“Who Are They?”
Feminism in the Early Novels of
Bernardine Evaristo
Kelly Vervondel
Studentnummer: 01507117
Masterproef voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van
Master in Gender en Diversiteit
Promotor prof. dr. Elisabeth Bekers
Co-promotor prof. dr. Janine Hauthal
2015-2016
Klassieke Masterproef: 21 505 woorden
Abstract
Deze masterproef onderzoekt of de vroege romans van de zwart Britse auteur Bernardine
Evaristo al dan niet feministische romans genoemd kunnen worden. De feministische beweging
en feministische literatuur strijden vaak samen tegen gender stereotypes en voor gelijkheid. De
vraag of hedendaagse literatuur waarin vrouwen prominent zijn ook feministische literatuur is,
is dan ook een vraag die vaak gesteld wordt. Allereerst zal in deze masterproef gekeken worden
naar de theorie rond feminisme en gender, waardoor er een theoretisch kader gevormd kan
worden voor de latere hoofdstukken. Vervolgens worden drie van Evaristo’s vroege romans
geanalyseerd: The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists en Blonde Roots. Tot slot worden het
theoretisch kader en de literaire analyse samengebracht zodat er een conclusie kan gemaakt
worden omtrent de feministische aard van Bernardine Evaristo’s vroege romans.
Het theoretisch onderzoek besluit dat een feministische roman hoort te gaan over vrouwen
en het vrouw-zijn en dat het doorgaans zekere ideeën betreft die een poging doen om gender
normen te veranderen, of op zijn minst bloot te stellen. Daarnaast hoort er niet enkel rekening
gehouden te worden met gender, maar ook met andere factoren zoals etniciteit en sociale klasse.
Aangezien niet alle vrouwen dezelfde ervaringen delen, moeten andere sociale factoren ook in
acht genomen worden. Om de feministische aard van Evaristo’s romans te onderzoeken, focust
deze thesis dan voornamelijk op machtsrelaties, de constructie van vrouwelijkheid en de
‘empowerment’ van vrouwen, of anders gezegd, de manieren waarop vrouwen de kracht vinden
om hun limieten aan te vechten. Het wordt snel duidelijk dat hoewel mannen domineren in de
samenleving, vrouwen een stem krijgen in de romans en dat het de vrouwen hun wereld is die
centraal staat. Verder stelt Bernardine Evaristo niet enkel ongelijke machtsrelaties bloot, maar
toont ze ook aan hoe de constructie van vrouwelijkheid vrouwen negatief kan beïnvloeden. Zo
kunnen schoonheidsidealen, bijvoorbeeld, een schadelijk effect hebben op het zelfbeeld van
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vrouwen. Een focus op seksualiteit, moederschap en het ‘empowerment’ van vrouwen toont
verder ook aan hoe vrouwen voorgesteld worden in de romans van Bernardine Evaristo.
Door te focussen op een aantal aspecten zoals macht, vrouwelijkheid en ‘empowerment’
probeert deze thesis te bepalen of The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists en Blonde Roots
feministische romans genoemd kunnen worden of niet. Een uitgebreide, tekst-gerichte analyse
zal proberen te bewijzen dat Bernardine Evaristo een feministisch standpunt inneemt in haar
vroege romans door gegenderde machtsrelaties en de schadelijke effecten van de constructie
van vrouwelijkheid bloot te stellen en door het voorstellen van sterke en genuanceerde
vrouwelijke personages.
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Abstract
In this master’s thesis, it is investigated whether the early novels of black British writer
Bernardine Evaristo can be classified as feminist novels or not. Together, the feminist
movement and feminist literature have often undertaken the fight against gender stereotypes
and for equality. Whether contemporary literature that features women is then feminist
literature is an frequently asked question. Firstly, this thesis looks at the theory surrounding
feminism and gender, providing a theoretical framework to rely upon. Then, it analyses three
of Bernardine Evaristo’s early novels: The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots.
Lastly, it brings together the theoretical framework and the findings of the literary analysis to
conclude on whether or not Evaristo’s early novels can be considered feminist novels.
The theoretical research concludes that a feminist novel is supposed to concern itself with
women and womanhood and usually engages with certain ideas that attempt to change gender
norms, or at least expose them. Further, not only gender should be taken into account since not
all women’s experiences are the same. A feminist novel should thus consider the different
aspects that characterise women’s experiences, such as race and social class, as well. To
research the extent to which Evaristo’s novels can be called feminist, this thesis focuses on
three aspects: power relations, the construction of femininity and women’s empowerment. In
terms of power relations, it becomes clear that while men dominate the social structure in the
three novels, women are given a voice through the narration and it is the women’s world which
is brought to the centre of attention, not the men’s. Further, Bernardine Evaristo not only
exposes power imbalances, but also brings to light the harmful impact of the way femininity is
often constructed, for example the way beauty standards influence women’s self-image.
Through the investigation of sexuality, motherhood and women’s empowerment, this thesis
also looks at the way women are represented in Evaristo’s early novels.
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By focusing on a couple of aspects such as power, femininity and empowerment, this thesis
thus tries to assess whether The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots can be called
feminist novels or not. Through an extensive text-oriented analysis this thesis will try to prove
that Bernardine Evaristo takes a feminist stand in her early novels by exposing gendered power
imbalances, the harmful ways of the construction of femininity, and the portrayal of strong,
round and nuanced women characters.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 1
Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 6
Research Question .................................................................................................................. 6
Methodology........................................................................................................................... 8
1.
2.
Feminism, Gender and Intersectionality ........................................................................... 10
1.1.
Feminism and Gender ................................................................................................ 10
1.3.
Oppression and Privilege ........................................................................................... 17
1.4.
A feminist novel?....................................................................................................... 19
The Early Novels of Bernardine Evaristo ......................................................................... 22
2.1.
Bernardine Evaristo ................................................................................................... 22
2.2.
Power in Evaristo’s Novels ....................................................................................... 24
2.3.
The Construction of Femininity in Evaristo’s Novels ............................................... 37
2.3.1.
Motherhood and Sexuality ................................................................................. 38
2.3.2.
Beauty Standards ................................................................................................ 47
2.4.
3.
Women’s Empowerment in Evaristo’s novels .......................................................... 53
Evaristo’s Early Novels: Feminist Novels? ...................................................................... 64
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 68
Works Cited.............................................................................................................................. 72
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Introduction
In the last centuries, the development of feminism as a movement has gone hand in hand
with the development of feminist literature. Ideas brought forward by feminists often find their
way into literature, and vice versa. Literature has been important for the feminist movement as
it is a carrier of ideas and often functions as an imperative for change. It gives a description of
society, who people are and what they do, and it often exposes the inequalities that exists in
society. Further, literature has the power to influence people and consequently, change one’s
ideas or viewpoints. As feminism has been a very significant movement in the last century, a
frequently asked question when it comes to literature that features women is whether or not it
is feminist literature. In this thesis, then, I ask this question of Bernardine Evaristo’s work.
Bernardine Evaristo is a black British women writer, who has written numerous novels, drama,
young adult fiction and literary criticism. (Bekers 2013: web) It is notable that most of
Evaristo’s protagonists are women. Therefore, her novels perfectly lend themselves for a
feminist analysis. Furthermore, her work also often deals with the exploration of black history
and the African diaspora; the impact of race is thus usually featured in her novels as well.
Research Question
The main research question for this master’s thesis is whether or not the early novels of
Bernardine Evaristo can be considered feminist novels or not. For this purpose, I have limited
my research to three of her early novels: The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Soul Tourists (2005) and
Blonde Roots (2008), respectively her second, third and fourth novel. I have chosen these three
novels for a couple of reasons. Firstly, all three novels have women protagonists. The
Emperor’s Babe tells the story of the young and black Zuleika, who lives in Roman London.
Blonde Roots deals with Doris’s fate, a young white girl who is kidnapped and enslaved in a
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world where white people are the oppressed and black people are the oppressors. Both novels
are narrated by women: Zuleika and Doris, respectively. In Soul Tourists, then, a black woman,
Jessie, has to share the narrative with Stanley, a black man, as they go on a journey together
through Europe. Secondly, The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots can be seen
as a certain development in Evaristo’s writing. Content-wise, The Emperor’s Babe deals with
Roman London, Evaristo then opens up the narrative to include contemporary Britain and
continental Europe in Soul Tourists and eventually, goes even beyond the nation and the
continent to include an even larger part of the world in Blonde Roots. (Cuder-Dominguez 2011:
72)
Further, this thesis is titled “‘Who Are They?’ Feminism in the Early Novels of Bernardine
Evaristo”. However, I have chosen not to include Evaristo’s earliest novel Lara. First of all, the
limited scope of this master’s thesis does not allow me to discuss four of Evaristo’s novels.
Secondly, although Lara has only one narrator, and a woman at that, just as The Emperor’s
Babe and Blonde Roots, I have chosen to include Soul Tourists instead. The fact that the woman
protagonist Jessie has to share the narration with her companion Stanley makes it, in my
opinion, interesting to see what happens to the novel’s narrative when both a woman and a man
claim focus. Thirdly, I chose to include either The Emperor’s Babe or Lara, since the two novels
are quite similar. Both are novels-in-verse with a black women protagonist. The Emperor’s
Babe, however, is less auto-biographical than Lara, which fictionalises Evaristo’s own family
history, and deals with another time period, namely Roman Britain, while Lara largely features
contemporary Britain, just as Soul Tourists does.
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Methodology
In the first chapter, called ‘Feminism, Gender and Intersectionality’, I will bring together the
existing ideas on feminism, gender and intersectionality, and oppression and privilege. By
means of a literature study I will put together a framework which will prove to be helpful in the
later chapters. For this literature study, I refer to well-known feminist scholars such as Karen
Offen, Joan Scott, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tracey Ore and others. I will focus on what exactly
feminism means, how gender relates to it and why a feminist perspective ideally holds
intersectionality into account as well. In the last part of this chapter, I will also look at the
meaning of a feminist novel. In order to discuss whether or not Evaristo’s early novels can be
considered feminist novels it is essential to have an idea of what feminism exactly is and what
a feminist novel is supposed to look like.
The second chapter, ‘The Early Novels of Bernardine Evaristo’, entails a text-oriented
literary analysis of the three women protagonists in Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, Soul
Tourists and Blonde Roots. I discuss three main aspects of the novels in order to investigate
whether or not Evaristo takes a feminist stand in the representation of her female main
characters. Firstly, I will look at power relations and more aptly put, power imbalances, since
such imbalances are often gendered. Secondly, I will focus on the construction of femininity as
it is represented in the novels. In particular, I will look at the characters’ experience of sexuality
and motherhood and the way beauty standards are constructed in Evaristo’s work. Lastly, I
discuss women’s empowerment in the novels, which means that I will look at the ways women
find the power to deal with the limitations that are often imposed upon them.
The last chapter, then, analyses whether we can call Evaristo’s early work feminist novels
or not, based on the framework of chapter one and the findings of chapter two. Further I will
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shortly look at the narrative situation and the titles of the novels and take these aspects into
account as well in my assessment of The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots.
Ultimately, I will conclude this master’s thesis with an answer on my research question: are
Bernardine Evaristo’s early novels feminist novels or not?
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1. Feminism, Gender and Intersectionality
In order to discuss Bernardine Evaristo’s novels from a feminist and gender perspective, I
will first focus on what exactly feminism and gender refer to. I will look at definitions of
feminism and gender, then focus on intersectionality and other aspects of identity that are often
related to gender and gender oppression. Finally, in the last part of this chapter, I will look at
the expectations of a feminist novel, which will further allow me to discuss Bernardine
Evaristo’s novels from a feminist perspective in the next chapter of this paper.
1.1.
Feminism and Gender
In its most basic definition, feminism refers to “the doctrine of equal rights for women, based
on the theory of the equality of the sexes” (Kent in Smith 2004: 275). Simply put, it means that
men and women should all be treated equally. However, Karen Offen has pointed out that
feminism is more than a system of ideas; it is also a “movement for socio-political change based
on a refusal of male privilege and women’s subordination in any given society” (Offen 2000:
20). It also encompasses a certain engagement and willingness to actually strive for the equal
treatment of both men and women. Since equal rights for women have always been feminism’s
main goal, it follows that this movement has mainly focused on the study of masculine power
and the way women are subordinated. In one of its earliest forms, for example, feminism strived
for women’s right to vote. Further, the women’s movement also fought for property rights,
marriage laws, reproductive rights and so on.
In its fight for equal rights and opportunities for men and women, feminism has encountered
many challenges. Susan Kent has remarked that while the concept of feminism seems very
simple, it is at the same immensely complex. It is the fight for equality, however,
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difficulties [also] immediately arise about the nature, content, context and constituency of
the term. Equal rights to what? For all women? Who is considered a woman in the context
of feminist demands? What does equality of the sexes mean? And who decides on these
issues? (Kent in Smith 2004: 275)
Kent refers to an important debate within the women’s movement. Women deserve equal
treatment, but do they so because they are similar to men, thus deserving of equal rights, or do
they rather because they are different from men and “therefore have special needs that deserve
recognition and response?” (Kent in Smith 2004: 275). Several academics have concluded that
feminism actually encompasses both equality and difference. As Joan Scott remarks, “equality
requires the recognition and inclusion of differences” (Scott 1988: 1). If there were no
differences at all, the struggle for equality would be redundant as everyone would be the same
and equality would be implied. It is because differences exist and are recognised that we should
make sure equal treatment is guaranteed.
Another challenge for feminism through the years has been inclusion. For a long time,
Western feminism assumed a certain commonness between women. The idea of a ‘sisterhood’
in which women shared common needs, common wants and, most importantly, a common
oppression was a widespread one. This idea resulted in a rather essentialist notion of women
and femininity. However, many women, especially women of colour, have remarked that
“differences in race, class, nationality, culture, religion, etc. must undermine any such notions
of an essential femininity or womanliness upon which feminism might rest” (Kent in Smith
2004: 276). If not, many women will not feel or be represented by feminism. If feminism strives
for the equal treatment of all, it should try to be as inclusive as possible and step away from any
essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman.
