The Feminine Creole: Identity in the Works Of

The Feminine Creole: Identity in the Works of

Jean Rhys, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Pauhe Melville

Jordan Stouck

A thesis submitted to the Department of English in conforrnity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Queen's University Kingston, Ontario, Canada September 200 1

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This dissertation challenges existing theories on creolmtion to offer a sustained exploration of what it means to be feminine and creole. Despite several ment calls for a

"woman version'' of creolization, current critical discourse has faiied to produce it.

Developing a theoretical intersection between Edouard Glissant's concept of cross- cultural exchange and Julia fisteva's ferninist version of subject formation, I argue for a new approach to identity which fuses creolition and gender as fiindamental dynarnics of being. The resulting mode1 of the ferninine mole not onIy deconstmcts but also reformulates the constituent~of identity as elements of an unceasing process of transformation. In other words. feminine creole identity tiinctions as a series of ruptures

and connections with the demands of social existence. The infinite variations within this process allow me to compare without subsuming the specificities of each w-riter.

Jean Rhys's ( 1890- 1979) white creole heroines intervene in the dynarnics of

history and postcoIoniality hma critically dissonant viewpoint. Thematking feminine creole alienation and revealing the assumptions upon which European culture is based,

the Rhys novel and short story I examine expose alterity as inherent to identity while also confinning the resonant power of social discourses. Alice Dunbar-Nelson's ( 1875- 1935)

New Orleans women of colour display the crises produced by Southern racial and ethnic

segregation. Dunbar-NeIson's short stories portray creoiization as bound to social,

Syrnbolic meaning even as they demand recognition of the contradictions and

inconsistencies embedded in American racism. Pauline Melville's (1948 -) story

collection, Shape-shifler, offers a new approach to the confiict between identity and iii difference articulated by Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson. bkl~illtengages with colonial history and mythology in an attempt to reveal their oppressive legacies and inaugurate the potential for a different future. Each version of the ferninine creole is as much a process of identity formation, historical revision and politicai intervention as it is a form of aesthetic and linguistic innovation. 1 offer, in short, an interpretive strategy which maps the conflictual and diverse intersections among race, gender and ethnicity in these texts. I would like to thank my supervisor, Asha Varadharajan, for her caretiil readimg and comments and for encouraging me to look for questions rather than for answers.

1 am also gratefiil to my second reader, Laura Murray, for her support and insightflll suggestions. 1 thank both Queen's University and the Social Sciences and Hurnanities

Research Council for the financial support which enabled me to complete this dissertation. 1 am gratettl to my father, David, for his advice and my mother, Mary-Ann, for her encouragement. And last but not leas, special thanks to Scott Zeman for his patience and support at every stage of this project. Table of Contents

Abstract

Ac knowledgements

Introduction Toward a Ferninine Creole Practice

Chapter 2 Rupture and Co~ection:The Errant Identities of Jean Rhys's White Creole Heroines

Chapter 3 Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's New Orleans Fiction

Chapter 4 "Return and Leave and Return Againn: Pauline Melville's Transatlantic Fictions

Conclusion

Works Cited

Vita Introduction: Toward a Feminint Crde Practice

The paradigm the lem through which somerhing is viewed. determines what is seen. Pauiine MelYille. Shaw-shifter

in a much-quoted passage, Gayatn Spivak laments the limitations of Jean Rhys's

Wide Sargasse Sea which "rewrites a canonical English [and feminist] text . . . in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native" (253). Yet why should the creole woman be dismissed within this postcoloniai dyaamic? Couid her perspective not productively complicate and even deconstmct the confluence of feminist and colonial discourses that Spivak seeks to expose? The following study addresses this negiected viewpoint through a new, feminine creole discursive lens. As the epigraph States, one's paradigmatic fiame determines what is seen, so that by changing the critical lens used to address creole women's writing, one shifis the focus fiom what has so fâr ben seen in these texts. The feminine creole discursive lem I propose produces a strategic distortion that illuminates a hitheno neglected aspect of creole identities and representative practices.

PauIine Melville, Jean Rhys and Alice Dunbar-Nelson d de6ne themsehes and their work as creole and share a preoccupation with the elusive and duplicitous nature of feminine identity. Each work represents new, chaiienging, and poiysemous variations on the theme of the feminine creole in order to idect the ethnic, racial, and historical dimensions of creole existence with sexuai difference. The elastic application of the tem "creole," therefore, invites a theoreticai intervention which compares without subsuming the spdcities of each woman writer. 'This study explores the implications of precisely such a non-essentidking theoreticai intersection between feminism and creolization while also offering new criticai perspectives on al three writers.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was born in New Orleans of rnixed racial ancestry. Although able to "pass" as white, Dunbar-Nelson identifid herself with the civil rights movement and worked both as a journaiist and educator on behalf of equality.

Much of Dunbar-Nelson's fiction explores the complexities of New Orleans creole experience, adapting and reformuIating the "locd colour" genre established by writers such as George Washington Cable. The mixed criticai response which Dunbar-Nelson's work has received emphasizes the need for a study which integrates feminine and creole concems. Gloria T. HulI, while emphasizing the importance of recovenng ûunbar-

Nelson's work for fican-American feminist scholarship, nevertheless questions the artistic ment of that work. Hull describes Dunbar-Nelson's stoties as bound by

"divisiveness and inarticulation," a creative failing (in Hull's opinion) that originates from her complex personality and background (xxix). This divisiveness is precisely, however. what links Dunbar-Nelson's work to that of Jean Rhys and Pauline Melville, and what prompts a new interpretive emphasis on the conflict between being ferninine and being creole. The ambivalence in Dunbar-Nelson's narratives, the way in which she adapts and twists conventional rnelodramatic mede plots, points to her thematic preoccupation with the nature of that identity rather than to her artistic incornpetence. Dunbar-Nelson's texts do not merely accept turn-of-the-cenniry New ûrieans identity categones, but in exposing moments of crisis, these narratives Mersuggest that femininity and ethnicity intersect in more complex and contradictory ways than has so far been addressed either in creolization theory or in relation to this author's work.1

Jean Rhys (1 890- 1979) articulates a white colonial perspective very different fiom

Dunbar-Nelson's version of creolization. Born on the isiand of Dominica, Rhys was a fourth-generation West Indian of European descent who lived much of her adult life in

Europe, and the conflict between those two culturd traditions is a pervasive theme in her fiction. Although, as a white creole, Rhys engages with cultural rather than racial discrimination, Rhys shares Dunbar-Nelson's preoccupation with the transformation of extant identity categories. Rhys's heroines repeatedly describe the double marginalization of being female and colonial not only in Europe, but also in Caribbean contexts, where white colonials or b2ki.s lost land and privilege after emancipation in 1838. Rhys's texts

Grther insist on experiences of econornic and ethnic marginalization which prevent their unproblematic aliment with Western bourgeois feminist aspirations. As a result of these double exclusions, Rhys's writing has been criticized by both postcolonialists and feminists for its ambivalent politics. Coral Ann Howells writes that "Rhys questions patriarchal pronouncements, though her fictions stiIl bespeak a coflusion with the principle of male authority..." (13). Like Dunbar-Nelson's 'divisiveness," this ambivalence that defies conventional categories of anaiysis is a defining feahire of Rhys's fiction and suggests the foundation for a comparative ferninine creole politics and poetics. Both writers interrogate (aithough in different tenns and with different emphases) existing

' Vuginia Dominguez describes disparate versions of cmlization as based upon ethnic rather than racial distinctions. since shad socio-historical features rahthan màal group define each version of creole iddry. in other wonis. men in New Orleans, creoleness is defined through heage and culture rather tban mked race identity. The faix that Jean Rhys is white, but of an ethnic group selfdefrned as Dominiciin mole. ~ernp~esthe compiexity of tlris tem See Dominguez 12-16. representations of identity. The criticism which has been Ieveled at Rhys's work by postcoloniai and ferninist scholars can be seen as a response to the cornplex cultural distinctions she is making, distinctions which preclude universal resolutions. To be white creole tiom Dominica is to combine Englishness, Caribbeanness and, in this case, femininity, in ways which confound traditionai analyses of identity. A process of assuming and rejecting existing categorizations which is different from the boundary crossings of racial passing, white creole is profoundly heterogeneous and ambivalent.

Pauline Metville ( 1948-) is a contemporary writer fiom Guyana, now living in

London, of mixed AFrican, Amerindian and European ancestry. Melville describes her fictional approach as a form of shape-shifting, a refùsal to write from one particular point

.t of view, which "break[s] down preconceptions. stir[s] up doubt, rattlles] judgements.. .

(Busby 740). In one of the few criticai analyses of Melville's work, Evelyn O'Cailaghan describes identity as "a site of multiple and heterogeneous 'subject-positions,"' composed of "the fluid boundaries and continual commerce between them"' (108). Although articuiating a new version of ferninine creole identity which explores the dynamic possibilities of that subject position, Melville's approach is similar to those of Dunbar-

Nelson and Rhys in addressing the contradictions and ambivalences characteristic of that

articulation. Melville acknowiedges the double marginaüzation of being femaie and creole even as she strategically "shape-shifts" the socio-historicai parameters of that position Al three writers describe the psychological costs involved in negotiating identity: Dunbar-

Nelson through displaying the crises produced by Southern race and ethnic policing, Rhys

through a thematics of alienation and Meide through the psychic as weii as physical violence in her stories. Despite the differences in emphasis in their fictions, al1 three writers expose the losses and disjunctions of feminine creole expenence.

A comprehensive reading of the sexual and niltural determinants of this fiction thus not only intemenes in the critical reception given these writers, but also in extant scholarship on creoliition. Despite several ment calls for what Evelyn O'Callaghan has termed a "woman version" of creolization, curent critical discourse has failed to produce it. Creole theories have generally adopted a masculine perspective, whilr feminist discourse is currently in the process of theorizing a space for women of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds (a project to which this dissertation airns to contnbute). These women's writings challenge the exclusively celebratory and masculine dimension of theories of creolization to suggest that creole identity cannot be read as only subversive, liberating, affrmative or creative. Instead. these narratives modify conventional postcolonial understandings of creolization to indude a recognition of the painfiil costs of becoming womad becoming creole. In short, the project of creolization remains incomplete and exclusionary without feminine voices.

The term creole has ben used to descnie a variety of sociological, linguistic and historical identities and practices. Rather than continuing to engage in discourses which seek to lirnit and define the kinds of composite societies produced by creole interactions, however, recent theorizations describe creole identity as multiple, fluid and dynamic. This analysis takes its eue fiorn such active and poIitically transfomative approaches to creolization. While 1 take seriousiy the possiiilities for reconceiving cross-cultural experience and for retaining spdcities of tune and place within a flexible fiamework characteristic of such approaches, 1 seek to redress th& negiect of gender in the revisionhg of creole being and becoming. Edouard Giissant articulates the most suggestive model of creolization for the purposes of this study in his major theoretical works, Canibean Discourse and Poetics of Relation2 Rather than define creoleness or presurne ta catalogue its features Glissant views creolization as an open potentiai, an

"unceasing process of transformation" (CD 142). For Glissant, creolization is change, rnovement, endless process rather than stability, stasis and teleology. Linguistic and socio- historical attempts to classi@ and regulate experience, whiIe expressing temporary confluences, are. in Glissant's argument, constantly outmoded and exceeded by the dynamics of creole process. In thus descniing creolization as a practice of rnuitiplicity, Glissant's model remains open to the inclusion of femininity despite his own failure to pursue this aspect of identity. Gender, in this sense, is less an appendage and more an independent agent that produces "polyphonous" combinations and intersections with race and ethnicity in the construction of identity. For these reasons, the foIlowing summary of what creole theory has to offer is animated by the promise implicit in

Glissant's work. My intention is not only to flesh out this promise but also to highlight the manner in which gender intervenes in the operation of raciai, ethic. historical and cultural determinants to produce emphatic and insistent dissonances. In other words, I supplement

Glissant's creole becorning with considerations of sexual difference which expose the psychological costs. as weli as compeliing possiiilities, involved in rejecting essentialist notions of identity.

Glissant develops his ideas in relation to the French Cariiqstem of dèpmtement~d'outre mer which as H. Adlai Murdoch bas noted. involve ceriain pspe&es distinct hmEnglish colonies. While the SpeCrEicities of Fmch Cariideveiopment are important to note. the nature of Giïssant's ideas mitsa wider application and hi.n~rk bas become an infiuential component of mole hq. !3ee Murdoch LS3-t. Creole Negotiations

Glissant theorizes Caribbean identity as the interrelation and interdependence of two cuitural processes: Relarian, a state of constant metamorphosis, and antillanite, a commitment to self-discovery. AntiUanité or the commitment to Caribbean identity represents for Glissant conscious self-expression, a voicing of multiple Caribbean specificities without claiming finality or "fixing" diversity.) Glissant descnies this

Caribbeanness as an emerging possibility, existing in essence but yet to be fùlly and consciously anicdated:

The distant, uncertain emergence of the Caribbean is ... capable of carrying forward our people to self-renewai and ofproviding them with renewed ambition, by making them possess their wodd and their lived experience (wherein a Caribbean identity is present ) and by making them fall into sep with those who also share the same space (this too is implied in antillanité). (Co î23-4)

As the suggestion of cornrnunity and the possessing of identity in ihis passage make evident, Glissant is both celebrating unpredictabiiity and advocating the deliberate assumption of dynamic identities. In other words, antillanité is not simply a validation of chaos, but also an acknowtedgement of the need for eiernents of direction and awareness within those interactive processes. As J. Michael Dash explains, Glissant's intent in reconceiving and re-contextuaiiing global interactions, is "to move fiom the intuitive sense of being Caribbean to a conscious expression of Can'btieanness" (a).

Wilson Harris. Antonio Benilez-Rojo and Faut Gihave simiMy ppropased models of -le culture as fIexiile and multiple. In focusing on Glissant's approach 1 am impliàtiy dtawing on the inteiiectuai affirmation which rhese wricers offer. GLissaot's work ü however. @particubrSr suggesthc in his comprehensive theorization of the m-ements benidentification and in his inclusion of linguistics as a mode of analysïs. See Harris. Womb and Tradition; Benitez-Rojo; and Gi. Cross-cultural movement, or what Glissant tems a "poetics of Relation," is the process by which these differential Caribbean realities interrelate. Cross-cultural poetics embodies Glissant's vital concept of the ceaseless dynarnism between Caribbean communities, the "conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures"

(PR 144). The principle of Relation ensures that identity can never be fked or universalized but is always a non-linear movemem, forever conjectural and un~table.~

Indeed, Glissant uses the French term Relation specifically because it does not fix grammatical meaning in the way that the word "relationship" would, fùnctioning in

Glissant's words, " somewhat like an intransitive verb (PR 27). In other words, Relation connotes a dynarnic exchange between positions rather than a fixed and static correspondence. Ultimately Glissant expresses his idea of Relation in terms of the displacement of authenticity or originality in favour of a relational identity. Re- constructing the term errantry to mean a deliberate wandering, Glissant deconstructs the notion of identity as founded upon a single origin or root and instead posits identity as errant or rhizomatic, taking on multiple imaginative and relative fonns, Glissant employs

Deleuze and Guattari's description of the multiplying network of rhizomes as a further way to illustrate his rnea~~ing.~Rhizomes, Deleuze and Guattari write, "are anti- genealogicai," functioning instead as Luies of connection within an endlessly "becoming- world" (Plateaus 1 1).6 Comparing the two concepts of identity, Glissant wrîtes: "The

"Ive followed Glissant's translators in capitalizing "Relation as a way of disünguisbuig the complcx pmçesses of that term fmm the English word "relation" Edwad Said's distinction behveen filiation as hear or biologicai conneciion. and afhliation as horizontal and criticaiiy conscious identincations. is also mggesteri in Poetics of Relation as a way to descriï the pmliferating possiliiities of Relation. See Said WorId 16-24. Deleuze elahrates on the political implicaUons of rhizomatic pmœss in his essay -Nomad Thought- 13649. notion of the rhizome rnaintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but chailenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what 1 cal1 the Poetics of

Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the

Other" (PR 1 1). Within Relation and the exchanges of errantry al1 cultures have a didectical and transformative effect on each other rather than assuming hierarchically determined positions.

Creolization is, in Glissant's formulation, a product of these cross-culturai processes, the representation of Relation and the hoped for realization of antilanite. As

Poetics of Relation States, "What took place in the Canibean, which could be summed up in the word creo~i:utiori,approximates the idea of Relation for us as neariy as possible. [t is not merely an encounter... but a new and original dimension" (34). Creolization as an identity process can. in this sense. be distinguished From definitions of creoleness which prescribe or circumscribe that identity. Glissant specifies that his understanding of creolization can never be a reactionary altemate definition such as négritude, but is opposed to any form of fixity or universalization:

If we speak of creolized cultures ... it is not to define a category that wiI1 by its very nature be opposed to other categories ("pure" cultures), but in order to assert that today infinite varieties of creolition are open to human conception, both on the level of awareness and on that of intention: in theory and in reality. (CJ 140)

In this sense, creolimtion is distinct 6om broad uses of the term hybridity which describe composite cultures, generaily composed of two elements in static combination. Hybndity used in this sense clearly does not incorporate the multiple and dynarnic processes of creolization, nor does it escape the limiting definitions and oppressive power imbaiances embodied by extant sociological c~nstnicts.~

Glissant's emphasis on Lirnitless exchange distinguishes his approach fiom that of

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who proposes another iduential concept of creole culture in his text The Development of Creole Societv in Jamaica. Arguing initiaily for creolition as a mode of cultural interaction, a "socio-cultural continuum," Brathwaite ultimately concludes that power imbalances require a folk or broadly ex-African bais as a creative source (3 10). White creoles in the Caribbean, Brathwaite writes in Contradictorv Omens,

"have separated themselves by too wide a guif. and have contnluted too little culturally, as a grmip, to give credence to the notion that they can, given the present structure, meaningfUy identifi or be identified with the spirituai world on titis side of the Sargasso

Sea" (38). Indirectly aiiuding to (and excluding) Jean Rhys's Wide Sareasso Sea with this comment, Brathwaite prescribes what cmand cannot be creole and consequently circumscribes identity in ways which Glissant rehses to do. WhiIe Brathwaite accurately identifies the power dynamics which compIicate GIissantYsapproach to creolization (an issue 1 will return to in my own adaptation of errantry), these exclusionary gestures ultirnately seek a new, originary source for creole culture rather than deconstructing oppressive notions of authenticity. Chris Bongie concludes that Brathwaite's uuevre represents the double bind of creolization theory in which impulses away hmidentity are inevitably entwined with impulses back to identity. Bongie writes that Brathwaite, ". ..

' Eariy modeIs of Caniculture debate wkther that scciety can be described as a composite of diverse influences or as a fuadamentaiiy âkpmte, hostiie coiîenion of social groups. See Oriando Patterson: M.G. Smith: and RCK Nettleford Barb syncretic and contlictuai models anempt to deiineate creole Society condusively wbereas Glissant argws for a concept of cuiture as Limitless process and change. insists upon the presence of a culture-core, an essential identity, and yet while advocating this position he also fieely adrnits that this essence is itself the product of an historicai transformation" (57). Brathwaite's focus on political realities directs one aspect of the intervention 1 wiU make in Glissant's work, yet his return to origins necessarily presents a contradictory imptilse withir; the notion of creoiiition itseif.

En a move similar to Brathwaite's, Jean Bemabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël

Confiant, the writers of loge de la Creolite and self-proclaimed foiiowers of GEssant, lirnit creole identity to a foikloric, masculine root, arguing for the need to claim and define that positionality. As Maryse Condé points out, this notion of authenticity begets exclusion ( 106) and prompts Glissant himself to distinguish his project from that of the

Élo-e de la Créalité (despite that work's foundations in his theory). Glissant specifies that

"We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities but by their relation to everything possible.. . " (PR 77). in other words, in contrat to Brathwaite and the writers of ~ione,Glissant includes moments of identification within a larger, metadiscourse of endless becoming. Points of stasis, in Glissant's argument, are exceeded by the infinite transformations and permutations of creolization. AIthough I will argue. dong with Chris

Bongie, that identity retains its imaginative force in ways which Glissant fails to recognize. the dynamics of becoming are, for Glissant, infinitely open.

This extendeci creole scope, acknowledging yet reaching beyond moments of synthesis, also distinguishes Glissant's approach fiom uses of the term "métissage" to refer to cultural mixing- Française Lionnet has most recently empioyed mêtissage in ways which ovedap with creoiization, caiüng for a transfomative dynamic which "allow[s] us to think othemisd' out of the binaries of colonialism (5). Glissant also uses the term in bis early work to describe cross-cultiird processes. Utirnately, however, Glissant distinguishes creolization from métissage, writing that, "If we posit métissage as, generally speaking, the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, its elements diffiacted and its consequences unforeseeable" (PR 34). [n other words, creolization transcends the synthetic connotations of métissage to assert the multiple ruptures and separations, as weU as connections, which occur within cross- cultural interaction. Predictably enough, Glissant descnies syncretic impulses too as limited. Instead, creolization incorporates and extends métissage because it includes moments of rupture and reformation dong with moments of (re)connection. Chns Bongie recognizes this use of creolization within Glissant's work as an attempt to prevent

Caribbean cultures %om becorning oppositionai identity categories, a possibility invoked by syncretic uses of the word "métissage," but which creolization's flexible,

"unforeseeable" scope precludes (67). Guyanese critic Wilson Harris's cross-cultural approach, while in practice similar to Glissant's in descniing "an intuitive self that moves endlessly into flexible patterns, arcs or bridges of community," nevertheless presents a problematic defence of syncretism for Glissant (Womb xviii). Harris' desire to consume biases, to uni@ rather than exploit the dissonances ofbecoming, forestails Glissant's vision of the infinite potential that is creoiiition.

Giissant hrther emphasizes the creative aspects of creolition over what he terms

"trickster" strategies or devices of subversive imitation such as .bancy and coyote figures

as weff as foms of mimicry. In Glissant's view, these strategies may divert pnnciples of

domination but do not offer "any real potentiai for development" (CD23). Creolization is

not an inteiiectual game but carries an obiigaaoa to change. in ernphasizing the creative possibility of creohtion, Giissant disànguîshes his approach f?om Horni Bhabha's concept of hybridity. Bhabha describes hybridity as a heterogeneous, third identity space which demonstrates the limits of colonid discourse. The hybrid moment simultaneously repeats and exceeds colonial representations of difference, deconstructing the binary of self and other to undermine Western authority and "tum the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power" (1 12). AIthough this mode of analysis effectively disrupts extant discourse, Benita Pany points out that it contains little creative potential, and remains to some extent bound by the discourses it deconstructs: "Bhabha's interrogation of received historical authority takes place on the territory of colonial discourse itself'

(42). Although Bhabha's project is in part to make visible what is not encompassed by colonial discourse, to articulate a "third space" of enunciation and in that sense locate a creative dimension, Parry's point is that hybridity cm only exist between the binaries of colonial and native and is consequently limited by those terms. Such a subversive approach precludes the lirnitless transformation that Glissant argues for because it cannot transcend its binary ongins. FmGIissant, hybridity remains bound to the colonial dynamic and unable to fùlfill the transformative potential of creolization.

In addition to the strategic limitations of using hybridity as a subversive third term,

Robert Young has convincingly argueci that histotical connotations of racial classification

haunt the term itself. Despite Bhabha's deconstructive intent, Young writes that hybndity

may on certain levels always disturbiigiy reinforce those classificatory meanings.

Assuming the pnor existence of fixed racial ongins, hybridity, according to Young, "has

not siipped out of the made of the past, even if.. . [it] bas been deployed against the very

culture that inventeci it.. ." (25). Mitissage is susceptlile to similar charges in its genetic implications. Sylvia Wynter questions contemporary uses of the term preciseiy on those grounds, writing that métissage and mestizo imply "simply the recombination of wo variants of the human genome" and suggest the "recombination of cultures" into an opposing, "new Caribbean and American synthesis" (647). Creolization is not tied to genetics in the same way as these other terrns, particularly in contexts such as Dominica where creole is used to describe descendants of European settlers (indicating a new place) rather than a certain genetic makeup or background. The multiple applications of creole confound racial and ethnic labels and ailow Glissant to use the tenn in more open and flexibIe ways.

These distinctions between Glissant's approach and those of other mole theonsts identify important strands in my application of creole theory to the writings of Dunbar-

Nelson, Rhys and Melville. Glissant's encompassing approach, which incorporates elements of stasis and constraint within a dynamic metadiscourse, is not lirnited by considerations of identity, origin or genetics. Syncretism and subversion are provisional tactics within a larger process of cross-cultural transformation. This attempt to theorize the world as an inclusive dynarnic offers compellig possibilities in relation to the diversity aiready noted in these writers' texts. in that Glissant attends to Cm'bbean particularity but, as one crîtic writes, "refus[es] to be lirnited by it"his approach permits the relation of diverse creole expressions without subsurning their specificities (Leblanc 174).

Understanding creolization as an open and inclusive dynarnic allows me to compare cross- cultural processes in New Orleans to creolization in the Caribbean. The racial politics of

Dunbar-Nelson's antebellum stories represent one set of creole negotiations while Rhys's white cotonial narratives describe a very different set of experiences. The two versions of creolization are distinct in terms of cultural context, but are Iinked by their thematics of shifiing identity positions. Despite his rejection of (an empty) universaiity, Glissant conceives of Relation as a global dynamics, a transversal or "shared process of cultural mutation" which takes on multiple, context-specific forms (CD 67). This framework describes the intersection of distinct regional and historicai meanings without seeking to circumscribe or elide the cornplexities of each experience and this diversity in turn stretches and expands the scope of creoiiition. Indeed, Glissant preserves diversity within the processes of Relation through what he tem the "opacity," namely the desire nat to reduce the world to sameness but to encourage and proliferate difference (PR 62).

Despite the uniquely imaginative and encompassing aspects of Glissant's poetics, however, his approach does not give adequate acknowledgement to the constraints within which each individual subject operates. The pervasive resonance of colonial discourse that both Edward Brathwaite and Horni B habha recognize, in addition to the circumscriptions of gender, class, economics and regional context, cannot be simply overtaken by the processes of creolization. Power dynamics, constra.int and a need For identity affirmation persist within cross-cultural exchanges and to deny their force is to ignore the contradictions and inconsistencies which pervade the work of al1 three women writers 1 consider here. Although Glissant acknowledges moments of stability or confluence, his theory de-ernphasizes the role that those elements play in favour of the revolutionary and transfomative aspects of creoiiition. For Glissant, the imaginative possibility inherent in cross-cultural exchange takes priority over social constraint. Ferninine creole texts, however, do not aiways articulate new or radical configurations of identity. Dunbar-

Nelson's stories are at times complicit with New Orleans taciai segregation, Rhys's texts occasionaliy affirm patnarchal stereotypes and Melviile's work both repeats and challenges existing social structures. These contradictory and ambivalent elements need to be validated and read as significant aspects of feminine mole narrative rather than subordinated to the dynarnics of cross-cultural process. In this sense the political issues raised by Brathwaite and the affirmation of syncretism promoted by Wilson Harris are worth prese~ngand using to supplement Glissant's focus. My approach to feminine creole identity therefore expands Glissant's cross-cultural process to inchde syncretic and subversive elements as important aspects of the creole dynarnic.

Glissant's celebration of creole possibility aiso presents a problem for reading the emotional landscape of ferninine creole texts. Cornpeliiig as his enthusiasm for transformation may be, Glissant's focus on the positive outcomes of creolization, on the

"drearn" of releasing infinite potential, de-emphasizes the violence and suffering which can

also accompany cross-cultural processes (a139). Not to beiong hlIy either to one or

another cultural category is both the site of creative possibility and a space of loss and

rejection. DoubIy defined and doubly excluded, the ferninine creoie is profoundly

ambivalent and for this reason Glissant's positivity must be expanded with a consideration

of the psychic costs of experiencing identity other-wise. To be both self and other in

terms of traditional identity categones is, these texts suggest, at once liberating and

painful.

Despite these reservations, however, Gtissant's understanding of cultural identity

as shifting and protean does account for the movement between identifications which 1

have suggested typifies these writers' texts. Dunbar-Nelson, Rhys and Melviile portray

characters that osdate between identity and impenonation, a rnovement which the concept of Relation provides a way to read not just as debilitating contradiction but as endemic to creoIe experience. Pauline Melville's main character in the story "You Le!? the

Door Open," for instance, is a performer who deliberately assumes other personae, shifiing between fernale and male, victim and oppressor, present and pst in a process which is both violent and Iiberating. Only a theoretical context which understands contradictory movements as defining rather than debilitating can hlly address the emotional cornplexhies of such a work.

Glissant's dynamic and flexiile concept of identity fiirther ensures that his argument mediates between global and specific, individual and communal forces.

Although the autonomous subject has been a divisive influence within Western thought and Glissant emphasizes the need for communal solidarity, he also acknowledges a space for the individual within that community. Subjective autonomy is, in Glissant's view. never divorced from and yet aIso never erased by everchanging cross-cultural practices: "The individual, the community, the land are inextricable," Glissant writes (a105). This connection between physical space and subjectivity is replicated in the fiction as each writer negotiates ferninine creole identity through the parameters of histoncal and regional place. The individuai within the community, Glissant continues, becomes a structure for conceiving the world and in this sense the individual retains agency. Indeed, Glissant emphasizes the need for construction, for creativity, for "subjecthood" in order to overcome the historicd objectification of Cariibean peopIes and to actively pursue a shared reality (CD I49). In a similar sense, each fictiond individual creatively assumes and discards aspects of patriarchal and colonial constructs, enacting an errantry which never completeIy abandons a concept of community while still asserthg individual agency. Glissantk ideas do not prescribe a notion of community which erases individuai experience, but instead describe an active consciousness pursuing creative possibilities within a new world dynarnic.

Glissant's concept of the agency of the individual within a community suggests a particularly productive way to understand the effects of socid context in ferninine creole texts. Rather than viewing the individuai as completely constrained by discourse so tht no movernent could exist between oppositions (a position which would limit creole to yet another discrete identity term), Glissant theorizes the possibilities for deliberate, creative exchange between cornmunity and individuai. This balance between conscious creation and social consuaint provides a way to read the multiple, socially detennined discou~es which affect each character in these writers' texts. Without denying the force of existing identity constructs, Glissant suggests that certain forms of creative agency are stiII possible and necessary to renew culture in areas hitherto dominated by imperiai powers. The ability to assume identity selectively and to move between categories represents an agency which destabilizes hierarchies and enables new and as yet unimagined cultural expressions.

Dynamic process creates the possibility for identity to move beyond existing cultural and literary categorizations.

The essays in Caribbean Discourse also focus on replacing universa1 concepts of

History and language with cross-cultural understandings of these experiences. A major aspect of Gf ssantls project is to re-conceive Western, linear versions of History (indicated in Glissant's work by a capitd "H")with diverse histories recovered from Caribbean reality and indigenously sig~cantevents. Re-conceiving time as dudon, where past and future are transversally linked rather than 6xed in a series of linear moments, Glissant advances a notion of history as "the roots of a cross-cultural relationship.. .. not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in ail directions in Our world through its network of branches" (a67). This reconceptualization of History corresponds to

Derek Walcott's argument in "The Muse of History" which cals for a revisioning of past and present as fictionai tem8 Walcott conceives of poets creatively imagining new identities in the role of "a second Adam" (356). This re-imagination would not be a naïve forgetting of the past; rather, it would be a new vision articulated through an awareness of past events. Although this vision ofa second Adam clearly displays the need for a ferninine voice within creolization, Waicott nevertheless lends support for Glissant's revision of the past as not simply oppressive but ais0 a source of creative in~piration.~

Language is another site for Giissant's re-reading of cultural constructs.

Distinguishing between "natural" and "forced" or constrained expression, Glissant argues that within the Caribbean context certain foms of Creole language become forced because they represent "an inability to achieve expression" (CD 120). While French is the language of coloniai domination, Creole can also become stagnant due to lack of creative growth, attempts to regulate the language and preoccupations with resistance and

folklorization. Glissant views rnany foms of Creole Ianguage, inciuding that of

Martinique, as a potential yet to be developed into conscious, fully reaiized expression.

Creole language forms mus be restored to an expressive, natural poetics through the

Glissant. in fact cites Walcon's approach as coinciding with his own in duingthe conventions of anaifical thought See Glüsant. CD 65. Wilson Harris simiiariy weaves histoq into the present in an attempt to restore wholeness to Can'bbean identity. Both Walcott and Hams's treawnts of history o8ér inceiiecnial a£firmation for Glissant's approach See Harris Traditioa. advancement of orality and intertextual exchanges or, in Glissant's words,

"entanglements" which weave past and present texts together into a new, creolized creative source. In discussing creolition as both a linguistic and cultural practice,

Glissant re-articulates the work of linguists such as De11 Hymes, RB. LePage and Andrée

Tabouret-Keller, who argue that creole languages enact and replicate cultural concepts of multiplicity and change.1° The exchanges which occur between cuItures so that the

Caribbean, for instance, is no longer Afiican, ùidigenous or European but a new dynarnic, are exchanges replicated within language itself Creole speech becomes a continual process of reformulating linguistic influences. This language continuum transforms scientifically classified, "standard" ianguages and undermines linguistic "purity" through practices of code-switching (moving berween dialects) and appropriation. As the hters of The Empire Writes Back explain, these strategies are important in exposing al1 language as infinitely dynamic (rather than static) and asserting the "plurality of practice" which drives linguistic creativity (47). For Glissant and ultimately for Julia Kristeva (to whom

shall return), the project of re-conceiving identity develops in conjunction with an understanding of the representative power of discourse.

As 1 read these ferninine crede texts, then, representation and communication, the

manipulation of narrative voice and semantic possibdity are also elements of cross-cultural

(not merely linguistic or aesthetic) practice. As Celia Britton concludes in her recent

evaluation of the postcoloniaI implications of Glissant's work, in order to reconceive

identity, "[tlhe subject's relation to language has to be a strategic onen which "changes the

tem" of cultural discourse through textuai experimentation (183). in this sense,

'O See Hymes and LePage and Tabouret Keïler. Glissant's approach endorses my own desire to take Gterary innovation seriously in the delineation of a creole politics. The thematizauon of creole identity is articulated in unorthodox sentence structures. in fiactured dialogue, in shifting diaiects, in the use and abuse of pronouns, in intenemal repetitions, and in the pIayfbl dismantling of narrative conventions.

Glissant describes his collection of essays, Poetics of Relation, as a "reconstituted echo" or "spiral retelling" of the ideas first set out in Caribbean Discourse (PR 16). In retelling his earlier text, and through his circular, associative style, Glissant deploys the essay fom to exemplify or perfonn his ideas on cross-cuiturai interactions. Indeed, the element of performativity is significant in understanding Glissant's formulation of process. since each expression of Caribbean identity is a moment or instance within the process of historical transformation. Glissant conceives of identity as essentiaily a series of performances or processes of becoming, rather than a state of "Being." An infinite mode of questioning, Glissant writes, Relation "does not partake of Being... . Being is self- sufficient, whereas every question is interactive" (& 160-1). Any assertion of identity is, for Glissant, provisional and contingent in a manner similar to Judith Butler's ideas on gender identity. Butler procfaims that "gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time," never hlly expressing the being behind it and assumed out of social necessity (140).

