Out With the Old, In With the New

by Christina Hall

To assimilate is to absorb, integrate, adjust, include, or adapt a new way of thinking, acting, or living.  Often it is the ideas, values, and or ways of life of a culture (the dominant culture) that are taken up by another.  It is a process that was accelerated during colonization, and kept alive through globalization.  It can be used as a tool to escape or to belong; it can be forced on the unwilling or welcomed with enthusiasm.  It is a word wrought with contradictions…out with the old, in with the new.

Our early teens are formative years when youth can be found searching out new ways in which to assert their independence within their worlds.  It is also a time when many children disregard against what their parents or elders have taught them and look to redefine themselves with the popular, dominant culture.  It is a process we came across with Tambu in Nervous Conditions, and it comes to us again with Matilda in Mister Pip.

In these novels, both girls choose to bring the colonial culture into their lives; Tambu seeks it out through education, as does Matilda.  In both cases their mothers are the embodiment of the culture they are trying to escape from, yet feel tied to by duty.  For Matilda it is her mother’s mental bullying that pushes her to turn to the story of Pip, and his England:

“…she returned to her other preoccupation, testing me with the names of relatives and fish and birds from our family tree.  I failed miserably.  I could think of no reason to remember them, whereas I knew the name of every character I had met in Great Expectations…[they] were more part of my life than my dead relatives, even the people around me.” (75)

Her mother’s stubborn resistance to Mr. Watts and his teaching of Great Expectations, eventually becomes a source of embarrassment for Matilda as the novel progresses:

“My mum was so eager for us kids to know what she knew, but she didn’t know how to plant it in our heads.  She thought she could bully us into     knowing what she did.  Did she notice that whenever she got onto God and the devil, every kid’s face dropped?” (80)

Her mother’s vain attempts in teaching her important and valuable knowledge, in fact only works in pushing her daughter further away, and into dreams of a far away land and a new life.

I think it is interesting that assimilation of the colonial culture is looked at in distain by the majority of adults in the works we have looked at, except in The God of Small Things where it is actually aspired towards.  It starts with Pappachi’s goal of Anglicizing the family, and continues with Baby Kochamma forcing the twins to speak English.  Also interesting is the twins denial of the dominant culture; they’re rebellion is to continue speaking the traditional Malayalam.

Questions to ponder:

1.    If the Dolores had not tried to force her traditional knowledge on Matilda, and had not been completely adamant in her dislike of everything having to do with the white man’s world, do you think Matilda would have been as enraptured with the story and other world of Great Expectations?

2.    What other forms of assimilation can we see portrayed within Mister Pip?

3.    –  Does the act of assimilation always have an element of force connected with it?

–  Is something always ultimately lost when someone is assimilated, or is there a gain?

–  Is it possible to be free from assimilation in today’s global world?

(Do not feel like you need to limit yourself to Mister Pip in the answering of these questions)