Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen______Literaturwissenschaft Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) Rien T. Segers (Groningen) Jg. 19 (2000), Heft 1

Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften SPIEL Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

Jg. 19 (2000), Heft 1

Peter Lang Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Bern • Bruxelles • New York • Oxford • Wien Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Siegener Periodicum zur internationalen empirischen Literatur­ wissenschaft (SPIEL) Frankfurt am Main ; Berlin ; Bern ; New York ; Paris ; Wien : Lang ISSN 2199-80780722-7833 Erscheint jährl. zweimal

JG. 1, H. 1 (1982) - [Erscheint: Oktober 1982]

NE: SPIEL

ISSNISSN 2199-80780722-7833 © Peter Lang GmbH Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2001 Alle Rechte Vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

SPECIAL ISSUE / SONDERHEFT SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1

Historical Readers and Historical Reading

Historische Leser und historisches Lesen

ed. by / hrsg. von

Margaret Beetham (Manchester) & Sophie Levie (Utrecht)

Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

Contents / Inhalt SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1

Margaret Beetham (Manchester) and Sophie Levie (Utrecht) Introduction 1

Frédéric Barbier (Paris) History, the Historian and Reading 4

Stephen Colciough (London) Recording the Revolution: Reading Experience and the History of the Book 36

Berry Dongeimans (Leiden) and Boudien de Vries (Leiden) Reading, Class and Gender: the Sources for Research on Nineteenth Century Readers in the Netherlands 56

Margaret Beetham (Manchester) In Search of the Historical Reader; the Woman Reader, the Magazine and the Correspondence Column 89

Titia Ram (Utrecht) The Gentleman's Magazine; or Speakers’ Corner 105

Marita Keiison-Lauritz (Amsterdam) Towards a History of Gay Reading: A Study of Two Early Twentieth Century Periodicals 126

Laurel Brake (London) Gender and the Historical Reader: The Artist and Cleveland Street 141

Lledeke Plate (Utrecht) Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 155 10.3726/80987_155

SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1, 155-167

Liedeke Plate (Utrecht) Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception

Anhand von Mary Reilly (1990) von Valerie Martin und Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) von Jean Rhys soll hier der Ort kreativen Neuschreibens in der Rezeption von Texten untersucht werden. Neuschreiben ist der Prozeß und das Produkt involvierten Lesens; es funktioniert sowohl als Form der Rezeption des Textes, den sie neu schreiben, als auch als Kritik, das ihre künftige Rezeption beeinflußt. Tatsächlich können die hier besprochenen Neuschreibungen als kreatives Gegenstück zu dem gesehen werden, was Judith Fetterley resisting reading (widerständiges Lesen) genannt hat, d.h. eine Lesart, die feministisch ist in ihrer Bewegkraft und ihrem pädagogische Ziel, und die das bewerkstelligt durch einen “Widerstand” gegen die impliziten Leserpositionen des Textes. Indem sie die betreffende Geschichte aus der Perspektive und mit der Stimme einer Nebenfigur neu erzählen, nehmen die beiden hier betrachteten Romane gegenüber den Texten, die sie neu schreiben, eine widerständige Perspektive ein.