Performativity provides a usetirl way to understand identity as provisional for both Butler and Glissant; however. Glissant's assumption of identity is not done ironicaily as it is in

Butler's theory. For Glissant, identity is assumed as one (limited, but candid) instant within an inf'inite and continuaily changing cross-culwal practice. In this sense, the writings of Rhys, Dunbar-Nelson and Melvilie can be perceived as Wga dialogical model of the feminine creole. Each text is a performance of a specific creole identity, a discrete configuration of experience grounded in historical and regional particularity, but is dso never a final or irrefùtable version even of concrete historicity.

Ecology likewise offers a model for the kinds of cross-cultural negotiations that

Glissant is making. Both dynamic identities and ecologicai systems are inextricably Iinked and altered by their relationship with others (PR 146). Glissant develops this "politics of ecology" through the Martiniquan landscape, which is descnbed as illustrating his concept of chaos functioning within the processes of Relation. The edge of the sea fluctuating between water and land. between humcane and volcano, represents the altemation

"between order and chaos .. . . between threatening excess and dreamy fiagility" (PR 13 1-

22). Fragility in this description reveals the instability, the essentiai impermanence of crede interactions, while excess refers to the endless complication of limiting categories which creolization aiso enacts. threatening because it disrupts identity. Ferninine creole texts deploy this politics of ecology in the delicate links and interconnections between shifting identity positions. Land and physicai space serve as extensions of, and indeed are inseparable fiom, cultural identity and in this sense the mutating space of the beach represents the shifting dynamics of creolition.

Glissant further describes this movement as a "turbulent confiuence" which is the principle of "chaos-monde" as weii as the permanence of "échos-monde." The motion of chaos, which in Glissant's understandimg is "neither fusion nor confusion" but a hidden, dnving force within the universe, is an essentiai component of Relation. Chaos propels the unpredictable and unforeseeable redts of creolizatioc. Glissant juxtaposes this force against the concept of "échos-monde" which expresses confluences in the world and ailows the re-iteration of previous systems without according authority to any. While

Glissant does, as 1 have mentioned, therefore theorize a place for elements of order and traditional identity within the processes of Relation, he views these aspects of culture as brief moments of syncretism which will ultimately be overtaken by larger, cross-cultural processes of exchange. Glissant writes: "ln order to cope with or express confluences, every individuai, every community foms its own échos-monde, imagineci from power or vainglory, fiom suffering or impatience" (PR 93). For Glissant, moments of synthesis have IittIe imaginative resonance, originating from oppressive principles, while change, movement, creativity embody the vital possibilities of creolization. The dynarnics of creolization thus take precedence over stability and, as this quotation reveals. Glissant rernains suspicious of the desire for synthesis because of its categorical. "fixing-' potential.

While feminine creole texts do shifl between identity positions, enacting a fluid errantry, they aiso thematize elements of constraint and irresolvable conflict and take on the issue of retuming oppression. The impulse to identity and stability therefore merits more attention in these texts than Glissant's approach suggests and this, dong with issues of semal difference and the emotionai suffering expressed in these texts, form the impetus for my intervention in his work.

If the ferninine creole acquires politicai resonance as weil as poetic power because its fictionai heroines suffer anguish and irresolvable confiict, Glissant's mode1 of interminable and orgasmic becoming will simply not suffice to account for the melancholy and aiienation that beset the "woman version" of creoliation. Julia Kristeva's work overiaps with Glissant's mode1 of mole process in offering a vision of identity as heterogeneous process. More hportantly for my reading of the femlliine creole, however, she theorizes how social structures have deveioped and fimction dong gendered lines.

Kristeva offers a dialectical approach to sexud difference in which "male" and "fernale" are never pure or static oppositional categories but in a constant process of exchange.

Matemally based creative impulses inspire the patriarchal Iinguistic-cultural order, which in tum makes the feminine partially articdable within language. Neither space cari exist without the other and interactions between them are ais0 never fixed but constantly being formulated and reformulated in the way that Glissant imagines Relation. Kristeva, however, theorkm these exchanges as hu&t and contradietory rather than a cdebration of endless possibility- Identity is structureci by abjection, a process which violently rejects the "horrot' of difference in a fbtile atternpt to assert sameness (fùtiie because alterity is always already inherent within identity). Constraint is vital to abjection as one component of the shiftins dynamics between identity and difference. Krisieva's work is compelling for my reading of feminine creok texts not only because she theorizes gender in a way which overlaps with Glissant's approach to cross-culturd exchange, allowing me to construct a gender inclusive version of creoiization, but aiso because Kristeva's poetics shifi the emotiond focus of male creoiiition theories to vaiidate experiences of melancholy, loss and conflict. The writers [ examine simultaneousiy manifest the dynamic possibilities of a creole "becoming" and the dienation of alterity. Weabjection thus expands the scope of creolization, on another IeveI of theoreticai "errantry" or exchange, the culturd specificity that creoIization insists on transforms Kristeva's universal psychoanalytic subject into specific regional and historical terms. Kristevan Interrogations

Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Lanmiaee and Powers of Horror explore the moments in which socially constructed identities are exceeded or dismpted through her revision of Freud's concept of pre-oedipal drives and te-reading of Lacan's irrevocable placement of the subject within a phallocentric Syrnbolic order." In Kristeva's version of identity formation, the conscious subject and pre-conscious drives are never readily separated but remain in uneasy relation.

Kristeva's approach re-conceptuaiizes language and the body as integral to the construction of identity and difference. Revolution in Poetic Lanqage argues that language aiways contains a semiotic dimension which can be located in the pre-Symbolic bond with the maternai body. The semiotic consists of the primary processes identified by

Freud as drives, where "discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such" (Revolution 25). For Freud and Lacan (in an understanding that Kristeva will complicate), the semiotic is identified with the maternai because Symbolic langage is predicated on an identification with the father. Kristeva identifies the drives in their initial state as a semiotic chora, a provisional articulation because once the subject has entered language the chora cannot be tùlly recovered.

Semiotic drives do. however, make their way into langage in qualified foms so that language itself, in Kristeva's formulation, consists of heterogeneous elements.

Differentiating her work from that of Lacan, Kristeva argues that semiotic elernents break

' In Lacan's formulation the Symboiic order (indicated here by a capital "sn to distinguish hm Kristeva's undersiandhg of symboiic elemenis) is the order of signification wiîhïn society. Lacan also identifies a preSymboiic Imaginacy stage in which the subject is not yet tecognized as such. Both Spboiic and hginqare distinct hmthe Reai or aspects of e.xïstence which are unknowable to the subject. See Lacan 1-7. up the des and structures of the symbolic order to introduce impulses which lead to new and changing meanings. Without the semiotic element, the symbohc would be only forrd structure and without the symbolic aspect the semiotic would be meaningless. inarticulabie. Kristeva writes that, "These two modalities are inseparabie within the signifLingprucess that constitutes language, and the diaiectic between thern determines the type of discourse.. . in other words, so-cailed 'naturai' language allows for different modes of articulation of the semiotic and symbolic" (Revolution 24).

While semiotic, bodily drives are therefore acting within the Symboiic; Kristeva also argues that symbolic eIements structure and facilitate the ordering or disposition of drives within the matemal chora. Social organization, Kristeva writes, itself "always already symbolic, impnnts its constraint in a mediated fonwhich organizes the chora"

(Revolution 27). Kristeva posits heterogeneity and breaks down Lacanian understandings of the prirnacy of patemai law not only through asserting the semiotic tiinction within the

Symbolic, but also through asserting that symbolic ordering elements (although not the law itself) precondition the maternai body. For this reason, criticd readings of Kristeva's semiotic as an essentialist mode1 of the ferninine seem Iimiting. For Kristeva identity is neither essential nor static, but rather involved in a continuai practice of exchange. Judith

Butler has pointed out that Kristeva's understanding of the serniotic as founded in the preverbal and maternai body overlaps with patriarchai silencing and reductions of women to physicality. Butler writes that, "Kristeva describes the materna1 body as bearing a set of meanings that are prior to culture itself. She thereby safeguards the notion of culture as a paternal structure and deiiits matem-ty as an essentiaiiy preculturd reality" (80).

However, fisteva's theory of interacting semiotic and symbolic elements in both Syrnbolic and presymbolic stages deconstructs (biologicdy naturalized) binaries of woman and man to emphasize the beterogeneity of ail processes of signification and subjectivity. Kristeva's semiotic cannot be identifieci as purely fernale just as the symbolic is never purely male, but rather both temare defined and indeed made viable through the interaction between ttiem. Kristeva adoprs culturally resonant gender distinctions only to complicate thern endlessly.

This model not only of rneaning as a process but also of identities in process establishes a vital connection between Glissant's approach to creolization and Kristeva's approach to the gendered subject. Kristeva describes language and the subject in terms of a continuous process of exchange between semiotic and symbolic elements. In cultural terms. the model of creolization proposed by Glissant describes a sirnilar process of exchange between multiple identities, both dominant and historically oppressed, existing in the Caribbean region. Like Kristeva's understanding of language practice, Glissant argues against the "purity" or exclusivity of any cultural category and asserts the creative necessity of dynamic interaction. For both theorists, identities are shifiing practices. never stable but intcrsecting each other in multiple ways. This affinity between the ways that

Kristeva and Glissant canceive subjectivity suggests their ideas can be used together to theorize the multiple identity discourses which configure the ferninine creole. In short.

Kristeva makes it impossible to ignore the (en)genderuigof cultural formations.

Both creoiization and semiotics are aiso transfomative linguistic, as well as cultural, practices. In both cases, the project ofre-vaiuing identities origïnates fiom a recognition of the representative power of discourse. Semiotics tùnctions as an on-going exchange between accepted or "standard" Symboiic constructs and the disruptions of semiotic excess necessary to inspire meaning. In a move siilar to Glissant's cal1 for the continuous transformation of language in order to prevent stagnation, Knsteva posits the need for disruptive elements within linguistic structures. Although fisteva's approach ses subjectivity as more constrained by Syrnbolic structure than Glissant's sense of unlimited linguistic possibility, both theorists insist on the infùriating and exciting ways in which Ianguage (dis)articulates identity.

Semiotics and creolization as linguistic practices sirnilarly rupture and creatively re-combine language. For Kristeva, Symbolic language is split open by semiotic elements in a manner simiiar to creolization's disrnantling of standard langage forms. in both semiotics and creolization. language is never fixed and standardized, but constantly and tellingfy intruded upon by elements of difference. To simply break open the dominant or

Symbolic discourse, however, creates a counter discourse which is negatively defined and which, CeIia Bntton notes. runs the risk of replacing the circumscriptions of colonial

Ianguage with another, equaIly Iirnited indigenous one (33). Consequently, both creolktion and semiotics are creative as well as subversive linguistic practices. As

Glissant explains through his reading of a bumper sticker in Caribbean Discourse, the

French saying, "Ne rouiez pas trop près," is not simply replaced by a single Martiniquan substitute, but by a number of creolized variations (164). in other words, creolization invites multiple linguistic responses, embracing individual creativity and refùsing static modes of expression. For Kristeva, semiotic exchange Iikewise produces innumerable linguistic variations and experiments. Each serniotic intrusion reconfigures Symbolic speech, disrupting its linear structure with intertextual allusions, musicality, repetition, and diaiectical interactions which transfonu the terms of that discourse. In that neither creoie nor woman is adequately articulated as a subject by standard language forms, Kristeva and

Glissant recognize langage as a founding site both for exploding and imaginatively transforming discourse.

Knsteva elaborates on her mode1 of semiotic-Symbolic interaction through the concepts of abjection (to which 1 shaü return) and the thetic break. Within the Knstevan narrative of subject formation, the speaking subject must enter the Symbolic order, a process which is camed out in relation to the thetic break. The thetic is the point at which the potentiai subject enters the Symbolic, taking up a position within language and separating itseif fkom a continuity with biological experiences. Kristeva proposes that symbolic logic working within the semiotic prepares for and effèctively generates the thetic break through bodily impulses of separation from the preverbal maternai space.

Bodily rejection culminates in the first location of the thetic break, Lacan's mirror stage, which marks the child's initial distinction between its own image and the world around it. fisteva thus complicates Lacan's theory in suggesting that separating impulses occur prior to the child's primary recognition of self; this observation asserts the interchange between semiotic and symbolic so necessary to Kristeva's challenge to the privileging of the Oedipal in Lacanian psychoanaiysis. For Kristeva, the mirror stage is an intermediary position, poised between bodily drives and the subject's entrance into language.

The second and conclusive positing of the speaking subject for Lacan occurs with the oedipal recognition of castration, with the perception of the mother as lacking and the consequent identification with the Symbolic. During this process, the child locates itself within the signifying order through processes of repression and subhtion. The oedipd moment describes the intervention of the father in the rnother-child dyad, an intervention which enforces the separation between cMd and matemal other begun in the mirror stage.

The child perceives its inability to fiilfiii the mother's desire and identifies with the Father, becoming a subject within language. Desue for continuity with the mother is replaced by a series of signifiers or stand-ins which can only partially express the original semiotic state. l2 Repeating aspects of Lacan's formulation, where an inarticulable Real dimension is mediated by Imaginary representations of othemess within the Symbolic, Kristeva translates Lacan's Imaginary-Symbolic distinction into a series of interactions between semiotic and syrnbolic. in both Lacan and Knsteva, the language process transforms the other of tme difference into an Other necessary for communication. However, Knsteva's formulation proposes that the separations between Imaginary-Symbolic/ serniotic-symbolic are not as irrevocable as Lacan's original theory of the split subject suggests. As traditional notions of mother and father are increasingiy challenged and complicated within contemporary society, what is particularly compelling and relevant about Kristeva's approach is her acknowledgement of the overlap and exchange between gender roles, an acknowiedgement absent in earlier psychoanalytic approaches.

in Kristeva's signimng practice, the thetic break, constituting as it does the distinction between semiotic and Symbolic spaces, between signified and signifier, is constantly transgressed when semiotic excess erupts into language. As Kristeva elaborates, "Though absolutely necessary the thetic is not exclusive: the semiotic. which

also precedes it. constantly tears it open, and this transgression brings about al1 the various

'=Lacan's onguial formulation of casvation descni the Phallus as abject of desire. as complete gratification. On percening that the mother is not cornpletc !lut she does not have the Phallus and that uni@ with her is socially unaccepiable. the child experiences la& and nibstitutes an identification with the Father as having access to the Phailus and ultimaieiy the mother. See Oiiver 2 1-28. transformations of the signifying practice that are caiied 'creation"' (Revolution 62). The subject, then, founded on a primary thetic position, must continuaüy confkont aitenty within its own identity. Kelly Oliver hds this aspect of Kristeva's approach particularly significant, writing that, "The subject-in-procesi on trial is an identity-in-procesd on trial.

Kristeva proposes a way to conceive of a productive but aiways only provisional identity, an identiry whose constant cornpanions are alterity, negation and difference" (14). For the feminine creole, an identity in process describes the positive implications of errantiy negotiating gender and cultural constructs while an identity on trial points to the elements of social judgrnent and constraint which also pervade these texts. Knsteva's theory incorporates both process and trial, the validation of open exchange and the alienation

L'rom society which these texts thernatize.

The element of provisionaiity within Kristeva's approach suggests a tiirther affinity with Glissant's cross-cultural poetics. For both Glissant and Kristeva, each expression of identity is a moment or single performance within a larger process of becoming and, like

Glissant. Kristeva enacts this concept within her theoretical writing. Points in Kristeva's texts which repeat existing cateyories of identity and genre are intempted by more abstract sections which can be seen as attempts to articulate aspects of the seriotic

(although the semiotic is never fully recoverable within langage). As Toril Moi encapsulates Kristeva's work, her theory carries out "a dicuIt balancing act between a position which would deconstruct subjectivity and identity altogether, and one that would try to capture these entities in an essentialist or humanist mouIdn (1 3). For feminine creote narrative, this double impulse away fiom and towards identity is performed in the rejecîion and affirmation, rupture and remof traditional identity categories. While both theorists thus recognize the need to include concrete ideas and directions within their approaches

(rather than advance pure relativity), neirher aims simply to replace old categories with new. Instead, both Glissant and Kristeva perform a theory of practice, enacting multiple discrete versions of identity. Thea Hhgton expiicitly addresses Kristeva's texts as performative. writing that "it is the notion of a performance of a practice as performance of revolutionary acts, by which Knsteva articulates the space for a new ethics" (139).

Kristeva's essay, "Stabat Mater." for example, is divided into two columns which juxtapose semiotic reactions against Symbolic Iogic as one performance and practice of the theory. This provisional perforrnativity allows Kiisteva's generai approach to be translated into specific feminine creoie terms. If dterity is within every identity, then what makes feminine creole texts unique is their specific historicai and regional configurations of that difference, a specificity encouraged by a performative theoretical foundation.

Later sections of Revoiution in Poetic Lanmiaee and subsequent texts such as

Powers of Horror elaborate on the multiple ways in which a subject exists as practice and flux. Kristeva reformulates Hegel's concept of negativity to describe an energy of opposition and process founded in the multiple and plural semiotic drives which "exceed the signiwng subject" (Revolution 119). To repeat and emphasize Hegel's distinction between negativity and the purely oppositionai stance of negation, Kristeva ultimately terms her version of negativity rejection. Rejection is, therefore, an energy which operates first within the semiotic body to activate the pnmary transition to subjecthood and then provokes change/ new combinations of identity within the Syrnbolic. Rejection operates in the Symbolic in relation to the thetic break so îhat moments of stasis, when the thetic break is assened and identity is cleariy defined according to Symbolic categories, are succeeded by the disruptions of semiotic excess which are in turn followed by a reformulated thetic boundary and identity position. According to Kristeva, rejection is the heterogeneous energy which creates the "subject-in-process":

Rejecrion ... produces its various forms, including their symbolic manifestation, at the same time that it ensures, by its repetition, a thresholcl of comrancy: a boundq, a restraint around which difference will be set up ... . Although repeated rejection is separation, doubling, scission, and shattering, it is at the sarne time and afterward accumulation, stoppage, mark and stasis. (Revolution 160. 17 1)

In other words, the double emotional focus and dialectic between identity and difference which feminine creole texts thematize are also the heterogeneous energies animating

Kristeva's mode1 of subjectivity.

Abjection can now be contextuaiized within this narrative as a process operating between bodily and Symbolic forms of rejection. Kristeva views the transition From pre- oedipal stages to signification as, I suggested earlier. fiindatnentally more complex than either Freud or Lacan's models would seem to imply. Kristeva proposes that, alongside

symbolic and semiotic elements and the energies of rejection operating in both spaces. a

crucial phase of transition invohes abjection of the maternai body and ternporary

identification with a loving pre-oedipai father (who will soon become the stem father of

patemai Law). Although men and women experience abjection differently, with women

less able to abandon the maternai because they share a continuai identification with the

female body, Kristeva asserts that both genders undergo this phase of separation.

Abjection is therefore an early process of maternai rejection, establishing the boundary or

threshold which Kristeva claims is necessary to the assertion of ciifference. The abject,

Kristeva writes, is preçiseiy " .. . what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite ... It is something rejected fiom which one does not part ..." (Powers 4). Abjection is a repeated and violent response to the threat of semiotic excess intmdiig on the symbolic subject. It is a re-assertion of borders between what is socially signifiable and that difference which threatens social constmcts.l3 As Kelly Oliver writes, the abject is not a quality in itselc but "a relationship to a boundary" (56).

Within the genealogy of the subject, abjection involves "our earliest attempts to release the hold of maferrial entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stiflig" (Powers 13). The rnaternal body ultimateiy confuses boundaries between subject and other and so must be abjected in the process towards differentiation. Abjection is therefore initiated within the semiotic and is in that sense not fully articulable within language: however, as a patrolling of borders, abjection is also enacted (and represented) with the Symbolic against any element which threatens the supposedly discrete subject. Indeed. abjection is coextensive with symbolic elements because it occurs as soon as separating impulses begin. Since what becomes abject is also part of the self (food, waste, the rnatemal body) abjection is aiways a process of abjecting the self by, Kristeva Mites, "the sarne motion through which

'1' clah to establish myself' (Powers 3). Abjection is never &al because these elements of self remain to haunt the subject, never compietely separate because they are the self

l3 1 am referring to difierence in p~choanaiyîicterms as that which disnrpts Syrnbotic subjecthoodl simùfWig process while identity is an ideal of samenes which structures the subjen In cultural terms. 1 am using difierence to indicate not oniy diverse beiiefs and pracîices. but also the cullurally consuucted opposition between identity and alterity as delïning the dominant and the oppressed This incomplete separation results in the conflict and violence which characterize abjection, as Kristeva describes; "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, diected aginst a threat that seems to emanate fiom an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possibie, the tolerable, the thinkable" (Powers

1)-

The process of abjection establishes kher, sustained Ievels of comection with creolization, suggesting that each approach can be used to expand the other without contradiction or distortion. ln descniing abjection as a relationship to the boundary between self and otherness, Kristeva replicates Glissant's understandmg of creole process as an endless becoming. Both theories conceive these relationships with cultural boundaries as hndamentally productive in that each assertion of identity results in a new, slightly modified version. Within abjection, each response to or patroiiiig of the border between semiotic and symbolic produces a new configuration of identity, repeating the thetic break but inevitably incorporating change. Kristeva writes that serniotic poetic expression works within the socio-symbolic order as "the ultimate means of its transformation or subversion. the precondition for its mival and revolution" (Revolution

8 1). SirniIar to Glissant's understandmg of the creative possibility of Relation, fisteva's theory of semiotic-syrnbolic exchge is a theory of constant revision. For both theorists. identity is repeatedy asserted in a process which extends it hto new shapes and forms.

The socio-historicai parameters ofeach version of ferninine creole can thus be incorporated into this theoretid ma* giving creoiization a gender inclusivity and abjection a cuItural specificity which they currently lack. Kristeva's project of destabilizing existing hierarchies also repiicates the aims of creole practice as Glissant identifies them. By asserting the heterogeneity of both semiotic and symbolic processes, Kristeva conceives of identity in process not only within a single signifjing field but as interacting with difference (that which exceeds symbolic categorizations) in multiple forms. Sirdar to Glissant's replacement oFuniversal concepts with cross-cultural entanglements the diverse configurations and divisions produced by semiotic-symbolic exchange and by abject relations to the thetic break resuit in assertions of heterogeneity which "sirnply aut!l&" according to Toril Moi, hierarchicai constmcts as weil as negative binary reactions to such constmcts ( 17). Kristeva's heterogeneous political practice is ais0 consonant with Glissant's cross-cultural poetics because she extends her narrative of the gendered subject to a theorization of national and ethnic identities. Knsteva's text Strancjers to OurseIves arees that "foreignness" is a lived illustration of border (here and there, now and then) (4). Kristeva works through Freud's concept of the uncanny to propose that the so-ded foreigner is an extemal construction of the dterity within eveq psyche. Raalüng her understanding of the process of abjection, Kristeva writes that "In the fascinateci rejection that the foreigner arouses in us, there is a share of uncanny strangeness," an uncanniness which is, in Freud's understuiding, the retum of a familiar difference (Stranners 191). This concept of altenty,

Kristeva proposes, can be extended to understand difference without ostracism and without demanding conformity to existing categories. The process of abjection, like

Glissant's creolization, puts supposedly natural and discrete categories of identity into play, articulating, in Kristeva's words, a "land of borders and othernesses ceaselessly constructeci and deconstnicted" (Stranaers 19 l).14

Powers of Horror continues to dehe abjection within a social context. FolIowing

Mary Douglas' work in Purity and Danger on social taboos as a fom of cultural differentiation, Kristeva analyzes prohibitions against incest and menstruation as forms of abjection tied to the matemal body. Kristeva reads the bibiical book of Leviticus in terms of the taboos surrounding vanous foods and bodily states. Such taboos, Kristeva asserts. act as a form of prevention against abjection in that they mark the boundary between identity and difference, forestahg what would otherwise be a need to enact abjection ntuaily through sacrifice. Significantly, food prohibitions are placed on those animais that cross habitats (hence the depravity of the snake), on bodily states which suggest decay or permeability (the impainnent of the skin as separating boundary thus accounting for the horror with which leprosy was treated) and on hybrid or migrant peoples who transgress the cultural logic of sameness. The detaiied restrictions surrounding diet, rnarriage, and buBa1 procedures in Leviticus exemplify a Symbolic patrolling of cultural borders. For ferninine creule texts which negotiate identity through semial exchanges, the regulations surroundhg rnarriage are significant in de6ning the border between cdturd belonging and alienation. In reveaüng how these accepted social structures function, Kristeva exposes the complexities and instabilities of identity which such regulations atternpt to

- -- l4 Bath KeUy Oliver and Iris Young extend the cuiturai appiications of Kristeva's approach. Oliver suggests. for instance. chat one way of understanding the oppression of women is as a conflation with the abjection of the mother. Without a discourse to account for maternai separating processes and because of patriarchal stereohrpes which contlate woman with body. ail women become abjected withui contemparary cuiture as a misplacement of the abjection of the maternai body. See Oliver 160. Iris Young. meanwhiie. argues that "bonkriine"pups in pampamcuiar(people who are not instantly recognizable as ûther or same) are both abjected by dominant culnirirs and enact the process of abjection within their awn societies due io the Ynbiguous position they simultaneousiy cepcesent and expience. A "consciouness-raisingr*in tem of tecognizing the instability and indMdualîQ of al1 identities is Young niggests. necemq Io prweni continoed oppression of these pups. See lris Young 145-55. contain. Moreover, in delineating the rnechanisrns that maintain boundaries, Kristeva provides a theoretical expianation of how constra.int tùnctions within society (a discussion more or less absent in Glissant's version of creolbation).

Despite these socio-political appiications of abjection as a destabiiizing practice, severai theorists have criticized Kristeva's approach as conservative. arguing that the repetition of Symbolic primacy and subordination of semiotic elements effectively limits cultural subversion. Ann Rosalind Jones, for instance, connects Kristeva's temporary withdrawai fiom political issues in 1984 to an essential arnbiguity within her theory which reinforces the Symbolic by conceiving the social world as an "immovable stmcture" (66).

Although critiques such as these do point to the practical difficulties of implementing heterogeneity as a political practice, descxiptions of Kristeva's theory as disengaged seem based on a re-affirmation of oppositions between serniotic md symbolic rather than on a recognition of the operation working to deconstruct both spaces. In fact, Kristeva argues for a recognition of the multiple and individudieci experiences of subjecthood which result fiom heterogeneous serniotic-symboiic relationships. In a 1980 interview, Kristeva herself states that the trouble with feminism as a category of'analysis is its group politics which, in her opinion, foreclose the dimensions of individuai identity and individuai negotiations of serniotic and symbolic. Kristeva argues that feminisrn's goal should be "to try, in every situation and for every woman, to find a proper articulation of these two elements. What does 'proper' mean? That which best fits the specific history of each woman, which expresses her better" (Portable 371). Knsteva thus argues that her narrative of individuai identity formation is a vital mode of analysis for disrupting social categories such as those which determine the ferninine creoIe. IUthough Knsteva's theory can therefore be defended in terms of its poIiticai potential, critics such as Jones do point to an element of complicity within Kristeva's process which differentiates her approach fiom that of Glissant. Specifically, Kristeva's concept of the thetic break and the necessary role she posits for symbolic elements within the sign-g process differ fiom Glissant's affirmation of constant transformation.

Abjection is a process of re-affirming the thetic break, re-establishing the border between what is socially signifiable and what is not, within "the same motion" by which semiotic excess disrupts those discrete boundaries (Powers 3, emphasis mine). Kristeva asserts that the border between semiotic and symbolic elements is as necessary to the signi@ng process as those moments of semiotic dismption which produce new meaning. In order to exist as a coherent subject within society, Kristeva realizes, one must fiilfil1 at lem some of society's demands. Although Glissant acknowledges the expression of confluences and citation of existing categones as inevitable within the processes of Relation, he describes their potential for creativity as limited. For Glissant, new configurations of identity and a focus on prornoting transformation define crossnilturai potential. The element of cornpticity in Kristeva's process provides a way to interpret the charges of patriarchal and colonial collusion which have ben leveled at Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson in a way which does not biame these writers, but rather acknowkedges the importance of these moments within ferninine creole process.

Knsteva's narrative of subject formation thus validates points of stasis and complicity with existing discourses that Glissant's concept of creole identity does not. For these ferninine creoie wnters and for Kristeva, to dernotish Symbolic structures completely wodd be to eliminate a part of subjecthood (and, indeed, an unsustainabIe position within signification),just as to deny colonial influences wodd be to reject a part of creole identity. Kristeva's approach thus expands Glissant's foçus on processes of transformation to address how constraint hnctions in society. For feminine creole texts, a dynamic which vaiidates both change and synthesis, complicity and contradiction, provides a more comprehensive account of the identity transactions they are making. ldentity construction is as much a hnction of boundaries and Iitsas it is of creative transformation.

Kristeva inflects the monotony of Glissant's joyous approach to creolization with a recognition of the loss and contradiction inherent to subjectivity. In developing a theory of the subject in relation to the theietic break, Kristeva describes identity processes as marked by moments of violence, exclusion and melancholy. Powers of Horror stresses that abjection is a "vioient, dark revol[t] of being," a painfût process of continual self- rejection within identity:

During that course in which "1" become. 1 give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence oPa convdsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. [t abjects. (Powers 3)

In other words, Krîsteva's formulation descnies the emotional experience of border crossing not only as an affirmationof change, but ais0 as a painfui separation fiom semioticl materna1 influences which are at once vital and threatening to the subject. In that identity is, in both creoIe and ferninine terms, a process of continual border crossing, this representation includes expenences of violence and pain as well as the empowering modes of Glissant's theory. Indeed, Dunbar-Nelson's, Rhys's and Melville's texts are repeatedly marked by both self-;Inicted and extemaiiy directed violence, as weii as by experiences of exclusion and rejection. bisteva's change in emphasis frorn the possibilities of errantry to the costs of shifting identity processes marks the duality of ferninine creole experience.

In conceiving of gender as a cultural practice, abjection fùrther addresses certain gaps within creole theory as it applies to Wnting by women. Although Glissant's work illuminates the movement of cuIturaI identities, in not addressing gender difference he assumes a male viewpoint. As the conclusion to Caribbean Discourse makes explicit,

Glissant appeals to a male audience in his cal1 for cultural re-invention:

If the reader bas followed these arguments up to this point. I would wish that, through the twisting complexity of my approaches to Caribbean experience, he rnay manage to catch this voice rising hmunexpected pIaces: yes, and that he may ~rnderstandit. (256)

The ways in which gender can determine social expectations and material circumstances are elided From Giissant's approach, making the inclusion of Kristeva's narration of gender- identified processes vital to understanding ferninine mole texts. In that both theories describe identity as a heterogeneous exchange with other categocies, the intersections between gender and culture provide a hrther and, in relation to feminine creole texts, necessary dimension for analysis. Dunbar-Nelson's, Rhys's and Melville's work descnies the experience of border crossing as more confiicted and painfùl than has been acknowledged by the (predominantfy mde) theorists who have authored creolization thus far.

Indeed, a final point of consideration in relation to Kristeva's theory concerns her understanding of the differences between male and femaie literary texts. ln Revolution in

Poetic Lanmiaee and two later essays, "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini" and

"Stabat Mater," Knsteva asserts that the pregnant mother and (male) avant-garde poetry aliow the only true access to the semiotic within languagd culture. The location of mateniity in this sense follows fiom Kristeva's understanding of presymbolic processes, while her position on art and the artist evolves hmthe distinctions that she makes between male and female experiences on entering languag. Although Kristeva opposes essentiaiized gender categuries, she does distinguish befween men and women based on the extent of their separation fiom the maternai body. Where, for men, Symbolic identity involves a clear separation fiom theù mothers, a daughter cannot decisively split fiom the mother because in so doing she would split herself, becoming abject in her femininity.

Women experience language more traumatically than men do and, according to Kristeva, cannot recover the stmiotic there. For this reason, Kristeva's textuai analyses focus onIy on maIe writers such as Joyce, Lautréamont and Mallarmé as recovering the semiotic within language.

While tfüs position on the gendered artist cleariy exemplifies Kristeva's difficult relationship with feminism, the refûsal of these forms of semiotic expression does not necessarily foreclose upon women's writing, as Elizabeth Grosz has argued (9 1 -2).

Instead, 1 propose that ait hough Knsteva does assert women cannot recover the semiotic within language as easily as men, their position on the borders of signification cm allow for privileged expressions of abjection. In other words, while Kristeva's geneaiogy of the subject concludes that women rnay not occupy as secure a position within Ianguage as men and so cannot employ the recuperative strategies that writers such as Joyce do, her position also suggests that women constantiy contend with the space of abjection. Rather than straightforward reconstructions of the semiotic, women writers express a process of simultaneously recognizing and repressing elements of ciifference. Writing abjection is not the same as recovering semiotic elements but, in that those disniptive aspects are present amid re-assertions of boundary and division, the two concepts overiap. In a process sirnilar to Glissant's description of "threatening excess" and "drearny tiagility," abject narratives play dong the boundaries of identity in a process which is simultaneously inspiring and sinister. My appropriation of abjection for an andysis of feminine creole writing therefore begins fiom the position that both sexes can write the abject, with women in fact occupying a privileged, if it can be called that, space within the process. As the conclusion to Powers of Horror rnakes explicit, abjection "illuminates the Iiterary scnption of the essential struggle that a writer (mm or woman) has to engage in ..." (208, itaiics mine). Not ody do both men and women dramatize the changing crises of identity wiiich are "the horror of being" but literature itself is essential in unveiling these processes.

A Working Mode1 of the Feminiae Crcole

In combining Glissant's version of creolmtion with that of Kristeva's gendered subject, 1 am expanding the scope of each theoretical application. Although no identity in process such as the feminine creole can ever be conclusively schematized, textuai analysis requires the reading strategies and thematic guidelines offered by a worhg model.

Without assertions and polemics, as both Glissant and Knsteva recognize, thid concepts of identity would be meanîngIess ceiebrations of relativity. I am also attempting a creole theoreticai act in joining Kristeva's work, based as it is on European concepts of signification, with Glissant's Canïbbean theory. By ernpIoying culturally disparate analytical modes toward what 1 believe will be a productive interpretive process, 1 am replicating the kinds of cross-cultural interrelations Glissant descnies within a gender- inclusive analysis.

As a first and founding concept, my model of the feminine creole is a model of process, of shifting identity positions and wilimited possibility. Adapting and appropriating concepts of abjection, errantry and rhizomatic exchange in which each and every identity is extended and reformulated through its relation to others, rny model describes gender and culture intersecting each other in diverse ways. According to

Kristeva, gender is itself a heterogeneous concept, consisting of many possible formations of social identification and disniptive difference rather than only the binaries of male and female. Plurality is similarly fiindamentai to Glissant's concept of cross-cultural interaction. hyideai of pure or authentic culture is defeated by the creole continuum. which incorporates not only a plurality of cultural influences but also the complex and non-linear interactions which have occurred over centuries between settler cultures.

Moreover, heterogeneous gender configurations combine with the cross-cultural possibilities suggested by Glissant to produce interactive, constantly shifting, and non- linear perspectives on the lineaments of an impermanent, multiply-defked, and fùndarnentaily dynarnic feminine creole identity.

