Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 [1st ed.] 9783030282226, 9783030282233

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 (Elaine Savory, Erica L. Johnson)....Pages 1-9
Front Matter ....Pages 11-11
Interview with Caryl Phillips (Elaine Savory)....Pages 13-22
Interview with Chrisila Maida (Elaine Savory)....Pages 23-28
Infamous Daughters: A Capsule Collection Inspired by Wide Sargasso Sea (Alexa Roccanova)....Pages 29-49
Wide Sargasso Sea Then and Now: Reading Jean Rhys `la mode (Sophie Oliver)....Pages 51-70
After Mrs Rochester: On Portraying Jean Rhys Onstage (Diana Quick)....Pages 71-81
Interview with James Thackara (Elaine Savory)....Pages 83-87
Front Matter ....Pages 89-89
Who Writes for the Trees?: Wide Sargasso Sea, the Dominican Forest, and Its Parrots (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert)....Pages 91-110
Jean Rhys Getting the “Feel” of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea (Sue Thomas)....Pages 111-124
“Broken Parts”: Wide Sargasso Sea and the Poetics of Caribbean Modernism (Mary Lou Emery)....Pages 125-139
Front Matter ....Pages 141-141
#Metoo in Wide Sargasso Sea (Carine Mardorossian)....Pages 143-159
The Lineaments of Life and Death: Desire, Sexuality and Manhood in Wide Sargasso Sea (Elaine Savory)....Pages 161-181
Vulnerability and Authenticity: The Wisdom of Wide Sargasso Sea (Katy Cook)....Pages 183-198
Front Matter ....Pages 199-199
“I so wanted to hand Emma a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea”: Wide Sargasso Sea and Contemporary Re-workings of Jane Eyre (Kylie Mirmohamadi)....Pages 201-214
Encryption as Transmission: The Secret Gardens of Wide Sargasso Sea (Patricia Moran, Erica L. Johnson)....Pages 215-231
Burning Down Her Master’s House (Again): Marlon James Responds to Jean Rhys (Ania Spyra)....Pages 233-246
Back Matter ....Pages 247-252

Citation preview

NEW CARIBBEAN STUDIES

Wide Sargasso Sea at 50

Edited by Elaine Savory · Erica L. Johnson

New Caribbean Studies Series Editors Kofi Campbell Renison University College University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, Canada Shalini Puri Department of English University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA, USA

New Caribbean Studies series seeks to contribute to Caribbean self-­ understanding, to intervene in the terms of global engagement with the region, and to extend Caribbean Studies’ role in reinventing various disciplines and their methodologies well beyond the Caribbean. The series especially solicits humanities-informed and interdisciplinary scholarship from across the region’s language traditions. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14752

Elaine Savory  •  Erica L. Johnson Editors

Wide Sargasso Sea at 50

Editors Elaine Savory Department of Literary Studies and Environmental Studies The New School New York, NY, USA

Erica L. Johnson Department of English Pace University New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2691-3011        ISSN 2634-5196 (electronic) New Caribbean Studies ISBN 978-3-030-28222-6    ISBN 978-3-030-28223-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Chrisila Maida This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To DIANA ATHILL December 21, 1917–January 23, 2019

Acknowledgments

Many people have supported or enabled this book to come into being. We thank the organizers of the London symposium in March 2016, Peter Hulme and Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, as well as Joan Anim-Addo and her staff. She was the institutional host at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, where she is a key figure in postcolonial and Caribbean studies. Elaine Savory’s organizing of the New York symposium (October 2018) was supported by The Literary Studies Department at Eugene Lang College, New School University, most particularly by department chairs Juan de Castro and James Fuerst; by the Dean, Stephanie Browner; and by Jane McNamara who provided institutional support and assistance in seeking funding. In addition, the conference on Rhys held at the Sorbonne in June 2018, “Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission/Lignes de transmission,” provided another forum that enabled us to think through this book, thanks to many wonderful conversations and presentations from others in the Rhys world. We thank the organizers, Kerry-Jane Wallart, Juliana Lopoukhine, and Frédéric Regard, for their invitation to contribute to that event. Elaine Savory also thanks Esther Phillips, presently Poet Laureate of Barbados, for her invitation to attend the BIMFEST literary festival (May 2016) at which Wide Sargasso Sea was celebrated as a part of the emergence of canonical Anglophone Caribbean literature between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. We thank the entire Palgrave Macmillan team for shepherding this project through. On a personal level, we thank our families for their patience and support during the time of compilation of this collection. vii

Contents

1 Introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea at 50  1 Elaine Savory and Erica L. Johnson Part I Inspirations and Influences  11 2 Interview with Caryl Phillips 13 Elaine Savory 3 Interview with Chrisila Maida 23 Elaine Savory 4 Infamous Daughters: A Capsule Collection Inspired by Wide Sargasso Sea 29 Alexa Roccanova 5 Wide Sargasso Sea Then and Now: Reading Jean Rhys à la mode 51 Sophie Oliver 6 After Mrs Rochester: On Portraying Jean Rhys Onstage 71 Diana Quick

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Contents

7 Interview with James Thackara 83 Elaine Savory Part II Framing the Text  89 8 Who Writes for the Trees?: Wide Sargasso Sea, the Dominican Forest, and Its Parrots 91 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert 9 Jean Rhys Getting the “Feel” of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea111 Sue Thomas 10 “Broken Parts”: Wide Sargasso Sea and the Poetics of Caribbean Modernism125 Mary Lou Emery Part III Sex and Gender 141 11 #Metoo in Wide Sargasso Sea143 Carine Mardorossian 12 The Lineaments of Life and Death: Desire, Sexuality and Manhood in Wide Sargasso Sea161 Elaine Savory 13 Vulnerability and Authenticity: The Wisdom of Wide Sargasso Sea183 Katy Cook

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Part IV  In Dialogue with Wide Sargasso Sea 199 14 “I so wanted to hand Emma a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea”: Wide Sargasso Sea and Contemporary Re-workings of Jane Eyre201 Kylie Mirmohamadi 15 Encryption as Transmission: The Secret Gardens of Wide Sargasso Sea215 Patricia Moran and Erica L. Johnson 16 Burning Down Her Master’s House (Again): Marlon James Responds to Jean Rhys233 Ania Spyra Index247

Notes on Contributors

Katy  Cook  who presented at the London symposium, has a PhD in Psychology from University College London (UCL), as well as a master’s degree in Modern Culture Studies and a master’s in Psychology. She is the founder of the Centre for Technology Awareness and co-founder of No Data Day and has given talks on a number of topics, ranging from psychological captivity to the future of education. Katy spent many years working in research, focusing on eating disorders and medically unexplained symptoms. She has taught at UCL and currently runs the technology training for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Mary Lou Emery  who presented at the London symposium, is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. Her publications include articles on British modernist and Anglophone Caribbean writers and on Caribbean Modernism. She has edited a special issue of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures (2003) on Jean Rhys and authored two books, Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (1990) and Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (2007). Erica  L.  Johnson  who presented at both the London and New  York symposia, is Professor of English at Pace University in New York. She is the author of Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), the co-editor with Patricia Moran of Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (2015) and The Female Face of Shame (2013), and the co-editor with Éloïse Brezault of Memory as xiii

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Colonial Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is also the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009) and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro (2003). She has authored articles on modernist and postcolonial writers in such journals as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Meridians, Biography, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the Journal of Caribbean Literatures. Chrisila Maida  is a Brooklyn-based designer, illustrator, and writer with a love of storytelling and odd characters. She is an assistant designer at HarperCollins Children’s Books, where she gets to work on the books she fell in love with as a child. She graduated from Parsons School for Design in 2016 with a dual BFA in Illustration and BA in Writing. Carine  Mardorossian  is Professor of English at University of Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Framing the Victim: Rape, Agency, and Structural Masculinity in the Contemporary United States (2014) and Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (2005). She has written articles on Caribbean writers in such premier journals as Callaloo, Research in African Literatures, and Small Axe. She is the Executive Director of the Northeast Modern Language Association. Kylie  Mirmohamadi  is a research associate at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Her works have been published widely in Australian and British historical, cultural, and literary studies. Her most recent book is The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). She has co-authored and co-edited a number of books including, with Susan K.  Martin, Sensational Melbourne (2011) and Colonial Dickens (2012). Patricia Moran  who presented at the London symposium, is a reader at City, University of London. Her books include Antonia White and Manic-­ Depressive Illness (2017), The Aesthetics of Trauma in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Word of Mouth: Body/ Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (1996). She is the editor, with Tamar Heller, of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th- and 20th-Century Women’s Writing (2003) and with Erica L. Johnson of The Female Face of Shame (2013) and Jean Rhys: Twenty-­ First-­Century Approaches (2015). She has written articles on modernist women writers for such journals as Modernism/modernity, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies, and Woolf Studies Annual.

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Sophie Oliver  has just finished her PhD on modernist women and fashion, from clothes to literary vogues. Her article “Fashion in Jean Rhys/ Jean Rhys in Fashion” was published in Modernist Cultures in 2016. That year, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Wide Sargasso Sea, she conceived and curated an exhibition at the British Library in London, “Jean Rhys and the Making of an Author.” Lizabeth  Paravisini-Gebert  who presented at the New  York symposium, is Professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College. She is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (2003, with Margarite Fernández Olmos), and Literatures of the Caribbean (2008). She is at work on Glimpses of Hell, a study of the aftermath of the 1902 eruption of the Mont Pelée volcano of Martinique, on José Martí: A Life, a biography of the Cuban patriot, and Endangered Species: The Environment and the Discourse of the Caribbean Nation. She has also co-edited a number of collections of essays, most notably Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997) and Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures (2008). Her critical editions of texts by Caribbean women writers include Phyllis Allfrey’s The Orchid House (1997) and It Falls into Place: The Short Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey (2004). Her articles and literary translations have appeared in Callaloo, the Journal of West Indian Literature, the Jean Rhys Review, the Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Obsidian, and the Revista Mexicana del Caribe, among others. Caryl Phillips  who presented at the New York symposium, is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, playwright, and Professor of English at Yale University. His novels include The Lost Child (2015), Dancing in the Dark (2005), A Distant Shore (2003), Crossing the River (1993), Cambridge (1991), and The Final Passage (1985). His work in non-fiction includes Colour Me English (2011), The Atlantic Sound (2000), and The European Tribe (1985). He has won numerous awards and prizes including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and his work has been shortlisted for the Booker. His latest novel A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) is about the life of Jean Rhys.

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Diana Quick  who presented at the London symposium, is a BAFTA and Emmy-nominated British actress with extensive film, television, and stage credits to her name. She is well known for her role in the British television series Brideshead Revisited and her more recent role as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. In 2003, she played Jean Rhys in Polly Teale’s play, After Mrs. Rochester. She is the author of a memoir, A Tug on the Thread: From the British Raj to the British Stage. Alexa  Roccanova who presented at the New  York symposium, is a New York City-based writer working in the fashion industry. She has a BA in Literary Studies and a BFA in Fashion Design from The New School. In 2016 she completed her senior capstone piece, a series of humor essays focusing on the unvarnished reality she has come to know from studying and working in fashion. The following year she presented her thesis, a womenswear collection inspired by Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Her work largely explores the ways in which fashion and literature intersect. Elaine  Savory  who organized and presented at both the London and New York symposia, has written widely on African and Caribbean literatures, especially women’s writing, theater and drama, poetry, and most recently, ecocriticism. She has authored two books on Jean Rhys (1998 and 2009) and she edited The Jean Rhys Review for several years (which will soon be web-accessible). She has recently written a new essay for the first Paris conference on Rhys (2018), and has a book in progress on Caribbean literature and ecology. She contributed an article to the collection Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran. She is also a poet who has been inspired by Rhys, and she is presently working on a new collection which includes dramatic poems in the voice of Annette, Antoinette’s mother, in Wide Sargasso Sea as well as a memoir. She teaches at The New School, where she is Associate Professor of Literary Studies. Her work focuses on ecocriticism and environmental studies. Ania Spyra  is Associate Professor of English at Butler University (USA) and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University (UK). She teaches Transnational and Postcolonial Literature, Translation and Creative Writing. She has lectured and written widely on nodal cities, feminist contestations of cosmopolitanism, multilingualism, and

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transnationalism, most recently in Studies in the Novel, Comparative Literature and Contemporary Literature. James  Thackara is a distinguished American novelist who recently returned to New York City after half a century in the UK. He knew Jean Rhys in her last years, when he was starting out as a novelist. His remarkable novels include America’s Children (1984, 2001); Ahab’s Daughter (1988) and The Book of Kings (1999). Born in California and educated in Buenos Aires, Provence, California, Rome, Switzerland, and New England, Thackara is, like Rhys, a transnational. Sue  Thomas who presented at the London symposium, is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She is the author of Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures 1804–1834 (2014), Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in ‘Jane Eyre’ (2008), and The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), a co-author with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi of England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2001), and a co-­editor with Anne Collett and Russell McDougall of Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather: Typhoons, Hurricanes, and Cyclones (2017), among other books. She has written very extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, decolonizing literatures, and nineteenth-century periodicals. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she is a member of the editorial board of Postcolonial Studies and of the National Advisory Board of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network. Her recent scholarship on Rhys has been funded by the Australian Research Council DP140103817.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Book jacket for Wide Sargasso Sea by Chrisila Maida. (Courtesy of Chrisila Maida) 24 Figs. 4.1 Infamous Daughters: Final Lineup. (All photos in this chapter and 4.2 were taken by the author) 31 Fig. 4.3 Look three: Cotton tunic with polyester pleated chiffon skirt and silk lining 34 Fig. 4.4 Look two: Cotton-wool blend top with silk dupioni appliqué and stretch cotton pant 37 Fig. 4.5 Look five: Silk tunic with wool strap detail and polyester pleated chiffon pant 47 Fig. 5.1 Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, back view. (All photos in this chapter were taken by the author) 54 Fig. 5.2 Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, bodice55 Fig. 5.3 Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, front view 56 Fig. 5.4 Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, cuff56

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 Elaine Savory and Erica L. Johnson

The year 2016 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jean Rhys’s last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. It used to be said that 50 years was the right length for copyright to persist, and that reputations of artists and their work were unstable for at least half a century, before assessment found its balance. This collection implicitly argues that 50 years after publication is a good moment to pause and reconsider a work still vibrantly alive for a new generation of readers. We began this project after presentations given at two symposia in 2016 to celebrate the novel’s special birthday. From the response of Rhys scholars, established and new, as well as fiction writers and visual artists, it was clear that there is more to say about this now canonical, highly influential text. This collection explores how a diverse group of readers interpreted it in this moment, almost two decades into another new century, and found highly significant new ways to think about it.

E. Savory (*) Department of Literary Studies and Environmental Studies, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. L. Johnson Department of English, Pace University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_1

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The two symposia took place in March and October 2016. The first was hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London, organized by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Peter Hulme, both eminent names in postcolonial/Caribbean literature circles. Paravisini-Gebert’s biography of Rhys’s contemporary, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, and Peter Hulme’s work on Amerindian cultural presence in Dominica, Rhys’s homeland, are of great importance in understanding Rhys’s work. The two-day symposium presented reconsiderations of the novel in times very different from 1966, marking not only the evolution of approaches by established critics, but the first steps of new Rhys scholars engaged in doctoral work. Known Rhys scholars such as Judith Raiskin (who edited the critical edition of the Norton Wide Sargasso Sea), Denise Decaires-Narain, and Helen Carr were not able to contribute to this collection, but made important interventions in London. The second symposium was hosted by the New School University, New York, in October 2016, organized by Elaine Savory. This was a one-­ day event, with presentations by academic critics, creative writers, and a visual artist, proof that Wide Sargasso Sea inspires people in a range of disciplines, not only literary critics and theorists. The only presenter not included here is the novelist Robert Antoni: his conversation with Caryl Phillips about their respect for Rhys’s work was a powerful conclusion to that day. A third event should be mentioned because it marks the distance Rhys has come from being regarded as only a British writer to being included in the canon of Anglophone Caribbean literature. The BIMFEST (the biannual literary festival held in Barbados and named after the famous journal Bim) included Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in a retrospective reevaluation of roughly half a century of now-canonical Anglophone Caribbean literature. This affirmed that Rhys cannot be responsibly considered without the Caribbean context which shaped her so profoundly for the first 16 years of her life. We can trace this approach back through the work of the founding editor of Wasafiri, Shusheila Nasta, who attended the London symposium and who published two important clusters of sociopolitical responses to the novel (1995, 1998). These included Kamau Brathwaite’s naming of Rhys as the “Helen of Our Wars,” a term that evokes just how significantly she figured into the conversation about Caribbean literature, wherever critics came down on the issue. Reception of the novel in and since 1966 has often been said to reflect three main approaches. In no intended order, these are feminist/gender,

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postcolonial/Caribbean, and modernist. Wide Sargasso Sea appeared in a moment of cultural ferment, in which race, gender, and class issues were at the forefront, and the formal ending of British colonialism in the Caribbean was underway. This novel, representing the story of a white creole woman in the immediate aftermath of slavery, revisioning Jane Eyre, was bound to provoke political discussion, not just in the 1960s, but since. This may be the case in part because she was herself often thinking along with theoretical trends in her fiction; as Helen Carr so eloquently put it, in historicizing the reception of Wide Sargasso Sea at a conference on Rhys in Paris in 2018, “Rhys’s ideas quickened to more theoretical debates.”1 Carr showed how, for example, Rhys was thinking through power in a mode and moment that resonated with Foucault’s theoretical work on the same topic. Looking back on the reception history of Wide Sargasso Sea makes it possible to see cultural and literary trends as they shaped particular approaches just as the readings in this volume shed light on such current issues as the #MeToo movement and its recognition of a global culture of sexual exploitation, the twenty-first-century concept of rape culture, climate change and environmental destruction, and even contemporary trends in fashion and design aesthetics. The novel speaks to all of these issues and more. There have been a wide variety of insightful readings of the text over its 50-year history. Chronologically, the first phase of response to Rhys’s work focused on her modernist beginnings as a writer in Paris in the mid-­1920s. Ford Madox Ford, her mentor, almost complained, because she ignored his advice, about the lack of contextual detail (topography) in her first collection of stories except for the Caribbean. He could be a very prolix writer himself and he found her concision to be extreme. Clearly Rhys’s instinct gave her a unique voice, just as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. have particularly individual voices within what we call modernist literature. We also know now that modernism is not one movement, and it is not only European. For example, many point to the role of violence in modernist formations and tend to focus on the world wars as forces that changed consciousness, but while these European-centered wars were intensely murderous and cruel, we have to acknowledge that the transatlantic slave trade was the beginning of a brutal modernity and displacement for millions over centuries. Because Rhys’s work and Wide Sargasso Sea in particular are grounded in the Caribbean, this history haunts her poetics. As our perception of modernisms has evolved, so have readings of Rhys’s work.

