Small Island’s Queenie as a Proto-Feminist Agent of Social Change
The birth of a child is often a joyous occasion and serves as a symbol of bringing in something new to pass on to the future. In the novel Small Island by Andrea Levy, a child is born at the very end. Yet this is not a child without controversy. Rather, the product of miscegenation proves to create difficulties for the white mother, Queenie, in a fairly undecided ending. She writes the black immigrants of post World War II Britain into history and validates their position in society as she accepts them as boarders and as she procreates with a black man. Despite the warnings and increased alerts of such possibilities by legal codes, Queenie defies the gendered codes set for her. Queenie asserts her power with changing society through having this baby, the symbol of future multiculturalism for Britain.
In Small Island, Andrea Levy weaves four people’s stories (and four plots) into one cohesive narrative. Levy separates the book between past and present times, reflecting and acting, oscillating between the two. Then, she divides the narrative into four smaller narratives, having sections written from a particular character’s perspective. Gilbert Joseph (a Jamaican Royal Air Force member who immigrates to England), Hortense Joseph (a Jamaican who follows her “husband” Gilbert to England), Queenie (a white landlady), and Bernard (Queenie’s husband who has fought in World War II) tell stories individually, adding up to an interesting narrative, detailing the types of wars they all fought. Throughout the article “Small Island, Crossing Cultures,” Bruce Woodcock posits that each character is a small island within the larger context of Britain as a “small island” and all come together to form a microcosm of post World War II British society.
Bernard, Queenie’s husband, goes off to war and is presumed dead by Queenie after not returning after the war’s end. While he has been away, she has rented out rooms to black immigrants from the Caribbean. It was controversial enough for Queenie to go to a movie with Gilbert, a black immigrant however, Queenie ends up being impregnated by another black immigrant. Gilbert is harassed by white policeman outside the theater and this event exemplified race relations in post World War II Britain. Amidst the physical setting of a ravaged Britain, racial and gender discriminations were present, eating away at its interior. Historian Sheila Patterson, in Immigration and Race Relations in Britain 1960-1967 stated that “no overall provision for reception, dispersal, placing or general integration was made by British authorities [for West Indian immigrants]” (2). Furthermore, most immigrants were not culturally ready to enter the complex industrial society of London (4). While West Indians anticipated full acceptance by the Mother Country, this illusion soon dissipated due to racism. The white British had previously-held views of associating dark skin with primitive abilities and inferiority (6).
The conditions of how immigration occurred led to increased relations between white British women and immigrants. The war had brought male immigrants from British colonies to join the Royal Air Force. The Windrush, a British ship, picked up former servicemen in the Caribbean. It stopped in Jamaica (where Small Island’s immigrants came from) where those wishing to rejoin the RAF, and some others, hopped aboard. On June 22, 1948, these passengers exited the ship in Tilbury, Britain (Phillips). Given that the initial waves of immigrants were 85% male and that many British men were away serving the war meant that, in a heterosexual context, white British women were the first to have “intimate relations with the predominantly male visitors and migrants from abroad” (Niva 672). The groundwork was laid for these interactions and even “the US army command felt it necessary to warn its troops that British women had a different racial consciousness and would go to a movie or a dance with a ‘Negro’ quite as readily as with anyone else” (672). Such sentiment against these interracial practices brings to life Deniz Kandiyoti’s thesis in “Identity and Its Discontents” claiming “the regulation of gender is central to the articulation of cultural identity and difference” (388).
In her article “Gender and Racial Others in Postwar Britain,” Mica Nava posits that white women identified with the marginalized black migrants and this is partially what drew the two social groups together so frequently (673). Stephen Brooke in “Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s” explains: “The exigencies of war demanded the idealization of traditional stereotypes, such as mother and wife” (776). Despite women’s work during the war, the Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services promoted the pre-war breadwinner and housewife dichotomy. However, the need for labor in Britain blurred women’s roles as either mother or worker (776). Society did not readily accept that a woman could do both. This dependent image created an issue of gender inequality in post-war Britain for females. On the other hand, “modernity was invested with different meanings for men, who were relatively free to adopt new styles of conduct” (Kandiyoti 379). Men did not have the same social constraints that women experienced. It is this socially lower class and the lack of liberation and voice which brought white women to feel inferior and less than white men. It was the racial discrimination which brought incoming black migrants to feel inferior and voiceless to the white men. These social groups quested for greater equality.