Rewriting - the act of retelling a story from a different perspective - is the process and product of an involved reading. Frequently taking its point of departure in what Jane Smiley, in her recent rewriting of King Lear, terms “that detail that went unrevealed by the stories” (Smiley 1991, 133), it proceeds by furnishing us with an account, an imagi­ native reconstruction, of an experience hitherto unaccounted for. “Wie, auf welche Wei­ se, geschah es ihr, das Zusammenbrechen aller Alternativen? [Exactly how did she ex­ perience the collapse of all her alternatives],” Christa Wolf asks about Aeschylus’s Cassandra in her report about the genesis of her novel Kassandra (Wolf 1998, 20; Wolf 1984, 150). And also: “Was war Priamos, Kassandras Vater, für ein Mann? Und wie war ihre Mutter Hekabe ... zu ihren wenigen Töchtern? Wie hat denn diese Königstöchter in Troia ... gelebt? [What kind of man was Priam, Cassandra’s father? And how did her mother, Hecuba, ... treat her few daughters? And what kind of life did this king’s daugh­ ter lead in Troy?]” (Wolf 1998, 24; Wolf 1984, 153). In the same way that these many questions, which the texts of the past do not answer, inform W olfs telling of the story of the mythic seeress - so do Valerie Martin’s account of Jekyll’s maid’s experiences, Jean Rhys’s story of Rochester’s first wife, and Pia Pera’s diary of Lolita fill in blank pages from literary history: in Mary Reilly (1990), Valerie Martin sets out to rewrite R.L. Ste­ venson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the perspective of Jekyll’s maid because, as she explains in a telephone interview, “I always thought that I’d like to know why that servant was crying” (Graeber 7); in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys re­ writes Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from the perspective of the first Mrs. Rochester in response to the perceived misrepresentation of the West Indies and what she terms, in 156 Liedeke Plate one of her letters, Bronte’s “all wrong creole scenes” (Rhys 1984, 262); and in Diario di Lo (1995), Pia Pera retells Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita from the nymphet’s perspective as a playful answer to the challenge issued by Nabokov’s narrator’s remark UI simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind,” and his exclamation, “Oh, that I were a lady writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light” (Blumenthal 1998). Rewriting, then, is first of all a quest for what has hitherto been left untold, for the experience that has been buried within the plots of the great classics. Initiated by a sense that something has been withheld and prompted by tantalizing blanks, it is also an activ­ ity that goes well beyond the filling of “spots of indeterminacy” and other gaps that de­ fines the act of reading according to the aesthetic-response theorists Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser (Ingarden 1960; Iser 1976). Indeed, if reading can be troped as (re)writing - if to read is to (re)write, as many critics have argued - the taking of the productivity of reading literally to which rewritings bear witness also attests to a rather complex interac­ tion with the text being read. Marked at once by a desire for and a resistance to the stories as they are traditionally told, the filling in of blank spots here is as much structured by the text itself as by the reader’s political orientation and agenda. In addition, if a rewriting can be said to be a “reading” (to reverse the figure and trope writing as reading), then it is as the articulation of what Judith Fetterley has termed a “resisting” reading: a feminist re­ reading that “resists” the reading position implied by the text to assume an alternative one, and whose expression is to awaken further female readers to the ways in which they are co-opted into participation in a fictional world-making from which they are simulta­ neously excluded. Conceived in the wake of Adrienne Rich’s seminal essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction examines the way American literature is a (male) con­ struct that requires one “to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny” (Fetterley 1978, xx). To counter the alienating effects of this uimmasculation of women by men” (Fetterley 1978, xx; Fetterley’s emphasis), Fetterley suggests women adopt a reading posture that resists the text’s dominant patterns of identifications and refuses to assent to its value system. It is, then, to the extent that rewritings give expression to read­ ing postures that, like Fetterley’s resisting reading, are bent on displacing established reading modes that they are to be placed within the context of a body of feminist criti­ cism that emerged in the 1970s; for like its more academic counterpart, the rewriting functions at once as a form of reception that testifies to a historically conditioned experi­ ence of the text it rewrites, and as a critical piece that orientates its future reception. In Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mary Reilly, as Valerie Mar­ tin calls Jekyll’s maid, appears once: toward the end of the narrative proper, as the mem­ bers of Dr. Jekyll’s household sense something to be amiss with their master, Gabriel Utterson, Dr. Jekyll’s lawyer, is sent for to investigate the situation. As he enters JekylPs home, Utterson finds the whole servant body huddled together in the hall, and the follow­ ing scene ensues: “At the sight of Mr. Utterson, the housemaid broke into hysterical whimpering; and the cook, crying out, “Bless God! it’s Mr. Utterson,” ran forward as if to take him in her arms. “What, what? Are you all here?” said the lawyer, peevishly. “Very ir­ regular, very unseemly; your master would be far from pleased.” “They’re all Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 157

