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her back to Scotland with him and then commits suicide on the day
of McDonald’s departure by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
Conversely, Imelda (who is very different from Jenny and is also
shown to expect certain material gains from her relationship with
McAndrick) first responds to McAndrick’s reluctance to allow her
any sort of individuality and influence in their relationship by be-
coming increasingly violent towards him, until McAndrick, fright-
ened by her behaviour, decides to get rid of her; Imelda’s reaction is
to savagely murder McAndrick with a primitive blowpipe off his
living-room wall. This extreme divergence between Jenny and
Imelda’s response to their lovers’ self-assumed superiority is first
and foremost caused by their different personalities and social sta-
tus; Jenny is a servant whose innocence, subservient nature, and
love for McDonald make her sacrifice her child and herself for
McDonald’s benefit, whereas Imelda is a kept mistress whose gentle
and passive façade hides a resolution and intelligence which, mixed
with her violent streak, make her determined to assert her inde-
pendence against McAndrick’s male and colonialist domination.
What do these two diverse endings signify in feminist and post-
colonial terms? To begin with, Jenny’s complete submission to
McDonald as her lord and lover obviously reaffirms the patriarchal
construct rather than challenges it, and this fact makes The
Expatriates emerge as a novel which ultimately upholds patriarchal
conceptions of set gender roles. This element of the novel is clearly
suggested through the perspective of Jenny’s employer, Florence
Bennett, who knows that Jenny’s nature and actions work against
the feminist cause, and who views Jenny as “the worst traitress ever
to [her] own sex” (Jenkins 1971: 141). On another level, Jenny’s
unquestioning subservience to McDonald, her surrender of her
daughter Nancy to the embrace of Western mentality and culture,
and her ultimate self-sacrifice by suicide, can all symbolise a colo-
ny’s passivity towards an imperial power, thereby confirming
Occidental views of the Orient as subordinate by nature and in need
of Western control. Jenny’s final act demonstrates her subservience
to McDonald in the most extreme way: she sacrifices her own life
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