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Although Rhys began writing Wide Sargasso Sea during the period of high modernism, by the time of its publication in 1966 two important political movements were underway: European and U.S.-centered feminisms and demands for the end of formal colonialism in the Caribbean. The novel was not written for or to the 1960s, nor even in terms of evolution, in the 1960s, but it speaks to that moment of hope and determination for cultural and social change. There was a wide spectrum of feminist readings of it by critics of different ethnic backgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic and also from the Caribbean. It took a little longer to establish that Rhys is definitively a Caribbean writer because that had to be argued from deep knowledge of the region and she was claimed by Britain in mid-­ career. This is understandable in that Rhys was white creole and left the Caribbean as a teenager to live in Britain, then France and Britain again, only ever returning for a few weeks to Dominica in her middle 40s. In fact all her work displays either evidently or subtly, her Caribbean identity and affiliation, but it was Wide Sargasso Sea, even more than her somewhat autobiographical first novel Voyage in the Dark, which made facing this unavoidable. Thus, the novel has been a litmus paper for shifts in cultural consciousness in readers, and it is valuable to look at the reception history of Wide Sargasso Sea from this point of view. It is canonical because it is so well written that it can inspire diverse interpretations. In shaping this collection, we have found that critics and theorists who may have thought they were done with the text have found, in our moment now, 50 years on from the novel’s beginning in print, they have much more to say. This might be so partly because Wide Sargasso Sea is such a highly determined, very precisely written, short text. Rhys worked on it for a number of decades, and clearly earlier texts, such as her lost draft novel, “The Revenant,” are ghost presences within the finished work. Novels which are baggy monsters, full of digressions and detail, are actually much harder to read from divergent perspectives than lean ones, in which many words carry metonymic significance. In fact, it is always most productive to read Rhys’s prose employing an awareness of the economies and layering of poetry. She had a lifelong deep attachment to poetry, especially in French, though she rarely wrote it herself, and when she did, she did not choose to work at it seriously: instead, she found some formal poetic strategies useful. The very concision of her prose invites the reader in to explore and speculate, because it excludes definitive, detailed representations. She also is expert at indicating large historical events or moments via a small occurrence. For example, Mr. Mason has the idea of bringing in

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Indian labor to the plantation. In this moment, he represents the white male plantocracy, which did just that in reality in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. Aunt Cora, in her opposition to this idea, represents the canny insider who knows better. Moreover, Cora’s role in trying to help Antoinette illuminates the powerlessness of the white creole woman given into marriage with a foreign, colonialist stranger because her money attracts him. But then Rhys complicates these characters in ways which provide many alternative readings. Mason is a kindly stepfather to Antoinette, despite all of his troubles with her mother; Cora is in the end not just an affectionate and protective aunt but a scion of a past with slavery, which benefited her. It is easy (and true) to say this plurality of perspectives is quintessentially Caribbean, but it is also a key part of highly accomplished literary storytelling. A word needs to be said about the wide range of inspiration which the novel has provided to many kinds of writers and artists, some of whom are included in this collection. Although, like much sensitive and well-written fiction, Wide Sargasso Sea has not translated well into film; two attempts have been made to do this (1993, directed by John Duigan for an Australian film company, and 2006, directed by Brendan Maher for the BBC). These films were not successful visions of the novel despite Rhys’s biographer Carole Angier providing screenplay input for the first film, and established writer Stephen Greenhorn screenwriting for the second. Making Rhys’s subtle visual representations literal almost inevitably condemns them to becoming lurid and falling into cultural clichés of race, sexuality, and gender, even to the extent of Caribbean foliage and topography (the tourist promotion of the region for jaded northerners looking for escape from reality does not help). Far more successfully, more than one play has sought to represent Rhys herself dramatically, for example in Barbados in the early 1980s, directed by Earl Warner, and in London in 2003 (the actor who played Rhys in London, Diana Quick, has contributed a chapter to this collection). For those pursuing careers in design—in our collection, a book cover designer and a fashion designer serve as examples—the novel appears to speak volumes in terms of suggesting ways of speaking important insights by means of line and color. Also poets and fiction writers, in/from the Caribbean, have been inspired by Rhys as a kind of literary godmother, someone who demonstrates how to tackle the difficult history and complex Caribbean present reality through careful and accomplished prose. Rhys also demonstrated a sensitivity to the

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natural world which is entirely the product of her childhood on Dominica, still a stunningly wild place. Seeking to discover new apprehensions of Rhys’s last work of full-­ length fiction has been a very rewarding task. We begin with a set of interviews and chapters that document the influence Wide Sargasso Sea has had on these contemporary artists and writers. The “Influences and Inspirations” section includes three interviews that Elaine Savory conducted with the writers Caryl Phillips and James Thackara, and with the artist Chrisila Maida. Phillips’s discussion is timely indeed, given that he has just recently published a novel inspired by Rhys’s life, entitled A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). Phillips and Savory engage in a wide-­ ranging conversation about Caribbean literature and culture, and artistic choices made by both Rhys and Phillips. Their discussion of Rhys as a writer and as a character goes into how her most Caribbean novel shaped Phillips’s strategy of framing his novel with the bookends of her childhood in Dominica and her one, melancholy return trip there as an adult. The American novelist James Thackara has spent most of his adult life in England and knew Rhys personally in the last years of her life. His memories of her and impressions of her work bring to light new details about her relationship to modernist circles. The artist Chrisila Maida, quite coincidentally sent us a cover she had designed for Wide Sargasso Sea while we were assembling this volume and we wanted to include her beautiful artwork along with a brief discussion of it. In her interview, Maida explains that she painted the cover not on commission but out of pure inspiration and personal fascination with the world Rhys creates in her novel; the brilliance of her image, which now graces the cover of this book, reflects this. Similarly inspired, the fashion designer Alexa Roccanova offers a chapter in “Influences and Inspirations” about a stunning line of clothing that she created on the basis of Wide Sargasso Sea. Roccanova explains how she mapped out the novel’s palettes and themes and how she worked from Rhys’s text to the delicate gowns and red-accented tunics of her “capsule collection.” This unique expression of the novel reveals Rhys’s imagination as intensely visual, and the designs speak to the novel’s richness and many layers—to which we allude throughout this introduction. Sophie Oliver, too, speaks to the topic of fashion by drawing out Rhys’s own fashion sense and how it directs her reading of the novel. Oliver came into possession of one of Rhys’s dresses, and she explores how the dress figures as a transtemporal, female, and feminist connection between herself, Rhys, and the text at hand. Filling out this section on artistic responses to Wide

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Sargasso Sea is a chapter by the eminent actress Diana Quick, who played Rhys in Polly Teale’s 2003 play about her, After Mrs. Rochester. Quick presented and discussed excerpts of the play at the London symposium to great effect. Her research into Rhys’s life and affective understanding of it enabled her to embody Rhys; moreover, the play dwells on the period in her life when Rhys was writing Wide Sargasso Sea, and this is conveyed by the omnipresence on stage of a Bertha/Antoinette figure, whose comments and movements underscore the dialogue that ensues between a younger version of Rhys and the older version that Quick played. The next section of this collection, “Framing the Text,” provides key critical frameworks through which Wide Sargasso Sea is read in the twenty-­ first century. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert presents an ecocritical reading of the novel that is terrifyingly relevant after the devastation of the 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean, from which Dominica is still recovering. Her piece attends to Rhys’s precise and detailed account of the vulnerability of the natural world and considers the fate of this world in a stage of climate change that Rhys could never have foreseen but to which she speaks nonetheless. The next chapter, by Sue Thomas, also returns to Dominica to frame the novel with Rhys’s childhood memories of her aunt’s songs and quilts. Through archival research, Thomas traces these small and essential details from Rhys’s memories to her novel, thereby offering new insights into the affective underpinnings of the work. Finally, Mary Lou Emery builds on her considerable body of work on Caribbean modernism in her analysis of how Wilson Harris’s notion of “broken parts” plays out in Wide Sargasso Sea and how this theme informs a modernist aesthetic of the 1960s that the novel exemplifies. Caribbean poetics and theory draw heavily on ideas of breakage—and assembly—and Emery’s discussion of this theme thus updates this important theoretical conversation for a contemporary reading of the novel. One of the most provocative dimensions of Wide Sargasso Sea is Rhys’s depiction of sex, and so the section on “Sex and Gender” shows how her insights anticipate and speak to our current #MeToo moment. Long before “rape culture” was even a term, Rhys makes it clear that plantation society could be described as exactly that. Antoinette’s father, for one, evidently has sex with several Black women who are then erased from the narrative, which is to say they are dehumanized by these sexual encounters. The unnamed husband’s treatment of Amélie as nothing more than a sexual object to be used in his humiliation of Antoinette makes their encounter a crude and aggressive power play on his part. Carine

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Mardorossian reevaluates the novel in light of the #MeToo Movement, which she characterizes as both a watershed for women’s rights and as a movement whose power has been undermined by racial differences. Tarana Burke, the African American founder of the movement, was initially erased by white women’s appropriation of her term, although she has since resurfaced as its face and voice thanks to outrage on social media. Mardorossian uses contemporary politics as a lens on the fraught relations between Antoinette and Amélie, and looks at the role of solidarity in gaining leverage on the husband’s sexual aggressions. Elaine Savory also looks at sexual relations in the novel from the perspective of male sexual and emotional abuse of women. She engages with journals written by two white male planters during slavery which reveal the rape culture of the plantation. In one of the most frank addresses to the novel’s sexual relations, Savory historicizes the husband’s corrupt sexuality in relation to these historical men and to Rochester in Jane Eyre. The last chapter in this section focuses more on gender than sexuality as Katy Cook takes a key concept of contemporary critical theory, vulnerability, and shows how Rhys understood its nuances and explored its affective “wisdom” through the character of Antoinette. Rhys’s critics have to work continuously, generation to generation, against the characterization of her protagonists as victims, and Cook’s argument effectively dismisses that approach by showing how Antoinette does not seek relief from her vulnerability but rather opens herself to others, to suffering, and to her fate in such a way that she comes into possession of truth about herself and the world she inhabits. The last section focuses on dialogues between Wide Sargasso Sea and other works ranging from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to fan fiction and reader-critic commentators on websites. An inherently dialogic text, Rhys’s novel has been read together with scores of other works, and critics have carefully traced her influences through close readings of her work. Rhys liked to insist that her own reading practices were lowbrow but close readers can see that they included everything from pulp fiction to Shakespeare, Freud, Baudelaire, and scores of other canonical writers in French as well as in English.2 Her reading is not widely documented in the existing Rhys archives so critics have had to do much of the work of unearthing her influences from within her stories and novels, as though her writing holds their secrets.3 The chapters in this section draw out contemporary dialogues or offer new theories of Rhys’s unique mode of literary influence. Kylie Mirmohamadi’s contribution shows just how much Wide Sargasso Sea has

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influenced readings of Jane Eyre through a growing constellation of Brontë fan fiction. She demonstrates that readers of these recent spin-offs almost inevitably read them through the lens of Wide Sargasso Sea— whether they have read Rhys or not. So prominent is Rhys’s novel as a forebear of Jane Eyre spin-offs (although it transcends that genre in itself), it finds new critical life in online reviews and social media discussions of current fan fiction. Patricia Moran and Erica Johnson look to more classical predecessors of Rhys’s novel, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, as influences on Wide Sargasso Sea—with an emphasis on the mode of influence. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of how material can be “encrypted” in the unconscious, Moran and Johnson apply this idea to Rhys’s mode of literary influence, arguing that hers was a unique, feminist one through which she preserved the secrets of gendered violence from other women’s texts in her tale of the same. Finally, Ania Spyra brings Wide Sargasso Sea back to its twenty-first century resonances as they play out in Marlon James’s 2009 novel, The Book of Night Women. Spyra draws clear lines between James’s neo-slave narrative and Rhys’s novel and shows how and why a contemporary Jamaican writer is compelled by this 50-plus-year old novel as it continues to haunt and articulate our present reality.

Notes 1. This was the “Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission/Lignes de transmission” conference at the Sorbonne in June of 2018. 2. See Juliette Taylor-Batty, “‘Le Revenant’: Baudelaire’s Afterlife in Wide Sargasso Sea (Modernism/modernity 27.4 [November 2020]). 3. This could change given that, at the conference in Paris, “Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission/Lignes de transmission,” Ellen Moerman, the executor of Rhys’s estate, revealed the existence of a library containing some 1000 books and 300 recordings that Rhys left behind. Were this library to become available to Rhys scholars, it would shed brilliant light on investigations into her influences.

PART I

Inspirations and Influences

CHAPTER 2

Interview with Caryl Phillips Elaine Savory

Caryl Phillips is a distinguished novelist, essayist and playwright. Born in St. Kitts and raised in Leeds, UK, he shares with Rhys the experience of “crossing the water,” of being influenced by and attached to more than one place. In his editorial introduction to the anthology Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997), he writes “To my way of thinking, English literature has, for at least 200  years, been shaped by outsiders.” In his collection of essays about a journey to the three major ports of the transatlantic slave trade, The Atlantic Sound (2000), there are three sections: “Leaving Home,” “Homeward Bound,” and “Home”; in this volume, he incisively and thoughtfully considers the nature of experience for those who have undergone migration, involuntary and voluntary. In Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11 (2011), the titles of his essays and meditations include “Necessary Journeys,” and a reworking of George Lamming’s famous title “The Pleasures of Exile” (1960), in which Phillips says, “I also understand that an umbilical cord often connects the pain of exile to the pleasure of

E. Savory (*) Department of Literary Studies and Environmental Studies, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_2

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literature” (231). Perhaps most significantly, in an essay titled “St. Kitts: 19 September 1983,” Phillips positions home as having “troubling complexity.” He is thinking at this moment of people like his own parents who migrated from St. Kitts to Britain, and of those who have tried a return visit to “home.” Caryl Phillips has long had an interest in Jean Rhys’s work, and was a presenter at the 2016 New York symposium held to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea. His 11th novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, which fictionalizes portions of Rhys’s life, came out just as the first conference on Rhys in Paris began (June, 2018), and at that conference he graciously participated in this interview, as well as doing two readings from the novel. E.S.: The place to begin might be what connected you to Jean Rhys and her work in the first place, long before this novel was imagined or written? C.P.: I cannot remember exactly when I was first introduced to her work, but I became aware of Wide Sargasso Sea in the 1980s. Horace Ové from Trinidad had been trying to make a film of Wide Sargasso Sea in the 1970s and 1980s and was talking to me about Rhys in those years, so I read the book and liked it, but it did not unmoor me. E.S.: Horace Ové directed Playing Away (1986), for which you wrote the screenplay. But Rhys’s novel eventually really impacted you. C.P.: Yes. I realized Wide Sargasso Sea was a kind of response to the canon, and also clearly her most popular text, but it was not until about 20 years later that I went to give a talk at Colgate and Ken Ramchand gave me a copy of Voyage in the Dark and said, “I think you should read this.” Then I felt a real connection because unlike Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a work, among other things, of canonical interrogation, Voyage in the Dark was really about how England can launch a stealth attack on your identity. I am still grateful to Ken Ramchand for giving me the book and enabling me to begin a more intimate relationship with Rhys. E.S.: What was it like to write a novel which fictionalizes Rhys’s life? C.P.: Writing the novel brought growth in understanding. I wrote about her because I wanted to understand her. I try not to judge characters I write about. My job is to try and understand them, which is also the reader’s job. Three or four years seems to me like the right length for this process of growing and understanding. It takes time to develop and become intimate with a character, just as it takes time to understand a parent or a son or a daughter.

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Also people have secret pockets in their lives—in even the most intimate of marriages. There are always secrets—and these pockets of secrecy are fascinating to me. Though we are social animals, some of us do not give up information about ourselves very easily. E.S. Speaking of lives, what is it like to write a fictional biography of an actual writer? C.P.: I don’t really think I have a relationship to conventional biography. For me, fiction is related to a (hopefully) profound sense of empathy. We try to imagine ourselves into the lives of people who are not us—which these days we should be doing more of. People find it so easy to make quick, unexamined and judgmental responses about people in the world. If you take the time to read a book about a person who is not you (Madame Bovary, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, etc.), this is a very important step to understanding the complexity of all people—I think this more and more with each passing year. It might be a better world if a few politicians read a book which caused them to empathize with a person who is not them. We do not have many other places where we can go to empathize. Reality TV takes a rise out of people, and we have an often corrupt media, and indifferent and frequently clumsy social networking. As readers, writers, teachers, it is really important we make students read. I am completely a believer in fiction. So to come back to Rhys, some of the people I write about have actual lives which I try to understand. But I’m not interested in their jobs or vocation. I’m interested in the person. You can’t write as Rhys did without being a perceptive and decent person. She had a great understanding of human frailty. If she did not, people would not love her work. The person I know the best of all writers is probably Derek Walcott. His poem about her (“Jean Rhys”) understood her. He could perceive beyond the facts of her vocation—her life as a writer—to the emotional source of the disturbance in her life. E.S.: What do you notice most about her writing? C.P.: One thing I would say about Rhys—which you can’t say about every writer—is she is kind of editor-free. Every sentence is the right word in the right order. She took the time to choose the right word, the right adverb, the right adjective—I utterly respect that. It partly has to do with her being a woman, and being so completely underrated and misunderstood by the people she was dealing with—she could not assume that anyone knew what she was talking about, because they would never have the good manners to imagine her experience. She had to do all the work

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for them. I respect the precision of Jean Rhys, in language, in sentence structure and in rhythm. Everybody has ideas, so ideas don’t mean that much. What matters is how you discipline ideas and put a shape on them, whether we are talking about sculpture or music or a play or a novel or a poem. This is one of the reasons why Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica Kincaid and many other Caribbean writers admire her—people who stand on the periphery of the English-language tradition and who cannot presume that those in the middle can understand their work, so they have to batten down their sentences. Another example of such a writer is Kamau Brathwaite. Their choice of verbs, adjectives and adverbs has to be very clear because publishers in Britain are outside their experience. She saw different sunsets, for example. I respect how she had to make herself somewhat editorially bullet-­proof. And she did. E.S.: Do you have a favorite Rhys text and why? C.P.: The Collected Short Stories. These are tremendously underestimated, but their orchestration of voice, perspective and register is almost unequalled and certainly not surpassed in twentieth-century fiction in English. Not many authors can compete with her—maybe Alice Munro and William Trevor, who dedicated whole careers to short fiction. She was perhaps most comfortable in the short story form. In all of her novels, she is restless in terms of perspective and voice, and one senses that she is constantly irritated by dominant narratives, by master narratives. You sense a complete distrust with the form of the novel—however, in the short story she can distill a vision without having to be so restless. Not to say I do not also appreciate the shifting sand on which she builds her novels—I do—but something about the truth of her vision seems to work with great facility in her short stories. E.S.: I see connections between A View of the Empire at Sunset and your previous novel, The Lost Child. Gwen is a lost child; someone who is permanently separated from her home but was alienated at home as well. “Child” occurs many times in your text. C.P.: I haven’t done any interviews about my novel before this one, so I have not thought about this—but of course she is a lost child … that’s one of the things that attracted me to her. I tried to imagine her in Dominica, and the atmosphere with her father and buttoned-down mother, and then I tried to see her in the Victorian-Edwardian era. There is a persuasive sense of loss about her life. Clearly, loss was part of her Welsh father’s life. He might well have been told, do not get buried in