Queenie was a white woman who experienced this inequality in the post World War II climate. She felt voiceless. To gain voice, she subverted dominant culture which told her it was not acceptable to have relationships and communication with black migrants by inviting black migrants into home. Not only did she do that, but she had sexual intercourse with a black migrant and had his baby. This action is also subverting the white male view of being able to fully satisfy a white female. White women’s relationships with black male migrants can be seen “as a
form of proto-feminism: interracial relations constituted a revolt against the constraints of ‘femininity’ as well as the parental culture, and in this way anticipated the political critique that was to emerge at the end of the 1960s with the women’s movement” (Niva 673). Using subversion of the dominant culture, Queenie is writing these black migrants into history and giving them a voice through the birth of her baby. She is also leveraging her social position as she defies social protocol and asserts herself as a proto-feminist character. Kandiyoti points out that “feminism is not autonomous, but bound to the signifying network of the national context which produces it” (380). In this case, Queenie uses feminism as a tool to help change the national context’s racial and gender inequalities.
Queenie’s child is the product of her proto-feminism, but she keeps this product secret for a long time. Queenie has had a sexual relationship with the Jamaican immigrant, Michael Roberts. During a time of hurricane activity in Hertfordshire, Queenie explains they stayed together three days and nights. Amidst the background of war and the force of a hurricane, Queenie finds comfort in what she socially should not: a black immigrant. In the article, “Small Island, Crossing Cultures,” Bruce Woodcock connects the whirlwind of activities: “The hurricane, the war, Windrush are all monumental upheavals. The displacement and disorientation of Queenie…reverberates throughout the novel….all [characters] become migrants and refugees in different ways as they face the need for small islands to communicate and connect” (52). Her displacement continues as her situation becomes more complex. As a result of these joyous days and nights, Queenie is pregnant. Queenie reflects, “I knew I was pregnant. If that miserable doctor I’d seen before the war was right, then I had to be. They might not strictly have been conjugal relations but, by God, I blinking enjoyed them” (Levy 411). At first Queenie wanted to get rid of it and would move heavy furniture around in hopes of miscarriage. Then, one day the baby kicked and Queenie states, “I felt queasy thinking that the little mite was probably scared of me. Who else alive was there who could protect it? I was so sorry and I told it so over and over” (411). Queenie’s fear of societal rejection came was displaced on the baby. But, in the end, she decided to birth the baby.
No one even finds out about her pregnancy until the novel’s ending. As Gilbert and Bernard bicker and their voices escalate, Queenie begins feeling ill very quickly. She is then insistent on Hortense to bring her to her bedroom. There, Queenie unwraps bandages around her midsection to reveal her pregnant self— a fact she has been hiding since she knew it. Hortense performs as the midwife. The child is black; Hortense then questions Queenie. Queenie unveils her fling with Michael Roberts who arrived to her house and stayed for a few days of passionate lovemaking. As Gilbert and Bernard enter the room, Queenie’s secret is revealed. Despite Bernard’s pleadings, Queenie begs Gilbert and Hortense to take the child, as they are moving to another location. They bring the child with them, adopting it as their own, as they move on, finally in love.
Queenie’s baby is the symbol of the emerging British identity, multicultural and complex. In the article “Kafka: toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari examine some of the elements of minor literature. Specifically important to Small Island are the qualities of communal writing and writing as a political device. Small Island features an immigrant community and its views. It also shows the political conflicts and a concluding message of the equal necessity of all people. This final scene articulates the illogical notion of racism when Queenie asks Gilbert and Hortense to adopt her black baby, which also feeds into the political issue of miscegenation.