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Alongside the women’s movement fighting for equal rights, academics worked towards a
new discipline, Women’s Studies, in which the inequality between the sexes and the study of
masculine power were at the centre of analysis. Feminist work and Women’s Studies aimed to
“alter fundamentally the nature of all knowledge by shifting the focus from androcentricity to
a frame of reference in which women’s different and differing ideas, experiences, needs and
interests are valid in their own right” (Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 17). Over time, then, a
new discipline gained more attention: Gender Studies. In some instances, it was said that the
development of Gender Studies was “a deliberate attempt to dilute feminist Women’s Studies
by forcing the focus off women and back onto men and changing the paradigm from one of
feminist critique to gender difference” (Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 19). However, while
Gender Studies can thus be seen as a danger to feminist work, it can also be considered an “ally
of those seeking to examine gender relations from a progressive and critical standpoint”
(Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 19). Frequently inspired by feminist thought, Gender Studies
focuses, then, on “gender identity and the representation of gender as the central foci for
analysis across a wide range of academic disciplines” (Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 20).
What does gender mean, then? Gender is often used to make a basic distinction between
biological sex and the social expression of biological differences. It is often defined as the
“socially determined difference based upon the biological differences between the sexes”
(Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 5). Further, Joan Scott has defined gender as being made up
out of two components: it is on the one hand a constitutive element of social relationships,
“based on perceived differences between the sexes,” (Scott 1986: 5) on the other hand it is a
primary way of signifying relationships of power. Gender is more than only the expression of
socially defined roles that are expected of men and women. These gender constructs are actually
transformed into a gender system “in which men and masculinity are at the top of the hierarchy
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and women and femininity are at the bottom” (Ore 2009: 12). Judith Lorber remarks that gender
is also a social institution; it is a process of “creating distinguishable social statuses for the
assignment of rights and responsibilities” (Lorber in Ore 2009: 113). It is one of the major ways
in which humans organise their lives, as will become clear in the analysis of Evaristo’s novels
from a feminist and gender perspective in the remainder of this thesis.
It is thus a stratification system, in which men are ranked above women. As Lorber put it:
“in a gender-stratified society, what men do is usually valued more highly than what women
do, even when their activities are very similar or the same” (Lorber in Ore 2009: 115). Feminism
has worked hard to achieve gender equality and while a lot of progress has been made, it would
be wrong to say that it has completely achieved that goal. Today still, although the extent of the
inequality varies between different societies, “where there is inequality, the status ‘woman’
(and its attendant behavior and role allocations) is usually held in lesser esteem than the status
‘man’” (Lorber in Ore 2009: 115). Gender inequality, then, implies the devaluation of “women”
and the social domination of “men”. (Lorber in Ore 2009: 116) However, by constantly focusing
on either men or women, we ignore another important part of gender. The term gender considers
both masculinities and femininities and most importantly, “the range of ways in which these
can be expressed” (Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 4). It can be seen as a continuum, with
people all at differences places along it. Further, masculinity should not only be associated with
men and likewise, femininity is not exclusively reserved for women. It has been a challenge to
move beyond the gender binary, which has, for example, resulted in people defining themselves
“as gender-benders, gender-blenders, bigenders or simply describe[ing] their identity more
loosely using the umbrella concept of transgender” (Wickman in Letherby and Marchbank
2014: 6).
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As I will discuss later on, the characters in Evaristo’s novels are all defined by their gender.
However, gender should not be seen apart from other signifiers of social difference and their
interrelationship. (Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 4) Gender is one of the major ways in which
people organize their lives, but it is important not to consider it as the only way in which people
do so. Other signifiers of social difference, such as race, social class or sexuality, among others,
might influence one’s gender position. Women from minority groups, for example, could
experience different forms of discrimination and oppression based on their race, class, sexuality
and so on. In this regard, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined a theory called intersectionality.
Intersectionality is a theoretical model that pays attention to the ‘intersections’ of individual
positions. It emphasises the necessity of recognizing the many strands that make up identity.
(Crenshaw 1991) Sarah Earle and Gayle Letherby also note that gender is “cross-cut by other
aspects of self-identity such as class, ethnicity and age” (Earle and Letherby 2003: 4).
Intersectional theory has achieved great significance in contemporary feminism and gender
studies. It is difficult to look at gender without paying attention to interrelationships between
other systems such as ethnicity or sexuality. In this thesis, then, I will mainly look at feminism
and gender, but where necessary I will include other aspects, as they also shape people’s
identity. As Tracy Ore remarks, what are often discussed as “distinct categories of difference
and systems of inequality […] are systems of oppression that interconnect in an overarching
structure of domination” (Ore 2009: 15). In the second part of this chapter, I will look at a
couple of such aspects, such as race and sexuality, and how they can also be oppressing.
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1.2.
Intersectionality: Other Aspects of Identity
Firstly, two important aspects, especially considering Bernardine Evaristo’s novels which I
will look at later, are race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are often discussed together as they
are usually first and foremost discerned on the basis of one’s skin colour. In the definition of
Tracy Ore,
race denotes a group of people who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as
possessing distinctive hereditary traits. Ethnicity denotes a group of people who perceive
themselves and are perceived by others as sharing cultural traits such as language, religion,
family customs, and food preferences. (Ore 2009: 9, original emphases)
Further, she notes, “racial and ethnic categories are significant in that they are constructed
in a hierarchy from ‘superior’ to ‘inferior’” (Ore 2009: 9). Usually based on skin colour and
physical traits, it is thought that there exist different ‘races’ with their own distinctive traits.
Over the years, then, many attempts have been made to discern the scientific meaning of ‘race’.
It has often been attempted to establish a biological basis of race, but today, sciences have come
largely to reject biological notions of race, this in favour of an approach which sees race as a
social concept. (Omi and Winant in Ore 2009: 21) It is the human race, and any subcategory is
mostly a social construction. Because of this, the term ‘race’ is often put between quotation
marks. Ethnicity, however, manifests itself in different ethnic groups, which are often
discernible groups with their own cultural characteristics.
Race and ethnicity are two of the most important aspects to define others. As we have seen
above, gender can be an important construction to categorise people. Race and ethnicity are so
as well. Michael Omi and Howard Winant point out that “we utilize race to provide clues about
who a person is.” Moreover, “without a racial identity, one is in danger of having no identity”
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(Omi and Winant in Ore 2009: 22). People use race and ethnicity to categorise and comprehend
the world, and more importantly, act in the world. Omi and Winant further remark that “skin
color ‘differences’ are thought to explain perceived differences in intellectual, physical, and
artistic temperaments, and to justify distinct treatment of racially identified individuals and
groups” (Omi and Winant in Ore 2009: 23, emphasis added). Race and ethnicity are then also
seen as a hierarchy; to be white is considered to be the norm. Tracy Ore concludes, “in our
efforts to define others we not only attempt to construct distinct racial categories, but we also
create white as an ‘unmarked’ category and as a standard against which all others are judged”
(Ore 2009: 10).
A second important category is social class. In the same way as gender and race or ethnicity,
social class is another construction which denotes a hierarchy. How much income and wealth
someone possesses determines for a large part a person’s place in society. More than that, “what
class we belong to is determined not just by how much money we have or the material
possessions we own but also by the institutions of our society, including state policies and the
structuring of the economy” (Ore 2009: 10). It is a process of social exclusion, through
institutions, but also in interpersonal contexts. Just as people do with gender and race or
ethnicity, we attach meanings to categories such as rich, poor, middle-, high- or low-class, and
so forth. (Ore 2009: 11)
Thirdly, again in the same manner as the previous aspects, sexuality can also be seen as a
construction through which people organise the world. Further, sexuality is closely linked with
gender; sexual orientation or preference is often solely based on the gender of one’s partner of
choice. (Bornstein in Ore 2009: 208) It can be defined as involving “attraction on a physical,
emotional, and social level as well as fantasies, sexual behaviors, and self-identity” (Ore 2009:
13). Although sexuality exists in many categories, just as gender not only exists as either being
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a man or a woman, people often only recognise two categories: gay and straight. On top of that,
heterosexuality is usually considered to be the norm, which again indicates a hierarchy. Further,
other categories such as age or ability can also be part of what shapes identities, but are of less
importance for this paper. The identities of Evaristo’s protagonists are mainly determined by
three important aspects: gender, race and social class. Sexuality will be discussed in the light
of gender oppression, but issues such as ageism and ableism are less featured in the three novels
I will analyse.
1.3.
Oppression and Privilege
In this part of the chapter, I turn to systems of oppression and the privilege that plays an
important role in those systems. The categories briefly discussed above, gender, race, class or
sexuality, are all complex aspects of a person’s identity. However, they are often seen as a
binary: man or woman, white or non-white, rich or poor, and straight or gay. They are all
socially defined within rigid and limiting constructs. (Ore 2009: 13) Further, the social
construction of differences that we have discussed in this chapter often leads to discrimination
and oppression. Tracy Ore points out that “it is not the differences that are the causes of
inequality in our culture. Rather, it is the meanings and values applied to these differences that
makes them harmful” (Ore 2009: 1). Gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality, among others, all
denote a hierarchy in which the dominant group often benefits “from the systematic abuse,
exploitation, and injustice directed at a subordinate group” (Ore 2009: 15, original emphasis).
In this regard, Patricia Hill Collins speaks of a “matrix of domination,” which would enable
people to not only see the differences and similarities between various systems of oppression,
but also see the commonalities in the sources of inequality and help them focus on how those
systems interconnect. It would provide a clearer perspective on how to address inequalities and
avoid additive analyses of systems of oppression. An additive analysis is, for example, to see a
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black woman as doubly oppressed as a white woman. These kind of analyses are considered
problematic since they suggest that oppression can be quantified, which results in debates on
who is more oppressed and which form of oppression is the worst. This only places people
further in competition with one another. (Ore 2009: 16) Tracy Ore concludes that “the matrix
of oppression permits us to understand how we all experience both oppression and privilege”
(Ore 2009: 16).
It is relatively easy to “[assess] our own victimization within some major system of
oppression […] [but people] typically fail to see how [their] own thoughts and actions uphold
someone else’s subordination” (Collins in Ore 2009: 720) as well. White feminists, for example,
have received a lot of criticism for routinely addressing their oppression as women, but resisting
to see how their white skin also offers them privileges. (Collins in Ore 2009: 720) However, to
recognise privilege is important when looking at inequality and oppression. When I turn to the
discussion of Evaristo’s novels, we will see that while her characters often face oppression in
terms of their gender or race, they might also be privileged in other ways, which might
complicate their experience of oppression and privilege. Inequality, discrimination and
oppression are based on the privileging of certain characteristics: “the characteristics of the
privileged group define the societal norm” and “those who stand outside are the aberrant or
‘alternative’” (Wildman and Davis in Ore 2009: 618). As a consequence, the societal norm
benefits the privileged group, whose group members can often rely on their privilege. When we
then consider the aspects that have been discussed above, “white privilege derives from the race
power system of white supremacy. Male privilege and heterosexual privilege result from the
gender hierarchy. Class privilege derives from an economic, wealth-based hierarchy”
(Wildman and Davis in Ore 2009: 618).
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Patricia Hill Collins points out, then, that we all have “both/and” identities and that we are
thus all able to benefit from privilege and suffer from discrimination or oppression. She remarks
that, “each of us lives within a system that vests us with varying levels of power and privilege”
(Collins in Ore 2009: 728). These differences in power frame our relationships; they often make
it difficult to build coalitions that are essential for social change. However, Collins remarks that
by seeing various systems of oppression as a matrix and “by taking a theoretical stance that we
have all been affected by race, class and gender as categories of analysis that have structured
our treatment, we open up possibilities for using those same constructs as categories of
connection in building empathy” (Collins in Ore 2009: 732). Further, she concludes that
men who declare themselves feminists, members of the middle class who ally themselves
with anti-poverty struggles, heterosexuals who support gays and lesbians, are all trying to
grow, and their efforts place them far ahead of the majority who never think of engaging in
such important struggles. (Collins in Ore 2009: 732)
Thus, by considering the various systems of oppression, such as gender, race or class, as a
matrix, similarities and differences are exposed, which makes it possible for people to move
beyond these categories and build coalitions that can lead to social change.
1.4.
A feminist novel?
Before we can take a closer look at Evaristo’s novels, we first need to ‘determine’ what
exactly is considered to be a feminist novel. What are the ‘expectations’ of a feminist novel?
Both the words ‘determine’ and ‘expectations’ are put between quotation marks because there
is no clear-cut definition of what a feminist novel is supposed to be. There are, however, some
main characteristics. First of all, it is important to note that feminist literature is not the same
as literature by women. While feminist literature is often written by women, not all women
19
writers are feminists. Women also often write non-feminist literature and men can just as well
be feminist authors. A feminist novel is not determined by the gender of its author.
Over time, together with feminist literature, feminist literary criticism developed as well.
Feminist literary criticism addressed plenty of issues that were important for feminist literature
and were featured in feminist literature, such as the representation of women. Early women
authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf have written on the representation and
absence of women in literature, the difficult circumstances in which women were writing and
the oppression of women writers in literature. (Bekers 2016: 202-203) The French feminist
Hélène Cixous remarks that
woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which
they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies […]. When I say ‘woman’, I’m
speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man […]. Write, let no
one hold you back, let no one stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in
which publishing houses are the crafty obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by
an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. (Cixous, qtd. in Bekers
2016: 208, emphasis added)
Feminist literary criticism is also characterised by explorations of women’s writing and
feminist issues, which we often see in feminist novels as well. In “Theses on the Feminist
Novel” Roxane Gay puts forward some ideas on what a feminist novel ideally looks like: “it is
a novel where the concerns of women and womanhood are the alpha and the omega of the
narrative” and it is “also a novel that illuminates some aspect of the female condition and/or
offers some kind of imperative for change” (Gay 2014: 45, 46). Furthermore, she notes that “a
feminist novel explores what it means to not only be a woman, but to be a woman from a certain
time and place. It explores the question of identity – the stories of who we are” (Gay 2014: 46,
original emphasis).
