slums with “rough shacks” standing “beyond the railroad fence,
alongside a ditch running with raw sewage”. His are not places where we might want to be. But as
readers, we become utterly engrossed in his characters’ lives – we hope with them, we fear for them
and, at the end, we cry for them.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

Oh! To be in Napoli. Amazon

Elena Ferrante’s novels take me straight to my favourite city of Napoli. Starting with My Brilliant
Friend, the four novels chart the intensive relationship between two girls, Elena “Lenù” Greco and
Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, who grow up in a poor neighbourhood in the 1950s.

Reading Ferrante’s sprawling narrative conjures up images of Napoli and makes me feel like I am
standing in the Piazza del Plebiscito or having an espresso in the historic Caffè Gambrinus. Together
with Lenù, I can see Vesuvio across the Bay of Naples, the:

delicate pastel-colored shape, at whose base the whitish stones of the city were piled up, with the
earth-coloured slice of the Castel dell’Ovo, and the sea.
I can feel, hear and smell Napoli around me. Reading about the city might not be as good as being
there in person; but, at the moment, it is a close second.

Of course, books can’t stop a global pandemic. But, for a short while, they can let us forget the world
around us and, instead, transport us to different places, allowing us to at least travel in spirit.
 Shang 44

Article 4

Deconstructing postcolonial scopic regimes: The

subversion of power imaginaries in the novels of Ngugi
wa Thiong’o and Sony Labou Tansi
Gilbert Ndi Shang

Department of Romance Literatures/Comparatives Studies, Faculty of Linguistics and Literature, University of

Bayreuth, Germany.

Received 13 August, 2019; Accepted 12 December, 2019

This paper examines the relationship between visuality, knowledge and power in the
postcolonial African novel. With examples from selected texts of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sony
Labou Tansi, it argues that visual culture, usually employed in the analysis of cultural images
and material iconographies in media studies, can aptly be employed in textual analysis given
that postcolonial novels are primarily engaged with the undoing of dominant visual regimes.
Against the background of hegemonic regimes based on instrumentalist and subjectifying
surveillance of the subject, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Labou Tansi build their texts on visual
tactics and practices that subvert the capacity of the state apparatus to see, hence to know
the subject. Bordering on humour, parody, graffiti, bricolage and surrealist representation, the
two authors “play” with the state Panopticon, creating avenues for countervailing meanings
that elude the dominant regimes of vision, knowledge and power. The subversive visual
practices are inscribed within a conception of literary textualities that is based on
plurivocality, heteroglossia, dialogism and the non-transparent text. Through the
deconstruction of dominant visual architecture, both authors open up spaces for democratic
conception of power that takes account of inter-subjectivity and non-hegemonic participation
in the postcolonial public sphere.

Key words: Postcolony, visual culture, visuality, subversion, dictatorship.

INTRODUCTION

Visual culture is a well-established approach to arts and
cultural studies. It examines the intricacies and
implications of visuality in media identities, popular
culture, virtual perceptions, socio-political iconography
etc. It places emphasis on the power to see/show as a
crucial aspect in analyzing a wide variety of socio-cultural
productions ranging from social media images to private
E-mail: ndishang@yahoo.co.uk.
Author(s) agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License 4.0 International License
and public spaces iconography. However, this approach
has hardly ever found solid expression in literary analysis
of written texts in spite of the preponderance of
“regimes of seeing” as determinant leitmotifs in a
number of classic creative texts dealing with dictatorial
power. Prominent amongst them is George Orwell’s
futuristic novel 1984 that portrays Big Brother
surveillance, a characteristic of modern hegemonic state
system, especially during the Cold War period. In a
strictly postcolonial African context, Marechera’s (1980)
photographic novel, Black Sunlight, offers another
outstanding example of the visual novel 2 Int. J.
English Lit.
wherein a photojournalist captures events under a
totalitarian African government through his
photographic lenses. Such visual novels invite us to
think beyond the traditional “point of view” analysis
that is recurrent in narratological approaches to
literature, instigating an intermedial overture for the
proper understanding of literary depictions of
hegemonic formations on the one hand and creative
tactics of transformative interpolation of master
perspectives/narratives on the other. This article
attempts to bring the approach of visual culture to bear
on the analysis of the written text, examining the power
dynamics involved in the mechanics of seeing and its
relationship to power constellations. Firstly, the primacy
of visuality in the imperialist dimension of the
Enlightenment project is discussed. Secondly, this form
Shang 45
of visuality in the conception of dictatorial state power
and their deconstruction in dictatorship novels is
established by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sony Labou Tansi.
Vision and visuality constitute important dimensions of
postcolonial tactics and strategies of social formations.
Like its counterparts in other parts of the world,
postcolonial dictatorial regimes rely on their
surveillance machinery over their subjects, leading to
what Allen Feldman refers to as “scopic regimes”.
Feldman (2007, 429) defines scopic regimes as “the
regimes that prescribe or render untenable other
modes and objects of perception. A scopic regime is an
ensemble of practices and discourses that establish
truth; claims, typicality, and credibility of visual acts and
objects and politically correct modes of seeing”.
However, postcolonial writers gaze back at scopic
regimes, unpacking and disentangling their complex
hegemonic strategies. It is further argued that the
“seeing back” tactics of postcolonial novels do not only
target the postcolonial visual regimes, rather they
participate in a wider and deeper enterprise of
deconstructing hegemonic culture and Cartesian
rationality encapsulated in the postcolonial state
system.
IMPERIAL SCOPIC REGIMES: THE POWER OF
SEEING IN IMPERIAL DISPENSATIONS
To see is one of the most essential functions of human
senses. In an analysis of the primacy of sight/vision in
our claim to knowledge in everyday practices, Thomas
Seifrid posits that the pre-eminence of visuality in
knowledge formation at the very basic level of human
interaction, is evident in “our now thoroughly visual
everyday vocabulary (including casually deployed words
and phrases like evidence, insight, shed light on,
obvious, appears, brilliant) to the rampant videoism of

