VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY

EGL Ė JAGMINIEN Ė

WRITING AND REWRITING: JEAN RHYS’S NOVEL WIDE SARGASSO SEA

MA Paper

Academic Advisor: Assoc. Prof. Regina Rudaityt ė

Vilnius, 2008

VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY

WRITING AND REWRITING: JEAN RHYS’S NOVEL WIDE SARGASSO SEA

This MA paper is submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of the MA in English Philology

By Egl ė Jagminien ė

I declare that this study is my own and does not contain any unacknowledged work from any source.

Academic Advisor: Assoc. Prof. Regina Rudaityt ė

2 CONTENTS

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………… 3 INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………….. 4 1. POSTMODERNISM AND THE CASE OF REWRITING ……………………….. 8 1.1 Postwar Realities and Literature ……………………………………………. 8 1.2 Postmodernism and Poststructuralism ……………………………………… 9 1.3 Posmodernism and Feminism ……………………………………………….. 10 1.4 Postmodernism and Intertextuality ………………………………………….. 14 1.4.1 Concept of Intertextuality …………………………………………….. 15 1.4.2 Development of the Theory of Intertextuality ………………………... 16 1.5 Postmodernism and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea ……………………… 20 2. RHYS’S ANTOINETTE AS THE OTHER SIDE OF BRONTË’S BERTHA …… 24 2.1 The Narrator of her Own Story ……………………………………………... 24 2.1.1 The Strategy for Survival ………………………………………... 24 2.1.2 The Narrating Self and the Experiencing Self …………………... 25 2.1.3 The Restitution of the Memory ………………………………….. 26 2.2 Problem of Identity …………………………………………………………. 28 2.3 Inquiry into the Madness …………………………………………………… 30 2.3.1 Heredity or Victimization ……………………………………….. 30 2.3.2 Renaming and Refashioning …………………………………….. 31 2.3.3 Incarceration and Breakthrough …………………………………. 33 2.4 The Role of the Dreams in the Narrative Framework ……………………… 34 2.5 The Multiple Annotation of the Ending ……………………………………. 35 3. RHYS’S ROCHESTER AS BRONTË’S PROTOTYPE …………………………. 38 3.1 The Three-sided Portrayal of Rochester ……………………………………. 39 3.2 The Victimizing Role of Englishness ………………………………………. 41 3.2.1 The English Self and the Colonial Other ………………………... 41 3.2.2 The “Righteousness” of British Imperial Power ……………….. 42 3.3 Dangerous Exotic Excess …………………………………………………... 43 3.4 Racial Prejudice. Cultural Rift ……………………………………………... 45 3.5 Inexorable Punishment ……………………………………………………. 47

3 4. INTERTEXTUALITY AS RHYS’S TOOL OF REWRITING JANE EYRE …… 50 4.1 Narrative Intertextual Techniques ……………………………….. 52 4.1.1 Negotiation with Brontë’s Text ………………………………... 52 4.1.2 Revision of Perspective ………………………………………... 53 4.2 The Problem of Sequel and Prequel ………………………………………. 54 4.3 Evaluation of Wide Sargasso Sea …………………………………………. 55 CONCLUSIONS ...... 57

SANTRAUKA (Summary in Lithuanian) ...... 61

REFERENCES ...... …63

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... …67

4 ABSTRACT

The aim of the M.A. thesis “Writing and Rewriting: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea” is to disclose the textual bonds between Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea , to analyse the latter’s intertextual method of rewriting, falling back on typical poststructuralist techniques. Jean Rhys, in rewriting Jane Eyre , turned Brontë’s mute, animal-like Bertha into a narrative subject with her own voice and life story. Rhys has convincingly proved that Bertha/Antoinette was not born mad but made into such – the agents being socio-racial prejudices and most significantly Antoinette’s “pure English” husband Edward Rochester. Rhys’s Rochester is a complex personage embodying several character types: a standard villain of the sentimental novel, a Byronic/Gothic hero, a Faustian figure and a Shakespearean Othello. His narcissistic belief in the superiority of English imperialism instills in him the right to usurp colonial money and impart non-English with inferiority, sexual and moral perversion. Being unable to control Antoinette and her island, Rochester turns his Creole wife into insane “other”, transports her to England where he could exercise his domination and slave ownership. While rewriting the hypotext ( Jane Eyre ) into the hypertext ( Wide Sargasso Sea ) Jean Rhys resorted to the intertextual techniques of fact saturation, character adaptation and revision of narrative perspective. Her novel undoubtedly hinges on postmodernist techniques: symbiosis of narrative voices, blending of past and present, reality and fantasy and non-fixity of the ending, allowing for multiple interpretations. Jean Rhys’s book Wide Sargasso Sea , opening new interpretations of a canonical nineteenth-century English novel most importantly is a superb creation in its own right.

5 INTRODUCTION

A modernist movement in human sciences which has affected a number of fields of knowledge (language in particular) and which became widespread in Europe at the beginning and the first half of the twentieth century, as the “Dictionary of Literary Terms And Literary Theory” states, is known as structuralism (Cuddon, 1999, 868). Structuralism theory considers all conventions and codes of communication by which human beings convey information. In the field of literature structuralism challenges the long-standing belief that a work of literature reflects a given reality; a literary text is rather constructed of other conventions and texts. Poststructuralism (acting within postmodernism context) followed structuralism in the second half of the twentieth century and further developed the theory of codes and conventions. Relying on Ferdinand de Saussure’s signification theory they emphasized differential sign, “oppositionality, plurality, dissemination”(ibid., 869). Poststructuralists underlined the idea that signification, and hence – meaning, is inherently unstable and its explanation needs metalanguage. In view of this they created a lot of terms: intertextuality, hypotextuality, hypertextuality, transtextuality, paratextuality, etc. Postmodernist literary theory and criticism state that works of literature are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. Texts, especially literary texts, are viewed by theorists as lacking in independent meaning. They are intertextual. The act of reading presupposes a network of textual relations. Meaning, according to Graham Allen (2002), “becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes an intertext”(2002, 1). The elicitation of intextual relations may contribute a lot to ideology, aesthetics and artistic value of the text. This is the case of critical investigations of two prominent novels – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1960) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1997). Both books are in a very close-knit intertextual relationship. The latter draws on the textual facts from the first, however exhibits new interpretations, ideologies, concepts, not only presenting entirely fresh insights into earlier described characters and events but also showing the precursor text in a new light. The aim of the M.A. thesis is to unearth the textual bonds between Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea , explicating the method of rewriting, i.e. intertextuality.

6 Jean Rhys worked on her novel during the 1950s and 1960s, a period of increasing West Indian emigration to Britain and of a growing awareness of the issues involved in struggles for independence in colonized countries. She sets her novel Wide Sargasso Sea in a time that was crucial in the development of colonial history: the time just following the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833. She focuses on the experience of the white plutocracy, people born in the West Indies who derived their wealth, status and identity from the system of slavery. After the enfranchisement of slaves, the former estate owners were left without the source of income, threatened with destitution – “displaced”. Rhys’s primary concern was the fate of a woman belonging to a stratum that no longer had a place, the one belonging to the marginal community. David Leon Higdon distinguishes four sources of Jean Rhys creative energy: “a personal response to Jane Eyre , an autobiographical urge, a historical awareness that such things actually had happened in the West Indies and echoes of Rhys’s earlier novels, especially Voyage in the Dark. There can be little doubt though that reaction to Jane Eyre was uppermost” (Higdon, 1985, 105). To be more precise, the impetus to write the other side of Antoinette Cosway/Bertha Mason was instigated by Charlotte Brontë’s “inhuman” interpretation of a white Creole, the first wife of Edward Rochester, who came from the West Indies, one of Britain’s colonies. Being herself a white Creole, Jean Rhys shows awareness of the fact that a West Indian woman cannot be understood separately from the way this identity has been constructed in the imperial Anglo- Saxon cultural context. She aims at exposing the falseness of this dominant English ideology, presenting the context and the reason of Antoinette’s madness and placing the blame for it namely on that superior imperial ideology.

The aim of the thesis is achieved by solving the following tasks:

• Presenting a general concept of postmodernism;

• Explaining intertextuality as a postmodernist/poststructuralist method of rewriting; • Presenting Antoinette as the other side of Brontë’s Bertha; • Analysing the portrayal of Edward Rochester as Brontë’s prototype; • Revealing intertextuality as Jean Rhys’s specific postsructural tool of rewriting Jane Eyre .

The main problems occurring in the analysis are the following:

7 • Is Wide Sargasso Sea a postmodernist, postcolonial or feminist novel? • Does Wide Sargasso Sea really usurp Jane Eyre ’s facts, themes and characters? • What is the relationship of the two novels: which is a prequel and which is a sequel? • Could Wide Sargasso Sea be considered as a book drawing on its own recourses?

The solution to the problems is sought in four parts of the thesis.

The first part dwells on postmodern trend in literature emphasizing controversy and disillusionment in all modes of literature, its inability to create anything new – hence resorting to rewriting, pastiche, etc. This part also embraces poststructuralist and feminist ideas, concentrating on utterly idiosyncratic character of Jean Rhys’s feminism. It presents postmodernist elements in Wide Sargasso Sea : avoidance of fixity, symbiosis of narrative voices, clashes of present and past, of reality and fantasy and neo-gothic elements which prove that Wide Sargasso Sea is a postmodernist novel. Since both books are tied by close-knitted bonds of intertextuality – the theory of its concept and development is also analysed in part one. Part two aims at presenting the main heroine of the book Antoinette as the other side of Brontë’s madwoman Bertha Mason. Antoinette’s narration of her life story reveals the background and the reason for the splitting of her identity, fragmentation and displacement. Jean Rhys convincingly shows that Antoinette’s mental disturbance stems not only from complex social-racial context in which she lives but more importantly from her husband’s materialistic outlook and his superior treatment of her as an inferior colonial subject. Part three explicates the complicated character of Edward Rochester, shows his similarities and dissimilarities with Brontë’s hero. Here Rochester is presented in three-sided model: as a standard villain of sentimental fiction, as a Byronic hero and a peculiar counterpoint to the other two. Rochester’s craving for money and his “narcissistic” belief in the superiority of the Englishness belittles the native people, turns them into the “colonial other” to whom he ascribes Antoinette as well and treats her as alien and inferior which inevitably leads to her destruction. Part four explains the intertextual relations between the two books, concentrating on intertextuality as Rhys’s method of rewriting Jane Eyre . The method shows how Brontë is written into modernity. By using her text as a starting point Jean Rhys placed her writing in a larger social, racial and political context and revealed the roots of English imperialism so crucial to colonial subjects. While negotiating with Brontë’s text Jean Rhys changes the dates, narrative perspective and, most importantly, turns her own novel – a sequel – into a prequel.

8 The M.A. thesis is written resorting to the theory of poststructuralism with the emphasis on intertextuality as one of the key postmodern strategies. The theoretical part presents the ideas extracted from critical reference literature, books as well as essays, and is followed by conclusions. Conclusions presuppose individual findings, inferences and generalizations. The work centres mainly on the following literary critics: M.M. Adjarian, G. Allen, C. Angier, A. Davidson, E.G. Friedman, D.L. Higdon, V.M. Gregg, G.Genette, E. Luengo, P. Le Gallez, J. Kristeva, K. Mezei, T. Staley and others.

9 1. POSTMODERNISM AND THE CASE OF REWRITING

It is common knowledge that literature is closely connected with social realities. Hence postmodernist literature is tightly related to postwar aftermath events.

1.1 Postwar Realities and Literature

The period of 1945-55 for Great Britain was a period of losses, controversy and disillusionment. There were great changes in the National Health Service, Education and other social issues, however, monarchy strived to conserve the old prewar order. Gary Day, the editor of “Literature and Culture in Modern Britain ” (1998) , in his essay “Decline and Fall. The Course of the Novel” calls this period “a failure of intellect and imagination” (1998, 65). The changes appeared in all spheres of human thought and theoretically they are known as postmodernism. The “Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory” defines postmodernism in the following way: “A general term used to refer to changes, developments and tendencies which have taken place (and are taking place) in literature, art, music, architecture, philosophy, etc. since the 1940s or 1950s” (Cuddon, 1999, 689). As far as literature is concerned it is possible to discern certain features of postmodernism. There is literature which tends to be non-traditional, practicing experimental techniques, displayed in nouveau roman and anti-novel. Other discernible features of postmodernism are an eclectic approach, aleatory writing, parody and pastiche. There also should be mentioned magic realism, new modes in science fiction, neo-gothic and the horror story. Early British postmodernist novelists tried to recreate a sense of national identity after the loss of colonial empire. The reduced sense of nation finds expression in provincial novel which typically reflected a provincial misfit to the metropolitan centre. The reason why the provincial novel failed to imagine a new national community was because it was written in a traditional form of nineteenth-century realism. The old form was neither applicable nor relevant to postwar society with the awareness that, “in the form of the atomic bomb humans had the power to destroy both themselves and the planet” (Day, 1998, 66). This awareness infected literature with the sense of unreality. The effect of unreality is reflected in Samuel Beckett’s “Malone Dies” (1951) where the writer dispenses with such staples of narrative as plot and chronological sequence because life cannot be oriented towards a future. The realization that there might not be 10 a future drove some novelists back to the past. Postwar fiction ironically “revisits the history in order to focus on its hidden inglorious underside” (Day, 1998, 66). Thus, for instance, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) demystifies the British as the bearers of superior civilization. An anxiety about the future upsets notions of continuity on which community depends. A response to this is the novel sequence where the characters participate in different but interconnected novels. Gary Day remarks that “sequences allow the production and renewal of a closed and self-consistent world, they also mimic the unpredictable looseness and contingency of lived historical time in which the senses of process, interruption and discontinuity are as necessary a part as the principle of recurrence, resumption and repetition” (Day, 1998, 67). C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time give the tradition of the novel a new twist. Snow explores the relationship between human individual will and a society which is an institution concerned with the abstract realities in life. Powell’s sequence traces the decline of the British aristocracy and the fragmentation of Victorian world. The postwar novel was not insulated from continental developments. Iris Murdoch’s first novel Under the Net (1954) drew on the tradition of French surrealism and was philosophically contemporary with French existencialist novel. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) proved that modernism was still an active force. In fact modernism gave birth to postmodernist realities and literature with all its forms and manifestations, poststructuralism and feminism included.

1.2 Postmodernism and Poststructuralism

Structuralism is closely connected with modernist theories. First of all it is concerned with language in a most general sense, not just the language of utterance in speech and writing. It is concerned with signs and signification. Ferdinand de Saussure is considered an originator of structuralism in the science of linguistics. Saussure made a number of important original contributions, the most significant of which, according to J.A.Cuddon, is the concept of language as a sign system or structure whose individual components can be understood only in relation to each other and to the system as a whole, rather than to an external reality (Cuddon, 1999, 868). In the 1960s, at the beginning of postmodernist era, structuralism became a subject to a rigorous and lasting critique of its concept and methods.

11 Poststructuralism is based on Saussurean linguistics but compliments structuralism by offering alternative modes of inquiry, explanation and interpretation. As far as literature is concerned poststructuralism tends to reveal that the meaning of any text is unstable, because signification itself is of unstable nature. Poststructuralists pursue further the Saussurean perception of the signifier and the signified but they emphasize that “the signifier and the signified are not only oppositional but plural, pulling against each other and, by so doing, creating numerous determinants and sequences of meaning what are called “disseminations” (Cuddon, 1999, 691). In poststructuralist theory Roland Barthes is of particular importance because he bridges the structuralist and poststructuralist movements in his book Elements of Semiology (1967). His postulations and the thoughts of his co-thinkers later found their development in the theory of intertextuality. All the above expounded ideas and theories enter the earlier introduced concept of postmodernism. Psychoanalytic criticism and feminism since the 1970s are yet other aspects of postmodernism.