20
A feminist novel is thus a novel that concerns itself with the lives of women. However, not
all novels that do so are feminist novels. Feminist literature usually also engages with ideas that
attempt to change gender norms, or at least expose them. In the same vein as Roxane Gay,
Laura Thompson notes that feminist literature “tends to examine, question, and argue for
change against established and antiquated gender roles […]. [It] strives to alter inequalities
between genders across societal and political arenas” (Thompson, n.d.: web). The feminist
issues that feminist literature concerns itself with thus span quite a broad range. The fight for
equal rights in the workplace or reproductive rights can be considered to be feminist issues, just
as well as, for instance, the representation of women. In that regard, the subverting of
stereotypical representations and gender roles can be seen as a feminist effort for change. In the
next chapter of this paper, I will focus on three main aspects to discuss Evaristo’s novels from
a feminist perspective: power relations, the construction of femininity and empowerment of
women. These aspects, especially power relations and the construction of femininity, are
typically defined by a gender hierarchy and gender roles, which makes it interesting to see how
Evaristo represents these aspects in her novels, and whether or not she takes a feminist stand.
Lastly, as we have seen earlier, intersectionality plays an important role in feminism. Ideally,
this is reflected in a feminist novel as well. As Roxane Gay points out, such novels should deal
with women from a certain time and place. Not all women’s experiences are the same and
gender is not the only signifier of identity or social difference. Other aspects that characterise
and define women’s identities should, thus, also be held into account when writing about
women from a feminist perspective.
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2. The Early Novels of Bernardine Evaristo
2.1.
Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo is a novelist and author of numerous other works that span the genres
of fiction, poetry, verse fiction, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and radio and theatre
drama. (Bernardine Evaristo Bio: web) She was born in London, in 1959, to an English mother
and a Nigerian father. She first completed the Community Theatre Arts degree at Rose Bunford
College of Speech and Drama in London, then earned a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths,
University of London. (Bekers 2013: web) For this thesis, I have chosen to focus on three of
her novels: The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots. The Emperor’s Babe,
Evaristo’s second full-length novel, tells the story of a young black girl, Zuleika, living in
Roman Londinium, who, at the age of eleven, is married off to an older Roman senator, Felix.
Evaristo’s third novel Soul Tourists explores the history of Black Europe through its two
protagonists, Stanley and Jessie, who go on a journey through Europe and eventually end up in
the Middle East. Lastly, Evaristo’s fourth novel, Blonde Roots, reverses the roles of slavery and
introduces the reader to Doris, a young English girl who is kidnapped one day and shipped off
to the New World, where white people are enslaved and where black people are the slaveowners. In a way, these three novels form a unity, and are characterized by a sense of continuity:
Evaristo traces the story of a black girl in Roman Londinium, and consequently the history of
black Britons, in The Emperor’s Babe and later opens up the narrative to include the history of
continental Europe in Soul Tourists. Eventually, Evaristo completes the “examination of Black
History […] beyond the borders of a nation (Britain) and a continent (Europe)” (CuderDominguez 2011: 72) in Blonde Roots, which encompasses an even larger part of the world.
22
Further, the three novels considered in this paper show a certain development in Evaristo’s
writing. Over the years, Evaristo has claimed that what she loved about writing was “embedded
in poetry such as linguistic inventiveness, imagistic freedom and the craft of concision and
capturing the essence of something as well as paying attention to rhythm and sound” (Evaristo
2008a: 1199). Her prose, however, she found “plain, flat, almost devoid of imagery and
rambling” (Evaristo 2008a: 1199). The earliest novel I discuss, The Emperor’s Babe, is a novelin-verse; the novel is written almost completely in couplets. Soul Tourists, then, can be called
a novel-with-verse. Evaristo makes use of prose, but also shifts to verse from time to time. It is
a novel that “juxtaposes prose, poetry, script-like forms and, as it happens, other non-literary
forms such as relationship described through a budget” (Evaristo 2008a: 1199). Eventually,
Evaristo wrote a prose novel with Blonde Roots: “after some 14 years of trying to write a prose
novel, [she] finally did it, and felt that [she] didn’t compromise [her] natural poetic voice in the
process” (Evaristo 2008a: 1199-1200). In this way, the three novels I chose for this thesis show
a development in terms of form in Evaristo’s writing as well.
To discuss The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots from a feminist perspective,
I have chosen three main aspects to focus on: power relations, the construction of femininity
and the way women find empowerment. When it comes to power relations, I will look at
marriage, among others. The construction of femininity, then, includes motherhood, sexuality
and the idea of beauty. Finally, I will look at empowerment and how power relations and the
construction of femininity influence the way women find empowerment.
23
2.2.
Power in Evaristo’s Novels
Power can be understood in two main ways: it can be considered as “the ability to attain an
end or a series of ends (power-to)” (Koester 2015: 1), or it can be seen as “getting someone else
to do what you want them to do (power-over)” (Koester 2015: 1). Further, in its most simple
definition, power refers to “the ability or right to control people or things”; it is the “possession
of control, authority, or influence over other” (Merriam Webster). Power can be visible, directly
observable through formal institutions and official decision-making, but it can also be more
hidden, for example in the ways “in which some powerful actors shape [such] formal processes
by controlling who participates in decision-making” (Koester 2015: 2). There is also a third,
even less visible way, in which power operates: “by shaping people’s sense of themselves and
their world, thus keeping issues not only off the agenda but off people’s minds” (Koester 2015:
2).
Earlier in this thesis, we have seen the link between feminism and gender. Further, we have
seen Joan Scott’s definition of gender. She remarks that gender is not only a constitutive
element of social relationships, but that it is also a primary way of signifying relationships of
power. (Scott 1986: 5) Gender actually shapes power relations at all levels of society. Diana
Koester points out that “the set of roles, behaviours and attitudes that societies define as
appropriate for men and women may well be the most persistent cause, consequence and
mechanism of power relations from the intimate sphere of the household to the highest levels
of political decision-making” (Koester 2015: 2). As noted in the previous chapter, gender is a
stratification system, in which men are ranked above women. Consequently, there are large
inequalities between men and women in the distribution of both power-to and power-over. The
domination of women by men can be considered as “perhaps the most pervasive,
institutionalized and detrimental power-over relationship in our world” (Kroeger 2015: 3).
24
Since gender is a stratification system, gender roles are power relations. Gender roles are
defined by power dynamics:
in many contexts, what it means to be a woman is to be powerless; it is considered ‘feminine’
to be quiet, accommodating, and obedient. By contrast it is considered ‘manly’ to exercise
power-over, that is, to get others to do what you want them to do. […] Power/powerlessness
is the sex difference. (Koester 2015: 3)
One of the institutions in which power, especially between men and women, can be
discerned is marriage, which is illustrated clearly in The Emperor’s Babe and is featured to a
lesser extent in Soul Tourists, in which the female protagonist Jessie has been married multiple
times. Marriage is a legal contract and social institution and thus exerts a lot of power in society.
Further, it is often considered to be enforced and oppressive. (Whitson 2004: 152) Scholars
have argued that marriage “normalises and mandates heterosexuality, restricts women to the
domestic sphere, and, generally, underpins male dominance” (Whitson 2004: 152). Men are
committed to their productive work outside the house, while women are associated with the
domestic sphere of work: household and family-related tasks. Not only are those domestic tasks
often devalued, men are also able “to access the public arenas that grant power, while women
have been limited to interaction on the home front” (Whitson 2004: 78). Marriage is said to
reinforce these patterns, further underprivileging domestic labour and the position of women.
However, gender is not the only factor that constitutes power relations. As mentioned in the
previous chapter, intersectionality plays a key role in the study of oppression and privilege.
While gender is an important aspect of power relations, it also exists in interaction with other
hierarchical power relations. (Koester 2015: 4) In the novels, as well, the characters are not
automatically powerful or powerless because of their gender, other factors such as ethnicity and
class can either offer them privileges or rather underprivilege them even more.
25
Evaristo’s three main female protagonists, Zuleika, Jessie and Doris, all live in societies
where men seem to have the upper hand. The Emperor’s Babe’s Zuleika, a young black girl
living in Roman Londinium, is married off to a rich Roman senator, Felix, at the age of eleven.
Felix seeks a subservient wife, who is conscious of her inferior position and will not disobey
him:
I have been looking for a nice,
simplex, quiet, fidelis girl, a girl
who will not betray me with affairs,
who will not wear me out with horrid fights (Evaristo 2001: 16)
Zuleika’s father, glad with the prospect of his daughter marrying a rich senator, reassures
Felix: “Si, Mr Felix. Zuleika very obediens girl, sir. / No problemata, she make very optima
wife, sir” (Evaristo 2001: 14). Even before Felix notices Zuleika at the baths one day, it is clear
that she was “meant for marriage and domesticity” (Cuder-Dominguez 2011: 63). The gender
hierarchy quickly becomes clear when her brother Catullus is born and Zuleika immediately
realises that, even though she is older, Catullus will be more powerful:
Darling Catullus came three years later,
a miracle on account of his sperm bag.
I hadn’t been left to die outside the city walls
exactly, but, aged three, I knew who
would inherit the key to the kingdom of Pops. (Evaristo 2001: 20, emphasis added)
Catullus thus occupies a higher place in society, simply because he is a boy, and actually
experiences privileges that Zuleika does not have, such as a proper education. With the prospect
of marriage and domesticity, she gets “the sewing kit and tweezers”, while her brother gets “the
abacus and wax” (Evaristo 2001: 10). He receives the best education possible and is accepted
26
at prestigious schools, even though he “can barely string a sentence / together for all his
educatio” (Evaristo 2001: 82). Furthermore, Pilar Cuder-Dominguez points out that, even more
painfully for Zuleika, Catullus’s rise has been bought by her own body, “for it was her marriage
into the prestigious and wealthy senatorial class that made it possible” (Cuder-Dominguez
2011: 63). At a young age, the gender hierarchy provides thus a first limitation set upon Zuleika.
However, the power relations that come with gender really start to constrict her when she
marries Felix at only eleven years old. Especially after her wedding, “Zuleika lives in a world
where she is dispossessed of most of her agency” (Gunning 2005: 167). When she marries
Felix, she feels that everything changes. She is no longer allowed to go out alone and she
describes herself as a girl with, “around her neck, a metal collar” (Evaristo 2001: 28). Further,
Felix’s discourse on how a senator’s wife should be and how she should behave stifles Zuleika’s
own identity and freedom: “Felix’s refrain haunted me still […] silence is a woman’s best
adornment” (Evaristo 2001: 142-143). She is, as Cuder-Dominguez remarks out, mainly a
sexual object for Felix and a luxury ornament for him to show off and increase his social status.
(Cuder-Dominguez 2011: 63) For her parents as well, she is rather “a valuable commodity to
trade toward their rise from penniless migrants to well-off, well-connected middle-class
citizens.” (Cuder-Dominguez 2011: 63).
Zuleika is imprisoned in her marriage, and for a long time, she does not know what to do
about it. With her marriage, she leaves “behind the freedom of a working-class childhood for
the constricting walls of a whitewashed, upper-class villa on Cheapside” (Cuder-Dominguez
2004: 180). Felix is often away, and even starts a family with another woman, but keeps
exerting his control over Zuleika through their servant Tranio, who is supposed to control her
every move. She knows herself that she is not “exactly an example of happily married bliss”
(Evaristo 2001: 97) and neither do her friends think highly of her marriage. When Zuleika and
27
her friend Alba discuss Alba’s own marriage, Alba is clear in her opinion: “No one imprisons
me. I’m not you” (Evaristo 2001: 102, emphasis added).
However, Zuleika’s marriage to Felix does not only limit her. While the gender hierarchy
and the power relations that come with it do limit her, her marriage to Felix also offers her a
couple of new privileges. Class, for example, plays an ambiguous role in Zuleika’s privileges
and the power she has. On the one hand, as mentioned above, her change in social status limits
her. Was she once free to roam the streets, she is now confined to Felix’s prestigious villa.
Furthermore, her relationship with Felix forces her to deal with the contempt of the high-born
senatorial class, such as Felix’s sister, Antistia. As a daughter of migrants, Zuleika remains less
powerful:
‘You will never be one of us.’
At fourteen I was no longer a novelty.
[…]
‘A real Roman is born and bred,
I don’t care what anyone says, […] (Evaristo 2001: 53)
On the other hand, Zuleika’s marriage to Felix also allows her to climb the social ladder,
which benefits her in new ways:
The white stucco villas of Cheapside
are usually out of bounds to scallywags
like me and Alba. Guards shoo us away.
(She has not been invited.) Today
they bow as if I were the emperor’s wife, [emphasis added]
when my horse-drawn carriage, if you please, [original emphasis]
arrives at a villa with its very own latrina. (Evaristo 2001: 27)
28
Furthermore, when she moves into Felix’s villa, she gains two slaves of her own, Valeria
and Aemilia. She also has other servants, such as a cook or a masseuse, Cornelia. Zuleika, thus,
gains power over others, but is herself still dependent of Felix: “my bath is ready, Cornelia my
masseuse / awaits me […] If I am good to Felix, she comes every day, / if not, I do without
[…]” (Evaristo 2001: 73, emphasis added). Moreover, the power that she gains, further
complicates the way she feels about her position as Felix’s wife. She calls Tranio, Valeria and
Aemilia her slaves, but then has to ask herself the question whether she is “a slave or a slaveowner” (Evaristo 2001: 201). She is herself enslaved as Felix’s wife, and can understand the
young Scottish slaves Valeria and Aemilia’s suffering. However, she “does not give rein to the
feeling of guilt and pity” (Toplu 2011: 25) when they tell her about their losses: “But how could
I put balm on their wounds / when my own were still so raw? / Suffering? Join the club, girls”
(Evaristo 2001: 59). Zuleika cannot deny that she has a certain kind of power as well, as she is
the wife of a rich senator, but has trouble with her own position and oppression.
Eventually, although Zuleika finds a couple of ways to take her life in her own hands, which
I will discuss in a later part of this thesis, in the end, Felix’s control over her remains strong.
She is poisoned on his command when he finds out about her affair with the emperor Severus:
‘I, Felix Aurelius Lucius, created a lady
out of a sewer rat and your thanks?
I am the laughing stock of this town.
I trusted you and I have been utterly humiliated.’ [original emphasis]
I was banished to my cubiculum
and locked in. [emphasis added] (Evaristo 2001: 241)
29
As we will see later, Zuleika shows resilience and potential to live her own life, but in the
end, as Cuder-Dominguez remarks, “tyranny remains strong and unchallenged” (CuderDominguez 2011: 65) as Felix exerts this final act of power and control over her.
