A Postcolonial Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

A Postcolonial Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys Res. Asst. Neşe Şenel Erciyes University, [email protected]

Abstract Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on the surface seems to be a pathetic love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her marriage to an English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several crucial cultural and political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europe’s alternative and potential “other,” are depicted. “Orientalism, in Said’s formulation, is principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others”. Accordingly, within the context of this paper, the other version of the story of “the othered” will be examined from a post colonialist perception through the representations of the characters especially, that of Mr. Rochester. His orientalist and “othering” attitude towards Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the Caribbean and the related crucial identity problems of Antoinette will be discussed within the framework of this postcolonial reading on Wide Sargasso Sea. Key Words: postcolonialism, orientalism, postmodern paroody, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Eyre

In postmodern literature, after the fading away of the colonial discourses and the rising of literary voices from the former colonies on issues like self-identity, there there appears a new literary genre, in which the writers try to give voice to the margins’ cultural, political and sociological identity and question the imposing power of the supposedly superior mainstream society. Especially with the impact of second wave postcolonialism, the postcolonial writers in literature started to write for a specific purpose, using the language of Sea is the mainstream power and aiming at the same target (Ashcroft 1989: 23). Wide Sargasso Sea is such an attempt to exert a previously silenced voice using the mainstream methods and language with the basic purpose of constituting a cultural self for the formerly suppressed voice of the Creole peoples. Jean Rhys applies the customs, ways and tradition of the center, that is, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Bronte’s Jane Eyre , to tell the story of the other, the periphery. The point of view that was misjudged, disregarded and silenced in Jane in Jane Eyre now Eyre now turns out to be the basic Sea , in which the story of the other is chiefly displayed. In key perception in Wide Sargasso Sea , her postcolonial reply, Rhys rejects the imposing imperialist ways and methods of fiction writing to identify the repressed ones, because Postcolonialism “wants to disrupt, disassemble or deconstruct the kind of logic, ideologies i deologies of the West” (27). In this sense, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea Sea is an indispensible postmodern and postcolonial Eyre. Via her novel, which is perfectly written as a reply to Charlotte Bronte’s Jean Eyre. deconstructionist method, Rhys adroitly plays upon the theme, characters and general plotline of Jane Eyre , utilizing all the blessings of parody and pastiche method of a postmodern novel, which marks Wide Sargasso Sea Sea as a flawless postcolonial parody of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Bronte’s Jane Eyre. parts of Jane of Jane Eyre , Rhys gives voice to Eyre. In her rewriting the main parts 38

2014 , Dil ve Edebiyat Eğitimi Dergisi , , 11, 38-45. Education, 11, 38-45. 2014, Journal of Language and Literature Education,

the deliberately silenced Jane Eyre Eyre characters with a postcolonial attempt to unearth the “other” side of the related character and the story. The mad woman in the attic, Bertha Mason, Edward Rochester’s first wife who was a silenced character of Bronte, coming from a creole origin and manifested to the readers as a woman with a dark and horrific image through the writer’s intention of othering, becomes Antoinette Cosway, a key figure of Wide Sargasso Sea , in which the othered, repressed and silenced “mad woman’s” story is retold to unearth the orientalist attitude of Bronte’s story towards the West Indies and the Creole culture. Therefore, it would not be farfetched to mark Wide Sargasso Sea , Sea , as the story of the “other”, whether it is the story of the othered Bertha, or othered Creole women, in general. In her new narration of Bertha’s story, Rhys focuses on her life as Antoinette in the West Indies and puts forward the reasons for her arguable madness, questioning the post colonialist intentions of Bronte. Through the new version Jane Eyre , the unknowns of the Creole life of Antoinette, of her mother Annette, of her marriage with Mr. Rochester and of main issues which were left blank are narrated from a new point of view with a desire to create a new understanding of the other. Sea on the surface seems to be a pathetic Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her marriage to an English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several crucial cultural and political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europe’s alternative and potential “other,” are depicted. “Orientalism, in Said’s formulation, is principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others” (Ashcroft 2001: 50). Accordingly, within the context of this paper, the other version of the story of “the othered” will be examined from a post colonialist perception through the representations of the characters especially, that of Mr. Rochester. His orientalist and “othering” attitude towards Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the Caribbean and the related crucial identity problems of Antoinette will be discussed within the framework of this postcolonial reading on Wide Sargasso Sea. Sea. Via her creation of Antoinette Cosway, Rhys creates a parallel character to Bertha Mason of Bronte with the intention of creating a naïve character from the horrific mad woman in the attic. “The author transforms the first Rochester into an individual figure whose madness is caused by imperialistic and patriarchal oppression” (Swietlik 2005: 2). The madness of Bertha, or in other words, previously Antoinette, is totally related to the double and even triple oppression that she suffers as a woman from the patriarchy and as a Creole woman in the West Indies, the burden that places her just in-between white English society and newly emancipated slaves. Throughout her life, she is left to live under a hegemonic oppression from her supposedly beloved husband, and the harassment of not being a pure white blood from White English society and what’s more, the subjugation from the newly freed slaves who were previously working in their plantations. These three factors could be adduced as the main points that push Antoinette to madness, which is again questionable on the Sea is a new grounds of its reality. However, what Rhys adroitly parodies in Wide Sargasso Sea perspective of sympathy for the mad woman in the attic. “The vision of Bertha/Antoniette as an insane offspring from a family plagued by madness is no longer plausible to the reader” (Spivak 1985:270). Now, instead of binding any empathic relation for Mr. Rochester, who is the ideal masculine character from Jane from Jane Eyre , Eyre , the reader mostly devalues his attributes and acts; and instead, favors the pitiful and misfortunate fate of the beautiful Creole heiress, 39


