Michal Golis (330988)

Mgr. Martina Horkov, Ph.D.

AJ 56011: Postcolonial and Feminist Rewritings of Master Narratives

6th January 2013

Wide Sargasso Sea

A relatively minor character from Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre, Rochester's wife Bertha is recreated years later to serve as an inspiration for Antoinette, the main character of Wide Sargasso Sea, a post-colonial rewriting of Bront's famous novel, written in 1966 by a Dominican novelist Jean Rhys. While in Jane Eyre the character of Bertha serves mostly to provide, then very popular and widespread, gothic element and as a tool through which the final escalation of events in the novel's climax could be achieved, Rhys successfully rids her of this one-dimensionality, showing her to be an individual with her own story to be told. It is the aim of this essay to show some of the ways in which this transformation was achieved with regard to the master narrative and how, to what extent and for what purpose it is manifested in Rhys' novel. By giving her heroin voice of her own and letting her out of the confines of the tower through focusing on her previous life she places her later character, life and actions within a broader context, which serves to subvert rather than complement Bront's famous work.

To become genuinely a mad woman in the attic, as Bertha has often been described, Antoinette first needs to be a woman with her own personality, feelings and desires. Even though it might seem self-evident it is nevertheless questionable whether this condition was fulfilled in the master narrative where Bertha more than as a woman is presented as a de-sexualized object or a source of ominous energy, completely missing the aspect of humanity inherent in the word woman. The simple act of preceding woman with mad thus effectively neutralizes Bertha's femininity, turning it into a purely physical and biological descriptive term. What this achieves is that eventually she is not really thought of as a woman anymore. Nevertheless, for that to happen, she first needs to be classified as mad for a particular, supposedly objective, reason which also provides justification for locking her up in the attic. Is she, however, objectively mad and is that the reason why she must be locked up and hidden from the rest of the of the world and if she is mad, then what made her so? As she tells her husband at one point in Rhys' novel: There is always the other side, always.(106) Not only does she have her own story to tell, unlike Bront's Bertha, she also, at least to a certain extent, has her own voice to give it, as she is one of the narrators of Rhys' novel. This allows the reader to discover the womanhood that was supposed to be killed by her madness, extricated from her forever by the attic door.

In the Wide Sargasso Sea the issues of identity are negotiated on the backdrop of a complex interplay of race, gender and class. They form a closely intertwined web of forces impacting the characters at every point of their lives and, it might be argued, in many situations to a large extent pre-determining their behavior. The colour of one's skin and one's sex, closely related to one's social status are more telling of a person's life and future than any personal characteristics ever could. They form boundaries it is hard to escape from. Antoinette is not a typical colonial subject, being descended from a lineage of rich plantation owners. However, as a white creole in a hostile environment she faces an ordeal of being considered a white cockroach, ostracized by both the former black slaves and their white English masters, destined to call home a place where she is not, and never will be, welcome or fully accepted. As a woman, once married, she is, furthermore, predestined to become only something more than a property of her future husband with all that belonged to her, that is, including the right to construct her own identity and to determine her destiny. Therefore, it has to be primarily the period before her arranged marriage when her true identity is most significantly formed and manifested the period that the character of Bertha is so sorely missing in the master narrative, a void that Wide Sargasso Sea is trying to fill. That is why Rhys had to write a prequel instead of simply rewriting Bronte's novel.

Rhys' main character is not even Bertha, albeit called so by her husband. It is a name which symbolizes Edward's (Rochester's) effort to ascribe a new, completely alien identity to her, which attests to his inability to cope with her past and accept her as an individual. This later culminates in his scorn of her background, culture and eventually also character, as well as his unwavering belief in her insanity. Madness, therefore, rather than being an objective description of someone's mental state or a congenital defect, becomes a tool and a consequence of an effort to silence the undesirable, as well as a crystallization of Antoinette's and her mother's helplessness. Bertha is thus merely Edward's creation which Antoinette is forced into accepting. When asked about the origin of the name, he responds it belonged to someone he used to know, signaling his need to remodel his wife into something familiar and unthreatening in order to be able to possess her more fully. The act of naming has always been connected with the idea of control. Whether it be discoverer's naming of the new land and thus claiming it for his country or Robinson Crusoe's naming of his companion Friday and thus making him only a little more than an episode in his own story, the power lies quite clearly on the side of the name-giver. The object being named has merged with or, in fact, been swallowed by the name-giver's conceptions and motivations, however incomplete, misleading or erroneous they might be. Hence just as it requires considerable effort to think of Friday without Robinson it can be really problematic to successfully imagine Bertha apart from her husband. The same mental separation after which Bertha ceases to exist in the reader's mind, nevertheless, clearly represents an act liberation for Rochester. In fact, it represents one of the preconditions for Jane Eyre's harmonious ending, an obstacle to overcome for Jane and Rochester's marital union to finally take place and for Jane to be able to say: I hold myself supremely blestblest beyond what language can express; because I am my husbands life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. (Bronte )