1.3 Postmodernism and Feminism

Prof. Adolphe Haberer from the university of Lyon is his article “Intertexuality in Theory and Practice” (Haberer, 2007, 54) views postmodernism as a development of modernism which manifested itself during the first decades of 20 th century in the years preceding and following the great fracture of the First World War. “Modernism was characterized by the loss of stable values, by the loss of belief in the possibility of an objective truth in the validity of totalizing ideologies, by rejection of formal aesthetic theories, the emphasis given to subjectivity … to reflexivity and self-consciousness in the production of texts” (ibid.). The author suggests that postmodernism merely went further in the same direction, sometimes with an added doze of skepticism and irony due to the developments of the new technologies, consumerism and globalization (ibid.). There exists a certain relationship between postmodernism and feminism. According to Rosemarie Putnam Tong, (1998, 193) this relationship is an uneasy one, because the representatives of feminism have difficulty explaining how they can be both postmodern and feminist. “Postmodern feminists, like all postmodernists, seek to avoid in their writings any and all reinstantiations of phallogocentric thought, ideas ordered around an absolute word that is “male” in style” (Tong, 1998, 193). They view with suspicion any mode of feminist thought that aims to give an explanation for why woman is oppressed. Some postmodern feminists are so afraid of traditional 12 feminism that they reject it altogether. Linda J. Nicholson in her introduction to the book “Feminism / Postmodernism” gives general evaluation of postmodernist - feminist ideas: In general they have argued against the supposed neutrality and objectivity, asserting that claims put forth as universally applicable have invariably been valid only for men of a particular culture, class, and race. They have further alleged that even the ideals which have given backing to these claims, such as “objectivity and reason”, have reflected the values of masculinity in the modern West (Nicholson, 1990, 5).

First and foremost it were French feminists who began to be called “postmodern feminists”: Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are the intellectualists who first of all “interpret traditional Freudian thought iconoclastically” (ibid., 194). The aim of their writings is to motivate women, to change their ways of “being and doing in the real world” (ibid.). Postmodern feminism is one of the aspects of the general ideology of postmodernism. It is connected with the theories of Existentialism and Deconstruction. The roots of Postmodern feminism can be found in the works of Simone de Beauvoir, who practiced the essential question “Why is the woman the second sex?” Rephrased in postmodern terms, the question becomes, “Why is the woman the other?” Postmodern feminists claim that woman is still the other, but rather than interpreting this condition as something to be transcended, postmodern feminists proclaim its advantages. The condition of otherness enables woman to stand back and criticize the norms, values and practices that the patriarchal dominant culture seeks to impose on everyone. Thus, otherness is much more than the oppressed, inferior condition. It is also a way allowing for openness, plurality, diversity and difference (Tong, 1998, 195). Postmodern feminism is affiliated with Deconstruction theory, because of its postulations of a woman as being “excluded, shunned, frozen out, disadvantaged, unprivileged, rejected, unwanted, abandoned, dislocated and marginalized” (ibid.). However, in their essence postmodern feminists reject any label ending in “ism“, including “feminism” and “postmodernism”. According to Luce Irigaray (1987, 66), “labels always carry with them the phallogocentric drive to stabilize, organize and rationalize our conceptual universe”. H. Cixious, J. Kristeva and L. Irigaray offer women the most fundamental liberation of all: “freedom from oppressive thought” (ibid., 198). Since the object of the analysis in M.A. theses is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea it is worthwhile to examine the writer’s ideological and aesthetic views, the more that some critics include her into the list of feminist writers. In order either to affirm or refute this statement we will turn once more to general postulations of feminist theory in Europe. 13 To a larger degree, feminist theory in Europe has addressed the political, cultural and sociological practices and institutions that marginalize or oppress women. Some feminists look only at the empirical facts that bind women. Others, Julia Kristeva among them, looked at the question considerably deeper. They seriously considered the main question of feminism– the question of sexual difference. They claim that there is some fundamental difference between the sexes. Not just a biological or psychological difference – but the difference in inherent logical structures that position women as merely the negative of men. According to Noëlle Mcafee, “any inquiry into whether or not there is an “essence” of “woman“ conjures up images of old Sexists classifications of woman as possibly inferior to men” (Mcafee, 2003, 93). Julia Kristeva noted three “generations” of European feminism. By generation she means a particular approach or attitude. The first generation, according to her, was the movement prior to 1968 that called for equal rights and equal treatment. The representatives did not see truly important differences between the sexes, so women should be treated the same as men (Kristeva, 1980, 222). The second generation comes after 1968. The aim is to “clarify the difference between men and women as concerns their respective relationships to power, language, and meaning” (ibid.). While the first generation minimized the difference between sexes, the second generation began to focus on it intently, sometimes simply because the old system devaluated all that is womanly. “Turning away from the first generation’s interest in linear time, the second generation has sought to return to women’s archaic, cyclical time, monumental time of the species” (ibid.) The third (a new) generation, Kristeva hopes, will avoid romanticizing “woman”. Since the second generation erased actual woman’s individuality and specificity the task of the third generation is to attend to the singularity of each woman. The aim of this generation is: “ …to combine the sexual with the symbolic in order to discover first the specificity of the feminine and then the specificity of each woman” (ibid., 225). Kristeva thinks the next generation will take seriously women’s desire to have children alongside with their desire to enter the male world of linear time – that is to have children and have careers. As it has been mentioned above, the question arises whether Jean Rhys can be considered a feminist writer; could she be identified with any of these generations, or is she quite a unique phenomenon? Carole Angier starts the introduction to her book Jean Rhys (1985) by the following: Jean Rhys was not a modern woman. Modern women want their own independent lives and independent souls – these were the last things Jean wanted. From beginning to end, dependence was her way of life. It did not bring her peace and happiness; it failed her and tormented: but she never gave up the ideal of it. All she wanted to be was an ordinary, happy, passive and protected woman (Angier, 1985, 55).

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“Her writing however was modern. Her heroines are modern: homeless and alone, victims in a shifting, uncertain, dangerous world” (ibid.). However, they do not behave like the ideals of feminist writers: they do not strive for carrier, do not fight for their rights, do not cut their hair short, do not wear modern clothes. Many critics maintain that men in her novels are shown to suffer oppression too, though in a different way. Men who are oppressed also require a strategy of survival. They find it through their act of oppressing women. “To think of her as a feminist, or a socialist, or any other – “ist”, wrote Carole Angier, “is to miss her central and most tragic point” (Angier, 1985, 58). According to Angier, in Rhys’s world the poor and weak are not better than the rich and strong. Blacks are as materialistic and cruel as whites; women are more conventional and meaner than men. Such was unchanging human nature. Feminist writers would like to hail her as feminist, because her novels are a brilliant account of the traps that await dependent women, and what happens to them when they fall in. But Jean did not write about dependent women: she wrote about herself” (Angier, 1985, 58). Moreover, Rhys herself made her stance as a non-feminist quite clear: “I’ m not at all for women’s lib. I don’t dislike women exactly, but I don’t trust them. You can never tell them what you really think because if they know what you think – they’ll do you down” (Letters, 1984, 153). Rhys’s own conviction was that the way to survive in a patriarchal system of oppression was to make use of the weapons of femininity given to women by that system. According to Dworkin, this method had nothing in common with the feminist approach. The novels themselves proved that such a tactic is a very unsatisfactory one – Rhys’s women can never win. “As beings we women are defined as submissive, passive, virtually inert. For all of patriarchal history, we have been defined by law custom and habit as masochistic passive and inferior…”(Letters, 1984, 155). With concern to Jean Rhys’s ideology in general and Wide Sargasso Sea motifs in particular, many critics maintain that the book is only semi-feminist. To use Jill Neville’s words: “Jean Rhys’s women have only their ability to perceive, note, mark and inwardly digest” (Neville, 1992, 70). Rhys’s heroine Antoinette is by largely a passive woman who permits herself to be manipulated by a man. Her only revenge is irony and her only resistance is an occasional gesture of violence that is directed most often at herself. According to M.M. Adjarian, “Rhys’s text troubles the operations of a postcolonial feminism that unconditionally aligns itself with the rejuvenated figure of Brontë’s West Indian madwoman because it discloses the complicated

15 relationship between Antoinette’s complicity with and “her resistance to the English imperial project” (Adjarian, 1995, 134). Judie Newman is of the opinion that Wide Sargasso Sea is a feminist text in that it describes what it is like to be a woman in a male-dominated society, but the novel is also about what it is like to come from a colony in an imperial society. Above all Wide Sargasso Sea is about what it means to be a writer-woman writing back “from the margins” (Newman, 191, 33). Paula Le Gallez’s statement is of a very significant generalizing power: “When the two texts [Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea ] are juxtaposed as they are in Wide Sargasso Sea , Antoinette’s story makes a very powerful conclusion, a conclusion which has inescapable feminist significance in a work of consciously non-feminist writer” (Gallez, 1990, 173).

1.4 Postmodernism and Intertextuality

To use Randall Stevenson’s words “The epistemological shift and general changes in outlook at the end of the nineteenth century led modernism to question and experiment with ways reality can be known … by mind or text”(Stevenson, 2000, 33). According to the author, postmodernism extends uncertainty, often assuming reality – if it exists at all – to be quite unknowable. Postmodernists stated that the forms of representation, language in particular, have become detached from reality. Typically of postmodernism, fictional worlds are unstable, revealing their constructed artificial qualities. Invention and imagination have become more and more frequently the subject of the novel. Thus, postmodernism investigates, what “separate worlds can be projected or constructed by language and text themselves and how they interrelate. Postmodernist literature having been torn away from reality bears the symptoms of exhaustion and disillusionment. The idea that nothing new can be created led to frequent rewritings of antecedent works, intertextual parallels, prequels or sequels to canonical texts (ibid., 44). In this respect it is necessary to get to the key concept of intertextuality “to account for that all-important dimension of our experience as readers of literary texts, which we could call the memory of literature” (ibid., 45). Concequently we will start with the presentation of the concept of intertextuality and its development.

16 1.4.1 Concept of Intertextuality

The overarching abstract phenomenon of intertexuality appeared in 1960. Julia Kristeva, a French semiotician, is generally credited as the first to introduce the term. She claims that “…any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva, 1980, 66). The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms describes intertexuality as a term “to designate the various relationships that a given text may have with other texts. These intertextual relationships include anagram, allusion, adaptation, translation, parody, pastiche, imitating and other kinds of transformation”(Baldic, 1990, 113). The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory states that “the basic premise of the theory of intertexuality is that a text is not a closed system and does not exist in isolation. It is always involved in a dialogue with other texts” (Macey, 2000, 203-204). Graham Allen in his book “Intertextuality” writes of his deep conviction that “… intertextuality is and will remain a crucial element in the attempt to understand literature and culture in general. Without a working knowledge of intertextual theory and practice, readers are likely to retain traditional notions of writing and reading, notions which have been radically challenged since the 1960s” (Allen, 2002, 7). In view of intertextuality any literary text is understood not as the container of meaning but as a space in which a potentially vast number of relations coalesce. According to Barthes, a text is not a line of words, but a multidimentional space in which a variety of writings blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. “The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them. Did he wish to explain himself, he ought at least to know that the inner “thing” he thinks to “translate” is only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely” (Barthes, 1977, 146). Julia Kristeva calls intertextuality a crossed threshold between languages and cultures. She underlines socio-historical aspect of intertextuality: …the meaning of socio-historical aspect of intertextuality, as already developed by Bakhtin and Barthes, acquires a new significance: within each sociolect or ideology there will always be a breach of subjectivity carrying out a hidden matrix of pre-symbolic forces able to make history move on through all its short and singular stories (Kristeva, 2000, 7).

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1.4.2 Development of the theory of “Intertextuality”

The origins of intertexuality can be traced back to the ancient times but as literary theory it is often viewed as taking its origins from the modern linguistics, particularly in the works of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. F. de Saussure analysed the essence of a linguistic sign. His sign combines a “signified” and a “signifier”. The signifier is a written or spoken word, while a “signified” is the concept associated with that particular signifier. The meaning of a linguistic sign is non-referential: a sign does not refer directly to things in the external world but derives its meaning through the relation between signifiers and signified. Signs are arbitrary. They exist within a system and produce meaning through their similarity to and difference from other signs. The theory of intertexuality develops from Saussure’s notion of the differential sign. If all signs are in some way differential, they have a vast number of possible relations of similarity and difference. If it is true of linguistic signs in general, it is true of literary sign too. According to G. Allen, “Authors of literary works…select plots, generic features, aspects of character, images, ways of narrating, even phrases and sentences from previous literary texts and from literary tradition” (Allen, 2002, 11). If we imagine the literary tradition as itself a synchronic system, then a literary author works with at least two systems, those of language in general and of the literary system in particular. Such a point reinforces Saussure’s stress on the non-referential nature of signs. In reading literature we are aware that the signs deployed in any particular text have their reference not to objects in the world but to the literary system out of which the text is produced. Graham Allen in his book “Intertextuality” gives the following example of intertextual tradition. In his opinion “if a modern writer presents a characterization of Satan, he/she is far more likely to have in mind John Milton’s representation of Satan in his epic poem “Paradise Lost” than any literal notion of the Christian Devil”(Allen, 2002, 11). The theory of intertexuality was further developed in the works of the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin. The fulcrum of Bakhtin’s theory is the statement that all language responds to previous utterances and to preexistent patterns of meaning, unconnected to previous and future utterances. Language always occurs in specific social situations, combining a dialogue between specific human agents and words carry a dialogic quality, combining a dialogue between different meanings and applications. From the simplest utterance to the most complex work of scientific or literary discourse, no utterance exists alone. “All utterances are dialogic, their 18 meaning and logic depend upon what has previously been said and on how they will be received by others” (Allen, 2002, 19). Bakhtin used the term dialogism. To explain it he employed other terms, such as “polyphony”, “heteroglossia”, “double-voiced discourse” and “hybridization”. Polyphony is the simultaneous combination of parts or elements, or voices. Bakhtin used it analysing the novels of Dostoevsky who, according to Bakhtin, could hear dialogic relationships everywhere, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life (Bakhtin, 1981, 40). The term “heteroglossia” explains the clash within language. It often exists within individual utterances and even within the same word. In the polyphonic novel the speech of individual characters is always heteroglot, doublevoiced. It exemplifies the intertextual or dialogic nature of language by always serving two speakers, two intentions, two ideological positions but always within the single utterance. Hybridization refers more specifically to the clash of languages, occurring within the same utterance (ibid., 43-44). M. M. Bakhtin does not seek to announce the death of the Author. The author for Bakhtin still stands behind his or her novel, but s/he does not enter into it as a guiding authoritative voice. All utterances depend on or call to other utterances: all utterances are shot through with other competing and conflicting voices. Bakhtin explains the essence of intertextuality in the following way: “The life of the word is contained in its transfer from one mouth to another, from one context to another context, from one social collective to another, from one generation to another generation. In this process the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of those concrete contexts into which it has entered” (Bakhtin, 1981, 113). The term “intertexuality”, as it has already been mentioned, entered into the French language in Julia Kristeva’s works in the 1960s. Her essay “The Bounded Text” is concerned with establishing the manner, in which a text is constructed out of already existent discourse. According to Kristeva, a text is a permutation of texts, an intertexuality in the space of a given text in which several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another” (Kristeva, 1980, 39). Texts are made up of cultural or social text and, thus, the text is not an individual isolated object, but a “collection of cultural textuality” (ibid). In summing up, neither sign, utterance nor text can exist in isolation and have meanings on their own. They are tightly bound with the previous signs, utterances and texts. This is the main idea of classical intertexuality, which later underwent modern adaptation. Kristeva defines the dynamic literary word in terms of a horizontal dimension and a vertical dimension. In the horizontal dimension “the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and 19 addressee”, in the vertical dimension “the word in the text is oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus” (Kristeva, 1980, 66). Horizontal axis (subject-addressee) and vertical axis (text-context) coincide bringing to light an important fact: each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read (ibid.). In Bakhtin’s work, these two axes, which he calls dialogue and ambivalence, are not clearly distinguished, while Kristeva was very explicit and by them she explained the dependence of a text on other antecedent texts. Developing the theory of intertextuality Kristeva based it on psychoanalytical analysis. She worked on the terms “transposition” and “representability” which she used speaking about the ability and creativity of the author in passing from one sign system to another. She wrote: We shall call trasposition the signifying process, ability to pass from one sign system to another, to exchange and permutate them; and representability – the specific articulation of the semiotic sign system. Transposition plays an essential part here inasmuch as it implies the abandonment of a former sign system, the passage to a second via an instinctual intermediary common to the two systems, and the articulation of the new system with its new representability (Kristeva, 1980, 60).