Antoinette. The work, in itself, is a great opportunity to comprehend the detrimental and maddening results of “power” oppression articulated on those repressed agents, on the “other”. Shedding light on this perception, Swietlik in i n his essay recounts that: Sea Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side In Wide Sargasso Sea Jean to Jane Eyre. Eyre. The character of the mad Creole is given voice, dignity, identity and right to tell the reader “her side of the story”. The protagonist knows that the fate of her mother and the tragic history of her whole family can be misjudged and misunderstood by others. That is why the heroine assures her husband: “There is always the other side, always.”(Swietlik 2005:4). In her attempt to give voice to the silenced side, Jean Rhys portrays what was formerly marginalized and othered as a crucial and dominant figure, displaying the importance of the perception in which the margins could also have the ability to become a center. According to Howells, “Rhys speaks from a self-consciously marginal position raising issues of gender and colonial difference in fiction of resistance which are always compromised compromised by the conditions of female dependency” (1991: (1991: 58). Accordingly, to be able to focus on the viewpoints of the the silenced other, in Wide Sargasso Sea , Rhys replies to Bronte’s imperialist way of fiction narration from a one fixated white English point of view, through several points of view and narrations. She both leaves a space for the views of the silenced Jane silenced Jane Eyre characters Eyre characters and she also adroitly calls forth multiple narrations of different characters in the classic technique of Sea , as opposed to the first person narration of almost all postmodern novels. In Wide Sargasso Sea , of Jane Eyre , Antoinette, Mr. Rochester, Grace Poole all serve as narrators throughout the story, which gives the readers an opportunity to grasp the questionable “reality” via three different points of view. Therefore, in her telling the story of the the other, Rhys perfectly dances among among different viewpoints, instead of fixating on just one point of view, which raises the readers’ understanding of the previously marginalized and newly centralized side. To compare and contrast these two parallel stories of the related Creole women, Gayatri Spivak in her essay, “The Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”, appreciates Rhys for her ambitions to tell the story of Bertha from a perspective of the Creole, however, she also attacks the author for marginalizing the native peoples of West Indies (Swietlik 2005: 3).Therefore, basing on the perception of Spivak, in her postcolonial reply to Jane to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys also subconsciously downgrades the native inhabitants of the Caribbean via her character depictions in which the native inhabitants are portrayed as open to sexual abuse, unreliable, performing obeah in its extremes, and abusing the main characters. In all these depictions depictions the native West West Indians are manifested manifested to the reader as nothing but dark, abusive, minor characters, who are a used to identify the pureness and ideality of White and even Creole white characters. It is sure that geography does play almost no role in determining the oriental approach of the West towards the rest of the world, which is based on Eurocentric universalism as it is put forward by Edward Said in his Orientalism Orientalism (1978). If the aforementioned society does not string along with the power structures of the West, then that very society is doomed to be labeled whether as East, the rest, and always as the other. “Said identifies a European 40


