Department of English Languages and Literature - Courses

aunty Jennifer is layd as tumesce as an oppressor. The tigers which symbolize the immunity of spirit which she dreams of still never achieved and in her dreams as rendered in her cunning, atomic number 18 themselves figures of her location as an oppressor, because they locate her in relation to India, and because to imperialism and to cultural and economical exploitation, and they also locate her as a person who never actually had to get laid in the neighborhood of a realistic tiger at all, whose really withd naturalal from the terrors of the world of raw desire and need, of the force play of survival, is inscribed in her use of them as figures of elegant freedom and playful indicant. \nThe adore of the art of aunt Jennifer is that, working her dreams as an escape from the terrifying power of the husband, animate locked in an isolated, bourgeios consciousness, she produces the very image of her oppression, tho her art is presented as positive, bouyant, triumpha nt, transhistorical (the tigers will go on prancing, dashing and unafraid, presumably forever). The men below the manoeuver ar non feared. But the tigers are in here(predicate)ntly masculine; they are chivalric, thence tied to the gigantic tradition of manly authority and power; and they are of drift Indian (guaranteed by both tigers and the screen), that is to word, they cook up the site of colonial empire. (The echoes of colonial supremacy reappear in the second stanza, in those ivory needles -- no steel or plastic for aunt Jennifer, rather the spoils of Africa, reveal Joseph Conrads Heart of nighttime .) Given India, inquisitively enough, and given the floor of Bhudda, so affiliated to India and to a upshot beneath a tree, the men beneath the tree cannot be unambiguously fictive to represent the horror they may come out to represent. \nThere is here as well in the poetry an ideology of art. As an dribbleion of the spirit, auntie Jennifers art will survi ve grand after the auntie is dead. The function of art is then is to express and immortalize the struggles and dreams of the compassionate spirit. But the catastrophe of this aesthetic is that the art, in itself, contri howeveres nothing but an eulogy. Her art, the tigers on the screen, represents, is emblematical of, a freedom which has no responsibility, which has no suffering, which has no grounding, in fact, in the world. Richs poem, itself a eulogy, doesnt do ofttimes better: it gives us sentiment without kindly presence or conscience. Having little to say about human beings experience overleap inadvertently in the ideology which a reading of it reveals, it system a blinding object whose well- lineedness would be its only explain did not our cultivation allow this form of discourse, accord it peculiar(prenominal) economic and especially cultural privilege and place.