popular culture” (1998, 438). Right at the beginning of
his Treatise on Metaphysics, the Greek philosopher
Aristotle stresses the primordiality of seeing as the
strongest and determinant sense with which humans
are endowed. In his view, seeing prevails over other
senses in determining our claim to knowledge: “above
all others the sense of sight.
For not only with a view to taking action, but even when
we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one
might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, of
all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many
differences between things” (350 BC, 1). Exploring the
contiguity between seeing and knowing, Bill Ashcroft
takes us back to ancient Greece and its defining
contribution to Western (and now “globalized”)
philosophical regimes, asserting that:
The linking of knowledge, reason and sight attended the
birth of philosophy and prompted a wide range of social
and cultural practices, from the emphasis on optics to the
idealization of the nude body. The verb to know in
classical Greek is the perfect form of the verb eido I see
and both are related to the Latin video - I see (2001,
126).
Thus, seeing has become coterminous and metonymic
with knowing, and the former being the ultimate form of
testimony in Western culture; a cultural prism that has
imposed itself on other cultures some of which are
otherwise based on the primacy of other human senses
like touch or hearing for example, in Hebraic and but also
in some African societies.
The visual cultural critic and Frankfurt School historian,
Martin Jay, has equally analyzed the power of
vision/visuality as a determinant in Western cultural
selfwriting and perspectives on the visualizable and
transparent “other” in connection with the entire
network of imperial governmentality. The metanarrative
of Western progress is based on the pre-eminence of
Shang 46
Western perspective, the ability to know the “other” and
to integrate him into the colonial project. This explains
why within Western culture itself, deconstructive
discourses have often taken account of the prerogatives
of seeing and its mechanics of control. In relation to
Foucault’s analysis of surveillance concerning the
Panopticon, Richard Rorty’s mirror of nature and Guy
Debord’s society of the spectacle, Martin Jay asserts that
“we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the
master sense of the modern era” (2003, 3). Western
visuality has constructed a complex epistemology of
power and knowledge that cannot only be deconstructed
through a return of the gaze but also by problematizing
the mechanics of visuality and contesting the
objectification and instrumentalisation of the other for
the self.
The act of seeing is a pre-requisite, a premise for an
instrumental re-definition of the seen by the seer. Seeing
is accompanied by an epistemological appropriation or,
in extreme cases, physical elimination. Martin Jay
underlines the curious connection between the act of
seeing and the implicit violence that it presupposes. To
see, in a context of power always proceeds to the act of
mastering, possessing, limiting, re-fashioning, and if
possible, elimination. Martin Jay posits that in an
essentially ocularcentric world, represented by the
camera as the framing mechanism, there may be a kind
of distanced violence in the penetrating stare or
withering gaze that is more than a metaphorical
analogue of its more proximate tactile counterpart. The
underlying aggression in the photographers “shot” has
also not gone unnoticed (2003, 2).
To capture another individual/object within one’s visual
purview always goes with certain assumptions of power.
The violence of overbearing perspective has
characterised the Western “I-Eye” and its cultural
relationship of domination over and relationship with
other cultures of the world. This privileged perspective,
the basis of Cartesian logocentrism characteristic of
European Enlightenment, has not been dissociated from
the power of naming, possessing through nomenclature
that which one perceives as objective and immutable.