Ronald Barthes further developed the theory of intertextuality. Barthes fundamentals concern are notions of stability and security. The security is based on “civilization of the sign”. This is again Saussurean understanding of the sign and signification. The text, as material writing, gives stability and security to the work as intended meaning because it stands in the relation of material signifier to the work as signified. Bakhtin wrote: The notion of text implies that the written message is articulated like the sign: on one side the signifier (the materiality of the letters and of their connection into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters), and on the other side the signified, a meaning which is at once original, univocal, determined by the correctness of the signs which carry it” (Barthes, 1977, 91).

According to Barthes, a text in traditional terms is “the phenomenal surface of the literary work. A text is the material inscription of a work. It is that which gives a work permanence, repeatability and thus readability. At the same time the text is “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony… the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas” (Barthes, 1977, 160). Gerald Genette is another influential author on intertextuality. In his essay “Structuralism and Literary Criticism”, Gerald Genette states that a literary text can be rearranged into “themes, motifs, key-words, metaphors, quotations, and references, etc. which make up a system out of which the work is constructed” (Genette, 1997, 5). According to Genette, literature like any other activity of 20 the mind is based on conventional systems. The description of these systems constitute a mapping of the closed system of literature and provide the basis for any meaningful analysis of individual works (ibid.). As it has been stated above, Julia Kristeva referred to the inter-connectedness of texts as “intertextuality” and portrayed texts as mosaic of other texts. Gerald Genette expanded Kristeva’s theory. He classified the phenomenon into a number of categories that he grouped under the umbrella term “transtextuality”. The term “transtextuality” covers the cases in which a text is present in another text, the theory which is very helpful for our investigation. Speaking about the text G. Genette states: ‘For the moment the text interests me in its textual transcendence – namely, everything that brings into relation (manifest or hidden) with other texts. I call that transtextuality…” (Genette, 1997, 7). Gerald Genette’s system of transtextuality is materialised into a five-part schema, including intertextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, paratextuality and hypertextuality. “Intertextuality is defined as the presence of one text within another in the form of quotation, plagiarism and allusion. This is pragmatic and determinable intertextual relationship between specific elements of individual texts (Genette, 1997, 1-2). “Metatextuality is defined as a form of explicit or implicit critical commentary linking one text to another without necessarily citing it. Metatextuality unites a given text to another of which it speaks without summoning it or even without naming it (Genette, 1997, 4). Architextuality is defined as a connection of a primary text with other texts through genre. This is “the entire set of general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres – from which each singular text emerges”. (ibid., 5). Since literature is conceived as a formally defined system filled with categories such as the realist novel, tragedy, short story, etc. – architextuality is the study of literature in terms of these formal categories. Paratextuality is defined as the relation between a text and its “paratext” – that which surrounds the main body of the text – such as titles, subtitles, intertitles, prefaces, notices, forewords, epigraphs, illustrations, covers, etc. For G. Genette, the paratex “constitutes a zone between a text and an off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction a privileged place of pragmatics and strategy of an influence on the public” (Genette, 1997, 2). Hypertextuality is defined as any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext), to an earlier text A (hypotext) – a text on which it is leased but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including prequel, sequel, parody). “It is a relationship between a text and another text that extensively reworks or transforms it in some way but without a commentary on the original” 21 (Genette, 1997, 6-9). This is especially important for our study – the study of hypertextuality between hypertext – Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and hypotext – Charlote Brontë’s Jane Eyre . However, for the sake of clarity and convenience in our analysis we will stick to the conventional general term “intertextuality”, having in mind the hypotextual relations of the two texts. In order to grasp the essence of Rhys’s intertextual technique the thesis will draw a parallel (and at the same time contrastive) line between Jean Rhys’s and Charlotte Brontë’s main characters Antoinette Cosway / Bertha Mason and Edward Rochester.

1.5 Postmodernism and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Critics have argued over whether it is possible to describe Wide Sargasso Sea as a modernist, or a postmodernist, or a feminist, or a post-colonial novel. Or is it all or none of these? Joya Uraizee calls it “a subversive history or anti-history of Antoinette and other colonized peoples”(Uraizee, 1989, 260). The critic explains that “anti-history promotes polyphony, eschews fixity, monocentrism and closure” (ibid.). That is exactly what Wide Sargasso Sea does. It eschews fixity, monocentrism and closure due to the dual narrative voices and the ambiguity of the ending. Lack of closure or fixity is often considered a postmodernist technique, but what makes it peculiarly postcolonialist in this context is “the circularity of ambiguity of Rhys’s text vis-à-vis Brontë’s master narrative” (Uraizee, 1999, 261). The alternation of the narrative voice between Antoinette and Rochester creates polyphony. Both narrators use interior monologues and past memories to reveal their fears and insecurities. Antoinette’s voice gives her a clear sense of identity. It is an identity determined and set in place by Brontë. Rochester’s voice working antiphonally with that of Antoinette’s gives the tragedy an ironic frame. Ned Thomas writes: “The whole story is known to Antoinette as she writes… Rochester’s narration, however takes place at the moment that events occur and consequently, we share with him his revelations and growing horror. Thus the two voices tell one story, giving us not merely the contrast of their attitudes, but more important for the effects of horror which it produces, the contrast of the victim who knows his fate with that of the victim who must gradually learn his. Antoinette knows from the start that she is doomed… while Rochester imagines that he is a free agent” (Thomas, 1991, 19).

The voices of the freed slaves (like Christophine) are also audible in the novel. These voices, despite being powerful and defiant, according to Uraizee, “ultimately remain subversive and not resistant” (Uraizee, 1989, 262). Thus Wide Sargasso Sea must be viewed as “an example of

22 literary symbiosis (a combination of voices at once powerful and silent), and not as an attempt to replace the master-narrative of Jane Eyre with an alternative history” (ibid., 263). To sum up, three things make Wide Sargasso Sea a postmodernist novel: polyphony of voices, ambiguous ending and clash of real and unreal, present and past. Rhys blurs the division between hallucination and reality, past and present through the interplay of memory, self- conscious meditation and the imagistic description of the external world. Polyphony of voices has already been discussed and will be further referred to in the analytical part as well as ambiguity of the ending. It remains only to dwell on the amalgamation of real and unreal so typical in Jean Rhys’s novel. There are many instances in the novel when reality resembles imaginary and visa versa, phantasy, imagination, dreams coalesce with real life. First and foremost this is reflected in Neo-Gothics in the novel. The novel has received comparison to the work of Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allen Poe and William Faulkner for its gothic tone. Jean Rhys makes the gothic mode an active element in the novel. This mode helps tie the novel to Jane Eyre and functions as “narrative idiom where the descriptions themselves with their frequently elaborated portents achieve a metaphysical relationship to the characters and draw a close relationship between natural and psychological landscape”(Luengo, 1976, 231). Speaking about Gothic novelists, Luengo emphasizes that “Rhys moves much deeper into the unstable mental world of the characters, much as Charlotte and Emily Brontë were to do when they helped to transform the tired clichés and conventions of the Gothic into powerful tools exploring the turbid depths of the human spirit” (ibid., 213). Underlying the thematic affinity of the two novels, M.M. Adjanian remarks: “The madwoman who haunts Mr. Rochester’s upper floor is from the West Indies, thus Brontë is setting Caribbean ghosts loose in British domestic sphere” (Adjarian, 1995, 202). Anthony E. Luengo explains what is meant by “Neo-Gothic” and “Caribbean Gothic” terms. He adopts the “Neo-Gothic” term while describing such novels as Jane Eyre , Wuthering Heights and Wide Sargasso Sea , also the works of American authors, such as Poe, Melville, Faulkner and Capote. According to him, the works of these authors “correspond in quality to our deepest fears and guilts as projected in our dreams or lived through in extreme situations” (Luengo, 1976, 242). He is of the opinion that Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea may be termed “Caribbean Gothic” but this term can be understood only in the wider context of the Gothic tradition. Like all novels in the Gothic and Neo-Gothic mode Wide Sargasso Sea is remarkable in its evocation of landscape. Both narrators of the novel evince sensuous feel for a land that is at once “overpoweringly beautiful and mysteriously menacing. This makes the work intoxicatingly atmospheric. Colours 23 and smells predominate in many scenes of pastoral charm strewn through the book” (ibid.) Luengo calls this a “projective method” of landscape description which becomes a powerful tool in the hands of Neo-Gothic writers general and Jean Rhys in particular. Speaking about Granbois, Rochester remarks that the place is not only wild but menacing. “These hills would close in on you” (Rhys, 1997, 42). Similarly, the dense tropical forest symbolizes the increasing gloom and confusion of Rochester’s mind. The forest is hostile to him. “It is hostile … I found that the undergrowth and creepers caught at my legs and the trees closed over my head… ” (Rhys, 1997, 66). The sense of menace is here very pronounced. Neo-Gothic authors aimed to find a substitute for “the centuries-old castle”- the symbol of the gothic tale. They found it in “exploiting to the full the symbolic implications of the dark forest” (Luengo, 1976, 243). In Rhys’s technique Caribbean jungles at once provide a strikingly visual and textured terror and a convenient mirror in which to reflect the inner turmoil of her two main characters. Thus we can trace Rochester’s changing moods by his changing attitudes to a seemingly changing land. Antoinette, in contrast, is unnervingly consistent in her view of the forest: “it is an absolutely diabolic force that presses close on the walls of her Edenic garden” (Luengo, 1976, 243). Thus, nature in Wide Sargasso Sea takes on the importance that had in original Gothic fiction been given to architecture. One quality that Coulibri and Granbois share is their extraordinary remoteness, a geographical isolation which symbolizes the spiritual separation of the protagonists from the mainstays of normality. The presence of ruins in Wide Sargasso Sea also fulfill a definite purpose in narrative: they embody the increasingly terrifying enigma of Antoinette, her ancestry and her island which Rochester is finding he cannot solve. Brief yet striking the “ruins scene” in Wide Sargasso Sea is effective use that Rhys makes of the conventional machinery of the Gothic. “The view of the ruins was very striking, without being beautiful. It spoke at once to the imagination, with the force and simplicity of truth, the nothingness and brevity of this life” (ibid.). The moon inevitably provided the dim illumination for the Gothic night. Rhys connects the moon with the terrifying intimacy to the subjective states of her two characters. When Antoinette says that she “has slept too long in the moonlight” (Rhys, 1997, 51), Rhys points to Antoinette’s deteriorated mental state which is especially noticeable in Rochester’s narration where he refers to Antoinette as “blank hating moonstruck face” (Rhys, 1997, 107). With regards to Rochester the moon takes on a different resonance. In the West Indies the moon is alien to him, it means desperate alienation. 24 Rhys in her novel also makes use of neoromantic activities. Antoinette imagined that Christophine had hidden in her room “a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut, blood drop by drop falling into a red basin” (Rhys, 1997, 14). Obeah (a milder form of black magic) is also used in the novel to heighten the enigma of Antoinette and her island which disorients Rochester. Rhys also employs Neo-Gothic ghosts. However, for Rhys a ghost is a mental phenomenon, the product of the “heart-oppressed brain”. It becomes, like the landscape, an expression of the anguish of her main characters. In her dreams Antoinette sees the ghost of a “woman with streaming hair” and Antoinette herself becomes a ghost in the eyes of Rochester as she sinks deeper and deeper into madness: “ She was only a ghost. A ghost in the gray daylight” (Rhys, 1997, 107). To conclude, all the above analysed instances of Neo-Gothic witness outspokenly to postmodern character of Rhys’s novel. Thomas F. Staley is of the opinion that Jean Rhys honestly depicted the isolated, abandoned, even paranoid world of her women characters who yearn vaguely for a lost beauty and passively yet doggedly attempt to survive. Rhys subtly reveals the attitudes towards race, social classes, the bourgeois world in which her heroines are victims. Rhys’s way of looking at the world from the perspective of a displaced woman “come remarkably close to our own deepest human concerns” (Staley, 1979, 2). Thomas F. Staley states that Rhys’s work, background and culture not only set Rhys apart from her contemporary novelists, but also shaped a widely different sensibility and radical consciousness. “Of vital importance to an understanding and appreciation of Rhys’s contribution to the modern novel is the recognition of the striking way in which her fiction reflects a complex of values and an attitude toward life which both undercuts and opposes so many of the most cherished values, both public and private of the bourgeois world” (ibid.). Carole Angier sees the roots of idiosyncratic features of Rhys’s feminism in Edwardian England, into which she stepped, at seventeen, alone and unprepared. Here were the arrogance and snobbery she would hate all her life. But here also were the extremes of beauty and squalor, wealth and destitution which always fascinated and frightened her. And here were the ideals of courage and loyalty, the old world courtesy, the love of luxury, which became hers for the rest of her life. Her lucid, disabused tone, her dispossession, and alienation, were modern: but her ideas and aspirations were classic (Angier, 1985, 15).

In modernism lies her affinity to feminism, in the passivism and disconstructivity – her distance from the feminist ideals. 25 2. RHYS’S ANTOINETTE AS THE OTHER SIDE OF BRONTË’S BERTHA

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is not a resistant novel, neither it can be considered an alternative history because there is no attempt to dislodge Antoinette / Bertha from her role as scapegoat and the narrative of Jane Eyre is not reversed. Rhys cannot create a new destiny or closure to the one set by Brontë. She can only destabilize it and make ambiguous. Although Antoinette’s history is predetermined, she does, at least, have a voice with which to tell her story.

2.1 The Narrator of her Own Story

As it has already been discussed, the story of the main heroine of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea was evoked by Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre . Jean Rhys was particularly shocked by the image of the Rochester’s first wife mad Bertha Mason, a white Creole descendent from the West Indies – a British colony. The description of her is more of a wild animal than a human being. Bertha is offstage, she is mute, she never speaks, except growls and bites. Heartbroken by such a picture Jean Rhys decided to write Antoinette’s story, let her speak, because to use Antoinette’s words: “There is always another side of it. Always!” Jean Rhys wrote in her Letters (1931-1966): The Creole in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a lay figure–repulsive… She is necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry – off stage. For me she must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire…(Letters, 1984, 199).