Bernard seems okay with Queenie keeping the child. In defense of what public opinion would be, Bernard states, “There’s been a war, all sorts of things happened. Adopted, that’s what we’ll say. An orphan. Quite simple” (Levy 431). By masking the truth with this lie, though, Queenie would constantly be in denial of how she has gone against what her “duty” as a white British woman is: furthering her racial line (McLeod 49). Queenie explains to Bernard, “One day he’ll do something naughty and you’ll look at him and think, The little black bastard, because you’ll be angry. And he’ll see it in your eyes” (Levy 431).
Given the racial and gender issues in post World War II Britain, Queenie sees her only viable option as giving the baby to her Jamaican migrant boarders, Hortense and Gilbert. It would seem as if a natural occurrence and the child would not be stigmatized as he would be in white British society. This adoption supports the theory of “belonging by suggesting that - in this country in 1948 - the best place for a child who looks black is with a black family. The child's individuality will be elided and its disruptive presence safely accommodated and neutralised” (McLeod 50).
John McLeod in his article “Postcolonial Fictions of Adoption” contends that “in particular, the figure of the adopted child - born to one set of parents but raised by another - has begun to emerge as a significant personage in such writing”(45). As a “social practice” adoption reveals the core of national, cultural, and racial ideals. (45-46). With the act of adoption, Queenie’s baby becomes a political entity with his life espousing the various racial, cultural, and national ideals about British identity. In this post World War II world it was unacceptable for miscegenation and mixed-race families to exist. The baby symbolizes this complexity.
Yet it is also with this adoption scene that the potential hope for change in Britain’s racial divide exists. To begin with, the baby is mixed-race and Queenie did not terminate the pregnancy. She was intending to have the baby, had her husband not returned from war. Furthermore, when she sent baby to live with Hortense and Gilbert as they planned to move out of Queenie’s house, she sent a picture of herself for the baby. Hortense explains, “But then at the bottom of this bundle was a photograph. It was of Mrs Blight taken, I was sure, in a happier time. Head and shoulders, her eyes angled to the viewer, gazing out with a gentle smile” (Levy 438). However, Hortense states she is going to make the money Queenie gave them and the photograph a secret for the baby in order to protect the familial unit. By including this photograph, Queenie is showing she does not wish to completely abandon the child. By including the photograph, Queenie is once again creating the act of subversion. McLeod explains: “The family has often been the site where legislative and divisive discourses of race and nation unhappily encounter loving and often brave human relations which reach subversively and threateningly across such divides” (McLeod 46). Queenie’s choice to birth the child and to go farther and include her personal photograph subverts and threatens the racial divide which has forced her to make the decision whether or not to raise the child. It physically threatens the racial social constructions in place as “the photograph of herself which Queenie leaves for her son will always remind him of the untidiness of these arrangements, as well as the violence involved in maintaining a confection of filiative [racially harmonized] belonging” (50).
Through deciding to have sexual relations with a Jamaican immigrant and by allowing black Jamaicans to be boarders, proto-feminist Queenie subverted the dominant discourse at the time subscribed to her by a male-dominated society. Furthermore, she had a baby that was multiracial and multicultural. Her baby represented the future for Britain, a multicultural society with many voices speaking. Despite giving the baby to Gilbert and Hortense for adoption, Queenie asserts her power and voice by giving a photograph of herself to the baby. Queenie defies societal norms and has a child as a form of political agency to change her society.
Works Cited
Brooke, Stephen. “Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s.” Journal of
Social History. 34.4 (2001): 773-96. Web. 20 Oct. 2010.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of
Expression.” New Literary History. 16.3 (Spring 1985): 591-608. Print.
Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Identity and its Discontents: Woman and the Nation.” Millennium: Journal of
International Studies. 20.3 (1991).
Levy, Andrea. Small Island. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.
McLeod, John. “Postcolonial Fictions of Adoption.” Critical Survey 18.6 (2006): 45-55. Web.
3 Nov. 2010.
Nava, Mica. “Gender and Racial Others in Postwar Britain.” Third Text 20.6 (2006): 671-82.
Web. 14 Oct. 2010.
