Critics have attempted to grasp what modernism is (or was) by rethinking the general notion of modernism as antagonistic successor to realism, which has in turn involved delinking realism from its nineteenth-century European practice and analyzing it as a kind of formal attitude to the world, its space and time. Constructing a model of a singular modernity from which he theorizes modernism, Fredric Jameson posits that conceptually grasping realism—if such an act were at all feasible—would not naturally lead to the capture of modernism because “the two concepts of modernism and realism are not on all fours with each other…Modernism is an aesthetic category and realism is an epistemological one” (Singular 124). For Eric Hayot, though, realism and modernism need not be incommensurable; for Hayot, Realism and Modernism, along with Romanticism, might be thought of as aesthetic modes or attitudes detachable from their historical practices.¹ According to Hayot, the three modes distinguish themselves through their respective binary approaches—affirmations or negations—to the natural world and the world-concept. Accordingly, such modes exist in pure forms only in the abstract, and each literary work will offer some original combination of all three modes (173, 174). Both Jameson’s and Hayot’s conceptions of realism (or Realism) are indebted to, but also complicate and refute, Georg Lukács’s thesis on narration and description as ideologically discrete attitudes to the given world.²

If realism has received renewed critical attention as a mode or epistemology, it has also reemerged as contemporary practice, especially in the so-called peripheries of the world-system. Jed Esty and Colleen Lye welcome the resurgence of realism outside of America and Europe with the claim that literary realism potentially blazes a way out of the aesthetic aporia resulting from the mammoth task of representing a hyper-extended world-system:

[W]here classical realism maps national space as a working social totality, and where modernism (including the late modernisms of minority and postcolonial magical realist writing) stylizes, even heroicizes, its baked-in failure to map the global system (projecting the latter as abysmal antimatter to literary description itself), peripheral realisms approach the world system as partially, potentially describable in its concrete reality. (285)

For Esty and Lye, the resurrection of realism outside Europe and America is reason for optimism, for it indicates a gameness to represent, however partially, spaces that hitherto elided in literary history. Jameson notes more cautiously the richness of peripheral realisms today “is to a certain degree dependent on the embattled and subordinate status of realism in [the realism-modernism] opposition,” suggesting that the revived momentum of realisms in the peripheries may not survive its own success (“Realism-Modernism” 485). In any case, having recognized the comeback of realism as a practice in the peripheries, critics have called for braver, more inclusive study of realisms old and new.³

But peripheral realisms are far from new; they have a twentieth-century prehistory. My aim is to splice together these two critical concerns—one, regarding realism as epistemology as opposed to aesthetic category, and two, regarding its renewed practice in the peripheries—by revisiting realism proper and the moment of its initial propagation to the colonial peripheries. In what follows, I explore the consequences of the transportation of such novels to the colonies: what happens when the English realist novel, which grows out of a specific, diachronic national tradition, amplifies into a synchronic imperial culture that threatens to interrupt if not supplant local diachronic traditions? Rewriting Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, respectively, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea dramatize the failure of English literary epistemologies to strike roots in colonial soil. It is particularly apt that the writers are from, and the novels are situated in, plantation economies, for both demonstrate that literary epistemologies are not like agricultural products or livestock, which were so often introduced to, grown in, and transported out of the colonies with alarming ease. Bowen and Rhys suggest that the literature of the peripheries, at least in their time of writing, can neither be cultivated in a form familiar and gratifying to metropolitan tastes nor be absorbed into a Commonwealth literary marketplace headquartered in London, for colonial states possess geographical and historical conditions fundamentally different from, and indeed inimical to, those that gave rise to the English literary tradition. Or, in the words of a Barbadian poet, “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters”—peripheral experience cannot be contained in the strictures of a metropolitan form (Brathwaite 10).