While in The Emperor’s Babe it is Felix who needs a wife and picks out Zuleika (“my fate
was sealed / by a man thrice my age and thrice my girth, / all at sweet eleven […]” (Evaristo
2001: 4).) we see a different situation in Soul Tourists. The two protagonists, Stanley and Jessie,
meet at the bar where Jessie works. Jessie is older than Stanley and immediately gives the
impression that she has more experience:
I’m forty-five, but look thirty. Not vanity but fact, Stanley, dear. Wish I was twenty, if I
knew then what I know now, etc. Have the emotional age of a three-year-old, or so every
man I’ve ever married felt obliged to inform me. I’ve got the life experience of an
octogenarian and a veiled woman going by the name of Salomé at the funfair at Roundhay
Park. (Evaristo 2005: 28).
She is used to try to make it in a world that shuts her down “on account of [her] colour or
gender or the size of [her] protuberances or usually all three” (Evaristo 2005: 33). She grew up
in a children’s home, became a mother at a young age, and got married a couple of times, often
not being treated as an equal. (Evaristo 2005: 31) Life has hardened her a little, it seems, but
Jessie is adamant that she does not need any pity: “I don’t dwell on the past, me” (Evaristo
2005: 36). Further, the gender hierarchy that in The Emperor’s Babe clearly underprivileges
Zuleika is much less straightforward in Soul Tourists. Zuleika is evidently controlled by Felix,
who holds all the power, while it is less clear whether there is a significant power imbalance
between Stanley and Jessie. After their first meeting, Jessie seems to take the lead, leaving
Stanley to trail behind her: “Whenever Stanley tried to lead, Jessie speeded up so that he was
always half a step behind. He didn’t mind” (Evaristo 2005: 33). She asks him to go on an
adventure with her, even though they have just met, and tells him she is his fairy godmother.
30
Stanley himself remarks that he “had never before met a woman so utterly determined to be
herself” (Evaristo 2005: 44). Stanley struggles with his identity, especially since his father died.
As Petra Tournay-Theodotou points out, on the one hand Stanley is English and “rejects his
father’s sentimental longing for the ‘imaginary homeland’” (Tournay-Theodotou 2011: 113).
On the other hand, he questions his position as a black Briton, fears racism, and is of the opinion
that he does not “have any real roots here” (Evaristo 2005: 51). Jessie, on the contrary, feels a
greater sense of belonging. She identifies completely with England:
[…] the only culture I knew
wrapped greasy chips in dirty old newspaper
with battered fish and squashed peas,
[…]
Look, I may have a cantankerous obeah woman
buried not so deeply in my genetic code,
but I’m a Yorkshire woman, and reet proud of it. (Evaristo 2005: 197-198).
Jessie is thus represented as an assertive and independent woman, confident in her roots and
experienced enough to know her way around the world. The novel, then, focuses rather on
Stanley and his process of rethinking “his identity and status within British society and culture.”
(Tournay-Theodotou 2011: 112). As Cuder-Dominguez words it, Jessie is “in fact little more
than an assistant in Stanley’s journey in search for his self-knowledge” (Cuder-Dominguez
2011: 66-67). However, for all that Jessie is in fact independent, she becomes increasingly
dependent on Stanley as their journey continues. After having grown up without parents, three
unsuccessful marriages and her son leaving her behind as well, Jessie is all alone. She wants to
go on a journey, preferably to Australia where she hopes to reconnect with her son, and finds
an ideal companion in Stanley. He quickly becomes her “one and only” (Evaristo 2005: 111)
31
and she has trouble letting him go. When he wants space she tells him that “[they]’re a knuckle
and joint; separate and [they]’ll dislocate” (Evaristo 2005: 139). She clings to him and worries
that he will never come back when he leaves for a moment, even if it is only to get some water.
When he eventually leaves, she is left behind trying to survive without him. Having not seen
his departure coming, she asks herself whether she was responsible for it and concludes that
she is “a rotten stinking guttersnipe” (Evaristo 2005: 161) and that no one sticks around her for
long anyway. Stanley and his departure once more reinforce her low self-esteem. When Stanley
returns, then, she readily continues their journey together, even though she has not exactly
forgiven him for leaving her. In the end, they separate again, Stanley telling her that “[they] are
a knuckle and joint, but [their] groove simply does not fit” (Evaristo 2005: 270, original
emphasis). Ingrid von Rosenberg remarks here that, in terms of gender and power dynamics,
“Stanley’s and Jessie’s modern world seems more balanced, but in the end it is Stanley whose
will is done: they separate” (Von Rosenberg 2010: 392) and Jessie is left devastated, once again
left alone and once again asking herself what she has done wrong.
Blonde Roots’ Doris, then, is another one of Evaristo’s characters who clearly suffers from
imbalanced power relations. More pronounced than in the other novels, Doris finds herself at
the intersection of two main axes of power: gender and race.1 Blonde Roots reverses the
transatlantic slave trade and tells the story of a world in which black people rule over white
people. More importantly, it is black men who hold all the power. Consequently, Doris, as a
white enslaved woman, suffers from oppression based on her gender and her skin colour. As a
young girl she lived in England, coming from “a long line of cabbage farmers” (Evaristo 2008:
7). Her family were serfs, bound to their land and their master, Lord Perceval Montague. She
Race also plays an role in The Emperor’s Babe and Soul Tourists, but to a lesser extent. Zuleika faces little
oppression in terms of race and when it comes to Soul Tourists, it is mostly Stanley who worries about race and
feels less privileged because of his skin colour.
1
32
lived in a small cottage with her parents and her three sisters, and while they were not exactly
free, they were not enslaved either:
we weren’t landowners, oh no, we were serfs, the bottom link in the agricultural food chain,
although no actual chains clinked on the ground when we walked around. Nor were we
property, exactly, but our roots went deep into the soil because when the land changed hands
through death, marriage or even war, so did we, and so tied we remained, for generation
upon generation. (Evaristo 2008: 8, emphasis added)
The world where Doris eventually ends up, the New World, was only a faraway rumour
when she was young: “to us peasants the New World was a distant land far across the seas about
which we knew nothing, except that no one wanted to go there, because those that did never
came back” (Evaristo 2008: 9). As a young girl, Doris knew that her father would have liked to
have a son, rather than only daughters. Typical gender roles also existed when she was young;
women were supposed to take care of the house and family, although they also had to work on
the fields. For example, Doris’s older sister Madge knew that the household was supposed to
be her future: “no one had to tell Madge she’d have to take over running the house if Mam
passed on. […] [She] spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ and being part of ‘God’s greater
plan’” (Evaristo 2008: 48-49). Women were to be wives and mothers so “[they] were taught
how to cook” (Evaristo 2008: 51) and how to sew clothes. Men were also more powerful than
women; when Madge talks back to their father, for instance, Doris remarks that “such talk from
a child to an adult was unheard of, as it was from a woman to a man” (Evaristo 2008: 48,
emphasis added). Still, Doris did not feel very disadvantaged because of her gender and had a
clear plan for the future. While she knew that it would not be easy for a girl from a serf family,
she was convinced that she would become a successful businesswoman:
33
I’d already decided on my career path. I was going to become one of those rare silk-trading
women, like that young Margaret Roper from the village at Duddingley who went off on the
back of a cart and came back in her own carriage. Like her I’d be apprenticed for seven
years, then I’d run my own business. […] The debt would take many years to pay off but
eventually I’d be rich enough to settle it myself. (Evaristo 2008: 13-14)
She had it all sorted out, but that changed when she was kidnapped and shipped off the New
World. As a ‘whyte’2, she suffers from all kinds of oppression, humiliation and cruelty by the
hands of her ‘blak’ oppressors. Katharine Burkitt remarks that “it is the enslavement of women
and the subject of femininity that are all pervasive motifs” (Burkitt 2012: 414) in Blonde Roots.
She continues that “the position of women in slavery is demonstrated to be precarious and
compromised” (Burkitt 2012: 414). The way that Doris and other women are oppressed as
female slaves is illustrated plenty of times. Upon arriving at New Ambossa3, Doris is inspected
at a slave-market: “he cupped my chest, slapped my bottom like it was a cow’s shank and
squeezed each thigh to test its musculature. Then he made me sit down and spread my legs so
that he could ‘inspect’ my vagina, pushing those meaty fingers of his inside my virginal self”
(Evaristo 2008: 93). Women are also often raped, for example on the slavers. Doris recounts
how women are eased off shelves by the sailors, most of them having lost the strength to resist,
and how she would hear “the rumblings of men helpless to protect their own” (Evaristo 2008:
86). They have to undergo severe abuse, receiving regular whippings so that “not an inch
remained of the silky-smooth skin of which [Doris] had once been so proud” (Evaristo 2008:
188).
2
In Blonde Roots, people with white skin colour are called ‘whytes’; people with dark-coloured skins are called
‘blaks’.
3
New Ambossa is a city in the New World where new slaves were brought.
34
The ‘whyte’ slaves completely lose control over their own lives and have to comply to the
orders of their ‘blak’ oppressors. If they refuse to do so, they are met with severe consequences.
After Doris’s failed attempt at escape, her master Bwana is clear: “I will beat you until you can
no longer beg for mercy. I will cut off one ear so that you will hear better with the other. I will
chop off one foot so you can no longer run. I have been a kind master to you. Now I will be a
stern one” (Evaristo 2008: 169). The black masters thus control every aspects of the slaves’
lives. Doris mentions how “slaves don’t end relationships. Other people do it for them”
(Evaristo 2008: 21). She gives birth to three children while enslaved, but is powerless and has
to watch as they are taken away from her and sold on. As Cuder-Dominguez remarks, even
beauty standards are greatly influenced by issues of power, feeding into Doris’s feelings of
inferiority and ugliness. (Cuder-Dominguez 2011: 70-71) In the next part of this chapter I will
focus on the construction of femininity, including motherhood and beauty, and will thus
elaborate on Doris as a mother and beauty standards in Blonde Roots.
Finally, one of the most pervasive ways in which the clear power imbalance between ‘blaks’
and ‘whytes’ is illustrated is through the renaming of white slaves. When she is first enslaved,
Doris is renamed and becomes Omorenomwara, which, ironically enough, means “this child
will not suffer” (Evaristo 2008: 37). All ‘whytes’ are renamed upon becoming slaves. For
example, one of Doris’s room-mates, Gertraude Shultz, becomes Yomisi; Doris’s love of her
life was once called Frank but got renamed as Ndumbo, and her sister Sharon gets the name
Iffianachukwana. This renaming by their black masters destroys personal identity, which is
clearly brought to life in the novel. As Judie Newman notes, the renaming of the characters
makes it difficult to remember that the slaves are white, or that Sitembile, another one of Doris’s
room-mates, was once taken hostage from a palace in Monaco. (Newman 2012: 287) The fact
that the slaves are all renamed illustrates the power that the ‘blaks’ have over the ‘whytes’,
35
going as far as to destroy the identity of the ‘whytes’. When Doris tries to escape with the help
of the Ambossan Resistance and is finally able to tell someone her real name, asking them to
call her Doris, she says it feels like “reclaiming [her] identity” (Evaristo 2008: 37).
It is thus clear that in all three novels, men dominate the social structure, as Ingrid Von
Rosenberg has pointed out. Evaristo’s female main characters are “all strong, resilient, sexy and
spirited, but not mistresses of their own fate” (Von Rosenberg 2010: 391). Zuleika is subjected
to the power and the will of the men in her life, Doris’s powerlessness is implied in her status
as a slave and even Jessie has to conform to Stanley’s will. However, that does not mean that
these three women resign themselves to the position that is given to them. Later on in this thesis,
I will show how these women try and find empowerment in the male-dominated society that
often oppresses them.
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2.3.
The Construction of Femininity in Evaristo’s Novels
Since gender refers to the socially determined difference between the sexes and the
expression of socially defined roles and expectations associated with men and women, it
follows that femininity is also a social construction defined by the gender hierarchy and gender
roles. Both femininity and masculinity are socially constructed concepts and can be seen as sets
of roles, behaviours and attitudes that are generally associated with either girls and women or
boys and men. For example, women are thought to be emotional, while men are rather
considered to be rational. Women are associated with passivity and tenderness, while men are
assigned with traits such as aggression and intelligence. (Millett 1970) Over time, the
characteristics of femininity can change, but women are usually associated with traits such as
gentleness, empathy, compassion, tolerance, sensitivity, nurturance, and so on. The ideal
woman encompasses these traits. Further, when it comes to sexuality, women are often thought
to be sexually passive and receptive. Men, in contrast, are considered sexually assertive and
able to express sexual desire. In terms of beauty, as well, certain ideals are clearly set upon
women.
However, different cultures often harbour different expectations about the ideal expression
of femininity. The question is, then, how is femininity constructed in Evaristo’s novels? What
is expected of women; what is the norm? The construction of femininity is thus normative; it
forces certain notions upon women that are thought to be the only right standards. In this part
of the chapter I will look at Zuleika, Jessie and Doris and whether they conform to these
expectations or not. In particular, I will focus on three aspects to explore the way femininity is
constructed in the novels of Bernardine Evaristo: motherhood, sexuality and beauty standards.
This analysis, then, will provide more evidence for whether or not Evaristo takes a feminist
stand in her novels. Ideally, a feminist novel steps away from these socially defined norms of
37
femininity, or at least exposes them. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, if feminism
strives for the equal treatment of all, it should try to be as inclusive as possible and step away
from any essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman.
2.3.1. Motherhood and Sexuality
Motherhood is a prominent aspect in Evaristo’s novels, as both Jessie and Doris are mothers
and Zuleika is unable to have children. The birth and upbringing of children are still largely
considered to be women’s responsibilities and motherhood is viewed as “the ultimate aim of
traditional femininity” (Whitson 2004: 169). However, Earle and Letherby remark that although
it is an expected primary role for women, it is only viewed positively “when achieved and
practised in the ‘right’ economic, social and sexual circumstances” (Earle and Letherby 2003:
4). They note that a hierarchy exist with “the heterosexual, white, middle-class married woman
being the most highly valued” (Earle and Letherby 2003: 4) while other mothers are often
stereotyped as inappropriate. Nicole Pietsch, as well, points out that dominant representations
of femininity, namely white representations, often stand in stark contrast to racist depictions
that consider coloured women as bad mothers, aggressive and sexually promiscuous. (Pietsch
2009: 137) Motherhood is also usually associated with the private sphere of the home and tasks
such as cleaning and cooking. It has to do with “all that goes with caring for others” (Earle and
Letherby 2003: 26).