Given its perceived difference with painting, an art born
out of the artists’ imagination, photography purports to
capture things as they are in reality. This statement is not
to deny the mimetic nature of painting but to stress the
mechanic intentionality of the photograph to depict
reality as “it is.” Thus, it presents itself as the
enhancement of the natural eye, as the “instrument of
evidence” which is at once undeniable and irrevocable. In
his analysis of the power implications of photography,
Allen Feldman establishes the contiguity between the
acts of seeing and killing in some contexts. He insinuates
that:
Seeing and killing, being seen and being killed are
entangled and exchangeable in the ecology of fear
and anxiety. Further, visual appropriation, because it
is always pregnant with the potential for violence,
has become a metonym for dominance over others:
power lies in the totalizing engorged gaze over the
politically prone body, and subjugation is encoded as
exposure to this penetration (Coronil and Skurkis,
2006: 428).
The metaphorical connection between photography and
“rape” as symbols of domination is emphasized by Susan
Sontag in her pioneering text On Photography
(1977). Sontag underlines the intrusive dimension of photography
and the prerogative of the visual gaze. However, where Sontag clearly
brings out the instrumentality of the camera in “capturing” and
“shooting” the other is in relation to the ruthless expansion of
Americas white population into the Wild West (1977, 50). She
purports that the camera played a curiously similar role as the gun in
the ruthless expansion into the Wild West. The choreographed pose
of the Indian was meant to perform his backwardness and
to act as the exotic other of the immigrant American. The
photographs taken of the Indian under circumstances
induced by the photographer, later became an archive
that generated authoritative (though biased discourses),
on his culture over which he had virtually no control. The
Western colonizer perceived the native other as a
spectacle to be exhibited in order to prove the natives
inherent need or inarticulate request for intervention in
the name of civilization and modernization. Throughout
colonial history, these two processes have been
Shang 47
pretexts for capitalist accumulation and its resultant
violence on the colonized. To photograph and exhibit the
native was thus a means of making evident the
insufficiency of the natives’ body, culture, worldview and
inferiority in comparison to the Western Self. In other
words, the other entered the archive and conscience of
the Western world through the mechanics of
instrumentalised seeing.
Orientalism also embedded a very violent imagistic
dimension. Portraying the Orient in Orientalist/colonialist
exotic photography was as important as speaking or
writing about it. In his text Bodyscape, Nicholas
Mirzoeff stresses the importance of photography in
attempts to visualize the bodies of the Oriental others.
The natives’ body was perceived as physiognomy gone
wrong, corresponding to the realm of unreformed nature
as an antithesis of the perfect Western body. In
underlying the photographic dimension of racialist
ideology, Mirzoeff asserts that:
Race thus could not exist without a visual taxonomy
of racial difference. In order to provide and classify
such difference, entire archives of visual material
came to exist in nineteenth and twentieth-century
museums, private collections and laboratories. One
such archive is that constituted by the mass of
photography produced by colonial travelers,
scientists, and governments in the former colonies of
Africa and Asia. These anthropological studies,
postcards, views and scenes of native life were
quickly designated an embarrassment in the era of
decolonization, their previous popularity at once
forgotten (1995, 124).
The traveller-cum photographer became the expert of
the Orient given that his photographs and accounts shed
light on aspects of the native social, political, religious
and economic life. The practice of travel photography
contributed to what could be referred to as scopic
regimes given their appeal to Western viewers. More
importantly, colonized subjects came to look at
themselves through visual prisms constructed by
Western eyes.
 Shang 48

The process of decolonisation set in a gradual

reconsideration of the gaze through practices of
selfrepresentation. However, it is argued that at the time
of decolonization, the aesthetics of “seeing back” was
deployed against two different but interrelated regimes
of power. At once poised at the overruling colonialist
visuality, it also developed at a time when political
dictatorship became a major characteristic of
postcolonial political reality. Within the tradition of
postcolonial practices of subversion, the tactics of
“seeing back” can be inscribed within what Bill Ashcroft
defines as interpolation:

The capacity to interpose, to intervene, to interject a

wide range of counter-discursive tactics into a dominant
discourse without asserting a unified anti-imperialist
 Shang 49

intention, or a spate of oppositional purity. Post-colonial subjects, in their ordinary dialogic engagement
with the world, are not passive ciphers of discursive practices (Ashcroft, 2001, 47- 48).

In a slightly different way from the counter-discourse that focused on the empire writing back at the
presumed centre, interpolation performs a dual role. It dismantles both the colonialist epistemology
and the infrastructures of postcolonial dictatorial regimes which have re-utilized much of the
epistemological apparatus of the colonial system. The postcolonial modes of “seeing back” therefore
have to confront the totalizing visuality of imperial hegemony and postcolonial state ideological and
repressive apparatus.