2.1.1 The Strategy for Survival

Kathy Mezei in her article: “And it kept its secret”: Narration Memory and Madness (1987, 195-209) writes: “In Jane Eyre Antoinette (Bertha) is not permitted to speak”. Instead, it is Jane who speaks for her when she admonishes Rochester, “you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady … she cannot help being mad” ( Jane Eyre , 1960, 302). To rectify the situation, Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea allows Antoinette to narrate her own story. Thus, despite Rochester’s

26 malediction, Antoinette does “tell it”, and “the telling of her secret, her memories, and her story mirrors her desperate effort to safe herself from a lie”(Mezei, 1987, 201). According to Kenneth Burke, (1991) for women narrators this symbolic action is a necessary strategy for survival. Antoinette joins Penelope, Scheherazade and countless other female narrators whose only form of control is through the weaving of words and telling their own story in their voices as narrating subject not narrated object. What is interesting about Antoinette’s narration is how desperately and ingeniously she uses the narrative techniques – “illusion of sequence and line as chronology to delay the final secret, climax, closure of her story – her descent into madness and death” (Burke, 1991, 33). As long as Antoinette can remember and order events of her memories into a temporal or causal sequence, even create an illusion of sequence and maintain a measured sense of space and time, then she can hold her life and self together. When in the third part she lies incarcerated in Thornfield Hall’s cold, dark attic the thread that holds her to reality finally breaks. She says herself: “time has no meaning” (Rhys, 1997, 120). Sequence disintegrates into a confusion of present and past and ultimately into a dream which narrates her future. We agree with Gerard Genette that the relation between the time of the text and the time of the events blur, creating anachrony (Genette, 1997, 49). Antoinnete’s sense of space becomes also distorted. Her attic is not England, a place but a configuration of her mind, an enclosure. Finally, no longer in control of her narration, she must end it. It is interesting to follow Antoinette’s narrative technique through the book.

2.1.2 The Narrating Self and the Experiencing Self

Although Part One is narrated retrospectively in the past tense, there are moments when Antoinette slips into the present and we can catch a glimpse of the older, narrating Antoinette and the secret of her narrative. At the beginning of her story, Antoinette describes her mother: “Once I made excuses to be near her, when she brushed her hair, a soft black cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe. But not any longer. Not any more” (Rhys, 1997, 8). The repetition of ‘not any’ and a change from ‘longer’ to ‘more’ implies that the second phrase is spoken by the present narrator brooding on her loss of her mother and that in the narrator’s mind past and present blur. This repeatedly occurs in part three and suggests a disassociated mind. The dream in the forest is 27 narrated in the present tense by Antoinette in the attic to help her to remember what it is she must do at Thornfield, since the dream clearly shifts from Jamaica to England: “We are not longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden, surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees” (Rhys, 1997, 34). Then she wakes and continues to describe the convent, (Sister Marie Augustine giving her chocolate) in the present tense but her thoughts are mixed up with her dream. Antoinette has structured her narrative deliberately. And, although the sequence of events are connected by associative memory rather than by temporality or causality, Antoinette strives to restrain her story within the boundaries of conventional narrative. This is why she so carefully sprinkles dates and duration of time throughout her telling. Thus for instance, she mentions a date 1839 when she enters the convent and explains that “during this time nearly eighteen months my stepfather often came to see me”(Rhys, 1997, 33). These are signposts of sanity, according to Kathy Mezei, because the measure of time is a measure of how closely one is in touch with reality” (Mezei, 1987, 205). Thus, as it has been mentioned above, Antoinette’s narrative is associative rather than temporal or causal and the associations are based on Antoinette’s obsessions – her fear of the loss of safety, her sense of desertion and isolation. She begins her story with an oblique reference to the Emancipation Act: “…when trouble comes close ranks…"(Rhys, 1997, 5). Later she continues the story of Mr. Luttrell’s suicide, then recounts the poisoned horse incident (each episode “marooning” them further), and moves on to Pierre’s feebleness, and a description to the wild garden – Eden destroyed. For a time she feels safe in her bed, Coulibri, the convent and Granbois. However, each refuge is progressively destroyed. Coulibri ruined by fire, invasion of blacks, mother’s second marriage, her own loveless marriage, which like her mother’s culminates in fire and madness. In order to prove that for Antoinette her narrative is a grasp to sanity, to show how desperately she strives to tell it, we need to discuss Rochester’s narrative too. In her Letters Rhys writes that she wanted a ‘cold factual’ narrator to contrast Antoinette’s emotional account. She also felt sympathy for Rochester’s plight and gave him a chance to justify himself. His narration unlike Antoinette’s is not a confession or a matter of survival, but a self- justification, an attempt of a rational, analytical explanation of a breakdown of his marriage and of his wife. When Rochester starts his narration Antoinette feels greater and greater distress and disassociation. She undergoes a division of the self when she speaks of two deaths: the real death – the death of the mind and becomes blank, doll-like, inhuman, waiting for the second death, the death of the body. She is outside herself, so the story is continued by the outsider from the outside. 28 Rochester has married her, took possession of her so he tells her story, which has become his story and no longer hers. Antoinette becomes a character in his story. However, Antoinette resists complete marital and narrational possession by Rochester which is evident when on two occasions she breaks into Rochester’s narrative to present her point of view. Having heard Daniel’s incriminations, Antoinette wakes from one of her sleeps and temporarily takes on telling of her own story: You saw him…I know what he told you. That my mother was mad and an infamous woman and that my little brother who died was born a cretin, an idiot, and that I am a mad girl too. That is what he told you, isn’t it? (Rhys, 1997, 82).

However, there is a dissonance between the narrating and experiencing self: narrating Antoinette is from her English attic, since in a digression, she refers to England, focalizing on her experiencing self: “I will be a different person when I live in England” (Rhys, 1997, 70), but then quickly exposes her knowledge of England, a knowledge that can only come from living there and thus from the narrating self: “Summer. There are fields of corn like sugar-cane fields… After summer the trees are bare, then winter and snow” (Rhys, 1997, 70). As she closes her interlude, it is the narrating Antoinette speaking in the present from the attic room, with its one window high up, who observes:“…but now I see everything still, fixed for ever like the colours in a stained-glass window. Only the clouds move” (Rhys, 1997, 75). As it has been mentioned above, Antoinette’s voice breaks in Rochester’s narrative, through extended passage of dialogue between the two that allows Antoinette to explain her past and clarify the sequence of events of her own life: … Is your mother alive? No, she is dead, she died When? Not long ago . Then why did you tell me that she died when you were a child? Because they told me to say so and because it is true. She did die when I was a child. There are always two deaths, the real one, and the one people know about (Rhys, 1997, 81).

It is a disturbed, fragmented state of mind. Antoinette’s mind is broken and Rochester vows: “I too can wait – for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie…” ( Rhys, 1997, 112).

29 2.1.3 Restitution of the Memory

Rochester is prophetic, for in the end all Antoinette has is her memory, which becomes her life line, her death and almost the death of Rochester. Antoinette acts out of that memory to burn Thornfield to the ground. According to Gilbert and Gubar (1984) “once Antoinette has recollected the past, she transforms memory from a passive to an active mode” (1984, 23). In part three Antoinette resumes her story in Gilbert and Gubar terms using analepsis and prolepsis techniques: at first she speaks in the present, then digresses into the past (analepsis) and into the future through a dream (prolepsis), that foretells the events which follow after the narrative concludes, for a narrator cannot describe her own death. In her final narrative she has lost all sense of measured time and place for she refuses to believe that “this is England” and she cannot recognize herself in the mirror – the woman with streaming hair, surrounded by a gilt frame. Her memory, which gave her a tenuous connection to reality, eludes her too. And Antoinette who can no longer remember is no longer Antoinette; she has lost her true self. The narrating self has dissolved into a completely experiencing self. She makes tremendous efforts to remember, to disclose the secret locked in her past, and to complete her story; her mind works again by feverish association. She sinks in a dream and when she wakes, she finally remembers: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do” (Rhys, 1997, 124). Through dreaming and submission to her subconscious, her memory has been restored. Deprived of everything she has made the supreme effort of will to narrate her own story and to bring to conclusion herself. The secret is thus told and the telling is the secret (Mezei, 1987, 209).

2.2 The Problem Of Identity

The tragedy of Antoinette’s situation, according to Paula Le Gallez (1990, 141) is her powerlessness as an individual in the patriarchal environment in which she lives. The West Indies after the emancipation of the slaves were bristling with resentment, hatred, vindictiveness. A vast cultural gap separates young Antoinette from her surroundings, and a completely unbridgeable gap exists between her and English culture. Antoinette – a white Creole born in the West Indies cannot keep a fixed identity. She is neither pure blood white, but she is not black either. Antoinette’s family is indigent and the blacks call them white niggers or cockroaches and rich plantocrats look upon them as inferior. Antoinette has long debates with herself about whom she would like to be. 30 She decides she would like to be black. She has a black childhood friend Tia. However, Tia cheats Antoinette in many ways. When Tia steals Antoinette’s dress and the latter is forced to put on bedraggled Tia’s dress – literary critics decide that Antoinette “puts on a mantle of a nigger”(Gallez, 1990, 150). Some critics claim that Tia is Antoinette’s double, her other side – the roots Antoinette wants to have on the Island. Tia is Antoinette’s alter ego. One of the most striking relationships in the novel, as many critics have pointed out, is that between Antoinette and Tia. Kamau Brathwaite in his article “Contradictory Omens” argues strongly that a friendship between the two girls is implausible because Tia was historically separated from Antoinette. There existed ideological colonialist barriers because of white supremacy. According to him, “the narrative function enacts a sentimental fiction of friendship between the black and white girls – even as the “textual function” demystifies and undercuts it”(Brathwaite, 1995, 89). However, in Rhys’s narration they are friends until the Coulibri is burnt by the blacks and Tia takes the side of her kind and even throws a stone at Antoinette when she wants to stay with Tia. Diana Athill writes that Antoinette’s attraction to the black culture is disrupted by the rebellion and a disjunction in her personality results. Her brother’s death and her mother’s madness confirm Antoinette’s complete isolation and seal her fate in a private schizophrenic world between two times, two races, two cultures (Athill, 1966, 378-379). However, we hold Thomas F. Staley’s (1979, 103) point of view that: “From all her estrangement from the native and black population, Antoinette is a part of the islands; her attraction to the wild and the exotic confirms her affinity. It ties her irrevocably to this Island, in spite of her hostility to it and it to her” (Staley, 1979, 103). Antoinette carries those ties throughout her conscious and unconscious life till the very last. Looking down from Thornfield towers into the pool she sees all exotic colours of Coulibri and she responds to Tia’s beckoning. According to Emery (1982): …by jumping into the pool Antoinette will not only achieve victory over Rochester, she will also be able finally to reach the other side of the looking glass and merge with both the colonial blackness and the lost mother–bond Tia represents, thereby achieving a wholeness that has until now eluded her (Emery, 1982, 420).

Coming back to the problem of Antoinette’s identity her identification with her mother Anette should also be discussed. The first association comes through the names. Just as “Tia” is a diminutive of Antoinetta, mother and daughter, Anette and Antoinette (the French and English versions) bear the same name and the same fate. Anette and Antoinette mirror each other. Both are Creoles who marry Englishmen. Both women’s marriages are based on the economy of slavery and

31 postslave societies with their bodies as a site of negotiation in this economy (Gregg, 1995, 97). Both die without the security that money was meant to bring. Both die outside the action of the novel. They resemble each other in physical appearance too. Antoinette’s identity also draws on Christophine, a black woman, Antoinette’s childhood nurse and protector - the only strong woman character in the novel. Antoinette seeks Christophine’s help and advice and wishes to have some of her strength and independence. In juxtaposition of Antoinette with Christophine, who is proud of her black roots, Antoinette’s identity seems even more fragmented.

2.3 Inquiry into the Madness

The description of Bertha /Antoinette Mason by Charlotte Brontë in her novel Jane Eyre will serve as the starting point for the investigation of the problem: In the deep shade, at the further end of the room a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not at first sight tell as 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 face ( Jane Eyre , 250-251).

Evidently, the description of the first Mrs. Rochester characterizes her more like a beast than a human. In Rochester’s opinion her bestiality and madness is the result of her sexual excess. In Victorian beliefs female sexuality exists as a symptom of mental illness. Not surprisingly Charlotte Brontë described her madwoman very much in accordance with the attitudes of her time which deeply offended Jean Rhys who herself was descendent from the West Indies Creoles.

2.3.1 Heredity or Victimization

Dennis Porter (1976, 545) in his article “Of Heroines and Victims: Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre ” is of the opinion that such madness is explained in terms of degenerate heredity, she is the mad daughter of a mad mother. But Jean Rhys, delineating Antoinette’s life story from her birth in Jamaica to her imprisonment in the attic cell in Thornfield, convincingly proves that Bertha Rochester (Antoinette Mason/Cosway) was not born mad but made so, both singly and collectively by men. However, the book does not offer a single explanation of the true cause of that madness. Christophine claims that Antoinette’s mother Anette was driven to insanity by the events she could

32 not control and people who misunderstood her: consequently, Antoinette has not inherited any “bad blood”. Consequently there is plurality of causes behind both women’s breakdowns. As it has been mentioned above, Antoinette is very far from the conventional female heroines of the nineteenth and even twentieth–century novels, who are rational and self- restrained. In Antoinette, by contrast, we see the potential dangers of a wild imagination and an acute sensitivity. Antoinette’s childhood tragedies are psychologically as well as symbolically related to her adult ones. One of the main reasons for her tragedies is rejection. She is early rejected by her mother, by the black community, by her only friend Tia. As a result, she loses her brother, her home, (Coulibri burns – she loses her paradise), her safety, her grip on life. Left mainly to her own devices as a child, Antoinette turns inward, finding there a world that can be both peaceful and terrifying. She is persecuted by death images: a dead horse, dead parrot, a threat of death by the blacks,etc. Arnolde Davidson (1985) maintains that “From such a shaky foundation it is hard to construct a firm sense of self. The weak are more likely to be victimized than the strong and the more they are victimized the weaker they become”(Davidson, 1985, 27). This is exactly what happens with Antoinette after the arranged marriage with Rochester. The marriage is a mismatch of culture custom and ideology. Rochester is as damaged by his father’s failure to love him as Antoinette is by her mother’s. Seeing himself as a disposed and despised younger son, he feels that despite the thirty-thousand pound dowry already paid into his hands, he is being duped. Beautiful though his bride is, she is clearly not a demure and proper English maiden. She is alien to him, he fails to understand either her or the beautiful surroundings, lush, exotic nature in which they spend their honeymoon. It does not resemble England in the least – it scares and confuses him with Caribbean gothic mysteries, customs of obeah, prejudices and rituals, Antoinette’s love and passion at first attracts him, but later scares and repulses. He is an Englishman who is used to control everything – here he is lost and afraid because life seems to go out of his control, though Rochester makes desperate efforts to control life. The first thing he undertakes – he renames his wife giving her a new name “Bertha”, which has disastrous effect on Antoinette because she does not want to assume another identity. She calls it obeah.

2.3.2 Renaming and Refashioning

M.M. Adjarian (1995, 202) is of the opinion that Rochester as a white Englishman thinks he has an authority and privilege to confer identity on others. He decides to rename his wife, calling 33 her Bertha. Later he takes away Antoinette’s voice along with her name, refusing to listen to her side of the story. As he continues to fragment her identity, he creates a new name “Marionetta”, a cruel joke that reflects Antoinette’s doll-like pliability. He ultimately refashions Antoinette into a raving madwoman and treats her as a ghost. Renaming her into Bertha, Rochester wants to transform her identity into one he has constructed for her. By giving her a new name he codifies the Creole according to the logic and domination of his desire (Adjarian, 1995, 202). Barbara Bush is of slightly different opinion. According to her, Rochester labours to make English sense out of this colonial confusion. “He is determined to resolve Antoinette’s ambivalence first into the singular tones of English womanhood, and second, once his failure to cast Antoinette as the chaste mother of English sons is totally clear, into the equally singular tones of savage otherness”(Bush, 1990, 65). As it has been mentioned above, Rochester is of the opinion that Antoinette went mad because of sexual excess. Anna Davin wrote (1992): The proper Englishwoman ostensibly restricts all sexual activity to the domain of the patriarchal family and thereby regulates the genetic makeup of the English imperial race. The unchaste Creole woman must be the object sustained legislative attention and state control (deprived of her money and state). Like Bertha Mason, the “intemperate and unchaste” (Brontë, 1960, 334) West Indian lunatic of Brontë’s novel, Antoinette is deemed unsuited for English domestic bliss not because of any psychological disorder from which she might be suffering but because of the appetites and excesses she so liberally exhibits (Davin, 1992, 53).

