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Jean Rhys's Novel Wide Sargasso 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
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