NGUGI WA THIONG’O/SONY LABOU TANSI:

INTERCEPTING THE STATE PANOPTICON

Ngugis burlesque novel Wizard of the Crow narrates the story of the gradual downfall of a Ruler, who
wants to erase the memory of his subjects and blinker their vision of a future without him. The story is
a dexterous mixture of fairy tale aesthetics and modernist novel. This “theatrical novel” represents the
absurd megalomania of postcolonial leadership. One of the Ruler’s most trusted acolytes is Markus
Machokali, the Minister of foreign affairs. As if in a theatrical cast1, the narrator presents the various
key political actors of the Republic of Aburiria in the opening pages of the novel. On the subject of

Machokali, he reveals that, one day he flew to England, where under the glare of publicity he entered a
major London hospital not because he was ill but because he wanted to have his eyes enlarged, to
make them ferociously sharp...so that they would be able to spot the enemies of the ruler no matter
how far their hiding place. Enlarged to the size of electric bulbs, his eyes were now the most prominent
feature of his face, dwarfing his nose, cheeks, and forehead (Wizard, 13).

Machokali stands as the eye of the government, a terribly insecure regime that dreads the resistance of
the citizens that it has continuously muzzled for decades. Machokali’s talents and insights bring him
into collision with other members of the Ruler’s cabinets like the state security chief, Sikioku and
Minister of Information, Benjamin Mambo. These figures enlarge their ears and lips respectively to be
able to serve the Ruler more “efficiently”. The role of these ministers is three-fold. Since they serve the
interests of the Ruler, they equally stand for the eyes, ears and mouth of the respective European
countries where each of them performs his surgeries. This situation adds a neocolonial dimension to
the power networks wielded by the three government ministers given that when the Second Ruler falls
ill, foreign states start proposing specific ministers as possible replacements. Thus, each minister
becomes the eyes of a specific foreign country with regard to its interests in Aburiria. Last but not least,
they use their enlarged organs to be able to spy on each other as every one of them seeks to enhance
his narrow interest in the face of the ruler. Influence peddling amongst these three figures leads to

1
In an earlier article, I analysed Ngugi’s novel as a dramaturgical text for which the novelistic form has been used as a matter of convenience. See
Shang, G. N. (2013) « Texte comme Prétexte: la transfiguration générique dans des romans de Sony Labou Tansi et de Ngugi wa Thiong’o. »
French Studies in Southern Africa. Rev. 43.
 Shang 50

visceral in-fighting that contributes to political instability and the eventual downfall of the kleptocratic
regime.

In spite of the desire of the Ruler to exercise complete visuality on the territorial space in order to
capture and coarse the subjects under public authority, the latter exploit zones of escape to maximize
their chances of survival under the dictatorial regime. A perfect example of the subjects capacity to
dismember the visual technology built around him by hegemonic forces is clearly brought out through
the subplot that deals with Kamiti. Kamiti evolves from a wretched unemployed youth to one of the
most coveted figures by the power circles of the Republic of Aburiria. He holds a Masters Degree from
an Indian University but when he returns home, he cannot get a job, to his sheer disappointment and
that of his parents. His desperate situation calls for a nimble sense of innovation. On one occasion, he
disguises as a beggar and occupies, with other fellow “beggars”, the entrance to one of the most
luxurious hotels in Eldares, the countrys capital. Unfortunately for them, the local police launch a clean-
up operation to rid the public sphere of the scum of the city. One policeman, in a venal quest to seize
Kamitis begging bag full of coins, follows the latter into a nearby thicket. Dreading imminent capture,
Kamiti improvises a signpost on which he inscribes “Wizard of the crow” and places it on the doorpost of
an abandoned bush-house, warning against unauthorised entry into the “sacred” sanctuary. Gathere,
the policeman, backtracks in fear, diffusing rumours about the supernatural powers of

“Wizard of the crow”. Through Arigaigai’s rumours, the incontestable divining powers of “Wizard of the
crow” become a popular saga within the power cycles of Aburiria’s capital city. Gradually, this space
turns into a

“secret and sacred public space”, with ambitious and high-ranking state officials visiting to consult the
“seer” so that he can use his magical powers to enable them get promoted or appointed to higher posts
in the Rulers government. Meanwhile, Nyawira, the female character that contests the Rulers regime,
meets Kamiti. After they share their life stories, she joins the latter, and both become the male and
female personae behind the improvised shrine.