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Dominica. However, to stand and look where he is buried in the Roseau graveyard, is to experience a sense of loss. Her colonial heritage—empire— suggests a sense of loss of home. She was lost because of intelligence, gender, race. She was not recognized fully as a child. In fact, being a smart white girl would most likely be a problem for her in the Carnegie library in Roseau, and in other places in Dominica. How is she going to assert herself—who she is, and use what she has? Sexuality is a source for sure. There are early sexual experiences with Mr. Howard, and the Carib boy—all of that is going to affect how she behaves in Edwardian England. That’s what she takes with her on the ship. What happens when she is locked away in an English school with young sexually blossoming girls? Confusion? Dominica is key to understanding her. One of the things people get wrong about Rhys is that they do not want to accept that she is a child of the Caribbean, and not a child of Edwardian England. Her torment is all rooted in the Caribbean. The world of her fiction is a terrain of romance but also a place of horrors— men are sexually hopeless, emotionally damaged, protagonists are sometimes violent. E.S.: Her use of autobiography is evident enough that she has been criticized for writing only from her life. C.P.: In terms of being a writer, there’s a certain control that she’s trying to assert on her life—round the corner from where we are sitting, in the Place de la Sorbonne in Paris, is Rue Vavin, where she wrote Quartet. She and Lenglet initially stayed in a hotel near Gare du Nord. She went to the Dôme restaurant. But if you look for Rhys in Paris and London, you will be somewhat frustrated. The truth is, you will only find her in Dominica. That’s where her anxieties infiltrated her soul. When I was in Dominica, it became very clear to me what the issues were around her childhood. The Carnegie Library is three minutes from her father’s grave and five minutes away from the mango tree behind her father’s surgery and their church was close—it was all spread out before me. I wanted to find some way of including the texture of Dominica into the narrative, not just the factual stuff. What does the Caribbean smell like? Not like England. What is the first thing you notice when you go back? The heavy texture of air. Caribbean nights do not sound like Parisian nights. The Caribbean day has light and dark of equal lengths, 6 a.m.-ish to 6 p.m.-ish. There is a different way of feeling the length of the day, the rhythm of your life is just different. My guide in Dominica was historian Lennox Honeychurch. According to Lennox, Carole Angier never went to Dominica when she

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wrote her biography. I was surprised to discover this. I have nothing against her, but just the very idea that you would not want to intimately explore the first 16 years of someone’s life—it seemed very odd. Dominica is very different from Barbados. She goes to Barbados with her father en route to England—I tried to show the Barbados landscape as different, after all Dominica scares you. It has its own atmosphere. And then later, the section in my novel that is set in St. Lucia is meant to prepare the reader for Dominica. E.S.: How did you set about constructing your fictional world out of the biographical material? C.P.: Jean Rhys said she liked novels which imposed a pattern on life which, of course has none. This is one of the most intelligent things anyone has said about fiction. Writing is a construction, a process. We wonder about what keeps people awake at night. Why this particular person found it so difficult to love and be loved. Why is it so hard for some people to allow themselves to be loved? There are class issues in Rhys’s life and in her fiction. The uptight inability of certain Edwardian men to feel. Leslie found it difficult to love her, and I tried to get at Leslie’s perplexity with her. I fleshed out Lancelot—he is as constrained as she is. After all, posh white guys have problems too that I am interested in. They perform in certain ways. His parents had expectations for how he was supposed to comport himself, and he was not supposed to be with her. But he loved her so what was he supposed to do about that? I can’t stand outside of him because of the prejudices of his class. Class is a hundred per cent to do with what happened with Lancey. I want to know what keeps him awake at night, why did he not offer a gesture of generosity which might have given them some relief from tension. You must approach a relationship story from both sides if you want to know what is going on. She thinks she can operate on his level. His perception is that she is a bit more than a tart—more interesting than the others—a little more strange-looking, intriguing. But she is to her mind of the tennis club set in the Caribbean so why is he treating her like this? Like a chorus girl? She does not see herself like that. This is colonialism’s class confusion—we know this as a joke kind of thing—African princes being asked if they want to work on the buses. Indian Nawabs if they want to work in a factory. E.S.: How do you read the historical and social context of her adult life? C.P.: She was in Dominica when Queen Victoria died—which was a huge moment. It was a huge turning point in British and colonial history—a quarter of the world’s population was shaken when Queen Victoria

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died. There was this 11-year-old girl in Dominica, where attitudes to Britain, power, even gender were challenged at that moment. Her mother tried to organize a party for the ladies and her father was off with the men—male power, female power, British power, colonial power—these events are bound to shape how she thought about power and authority and gender and class way before she went to England. Graham Greene said all writers are formed by the age of about 20. It’s your frame of mind in the world you grew up in that is of most importance. My subject is a person who lived between 1890 and 1979. I have to impose a shape on the narrative. I ask myself what are the time parameters of the life I am going to consider. I must make narratological decisions and impose shape. Year 1936 is a pivotal year in the life of this person because it is the year she went back to Dominica. She could not return really. How can you ever go back? For those of us who have crossed water, we hope to establish a home somewhere but there’s never a sense of ever again having a home. To some extent, life becomes a quietly desperate attempt to reconnect. E.S.: Clearly, you made some very particular choices in creating fiction out of her life. Her writing is barely present, for example. C.P.: Her fiction followed an autobiographical line, but people make the mistake of thinking her fiction is her life. Writers are very good at covering their tracks. Their job is to invent, including inventing their own life. Carole Angier veers into a lot of speculation, sometimes using Rhys’s invention of her life. There are facts, of course. I know she lived in Chelsea and Holland Park. Where she first slept with Lancey is now the Saudi Arabian embassy in London. Where she first had a job as a nanny in Paris is now the Israeli Embassy. I know the addresses. But you have to go beyond the facts to the emotional source of the disturbance in her life. That is not in the addresses, not anywhere, in fact, but in the imagination, which is the only thing that she trusted. In my own case too, the only thing I have trusted since I was 21 is the imagination. I am interested in emotional texture. The thing that unlocked my imagination was going to Dominica in search of her. That journey made it abundantly clear to me that this is a person you have to understand through the Caribbean. These early years are what form a person. It matters where a person first learns to read and write and see themselves— as pretty, ugly, attractive, desirable, or not. It happened to her in the Caribbean. So much of the critical response to Rhys has been channeled through modernism, or some strange notion of her as a failed Edwardian

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theatrical performer. Either way, these responses neatly bypass the first 16 years of her life. E.S.: You have often had female characters in the center of your fiction. How did you go about thinking of Rhys’s experience as a woman, thinking of her not as the writer but as a person? There is a strong focus on her feelings. C.P.: I don’t think I considered any other way of approaching her life. I am only interested in the emotional topography of the people I write about. William Faulkner talked about the human heart in conflict with itself. The big stuff. Love, grief, betrayal. So I asked myself, “What disturbed her as a character?” Also people pass over what choices women had at beginning of the twentieth century—what choices did Anna Morgan have in Voyage in the Dark? I ask my students and they do not know. A woman of Anna Morgan’s time could not have got property out of a divorce. Not even her own children. Often female students now cannot understand Rhys’s lack of authority over her life, and her sense of marginalization as a colonial outsider. She was in an unbelievably disempowered position—out of that she built something … she found a voice. To return to the idea of the right word—she had to be extremely careful to be sure she was not misinterpreted. Her voice meant nothing to some people because she was a woman and a colonial, despite the fact she occasionally fraternized with literary men like Ford Madox Ford. E.S.: What led you to this particular story? C.P.: The world I grew up in was working class and northern. I was displaced through geography, race, and class. I can never say those things factored in in a direct way to what I have written but they have had a profound effect on me. Not in the sense of burden or handicap. More in the sense of realizing this is the world I inherited, and I will forever stand on the doorstep of other worlds. Similarly, the world in which Rhys grew up informed her. This is the first time in a long time that I have not written an essay before publishing the novel. In a sense I do so to find out what I have done … to help me through occasions like this. Perhaps because the novel is about everything I know—the Caribbean and Britain, the betrayal and misunderstanding between the Caribbean and Britain, the place where I was born and the place where I grew up. Perhaps this is why I haven’t written an essay. In some respects, the connection between these places is extremely familiar to me

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E.S.: Did her journey as a writer, as a person, connect with your own as you were writing? C.P.: It must have in some respect. There’s nothing casual about writing a novel. For me, it takes three to six years. It must connect to my life. Not the writing life. To have represented her as a writer would have been phony—I could not and would not do that. That’s the job of other people. But my world is the Caribbean and Britain. Why would I do the long work of writing about her if it was not to some extent about my life? My parents came to Europe in the 1950s with ideas and dreams. But there is a connection there with how coming to Britain reduced people’s lives. And, of course, after all these years, I still do not fully understand the word “home,” any more than Rhys does. E.S.: She was a performer, a chorus girl, and there are many references to performance in the novel. Could you comment on that? Your novel Dancing in the Dark and the plays and screenplay you have written demonstrate your interest in theatre. C.P.: There were about 250 changes to the proof—small ones, such as tightening up adverbs and adjectives. Nothing structural. But the largest change was cutting back on some references to performance. I prefer to be understated. She was a model, and performed in music theater. I am always interested in performances—especially how people on the periphery have to perform their identity. E.S.: She writes a good deal about sex and love. Could you comment on your reading of these in her life? C.P.: She was in part ushered into young adult life by being sexually attractive in the tropics and she was preyed upon by men. Neither of her parents were helpful guides with regard to how to navigate these issues. In the end she became interested in guys with a sense of alienation—outsiders. That was part of her problem with Leslie. He was what she needed—a dependable guy—to some extent safe and stable—but she deeply resented these things. What she was attracted to was the outlaw, the criminal. Two of her three husbands were white-collar criminals. One of the triumphs of Jean Rhys’s life is that she does come to realize that what Leslie has to offer is important—they are not exactly partners, but I think they do love each other unconditionally. E.S.: At a symposium in New York in 2016, you remarked that Rhys had a West Indian accent all her life and this marked her as strange in Britain. Was this in your mind when you were writing the novel?

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C.P.: Were I writing this as a drama, I think I would be more conscious of her accent and how it affected the way in which she “presented” herself. Less so in the novel. E.S.: How did you come to the haunting title? C.P.: I was with a friend, the poet Glyn Maxwell, in St. Lucia at sunset. The title sort of popped out, before I’d completed the novel. I don’t usually have a title until I’ve done the novel. Normally I am finishing a book and thinking of what this title might be. Sometimes I have no idea even some weeks after I’ve finished a book. Of course I cannot send it anywhere without a title. Before the internet, I would call a bookstore to ask about a title I intended to use, to see if it was already out there. E.S.: Thank you. It is a great privilege to be able to talk with you about what has framed and inspired your really great novel about Rhys—this interview is profoundly important in thinking about how her life and the work connect.

CHAPTER 3

Interview with Chrisila Maida Elaine Savory

Chrisila Maida encountered Wide Sargasso Sea in one of my classes at The New School. Haunted by the novel, and now a book cover designer for HarperCollins, she designed a cover and sent it to me. This was just as Erica Johnson and I were planning this collection. The timing was so amazing and the cover so beautiful and apt that we decided it should appear in the collection as an illustration; we were subsequently delighted that we were able to work with the team at Palgrave to make it the cover of this book. What follows is a brief interview about the creation of the cover (Fig. 3.1). E.S.: Have you any idea why Wide Sargasso Sea first made an impression on you? C.M.: I first read it in your class after a reread of Jane Eyre. I had read Jane Eyre, first at 12, then at 14 and after that I lost count. It was the female coming of age story I needed to have because every story given to me in school was focused on the male experience—such as The Catcher in the Rye and The Odyssey. So it was fascinating to find something which challenged conservative ideas about femininity. After reading it, I would

E. Savory (*) Department of Literary Studies and Environmental Studies, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_3

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Fig. 3.1  Book jacket for Wide Sargasso Sea by Chrisila Maida. (Courtesy of Chrisila Maida)

discuss Jane Eyre with people and Wide Sargasso Sea would always become part of the conversation. E.S.: What affected you the most about the novel when you first read it? C.M.: I loved this idea of a character, an other-worldly mad woman, from Jane Eyre, being made human. She’s not a vampiric character any more, she is lively, emotional, vibrant and able to be heard. My mind then went to the history of the time. Antoinette would have faced colonialism, along with her own personal concerns and the emotional manipulation of her husband. Then the novel demonstrates the fragile male view of femininity—she is a prize which loses its luster. These conditions would drain a person, and I loved the way her mental state in this condition was conveyed by the switching of the narrative voice. E.S.: Have your responses to the novel evolved over time? C.M.: In the beginning, I saw a thrilling argument between two books. There was a time then after graduation when I was going back and forth between reading parts of both. This back and forth gave me curiosity to find what Jean Rhys was struck by and working against. I am still working with these two books. Also now I read Wide Sargasso Sea as a master-­class in writing. My responses have not changed but deepened over time. E.S.: Why and when did you decide to do the book cover design? (Fig. 3.1).

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C.M.: It is a habit of mine when I read a book to notice visual clues and imagine how these might lay out for a book jacket, and then create that jacket. I have been doing this since high school. The first book for which I wanted to do a cover was Dante’s Inferno—which I read in junior year in high school. I have been studying that for years—it never finishes! I wanted to make covers for books which mean something to me, and books which have already fantastic covers I would leave alone—no need to compete. After graduation, I was doing a flurry of book covers and had considered doing a cover for Jane Eyre. Through all my re-­readings of the text, though, the Jean Rhys voice was always coming through, so I decided to redesign Wide Sargasso Sea instead. I felt compelled to do so—I’m constantly stunned by how relevant the themes of the novel are. That’s what made me realize this book needed a new face to visually mark it as a text that’s so thematically contemporary. E.S.: How did you set about this cover? C.M.: I always feel a book designer is in service to the stories. There’s no time for ego to come into it or to pursue what looks pretty or appealing. A book designer should reach what’s at the heart of a story. Designers know the different sentiments conveyed by the graphics of a book cover and use them to call out to the type of person we know would love this book. We are making the book cover to hit the nerve in the passing person in the bookstore which makes them pick it up and know this is going to be this enchanting thing. I know that for some people the book cover has to be flashy to call attention but I think it has to portray the inner voice of the book. So the first concern then was to think about the inner core of Wide Sargasso Sea as the intimate tale of a person who, in Jane Eyre, was not been portrayed as human. E.S.: So, practically, how do you set about making a book cover? C.M.: For this one, I used cold press watercolor paper and gouache paint, exclusively Holbein gouache (a powder based paint, with very saturated rich pigments). I painted the solid blue background on one piece of paper, and drew the flowers and painted them by hand again on another piece of watercolor paper separate from the background. The blue background and the flowers were then both scanned and digitally combined. The method of hand-lettering for a title makes a cover more intimate and conveys the voice of a book. No two kinds of hand-lettering can be the same—it is almost like the fingerprint of the book. The hand-­lettering is then also scanned and digitally combined. This is a layering method with

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the lettering last. I used white for the letters so it is vibrant and loud, and offset by the dark blue of the background. E.S.: What about the colors, or palette you used? C.M.: I felt the book already chose this palette for me. For some time, in other projects, I have thought about using a “Jean Rhys palette”— bright greens, exploding pinks, oranges and reds, which you find when you go back through the text. There is such an emphasis of the wild, natural color of the Caribbean, and I knew I wanted that for the cover. Behind the bright cluster of flowers is the very dark blue background to offset the brightness. I thought of a blue like the Caribbean Sea at night. It is a foreboding color—suggesting the darkness which lived behind those bright colors. For this I mixed indigo and Prussian blue—a mix that stays vibrant, but dark enough to convey some ominous thing is lurking in the back. Then I wanted the text of title to be over the flowers and in white, since white is the loudest thing to separate from the blue and bright flowers. As I said before, the title is hand-lettered, rather than a computer-generated font. I tried about fifteen different versions of the word “Sargasso” and about four versions of “Sea.” After I made tons of drafts for each one, I wrote them together as they appear on the cover and added wave flourishes. I wanted the cover to signify the freedom Antoinette felt before her marriage. But for the back cover, I initially wanted to portray the caged person that she then had to become. Part III of the novel had always stuck with me, it’s heart-breaking when Antoinette holds up her red dress, then throws it down and puts on a grey wrapper. Red is so strong through the novel, and specifically in this scene—fire, blood and the red dress. After much rereading of Part III though, I decided not to portray the downtrodden Antoinette, but the version of her when she regains her agency— the moment of her dream, which evolves into the empowering plan to take control of her life again. To portray her as strong, I wanted her in the red dress, and not showing her face so the dress becomes her identity. The blue of the front cover background is still present on the back cover, but as the dark room she is kept in. So the inner voice portrayed on the front and back cover is the humanity of Antoinette’s journey—how she went from something free, to caged and deciding to take her life back from her captor. The covers mark a transformation. Yes, she is locked in a dark room, but in her red dress and holding the candle—so as to show what is immediately to come.

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E.S.: A lot of people do not notice the back cover of a book—beyond reading the blurbs there. C.M.: That is why I always deliberately put something on the front cover which trails over the spine to the back cover to make the passing book browser turn it over and look there. The back cover is a fascinating platform to hide small secrets of the novel that will only be recognized once the novel has been closed. E.S.: Do you think of how a reader might apprehend your cover— before or after reading the text or both? C.M.: I like a book cover which seems to finally bring everything together only after they’ve finished the book. There’s almost a moment of reading the last words, really feeling their weight, then closing the book only to see the cover design and think, “Ah, I see what you did there.” E.S.: You had training in literary analysis of a book, and I imagine this must be critically important in getting from text to design. Could you talk about that? C.M.: All of the practical techniques I use in creating a book cover, the painting and Photoshop, were part of my graphic design training during my BFA degree from Parsons. But you are right, there is an element of literary analysis that must be employed when going into a book design project. I’m not sure those outside of the field realize the closeness that grows between a narrative and its designer. There are hours of reading, rereading, underlining the moments of tension and small details about a character just to get to know them more intimately. E.S.: And you have to apprehend the book with a designer’s eye, reading for that is a special kind of reading, yes? C.M.: In my experiences of reading a book and finding myself so struck by it that I want to invent a new cover—the way in which my Wide Sargasso Sea redesign came about—I see that I tend to think of the physical object of the book as an artifact of the story. In this case, no element of the book’s design goes to waste. E.S.: Can you be specific as to the elements of design of the cover? C.M.: In designing the book cover, I would want the entire book to feel as if it is a remnant from the story. As if it came out of the environment of the narrative itself. To do this, each characteristic of the book’s design— the color palette, usage of illustration, the style of letters used for the title, and even the physical measurements of the book—is chosen as a way to relate back to the story. For example, I would like my design of the Wide Sargasso Sea book jacket to be printed on paper with rough edges rather

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than straight edges—as if the book had been with Antoinette on her voyage and had weathered a bit along the way. To me, the element of the book that makes the first impression is the trim size—which is the height and width of the book. The standard is usually an 8-inch height, 5-inch width, so when that mold is broken and a book has measurements larger or smaller, I feel it stands out. A larger trim size means the book will have fewer pages (since the pages will have more room for text), while a smaller trim size means more pages, and will be a heavier book. Since the trim size determines the weight of the book, and how it feels when it’s held, I feel it leaves a tangible impression on the reader. A slightly longer vertical trim size, in my opinion, gives the impression of something stately, strict, and dignified. I would use that trim for Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to highlight Wharton’s serious critique of those upper-class families throughout the story. A book with a smaller trim size, however, gives off the impression of something practical or utilitarian, and always reminds me of travel narratives. I would use this smaller trim size on redesigns of Don Quixote, or The Odyssey. With a smaller size, the physical book’s compact design gives off an idea that the book could have been packed along with the essentials on the journeys that take place in these stories, making it a remnant of the story itself. To design the books in this way—as if they have been born and sculpted from the landscapes of the stories they hold—takes them out of the context of the middle-class home, and makes them relics of their own story. Rather than a domestic library book, it is an object that is a remnant of the plot. If the design of the book can take the details that give life to the story, and in some way apply them to the tangible book, I’d say the design has succeeded.

CHAPTER 4

Infamous Daughters: A Capsule Collection Inspired by Wide Sargasso Sea Alexa Roccanova

Inspired by the novel’s protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, my capsule collection—a succession of key garments used to communicate the overlying creative theme—began as a visual interpretation and evolved into a response to the perception of mental illness in women. Afflicted with calamity and a reputation as a madwoman, Antoinette’s perspective compels one to consider both the positions of women and the mentally ill. My collection development began with textual analysis and ultimately grew to become a reinvention of clothing through literature. With five multipiece looks that originated from both classic womenswear tailoring and impulsively draped shapes, I sought to capture the deadly allure of Antoinette and her homeland, the West Indies—both of which mirror what Rhys called in a letter to Francis Wyndham “the magic of the place … a very disturbing kind of beauty” (Letters 139). While some of my silhouettes were developed first by drafting flat paper pattern pieces, others were derived from the experimental manipulation of fabric on the dress form.