As has been said it is Antoinette's (or Bertha's) past, or personal history, that is crucial for comprehending the motivations and forces behind her behavior later in the novel. Albeit painful, her childhood is the place she is constantly coming back to and which she almost desperately clings to, incessantly recreating the times she spent in her family's Coulibri estate with her mother and her Caribbean nurse Christophine. With her family largely gone, her childhood house, the old Christophine and nature are Antoinette's last remaining links with this world and as such become the objects of her husband's hate, fear and scorn as he finds them incomprehensible, alien and thus possibly dangerous. Although in Edward's eyes Antoinette's secret family history and her mother's madness are seen as the primary reasons for her worsening mental condition, he does not realize (or, perhaps, rather, does not want to realize) that it is exactly by trying to force her to turn her back towards her past and memories, thus cutting the symbolical umbilical cord with her identity, that he is pushing his wife further and further into her mounting desperation and depression, while at the same time deepening his own paranoia. The reason why he cannot resist being influenced by Daniel Cosway's poison-pen letters is that they play on the very fears and notions he came to Caribbean with, notions which are so deeply ingrained in his subconscious he is not able uproot them regardless of what his reason or heart tells him.

By being given a chance to perceive the narrative also through Edward's eyes, one can see how easily Antoinette's story could be distorted and trivialized and her character flattened, whether intentionally or due to ignorance, were it to be told solely by him. Indeed, in order to see it happening one does not have to go much farther than to the master narrative itself where basically all the reader gets to know about Bertha comes from the mouth of her husband: What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. (Bronte 322) Such a description, extensively relying on animal imagery, triggers images of a dehumanized beast-like creature - strange, hostile, threatening and unpredictable. Unpredictability is one of the characteristics traditionally associated with both wild animals and the insane. It is also one of the reasons why they are perceived as possibly dangerous and ideally for one's safety not allowed too close or trusted too much. Throughout Jane Eyre Bertha is, furthermore, viewed solely through the lens of her impact on Rochester as if her individual existence was otherwise largely irrelevant. Her feelings are turned into blind impulses; her acts, thoughts and motivations are interpreted as the work of instincts and delusions. As such they are not deemed worthy of any serious attention on the reader's part, glossed over by the author and regarded solely for their surface value, for moving the plot ahead and contributing to the overall ambience of the story.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, on the other hand, the one genuine feeling that most of the characters express at one point or another and which binds them together is hatred. As there is always the other side to everything, hatred paradoxically becomes a confirmation of their humanity and sanity. It is something which animals are not capable of and the insane cannot be accused of or held responsible for. That is why it is when Edward forces the hatred out of Antoinette's eyes, after first refusing her love, he renders her incapable of feeling anymore. Her beauty leaves her as well and she becomes only a desensitized, lifeless, ghost-like reflection of her former self, symbolically buried when he covers her with a white sheet like a dead girl. At the same time he regains power and control, replacing his previous relatively ambivalent feelings of indifference and physical attraction with intense hatred towards her and everything she stood for in his eyes. It did not take him long after their wedding to realize: I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did. (Rhys 39) As his feelings become much more pronounced and hostile, he expresses them very lucidly: I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. (...) Antoinette comes to embody Edward's fears and anxieties, she becomes a living token of the scary incomprehensibility of the self-contained world that makes him feel like a stranger, insecure and powerless.

The object of such a hatred is unfailingly the other, that, which is viewed as alien, whether it be a white woman in the world of blacks, the rich to the poor or the Caribbean with its nature and mysterious traditions to an Englishman. In Rhys' world hatred, in a way, is a natural way of reacting when confronted with the alien or unknown, the safeguard of sanity in the face of the incomprehensible when love and understanding are not possible. That is why Christophine implores Edward to try to love his wife, to try see her as something more than a stranger even though she knows about his true feelings towards her. The author also expresses a rather bleak view of the possibility of ever transgressing the differences in which such feelings are rooted. Most of the characters do not even try to do so, yet, any effort to the contrary unfailingly ends up in a tragedy. The lines of difference are solid and unyieldy to the desires of a man. This becomes evident when Antoinette approaches Christophine in a desperate effort to (re?)gain Edward's love with the help of her skills as an obeah woman. Even though she is forewarned that such powers are not to be played with by bks - the strangers, she eventually persuades Christophine to help her and follows through with her plan, merely ending up poisoning Edward. The scene also highlights Antoinette's complete alienation and isolation when, as a stranger to the Caribbean traditions, she inevitably fails to conjure her husband who, conversely, she is completely estranged from exactly because in his mind he is unable to disassociate her from the Caribbean and its dark mysteries. At the same time she is aware of the fatalism inherent in her situation, knowing Edward would not let her leave him now that she is his. Her actions are only last desperate efforts to retain the identity she has renounced, or been stripped of, by marrying him, her entreaties last silent screams of woman without her voice.

Rhys shows that one's individuality can be truly attained and manifested only within and with a reference to the larger context of one's life and history, which is deeply subjective and personal. Torn away from such a context and without a voice of one's own, person's actions lead to madness as emotions give way either to apathy or to animalistic impulses. One becomes only a tool in the hands of the controller or the narrator.

Bibliography:

Bront, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1998. Print.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006. Print.