19 pages • 38 minutes read
Derek WalcottRuins of a Great House
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
Since Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492, the Caribbean has been a major hot spot of colonization for European powers. Before the Spanish conquest, the Caribbean Islands were home to multiple indigenous communities effectively wiped out by violence and disease due to European contact. Over five hundred years of foreign colonization and rule have created many unique Caribbean cultures and a problematic relationship with their history. The colonization of Caribbean Islands entailed the exploitation and enslavement of Africans brought to the Caribbean via the Atlantic Slave Trade. Colonial settlers established gold mines, and later, large plantations to produce various goods like sugar, a highly profitable luxury item in Europe. This meant that colonizers could amass massive wealth and build great estates like the one featured in “Ruins of a Great House.” Many Caribbean islands were traded back and forth between nations for hundreds of years, leading to a rich, vibrant, but complicated culture with a dark history of slavery, oppression, and violence. Old manors crumbling into ruin like in “Ruins of a Great House” are relics from a time when white Europeans profited from the exploitation of African and indigenous peoples in the Caribbean.
Slowly, Caribbean nations gained sovereignty in the twentieth century, but they remain scarred by the effects of colonization and slavery. Walcott’s home island of Saint Lucia became independent in 1979, more than twenty years after Walcott wrote “Ruins of a Great House.” Because of economic exploitation and dependence on plantations, many of the island’s inhabitants were skilled in agriculture, but lacked experience in managing a nation-state. Moreover, the many years of colonial exploitation meant that the profits of those large plantations stayed in the hands of the Europeans and left the Caribbean peoples with little capital to invest in their nation’s industries. “Ruins of a Great House” captures the darkness of these grand estates as they fall into ruin, with nature slowly eroding a monument to oppression.
Literary Context
Walcott's “Ruins of a Great House” utilizes a broad scope of literary references to establish the tension between the brutality of English colonization and the speaker's love for English literature. Walcott flexes his extensive scholarly knowledge of English literature, boasting his status as a literary scholar. Walcott chooses his references deliberately, representing what could be considered a very traditional and classical collection of English writers. The literary references range from the late 1500s with Shakespeare to the 1930s with the American author William Faulkner. Even the epigraph by Thomas Browne emphasizes the depth in Walcott’s literary education, as Browne is an obscure figure admired primarily by other famous English writers. Walcott situates himself within this canon of English greats and, in doing so, rebels against his own history of oppression. As an Afro-Caribbean man, his English education is itself an act of revolution. Historically, Walcott’s race and class would have made any education inaccessible to him, let alone such a comprehensive one. In this way, through this poem, Walcott asserts his right to have a seat at the table among these key figures of English literature.
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By Derek Walcott