Further, motherhood comes with highly idealized representations. There are ‘good’ mothers
and ‘bad’ mothers: the ‘good’ mother is usually seen as “self-sacrificing, selfless and probably
not seen as sexual” (Earle and Letherby 2003: 26). ‘Bad’ mothers, then, are everything ‘good’
mothers are not. Sexuality plays thus a role as well. ‘Good’ mothers are not to be associated
with sexuality. This furthers the idea that women are often denied their sexuality. As mentioned
earlier, they are thought to be passive and receptive, while men are allowed to be assertive and
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express desire. Then again, black women are often stereotyped as sexually promiscuous, and
therefore ‘bad’ mothers. Such binary representations, however, oversimplify the experience of
mother- and womanhood. As we will see in Evaristo’s novels, the distinction between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ mothers and women’s experience of sexuality are not always that clear-cut.
The three female main characters that I discuss in this thesis are all associated with
motherhood, although in different ways. Jessie and Doris both have children, while Zuleika is
unable to bring children into the world. When she marries Felix at the age of only eleven,
Zuleika is still a child and has little knowledge of what sex exactly entails. When she used to
go out with Alba, walking through dark alleys and peeping at people having sex, she was
“amazed at the adult need to strip off / and stick things in each other” (Evaristo 2001: 11). At
such a young age, sex with her husband is all but pleasant. Zuleika describes her wedding night
as her first night in “the Kingdom of the Dead” (Evaristo 2001: 29) and sex becomes “a symbol
of her oppressive relationship with [Felix]” (McLeod 2011: 174). She does not enjoy sex and
does it merely because she has to:
Yes, but sex has always been an ordeal
for me, Alba. I’m used to it now,
but I can’t say I really dig it.
I think I’ve got a libido, deep down.
[…]
You see, I discovered sex before desire. (Evaristo 2001: 98)
She also uses sex sometimes to get a favour out of Felix. For example, her masseuse Cornelia
comes every day if she is good to Felix since that “is the price of a blow job” (Evaristo 2001:
73). Further, sex is mainly a means for procreation, but when Felix realizes that Zuleika will
not bring him an heir sex becomes “tri-annual” (Evaristo 2001: 119). It becomes clear that
39
Zuleika cannot have children because, as she tells her friend Alba, Felix ruined her before she
was ready and “drew blood before eggs ripened” (Evaristo 2001: 67). Felix, then, takes a
mistress and starts a family with her. Throughout the novel, it is never very clear whether
Zuleika struggles with being childless or not. In one of their many conversations, Alba remarks
that Zuleika should not fret over not being able to have kids and that if she had the choice, she
would not have gotten her twins. Zuleika, however, does not convey much of a reaction. At any
rate, whether she wants them or not, it is still expected of her to bring children into the world.
Her father, for instance, keeps reminding her and asking her “when [she] go make bambino?”
(Evaristo 2001: 86). Later in the novel, then, after she has started her affair with the emperor
Severus, she asks him about Felix’s other family. Severus tells her that he has five boys to
which Zuleika reacts: “Now it was my turn to look away. / Why should I care?” (Evaristo 2001:
157). Severus comforts her following her telling reaction, yet it remains unclear whether she
reacts this way because she herself desires a child or because she feels that she should have
been the one to give Felix children.
In the same conversation in which Alba confesses that she had rather not have children, she
also encourages Zuleika to get a lover, asking her when she is going to go extramarital, since
apparently “the whole town is at it” (Evaristo 2001: 98). While Zuleika is hesitant at first, she
eventually meets Septimius Severus and starts an affair with him. Through Severus, then, she
discovers her own sexuality and her passive sexual experience, for which she cared little, turns
into a positive experience. As John McLeod remarks, sex actually becomes “a symbol of her
empowerment” (McLeod 2011: 174) once she starts a relationship with Severus. Did she once
say that she had a libido only deep down, she now “want[s] to be on fire” and “want[s] to be
consumed” (Evaristo 2001: 121). She discovers the joys of love and sex only when she sleeps
with Severus:
40
After all these years, I had discovered
amore nihil mollius nihil violentius:
nothing is tamer or wilder than love.
[…]
I had discovered the miracle of love-making (Evaristo 2001: 140)
Zuleika’s relationship with the emperor thus empowers her and, as she claims herself, makes
her world larger. She tells him that she knew “[she] would discover more of [her]self through
[him]” (Evaristo 2001: 220). However, her affair with Severus and, consequently, her sexual
awakening also leads to her downfall. When Severus dies, and Zuleika is left without his
protection, her two young slaves Valeria and Aemilia inform Felix about her affair with the
emperor. Since she knows that a woman’s sexuality is punished more severely than a man’s,
she knows her end is coming:
Was my punishment to come?
A husband could do what he liked
and many an errant wife ended up
in an unmarked grave outside the city walls.
I did not scream […]
but accepted what was due.
[…]
I had lived my life. (Evaristo 2001: 242)
Zuleika dies in the end, punished for her affair, her sexuality and the humiliation she put
Felix through. However, for the better part of the novel it is female sexuality that receives
central focus and, as Dave Gunning points out, while she ultimately perishes, she has shown,
through her sexuality, among other things, “her ability to have flared (however briefly) within
41
the confines of [her] restrictive social position” (Gunning 2005: 176). In a later part of this
chapter I will further elaborate on the other ways in which Zuleika finds empowerment within
a society that puts so many limitations upon her.
In contrast to The Emperor’s Babe’s Zuleika, Soul Tourists’ Jessie is able to have children
and has one son, Terry. She gave birth to Terry at the age of only sixteen; his father Curtis lived
in the boys’ home. Still young and not having been offered sex education classes by the nuns
in the girls’ home, Jessie barely knew what she was doing with Curtis. However, nine months
later Terry was born. She tried to perform an abortion first, but that did not work out:
Tried aborting with the vacuum-cleaner hose,
preferable to a coat-hanger, which was all the rage
in those days, but what was I thinking?
God forbid and thank God it didn’t work, aye. (Evaristo 2005: 109)
Once Terry was born, the nuns at the home tried to put him for adoption, so he would end
up in a “good Catholic home” (Evaristo 2005: 108). While motherhood is thus seen as a primary
role for women, Jessie was not considered to be suitable to become a mother. Still, she was
adamant on keeping her son. Although “no one taught [her] mothering” (Evaristo 2005: 107),
she tried her best to take good care of her Terry. As he was the first thing in her life that was all
hers, she barely let him leave her side, even “breastfe[eding] him till he was four years old”
(Evaristo 2005: 107). Terry, however, grew up to be a disobedient teenager and pulled away
from Jessie. Unable to deal with this, the novel suggests that it came to a confrontation between
the two of them: “I was choking mad, you were going to leave. / I did what no mother should
have to remember.” (Evaristo 2005: 54, original emphasis). Jessie goes on to talk about “the
sight, stench and sizzle of frazzled skin” (Evaristo 2005: 54), Terry’s gasp and her scream and,
eventually, his punishment, her penance and his disappearance. In a later passage, she dreams
42
about Terry and his life since he left her. In her dream she gives an explanation for the ironshaped scar on his shoulder blade:
[…] We were only kids
larking about when this iron, set to Linen, set to Steam,
wasn’t plugged out at all and my little mate Timothy
held on petrified for ages before he dared rip it off
with a layer of burned, melted cheese attached.
Left me allergic to ironing rest of my life. Ha. Ha. (Evaristo 2005: 277, original emphasis)
However, from the earlier passage it becomes clear that this certain Timothy probably had
little to do with Terry’s scar and it was rather Jessie’s work. Since she grew up without parents
and lost her first husband and then another husband Kwame, who turned out to be her cousin,
the thought of possibly losing Terry as well seemed to be too much for Jessie, driving her to
extreme measures. Following this incident, Terry disappears without a trace, and Jessie first
hears from him again twelve years later through a Christmas card. He now lives in Australia
with his wife and child, which is the reason Jessie wants to go on a road trip. She hopes to end
up in Australia and finally reconnect with her son.
Evaristo thus paints a rather complicated picture of Jessie as a mother; she does not really fit
in the binary distinction between ‘good’ and bad’ mothers. While it is clear that she made a
terrible mistake in a desperate attempt to keep Terry close to her, it is also evident that she loves
him unconditionally. Hoping for forgiveness, all through the novel she feels “a longing for her
son that just wouldn’t bloody abate” (Evaristo 2005: 204) and when asked who she would
choose if she had to, Stanley or Terry, she answers in no uncertain terms: “Don’t be daft! You
don’t know love until you’ve carried a child inside and devoted yourself to its upbringing”
(Evaristo 2005: 163). Further, she realises that she was at fault and hopes Terry can forgive her,
43
yet, the fact that he disappeared for so many years has haunted her, for which she sometimes
rather seems to blame him instead of herself:
Got my own ghouls, Stanley, dear – [original emphasis]
the nameless mother who shamelessly left me,
the named father who could have rescued me,
the son who selfishly deserted me [emphasis added] (Evaristo 2005: 129)
Her experience as a mother has fundamentally shaped her life, before and after Terry left. It
has influenced her relationships with others, for example in her different marriages. When she
talks about her marriage to her first husband, Brewster Montgomery, the fact that he “treat[ed]
her child as his own” (Evaristo 2005: 30) is of crucial importance. He did not exactly treat her
as an equal, but she did not complain because he treated Terry well, which was what mattered.
Many years after Brewster died, she met Kwame and again, his relationship with Terry is what
matters first and foremost: “Loves young Terry. Young Terry loves him” (Evaristo 2005: 35).
Further, Terry’s disappearance, along with the fact that she grew up without her parents, has
cut into her self-esteem, which has impacted the way she handles her other personal
relationships. As I have mentioned in a previous part of this chapter, Jessie becomes quite
dependent of Stanley and clings to him, afraid that he as well is going to leave her. Since her
parents, her husbands and her son have all, in one way or another, left her, she seems convinced
that she always does something wrong, leading to people deserting her.
Jessie is thus clearly represented as a mother, who makes mistakes but who also loves
unconditionally. At the same time, however, she is also portrayed as a sexual human being.
Evaristo does not restrict Jessie to her role as a mother; she is also allowed to express her
sexuality. The sexual tension between Stanley and Jessie is clear from the moment they meet
and quickly leads to a sexual relationship. Even more, Jessie is allowed to be assertive in her
sexuality, for instance, as she seduces Stanley while she is driving: “she slid a hand between
44
my thighs, up to my crotch, unzipped my flies, squeezed and rubbed as I opened my legs wider
and let out a gratified groan” (Evaristo 2005: 53). Stanley regularly describes Jessie in sensual
terms, talking for example about “the voluptuous spread of her thighs” (Evaristo 2005: 31), her
“voluptuously creamy legs” or “her voice throaty with sleep and the residue of sex” (Evaristo
2005: 128). Their sex life is often mentioned throughout the novel, with Jessie being just as
much, if not more, dominant than Stanley. However, the novel describes Jessie and her sexuality
in such terms without reducing her to the stereotype of the sexually promiscuous black woman,
whose sexuality influences her motherhood and turns her into a ‘bad’ mother without any form
of redemption. This way, Soul Tourists as well diverts from gender stereotypical representations
of female sexuality and motherhood.
Blonde Roots’ Doris is a mother as well, yet has a very different experience of motherhood
than Jessie. Her life in slavery complicates sexuality and motherhood in a couple of ways. With
the little control that they have over their lives, it is sometimes difficult for slaves to form
relationships. Doris mentions that “slaves don’t end relationships. Other people do it for [them].
Often [they] don’t start them either, other people do it for [them]” (Evaristo 2008: 21). Still,
they find ways to express their sexuality and form romantic or sexual relationships. Before
Doris’s first attempt at escape she lives as a house slave in Londolo, the capital of the UK of
Great Ambossa, where she meets Frank, another slave. Doris recounts how slaves sneak “in
and out of the compound to engage in romantic trysts with [their] lovers, [her]self included”
(Evaristo 2005: 19). Time spent together, then, is a way for Doris to, in a certain way, reclaim
her body. Her relationship with Frank, and the expression of sexuality that comes with it, is
reinvigorating for Doris: “at night Frank’s dexterous carpenter’s hands roamed so expertly over
the contours of my back and limbs that my deadened body was resensitised and reshaped into
a work of art” (Evaristo 2008: 20, emphasis added). After her failed attempt at escape, she is
45
confined to a life as a plantation slave, where she lives in the slave quarters. There she takes a
new lover, Qwashee, but is never quite able to forget about Frank: “I shared his hovel on some
nights but not all, let him love me up, while I offered him all the love I did not hold in reserve
for another” (Evaristo 2008: 212).
Evaristo thus shows that the slaves form personal relationships, yet the experience of their
sexuality is complicated by the intimidation and violence that they have to deal with. Many
‘whyte’ women have been raped by their ‘blak’ oppressors and the same fate awaits the
daughters of many slaves: “biggez problem fe us iz our gyal-chiles. Soon as dey ole enuf, dey
forced a-do nastee-nastee tings wid de massas” (Evaristo 2008: 192). Through their sexuality,
the novel again exposes gendered power imbalances: “all whyte women were labelled sexually
insatiable. A sick joke, of course, because how could we refuse their advances?” (Evaristo 2008:
32). Further, because of their lives as slaves, “motherhood was far from straightforward too”
(Evaristo 2008: 183). When women get pregnant, they face the risk that the baby, or the mother
herself, dies because of the poor health circumstances they live in. Do they both survive, it is
not said that the mothers are allowed to keep their babies, and even if their masters allow them
to raise their children, they could still be sold later on in their lives.