Despite these relational processes, however, feminine creole identity is not without direction or definition. Foliowing fiom Glissant's ideas of errantry and rhizomatic exchange, the ferninine creole fiinctions as a deüberate and strategic wandering in which each writer manipulates the identity possibilities open to her. These juxtapositions of one identity term against another, although wandering in the sense of embracing process and defjing iinearity, are nevertheless shaped by distinct regional and historicai contexts. Afko-Caribbean and English fomofpoweri knowledge can, for instance, be used against each other in texts which incorporate both perspectives. in other (Knstevan) words. the feminine creole cannot fully escape symboiic meaning, aithough the repeated and inevitable ruptures of the thetic break fundion as a disruptive strategy which reveals the assumptions and exclusions behind eac h assertion of t he Symbolic. Kristeva's gender- inclusive semiotics intervene in Glissant's cultural errantry to drive the "wanderings" of these texts in new directions. [dentities are uniiimited in potential, in the intersections and configurations they may eventuaby make, but they remain provisionaily restrained by the persistent and rnenacing presence of social and historical constraints.

The idea of deliberate as opposed to aimless wandering fiinher assens a lirnited agency in the ability to employ oppositionai perspectives provocatively. Xlthough bound by the discursive constraints which poststrucniralists Michel Foucault and Edward Said have so influentially posited, the (fded) resistance to categories of identity is itseif a mode of agency. '5 The multiple discourses surrounding feminine creole identity create a

"threatening excess" of identity categories which cmthen be deliberately juxtaposed.

Dunbar-Nelson, Rhys and Melville di empIoy oppositional perspectives in their work which evidently comment on each other. in 3s deliberate wandenng, the feminine creole mediates between discursive restraint and individual agency, between giobal dynamics and discrete experience, between uniimited process and very specific considerations of time and place.

l5 Foucault essentially argues tbat e.upend kwwledge is coii5micted by power discourses. See Foucault 14832. Edward Said dekates how such disciimve pmductions of knowIedge hinaion in Orientahm. See Said ûrientaiism. Thus typified by its dynarnic manipulation of cultural and gender positions, my mode1 of the feminine creole fiirther theorizes contradiction and constraint as productive components of these negotiations. Where Glissant dismisses moments of complicity with oppressive discourses as imaginatively barren, the feminine creole incorporates constraint as a way of contending with the haunting power of colonial and patriarchal pasts.

Abjection provides a guide for this notion in its description of subjectivity as founded on

"an opposition that is vigorous but pervious. violent but uncenain," and which forces a continuai reassertion of social boundan'es (Powers 7). Within this repetition, this incessant reformulation of the thetic break, change and movement inevitably occur so that constraint is essential to the imaginative potential of feminine creole identity. Moments of complicity with patriarchal or colonial discourses in these texts are not ternpomy set- backs in cross-cultural exchange, but in fact produnively revise the parameten of those negotiations. Extant discursive constmcts not only direct the kinds of feminine creole processes that are possible, but their manipulation and repetition are ftndamentally creative sources within that practice. Creativity, an essential concept in this analysis both in transforming identity and in producing works of art, thus iies in both movement and connection. Syntheses and confiuences are as important to the ferninine creoie as its affirmation of Buidity and dynamic process. Creoiiig fisteva's terminology, the ferninine creole is an aesthetics of vigorous excess and pervious boundaries, violent rupture and uncertain connection.

Incorporating gender as a concept for anaiysis, rny mode1 argues for an understanding of the feminine creole as distinct fiom extant male versions of creoIe identity. Elements of violence, melancholy, excIusion and conflict stnictwe these texts by creole women while male theorists such as Wilson Harris and Glissant himself have focused on more affirmative experiences of subjectivity in process. Although ferninine creole texts do incorporate positive moments, they also describe the pain and uncertainties of shifiing identity positions. For Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson, the double exciusions produced by patriarchal and colonial discourses are inescapable cornponents of their writing. Where creolition posits that arnbiguous identity positions cm involve constructive interrogations, Kristeva's understanding of abjection as Moient exclusion explains the persistent and vital presence of those themes in feminine creote writing. An

"errant" synthesis such as t propose, which proMsionally assumes and diswds elernents of the two theories, both affirms the potential of dynarnic identities and reveals the painhl fosses and psychological divisions produced by subjectivities in constant trac with the abject.

My mode1 of the feminine creole aIso incorporates Iinguistic analysis as tùndarnental to the re-vision of identity. For Kristeva and Glissant, the recovery and advancement of heterogeneity is a linguistic as well as discursive project. Language must be negotiated and revitaiized through disniptive strategies so that it is no longer a regulating entity but open to endless change and possibility. Rhys, Dunbar-Nelson and

Melville put the forms and stnictures of the English Ianguage into play, fiagmenting sentences, switching Iinguistic codes, appropriating and subverting "canonical" texts. Yet, at other points these texts repeat and reahstandard grammatical constructs.

Language, like identity processes, is thus a site for the negotiation of cuitrtral boundaries.

The aiternation between fodexpression and disniptive fragments becomes a sualegy for reading ferninine creole subjectMty in these texts. A "naturai poetics," for the ferninine creole, eKists in fond innovation, in the dialectic between semiotic poetry and symbolic structure.

The feminine creole is thus a model of dynamic identity directed and defined by the manipulation of discursive parameters. Distinctions between Caribbean creole, New

Orleans creole and contemporary creole represent the historical and regional diversity, the

"opacityl' which Glissant sees as precluding a reductive, essentiaiking sarneness which would instate (ferninine) creoIe as an altemate identity rather than IimitIess process.

Distinct from many male-authored versions of creoliition, the ferninine crecte theorizes constraint as an essential and productive component of these errant transactions.

Emotional focus is also expanded beyond the celebratory modes of Gtssant's theory to include the loss and division, "the horror of being" so effectiveiy theonted by abjection.

Conversely. the dienation and individuaiity which are essential components of Kristeva's psychoanaiytic focus, are recontextuaiized within Glissant's encompassing and inclusive process of infinite becoming. The individuai now acts within a global dynamic, affected not only by personal experience but also by historical and regional cornrnunities.

Alienation is not simply the failure of psychoanaiysis but a valid and productive perspective. Ultimateiy, the version of feminine creole that 1 am advancing is, in Glissant's phrase, "an aesthetics of rupture and comection," a senes of creative maneuvers around the borders which wnstruct language and identity.

Progessively complicatùig the tentative model of feminine creole set out above,

Dunbar-Nelson, Rhys and Melville's fiction ultimateIy generates questions about the sustainabiiity of creole practice. Pushed to a series of crises in these texts, is the feminine creole a tmly revolutionary mode of conceiving identity? Or, in thei. inclusion of conmaint, is the final message of these texts that oppressive discourses perpetuate themsehes even within the processes which seek to transfom them? My first chapter will address Jean Rhys's fiction as most cleariy articulating feminine creole dynamics.

Aithough approaching Rhys first confounds historical sequence in this study, her work provides a usefirl starting point in describing the intersection of feminine and creole as process and restraint. Moreover, within the creole continuum, history is a duration which resists linear ternporality. To move between moments foIIowing strands of thought is thus a typically creole act.

Rhys's shon story "Mixing Cocktails" juxtaposes English and Afio-Caribbean cultural reference points to describe the perspective of a white creole girl. A classic exampte of feminine creole process, this shon nmative effectively iilustrates many of the initial ideas on linguistic impurity and cultural boundary crossing 1 have set out through my readings of Glissant and Kristeva. Rhys's founh novel, Good Morning Midniaht engages with Glissant's notion of errantry to describe a migrant, expatriate comrnunity in

1939 Paris. A trac in language and identity as well as a source of creative disniption, errantry contrasts the representation of society's rules and regulations in this novel. Good

Moming Midnirrht fiirther articulates the alienation of abjection through Rhys's main character, who is pushed to an identity crisis in the final pages. No longer able to make her peace with society's demands upon her integrity, Rhys's heroine abjects her protean self and accepts society's definitions. This ending not only raises questions about the fiiture of feminine creole process, about the continrilng paintiil and codlicted nature of those identities, but also suggests the persistent force of oppressive sociai rnechanisms. Sirnilar to the ending of Good Mornina. Midniaht, and providing a nanrral continuity within this study, Dunbar-Nelson's stories repeatedly ponray identities in crisis.

More conservative than Rhys in grammatical structure and in replicating conventional plot lines, Dunbar-Nelson's thematic preoccupation with moments of identity crisis nevenheless repiicates Rhys's approach in questioning repressive constmcts. Although these texts ultimately re-affirm existing conventions, the multiple, mutually exclusive definitions of creok identity which provoke these crises remain. suggesting that creole identity here is a process of crisis and its repression, excess and its abjection. "Little Miss

Sophie" and ''On the Bayou Bridge" cm be read against each other as two very different engagements of abjection within similar plotiines. The motifs of sacrifice and rnurder fiinction respectively to dernonstrate the re-containment of identity and the violent assenion of racial bigotry. "The Stones of the Village," meanwhiie, translates Glissant's deliberate assurnption of identity into a racialized narrative of passing. Reveding the costs of assuming another raciai and ethnic identity, this story also suggests the subversive potential within such acts, a potential which Melville's shape-shifting poetics will exploit.

In many ways, Melville's fiction ties together elements of both Rhys and Dunbar-

Nelson's work. Writing with an awareness of contemporary theoretical issues, Melville revises Glissant's dismissal of trickster strategies to assen their creatïve as weii as subversive potential. In Melville's narratives, shape-shifting becomes a strategy not only to disrupt existing constmcts. but also to combine cultural tenns productively, transfonning them into new aesthetic and subjective expressions. The story "Eat Labba and Dn'nk Creek Water" re-constnicts passing in this sense as a trickster suategy, a crossing of racial boundaries which produces exciàng pomi'bilitied matenal opportunities, as weii as persond ioss and famify division. Melville Werpicks up on the qualification of creole possibili that Rhys makes in the conclusion to Good Morning. Midnight.

Engaging with historicd legacies of colonialism and sexual violence, Melville's stories end with a challenge for feminine creole theory: Are re-visions of identity possible that use constraint productively without repiicating the oppressions of past discourses? Can the feminine creole be pursued beyond its representation in these texts to suggest the means to a less abjected and abjecting fûture? The final pages of this study will explore the ferninine creole as a politics and poetics for the friture, asking whether it can achieve its transfonative potential and refomulate restraint in more enfranchising terms. Rupture and Connection: The Errant Identities of Jean Rhys's White Cmk Heroines

Any measurement mua take in10 acconnt the position of the obsemer. Therc is no such hgas measuremenc absohte. there is on& measurement relative. Relative to what is an important part of the question This bas been my difficuity. The di[nculty with my life. Thme well-built uig points. those physid detenninants of parents, background. school. famiiy. birth. mamage. dm&. love. wock are themselves as much in motion as 1 am. Whai should be stable. stiirts. What am told is solid slips. Jeanette Winterson Gu1 Svmmctries

In a 1972 review, V. S. Naipaul described the "break in a life" as an essential theme of al1 Jean Rhys's work A break within the process of living, an instant of rupture and then re-connection with the demands of social existence, aptly describes the recurrent contradictory movements that typiSf Rhys's feminine creole poetics. In articulating these transactions benveen shifting "trig points," to use Winterson's phrase, Jean Rhys's fiction establishes the iimits and possibilities of the ferninine mole. Her work represents the fractures and continuities of migrant identity and dienation as NaipauI presciently suggests; more to the point, however, her heroines exemplifi the dreamy Fragility that erupts as threatening excess in Glissant's imagining of creole identity. Rhys inaugurates my arpkoration of the feminine creole because her britliant and disturbing portraits of the intelligent, semai, yet abjected woman produce an unsurpassed vision of the arnbivdent dynamics of creolization. In no other writer do the poetics and poiitics of creolization intersect with such tellhg and unpredictable results, making Rhys impossible to ignore in the construction of an inclusive modernity To be a white creole woman in early twentieth-century Domlliica is to be both

Caribbean and English and neither tùlly Canibean nor fuHy Engtish. While these contextual locations are important for understanding the parameters of Rhys's white creole identity, a historical survey also reveais that the ferninine creole is not a static, composite cultural product, but is constantly in flux within those pararneters of time and place. 'White cockroach" according to Afro-Caribbeans and "mad creoiei' according to English colonizers, Rhys's heroines are doubly defined and doubiy excluded in cultural terms.' Sexually active and consequentiy categorized as Licentious within English society (a licentiousness Sied to culturai/ raddifference), Rhys's heroines are exploited, romanticized and condemned for their sexuality by European men. Women such as Sasha Jansen and Antoinette Cosway struggle to conform to patriarchd expectations while also reaiiig that these are empty disguises. Rhys's heroines' starkly expressed dienation is itself a reminder of the tepressive power of social conventions and of the epistemological categories which f'to contain or explain their predicament. This insistence on the social, economic, and coloniai parameters of white creole identity make it necessary to situate Rhys's writings both geographically and cuiturally. Her narratives are notoriousiy about culturai displacements and disidentifications; therefore, this project cannot be one of socio- historically pinning dom and defining an identity, but of exploring the grounds and dimensions of a fluid identity formation Creole identity, then, is a process of continual becoming rather than merely or even only a hybrid state of being.

I Charlotte Bronlii's Sane Evre pomays the most famous English version of the mad. creole woman. Rhys's wriüng back to this text in Wide Sar~assoSea decon.tbis stereorype whiIe also mealing the white creole's post-ernancipaiion esdusion nnhin the CaniBoth English and Dorninican culture is itself composai of several cornpeting traditions. The island of Dominica was inhabited before European presence becarne dominant by a changing procession of Cd,Arawak and Taino peoples. As Patrick Baker emphasizes in his socio-histoncal study, Centriny the Peri~hery,this population movement established an eady tradition of cross-cultural contact (18). Columbus's

1492 "discovery" of the Caribbean, while devastating the Amerindian population on other isiands, did not completely decimate the Cani population in Dominica With a

Carib territory existing to this day, Dominica is unique in retaining a physical and imaginative awareness of Amerindian presence.' Elaine Campbell emphasizes the significance of this presence in symbolizing the independence and diversity of

Dominican society (350),whiie haMorgan in Rhys's Vovaee in the Dark articulates her own autonomy as ferninine creole through this Amerindian pas. recounting that

"The Caris indigenous to this island were a warlike tnbe and their resistance to white domination, though spasmodic, was fierce" (9 1)- Ha twentieth-century white creole woman can identifi with the Cm% people fighting against eariy coloniai domination, then history is not a linear sequence but, as Glissant asserts, a durationai series of imaginative connections and separations. Amerindian presence in DomùUca disrupts coloniai binaries of black-white, master-slave and points to a series of cornplex, non-

Iinear interactions beniveen colonial and native, past and present.

-- - - Caribbean the creole is dehxî ùy and yet excludeci hmboth cuiiures. Domiaica is the only Caniisland with a signiticanl Amriadian population (appmxhateIy 3500 Cmï ppieüve in the territo~), Despite exueme poverty and nilhiral dienation suffered under coionhi de. the Carib or Kaiinago people have. since 1970, had an active mice in Domhican parliament and have recentiy panicipaied in giobal aboriginal ri@ movemenis. See Ri* The -. -. Dorninican culture's dynamic multiplicity can also be seen in the colonial interactions which occurred on the island. Spanish government in the Caribbean was initiaiiy concentrated on larger, sugar-producing islands and had little effect on

Dominica. During the early seventeenth century, however, as other European powers began to colonize the Caribbean, Dominica became a disputed temtory. France was first to settle Dominica in 1635 and French language. Catholicisrn and geneaiogy remain important to island society. England, however, also claimed Dominica, and for years the island was altemately declared the property of one or the other colonial power. British possession and plantation society oficidy began in 1763, bringing a small nurnber of British families (white creoles) as well as large numbers of ex-African slaves to the island. Jean Rhys's maternai great-gandfather, lames Lockhart, anived during this periud, first managing and then in 1824 buying a sugar plantation at Grand

Bay, Dorninica. Rhys's family thus had a lasting comection with the complexities of

Dorninican society (Angier 22). A sense of caribbeanness or millanité, to use

Glissant's term, is not a passing or appropriated sentiment in Rhys's version of white creole identity, but is founded in a prolonged engagement with the land.

The altercations between French and English as weil as the speciai interests of smailer settling groups reveal that colonization itseff was not singdar or monoiithic here, but prey to multiple influences and composed of diverse hi~tories.~Reveaiing the inconsistencies of this process, French traditions were creoiized over English, so that, as Carole Angier ironically notes, "Dominica was owned by England, but it was not

3 Adding to the cornplex inieractioos sbaping this period hm1635 to 1763. a numk of €ree "mlodpeople. escaped slaves [known as mmns). and pirates found the isolation and dïf6cult terrain of Dominiça an inducement to settle there. English. English clergymen preached austere, educated English sermons which no one

[in the French-based patois speaiùng population] understood.. ." (5). This juxtaposition of English and French fiirther pervades Rhys's ''continental" or

European-set fiction, suggesting a continuity between the absurdities of colonial history and the destructive cultural mistranslations that are the hallmark of her work.

Englishness itself is not a "pure" cultural category in the Dominicm context either, since "Like so many 'English' colonial families, wys's] was nrit English but Welsh

Irish and Scottish (Angier 6). Difierence is not onIy a kature of the intersections between contending cultural groups but exists at the hem of the presumed homogeneity of groups. [n these ways, the history of Dorninica, despite attempts to classifi its components and emplot its ci~ronolo~~,~seems, rather, to prove Glissant's point that there is no authenticity, oniy an endess series of cross-cultural exchanges.

Both English and slave cultures were essential to the developing structure of creole society untiI the mid- 1800s when the abolition of slavery resulted in the failure of the plantation system and increased politid power for people of colour.

Altercations between planters and ex-slaves du~gthis period were sometimes violent, with Rhys's faniily eaate among others being bunit in the census riots of 1 This postslavery crisis was not only economic and politicai, but also an identity crisis for the white creoIe ruhg class. Creole tamilies suffered EngIish condemnation as

Severai English nineteenthccn~historians consrnicted FemarkabIy AngIo-cenUic interpretations ofCaribôean histov. See. for instance, James Anthony Froude. Although nationalist rewritings effkriveîy assert Alro-Caribbean pcrspffllves Dominicaa culture is still more cornpie.. than any one Mewpoini or historical writing can ducidaie. 5 Ceasus takiog was inteqceted by the newîy W Wanipopulation as the ktmove in a remto slavery and consequentiy pmmpted a series of flots in Roseau and on severai plantation estata. See Gregg 20-22. representatives of the slave trade and were reviled by Mo-Ckbbeans as parasitic oppressors. Perhaps more violently and significantiy than the cross-cultural connections made with Amerindian history or the French-English contest over colonization, this postsiavery crisis idorms Rhys's representation of white creole identity. Veronica Marie Gregg writes tint, "mys] grasps that her own locational identity as a Creole woman is a fbnction of, and can be made inteugible only in terms of, this [postslavery] penod, which was both a beginning and an end" (24). This postslavery moment is defining in that it sets out the tenns, the histoncal basis, for the violent fractures and re-connections which animate Rhys's fiction. Emancipation not only marks the end of colonial power structures, transfomiing white creoles from a priviieged ruling class to a dispossessed and despised group of outcasts but also changes the terms and parameters of Dominican creolimtion, As Wide Sar~assoSea's postslavery setting makes evident, emancipation is a founding moment for the white creole, a point of "hîstorical entangIement7' in Glissant's words, which tums the Iegacy of coloniaiism toward a new set of exchanges and exclusions (CD26).

As both Edward Brathwaite's and Edouard Glissant's attention to historical detail reveais, history specifies the linguistic, racial, and ethnic limits of creole identity, but within those parameters diverse possiiiiities and configurations can occur. In this sense, Rhys's work is intensely preoccupied wiîh historicai legacies, with the competing elements that shape white creole identity, yet those socio-histonc detinitions are ultirnately depIoyed within an existentid quest for identity. Rhys's heroines are native to Dominica and yet also clearly not; coloNzation itseif produces conflicting identifications with French and Englisb cultures, while the postslavery moment both defines white creole identity and prevents straightforward inclusion in either English or Caribbean societies. Perhaps the only way to express these multiple identifications and exclusions then becomes through an identity in process and on trial, a deliberate errantry which endlessly assumes and discards points of view. Rhys's writing might then be construed not only as an agonized expression of but also as a dynarnic and agonistic intervention in the production of identities tom between desire and historicd constraint as her heroines certainiy are. According to Veronica Marie

Gregg, "One of the tùndamental obsessions of Jean Rhys's writing is an insistence on the symbiotic relationship between history and self-writing and the attempt to

3, reconceptualize both in Edouard Glissant's tenns, as 'consciousness at work'. ..

This mediation between self and society suggests another way to employ early criticism of Rhys's writing, which focused on the ways in which her art reîlected her life. This assumed autobiographical basis initiaily produced reductive readings of

Rhys's texts, as ludith Kegan Gardiner notes:

When a writer like Joyce or Eliot writes about an aiienated man estranged from hirnself, he is read as a portrait of the diinished possibilities of human existence in modern society. When Rhys writes about an alienated woman estranged fiom herself, critics applaud her perceptive but narrow depiction of female experience and tend to narrow her vision even tùrther by labeling it both pathologicaI and autobiographical. (247)

60th Gardiner and Helen Carr convincingly argue, in opposition to these approaches, that Rhys is a politicaily charged and cuituraiiy relevant EquaUy conwicingly,

6 For a sumrnaq of these autobiographical and 'pathologizïng" appmaches, see Gregg 20 1 n. 1. however, Teresa O'Connor's in-depth study of Rhys's exercise books reveals that many of her fictional themes and events do have a bais in spdcpersonai experiences.

Veronica Marie Gregg's thorough historicai investigation Iikewise argues that Rhys writes her own fady history into the background of Wide Sar~assoSea, including detaiis such as the post-emancipation buniing of her maternai Lockhart family estate.

For the ferninine creole, this symbiotic relationship between history and self-writing articulates the agency of the individual within society. Never simply an isolated subject, nor simpiy subject to historicai constraints, Rhys's heroines experience the world abjectly, speaking From the limits of identity. This marginal position. constantly battting the strictures of convention, is the source of their insight into the auel world of sexuaiity and sociality.

Rather than continue the criticai opposition between Uys's political relevance and self-representation, the debate cm itself be read as demonstrating the errant processes at work in her texts. Rhys, in a move parallel to Glissant's assertion of an active Caribbean consciousness, asserts individual awareness within the bounds of socio-historicai meaning. Both seif and other, author and fictionai creation, autonornous individual and cuitural product, Rhys's herches siide in and out of existing social constructs. Texts SUC~as GOod Mornina Midnipht traverse the borders between personai experience and politidy aware fictions, mediating between self and society in a creoIig proczss which acknowiedges the formative power of historical constructs even as it asserts the imaginative force of self-representation.

This re-reading of the historicat and autobiographical elements in Rhys's work is, essentiaiiy, an enactment of Glissant's theory. History understood as chronology and geneaiogy is replaced by cross-cuItural, durabonal interactions that mediate between society and the individual. The body of this chapter explores these shifting parameters of white creole identity at play within the fiction. Read accordiig to

Glissant's concepts of rupture and connection and enantry as a deliberate wandering,

Rhys's white creole narratives articulate a perspective which intervenes in modernist and postcolonial thought. Taking on canonical modemist texts and narrative techniques in Good Momine. Midnight, Rhys's heroine marks her difference as ferninine and creole. Similarly. Rhys's articulation of white creole femininity intervenes in postcoloniaiism's binary foundation (developed as it is fiom concepts of self7 Other and nowl then) to assert the cumplicating perspective of an identity which is both European and Caribbean, and neither fujly European nor fiilly Caribbean.

Rhys's white creole woman defies binaries and troubles historical-cultural categones through strategies of representation which locate only to dislocate, which rupture identity oniy to return to it in new forms.

"Muing Cocktails": (Dis)PIacing the White Crcok

"Mixing Cocktails," one of Rhys's early short stories, thematically and fomally exemplifies the dynamics of feminine creoIe self-fashioning+ The three-page sketch of childhood in Dominica places Rhys's female speaker as Engiish colonial only to displace that perspective with Afio-Caribbean tradition and in turn supplement both those perspectives with the Merdifference that fernininity entails. Rhys's writing style simifarly interrupts grarnmatidy correct maxitus and desfor behaviour with elhpses and phrases that Fragment and refiact codes of etiquette. "Mixing Cocktailsw

is, as the present continuous tense of the titie suggests, a narrative about identity in

motion, emerging in permutations and combinations that operate in the world of

dreams, reverie, memory and fantasy.

The narrative of "Mxing Cocktails" reproduces the diumal routine of the

narrator through the mechanism of what 1 shaii cal1 "telescopic voyeurism." At once

Iimiting and expanding what it sees, the telescope is a tool that enables the narrative

voice to make its perceptions both transient and unreliable while simultaneously

according to itself the flexibitity and muitiplicity (even cautious omniscience) that the

telescope's magnifjlng lens otfers. The eye here becomes a series of "Ys engaged in

the process of becoming.

The narrator spends the day dreaming in the hammock on the verandah, itself a

transitory space as the verandah is physicaliy located between home (with its Engiish

colonial associations here) and the extemai Caribbean environment. The namator,

who, despite her parents' British on'gins, grows up in Dominica, describes how her

dreams are seen as disturbing social behaviour and are invariably intruded upon by one

The midday dream was languid too - vague, tinged with melancholy as one stared at the hard, blue, blue sky. It was sure to be intempted by someone cailing to one to corne in out of the Sun. One was not to sit in the sun. One had been told not to be in the sun ... One would one day regret freckies. (163)

This passage reveals the manner in which c~lonialsociety imposes its code of conduct

upon the narrator's behaviour. SimuItaneousIy intenialiPng and resenting these

stnctures, the narrator accepts the socid controi that they represent while striving to maintain a precarious distance from this imposed Englishness. The repeated indefinite pronoun, "one," for instance, is at once a seif-reference and, in its fonnaiity, an articulation of social expectation. Mediating and distinguishing between self and the forces that constmct that identity, the repetition of "onen both emphasizes and ridicules social dernands. Sirnultaneously English and not, the narrator adopts a strategy of alternately repeating and challenging the requirements of colonial culture.

This shifting process is both an exemplification of Glissant's relational identity and an articulation of the constraints 1 have argued for within creole writing. The act of rejecting a concrete, or what Glissant terms "transparent," coloniai identity position for one which is not easily defined, which "plunges into the opacities of that part of the world," is an act of nipturing which opens up new possibiiities, new interrelational potential for the white creole (PR 20). The ambivalent attitude of the narrator, tom between dreams and social demands, shatters the opposition between coionid transparency and the opacity of the not easily defined. The narrator traffics with both opacity and transparency in this passage to create a new, creole dialogue of becoming, a cross-cuitural exchange, in Glissant's words, which is the form and content of this story. Like the description of star-gazing, another form of "telescopic voyeurism," the narrative is fiindamentally dialogic, asserting a transparent identification, "That's

Venus," only to undermine it through an ambiguous retum, "Oh,is that Venus" (1 62).

Opaque in that it is neither question nor reply, neither mation nor contradiction, this response composes one eIement of aeolization's errantly transparent and opaque exchange. In a similar sense, the speaker is preoccupied with the creative pssibility and opaque complexities which her dreams offer, while also parodying English commands which seek to define and circumscribe the white creole individud physically. These passages repeat English colonial edicts even as they register the namator's intervention in them; that is, the transparency of these edicts is caIled into question because it is impossible for the feminine creole subject to obey them even if she cornprehends their power. The speaker establishes her connection to colonial and subtly racial discourses (freckles entailing a darkening of the skin) in the same process that asserts the proliferating possibilities, the intemal and extemal dialogues, of a creole consciousness.

This repetition of English commands can, however, be understood as a part of larger, and indeed creative, feminine creole dynamics through incorporating the boundaries and limits inherent to the process of abjection. Constantly reformulating the borders of identity, abjection repeats social constructs within a process that also incorporates difference and that disruptive difference is, according to fisteva the source of creativity (Revolution 62). In other words, the repetition of Englishness enables the articulation of a white creole consciousness which is both connected to and separate from colonial culture. In this sense, parody is also a repetition with a difference which creates space for new articulations of creole experience.' The inclusion of constraint within cross-cuItural exchange recuperates mirnicry, parody and trickster strategies as productive components of these identity transactions. Glissant's dismissal of subversive tactics as imaginatively limited is thus revised by this feminine creole narrative; indeed, both Rhys and Pauline Melville use parody creatively as well

See Linda Hutcheon's disasion in A ïheorv of Parodv 4 1. as deconstmctively. In other words, the two concepts of creation and destruction or diversion, which in Glissant's theory are opposed to each other, in fact work together in the ferninine creole, taking apart so that they put together new forms. These ruptures and connections characterize the individual's relationship to personal and communal forces, and expose the white creole's fiaught relationship to English culture. Colonial power no longer appears racidly or culturaily justified in a context which displaces any notion of purity or iiiear hierarchy.

ExempliQing the linguistic dimension of creoiiing processes, sentence structure here enacts a cornplementary fulfihent and disruption of grammatical rules.

Social edicts are expressed in direct and complete sentence forms ("One was not to sit in the sun") while dreams. those elements which disrupt the English family/ social dynamic, are recounted in descriptive fragments, repetitions and eIIipses ("The midday dream was Ianguid too - vague, tinged with melancholy as one stared at the harh blue, blue sky"). The repetition of "blue" in this sentence, evoking as it does a tactile and subjective bodily response, suggests the intrusion of semiotic sensation amid syrnbolic logic. A non-quantifiable force of disruptive dissonance, the semiotic here inserts the physicd and wacative qualities of colour within conventional descriptions of landscape. The narrative itseifdraws attention to this a&n through conuasting the English aunt's stereotypicd observation about the sea ("Couid anything be more lovely?") with the speaker's semiotically Uifanned sentence hgment, 'The deepea, the loveliest in the world.. ." (163). Replicating the shifting processes of identity, language here also appropriates, deconstnicts and reconfigures conventional edicts. Creolization is an unceasing process of linguistic becoming., putting the structures and forms of language into play just as it puts the terms and categories of identity into productive turmoiI.

Kristeva stresses the disruptive potentiai of ellipses which break up symbolic authonty in a practice which, "disturb[s] the transparency of the signifjing chain and open[s] it up to the material crucible of its production" (Revolution 10 1 ). The crucible of (re)production is, in other words, the matemdly identified semiotic, suggesting the foundation for a ferninine revolution in language. Linguistic innovation is, for

Knsteva, tied to invocations of the semiotic as a female-informed, antagonizing force.

When a writer such as Rhys serniotically disrupts Symbolic grammatical constructs and linear meaning, she is intempting patnarchal forms of Language with a femde- identified source of creativity. Wthin this pracess of linguistic and ferninine revolution, ellipses point to what cannot be described, to an antagonistic moment,

"pregnant" with possibility. before alterity is abjecteri through the processes of negativity and rejection. In other words, eIIipses indicate the lirnits of signification the way in which serniotic difference is covered over by language, in ways similar to the narrator's denaturaiization of identity categories. Even more graphically, the altemations in pronouns fiom "I" to "you" to "one" in this passage and throughout the narrative enact a displacement of nilW identifications. Semiotic disruption haunts the language of this narrative. an antagonizing force which drives the ruptures and connections made by the creole subject discoverhg a means of expression. White creoIe subjectivity in this narrative is constnicted not only in relation to

English society but dso Afro-Caribbean culture. Following the midday dream, the speaker continues to describe her evening in distinctly "Caribbean" tenns:

The verandah gets dark very quickly. The sun sets: at once night and the fireflies. A warm, velvety, sweet-smelling night, but fnghtening and disturbing if one is done in the hammock. Ann Twist, Our cook. the old obeah woman has toId me: 'You al1 must'n look too much at de moon .. .' If you fdl adeep in the moonlight you are bewitched, it seems ... the moon does bad things to you if it shines on you when you sleep. Repeated oflen ... ( 164)

Ironically reversing the English command not to sit in the sun, and suggesting the polarity of the two positions, this prohibition evokes another cultural category. The narratots knowledge of and implicit belief in obeah waniings suggests her identification at some Ievd with Mo-Caribbean culture. The speaker here has thus moved from English to Caribbean belief systems and, in her inability to sit peacehlly either in sunlight or moonshine, reveals the double exclusions involved in being white creole. The many connotations of moonshine, as magic, as Iiquor, as fabrication, türther point to the creative instability of language and to the dierences in meaning that cultural context can bestow. The opposition between day and ni&t aiso suggests the visual polarities of race, so that the narrative ultimatety undermines the exclusivity of those binary oppositions through iiiustrating the white creole narrator's trfic with both. Antiüanite is inseparable from the dynamic processes of Relation for the white creole because that expecience of Caribbeanness is defined by bofh colonial and Mo-

Caribbean so~~-histori~allegacies. in order to achieve seIf-enpression, the white creole must pefiormatively assume and discard elements of each identity, encapsulating Glissant's notion of the shifting transactions between belonging and difference.

This passage îùrther insists on the rules and regdations which structure Afio-

Caribbean culture. Despite the differences or even oppositions between their demands, both English colonial and Afro-Caribbean references here represent the mies that society [ives by and are in that sense symbolic elements. To define the Caribbean as semiotic in opposition to European society, which certain cntics have done in relation to Rhys's texts, essentializes both options and ignores how both societies regulate the individual's behaviour, thought, and e~~erience.~In other words, to draw a clear distinction between semiotic and symbolic spaces is to deny the heterogeneity which Kristeva asserts is so fùndamental to the processes which constmct identity:

Symbolic structure inhabits the semiotic just as the semiotic productively disrupts the

Symbolic. Moreover, to represent the Caribbean merely as semiotic excess is to deny the authority and regulating power of AFio-Caribbean culture. AM Twist's sayings intenupt the narator's thoughts just as her colonial family's do. Indeed, what the narrator is warned against by Afro-Caribbean culture in the idea of bewitching appears to be a traffic with the serniotic, with forces that disrupt social authority, and this is also the focus of English colonial prohibitions. The semiotic here is not an oppositiond space, but a dismptive force, a heterogeneity that ruptures and challenges aii eicisting social categories. This conceptual shift in the fiuiction of the semiotic fiom oppositional space to antagonizing force displaces binaries and r&rms the dynamic relationship between identity positions. As this refusal to privilege one culture over another reveals, the reai tension or conflict in this sîory is between dreams and social obligations. Dreams in this story intrude on and threaten the Symbolic order because they include serniotic elements.

Daydreams, representing a state between conscious thought and subconscious association. are not regulated and cannot be tùlly articulated as the ellipses used to describe them throughout this narrative exempli@. Incorporating serniotic disruption, dreams here initiate a sense of endless possibility within the parameters of white creole identity: ". ..the morning dream - mostly about what one would do with the endless blue day" (163). Not the semiotic itself, as that state is inarticulable within language and Symbolic experience, dreams here descnie intrusions and logical disruptions (such as the "blue day") which are the semiotic's presence within discourse. In this sense.

Rhys's speaker registers the deconstnrctive power of her dynamic, creolizing thought processes as well as their vigorous repression by both EngIish and Caribbean cultures:

"So soon does one learn the bitter Iesson that humanity is never content just to differ from you and let it go at that. Never. They must interfere, actively and cgrirnly, between your thoughts and yourself - with the passionate wish to level up everything and everybody" (163). Drearns and semiotic movement cannot constitute an identity in themselves but, according to this narrative, provide a disruptive context in relation to both English and Mo-Caribbean socid edicts. The creative potential instigated through semiotic disruption is also the dynamic force of Relation, so that both Glissant and fisteva's theorizations of dynarnic procas descnbe this narrative movement.