The shrine of the Wizard of the Crow stands as a very creative trope in the text. Through this theatrical
space, Ngugi engages in a discursive reversal of visuality as a key element in the dynamics of hegemonic
power. Through the window of the shrine, Kamiti and Nyawira are able to monitor the government
officials who come to them for “consultations” in expectation of ministerial appointments. When
Sikiokuu, Minister of Internal Security, decides to visit the shrine to outdo his rivals in government, his
characteristic self-assurance sinks once he enters the simulated space of the Wizard of the Crow:
There was the minister of security. The enlarged ears, the most conspicuous feature of his body. He is looking
everywhere. Left. Right. Nyawira whispered to Kamiti: let us start. Kamiti nodded. He coughed provocatively, and the
minister turned round in fear. Not knowing where the voice came from. You are in the presence of the Wizard of the
Crow!! (Wizard, 476)
From the small hole of the shrine, Kamiti and Nyawira (the two faces behind “Wizard of the crow”) laugh mockingly at
the trembling body of one of the most prominent ministers of State, Sikiokuu. Through the simulacra that characterize
his novel, Ngugi reverses the gaze of the power tender, subjecting him to uncertainty and fear. Sikiokuu, the object of
vision does not know when and how he is being observed, nor is he aware of the double articulation of the eyes and
voices behind the smokescreen of "Wizard of the crow." Nyawira and Kamiti peep through the hole of the shrine in
turns, impersonating one voice to give the impression of only one person behind the show. We are therefore faced with
an improvised and inverted Panopticon that traps the state in its penetrative visuality. When the state penetrates into
 Shang 51

the bush Ela (1990),2 in its attempt to use the subject to foster its power, it exposes itself to the wiles and guile deployed
by the latter to escape capture. At the end of the process of conquest, it is the state that is mastered thanks
to what Achille Mbembe calls the historical ability of the postcolonial subject to play with power
authorities3 (Mbembe and Indociles, 1988).
Contrary to the instrumentalisation of visuality by state power, Kamiti and Nyawira resort to mimicry
and laughter. From this simulated private/public space, they access state information, revealing the
shaky foundation of a state on the brink of implosion.

From a rather different dimension, the deconstruction of the state Panopticon is aptly expressed in
Labou Tansi’s (1981) dictatorship novel, L’Etat Honteux (The Shameful State). Through the use of
parody and sarcasm, the codes that govern the myth of the founding father are inverted. In this text,
Martillimi Lopez, a prototypical incarnation of patriarchal dictatorship, becomes a victim of his
ostentatious exhibition of power when he dies. In the manner of medieval Kings whose bodies were
preserved to ensure a sempiternal memory (Bakhtin, 1984, 193), Lopez’s corpse is subjected to a parodic
beatification process. The national museum, as a space for the exhibition of national cultural patrimony,
is the ideal space for the caricaturing of the lost power of the defunct patriarch:

Lopez de Maman qui maintenant dort au musée de la

Nation dans un cercueil de pierre, avec son œil droit qui na pas pu se fermer, mais laissons-le
regarder la patrie pour des siècles et des siècles, quil veille sur nous dans son sommeil de père
pourrissant, laissons le nous protéger des tyrans, ce regard de mort germera dans la mémoire
des enfants de notre passé, Dieu est grand!! Cet œil mort qui regarde cest la nation en
miniature.

Mama’s Lopez now sleeps in the national museum in a stone coffin, with his left eye unable to close, but
let us allow him to look at the fatherland for centuries and centuries to come, let him watch over us in
his sleep of a decaying father, let him protect us against tyrants, this gaze of the dead will germinate in
the memories of the children of our history, God is great!! This dead eye that looks around is the nation
in miniature (L’Etat, 23).

The posthumous treatment of the patriarchs body portrays an ambiguous co-fusion of both canonization
and profanation that reflect the duality of Lopezs hypocritical regime and parodies his aspirations to
divinity and immortality. In his analysis of spaces in “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”,
Foucault refers to museums as “heterotopias in which time does not cease to accumulate, perching, so
to speak, on its own summit” (Foucault, 1997: 5). The exhibition of the president’s corpse in the
museum parodies his abuse of culture and history in legitimizing his brutal state. With his eyes that are
still open, he can still watch over the country even after his death. In the potentates surveillance system,
the subject is both a child that needs to be protected (against himself) and a threatening “other” that