The food, drink and money that Antoinette distributes to her Creole relatives also marks her character as unEnglish and unsuitable wife for Rochester. Naturally, Antoinette has undergone a transformation since the beginning of their honeymoon. The tensions in the marriage, aggravated by Rochester’s increasing coldness and his infidelity with the servant girl Amelie reduces Antoinette to outlines of the Bertha encountered in Jane Eyre . Rochester refers to the results of his doing: “When I saw her I was too shocked to speak. Her hair hung uncombed and dull into her eyes which were inflamed and staring, her face was very flushed and swollen. Her feet were bare” (Rhys, 1997, 93). She accuses him of turning the place she loved into a place she hates and bites his arm, as she will later assault her brother in Jane Eyre . Rochester decides to wait “for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away and like all memories a legend. Or a lie…” (Rhys, 1997, 112). At this point according to David Leon Higdon, “Rhys’s novel has moved almost full circle back to Jane Eyre” (Higdon, 1985, 111).

34 2.3.3 Incarceration and Breakthrough

The ocean voyage from the Caribbean to England on which Rochester takes Antoinette while reversing the direction of the transatlantic slave routes, recalls cruel images of terror, confusion and discomfort. The barbarity of Antoinette’s enslavement takes place on the “Western Island” that Rochester believes to be the seat of civilized logic and reason. Rhys thus invites a comparison between Antoinette’s situation and that of the slaves. Antoinette is captured, sold, given a new name, transported across the sea and locked up. This is the result of the passage across the Sargasso Sea and the other side of Jane Eyre . The reader arrives, then, “back at Jane Eyre from a world of relative clarity and sanity to a world of Madness” (Olaussen, 1993, 70). Whenever Antoinette speaks in the third part she reveals how dislocated she feels. The fact that she does not remember attacking Richard Mason suggests the extent of her fragmentation. According to Jan Curtis (1990, 189), it seems that she and the raving madwoman are two distinct entities, locked in combat over the woman’s identity”. What troubles Antoinette most about Richard Mason’s visit is Grace Poole’s report that he did not recognize her. Without her real name, without a mirror in the attic, Antoinette can no longer view her reflection and confirm her own identity. She has slowly become Rochester’s creation, renamed “Bertha Mason” and transformed into a madwoman – a ghost: … it seemed to me that someone was following me, someone was chasing me, laughing. Sometimes I looked to the right or to the left but I never looked behind me for I did not want to see that ghost of a woman whom they say haunts this place… There was someone talking in one of the rooms. I passed it without noise, slowly. (Rhys, 1997, 122).

Paula Le Gallez in “The Rhys’s Woman” (1990) underlines the fact that “Her failure to connect this reputed spectre with herself is a clear sign of her lack of ultimate knowledge. The reader, however, knowing the story of Jane Eyre appreciates the dramatic irony in Antoinette’s own description of her movement –‘without noise, slowly’–which typifies the received idea of ghostliness”(Gallez, 1990, 103). The culmination of Antoinette’s transformation is her failure to recognize herself in the mirror which she finds in the hall. The gilt frame which surrounds “the image of the woman with the streaming hair” signifies that the image itself is, in fact, a reflection of Antoinette. Antoinette takes what she sees there to be the ghost. “This failure to recognize herself in the mirror is the mark of a complete breakdown in her recognition of her own identity” (ibid., 109). However, Ned Thomas is of the opinion that Antoinette’s madness takes on a weird clarity. The flames she dreams ignite her memory and inwardly she becomes aware of why she had been brought here and what she had to do (Thomas, 1991, 95).

35 2.4 The Role of the Dreams in the Narrative Framework

Joya Uraizee (2002) in her article “She Walked away without Looking Back”: Christophine and the Enigma of History in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea ” lays great emphasis on Antoinette’s dreams. She writes: “Antoinette’s dreams provide a narrative framework, but the dreams also narrate themselves. Thus, the text itself becomes a dream, to which other women (the readers) respond just as if they were responding to their own dreams”(Uraizee, 2002, 261). Antoinette’s consciousness does not differentiate between a dream and reality. Antoinette’s dream is repeated three times in the novel, each time with more clarity and detail: “I dreamed that I was walking in the forest. Not alone. Someone who hated me was with me, out of sight. I could hear heavy footsteps coming closer and though I struggled and screamed I could not move” (Rhys, 1997, 11). The dream suggests fear of sexual violation and on the whole the fear of the future. The second dream contains even more clearly the fear of sexual violation, but also an active determination not to fight or try to escape. The image of a white long dress and the skirts of which is held by a man and which Antoinette is afraid to get soiled undeniably symbolizes purity and innocence, but it is overcome of Antoinette’s decision not to resist this time: … if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen… Now I do not try to hold up my dress, it trails in the dirt, my beautiful dress. We are no longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall, and the trees are different trees. I don’t know them (Rhys, 1997, 34).

It is this sense of inevitability, which emphasizes the terrifying nature of Antoinette’s experience in the dream. The sexual significance is brought out through implication rather than direct statement and this is the key to understanding this fear. The accompanying man, who is rather vague, in the first dream, in the second, according to Uraizee, his image is clearer. The critic writes: “the emergence of his maleness has a definite part to play in the implied sexual significance of the whole” (Uraizee, 2002, 163-164.). Though the stone-walled garden in the dream is not identified, it is clearly not that of Coulibri Estate. Antoinette’s inability to recognize the trees must imply that the location has altered to a totally different geographical reason. This suggests that these are the English trees. To hold Uraizee’s point of view the description presages Antoinette’s removal to the enclave of Thornfield Hall. The ‘enclosed’ situation of the garden, suggesting no means of escape, would conform with the idea of her imprisonment (ibid.). Antoinette’s third dream differs from the two previous ones in that it is clear. She knows why she was brought to England. Judith Kegan Gardiner (1992) in her article “Jean Rhys” states that

36 “Antoinette’s final dream picks up and weaves together all the former scenes and symbols in the novel”(Gardiner, 1992, 400). In it she calls on Christophine for help and is answered with a wall of fire. She hears the parrot Coco croaking “Qui est là?” – the request for identity, so difficult for Antoinette. She sees all the brilliant colours of Coulibri garden, grandfather’s clock, aunt Cora’s coloured patchwork. She sees Tia beckoning to her at the pool at Coulibri. She now knows her mission: she steals Grace Poole’s candle, and “it burned up again to light me along the dark passage” (Rhys, 1997, 124) – of her own and other women’s lives and also of all the literary passages from Brontë to Rhys” (Gardiner, 1992, 403). By jumping the Thornfield battlements Antoinette escapes “the ghost” in the mirror and keeps her identity.

2.5 The Multiple Annotation of the Ending

As it has been mentioned above, one of the vivid traces of modernism in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is the openness of the end of the book. It brought up heated critical debate. Antoinette’s suicide can be read either as a defeat, in which she succumbs to her repressive society, or as a victory, bringing her freedom and vengeance. There are more proponents of the second interpretation than the first one. Arnolde Davidson (1985, 39) reminds us of Antoinette’s words: “there is always the other side, always”. For Brontë, the full and final demonstration of Bertha’s madness is her flaming suicide. For Rhys, that same fate is Antoinette’s most decisive action and her final escape from further domination. We hold Arnolde Davidson’s view that: Ironically, in Wide Sargasso Sea , the dispossessed madwoman acting out a mad-dream does considerably better by herself than did the same woman sane and endowed with a fortune and pursuing the standard dream of love, marriage and happiness ever after. That difference, Rhys suggests, signifies more about woman’s reality than woman’s insanity (Davidson, 1985, 40).

In other words, there is certain logic in Antoinette’s madness and particularly in the last act, inspired by that madness. That suicide demonstrates that Rochester did not destroy her. There is also certain justice and symmetry in Antoinette’s final action. According to Davidson: Since Rochester early robbed her of her island heritage, she will finally deprive him of part of his. Indeed, by burning Thornfield Hall, the ancestral manor that he inherited and returned to him soon after he had established in the West Indies she hits him where it will most hurt, in his quintessential Englishness (ibid., 44).

Maria Olaussen (1993) draws a parallel between Antoinette and a parrot Coco. At Coulibri fire, the whole family was saved by their parrot, which frightened the superstitious black people.

37 Antoinette embodies the burning parrot when she jumps down from the battlement at Thornfield Hall her hair aflame. Rhys here evokes the black legend of flying to freedom. The legend goes that some slaves from Africa knew how to fly and flew away to freedom when the situation in the fields became unbearable. Ultimately it suggests “escape from white femininity towards blackness” (Olaussen, 1993, 114). There are more legends connected with Antoinette’s action. Ellen G. Friedman aligns Antoinette’s final action with “a female and West Indian world, and with revolt against slavery. Pre-Columbian myth tells about a burning tree of life, by climbing which a defeated Caribbean people escaped from their enemies and were transmuted into sparks, and then, as stars into the sky” (Friedman, 1989, 120). Therefore Antoinette’s phoenix-like flight takes her into the heaven of another culture (Newman, 1991, 97). Jan Curtis (1990, 190) also puts forward “phoenix-like” theme of the end of the novel. According to him, in Part Three, the red dress, “the colour of fire and sunset”, suggests “the colour of flamboyant flowers”. From Antoinette’s remarks: “If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, your soul is lifted up when it flowers!” (Rhys, 1997, 120) Curtis makes a conclusion that the paradox of the buried and flowering soul has all the conventional connotations of phoenix, rebirth and resurrection. Rhys also carries the tree image into Antoinette’s final dream, where the tree of life is in flames: this is Antoinette, a defiant flame shooting upward, not an abject creature crying mercy against a contemptuous wind. It is an image that combines the resurrection theme with the flamboyant tree, the paradox inherent in the symbol of fire. We agree with M.M.Adjarian that Rhys negotiates with Brontë’s text as Jane Eyre is a canonical text, the merging of Antoinette’s fate into that of Bertha’s is inevitable. But Rhys allows us to interpret the fate of Antoinette differently by having the ending open. The novel ends with Antoinette’s resolution to act rather than a description of her death, or an exact repetition of Brontë’s words. Thus the possibility of a different fate for Rhys’s character is left intact. “The more recent text can be said to have an influence on the earlier text and to extend its possibilities”(Adjarian, 1995, 202). M.M. Adjarian writes namely about this suspension, which characterizes the ending. The end of the book finds Thornfield Hall still standing, and Antoinette, candle in hand, walking down a corridor outside her room. She is never seen firing the Hall. Joya Uraizee points out to several curious omissions in the dream itself. For one thing, the dream ends before the narrative does. Though she knows what she has to do, we never see her enacting ’what I have to do’; we just assume that it must be a reiteration of her red dream. Therefore, the narrative never actually ends, but closes on a “twice deferred” event, deferred from both Jane Eyre and the red dream, but which never actually takes place within either narrative. However, the outcome of the event is “foregone” since we know it already. In fact, the ending of the dream is “the fate that 38 the plot of Brontë’s novel has already provided for her. Hence, the text is open-ended and unfinished, and yet is completed by other texts and other events” (Uraizee, 2002, 261). However, the fact that the author attempts to transcend the bounds Brontë delineates reveals that she creates what Karen Caplan calls “a world of possibilities out of the experience of displacement and moves beyond the repetition that entraps rather than liberates ( Caplan, 1987, 191).

39 3. RHYS’S ROCHESTER AS BRONTË’S PROTOTYPE

First and foremost it should be stated that Rhys’s Rochester is a more complex and psychologically interesting character than his Brontë’s prototype. Many critics are of the opinion that Rochester is the strongest and best developed Rhys’s character in Wide Sargasso Sea . Dennis Porter delineates the difference between Brontë’s and Rhys’s Rochester in the following way: The difference between Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys as far as Rochester is concerned is, first, that the latter explicitly adds race where the former perceives sex and class; second is that the modern author sees him unredeemable, whereas her nineteenth–century predecessor demonstrates how he might be reformed. The harsh pessimism of Jean Rhys concerning relations between the sexes confronts a relative optimism in the Victorian authors that is founded on faith in moral energy and the regenerative power of human feelings (Porter, 1976, 547).

Rhys’s Rochester just as Antoinette is also limited by his role in Brontë’s novel. Joyce Hart is of the opinion that “Rochesters’s potential for change is a possibility strangled by the necessity of his playing out an inexorable role. He is as stuck in his destiny as Antoinette in hers. Almost everything in Wide Sargasso Sea is calibrated by Jane Eyre ”(Hart, 2004, 71). Arnolde Davidson maintains that Rhys in recasting Brontë’s plot refuses to make Rochester into simply the stock villain that he easily could have been: Yet Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea , does exactly what the stock villain would be called upon to do in any cautionary tale depicting the sad fate of a foolish maiden seduced into a thoroughly unsuitable marriage. He quickly convinces the girl that they should wed; as husband, he takes full control of all her property; once he has that control he soon decides that he does not really love her and puts her aside…(Davidson, 1985, 329).

There is a strong suggestion throughout the text that the moral decline of Rochester may be traced to his materialism. This is shown to be a cultural value, and it is instilled into him at a very early age. Being a younger son of a wealthy father, who totally believes in English laws of “primogeniture that provide the younger son with nothing to inherit but his name, Rochester’s identity is left uncertain” (Adjarian, 1995, 202). Edward is forced to strengthen his status by taking part in an arranged marriage with a wealthy heiress. This, coupled with his own attitude of reluctance and bitterness, makes Edward into more of a victim of his own background than was suggested by Brontë’s text. Certainly, Brontë’s portrait of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre lacks substance. In Rhys’s text his character is considerably fleshed out so that his cruelty becomes understandable while, at the same time, just as unacceptable. Gallez is of the opinion that: Because Rhys allows the reader an insight into Edward’s make-up and motivation, his behavior is, to a certain extent, explained. His cruelty is not ameliorated thereby, but it is, at least,

40 observed to be a constituent element of his own human frailty – a factual flaw in his personality (Gallez, 1990, 83).

Rochester himself was a strict believer in primogeniture, so he had no other way to secure money and property than through a dowry. However, Rochester feels sold up. His marriage has aggravated his pawn complex: “It has been arranged that we would leave Spanish town immediately after the ceremony and spend some weeks… at a small estate which had belonged to Antoinette’s mother. I agreed as I had agreed to everything else” (Rhys, 1997, 66). David Leon Higdon (1985) in his article “Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea , ‘All Belonged to the Past’” speaks about Rochester’s multilateral character. “…Rhys developed three characteristics which victimize Rochester but also turn him cruel – his fear of passion, his racial prejudice and his crushing sense of betrayal by all concerned” (Higdon, 1985, 110). The most sinister betrayal he imagines comes from Antoinette, especially since he believes that the love potion she put in his wine was poison. ‘They bought me, me with your paltry money. You helped them to do it. You deceived me, betrayed me…” (Rhys, 1997, 110). Brontë’s Rochester tells Jane he needs to restore his self-respect, and it is precisely this loss of self-esteem that Rhys fastens on in her portrayal of Rochester. He loses his feeling of security, his face, his pride and self-respect. Antoinette wants to draw him into her private world, to live naturally and passionately within the rhythms of natural environment, but he is filled with deep foreboding. Peter Wolfe (1999) in his book Jean Rhys writes: “Rochester’s thoughts and values have crystallized; he is egocentric, but not, perhaps, the convincing, malicious male he has been thought to be. He is blind rather than deliberately malicious … sad rather than vengeful”(Wolfe, 1999, 79).