A. Roccanova (*) The New School, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_4

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The more traditional garments featured in the lineup, such as the corset, tailored blazer, and palazzo pant,1 were reworked from standard pattern templates, while the fluid, asymmetrical shapes of my tunics relied solely on the body to give them structural context. The uninhibited yet isolating nature of Antoinette’s mind and environment was translated through the incorporation of both fitted and loose silhouettes (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). One of Wide Sargasso Sea’s strengths lies within the reinvention of the doomed character, Bertha, whose fate is predestined by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, originally published in 1847. Rhys may not have been able to offer this character an alternative future; however, she could invent a past that affords a societal reject some dignity under the label “lunatic” that Mr. Rochester so famously prescribes to her. What drew me to Antoinette was her ability to both elegantly appeal and intensely repel. The aspects that repel her fellow characters in the novel only strengthen the kinship between protagonist and reader. This dichotomy that exists within her character provided inspiration for the core aesthetic element of contrast in my garments, translated through opposing colors and surface textures. By the end of Part III, after being displaced to England, Antoinette is presumed mad by all who lack the reader’s intimate insight into the tragic events of her childhood and young adult life. Rhys afflicts Antoinette with calamity from the opening lines, “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 9). The identity of Antoinette as Creole is the first of many unfortunate distinctions that turn Bertha’s affliction into a societyinduced trap. After being led through her past, the reader is left to wonder, who wouldn’t go mad under such circumstances? How could there have been any other outcome for Antoinette? The passion and rash actions of Rhys’s tragic heroine are, however, what lure us to her. They are what make her a remarkable character—powerful, beautiful, bold, and delicate all at once. Through Antoinette, Rhys offers an alternative perspective of the madwoman, the spirit of whom I attempted to embody within my collection. In a letter to Selma Vaz Dias, Rhys wrote: I will not disappoint you. Come with me and you will see. Take a look at Jane Eyre. That unfortunate death of a Creole! I’m fighting mad to write her story. (Rhys, Selected Letters: To Selma Vaz Diaz 137)

An association of madness and hysteria with female gender has remained consistent through time and is evident in even the most colloquial of

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Figs. 4.1 and 4.2  Infamous Daughters: Final Lineup. (All photos in this chapter were taken by the author)

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modern phrases, such as “crazy ex-girlfriend,” “crazy bitch,” “she’s psycho,” and so on. While women have been popularly perceived as being more susceptible to becoming debilitated by their emotions, one must also consider hysteria along with Antoinette’s condition as “at least partly an illness of being a woman in an era that strictly limited female roles. It must be understood as a response to stifling social demands and expectations aptly expressed in paralysis, deafness, muteness, and a sense of being strangled” (Hustvedt 4). When a man has a debility causing him to waver from his traditional role as protector, provider, and controller, then his masculinity and ultimately his worth are depreciated: In patriarchal societies that have historically denigrated women as the ‘frail sex,’ disabled men have been perceived as feminine and denied their sense of masculine competence, while disabled women have been doubly oppressed. (Berger 37)

While Antoinette has a tendency to act on her emotions freely throughout the novel’s plot, Rochester principally maintains a masculine rigidity and self-restraint when it comes to submitting to Antoinette and the West Indies, until finally succumbing to a moment of madness himself after failing to live up to the patriarchal expectation of securing control over one’s wife: She said she loved this place. This is the last she’ll see of it. I’ll watch for one tear, one human tear. Not that blank hating moonstruck face. I’ll listen …. If she says good-bye perhaps adieu. Adieu—like those old-time songs she sang. Always adieu (and all songs say it). If she too says it, or weeps, I’ll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She’s mad but mine, mine. What will I care for gods or devils or for Fate itself. If she smiles or weeps or both. For me. (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 99)

Antoinette is an untamable force. Once Rochester comes to this realization, the reader witnesses a manic possessiveness matching, if not surpassing, Antoinette’s own degree of mental fragility. In order to reestablish his masculinity and in turn his sanity, Rochester must flee the West Indies with his wife, leaving her to further deteriorate in the confinement of his English home: “In the history of patriarchy, the well-being of a man depends on the reduction of a woman to a ghost” (Fayad 226). Though the outcome of the plot remains consistent with the patriarchal social standards of the nineteenth century, there still exists a hopeful ending to Antoinette’s story.

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Her demise is imminent, yet also promises liberation. The novel ends with the image of a passionate woman on a mission of self-­deliverance rather than the “clothed hyena” or “gross, grovelling, mole-­eyed blockhead” witnessed by Jane Eyre (Brontë 127). By submerging both her female and male protagonists into moments of wavering mental stability, Rhys depicts the sexes as being equally susceptible to madness. Insanity then becomes a universal temperament of the human condition triggered by one’s environment rather than a rare, tragic affliction. Through this perspective, Rhys allows Antoinette to retain her humanity and identity outside the generalized identity of madwoman. Whether intended or not, the writing of Antoinette’s story fractures the stigma associated with mental illness, which stems from the notion that those who cannot function normally within the status quo of social behavior are somehow less than human, to be shunned, feared, and kept out of view in everyday public life. Through my interpretation of Antoinette and her equally complex homeland, I sought to communicate that there exists beauty within in an overactive mind and an uninhibited capacity to feel and show feeling. During the initial stages of my garment development, I tried to find balance between aspects of tension and relief. While some pieces including a structured blazer and fitted vest reflect Rochester’s male severity, the skirts and tunics of other looks are more relaxed with cascading hems achieved by cutting fabric along the bias grain.2 The incorporation of masculine shapes in an overall feminine collection evokes a level of neutrality that is meant to address the impartiality of mental disability suggested by the novel. In my two more eveningwear looks, the streamlined silhouettes of the main bodies are interrupted by an aqua, pleated chiffon to provide visual relief from shapes that would otherwise be rather dense due to their dark color and extensive coverage of the body. The tunics featured in these outfits both have asymmetrically cut hems that allow for the pleating to be organically revealed, with just a sliver of the iridescent ripples beginning at the hip and spilling downward into the full circumference of each hem. The transparency, color, and reflective quality of the pleated chiffon are indicative of water. Together they invoke a similar sense of ease and serenity that water fosters within the novel’s characters (Fig. 4.3): Now the sea was a serene blue, deep and dark. We came to a little river. ‘This is the boundary of Granbois.’ She smiled at me. It was the first time I had seen her smile simply and naturally. Or perhaps the first time I had felt simple and natural with her. A bamboo spout jutted from the cliff, the water coming from it was silver blue. (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 42)

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Fig. 4.3  Look three: Cotton tunic with polyester pleated chiffon skirt and silk lining

Within the novel Rhys has created an intensely prismatic environment from which many core elements of my clothing, including fabric choice, color palette, and surface detail were derived. Part of what makes Wide Sargasso Sea so lusciously dense is Rhys’s ability to activate the senses through color, texture, and scent-evoking prose. Imagery proves to be an integral means of establishing Antoinette’s relationship with her homeland and ultimately, the complex beauty that they mirror. Between the narrative’s two major locations, the West Indies and England, there exists a contrast of physical environment, color, and mood—that is, the overarching mood at a given point in the novel, as well as the temperaments of individual characters. The West Indies is presented first to the reader in Antoinette’s description of Coulibri Estate as a lush and vibrant home, but also as a place of isolation: Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible—the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach

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or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root … I never went near it. (11)

In comparing her childhood safe-haven to the Bible’s Garden of Eden, Antoinette thinks of the estate and its surrounding wilderness with a sense of sacredness. She describes the vegetation with an admiration for its beauty, while also recognizing the unforeseeable hidden threats it harbors. Even the air is tinged with the ominous scent of death, leaving an underlying note of caution. To capture the spontaneity and natural energy of the Caribbean forests, I left the seams of certain garments raw and exposed, which gives the fabric a frayed, unfinished appearance—a bit like foliage. I also used curved seams to achieve more organic lines. This technique is specifically applied to my more constrictive pieces such as the corset and fitted pant. Though these garments physically compress the body, the raw edges ease their rigidity. This balance also mirrors Antoinette’s view of her wild environment as both a barrier and means of escape. As a child Antoinette knows to admire certain elements from a distance both out of respect and an acute fear of harm though ultimately, her natural surroundings provide protection from her most prominent fear of other people: I went to parts of Coulibri that I had not seen, where there was no road, no path, no track. And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think ‘It’s better than people.’ Black ants or red ones, tall nests swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin—once I saw a snake. All better than people. (16)

To her Coulibri Estate is a fortress reinforced by the overgrowth, sheltering from those who bring insult and shame. While her family’s inhibited social position as descendants of former slave owners post-Emancipation largely contributes to their isolation from both the white and black Jamaican communities, time and nature have also physically separated her and her family from the rest of civilization. As a result, Antoinette substitutes human connection with the closeness she develops for the Caribbean wilderness. In times of distress caused by human interaction her first inclination is to turn to nature, to those living aspects of the world that are indifferent to race, social status, and human existence itself: “I sat close to the old wall at the end of the garden. It was covered with green moss soft

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as velvet and I never wanted to move again. Everything would be worse if I moved” (13). To address the sense of comfort Antoinette finds within her natural environment, I used soft fabrics and incorporated natural fibers in my collection. My first two looks feature garments cut from a plain weave, cotton-­wool blend. From a distance the fabric appears to have an even beige tone; however, up close the yarns actually consist of varying neutral shades that together produce an organic, grainy surface. Still, the fabric has a subtle sheen, which gives it a refined finish. My second look also features a fitted pant of a teal, stretch cotton that is smooth in hand. Though the pants appear to be constrictive, the good recovery of the material makes it quite forgiving and easy to put on. My eveningwear looks present not only a combination of different textures, but also a joining of natural and synthetic fibers. In look three, a cotton tunic is layered over a polyester pleated skirt with a thin silk lining. Each layer provides a contrasting texture, yet the light weights of each cause them to share a similar airiness in the way they drape. In contrast, the tunic of my fifth look mimics the asymmetrical shape of look three, but is cut in a lustrous four-­ ply silk that results in a heavier drape. Finally, I used a military-weight wool drill in the blazer of look four. The fabric provides structure, but is still soft and slightly fuzzy. Paired with the blazer is a fluid pant of an equally woolly nature. Together they not only retain a great deal of warmth, but are also gentle against the skin despite the overall austerity of the look. One recurring motif in my collection is that of the palm leaf—a more obvious nod to native Caribbean flora. The direct surface application of this element over vulnerable areas of the body, imply a sense of nature as protection. The leaves themselves are nonuniform in shape and cut to look as though they have been slowly decayed, as if by acid rain. Those applied to a kimono top are cut from a pale, pink silk dupioni (Fig. 4.4). One of the distinct characteristics of this fabric is its textured surface caused by slubs, or protruding irregularities resulting from the nonuniform tightness and twist of the crosswise threads. The uneven hand of the silk lends a grainy quality to the palm leaves. En route to Granbois, an estate owned by Antoinette’s family, Rochester also addresses the threatening nature of the West Indies: The road climbed upward. On one side the wall of green, on the other a steep drop to the ravine below. We pulled up and looked at the hills, the

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Fig. 4.4  Look two: Cotton-wool blend top with silk dupioni appliqué and stretch cotton pant

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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. (41)

From Rochester’s perspective, the landscape has a mind of its own, capable of recognizing and rejecting those who do not belong. While Antoinette finds solace and security in the extremities of Granbois and its surrounding wilderness, Rochester is merely an outside observer, never able to fully embrace his surroundings. The more he attempts to immerse himself into the West Indies environment, the more paranoid and suspicious he becomes of the land, the people, and ultimately his wife. They are all linked, all in on a secret that he is excluded from as an Englishman: It was a beautiful place—wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret  loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing—I want what it hides—that is not nothing.’ (51–52)

Antoinette remains a figure of mystery and unattainability for her husband because she is not of his world. For him she encompasses the unrestricted beauty, complexity, and threat he sees in the West Indies—abstract elements that are not physically attainable. His inability to accept the intangibility of these characteristics eventually causes Rochester to unravel mentally and withdraw back to England, where Antoinette is left to wither in the attic of his estate: “This place…is like a cold dark dream sometimes,” she recalls a friend writing of England, “I want to wake up” (47). Just as Antoinette seems to withhold some undistinguishable secret from Rochester, I wanted the clothing to emanate a similar air of mystery. Each look incorporates some suggestion of a cross-body protective element. In my first look, a structured corset conceals most of the collar and front-opening details of the vest it is layered over. Both are cut from the same beige wool resulting in the monochromatic appearance of synchronicity; however, the unusual styling of corset over vest suggests there is some mysterious element hidden within. The vest’s most interesting design details, a collar and lapel shaped to mimic the edge of a palm leaf, are intentionally obscured. The compression of the corset causes the exposed portion of the collar to drape organically around the neck in a snake-like configuration. As the eye is drawn to this point of interest, it follows the collar’s winding path until it disappears beneath the top edge

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of the corset. Like Rochester, one is left to wonder what lies beneath the surface. Similarly, my kimono top features belt ties that can be twisted together across the waist and wrapped around the body to partially cover a portion of the top’s surface application. When untied, the palm leaf appliqué becomes fully visible. The wearer has control over how much of this motif is exposed. Raw-edged, cross-body straps are also top-applied to the tunic of look three, extending from right shoulder to left hip. The straps are attached with embroidery sequences that were inspired by images from the Prinzhorn Collection, a compilation of artworks created by psychiatric patients that were collected by German psychiatrist and art historian, Hans Prinzhorn. The works featured demonstrate a freedom of the mind uninhibited by any need to please or fulfill societal expectations for art. Many have a spontaneous, sketch-like quality that I wanted to maintain through my embroidered details. In a series of letters by patient, Emma Hauk, the phrase, “Sweetheart come” is repeated and layered to cover almost the entire surface area of the paper in a passionate plea for her husband. The distress and longing suggested by Emma’s dense scribbles reminded me of the intense passion Antoinette exhibits for Rochester. Using contrasting turquoise and red threads, I applied impulsive stitches to the tunic’s surface creating indistinct scribbles, some of which suggest words and others appearing as leafy shapes. These haphazard thread marks provide a subtle contrast to the severity of the navy fabric while nodding to the creations of the artists celebrated in the Prinzhorn Collection. In my fifth look, another asymmetrical tunic, I utilized straps for fit functionality. One helps to hold up the garment, extending over the left shoulder and disappearing through a keyhole at center waist. From this same opening emerges a second extension that can be tied around the torso to fit one side of the tunic, while the other is left to drape freely around the body into a train. The resulting shape maintains a juxtaposition of tension and release. And finally, featured on a tailored blazer are double inset sleeves, the outermost of which can be crossed over the front of the body in an X-formation and secured through faux pockets. The appearance of restriction resembles that of a straightjacket, but without evoking hospital-wear. Though I did look to hospital gowns and other apparel that have been distributed to patients in psychiatric centers, it was important to me that the clothing not appear institutional. To achieve this, I also alluded to the sense of restriction by incorporating fit variation in the form of discreetly placed closures. For example, inserted into the front, side, and back seams

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of my vest are invisible, separating zippers that open to the waist for wearer-controlled modification. The zippers can be closed to achieve a more fitted shape, or opened at any of the seams to release tension around the hips. Additionally, wearer-controlled tension and release is attainable through hidden tie closures and snaps that affect the overall shape of the garment, such as in my kimono top and tunics. Color was also essential in the collection’s divergence from medical-­ wear. The distinction between the West Indies and England, Antoinette and Rochester, can be simplified into color codes. Throughout Rhys’s descriptions of setting, one can identify the separate color palettes utilized to reflect not only a contrast of appearance, but also a contrast of mood. The West Indies is intensely saturated in a fusion of greens, blues, reds, yellows, and purples. The extreme and diverse coloring contributes to its intimidating and alien nature as perceived by Rochester: Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger. (41)

Rochester aligns the unfamiliarity of his surroundings with that of his wife. The repetition of the words “too much” are an early indication of his inability to cope with the overstimulation triggered by both this environment and his wife alike. On the other hand, Antoinette identifies as one with the West Indies in all its vividness. Her reiteration of her belonging there only makes her eventual displacement to England all the more incongruous: The sky was dark blue through the dark green mango leaves, and I thought, ‘This is my place and this is where I belong and this is where I wish to stay.’ (65)

Again, Antoinette turns to nature as a protective force. She feels safe under the colorful coverage of the native flora. Another notable difference between Antoinette’s and Rochester’s perceptions of setting is the inclination toward either lightness or darkness. While Rochester’s descriptions are highly saturated, Antoinette has a tendency to note the darkness within the pictures she paints of her homeland. Though she regards the West Indies with the utmost respect, it is as though she is always seeing under an ever-present shadow of her traumatic past:

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Everything was brightness, or dark. The walls, the blazing colours of the flowers in the garden, the nuns’ habits were bright, but their veils, the Crucifix hanging from their waists, the shadow of the trees, were black. That was how it was, light and dark, sun and shadow, Heaven and Hell. (34)

The dichotomy within the West Indies, as Rhys presents it through Antoinette’s and Rochester’s eyes, is that between euphoria and damnation. Though Antoinette feels a kinship with her homeland, it is always countered by society’s rejection of her for being creole, female, descendant of slave owners, and daughter of an infamous madwoman. There exists a constant push-pull dynamic within which Antoinette is simultaneously at ease in her most natural state and tormented by her past and reputation. As a result she longs for an escape, looking to England and her husband as her sole hope for starting anew. Here exists another case of visual contrast, but in the form of color opposition. Throughout the lineup of my collection, there is a clear progression from light to dark beginning with the beige, lightweight wool of my first two looks and ending with deep blues and reds in a variety of fabrics for my final three looks. Rhys reveals the reality of England as cold, dark, and devoid of free emotional expression. In contrast to her passionate nature present in the West Indies, Antoinette occupies a state of numb delirium, unable to come to terms with the dull, flatness of the location: I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. (107)

In England, Rochester attempts to suppress Antoinette’s vitality, but is only successful to an extent. Antoinette’s constant questioning of the solidarity of the walls around her and of the realness of her new environment provides proof that her free thought is never fully extinguished. Though inhibited by her physical isolation on a greater level than that which she experienced in the West Indies, she remains suspicious and inquisitive, ready at any moment for the intensity of the West Indies to come bursting though the space that contains her—a space that she perceives to be a hazy imitation of reality. In moments when her passion resurfaces she even tries to initiate the merging of these two worlds herself, revealing a glimmer of

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female initiative: “I smashed the glasses and plates against the porthole. I hoped it would break and the sea come in” (107). The color palette Rhys uses to portray Antoinette’s England is largely composed of browns, greys, and golds, but they fail to hold the same authenticity as the colors of the West Indies. Antoinette is accustomed to the vividness of her homeland. The dullness that surrounds her is itself a prison from which she seeks escape: “I will not trouble you again if you let me go” (106). Having looked to England to end the suffering she experienced in the West Indies, Antoinette developed her own fantasy version of what this new land would look like: I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you. I will be a different person when I live in England and different things will happen to me … England, rosy pink in the geography book map, but on the page opposite the words are closely crowded, heavy looking … Cool green leaves in the short cool summer. Summer. There are fields of corn like sugarcane fields, but gold colour and not so tall. After summer the trees are bare, then winter and snow. White feathers falling? Torn pieces of paper falling? They say frost makes flower patterns on the window panes. I must know more than I know already. For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I shall lie in has red curtains and I have slept there many times before, long ago. How long ago? In that bed I will dream the end of my dream. (66–67)