afraid,” said Poole.Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the maid lifted up her voice, and now wept loudly.“Hold your tongue!” Poole said to her, with a ferocity of accent that testified to his own jangled nerves; and indeed when the girl had so suddenly raised the note of her lamentation, they had all started and turned towards the inner door with faces of dreadful expression”. (Stevenson 1979, 64; “The Last Night”) In this tale centered on the professional class, the appearance of the otherwise incon­ spicuous servants at the crucial moment when the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is about to be disclosed functions as a reminder of the close ties that knit the life of the domestic class to that of its employers. Recalling the servants’ presence in the house during the whole affair, it also gestures toward the ordeal they went through in having had to, literally, serve two masters. The butler’s laconic explanation for this indecorous scene, no less than the servants’ anxious gaze, further invites the reader to ponder why they are afraid. Ostensibly a response to the prompts in Stevenson’s text, Martin’s narra­ tive can thus be seen to be the outgrowth of the most basic activity of the reading process, the actualization of one of the possibilities opened up by the novella. “I always thought that I'd like to know why that servant was crying,” I’ve already quoted Martin as saying. The story recounted in Mary Reilly is that of a maid who becomes increasingly in­ volved in maintaining her master’s double life a secret. As she recounts in her diary, Henry Jekyll wins Mary’s devotion to him by showing, one day, some interest in her and asking her about the origin of the scars on her hands and in her neck. Mary subsequently spares no effort to please her compassionate master and so to retain what she considers the best place she has had. Soon afterwards, however, Mary meets Dr. Jekyll’s new and mysterious assistant, Edward Hyde. Her encounters with him stir confused feelings of jealousy and fear and bring into focus her infatuation for her master and her concern for his well-being, as well as her battered childhood. Jekyll exploits her undying loyalty to him and his supposed humanitarian cause by sending her on shady errands to seedy neighborhoods and bloody prostitution-houses. In the end, as Mary comes to fear for her master’s life, a confrontation first with Hyde and then with Jekyll leads her to the realiza­ tion that the two men are one and the same. If Mary Reilly is a creative filling in of one of the gaps in Stevenson’s novella - is a filling in, if you like, of the “blank silence” that “followed” the butler’s suggestion that the maid’s crying is to be ascribed to fear - Martin’s account of the trials and tribulations of Jekyll’s maid, re-presenting the events that took place in Jekyll’s house from the per­ spective of and as they were experienced by his maid, is, in effect, the story of Mary’s involvement with Stevenson’s Strange Case. 1 In other words, what Mary records in her journals is the text of a reading of the novella that famously revolves around the event of Dr. Jekyll becoming the evil Mr. Hyde under the influence of a drug which allows him to separate his good half from his bad one. Stevenson’s novella, one will recall, is a care­ fully crafted detective fiction that focuses on the lawyer, Gabriel Utterson, as he unravels the mystery surrounding Dr. Jekyll and his association with the sinister Mr. Hyde. This mystery is then also the focus of the journals wherein Mary chronicles her daily life in

1 For a more extensive discussion of Mary Reilly as a story of reading, see Plate 1998, esp. 176- 178. 158 Liedeke Plate the service of Henry Jekyll. Yet the story Martin tells is not quite the same as that of Stevenson. To begin with, in Mary Reilly, the presence of Hyde in Jekyll’s household stirs Mary’s memories of her alcoholic father, who mistreated her as a child. Mary’s awakened fears, moreover, promptly materialize, as it soon becomes clear that if Hyde is a manifestation of her abusive father, so is Jekyll. While Jekyll increasingly comes to rely on the unwitting services of his maid, for Mary to become an observer-participant in Stevenson’s tale of fantastic doubling is to find herself getting involved in a world of brutal yet eroticized encounters. In a sense, Mary Reilly constitutes a parallel account to Stevenson’s Strange Case, presenting the domestic side of Jekyll’s household rather than his gentlemanly profes­ sional circle. Elaborated within the space opened up by a reading that attends to what the text says and doesn’t say about women, its imaginative telling of what happens in Jekyll’s domiciliary environment is in fact a critical commentary - “a book that com­ ments on another book,” as Martin herself acknowledges (Martin 1993, 2). Martin’s shift in emphasis from the supernatural horror of pure evil embodied and its consequences for Jekyll’s gentlemanly circle to the very real and realistic horror of child abuse, and to women’s confrontation with violence at home, suggests that somehow, Stevenson’s ac­ count is not the whole story. Whereas critics have long agreed that the strangeness of Stevenson’s tale resides precisely in the fact that there are no women in it, Martin’s inser­ tion of Mary as a third term between the men upon whom Stevenson’s novella centers shows the emphasis on the bonds between men to gloss over a violence to women. As such it is a reading, an interpretation of Stevenson’s all-male world - a kind of fictional “showing” as distinct from more academic critical “tellings,” one might say. In fact, in its inscription of a working-class feminine perspective, Mary Reilly appar­ ently engages as much with the reception history of Stevenson’s novella as with the no­ vella itself.2 Ever since its publication in 1886, critics have observed that while the ab­ sence of women in Stevenson’s Strange Case reinforces its gothic tenor, the exclusion of women from a text whose main obsession is the relationship between men in a patriarchal order also highlights men’s dependency on them. Until the late 1970s, William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch point out in the introduction to their volume on the occasion of the novella’s centenary, Stevenson’s tale was primarily held to be a “crude morality,” a “tragedy” whose “allegory is too schematic” (Veeder & Hirsch 1988, x). More recently, interpretations have turned to reading the tale as a complex matrix of conflicting views about gender. On the one hand, keys to Stevenson’s novella have been sought in the author’s biography: the tale has been read as an assertion of independence from his literary wife Fanny (with whom he col­ laborated previously, and who may or may not have had a hand in Strange Case)} and in the

