Male Masochism and the Colonialist Impulse: Mary Webb's Return of the Native Tess

Abstract

Although the literary canon has become not only a site of conflict but a passionately contested concept and gynocriticsI has won considerable respect for the recovery of forgotten women's texts, books by previously popular and recently rediscovered women writers continue to go rapidly out of print. If for no other reason than their usefulness in providing contextualization, such books should be of interest to theorists of culture and language and to feminist critics of all sorts. Why, then, are these books disappearing almost as soon as they reappear? A line of argument that has been pursued by many feminist critics is that the structure of the academy and the training of English professors exert an often unconscious influence on our judgments so that we apply without question heavily biased received standards of greatness or even goodness.2 In other words, our rational processes are colonized by the dominant discourse. However, our rejection of certain books as inferior and unworthy of serious attention can as easily proceed from unexamined feminist standards. Books that have enjoyed popular success often did so because they offered sensationalism derived from a strong mixture of sex and violence, while avoiding outraging their public by at least overtly upholding the most prevalent contemporary ideology. For obvious reasons, such books are unlikely to be a source of immediate delight to feminist readers, perhaps especially when their authors are women. Yet, though feminism and institutionalized misogyny are in unlikely alliance against them, these books often deserve careful attention in context-rather than as part of the project of contextualizing classics-because, reilluminated in this way, they shine with a surprising power of their own. Mary Webb's Gone To Earth, the novel I will concentrate on in this essay, is a case in point. Just when the predicament of Hazel Woodus, the heroine of Gone to Earth, seems to allow for no resolution, Webb ends the novel by dropping her into a hole. By what might be considered a sort of poetic justice, Webb, as author, has been in danger of suffering the same treatment from readers for some time now. Despite the seductively beautiful paperback editions of her books published in the late 1970s and early 80s, Webb remains unfamiliar even to most professional readers. The current lack of interest in her work is understandable be-