3.1 The Three-sided Portrayal of Rochester

Arnold Davidson is of the opinion that Rhys’s Rochester is a very complicated three-sided character: There seem to be not two but three different Rochesters in the text. We have a standard villain of sentimental fiction about whom women should be warned and we also have a Byronic hero, for Rhys’s Rochester always acts consistent with Brontë’s, and at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea he has become precisely the same character whom Jane in Jane Eyre , first meets at Thornfield Hall. The subtlety of this three-sided portrayal centers especially in that third side. Rhys’s Rochester ends up as a fully Byronic character wending with cragged willfulness, his dark and solitary way through a world he holds in total contempt. Yet this last Rochester is portrayed in counterpoint to the other 41 two, and that counterpointing penetrates the romantic mask. In effect, the three faces of Rochester reveal a pathetic man half caught in his final protective pose and half huddled behind it (Davidson, 1985, 28).

However, Wide Sargasso Sea also shows the confusions and self-deceptions at the heart of Rochester’s heroic posturings. Another critic Anthony E. Luengo (1976) defines exactly the features of the Gothic Villain or the Byronic hero, as he calls Rochester: The Gothic Villain, as many literary historians have indicated, is the closest literary ancestor of the type that was to become known in the Romantic period as the Byronic Hero. Rochester, as he is portrayed in Jane Eyre corresponds to this type exactly: “he has been a guilt-haunted wanderer harsh… grim… almost historically cynical, his face marked with the standard features of his type (prominent forehead, full, black, well-defined eyebrows and piercing dark eyes, grim mouth and skin, black whiskers)(Luengo, 1976, 233).

In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys gives us a more youthful Rochester, an initially self-deluding, fortune-hunting Englishman. As he first presents himself to us, he is a romantic suitor: “…I bowed, smiled, kissed her hand, danced with her” (Rhys, 1997, 46). However in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester does not remain the young hero for long, as he himself states: “A short youth mine was” (Rhys, 1997, 51). Luengo thinks that Rochester’s life on the islands brought him many shocks. “Subjected to shock after shock, he goes through a metamorphosis, not only psychologically in the direction of neurosis, but from purely literary standpoint, in the direction of the Gothic/Byronic villain/hero type”(1976, 233). A foreshadowing of transformation comes early in Rochester’s narration when he sees himself as a Faustian figure: “I have sold my soul or you [his father] have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain?” (Rhys, 1997, 42). Later in the narrative, Christophine, in anger accuses Rochester of being “wicked like Satan self”. “… You do that for money? But you wicked like Satan self” (Rhys, 1997, 104). It is clear that other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea also played their appropriate role in Rochester’s metamorphosis. Clara Thomas sees the relations between Rochester and Daniel Cosway like those of Othello and Iago. With a reversal in races, Rochester and Antoinette are ruined by a combination of irreconcilable cultural differences, personal insecurities, and the pride, jealousy, and betrayal that destroy Othello and Desdemona. Daniel Cosway is the outside agent of their tragedy, motivated, “like Iago by malignant greed”(Thomas, 1978, 350). Daniel Cosway’s hateful information wounds Rochester’s pride. In typical Victorian fashion he is outraged and beside himself, he hates Antoinette for causing him to lose control, to abandon his closely guarded self. He decides he will not allow himself to become exposed and vulnerable. His infidelity with a

42 servant Amelia demonstrates his power of maleness and shows that he has the power to destroy Antoinette.

3.2 The Victimizing Role of Englishness

We quite agree with Clara Thomas (1978, 352) that Rochester is a victim of his own Englishness. As it has been mentioned above, Rochester believes and submits to English law of primogeniture and is forced to hunt for rich dowry. He is a victim of his inexperience and “built-in conditioning to despise and distrust blacks and abhor the thought of English blood “tainted” by black; of the attitudes of his time towards purity in women, so confused by the realities of sexuality in both men and women. Most of all he is “victimized by his own pride”(ibid). Clara Thomas compares him with Browning’s Duke (The Statue and the Bust), who “does not choose to stoop”. He becomes both monstrous, vindictive and increasingly vulnerable to the torments of jealousy. Finally, he is separated from human contact with everyone – and this is the Rochester we first meet in Jane Eyre . The source of Rochester’s tragedy, according to Veronica Marie Gregg, is his narcissistic belief in the superiority of the English. Her opinion is that Rochester interprets racial differences in moral and sexual terms. According to Rochester, blackness implies sexual and moral perversion, while whiteness stands for purity (Gregg, 1995, 111). A pure European as an alternative to colonial society looks upon the island and its inhabitants as “sly, spiteful, malignant” (Rhys, 1997, 39) and far from “civilized”. At the same time, they also seem to possess an understanding of their environment and strong interpersonal bonds that he, a white outsider, does not have. Because the islanders keep what they know and have from him, he desires to gain access to their secrets.

3.2.1 The English Self and the Colonial Other

Rochester’s sense of superiority cannot admit blank unexplored spots. He says: “It was a beautiful place… and it kept its secret. What I see is nothing – I want what it hides” (Rhys, 1997, 54). Rochester has an intense wish to possess Antoinette and control her. He thinks that by controlling her, he controls what Antoinette comes to represent for him – the island, the exotic nature, its inhabitants and the threat they pose to him and “his self-conception as an all-powerful, 43 all-knowing European” (Adjarian, 1995, 206). M.M.Adjarian states that Rochester physically expels that which both literally and symbolically contaminates him. “He endeavours to fix the difference between an English core and an ethnic periphery, to classify peripheral subjects so that they can be managed and mastered in order to eliminate the threat of contamination posed by immoral and indecent past – a threat that is embodied for him by Antoinette” (Adjarian, 1995, 199). Alternatively attracted and repelled by the sights and smells of the West Indies, Rochester gradually learns to discipline his body like an Englishman; he learns to define himself by the English tastes, feel aversion to West Indian “plantocrats”, feel intense physical disgust for Daniel, literally expulse the obeah draught given to him by Antoinette, which maps out the limits for the English body. According to M.M.Adjarian, “it marks him as an English subject whose body ever vigilantly polices moral and physical differences celebrated by abolitionists” (ibid.). Rochester’s physical disgust for Daniel means more than the difference between an English Self and colonial Other. This disgust discloses a point of identification and “disindentification” between the Englishman and the colonial “half-caste”. Daniel and Rochester each see themselves as disinherited sons who must struggle for wealth, power, and the ever elusive patronymic the name of the father that Cosway has refused to Daniel and that Jean Rhys has refused to Edward Rochester” (Ciolkowski, 1990, 340). Rochester’s perception of the West Indian people, their Otherness derives not from his interaction, but from prior knowledge which inverts the West Indies “as uncivilized and wild, a place to make money, where the blacks are inhuman and the Creole whites are contaminated and strange”(Adjarian, 1995, 202).

3.2.2 The “Righteousness” of British Imperial Power

According to Laura E. Ciolkowski, Rochester’s meeting with Daniel not only reveals Rochester’s differentiation of himself and the colonial subjects he despises; it calls into question the very integrity of the English culture and identity. “Englishness emerges in Wide Sargasso Sea as an empty fiction that is as seductive and dangerous as any of the other tales of identity. Daniel is proud to imitate an English sitting room in his house; for Rochester Granbois “looked like an imitation of an English summer house” (Rhys, 1997, 43). They all mask the utter emptiness of the “authentic” English model to which they refer. The English gentleman of Rhys’s text is himself no more than a pretender. Actually he repeats the sexual vices of the very “plantocrats” whom he despises. Antoinette accuses Rochester: “You abused the planters and made up stories about them, but you 44 do the same thing. You send the girl [Amelie] away quicker, and with no money or less money, and that’s all the difference” (Rhys, 1997, 94). And like the slave-master who assigns to his slaves new and often ridiculous names in an attempt to separate them from their exotic culture and dangerously alien social structures, Rochester renames Antoinetta “Bertha”, “blasphemously baptizing her the Madwoman of Charlote Brontë’s Victorian attic” (Ciolkowski, 1990, 342). The cluster of misfits and sexual deviants that wander through Rhys’s text as the products of accursed system of slavery and its aftermath advertise the threat of contamination that the slave economy necessarily carried along with it. It seems to Rochester that the exotic excess of the island could infect the innocence of his English body. In Rosemary Marangoly words: “British imperial power was understood in no uncertain terms to be the moral right of a morally righteous English people. In Wide Sargasso Sea the character of the Englishman, which appears to be the most fully developed, is inextricably tied to a concern with Empire - imperial desires, imperial fictions, imperial aggression, imperial history”(Marangoly, 1994, 101).

3.3 Dangerous Exotic Excess

Edward Rochester, as it has already been discussed, comes from another world and cannot comprehend the life of the passions; everything in the natural beautiful surroundings tells him that this is Antoinette’s world and this is why he fears it from the beginning. Antoinette’s explicit sexual domination strengthens his fears and the sense of sinister powers which surround him. Thomas F. Staley (1979, 68) also holds the view that the passion was the true reasons of Rochester’s fears: This [Antoinette’s passion] is psychologically untrue, for to give in to the passions which Antoinette released in him represented a union which was intolerable, because he could not dominate, control or completely exercise his will, and for Edward such a union would be antithetical to his nature. This is the real source of this fear – his own violent passions, which Antoinette released, and which he saw as leaving him exposed and vulnerable to another person. Edward is essentially a figure who despises passion and because the seductive beauty of the island and Christophine’s drug temporalily filled him with passion, he will despise Antoinette as something alien and hostile to him (Staley, 1979, 114).

An affair with Amelie is a deliberate act of revenge – an act which dramatizes his hostility and need to dominate, as it has been mentioned above. He has demonstrated to himself the power of his maleness, his strong ego and in doing it he has demonstrated his ability to destroy Antoinette. 45 Clara Thomas (1978, 349) thinks that all Rochester’s torments come from his sexual immaturity – he cannot cope with either Antoinette’s sexuality or his own. He can only tolerate a relationship in which he is the Master. Since he has not been able to dominate Antoinette’s own sexuality, he will either condescend to keep and enjoy her as his mad girl or he will shut her away from all loving and possibilities of loving. “Mad but she is mine, mine…” (Rhys, 1997, 107) An unbalanced person as he was Rochester swings wildly in his mind from love and regret to hate and revenge: My hate is colder, stronger… You will have nothing… I did it too. I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty. She was only a ghost…Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it (Rhys, 1997, 110-111).

He hates alien exotic nature of the island. He feels being assaulted by the landscape of the island. For him the place is “Not only wild but menacing. Everything is too much… Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near” (Rhys, 1997, 42). He often imagined that the green hills are closing in around him. This goes in great contrast with the nature he loves and cherishes - his English nature. This is how Rochester describes it to Jane in Jane Eyre . “I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness and stillness of world under this frost. I like Thornfield; its antiquity; its grey façade and lines of dark windows” (Bront ё, 1960, 145). Critics agree that in her book Rhys expresses the archetypal conflict between the warm sensual tropics and the cold Northern world. Naturally, Rochester’s hatred of the island’s nature stems from his inability to read it or commune with it. While his servants and his wife find an abundance of meaning in their surroundings, Rochester sees it as alien, feeling bombarded by its beauty and excess. Veronica Marie Gregg thinks that rejecting its elaborate contours and intricate meanings he speaks of the “mountains, and the hills and the river and the rain refusing colours” these nouns acquire with adjectives and descriptions. He reverts to simple nouns, adopting a sparer language, and holding the landscape’s secret at a safe controllable distance. Still he often feels antagonized by this landscape with its excess. In his view the West Indian landscape is “ monstrous violation of limits”(Gregg, 1995, 95). As it has been mentioned above, the exotic excess for Rochester threatens to spill over and infect the innocence of the English body. Thomas F. Staley is of the opinion that natural world is used by Rhys as a metaphor for human relationship, and natural environment plays a role in forming characters. He summarizes the fatal influence of islands landscape in the following: “The exotic landscape with its widely

46 fluctuating conditions externalizes his [Rochester’s] apprehension and ambivalence, as Rhys invests the lush tropics with fear, horror and malignancy along with its primitively appealing and seductive quality. At times description almost becomes incantation”(Staley, 1979, 105). Lorna Sage (1992) writes that Rhys’s anti-hero finds himself suffocating in a “poisonous paradise of alien intensities” – where everything is “too much”. Antoinette’s vagrant intuitions, her patchwork of insight and superstition, her self-surrender, all spell deviousness and impenetrability to him. Her ‘secret’ locks him out. So he will lock her in his reality, take her to England and make her part of his past” (Sage, 1992, 51.).

3.4 Racial Prejudice. Cultural Rift

There exists a natural, cultural rift between Rochester and Antoinette. Ned Thomas (1991, 47) rightly says that “the streets and buildings of the great northern city, London, makes as little sense to her as Jamaica’s mountains and rivers do to him”. Yet of the two, she works harder to bridge a cultural gap, which due to Rochester’s racial prejudice became unbridgeable. The blazing sun, the clamouring green hills, and the heavy, floral-scented air perturbs him. Then Amelie and Daniel perturb him anew, the one claiming his body while the other corrupts his mind. His well-shored inferiority complex stops him from coping with Antoinette’s beauty, let alone enjoying it. According to Ned Thomas, “…he becomes a casualty of psychological warfare. However, Rochester’s evil stems more from weakness than from depravity”(1991, 49). As it has been earlier stated, inferiority complex is deeply rooted in Rochester – the younger son of the family. Though more than two thirds of the novel is told from Rochester’s point of view, Rhys insists on his “nothingness”. He enters the narrative as a nameless person. “I carefully haven’t named the man at all” writes Jean Rhys in her letters (Letters, 1984, 297). When a servant boy cries that Rochester is leaving, the latter is very much surprised: “Who would have thought that any boy would cry like that. For nothing. Nothing…” (Rhys, 1997, 112). The repetition of “nothing” further reinforces the sense of nothingness and suggests a dissolution of the self. Rhys’s text constructs the husband as “Nothing” and the West Indian culture as a Not- nothing to which ironically, the access for Rochester is denied. Rochester craves to get this access to the secret, to control it, to dominate it even if it means destruction. Ultimately, Rochester understands that he can ensure his dominance only by returning to England and taking Antoinette 47 with him as captive. His decision is written as an act that privileges his ego. The word “I” as hierarchical marker, appears fifteen times, while Antoinette is drawn as a stick figure: He scowled at me then, I thought. I scowled too as I re-read the letter I had written to the lawyers. However much I paid Jamaican servants I would never buy discretion. I’d be gossiped about, sung about… Wherever I went I would be talked about… I drank some more rum and, drinking, I drew a house surrounded by trees. A large house. I divided the third floor into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman – a child’s scribble, a dot for a head, a larger one for the body, a triangle for a skirt, slanting lines for arms and feet. But it was an English house. English trees. I wondered if I ever should see England again (Rhys, 1997, 106).