Even before Antoinette arrives in England, she associates the country with a sense of crowded confinement and her fantasies pale in comparison to what she knows of the Caribbean wilderness. They are portrayed as if through dreamlike, gold and pink filters—ideal to an extent, but still distant and lacking in tangibility. As she speculates over the concept of snow, she substitutes the murky notion with feathers and paper pieces because the sensation of cold weather is incomprehensible to her. When Antoinette finally experiences the frigid temperatures of England for herself, her vitality is drastically reduced. The longer Antoinette remains confined, the more desperate she becomes in her pursuit of the realness she knows of the West Indies. Even before leaving her homeland, she finds it difficult to grasp the concept of an English environment, and compares it to a dreamscape: ‘Is it true,’ she said, ‘that England is like a dream?’ …‘Well,’ I answered annoyed, ‘that is precisely how your beautiful island

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      seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.’ ‘But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?’ ‘And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?’ ‘More easily,’ she said, ‘much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.’ (47–48)

After identifying the distinct color codes Rhys utilizes to distinguish the West Indies from England, I was able to pull base colors from which I could further develop a more extensive palette of my own. Those core colors were blue and red. Throughout the novel, blue appears as a color of tranquility, usually associated with water, and like red is described as being composed of shades in layers: “Now the sea was a serene blue, deep and dark” (42), “… the water … silver blue.” The affiliation of blue with ideals of calmness contributes to its general appeal. Red, conversely, often appears in association with fire in lively bursts of color and warmth. It also has a reputation for evoking anxiety. The two colors representing opposing elements create a contrast between hot and cool, lively passion and passive serenity. The West Indies environment incites both of these temperaments within Antoinette. Through fabric color I also wanted to address the contrast between the West Indies and England: … Wide Sargasso Sea construct(s) England … as largely cold, dark, dull or pale whereas the Caribbean is full of strong colour. This is evidently not simply an observation of the difference between northern and southern locales but a reflection of a difference between feeling, activity and strength signified by vivid jewel colours on the one hand and stress, passivity, self-­ destructive hostility and inability to feel on the other. (Savory 86)

Here, the contrast between bold and dull symbolizes that between a flat passivity and emotional activeness. Antoinette’s mental state is largely affected by her surroundings, especially in regard to color, but ultimately her vitality is never fully repressed. The fire within Antoinette lies dormant when the colors and emotional environment around her are at a low intensity. When she is placed in a highly saturated landscape or in the presence of a highly saturated element such as fire, she becomes more animated. Throughout the novel, red remains a distinct undercurrent that becomes increasingly present with Antoinette’s character progression. The first image Rhys presents following Antoinette’s removal from a burning Coulibri Estate is that of her cut plait: “‘I saw my plait, tied with red

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ribbon, when I got up,’ I said. ‘In the chest of drawers. I thought it was a snake’” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 27). This subtle placement of red is the first time the color appears as a symbol for both danger and strength as an extension of Antoinette herself. It is a reminder of the tragedy that has come to pass, as well as confirmation of Antoinette’s survival of a former self. Having shed this hair marked with the red of danger, Antoinette acquires a resilience from the loss of her childhood sanctuary. Her alignment with the color red is emphasized again in another recollection of her time spent at the convent following the fire at Coulibri: Quickly, while I can, I must remember the hot classroom …. 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 Calvary Convent, Spanish Town Jamaica, 1839. (31)

In this passage, Rhys abruptly changes the tense of Antoinette’s narration, using a combination of the present and future tenses, though the memory being described is set in the past. This aside of sorts indicates that Antoinette may be narrating from England, as it is the only other setting in the novel from which she speaks in the present. Under this assumption, the combination of tenses hints at her state of delirium and desperation to recall what is important—here, that is who she is and the colors that represent her. The colors of her embroidery meant to replicate the natural flora of the West Indies are underlined by the red of her signature. It is peculiar that she describes the shade as “fire red” given the calamity that has come to pass, as though she wishes to embody the unrelenting fierceness of the flames. She identifies with the very element that brought her early childhood to a violent end, nodding again to her reverence for nature. Rhys associates Antoinette with fire to indicate her potential for becoming a similar force of nature. In England, Antoinette wakes from her numb state upon finding her red dress from home, the sensations of which revitalize her faded spirits. The red dress serves as a symbol for her identity, sexuality, and the West Indies. Antoinette’s seeming loss of sanity is countered by the regularity of prose used in her recount of the dress. Compared to the previous parts of her narrative, there are no apparent inconsistencies in her language. This suggests that her reason is internalized rather than lost to insanity. Rhys takes care to emphasize this self-assuredness through Antoinette’s

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declaration of her red dress as the only significantly real object in her new English life: only I know how long I have been here. Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter. Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has a meaning. Where is it? (109)

In a state of confusion, Antoinette calls out for an inanimate object to ground her rather than any significant individual from her past or present. This could be due to the fact that most people are consistently unreliable throughout her story and, so, the relationship she develops with red, and in turn her dress, surpasses any existing human connection she has at this point. Color gives Antoinette’s visual and emotional perception of the world depth and meaning. It is impartial, offering beauty for all to experience. Color has also perhaps been one of the only constants throughout Antoinette’s life, so it is only natural that she calls upon the most vibrant reminder of home to aid her in her time of need. Antoinette describes the specific red of her dress in relation to the flora and natural elements of the West Indies: the colour of fire and sunset. The colour of flamboyant flowers. ‘If you are buried under a flamboyant tree,’ I said, ‘your soul is lifted up when it flowers. Everyone wants that’. (109)

Here, Rhys reiterates the image of fire while also alluding to a specific tree native to the West Indies, Delonix regia, otherwise known as the Flame Tree (or flamboyant) for its scarlet flowers (109). Antoinette speaks of her belief in its power of resurrection in a tone of fleeting hope. In this peculiar utterance, she seems to be indirectly beckoning to death as a means of final escape from her current misery. As the senses are reactivated by her dress and the memories of the Caribbean forests it evokes, she becomes increasingly entranced by its scent, “The smell of vetivert and frangipani, of cinnamon and dust and lime trees when they are flowering. The smell of the sun and the smell of the rain.” The red of her dress has transformed from a mere shade to an immersive experience. Rhys also “exploits the conventional signification of red as passion, especially sexual passion” as Antoinette’s red dress triggers a recollection of “the life and death” kiss she shared with her half-brother, Sandi (Savory

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88: Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 110). This mention of intimacy opens the question of whether Antoinette shared a sexual relationship with Sandi as suggested by Daniel Cosway, another half-brother of hers. “I took the red dress down and put it against myself. ‘Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?’” she asks, directly addressing her reputation of impurity, “Infamous daughter of an infamous mother…” (110). Rhys’s use of red here poses the question of virtue—not just of Antoinette’s virtue, but of the meaning of virtue in an oppressive, patriarchal culture. Red is also key in signifying an ending. As Antoinette flees with her family from her childhood home, she takes in the fire’s affect on her surroundings: “The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like sunset and I knew that I would never see Coulibri again” (27). The image of a red sky emerges again in Part III during Antoinette’s account of a recurring dream—the dream that unites her fate with that of Bertha from Jane Eyre: Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it. I saw the grandfather clock and Aunt Cora’s patchwork, all colours, I saw the orchids and the stephanotis and the jasmine and the tree of life in flames, I saw the chandelier and the red carpet downstairs and the bamboos and the tree ferns, the gold ferns and the silver, and the soft green velvet of the moss on the garden wall …. And the sky so red. (112)

Here, red is a spectrum of colors from Antoinette’s past, present, and future. In this instance meant to foreshadow Antoinette’s euphoric demise, Rhys provides what is perhaps the most vibrantly complex palette in the story—a summation of the colors that represents both Antoinette and the West Indies alike. The montage in the sky provides both a temporary and final escape from her imprisonment in England. The refuge she seeks is an ideal West Indies environment free from the social isolation and tragedies of her past. She strips down her memories of home to mere sensations— colors and feelings. It is this imagery and the anticipation of a final fall into the landscape of her past that reignites her passion and sense of motivation But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now. (110–111)

This flash of vivacity that stirs Antoinette to action is interpreted in my clothing through minimal pops of red—a nod to the comfort she finds in

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Fig. 4.5  Look five: Silk tunic with wool strap detail and polyester pleated chiffon pant

her red dress and the memories of home it evokes. I chose a particularly scarlet shade of red to carry throughout the looks of my collection, one I thought to be reminiscent of the flowers of the Flame Tree Antoinette alludes to. These accents appear as inserts in the linings, trims, and facings of various garments (Fig. 4.5). Small slivers of red, sometimes only visible on a garment depending on the movement and stance of the wearer, are

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points of disruption within the otherwise neutral bodies. Antoinette, however, is not all erratic passion. The parts of the novel she narrates are quite measured and elegant in prose as she recounts her story with the steady wisdom of one who has carefully considered the events of her past. Rhys has written Antoinette a voice of reason that attests to her sanity. I felt it important to maintain neutral tones of beige, navy, and maroon as base colors with which to layer fabrics of more saturated color. These more subdued tones for me also represent the neutral level at which humans generally strive to keep their emotions. The red is a reminder that within us there exists the driving force of our irrepressible emotions. As Rhys suggests through her characters, anyone can succumb to madness. The potential to act outside of the behavioral protocol that society has trained us to follow and expect from others lies behind every internalized emotion. The practice of “appropriate” social conduct is itself a choice to suppress these emotions, or at least reduce and refine them through a very narrow, but socially acceptable means of self-expression. The entire goal of abiding by such rules of conduct, especially for women, is to avoid being considered crazy, excessive, or hysterical. Not conforming to a norm risks the label of deviance or madness, and is sometimes attended by confinement. For Friedan, Millett, Greer, the great feminists of the second wave, mind doctors constituted the enemy, agents of patriarchy who trapped women in a psychology they attributed to her, stupefied her with pills or therapy, and confined her either to the ‘madhouse’ or the restricted life of conventional roles. (Appignanesi 7)

For those women like Antoinette, who fail to fulfill their “conventional roles,” “agents of patriarchy” have found their solution in the suppression of “women [who find] themselves in a world that [has] little use for them” (Hustvedt 4). Rhys contradicts the notion of socially divergent women as defective through her writing of Antoinette’s story. She celebrates female passion and disobedience by portraying her heroine as one in the same with the West Indies environment, both of which embody an intoxicating beauty and unrestrained force. From Antoinette’s end arises a new beginning—a transcending of repression. She represents an alternative perspective of those women whom society rejects, while also acting as a catalyst for self-liberation.

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Few people are mad, bad or sad continually and forever: if the pain endured by the sufferer is frightening, unbearable and damaging, often to those around her as well, it can dissipate, too. There are no firm rules where sadness and madness are concerned (Appignanesi 9)

Notes 1. A style of pant known for its fitted, high waistline that flares into an extremely voluminous hem. 2. The pattern pieces of a bias-cut garment are placed and cut diagonally between the cross and straight grains of the fabric to achieve a more fluid drape.

Works Cited Appignanesi, Lisa. Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. Berger, Ronald J. Introducing Disability Studies. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013. Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre. Norton ed., New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., [1847] 1999. Fayad, Mona. Unquiet Ghosts: The Struggle for Representation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Norton ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. Hustvedt, Asti. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011. Rhys, Jean. “To Francis Wyndham.” Selected Letters, Norton ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 1999a. Rhys, Jean. “To Selma Vaz Dias.” Selected Letters, Norton ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 1999b. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New  York, W.W.  Norton & Company, Inc., [1966] 1999c. Savory, Elaine. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature: Jean Rhys. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 85–108.

CHAPTER 5

Wide Sargasso Sea Then and Now: Reading Jean Rhys à la mode Sophie Oliver

The occasion of an anniversary—50  years since the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea—encourages us to think between two moments: then and now. What did this book mean when it was published? What does it still offer us? What does it suggest now that is new and particular to our moment? These questions then invite us to think not only about the publication and immediate reception of the book, but its contexts before and after. In this Rhys is our guide, for her novel looked back to an earlier era, the 1830s, and to another work of literature, Jane Eyre, published in 1847. In fact, Rhys’s fiction is full of such relationships between past and present, from her anachronistic structures and the retrospections of her protagonists to the tropes of haunting and returns that give her writing a deep and layered sense of time, the past often returning, unwanted or compelled, to transform, unsettle, or stall the present. One of the images she consistently used to represent this complex attitude to time is fashion, which recurs in all her work as a motif of change, repetition, and the relationship between then and now. Nowhere is it more imaginatively used

S. Oliver (*) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_5

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than in the final part of Wide Sargasso Sea. “Time has no meaning,” says Antoinette: it is an abstract idea. But the “red dress, that has meaning.” “The colour of fire and sunset. The colour of beautiful flowers,” scented with her island, the smell of “vertivert and frangipani, of cinnamon and dust and lime trees” (Rhys 1999: 109): this dress, vibrating with the West Indies, lets Antoinette imagine herself back there. But its dramatic color also associates it with the fire in her cold attic room: I let the dress fall on the floor, and looked from the fire to the dress and from the dress to the fire. […] it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. (110–11)

The red dress is both a vivid portal back into her former life on Jamaica and a blazing sign of future action, the fire she will light in Thornfield Hall. In this chapter, I would like to follow Rhys in her use of fashion, reading the transtemporal reach and present-day relevance of Wide Sargasso Sea through one particular item, a dress that belonged to Rhys herself. I want to use this dress to time-travel, locating the novel in three different moments—1914, 1966, and 2018—in order to narrate one account of its enduring significance.1

Fashion, the “Restless Image” I woke next morning knowing nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing. (Rhys 1999: 16)

Fashion is an especially productive model for thinking about temporal dynamics. In the fashion system, and in fashion-oriented behavior, continual change is balanced by stability, when deviations from convention become either aborted trends or assimilated norms, giving way to new deviations, and so on, and so on. “In fashion,” René König writes, “the dynamic component is predominant”—he calls it a “restless image” (41). Walter Benjamin recognized the dialectical potential of fashion to connect history with the present moment. The 1935 exposé of The Arcades Project describes “passing fashions” as dialectical images, “wish images”—“images in the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the old” (4–5). In 1940, he reprised this note in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” writing memorably that the “tiger’s leap” of fashion from the

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present “into the past” that it evokes reveals the “time of the now” in history (1968: 253). For Benjamin, this structural characteristic of fashion was particularly evident in old clothes (as it was in the architecture of the Paris arcades). A once-fashionable dress like the one I will introduce here embodies the restless logic of fashion, bringing the particularities of its moment of production into dialectical relation with both its historical precedents and its future revivals. In turn, this temporal dynamic represented by the dress provides a model for reading Wide Sargasso Sea in relation to various moments in history and today. The dress in question (Fig. 5.1) has a restless history characterized by obsolescence and revaluation, a sense of relevance lost or renewed over time. Probably mass manufactured in around 1914 but altered by hand to accommodate a changing figure or fashions, this cotton house-gown was given by Jean Rhys to Jo Hill in the 1970s. Hill, who was one of Rhys’s close friends and carers during the final years of the writer’s life, had tried unsuccessfully to donate the dress to Rhys’s archive in Tulsa and to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. On hearing that I was interested in fashion in Rhys’s writing, Hill passed the dress on to me in 2014. We cannot know whether Rhys herself bought the dress, or even whether she wore it. But she kept it all her life, and told Hill that it was her favorite. There are certainly signs that someone wore it—a cigarette burn on the bodice, for example (see Fig. 5.2)—and I write as if it was Rhys, a liberating assumption that helps to blast open history.2

1914 (“Too Much Blue … the Flowers Too Red”) ‘A very graceful dress,’ I said and she showed me the many ways it could be worn, trailing on the floor, lifted to show a lace petticoat, or hitched up far above the knee. (Rhys 1999: 84)

This house-dress, both loose and semifitted, is relatively simple, constructed in heavy cotton in two main parts: the inner bodice, which fastens with large brass hooks and eyes (Fig.  5.2), and the wrap of the outer gown, which creates a V at the neck, is tied at the waist (Fig. 5.3), and, at the back, forms an elaborate, improbable train (Fig. 5.1).3 The arms reach to the wrists, each cuff trimmed with a single ruffle (Fig. 5.4). The red and blue graphic floral pattern, including large chrysanthemums, is Orientalist in style. It is, like the train, bold.

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Fig. 5.1  Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, back view. (All photos in this chapter were taken by the author)

The house-dress or house-gown is one term among several for the so-­ called “undress” that was worn by women at home in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ranging in formality from garments that were appropriate to wear in company to those that were not. At the more formal and elaborate end was the tea gown, which between the 1870s and 1910s was a highly fashionable, often whimsical item favored by hostesses

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Fig. 5.2  Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, bodice

(Bissonette: n.p.). Essentially comfortable and ideally freeing (although some were worn with corsets), the tea dress was often associated with artistic dress, which was similarly characterized by a loose fit and Orientally inspired patterns and colors. Whether worn by the hostess or the artistic type (or, one imagines, the hostess with artistic aspirations), this kind of garment promoted a particular kind of liberty and autonomy for women, based on physiological freedom, the opportunity to express oneself within the sphere of one’s own home, and a measure of aesthetic fancy, even fantasy. Rhys’s dress is very different from, but related to, this kind of robe interieur; loose and comfortable, it certainly shares something of the tea gown’s sense of freedom. It may have been worn in company, but with very little in the way of structure or fastenings seems more likely to have been essentially a private garment.4 It is thus more modest in its function, but also in its materials, which are simple. The sense of autonomy attached to this dress is, we might speculate, imagined by the wearer as well as experienced physically. The dress pulls in different directions, then: it suggests both modesty and aspiration, intimacy and a form of public display, a

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Fig. 5.3  Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, front view

Fig. 5.4  Cotton house-dress once belonging to Jean Rhys, c.1914?, cuff

conformity to feminine convention, and, in the fabric and train especially, a form of opposition or disruption—an undeniable sexuality and productive sense of excess that cannot be separated from its Orientalist associations, as will be discussed. Like the flowers of Wide Sargasso Sea’s fallen

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Eden—or like the red room of Jane Eyre—this “house” dress feels unheimlich, unhomely. In 1914, when the dress was possibly made, Rhys was in London. The notorious, raffish Crabtree Club opened that year, and we know Rhys was there. She would not have worn the dress at the Crabtree, among the artists, journalists, models, and actresses—this was a dress for indoors—but perhaps she wore it before she went out, or afterward, when she came in at dawn (Rhys 1979: 132). Paul Nash described the Crabtree as “a most disgusting place! […] A place of utter coarseness and dull unrelieved monotony, which only the most pinched harlots attend” (Holroyd: 418). More affirmative, Augustus John nonetheless shared Nash’s view of the earthiness of the club that he had helped set up—this was the “real thing,” John said (Holroyd: 418). But it was in this coarse place, this very real place, that Rhys dreamt of leaving London altogether. Here, she said, she decided to go to Paris (Rhys 1979: 132). The dress begs to be read in this context. It, too, veers between reality and dreams: between the cigarette burn on the bodice and the fantasy of its pattern and train. We can attach Nash’s easy maligning of female sexuality—“harlots”—to the dress’s implied sensuousness, and then transcend his misogyny by remembering its implied freedom, the female wearer asserting some measure of independence. Laced with the seediness of the bohemian, the dress also announces that figure’s anti-establishment values, to which Rhys would subscribe all her life. In no small part this association is due to the Orientalist features of the dress, including the elements redolent of the kimono—the crossed bodice and drapery-like quality—and especially the dense, flattened print, with its bright red, “exuberant intricacy” and “abundance of flowers […] long ago imported from Asia and the Middle East” (Geczy: n.p.).5 Red, specifically Chinese vermillion, was the color of the waistcoat that Théophile Gautier wore in support of Victor Hugo’s controversial play Hernani, in a notorious moment of bohemian self-fashioning (Gluck: 25–6). Orientalism is, Adam Geczy writes, “the sign of belonging to a nameless cult, but a cult in the name of difference, which is alternative, free and therefore pregnant with potentialities that the opposite term, the staid West, is less able to offer”—“a means of transformation” as much as “transgression”. “[O]rientalism in fashion has long been used to register dislocation from the status quo” (Geczy: n.p.). This is fraught territory, full of stereotypes, not least the mapping of the erotic on to the oriental. But for Geczy the “Orient” also provides “a