Bowen and Rhys both offer realist experiments that cross-pollinate recognizable styles and plot structures from the English marriage plot with local sociopolitical conditions to demonstrate the impossibility of metropolitan cultural synchronization. The significance is not merely that these novels, broadly categorized today as modernist, rehearse realism’s incapacity to map the totality of the world system, which is a commonplace, but rather that by demonstrating the failure of English realism to map even the local experiences of the Anglophone colonial elite in the peripheries, they stress the historical, political, and economic limitations of the English realist tradition. Put differently, once it moves beyond local British contexts, realism ceases to function as epistemology and becomes a contrived aesthetic category that fails to render the world legible. Both Bowen and Rhys reveal the English realist marriage plot, then, to be a historically and geographically contingent mode operable only in England during Pax Britannica, the stable expansion phase of what Giovanni Arrighi calls the British systemic cycle of accumulation, a phase that spanned from 1815 to 1914 (56). That short-lived period of peace coincides with the period of late Austen and Brontë, the place and time in which realism—which, according to Hayot’s formulation, doubly affirms the world and the world-concept—made sound sense.

The two writers thus demonstrate that what worked as normative epistemology in Europe transmogrifies into tenuous aesthetic category in colonial plantation economies. Bowen’s and Rhys’s protagonists, who forever strive to construct and maintain a semblance of worlds limned in European realist novels, thus instantiate a claim that Antonio Gramsci made in his prison notebooks in roughly the same period:

One’s conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by reality, which are quite specific and “original” in their immediate relevance. How is it possible to consider the present, and quite specific present, with a mode of thought elaborated for a past which is often remote and superseded? When someone does this, it means that he is a walking anachronism, a fossil, and not living in the modern world, or at least that he is strangely composite. (323)

Inhabiting defunct husks of Victorian realist plots plunked awkwardly in the midst of plantation economies, Bowen’s and Rhys’s young protagonists are twice removed from the pulsing, “quite specific present”; “remote and superseded,” they are always already walking anachronisms, fossils, not living in the modern world, strangely composite. Both novels, like William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, replace the convention of comic resolution through marriage with a ritualistic burning of estates at once tragic and euphoric. Such exuberantly destructive endings slash and burn an English literary tradition to create fertile soil to enable the growth of fresher local crops—perhaps even future homegrown realisms—untainted by the anxieties of imperial influence.

Readers of Bowen have pointed to William Shakespeare, Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Graham Greene as her stylistic antecedents.⁴ Maud Ellmann, for instance, remarks that “[i]n the settled world of Jane Austen’s novels, a powerful influence on Bowen’s work, political and social history forms the backdrop of the action, rarely impinging on the lives of the protagonists,” while Bowen’s world “is too precarious for history to recede into the wings” (42). I claim more specifically that The Last September imports and rewrites Persuasion (which Ellmann, even as she refers to Emm, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice, passes over) in the Irish colonial context to show the incompatibility of imperial literary history and colonial experience.

Persuasion is an intuitive English intertext for plotting Anglo-Irish decline because it mediates the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of a professional bourgeoisie through its realist marriage plot. Readers of Persuasion will find The Last September eerily familiar. The most immediately apparent affinity, which Ellmann also notes, is the general scope and ambience of the space the characters inhabit: we are in the world of stilted drawing room conversations, promenades around the estate, affectionate letters shared between sisters or confidants, and dance parties thrown for girls and young officers (with Bowen’s brilliant touch of replacing Austen’s piano—which always exerts pressure on Austen’s heroines, who tend to be mediocre players—with a troublesome gramophone). There is also Bowen’s employment of taut understatement, irony, and suppression both in the narrative and in the accents of her characters, language that could not be more distant from the exaggerative blarney so lovingly and critically reproduced by her compatriots such as J. M. Synge, Seán O’Casey, and James Joyce. Similarities persist on the level of character; the surname of Gerald Lesworth, Lois Farquar’s love interest in The Last September, may indeed be a play on “worthless” as Heather Bryant Jordan argues, but also suggests Frederick Wentworth, Anne Elliot’s match in Persuasion (49).⁵ These men lack the nervy, glittering hauteur of a Darcy and possess a family resemblance in their well-intentioned blandness and middle-class careers as colonial officers (Lesworth is a subaltern stationed in Ireland, while Wentworth is said to have had a stint as a commander in the Caribbean ten years before the novel begins). In both novels, haughty surrogate mother figures—Lady Russell in Persuasion, Lady Naylor in The Last September—disapprove of intermarriage with a nobody and interfere after the first proposal. Even seemingly nugatory details such as Wentworth’s proposal to Anne in a hotel are displaced to minor characters and repeated, with Livvy receiving her proposal from David Armstrong at the Imperial.