The drawing that he absentmindedly doodles expresses his innermost thoughts which are struggling to spell out a warning - the picture that he draws coincides with the future that he chooses. The reader of Jane Eyre recognizes the significance of Rochester’s scribbled picture of a woman staring out from the attic window. Rochester contrives a terrifying plan of cruelty. Antoinette must pay for all his set backs, as well as his misdeeds and mental conflicts. He would use her madness as an excuse to defraud her: “She’ll not laugh in the sun again. She’ll not dress up and smile at herself in that damnable looking-glass. So pleased, so satisfied. Vain, silly creature…” (Rhys, 1997, 107). This is Rochester’s revenge. Ironically, his own choice of words shows his pretension towards the status of a tragic hero. This belittering description of Antoinette as a ‘vain, silly creature’ does the most damage to his own self-image. His projected incarceration of her puts him on a level far baser than that we associate with nobility of the classical hero. There is a great tragedy concerning Antoinette’s fate – her powerlessness to avert the suffocation of spirit which is in store for her. He is anxious to lock her away in England so that she can become “A memory to be avoided”. Antoinette’s refusal of the husband’s England and Europe provides the impetus for his desire even to kill her. Treating her like a corpse, he covers her with a sheet as she sleeps. He seems to enact her “first death” referring to her earlier saying about two deaths: “the real one and the one people know about”(Rhys, 1997, 81). Rochester appears to adhere to this formula by figuratively killing Antoinette. His disappearance from the narrative in part three “suggests that he now hovers over the plot as the mastering puppeteer, peering down into what Antoinette thinks of as her cardboard prison. He seems to be spying on her just as generations of Brontë’s readers have done. This act of watching develops into a kind of pitiless voyeurism in which we like Rochester, look in at the madwoman he has created” (Thomas, 1991, 88). Veronika Marie Gregg (1995) also thinks that the silence of Rochester in Part Three is very important. His nonappearance highlights rather than undermines the power with which the

48 nameless Englishman is inverted. “His invisibility is a sign of the power of the ideologies by which he is constituted”(Gregg, 1995, 102). Rochester’s inhuman behavior with Antoinette has bouncing power. Clara Thomas (1978) claims that before making Antoinette into a madwoman Rochester himself became mad. As it has been expounded above, there are many things he does not understand about the place and the culture and he gradually lets his fears overcome his reason: The reader is invited to question who is actually going mad as Rochester’s language becomes increasingly fractured and fragmented. He is bombarded by constant menace of the strange exotic land, the people he distrusts and something secret that he cannot understand in Antoinette. In his recollections the reader begins to get signals suggesting a real disturbance in Rochester’s mind (Thomas, 1978, 345).

It seems that Rochester’s mind is disturbed since he speaks about death as he remembers their lovemaking: “Die then, sleep. It is all that I can give you… I wonder if she ever guessed how near she came to dying. In her way, not in mine. It was not a safe game to play - in that place. Desire, Hatred, Life, Death came very close in the darkness. Better not know how close” (Rhys, 1997, 58 ). Earlier Rochester has mentioned his “confused impressions”: “There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up” (Rhys, 1997, 46). Jean Rhys indicates certain blanks in his recollections by four dots and by the omission of key words in a sentence. She does not do this often, but sparingly, and because of that the reader is all the more aware of ellipses in Rochester’s memories. The West Indies for Rochester is a dreamlike and unreal place. He feels like a zombie or sleepwalker in this place. Reality seems elusive and ungrounded, tangled with dreams and deceit. Clara Thomas (1978) is of the opinion that “there is finally, no clear decision possible between his madness and hers, though clearly at the end he is his own victim, motivated by pride and hate, and she is irreparably victimized by him” (Thomas, 1978, 348). By this Clara Thomas wants to note how easy is to lose one’s control of reality and sanity when one finds himself / herself in alien surroundings, unable to pursue one’s usual actions and ideologies.

3.5 Inexorable Punishment

It should be mentioned that Rochester is brought to at least a partial confrontation with his own behaviour. Christophine, Antoinette’s childhood nurse, is very indignant with Rochester for his affair with Amelie. She foresees his real intentions: “…you marry her [Antoinette] for her money 49 and you take it all. And then you want to break her up, because you are jealous of her… You pretend to believe all the lies that damn bastard [Daniel] tell you… and you meant her to hear you with that worthless girl”(Rhys, 1997, 98-99). Christophine demands half of the money to be returned to Antoinette and left in Christophine’s care. Rochester’s reaction to defend his money is shocking. He sees an enemy in Christophine and drives her out by threatening to give her in the hands of justice. Money plays a great role in the novel. The social significance of money, its power to motivate and control people’s lives is shown to affect every character in the novel, regardless of status or colour. Three pennies that Antoinette possessed in her childhood grew into thirty thousand pound dowry, which was absorbed by Rochester after the marriage. This money “saved his face” – allowed him to be independent of his father and older brother in England, saved him from financial disgrace. Christophine’s position of independence concerning money is a challenge to culturally inherited values. Set against Antoinette’s dependence upon her husband, the black woman’s attitude towards her own money “ presents a twentieth century image of financial liberation from male domination” (Gallez, 1990, 142). “She spat over her shoulder. “All women, all colours, nothing but fools. Three children I have… each one a different father, but no husband, I thank my God. I keep my money. I don’t give it to no worthless man” (Rhys, 1997, 69). Christophine had Rochester himself in mind when she uttered the words “worthless man”. However, Christophine’s words come back to haunt him. They beckon him to reject his “knowledge” as false and to embrace what he sees and feels in the West Indies: “So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest’s a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here” (Rhys, 1997, 107). Consequently in his heart of hearts Rochester knows that all his pretended betrayal on Antoinette’s and her culture’s part is false. However, that does not stop him from fulfilling his malevolent plan. He prefers certainty to doubt, even if certainty means sacrifying another person. But the peace of mind he pays so much for comes only years later, after he has lost his sight, his arm and his property. The form the punishment takes is itself significant because it suggests that in Charlotte Brontë’s work, too, the cause of the suffering in the past and its avoidance in the future are related to the character of Rochester’s sexuality. We agree with D.Porter that: The fire in the blood which drew him to his Creole wife and later to his foreign mistresses – to Parisian and Viennese women in the two contemporary European capitals of sexual pleasure, has to be controlled without being extinguished. Sex, as both Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys remind us, can be dehumanizing and demonic. Consequently, Rochester loses the sight of those 50 eyes which saw and in seeing desired, and of one of the two hands that caressed and overpowered. From henceforth the only beauty he will experience is that which can be felt and heard. He will know only the warmth of a physical presence and the sweetness of a disembodied voice (Porter, 1976, 549).

Though Rochester receives punishment in Charlotte Brontë’s book by the pen of the author who partly rehabilitates him, his punishment is nonetheless significant. He suffers not only corporal mutilation from the hands of the one he had excruciated but he also suffers the deterioration of his property, loss of pride, dominating extravagance and temporarily his beloved woman.

51 4. INTERTEXTUALITY AS RHYS’S TOOL OF REWRITING JANE EYRE

The intertextual relations, according to Kristeva, involve not merely a reference to another text but “the absorption and transformation of that text” (Kristeva, 1980, 77). R.McClure Smith in the essay “The Textual Unconscious in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea ” (1996) writes: Rhys is not so much an objector of Brontë’s literary influence, as she is an authorial agent shaping a countertext through adaptation, assimilation, transformation, through the systematic and intentional revision of the precursor text. Wide Sargasso Sea seeks to recreate the true story of Bertha Mason, the Jamaican mad wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre . In telling Bertha’s story (known in Wide Sargasso Sea as Antoinette Cosway), Rhys explores the complex relations between white and black West Indians, and between the old slaveholding West Indian families and the new English settlers is the post–emancipation Caribbean (McClure, 1996, 113).

Set mainly in Jamaica and Dominica, the country of Rhys’s birth, the novel describes how Antoinette became mad. In Brontë’s novel, Bertha /Antoinette is a monster, described as violent, insane and promiscuous. Rhys claims that it is only one side – that of English imperialism and strives to give another side of the matter, that from colonial point of view. Jean Rhys wrote that Brontë herself was unhappy with her own technical and moral portrait of Bertha, accepting that her character’s humanity was not fully realized: “I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling: I have erred in making horror too predominant” (Letters, 1984, 201). Veronica Marie Gregg in her essay “The 1840s to the 1900s. The Creole and the Post slavery West Indies” (1995, 82) quotes Jean Rhys: “The West Indies was rich in those days. The girls [West Indian Creole Women who married Englishmen] … would soon once in kind England be “Addressed Unknown”. So gossip. So a legend. If Charlotte Brontë took her horrible Bertha from this legend. I have the right to take lost Antoinette. And how to reconcile the two and fix dates I don’t know-yet. But I will” (ibid.). The shifting of dates was crucial. Wide Sargasso Sea is set in time before Jane Eyre . Charlotte Brontë tells us that Bertha Mason is older than Jane Eyre, and five years older even than Mr. Rochester. In fact Jean Rhys altered the possible dates of the narrative in Jane Eyre (where the action covers the 1820s and 30s) to suit her own story. She starts the action of Wide Sargasso Sea soon after 1833 – an important date of the Emancipation act which banned the slavery. Later at school Antoinette embroiders the date 1939, and soon after this she is married and taken to England. Thus Wide Sargasso Sea is a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre . Situating her text both beside and against Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century canonical narrative Jean Rhys is placed within a 52 postcolonial literary tradition “that is specifically interested in rewriting the fictions of English Empire. It has become the project of postcolonial writing to investigate European textual capture of places and peoples. A mapping and dismantling of particular canonically enshrined imperial texts constitute a major part of post-colonial writing: re-writing of “The Tempest” by writers from Australia and particularly Canada, the West Indies and Africa; of “Robinson Crusoè” by Marcus Clarke, J.M. Coetzee, and Samuel Selvon; of “Heart of Darkness” by many writers; and perhaps most famous of all, Jean Rhys’s re-writing of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea ” (Adjarian, 1995, 23). We hold Joya Uraizee’s view who says that Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites by “subverting a Western feminist bildungsroman to create a clear history or identity for the Caribbean Creole woman. The subversion arises from the novel’s ideology, but there is sharp deviation from the “master-narrative” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre ”(Uraizee, 2002, 26). In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys writes back not only to Charlotte Brontë, but also to the imperial logics and common-sense structures in which Brontë’s text is produced and consumed. This rewriting unsettles both the liberal-feminist narrative of Jane Eyre and “the larger colonialist enterprise in which it is so heavily invested” (ibid., 30). Provoked by Brontë’s skewed, narrow depiction of Creole Bertha, Rhys determined to write Brontë into modernity where such depictions lack plausibility. E.G.Friedman expresses the following opinion: “Reshaping the contours of Brontë’s phallocentric quest narrative, Rhys writes into an adoption of otherness, an embracing of the feminine. In this act of conversion, Rhys, to be sure, betrays her precursor (imagine Brontë reading Wide Sargasso Sea ), but she also discovers a mode for coming to terms with a past that if left alone is unusable and hostile” (Friedman, 1989, 119). The choice of Jane Eyre as a starting point is important to Rhys. In one of her letters she writes: “It might be possible to unhitch the whole thing from Charlotte Brontë’s novel but I don’t want to do that. It is that particular mad Creole I want to write about…” (Letters, 1984, 200). Rochester’s mad wife “off stage” for Brontë was to be “on stage” for Rhys in order to be redeemed. We hold with Friedman that Rhys’s rewriting of the precursor text was: …the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes of entering an old text from a new critical direction… to know the writing of the past, and know it, not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. For while Wide Sargasso Sea pays respectful homage to Jane Eyre , it is primarily a critique: the previously silent mad woman speaks, and in the process exposes and inverts the patriarchal and colonialist presumptions and value systems around which thematics of the precursor text coalesce (Friedman, 1989, 121).

53 Rhys’s fictional characters are duplicated in the intertextual relations of Wide Sargasso Sea and its influential “mother text”. Rhys “mothers” her mother text by creating its fictional antecedents. To use E. Friedman’s words, “Rhys is therefore the rebellious daughter who punctures the body, who ruptures the text, making holes and blank spares through which a reader is compelled to look with a self-conscious twentieth–century vision that will necessarily transform what it sees. In Rhys’s rewriting the mother text is maimed and in essence disarmed” (ibid). In many cases Wide Sargasso Sea brings to consciousness some of the hidden implications of Jane Eyre . Clara Thomas evaluated Jean Rhys’s novel as an enormous challenge. She wrote: To build a contemporary work into another, classic novel of the nineteenth century is to invite a hypercritical approach from readers and critics who are consciously or unconsciously defensive about a trespass into familiar and protective territory. She succeeded because her depth of concern for, and understanding of her characters was complemented by a stunning achievement in narrative technique (Thomas, 1978, 349).

4.1 Narrative Intertextual Techniques

Throughout Wide Sargasso Sea the reader is conscious of its intimate relationships with Brontë’s Jane Eyre . Thus, it is important to analyse those stunning narrative techniques of Jean Rhys on the basis of intertextuality.

4.1.1 Negotiation with Brontë’s Text

It is through Intertextuality that Rhys negotiates with Brontë’s text. As an already canonical text, the merging of Antoinette’s fate into that of Bertha’s is inevitable. But Rhys allows the reader to interpret the fate of Antoinette differently by having the ending open. This endows Rhys’s narrative with the possibility of a different fate for her character. Wide Sargasso Sea is saturated with facts from Brontë’s novel, facts which, according to David Leon Higdon (1985, 79), were used consistently “to mesh Rhys’s story with Brontë’s, and hence to give the illusion that this is the “other side” of the truth”. Rhys has used the insane, confined mother, the idiot brother, the parental duplicity on the parts of Mason and Rochester’s father, and the Spanish Town marriage. She also hews closely to the themes of betrayal, isolation, alienation and develops the motifs of sexuality, passion and fire. Consequently, the narrative facts are identical but their treatment and

54 interpretation are not because they involve a telling of Bertha’s childhood and place most of the blame for her madness on Rochester’s shoulders. Bertha is pictured as being a lonely girl victimized as much as is Jane Eyre but lacking Jane’s resilience and courage. It is obvious that in Wide Sargasso Sea the facts are taken straight from Jane Eyre . If the fate of the first Mrs. Rochester is bound up with her colonial origins, as is hinted in Jane Eyre , it is also determined by the character of male sexuality and cultural modes through which such sexuality finds expression. Rochester is considered the most conventional figure in Brontë’s novel, an embodiment of the darkly brooding Byronic hero. Jean Rhys to some extent demystifies the figure but she is not simply reductive. The journey to the West Indies to procure a rich wife is also in her handling a journey to Rochester’s own heart of darkness – a journey for which even in Jane Eyre he will eventually be called to account. There are other facts that intersect both novels. The secret that is so long hidden away at Thornfield is finally revealed to Jane, but its meaning is not interpreted. It is Jean Rhys who explains in her novel that Thornfield’s secret – a monster, a madwoman was once an ordinary woman, a woman put up for sale by one man and purchased for his own purpose by another. Of course intertextual method placed restrictions on both the narrative and on the main characters. As it has been mentioned above, Rhys’s Rochester is limited by his role in Brontë’s novel. Rochester’s potential for change is a possibility strangled by the necessity of his playing out an inexorable role. He is as stuck in his destiny as Antoinette in hers. J.Hart is of the opinion that almost everything in Wide Sargasso Sea is determined by Jane Eyre , but “it is against Jane Eyre that Rhys writes” (Hart, 2004, 71).

4.1.2 Revision of Perspective

Rhys critiques Brontë’s position not only in the kinds of associations she makes among some of the dominant images in her novel, but also in how she manipulates the point of view. Wide Sargasso Sea is narrated by two individuals, Antoinette and Rochester. The reader is often granted two sometimes conflicting perspectives. As a result, the act of assessing Antoinette, Rochester and what each represents becomes much more problematic than in Brontë’s novel, which is narrated only by Jane Eyre. In character perspectives Rhys revises Brontë’s tactics. Where Brontë makes Bertha and Jane antithetic, the one - a barrier to the other’s happiness, a dark alter ego of subconscious passion, 55 Rhys gives Antoinette a background similar to Jane’s: orphanhood, poverty, social humiliation, repressive religious schooling and lack of love. The only real difference between the two women is their cultural position – one on the margins of Empire, the other at the centre. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1984) in their general discussion of Jane Eyre in The Madwoman in the Attic observe that: “Bertha is Jane’s truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret-self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead. Consequently, fictional characters can develop one or another leading trait, depending on surrounding environments and circumstances which befall them” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1984, 37).