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reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay— allows for a ‘detachment’ from the regular symbolic system into an elsewhere that promises a fertile pasture of creation” (Geczy: n.p.). Such creative rupture is particularly beneficial to those outside “the regular symbolic system”—perhaps those, like women, whose image is often regulated (and, indeed, often by their dress). In Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934), set in London in 1914, the kimono helps express the moral judgment that young women of uncertain social status face. The novel opens with Anna Morgan and a fellow performer in the chorus line, Maudie, who comes downstairs in their lodgings “in her nightgown and a torn kimono.” The item stands visually for the landlady’s suspicion that Anna and Maudie are not “decent,” that they are “[g]etting my house a bad name” (Rhys 1969: 8). But it also stands for female imagination and mettle, for in this scene Anna is lying on the sofa reading Nana, which makes her “sad” and “frightened” but also “excited.” As their discussion turns to the representation of women like the prostitute of Zola’s novel, Maudie resists the “lies” that people tell about “tart[s]”, encouraging Anna in the face of the landlady’s disapproval: “You’ve only got to learn how to swank a bit, then you’re all right” (Rhys 1969: 9). Imagining Rhys’s dress in this vein, it pulls in different directions once again: the restriction and freedom of women; the policing and vaunting of female sexuality; orientalist fantasies and the open space that such fantasy allows, in which an alternative life might be conceived. In this way, the dress in 1914 provides an imaginative lens through which to read Wide Sargasso Sea proleptically, unmooring the novel from its moment of publication and hooking it, speculatively, to an earlier point in time. The dress provides a way to think particularly about the hinge of the novel between oppression and liberation. Its sense of excess, at once exotic stereotype and symbol of liberation, is in tune with Rhys’s representation of the West Indies, in the eyes of her male character (Rochester, though she never names him): Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger. […] [She] is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet…. (41)

Rhys’s unheimlich house-dress is also “too much”; like the West Indies of her novel, its floral pattern and long train signal boundaries crossed and

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things unknowable. Indeed, throughout the book, dress generally stands for the danger that women represent to men, as in the description of Christophine, whom Rochester fears: “dressed up and looked very imposing. The skirt of her flowered dress trailed after her making a rustling noise as she walked and her yellow silk turban was elaborately tied. Long heavy gold earrings pulled down the lobes of her ears” (50). Amelie, the servant girl with whom he has sex to punish Antoinette for her control over him, shows off her dress after their night together: “‘A very graceful dress,’ I said and she showed me the many ways it could be worn, trailing on the floor, lifted to show a lace petticoat, or hitched up far above the knee” (83). These are romantic, Western stereotypes of otherness, of an exotic female sensuality. But Rhys’s subtle achievement is that she simultaneously turns them around, making them equally a mode of opposition. She needs to do this in order to rescue Antoinette from the simplistic representation of Bertha in Jane Eyre: to make the novel’s own stereotypes a form of resistance. A central tension in Rhys’s characterization of Antoinette is that she is both vilified for and energized by her femininity. Her new husband uses her sexuality to judge her moral worth, a judgment that is made via the red dress: “I took the red dress down and put it against myself. ‘Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?’ I said. That man told me so” (110). Ultimately this alleged promiscuity assumes for Rochester a pathological character, as women’s unorthodox behavior so often did in the nineteenth century. And yet, recalling Rhys’s dress with its bold pattern and train, its liberating sense of comfort and individuality, and the decision that Rhys herself took to leave London in 1914, we also remember the enabling, oppositional potential of the red dress of Wide Sargasso Sea. It is as if the flame-red dress—intemperate, that is, too much—tells her to light the fire that will burn down Thornfield Hall (“it was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do”). Her sexuality, used against her, is thus turned into rage and then action, becoming her tool against the man who oppresses her.

1966 (“Dreamers of the Golden Dream”) all damned and no use praying. (Rhys 1999: 20)

This rage, the overturning of hierarchies, and the flames of Wide Sargasso Sea made it a novel of its era. “A book for our own haunted times,” wrote Colin MacInnes in The Observer. It is not a political tract, nor even

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straightforwardly political, much as Rhys’s dress is an agent of female restriction as much as of female individuation. But the novel’s oppositional force, which is expressed through paralysis and breakdown perhaps more than resistance, connects it very much to the 1960s. Discussing the novel in a live event, Margaret Reynolds claimed: There is a way in which this book could not have been published before 1966. Of course it’s 1966: it’s Black Power, it’s the beginnings of the women’s movement. These things are in there … it’s colonialism, for sure, it’s the Vietnam War. That’s what’s in this book. And that’s why it has to be ’66. And I think that’s why it’s had the impact it’s had, because it arrived at a particular moment. … it may have started with Jane Eyre but really and truly it’s about 1966.6

Take the opening section of Wide Sargasso Sea, with its celebrated opening line: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.” This announces the racial fault lines of the novel, the “them” and “us,” the “trouble” the book makes—with English literary history, with hierarchies, which have been overturned and confused: “Old time white people nothing but white n----- now, and black n----- better than white n-----” (14). A defining feature of the 1960s was the “emergence of new historical subjects”—groups who understood themselves based on race, national identity, and (incipiently) gender (“The 60s” 4).7 Wide Sargasso Sea does not exactly represent the struggle that such consciousness generated, but through its depiction of post-slavery conditions and a violent but vulnerable colonialism, and of a woman’s compromised autonomy, the novel signals something of the moment’s epistemic shift, despite being set in another moment entirely. There are points when it even seems to suggest a common cause with the international protests of the late 1960s—against working conditions, the Vietnam War, dictatorships, and social and political issues more broadly. Its latent violence sometimes rises in more explicit images of resistance, as when Antoinette describes her stick: a narrow long piece of wood, with two nails sticking out at the end … I picked it up soon after they killed our horse and I thought I can fight with this, if the worst comes to the worst I can fight to the end though the best ones fall and that is another song. (22)

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Perhaps even more resonant is the scene in which freed slaves try to burn down the family home. “Some of them were laughing and waving sticks, some of the ones at the back were carrying flambeaux and it was light as day” (25). This uprising, driven explicitly by class inequalities as much as racism—an attack on a doomed ruling class—is subtly connected to the French Revolution through a subsequent reference to Annette, Antoinette’s mother, as “sans culottes” (29). Just as Jane Eyre seemed to many of its contemporaries to channel in its willful female protagonist some of the revolutionary energy of its day, Wide Sargasso Sea associates its own women with a destructive madness caused by and intent on breaking up a corrupt structure.8 Their breakdown is echoed in the book’s mood of ruin—where “all [are] damned and no use praying” (20)—a quasi-biblical fallen state in the Eden of Jamaica (that land that is “too much”). Things are broken. “[R]oad repairing was now a thing of the past […] feeling safe in bed—all belonged to the past” (9). People have fled, or stopped working (“No more slavery—why should anybody work?” [11]), others are in paralysis, waiting for something (9). What are they waiting for? What comes next? Something has clearly changed, but the new era has not yet dawned. This productive breakdown, the destruction that must take place before something fairer can be established, is very much a 1960s mood.9 The anti-work ethic, as witnessed in the strikes of workers in Turin, for example, was intended to clear a “new space” within capitalism (“The 60s” 3). This was a razing of the “system,” another very 1960s word that somehow fits Rhys’s worldview: no unionist, she was dedicated in life and work to living “Outside the Machine,” as one of her short stories was called. A contemporary book equally concerned with ruptured illusions, and one which captures this same 1960s mood, is Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, with its end-of-days epigraph from Yeats’s “Second Coming” of 1918, including the lines: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; | Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (ix). The opening piece, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” published like Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, makes a woman and a fire the central symbols of a disorderly America, of a soured fantasy. Its subject, Lucille Miller, is accused of setting her car on fire with her husband inside it. In the minds of the press and public, her adultery and pregnancy by another man—her sexuality—are proof of her guilt, and, Didion implies, co-opted as signs of a country’s fractured values. But the fire remains, implicitly, as an act of

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rebellion by a woman trapped in a loveless marriage, dreaming a different dream.10 In this reading, the fire with which Wide Sargasso Sea closes is a necessary destruction, a radical act of recalibration, after which “something else” might be felt. This is also legible as a utopian impulse, a romantic gesture that poetically prefigures the radical gestures—ultimately deemed failures—of 1968.11 Certainly, the thrust of many contemporary reviews was that the book as a whole was—like Dominica, like Antoinette’s madness, like Rhys’s dress—too much. “Romanticism is what the whole book is about,” wrote a reviewer in The Times: “the smell of West Indian magic, the creak of obeah spells, the madness in the family, the ominous aunt, the convent in the sunshine. Miss Rhys doesn’t resist it” (“New fiction”). She created “a fairy-tale neurotic,” said Mary Kay Wilmers, more subtly and approvingly, in the TLS. Wilmers continues: “In mood and style Wide Sargasso Sea achieves a rare synthesis of the baroque and the precise, the coolly empirical and the lushly pretty.” It is as if, between or from within Rhys’s notoriously controlled sentences, something disobedient erupts, exceeding and unsettling boundaries. Like Rhys’s dress, this is prose that pulls in opposing directions. We can recognize, then, in Rhys’s dress, in Wide Sargasso Sea generally and Antoinette’s red dress specifically, a sense of romantic fantasy as an unsettling, productive form of excess. Fifty years later (another anniversary), the “something else” imagined in 1968 is on people’s minds again.12 In this context, in 2018, the complex desire and unconstrained rage of Wide Sargasso Sea is newly relevant.

2018 (the “Age of Anger”) I let the dress fall on the floor, and looked from the fire to the dress and from the dress to the fire. … It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. (Rhys 1999: 110–11)

For Pankaj Mishra, who has designated our current era the “age of anger,” the rage belongs to terrorists and nationalists, to demagogues and their supporters. He understands this dialectically, as the return of Nietzsche’s “men of ressentiment,” “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge” (Mishra 2018: 9), or Freud’s “primitive, savage and evil impulses” (Mishra 2016: n.p.), none of which—despite, and in fact

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because of, the West’s claims to modernity and enlightenment—ever really went away. Proceeding dialectically, then: fashion, too, has always been a threat to enlightenment and modernist rationalism. For Western thinkers from Rousseau to Nietzsche and Veblen, fashion’s excesses have threatened their vision of the republican order: democracy, plain speaking, natural sexuality (for them: controlled and heterosexual). The nature of this threat has been consistently symbolized for them by the Orient, in other words as an Other of the West that promises to unsettle it from within; fashion is what Barbara Vinken has called “an oriental tyranny in the heart of the west.”13 This is, she makes clear, not only a racialized response, but a misogynist one: a male reaction against  what was perceived as  female volatility. In this context, Rhys’s dress—“too much blue […] the flowers too red”—again becomes a symbol of various conflations and of potential disruptions, through which we can think about the relevance of Wide Sargasso Sea now, in this so-called “age of anger.” Not only are its oriental pattern and implied sexuality easily adopted in a form of othering along racialized and gendered lines, these very stereotypes can be considered as unsettling forms of excess, especially a productive kind of feminine volatility. Indeed, the rage of our era does not only belong to disaffected men but is markedly felt and expressed by women. In the 2010s, women are vocally angry. “Female rage”—a rage, writes Sarah Banet-Weiser, “at the injury of being harassed and assaulted, a rage at not being believed, at being called hysterical and out of control” (n.p.)—is on our television screens (from Good Girls to the adaptations of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace), has entered the lexicon of op-eds, and is the subject of a number of new books.14 In the New York Times in 2016, Roxane Gay reported that women ask her how they can comport themselves so they aren’t perceived as angry while they practice feminism. They ask this question as if anger is an unreasonable emotion when considering the inequalities, challenges, violence and oppression women the world over face. I want to tell these young women to embrace their anger, sharpen themselves against it. (n.p.)15

In these conditions, Wide Sargasso Sea resonates with renewed force.16 Antoinette, in defiance of perception and “reason,” embraces the anger induced by violence and oppression. Women are unsafe throughout this

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novel. As Grace Poole says in its final section: it “can be a black and cruel world to a woman” (106). Earlier, Antoinette recalls: “I used to sleep with a piece of wood by my side so that I could defend myself if I were attacked” (44). But the rage that simmers beneath the surface of the novel also becomes Antoinette’s weapon, so that Rochester, too, is unsafe: “the feeling of security had left me. I looked around suspiciously. The door into her room could be bolted, a stout wooden bar pushed across the other” (44). We have seen that this is part of women’s demonization in Rhys’s book: Antoinette is dangerous because of her sexuality, Christophine because of her obeah. But in turning this anger into a weapon—“sharpening themselves against it,” as Gay says—the feminine volatility that threatens men (and which Barbara Vinken has connected to fashion’s threat) becomes a tool, quite literally, to dismantle the master’s house.17 Rhys was dismissive of organized feminism, and her books, with their passive female protagonists, have always elicited complex reactions from those discussing sexual politics.18 But today Wide Sargasso Sea unmistakably articulates something of a current, affective mode of feminist theory that is less concerned with equality and discrimination than an active expression of outrage—a forceful, if necessary aggressive, denunciation of the status quo. This is a feminism that looks back to Audre Lorde, who wrote in 1981: Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. (8)

But it is, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, often less precise and directed, less measured. Sara Ahmed, for example, unwilling “to make happiness my cause,” calls attention to the moment when “a woman snaps, that moment when she does not take it anymore” (257, 3): Our bodies become our tools; our rage becomes sickness. […] We begin to feel the weight of histories more and more; the more we expose the weight of history, the heavier it becomes. We snap. We snap under the weight; things break. (255)

In her red dress, intemperate and unchaste, Antoinette is Ahmed’s “willful subject” (Ahmed: 257), razing Thornfield Hall as an act of revenge

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on the man who has demonized her sexuality and pathologized her distress. We might associate her with other instances of red worn by rebellious women. There is the “woman in red,” Ceyda Sungur, who was assailed with pepper spray by armed police in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013: her sartorially defined image became a symbol of resistance to an authoritarian, patriarchal state. The scarlet cloaks of Margaret Atwood’s handmaids in the recent TV adaptation have become icons of repression and its defiance, adopted internationally in 2018 by women protesting in favor of gender equality and reproductive and sexual rights.19 If Antoinette’s destruction in order to start again was a 1960s mood, it also figures in Jacqueline Rose’s vision of a twenty-first-century “scandalous feminism.” In Women in Dark Times, Rose calls for a new understanding that “rip[s] the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves” (ix). This new way of seeing exposes “everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle for the better political futures we want” (xii). Framed by a “scandalous feminism,” Antoinette’s irrationality and excessiveness—her violent act, not eloquent but injured, a howl against inhumane treatment—make sense as a denunciation of abuse, of “the ugly secrets of the consensus” (2). Many ugly secrets are exposed by Wide Sargasso Sea—not least concerning race—but Rose’s words point us to the ugliest in the context of a scandalous feminism: “The sexuality of women can provoke a patriarchal anguish which knows no limits in the violent lengths it will go to assuage itself” (x). Rhys’s novel presents us with a nuanced case of female sexuality with pressing relevance to today’s discussions about sex relations. Much of the recent and just outrage about sexual harassment, as witnessed by the resurgence of the phrase “me too” as a social-media hashtag and clarion call for solidarity, focuses on the threat of male sexuality.20 But as Rose observes elsewhere, “the aim of harassment […] isn’t just to control women’s bodies, but also to invade their minds” (2018: 11). Wide Sargasso Sea depicts a complex picture of the intersection of psychological and sexual coercion. Rochester’s sense of control threatened (“She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing” [103]), he deliberately seduces Amelie in order to manipulate his wife’s sexual jealousy. Christophine’s interpretation emphasizes this as a gendered, structural issue, remembering of Antoinette’s mother Annette: “They drive her to it. When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away. They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad” (94). Rhys suggests that male power

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replicates itself: Christophine accuses Rochester, “You want [Antoinette’s] money but you don’t want her. It is in your mind to pretend she is mad” (96). Equally complex and relevant to today’s issues are Rhys’s refusal of such binaries as male predation versus female purity and her acknowledgment of “the vagaries of human sexuality” (Rose 2018: 8). As Rose has asked, drawing on Gay: “How can we acknowledge the viciousness of sexual harassment while leaving open the question of what sexuality at its wildest—most harmful and most exhilarating, sometimes both together— might be?” (2018: 11). If Wide Sargasso Sea articulates something of women’s current rage at male aggression, it does not do so at the expense of women’s sexuality or even the dark complexities of sex for either gender. Antoinette is a sensual being whose desire scares her new husband, and whose need to be desired leads her, too, to ambivalent action: she persuades Christophine to use obeah to help seduce him. Alongside her righteous anger at Rochester’s treatment of Bertha Mason, Rhys makes room in her characterization for the darker drives of an erotic woman. Rose’s description of Gay is apt here: “Gay sits on a border between a space in which trauma is the sole cause of anguish—‘Look what has been done to me’—and one in which the mind, thumbing trauma, takes flight: ‘See how far I can go’” (2018: 11). Of all Rhys’s novels, Wide Sargasso Sea lets her traumatized female protagonist take flight. Twenty-first-century anxieties help us to see the subtlety—and the feminism—of this literary endeavor. If Rhys’s aim was to put flesh on the bones of Brontë’s monstrous Bertha, already demonized for her sexuality, she resists turning her into an opposite parody, one of purity. Instead, she claims that sexuality and makes it complex and real: a source of male desire and fear, and of both female oppression and female power. “Is it disordered,” Rose asks, “in a sexually disordered world, for a woman to feel something of both?” (2018: 8). For all its contemporary resonances, this discussion also takes us back to 1914 and Rhys’s unhomely house-dress, with its bold red and blue Orientalist pattern and sensual, excessive train—signs, as I read them, of both restrictive stereotypes and female freedom. Using the dress to direct my reading of Wide Sargasso Sea opens up the novel’s temporal range, giving a glimpse of its prehistory, its currency in the decade of its publication, and its persistent relevance. Ever restless, as Rhys knew, fashion offers us a way in to thinking about literature in the same vein: as a changing, ebbing, renewable force. Fifty years after its publication, Wide Sargasso Sea seems

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to have acquired the status of a classic, but perhaps we would do well to remember that, according to the same restless logic, the book always risks falling out of fashion. Like the West Indies, like Antoinette’s desire and anger, like the pattern and train of Rhys’s dress—it always risks being unreasonable, inappropriate, too much. No doubt if its star does wane, it will rise again in another moment when Rhys’s fevered, romantic vision makes sense to readers of a new era.