%Maure1 8 1-7 and Kloepfer. These kaught cultural identifications not only delineate the socio-histoncai influences at play within the short story but aiso intervene in postcoloniai readings of

Rhys's work. Rhys's dual affiliations with Europe and the Caribbean have initiated continuing debate. Waily Look Lai and V.S. Naipaul influentiaily included Jean Rhys within Caribbean literary canons following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in

1966; however, Edward Brathwaite has remained opposed to the placement of white creole texts within Caribbean literature (Contradictorv Omens 38). As my introduction explains. Brathwaite believes in an irreconcilable gulf between white and

Afro-Caribbean cultures.

This initial debate over Rhys's "authenticity" as a Caribbean writer continues within postcolonial criticism. Gayatri Spivak's 1985 article, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," posits that despite Rhys's voicing of the neglected white creole perspective in Wide Sareasso Sea, her novel remains bound by colonial culture, Ming to give expression to the experiences of Afro-Caribbean women such as

Christophine (253). Yet, as Benita Parry points out and as my introduction also suggests, Spivak does not explore the possibility that white creole experience may be a different form of Caribbean identity, rather than sirnply expatnate European. Parry writes that "[Spivak's] discussion does not pursue the text's representations of a Creole culture that is dependent on both pnglish imperialist and Afro-Caribbean cultures] yet singular, or its enunciation of a specific settler discourse, distinct from the texts of irnperialism" (37). In other words, purely negative definitions of the ferninine creole as not-European or not-Caribbean cmbe replaced by recognitions of that identity as a discrete subjectivity, a separate entity. Although de- by its complex dynamics, by what Maggie Humm describes as its "traffic" with others: white creole subjectivity is nevertheless a distinct identity position rather than simply an appendage of English and

Caribbean categories. The politics of becoming creole thus offer a particularly productive complication of postcolonial theory as not simpiy a dynarnic of identity and difference but of infinite and proliferating identities and dflerences. The white creole displaces notions of authenticity and originality through a process of transformation which postcolonial theory has yet to appreciate fuIIy.

Indeed, the notion of defining Rhys's work in terms of its "authenticity," its origins and right to be Caribbean or European, is directly opposed to what Glissant argues is the effi of creole dynamics. As "Mixing Cocktails" makes evident. creolization, while creating distinct identity positions, never articulates a unified space of enunciation, but rather a shitting series of English colonial, Mo-Caribbean and semioticaily disruptive interactions, Debates as to whether Rhys's creole texts adequately express Caribbean experience can themselves be read as oniy partial descriptions of creolization's uniimited potentiai. Ironicaily, Rhys's writing, which deconstmcts social categories and stereotypes, has in this way itself been subject to attempts to recontain it within existing culturai boundaries. Instead, "Mixing

Cocktails" iIlustrates the necessity of a Giissantian reading strategy which cornplicates any definition of Europeanness or Caribbeanness to assert the complex and inconclusive interactions occurring benveen those two putative essences. The white creole is a distinct identity space in its articulationof what it is not oniy to be informed by, but aiso to reconfigure creativdy, bath European and Caribbean cultures.

9 See Humm 1-12. The identity issues raised by this short story are not, however, limited to ethnic positionings. Rhys's speaker recounts her afternoon dream, a "matenalistic" one, specifically in tems of how femininity is constmcted within this white creole context:

It is of the days when one shall be plurnp and beautiful instead of pale and thin: perfectly behaved ùistead of awkward ... When one :vil1 Wear sweeping dresses and feathered hats and put gloves on with ease and delight ... And of course of one's maniage: the dark moustache and perfectly creased trousers... Vague, that. ( 164)

This passage clearly constmcts the narrator and the social compromises she will make in gendered tems since a creole man would have very different expectations of his hture. If sitting in the sun is forbidden (since Lieckles are more of a concem for women than men), cultural constructs are inextncably bound to and invaded by sexual difference. Despite repeating clichéd notions of colonial femininity, however, the speaker's ironic tone and inability to imagine an English mmiage and husband beyond extemal accoutrements also marks an aiternate rnovement of dissociation. The narrator articulates her conflicted reaction to gender expectations through her aunt, who embodies English femininity but is comically ünable to cope with the Caribbean environment: "1 should like to tau& at her, but i am a well-behaved little girl.. . Too well-behaved.. ." (1 64). Complicit in and resistant to social expectations, Rhys's narrator negotiates gender stereotypes through the same act and process by which she negotiates cultural constmcts. The ferninine creole is never only a dynamic cultural location but culture as it is hned and formuiated through the perceptions and expenences of femininity.

Gender thus compiicates and produces Wher leveis of merence withîn culturai tem, exemplifjhg why Glissant's masculine focus must be supplemented by bisteva's gender inclusive anaIysis in these feminine creole texts. The way in which gender informs mole identity becomes a central concem in Good Moming. Midnieht, where Rhys's heroine negotiates her placelessness through smal as welI as cultural clichés. [n its portrayal of a Young, white creole woman, "Miang Cocktails" exemplifies how semai difference intervenes in culturai debates. refiacting and multiplying those categories. In this way, "Mixing Cocktails" can be read as one articulation, one performance of ferninine creole processes of becoming. The conflicted aitemation between conformity and difference descnbed in this text results in the narrator's painfûl longing to be like "ûther People," yet the cultural location of these people rernains arnbiguously designated since an emphasis on "ûther" in this coio~aicontext can suggest a very different identification from the preceding forms of

~ngMness.~~In other words, "Othe? marks the narrator's desire for and difference hmEnglish colonial culture, whiie alsa indicating the binary "Othe? of colonial discourse, the racial and ethnic other which the narrator again longs for and is excluded from. "Otherness" in this sentence embodies the double excIusions and ambivalent desires of the white creole. The stov ironicalIy concludes with the staternent that, "Action, they Say, is more worthy than dreaming.. ." ( I 65). Using a

European socid maxirn to deconstnact its own fantasy (which is JI a conclusive positing of identity can be in this feminine mole context), the narrator affirms her own

1 O Rhys's capiralization of the -Other- here suggests a mnstnicu*onofdinerence nrnilar to Lacan's constituUon of the mer as a siMer mering over uue ciifference. In Lacan's terms. the Mer is a socid coNtnict a way of teferring to culturaU imaginative differenw tbat can never be Mb recnperaied within ianguage. Aîthough Rhys was not direct& rrférring to Lacan-s idea this constnrction of ditference is signifiant hem in marking the narrator's constitution of Englishness as a form ofdiffercnce hmhaself. Krkxeva discnsses the implications of Lacan's tenninology in Revolution 22-26. fluid state of becoming. Rhys's negation ofwhat "they say" is far From obvious but that is precisely the point - her narrator eludes the worlds of both dream and action and resides, instead, in an elsewhere that enables her to be in each but of neither.

Good Moming. Midnieht: The Ferninine Creole Impasse

Rhys's fourth novel elaborates upon and problematizes the impersonations and evasions initially set out in "Mixing Cocktails." Rhys's heroine, Sasha Jansen, employs the incipient, estranged feminine creole perspective of "Mixing Cocktails" within a new, errant aesthetic. Emtry is both an assertion of the alterity inherent to identity, and a covering over of this "stranger within" through social disguises. Identity becomes an assumed social fiction and source of creative transformation within the migrant community of expatriate Paris. Rhys's text rewrites modemist alienation as both distinctly ferninine creole, and as productive in its migratory movements. As the title, taken From Emily Dickinson's Poem 425, indicates, Rhys's novel (like

Dickinson's poem) embraces contradiction as an artistic practice, assuming perspectives only to invoke their opposite, hailing night oniy to describe day. The comma in the title tùnctions both as a greeting and a space of exchange between the binaries of day and night. However, these errant processes dtimately reach their limits as Sasha can no longer negotiate her identity productively. The concluding affirmation of "identity in process" in "Miiàng Cocktails" is precluded in this novel by the

Eurocentric and patriarchal society in which Sasha exists. Forced to abject her errant seIf, Sasha marks the iimits of creoIinng process in her inability, halfy, to refuse society's containments, making the ferninine creole a state of impasse. In the tragic ending of this text, there is no fùture for the white creole in Europe, only the continued pain of dienation or the abjection of self in favour of a social mask. The novel's conclusion delivers a waming about the tragic implications of rigidly policing cultural. ethnic and gender borders.

Intenextuality provides one way of reading the identity negotiations present both formalty and thernaticaily in this text. Kristeva has specificdly descnbed intertextuality as a form of transposition between sign systems, writing that, "The tenn

Uiter-rextrialip ... specifies that the passage from one signitjing systern to another demands a new aniculation of the thetic - of enunciative and denotative positionality"

(Revolution 60). in other words, the transposition of a text frorn one context to another is equivalent to the reconfiguration of the thetic during abjection, a repetition with difference which changes the position of the speaking subject. Kristeva insists that every signi&ing practice is essentiaiiy inter-textual and in that sense, despite atternpts to constnict sameness, every perspective is plural and polyvaient. Good

Momina Midniizht, in its efiensive use of intertextuaiity, makes evident this constant repositioning of the thetic, this Mcbetween signifying systems. Sasha's assumption of multiple perspectives - of respectable woman, of sexd victim, of ironic observer - is replicated in her appropriation and reconfiguration of the texts of high rnodemism and early feminism.

In using lmes Joyce's U~ssesas one point oflinguistic reference, Good

Momina Midnidit invokes what Kristeva descnïes as a thematics of abjection. In Powers of Horror Kristeva writes that, "The abject lies, bcyond the themes, and for

Joyce generaily, in the way one speaks; it is verbal cammunication, it is the Word that discloses the abject. But at the same tirne, the Word aione purifies fiom the abject ..."

(23). In other words, the semiotic exists as an antagoniàng force within Joyce's writing, prompting, according to Kristeva his non-linear narrative strategies. This semiotic Cisruption, this aiterity within language, is also the abject, that which is relegated outside symbolic meaning. Joyce's semiotically-inforrned language thus indicates the presence of this aiterity even as it abjects or purifies itself and re-asserts syrnbolic meaning. In her self-conscious Jfusion to Joyce's writings, Rhys also elucidates and enacts the linguistic version of abjection. Good Mornine. Midnieht disrupts linear narrative. sentence structure and tirne Iine with memory sequences and subjective thought processes which evoke Joyce's writing, style and hence the process of abjection. Both writers enact what Kristeva describes as "the subject's dialectic within the signifjmg process" (Revolution 82). [n using this form of intertextuaiity,

Rhys is reveaiing her own traffic with the serniotic and revisioning Joyce's dynarnic thetic locations from a feminine and impticitly creole viewpoint.

Heien Cam, Judith Kegan Gardiner and Syivie Maurel have di emphasized the intertextuality of Good Momin~Midnieht, which not oniy employs a Dickinsonian epigraph and a direct allusion to MoUy Bloom's monologue, but also engages with

Virginia Woolf s feminist treatise, A Room of One's Own. Maurei in particular connects Rhys's use of intertextuaiïty to Kristeva's proposition that al1 texts are to some extent allusively transfomative. Hawever, Maurel writes that, "So great is the extent of these borrowuigs that Good MohsMicinidit may be regarded as a dramatiition ofintertextuality" (103). lf Rhys is thus deliberately making these intertextual gestures, then 1 argue that they cm be read not only as an exchange with different formations of the thetic but also as an engagement with the politicai implications of these literary works. For Rhys, the thetic is located in identity boundaries, in existing cultural and poiitical distinctions, so that her revision of the thetic is an insertion of the marginalized white feminine creoie perspective. In other words, Rhys's intertextuality represents an assumption and revision of the politics of both early feminism and of canonical modemism.

This revision of modemist politics explains Rhys's arnbiguous cntical placement within that movement. Aelen Carr notes that despite living in expatriate

Paris, a close association with Ford Madox Ford and publication in the transatlantic review, Jean Rhys's fiction has never been given full modemist intellectuai status (7).

Mary Lou Emery more directly suggests that Rhys's perspective on modernism is decidedly ambivalent, as she writes kom an alienated perspective ofien critical of

European artistic and social structures (145). The intertextuai interventions of Good

Momine. Midnight exernpIiQ Rhys's critique of modernist class and culturai assumptions. While employing modernist ahenation and non-linear narrative in her texts, Rhys also exposes the Western bourgeois assurnptions upon which that movement was based. As Judith Kegan Gardiner States, this altemate acceptance and rejection of modemisrn reveals a dynamic literary identity which recontextualiies modemist values fiorn a fernale an4 1 would adci, creole viewpoint (249).

Teny Eagleton has descnbed modernism as a concept "of permanent ontological possiiility" and in this larger theoretical sense, Good Moming Midnight's disruption of traditional identity categones makes it a modemist text (388). However. in the same essay, Eagleton points out that as a strategy to resist the commodification of art, high modemism "brackets off the referent or reai historical world," resulting in an "iilusion of aesthetic autonomy which marks the bourgeois humanist order it aiso protests against" (392). This often apolitical and elitist aspect of modemism is what

Rhys takes issue with in Good Morninp. Midnight. In transposing the ending of

ülvsses, an ending which records the thought processes of Molly Bloom as imagined by Joyce, Rhys re-locates those utterances in a new gendered economic position, a position which reveais the original's failure to address how women's sexuality is linked to social place. Marginally middle-class, unmarried and sexually active. Sasha's acceptance of the commis reconfigures what Judith Kegan Gardiner calls Joyce's

"fantasy of totaI female responsiveness" to make evident the complex social discourses surrounding and preceding that act (248). Sasha's "Yes - yes - yes.. ." is uttered from a perspective opposed to that of the inaie-authorcd, married, Molly Bioorn. Not oniy does mmiage entail some level of social security, respectabiiity and financial support, but Rhys's te* insists on the very reai, socio-economic determinants of female sexuaiity. In ICristevan terms, intertextuaiity here repositions the signifjmg system of

Joyce's text, shattering the original enunciative space to replace it with an agonistic thetic position. Sasha argues for her own gendered experience while revealing the idedistic, se& assumptions behind Joyce's version. Repeating Joyce's writing of the heterogeneous seK Good Mornine. Midnî~htnevertheles rejects his constmction of modemist femininity. Rhys's tact bus negotiates with Joyce's narrative on the basis of maritai/ economic difference, a difference inextricably iinked to geuder experience. Yet, the novel's subtie use of ViaWoolf s feminist treatise, A Room of One's ûwn, also

reposnions that work to reveal its economic and class assumptions. Woolfs text

argues that, given the opportunity represented by a "room of one's own" and the

financial support to make use of if women writers would be able to overwme the

social disadvantages wtucti have historically restrained them (93). Good Mominq

Midnight rewrites Woolf's concept of a rwm as fiee fiom social consuucts and

Uistead desciiies the sexuai, economic and emotional coristrauits which structure any

space. ültimateiy, given the opporhinity that Woolf suggests, a Iegacy which will

support her indehitely, Sasha's painfirl experiences of marguialization continue to

pursue her. 'Weii, that was the end of me, the real end. Two-pound-ten every

Tuesday and a room off Gray's Im Road. Saved, rescued and with rny place to bide

in - what more did 1want?" (37). Unlike Woolfs 6eely creauve space, Sasha's room

marks another confinement and subjective death. Sasha continues to be definecl by the

exted social environment surroundhg her and in this sense her room is a "hidhg

place" rather than a creative retreat. Moreover, the two pound ten a week marks a

very diierent economic bracket fkom Wooif's five-hundred a year. Sasha will have

enough to Iive on, yet not to live wdortably, an example of women's continuhg

economic subordination

Good Mominpi Midnieht addresses the issue of modernist women's hting

more directly hughSasha's experïence as a ghost wrîter. ~ithoughsections of the

text do imitate stream-of-consuousness techniques used by Woolf: the passage describing a weaithy woman writer also succinctly comments on the bourgeois limitations of that literary approach. Sasha remembers being employed by this woman to ghost-write fairy tales, supposedly degorical, but in reality a mess of exotic and clichéd symbols. Sasha imitates modemist narrative in descniing her response to this woman writer and marks her distance in socio-economic (and perhaps criticai) terrns:

They explain people like that by saying that their minds are in water-tight compartments, but it never seemed so to me. It's al1 washing about, like the bilge in the hold of a ship, ail washing around in the same hold - no water-tight compartments... . Fairies, red roses, the sense of property - Of course they don't feel things like we do - Lilies in rnoonlight - i believe in survival fier death. I've had personal proof of it. And we'U find our dear, familiar bodies on the other side - Samuel has forgotten to buy his suppositoires - Pity would be out of place in this instance - 1 never take people like that to expensive restaurants. Quite unnecessary and puts ideas into their heads. It's not kinrl, reaily - Nevertheless. al[ the little birdies sing - Psycho-analysis might help. Adler is more wholesome than Freud. don? you think? - English judges never make a mistake - The piano is quite Egyptian in feeling.. . . ( 140-i)

Recailing sections of To the Liethouse and Mrs. Dallowav, the passage both repeats and ridicules the class-based assumptions which structure this woman's thinking. Both using and taking on the "they" of social judgement, Rhys rewrites modernist femi~sm fiom a disadvantaged economic location, a perspective that does not participate in the

"sense of property" or entitlement so integrai to this woman's perspective. Inhabiting a different feminist literary position, Rhys's text reveals and comments on the social assumptions underlying Woolf s bourgeois modemism.

Good Momins. Midnieht begins with a ~rammaticallycorrect articulation of social maxims, desmïing how sexuai and econornic discourses regulate experience: There are two beds, a big one for madame and a srnaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large roorn, the smeU of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The Street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they cdan impasse. 1 have been here five days. 1 have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my dnnk in &er dinner. 1 have arranged my Little Iife.

The place to have rny drink in fier dinner... . Wait, t must be carefiil about that. (9)

This opening setting, "polarized by gender and by semial tension" as Judith Kegan

Gardiner points out, voices Sasha's fear and anger. her carefùl conformity and rebellious irony (235). Cringing before the restrictions with which "they." the social collective. circumscribe her life, Sasha nevertheiess mocks the narrow sema1 and economic attitudes reproduced in the decor of a Paris hotel roorn. Having set up the parameters which enclose Sasha, the text immediately amends, "The place to have rny drink in afler dinner . . . . Wait.. ." (9). The suggestion of deception and the abandonment of grammatical niles for sentence fragments and ellipses here articulates a disruption of the social machinery which seeks to define Sasha. This opening enacts the processes of rupture and connedon, the complicity with and opposition to patriarchai, class and moral discourses which occur throughout the novel. h Helen

Carr writes, "The tcxt follows Sasha's swings from defiance to defeat, from apathy ta anger: she is uncertain, unsure, outraged by the so-called morality which judges her, but never confident of her power to hold it at bay" 157).

These conflicting rnovements can be rad in terms of Glissant's notion of errantry as a deIiberate wandering which refiises iinearity and authenticity in favour of dynarnic cross-culturai exchange. Rhys's main characters compose a migrant community in expatriate Paris, a community which traEics in cultural fictions, commodities and stereotypes. Functioning in opposition to "respectable" society, this dternate community of bohemians, traveliers and tricksters validates Sasha's identity manipulations, suggesting, at least initiaily, that non-oppressive concepts of community are possible. The errant IifestyIe that Sasha practises is both an experience of sustained dienation and an exploration of the creative possibility which exists in splitting, combining and re-combining caregories such as ATn'can, Caribbean, and

European. Gender is integral to Sasha's experience of this process in deteminhg the options available to her. Sasha stmggies against senid roles imposed by her position as a woman while also knowingly adopting these ferninine guises. This "aesthetics of rupture and connection." this concept of identity as "a contradictory experience of contacts among cultures [and, I would add, genders]," is feminine creole not only in its expression of identity as dynamic process, but also in its mediation between individual and conununity (PR 15 1, 144). Sasha is intensely self-absorbed and yet that self is constantiy eroded in its compulsion to succurnb to patriarchal and culturd stereotypes.

In a wodd of impersonation and ventriloquism, even Sasha's wiiifiii "errantry" comes to be eciipsed by the flamboyance of those she encounters. Using dialogue, parody and irony, Sasha marks out an identity posaion which criticizes and mocks the social machine even as she assumes its disguises.

Swha defines herself as marginal within society, as not being "one of the cornfortable ones" (1 13). She refuses otfiers' atternpts to categorize her, mocking her fiiend Sidonie's choice of a hotel room: "She imagines that it 's my atmosphere. God, itTsan insult when you corne to think about it! .. . But one mustn't put everything on the same plane. That's her great phrase.. .. And this is my plane.. . Quatrième a gauche, and mind you don't trip over the hole in the carpet. That's me" (12). Roorns in this quotation, and throughout the text, represent society's attempts to class* and litedly "place" people, a Iimiting projeci which the novel cnticizes. How a room is decorateà, where it is situated and, most importantly, who pays the bill serve as indicators of social and sexual standing. The text demonstrates, however, that Sasha's identity cannot be envisaged as a bound space, that she is not defined by her social or material surroundings, but is inherently dynamic. Sasha's nationality, for instance, is a continuing source of arnbiguity throughout the novel both because the patron of the hotei cannot place her and because the Russians "tactfidly" do not attempt to guess iter origin. Similady, Sasha's name is revealed to be assumed in a manipulation OC identity which she believes wiIl alter her social position. Despite references to a past in

London, Amsterdam, and Paris, and descriptions of an unspecified tropical environment, Sasha moulds an identity essentiaily more cornpiex than supposedly naturai national, gender, or cultural "placements" acknowledge. This deliberate assumption and rejection of names and origins is an enactment of errantry, a movement which deploys identity as an active process rather than a single, definable location.

The other sympathetic characters, the aitemate community, that Sasha encounters are iikewise ambiguously situated. Despite claiming to be Russian, Delmar and the other man retùse to elaborate on their national backgrounds and Sasha suspects that they may be constructing new identities for themseIves. Serge, the

Iewish painter, advertently reveais this trafiïc in culturai identities when he teils Sasha the West Afi-ican masks lining his waiis are "straight from the Congo ... 1 made them"

(76). Looking at the masks, Sasha realizes that society's definitions are absurd and increasingly irrelevant within the protean cultural context that the painter has introduced: "That's the way they look when they are saying: What's this story?'

Peering at you. Who are you, anyway? Who's your father and have you got any rnoney, and if not, why not? Are you one of us? Wi11 you think what you're told to think and Say what you ought to say? Are you red, white or blue - jelly, suet pudding or ersatz caviare?" (76-77). Parodying genealogicai and national preoccupations with origin, this passage concludes with an ironic articulation of the nationai associations tied to suet pudding and caviar. Food is equivaient to ideology in this xenophobic distinction of other from self Rhys uses parody productively as a way of repeating identity categories from a very different perspective, asserting, in contrast to Glissant's dismissal of "diversionary" tactics, the creative potential inherent in deconstmction.

Society in its categorizing preoccupations is thus very different from the community offered by Serge and Delmar in which Serge, the artist. dissolves the distinction between protean selves and contexts. The assumption of a culture or cultures not one's own deconstructs any notion of authenticity so that, quite literally assurning and discardimg cultural masks, these sympathetic characters enact an aesthetics of rupture and comection which is both the subject of Serge's art and of Rhys's text.

René is Sikewise varïously English, French-Canadian, Spanish-American and tells the story that he has recentIy come fiom Morocco. Sasha's sexual marketability and her manipulation of identity are akin to René's, as she notes during one of their earIy exchanges: "He is going to say his piece. 1 have done this so ofien myself that it is amusing to watch somebody else doing it" (6 1-2). Although Sasha does not believe most of what the gigolo says, his ability to construct a story, to change attitudes. "like a fish gliding with a flick of its tail, now here, now there," is something she recognizes and shares (127). Indeed, René's deceptive abilities. the fact that he is very likely conning Sasha, replicates Sasha's own inhabithg of a variety of disguises and assumed personae. A centra1 preoccupation during Sasha's fortnight in

Paris is to effect a process and "programme" of transformation, buying clothes, a hat, dyeing her hair in an effort to appear a respectable woman. These identity nises present another set of tactics that mpture social conventions and assert the creative potential of enantry. Contesting Glissant's dismissal of subversive strategies, Sasha's repetition of the forrns of respectability is done with an ironic awareness that exposes the transparent hypocrisy of social niles and regulations. René's con demonstrates how identity is susceptible to rnanipdation, how the charlatan can productively exploit

society's illusions.

This migrant community demonstrates a continued process of becorning, to use

another of Glissant's formulations, rather than a state of being. Within the parameters

of expatriate Paris, Sasha Delmar, Serge and René al1 contend with the demands of

nationdity and ongin only to reveal their uitimate exile. EnantIy constmcting

appearances just as Serge constnicts masks, each sympathetic character performs

identity as an assumed social fiction, donneci in order to respond to the exigencies of

each new situation. As Sasha explains, hm difference from "'the extremely

respectable" is not attributable to 'theu cmelty, it isn't even their shrewdness - it's

their extraordinary &veté. Everything in theù whole bloody worid is a cliché. Everything is bom out of a cliché, rests on a cliché, su~vesby a cliché. And they betieve in the cliches - there's no hope" (36). In a world where the complexities of identity are elided in favour of stereotypes, where discursive constmcts regulate experience. the only creative possibility left is to beat them at their own garne. "a shared process of cultural mutation" which cails into question the authority of identity

(Glissant, CD 67). Rhys's opaque and elusive writing style is an attempt to recover the complexities of identity rather than succumb to clichés. In her description of cliches as naïve rather than cruel, Sasha critiques the extraordinarily simplistic perspective involved in seeing identity as unified and immediateiy obvious rather than fiaught and contradictory. Switching languages, appropriating other texts, parodying attitudes and de@ng linearity, Rhys enacts errantry on both thematic and linguistic levels. As Glissant writes, the effect of errantry is to "chaIleng[e] and discar[d] the universal - this generalizing edict that summarized the world as something obvious and transparent ... The thinking of errantry conceives of totality but willingiy renounces any claims to sum it up or to possess it" (PR 21).

However, ferninine creole enantry not oniy involves the rupture of oppressive constructs that 1 have so far described, but aiso moments ofcomplicity with European colonial and patriarchal discourses. This double action can be seen in Serge's exoticizing and materialistic exploitation of West Afncan culture. Similarly, René repeats and (mistakeniy) relies on gender and class clichés in his appeai to Sasha even as he reveals the protean nature of identity. Sasha herself mocks respectability in the same moment that she describes her desire to fit in. Drinking in a tabac, Sasha tèels: ... a cringing desire to explain my presence in the place. 1 only came in here to inquire the way to the nearest cinema. 1 am a respectable woman, une femme convenable, on her way to the nearest cinema. Faites comme les autres - that's been my motto ail my life. Faites comme les autres. darnn you. And a lot he cares - 1 could have spared myself the trouble. But this is my attitude to life. Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, 1 am trying so hard to be like you. I know Idon? succeed. but look how hard I try. ïhree hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a haif trying to make myself look Iike everybody else.. .. And mind you, Iknow that with ail this 1 don? succeed. Or I succeed in flashes oniy too damned well. (88)

Sasha "succeeds only too weil" as she moves fiom shame to anger to resentment. fiom impersonation to plea to harangue, performing the motions of respectability even as she rebels against them. In a similar sense, Sasha is variously a part of and alien to

1937 European society, recognizing the exclusions upon which that masculine- privileged and increasingly fascist culture is based; however, as a white and at least partly European woman, she is ais0 implicated in those processes. As Helen Carr notes, the above quoted passage is followed by Sasha's reaiiition that in drinking at that tabac she is sustaining an economic system which oppresses the working class

(67). Similarly, Sasha recognizes her role as oppressor in evicting a stray cat which syrnbolizes her own sexual and economic persecution. She fantasizes that "One day the fierce wolf that waiks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out," even as she backs down fiom a realistic confrontation (45). In the sense that

Sasha defines herself negatively in relation to European society, the ferninine creole is never only cornpliant, yet in her traffic with that culture she is aiso never only resistant.

Giissant's errant process of becoming is, for the ferninine creole, not simply a celebration of protean identity, but a fraught experïence of discursive rupture and co~ection,rebellion and defeat. Patriarchd and cultural discourses define the tems of Sasha's aiienation even as she ironically deconstructs the models of female, middle- class respectability. In this way, the ferninine creole challenges and discards transparent, modernist versions of existentid aiienation with an assenion of the opacities which characterize cross-cultural exchange." Sasha is never tiilly outside the effects of the social machine which dernands that one behave in codified ways; indeed, envisionhg the machine towards the end, she claims she knows its music and can sing its song (1 57). However, in a fictional context where the ciassification of identity is a basis for discussion, anviety and exdusion, Sasha remains ultimately indefinable. repeating multiple viewpoints but never definitiveIy located, never, recalling the novel's opening, confined to her room. As an echo of the social machine, singing its song, Sasha is both complicit with dominant discourses and a threatening excess which complicates and confiises the original tune. Rhys cleverly switches the emphasis fiom the emptiness of the echo to its haunting reverberations. As in "Mixing Cocktails,"

Sasha's complicity occurs within a Iarger process of reformation so that the "scission and shattering," "mark and stasis" through which Kristeva describes abjection is also the liberating play of Relation.

Sasha's femininity distinguishes her fiom those she regards as cornpanions in errancy. Sasha struggles with society's definitions of what it is to be a respectable or

II Writes such as T.S.Eliot express alienation as a univeml condition In The Waste Lanb" for instance. culhuai differencc is approptïated as a set of mis to express Europe's spirituai barremess rather than as in Rhys. defining the rem of chat dienation Judith Kegan Gardiner comments on the distincüons beiwœn Rhys's work and bat of maIe modeniists such as Eiiot and Ford Madox Ford Sec Gardiner 23349. not-so respectable woman, gender positions which entail very different expectations and prohibitions fiom those applied to men. Sasha realizes that the type of room the social space, she inhabits is based upon a system of sexual exploitation: "That's the way it is, that's the way it goes .... A room. A nice room A beautihl room .. . . Up to the Lingheights of the suite. Two bedrooms, sitting-room, bath and vestibule.

(The smail bedroom is in case you don? feel Like me, or in case you meet sornebody you like better and corne in late)" (79). As the accusatory "ou" in this passage indicates, Sasha is speaking back to society's double standards which label female sexuaiity outside of maniage promiscuous and yet accept aiid even facilitate (rhrough the second bedroom) male sexuality.

Sasha's interaction with her former boss, Mr. Blank, illustrates how women without the backing of marriage, money or genealogy are marginaiiied within society.

Mr. Blank's narne not only represents his status as agent of oppression, but also, in light of the novel's semal economy, connotes a careful anonymity which allows him to participate in clandestine liaisons without consequences. Different from Sasha's assurned narne, Mr. Blank's anonymity is assurned to preserve his place within society rather than to explode the notion of place itself. As a result of Mr. 8lank7sinability to pronounce the French word for cashier correctly, Sasha recounts wandering the store desperately searching for the mysterious "kise" until she is fked. Sasha excoriates Mr.

Blank as a representative oppressor: Well, let's argue this out, Mr. Blank. Yoy who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred fiancs a rnonth. That's my market value, for i am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly darnaged in the fiay, there's no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to Iodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harrass me with wony and monotony and unsatistied longings tiil you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can't al1 be happy, we can't al1 be rich, we can't al1 be lucky - and it would be so much less hn if we were. (26)

Sasha recognizes and exposes the inhuman way in which society transforms people into materiai goods through parodying Mr. Biank's perspective. Repeating English business attitudes from a femaie and econornicdly deprived subject position, Sasha reveais the oppressions upon which capitalism thrives. Indeed, the bitter final phrase,

"it would be so much less fun if we were." uncovers the real sadism behind these acts.

Yet, in this imaginaq conversation, Sasha is the one who verbalizes the discourses that exclude her. She reaffims the resonance of patriarchal constnicts even as she exposes their cmelty, and in this sense Sasha's errant negotiations require their opposite.

Parody repeats while it creates a space for difference, for the articulation of Sasha's resistant point ofview

In another manipulation of her gender position, Sasha plans to assume the wealth and statu of the men who have hurt her and as she says, "get some of my own back" with René (61) However, this reversai of roles is not easily effected as René attempts ta rape Sasha, making them opponents in a gender-based struggle for dominance. As Judith Kegan Gardiner writes, "René. Sasha's male minor, reveals that he can at any moment revert to acting as an agent of patriarchai violence" (243). -4s the ody woman in her errant "cornmunity," Sasha remains distinct hmand a potential victim of the other characters because of her gender difference. The fiagile, errant community is niptured through semial violence, a possibili ty which also troubles

Sasha's meeting with Serge and Delmar (83). Yet, Sasha realizes that sex is ultimately not the issue in her final struggle with René. "agame played in the snow for a worthless prize"; rather, it is a contest for the emotionai power to wound the other

(1 5 1). The lan pages of the text, as several critics have noted, are ambivalent as

Sasha's voice splits into two, one that constructs the situation in socially acceptable terrns and another that dissociates herself from the system of gender-based oppression that has destroyed any possibility of co~ectionbetween herself and René. These two voices, one of social authority and another which seeks to transcend gender divisions through an emotional connection with René, graphically represent the two impulses of opposition and constraint within ferninine creole process. Sasha exposes the unnaturai performance which the laws of sexual difference cornpet even as she performs her socially sanctioned role.

The way in which Rhys reveais the continuing force of patriarchal constructs while she also criticizes and parodies those discourses has presented a continuing problem for feminist cnticism of Rhys's work. Heien Nebeker, in her 198 1 study of the novels, attempts to recuperate those texts for tbeir ctiticism of patnarchai institutions, but other feminist readers, such as Laura Niesen de Abruna, interpret the passivity and complicity of Rhys's characters as anti-feminist.'* More recent gender studies explore the subversive strategies within Rhys's texts as deconstructing patriarchal authority. Sylvie Maurei's 1998 book, for instance, describes characters such as Maya in Ouartet and Sasha in Good Momina Midnieht as mimicking or parodying patriarchal stereotypes of women as passive and powerless. '' Rather than debate the deconstructive intent behind Rhys's characterizations, however, 1 suggest that the gender stmggles narrated in Good Mornina Midnieht more accurately describe Rhys's feminist location. Rhys is feminist both in her recognition of the oppressive nature of patriarchal society, and in her demonstration of its pervasive power. Women's identities are inherently more complex than an exclusively oppositional feminist stance can address and Rhys illustrates these fraught processes through her depiction of women who, like Sasha, rebel against patriarchai definitions even as they use those feminine guises to their occasional advantage. For Rhys, as for

Kristeva, feminism should not be a universal set of rules and oppositions but should be

rnanipulated to respond to the experience of each woman, experience that, for Rhys, is not simply delineated by gender but also by culturai and economic considerations.

In this sense, Sasha's struggie with patriarchai discourses is fùnher

complicated by the oblique allusions to Caribbean culture and experience which pervade the text. Although creole identity is not overtly invoked here as in other Rhys texts, Gaod Momine. Midnieht repeats, according to Helen Tiffin, "the processes of colonization" in Sasha's "difficult denaturing and reconstmcting" (337). Helen Cm

likewise writes that. "the politicai systern which Rhys analyses in her Caribbean and

" See Nicsen de Abruna 327-8. II Both Moira Ferguson and Corai AM Howeih e?rphrc Rhys's characters as sirnuitand! contained wiihin European patriarcbal discourse and subvcrsively aiticai of those constnicts. Although such approaches articulate the conflicted status of Rhys's characiers hma feminist pespectivc. each critic ultirnately emphash the subversive potenîiai of this duality. See HowelIs 13 and Ferguson 1-8. continental fiction is one and the same, a system based on divisions of class, race, money and gender. .." (74). Several passages specificaiiy locate this noveI as a narrative of the white creole in Europe. Not only do Sasha and Serge discuss

Maniniquan music and clubs, but the conversation prompts the 6rst of severd references to a Caribbean past: "1 am lying in a hammock looking up into the branches of a tree. The sound of the sea advances and retreats as if a door were being opened and shut . Al1 day there has been a fierce wind blowing, but at sunset it drops" (77).