4.2 The Problem of Sequel and Prequel

Just as Antoinette’s final fate is prescribed by the conclusion of Jane Eyre , so too it is prefigured by the beginning of Wide Sargasso Sea . Rhys has adapted the scene of Richard Mason’s visit from Jane Eyre , but has altered the perspective. No longer the scene is described from the view point of Jane - Rhys allows Antoinette to speak. Antoinette’s account reveals just how confused and dislocated she feels: she does not remember attacking Richard Mason. The dark passage down which Antoinette walks alone to her death is, in the largest sense, according to Arnold Davidson (1985, 210), the course of her entire life. That journey is carefully traced out in Wide Sargasso Sea . But the path Antoinette follows is also grounded in Jane Eyre . The earlier text prescribes the conclusion of the latter one and hence by implication, the way to that conclusion. Jane’s ultimate possession (of a fortune, of a family, of Rochester, etc.) is premised on Antoinette’s ultimate dispossession (of her family, of her fortune, of Rochester, of her sanity, of life itself). Moreover, Jane’s final chief possession, Rochester, from whom her other goods flow, must necessarily be the main agent of Antoinette’s terminal dispossession. The ideal Victorian wife [Jane Eyre] depends on the failure of the dangerous “other” who haunts the margins of Brontë’s novel. According to Judie Newman, Antoinette is triply “other” . She is mad, female and a mulatto colonial subject. The unvoiced, the disempowered becomes the heroine and dies by fire. Here the key relationship is between two women writers, not between male and female writers. “Here the intertextual relationship explores both, gender and post-colonial politics” (Newman, 1991, 163). In a number of subversive moves Rhys does tamper with Brontë’s book. For instance, she attaches her text to the mother-text through a sly allusion to the physical book Jane Eyre . Judy Newman is of the opinion that in part III of Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette /Bertha speaks of 56 leaving her attic prison and entering the world of “cardboard” (Newman, 1991, 164). Further on Newman explains that in this cardboard world “live the forces that victimize her, that have driven her into the attic and inward into her own psychic spaces. These forces were born in Brontë’s novel, the physical book “between cardboard covers” that Rhys’s nineteenth-century precursor produced (ibid.). Rhys’s Antoinette refers to this in the following way: Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is as I always knew made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard (Rhys, 1997, 117).

In this way Jean Rhys constructs a door leading to Jane Eyre . Thus the end of Wide Sargasso Sea explodes into Brontë’s novel. It is the madwoman in Brontë’s attic who sets the house on fire and then leaps to her death, enacting what is only a dream in Rhys’s novel. Bertha’s act in Jane Eyre becomes a willed act rather than a helpless act of lunacy. Rhys thus frees the madwoman from her bestiality and lunacy. As it has been noted above, Wide Sargasso Sea , a text born from Jane Eyre , is deliberately situated before most of the events which occur in Jane Eyre , in order to reconstitute itself as the mother text or point of origin of the European novel. Reproduction and textual production are linked, so, according to Judie Newman, “ Wide Sargasso Sea , a prequel to Jane Eyre , becomes its necessary precursor”(Newman, 1991, 165). By converting Jane Eyre into sequel, “Rhys invites future readers to envisage Victorian Britain as dependent upon its colonies, just as Brontë’s heroine depends upon a colonial inheritance and the obliteration of its colonial source” (ibid.)

4.3 Evaluation of Wide Sargasso Sea

Critics’ opinions concerning both books vary. Francis Wyndham, for example, considers that Jean Rhys violated Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre with her own reversionary novel Wide Sargasso Sea , for which she usurped Brontë’s characters and plot (Letters, 1984, 322). He concludes that Brontë’s material did not lead Rhys to create a wholy independent narrative. Another critic Denis Porter sees reciprocal relationship of both texts. In his article “Of Heroines and Victims. Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre ” (1996), speaking about Charlotte Brontë, he points out that …“it is the genius of the nineteenth-century novelist to have created a symbolic structure that accommodates itself easily to the insights of the twentieth-century writer. The importance of Wide Sargasso Sea lies in bringing

57 to consciousness some of the hidden implications of Jane Eyre which it both develops and challenges” (Porter, 1976, 550). Michael Thorpe (1977) strongly believes that the book [Wide Sargasso Sea ] is no mere “extension” of Jane Eyre but exists entirely in its own right. “It is at once both an inspired piece of literary research and a superb creation in its own right” (Thorpe, 1977, 100). Hilary Jenkins in her introduction to 1968 edition of Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea elicits the merits of the book, explaining Jean Rhys’s method which she calls “writing back”. According to her in writing back in this way Wide Sargasso Sea deliberately confronts and subverts the intertextual echoes of Jane Eyre and offers a more complex and problematic version of colonial history. In writing back in this way, Jean Rhys is not simply filling in the gaps in the story to help us appreciate the Brontë’s text more. Instead she is changing how we see the classical novel. By giving voice to the marginalized and silenced (the mad woman, the colonized) she enables us to see the true story of Jane Eyre in a context larger than that of England in the nineteenth century. Just as Wide Sargasso Sea is full of the ghosts of the earlier novel, so Jane Eyre is now haunted by Rhys’s novel. Hilary Jenkins resolutely concludes that while it is interesting and enjoyable to find the links between the two books, the more important is that Wide Sargasso Sea can be read independently. Hellen E. Nebeker is even more categoric on the point. According to her: Wide Sargasso Sea is no parasitic work sucking life to sustain itself from the Brontë’s novel. Wide Sargasso Sea takes a situation which, to its author, epitomized the half-understood conflicts between diverse cultures. She felt that Charlotte Brontë was “beastly English” to Bertha Mason and to the problem of culture shock in general. Rhys simply told the other side of the problem (Nebeker, 1990, 150).

In conclusion it has to be stated that Jean Rhys employed intertextuality as a very convenient tool to express her views not only on a canonical English masterpiece but also to demonstrate her own literary mastery.

58 CONCLUSIONS

From what has been expounded above the following conclusions can be made.

There are obvious distinguishing features in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea which ascribe the book to a postmodernist novel: literary symbiosis of narrative voices, clashes of present and past, amalgamation of fantasy and reality and ambiguous ending.

Refusing the label of a “feminist writer” Jean Rhys created her women characters true victims of modern male world, alienated and displaced, though not striving for feminist ideals.

In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre Antoinette/Bertha is a mute, animal-like narrative object. In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette becomes a narrative subject. She regains her voice and the right to tell her own story. Her narrative uses analepsis and prolepsis techniques and is associative rather than chronological or causal. Associations are based on Antoinette’s obsessions, her fear of desertion and isolation.

Under Rochester’s influence Antoinette undergoes a division of her self: she considers her soul to be dead, awaiting for the second physical death. Her self is divided into narrating self and experiencing self and gradually the first is completely absorbed by the second.

Antoinette has a great problem in fixing her identity. Being a Creole, she feels attracted by the black people and their culture, craves for their friendship but is repeatedly betrayed by them and finally displaced. However, Antoinette’s jump from Thornfield’s tower at the end of the book directly suggests her escape from incarceration and, indirectly from white femininity towards blackness.

Jean Rhys convincingly proved that Antoinette/Bertha was not born mad but turned into a fragmented person both singly and collectively by men. However, the book does not give a single explanation of the true cause of her insanity. One of the main reasons of her tragedy is her rejection (by mother, black community, Rochester).

59
Rochester, by renaming Antoinette into Bertha, takes away her identity and later he deprives her of her voice too. Having failed to refashion Antoinette into a representative of English chaste womanhood, he endows her with singular tones of savage “otherness”.

Antoinette’s dreams suggest fear of sexual violation and on the whole the fear of future and inevitable doom awaiting her in Thornfield attic. The last dream helps Antoinette to subconsciously restitute her memory and to comprehend her errand in Thornfield.

The novel ends with Antoinette’s resolution to act, rather than a description of her death. Thus the end of the novel presupposes postmodernist non-fixity, inviting multiple interpretations. Most importantly, it symbolizes Antoinette’s flying to freedom. If, for Brontë Bertha’s suicide is the final demonstration of her madness, for Rhys it means Antoinette’s most decisive action to escape domination and slavery.

Rhys’s Rochester is a more complex and psychologically interesting character than his Brontë’s prototype. The main difference is that the latter explicitly adds race where the former perceives only sex and class.

Rochester’s character portrayal is three-faced. It includes a standard villain of sentimental fiction, a Byronic/Gothic hero and a counterpoint of the other two, skillfully delineated by Jean Rhys. Some critics compare the latter Rochester with the Faustian figure and Shakespearean Othello.

Rochester is a victim of primogeniture law, seeking to secure his material welfare by means of arranged marriage. He feels betrayed by his own family, but most importantly by Antoinette herself.

There exists a natural cultural rift between Rochester and Antoinette. Antoinette’s and her island’s beauty seems menacing to Rochester. It fills him with fear and foreboding which he can neither understand nor control.

It is generally assumed that Rochester, acting on prior knowledge, becomes a victim of his own Englishness. His narcissistic belief in the superiority of the English impart non- English with inferiority, sexual and moral perversion, which threaten to contaminate the purity of whiteness.

60
Inability to control Antoinette’s beauty and sexuality and get access to her and her island’s exotic secret, makes Rochester strive for Antoinette’s madness and bring her to England – the only place where he could exercise his domination.

It is a generally acknowledged fact that Rhys’s book significantly hinges on Brontë’s canonical novel. The intertextual method helped to establish close hypotextual ties between Jane Eyre (hypotext) and Wide Sargasso Sea (hypertext).

In Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys writes back to imperialist logics and common sense structures in which Brontë’s text is produced and consumed. Though Rhys pays respectful homage to Jane Eyre , at the same time she criticizes it allowing for fresh interpretation of a 19 th century novel.

Negotiation with Brontë’s text was fulfilled by means of the following intertextual techniques: saturation with hypotext facts and themes, adaptation of the main characters by means of intersection, comparison/contrast and replenishment, revision of narrative perspective.

While Brontë makes Bertha and Jane antithetical, Rhys, giving Antoinette a background similar to Jane’s, showed convincingly that the only real difference between the two women is their cultural position, one at the centre of empire, another – at the margins.

The ideal Victorian wife [ Jane Eyre ] depends on the failure of the dangerous “other” (Bertha/Antoinette). Rhys’s Antoinette is triply “other” as she is mad, a female and a mulato colonial subject.

Many critics interpret the end of Wide Sargasso Sea by way of legends, implying the themes of flying slaves, burning tree of life, phoenix–like resurrection and others.

By deliberately changing the dates, Jean Rhys reconstitutes her book into a “mother” text, so that Wide Sargasso Sea , a thematic prequel to Jane Eyre , becomes its necessary precursor. By converting Jane Eyre into sequel, Rhys invites future readers to envisage Victorian Britain as dependent upon her colonies, just as Brontë’s heroine depends upon a colonial inheritance and the obliteration of its colonial source.

Critical evaluation of the book differs. Some critics consider that Jean Rhys violated Jane Eyre and usurped Brontë’s characters and the plot. Others praise Brontë’s genius to have created a symbolic structure that accommodates itself easily to the insights of a

61 twentieth-century writer. However, a vast majority claim that Jean Rhys not only filled the gaps to help us appreciate Brontë’s text but she also changed the readers’ attitude towards the canonical English novel. At the same time Wide Sargasso Sea being an inspired piece of literary research, is a superb creation in its own right.

62 REZIUM Ė

Magistro darbas Rašymas ir perrašymas Jean Rhys romane “Plati Sargaso j ūra” (Wide Sargasso Sea ) turi tiksl ą atskleisti intertekstinius abiej ų roman ų ( Jane Eyre ir Wide Sargasso Sea ) ryšius, padedan čius naujai įvertinti XIX a. angl ų klasikin į romaną, tuo pa čiu atskleidžiant jo ribotum ą XX a. kontekste. Darbe išnagrin ėta nemažai problemini ų užduo čių: • Kaip vertinti Wide Sargasso Sea – ar tai postmodernistinis, feministinis ar postkolonialinis romanas?

• Ar iš tikro Wide Sargasso Sea bes ąlygiškai pasisavina Jane Eyre faktus, temas ir charakterius?

• Koks yra abiej ų roman ų tarpusavio santykis: kuris iš j ų yra “pagrindinis” tekstas, o kuris yra jo pasekm ė, t ęsinys? • Ar galima Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea laikyti savarankišku literat ūriniu k ūriniu?

Atsakymai pateikiami palaipsniui keturiose pagrindin ėse dalyse. Pirmojoje dalyje vienareikšmiškai atsiskleidžia, kad Wide Sargasso Sea yra postmodernistinis romanas, naudojantis postmodernistin ę technik ą: pasakotoj ų bals ų simbioz ę, esamojo ir b ūtojo laik ų, o taip pat realyb ės ir fantazijos sujungim ą, pasakojimo perspektyvos pakeitim ą ir “atvir ą” knygos pabaig ą. Vaizduojamoji vieta, laikas ir iškeltos id ėjos roman ą paver čia tuo pa čiu postkolonialiniu kūriniu. Ta čiau Wide Sargasso Sea yra tik pusiau feministinis romanas. Nors knygos heroj ė yra imperialistinio vyriškojo pasaulio auka, ji, jokiu b ūdu, nesiekia feministini ų ideal ų. Antroji dalis įrodo, kad Wide Sargasso Sea toli gražu nepasisavina Jane Eyre siužeto ir charakteri ų, bet laiko juos pradiniais fabulos taškais. Analizė atskleidžia svarbiausias priežastis, kod ėl Bertha/Antoinette tapo protiškai nepilnaverte ir įrodo, kad kalt ė, vis ų pirma, tenka jos vyrui Ro česteriui, žmogui, atiduodan čiam pirmenyb ę anglišk ąjai imperialistinei arogancijai. Tre čioji dalis, analizuojanti Bront ės ir Rhys Ro česteri ų sintez ę, atskleidžia papildomus Rhys sukurto Ro česterio charakterio bruožus, jo seksualin į nesubrendim ą ir imperialistin į-rasistin į poži ūrį į kolonistus (tarp j ų ir savo žmon ą) kaip antrar ūšius, paženklintus seksualiniu ir moraliniu išsigimimu, pavojingus baltiesiems anglams.

63 Ketvirtoji dalis, nagrin ėjanti konkre čius poststrukt ūralistinio/intertekstinio metodo pasireiškimus Jean Rhys knygoje, parodo, kaip novatoriškai autor ė sprendžia “haipoteksto” ir “haiperteksto” santykio id ėją. Nor ėdama parodyti, kad imperialistin ė Anglija priklaus ė nuo sav ų kolonij ų, Jean Rhys pakeit ė Bront ės naratyvo laik ą, sukeisdama abu romanus vietomis taip, kad atrodyt ų, jog Wide Sargasso Sea eina prieš Jane Eyre ir Jane Eyre priklauso nuo Wide Sargasso Sea . Dauguma kritik ų įžvelgia intertekstinius abiej ų roman ų ryšius, bet traktuoja, kad Wide Sargasso Sea yra įdomus, pilnavertis, savarankiškas k ūrinys, postmodernistiškai žvelgiantis į Bront ės XIX a. kanonin į k ūrin į.

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