The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
Calling on thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud, George ‘Bishop’ Berkeley and G. E. Moore, Randi Koppen identifies, in this chapter, a Woolfian reading practice that is alert to dense textual allusion. Her chosen sentence prompts examination of the ‘freakish and unequal’ aspects of Orlando and, more specifically, the ‘unequal juxtaposition’ of ‘biscuits and philosophy, Bishop and negress’, in Chapter V. Koppen discusses the manifold allusions encompassed in this sentence – including its dialogue with Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) – and throws into relief its ‘questions of marriage, of language and what we have in common, but also of the colonial origins of modernist aesthetics and life-styles’.
Keywords: colonialism, G. E. Moore, George Berkeley, intertextuality, marriage, modernism, philosophy, race, reading, Sigmund Freud
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