2 It is indeed important that the feminine perspective Martin reinscribes in the text be a working- class one - a fact that distances the novel (and its soon to follow film version) from earlier film adaptations of Stevenson’s novella, which felt few qualms about introducing “ladies” in the story. 3 Fanny’s role in Stevenson’s revisions of Strange Case is a debated one, and no conclusive proof can be summoned to assess its exact nature. Most critics concur that there was influence: she certainly acted as a censor, may even have been an editor, as Malcolm and Veeder seem to be­ lieve (Malcolm 1950; Veeder 1988). As Doane and Hodges observe, Stevenson’s own account about the genesis of his tale in “A Chapter on Dreams” provides support for the view if not that Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 159

light of the anxieties of late-Victorian male writers about the rise of the New Woman in general, and about the emergence of the literary woman in particular.4 On the other hand, analyses of the novella have focused on the ways in which the absence of women inhibits the maintenance of the ties that ground, constitute, and guarantee the preservation of patriarchy (Veeder 1988, 109) and how it disrupts the possibility of upholding a “stable representation of men” (Heath 1986, 100). In view of this recent critical interest in the tale’s representation of homosocial relations, Martin’s very lingering over the missing term in Stevenson’s no­ vella is a rewriting that implies that, in the words of Eve Sedgwick, “the pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality [embodied in the mid-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century novel] was in an intimate relation to class; and that no element of that pattern can be understood outside of its relation to women and the gender system as a whole” (Sedgwick 1985, 1). Martin’s restoring of the politics of class and sexuality suppressed in Stevenson’s account, no less than her making of Hyde’s secret ad­ ventures as involving prostitution, become most interesting, however, once we remember that in the months preceding the composition of Strange Case, the Criminal Law Amend­ ment Act was passed in Parliament. Because of a clause introduced in the Bill by Henry Labouchère, this Act the explicit purpose of which was “to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls” through the prohibition of prostitution and of sexual traffic of women under age of consent received extensive coverage in the weekly press in the months leading to the parliamentary session’s prorogation. Clause 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act has ostensibly no relevance to the is­ sue of the protection of women: it criminalizes “any gross act of indecency” between men whether public or private, and stipulates a punishment by imprisonment of a term no longer than two years, with or without hard labor. Possibly moved with the object of overturning the Bill, it brought about a fast-spreading hatred of male homosexuality, and incurred much misery upon its many victims, among whom Oscar Wilde was but the most famous one. As Wayne Koestenbaum and Elaine Showalter have convincingly argued, the concur­ rence of the going into effect of Clause 11 and the publication of Stevenson’s tale enables one to view Strange Case as falling within the pale of duality as a trope for the homosex­ ual double life (Koestenbaum 1988; Showalter 1990). Re-located within its socio- historical context of production, the tale becomes one that “can most persuasively be read,” as Elaine Showalter puts it, “as a fable of homosexual panic, the discovery and resistance of the homosexual self’ (Showalter 1990, 107). Yet if Stevenson’s Strange Case can be shown to be grappling, at a symbolic level, with the issue of “the love that dares not speak its name” as criminalized by Labouchère’s Amendment, is it too far­ fetched to suggest that Martin’s rewriting of it restores critical attention to the issue rai­ sed by the Criminal Law Amendment Act in the first place, namely that of the abuse of