Doris in particular then gave birth to three children, two girls and a boy. She remarks that
slaves “were encouraged to breed merely to increase the workforce” (Evaristo 2008: 21), as
many children are sold on. Motherhood is another way through which the masters control and
manipulate their slaves. Each time Doris was promised that she could keep her children, yet
each time her children were taken away and “placed into the guardianship of a wet nurse, until
they were sold on” (Evaristo 2008: 22). Doris clearly struggles with the loss of her children:
“sometimes, when I place my hand over my stomach, I can still feel their little kicks” (Evaristo
2008: 22). She keeps hoping that one day her children will find her, but this never happens. The
46
loss of her children has scarred her, yet she finds other ways to express her love. In another
manifestation of power, while she is not allowed to nurse her own children, Doris’s master
orders her to wet-nurse his son: “I had breastfed him when my first newborn had been taken
away and I was still heavy with milk. All the while I was in mourning for my lost child. I
swaddled Bamwoze with all the love meant for my own. I even kidded myself, at times, that he
was indeed my own” (Evaristo 2008: 35).
In a way, Doris finds thus ‘surrogate’ children to give her love to. Later on in the novel, in
the slave quarters, she lives with another slave, Ye Memé and her five children. Spending time
with the children makes her remember her own all the more, and here as well she starts to see
them a little as “[her] children” (Evaristo 2008: 209). It makes her feel more alive, yet “the hole
that [her] children had left […] never felt more hollow” (Evaristo 2008: 197) than in those
moments when she lives and spends time with Ye Memé and her family. The loss of her own
children is an ache that never leaves and another burden to carry with her. As I mentioned
before, motherhood is usually considered to be a primary role for a woman and the ultimate
aim of traditional femininity, yet Doris has given birth but she is not allowed to be a mother for
her own children. Through the experiences of sexuality and motherhood, Evaristo shows again
how slavery controls and influences every single aspect of Doris’s, and other slaves’, life.
2.3.2. Beauty Standards
Other important aspects through which femininity is very often defined are beauty and
appearance. In every culture, certain standards exist to which women have to conform if they
want to fit within the dominant ideals about femininity. Different cultures have different
expectations about beauty, clothing and appearance, yet white beauty traits are often considered
normative feminine attributes. These standards, then, “create a normative yardstick for all
femininities in which [non-White] women are relegated to the bottom of the gender hierarchy”
47
(Pietsch 2009: 138). In this part of the chapter I will thus look at what beauty means in the
novels and their different contexts. Does The Emperor’s Babe’s Roman Europe differ from Soul
Tourists’ contemporary Europe when it comes to ideals of beauty and appearance? And what
does beauty exactly entail in the world of Blonde Roots? I will look at whether the women in
the novels conform to the standards or not and how that impacts them. By looking at beauty
and appearance, it will again become clear whether Evaristo takes a feminist stand or not, by
either uncritically conforming to the dominant beauty standards or exposing and possibly
stepping away from these standards.
For Zuleika in The Emperor’s Babe, conforming to beauty standards and certain norms about
her appearance is part of her marriage to Felix. She gets decorum classes from a “snooty Roman
bitch […] learn[ing] how to talk, eat and fart, / how to get [her] amo amas amat right, and ditch
/ [her] second-generation plebby creole” (Evaristo 2001: 4). As a young working-class girl of
only eleven years old, she was not yet keeping busy with make-up and looking a certain way,
yet when she marries into the senatorial class it is expected of her that she looks impeccable
and in accordance with the reigning beauty standards:
A lady uses powdered horn to enamel
her teeth, dontcha know, and powdered
mouse brains keep her breath sweet.
I am pampered by maids, an ornatrix is weaving
Indian hair into my own, six pads – Vestal-stylee.
They are painting me white with chalk,
my lips and cheeks with the lees of red wine,
[…] Black ash is dabbed on to my eyes. (Evaristo 2001: 27, original emphasis)
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The black Zuleika thus has to let people whiten her skin so she would fit in. Felix’s sister,
for example, has “a face fashionably white with lead / and pouting ochre-red lips” (Evaristo
2001: 52) and is quick to point out that Zuleika will never be one of them. As Dave Gunning
points out, “those who hold power are able to define the criteria for inclusion within the circle
of influence” (Gunning 2005: 172). Such criteria include beauty and appearance, and “as long
as it is possible for Zuleika to be defined by her skin colour, then it is evident that this attribute
can be used as a tool to justify her oppression” (Gunning 2005: 171). No matter how much
make-up Zuleika wears, never again “be seen au naturel” (Evaristo 2001: 28), she will
apparently never really fit in. Still, though she cannot hide her skin colour, her marriage to the
high-born Felix does offer her more opportunities to conform to beauty standards than she had
before she met Felix. She has servants by her side to pamper her and the wealth to buy the
fashion the senatorial class is accustomed to. She is able to buy glorious stola’s, for example
“an orange and green damask / check with twisted gold thread, designed / by her favourite
couturier Emporio Valentino” (Evaristo 2001: 91). Here, Evaristo illustrates the ambiguity of
the situation; Zuleika is forced to conform to the prevailing beauty standards, yet is never able
to fit in completely. Still, while her skin colour might disadvantage her in this situation, her
social status offers her the privilege to fit in to a certain extent. At any rate, Evaristo shows
through these small instances that beauty standards matter and that different aspects influence
one’s ability to conform.
References to beauty standards are less apparent in Soul Tourists, although some small
passages do illustrate that, again, white is the standard. When Stanley talks about what kind of
girls would receive his father’s approval he mentions “passive, polite, pretty (which meant white
girls or, if black, then light-skinned)” (Evaristo 2005: 44, emphasis added) girls. Dark-skinned
women are thus considered to be less beautiful. However, when it comes to Jessie, Stanley
49
describes her in terms of beauty and calls her “a gorgeous mirage” (Evaristo 2005: 29). Further,
it is unlikely that Jessie would in any way try to adapt to any beauty standards since, as Stanley
mentioned, “[he] had never before met a women so utterly determined to be herself” (Evaristo
2005: 44). She does not seem to care about any beauty standards and is confident in her own
appearance. At one point, she mentions the Black Power Movement “landing outside [her]
council flat in Chapeltown” and bringing “a shipment / of unprocessed hair in the shape of an
Afro, / the shocking slogan Black is Beautiful / and a longing for ‘Our African Culture’”
(Evaristo 2005: 197), yet she barely cares for it, content with the culture she has always known
and telling them “to cut the crap” (Evaristo 2005: 198). In an earlier part of this chapter, we
have seen that Jessie struggles with the consistent leaving of the people in her life, which,
consequently, makes her doubt herself. However, throughout the novel, it does not seem that
she doubts her appearance or considers it to play any role in her loneliness.
Evaristo’s most explicit critique on beauty standards and how they impact women and their
self-image can be found in Blonde Roots. As Judie Newman points out, “an ‘Aphrikan’ aesthetic
dominates standards of beauty” (Newman 2012: 290). Through many instances in the novel,
Evaristo criticises the socially constructed nature of femininity and feminine beauty, and the
fact that it functions as “a form of enslavement” (Burkitt 2012: 414). From the moment she is
taken away from her home, Doris is to grow up in a society that convinces her that she is
unworthy and ugly. Her first mistress, the young girl Little Miracle, to whom Doris is supposed
to be a playmate, wastes no time in telling her that she is inferior: “‘you ugly,’ she said, putting
on baby-speak, as if that excused her rudeness […] ‘Me pretty,’ she said, preening herself. She
was right, of course. And there was no one in that society to tell me otherwise” (Evaristo 2008:
97, emphasis added). The novel exposes a “racialized ideal of feminine beauty” (Burkitt 2012:
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415) where everything that is considered ‘blak’ is superior and beautiful and ‘whyte’ is inferior
and ugly.
Doris becomes convinced that her slender figure, her concave stomach and her thin blonde
hair that are considered “the embodiment of beauty in Europe” are actually “ugly as sin”
(Evaristo 2005: 31). All around her, people try to fit in with the ‘blak’ aesthetic, thereby
confirming its superiority. Before her first attempt at escape, Doris lives with a couple of roommates, one of whom “twist[s] her hair into pigtails mixed with clay [and] rub[s] ochre into her
skin to darken its pigment” (Evaristo 2008: 16), in the hope that one of the Ambossans will
notice her and pick her as their mistress. Further, not only slaves adapt to the ‘blak’ beauty
standards. In fact, ‘Aphrikan’ culture thrives in the suburbs of Londolo, where the free ‘whytes’
live, with adaptations of ‘blak’ cultural icons such as music, hairstyles or skin treatments: “In
the Burbs you rarely saw a free whyte with natural hair. They wore the perms, twists and braids
of Ambossan women, although Aphros were most in demand. […] In the Burbs tanning was all
the rage too” (Evaristo 2008: 30). With a satiric eye, Evaristo goes on to comment on “the
brutality of the stereotypes of feminine beauty” (Burkitt 2012: 415):
The hairdressers used kinky Aphrikan hair on the Burbite women, who had their own fine
hair chopped off and these bushy pieces sewn onto them so that the effect was (un)naturally
Aphrikan. It took up to ten hours and when the blonde, red, brown or straight roots came
through it looked just plain tacky, apparently. […] You could get a nose flattening job done
quite cheaply, we heard, although I always thought that flat, fat nostrils on whyte faces
looked ridiculous. The very thought of a mallet smashing down on my nose was just too
scary for words. (Evaristo 2008: 30)
This passage also references the title, Blonde Roots, which is, as Katharine Burkitt remarks,
an explicit reference to “the paradoxical fact that it is naturally blonde hair that looks ‘plain
tacky’” (Burkitt 2012: 415). By reversing these racial stereotypes, Evaristo forces the reader to
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consider these beauty standards and their impact on women. These standards impact women
not only physically through different beauty treatments, but emotionally as well. As mentioned
earlier, Doris is convinced that she is ugly since all she sees around her are either ‘blak’ women
or women wanting to look like ‘blak’ women. She has “image issues” (Evaristo 2008: 31) which
start to develop when she was still just a child. She mentions that in the motherland, all little
girls loved the “floppy little female figures with one-inch waists, blue-button eyes and fourinch blonde tresses” called Barbee, yet in Londolo little white girls are not interested in those
dolls: “find a little slave girl on this continent and you’ll discover she’s hankering after one of
the Aphrikan Queens, a rag doll with a big butt, big lips, lots of bangles and woolly hair. It was
so bad for our self-esteem” (Evaristo 2008: 32, emphasis added). ‘Blak’ is the norm; ‘blak’ is
how little girls want to look and when they do not, they might start to develop self-hatred. This
way, Newman remarks, Blonde Roots “makes a serious comment on the construction and
irreversible effects of racism” (Newman 2012: 290).
Doris, however, tries to resist these standards that are imposed upon her. Every morning she
repeats a mantra while looking in the mirror, which is reminiscent of the ‘black is beautiful’
mantra: “‘I may be fair and flaxen. I may have slim nostrils and slender lips. I may have oilrich hair and a non-rotund bottom. I may blush easily, go rubicund in the sun and have covert
yet mentally alert blue eyes. Yes, I may be whyte. But I am whyte and I am beautiful!’” (Evaristo
2008: 32, original emphasis). While the dominant ‘blak’ culture thus pleads against her, Doris
tries to oppose it and tries to find pride in her own ‘whyte’ features. In all three novels, then,
Evaristo exposes either implicitly or explicitly certain dominant beauty standards and how the
women in the novels deal with these standards. In the last part of this chapter, I will look at
empowerment and how Zuleika, Jessie and Doris find ways to handle the restrictions that are
put upon them.
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2.4.
Women’s Empowerment in Evaristo’s novels
In earlier parts of this chapter, we have seen that the women in The Emperor’s Babe, Soul
Tourists and Blonde Roots are limited in certain ways. Because of their gender and race
restrictions are often put upon them when it comes to power, motherhood, sexuality or beauty
standards. However, that does not mean that Zuleika, Jessie and Doris resign themselves to the
position that is given to them. In the last part of this chapter, I will look at the way that Evaristo’s
female protagonists empower themselves in a male-dominated society. Firstly, I will briefly
focus on the term empowerment itself and what exactly it means. Then, I will look at the three
novels and the way Evaristo illustrates women’s empowerment.
Empowerment is a contested term. In its basic definition, ‘to empower’ means “to give
power to” or “to promote the self-actualization or influence of” (Merriam Webster).
Empowerment, then, can be seen as the capacity to self-actualization; the process of learning
and the ability to stand up for one’s self. However, there is more history to the term than that.
Jia Tolentino notes that, decades ago, the term came into being as “the process by which an
oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able
to take action against his oppressors” (Tolentino 2016: web). The concept was then further
broadened into a theory of power “that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitless
[…] and placed faith in the individual” (Tolentino 2016: web). Today, the meaning of the term
has altered even more. Under the influence of advertisers and media culture, the word largely
lost its rather radical connotation and is now mainly used to describe women who live their
lives on their own terms and “according to their own choices and desires” (Freeman 2016: web).
This way, practically everything a woman does, even the most mundane things, can be seen as
empowering. On the one hand, this can be a good thing, as it gives women the power to be who
they want to be. On the other hand, this approach risks that it “leads to a great big pile of
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nothing” (Freeman 2016: web). If everything is seen as empowering, one could argue that
nothing really is.
In the context of Evaristo’s novels, then, I opt for some kind of middle course. In any context,
however, women’s empowerment will remain a rather vague and broad term. It can be pretty
much anything that gives women the power to fight against their limitations. Yet, in the novels,
empowerment is not illustrated through seemingly trivial things, which it often is in
contemporary pop culture or media. As I will discuss later on, what I consider empowerment
in Evaristo’s novels are the ways in which Zuleika, Jessie and Doris find the energy and the
power to deal with the restrictions that are put upon them by the male-dominated society in
which they live.
In The Emperor’s Babe, Zuleika starts to question her identity because of the changes in her
life, such as her marriage to Felix, and comments that are made by others, for example Felix’s
sister Antistia who makes it very clear that Zuleika will never really fit in. Early on in the novel,
she asks herself “I am the same girl / I was last week. Or am I?” (Evaristo 2001: 27) since she
is suddenly treated differently, the only reason being her marriage to Felix. Later, Antistia’s
remarks plant a seed of doubt as well, making Zuleika wonder that “she was Roman too” and
that “it was all [she] had” (Evaristo 2001: 54). As she struggles with her identity and her
confined life in Felix’s villa, she realises that she needs ‘a raison d’être’ and decides to devote
herself to her poetry: “I’d been working hard on my poetry, / I would work harder, yes, harder,
/ I would devote my every spare moment to it” (Evaristo 2001: 103). Through her poetry, she
eventually finds a way to express her identity:
Identity Crisis: Who is she?