2
Jean-Marc Ela’s text Quand l’Etat pénètre dans la brousse, (1990) analyses the subversion of state power in the postcolonial peasant space and
the strategies that the local folks mobilize in order to mitigate the hold of the state system on their lives and activities.
3
. In Afriques Indociles: Christianisme et Pouvoir en Afrique Postcoloniale, Mbembe asserts that «lindigène recourt, comme à lépoque coloniale,
à toutes les ressources de ce quil faut bien appeler sa capacité historique à lindiscipline[…]Partout, la délinquance dEtat a produit une culture
de débrouillardise et de sauve-qui-peut et un déclin de lidentité citoyenne» (The native resorts, like during the colonial period, to the possible
resources of what one can call his historic capacity for indiscipline […]. Everywhere, state delinquency has led to a culture of improvisation, of
every-man-for-himself and a decline of civic identity) (1988, 148-149).
 Shang 52

needs to be kept under watch. These two epistemologies of the colonial subject resonate with the
colonial archive on the native subject. The eye, symbol of his hitherto spatiotemporal Cyclopean vision,
capable of intruding and mastering both the subject’s private and public spheres, remains open but
emptied of its essence: that of sight and vision. It is turned into a Rabelaisian poached egg-shell (Bakhtin,
1984, 200), rendered by the vivid oxymoron –

"oeil mort qui regarde", the “dead eye that watches”. This passage therefore deconstructs and
demystifies the power of Martillimi Lopez, who, despite his larger-than-life image, does not escape
poetic justice in the hands of death. The image of the marble stone, a male material, has often stood for
impenetrable authority and fortitude, for, according to Fanon, the world of the colonizer is hemmed
behind stone and steel (1973, 36). His being embalmed in a marble coffin deconstructs his phallocentric
image for he is now powerless. The stony fortress bears a false appearance of strength and authority.
The symbolic archiving of Martillimi Lopez’s body can be interpreted as the ultimate act of subversion in
the text. From being the omnipresent actor and the unmoved mover in the narrative, Lopez’s body is
now acted upon. The textual treatment of the dictators body conforms to Lydie Moudileno’s view that
“as soon as the tyrant is made into a character in the tale, he immediately loses the exclusiveness of
authority by becoming the subject of an author who can now have him suffer the whims of his
imagination” (Thomas, 2002, 58). Martillimi Lopezs body is made to occupy the public cultural space
differently, not as the national hero but as a victim of his decadent authority.

Through interpolations of dominant visualities, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sony Labou Tansi’s novels
epistemologically interrogate prevailing narrations and hegemonic understanding of nationhood and
belonging. The dictatorial postcolonial regimes conceive of the nation as a unified and monologic
formation at the service of unquestionable state Reason, ruling out any possibility of contending views
and alternative visions. Conceiving of a homogenous nation is one of the primary grounds or bases for
the one-party regimes and their mutations into pseudo-pluralistic political dispensation in a supposedly
democratic and post-cold war era. In a critical interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s corpus about anti-
totalitarian discourse, Gerhard Richter foregrounds the sense of community and nationhood as based
on wechselseitige Fremdheit, that is, “mutual alienness to reflect on how unspeakable any
community these days... must be. This mutual strangeness is not a phantasmagoria of the coordinated
masses, it is precisely the promise of any community to come” (2000, 99). This view is in total contrast
to the totalistic and totalitarian visuality of hegemonic regimes a la Hitler that repose on the claim of
Gleichschaltung, (enforced political conformity) of the masses (Richter, 2000, 216). The
aestheticisation of politics and the political instrumentality of the visually transparent masses are thus
inscribed within the larger-than-large telos of the charismatic leader. Richter defines German fascism as
based on a certain epistemology of visuality:

Fascism was characterized by a rhetoric of presence; the delusions of subjective heroism; the
questionable ability to show the masses their own face; the effacing differences (such as that between
civilian and military populations), war-driven technophilia, rhetoric of eternity, effort of total co-
ordination, myth-inspired irrationalism, false essence, immediacy, doctrine of single, stable meaning
(2000, 79).

Thus, much effort was invested by the Nazi scopic regime to condition the visual possibilities of the
masses. Totalistic and conclusive visuality is the ground on which the fascistic state claims to be the
 Shang 53

epitome of a popular spirit. Making recourse to the differences between the baroque and
Enlightenment visualities, with regard to Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s La raison baroque and La
folie de voir, Martin Jay affirms that:

Celebrating the dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of images in baroque visual experience, she
emphasizes its rejection of the monocular geometricization of the Cartesian tradition, with its illusion of
homogeneous three-dimensional space seen with a God’s-eye-view from afar. She also tacitly contrasts
the … belief in legible surfaces and faith in the material solidity of the world its paintings map with the
baroque fascination for opacity, unreadability, and the indecipherability of the reality it depicts (2003,
16-17).