Patterson, Sheila A. Immigration and Race Relations in Britain 1960-1967. New York: Oxford
U P, 1969. Print.
Phillips, Mike. “Windrush—The Passengers.” BBC. 2009. Web. 20 Oct. 2010.
Woodcock, Bruce. “Small Island, Crossing Cultures.” Wasafari 23.2 (2008): 50-55.
In Small Island, Andrea Levy weaves four people’s stories (and four plots) into one cohesive narrative. Levy separates the book between past and present times, reflecting and acting, oscillating between the two. Then, she divides the narrative into four smaller narratives, having sections written from a particular character’s perspective. Gilbert Joseph (a Jamaican Royal Air Force member who immigrates to England), Hortense Joseph (a Jamaican who follows her “husband” Gilbert to England), Queenie (a white landlady), and Bernard (Queenie’s husband who has fought in World War II) tell stories individually, adding up to an interesting narrative, detailing the types of wars they all fought. Throughout the article “Small Island, Crossing Cultures,” Bruce Woodcock posits that each character is a small island within the larger context of Britain as a “small island” and all come together to form a microcosm of post World War II British society.
Bernard, Queenie’s husband, goes off to war and is presumed dead by Queenie after not returning after the war’s end. While he has been away, she has rented out rooms to black immigrants from the Caribbean. It was controversial enough for Queenie to go to a movie with Gilbert, a black immigrant however, Queenie ends up being impregnated by another black immigrant. Gilbert is harassed by white policeman outside the theater and this event exemplified race relations in post World War II Britain. Amidst the physical setting of a ravaged Britain, racial and gender discriminations were present, eating away at its interior. Historian Sheila Patterson, in Immigration and Race Relations in Britain 1960-1967 stated that “no overall provision for reception, dispersal, placing or general integration was made by British authorities [for West Indian immigrants]” (2). Furthermore, most immigrants were not culturally ready to enter the complex industrial society of London (4). While West Indians anticipated full acceptance by the Mother Country, this illusion soon dissipated due to racism. The white British had previously-held views of associating dark skin with primitive abilities and inferiority (6).
The conditions of how immigration occurred led to increased relations between white British women and immigrants. The war had brought male immigrants from British colonies to join the Royal Air Force. The Windrush, a British ship, picked up former servicemen in the Caribbean. It stopped in Jamaica (where Small Island’s immigrants came from) where those wishing to rejoin the RAF, and some others, hopped aboard. On June 22, 1948, these passengers exited the ship in Tilbury, Britain (Phillips). Given that the initial waves of immigrants were 85% male and that many British men were away serving the war meant that, in a heterosexual context, white British women were the first to have “intimate relations with the predominantly male visitors and migrants from abroad” (Niva 672). The groundwork was laid for these interactions and even “the US army command felt it necessary to warn its troops that British women had a different racial consciousness and would go to a movie or a dance with a ‘Negro’ quite as readily as with anyone else” (672). Such sentiment against these interracial practices brings to life Deniz Kandiyoti’s thesis in “Identity and Its Discontents” claiming “the regulation of gender is central to the articulation of cultural identity and difference” (388).
In her article “Gender and Racial Others in Postwar Britain,” Mica Nava posits that white women identified with the marginalized black migrants and this is partially what drew the two social groups together so frequently (673). Stephen Brooke in “Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s” explains: “The exigencies of war demanded the idealization of traditional stereotypes, such as mother and wife” (776). Despite women’s work during the war, the Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services promoted the pre-war breadwinner and housewife dichotomy. However, the need for labor in Britain blurred women’s roles as either mother or worker (776). Society did not readily accept that a woman could do both. This dependent image created an issue of gender inequality in post-war Britain for females. On the other hand, “modernity was invested with different meanings for men, who were relatively free to adopt new styles of conduct” (Kandiyoti 379). Men did not have the same social constraints that women experienced. It is this socially lower class and the lack of liberation and voice which brought white women to feel inferior and less than white men. It was the racial discrimination which brought incoming black migrants to feel inferior and voiceless to the white men. These social groups quested for greater equality.