cultural tradition of orientalism, which is a particular and longstanding way of identifying the East as ‘other’ and inferior to the West. The orient, he says, features, in the Western mind as a sort of surrogate and even underground underground self “(Barry 2002: 186). So what is East, the rest, non-West, becomes a projection of all the qualities and features which the West would not like to attach to itself. In a way, to be able to identify and acknowledge acknowledge its own identity as pure good and the ideal reason, the West makes use of the binary oppositions in which the pure whiteness always depicts the West. That is why, in most literatures of the West, such qualities like cruelty, savageness, inferiority, laziness, corruption belong to the non-Western societies but goodness, reason, hard work, all the ideal labels are manifested to belong the West. Another main oriental attitude of the West towards nonwestern societies has been to perceive the rest as the “exotic, mystical and seductive” other companion combined with a desire of identifying those other peoples peoples as homogenous masses instead of recognizing recognizing their individual choices and variations (Barry 2002: 187). The aforementioned orientalist or imperialist attitudes are pretty apparent in Wide Sargasso Sea in Sea in the characterization of Mr. Rochester, a white Englishman who is debarred from his family heritage because of the restricting English laws and, on the other hand, seeks a sudden union with Antoinette due to solve his his financial problems. problems. The unnamed unnamed Mr. Rochester, at the beginning of the story, seems to be fascinated by the ways of Antoinette; however, this illusion lasts only until the honeymoon when he is shaken by the awareness aroused by the the brother-in-law and Amelia that Antoinette is from ‘bad blood’. From that moment on, the orientalist attitude of Mr. Rochester towards Antoinette gradually unearths itself. However, his Eurocentric Universalist attitude cannot only be directed at Antoinette, but it could also be referred to his contempt for the native Caribbean Caribbean people. In this sense, based on the conceptualization of Edward Said, the basic two orientalist attempts of othering and mythicizing of the West towards the East are very dominant within Sea . In the the characterization features of Mr. Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea. the second chapter of of the novel, as Mr. Rochester and Antoinette stay in Granbois for their honeymoon, the orientalist attitude of Mr. Rochester towards West Indians comes to the surface. When he is served coffee by Christophine, the servant he obviously dislikes due to her commitment to obeah, he rejects the drink with disgust. disgust. Upon the insistence of Antoinette, Antoinette, he says, “I like the drink, but I hate the language” (Rhys 1969: 45). This very succinct statement of Mr. Rochester is enough to unearth his attitude towards the people of the West Indies; he surely likes the land, its richness, the plantations, the natural beauty, and the exoticism of the nature, which cannot be attained in his homeland, England. All the same, the very cultural semblance of the West Indies is the issue that disturbs him; it is the ‘other’ ‘ other’ people themselves that intrude Mr. Rochester. Rochester. This ‘annoying’ ‘annoying’ cultural semblance surely refers to the native language, their customs and traditions, their native obeah conventions and all the other related issues, which do not smell like the Europeans, or suit a set of Eurocentric universal values. As Mr. Rochester fails to appreciate West Indians and their values from their own perspective but from a much broader unjustified vision of universality, he fails to welcome those cultural and regional differences as blessings and comes to take them as inferior facets of corruption. It is even the key point point as Mr. Rochester begins to think think as he was told told beforehand, that he is ‘married to the wrong kind’, which is a kind that cannot truly fit into white pure Englishness, but which again does not ally with the more inferior ‘Nigger’ ‘Nigger’ kind. 41