Other unspecified memory sequences aIso recall a tropicd environment such as in the passage afier her husband leaves and Sasha remembers: "1 stayed there, looking dom at the dark red, dirty carpet and seeing a dark wail in the hot sun - the walI so hot it bumed your hand when you touched it - and the red and yelIow flowers and the time of day when everything stands still" ( 1 17). Looking through the European present in

this passage. Sasha finds a Caribbean past underlying and detining her subjectivity as

white creole.

These Caribbean references reveai Sasha as stniggling with the

cirnrmscriptions not only of European national, class and gender discourses but also

with this other fom of cultural difference. The text repeatedly evokes Caribbean

experience and yet that exchange with othemess rernains embedded within Sasha's

European identity. This creoleness which haunts Sasha recalIs Kristeva's location of

dterity within identity, suggesting that identity is always a hction of difference and

that cultural origins are inescapably hybrid. Sasha's trafEc with the Can'bbean marks

her dissociation Liom European discourses even as she negotiates her identity within

Western tem. This conflicting process of assertion and rejection is the process of abjection, as Kristeva writes: "1 abject myselfwithin the same motion through which

"i" clah to establish myselp' (Powers 3). Sasha abjects her Caribbeanness as she claims her European identity in a process which is never ha1 and which embodies the dual processes of rupture and connection which 1 have argued delineate the feminine creole. Caribbean references exkt here as Sasha's constitutive other, as a necessary component of her identity. This notion of otherness as constitutive of identity prevents the former fiom operating as the embodiment of the semiotic; instead, evocations of the Caribbean become mations of Sasha's always already heterogeneous perspective. In this situation, abjection tbctions productively within the exchanges of errantry. Not simply European, and not simply Caribbean, Sasha intemenes in that binary to assert the dynamic complexities of feminine creole identity.

The double movement of repetition and rejection is fùrther exemplified in the text's linguistic strategies. The opening paragraphs, for instance, descnbe an al temation between grammatically correct maxims and sentence hgments which undermine those sociai constructs. Rhys's use of internai and extemal dialogue, oftefi moving between past and present, îürther ilkstrates Sasha's unstable subject position.

As the following passage demonstrates, Sasha repeatedly shifts temporal and subjective contexts:

.... When 1 corne out of the cinema it's night and the Street Iamps are lit. i'm glad of that. If you've got to walk around by yourself, it's easier when the larnps are lit. Paris is lookùig very nice tonight .... You are iooking very nice tonight, rny beautifùl, my darling, and oh what a bitch you can be! But you didn't kill me ailer ail. did you? .And they couidn't kiii me either .... Just about here we waited for a couple of hours to see Anatole France's tùned pas, because, Enno said, we mustdt let such a great Iiterary figure disappear without paying him the tribute of a iast salute. There we were, chatting away affably, paying AnatoLe France the tribute of a last salute, and most of the people who passed in the procession were chatting away afXably too, looking as if they were making dates for lunches and dimers, and we were ail paying Anatole France the tnbute of a last saiute. 1 walk dong, remembenng this, remembering that.. . ( f 5).

The first paragaph in the passage is a present-tense first person, grammatically correct, "according to program" description of Sasha's aftemoon. The second paragraph immediately erodes this certainty with ellipses and a switch frorn the present tense to remembered pas. The use of pronouns here proliferates arnbiguity, as the

"you" is initially a direct address to the city, but then that reference is unmoored so that "you," "me," and "they" are no longer specific referents but markers within a dynamic process. By the end of this paragraph, "you" is no longer just Paris, but also a reference to Sasha's past and to the society that alienates her. The narrative moves to another pronoun space in the third and fourth paragraphs, appropriating the opinions of Sasha's ex-husband and progressing to undennine his rather pompous statement by revcaling the triviality with which people treated Anatole France's funeral. The use of repetition here both recalls the process of abjection in repeating socially accepted formulations and parodically undermines the authority of those statements: The "tributeof a last salute" is, by its third repetition. an ironic revelation of Society's shallowness and hypocrisy. Finaily, the passage retums to a present-tense, kst person narrative which provides a context for the previous remembered events.

Narrating oniy a seemingly random collection of mernories. Sasha merges with and dissociates fiom an unstable and provisional "1." Language here articulates, disarticulates and rearticulates in a process which recalIs Kristeva's description of the dynamic speaking subject. The semiotic dismpts but does not replace symbolic logic, creating an errant speaking subject amid the confines of Parisian society.

The passage's treatment of past and present also recaiis and adjusts Glissant's concept of history as developed in opposition to History. Glissant argues that history

must be re-conceived in a "literary" sense in that it must be written as "a consciousness at work and history as lived experience" rather than an imposed linear fantasy (CD

65). In this sense, Sasha's linear narrative is repeacedly fissured by emptions of a

subjectively constmcted past. In Good Momine. Midniaht present and past are

inextricably linked in a creative dialectic similar to Glissant's re-imagining of collective

histories. However, the retum of personal history here is also tiequently the retum of

painful past oppressions. Recollections of how the past almost killed Sasha retum in

the quoted passage even as she reconfigures history as a diaiectic. Complicity and

constraint fiinction both productively and negativeiy and, in this sense, Rhys's writing

of history challenges Glissant's notion oftiistorical plurality as a liberating process.

Sasha insists on her ferninine creole experience but that durationai experience

perpetuates limiting constnicts, as well as transforming them through parodic

repetition and errant exchanges. In this sense, Glissant's version of history is revised

through the constraints of abjection. Personal pasts dismpt communal and Iinear

versions of history but cannot constitute a fiiture devoid of painfùl, repressive

constmcts.

In reveaiing the pervasive force of past oppressions, Rhys's ferninine creole

version of historicai intervention problernatites Glissant's notion of iimitless becoming.

ifidentity is an endless process of productively chaiienging but also repeating the constmcts that alienate the feminine creole, then is the future not inevitably bound to this oppressive put? Does Glissant's vision of endkss becotning of a durationai

co~ectionbetween past and present, in fact result in an endless collusion with often

painfiil circumstances? Can an identity such as Sasha's indehitely carry out Siese

processes or does she ultimately reach the timits of errantry? These questions become

increasingly reIevant to Sasha's rewriting of culturai identity as the double movements

of mpture and connection do not only articulate a creative consciousness but aiso

mark a series of Iirnits or impasses. By the end of this text, constraint no longer

fùnctions as a productive rearticulation of boundaries as it did in "Mwng Cocktails"

and in Sasha's parodic repetitions but articulates moments where imaginative revisions

fail. This impasse between social identity and the proliferating possibility of difference

results in Sasha's final. abjecting act.

Marking one aspect of this irresolvable confiict between identity and the traffic

with difference, Good Mornina Midniaht enacts a series of violent shifts between

French and English. Without providing any translation, the text forces the reader to

change linguistic contexts, to switch codes, thereby experiencing a process of

alienation and dislocation:

The patron, the patronne and the two maids are having their meaI in a room behind the bureau. They have some tiiends with them. Loud taiking and laughing.. .. '"Tu n'oses pas," qu'eue m'a dit. "Ballot!" qu'elle m'a dit: Comment, je n'ose pas? Vous allez voir que je lui ai dit: "Attends, attends, ma fille. Tu vas voir si je n'ose pas." Alors, vous savez ce que j'ai fait? J'ai ....' His voice pursues me out into the street. (3 1)

Despite Sasha's ability to understand and speak both Ianguages, she is a stranger to the

class, gender and hcophone context out of which this threatening male voice speaks. As in Sasha's expenence with Mr. Blank whose inability to pronounce "la caisse" should mark hirn as the dien, Ianguage here is a marker of one person's cultural identification and of another's dienation. Mr. Blank's inability to negotiate another language is a marker of his Englishness, his confident belonging in and perpetuation of that unified cultural position. Sasha's ability to negotiate multiple languages, meanwhile, illustrates her manipulation of identity and, within Mr. Blank's world, her traffic with the semiotic as a source of disruptive alterity. That disruptive position ultimately leaves Sasha alien to both cultures. Neither hlly English nor fiilly French,

Sasha is chased out into the Street by this recognition of her exclusion. Sasha's juxtaposition of European cultures may be productively errant, but the psychic costs of abjection exemplified here also describe that identity as bound to continual conflict.

Linguistic code-switching is both a liberating dismption of English in this text and a marker of foreignness, an ability to speak two ways without cultural credibility in either. As Kristeva writes in Straneers to Ourselves, despite high levels of linguistic cornpetence, the foreigner is inevitably "between two languages," never fully voiced in a representative sense by either (I 5).

A hrther culturd exclusion is enacted during Sasha's conversation with Serge, when he tells of a Martiniquan woman he encountered in London. A victim of systemic Engiish racism, the woman drinks to escape her grief Sasha's fim impuise is to identifj with the Martiniquaise, linking herself to that expenence of cultural and gendered dispossession. However, Serge replies that the woman was, "Not like you at a"replacing Sasha's identification with a recognition of racial difference (79).

Sasha's attempt to redefïne her ferninine mole subjectivity through an errant identification with this Caribbean woman is precluded by the history of emancipauon.

Creoiig processes of relation are circumscribed in this instance by racial legacies which make this attempted interchange an insidious appropriation. White creole, this passage asserts, cm never be equated with mked race creole because to do so would be to appropriate the other as a self in a neo-colonial act.

These situations of impasse where Sasha's ferninine creole negotiations f~l mark the painhl iimits of those dynamic processes. in this sense, Kristeva's dynamics of abjection aptly describe the emotional setting of Good Mornin~.Midni-ht. .As

Heien Carr aiso observes, Rhys's protagonists, "society's undecidabies,"

[Sltir up the fear of abjection, because the unplaceable is what 'disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, mies.' At times Sasha can simply mock the Mr. Blanks who keep the system in order, who abhor and fear her placelessness, but when she taiks of streaming blood and brains she herself has been sucked into the fantasies and psychic horrors of abjection. (70- I . quoting Krïsteva, Powers 4)

Ultimately, Sasha's movements between identity discourses, between conforrnity and difference and between the categorizations of culture and gender, become internalized as these psychic horrors. The final split into a voice of socid authority and a "reai" voice of abject contradiction and pain registers the unsustainable psychic space which is finally Sasha's state of mind. In a sentence which exemplifies this loss of seK Sasha says: "This is me, this is myself, who is crying. The other - how do 1 know who the other is?" (1 54). This other voice goes on to give her version ofevents, reducing

Sasha's experiences and making her compiicit with the matenalistic, clichéd concepts that society favours: "Now, calm, cairn, say it aii out calmiy. You've had dinner with a beautifid young man and he kissed you and you've paid a thousand fiancs for it. Dirt cheap at the pnce, especially with the exchange the way it is. Don? forget the exchange, dearie - but of course you wouldn't, would you?" (154). No longer a cohesive speaking subject, no longer able to manipulate identity productively, Sasha ultimately articulates her internai dienation. As her repeated conversations with looking gIasses (which, rather than rnirrors, suggest a looking through, a difference between being and reflection, self and constmcted image) reveal, Sasha has reached a psychic impasse. Recalling Kelly Oliver's description of abjection, the subject in process has become a subject on triai, forced to choose between errantry and a socially acceptable identity.

The ending of Good Moniine, Midnipht has been diversely interpreted as a positive rebinh in its echo of James Joyce's Cilysses and as a profoundly ironic restatement. revealing Sasha's final degradation." Most recent cnticism has focused on the ambiguity of the conclusion. As Mary Lou Emery observes, "To take either position means to stress some themes and images and to discount others.... reducing a compelIing ambiguity to a single. even if cornplex, dimension" (145). Reading this text as a narrative of identity in process. the ambiguity of the conclusion presents another confrontation with the social discourses that seek to define Sasha. The ending is both

a death and a rebinh as critics have observecl, because in embracing the patriarchai

society that the commis represents, Sasha is rebom, remade as a symbolic subject, and

yet the protean perspective which she has created is lost. In his sexism, moral judgements (labeling Sasha a "sale vachen for her interaction with René) and cultish

'' Arnold Davidson crnphasizes the ending's rmu;iph- mer thc death of human vaiues 34744. Conveixly. several critics argue htthe degradation depicid by Sasha's embnce of the commis prevails over any positive assocrations See. for insiana bgier 406. attempts to make Sasha into a sexual commodity, the commis repeats the mechanisms of European society. Sasha, abandoned not only by René (who initiaily offered a more positive comrnunity with the errant manipulators of identity) but aiso by her social self and by her consciousness, her sde cerveau, is unable to maintain her protean identity.

Ernbracing her oppressor and the sociaily defined space to which he will relegate her.

Sasha resolves the psychic turmoil which has plagued her.

Accepting society's definitions is in one sense a rebirth into subjectivity, into a concept of belonging similar to the identification a child makes with the Symbolic. Yet in making this unquaiified gesture, Sasha also kills/ abjects her complex identity. As

Kristeva stresses, the process of abjection is psychologicai turmoil, resulting in the desire for subjectivity. \;et the finality of the text suggests Sasha's death as a negotiating, contradictory, acting being. Paradoxicdly, as the title suggests, in becoming socially defined, in identifying herself with the commis, Sasha abjects herself and loses her creative potential. Birth is aiso death, a theme replicated in the death of her baby. As Sasha looks "straight into his eyes and despise[s] another poor devil of a human being for the last time" she is gMng up her identity, her ability to recognize and assume or reject another on her own tems forever (1 59). As Mary Lou Emery notes, the ending "leads our readings in two directions at once: toward suggestions of death

... and conversely, toward the unimg implications of the formai process that lead us to sense the possibility of new meanhg and perhaps a new seif-identity" (149). In this way, the concluding gesture of the text is at once a generous acceptance of another in al1 his flaws and cruelty, and aiso a te-giy abject act. Sasha is embracing a representative of the categorizing machine at the same moment that she is abjecting herself, relegating Glissant's creative interchange to a space outside possibility.

To exist within the social definitions of 1937 European society is, this novel concludes, the death of creative identity process. Good Mornine. Midnieht ultimately negates the possibility of errantry, retuniuig Sasha to the moment of subjective birth which is also death through the figure of the commis, white-gowned as both priest and doctor. Carol Angier notes that the reviews for Good Morning. Midnieht, published in 1939, invariably praised the technical aspects of the work but rejected its "sordid and unacceptable vision" (373). Rhys's French translater specifically stated: "il admire

les qualités incontestables du liwe mais ie sujet (en [sic] ce moment surtout) efioye

tout éditeur" (unpublished letter qtd. in Ansjer, 373). The horror and repulsion with

which this novel was initially greeted perhaps best exempli@ the abjection of protean

self that the ending enacts. WhiIe Good Mornina Midnkht thus performs the

movements of enantry and abjection, Sasha's tinai act questions the implication the

tinal result of each theoretical approach. Protean identity becomes a paintùlly

inhospitable space for Sasha to inhabit and ultimately she can no longer participate in

the repeated acts of "mpture and connectionnthat Glissant celebrates. Conversely,

while Knsteva, as a psychoanalyst, acknowiedges the costs of abjection and the

attraction of symbolic complicity, she offers no resolution. To deny the dynamics of

identity is the loss of possibihty that Sasha experiences at the end. In other words,

neit her continued manipulation nor acceptance of the cliché wül allow Sasha a fùture,

a sustainable way of Me. Perhaps the most fiightening aspect of this text is its

suggestion that the tùture cm oniy be radicdIy conflicted and violent. The union of Sasha and the man in the dressing gown opposes the separation involved in identity, yet is also for Sasha the death of any real sense of self Put on trial, Sasha's errantry, her identity in process, proves unsustainable.

Good Morning, Midnight is a thematic and forma1 exploration of identity in process. Glissant's concept of errantry, a concept of deliberate cultural exchange, describes one aspect of the processes enacted by Sasha and to varying degrees by the other sympathetic characters in Rhys's novel. Gender can be included within this

practice as one element. one thematics of negotiation. Yet. unlike Glissant's unlirnited and celebratory focus. Good Mornina Midnieht represents the constraints and emotional costs also involved in these transactions. Sasha taiks about the pain of her experiences in the openin3 as she recails crying in a restaurant, unable to forget "the pain, the stniggle and the drowning" (1 0). Later, she and René compare wounds, both physical and emotional, with which their pasts have Ieft them. In words that evoke Kristeva's abject, Sasha describes the violence, repuision and hatred, as well as

Iiberating creativity, involved in the infinite process of becoming. This ambivalent dynamic of rupture and comection, or scission and stasis in Knsteva's words. is

repeated formally in Rhys's use of parody, non-linear time and language or code-

mritching. Intertextual appropriations likewise take on the pokical contexts of other

modernist texts to mark Sasha's difference as ferninine and creoie. By the end of the

novel, however, this identity in process has become an identity on trial as Sasha is

forced to accept society's "rulings." For the white creole in Europe, neither the cross-

cultural exchanges of Relation nor the notion of belonging either to a Caribbean or

European community are tntly sustainabie. The ending of Good Mornina Midnietit presents a new challenge for rny ferninine creole theoretical framework- In portraying the psychic loss of subjecthood and the unsustainability of Glissant's identity manipulations, the conclusion of Rhys's novel questions the hture of creoIe negotiations. Can there be fomof identity not forced to tracwith the oppressive social discourses which seek to limit and define?

If protean identity is not always practicable and in fact obsessively returns the individuai to the past, as Sasha's personal history and final act make clear, then creolization clearly is not a iûlly satisfj4ng theoretical mode of conceiving identity politics. in a typically affirmative and deconstructive move, the ending of Rhys's novel both portrays and calls into question the implications of ferninine creole process.

It is imperative, then, to consider the possibilities that the discourse of creolization and the wtitin~sof Dunbar-Nelson and Melville have to offer for a less abjected and abjecting tkture. identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's New Orleans Fiction

"Armand- she pantcd once more. clutching his arm. "look at our child. What docs it mean? tell me.- He coldly but gently loosencd her fingers hmabout his am and thrust the hand away hmhim TeU me what it means!" she cricd despainngly. -[t means." he answered lightiy. "that the child is not white: ii mcans that !ou are not white.- Kate Chopin "Désirée's Baby"

Edouard Glissant asserts the continuity between the processes of creolization that obtain in the Caribbean and in the Amencan South. In Faulkner. Mississipui

Glissant wntes that "at the deepest leveI of meaning" William Faulkner writes about creolization, although even Glissant adrnits "it is the unpredictability [of cross-cultural exchange] that terrifies those who refiise the very ide* if not the temptation. to mix, flow together and share" (30). Aiice Dunbar-Nelson's historicd essay, "People of

Colour in Lauisiana." delineates the gens air cmilrirr from other Southern racial and ethnic groups, noting, like Glissant, the "horror" and repulsion which greet any conflation of these groups (9). For mm of the century w-riters such as Dunbar-Nelson, the South's multivalent and contested history is both the precondition for creolization and for the exclusions which structure that process. Dunbar-Nelson's stories make race simultaneously spectacular and invisible. Racial anxieties corrode the very being of her protagonists even though their ability to pass for white exposes the dangerous and seductive permeability of skin and the threatening impurity of blood. If metaphors

Iike "white cockroach" only serve to underscore the ambivalence of racial ciifference in

Rhys's tiction, Dunbar-Nelson's stories might be more aptiy described as "warring" 105 (Hull, "Introduction" ?abc). Race, as the relenttess motifs of sacrifice and murder in her work attest, is quite simply a matter of life and death.

Louisiana presents a unique version of creole culture in terms of its hncophone ries. its accession to the United States suice 1803, and its cajun, Anglo-

Amencan and creole social components. Settlement began in Louisiana in 1698 with

French colonizers traveling dom the Mississippi fbm Quebec and displacing the

Natchez First Nations. Afier the foundation of New Orleans in 17 17, Louisiana struggled financially as a colony for the next forty years. [n 1762 France ceded

Louisiana to Spain in return for support against the English in North Arnerica. Spain took fim administrative control, improved the econurnic situation in Louisiana by establishing a slave-based plantation system and increased the population througb

English Amencan immigration and with the settiement of Acadian cornmunities displaced fiom Eastern Canada. Napoleon ultimately forced Spain to cede Louisiana back to France and then initiated the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. At the time of the

United States purchase, the dominant cultural influence remaineci French despite the

Spanish government's administrative contributions to Louisiana.

Even more pervasively than in Dominica, French language, Catholicism and social organization fom significant components of New Orleans creole identity.

Indeed, Virginia Dominpez points out that one definition of Louisiana creole denotes a person of French descent bom in the Americas and Dunbar-Nelson herself uses

French lanyuage and Catholicism as dturai markers in her work. These ethnic constnicts have, moreover, been creolized Ïnto uniquely Louisiana forms sa that, as Dominguez Jso notes, a recent French emigrant of the nineteenth century might not necessarily be accepted into creole society.' Sunilarly, Acadian descendants, despite their similar historical and linguistic origins, are not included in urban creole society

A particular version of francophone ethnicity remains one way of distinguishing New

Orleans creoles from Anglo-Amencans, fiom Europeans, from Acadians and aiso from

Caribbean versions of creoliition.

Mer 1803, however, French culture was no longer the only defining dimension of New Orleans creote identity. Racial distinctions became increasingiy significant during the postbellum period of Southern history. By the early twentieth century, creole was altemately defined as people of colour and as whites of European ancestry, both with long family histories in New Orleans. Virginia Dominguez notes that the initial francophone definition of creole resulted in two rnutually exclusive terms, neither of which acknowledges the existence of the other:

Two types of Louisianians consequently identiG themselves today as Creole. One is socially and Iegiily white; the other, socialiy and iegally colored. The white side by definition cannot accept the existence of colored Creoles; the colored side, by definition, cannot accept the white conception ofcreole. The problem is encapsulated in the use of the terms Cajun Creole and Creole Cajun. These expressions make no sense at ail to white Creoles. A Creole in their estimation is a purely white descendant of French or Spanish settlers in colonial Louisiana; a Cajun is a purely white descendant of Acadian colonial settlers in southern Louisiana The two categories are mutudly exclusive subcategories of a strictiy white superclass... . The expressions Cajun Creole or Creole Cajun make sense only in an alternative interpretation, wherein Cajun signifies colonial Acadian ancestry and Creole signifies "raciailyn mixed ancestry. ( 149)

I See Dominguez 15 and 2 1 1. 107 The tem creole is thus doubly reinforced in this American contexr, marked both racially and ethnicaily, and yet the effect of that sociai policing is to undennine any certainty about what creole identity means.' In speciijing a series of fine gradations and distinctions such as Dominguez outlines with the term Creole Cajun, creolition evokes restrictive placements and impervious boundaries only to proliferate ambiguity.

Dominpuez alsa notes the role that legal institutions play in deterrnining raciai identity.

Where the white creole is put on trial in a psychologicai sense at the end of Good

Morning. Midnieht, rnixed race creole identity is put on trial in a very literal sense, subject to paranoid segregationist rulings.

This split process of determination and confusion definition and contradiction. is necessarily replicated in Dunbar-Nelson's socio-historical use af the term "creole" so that her texts evoke regdatory practices of discrimination only to produce a series of racial/ ethmc ambivalences. "Miss Sophie," for instance, is a version of the tragic mulatta stereotype which Werner Sollors describes as simultaneously racist in its embodiment of white values and revolutionary in asserting the humanity of mixed race people (24 L ). Overdetermined as white in sentiment and "cofoured in appearance, yet dtimately ambiguous in tems of what she conveys, the tragic mulatta embodies the contradictions and exclusions of Southem creole identiv. The historicd class, ethnic and racial parameten which detirnit Dunbar-Nelson's version of creolization thus problernatize identities even more than Caribbean constructs do. Tom between ethnic and racial binaries, the crede woman of coIour expenences identity as constant

Creolization produces ethnic as well as racial difference in this conte.. since nat all interracial people are considerd miebut only a cemin sectar of New Orieans Society. 1O8 contradiction, a contradiction Sollors encapsulates Ui his title, "Neither Black nor

White Yet Both."

Mice Dunbar-Nelson's personal history places her within racially mixed postbelhm creole society and within some of the definitionai crises that identity represents. Dunbar-Nelson's mother, once a slave, was of mixed Amencan Indian and fican-American ancestry who may or may not have been married to Dunbar-

Nelson's white "searnan" father.' Dunbar-Nelson was boni in New Orleans and grew up as a rnember of creole society, active in many prominent clubs and social organizations. Able to "pass" for white (and oflen using that ability to de@ "Jim

Crow" laws), Dunbar-Nelson was nevertheless politically active in the early civil nghts movement and led severai organizations on behalfof women of colour. Dunbar-

Nelson's attitudes toward race appear decidedly ambivalent to Gloria Hull, who writes of a "spiit authorial personality' in this regard, a duaiity which ailowed her to exploit her light appearance and the statu that entailed while sustaining an outspoken ailegiance to Afncan-Arnerican heritage. Indeed, Dunbar-Nelson's personai activism contrasts with her rather conventionai narrative forms. Given her civil rights work, her stories appear inconsistent in repeating the paradigms of "local colour" fictions.

Rather than see this conventionaiïty as a Failure to articulate her personai convictions, however, Dunbar-Nelson's extensive literary and worldIy education indicates that she may have recognied and even consciously displayed racial and ethnic contradictions in her work Dunbar-Nelson pubiiciy identifid herself as a

' See Hull Colour. Seu and Poetrv 34-5. 1O9 "brass des," a person "white enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a reai love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race" (3 11). Dunbar-Nelson was very well educated for a woman of her time, graduating from Straight College, studying at Comell, Columbia and the University of

Pemsyivania, publishing numerous newspaper articles and even a literary essay on the influence of Milton on Wordsworth. Ail these accomplishrnents suggest that her explorations of identity can be re-read as not only replicating "local coIour" narrative thernes and styles but also as criticaily exposing the contradictions of creole society.

Aithough contemporary readers may well not have acknowledged these inconsistencies, Dunbar-Nelson's multivalent texts uncover stereotypicd figures such as the tragic muiatto/a as a figuration and exacerbation of identity in crisis. In other words, her activism and her writing cm be read coterminously in that her writing reveals the injustices which her activism sought to redress politicaily. Just as Rhys's writing manifests a symbiotic relationship between history and self-writing, so tao does Dunbar-Nelson deploy her personal politics to spotlight the assumptions and biases of conventionai narrative forms. For a woman who publicly criticized both white society for its racism and black society for its failure to inchde mixed race perspectives, the expression of these double exclusions is itselfa forrn of protest.

Dunbar-Nelson exposes the disjunctions which surround ferninine creoie identity through her repetition of the raciaI and ethnic discourses which (over) define that subjectivity. Kristina Brooks has productively applied this fraught cultural context to

Dunbar-Nelson's writing, claiming that the short stories delight in portraying creoleness as simultaneously "specific and unverifiable" (6). According to Brooks. creolization in tum of the century New Orleans reproduced rigid boundaries and definitions within a highly contested identity space. Moreover, as the comection between blackness and femininity and the exploitation of creoie women by white men in the first two stories reveal, those boundaries are fùrther fissured and complicated by sexual expectations and stereotypes. Dunbar-Nelson's American version of creolization thus revises Glissant's Caribbean-based theory within a more ngid context of racial and ethnic distinctions. The double movement of definition and contradiction

makes creolization in these stories less the endless play of Relation and more a system

of violent assertions and rejections. As in the conclusion of Good Moming Midnieht,

the utopian ideais of Glissant's infinite becoming, where difference is validated and encouraged, cannot be sustained within a society that rejects, indeed abjects, any

challenge to racial divisions. For Dunbar-Nelson, the genealogical preoccupations of

the discourse of racial identity preclude non-linear cross-cultural exchange.

Abjection is thus essential in descniing figures such as the creoIe woman of

colour, who represents a set of exclusive ethnic and racial definitions even as she

confounds conclusive categorizations of blackl white or Afiican-Amencan1 Anglo-

American. Dunbar-Nelson expiicates this fiaught dynarnic in her own description of

creole identity, writing that "The Caucasian will shudder with horror at the idea of

including a person of color in the definition," while the person of coIour will "retort" 111 with a very different definition ("People of Color" 9). Both "horror" and violent reaction, this characterization of race relations cIearly recalls the processes of abjection. As Kristeva writes, the abject "is something rejected fiom which one does not part," a series of repulsions and attractions, and this is precisely the nature of creole identity in New Orleans (Powers 4). White and coloured creole identities join in distinguishing themselves fiom other forms of Arnencan culture on the bais of ethnicity, but what distinguishes the two forrns of creole is race. In this exclusionary cultural context, alterity is within subjectivity itself, but that alterity takes on specific racial forms. Mixed race identity is the constituting otherness against which white creoles define themselves. just as whiteness is the alterity which harasses "coloured" creoles. One version of creole must be abjected, if never abandoned, in order to constitute the other and in this way the fiaught racial, class and ethnic context of

Southem society transforrns Glissant's errantry into the violence of abjection, bom out of but unable to transcend the "power or vainglory .. . suffering or impatience'' (PR

93).

Dunbar-Nelson's thematization of heterosexud romantic relationships tùrther distinguishes her approach to creolization. in her inciusion of male châracters,

Dunbar-Nelson reveals that abjection is not limited to femuiuie creole experience but rather that identity is a contested and tiaught process for both creole men and women.

In Kristeva's gender-idected narrative of abject formation, neither masculity nor femininity is a pure or homogenous space, but each is invoIved in the "essentiai stmggle," "the fascinated rejection of the other at the heart of that 'our selfn which is Il2 the nature of being (Strangers 191). Abjection, thematized as ferninine by Rhys. is. in

Dunbar-Nelson's work, applied irrespective of discursively produced gender differences. Yet these heterosexuai, abject exchanges are not only an extension of rupture and division to descnbe masculine experience but aiso point to love as a transcendent possibility. Characters such as Thalié in "On the Bayou Bridge" and even

"Little Miss Sophie" articulate a longing for genuine comection, a comection which would transcend the boundaries of abjection. Although the endings of these texts repeatedly deny this possibility, destroying any hope of tme love through the violence of social divisions, the revolutionary potentiai of love haunts the text as an alternate possibility. Unlike Sasha's inescapable isolation in Good Mornine Midnight, Dunbar-

Nelson's doomed lovers drearn of a transcendent communion even as they cofirm the power of abjection.

Dunbar-Nelson's representation of identities in crisis explodes racial discoune in a manner sirnilar to Glissant's explosion of French linguistics and poetics. Although

Dunbar-Nelson's tragic narratives configure cross-cultural relations as destructive rather than infinitely creative in the manner that Glissant suggests, his notion of a disruptive excess continues to apply to Dunbar-Nelson's work. "The Stones of the

VilIage," for instance, breaks down notions of racial purïty to assert the permeabiiity

of racial boundaries. In ail three stories, identities are ambiguously situated between

racial and ethnic categories, illustrating the dynamic potentiai that Glissant celebrates.

Yet Dunbar-Nelson's work differs fiom Glissant in conceivhg of creole identity as a

confiicted moment rather than an open duration. Linear hierarchies persist within 113 racial genealogies and assettions of creole "authenticity," so that Dunbar-Nelson's version of creolization cannot "wander" klyacross historical boundaries but is a construct of her time and place. Aithough more consecvative than Rhys's work in their conventionai narrative foms and sentence structures, Dunbar-Nelson's stories take ferninine creole analysis in new directions through the hctured and divided figures of racial passing and the tragic mulatta. Bound both to the restrictions and inconsistencies of tum-of-the-century New Orleans society, the "brass ankles" puts the disjunctions of creole identity on display, inviting a reading informed by Glissant's possibility but recognizing the inescapable confiicts of abjection.

"Little Miss Sophie": The Abject Mulatta

First collected in Nice Dunbar-Nelson's 1895 volume, Violets and Other Tales,

"Little Miss Sophie" can be read according to sentimental themes of suffering, transcendence and moral reform. The story is important from a ferninine creole

perspective in that it revolves around issues of identification, gender expectations and

cultural-regionai tropes. The resonant religious symboIism portrays Miss Sophie as

acting out a gendered and culturdy specific saaifice in order to preserve the integrity

of the white, male subject. In representing this almost fitual act within sentimental

literature of the time, the text both places Miss Sophie within that tradition and

publicly exposes the bnrtal hypocrisies of New Orleans radcjassincation. "Little

Miss Sophie" exhibits the sacrifices and exclusions which a racist society demands, and LI4 in this sense, aithough Dunbar-Nelson's fiction is predictabIy more subtle than her personai activism, both cari be read as politicai acts which unmask the injustices of

New Orleans society and demand refonn.

Kristina Brooks argues that 'a repeated theme in Dunbar-Nelson's oetrvre is that of hidden or coded local knowledge" of race and class as designated by place narnes, occupation and ethnic markers (8). According to Brooks, Miss Sophie's manual occupation, apartment in the Third District, and description as a dark-haired and "dusky-eyed" creole wouId place her as a woman of colour within New Orleans society. tndeed, Werner SolIors supports this interpretation in his enumeration of racial markers such as hair, eyes and fingers (Miss Sophie's hands si@@ manual labour) ( 15 1). According to Soliors, dark haïr and eyes were fetishized during the postbellum period as indicators of mixed racial ancestry, while Brooks notes that white creole women rehsed to do manuai labor, making work-wom hands another signifier of rnixed race status. A localty informed approach to this short story thus places Miss

Sophie within a particular set of ciass, ethnic and sexual codifications. Creole may be

a multiple and contested identity category within this text's version of New Orieans

culture, but it is aiso strictly regulated through racial definitions and prohibitions.

Shirley Samuels' introduction to The Culture of Sentiment argues that an

aesthetics of sentiment surrounded Nneteenth-century racial and gender discourses,

embodying abolitionkt forces of change yet strictly lirniting the kinds of sympathy and

hence cultural fonns that such changes couid produce. According to traditionid

interpretations, the figure ofthe tragic mulatta was a tool in sentimental writings Il5 intended to invite sympathy for anti-rack positions by minimizing difference. This process of "whitening" difference produced exceptionally heroic men and exceptionally beautiful women doomed to tragic ends because of a "fatal trace of blackness" (Sollors 227). Miss Sophie's faded beauty and melodramatic death clearly confonn to this stereotype. Yet Sollors alw points out that the very fact of miscegenation represents a reproach and a chalIenge to white suciety:

The critical wisdom of the past rested on a fiequently reiterated line (adopted tiom a racial conservative but repeated by many liberal and radical cntics) that the abolitionists chose Mulatto characters, "linle resembling their swarthy protégés," because "a white man in chahs was more pitifd to behold than the .&cm similarly placed," which was an expression of racism. Yet biracial characters could also be anathema because their representation (indeed, their very existence) has always chailenged, and still challenges, the notion that there is an obvious and easily definabIe boundary between black and white. (24 1)

In other words, miscegenation represents a genealogical crisis. Disnipting notions of

"purity'. and "authenticity,' the miscegenation figured in the body of the tragic mulatta exposes racism's fundamental instability and fictionality. Miss Sophie's racial ambiguity, a quality that Dunbar-Nebon emphasizes by refiising to label her character as "quadroon" or "mulatta" (terms employed by other creole writers such as George

Washington Cable), plays on this transgression of bounda~ies.~Moreover, historically, the existence of interracial characters represents a reproach to white men, who exploited slave women to produce this class of New Orleans society. According to

Sollors, the tragc muiatta is a divided Ligure in that, white except for a fatal "taint" of colour, she appeals to Southrn racial stemtypes while questioning the

" See. for uistance Cable's stories. 'Madame Delphine- and "Tite Pouietie- hmOld Cmle Davs. 116 values of a society that would hold those prejudices. In repeatedly exhibiting this woman in her stories, Dunbar-Nelson is replicating conventional stereotypes, yet those stereotypes themselves embody more complex and split rnemhgs than have generally been acknowledged.