Yet because this is not England on the cusp of Pax Britannica but Ireland in the throes of its War of Independence, maintaining the makeshift world of Austen is a full-time job that involves the intense affective labor of managing experiences and feelings—that is, seeing and feeling certain things, and not others—while keeping calm and carrying on with the ironic repartee. Daventry is at once a variation on Captain Benwick from Persuasion and a kind of sinkhole in Bowen’s character-system who, by refusing to participate fully in the performance of a nineteenth century English realist novel, threatens to make the precariously cocooned narrative vulnerable to outside violence. Benwick, we can recall, is a naval colleague of Wentworth with “a pleasing face and a melancholy air” who, after engagement to a lady, goes to the sea for “fortune and promotion” only to find upon his return that his fiancée has died from an illness (104, 105). In Austen’s novel, which is set in the short-lived peace of 1814, a British naval officer’s disastrous occupational hazard is absence at the passing of a loved one. To comfort Benwick, Anne recommends that he stop reading poetry (“the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness”) and read prose instead (“works of our best moralists, such collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering”) (108, 109). Anne, who functions frequently as an amateur nurse and nanny to the many injured characters in the novel, prescribes placid words to soothe a wounded mind. Benwick recovers surprisingly quickly and marries Louisa Musgrove, who had previously been a rival to Anne for Wentworth’s attention. Daventry’s melancholy, by contrast, is not the kind caused and cured by love, for he “had been shell-shocked” (212). Unlike most, if not all, characters in the novel, who remain blind to the outside world even with eyes wide open, Daventry keeps shutting his eyes, and it is then that he, and by extension, the narrative are drawn to vivid recollections of the quotidian violence being unleashed everywhere outside the big house, the orders he received to “search with particular strictness the houses where men were absent and women wept loudest and prayed,” or the beds that “contained very old women or women with very new babies” (212). If Benwick’s sorrows can be rehabilitated through reading and marriage, Daventry’s cannot, and irritated by the display of feminine sexuality in the “flash of his partner’s legs in their glassy stockings,” he aggressively grips his partner’s ankle, an act unimaginable in an Austen novel. He is of course beyond Lois’s assistance, and when he smolders moodily at her, Lois can only wistfully think, “There was a desperation about Mr. Daventry that she could have loved. But he apparently craved relaxation: she had found she did not relax Mr. Daventry” (214).⁶ Neither words nor marriage can save Daventry; the stable world of a realist marriage plot is an unrealizable fantasy.

In fact, Bowen’s world is generally devoid of productive gender relations, and Daventry is not the only one who craves relaxation but cannot be relaxed by the opposite sex.⁷ After her initial fumbling disappointment with Hugo Montmorency, Lois becomes near-fanatically determined to become a heroine in a marriage plot, but the world will not permit it. In passing, it is mentioned that Lois “had cried for a whole afternoon before the War because she was not someone in a historical novel,” to which Ellmann responds that this is precisely what she is, because The Last September is the only work Bowen set in a historical past (Bowen 108; Ellmann 54). Rather, Lois’s despair originates from the fact that she is in the wrong type of historical novel, the awkwardly belated Anglo-Irish kind, instead of the realist English kind. Because belated and Anglo-Irish, Lois has to strive to simulate Austenian affect and action. Declan Kiberd writes about the importance of affect, and in particular, emotional detachment for Bowen, explaining that “[a]ll [the Anglo-Irish ascendancy] had to protect themselves against the avenging masses was an attitude, an assumed style” (366, 367). More recently, Matt Eatough, reading Bowen’s Court, argues that “Bowen embraced professionalism as an alternative mode of transnationalism that was more amenable to Irish national autonomy than a gothic narrative of neofeudalism,” later adding that Bowen possessed “a commitment to impersonal ideals that is associated with British professionalism” (72, 73). Nevertheless, in The Last September, English affect—of emotional detachment, as Kiberd suggests—seems to be that of Austen rather than that of bureaucracy or trade, and it is hardly recommended by Bowen as “the secret to saving the Anglo-Irish from decline” as Eatough claims (73). Austenian affect is repeatedly proved unsustainable, a performance that cannot be kept up.