An alternative restricting imperialist attitude of Mr. Rochester can easily be traced when he attempts to call Antoinette Antoinette Bertha, which sounds sounds much more English than than Antoinette, a typical Creole female name. Throughout the story, Mr. Rochester also objects to Antoinette’s own authentic ways of clothing and hair dressing, proposing new Western alternatives. These acts of changing name to Bertha or disturbing her natural ways of fashion are nothing less than an orientalist attitude to impose an identity and a culture on a post-colonial subject, which would give rise to several self-individuality self-individuality problems in the related subject. subject. As Frantz Fanon puts forward in The Wretched of the Earth, throughout history, the colonizing power of Europe, devalued the histories of the colonized nations, alleging those histories as ‘precivilized voids’ and from then on the history and culture of the related nation was marked by the t he arrival of the European colonizers through their imposed educational systems (1965: 43-46). Imposing a history history on to a nation is nothing more than imposing imposing a new limited identity on the colonized people by the Colonizer that exerts his power. Accordingly, Mr. Rochester as a white ‘superior’ Englishman attempts to impose a new more English name on Antoinette, he also executes an identity, a created past and a culture on her, which again pushes her further to madness, the only place where she could find peace, away from the hegemonic oppressors. The time period that the novel covers covers is also of crucial importance. importance. Rhys’s story takes place place during the years following the Emancipation Act (1833) in Jamaica, the critical period when the racial problems were very complex complex and controversial. During that time, there were three different ethnical communities in the society that would fire up the density of the social tension; the Black, the Creole, and the White community. Now, upon upon regaining their their freedom, the newly emancipated ex-slaves were highly outraged towards their previous owners, who were were either White Creoles Creoles or White English. English. Throughout Throughout the society, the the rebellious nature of the ex-slaves would always haunt the reader each time Black community tried to take revenge on their former owners. owners. The revenge and the hatred hatred of the Blacks is pretty evident as they burn the plantation house of the Cosway Family, or as Amelia sleeps with Mr. Rochester, and even even when Christophine advises Antoinette’s on her ‘madness’. ‘madness’. However, it would be impossible not to agree with Spivak that although Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea , recounts the story of the silenced ‘other’ Creole woman, even with her post colonialist perception, she, herself, fails to avoid othering the Black community in the West Indies. Through her depiction of the black characters, she makes the same mistake of treating them as homogenous masses with no individual differences. Nearly all ex-slaves or the paid servants of the novel are portrayed as revengeful, demonic and infernal characters of corruption with almost no good ambition. Even Christophine, Antoinette’s dear black advisor, raises suspicion due to her devotion to obeah and her partial abuse of the emotional stress of Antoinette, within the minds of the readers. Accordingly, even when Jean Rhys writes back to create another version from the perspective of the suppressed Creole people, she “others” them. The social status of the Creole society is also another issue, which is a highly central matter for the novel to identify the in-betweenness that Antoinette suffered from the much ‘inferior’ Black community and the much ‘superior’ white English society. The social depression that Antoinette, and of course other Creole characters suffer in the novel stems from her mixed ethnic origin which is called by Homi Bhabba ‘hybridity,’ and the the result of this hybrid 42


culture surfaces as as ‘in-betweenness’. ‘in-betweenness’. In his book, Culture’s in Between , about Between , Bhabba recounts about hybrid cultures as follows: I have developed the concept of hybridity to describe the construction of cultural authority within conditions of political antagonism antagonism or inequity. Strategies of of hybridization reveal an estranging movement in the ‘authoritative,’ even authoritarian inscription of the cultural sign. sign. At the point at which the precept precept attempts to objectify itself as a generalized knowledge or a normalizing, hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategy or discourse opens up a space of negotiation where power power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal. Such negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration. collaboration. It makes possible the emergence of an “interstitial” agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies agencies find their voice voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy supremacy or or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy: the outside of the inside; the part in the whole. (1993: 212) The Creole culture that Antoinette originally belongs is no exception to Bhabba’s aforesaid hybridization of cultures. She does not belongs to the authoritative mainstream English Culture in West Indies and is therefore estranged from the ‘superior’ context culture. Nor does she belong to the alleged inferior black community which is another culture that she and her mother Annette, frequently despise and make fun of in the story. This aspect of Antoinette’s hybrid culture pushes her to suffer from all the traumas of in-betweenness. However, a new estranged Creole way of culture is created that neither purely fits into the mainstream white English society nor into the black society. The double oppression that Antoinette undergoes relatively much evident within the context of the novel via several relationships that she develops such as her morbid marriage to Mr. Rochester, her pathetic pursuit of relief from Christophine, and her hateful relation to Amelia, who would not obey Antoinette’s imperatives. Even the social space in which Annette and her daughter are fated to live in search of rich white English husbands is enough to recognize their restricted in-between in-between status in the society. The patriarchal patriarchal subjugation that Antoinette experiences as a woman intensifies her repression, causing her to endure double othering of the society both as a woman and as a postcolonial subject. The triple oppression under which Antoinette tries to acknowledge her self-identity leads her to the final place of resolution, re solution, which is nothing less than a desirable madness. The hybrid ethnicity of Antoinette can be given as the basic reason why Antoinette cannot come to terms with her identity, which is usually manifested as ambiguous. And her female status also blurs Antoinette Antoinette in her acknowledgement of a precise individuality. individuality. Throughout the novel the character Antoinette, is referred to by the public as the daughter of Annette, or as the wife of Mr. Rochester, or as Bertha, a name and individuality which is totally imposed on her by the husband. Owing to the imposed identities on herself by other power holders, Antoinette cannot strike a balance balance with her individual self. self. All the identity crisis is related to Antoinette’s inbetweenness inbetweenness and placelessness. Sexuality is also worthy of mention in 43


