BURNING LANDSCAPES, ISLANDS ON FIRE: MARIE-ELENA JOHN’S UNBURNABLE AND JEAN RHYS’ WIDE SARGASSO SEA

MANUELA ESPOSITO

This essay analyses the relation between Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys and Unburnable (2006) by Marie-Elena John through the image of fire.1 As an element of nature, it is inscribed in the landscape of the Caribbean archipelago. However, it also bears symbolic values and turns into a strategy of survival, helping women come to terms with the colonial past. If Jean Rhys devoted her novel entirely to fire, making her writing burn with the memory of the place, John composes her own work with the same love for the natural element. Both writers start from the presence of fire in the landscape, then stress the link between it and women and finally look into the cultural and religious connotations of fire, in order to re-tell history from the feminine point of view. Fire, which permeates Rhys’ and John’s works, is the necessary element to re-write the geographical space and the historical time of Dominica. So what is fire in Wide Sargasso Sea and Unburnable? It is the chaotic element that animates a disquieting natural and human landscape; it is what inflames Antoinette’s life in the Caribbean and sets fire to her oppression in England as well as what makes the lake in Dominica “boil”. This essay aims to uncover the liberating potential of fire in the novels by Rhys and John, as the writers express the need for a re-evaluation of women and colonial history in the Caribbean that passes through a renewal enacted by fire – in its material and symbolic form.

1 Marie-Elena John, Unburnable, New York: HarperCollins/Amistad, 2006; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, London: Penguin Books, 1966. 228 Manuela Esposito

Wide Sargasso Sea is a rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, told from the point of view of Rochester’s first Creole wife, Antoinette Cosway, whom Rochester rechristens Bertha Mason. If in Jane Eyre she simply functions as the mad woman in the attic, a sort of silent ghost, now Antoinette tells her own story, from childhood to death. In giving voice to this Creole woman’s life, Rhys inaugurates a poetics of red colour that inflames her writing with the deep relation between feminine identity and place. In Wide Sargasso Sea, bright and shocking colours are generally associated with the description of the Caribbean landscape, while pale and soft colours recall dark and cold England. Her focus on landscape reveals her determination to restore dignity to a place that seems to be deviant from the English norm. Thanks to fire, the landscape of Dominica regains its singular worth through the variety of colours of a nature opposed to the Western vision of it. The physical distinction between the two types of landscape also implies a different approach to life, a particular way of feeling and an intense relation with the place.2 Antoinette, like a painter with her palette, describes her emotions and her closeness to the landscape through vivid colours, embroidering roses according to her inner feelings and signing her name in fire red:

We are cross-stitching silk roses on a pale background. We can colour the roses as we choose and mine are green, blue and purple. Underneath, I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvar Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839.3

While Antoinette is at ease in her own place, Rochester, as a foreigner, is disturbed by the overwhelming reality of the too vivid Caribbean landscape. He shows a deep aversion for the nature displayed in front of him, because it seems sinister, unwelcoming and excessive in all its aspects:

We … looked at the hills, the mountains and the blue-green sea. There was a soft warm wind blowing but I understood why the porter had called it a wild place. Not only wild but menacing. Those hills would close in on you .…

2 Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 86. 3 Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 34.