That Austenian affect in Bowen is no longer a spontaneous expression but a contrivance becomes evident in the scenes in which Lois tries to ignite emotion in her sterile chest. In Austen, feeling is prior to language, and Persuasion is notable among Austen novels for its attention to the protagonist’s problem of verbalizing affect. After unexpectedly running into Wentworth in Bath (where her family has humiliatingly repaired after letting the estate), Anne is beset by emotions: “All the overpowering, blinding, bewildering, first effects of strong surprise were over with her. Still, however, she had enough to feel! It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery” (191). It is as if Wentworth, through his brief appearance, has sprung upon her a bouquet of feelings that she must later hold and parse—the business, also a pleasure, lies in assigning a word to each feeling with precision. For Lois, the situation has reversed, for she has to mimic feelings by stating them out loud, as in an incantation. Lois notes that for her youth—which makes flirting with Gerald a practical obligation—is theatrical, a part for which she has been cast: “She had never refused a role. She could not forgo that intensification, that kindling of her personality at being considered very happy and reckless even if she were not” (40). To falter in that performance, to admit to not feeling happy, reckless, youthful, “would be disloyal to herself, to Gerald, to an illusion both were called upon to maintain” (40). Like Francie Montmorency, who declares “Aren’t we too terribly dusty!” before “a tired look [comes] down at the back of her eyes at the thought of how dusty she [i]s,” Lois has to exclaim, in absence of any feeling, “Oh, I do want you!” into the empty air with the hope that she will, for once, desire Gerald (4, 41). Indeed, we are explicitly told later that “Lois, looked and strained after feeling, but felt nothing” (192). Thus when Gerald finally kisses her, all she experiences is an “impact, with inner blankness,” and she chides Gerald for being “so actual,” quickly urging him, “Do be normal: do play the piano” (126, 127). Austen’s characters never kiss on the page (they only do on the screen, in contemporary cinematic renditions) but they invariably play the piano. To kiss is too actual to be normal for an Anne Elliot manqué.

All these performances of speaking in order to incite feeling do not bode well for Lois, for as Lady Naylor remarks, “Real feeling explains itself” (246). Despite all of Lois’s efforts to construct her delicate Austenian milieu, the outside world rudely intrudes in the form of Marda, who, sophisticated and more experienced performer that she is, threatens to snatch protagonicity away from Lois by hogging male attention as well as narrative spotlight. Marda fascinates both Hugo and Laurence, and it is when Laurence, disappointed that Marda is not home, decides to leave the unappealing Lois and go lunch with others that Lois feels threatened: “She missed everything, no one would ever care, she would never marry” (163). The slippage is remarkable: anxiety about Laurence’s lack of sexual interests expands into a blanket sense that nobody will desire her, to the conclusion that she will be unable to marry, and thus fail to be the heroine of a marriage plot. During the mill episode, in which Marda and Lois accidentally confront an armed IRA member whose pistol goes off, hurting Marda, Lois feels “quite ruled out, there was nothing at all for her here. She had better be going—but where? She thought: ‘I must marry Gerald’” (181, 182). If in the earlier instance, Marda threatened to outshine Lois and make the latter into a minor character, here the encounter with the IRA member intimates that the narrative could swerve into an entirely different and less desirable genre of wartime violence or Gothic (where, once again, the pistol injures Marda, not Lois, who is once again pushed to the status of minor character). If Lois is to keep her illusionary world together and make her own life the organizing principle of the plot, she has to marry Gerald, but the colonial context will not permit her even this meager satisfaction.