she collaborated on this text, at least that it reproduces some anxieties about such collaboration (Doane & Hodges 1989). 4 Several years before marrying Fanny, Stevenson had claimed that “certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote” (qtd. in Koestenbaum 1988, 41). For a discussion of Strange Case in light of Stevenson’s conjugal relations with “a wife who wrote”, see Doane and Hodges 1989. 160 Liedeke Plate

young women? Emphasizing the physical and psychological violence to working-class women that lurks beneath the surface of fin-de-siecle London, Mary Reilly can then be construed as a critique of Labouchere’s detraction of public attention from issues of gen­ der and class, of Stevenson’s buying into the late-Victorian wincing fascination with such male-male affairs, and of the recent critical replaying of the novella as essentially articu­ lating homosocial concerns.5 It is only fitting, then, that the reader position that enables Martin to uncover a vio­ lence to women glossed over by the homosocial bond in Stevenson’s novella is not only that of the female, unintended and unimplied reader, but that this reading is also one wherein the reader projects her personal history, knowledge and experience onto the text. A practice of reading associated with women and less well-educated readers yet central to much feminist criticism,6 the lumping together of emotive and referential meaning that characterizes “affective” reading is precisely the means by which Martin brings to light what she considers to be the truth underlying Jekyll’s fantastic doubling. The story of reading which Mary’s diaries represent centers on the protagonist’s experience as it bears on her understanding of the strange case that takes place under her employer’s roof. In fact, it is because she lets emotive responses such as “tears, prickles, or other physiologi­ cal symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1971, 1029; sec. IV) be her guide that it most effectively reveals the hidden presupposi­ tions of Stevenson’s Strange Case. To be sure, Mary Reilly is but a fictional construction of a reader; her diaries, how­ ever, placing themselves in a long tradition of (self-reflexive) scenes of reading in American literature that are based on the understanding that there is a connection be­ tween the “reading” of a text and the “reading” of the world, testify to the recognition of the validity of interpretive strategies grounded in personal (and gendered) experience. As such, they function as a kind of rehabilitation of the very “soft” “Romantic reader psy­ chology” that Wimsatt and Beardsley rejected in favor of the more male “classical objec­ tivity” of “hard” and “scientific” “detachment” and “disinterestedness” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1971, 1028-9; sec. IV). Mary Reilly, it is worth remembering, was published in 1990, a time when reader-oriented approaches had succeeded to text-inherent theories, and feminist critiques claiming the experience of femininity as a form of knowledge were already well-anchored in the academic world. In contrast, I would now like to turn to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a text that, with a publication date of 1966, stands at the beginning of the academic movement away from the New Critics’ view of the text as an autonomous entity that ought to be considered in itself. My point here is then a rela­ tionship of mutual determination on the one hand: the themes foregrounded in Martin’s rewriting of Stevenson’s novella coincide with those that stand at the heart of Stevenson criticism in the mid- to late-1980s, and Mary Reilly can thus be seen to participate in the

5 I propose such a reading in my dissertation: see Plate 1995. 6 As Lynne Pearce (Pearce 1997, 7) argues, Wimsatt and Beardsley set up “a whole sequence of gendered oppositions which associate affective criticism with female/less well-educated readers (as epitomized by the reading practices associated with classic and popular romance)”. Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 161