Notes 1. I have written elsewhere about Rhys’s engagement with fashion in her interwar fiction, and how fashion’s logic can be used to understand the temporal fate of her work. See Oliver in list of works cited. Dress in Wide Sargasso Sea is discussed in detail by Maroula Joannou. 2. Rhys did smoke, at least in later life. In a letter of November 1965, she describes sitting up late, “smok[ing] one cigarette after another” (Rhys 1985: 293). 3. Curators at the V&A identified the dress as a house-dress when I showed it to them in 2014. 4. This characterization was suggested by costume curators at the V&A. 5. On the influence of the kimono on Western dress from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, see Mears. Though Osman Ahmed points out that in a sense Western fashion was made possible only by ancient trade networks and so “‘exotic’ motifs have always been part of fashion at the hand of empire, trade, and travel.” 6. Recorded conversation at the British Library, 15 December 2004. BL C927/115. Although the novel was published in 1966, its gestation period was long so it cannot be said to have been born of the decade in any traditional sense. Here, though, I am more interested in a mood that the book met, rather than one that generated it. 7. See also Jameson. 8. A review in the Christian Remembrancer (April 1848) damned the novel for its “moral Jacobinism.” Cited in Brontë 2006: xv. 9. For this line of thinking, I am indebted to Jo Applin’s wonderful book Lee Lozano: Not Working, which first made me consider Wide Sargasso Sea in the context of 1960s strikes but also utopian thinking, which I discuss later. Applin covers in far more detail than I can some of the fascinating manifestations of these prevailing attitudes. 10. Fire courses through images of this troubled decade, from the Watts riots to the monk Thích Quang Duc’s self-immolation in protest at the Vietnam War.

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11. Writing about the widely perceived failure of the revolutionary spirit of “’68,” Lauren Berlant urges academics, and feminists especially, to retain the unsettling of knowledge that such romanticism enacts. 12. See for example, Ali. 13. The phrase quoted here is the subtitle of Vinken’s recent essay. See also her 1995 chapter on similar themes. 14. See for example, Chemaly, and also Traister, who argues that female rage produces social change (a position opposed by Martha Nussbaum, for one; see Srinivasan). 15. See also Penny. As Gay reminds us, black female anger, potentially a just response to racism, is even more taboo: “Race complicates anger. Black women are often characterized as angry simply for existing, as if anger is woven into our breath and our skin” (n.p.). 16. I am not the first to notice this. See Leslie Jamison’s (2018) piece about female rage, which admires Rhys, along with Sylvia Plath, for her depiction of an “angry woman with a torch,” and what she calls in Plath’s case “unapologetic fantasies of retribution.” 17. Sara Ahmed provides a wonderful arsenal of further architectural and domestic metaphors useful for feminism. 18. See Oliver 324–26. 19. See Beaumont and Holpuch. 20. Me Too is the name of an activist group established by Tarana Burke in 2005. It is important to note the criticism that the recent #metoo movement, largely one of white women, has received for publicly appropriating the less visible work of a black activist.

Works Cited Introduction to “The 60s without Apology”. Special issue of Social Text 9.10 (1984): 1–9. Print. “New fiction”. The Times 17 Nov. 1966: 16. Print. Ahmed, Osman. “Orientalism in Fashion.” Bloomsburyfashioncentral.com. Bloomsbury. Web. 3 Feb. 2018. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017. Print. Ali, Tariq. “That Was the Year that Was: Tariq Ali Talks to David Edgar.” London Review of Books 24 May 2018: 3–10. Print. Applin, Jo. Lee Lozano: Not Working. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2018. Print. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “Mad women: how angry sisterhood is taking over the small screen.” Guardian 7 March 2018. Web. 7 March 2018. Beaumont, Peter, and Sarah Holpuch. “How The Handmaid’s Tale dressed protests across the world.” Guardian 3 August 2018. Web. 2 Sept. 2018.

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Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard UP, 2002. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1968. Print. Berlant, Lauren. “’68, or Something.” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 124–55. Print. Bissonette, Anne. “Tea Gown.” The Berg Companion to Fashion. Ed. Valerie Steele. Berg. Web. 28 Feb. 2018. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre [1847]. Ed. Steve Davies. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. Chemaly, Soraya. Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. London and New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Print. Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem [1969]. London: 4th Estate, 2017. Print. Gay, Roxane. “Who Gets to be Angry?” New York Times 10 June 2016. Web. 7 March 2018. Geczy, Adam. Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 20th Century. URL. Berg. Web. 11 July 2018. Gluck, Mary. Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-­ century Paris. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 2005. Print. Holroyd, Michael. Augustus John. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996. Print. Oliver, Sophie. “Fashion in Jean Rhys/Jean Rhys in Fashion.” Modernist Cultures 11.3 (2016): 312–30. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Periodizing the 60s.” Social Text 9.10 (1984): 178–209. Print. Jamison, Leslie. “I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore.” New York Times Magazine 17 January 2018. Web. 12 July 2018. Joannou, Maroula. “‘From Black to Red’: Jean Rhys’s Use of Dress in Wide Sargasso Sea.” Jean Rhys: Twenty-First Century Approaches. Eds Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015): 123–45. Print. König, René. The Restless Image: A Sociology of Fashion. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973. Print. Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 9.3 (1981): 7–10. Print. MacInnes, Colin. “Nightmare in paradise.” Observer 30 October 1966: 28. Print. Mears, Patricia. “Japonisme.” The Berg Companion to Fashion. Ed. Valerie Steele. Berg. Web. 28 Feb. 2018. Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. London: Penguin, 2018. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. “Welcome to the Age of Anger.” Guardian 8 December 2016. Web. 12 July 2018. Nussbaum, Martha. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Print.

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Penny, Laurie. “Most Women You Know Are Angry – and That’s All Right.” Teen Vogue 2 August 2017. Web. 22 June 2018. Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark. London: Penguin, 1969 [1934]. Print. Rhys, Jean. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. London: Andre Deutsch, 1979. Print. Rhys, Jean. Jean Rhys: Letters 1931–1966. Eds Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. London: Penguin, 1985. Print. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L.  Raiskin. New  York and London: Norton, 1999 [1966]. Print. Rose, Jacqueline. Women in Dark Times. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. Rose, Jacqueline. “I am a knife.” London Review of Books 22 Feb. 2018: 3–11. Print. Srinivasan, Amia. “The Aptness of Anger.” Journal of Political Philosophy 26.2 (2018): 123–44. Print. Traitness, Rebecca. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Print. Vinken, Barbara. “Fashion: An Oriental Tyranny in the Heart of the West.” Fashion and Politics. Ed. Djurdja Bartlett. London and New Haven: Yale UP, 2019: 58–71. Print. Vinken, Barbara. “Republic, Rhetoric, and Sexual Difference.” Deconstruction Is/ In America: A New Sense of the Political. Ed. Anselm Haverkamp. New York: New York UP, 1995: 181–99. Print. Wilmers, Mary Kay. “A Fairy-tale Neurotic.” TLS 17 Nov. 1996: 1039. Print.

CHAPTER 6

After Mrs Rochester: On Portraying Jean Rhys Onstage Diana Quick

Diana Quick is an Emmy- and BAFTA-nominated actress. Perhaps best known for her role in the mini-series Brideshead Revisited, she has performed on the screen and stage in works ranging from Shakespeare and Brecht to the recent television documentary drama The Queen, in which she portrayed Queen Elizabeth II. In 2003, she was cast as Jean Rhys in Polly Teale’s play, After Mrs Rochester, which played in the West End and on tour. At the 2016 symposium in London celebrating the 50th anniversary of Wide Sargasso Sea, Ms. Quick performed segments of the play and discussed her approach to playing Rhys, whose mannerisms and subtle accent she captured uncannily. After Mrs Rochester was an ensemble play about the life of Jean Rhys, conceived by Polly Teale in 2003 for her company Shared Experience, and then developed in the rehearsal room and on tour, then back in the rehearsal room before moving into London, by an acting company of six women and two men who all brought a considerable amount to the tight and fluid playing of the piece. Her company had earlier had a great critical success with an adaptation of Jane Eyre in which the conceit was developed of having Bertha Rochester, the mad first wife in the attic who ultimately

D. Quick (*) Oxford, UK © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_6

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burns the house, present as a character on stage throughout. This character reappears in the play about Rhys, whose novel Wide Sargasso Sea Teale had read as part of her research for the Jane Eyre adaptation. Teale says she was struck by the “intensity of the writing—the profound sense of loneliness, of dislocation” in Rhys’s work. She went on to read Rhys’s other novels, and started to build a picture of her “extraordinary” life, as she puts it. Teale was especially struck by the parallels between Antoinette Cosway, the young Creole who becomes Mrs Bertha Rochester, and the way Rhys’s own life had developed. Both were white Creoles from the West Indies who were to end their lives isolated in the remote English countryside. Both Jean and Bertha felt misunderstood, and both were prone to fits of violent, frustrated rage. It made perfect sense that Jean had wanted to rewrite Mrs Rochester’s story from the beginning, telling it from an insider’s perspective, and Polly’s project was to tell the story of Jean Rhys as the author whose culminating achievement was to be Wide Sargasso Sea, and to tell it not as literary biography but in theatrical terms. I played the older Jean who is on stage throughout the play, so that the action—which moves from her early childhood to her life at the end when she is reconciled with her child and Wide Sargasso Sea is being published— is effectively mediated by Jean’s memories of it all. To give something of the flavour of the piece, below I quote an important “hinge” in the action, when Jean decides she must attempt to write the book first called “Le Revenant,” which finally emerged, after many vicissitudes, as Wide Sargasso Sea: JEAN: I am sent to Holloway prison. To a cell 10’ long and 4’ wide. There is nothing but a bed. A window too high to see out of. They take away my hair grips and shoe laces and cut my nails. I ask for books from the library. I must take what I am given. Anything to shut her out. To shut her up… They arrive the next day. A shabby pile. The English Cottage Garden. Cobbett’s Advise To A Young Man. The Cloister and the Hearth. Jane Eyre…. (READING THE TEXT) TO ENGLAND THEN I CONVEYED HER. A FEARFUL VOYAGE WITH SUCH A MONSTER IN THE VESSEL. GLAD WAS I WHEN I GOT HER SAFELY TO THE COUNTRYSIDE AND LODGED IN THAT THIRD STORY ROOM.  THAT SECRET CHAMBER OF WHICH SHE HAS FOR 10 YEARS MADE A WILD BEAST’S DEN…

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What can I do but write it? Her story. My story. Right back from the beginning. From the start. Everything … because I was there… (INDICATING HER COPY OF JANE EYRE) She had never tasted a mango or seen one rot in the midday heat. She didn’t know that salt dissolves. That glued furniture falls apart. That everything decays as fast as it grows… That the road they built returned to forest… She had never seen the wide Sargasso Sea. (After Mrs Rochester)

Theatre is different from literary writing, of course: it does not seek to explain or document everything, or even to write fully rounded characters, necessarily. Shared Experience was a company that combined physical theatre with an exploration of text, its aim to dramatize emotion and set forth the workings of the imagination. It was also an ensemble theatre company and the physical action had to be developed to a great extent in the rehearsal process—it could not be choreographed on the page—so to give life to the script took a lot of input from the company. Thus, while the play was conceived and written by Polly Teale, the rehearsal process involved several weeks of workshopping of ideas—some of which failed, some of which set light to the imaginative reach of the script before the play could start to be put on its feet. Later on, we as a company were able to turn what could have been a disappointment to good advantage, when a week of the initial tour was cancelled at short notice, allowing us to revisit the rehearsal process for a week, armed with the feedback which playing to an audience gives the actors. We were thus all able, individually and collectively, to fine-tune the work, adjusting nuances in the text, disciplining moves and moments of stage business in the service of telling the story more clearly. It turned out to be an invaluable opportunity. The play begins with Jean, now in her 70s, struggling to write her novel, with a silent creature at her feet—her Bertha-like doppelganger— who will gradually become more active and articulate as the story unfolds. The introduction to the play describes her thus: She is dressed in Victorian undergarments much stained and worn. Her hair is matted and dirty. She is white but speaks with a West Indian accent. In the early parts of the play she is mostly sleeping, with occasional murmurings and mutterings. Later, as Jean’s own madness emerges she becomes a ­stronger and (more articulate) presence. In Bertha’s reality the room of the play is the attic of Jane Eyre, where she is held captive. She is remembering

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her life, reliving events and talking to (arguing with) Rochester. Although she relates physically to Jean/Ella she is always remembering events from her own life. The cramped conditions of the attic have given her movements an animal, feral quality. She spends much of her time on all fours. (After Mrs Rochester)

Jean, the worse for drink, is in her room in Devon (which is also the attic of Bertha’s reality) where she is being visited by her daughter, whom she has invited, but cannot let in. Bertha stirs in her sleep, muttering, “Mashed up. Broken. No use. No more.” When challenged by her child to explain why she cannot open the door, Jean slips back in her memory to a time when she as a child was standing in the river, navigating the stepping stones. In a line borrowed from Rhys’s short story collection, Sleep It Off Lady, Jean murmurs about “The round unsteady stone. The safe one where you stand and look around. The next one not so safe … not so safe.” The next morning, her daughter tries again, bringing breakfast bought in the village shop because, as Jean says, there is no food in the house. Bertha, roused from sleep, mutters, in allusion to a scene from Good Morning, Midnight, about “passages that never lead anywhere. Doors shut. Been there before.” The daughter is confused by this half-heard other voice. Jean tells Bertha to be quiet. The daughter, frustrated and angry, says she will leave if Jean doesn’t open the door, and when Jean says she can’t, she challenges her to explain. This emotionally charged encounter with her own daughter again propels Jean back in her memory to her childhood, and the play embodies her own repressive and frustrated mother beating her younger self, known then as Ella. From then on Jean and Ella share the stage (Jean never leaves it) and can interrogate each other from time to time, explain the actions of other characters encountered by Ella as she journeys through her life from Dominica to Britain to Europe, and mirror each other’s actions. This essentially theatrical device is another of the imaginative leaps which drama allows, and makes it possible for Jean to be both the protagonist and a commentator on her own life as it unrolls through the action. The mother who constantly chastises her is a crucial factor in Jean’s developing view of the world, and in this early scene Jean attempts to explain to young Ella why she is remembering the beatings. She sets forth her mother’s predicament: “It’s what her parents … my grandparents, your grandparents used to do to her. What they did to the slaves… Because they were afraid. Imagine living thousands of miles from home, on a tiny West Indian

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Island. Imagine twenty thousand people and only one hundred of them white. It was terrifying.” The audience then see Ella as a young girl, playing with a black Dominican friend Tite, who mocks her as being worse off than members of the black population because she no longer has the privilege or wealth of her slave-owning forbears. She taunts her: “I hear you all poor like nigger… You eat salt fish. No money for fresh fish. You got holes in your shoes. I seen them when you take them off to swim.” Ella attempts to defend her status saying, “My grandfather owned Geneva Plantation. He had 258 slaves,” to which Tite retorts, in a passage partially taken from Tia’s remarks in Wide Sargasso Sea, “And 258 children … I hear half the village your mammie’s brother and sister. Real white people got gold money. They don’t come near you. They don’t even look at you. You nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger.” Young Ella’s predicament is set out for the audience in that she has a charismatic black childhood friend who is deft and free spirited in a way she can never be, a mother who is stern and withholding of love and who nevertheless demands perfect manners from her child. There is a developing sense of the dislocations of her life, as scenes quickly unfold one after the other. She has overheard her mother tell her (British) husband, “A woman has to learn to fit in. To do as she’s told. Who will marry her if she doesn’t know how to behave?” To Ella she says, “Who do you think will love you?” Thirteen-year-old Ella replies, “I don’t know” and the question recurs, in her head first, and then with her interrogating the 70-year-­ old Jean, “Who will love me? Who will marry me?” We see her at school, where she reads Jane Eyre for the first time, and with a gentleman visitor who compliments her and molests her while pretending friendship—the first of many males in her life who confuse her and make her feel dependent and resentful and frightened. They also make her self-conscious. To wit, “From that day I would never be alone. I would always be watched. I must always strive to be beautiful… It was my only means of survival.” These memories of her early life in Dominica awaken Jean’s imagination, and the shadowy, incoherent creature at her feet gradually becomes more animated; her memory of reading Jane Eyre makes her imagine what Antoinette/Bertha’s young life in an impoverished West Indian family would have been like. Bertha the doppelganger becomes Bertha in the attic with Mr Rochester. Jean and her young self engage in dialogue, as the older remembers and the younger enacts her life story. We see her discovery of her mother’s grief for an older baby who died, and Ella’s realization that she can never

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be good enough to replace the ache her mother feels for the lost child. She identifies more and more with poor, broken Mrs Rochester in the attic, and, for a while, scenes run concurrently on the stage, of Jane Eyre witnessing Mrs Rochester attacking her husband, and young Ella’s violent resistance to her mother’s next beating of her. We see her sent to a convent on the far side of the island, where she learns to “punish myself for evil thoughts,” and is visited again by the family friend who teaches her that “Love is not about happy ever after. It is about violence. Violence and humiliation.” We see her mother admonish her not to be rude when he visits her at school, to be clean and to wear her best dress. Then we see the momentous decision to send her to finish her education at pre-war school in Cambridge, and her passage across the Sargasso Sea by boat, where she muses on the hidden weeds beneath the surface which “can pull whole ships down—or make you turn in circles and drag you back the way you came.” In quick succession, scenes unfold of her rackety life at Drama school, then as a chorus girl, her naive experiences with men, and her desperate dependence on them being kind, her passage to France and her encounter with Ford Madox Ford when she is in ever more desperate straits, and—at last!—the discovery that her writing is good. Although the action of the play follows the chronology of her life, it does not attempt to be a linear biography. The setting, a dilapidated room full of boxes spilling out the books they contain and a large wardrobe, with a door which has locked out Jean’s daughter, is both her room in Devon as she struggles to conjure the first Mrs Rochester, and a metaphor for the places she has been in her life. The boxes of books become stepping stones in the river where she played as a child; the wardrobe yields costumes as the young Jean becomes a chorus girl, a young kept woman, a destitute wife. It is the power of theatre to conjure an imaginative world that may be truer than a pedestrian reality. Luckily too, the cast of eight assembled by Polly Teale proved to be both versatile and dedicated. Her mother becomes her teacher at RADA and Ford’s wife Stella; her young vivacious friend on the island becomes her closest friend in the chorus; her daughter becomes Jane Eyre; her kindly father becomes the most generous of her lovers; and the threatening male who troubled and formed her as an adolescent becomes both Ford Madox Ford and Mr Rochester. Only the older Jean, her younger self Ella, and the monster Bertha are constants, all of them almost continuously on stage. This device in itself

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yielded so many riches, in terms of amplifying her fear and vulnerability, her attempts at control, and her disinhibited wildness. Our task was to make these three aspects add up to one person. When I spoke to Polly Teale recently, she said she felt that the portrait of Jean grew a lot as we three—the older, younger, and wild incarnations—became more connected through the process of working together in the rehearsal room. In order to illuminate, and not confuse, a many-layered and dreamlike text the whole company of eight actors improvised, moved, talked our way through the rehearsal process, sharing insights with each other, and, ultimately, trusting each other enough to proffer suggestions on how to act better—always a delicate matter of tact and good manners amongst the acting community. We all read most, if not all, of her body of work. I met Francis Wyndham, who had sought Jean out in Devon when most of the world thought she had disappeared for good, if not died; he described Jean to me as a “white witch with immense charisma who could have had any man she wanted.” We know that it took Jean so many years of struggle to let Wide Sargasso Sea be published, having written it first as “Le Revenant” in the late 1930s, lost and partly destroyed in her subsequent wanderings, and only finally and painfully brought to completion through Francis seeking her out in May 1957 when the world had forgotten her earlier novels. She thought she would be able to deliver a draft of her book within a year, but our play tried to set out the circumstances of her life which prevented her from delivering it for another 11 years. On November 17, 1958, she wrote to Francis, “It is a demon of a book—and it never leaves me. I sometimes think it needs a demon to write it… No one will like it probably anyhow. I look at it with horror believe me! And fear too. But I will do it no matter what. For it fascinates me more than anything else I’ve tried to write and it is more elusive.” I also talked to Al Alvarez, who described how, when he interviewed her on the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, she had vamped him, sensuously stroking her hand down the length of her still-elegant legs, and fixing him with a deep and meaningful gaze—it took him a moment or two to understand the significance of this behaviour in a 76-year-old woman towards a relatively young man. Such details were grist to the mill; and the modus operandi of Shared Experience was to allow the audience to see her inner world as well as the external in an essentially theatrical way, showing what the character of Jean is hiding.