The Last September, by staging a failed proposal that finally remains a failure, revises the conclusion of Persuasion, which gives its heroine and hero a second chance. Persuasion too famously begins with a failed proposal, a missed opportunity. Wentworth had first proposed to Anne when Anne was nineteen, and Wentworth was an entry-level officer. The marriage does not take place because Anne’s godmother, Lady Russell, interferes on Anne’s behalf. Austen hints that the clumsy youthful romance between Anne and Wentworth were unremarkable, perhaps just like that of Lois and Gerald; while the former couple are an attractive pair, they also loved “for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love” (28). But because England is peaceful, Wentworth, unlike Lesworth, does not die in war, but climbs the military hierarchy to return to Anne still middle-class but wealthier and more desirable. Wentworth comes to stand, that is, for the British naval force, which, as Anne Frey explains, replaces the aristocracy as a force to render cohesive the British empire. Lois and Gerald are not to have such a second chance at mature attraction, of course, because Gerald dies in action before Lois reaches her twentieth birthday. The Last September is a story that could, but fails to, ripen into the plot of Persuasion .

More than Lois’s extreme effort and ultimate failure to star in an Austen novel, the novel displays, with its anachronistically realist style, Bowen’s own awkward status as a belated Anglo-Irish writer who strains to draft a faux English realist novel. Contrary to Stephen Dedalus’s advice that “[t]he artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails,” Bowen leaves her fingerprints everywhere (Joyce 337). Bowen’s signature jolie laide style draws attention to the artificial, contingent nature of realist prose, and exposes as farcical the notion that a stable reality exists out there to be represented in a neutral, objective manner by the artist. Realism is shown to be a construct that is never value neutral. Susan Osborn reads Bowen’s idiosyncratic uses of commas, dashes, adverbs, and syntax as “uncertainly legible” and contends that by privileging the signs over their meanings, Bowen undermines the Barthesian reality effect (44, 47). As Osborn demonstrates through her close reading of nature descriptions and strange syntax in Bowen, the most jarring stylistic moments are when the act of narration draws attention to itself. Bowen’s animal similes, for instance, demonstrates the artificiality of realist prose, and in so doing renders visible the presence of an always mediating writer. When Marda asks Lois why she won’t write, Lois confides, “That’s so embarrassing. Even things like—like elephants get so personal” (142). This may seem like another theatrical throwaway line from Lois; yet it also points to the absurdity inherent in realist conventions such as metaphor that, when subtly executed, can equate an animal with a human and still take on a smooth illusion of impersonality or objectivity (a canonical example, to be treated later in the reading of Rhys, is Brontë’s conceit of her protagonist as a bird). Indeed, the comment on personal elephants is an in-joke sutured into the novel, for Bowen presents us with all sorts of outrageous animal-person comparisons. When Francie washes her hands, they turn “in the water like gentle porpoises in a slaver of violent soap” (18); Daventry’s eyes are “set in too close together, like a good-looking shark’s” (213); Mr. Forgarty drops his glass and stands “bent like an animal, chin on the mantelpiece” (292). Metaphors conventionally clarify, explain, and demystify one phenomenon by pinning it to another; Bowen’s metaphors kind of do too, but demand more strenuous imaginative connections and thus accentuate the work a reader usually does unthinkingly and automatically. On the flip side, Bowen forcefully makes personal the most generic of farm animals: “Michael Connor’s farm first announced itself by some pink little silky pigs running along the roadside. A sow got up, like a very maternal battleship” (89); “Square cattle moved in the fields like saints, with a mindless certainty” (92). These odd aestheticizations and professionalizations of livestock suggest that, if realism were an epistemology, it is always already inflected with an idiosyncratic, personal point of view. Realism in its Victorian, English phase may have aspired to the veneer of stable generality and universality. Bowen’s idiosyncratic realist style, by showing how simile squares a cow, de-generalizes and de-universalizes.