Queenie was a white woman who experienced this inequality in the post World War II climate. She felt voiceless. To gain voice, she subverted dominant culture which told her it was not acceptable to have relationships and communication with black migrants by inviting black migrants into home. Not only did she do that, but she had sexual intercourse with a black migrant and had his baby. This action is also subverting the white male view of being able to fully satisfy a white female. White women’s relationships with black male migrants can be seen “as a
form of proto-feminism: interracial relations constituted a revolt against the constraints of ‘femininity’ as well as the parental culture, and in this way anticipated the political critique that was to emerge at the end of the 1960s with the women’s movement” (Niva 673). Using subversion of the dominant culture, Queenie is writing these black migrants into history and giving them a voice through the birth of her baby. She is also leveraging her social position as she defies social protocol and asserts herself as a proto-feminist character. Kandiyoti points out that “feminism is not autonomous, but bound to the signifying network of the national context which produces it” (380). In this case, Queenie uses feminism as a tool to help change the national context’s racial and gender inequalities.
Queenie’s child is the product of her proto-feminism, but she keeps this product secret for a long time. Queenie has had a sexual relationship with the Jamaican immigrant, Michael Roberts. During a time of hurricane activity in Hertfordshire, Queenie explains they stayed together three days and nights. Amidst the background of war and the force of a hurricane, Queenie finds comfort in what she socially should not: a black immigrant. In the article, “Small Island, Crossing Cultures,” Bruce Woodcock connects the whirlwind of activities: “The hurricane, the war, Windrush are all monumental upheavals. The displacement and disorientation of Queenie…reverberates throughout the novel….all [characters] become migrants and refugees in different ways as they face the need for small islands to communicate and connect” (52). Her displacement continues as her situation becomes more complex. As a result of these joyous days and nights, Queenie is pregnant. Queenie reflects, “I knew I was pregnant. If that miserable doctor I’d seen before the war was right, then I had to be. They might not strictly have been conjugal relations but, by God, I blinking enjoyed them” (Levy 411). At first Queenie wanted to get rid of it and would move heavy furniture around in hopes of miscarriage. Then, one day the baby kicked and Queenie states, “I felt queasy thinking that the little mite was probably scared of me. Who else alive was there who could protect it? I was so sorry and I told it so over and over” (411). Queenie’s fear of societal rejection came was displaced on the baby. But, in the end, she decided to birth the baby.
No one even finds out about her pregnancy until the novel’s ending. As Gilbert and Bernard bicker and their voices escalate, Queenie begins feeling ill very quickly. She is then insistent on Hortense to bring her to her bedroom. There, Queenie unwraps bandages around her midsection to reveal her pregnant self— a fact she has been hiding since she knew it. Hortense performs as the midwife. The child is black; Hortense then questions Queenie. Queenie unveils her fling with Michael Roberts who arrived to her house and stayed for a few days of passionate lovemaking. As Gilbert and Bernard enter the room, Queenie’s secret is revealed. Despite Bernard’s pleadings, Queenie begs Gilbert and Hortense to take the child, as they are moving to another location. They bring the child with them, adopting it as their own, as they move on, finally in love.
Queenie’s baby is the symbol of the emerging British identity, multicultural and complex. In the article “Kafka: toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari examine some of the elements of minor literature. Specifically important to Small Island are the qualities of communal writing and writing as a political device. Small Island features an immigrant community and its views. It also shows the political conflicts and a concluding message of the equal necessity of all people. This final scene articulates the illogical notion of racism when Queenie asks Gilbert and Hortense to adopt her black baby, which also feeds into the political issue of miscegenation.
Bernard seems okay with Queenie keeping the child. In defense of what public opinion would be, Bernard states, “There’s been a war, all sorts of things happened. Adopted, that’s what we’ll say. An orphan. Quite simple” (Levy 431). By masking the truth with this lie, though, Queenie would constantly be in denial of how she has gone against what her “duty” as a white British woman is: furthering her racial line (McLeod 49). Queenie explains to Bernard, “One day he’ll do something naughty and you’ll look at him and think, The little black bastard, because you’ll be angry. And he’ll see it in your eyes” (Levy 431).