Am I the original Nubian princess
From Mother Africa?
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Does the Nile run through my blood
In this materfutuo urban jungle
Called Londinium?
Do I feel a sense of lack
Because I am swarthy?
Or am I just a groovy chick
Living in the lap of luxury?
Am I a slave or a slave-owner?
Am I a Londinio or a Nubian?
Will my children be Roman or Nubinettes?
Were my parents vassals or pharaohs?
And who gives a damn! (Evaristo 2001: 201, orginial emphasis)
As Şebnem Toplu remarks, through her poetry, Zuleika explores the binary creations that
are created on her identity. (Toplu 2011: 30). She finally finds a way to express the doubts and
questions surrounding her identity that have been troubling her. However, though she tries her
hardest, she fails to capture an audience with her poetry and thus never becomes a famous poet,
which she so desires. She calls herself “a nobody wanting to be a somebody” (Evaristo 2001:
154), but it is not through poetry that she will achieve this. Ironically enough, her brother
Catullus shares his name with the famous Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. It is not
unthinkable that if he had wanted to pursue a career as a poet, he would have been able to do
so, possibly receiving more support from his surroundings than Zuleika, a woman, got. Further,
as I have discussed earlier, Zuleika also finds empowerment in her relationship with Severus.
Within her marriage, sex is a symbol of her oppressive relationship with Felix, yet it “becomes
a symbol of her empowerment when she has her relationship with Severus” (McLeod 2011:
174). Sex is thus also linked to gendered empowerment.
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Another way through which Zuleika finds empowerment, and which returns in all three
novels, is female friendship and solidarity. Friendship can be seen as a form of social support,
which involves “emotional, informational, or companionship resources provided by network
members that help individuals deal with everyday problems or crisis events” (Bryan et al. 2001:
482) and can be further characterised by “intimacy, self-disclosure, mutual concern, a sharing
of resources, equality in power, and ultimately empowering” (Knickmeyer et al. 2002: 38,
emphasis added). Furthermore, friendship can become an essential form of social support for
people who experience intolerance or rejection. It can then be considered as “a community of
choice in which to redefine the self and develop aspects of self that are unsupported by the
‘unchosen’ family” (Friedman, qtd. in Knickmeyer et al. 2002: 53). It is often seen as way to
deal with unsupportive family members, but it can just as well be a means of social and political
resistance to oppression.
Şebnem Toplu points out that female friendship and solidarity is very important for Zuleika
since she does not like anyone in her family. Not only did she have to marry Felix against her
will, her parents always favoured her brother Catullus as well. Evaristo thus “subverts the
nuclear family relationship in her narrative” (Toplu 2011: 31) and grants more significance to
the friendships in Zuleika’s life, in particular her friendship with Alba and Venus. Venus acts
like a surrogate mother to her, helping her ever since she was only seven years old. Alba, then,
has grown up with her, yet when Zuleika gets married she has trouble to understand Zuleika’s
married life. When she marries herself, she and Zuleika have more in common again. They are
good friends and have fun together. However, Alba is adamant on not being imprisoned like
Zuleika. (Evaristo 2001: 102). She is free to have lovers and pushes Zuleika to live more freely
as well. Toplu remarks that Alba does not have “much significance in Zuleika’s life, besides
her presence as the only girlfriend [she] has” (Toplu 2011: 31) yet her advice to take a lover
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still seems to resonate with Zuleika when she starts a relationship with Severus, which will
prove to be empowering to her as well. Especially in the end, Alba “shows girl-friend solidarity”
(Toplu 2011: 31), as she is the only one with Zuleika at her deathbed. “We’re sisters,” (Evaristo
2001: 249), she tells Zuleika, in a final attempt to convince Zuleika that what she so desired, to
be important, came true, as she is important to Alba.
In the end, then, Zuleika dies, poisoned by Felix as a punishment for her affair with Severus.
However, as Dave Gunning notes, the fact that ultimately she dies does not mean that she has
not shown “her ability to have flared” (Gunning 2005: 176) within a restrictive society. He
points out that “Zuleika is clearly victimised by the harsh world she inhabits, but she is never
reduced to just being a victim” (Gunning 2005: 176, original emphasis). Her ‘transgressions’
such as her poetry and her affair with Severus illustrate her strength, her resilience and her
ability to express herself. While she dies in the end, the novel shows that Felix “and, by
extension, society as a whole, can[not] fully contain the entirety of Zuleika’s individuality”
(Gunning 2005: 170). Şebnem Toplu, as well, concludes that Zuleika “possesses agency as a
self-determining subject” and even though society imposes many boundaries upon her, she is
allowed “recognition, identification and pleasure” (Toplu 2011: 33).
In Soul Tourists, less attention is given to the way Jessie finds empowerment. In comparison
to Zuleika and Doris, she is also less restricted in her freedom. Jessie seems to mainly long for
the road, “to see nothing, but long, empty roads in front of her” (Evaristo 2005: 26). She seems
to wander from destination to destination which “may at first suggest that she has no ‘home’,
or that ‘home’ is on the move” (Velickovic 2012: 69), but actually, her aim is to reconnect with
her estranged son in Australia. As Velickovic remarks, the search for one’s roots are often seen
as an important source of empowerment. Yet, Jessie is not interested to trace her African roots.
(Velickovic 2012: 69) If Jessie harbours a sense of unbelonging at all, it is not nearly as
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outspoken as Stanley’s doubts about where he truly belongs. She calls herself “a Yorkshire
woman, and reet proud of it” (Evaristo 2005: 198). Her empowerment is thus not to be found
in a quest for her roots. She has one goal, to find her son, and that seems to be what empowers
her in her journey.
Further, the novel also shows a few instances of female solidarity. Along the way, Jessie and
Stanley meet a couple of people on a camping in Turkey and Jessie instantly becomes a social
hit. They all take a liking to her, seem to rather dislike Stanley and he wonders if they are “her
emotional bodyguard, protecting her from getting close to [him] again” (Evaristo 2005: 212).
Especially Sunita, another Englishwoman, offers Jessie support. When Stanley leaves for
Istanbul, and thus leaves Jessie alone for the second time, Sunita stays with Jessie, says “she
can’t leave [her] after the traumatic psychological / torture / and sadistic emotional wounding
that self-obsessed / male chauvinist trotter [Stanley] has put [her] through” (Evaristo 2005:
249). They part ways after a while, but Sunita’s presence offers Jessie support when she most
needs it. In the end, Jessie has an emotion implosion, which is, according to Evaristo herself,
symptomatic of her inability to understand and reflect on her need to control Stanley. (Evaristo
2006: 11) She has helped Stanley change and liberate him from his boring life, yet Jessie herself
is not as open to change as he is. She is “still trapped in the neediness of her childhood”
(Evaristo 2006: 11); at the end of the novel she still has not succeeded in reconnecting with her
son and laying her old trauma’s to rest. The novel ends with Jessie still not being truly
empowered to fight what holds her down.
Similar to The Emperor’s Babe and Soul Tourists, Blonde Roots illustrates the impact of
female friendship and solidarity as well. Throughout the whole novel, Doris finds support with
fellow slaves, often women as well. On board of the slaver, she meets Samantha and
Hildegaard, who occupy the spots next to her. They try to support one another to their best
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ability, and “in the absence of family, [they] all became surrogates” (Evaristo 2008: 82). Later
on, Doris lives with two room-mates, Yomisi and Sitembile, and there as well, they figure out
how to support one another while living their hard lives: “we three women had slipped into
each other’s lives and found a way to be together” (Evaristo 2008: 16). Further, during Doris’s
recounting of this time of her life, the novel shows another way of women’s empowerment,
even in the worst of circumstances. Yomisi, their master Bwana’s cook, was gang-raped shortly
after she was kidnapped, for which she was “hell-bent on revenge” (Evaristo 2008: 15). In
addition, she is forced to wear an iron muzzle in order to prevent her from eating on the job,
which makes her lips crack, her gums bleed and her tongue swell and which dehydrates her
mouth. In a silent protest, she often poisons Bwana and his family:
Sometimes Bwana vomited the night away or one of his children ran a fever. The runs were
commonplace. Bwana’s regular hallucinations bordered on insanity, and the entire family
frequently broke out in rashes so unbearable they could be seen clawing off layers of skin in
a communal frenzy. […] Crushed glass. Rotten meat disguised by strong herbs and spices.
Fungi. Plants she would not name. It was the only thing that gave her pleasure. (Evaristo
2008: 15, emphasis added).
Since Bwana has quite a few business enemies, no one suspects the quiet, passive cook to
be behind it all. Protests like this will not buy Yomisi freedom, but it is the only thing that gives
her a sense of pleasure and power over her masters.
The greatest illustration of female solidarity, however, happens after Doris’s first attempt at
escape when Bwana condemns her to a life as a plantation slave in New Ambossa and she lives
in the slave quarters with many other ‘whytes’. In this part of the novel, women characters
dominate and Doris and the other women create a strong slave community. As Judie Newman
remarks, the novel emphasises “the resilience and resistance of the slave community and their
attempts to assure the survival of their original culture” (Newman 2012: 294). From the moment
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Doris arrives, Ye Memé takes care of her. Still weak from the two hundred and one lashes she
received as a punishment for her escape, Doris can hardly stand on her two feet at work. It is
Ye Memé, then, “who stop[s] work at great risk herself” and “cradle[s] [Doris] in the damp
warmth of her soft-breasted, six-footer self while calming [her] down” (Evaristo 2008: 181)
and saves her life. Once recovered, Doris adapts rather quickly to her new life. Although she
abhors the work she has to do, the slaves have created such a community that on Sundays, when
they do not need to work, it was “like another world […]: busy, lively, normal” (Evaristo 2008:
185) and sometimes even “as if [they] were free” (Evaristo 2008: 209). While they are all too
well aware that they are in fact not free, the world that they have created, one where they can
play and sing and even celebrate a Christian service and thus preserve their own customs and
beliefs (Newman 2012: 294), provides them with enough strength and power to get through the
days.
In this context, Cuder-Dominguez notes that while Doris’s degradation to plantation slave
and its physical labour is meant as a punishment, which it is of course, it is during this time in
her life that Doris finds “the kind of community that she had been deprived of” (CuderDominguez 2011: 71). The slave quarters and its community offer her a place away from the
scrutiny of her masters. However, at the end of the novel, Doris’s master Nonso orders her to
do to office work for him, and the other slaves find out that Doris used to be an urban, literate
house slave. Judie Newman remarks that “class solidarity is prioritized over gender” (Newman
2012: 295) in this instance and that the solidarity the women feel for Doris becomes threatened
when they find out about her past. As they are “blue-collar slaves” (Evaristo 2008: 182) the gap
between them and the urban slaves to which Doris used to belong is significant. Yet, in a certain
way, Doris’s new job also benefits Ye Memé and her other friend Ma Marjani. Doris finds out
about the imminent sale of two young boys, the sons of her friends, and tries to figure out a way
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to escape together with the boys. When she tells them, Doris finds it hard to see her friend, who
is always so strong and powerful, break down because once again her children are to be taken
away from her. Still, the prospect that Doris might be able to escape with their boys is hopeful,
for the women who are to stay behind as well as for Doris herself, who while having never felt
more exhausted also admits to never having felt “more energised” (Evaristo 2008: 249).
Doris’s strength and power especially shine through in her attempts to escape. Always
clutching “[her] return ticket to [her] chest” (Evaristo 2008: 14), she never gives up hope that
one day she will be free again. On the day she turns fourteen, after a couple of years as nanny
of the insufferable Little Miracle, something changes for Doris: “I woke up and thought, you
know what? That girl called Doris? Where the hell did she go?” (Evaristo 2008: 101, original
emphasis). From this moment on, she tries to fight back and resist her masters. First, she finally
expresses her feelings about her mistress, and surprises even herself by writing a diatribe against
Little Miracle, including phrases such as “Little Miracle sucks. Shoot da bitch. […] She thinks
she’s it but she’s shit” (Evaristo 2008: 101). Unfortunately, the girl finds Doris’s writing and
thinks up a punishment for her slave: she is to be sent to the brothel. Fearing death at the brothel,
where all kinds of diseases are rampant, Doris fights back against her mistress and pushes her
into the river. When Little Miracle dies in what is later called “a terrible tragedy […] A feverish
Little Miracle wandering the grounds alone when she should have stayed in bed” (Evaristo
2008: 105), Doris is soon transferred to work for another family in Londolo.
In Londolo, she is a house slave for her master Bwana. Here, she starts to plot her escape in
an attempt to “return [her] life to its rightful owner” (Evaristo 2008: 5). With the help of the
Ambossan Resistance she tries to escape through the underground railroad system. From there
on, she could make it to the docks where then awaits a “long, hazardous trip back to Europe”
(Evaristo 2008: 7). However, Doris never makes it back to Europe. Bwana catches up with her
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and sends her off to his plantation on New Ambossa, but not before she receives two hundred
and one whip lashes as a punishment for her attempted escape. After a couple of years working
on Bwana’s plantation, Doris has still not completely given up her dream of finding freedom
again, although her time on the plantation has turned freedom into “an abstract concept”
(Evaristo 2008: 211):
It didn’t help that most of those who tried to run away didn’t make it out of the man-trapped
forest and if they managed to climb the perpendicular mountain slopes they were caught by
the patrols on the mountain roads. I often had to witness the kind of punishment meted out
to runaways for whom death would have been the easy option. (Evaristo 2008: 211)
Slaves who tried to escape often did not make it out alive, and if they were caught again they
had to undergo the most severe and cruel punishments, such as noses and limbs being sliced
off, limbs being removed or skin getting scalded. Once, Doris recounts, she even saw a man
“hogtied and roasted over a spit, alive” (Evaristo 2008: 212). Having to witness the awful fate
of these people, Doris admits that for her own getaway, “only one essential ingredient was
missing – courage” (Evaristo 2008: 212). In the end, however, she does find that courage and
makes a second attempt at escape. She finally escapes together with Dingiswayo and Yao, sons
of Ye Memé and Ma Marjani who are about to be sold, her lover Qwashee and her nephew
Ndewele. In her last days at the plantation she finds out that Bwana’s mistress Iffianachukwana
is actually her sister Sharon. When they reconnect and Doris tells her about her plan to escape,
Sharon decides to help her and asks whether her son Ndewele can come as well. Since Ndewele
is actually a slave driver, Doris is appalled by Sharon’s question. In this instance, the novel
illustrates that even though Ndewele is privileged in a lot of ways, he is not exactly free either:
“Yu tink say mi bwoys hav-a choice? What choice? Dem slaves too, like all a-we. […] Ndewele
always dreamin about bein free” (Evaristo 2008: 242-243).