Wide Sargasso Sea is another colonial reworking of a nineteenth-century classic, Jane Eyre.⁸ Rhys too writes an anachronistic prequel to the intertext from which it poaches plot points such as the protagonist’s unhappy childhood and convent school education (Jane’s allies, Helen and Miss Temple, are economically synthesized for Antoinette in the significantly less supportive Miss Hélène). Lifting details of Jane’s life and grafting them to Antoinette’s, Rhys redoubles Brontë’s original doubling of Jane Eyre and Antoinette/Bertha Mason. But if Bowen’s Lois hopes to recreate Austen in Ireland only to discover the futility of the attempt, Rhys’s Antoinette begins with the problem of having already being written into Brontë as a suspect character; hostility to Antoinette and her surroundings are already present in the master text. Like Bowen, though, Rhys engages with her English precursor in order to contemplate the paradox that is the inheritance of Anglophone colonial writers: the Victorian realist novel is part of the literary tradition that has been transmitted to writers in the peripheries that transmits epistemologies unsuitable for understanding colonial life.⁹

As in Bowen, a strategic deployment of animal metaphors and descriptions of local animals indicates the Victorian original’s intransigence. Rhys’s animals respond to Brontë’s conceit of Jane as a bird and the notorious description of Bertha Mason as “the clothed hyena,” that stands tall “on its hind feet” (343). Rhys challenges not the strangeness of the metaphoric construction as such, but the realist novel’s use of similes as means to essentialize and define others. The locals call the Caucasian Antoinette a “white cockroach,” and even when the narrative finally equates Antoinette to a parrot—a bird, like Jane—it is only to ominously foreshadow her fate through the parrot’s death by fire (20, 39). Meanwhile, animals native to the Caribbean function as part of the alien landscape that perform temporarily successful marronage against Rochester.¹⁰ Unlike Ireland with its livestock (which was exported to England even as the Irish starved), Jamaica harbors wildlife too strange to be laughingly compared to battleships or geometric forms. As Christophine puts it in an emasculating comment to Rochester, the locals drink coffee that is like bull’s blood, not “horse piss like the English madams drink” (77). In their brief honeymoon period, Rochester and Antoinette recognize their incompatibility in their discrete attitudes to animals: when Rochester asks if the local snakes are poisonous, Antoinette expresses a strangely fierce loyalty to them, using the possessive form that, by implication, separates her from her husband: “Our snakes are not poisonous, of course not” (80). Animals further function as repositories of secrets from which Rochester is excluded. “I don’t know the name in English,” Antoinette says of the “monster crab” that both Rochester and Antoinette suspect are dangerous, later explaining that Sandi (“a boy you never met”) taught her how to throw pebbles at it (80). In Wide Sargasso Sea, native animals escape Rochester’s basic comprehension or categorization and thus resist being pressed into use as metaphor.

More generally, Rhys repeatedly shows Rochester attempting and failing to manufacture a reality out of words and postulations. If realist description (and concomitant apprehension) of the given world is an epistemology, its powers do not extend to the Caribbean. Realism is predicated on the faith that the world is describable, that one can verbally preserve and relay experience to another—it affirms, as Hayot says, the presence of both a natural world and a world-concept (124, 125). Rochester is initially confused because Spanish Town constantly thwarts his attempts to map the space; it is a disorienting space of fire, dreams, and inebriation by alcohol and mysterious potions, consisting of a kind of fluidity that cannot be set down in text. Local names, for one, make little sense to Rochester. A town is named Massacre, but there is no history to explain the ghastly moniker; as Antoinette relates, “Nobody remembers now” (60). Although he is said to be worldly in Jane Eyre, here he cannot translate Granbois and misinterprets as “the High Woods I suppose” in a letter (69).¹¹ Likewise, time and age seem to be alien concepts to locals—a man with grey hairs claims to “have fourteen years,” then in the same breath to be “fifty-six years perhaps” (62). The letter Rochester writes to his father, crudely describing the environs, includes the admission that “It was difficult to think or write coherently,” and wondering how letters are posted in Jamaica, Rochester eventually folds it and deposits it into a desk drawer (69). A letter written in the realist epistolary style cannot bridge the gap between Jamaica and England: “As for my confused impressions they will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up” (69).