Baroque visuality thus stresses the uncanny as characteristic of human visual experience, disputing the
prerogative of a totalizing visuality and the all-knowing knowledge regimes that result from it. Baroque
visuality performs kitsch on the totalistic visual premise of Cartesian epistemology, underlining gray
areas of indeterminate meanings and zones of contradictions and unreadability. It can be compared to
the aesthetics of the graffiti, a form of writing that leaves space for its revision as it is papered on
pastiche, suture and temporariness. In other words, graffiti does to writing what baroque visuality does
to scopic hegemonic regimes. In the same dimension, baroque visuality, characterized by laughter,
perceives reality not as finality but as an entity in the state of becoming and (re)construction, favoring
negotiation over arbitration.

The graffiti form of writing as the graphic transcription of non-totalistic visuality is characteristic of
Tansi’s (1988) novel Les Yeux du Volcan (The Eyes of the Volcano). Labou Tansi’s aesthetics inflects
and porches the lens of the scopic regime through graffiti inscription. In one passage of the novel, the
narrator directs our gaze unto the inscription of the ruling party on the wall of an official building that
underlines the power of the State/president as guardian of the Revolution to monitor any dissident
subjects: «les enemis du people sont partout mais lœil de la Révolution les connaît» (the enemies
of the people are everywhere, but the eye of the Revolution knows them) (Yeux du Volcan, 85). Once
more, we are faced with the metonymy of the eye as an instrument for “knowing”. However, an
unidentified and unruly citizen intercepts the self-representation of the State and its panoptic
surveillance, exposing its ineptitude:«Un auteur de graffiti avait ajouté le mot «aveugle» au crayon
de beauté, juste au-dessous du mot oeil: «loeil aveugle»…» (A graffiti author had added the word
"blind" with a beauty pencil, just under the word eye: “blind eye”) (Yeux du Volcan, 87). The indocile
subject subverts the pretense of the state to see, hence know everything. The title of the text, “the eye
of the volcano” suggests the ability of natural laws to defy the will to power of the state forces. The
volcano, a possible metaphor for cataclysmic change, continues to threaten the certainty and perpetuity
of the dictatorial regime. A trait of the graffiti is that it hardly produces an autonomous text, but
rather maintains a parasitic and deconstructive co-existence with the master text. In the same
dimension as the graffiti, Tansi’s text is inertly haptic, heteroglossic, ambiguous, not canceling out the
official language, but interpolating it and disrupting its discursive coherence.

Ngugi and Labou Tansi subvert dominant visuality, recreating aesthetics that permanently haunt spaces
of hegemonic power. In Wizard of the Crow, the government posts posters of the civil rights leader
Nyawira, promising compensation to every citizen who provides any conduit to her hideout. However,
 Shang 54

the protesting masses come out and declare to the police that they are all different faces of Nyawira,
“the enemy of the state”, making it difficult for the police to arrest the dissident leader. With the
willingness of the masses to be detained as “Nyawiras”, the state Panopticon4 is disempowered. The
strength of Ngugis novel in particular lies in the ability to turn the fundamental perversion of the
governing regime into effective narrative tactics. In a regime where citizens are divested of individuality
due to the objectifying practices of the ruling class and where the lexicon "people" is merely used as
vacuous gap-filler in political discourse, Ngugi fashions a narrative aesthetic that fuses spaces and
subjects, blurring traditional lines of division and distinctions. An example of spatial fusion is when the
performing women and the putative audience end up participating in the chants that denounce the
Ruler in front of foreign dignitaries who have come to assess the feasibility of the Marching to Heaven
Project (Wizard, 250). This collapse of spatialities and subjectivities underlines the basic structure of the
gicaandi performance whereby Ngugi’s performer/ narrator Arigaigai and the audience both participate
in the construction of the common folk story that makes up the novel Wizard of the Crow. Thus, in
sync with the disruption of monologic visuality, the novel lends itself to plurivocality that enables it to
claim a truly communal construction and transmission through gossips and rumours, constituting an ever
indefinite, equivocal and dialogic medium of enunciation. The invasion of the public sphere with a
multiplicity of narratives responds to and dismantles the monopolization of the social space by the
discourse of the Ruler of the Republic of Aburiria.

The visual perception of the masses in postcolonial political imaginary is fundamentally based on their
political utility. They are the faceless, anonymous agents that come up to support upheavals and slide
back into oblivion. They are the vote banks that are summoned before elections and who are more or
less disregarded when the electoral process is over. In the expression of

Graciela Montaldo in “Mass and Multitude: Bastardised Iconographies of the Modern Order”, the
masses, as they figure in political discourse of the governing class in the public sphere “are like flocks,
they reproduce without control and the males are constantly sodomising each other; they have horribly
ugly faces and they are sensual” (Montaldo, 2005: 235). With regard to such a lack of consideration for
the genuine interests of the governed by the rulers, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2006), makes recourse to a de-
individualizing aesthetics that is based on fusion of spaces, discourses and subjectivities.