relation to Antoinette’s identity problem. In literature, black women generally are linked to the sexual openness. openness. Thus, Antoinette Antoinette is portrayed portrayed as a female character that has a tendency tendency towards sexual freedom like those black peoples, which is truly a metaphorical manifestation of her mixed ethnicity. All the triple oppression that she tries to endure in life consigns Antoinette to a kind of madness, the reality of which is disputable. Al the features of hybridity, in-betweenness, unhomeliness, isolation, estrangement, lack of belongingness, identity crisis, the feelings of insecurity, distrust, all kinds of economic, racial, patriarchal, sexual, colonial and class oppressions, are reasons of that could take Antoinette a step further towards madness. However, it would seem that the madness that she is pushed into or that she ‘prefers’ to be with, is an ideological reaction that Antoinette manifests against the all-oppressive powers in her life. In relation to this, it is interesting to consider Spivak’s famous essayCan essay Can the Subaltern the status of subaltern women, that is, oppressed oppressed postcolonial Speak? , in which she questions the female subjects and tries to find a new way for these double oppressed women to raise their voices against the patriarchal patriarchal and postcolonial postcolonial power exerts. Upon reviewing the current current situation of the subaltern via the theories of several post colonialist writers and theorists the orists with a liking for Derrida’s deconstruction, Spivak answers the very question that she directs at the beginning. She believes that as long as the West denies judging the subaltern or the postcolonial subjects on their own authentic values, and instead, favors a system of judgment, which is Eurocentric Eurocentric universal, the subaltern subaltern cannot speak (Spivak (Spivak 1988:144). No, indeed, the subaltern has never been able to speak and if the world power structures and economic systems do not alter, the subaltern will most possibly not be able to raise his voice for freedom. However, there is a sure way out for the subaltern, from all the economic, racial, patriarchal, colonial oppressions oppressions and that is madness madness and dreams. Antoinette revolts against all those subjugating factors of her life in her recurring dreams in which she sets fire to the whole captivating British prison-house. The subaltern, like Antoinette, has the dream and desire of protesting against all the power structures that captivates, devalues, and decreases their own identity. Maybe, one day they will wake up from their solicitous dreams and feel like acting out their desires of freedom and a self-identity, just as Antoinette at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea. Sea.

References Ashcroft, Bill&Pal Ahluwalia. (2001) Edward Said. Said. London: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin .(1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. Literatures. London: Routledge. Theory. Manchester: Manchester UP. Barry, Peter. (2002) Beginning Theory. Bhabba, Homi K. (1993) "Culture's in Between." Art Between." Art Forum 32.1: Forum 32.1: 167-211. Coral, Howells Ann. (1991) Jean (1991) Jean Rhys. Rhys. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Earth . Fanon, Frantz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Constance Farrington. (1965) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove. 44


Rhys, Jean. (1969) Wide Sargasso Sea. Sea. Harmondsworth. Speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingstoke: Reader. London: Routledge. ......(1995) Donna Landry, and Gerald M. MacLean. The Spivak Reader. ....... (1985) "Three Women's Texts and a Critique Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12.1: Inquiry 12.1: 24361. Web. Jstor. Jstor. . Swietlik, Malgorzata. (2005) "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys as a Postcolonial Response to "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. Bronte . Landeu: Universitat Koblenz.

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A Postcolonial Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

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