The day they burned the books analysis

Question:

In The Day They Burned the Books by Jean Rhys, why does Eddie say that he doesn't like daffodils? What do these flowers mean to both Eddie and the young narrator? How do they both feel about the English, and why?

Post-World War II Postcolonial Perspectives in Caribbean Literature:

After the devastation of World War II, the British Empire was no longer sustainable. For centuries, the British Empire had established colonies across the globe, from South Asia to Africa, from the Caribbean to Ireland. British colonizers ruled violently, using the English language, taxing to build British wealth, discriminating against nonwhite groups, and exploiting human and natural resources. The empire colonized by utilizing slave labor through the first decades of the nineteenth century, and colonizers continued to punish the use of indigenous languages and the practice of indigenous traditions to consolidate their English power in global trade for generations. After World War II, a period of decolonization saw the end of traditional British colonial rule in many colonies. The British Empire became the British Commonwealth, and many colonies finally gained independence from Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. Jean Rhys, a white female author of British descent, was born on the British colony of Dominica in the West Indies in 1890. Her observations as the child of colonizers who lived to see massive decolonization informed her writing, which engages directly with the racism and discrimination she witnessed in the West Indies and the alienation of colonial immigrants in Britain. Her exploration of complex themes of personal identity, national identity, and race, in works like The Wide Sargasso Sea and 'The Day They Burned the Books,' contribute to postcolonial studies of literature in the mid-to-late twentieth century when these formerly marginalized perspectives on the violence of colonization were finally gaining literary and political representation.

Answer and Explanation:

Jean Rhys's short story 'The Day They Burned the Books' was published in 1960 and marked her reemergence after decades of silence, long after she had been active in modernist circles in the 1920s. Rhys's writing in the 1960s explores the alienation of individuals in the larger national context of English identity and international context of decolonization and immigration. As a white child born into a family of British origin on Dominica, a British colony at the time of her birth, Rhys witnessed firsthand the cruel and hypocritical power dynamics on an island that was simultaneously considered British but also not considered good enough to be 'real English.' The short story's narrator, a young female like Rhys who is white and born on the island, tells the story of her friend, Eddie, a boy whose father is a white Englishman and whose mother is a mixed-race woman with an indigenous family history. White characters, like Eddie's father, and his trappings of Englishness, like his books and love of daffodils, are deployed in the story to reflect the discrimination and disdain that the colonizing group leveled against the colonized group, represented here by Eddie's mother. Through their childhood conversations with children of various backgrounds, the young people on the island nevertheless internalize the supposed superiority of English culture. The books that Eddie's father collects and the daffodils that his father likes better than local flowers are symbols of English culture in this Caribbean colony where they have to be imported, and where they compete with and replace traditions and flowers already there. Daffodils are a recognizable symbol of spring in English poetry, perhaps most well-known from William Wordsworth's 1807 poem, 'I wandered lonely as a cloud,' which ends with the speaker finding joy and inspiration in the countryside scene: 'And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.' However, daffodils are not native to the West Indies. They represent a faraway, so-called superiority expressed through books and literary canons that do not connect to the reality of children like Eddie and the narrator growing up in a colony with a different climate thousands of miles away. When talking to the narrator and other young inhabitants of the island, Eddie says: 'No, and I don't like daffodils either. Dad's always going on about them. He says they lick the flowers here into a cocked hat and I bet that's a lie.' Eddie's statement shocks the others, who expect him to respect and perpetuate the idea of English supremacy. However, the narrator admires what she views as his act of honesty and boldness: 'I for one admired him. I also was tired of learning and reciting poems in praise of daffodils, and my relations with the few 'real' English boys and girls I had met were awkward. I had discovered that if I called myself English they would snub me haughtily: 'You're not English; you're a horrid colonial.' 'Well, I don't much want to be English,' I would say... 'Heads I win, tails you lose, that's the English.' Both Eddie and the narrator learn that they are not considered English enough and they begin to suspect that the power dynamic between the English and the Caribbean is unfair and untrustworthy.

What is the theme of the day they burned the books?

Why does Eddies mother burn the books?

What is the symbolic representation of burning the books by Mrs Sawyer?

What ethnicity was Eddie in the day they burned the books?