general critical climate of its time of production.7 On the other hand, Rhys’s novel not only signaled a turning point in the reception of Bronte’s novel, but its practice of reading contributed to the making central of the reader to academic feminist criticism. A rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre that focuses on the figure Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would dub “the madwoman in the attic” in their eponymous study of nineteenth-century fiction (Gilbert & Gubar 1979), Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of the Creole Antoinette Mason Cosway as she comes of age in post-Emancipation Jamaica, experiences the economic decline following the abolition of slavery, witnesses her mother’s growing insanity, and finally marries the Englishman Edward Rochester. Following an account of how Antoinette became the first Mrs. Rochester, Rhys’s novel proceeds to re­ cord the gradual disintegration of the marriage, the husband and wife’s increasing alien­ ation, and Antoinette’s developing madness, which culminates in her being locked up in the attic of her husband’s English home. In her letters, Rhys locates the impetus for writing Wide Sargasso Sea in a desire to “correct” Bronte’s representation of Rochester’s first wife. Although she knows that, as she writes, “Girls were married for their dots at that time, taken to England and no more heard o f’ (Rhys 1984, 216), she also “remember[s] being quite shocked, and when [she] re-read it rather annoyed” at the “dreadful” “poor Creole lunatic” (Rhys 1984, 297). Vexed at what she terms Bronte’s “portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr. Rochester” (Rhys 1984, 262), Rhys decides to tell her “real story” (Rhys 1984, 153) - for as she writes of Bronte’s novel, “That’s only one side - the English side” (Rhys 1984, 297). The emphasis on Bronte’s misrepresentation of the West Indian woman suggests that for Rhys, who was bom in Dominica of a Welsh father and a Creole mother, identification determines her competence. It is because she at once recognizes and doesn’t recognize herself in the story of Bronte’s mad Creole woman that she criticizes Jane Eyre; and it is by laying claim to first-hand experience of life in the West Indies that she tries to purchase assent for her criticisms of the novel.8 As readers would soon realize, Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre functions as a critical commentary on Bronte’s novel: it provides “an explanation of events about which we’ve always wondered” (Mellown 1972, 473); and it “constitutes a formidable critical essay on the nineteenth-century work” (Porter 1976, 545).9 In her development of Antoinette’s journey towards maturity as a parallel trajectory to Jane’s, Rhys foregrounds the doubling

7 In a discussion of reception as production, Mary Louise Pratt points out that “it is safe to say that whenever there is a community interpreting art, there is a homologous or conjoined or over­ lapping community producing art, and there is every reason to expect that the shared beliefs and conventions shaping interpretation at a given moment are also bearing on production at that moment as well” (Pratt 1986, 31). 8 See also Louis James, who argues that many details in Rhys’s fiction can be traced back to her childhood days in the Caribbean (James 1977, 112-113). 9 See also Michael Thorpe, who speaks of “a subtle, implicit comment on the shortcomings of Jane Eyre" (Thorpe 1977, 105). In the above-mentioned essay, Dennis Porter discusses “Jean Rhys’s striking interpretation” of “the mad captive of Thomfield Hall” and the ways it “subjects Jane Eyre itself to a provocatively new critical reading” and serves “to comment effectively on Jane Eyre and extend its meaning in previously unperceived ways” (Porter 1976, 540-541). 162 Liedeke Plate

of Jane with Bertha that underlies Bronte’s novel,10 yet does so only to undermine it. The parallels Rhys establishes in their life-joumeys, culminating in marriage to Edward Rochester, emphasize the similarities between the two women; they also invalidate the polar opposition of “good” woman and “bad” woman that the two protagonists embody for Bronte. This is particularly important as the polarization of Jane with Bertha in Jane Eyre ends up predicating the white woman’s attainment of love and autonomy on the suppression of the Creole woman, and as that dichotomy upon which Jane’s individuality is based is achieved through a demonization of all things West Indian. For Rhys to “correct” Bronte’s representation of the alienated Creole woman is then to criticize a plot construction that predicates the emergence of one kind of woman (and feminism) on the silencing and suppression of another (Spivak 1985); it is also to demys­ tify Bronte’s gothic machinery. Offering explanations for what are, ultimately, the prime gothic elements of Jane Eyre, Rhys exorcises the myths about the West Indies that haunt the nineteenth-century English imagination as well as Charlotte Bronte’s fiction. In Bronte’s novel, Jane’s announcement of the appearance in Thomfield Hall of a stranger who “comes from the West Indies; from Spanish Town, in Jamaica” leads to Rochester’s reiteration of “Mason! - The West Indies” and his growing, “in the intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes” (Bronte 1985, 232, ch. 19). This first association of the West Indies with mysterious and frightful forces beyond the master’s control establish that place as an evil one from which dangers originate. These sinister connotations are further reinforced by Mason’s triggering of the heart-rending cry that shatters the night. Jane’s first real gothic fright takes place on the night when she hears Bertha’s “peculiar and lugubrious” murmur above her head (Bronte 1985, 178, ch. 15) and then her step and laughter outside her room: this is indeed a “marrow-freezing incident” (Bronte 1985 ff., 179; ch. 15) which “chilled [her] with fear” (Bronte 1985, 178; ch. 15). She subsequently experiences the full-blown gothic horror on the occasion of the deadly struggle between Mason and Bertha, when the latter reacts to her so-called brother’s nightly visit with “a savage, a sharp, a shrill sound,” a “fearful shriek” that makes Jane’s pulse stop, her heart stand still, and paralyzes her limbs (Bronte 1985, 235, ch. 20). In short, it is what occasions Jane’s frights, the “horror [which] shook all her limbs” (Bronte 1985, 235, ch. 20) which is explained, what seemed “like some strange wild animal ... covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane” (Bronte 1985, 321, ch. 26) which is made human. By renaming Bertha “Antoinette,” writing her a life, and showing the expense at which the character Jane Eyre succeeds in achieving love and autonomy, Rhys has effec­ tively transformed the way we read and construe the meaning of Jane E yre}1 After Wide