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At the very end of the novel, Doris finally sees freedom again: “When I stepped into the
river, soft sludge seeped through my toes and the rush of cold water invigorated my hot, dirty
feet. It was coming all the way down from Freedom Country” (Evaristo 2008: 258, emphasis
added). Doris goes to live in the Maroon camp where many fellow escaped slaves end up and
when freedom finally comes for everyone, years later, she, among others, heads back to the
plantation and finally reconnects with Ye Memé again as well. Ultimately, then, the novel
illustrates how Doris, after years and years of being enslaved, has never given up and how her
strength, hope, resilience and courage have finally led her to freedom again.
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3. Evaristo’s Early Novels: Feminist Novels?
I started this thesis with one main research question: can Bernardine Evaristo’s early novels,
The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots, be considered as feminist novels or not?
As we have seen in the first chapter of this thesis, a feminist novel is a novel that concerns itself
with women and womanhood and that “illuminates some aspect of the female condition and/or
offers some kind of imperative for change” (Gay 2014: 46). Feminist novels usually engage
with certain ideas that attempt to change gender norms, or at the very least expose them. It
strives to eliminate gender inequalities. Ideally, intersectionality plays a role in a feminist novel
as well. Not all women’s experiences are the same and other aspects that characterise women’s
identities should be held into account as well. The feminist issues that feminist literature
concerns itself with, then, can span a broad range. In this thesis, I have focused on three main
aspects: power, the construction of femininity and women’s empowerment.
In terms of power, as we have seen, men dominate the social structure. However, this does
not mean that the novels are then ‘anti-feminist’ novels. It is in the portrayal of the women in
such male-dominated societies that the novels can show feminist characteristics. Evaristo
exposes the gendered power imbalances in her novels and illustrates how Zuleika, Jessie and
Doris do not resign themselves to the position that is given to them, which is often rather
limited. Zuleika tries to find ways to cope with the restrictions that are put upon her through
her marriage to Felix, Jessie ploughs through Europe in the hope of finally reconnecting with
her long-lost son and Doris never gives up the idea of one day finally escaping her life as a
slave. Although it might seem less significant in Jessie’s case, since she is less restricted in her
freedom than Zuleika and Doris, all women try to work around the restrictions that are put upon
them. They search for ways to empower them, which Evaristo illustrates through, for example,
Zuleika’s poetry or the solidarity the women in the novels find with one another.
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Another aspect I discussed in this thesis is the construction of femininity. When it comes to
motherhood and sexuality, Evaristo’s main women characters are allowed to express their
sexuality and, in the case of Jessie and Doris, be a mother. Further, the novels’ depiction of
Zuleika’s, Jessie’s and Doris’s sexuality and their experience of being a mother or, for Zuleika,
not being able to be a mother, is quite nuanced. For instance, for Zuleika, who is only eleven
years old when she marries Felix, sex is initially a symbol of her oppression, and understandably
so. Yet, when she is older, the novel allows her to explore her sexuality and it actually turns
into a source of empowerment for her. In the same vein, Evaristo “informs accurately about the
horrors of slavery” (Von Rosenberg 2010: 390), yet she also shows how Doris is capable of
forming loving relationships within the horrible world she is forced to live in. At the same time,
Doris’s experience of motherhood, the uncertainty about whether or not she is allowed to keep
her children and eventually the loss of her babies as they are sold on, illustrates how slavery
still controls and influences every aspect of Doris’s life. Jessie’s experience of motherhood and
sexuality is nuanced as well. She is depicted as more than a sexually promiscuous black women
and the faults she has made as a mother do not instantly render her a bad mother. She is allowed
to make mistakes without falling into the ‘bad’ mother stereotype and most of all, she is allowed
a chance at redemption through her journey to reconnect with her son. Evaristo steps away from
typical gender stereotypes and depicts her characters in a nuanced way, portraying them as
women with a multitude of experiences and aspects that define or characterise those
experiences.
The last aspect I focused on in the previous chapter of this thesis is the way beauty standards
are represented in the novels and how they influence women. Especially in The Emperor’s Babe
and Blonde Roots, Evaristo exposes dominant ideals of beauty and more importantly, how they
usually negatively impact women. The novels deliver a critique on beauty standards through
65
Zuleika and Doris as they show how these women struggle with self-doubt, and even selfhatred, because they fail to completely conform to the prevailing beauty standards. However,
the novels also presents the women’s resistance. For example, Doris tries to oppose the
‘Aphrikan’ aesthetic by convincing herself that her own features, which are hated by everyone
around her, are beautiful as well. With Jessie, then, Soul Tourists showcases a women who is
actually confident in her appearance and does not care for any standards or ideals that society
forces upon women. Further, when it comes to beauty standards, the novels also perfectly
illustrate the importance of other aspects such as race and social class. Ideals of beauty are often
not only gendered but usually also racialized. Zuleika, Jessie and Doris will never be able to
completely conform to the reigning beauty ideals since, in the case of Zuleika and Jessie, these
standards are white; in Doris’s case beauty standards are ‘blak’. Social class, then, influences
one’s ability to adapt to certain standards as well. For example, Zuleika’s social position makes
it possible for her to buy the most fashionable clothes or hire enough servants to do her hair or
make-up. Doris, on the contrary, does not have the wealth or the social status that allows her to
fit in with the dominant beauty ideals. In terms of beauty, then, the novels again depict a
nuanced view and expose the harmful ways in which beauty standards impact women.
Another important element when it comes to feminist novels, and which I have not exactly
discussed yet, is the narrative situation. The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots
all have a women narrator. Even though Jessie has to share the narrative with a man, Stanley,
in Soul Tourists, she does get a voice in the novel. In the other two novels as well, women are
given a voice, which is of course an important condition for a feminist novel. Although men
dominate the social structure, women are still the dominant force in the narrative, as Ingrid von
Rosenberg points out. She remarks that “it is their world, not the men’s, which is at the centre
of attention” (Von Rosenberg 2010: 392). Şebnem Toplu, as well, talks about the significance
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of Evaristo’s choice to write about a historical period, for example in The Emperor’s Babe, with
a woman as the protagonist. In this regard, she quotes Godiwala: “to historicize, for the feminist,
would involve a re-search and a re-writing of tradition history to re-discover women where
there exist records only of great men” (Godiwala, qtd in Toplu 2011: 23). In this vein, then, the
narration in The Emperor’s Babe “evolves as a ‘herstory’” (Toplu 2011: 23). The same can be
said about Blonde Roots, where Doris’s life receives central focus. Evaristo brings women, in
a nuanced and non-stereotypical way, to the centre of attention in her novels and with the
narrative, the novels attempt to subvert the dominant social structures.
Lastly, I would briefly like to focus on the titles of the novels as well. Evaristo’s choice to
title The Emperor’s Babe the way she did once again emphasises Zuleika’s role. It is not the
emperor Severus or Zuleika’s husband Felix who receives central focus in the title. Zuleika’s
role is underlined instead of a man’s role, which again subverts the social structure. In this case
again, Evaristo uses the narrative to show another story than the one society depicts. Soul
Tourists seems less inspired by Jessie, as it is mostly Stanley who can be defined as a ‘soul
tourist’. Still, Jessie and Stanley undertake their journey together, learning from one another.
In a way, Jessie can be seen as a ‘soul tourist’ as well. Blonde Roots, then, as I have mentioned
earlier in this thesis, can be seen as a critique on the beauty standards that are often imposed on
women. Katharine Burkitt remarks that it is an explicit reference to “the paradoxical fact that it
is naturally blonde hair that looks ‘plain tacky’” (Burkitt 2012: 415). Through the title as well,
Evaristo draws attention to the dominant beauty standards and their impact on women. Not only
the narrative situation points thus towards the importance of women, Evaristo’s titles do so as
well.
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Conclusion
The feminist movement and feminist literature have often gone hand in hand, influencing
one another and translating one another’s ideas. Together they have often undertaken the fight
against gender stereotypes and for equality. Because of this link, a frequently asked question of
literature, and especially contemporary literature, is whether or not it can be considered feminist
literature. Starting from this viewpoint, this master’s thesis has researched whether the early
novels of contemporary black British writer Bernardine Evaristo can be called feminist novels
or not. In order to do so, I have first looked at what is meant with feminism and gender, and
what is expected of a feminist novel. Then, I have focused on three of Evaristo’s early novels,
The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots, and lastly, I have brought together the
theoretical framework and the findings from my literary analysis to conclude whether or not
Evaristo’s early novels can be defined as feminist.
In its most basic definition, feminism refers to equal rights for men and women; it means
that men and women should all be treated equally. However, it is not only a system of ideas, it
also encompasses an engagement and willingness to strive for the equal treatment of both men
and women. Further, it is inseparable from gender and gender studies, which focus on the
“socially determined difference based upon the biological differences between the sexes”
(Letherby and Marchbank 2014: 5). Most importantly, these differences are transformed into a
gender system: a hierarchy in which men and masculinity are at the top and women and
femininity are at the bottom. This way, gender is one of the major ways in which humans
organise their lives. In the same vein, social signifiers such as race and social class function as
a way to organise society as well. Such social signifiers are all transformed into hierarchies:
men is considered superior to women, white to black, rich to poor. On the basis of these kind
of hierarchies, people often face oppression and discrimination. In this regard, Kimberlé
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Crenshaw coined a theory called intersectionality, which pays attention to the ‘intersections’ of
individual positions. To look at such intersections allows us to see how people are oppressed
and privileged. While people can face oppression in terms of, for example, gender or race, they
can also be privileged in other ways, which might complicate one’s experience of oppression
and privilege.
Intersectionality is important when considering feminism and thus, ideally, plays a role in a
feminist novel as well. Not all women’s experiences are the same so a feminist novel should
take the different aspects that characterise women’s identities into account as well. Further, a
feminist novel concerns itself with women and womanhood and “illuminates some aspect of
the female condition and/or offers some kind of imperative for change” (Gay 2014: 46). It
strives to eliminate gender inequalities and usually engages with certain ideas that attempt to
change gender norms, or at least expose them. The feminist issues that feminist literature
concerns itself with, can span a broad range. In this thesis, I have focused on three main aspects,
power, the construction of femininity and women’s empowerment to assess whether Evaristo’s
early novels can be called feminist novels.
In The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots, women are all given a voice. While
the social structure is clearly dominated by men, the narrative situation subverts this by bringing
women to the centre of attention. It is the women’s world which receives central focus, not the
men’s. The power relations are usually in favour of the men in Evaristo’s novels, which
becomes clear in, for example, Zuleika’s life as she is subjected to the will of the men in her
life, Doris’s powerlessness that is implied in her status as slave or even in Jessie’s case, who
eventually has to conform to Stanley’s will as well. Yet, women receive central focus and are
given the opportunity to resist these power imbalances. The women in Evaristo’s novels are not
resigned to their position and they all search for ways of empowerment. Bernardine Evaristo
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exposes thus gendered power imbalances in The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists and Blonde
Roots, but also showcases women who try to find empowerment within the often restricted lives
they are forces to live.
Related to these power imbalances where women often have to conform to men’s will,
Evaristo also exposes harmful beauty standards through which power is exerted over women
as well. Especially in The Emperor’s Babe and Blonde Roots, the negative impact of such
standards on women is illustrated. Zuleika and Doris, for example, struggle with self-doubt,
and even self-hatred, as they fail to completely conform to certain standards. Here as well,
though, Evaristo shows how the women try to resist this kind of control over them, for example
with Doris’s attempt to love her own features. Further, when it comes to their femininity,
Evaristo’s women are not reduced to stereotypes, but are instead allowed to be mothers and
express their sexuality. Evaristo paints a nuanced picture of her women characters, as they are
allowed to be more than a stereotype and evolve into round characters. Jessie, for instance, has
made mistakes as a mother, yet she is not immediately dismissed as a bad mother. The novels
also exemplify the kind of complicated experiences of sexuality and motherhood that women
sometimes have to deal with. Zuleika struggles with her sexuality and her inability to have
children; Doris, controlled by slave masters in every aspect of her life, is not allowed to be a
mother.
The situation in The Emperor’s Babe and Blonde Roots is thus quite straightforward: despite
their many restrictions, Zuleika and Doris manage to show their resilience and potential. They
find ways to resist their limitations and their experiences are represented in a nuanced and nonstereotypical way. Furthermore, intersectionality is held into account as well. The women’s race
and social class is often considered too. However, Soul Tourists’ situation is more complicated.
In its modern society, the novel’s power imbalances are less straightforward. Jessie’s dominant
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personality gives the impression that she has the upper-hand, instead of Stanley. In the end,
however, it is Jessie who has to conform to Stanley’s will. Further, a lot of the novel’s focus is
on Stanley and his exploration of Europe and its ghosts. Yet, Jessie is given a voice on multiple
occasions as well. She is also a nuanced and round character, who is allowed to make mistakes
and find redemption. Evaristo thus also focuses on Stanley in Soul Tourists, but does not let
that eclipse Jessie and the feminist stand she takes in the portrayal of Jessie’s character.
Ultimately, based on the representation of Zuleika, Doris and Jessie in The Emperor’s Babe,
Soul Tourists and Blonde Roots in terms of power, the construction of femininity and women’s
empowerment, I think it is safe to conclude that the early novels of Bernardine Evaristo can
indeed be called feminist novels.
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