Both Brooks and Violet Hanington Bryan fiirther argue that Miss Sophie's relationship with Neale refers to the custom ofplaçage in which women of mixed race were kept as mistresses by wealthy white men. Brooks writes that "the reference to a

'little Creofe love-affair' that is succeeded by the white man's maniage to a white woman is an allusion to the usual course ofplaçage," yet what is unusual in this stol is the white man's implied irresponsibility and loss of identity which "places a neat twist on the racidied problem of identification typically experienced by the light- skinned African American..." (13). Plaçage defines sexuality in terms of race, marking Miss Sophie as tragic mulatta, as sentimenta1 stereotype and semai object while also, in this case, throwing white. male subjectivity Uito crisis. Using a highly stereotypicd narrative fom, Dunbar-Nelson proiiferates uncerîainty about what distinguishes identity. if the tmly white man cannot be found, then can any identity be conclusively defined? Dunbar-Nelson's racialized "twist" to this story exemplifies a culturally specific instance of the aiterity which Kristeva conceives as inherent to

identity. No assertion of identity, however powerfiil or sociadly endorsed, is ever free

fiom the spectre of othemess which can take on myrid contextually resonant forms.

The opening image of "Little Miss Sophie" introduces the cultural and racial

contradictions which haut this narrative. Huddled at the aItar of the Virgui, "a Little, 117 forsaken, black heap," Miss Sophie presents an abject, outcast figure penpherally observing, as the text subsequently reveais, the wedding of her former lover (140).

According to the system ofplup~ge,unions between creole women of colour and white men were relegated outside the institution of marriage (Bryan 126). In that marriage within one's social gcoup, as Knsteva notes, ttnctions to preserve cultural boundaries the wedding in this scene represents the affirmation and continuation of white, upper-class New Orleans society to the exclusion of other identities (Powers

79). According to these definitions, then, Miss Sophie represents an identity which cannot be officiaily recognized in that her aitemate version of creoleness undermines the exclusivity of white culture. A romantic union between Miss Sophie and Neale could not be afirmed by New Orleans society in that it would cross identity boundaries both for white and "coloured creoles. [ndeed, the description of the well- dressed and predominantly white-clothed wedding party contrasts in class and racial terms with the poverty and darkness of Miss Sophie's figure. Miss Sophie is portrayed abjectly in this scene in that she remains the rejected perspective against which the white-robed bride is constituted and defined: She is in that (white New Orleans) place and time a version of ferninine and creole identity which cannot be legitimized.

Miss Sophie lurks in the shadows here just as her memory disturbs her ex- lover's conscience. Rejected as Louis Nede's former mistress, Miss Sophie's presence throws the success of the maniage into question Her coincidental appearance at the wedding, as well as the description of her tenuous and meagre life locate Miss Sophie on the penphery of white creoIe society. Miss Sophie is also, however, uneasily 118 defined as part of the "coloured" neighborhood of the third district. Here, her neighbours construct a persona for her because she will not identif) one for herself

The issue which Miss Sophie initially raises for both white and coloured forms of creole society is not simply that of privileging one culture over another, but of crossing discrete boundaries of behaviour and attitude. At once a part of the third district and yet maintainhg a transgressive attitude toward her past relationship with a white man,

Miss Sophie disturbs comfortable classifications. Mary Douglas and Kristeva both note the importance of social taboos in preserving boundaries and the abject reactions which result fiom their transgression. Where the text and New Orleans custom indicate that relationships between white men and women of colour were cornrnon,

Miss Sophie's depth of attachment invites abjection through transgressing the nom and impiicitly reproaching the dismissive attitudes of Nede and his acquaintances.

The cultural conflict which surrounds Miss Sophie is also represented linguisticaily in her speech patterns. The text contrasts the grammaticaily "correct."

Anglicized speech of white creoles with the French-intluenced, New Orleans creole spoken by Miche[ and the landlady. Miss Sophie, aithough physically placed in the third district, uses standard Engiish fonns, thereby crossing a significant cultural and linguistic divide. In refusing to stigrnatize her protagonist through the use of dialect,

Dunbar-Nelson emphasizes the permeability of racial boundaries. Portraying a character marked as mixed race but who speaks as white, the text proliferates questions about what distinguishes and defines identity in typicaiiy GLissantian fashion.

Language is an opportunity for cross-cultural exchange, for breaking dom differences Il9 and revealing the ways in which a speech pattern (or identity) can be deliberately, indeed errantly, assurned. Yet despite her linguistic proficiency, Miss Sophie, Iike

Sasha's ability to speak Engiish and French while remaining dienated in both languages, speaks hmoutside the cultural context of that language. Miss Sophie is alien to "coloured and white creole conununities because of her Linguistic and sentimental transgressions. In that her cross-cultural negotiations produce oniy pain and longing, Miss Sophie lives a state of constant division and hlfdls the tragic mulatta stereotype.

The "twist" which Kristina Brooks observes in this story is that the issue of identity does not threaten Miss Sophie's existence. but that of Louis Neale. Neale's identity cannot be affirmed (and the fùture of the syrnbolic rnarriage cannot be assured) because of the efFects of his past relationship with Miss Sophie. As the following exchange reveals, sociaIIy recognized identity here is subject to the observation of certain rules and traditions:

"Yes;it's too bad for Neale, and lately rnanied too," said the elder man .... "How did it happen?" Ianguidly inquired the younger .... "Well, the firm faiied first; he didn't mind that much, he was sa sure of his uncle's inheritance repairing his lost fortunes, but suddenly this difficulty of identification springs up, and he is literally on the verge of min." "Won't some of you fellows who've known him a11 your lives do tc identiQ him?,, "Gracious man, we've tned, but the absurd old w-Uexpressly stipulates that he shall be known oniy by a certain quaint Roman ring, and unless he has it - no identification,no fortune. He has given the ring away and that settles it ...." ( 146-7)

As the text goes on to reveal, the ring was gïven to Miss Sophie, whose grief and betrayal at the end of the &air make Neale too ashamed to find her. The identity crisis 1XI which structures the story is thus a crisis of cultural boundaries: Neaie's past relationship with Sophie has exceeded even the social transgression accommodated by the plaçage arrangement. Neale's identity is threatened not simply because of the missing ring but because of the transgressive entanglernent its loss represents.

Miss Sophie's mulatta status may be at once conventionai and subversive, yet the tragic outcome of the story restores the ring, Neale's identity and, by the same token, discrete cultural boundaries. In this sense, both Dunbar-Nelson's text and the stereotypical figure of the tragic mulatta mark the litnits of Relation. Essentially more conservative than Glissant's work and even some of Rhys's writing, "Little Miss

Sophie" displays the irresolvable contradictions which delimit New Odeans creoie identity. Tragedy and destruction are a necessary outcome for the rnulatta in this context because she reveals the instability of racial categories. What distinguishes and allows a more cntical current reading of this narrative is the way that Dunbar-Nelson puts these issues on display and makes the white man responsible, as Violet Hmington

Bryan also notes, for the tragic outcome. Miss Sophie carries mord authority, "a kind of halo" which reproaches Neale's irresponsibie behaviour from a ferninist and racially inflected viewpoint (1 49). While the text restores social boundaries, it does so in a process which unmasks the injustices of that containment.

This tragic performance, which afbns identity in the same moment that it ackmwledges its instability, can be read as the process of abje~tion.~A wornan of

5 The fact that the stoq was wrïtten ovcr twenty years &et the abolition ofslaveq suggests that conventionai readings of the tragic mulatta solely as an aùoiïtionist twl are no longer relmant bere. The continuation of the mulana mpe within Southeni witing suggests chat this figure canîed 0th implications. 121 colour who upholds ideals of gentility and sensitivity popularly associated in this tirne and place with white culture (while Neale himself is notably lacking in these values),

Miss Sophie destabiiiies certainties which can only be recovered through her death.

Yet the tragic outcome here resolves the subversive implications of the mulatta figure in the same moment that it recognizes the transgression of excIusionary identity categories that has taken place. ExemplifYing the double movement of abjection, Miss

Sophie and Nede are returned to their sociaily constructed identities within a narrative

process that puts the petmeability of those identities on display.

Miss Sophie's self-sacrifice can be read in this context as the act which restores

Symbolic order. In her reading of biblical prohibitions in Powers of Horror, Kristeva

proposes that within the establishment of the subject, sacrifice tunctions to recover

breaches in discursive unity or the order of One. Where taboos organize difference

and attempt to forestall transgressions ofsymbolic Law, sacrifice becornes necessary to "constitut[e] the alliance with the One when the metonymic order that stems fiom it

is perturbed" (95). Sacrifice is thus a "metaphor," mediating violently between

oppositional terms and uitimately restoring the "semantic isotopy" or exclusivity of

each. This process, as Kelly Oliver explains. is also a process of abjection, a process

of re-establishïng the thetic break which separates the semiotic fiom the symbolic.

Oliver writes that.

Sacrifice, which focuses violence, becornes the precondition for society. This is true not ody of rehgious ritual sacrifice but of sacrifice and violence on al1 levels of the society. Sacrifice, ksofar as it confines violence to a single place or position, is thetic. The victirn's body is sacrificed for the sake of the Symbolic... (40). 122 identities which are doubly defined as one and other become scmiotic mess which must be regulated through abjection, or the reffirmation of the thetic. Miss Sophie's sacrifice, the sacrifice of the tragic mulatta (a figure which is excessive in taking on the qualities of more than one identity), can be seen in this respect as a thetic act which re- establishes identity categories and enables Neaie's continued existence as the symbolic subject. Sacrifice is central to this narrative in performing the economy of abjection.

The self-directed violence of Miss Sophie's act thus revises celebratos) notions of identity in process. Miss Sophie's act exemplifies the painfiil losses of creolization in contrast to the liberating expansion that Glissant exalts. While this narrative does display the pemeability of identity categories, it does not ultimately revel in this arnbiguity. Ferninine creole identity is not necessarily the subversive, "Looking Glass" realm that Kristina Brooks suggests but, in the three narratives I examine, is a senes of violent fractures and losses (6). Miss Sophie's miserable existence and ultimate death are a product of her creole manipulations. Revising Glissant with a concept of the exclusions necessitated by racial and ethnic distinctions in New Orleans. Dunbar-

Nelson's narrative also places Kristeva's concept of psychic dterity within a very specific public forum. Difference may be inherent to identity but the specific corifigurations and processes that it assumes depend on regional and historical context.

Miss Sophie and Neaie's relationship is transgressive oniy to the regdations constructed by Southern creole society and their identities are re-contained through socio-literary constmcts unique to that context. 123 In addition to enacting abjection in cultud terms, "Little Miss Sophie" dramatizes the socially sanctioned repression of femininity as difference. According to fisteva, Miss Sophie's repeated applications to the Vugin Mary include her in a discourse on female identity within the symbolic. In the essay, "Stabat Mater,"

Knsteva questions how the Marian cuit "was able to attract women's wishes for identification as well as the very precise interposition of those who assurned to keep watch over the symbolic and social order?" (Reader 180). Kristeva ultirnately reads the figure of the Virgin as a symbolic covering over of the maternd semiotic in ways which allowed women (and men) access to a discourse of femininity within the symbolic. Indeed, this coverin~over of difference is made literal and given racial inflections in Dunbar-Nelson's text as the Virgin wears a concealing white robe. In one sense, the Virgin represents a figure of repression. a discursive control of semiotic possibility. Yet the Marian cuit also offers one of the few permitted symbolic recognitions of difference, putting femininity and the possibility of alterity on display.

Miss Sophie's worship of the Virgin is a rimai which affirrns her fernininity even as it sacrifices that difference to a symbolically inspired discourse of ~arneness.~The theatricai eiements of the Virgin (music,pertirme, flowers, lights) are a sociaily sanctioned performance of femininity. As mother yet virgin, voiceless yet cornforting,

Mary transfonns the disruptive elements of semiotic excess into a syrnbolically

Kristeva is not ~ggesringthat either the wlicor semiotic are homogeneous. but that Symbolic discaurse involves a concept of unrfied identity. Knsreva's pmjea is ta pmblematize these concepts of smcness. !jee RevolutIon. 1 24 constmcted feminine "Other," a performance Miss Sophie repeats in emulating the

Virgin.

Mer hearing of Neale's dilemma and unable to think of how to retrieve the ring, Miss Sophie prays to Mary as a supplicant daughter, "Yes, the Virgin would know and have pity; the sweet, white-robed Virgin at the pretty flower-decked altar

..." ( t 49). Mer making this appeal, Miss Sophie resolves to sacrifice herself or, as 1 have suggested above. to re-establish identity boundaries. This act of selfdirected vioIence is a repression of feminine semiotic possibility modelled on the Virgin figure. yet it is also an act which displays the existence of aiterity. Miss Sophie's sacrifice reveais Neale's moral failjngs and consequently the hypocrisies of a society that disguises difference within fdse images of moral and racial "purity." Miss Sophie's sacrifice is the abjection of semiotic possibility within a society that cannot see the loss that this act represents. Dunbar-Nelson's text restores a recognition of this loss

through its reconstruction of the nature and circumstances behind Miss Sophie's act.

The conchding Christmas imagery, ciosely associated as it is with Mary. suggests that

Miss Sophie has become a Virgin figure, has herself become a symbolic construct of both fernininity and whiteness: "There it was, clasped between her fingers on her

bosorn. A bosom white and coi& under a cold, happy face. Chnstrnas had indeed

dawned for Miss Sophie .. . " ( 154). The Vugin endows Miss Sophie with the

whiteness and physical features of femininity (the bosom), which she was noticeably

lacking in the opening description of a "forsaken bIack heap." The 6nai tabIeau vividly

dramatizes Miss Sophie's repression of aiterity. 125 This idea of revelation as opposed to the secrecy and disguise commonly associated with interracial reIationships is ttrther exemplified in the narrative tone

Dunbar-Nelson employs. Recalling Rhys's exposition of social masks, Dunbar-Nelson makes what should be, in New Orleans society, a private, clandestine relationship the subject ofa public text. The omniscient narrative voice foregrounds social attitudes and opinions through observations such as. "If one were Qiven to pity, the first thought that would rush to one's lips at sight of Miss Sophie would have been: Poor Iittle Miss

Sophie" (143) and later, "Passengers on the Claiborne üne are too much accustomed to fiail, little black-robed women with big, black bundIes, it is one ofthe city's most pitifil sights" ( 145). The narrator here makes a reader aware not only of how Miss

Sophie is constructed according to a tragic type, but aIso of the insincerity of these sentimental depictions, since the implication is that most of society is not @ven to pity.

As in the explanation that Miss Sophie must remthe ring fieeIy because otherwise,

"That good, straight-backed, stiff-necked Creole blood would have risen in al1 its nrength and choked her." (I48) the narrator exposes the contradictions and prohibitions of New Orleans creole cuIture.

The disjunctive elements of Dunbar-Nelson's narrative are thus not the result of a conceptuai failing as GIotia Hull suggests, nor are they a celebration of arnbiguity such as Kristina Brooks proposes, but an explosion of the discourses by which sexuality is regutated (HuII, "Introductionn xxix, Brooks 6). "Little Miss Sophie" presents a uniquely late nineteenth-century New OrIeans version of the fernuillie creok in that the narrative poses a crisis of identity initiated by that time and place. As the 126 sirnultaneously diminutive and formai title suggestq the narrative moves in two directions. containing identity through the violently divided figure of the tragic mulatta and yet implicitiy reproaching the white male subject who benefits hmsuch actions.

Whereas Rhys htesoici of the postslavery moment of historical crisis, Dunbar-

Nelson's version of the feminine creole is a trenchant wn'ting of racial and ethnic crisis.

"On the Bayou Bridge": Retuming Alterity

"On the Bayou Bridge" is also a story about conflicted and mistaken identities.

A previously unpublished and unanalyzed typescript written between 1902 and 1909

(recently included in Dunbar-Nelson's collected works), the story is similar to "Little

Miss Sophie" in its depiction of a creole woman rejected by her lover for another.

Reading the two stories against each other, "On the Bayou Bridge" addresses simiiar

issues of racial and ethnic definition as refiacted througb a heterosexual relationship.

However, this narrative culminates in a differently-directed form of violence as Thalie

murders her faithless partner. Although this vioIent act 'bcorrects'' one transgression of

discrete identity categorïes in this story, Edouard's murder has unsettling

reperçussions. Like "Little Miss Sophie," this is a narrative of historicai crisis for the

creole woman of colour, and yet here Dunbar-Nelson also reveals that creolization can

produce moments of cisis for the white man.

Identities in this story are both over-defined and maddeningiy ambiguous. The

narrative voice Unmediately puts the boundw between cultural belonging and 127 difference on display. The opening description of the Bayou St. John places the reader outside local knowledge, assuming an unfarniliarity with the bayou: "Looking upon it for the first time, you would shudder because you feel what lies beneath the brown waters" ( 147). Regionai knowledge is a key issue in the text as the narrator relegates the reader to a position outside creole culture and asserts her own perspective inside.

This dynamic is a technique repeatediy used in "local colour" stories, where a part of the process is to stereotype and exoticize another ethnicity. Yet Knstina Brooks notes that Dunbar-Nelson-s use of this trope has another effect: "She makes the reader feel

"out of place" and thus forced to recognize just what economic, ethnic, and social place he or she is in" (33). In other words, the opening of this narrative plays on the boundaries of identity for the reader as well as characters, making ethnic and regional distinctions a focus for analysis. As "Little Miss Sophie" indicates, the stereotypical fonns of sentimental narrative are also fonns which can be recuperated by a modem reader as seeking to encapsulate the tensions of New Orleans society.

The narrative embeds ethnic markers within coded local knowledge, at once revealing and concealing identity in a process simiiar to the effects produced by multiple, mutually exclusive definitions of creohtion. More radicaily than the ending of "Little Miss Sophie," the finai revelation of this story returns aiterity within identity by exposing Edouard and Thaiié as more entwined than anyone suspects. Glissant's insistence on the opacities of identity becomes centrai to this narrative process as, playing on the line between identity and difference, the story reveais that no one is who slhe initidiy, transparently seerns. 128 Ethnic markers are fust apparent in the different dialects spoken by Edouard and Thalie, a linguistic contrast which signifies differences in class, culture and background. Edouard speaks standard Anglo-American English, marked by its tack of passion or affection: "1 am not afraid, Thalie, to stay with you. It is not fear that rnakes me go, it is duty, that's al]" (148). Edouard's precise articulation here, using only one abbreviation, as well as his short, concise sentences conform completely to grammatical rules and structures. His speech is an articulation of symbolic structure and restraint, as the reference to "duty" makes clear. Indeed, the text emphasizes the fact that he comes from another place than Thalie, a banier to their relationship which takes on class and ethnic. as well as physical, implications. Yet Edouard has a French narne and can speak that language, replying, "C'est impossible," to Thaiié's pleas for a continued relationship (149). A white creole man of this tirne and place would speak standard English, while understanding the diaiects and French language base of other speech foms. Read against "Little Miss Sophie," the reIationship between Edouard and Thalie bears remarkable similarky to a plaçage arrangement, with the white creole man attempting to break off his fiair with a woman of very different creole status.

The details which suggest this situation remain, however, coded in local knowiedge, a device which replicates the exclusions of creole society in that it insists on and makes most readers aware of their difference from that cornrnunity.

Supporthg this ethnic and raciaiiy infonned reading, Thdie's speech is in

French mole diaiect which does not confom to grammaticai des, just as her version of romance does not confom to accepted social iimits. Thaiïé replies to Edouard, 129 "Eh, moi, w'en duty cornes in, pouf - with love. You are cold, cold to talk of duty w'en yo' heart says love. Eet weel brake my hem - oh, Edouard, Edouard -" (148).

Incomplete sentences, dashes, repetition and diaiect identif) Thalié as speaking Eom a very different cultural perspective and subjectivity than Edouard. As in the above quotation, Thaiié displaces Engiish with French while also transforming Engiish pronunciations into a distinct diaiect. She uses the French word "moit' to refer to herself, defining herself in terrns of Francophone creoleness. In addition to her dialect,

Thalie's dark hair and working ciass status (racial markers also given Miss Sophie) suggest that she is a creole woman of coiour. A ciassic exampie of linguistic creolization, Thalié's dialectically stigmatized speech forms disrxpt sentence structure and symbolic meaning with a sense of what cannot be articulated and what cannot be dispassionately stated ("pouf - with love"). In thus interrupting linguistic rules and form, Thaiié inserts a serniotic element into her symboIic speech act. This speaking position is distinct fiom that of Edouard in terms of articulating Thalié's raciaiiied creole ethnicity. Her traffic with semiotic emotion meanwhile. prevents her ftom responding in what Edouard describes as "reasonable" ways to the end ofthe afbir.

The relationship between Edouard and Thalié not oniy transgresses the sociaily sanctioned bond between Edouard and his fiancée, but also initiaiiy suggests a border crossing in the way that Sophie and Louis' relationship does. As the bridge setting emphasized by the title suggests, their relationship occupies a transitional space, a

"bridgen between positionaiities. In that this is a heterosexual romantic relationship, the diferences are also gendered: Thalié appears to represent the stereotypicai, 130 passionate creole woman, wMe Edouard represents the rational, sexudy exploitive, white man. When Edouard dismisses Thdié's version of events, claiming she is

"deluded" and "melodrarnatic," he is effectively discrediting her feminine creole perspective and asserting his male prerogative.

The contest for subjectivity which is acted out in the course of the narrative thus opposes rnixed race feminine creole identity against that of the white Southern man. Difference does not proliferate in this context, but becomes a violent, abjecting conflict in which Thalie fi&s to affirm her cultural and gendered position in the face of Edouard's negation:

In the struggle, the thin crust of civilization was tom off with a wrench of the hand. Life became elementai, pnmordiai. Man fought for life, and life alone; woman fought that which she clairncd in a passion of matemity might be no other's if not hers. ( 15 1)

The links to maternity and pre-social, "elemental" experience here suggest that this relationship which has crossed social niles (of Edouard's promise to his tiancée, of maintainhg cultural difference. and in Thalié's "unreasonable" passion) presents a form of excess which must be correcteci in order to restore socially viable identities.

Enacting a violent rejection of that which threatens her being and her self-definition ("1 have no life but what 1 geet fom you" she telts Edouard), Thalié acts to relegate

Edouard and the transgressive excess which her association with him entails to an irrecoverable position outside society, that of the corpse. in a struggle which must entai1 the annihilation of one in order to preserve the idemity of the other, Thalie recovers herself through transfonnuig Edouard hto the abject object, "the corpse" which Kristeva writes "seen without God and outside of science, is the utrnost of 13 1 abjection" (Powers 4). Uniike Miss Sophie, who abjects herself in order to restore white, male identity, Thalié abjects Edouard in order to affirm her own ferninine creole identity and to preserve the separation of their culturd differences. As in her assertion of creole identity through language, Thaiié retùses to abject herself but rather, when

Edouard proposes to reject her and their relationship in order to affirm his own dominant identity through marriage, fights for her identity. The argument becrimes lethai, a contest embodying the ultimate violence of abjection in that it is a struggle for social legitirnacy. indeed for "elementai, primordial" existence itself

Revising narratives of self-sacrifice such as "Little Miss Sophie," Thaiié preserves fier female, ethnically marked and semioticaily inclusive identity position fiom the threat of negation. In this conflict of cultural and gendered locations, abjection assens discrete identity boundaries even as it recognizes their transgression, a double movement of alterity within identity which will take on a hrther twist in the story's ending. Yet "On the Bayou Bridge" also revises fisteva's individualized, psychoanalytic concept of abjection through a sense of creoie community, enabling

Thalies less-powerfitl social location to prevail over Edouard's more powe&l but isolated subjectivity. Thalié's group of fiiends clearly place her within a creole community (in other words her traflic with the semiotic takes place witb a social conrext), while Edouard's place of belonging is, as 1 have suggested, more solitary, remote and inherently arnbiguous. Aithough abjection is generally a process of

;tffirmingdominant patriarchai subjectivities, in this Southem context where community is vital to defining identity, the perspective being upheld is that of the 132 creole wornan rather than of the duplicitous outsider. Abjection fiinctions in this sense to deIineate and separate a specific New OrIeans community against outside intrusions.

Dunbar-Nelson exemplifies one way in which the cornplexities of Southem culture stretch theoreticai concepts, supplementing Kristeva's individual psychoanalytic approach with one articulation of the roie community can play in the process of abjection. Thaiie may represent the scorned creole woman, yet that identity performance aiso assens the inclusive force of this mixed race community.

The meaning of Edouard's murder and the affirmation of one creole identity over another is radicaily destabiked by the ending of the text. In an exarnple of the racially-inflected secrets which Werner Sollors describes as haunting Southern geneaiogies, Edouard and Thalie tum out to be potential relatives. This theme of hidden relationships, according to Sollors, exemplifies the fear that no identity is so- called "pure" within American society while also graphically illustrating the return of altenty (43).

This revelation of the aiterity inherent to identity, as well as the disguises assurned to cover over that "irnpurity," is linked to Southem gothic concepts of horror. A perception that the ego is not uncontested, that difference exists as

"threatening excess," is the foundation both for Kristeva's concept of abjection as a dynamic structureci by "the powers of horror" and for Southern narratives which relate the "horrïfic' discovery of racial and semal impurity. This narrative contains subtle gothic elements such as the opening and closing descriptions of the bayou, which the narrator descnies as "sinister" and "brooding," tilled with dark secrets that will cause 133 one to shudder (147). Thalie aiso reacts with horror to the revelation of the fiancée's identity, not only, the text suggests, because of a fear that her crime will be discovered, but also because of the implications of that revelation. On hearing the news, her voice, is "hoarse like the cry of the alligator with death in its tones," suggesting a Iink with the sinister bayou. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, in their introduction to American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, specifically connect gothic tendencies in Southem writing to Julia Krïsteva's understanding of the abject as what "draws [the subject] toward the place where meaning collapses" (Powers 2). Martin and Savoy suggest that the horror which characterizes both abjection and gothic writing originates tiom this perception that subjecthood is tiindamentally unstable. writing with reference to Kristeva that "the project of the gothic turn in narrative has been to take the ego, or the story generated by the national ego, 'back to its source on the abominable Iirnits fiom which, in order to be, the ego has broken away' ..." (viii-ix). The homfic revelation of this text exists

not simply in the repercussions of Edouard's murder, but in the collapse of Southern

social constructs, in the revelation that Edouard and Thaiié are never as separate as

ethnicl racial distinctions would attest.

Yet uitimately the circumstances surrounding this final revelation are unclear.

How could Thalié and Edouard remain ignorant of each others' identities? What

family relationship exists between Thalié and her stepsister? Are they of the same

race/ ethnic background and subject to the same semai exploitation, or is the process

ofphçage repeating itself through Thalié as the daughter of a mixed race union, white 134 her stepsister is the "legitimized" white creole wornan? The ending of the narrative both elucidates identity and proliferates questions about who inhabits what cultural and gendered position. Meaning is not only collapsed by the appearance of an unsuspected alterity within supposedly discrete identity positions, but identity is further reveaied as a continuai process of revision and alteration, construction and reconstmction. The abject act in this text becornes a tragic performance of the impermanence of dl affiliations.

Although Thalié makes a very different choice from Miss Sophie, murdering

Edouard rather than sacrificing herself, the racial deception and violently divided terms of New Orleans creole identity resuit in a similady tragic outcome to this narrative.

"On the Bayou Bridge" exemplifies the violent, abject contest for subjectivity which is the product of racial divisions perpetuated within New Orleans creole society of this tirne. As in many Southern gothic texts, the homfic secret which haunts this narrative is reveaied to be the permeability of ethnic or social categories.' Race and lineage are never hlly evident, yet are a constant subject for speculation and exposure in this

"local coloui' narrative. Dunbar-Nelson's conventional styIe and subject matter emerge as strategies for revealing the raciai and ethnic tensions which harass and, indeed, haunt the creole woman of colour.

See. for instance. ~~'sBah- as weii as Faulkner's Absalom, Nom!, a novel which even Glissant acknowledges as representing a aaumaticCencounter between so-caiied legitimacy and perversion. See CD 80. 135

"The Stones of the Village": Performiag 1 Passing

Also a previoudy unpubhshed typescript written between 1900 and 19 10, "The

Stones of the Village" is one of Dunbar-Nelson's most explicit expforations of race identity within Southem society. Employing the trope of raciai passing, tfiis narrative describes Victor Graben's experience as he supresses his interracial ongins to becorne a powertùl lawyer and judge. Victor assumes a sociaily advantageous position by abjecting his matemdly identified blackness in a process which aiternates between the subversion and reafEination of raçist distinctions. Moreover, in writing the experiences of a masculine protagonist, Dunbar-Nelson peforms a kind of authorial gender passing abandoning her fernale heroines of the previous stories to suggest that true power within early twentieth century Southem society cm oniy be the prerogative of the white male. Passing here not only displays the arbitrary. spenilarly perfomative nature of racial boundaries but aIso reveais the way in which white masculinity and its primary subject position wi thin American society is authen ticated through the subordination and abjection of women and people of colour. This narrative addresses the tensions involved in the Fracturd discourse of passiilg, which affims identity boundaries even as it enacts their subversion, and which reveaIs the arbitrary divisions of race within a practice of conceaixnent.

The narrative begins with a description of the multiple prohibitions which problematize Victor's chiidhood socid identification. Abandoned by his mother and ignorant of his (presumably white) father's identity, Victor is raiseci by his West Indian grnndmother. Grandmère Grabért, perhaps realiuig that Victor cm cross colour lies 136 because of his white appearance, prevents him fiom associating with his mixed race and lower class peers. Indeed, without a family heage or ethnic background to situate him (West Indian being very different fiom Southern), Victor does not really belong to the village's "coloured" creole community. Consequently, Victor attempts to find a place within white creole society: "Then when he toddled afler some other

Iittle boys, whose faces were white like his own, they ran him away with derisive hoots of Wigger! Nigger!' And again, he couid not understand" (5). Victor is rejected by white children based upon a concept of racial purity, so that he is finally not acceptable to either creole community. A victim of Southem race, ethnic and class distinctions,

Victor's early experience of creolization is most cleariy not a protean manipulation of identity, but a series of painfiil and tragic exclusions,

This state of social abjection is perhaps most cIeariy evidenced in Victor's negotiations with language. Forbidden to speak creole patois by Grandmère Grabèrt and yet unable to access the cultural context and traditions of standard American

English, "The result was a confùsed jurnbie which was no language at ail" (5). Victor is called "White nigger!" by both white and mixed race communities as a description of his double alienation (5). Without even a transitory ego position, Victor needs to, as

Grandmère says, "mek one man of himse'f,"because he has no identity (6). Rather than crossing socially constructed boundaries in a heterogeneous creole process,

Victor cannot yet acquire any Form of identity in his early expenences of rejection in the village. 137 Existing racial divisions thus dienate Victor so that he spends his first years in

New Orleans living outside social interaction. Retreating to the isolated. womb-like atmosphere of the bookstore and suggesting the rebirth that he is about to enact figuratively, Victor reads without social awareness or context: "Like a shadow of the old book-seller he sat day afler day ponng into some dusty yellow-paged book, and his muid was a queer jumble of ideas" (8). On the book-seller's death, Victor is given the opportunity to pass. to escape his isolation and identify with another race and class division. In a process of establishing subjectivity, Victor abjects his rnaterndly- oriented and racially marked past and is reborn into a patriarchally defined space through the father figures of the bookseller and his lawyer. Victor successfiilly passes as a Young, white man of fortune and eventually becomes a lawyer himself

This process of racial disguise is significant not only in illustrating Kristeva's genealogy of subjectivity but also for describing the fiinction of gender in this narrative. The identity crisis with which this narrative begins is resolved through a process of white racial identification in which Victor repudiates his connections with

Grandmere Grabert and Mme. Guichard. Elaine Ginsberg notes that, "the ongins of passing [exist] in the sexual exploitation of black slave women by white men" so that fernininity connotes blackness in this historical context (5). In a confiation of race and gender, Victor rejects maternity when he rejects his racial identity so that the genealogy of subjectivity constructed here is also a genealogy of racial ongins.

Neither gender, as Kristeva emphasizes, nor race, as this narrative reveals, are natural

constructs but rather the products of social imaguiing. While heterosexuality thus 138 creates the conditions for racial passing, gender is aiso central to the narrative in describing who has access to social power. As a woman writing the experiences of a male protagonist, Dunbar-Nelson demonstrates that tùll status within Southem society is onIy granted to white men. Victor Grabért is given opportunities that a woman of the tirne would never receive based on her gender so that, in writing a narrative about passing into the highest ranks of white New Orleans society, Dunbar-Nelson describes masculine experiences. Passing re-affirms the limiting categories of Southem society while also subvening concepts of transparent or "pure" identity through race and sender impersonations. Revising Glissant's idea of a "relation to everything possible,-' passing is not an open exchange between racial and gender positions but an exchange which must be secret and hidden, constantly haunted (iike the abject) by the Fear of discovery.

Yet, as a process of abjection, passing is a permanently unstable assenion of identity. Crictor's aiterity haunts his white, male supremacy so that, as the nanative reveais, not oniy is he threatened by the possibility of extemai discovery but dso by his own ambivalent feelings toward raciai segregation. Recalling his progress from school to college to law school and into practice, Victor is unable to feel hily satistied with the social institutions which stmctured his experience: "And yet, as he sat tliere in his coq study that night, and smiled as he went over in his mind triumph after tnumph which he had made since the old bookstore days in Royal Street, he was conscious of a subtle undercurrent of annoyance; a sort of mental reservation that placed itself on every pleasant memory" (12). Victor altemates between moments of identification 139 with white society and disturbing observations of discrimination which provoke his sympathy for people of colour. As he reaIizes early in the courtroom and through his relationship with Elise Vannier, the raciaI paranoia of white Southern society makes his position particularly precarious since he does not have the family ties so important in vaiidating lineage. Victor Grabert translates the violent and painhl process of abjection which structures al1 identity into culturally specific, creoIe terms.

Werner Sollors emphasizes that passing is a confiicted discourse of both loss and gain, birth and death (251). While this text descnies the binh of Victor's sociaily validated subjectivity through patriarchal identification, the costs of this process are represented in his psychic turmoil and eventuai death.' Suggesting one way in which discourses of the tragic mulatta and passing overlap, both "Littfe Miss Sophie" and

"The Stones of the Village" recover racial distinctions through the death of the protagonist. Like the tragic mulatta, passing is a violently tiactured discourse which represents the crossing of racial boundaries even as it reaffirms the power of discrimination through the demise of its practitioners. In describing not only the loss of rnixed race identity, but the materid benefits of beionging to another race and class,

Victor's experience is divided between impulses of subversion and compticity. Passing moves in two directions in that by perforrningl Mfilling the ideals of white creole society, Victor aiso undermines their race-based authority. Moreover, passing is,

8 Dmth is npcatcdly themed as a nist of passing in Southeni writing See. for instance. NeUa Larsens Passing which culminaies in the death of her protagonist. Or. in a text bearing even more similariues to Dunbar-Nelson-S.Frank Wd's The Garies and Their Friends describes the Vagic contlict pmduced by a man who passes as white to mmy the woman he loves. 140 ironically, a discourse in which its main characters do not pass, as Werner Sollors points out (250). Every narrative of passing paradoxically reveaIs its characters as racially or sexuaiiy other while seeming to make this othemess invisible and secret.

