Jane’s Career

Title: Jane’s Career

Author: Herbert George de Lisser

ISBN: 435 98540

Published: 1914

Publisher: Heinemann

Though living in similar condition, experience may vary at gender level. H G de Lisser delves into an untilled speck in the landscape of literature of the Caribbean Island, famed exclusively, for decades, by bearing the characteristics of the two comportments of exile and coming of age. As a novel of growth, Jane’s Career is the first of its kind to have come with female Negro as a central character.

H G de Lisser takes a forage into Jamaican society, spinning the narrative around a young Black girl named Jane, with an omniscient voice offering trailing commentary up to her adulthood from her childhood, exploring her condition at individual level, and thousands similar cases in the West Indies, generally. Interestingly, time changed, readers changed, the story remains.

Jane, 16, begins her career when she left her village of Mount Malas for Kingston as a domestic girl to Mason family.  The delight of what her people consider a social advancement is acute. Because Jane is a naïve ‘chile,’ a respected ‘ole’ man of the village lectures her to “keep herself up” because “Kingston is a very big and wicked city…”  

Celestina, having gone to the city herself, told Jane that she would have to need someone to assist her, by which she means a boyfriend, a polite way of referring to prostitution. Jane could not understand. She left determined to keep a virtuous life. Soon after her arrival, she discovered that morally living is “practically impossible.”  This is so because life in Kingston is radically and diametrically different from her rural upbringing.

Jane begins entering into stages of refinement the first day of her arrival. In the world of her own, she has to fend off sexual harassment from Cecil, mamparla, a Jamaican coinage for effeminate, the gentleman of the house, police intimidation and the rigor and hassle of Kingston streets.  

H G de Lisser examines the exploitative nature of peasantry and maid-servant relationship. Jane quickly finds herself in a cruel situation.  For us to understand exactly her condition, Kate, a village friend of Jane who accompanies Jane’s mother, Mrs Burrell, to visit Jane, brings the point home when she wonders loudly why not a single letter from Jane reached the village since she left. Jane replied “I have no time, me love.”

Mrs Mason can easily wear a façade to hide her inner self. A tactics that helps consolidate her atrocities. This manipulative practice forced Jane into mental asylum. The person, her mother, whom she hopes would understand her situation would never believe her. It is obvious to see that Jane is under forces of structural violence from within and without. Terror and fear have been instilled in her mind. Her vulnerability becomes more imminent and palpable when Sarah left.

The society is hemmed in on racial strata. Jane thought Mrs Mason as a White until she discovered later that she is mullato. And Jane wonders inwardly: oh!, she is not even White?  Maltreating me? This of course, subtly, exposes layers of difficulties Blacks have to, and continue, to contend with, in race relationships. Jane’s attitude here shouldn’t be misunderstood as an act of inferiority complex or acceptance of servitude and subservience. Rather a witty attack against racial discrimination.

Yet again, the issue of racism is touched at more profound level. While Jane has never blamed Mason’s race for her cruelty, Mrs Mason indicts Jane’s entire race. Although herself believes Jane is honest, when the girl ran away, her subconscious mind, long trained on stereotype, throws her into “diligent counting over spoons and knives and forks,” inwardly muttering “you ever see such a race of people.”

Economic reality has deprived people of their dignity, and in return empowers exploitation. Mrs Mason believes that despite the beating of her servants, they must be grateful. There are many who can willingly take their place mainly for the food and shelter she provides.

Mrs Mason is mean and intensely suspicious. For her, dishonesty is the general order for an average servant and resorts to setting up the girls against each other. Mrs Mason is simply judging others by her standard. The two girls worked together and defeated her.

Sarah, as a teacher, guides Jane through the process of navigating Mason’s world. Speaking to her on banana errand for the mistress, she tells Jane Mrs Mason is so mean, “she wouldn’t even gie y’u de banana skin, so I teck it myself, an’ I gwine to give y’u a piece. Only now an’ den y’u can get any’ting out of her when y’u go to de shop.” God knows that Sarah is not a thief.

Throughout the novel, Jane hungers for freedom and independence. But she cannot attain these aspirations if she remains under someone’s care and supervision. It is clear to see why she has to be exposed and be stripped and severed of vestiges of nativity and dependence, though Jane is not demanding much from the world. All she asks for is what Kenneth Ramchand calls “comfortable domesticity.”

Sarah left, and had to, despite the fact that her presence protects Jane from Mr Cecil’s amorous advances. Sarah is there mainly to teach her one or two things. Her revolt against Mrs Mason serves as an eye-opener to timid Jane. Her views of Mrs Mason as a cult-figure of awesome formidability and unconquerableness were quickly dispelled when, in her presence, Sarah successfully challenged her.

Sarah aggressively fought for her right and succeeded; but Amanda has lost when she attempted doing so.  Jane did neither. This beggars the question, thus: is it bravery or foolishness to look into the eyes of your employer and challenge them? Jane’s strength lies in her meekness, fighting passively but determinedly, up till the right time arrived, since when we, and not her, recognize that doing so at the moment is foolishness.

The second stage of Jane’s development begins when she deserted Mason family and joined a group of female factory workers who are living life in a purlieu, more or less like brothel. Everyone is struggling economically. It is until now that Jane realizes she really needs a ‘friend’ Celestina has insisted she should get. But the inherent honesty in her will not allow her to “eat the men out” as Sathyra suggested, since they [men] are not coming intent to marry them.

The handling of irony as a trope is strikingly dazzling. The innate shade, double-standing nature of man and the influence of environment on behavior is brought to light. People who maltreated and badmouthed Jane later came to celebrate her. Paradoxically, Jane herself would come to keep a servant whom she calls Mrs Jane. For under servitude the name of the slave is always insignificant, a nothingness in the face the master’s.

Human relation, we understand, is firmly built on the premise of the principle of quid pro quo. Mr Cecil cash assistance to Jane is not without hopes for something in return. Jane and Vincent have to trade off their ideals to be able to get married. At this stage, we have covered the repertoire of Jane growth. The vague sense of regret and trepidation she had when she set out from her village, sets the beginning of her transformation and accomplishment, reinforcing the idea of reward for the brave who trudge into the unknown.

The moving story of Jane would not have been so electrifying without de Lisser’s use of language, which is one considerate to universal readers, artfully stripped of elite pomposity, of what Terry Eagleton would describe as something ‘akin to nuclear physics.’ Characters speak ordinarily, a dialectical English variety domesticated to suit everyday life and local consumption, that ensures readers are not going to encounter no bode[the]ration “at all, at all,” especially for a Nigerian reader. “De trute of de matter” is that the language looks very alike with Nigerian pidgin. The food is yam and sweet potato with boiled salt fish and some rice.