Given the racial and gender issues in post World War II Britain, Queenie sees her only viable option as giving the baby to her Jamaican migrant boarders, Hortense and Gilbert. It would seem as if a natural occurrence and the child would not be stigmatized as he would be in white British society. This adoption supports the theory of “belonging by suggesting that - in this country in 1948 - the best place for a child who looks black is with a black family. The child's individuality will be elided and its disruptive presence safely accommodated and neutralised” (McLeod 50).
John McLeod in his article “Postcolonial Fictions of Adoption” contends that “in particular, the figure of the adopted child - born to one set of parents but raised by another - has begun to emerge as a significant personage in such writing”(45). As a “social practice” adoption reveals the core of national, cultural, and racial ideals. (45-46). With the act of adoption, Queenie’s baby becomes a political entity with his life espousing the various racial, cultural, and national ideals about British identity. In this post World War II world it was unacceptable for miscegenation and mixed-race families to exist. The baby symbolizes this complexity.
Yet it is also with this adoption scene that the potential hope for change in Britain’s racial divide exists. To begin with, the baby is mixed-race and Queenie did not terminate the pregnancy. She was intending to have the baby, had her husband not returned from war. Furthermore, when she sent baby to live with Hortense and Gilbert as they planned to move out of Queenie’s house, she sent a picture of herself for the baby. Hortense explains, “But then at the bottom of this bundle was a photograph. It was of Mrs Blight taken, I was sure, in a happier time. Head and shoulders, her eyes angled to the viewer, gazing out with a gentle smile” (Levy 438). However, Hortense states she is going to make the money Queenie gave them and the photograph a secret for the baby in order to protect the familial unit. By including this photograph, Queenie is showing she does not wish to completely abandon the child. By including the photograph, Queenie is once again creating the act of subversion. McLeod explains: “The family has often been the site where legislative and divisive discourses of race and nation unhappily encounter loving and often brave human relations which reach subversively and threateningly across such divides” (McLeod 46). Queenie’s choice to birth the child and to go farther and include her personal photograph subverts and threatens the racial divide which has forced her to make the decision whether or not to raise the child. It physically threatens the racial social constructions in place as “the photograph of herself which Queenie leaves for her son will always remind him of the untidiness of these arrangements, as well as the violence involved in maintaining a confection of filiative [racially harmonized] belonging” (50).
Through deciding to have sexual relations with a Jamaican immigrant and by allowing black Jamaicans to be boarders, proto-feminist Queenie subverted the dominant discourse at the time subscribed to her by a male-dominated society. Furthermore, she had a baby that was multiracial and multicultural. Her baby represented the future for Britain, a multicultural society with many voices speaking. Despite giving the baby to Gilbert and Hortense for adoption, Queenie asserts her power and voice by giving a photograph of herself to the baby. Queenie defies societal norms and has a child as a form of political agency to change her society.
Works Cited
Brooke, Stephen. “Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s.” Journal of
Social History. 34.4 (2001): 773-96. Web. 20 Oct. 2010.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of
Expression.” New Literary History. 16.3 (Spring 1985): 591-608. Print.
Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Identity and its Discontents: Woman and the Nation.” Millennium: Journal of
International Studies. 20.3 (1991).
Levy, Andrea. Small Island. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.
McLeod, John. “Postcolonial Fictions of Adoption.” Critical Survey 18.6 (2006): 45-55. Web.
3 Nov. 2010.
Nava, Mica. “Gender and Racial Others in Postwar Britain.” Third Text 20.6 (2006): 671-82.
Web. 14 Oct. 2010.
Patterson, Sheila A. Immigration and Race Relations in Britain 1960-1967. New York: Oxford
U P, 1969. Print.
Phillips, Mike. “Windrush—The Passengers.” BBC. 2009. Web. 20 Oct. 2010.
Woodcock, Bruce. “Small Island, Crossing Cultures.” Wasafari 23.2 (2008): 50-55.