10 In his analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea as “The Other Side” of Jane Eyre, Michael Thorpe docu­ ments extensively the “implicit parallels” Rhys’s novel draws between Antoinette and Jane, which he conceives of as “a bold departure” (Thorpe 1977, 103). In contrast, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest a whole range of parallels Bronte draws between Jane and Bertha - “parallels” which, they write, “may at first seem somewhat strained” - yet make no mention of Rhys’s novel (Gilbert & Gubar 1979, 360-362). 11 As a matter of fact, Wide Sargasso Sea has not only led to a re-evaluation of Bronte’s novel, but also of Rhys’s own novelistic oeuvre: its uniqueness among Rhys’s novels both in its his­ torical setting and in treating of the West Indies notwithstanding, critics were prompt to take up Francis Wyndham’s suggestion, in his introduction to Rhys’s novel, that Antoinette’s Carib­ Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 163

Sargasso Sea, Bronte’s novel can no longer simply be the story of one young woman’s coming into her own - for how can one still relish Jane’s love-story with Rochester? How can one take unmitigated pleasure in the happiness of Antoinette’s successor? And how can one not feel ambivalent toward the woman who marries a man who has driven his first wife to madness? In other words, enabling new interpretations and generating new readings of Bronte’s famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea performs a canonizing function similar to the more academic activities of criticism, interpretation, commentary, and translation - all activities, it might be worth noting, that go by the name of “rewriting” in the nomenclature of scholars like André Lefevere and Marcel Comis-Pope (Lefevere 1986; Lefevere 1992; Comis-Pope 1992). In fact, filtering and influencing our reading, rewritings mediate our access to the re­ written text in ways that go beyond what Judith Fetterley held possible when she devel­ oped her notion of “resisting” reading. As she writes in the Introduction to The Resisting Reader. “Clearly, then, the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted in us. The consequence of this exorcism is the capacity for what Adrienne Rich describes as re-vision - “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” And the consequence, in turn, of this re-vision is that books will no longer be read as they have been read and thus will lose their power to bind us un­ knowingly to their designs. While women obviously cannot rewrite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality, we can accurately name the reality they do reflect and so change literary criticism from a closed conversa­ tion to an active dialogue”. (Fetterley 1978, xxii-iii) What strikes one in this passage is that what Fetterley describes are the stages of a proc­ ess which is also the historical one of rewriting: to the first stage of a capacity for reading otherwise (as a woman, or as a feminist) follows rewriting (Rich’s “re-vision”); and these rewritings make that “books will no longer be read as they have been read.” More con­ servative than Virginia Woolf, who cautiously suggests women rewrite history in A Room of One’s Own (Woolf 1957, 47), Fetterley, however, did not anticipate that women would rewrite literary works, and that these rewritings would both reflect women’s real­ ity12 and “name the reality” the rewritten text reflects. Yet for all their functional similarities with critical rewritings, fictional rewritings such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly nonetheless operate in different ways and, frequently, target different audiences. To begin with, if rewritings mediate and affect the rewritten text’s received significance, the illumination of text and rewriting is, in effect, reciprocal and results in mutual canonization: on the one hand, the classic text confers legitimacy onto the rewriting and presents it with a readership; on the other, the rewriting, paying homage to its precursor text, invites

bean childhood is the backdrop against which the dislocated lives of Rhys’s earlier urban hero­ ines must be read (Wyndham 1966, 11). 12 Fetterley, writing in the late 1970s, still speaks of “our reality.” The subsequent intervention, within feminism, of race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation would complicate such a no­ tion. 164 Liedeke Plate