Indeed, the alternating first-person narrations by Antoinette and Rochester display the couple’s fundamentally irreconcilable approaches to the world. Antoinette, like Jane, imagines Europe with no first-hand experience, but if both Rochester and Jane in Jane Eyre rely on negative, xenophobic stereotypes personified in the form of Rochester’s various mistresses from France, Italy, and Germany, Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea imagines Europe in private, sensory terms:

Italy is white pillars and green water. Spain is hot sun on stones, France is a lady with black hair wearing a white dress because Louise was born in France fifteen years ago, and my mother, whom I must forget and pray for as though she were dead though she is living, liked to dress in white. (50)

Antoinette conceives of nation states through sensory synecdoche, not metaphor. If Antoinette habitually processes the world through mixtures of sense-data, such as images or temperature, Rochester’s own system, which is constructed by a priori postulations, crashes when unfamiliar surroundings overwhelm the senses: “Everything is too much…Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near” (63). What Antoinette metabolizes with ease only disorients Rochester: the marriage ceremony, little of which Rochester remembers, “was all very brightly coloured, very strange, but it meant nothing to me” (69). Rochester ultimately relies on empirical knowledge accumulated by his English predecessors to understand his new surroundings, researching the definition of obeah in a book. Text provides him with a way of grasping Jamaica in some way, empowering him to make legal threats to Christophine and rename Antoinette with the English name Bertha (97). The final chapter, set in Thornfield, however, shows the situation reversed—Antoinette, caged in the English country house, strikes back with her own methods. Just as Rochester recreates England in Jamaica with his words and postulations, Antoinette plans to reconstruct Jamaica in Thornfield by kindling a fire, which is truer and more meaningful to her than abstract concepts. In a moment of clarity, Antoinette tells Grace Poole: “Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has meaning,” and indeed, it is the sight of the red dress on the floor, an image, that speaks to her, reminds her of what she is still capable of doing (166).

But by Bowen’s and Rhys’s time, realism was not just becoming improbable in the colonies; it was also tapering off in metropolitan centers. What happened to realism after Austen and Brontë, at the end of the nineteenth century? According to Jameson,

Realism as a form (or mode) is historically associated…with the function of demystification…[T]he eradication of inherited psychic structures and values will remain a function of realist narrative, whose force always comes from this painful cancellation of tenaciously held illusions. But later on, when the realist novel begins to discover (or, if you prefer, to construct) altogether new kinds of subjective experiences (from Dostoevsky to Henry James) the negative social function begins to weaken, and demystification finds itself transformed into defamiliarization and the renewal of perception, a more modernist impulse. ( Realism 4, 5; emphasis mine)

This morphology of realism seems loosely true for artists who were writing in major cities for a metropolitan readership. In limning London, Woolf and T.S. Eliot could skip realistic replications of their cities and engage in bolder stylistic experimentation to estrange and defamiliarize because they had the luxury of their Victorian predecessors such as Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope, who had already rendered London legible and familiar to readers. In fact, Joyce is a fascinating outlier, an exception that proves the point—lacking realist predecessors in Ireland but determined to keep up with his more experimental modernist contemporaries, Joyce attempts to simultaneously demystify and defamiliarize Dublin in Ulysses.

The switch in realist function from demystification to defamiliarization thus occurs mostly within the old literary and cultural centers that already have vast archives of literary representation. Indeed, it seems plausible that realism was merely dispersed outwards, where its function of demystification continued to thrive: examples include E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, George Orwell’s Burmese Days, D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (to name just a few!) which all hew closer to realist composition than modernist construction.¹² Such works digest in familiar English prose the strange ways people of living in the peripheries of the world-system (India, Burma, Mexico, China, and Vietnam, respectively). Could it be that realism, having served its functions in the cities, was dispatched to the corners of the world, where it could continue its demystifying mission? Seen uncharitably, the aforementioned novelists are not unlike Rhys’s Rochester; they travel with their realist styles and plots in order to endure, and even suppress, the unnerving alterity of the peripheries.