In another dimension, Labou Tansi interpolates dominant visual apparatus through surrealist aesthetics.
In spite of the propensity of president Lopez’s security repressive apparatus to capture and execute
rebel leaders in the most brutal fashion, his surveillance regime is far from perfect. Subversion to his
authority comes from the most unlikely quarters. Through a surrealist double, the elusive avatar of Larsa
Laura penetrates the palace of the president and constitutes a pernicious and supernatural source of
subversion to his authority. For nine continuous months, Larsa Laura, through her double, violates the
intimate space of the president, desecrating the presidential bed with faeces (L’Etat, 58, 87, 88). When

4
A notion popularised by Foucault in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), the Panopticon refers to a surveillance model
conceived by the English utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham for the 19th century British penitentiary system. Through this surveillance
regime, the penitentiary inspector is located in a central watchtower with non-transparent glass walls, making it difficult for the inmates to know
for certain when he is present/absent. He “perpetually” sees but is never seen. Thus, the behaviour of the inmates is constantly being censored by
the carceral system, a key dimension of the State repressive apparatus and subject formation. The Panopticon has thus become a metaphor for
totalitarian forms of censorship through visuality and knowledge of the subjects.
 Shang 55

Martillimi Lopez meets a kid in his parlour after witnessing his desecrated bed, he accuses him of being a
surrogate of Laura. He attempts to cower down the kid:

Il frappe des mains et des pieds pour essayer d’effrayer le marmot. Lenfant tremble comme une
feuille. Il a peur, très peur. Le président lui sourit pour le rassurer. Il lui donne des bonbons, des
biscuits, il le laisse toucher sa hernie…

He clasps his hands and stamps his feet in an attempt to frighten the kid. The latter trembles like a leaf,
afraid, very afraid. The president smiles to reassure him. He offers him sweets, biscuits, letting him to
touch his hernia… (L’Etat, 87-88).

In response to Lopez’s interrogation, the kid confesses that though his friends call him Laura, which is a
nickname, he has nothing to do with Larsa Laura, the enemy of the State. Lopez’s paranoia makes him
difficult to convince. He orders his aide to hang the kid. Ironically, that does not save the situation for a
few weeks later; he discovers that there are more faeces on the president’s bed and in the whole town
than ever before (L’Etat, 88).
Through the use of the “double” which characterizes Tansi’s baroque and surreal world, the characters
invade the president’s sacred space without being visualized by the State security. The presidential bed,
symbol of the rulers erotic power, becomes a battlefield and a space of resistance while the ubiquity of
the faeces underlines the generalized decadence of the president’s power. The president’s protruding
phallus is the most visible aspect of his power and when he attempts to hide amongst the subjects to get
an idea of what they are thinking and saying about his regime, his herniated phallus exposes his identity.
It should be noted that Labou Tansi does not only make recourse to surrealist tactics to interpolate
hegemonic surveillance, he inscribes his entire textuality within an artistic resistance to the exigencies of
instrumental clarity in terms of motifs, settings and characters. The denial of absolute transparency,
accessibility and readability in his narrative does align with the resistance to uncontested interpretation,
objectification and utilitarian possession. To make recourse to Gerhard Richter’s expression in his
appraisal of corporeality in Walter Benjamin’s corpus (2002, 81),

“unhaunted” visuality or meaning formation in Labou Tansi is inconceivable and forms part and parcel of
the authors anti-ideological aesthetics. To extend the metaphor further, textuality and its multiple
possibilities of meanings can be conceived as a contestation of the state Panopticon and its subjectifying
rationalities that are based on a supposedly unifying truth.

CONCLUSION

Visuality forms a vital component of knowledge formation strategies connected with the construction of
hegemonic power. In the face of hegemonic visuality of the postcolonial state and the heritage of visual
underpinnings of enlightenment that informed Western colonialism, postcolonial texts have responded
with innovative modes of gazing back, interpolating and disrupting dominant visual codes and re-
imagining non-totalising forms of power. The analogous mode of writing that transcribes these counter-
visualities is the “graffiti text” which is discussed with regard to Labou Tansi’s novels, especially, The
 Shang 56

Eyes of the Volcano. Writing after Enlightenment becomes a form of graffiti, disconcerting and
dismantling visual certainties and underlying the remainder, that which is left out of the purview of the
putatively omnivisual seer. However, it should not be misconstrued that all postcolonial authors respond
to hegemonic visualities through burlesque and grotesque visual aesthetics. Such a claim would run the
risk of undercutting the plurality and diversity of postcolonial writing traditions with regard to the
deconstruction of hegemonic visualities and perspectives.

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS

The author has not declared any conflict of interests.

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