(re)readings and brings (new) readers to it. The commercial implications of this process of mutual mediation having escaped few people in the writing and publishing business - publishers issue reprints of the classic or offer boxed sets; bookstores juxtapose the texts; film rights are bought and sold13 - fictional rewritings can thus be seen to have further indirect canonizing effects. It is interesting, then, that in the lawsuit for copyright in­ fringement filed against Pia Pera’s unprecedented case of rewriting a classic that is not yet in the public domain, (the English translation of) her Diario di Lo be accused of harming Nabokov’s reputation (Blumenthal 1998). Much as Rhys shows herself aware of getting “cheap publicity from [Bronte’s] (often) splendid book” (Rhys 1984, 271) for Wide Sargasso Sea, so does Nabokov’s estate worry about Pera seeking to capitalize on Nabokov’s novel (Blumenthal 1998). Yet ought it not to consider the ways Pera’s novel might further increase sales of Lolita! Valerie Martin concedes as regards her rewriting of Stevenson’s Strange Case: “I know the publishing company was enthusiastic because they could see the possibility of a double market ... [and] assumed that the link to the well-known tale would make it possible for them to find a bigger audience” (Martin 1993, 2). In an interview given on the occasion of its publication, she adds: “I like that my book is going to make people go read the little classic” (Kastor 1990, F4). In their contributions to The Search for a New Alphabet, José Lambert and Joris Vlas- selaers discuss the place of literature in an increasingly “mass media-tized” world, and argue for a reconsideration of some fundamentals of reception theory (Lambert 1996; Vlasselaers 1996). As Vlasselaers observes, the centrality, in the contemporary multime­ dia culture, of discourse migration - what he terms “the continuous process of intertextual rewriting and réinscription across the various media” - requires the analysis of “the loca­ tion and circulation of discourses”; it also brings forth a new form of what he calls “me­ diatized reading” (Vlasselaers 1996, 288). To such a theoretical remapping of the proc­ esses of reception the study of rewritings could serve as prolegomenon; for if the exis­ tence of film versions of both Wide Sargasso Sea (John Duigan, 1993) and Mary Reilly (Stephen Frears, 1995) at once further complicates the processes described in the pages above and proffers the cornerstone for an incipient “mediatized reading” of the classics,14 the form of productive reception that is rewriting already demonstrates the need to ac­ count for the relationship between fictional and critical rewritings. As the examples of Martin’s Mary Reilly and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea show, some times rewritings occa­ sion new interpretations of classic texts, and other times academic study inspires new rewritings; and while one might imagine yet other times when they emerge in total igno-

13 In some bookstores in the United States, Mary Reilly was marketed along with Doubleday’s edition of Stevenson’s novella (Kastor 1990, F4); boxed sets were issued on the occasion of the publication of Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Scarlett (1991), and of Susan Hill’s sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Mrs. de Winter (1993); and while both Wide Sargasso Sea and Mary Reilly were turned into film in the 1990s, the film rights to Martin’s novel were sold long before the novel was finished (Martin 1993, 1-2). 14 Such a reading would have to include recent film adaptations of Bronte’s novel such as Franco Zefirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996), as well as Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). Indeed, in the major departure from Shelley’s novel wherein Branagh has Victor Frankenstein bring Elizabeth back to life as a monstrous female figure that sets fire to the house, she comes to echo veiy strongly with Bronte’s Bertha and Rhys’s Antoinette. Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 165 ranee of one another, it is imperative one recognizes not only the rewriting’s status as reading, but its place in the production of a classic’s significance.

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Author’s address: Liedeke Plate, Utrecht University Literatuurwetenschap Muntstraat 4 3512 EV Utrecht Liedeke.Plate@let. uu. nl