As I have shown, ambivalence about realism as an imported style came from writers of hyphenated identities in the colonies, who knew England from their colonial education, and perhaps because of this, also intuitively comprehended that realism is only one epistemology among many, one that is alien to the lands they inhabit. These writers thus resemble Brathwaite’s Caribbean children, who read “Shakespeare, George Eliot, Jane Austen—British literature and literary forms, the models which had very little to do, really, with the environment and the reality of non-Europe” and end up writing, in formally accurate but meteorologically impossible iambic pentameter that “the snow was falling on the canefields” (8, 9). Composing works of a simulated realism that hover between the accurate and the impossible, Bowen and Rhys present us with two case studies of periphery writers testing realism as an epistemology with which to understand and represent local realities. Bowen shows the achingly eager adoption of the Victorian realist novel, only to show that, transported outward and employed by the non-English, it is little more than a gutless shell that transmits inappropriate affect through an outmoded plot. Rhys magnifies and extends details from an existing Victorian realist novel to emphasize that the Victorian novel is in its very design hostile to the peripheries and thus a tradition that cannot take root. Thus the scorching destructions of the big house and the English estate are tragic but also jubilant; if history is a nightmare from which one cannot awake, one can at least burn it to the ground.

The return of realism in Africa and Asia could, on the one hand, be explained as a symptom of relative prosperity and peace in the peripheries, a belated throwback to a form discarded long ago by the center. This hypothesis fails to account for, however, the transmission of culture and information enabled by digital technology, widespread literacy in English, international publishing powerhouses, and rapid translations. Viewed more cynically, realism could indeed be considered a “toxic European gift” as Jameson puts it, the take-off of peripheral realisms indicating the global standardization of epistemologies and even affect ( Realism-Modernism 482). The more optimistic view—which theories of realism/Realism, such as that of Hayot, certainly seem to gesture to—would finally dissociate realism from its European and imperial associations for freer engagements. David Damrosch, for one, notes that the adoption of the English language (and concomitant metropolitan literary forms) has become less fraught affair for contemporary writers, who “move beyond older patterns of reluctant acquiescence or defensive resistance…to use global English as a linguistic resource to supplement, rather than replace, their own local idiom” (195). In a similarly optimistic mood, we might consider peripheral realisms as symptomatic of a more general “aesthetics of the earth,” which Edouard Glissant called for in his Poetics of Relation. There, Glissant acknowledges that an “aesthetics of the earth seems, as always, anachronistic or naïve: reactionary or sterile,” but stresses that “we must get beyond this seemingly impossible task,” for otherwise, “the prestige (and denaturation) felt in internationally standardized consumption will triumph permanently over the pleasure of consuming one’s own product” (150). An aesthetics of the earth holds out against the homogenizing force of global capitalism; thus, even though it may seem regressive as an aesthetic category, it is politically necessary.

More specifically, an aesthetics of the earth thinks in terms of land, not territories, and attends to material conditions:

An aesthetics of the earth? In the half-starved dust of Africas? In the mud of flooded Asias? In epidemics, masked forms of exploitation, flies buzz-bombing the skeleton skins of children? In the frozen silence of the Andes? In the rains uprooting favelas and shantytowns? In the scrub and scree of Bantu lands? In flowers encircling necks and ukuleles? In mud huts crowning goldmines? In city sewers? In haggard aboriginal wind? In red-light districts? In drunken indiscriminate consumption? In the noose? The cabin? The night with no candle? Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion. Finding the fever of passion for the ideas of “environment” (which I call surroundings) and “ecology,” both apparently such futile notions of these landscapes of desolation, Imagining the idea of love of the earth—so ridiculously inadequate or else frequently the basis for such sectarian intolerance—with all the strength of charcoal fires or sweet syrup.

Aesthetics of rupture and connection…Aesthetics of a variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum. (151)

Contemporary Asian and African realisms, then, emphasize not their past debts to a European realism, but their present ability to make perceptible the sinews of the world-system, to give concrete descriptive body to otherwise abstract, even sublime, notions such as environment and ecology. It is no coincidence that Glissant spells out specific scenes from the world’s peripheries with so much care, for what he calls for is a clear-eyed, loving attention to the places we inhabit, deprivations and all. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the root and the rhizome, which informs Glissant’s thought, we might consider the newest realist renditions not so much as peripheral realisms in the context of a world-system organized by First World metropoles but as rhizomatic realisms that are distinct from nineteenth-century realisms predicated on hierarchies of root and stem. What becomes possible with an aesthetics of the earth, a realism of relation, then, is not a toxic gift passively received but a hopeful rehabilitation of realism, an attempt to recreate a realism that can function, once again, as a means of knowing the world.