"The Stones of the Village" addresses the racial and ethnic tensions of New Orleans society through exhibiting their multiple exclusions.

On severai levels, then, Victor's experience of passing describes a constantly negotiated space of abjection. To counteract suspicion about his identity, Victor i-igorously negates any fonn of sympathy or contact with men and women of colour.

Marrying Elise Vannier. a woman who represents the traditions of oppression which have made his life so painhl, Victor refùses even to employ black servants and builds his career upon a policy of strict racial segregation (1 9). In a process of constantly re- affirming boundaries, Grabért becomes a force of abjection within New Orleans society :

When it came to a question involving the Negro, Victor Graben was noted for his Stern, unrelenting attitude .... He was liked and respected by men of his political beliet: because, even when he was a candidate for a judçeship, neither money nor the possible chance of a deluge of votes fiom the First and Fourth wards could cause him to swerve one hair's breadth from his opinion of the black inhabitants of those wards. (334)

Victor upholds racist beIiefs in an attempt to deny his own altenty.

Marriage and famiIy life are particula.points of anxiety within the discourse of passing not only in representing a constant risk of personal discovery but also through the potential genealogical return of race. Passing is made possible through heterosexual contact, yet the birth of dark chiidren was a centrai concem for men and women passing as white. As Clare Kendry states in Nella Larsen's novel Passing. "1 14 1 neariy died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark (168). This possibility of genedogical exposure serves to regulate discourses on miscegenation. Although race was typically connected to the woman either through adultery or the historicai confiation of race and gender, and Victor is not in fact "exposed by the birth of his son, the regulation of genealogy becomes a focus for his legal enforcement of racial distinctions. Marylynne Diggs in fact analyzes

Dunbar-Nelson's narrative specificaily in order to demonstrate that transgressions of the presumed social noms of heterosexuality and racial separation are manifested in remarkably similar fonns of secrecy and conceaiment. Race and sex were both perceived as being in need of legal regulation in order to, as Diggs writes, "ensure the maintenance of the two-color, two-gender system" ( 16).

As a successfiil Southern judge, Victor Grabért is thus active in regulating racial boundaries. Virginia Dominguez's study White bv Definition documents the fact that racial classification was a matter for judicid ruling, with Louisiana laws defining blackness (and consequently Iegal rights) according to as little as 1/32 of "negro blood" (2). During the penod of this narrative, legal blackness entailed significantly fewer priviieges in terms of education, employment, and public access, and decisions on racial identity rested with judges such as Victor. Signïficantly, the case which

Grabért and Pavageau clash over involves an evidently mixed race woman who insists that her grandchiid be allowed to attend a better equipped and staffed white school.

Patrolling the insecure racial boundaries of his own identity, Victor Grabért mles against her, declaring: "1 don? see why these people want to force their children into 142 the white schools.... There should be a rigid inspection to prevent it, and al1 the suspected children put out and made to go where they belong" (26). This fascist vision articulates Victor's own complicity in racist discourses as well as displaying the arbitrary legal regulations which atternpt to define race not only through appearance but also through farnily background. Judge Grabért acts out processes of abjection in his profession because any transgression of socially constructed racial divisions forces him to confiont his own aiterity and puts his own identity into play. The creole subject in process has become, in this context of racial deception, a subject literaily on triai, judged according to a binary systern of white or black. guilty or not guilty, innocent or criminal.

The lawyer Pavageau, a man of colour whorn Grabért secretly admires, thus represents a potentially dangerous tigure for Victor even before he realizes that

Pavageau knows about his past. Grabén senses that his own sympathy for Pavageau as a determined and successtùi creole lawyer might collapse the social divisions which vaiidate his identity, and consequently Pavageau becomes Victor Grabért's "bête noir ... his name a very synonym of horror" (24). Pavageau ultimately forces Victor to acknowledge the abjected alterity which has haunted his adult life. Leaving Pavageau's office, "He groveled in a self-abasement at his position; and yet he could not but feel a certain relief that the vague forrnless fear which had hitherto dogged his üfe and haunted it, had taken on a definite shape" (29). The fear of discovery which has plagued Victor in his daily interactions is now focused around the figure of a man such as he could have been. Pavageau may experience the very real exclusions of a racist 143 Southem society, yet he accepts his mixed race identity and the exclusions he experiences are less psychically fraught than Victor's experience of passing.

Finaily provoked to the point of psychic collapse by this threat of discovery,

Victor specifically articulates the double alienation that his abject and abjecting life bas produced:

Oh, what a glonous revenge he had on those littie white village boys! How he had made a race atone.... He had taken a diploma fiom their most exclusive college; he had broken down the barTiers of their social worid; he had taken the highest possible position among them; and aping their own ways, had shown them that he too. could despise this inferior race they despised. Nay, he had taken for his wife the best woman among them all, and she had borne him a son.. -. And he had not forgotten the black and yellow boys either. They had stoned him ioo, and he had lived to spurn them; to look dom upon them, and to crush them at every possible tum tiom his seat on the bench. Truly, his life had not been wasted. (30-3 1)

Shifling between defiance and bitterness, Victor reveaIs the multiple costs of passing.

His mimicry of white society has repressed a part of himself, while his revenge on people of colour bas simply made him complicit with an oppressive society. Indeed, while Victor's deliberate assumption of an identity denaturalizes racist distinctions, this passage suggests that that subversion has Little effect in cfianging those attitudes. His story simply exposes the arbitrary divisions of race and ethnicity.

Ultimateiy, the matemally and racidy Iocated difference that Victor has abjected retums to displace his white, upper-ciass life. While he is addressing the chaiman of a political banquet, Grandmère Grabért appears; "She was looking at hirn sternly and bidding hïm give an account of his He since she had kissed him good-bye ere he had sailed down the river to New Orleans. He was surprise& and not a Little I 44 annoyed. He had expected to address the chairman; not Grandmère Graben" (32). In a graphic return of the abject, Victor confiants this other element of identity and his performance of white subjectivity coIlapses. The text describes Victor's raciaily marked, "blackened lips" as he re-Iives the village boys' deniai of his identity and collapses in psychic and physical chaos (32). Victor exposes his own alterity in a narrative where passing may be technicaily possible, but where the psychic cost of rnaintaining an essentiaiized white identity is unsustainable. "The Stones of the

Village" contextuaiizes the act of passing as simultaneously possible and impossible, subversive and co-opted, abject and abjecting. In a performance of whiteness which undermines supposedly naturaiized concepts of race and dtural identitication, Victor reveals the cost of maintaining identity fictions.

Elaine Ginsberg emphasizes the subversive implications of passing, writing that,

"both the process and the discourse of passing challenge the essentialism that is ofien the foundation of identity politics, a challenge tht may be seen as either threatening or fiberating but in either instance discloses the truth that identities are not singularly true or fdse but multiple and contingent" (4). Yet the ending of this particular narrative is more ambiguous, allowing two aiternate readings which embody the split meanings of passing. In describing Victor's ha1 psychic coiiapse, "The Stones of the Village" uncovers racial "tniths* that a Southem reader of this time might see as inescapable, yet at the same time it reveds the aiterity, the essentiai "impurity" which Ginsberg conceives as deconstructing identity positions. In this sense, the ending of Dunbar-

Nelson's text represents the double impuises of complicity and critique which structure 145 the discourse of passing and which also embody the heterogeneous prucess of abjection. The conclusion divides between an affirmation of social constructed subjectivity, exposing racial "origins," and passing's dismptive potential, where identities are revealed as social fictions. Indeed, this point is the real revelation of

Dunbar-Nelson's text, which takes on a discourse of concealment to expose the multiple exclusions of New Orleans creole identity and the tragic effects those have on subjectivities such as Victor's.

Narrative voice continues this process of reveaiing identity boundaries through the act of authorial passing. Dunbar-Nelson assumes the perspective of a male protagonist, enterinrg his thoughts to reveal his secret identity, in a process which persistently uncovers the arbitrary separations of gender. As a woman writing a man's experiences, Dunbar-Nelson performs a crossing of gender boundaries which exposes the imaginative nature of gendered perspectives just as the plot exposes the fictions of racial difference. Again linking gender and race, Ginsberg points out that. "'maIenessf or 'whiteness' or ethnicity can be performed or enacted, donned or discarded (4). Yet

Dunbar-Nelson is again not questioning the social power of masculinity; rather, she is demonstrating its imaginative co-option. Masculinity is dispiayed as the embodiment of status and privilege, yet it is also revealed as a performative concept in the same way that race is. Victor performs his racial identity just as the narrator here performs a gender identity and the effect of this authorial gender passing is to expose the boundaries of identity as always permeable and yet aiso always central to this particular social discourse. t 46 "The Stones of the Village" thus translates the violent and painfiil process of abjection which structures ail identity into cuiturally specific, creole terms. Ail three of

Dunbar-Nelson's texts examinecl in this chapter are preoccupied with identities in crisis because creolition is, in this context, a clash of meanings and exclusive definitions.

Although each "local coloui' narrative puts the arbitraxy divisions of race and ethnicity on display, Dunbar-Nelson is not representing a joyiùl manipulation of identity positions but rather a series of painiül losses and violent exclusions: For Miss Sophie.

Thalie and Victor Grabert, creolization is a predorninantly destructive rather than creative expenence. Within the narrative that this study of feminine creole identity is constructinç, Dunbar-Nelson's stories represent abjection as taking over the processes of Relation that Caribbean theory celebrates. New Orleans society of this time is a comrnunity structured by the violent rejection and assertion of ethnic and racial identities and social-literary constructs such as the tragic mulatta and passing embody culturaily specific versions of that process. While abjection is, like Relation, always a process of problematizing essentialized identities, Dunbar-Nelson's historically situated texts emphasize the conflicts and violences involved in such a project.

The feminine creole impasse which concludes Good Moniing, Midnight is re- confîgured here in terms of the opposition between mixed race and white creole and the inclusion of a masculine dimension to abjection. The ambivalence that fiinctioned as a defining characteristic and aesthetic strategy withui Rhys's work is replaced in

Dunbar-Nelson's writings by clashin& contradictory discourses in which there is no possibiiity of a more iiberated fimire. Indeal, for Miss Sophie and Victor Grabért 147 there is no future at dl. Dunbar-Nelson articulates the failure of creolization, transforming the ambivalence which concludes Rhys's novel into an oppositional poiitics. Where Sasha reached a point of crisis, Dunbar-Nelson's characters me the crisis, embodying the explosive confiict of racial and sexual discourses. In exhibiting the volatile impasse of creole identity, Dunbar-Nelson also poiiticizes creolization, demanding that the injustices of racial and sexual segregation be redressed. Although

Glissant's notion of an exploded discourse remains relevant here, Dunbar-Nelson challenges his transfomative approach insisting on the destructive effects of creolization. For the New Orleans creole woman of colour, errantry and endless becoming, like tme love. remain impossible dreams, outside the immediate and relentiess canflict. the violent impasse, which in that time and place is the nature of being. "Retum and Leave and Return Again": Pauline Melville's Tmnsatlantic Fictions

Diversion is no1 a usefui ploy unless it is nourished by mersion: Not a remto thc longing for ongins. to some immutabie state of Being. but a retum to the point of enranglement.. .. Edouard Glis~an~Ckbbean Discourse

Gmdmother swcars by the aory of the stones in Ecuador [as a place of ongin[ although sornetirnes she might sqMexico or Venenicla for variety's sake - varie. being so rnuch rnorc important than uuth in her opinion. Morc rcliabie. she es. Tmth changes. Varicty remains constant.... WC, in ths pan of the world have a -ai vcneration for thc lie and al1 its consequenccs and tamifications. Wc treat the lie scriousl~.as a form of honiculm. to bc tended and nurtwed. al1 ils linlc iendrils to be cncouragcd. Paulinc Melville. ïhe Ventrilociuisi's Tale

Pauline Melville's Brst collection of stories. Sha~e-shifier,develops the creative as well as subversive potential of the folkloric title figure to explore the possibility of overcoming oppression and for "breaking down preconceptions" of race. ethnicity and gender in order to venture towards a different tiiture (Melville in Busby 740). Melville uses historical references to return to Glissant's "point of entanglementn not simply in order to subvert extant discourses nor, like Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson, ultimately to assert the alienation endernic to ferninine creole experience, but to re-formulate constraint as both productive und limiting. In "You Lefi the Door Open" and "Eat

Labba and Drink Creek Water," Melville crosses the AtIantic, using English and

Guyanese reference points to illustrate the perpetuation of patriarchy and racism while exemptifjhg the creative responses provoked by them. Always ambivalent in theû balance between oppression and empowement, Melville's stories descnie a process of working towards new possbilities which are neither the irresolvable crises of Dunbar-Nelson, nor the endless transformations of Glissant, but which explore the creative potential within constraint initially suggested by Rhys. Rhys concludes that errant identities such as Sasha's cannot continue in the Europe of late modernism, but

MelviIle's contemporary narratives resituate the imaginative potential of errantry within a pastmodern, postcolonial society.

In a ment autobiographicd essay, Melville links her personal background to the trickster figure and narrative strategy of her first story collection, writing:

1 aIso cause confusion. t look completely English. My mother is English . . . from a London family, a tribe of Anglo-Saxons if ever there was one, blonde and blue-eyed. The photographs show St. Augustine's angels in hand-me-down-clothes. My father was boni in Guyana.. . . The photographs show a genetic bouquet of Afiican. Arnenndian and European features. a family gazing out from dark, watchful eyes - al1 except one, who turned out with the looks of a Dutchman. But then, Berbice, their birthplace, was a Dutch colony in the eighteenth century. [ am the whitey in the woodpile. The trickster god now appears in another guise. He has donned the scientific mantle of genetics. (Busby 739-40)

-'Origins," according to this passage, are never the pure state of being that genealogical fantasies have constructed, but, as Glissant argues, they involve a recognition of the multiple entanglements that history, and Guyanese history in particular, entail. A series of genetic departures and returns, "European," "Afncan," and "indigenous" undermine any fixed notion oforigin in this version of the ferninine mole. The history of Guyana offers an exampIe of the cornplex transatlantic crossings which create the context for MeIvüle's new, creolinng venture.

The heterogeneous and settled nature of the Ame~diannations who continue to infiabit Guyana fom one distinguishing aspect of that society. Andrew Sanders' study, The Powerless Peoule, identifies ten distinct nations inhabiting Guyana at the tirne of European discovery and points to context-based differences between coastai peoples and those living in the Rupununi savannahs and dong the interior borders of

Brazil and Venezuela. Neither Columbus's "discovery" nor Sir Walter Rdegh's propagandist tract, The Discoverv of the Laree. Rich and Beautifiil Empire of Guiana, resulted in European settlement or change to indigenous iifestyles. Dutch West India

Company posts in Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara in the 1600s established trading refations with the Amerindian nations but, unlike in the Caribbean and North America, did not attempt to segregate or exterminate Amerindian peoples systernatically.

Claiming Guiana from the Dutch in t 8 14, the British colonial govenunent adopted both segregationist and assirnilationist policies which altered and denigrated

Amerindian culture. 9owever. as Sanders' study argues, indigenous Guyanese peoples remain a component of the country's creoiized society in ways which the history of island colonies prevented (2 1-77).

English and Dutch imperialist enterprises had lasting effects on Guyanese society and in determining the relationships between Mgrathg groups. Early Dutch trading settlements established ianguage, Iaws and economic practices that had a formative effect on the development of the country. As late as the 1970s linguists identified forms of Dutch creoie being spoken in areas of Berbice and the Roman-

Dutch law code persistecl in modified forms untii the 1950s. As Melville's observation about her own background notes, Dutch influences recur in surprishg forms. English administration and dues were tikewise iduential in establishing Guyana as a colony and in implementing the plantation system which brought Afiîcan-bom slaves to the country. Afro-Guyanese people form yet another social component, remaining after emancipation in 1833 to settle in communal villages. The Amerindian, Dutch, Engiish, and Afiican influences which Melville enumerates in her own background, in some ways integrated but aiso prese~ngtheir distinctions, thus compose a unique version of creolization.' R.T.Smith has analyzed Guyanese society to argue that this intense plurality produces a balance between integration and sustained cultural difference

(134). Acts are often seen as indicative of particular cultural backgrounds. but those identifications are not fixed and may be attributed differentiy in another context.

Indeed a "bouquet" of discrete parts, a composite society of distinct groups, Guyanese history produces shifting ailegiances and uneasy and prohse relations.

In statements such as the above quotation on her personal and collective history, Melville applies the concept of shape-shifting as both a conception of identity and as a fictiond device. Her shape-shifting heroines "nurture lies and fictions" to describe subjectivity as a creolizing expenence. but one that is more historically fiaught and loaded than Glissant's celebration of play and transformation suggests.

However, Glissant's work is itseif performative, choosing to focus on cenain strategies over others and dispiacing one with another. This emphasis on change and mutation invites his own theory to be taken in new directions and used expedientIy to explore the diversity of creolition. In applying Glissant's work to Melville's fiction,

1 am therefore appropriating and expanding Glissant's attitude toward strate@ of

"diversion" which is what he terms uickster discourse. While Glissant sees these

t Post emancipation labour shortages iürther contniuted to the mauk of influences fonnùig Guyanese creole society. Pomiguese. Chinese and indian labourers immigrated through the later nineteenth century and Asian-Cimanese in particular have contn'buted to the culhuai and politid development of the countq with Dr. Cheddi kgan elected as Guyana's tira premier in 1953. processes as limited in their focus on negative opposition, he also (somewhat circularly) acknowledges that, "The strategy of diversion can rherefore lead somewhere when the obstacle for which the detour was made tends to develop into concrete 'possibilities"' (a22). [n other words, as Glissant footnotes, the focus rnust be on creating new foms of being, not simply on undermining extant categories.

Diversion is productive when it activates a collective wiil to change but not when it af£imnegativity or asserts a new, static collectivity.

These productive possibilities constitute one aspect of Melville's textual exploration. Although her stories use shape-shifting, diversionary techniques to expose the instability of supposedly distinct, self-evident categories of gender, race. ethnicity. and crirninality, they also render constraint productive in ingenious ways.

Melville acknowledges the resurgence of oppression within Relation but also examines the discontinuity between oppression and Relation. This fictional approach establishes a new dialogue with Glissant in that Melville recuperates the syncretic and subversive potential elucidated by Wilson Harris and Derek Waicott within the processes of

Relation. Expanding creolization to see imaginative possibilities in the subversive repetition and re-connection with eiements of a mythic and historical past, Melville revises Glissant's dismissal of those approaches and appropriates them to her own ends. As in Walcott's idea of a selective historical remembering and forgetting,

Melville manipulates history as a discourse to be perverted and yet also imaginatively

~ecy~led.~

- See Walcon 354-56. Dunbar-Nelson's themes of race passing, secrecy and criminaiity are recontextuaiized in Melville's fiction. No longer only a legacy of discrimination, rad passing and criminal subterfiige also retum as a series of opportunities. The protagonist of "You Lefl the Door Open" is both the victim and perpetrator of the story's historically resonant attack. The narrator of "Eat Labba and Drink Creek

Water" traces a family history of passing which has tragically split her family, but which has aiso produced the transatlantic life she lives. Rhys's use of intenextuality

Iikewise reappears in Melville's texts as an engagement with histoncal narrative. Just as Rhys wntes out of the Dominican postslavery moment, "Eat Labba and Drink

Creek Water" retums to a text of colonial crisis for Guyanese identity in order to articulate a criticaily dissonant, creolized viewpoint. Aiways ambivalent. the departures and retums which structure these stones are never only resistant to established cultural concepts, but they are aiso never onIy compliant. Negatively formulated through the shifting definitions of persona1 and collective Guyanese histoty,

Melville's contemporary version of ferninine creole identity supplements Glissant's positivity with the exclusions articulated by Dunbar-Nelson and by Rhys in Good

Moming. Midnieht. Picking up on Dunbar-Nelson's themes as weU as on Rhys's version of errantry, the transatIantic crossings of this fiction work towards a revised notion of Glissant's continuous becoming; subverting, uansforming, shape-shifiing the exclusionary tactics of Being in a radical defence of Becoming.

Shaue-shifler begins with two epigraphs on the potentiai for transformation.

The th,attributed to an "unknown poetn (a reference which itself gestures toward and refiises identity) States, "The shape-shifier can conjure up as many dserent figures and manifestations as the sea has waves." The second epigraph, purportedly taken tiom Walter Roth's Enauirv into the Animism and Folklore of the Guiana Indians

(aithough Mervyn Morris suggests this is a deliberately misleading reference, since the actual text does not appear to contain such a passage) states: "It is a firm article of faith that the shaman or medicine-man of the indians of Guiana, to whom nothing is impossible, can effect transfomation of hïmself or others." These epigraphs invite a reading of the stones as shape-shifting creative acts, where the artist is identified with the sharnan. Sarah Lawson Welsh describes this elusive authoriai mode1 as "a fictional strategy of refusing to write from one particular point of view" ( 146). Melville expands the scope of authonal "passing" incipient in Dunbar-Nelson to grant the authorid persona the miracuious powers of the shaman who lies in the name of truth.

"You Left the Door Open": Impenonating Bistory

"You Lefi the Door Open" is in many ways the ultimate narrative of alterity within identity. The text describes a violent, semai attack without ever clearly naming victim or oppressor. As Evelyn O'Caflaghan notes, the story "complicates the supeficial binarism of aggressive male versus passive femaie victim in a chilling account of paranormal rape (of whom? by whom?)" ( t 08). Transgressing cultural. physical, Iegai and historical boundaries, the narrative sirnultaneously describes an exhiiarating creative act, and a horrifie return of past oppressions. In a process which confounds any originary concept of identity, meaning here is never found in a final explanation, but in the fluidity of subject positions, the "impenetrable ambiguity" which is ultimately, as the text states, "at the kart of the matter" (1 13). The narrator of "You Lefl the Door Open" is a cabaret artist who

"specialize[s] in impersonations," a profession whose raison d'être is the performance and manipulation of identity. This performative practice is not limited to the stage, but canied into her account of the attack, as the speaker constructs herself variously as compliant victim, cunning opponent, "new bride" and "shop assistant at a greengrocer's" (123, 126). Previous to the attack, however, she decides to do some male impersonation and one night creates the persona of a smaiI-time crook, Charlie.

Frorn the moment of his creation, Chariie takes on a subversively threatening life ofhis own. As Metvyn Morris notes (88), the opening sentence of this paragraph is clearly ambiguous, suggesting a blurring of identity boundaries between the narrator and

Charlie, as she says, "One night, alone at home, 1 found myself in the bathroom looking in the cabinet mirroi' ( 1 15). Does the narrator simply see herself in the mirror or in the act of creating Charlie is sbe in fact encountering an aspect of herseif3 This ambivalent conflation and separation continues as she takes Charlie out and notices:

"Normaily, 1 am short-sighted, but that evening 1 could see Far, way down the street"

(1 15). Charlie has altered her perspective, the Iens through which she sees, and the narrator's ability to contain him becornes increasingiy precarious as he takes her car and fnghtens her audience. ihriiled and horritied by iiis violence, the narrator takes

Charlie home and "put[s] him away in the cupboard," a space inside her apartment where he remains tenuousiy restrained ( 1 16).

This cross-gendered, cruninaI aiter ego exemplifies one form of identity manipulation within the text. The narrator, a speciaiist in assuming and discarding mbjectivities, is both herself and her creation. Shape-shitling across gender, Iegal and personal boundaries, the narrator enacts a version of Giissant's creolization in which each and every identity is extended through (and indeed becomes) its others. Like

Rhys's use of disguise and impersonation to effect her version of errantry, the narrator here literally acts out the syrnbiotic relationship between identity and difference. This initia1 conflation of artist and creation is türther complicated by extemal information.

Mer putting Charlie away, the speaker "giggles" to a fnend that he was too dangerous: "He had to be locked up in a mental hospitai" (1 16). In fact, the text continues, the man police ultimately hold responsible for the attack was released fiom a mental hospital at this time. 1s this Charlie or an actual attacker? If the attacker exists, did he ever enter the narrator's apartment or was this always only an element of herself! Is the man reiewed f?om the mental hospital the same as the man noticed sitting outside the house? The text proliferates questions and uncertainties about identity without ever reaching a definite answer.

The narrator's shape-shifiing performance thus exemplifies diversionary tactics in that it effectively subverts any fixed or pure concept of identity. This diversionary practice is, in Glissant's view, fiequently limited in its ability to move beyond the tenns that it challenges. The conventional Caribbean folktale, Glissant writes, suffers precisely From its "inability to liberate [itlself totally and an insistence on attempting to do so" (CD128). In Melville's narrative, however, the speaker's creative practice and ambivalent attitude toward her creation are not only subversive but aiso explore imaginative possibdities within the mythical, shape-shiftiig process. In returning to the moment of identity formation in her creation of Charlie, the narrator exploits trickster strategies to "hd another place," to put into piay a new set of character possibilities (GIissant, CD 23). The narrator uses her profession to explore the genesis of subjectivity and to imagine into being another existence, defmed by different gender, legal, and physical parameters. Charlie is thrilling because, in addition to the subversion of identity boundaries that 1 have described, the moment of Charlie's

"conception" is a moment of creative inspiration: He is the embodiment of the namator's art. Melville recovers the folk eIements which Glissant critiques to create a new avenue of creole possibility.

Yet, as Charlie's violence exemplifies, this creolizing practice also permits a retum of past oppressions and of the criminal abject. Charlie exemplifies the harmful as well as constructive effects of destabilizing identity categories. Even in the initial conflation of artist and creation Charlie is both thrilling and "predatory." The narrator is entertained by her creation and yet homfied by his tendencies. This other aspect of shape-shifting practice becomes more evident with the introduction of Charlie Peace. the narne given by the attacker and the historically factual name of a nineteenth- century murderer (also of course the first name of the speaker's creation). Although the nanator initially believes the name to be a fiction or clever allusion, the text reconstructs the matrix of fact and myth surrounding this mid-Victon'an historical tigure to describe the second Charlie, who may or may not be the speaker's creation, as a malevolent being fiorn the pax As the story relates, Charlie Peace was a performer, often playing on stage and in public houses. He frequently eluded capture through his ability to impersonate people of diverse age groups, professions, appearances, genders and race, as David Ward's account of his Me reveals. Like the narrator, then. Chariie Peace is a professionai manipulator of identity, using aliases and physical disguises to de@ the law. His cnminal nature is another persona of the shape- shifter. As a previous story in the collection states, the techniques of the confidence trickster are not dways distinct fiom those of the shape-shifter: "The gifis of the genuine sharnan overlap in places with the psychological wizardry of the charlatan"

(99). Charlie Peace, as both artistic creation and historical figure, arnbiguously combines crirninality and creative genius.

As a notonous nineteenth-century criminal, moreover, Charlie Peace recdls a historical moment significant to colonialism. In fictionally bringing Peace back to life. the narrative returns to a point of historical entangiement with Victorian society. A figure who exploited peopie for his own uses much like colonizers did in Guyana

Peace represents the return of a legacy of oppression and in this sense the narrative describes both the creative potentiai and the perpetuation of exchsion within creolization. Tou Lefi the Door Open" marks the creative Iimits of creole practice in its recognition of how shifting identity boundaries do not necessady exclude violence but can reproduce pas oppressions in new forms. Creolization may confound fked positions and reformulate identity, but, as this narrative graphically illustrates, creolizing practices cannot control exactly what returns. If the past includes figures such as Charlie Peace, then creolization cannot exclude the possibility that it wiii also reproduce eariier foms of oppression amid its heterogeneous transformations.

Although Glissant does not suggest that the past can be erased, his concept of endless becoming of confoundjng categorizations, is suppIemented here with an example of how creolization can incorporate, even regenerate, oppression. Chariie Peace reveals how creolization, in its strategies which ovedap witti abjection, can be both compelling and homfying. While Melville proves that diversionary tactics can be creative in

Charlie's inception, she also reveais the duai outcornes such an act can produce.

As both attacker and creation, Charlie maintains an ambiguous relationship with the narrator. In that the attack may be one element of a psyche struggling against another, the exchange is both violent and extremely intimate, with the speaker and attacker negotiating a series of concessions and demands. The opening emphasizes the destructive nature of the attack stating that "it was a violent one, a rnurderous one, at night, as 1 lay sleeping" ( I 13). Indeed, the attack is undeniably an incident of gender- based violence. Yet the narrator cooperates and resists in a process where "the advanrage slip[sj frorn one to the other," despite the fear of tape (the violent confrontation af gender perspectives) and murder (the find loss of identity) which underlies their neyotiations ( 1 19). The speaker sits nestled between her attacker's legs in "a mockery of snug intimacy," while the attacker is alternately tender and aggressive, plaintive and spiteful ( 1 19). This ambivalent alternation between intimacy and violence blurs distinctions between self and other and invokes the dynamics of abjection whkh 1 have demonstrated operate in Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson's work.

Abjection provides a way of theorking the violence of Melville's story whiie also describing the psychoIogical basis for this ambivalent relationship. Wtiile i Focus on reading this narrative in relation to Glissant's ideas on trickster strategy, abjection nevertheles remains significant in describing the violence and exclusions which are evident in dl three authors' versions of the ferninine creole.

The narrator, like Charlie, eludes identification in terrns of her fùil name, age, marital and legai status. To promote intimacy or "common ground" between herself and her attacker, the speaker describes her perhaps fictionai, perhaps real fnends and husband as aiso on the nin from authority (120). The narrator suggests that her flat is financed with money fiom diamond robberies, an unsubstantiated statement which nevertheless makes the narrator, like Charlie Peace and like her attacker, cornplicit in

(as well as victim of) the games of the charlatan. These criminai aspects of shape- shifting recail Southem legai regulations of race and ethnicity where to transgress fked identity categories is a boundary-crossing equated with the violation of legal codes. ln that criminality is by definition a legd transgression, both Dunbar-Nelson's and

Melville's thematization of crirninality represents a rejection of society's values. In a similar sense, Good Momine. Midni~ht'sParisian subculture of gigolos and drifters casts off legal restraints to enact an errantly subversive lifestyle. Both the attacker and the narrator of "You Lefi the Door Open" confound the unimaginative legai powers which seek to define and classi5 according to "forensic evidence and facts" ( 1 13). in one instance of the ambivalence which surrounds this narrative, Charlie Peace is both identified with a specific (Victorian) time and place and yet characterized as an outlaw to that society, crossing its definitionai boundaries as he uses disguise COelude capture and as he rehses to Iive by conventional means. The narrator's ambiguous legal natus similady diverts police attempts to investigate and explain what has happened, pointing to the narrowness of their paradigrnatic lenses and the ambiguity which is, &er al], what underlies and defines the attack.

The narrator fiirther eludes identification as to her age and marital status, two parameters essential in legd investigations. When tint asked her age by the attacker, the narrator Lies and clairns to be twenty-eight. When chaiienged, she claims to be fi@-eight and deflects hrther questioning so that her age remains finaily undetmerrmned in this narrative. In a similar sense, although the speaker daims to have a husband dso on the nin fiom police and identifies herself with the "rnarried woman" who betrayed

Charlie Peace. her husband is never mentioned otherwise and one wonders how tnithfid she is in "making a bond with her attacker ( 120). Consequentiy, when she tells the attacker her name is Carole and when the police cail her "Mrs. Atkins," a reader is lefi questioning whether those are her truc names or diases. [dentities proliferate in this story to link and confiate the narrator, Charlie Peace and the created character of Charlie until al1 three overlap in their troubling guises of victirn and attacker, citizen and outlaw.

The alternation between revelation and secrecy which occurred in Dunbar-

Nelson's narratives of racial passing is re-contextuaiiued here as a component of the ambivalence surrounding the professionai thief. According to folk legend, Charlie

Peace was reviled and pursued, yet also vaiorized for his daring escapades and for restonng some equity between middle-class industriaiists and the Northern English labourers they exploited. In living a secret identity quite openly in the rnidst of

London society, Charlie Peace, like the narrator's CharEe and like the ambiguous role she herself plays, combines heroism and violence, secrecy and display. As a kstoricai figure, Charlie Peace tùrther represents a combination of officiai and folk narrative-

The legai history of Charlie Peace is one of a criminal who was judy tried and executed. The legend of Charlie Peace is of a hero who mocked oppressive Iegal and class systems. Charlie Peace's double significance asserts yet also cals into question the authonty of official histoncal narratives. Legally a criminal, Peace's folk status inserts communaiiy significant experience into traditionai historical paradigms in a manner similar to Glissant's rupture of linear temporality. Where society and the law impose identity as a series of facts and irrefûtable evidence, creative individuais deal in impersonation and subterhge to assert a more productive set of pst and present possibilities.

The nimator exemplifies a more direct fonn of creolization - she lives in

London with some apparent ties to the Caribbean but owes degiance to neither. Her protective painting cornes from Haiti and her family is Iocated "abroad," but the narrator also appears integrated and familiar with her London environment (13 1). As a mole text, this story arnbivaientIy combines English and West Indian cultural referents to expose the lack ofany tixed nationdity. The speaker's identity is formulated and defined by a series of transattantic crossings and is, in this sense, made up of multiple ruptures and connections. Recalling Glissant's concept of errantry, identity is a process of shifiiog assumptions and rejections and the narrator's plural

London and Caribbean reference points are an exemplification of this practice. Her

&end, a Jamaican author, ironicaiiy articulates this exchange as a form of cultural tr&c occurring between London and the Caribbean. Unhappy with the cover designs proposed 10r her book, she requests another tnend residing in London to send sketches "with more of a Canibean feei" when she retum to Jamaica (1 16). This cultural production of the Caribbean within a colonial metropolis, where an illustration produced in London effectively conveys the essence of another identity, succinctly describes the type of interrelation occucring between the two spaces. Not simpIy a form of appropriation as the author herseifis Jamaican, this interchange suggests that the two cultures are linked in the creation of a new, creolized artistic produci and subjectivity.

The speaker's dream of the leopard, whiie evoking the shape-shifling practice of physical transposition also enacts a creolking combination of cultural reference

points. Thinking of the twenty-third psalm, with its green pastures and still waters. the

speaker realizes, "my own physical boundaries dissolved and 1 reçognized that those green meadows and rivers were inside me" (132). This vision Iinks a Christian

reference with the sharnanic practice of shifiing spatial boundaries. "Full of wonder,"

the narrator then fails asleep to dream of the Haitian iwpard in her painting ( 133).

Now sitting in the hallway of her London flat, the leopard must be aligned with its

reflection, its other. at which point the narrator realizes, "something terrible would

happen" (132). Connecting the speaker's very concrete London location with a

Haitian rather than Christian sacred figure, this dream shifis cultural reference points.

crossing the AtIantic in a creolizing process of departures and retums. The flucniating

emotions of this passage, moreover, display the fear as well as exhilaration which I

have argued spi@this version of creolization. Recailing the narrator's eariier shape-

shift into a cunning, "wild animal" during the attack, the leupard represents her

spiritual seIf in both îts positive and negative aspects. Both foreboding and

inspirationai, the dream exemplifies the etnotional duality of errant îdentity practices.

In yet a tiirther conflation of identities, Charlie Peace and the exaped criminal

patient (possibIy the man outside) exchange boundan'es. The police report that the

man tfiey have arrested, "[Isj in a horrendous mental state. Says someone is trying to

get into hirn and tell hm rvhat to do. Someune caiied John, he says" (133-4). The narrator reaiizes that John Ward was in fact Charlie Peace's most notorious dias and that the two attackers may be one:

Over the next few days my imagination ran wild over the gid of facts, dong the boundaries of reason and unreason that are staiked by the ancient figure of feu. Could it have been part of myseif that escaped and attacked me? Had the spirit of a nineteenth-century rnurderer and cabaret artist entered a contemporary smail-time burglar" Did we ail overlap? (133)

At the triai, the accused wears the black nylon sweater bought for the character,

Charlie (clothes serving to construct his persona), and has the high forehead and fairish hair of the man outside (130, 1 19). Both self and other, mental patient and malevolent spirit, the attacker is also described as demonic. The narrator describes the force of his me: "1 thought that if 1 turned, t would see a visage so appalling, so fearful that I would be paralyzed with terror," a characteristic he shares with the original Charlie

Peace ( 136). Witnesses repeatedly specified the tenible power of Peace's stare, which made him seem "more like an evil spirit than a man" (Ward 68). Subjectivities do indeed overlap in this transhistoricai, cross-gender, dter ego narrative performance, where determinate concepts of identity are replaced with a series of assertions, impersonations and destabilizations.

Moreover, these transformations refùse explanation according to any one discursive fiame. As the opening paragraphs wam, "The paradigm, the lens through which something is viewed, determines what is seed' (1 13). Yet. despite the

"synchronicities, unaccountable coincidences, signs even, as well as solid facts and evidence," the circumstances of the attack remain undefined due to the ambiguous nature of victim and attacker (1 13). Wih so linle evidence and with the shape-shifis that occur between speaker, created character, mental patient and histoncal figure, have the police arrested the nght man? As the narrator reports, "He consistently denied the attack. 'It wasn't me,' he repeated again and again.. .. In some ways he may have been right" ( 1 16). The opening pages set up the format and linguistic style of a police report, with a policewoman taking the narrator's statement and accumulating evidence and details without cohesive explanation. Yet, in not wishifig to record non- factual observations, such as the man "looked as though he had the sou1 of the wolf" (1 14) do the police inevitably impose a limiting paradigm which overlooks the psychological and demonic explanations for the attack? Could the criminal not be an element of the speaker's psyche. or, in this narrative that alternates between realism and folklore. even a mythic tigure present in contemporary London'?

This story undermines generic and spatial boundaries as well as supplements one with the other in order to reveal the impossibility of containing or explaining the attack

fully. The linguistic frame of the police report sirnilady constructs meaning and yet is also "semiotically" dismpted with the insertion of clues and coincidences that cannot be rationdly explained or documented.

In its shifiing gender and cultural positions, as well as in the violence of the

attack, "You Lefi the Door Open" exemplifies many of the concepts 1 have argued for

as distinctively feminine creole. Identity takes on numerous forms, becoming not a

fked ongin or definitive category but a senes of performative manipulations. This

diversionary process efféctively subverts lirniting categorizations, uskg the folkionc

figure of the shape-shifier to deconstruct gender, legal, national and physical

boundaries. Yet Melville's narrative places the trickster in a new postmodem postcoloniaI context where it is not simpIy bound by the terrns it seeks to oppose, a situation which Glissant describes as "forced poetics," where language is unable to adequately express the complexities of reaiity (Co 120). Instead, the text retums to a historical point of entanglement for Guyanese - English relations with the figure of

Charlie Peace and re-imagines the interchanges between such a figure and contemporary, cross-cultural women and men. Just as Rhys uses intertexhdity to articulate a criticaily dissonant perspective, Melville uses a folk figure to enunciate a new, postcoloniai subjectivity. This imaginative reconstruction is productive in making connections between people and in inspiring the narrator's performances. drearns. and suspicions. In this sense, Melville's narrative restores the traditionai tigure of the shape-shifter to. using Glissant's terms, a "natural poetics," where language expresses the here and now and motivates change (a[?O). fistory is

durational in inspiring non-linear connections and in returning the past to the present in

new fonns.

However, this process is not merely afkmtive in "You Lefi the Door Open,"

since Charlie Peace aiso represents the return of a violent, abjected pst. The painful

eruption of past oppression into the present undermines purely celebratory concepts of

a creolizing future. while aiso adding a new urgency to the impetus for change. "You

Lefi the Door Open" demands recognition of the continuing violence involved in

gender and culhirai negotiations, a problem which Glissant's approach tends to de-

emphasize. Yet the text aiso suggests that füture identity negotiations must attempt to

work beyond or out of fisteva's violent retums of the past. Abjection rernains a

structuring aspect of MeIviUe's nanative practice in that Charlie Peace represents a violent, gender-marked past intruding on the fernale speaker's present. When asked how he got into the flat, the attacker replies, "You Iefl the door open," and the speaker reaiizes that this is not a lited, but rnetaphysicd, door (122). A door to

"some infernal region," the presence oFPeace as a historical figure suggests this incorporeal opening is a door to the pas, a door through which past oppressions cm return to assault the present ( 122). Indeed, as the newspaper reports mentioned in the story reveal, violence against women is a continuing practice within contemporary society, a fact that femÏnine creole texts must acknowiedge while also attempting to change. Melville's text displays the way in whick gender and cultural oppressions can perpetuate while also tuming the violence of history towards a new vision. The fact that the victim "let? the door open." that she was, in other words, not innocent but an accomplice in the attack, encapsulates the emotional (and political) ambivalence of this story and points to the narrator's active role in detennining fier own tiiture.

In Poetics of Relation, Edouard Gtissant descn'bes cross-cultural experience in tenns of a turbulent chaos-monde which includes violence as "instinctively oppos[ing] any thought intending to make this chaos monolithic" (1 56-7). History's violent repression of certain narratives is deconstmed, in Glissant's concept, by a liberating violence which inserts personal and communaiiy significant histories into traditional empIotments. In other words, Glissant acknowledges here the sometimes contradictory experiences involved in creolization. but argues that past +i~ I ences cm be re-conceived, re-formed into productive forces which enable new relationships. In a similar sense, Kristeva describes the violence of abjection as also productive in constantly reforrnulating the parameters of identity. Artistic creation is essential, Kristeva writes, because it "represents the dtimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and serious apocalypses" (Powers 208). In other words, abjection's violent recodïguration of identity is vital in that it is the condition for the survival as well as the revolution of the syrnbolic. "You Lefi the Door Open1' reveals violence in both its oppressive and liberating aspects. Where Glissant focuses on violence in purely enfranchising tems, Kristeva's recognition of the horror as weil as exhilaration

involved in creativity aptly describes Melville's narrative. Oppression is inherent to the attack, but that violence can also be transformed, creatively recontextualized in a positive sense. Imrnediately after the attack, the narrator describes herseif as

"exhilarated," "naked and free," "hdf-caught in the branches of a pear tree, an early

rnoming goddess. calling and holtering" (I3 1). Ultimately, the ambiguity which is "at

the heart" of this story is its balance beween positive re-conceptions of creolization

and a recognition of creolization's Iimitations in transforming the past. Violence in

this narrative is both the perpetuation of oppression and a force which motivates

change. As her drearn reveals, the narrator cornes to a greater understanding of

herself in both positive and negative senses after the attack.

While these identity negotiations provide a way to read "You Lefl the Door

Openwwhich expands upon Evelyn O'CaIlaghan and Sarah Lawson Welsh's surnmary

considerations of the story, the text is not simply an exemplification of ferninine creole

theoreticai paradigms but rather questions the fii~eof that identity practice. The

ending of the story undermines any certainty that doors to the past have been, or

indeed can be, closed and raises questions about whether this attack is a singIe or

iterable event. The text prouerates uncertainty about whether the man being tried is in fact the attacker and, even if he is, the detective acknowledges that with so little evidence, "He may well get off' (133). This uncertainty suggests that, despite the possibility for creatively transforming extant identity categories which this text portrays, the direction which creolizing interrelations can take is still unknown. WiIl the attacker be fieed to re-enact his oppressive demands, binding creole women like the narrator within sexist and impenalist categones (bounds which may be psychologica1 as well as externally imposed)? Or can violence have a more positive outcorne? Can ferninine creole negotiations result in the more fiilly positive fiinire that

Glissant suggests? In "You Left the Door Open" the breremains arnbiguous, with agents of oppression as well as liberation poised to Ieave the counroom.

"Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water": The Second Retum

"Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water," the concluding story of Melville's colIection, is structured around a senes of personal and collective, physical and temporal, journeys. Planning to return to Guyana fiom London, the narrator introduces the theme of cross-cultural traffic with her statement that, "We do renirn and leave and return again, criss-crossing the Atlantic, but whichcver side of the

Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side" (149). These journeys transgress boundaries of time, physicai dimension and cuItural definition to enact a new fom of errantry. Locating her identity somewhere between the two poles of

Guyana and London, the narrator assumes and discards cultural perspectives in a process reminiscent of Rhys's characters, but with other racial, discursive and historicai implications. Evoking the travel narratives ofearly European explorers to

Guyana, this narrative movement incorporates a retum to the historicai point of entangiement between those two nations in order to explore possibilities for a different hture. Melville's story re-visits the past to, as Paula Burnett argues, "provid[e] bearings for the fbture" (12). Yet, as in "You Lefi the Door Open.," those bearings ambiguously combine positive and negative elements.

Joumeys occur in both physical and metaphysicd dimensions throughout the story. The speaker leaves and retums to Guyana in a process which she explains through the saying, "Eat labba and drink creek water and you will always retum"

(148). Not simply a singIe and final return, the "aiways" in this saying implies a continuai process of departures and arrivais. Indeed. the speaker has repeated dreams of crossing the Atlantic. once by "a frai1 spider's thread suspended sixty feet above the

Atlantic attached to Big Ben at one end and St. George's Cathedral, Demerara, at the other" (149). Another drearn imagines her as a turnbleweed blown across the ocean.

Each sequence conveys the double ernotional attachments and impermanent resolution of an identity defined not simply as British or Guyanese, but as constantly negotiating or, one might say suspended. between those cultural contexts. Moreover, the stops

and balances that a high-wire act involves suggest the non-linear or errant joumey that

such an identity process represents. Recallmg Glissant's description of identity as the

shifling space (or sands) O[ the beach, Mehilie's speaker experiences identity as both

multiple and impermanent, both excess and fiagiiity.

The nurator, her fnend Loma, and indeed her father and grandfather aii crïss-

cross the Atlantic in a process which reverses and confounds the linear trajectories of early explorers. Rather than simply going to a destination and retuniing, the narrafor and her family continually repeat the process of departure and retum, altered by each new experience. The narrator's grandfather leaves two fingers in Europe during the

Great War and returns to Guyana with a letter fiom the "Mother Country" which hangs on the wall as a reminder of his joumey and of his "service." The speaker's father repeats his father's joumey out, and, in mmgan English woman initiates his dauater into a life of continuous transatlantic crossings. Consequently, her childhood recollections include time spent at her aunts'. with her Guyanese tnend Gail, and in her rnother's English garden. The setting of this story is itself a shifting space. taking the narrator back and forth across the Atlantic and in and out of multiple farnily, ethnic and emotionai contexts.

This errantry takes on racial as well as physical and cuitural meanings as

MeIville addresses the theme of racial passing aiso seen in Dunbar-Nelson's work. On going to London, the father disguises his "Coloured. Native. Creole" status stated on his birth certificate and effectively passes for white (1 53). The narrator herseif appears white and is even called "ice-cream face" by neighbours in New Amsterdam. Recalling

Dunbar-Netson's storïes, passing is a painfùl experience as the narrator feels denigrated by the neighbours' comment on her whiteness and as she recaiis being ridiculed in London for her father's racialized features. Passing is a double excIusion and even self-direçted form of abjection here as, ultimately, the narrator internalizes white biases and telis her mother: ". . . Keith says Daddy looks like a rnonkey. And I think so too" ( 1%). Rejecting a part of herser in this rejection of her father, these racial negotiations recall the paùifiil psychic divisions of Dunbar-Nelson's New Orleans characters. The ability to cross racial categories is not aiways a privilege.

Indeed, these transgressions painfiilly divide the narrator's family sa that her aunts resent their Iighter brothers and reject the narrator based on her white skin and btue eyes. As one aunt rages, "Just because you've got white skin and blue eyes you think you haven't got coloured blood in you. But you have. Just like me. It's in yaur veins. You can't escape from it- There's mental iliness in the family too" (162).

Believing that she and Avril were left behind because of their rnixed-race appearance,

Aunt Rosa also condemns her white sisters-in-law, rejecting the other hdf of the narrator's background. These exclusions are, rnoreover, divided dong generational gender lines as the brothers many into white society, suggesting the link between sexuality and race already seen in Dunbar-Nelson's work. Melville's text addresses the discursive fictions which Iink the transgression of racial boundaries to the "mad creole" as well as to miscegenation. Miscegenation and passing both reveal the instabiiity of supposedly discrete identity categories and so evoke the violent responses and taboos associated with abjection. Accusations of madness become ways of discounting and denying those boundary crossings. On one IeveI. then, MelviIle's text recognizes that creolization does not always offer Glissant's positive identity transformations but can also involve a series of paintil divisions and psychological losses.

Yet, in other ways and contrary to the concIusions drawn by Dunbar-Nelson, passing opens up opporiunities for both the narrator and her father. ln leaving

Guyana, her father escapes the "stifling inertia" which he perceives in Guyanese society while encountering economic and employment opportunities in London. To say that passing is ody tragic exclusion for the narrator's father is to ignore the evident wealth he achieves as weii as his fascination with Engiish culture which prompts him to many there eventually. The narrator is also economically prideged, returning to Guyana with money to buy land and b~gingtechology that is impossible to get in Georgetown. The opening of the story portrays her creativeiy negotiating her cultural duaiity in sequences that convey continual Ionging ody because she can identify with and travel between London and Guyana. As the opening says, "the dream is aiways on the other side" (149). The narrator experiences errantry and passing as a sense of double identification as weil as double dienation. Passing excludes her in racial terms, just as the fact that she is not fùlly Guyanese makes her a continual visitor to lnends and farnily there, yet passing also %ivesher identity within both London and Guyanese social contexts. The narrative reysters the costs of racial passing and cultural errantry while dso representing the speaker as living Glissant's creoIized and creolizing future. Her transatlantic crossîmgs are in one sense the "new and original dimension" of Relation which "allow[s] each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open. lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea.. .-7

(Glissant, PRR 34). This new and original dimension also recaIIs Wilson Harris' syncretic vision in which antagonistic opposites can be transformed into a new, not necessarily static entity. MelviIle's fiction follows two trajectories, insisting on the matenal losses of crossniltural exchange as well as the creative potential, and this insistence on the possibilities distinguishes MelvüIe's approach to the ferninine crede fiom those of Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson. The context in which the narrator enacts the story's title, "Eat Labba and Drink

Creek Water," clearly exemplifies both positive and negative experiences of boundary crossing. The narrator's acts of eating and drinking are accompanied by mixed emotions. Her tnend Gai1 wants her to remboth as a symbol of fnendship and out of spite, saying: "NOWyou're bound to corne back" (159). Retum is at once a positive recomection and a paintU1 regression, an act of belonging and of oppression.

To leave and retum subverts root concepts of identity in a productive way, yet it is also aiways the loss of one context for another. Errantry is to negotiate the complex emotions of exclusion and indusion continuaily.

Other journeys in the text sirniIariy conflate pas and present, personal and collective, life and death to describe emtry as at once creative and destructive.

Wat's travels, for instance, portray a historic joumey which continues beyond death and beyond time. Explonng the labyrinthine tributaries of the Orinoco, Wat and his father's onginalIy linea. trajectory becomes diverted into a creoling pattern of ebbs and flows, of multiple crissnossing paths. Mer his death, Wat's body continues this shifling, literaily fluid journey, "begin[ning] a quest ofits own through the network of creeks and strearns and rivers" (160). Demg linear narrative conventions, Wat has aiso already become myth in a previous section of the text: 'They Say that the spirit of a pale boy is trapped beneath the watersn (149). Both historical figure and indigenous myth, Wat exemplifies a process of uansfonnation: Life become death, European traveler become Amerindian iegend, individuai become a symbol of the coIoniPng moment in Guyana's collective past. His joumey as a spirit of the river is a form of errantry which negotiates not ody physical but metaphysicai dimensions. The Ming body of the Amerindian Likewise travels both through space and tirne to exempli@ the transgression of personai and dimensional boundaries.

Moreover, in shifling fiom female narrator to assume the perspectives of Wat and the male farnily members, the narrative moves between gender perspectives. As in "You

Lefi the Door Open," gender becomes one facet of identities in process. The text itself aiso shifts fiom one journey to another, hmthe narrator to Wat to the

Amerindian to the grandfather and back to the narrator, representing the ways in which these journeys intersect, repeat and reverse each other. The narrator travels back to Guyana fiom England; Wat makes a very different historical journey dong the sarne route; the grandfather rnakes a singIe voyage to Europe and back; the father repeatedly travels back and forth; and each trip enantly combines elements of other joumeys into a new, creolized experience.

Not oniy exemplifihg the cuItural dynamics of creole identity, the figure of

Wat aIso evokes a historicai intenextuaiity siilar to the use of Charlie Peace. The mountain of crystd, city of Manoa and palace and gardens of gold that Wat expects to find are ail possibilities mentioned by Sir Walter Ralegh in his 1596 travei propaganda

The Discovery of the Large. Rich and Beautifid Emuire of Guiana. Ralegh's narrative was influential in generating beliefs about Guyana within European society and in encouraging English colonialism. Wat, moreover, was the name of Ralegh's son, who died on his father's finai voyage to Guyana in 1618. Used in Melville's text, the historical references quite iiterally retum to a point of entanglement with colonization to imagine a different future and acknowledge the oppressions of the existing one.

Wat and bis father (presurnably Ralegh) are founding figures in Guyana's history as an English coIony and yet the narrative returns to that moment to imagine a senes of creolizing possibilities that officiai history has not retained. Wat's fùture is imagined as an errant process in which he not only transforms fiom lie to death but fiom

European to Guyanese. Now a spirit of the Orinooco, Wat becomes a figure significant to both cultures, enacting Glissant's concept of creoliition as cross- cultural transformation and imagining a potential fùture beyond that recorded by traditional history. The canonical, imperialist perspective repeated through Melville's historical intenextuaiity is ruptured with titis new vision of Wat's future. Moreover, the use of present tense verbs to describe both present and past experiences conflates time periods, breaking down distinctions between collective historicai put, a familial past and the present day setting of the namitor's life.

This simultaneous use and deconstruction of Ralegh's text is best exemplified by the passage in which European fantasies about Guyana are turned back on themselves to re-present contemporary English society. Conflating London and El

Dorado, the passage parodies colonial travel narrative and mocks Ralegh's acceptance of fantasy as tmth:

Here &el1 men who deal in markets of coffee and sugar and vast mmbers of other like commodities. They have eyes in their shatrlders. rnotrths in the middle of their breasts, a long train of hair grows backwarcis berween their shoulders. fiey sit on fine&-made Ieathr ~lrshionsand there are also men Iike porters to canyfood to them on magnflcekzt plates of goid and silver. In ttie uppnnost rwms of these towers, whch are as we wolrld cal1 palaces, sit stockbrokers, their bodies anointed with white powdered gold blown thrmrgh hollow canes until they are shining ail over. Above rheir heads hang the skulls of dead company directors, al1 hung and decked with fiathers. Here they sit ahking, hunciredr of them together. for as many as sir or seven &s at a time. ( 134-5) This passage applies Ralegh's 15% exoticized descriptions of Amerindian customs to

English capitalists, reversing cultural myths and comicaliy defamiliarizhg contemporary business practices. Using itaiics to suggest the quotation of an older text, this passage is a writing back to English colonizers which subverts the authority of the original text. As in Rhys's use of parody and intertextudity, these devices open up an enunciative space for a cnticalIy dissonant ferninine creole perspective.

Not only diversion, however, the quoted passage is also creative in imagining a different tüture where the gaze of power is reversed and Europeans are exoticized fiom a Guyanese perspective. While Melville's text thus employs tnckster strategies of parody and mimicry to deconstmct English authority, the narrative does not simply rest there but retums to this point of entanglement to propose a new fùture. As

Glissant argues, diversion "leads nowhere" unless it encounters the potential for real development (23). In creating an indigenous myth out of the historical figure of Wat and rewriting Ralegh's text from a perspective of Guyanese authority, Melville sets up a set of new possibilities. possibilities where creoiiition and errantry are sources of inspiration and where Guyana may have potential beyond its present poveity and isolation. The narrative mocks and subverts Guyana's colonial origins, acknowiedging their oppressive legacy, and yet also employs those trickster strategies within a form which creatively combines past and present into something new. As Paula Bumett suggests, this wtiting back recalls Derek Walcott in colapsing hear history to instead mythoiogize a continuous present, where historical ongins and current tirne are al1 combined as elements within a dynamic cultural process (Bmett 1 1- I2). Inded, the present tense verbs used in each episode of this narrative articulate this tempord continuum: Wat exists in the same continuous present as the narrator, her father and grandfather.

The text not only exposes colonial fantasies but also addresses the neocoloniai attitudes of tourists traveling to the Caribbean. The man at the party conceives of the

Caribbean as a paradise of beaches, phtrees and reggae music, telling the narrator how lucky she is to be retuming. Yet the tourist industry presents a stereotype that the narrator knows to be false. "It's not like that at ail," she thinks, remernbenng the redities of Guyana and recognizing the globai economic interests behind seiling the

Caribbean to tourists (149). Stereotyped expectations are not confined to Europeans, however, as the narrator's father and grandfather each set out for London from

Guyana with a ktof fantasies that parallel those of the early explorers. The grandfather leaves anticipating that:

In England there is a library that contains al1 the books in the world, a cathedra1 of knowledge the interior of whose dome shimmers gotd fiom the lettering on the spines of ancient volumes.

In Endand there are theatres and concert halls and galleries hung hm ceiling to floor with magnificent gold-hed paintings and al1 of these are peopled by men in black silk opera hats and women with skins like cream of coconut.

In England there are museums which house the giant skeletons of dinosaurs whose breastbones flute into a ni-cage as Io@ and vast as the Stone nis inside Westminster Abbey, which he has seen on a postcard. ( 15 1 )

Later, her father sets out with a more contemporary set of expectations, incfuding the belief that, '-It is impossible to be a real man untiI you have been to London" (1 53).

Both cultures construct knowledges about the other in a process where, again echoing the story's opening, the dream is aiways on the other side. In responding to Ralegh's propagandist expectations about Guyana with Guyanese stereotypes about London, rnoreover, Melville is again writing back to the original historical text. At once creative in using imperiaiist fonns to new ends, as weU as tragic in the fact that none of these ide& cm ever be hlfilled, this narrative strategy articulates the elusive affect of

MelviNe's version of creolization. As in the section where Ralegh's party huddle under a waterfaii, wondering why they are not at the mountain of crystal while their

Amerindian guide believes he has taken them there, Melville's juxtaposition of colonial, neocolonial and postcolonial fantasies reveals the incommensurable ironies as well as creative potential within cross-cultural contact.

This ambivalent experience of creolization contributes to what Mervyn Morris descnbes as the text's "diaiogue with the past" (8 1). The narrator's family hentage and the historical intertextuality expressed through Wat's journey deconstmct discursive categories and productively re-imagine the past. However, both these processes are accompanied by abjection and loss. The narrator's errant, ferninine creole identity cornes with the loss offamily unity. Whiie dis~~ssingher family's racial history. the nanator tells her aunts: "We're in the nineteen-eighties. Nobody cares about that sort of thing any more" ( 162). Yet Rosa replies that oniy a crazy person would dismiss the effects of racism and, despite the speaker's daims, racial legacies continue to divide her family. Indeed, ambivaience defines not only the speaker's race- and gender-marked personal history in this narrative but also the portraya1 of Raiegh's historic voyage. The incorporation of Ralegh's text reveals the painfui effects of that coloniai moment, as weli as the indidual Ioss of life and creative potential represented by Wat's death. Wat (quite literdy) embodies the painful repressions of historical discourse in the sarne moment that he performs the fluid possibilities of a celebratory creolization. Wat transfoms the finality of death into a new, living potential while also presenting perhaps the ultimate figure of loss and abjection, a pale body trapped beneath the water.

Paula Burnett reads Melville's dialogue with history and literary-histoncal documents. a pervasive theme in both Shaue-shifter and her subsequent novel, The

Ventriloauist's Tale, as establishing a set of landmarks for the future. Although recognizing the violence of past cultural interactions, Burnett reads several contemporary Caribbean teas to conclude that, ". . . the timeless zone of myth, if imaginatively read, can provide landmarks to progress, so that the my~hopoeicartist may row the people's boat steadily towards a more benign tùture" (35). This forward- looking aspect of Melville's work, mentioned earlier in relation to her creative revision of tnckster myth, is figured in Evelyn at the end of "Eat Labba and Drink Creek

Water." Intent on creating a positive tùture For Guyana, Evelyn works tirelessly to reform econornic corruption and "tum this country around" (164). Evelyn's practical focus and energy impel a sense of urgency and effectively convey the need for reform.

Yet. the text concludes with a sense of uncenainty as the narrator pers out into

Evelyn's yard to see both vibrant, indigenous vegetation and the nisted shells of two cars. Can Guyana become the paradise that Evelyn envisions (and indeed one of the trees is a sugar-apple) or is it doomed to the continuing eroding violences represented by the two decomposing cars? Evelyn is a creative force, a "wizard" in her country, but can her transfomative powers overcome the negative aspects also present in creolition? Revising Burnett's positive emphasis, "Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water" advocates the irnpetus to change through EveIyn, yet also cautions against a naïve dismissai of past violences. Melville's transformation of Ralegh's text into a productive dialogue with the past affirmsGlissant's rupture of history, yet the narrator's abjection by her aunts and the disturbing economic situation of the country reveal the continuing effects of a racially hierarchicai and colonial past. This text engages with history in order to question whether creolization can be re!i;d upon to create a positive fiiture. Particularly as both "You Lefl the Door Open" and "Eat

Labba and Dnnk Creek Water" inscribe gender as a part of their shiftinç identity dynamics. they raise questions about the perpetuation of gender violence. Melville's historical dialogues to some extent affirm the potentiai for Glissant's Relation and even

Derek Walcott's "Adamic" re-creation of the Caribbean, yet also wam against the reproduction of vioience within this process. Indeed, Wdcott's gender bias, evident in the term "Adamic," pinpoints the bais for Melville's differential ferninine creole vision and for her inclusion of gender within dynarnic identity processes.

Both "You Left the Door Open" and "Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water" end with a statement and a challenge for the tùture. In re-contextuding errantry within a late twentieth century, postcoloniai process of departures and returns, Melville recovers ferninine creoIe creativity in ways that neither Rhys nor Dunbar-Nelson's historicai circumstances could sustain. Escaping the impasse that Jean Rhys arrives at as well as the explosive fadure of creolization written by Dunbar-Nelson, Melville acknowledges histoncal losses and psychic ambivalences without being debiitated by them. The potentid of Melville's vision lies in its persistent questioning of historical legacies and its creative appropriation of mythology. Indeed, Melville transfonns the very figures that have tomented Guyana's past to serve her own mischievous and antagonistic mythic purposes. Melville offers one strategy for understanding creolization nor oniy as loss and violence but dso as creative reconfiguration. The hture for Melville's fernale narrators is an enigmatic but invariably exciting set of shape-shifling possibiiities. Conclusion

The apptoach to creolization used in this study views identity as an endless process of transformation. Deliberateiy refiising to replicate the static categories of conventionai discourse - categories such as man, wornan, white, black self, other - the feminine creoie offers exciting possibilities for escaping those limitations and exploring the fùture as infinitely creative and individuai. Because creolization never arrives at a final moment or set of answers, never seeks to assert how identity should be, this study does not seek to generate conclusions in a traditionai sense. Instead, 1 have traced the themes and processes at work in these three writers' versions of the feminine creole and constmcted new paradigms through which to view them. The feminine creole is as much a process of identity formation, histoncai revision, and politicai intervention as it is a series of aesthetic and linguistic innovations. This

"conclusion*' sumrnarizes those processes in order to generate questions for the fùture. questions about the possible forms that ferninine creole identity cm take and how that identity cm transform elements of the past.

My original model of the ferninine creole, a model of rupture and co~ection, scission and stasis, is stretched in new directions by each text. Jean Rhys's short

story and novel inaugurate a vision of the ferninine creole as willtùily errant,

irnpersonating patriarchal and cultural ideais even as she articulates her bdarnentai

aiienation. The white creole. Rhys asserts, intervenes in the dynamics of histary and

postcotoniality from a criticaily dissonant viewpoint. Yet the ending of GUod

Motnina. Midniaht pushes these processes ofidentity and diffierence to a point of

irreconciiable codict, an impasse that reveals the subject in process as, in fàct, on trial in that she is subject IO society's rulings. Unlike the open and infinite processes of Edouard Glissant's creolization theory, Rhys's novel asserts the violent and painfiil exclusions of feminine creole experience. Alice Dunbar-Nelson's fiaught iiistorical and racial orientation makes these crises of identity even more apparent. In the

Amencan South, creolization is defined not only historically and ethnically but also

racidly, invoking genealogical and specular distinctions which bind the creole

woman of colour even more finnly to the demands of social, Symbolic meaning.

What Dunbar-Nelson's portrayai of identities in crisis does do is expose New Orleans

society as a community structured by abjection, repeatedly tiactured by the demands

of racial and ethnic segregation. Dunbar-Nelson makes oven the probiems that

Rhys's text concluded with and in this sense both writers insist on the need to pursue

creolization beyond its representation and beyond the initial theoretical intersection

between feminism and cross-cultural process to consider the possibilities for a less

abjecting and divisive tiiture.

The politics of becoming creole intervene in colonial and postcoIoniai

discourses through asserting the productively compiicating dynamic of identities

which are both self and other, both sameness and difference. No longer a binary

discourse of identification and opposition, the feminine creole recuperates

contradiction. conflict and dissonance as revolutionary moments which set up the

conditions for new enunciative positionalities. new spaces fiom which to speak. The

feminine creole is. at its most hndamentai, an antagonizig force within identity

politics which exposes the aiterity inherent to identity even as it confinns the resonant

power of social discourses. What rnakes ferninine creole versions of alienation different fiom other locations of identity and difference is the intervention of national, ethnic, racial and, inevitably, gender specificities. As a juxtaposition of Rhys and

Dunbar-Nelson's work shows, the white creole is a very different identity location from that of the New Orleans rnixed race creote and even narratives of passing involve a set of secrets and disguises distinct fiom the ventriloquism of the white creole in Europe. Creoliation as historical, racial. ethnic and feminine identity is always dynamic, explonng the intersections and inconsistencies between identity categories, as well as the specificities which make each version of the feminine creole distinct and prevent any easy return to colonial or postcolonial bmaties.

Pauline Melville's narratives engage with history and myth as points of

entanglement for Guyanese identity. Acknowledging the ways in which creolization can perpetuate oppression as well as transformation, Melville's stories recover the

subversive potential of the shape-shifler. in using shape-shifting practices to divert

conventional discourse and to explore creative possibility, Melville's stories suggest

one strategy for moving beyond the impasse articulated by Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson.

Melville deploys intenextuality as a narrative strateg to fissure existing histoncal

and cultural myths and to open up the potential for a different future. Although

recognizïng the historical losses and oppressions within creolization, Melville retiises

to be bound by them and instead imaginatively appropriates the figures which have

conupted Guyana's past.

Creolization as identity formation is, for al1 three writers, as weU as Glissant

and Kristeva, inextricably linked to tinguistic and aesthetic innovation. As Knsteva

emphasizes, the disruptive trdcwith digerence which is both ferninine creole and the abject's relation to the semiotic. revolutionizes language as weU as culturai politics. [ndeed, a static Iinguistic constxuct is, Glissant demonstrates, unable to communicate the multiple variations, the "infinite possibilities" of creolization.

Rhys's texts speak a language and aesthetics of rupture and comection in which forma1 sentence structures are intempted by ellipses, sentence hgments and intertextuai code-switching, and where themes of dienation, disguise and displacement abound. Dunbar-Nelson exploits diaiect as a way of marking identities that speak other-wise and a way of pointing to the crises, both expressive and thematic, which structure her work. Pauline Melville, meanwhile, shifts linguistic as welI as conceptual paradigms to reveai the ways in which language constmcts meaning. Parod~,intenextuality and the Iine between secrecy and revelation al1 form thematic components and aesthetic strategies within this shifting process. As a disruptive force, the feminine creole revolutionizes language, and such revolutions are the source of creative inspiration both for linguistics and litemy aesthetics.

This thesis ultimately reveais that it is not enough to read and interpret the contradictions of feminine creole texts, but that the identity discourses these authors engage in demand an exploration of the possibilities beyond representation. If, as

Kristeva argues, aiterity is aiways within identity, how can that be made a productive experience rather than the fiaught and violent processes that Rhys, Dunbar-Nelson and even, to a Iesser extent, Melville portray? Whiie Kristeva argues that a recognition of this essentiai aiterity wül eliminate distinctions between self and other, citizen and foreigner, the psychoanalytic component of her work suggests that thk recognition cm never be completed. If subjectivity is a continued, violent attempt to assert onesdf in the Syrnboiic, then, despite the real heterogeneity of identity, wilt difference not always be oppressed and denigrated? Glissant iikewise describes creolition as the future, a fùture where identity exists in "relation to everything possible," breaking dom oppression because there is nothing concrete to oppress and because each identity will be Iinked to every other. Yet the writers examined here show that creolization does not always have this liberating effect. For al1 three women, gender, ethnic and racial oppressions continue and even perpetuate themselves despite the links and movements created by cultural exchange. Melville offers one strategy for breaking dom categories of seif and other, yet her trickster discourse is only made possiblc through a particular history, textuality and family experience. üitimately. feminine creole texts require more than a singie mode[ for the future. Indeed. if versions of creolition are distinct and contextuaily specific, then strategies for recoverine identity as a productive and positive interrelation mus dso be diverse and contingent upon particularities of place and tirne.

This thesis, then, not only intervenes in current critical interpretations of the texts, identiwng new themes such as Dunbar-Nelson's identity crises and Padine

Melville's historical intertextuality, but also intervenes in creolization and feminist theory. The 6nd point that this thesis generates is that identity theories such as

Glissant, Krïsteva's and even my own initial mode1 must continue to explore strategies for the fùnire, strategies that propel creativity without reiaining past legacies of oppression. As Chris Bongie concludes in his recent work, Islands and

Exiles. the process of creolization is never divorced from the iegacy of identitarian thinking that is both the condition for its being and for its revolutionary vision Taking Bongie's ideas in a new, femifiine creole direction through my use of

Kristeva, 1 suggest that the elements of constraint which define identity can be deployed productively, but what remains to be chaiienged and explored is the possiiiiity of difference without oppression. Glissant writes in this sense that his vision for a Caribbean future is not "a conception of the whole as a unifom construct providiig solutions, but [a] potyvalent idea that is capable of explainhg and understanding the contradictory, ambiguous, or unseen featwes that have appeared in this (Martinican) expenence of the global relationship between cultures" (CD254).

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