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In terms of getting into the character of Jean, it is always difficult to describe the process by which an actor comes to inhabit a documented character; as with all roles, the starting point has to be the text and the clues that one can glean from repeated close reading of the words on the page. Jean Rhys was no different; Polly Teale had given very specific biographical details throughout the play, so one knew about her ambiguous class and her place in the changing society of both Dominica and, later, war-torn and post-war Europe. Because Jean gave a number of interviews, especially at the latter end of her life with the success of Wide Sargasso Sea, I was able to study her posture and, most importantly, her way of speaking—a mixture of a Dominican lilt, “refined” (drama school-elocuted), and a certain Frenchness to the way she pronounced some words. We were lucky to have an excellent voice coach working on the production, who paid close attention; one was initially given word lists with an indication of how to pronounce them, and then drilled on an almost daily basis until it became the only way to speak. This part of the work is purely technical, and requires attentive and regular practice, just as one would if a musician. In some ways, it may be easier to portray a writer than another historical person since an autobiographical writer like Jean Rhys leaves many clues in her fiction, and much of the work one does in preparing as an actor is imaginative and to do with developing the emotional life of the person by following such clues. Thus, familiarity with the narrative is crucial. Onstage, it enables one to take imaginative leaps as one goes through the actions of the play, observing the actions and behaviour of the other characters and, most importantly, allowing oneself to react to them in character. It is always said that acting is 50% re-acting, although of course one needs to have laid the groundwork in terms of research as much as possible, so that the alchemy of responding as Jean could start to happen. I was perhaps fortunate in that I had to spend several weeks in the rehearsal room more or less observing from the side while the story of young Ella Williams becoming Jean Rhys was put on its feet, and I took many clues from the work of Madeleine Potter as the younger Jean: our job was to become the same person, albeit at different stages of her life, and we did a number of mirroring exercises, where the two of us stood facing each other and tried as best we could to reflect exactly what the other was doing. As far as age went, I was a good 10 to 15 years younger than Jean when she had completed work on Wide Sargasso Sea, so, again, one worked with a coach to allow one’s body to become more feeble, more racked by the effects of

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alcohol and a collapsing spine, and yet to keep that strong sense of self which she seems to have retained to the end. One detail: the director had wanted me to keep my own dark hair and to wear black clothes, but I became more and more convinced that I needed to wear a white wig, prettily styled, and that my clothes should be lavender coloured. I am very glad that I was firm about this, as the effect was, for me, transformational. If I think of the play of After Mrs Rochester now at the distance of some 15 years since it was staged, I readily remember many of the ambiguities Jean Rhys battled to reconcile throughout her life. She was a poor white in a community which despises the fall of the former wealthy colonizers; a woman from a respectable background (her father was a doctor) who falls back on escort work when her theatre career doesn’t thrive; a Caribbean who belongs neither there nor in Europe; a writer who while writing like an angel no longer has a book in print; a child who feels abandoned by her mother and who in turn tries to abandon her own child; a person longing for the validation she thinks the love of a man will bring who herself, sooner or later, fights bitterly with all the men she encounters, and who believes, “I’ve always felt best when alone… People have always been shadows to me… I have never known other people.” She was a writer who believes that if she can write it all down, she will no longer be a prisoner of her circumstances, but who can hardly bear to let her work go out into the world; and a woman of sensitivity and intelligence who, when thwarted, becomes a termagent, a monster—like the woman at her feet and the shadowy figure in the attic of Jane Eyre who galvanizes her into her painfully long-drawn-out attempt to rehabilitate the broken, mad creature. It took Jean Rhys 27 years of toil, on and off, to find a way of resolving her own past in the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea. Madeleine Potter, who played the younger Jean/Ella in After Mrs Rochester, described to me her memory of finding peace for the “wild, sensual raging nature” whom she recognizes as her own self, and who, like Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, is damaged and fatally altered by her family inheritance and the agency of a male figure who lifts her out of her familiar world. The above is a catalogue of some of the fine work done in the play to lay out Rhys’s life to an audience unfamiliar with her story. The play was rewarded with enthusiastic reviews and a Best Director accolade in the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. However, there were some notable absences from the play. Some felt that Mr Rochester remained a mysterious cypher, both in the play and in Jean’s account of him in Wide Sargasso

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Sea. Ford Madox Ford and his wife Stella Bowen, both people of real substance in the literary world, are seen only through Jean’s eyes. Obeah, so powerful and mysterious a force on the island of Dominica, is not really much present in the play, nor is the powerful sensuality of Jean’s nature— we see her neediness and dependency on men, but not perhaps her sexiness. As one of the participants, I have found it quite difficult to describe the making of this play: I kept few notes that would make sense to anyone but myself, aside from factual research. My script is covered with jottings about subtextual motives and objectives from moment to moment through the play, but these are not things I could readily share outside the rehearsal process. The work of making a play happens mainly in the rehearsal room: it is a dynamic process based on research (read everything you can), observation of others in the play, familiarity with the story and with your fellow actors, and then it becomes as much about reacting to the actions of the others as it is about conjuring up some acting. Interestingly, Polly Teale has retrained as a therapist who uses drama since the demise of her company Shared Experience. Her last two-day workshop was about “healing the fragmented soul,” and when she spoke to me recently about Jean’s damaged relationship with her mother, her propensity for physical violence, and her sense of dislocation, she described how fascinating she is now finding it to have a new vocabulary to describe the landscape of a mind which in After Mrs Rochester was in fact embedded in the theatricality of the piece. My enduring image of playing Jean is as she describes herself in a late autobiographical fragment in Smile Please: “I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care”—except that our play gives her a moment at the end of the first act where her younger self interrogates Jean: Ella asks, “If you had had the choice between being a writer and being happy, what would you have chosen?” and Jean replies “To be happy, of course. To be happy.” The play was a success, moving from its tour to a six-month West End run at the Duke of York theatre. The Daily Telegraph had this to say about it: “There’s a deeply poignant moment in Polly Teale’s tremendous play about Jean Rhys when the raddled, drunken author is asked whether, given the choice, she would have opted to be a writer or to be happy. Rhys leaves no doubt that she would have plumped for happiness. But as Teale’s daringly

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imaginative, dreamlike drama chillingly suggests, happiness was never a real possibility for Rhys… The production is about as far removed from plodding biodrama as it is possible to imagine, full of theatrical invention, expressive physicality and the acute psychological insights that are the hallmark of Shared Experience at their impressive best … this is a show that is as vivid as it is intensely sad.”

CHAPTER 7

Interview with James Thackara Elaine Savory

James Thackara is a distinguished American novelist who recently returned to New York City after half a century in the UK. He knew Jean Rhys in her last years, when he was starting out as a novelist. His remarkable novels include America’s Children (1984, 2001), Ahab’s Daughter (1988) and The Book of Kings (1999). Born in California and educated in Buenos Aires, Provence, California, Rome, Switzerland and New England, Thackara is, like Rhys, a transnational. When he knew Rhys, he was writing about Europe in the years before and during World War II. He was very much aware of Paris in the era when Rhys knew the city. His literary circles and hers overlapped, despite the difference in their ages. This short interview provides an impression of Rhys in her last, post-Sargasso years by a writer who shares ancestry in a white plantocracy culture and a life of travel, displacement and establishing a home in writing. E.S.: When and where did you know Jean Rhys? J.T.: Between 1976 and 1979  in London. Her benefactor Stephen Spender helped her get an apartment at 31 Sloane Square West.

E. Savory (*) Department of Literary Studies and Environmental Studies, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_7

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E.S.: How would you describe the circle around Rhys when you knew her, and what literary connections of hers were you familiar with? J.T.: I knew Rhys through literary circles around Francis Wyndham, who was with Gothic writers and South Americans. Ford Madox Ford crossed my path, and I also knew figures close to the Hemingway-Joyce Paris circles, as well as the culture of Shakespeare & Co. E.S.: Do you remember what you talked to her about? You have spoken of the “art of memory” and those “oceanic evenings with Jean Rhys.” J.T.: Bernice Rubens, the first female winner of the Booker Prize, presented me to Jean at her little corner apartment, ornately crowded in fin-­ de-­siécle style, with a canary in a cage. Rubens idolized Rhys—she had a six-by-six-foot photograph of her on her study wall. Rhys asked me about myself and talked about Paris. Though I had known Peter Taylor and Robert Lowell well, I felt I was face to face for the first time in my life with a pure writer who lived in language. Even casual conversations with Jean had a musical quality. The first evening we spoke at length about Rhys’s Paris life. Contrary to the suggestion that Ford’s introduction didn’t make her part of the group of writers around him, Jean spoke about Hemingway and his friends, who had no money, and went in large groups to “couscous dives” where Hemingway, contrary to the gathering clouds of caricature—was a kind and sweet-natured young man and, as she remembered him, “the life of the party.” She told these as unaffectedly happy memories, hinting that she might have felt herself an asset in that company. Her opinions were often various—but I’d posit Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of genius as the ability to hold different opinions in the mind simultaneously—a novelist’s talent for arguing human truths through divergent personalities. Of course, by the time I went to Rhys’s London apartment, Madox Ford, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Conrad, Joyce and all the rest of a young Creole writer’s pantheon were long dead. She functioned on another level than the gossip of literary circles, which certainly isolated her. I think Jean was aware that I was poor and unpublished at the time we first met, but she chose not to notice. She identified with me—she had no judgment about her. In her relationship with me she spoke to me as if I were a patient—we suffered from the same sickness—as if we were in neighboring beds in hospital. I sat with her to talk, sharing the embarrassed kindnesses of writers.

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E.S.: How did you think of her—not only as a writer but as a person? J.T.: She was immensely strong. I understood her through the same creative moment we occupied and I appreciated her being free of my overeducation. The woman’s role as she assumed it was like that of a southern belle. Still and gracious on the outside. Slightly grandiloquent. She was a subtle person with a real literary mind—for which you need nuance. She probably lived more in her unconscious than I do. Like Hemingway, she lived in her language to an extraordinary degree. She had an earthy sense, though her writing sensibility was quite different from that. Jean was a very sexual woman even in her eighties. She was incredibly charming and alert. She did not invade space. E.S.: Did she mention anything about her family, or anything personal? J.T.: Like me, she really did not have a country or a family. What I learned as a writer from Faulkner was to move things far away from yourself. Transform memoir into metaphor through something universal, lens-­ like projections from the subconscious. She would have had to discover that for herself. Very early, in response to knowing I was in the middle of writing a European war parable, Jean spoke to me about a daughter vanished in the Belgian resistance. She was quite objective, without self-pity—there, in her apartment—across the street from war veterans, Chelsea Pensioners on Hospital Road. Jean’s fragile, gentle voice was indistinguishable from the Queen’s English. On the second occasion, she asked, tremulously, for Lehar on her record player. Bernice, with her acute historical memory of Lehar as Hitler’s favorite composer, replied, “The only vulgar thing about you, Jean, is your taste in music.” Though Jean could be frank, even savage, on the page, she was never artistically vulgar. E.S.: You have recently reread both Good Morning Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea. Can you relate your first reactions to those of now? J.T.: How extraordinary, even panic-inducing, to take up Good Morning Midnight again, with all of its associative surrealism, the suicide’s hourly dead end, loneliness and fear. It now brings me close again as a man to that rather opaque old huntress. Good Morning, Midnight is like a Hemingway short story extended to 190 pages. The Plath analogies are valid, the quality of women’s rage, but Rhys in life made it to the end—despite her many Hugheses. The ending of the novel has a kind of phantom cruelty, like a Foreign Legion of sexual skirmish. One of the strongest endings in literature, I’d say … although of

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its concluding three words, direct from Molly Bloom, what are we to think? The borrowing of an effect … or homage to a master’s great moment? Reading Wide Sargasso Sea for the second time, some forty-five years on, has been shocking, even a kind of obeah. I purposely did not reread it for decades, perhaps because her world of race hatreds in the Caribbean had seemed too close to the postcolonial race wars in the Sahara in my novel The Book of Kings, which I was writing then. Rhys has this seductive quality in her writing, and so I was surprised she reached out to structure in Wide Sargasso Sea. At that time, the near subliminal woman’s vulnerability passed me by. When I first read it, I understood the tropical, shadowy, erotic invocation of Antoinette’s convent girlhood and the emancipated slaves’ burning of Coulibri. I am now overwhelmed that Jean found the courage to venture back to the poison nightmare, the plantation punishment hidden in paradise. She succeeded in invoking obeah love spells to reveal what was Jean, an English girl only by dream and longing. There is the careless seduction of Amélie by the nameless zombie husband, the bitter cross-racial strychnine embodied in Daniel and the convent subtext. The hints about madness in both Antoinette and her mother are linked through sexual appetite, innate as a longing for God, but endlessly denied by patriarchal colonial law and order. Language was Jean’s nunnery, and through its charm we can just bear to see into the abyss. E.S.: How does Rhys figure in your ideas about fiction? J.T.: Though Jean was not a direct influence, she became my comfort as a fellow mariner, so to speak. Though others will elaborate the literary measure of Jean’s work, her one method I will comment on is the alchemist’s; the writer of parables, the use of characters as humors. Unite these character-humors in a plot’s central metaphor and the ritual comes to life. Her Rochester and Antoinette remind me of Melville’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby Dick. Coetzee falls for the postmodern tropism of borrowed names for characters taken from past works. I consider this a weakness. When I saw Grace Poole’s name in Wide Sargasso Sea, I was troubled as I had been forty years ago. But I think Rhys grafted herself onto Brontëan order to teach the English a postcolonial lesson. I also notice the absence of anyone white visibly toiling at work. White is associated with beauty, dresses, other people’s servility—all of which connects with the antebellum South, which I think about a good deal and shaped some of my own ancestry.

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And as I confront, at the age that Jean was then, my own family’s trauma under the English in old Shanghai, I more fully understand the vastly larger extensions of Faulkner’s South—far beyond García Marquez’s Macondo—the harrowingly lonely place in the Caribbean and English-­ language literature that Jean’s psyche must have occupied. What is neither postcolonial nor European nor even English but somehow at the same time must become all three.

PART II

Framing the Text

CHAPTER 8

Who Writes for the Trees?: Wide Sargasso Sea, the Dominican Forest, and Its Parrots Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

In the 50 years since the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, environmental degradation has become the focus of intense debate in the Caribbean as the region begins to adapt to the impact of climate change. A central aspect of this debate has been the state of the forests throughout the archipelago, as loss of forest coverage exacerbates the islands’ vulnerability to rising sea levels, higher land temperatures, and extinctions of fauna and flora. In Rhys’s fiction—and most particularly in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)—forests emerge as symbols, as central elements in disturbing dreams that reflect the characters’ isolation and feelings of entrapment. Yet these depictions are rooted in Rhys’s knowledge and understanding of the centrality of forests to the ecology and biogeography of her home island of Dominica and could be read ecocritically as foundational elements in Rhys’s environmental awareness and imagination. Drawing on postcolonial ecocritical theory, I examine here Rhys’s brief period of environmental proto-activism from mid-1974 through the summer of 1975 (seen

L. Paravisini-Gebert (*) Department of Hispanic Studies, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_8

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through her correspondence with fellow Dominican writer Phyllis Shand Allfrey) against her memories of the forests of Dominica and the two species of endemic parrots (the Amazona imperialis and Amazona arausiaca) that stood as their symbols, seeking to tease out Rhys’s understanding and identification with forests and forestry in the island of her birth and how this understanding impacted the way forests and their power were represented in her autobiography and fiction, most particularly in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys’s passion for Dominica was deeply rooted in the exceptional range and richness of the island’s primary tropical rainforests, which during her childhood and adolescence covered roughly 80% of the island. This dynamic forest environment, which still boasts from 50 to 60 different species of trees for every ten hectares of land (Charles), houses a remarkable terrestrial biodiversity that includes (in addition to the plethora of insects Rhys loathed), 2 species of endemic parrots and other Dominican birds Rhys mistakenly believed to be endemic, like the siffleur de montagne (Myadestes genibarbis), the diablotin (Pterodroma hasitata) and a variety of hummingbirds that appear in her writings as emblems of the perils of the forest—endangered, extinct, trapped. Her attachment to the forests stemmed from her father’s purchase of Bona Vista, an estate in the mountains northeast of the capital, Roseau— “very beautiful, wild, lonely, remote,” from where “you could see a range of mountains; the highest, Morne Diablotin, then slightly lower Morne Anglais, Morne Collé Anglais, Morne Bruce. … We believed, or I believed, that Diablotin was 8,000 feet high and that it had never been climbed … Round it flew large black birds called Diablotins (devil birds) found nowhere else in the West Indies or the world” (Smile 21–22). The privileged view Rhys describes in Smile Please encompasses the areas included today in Morne Trois Pitons National Park (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and the Northern Forest Preserve, home of the rare Sisserou parrot (Amazona imperialis), and whose main feature is Morne Diablotin. From the telescope installed at Bona Vista, Rhys and her family could watch the seemingly infinite, precipitous mountains dominating the primeval landscape surrounding the estate, the 100-foot gommiers used by the Kalinago (Carib) people to hew seagoing canoes, the abundant karapit trees, the chataigners with their buttresslike roots, and the proliferation of bromeliads, ferns, and orchids sharing the forest with the 176 species of birds recorded on the island—a matchless panorama on which to ground a sense of belonging. In Voyage in the Dark, Anna Morgan recalls a similar

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setting—“the verandah long and ghostly—the hammock and three chairs and a table with the telescope on it—and the crac-cracs going all the time. The moon and the darkness and the sound of the trees, and not far away the forest where nobody had ever been—virgin forest” (Complete Novels 51). Between Bona Vista and her father’s second property near the village of Massacre, where she would go for long walks on her own, Rhys developed a deep attachment to the land: “It’s strange growing up in a very beautiful place and seeing that it is beautiful,” she writes in Smile Please: It was alive, I was sure of it. Behind the bright colours the softness, the hills like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills. I wanted to identify myself with it, to lose myself in it… The earth was like a magnet which pulled me and sometimes I came near it, this identification of annihilation that I longed for. Once, regardless of the ants, I lay down and kissed the earth and thought, “Mine, mine.” (Smile 81–82)

Rhys’s sense of belonging to the land, as we can read in passages like this, was not political, as it eschewed notions of “island insularity and autonomy through the proclamation of micro-national status” (Hayward). Politically, she seemed indifferent to anything beyond the broadest parameters of coloniality and empire, but turned instead to geological features and island biogeography as the defining elements of her island-home. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Dominica (in contrast to the plantation-driven, worldly Jamaica) remains seemingly stranded in time, its people trapped in the social/racial constraints of a plantation system from whose riches it never much benefitted, the land still partly shrouded in the mist of mythical beginnings and endings—the island as primarily deep primeval forest. Hence her trust in the resilience of Dominica’s forests as a reassuring indication of the permanence of her island home. She describes the strangers from whom she must protect her land (mostly tourists incapable of loving the land as she does, but also loggers, exploiters of the land) as enemies certain to be defeated by nature’s power of renewal: “They can’t cut down the silent mountains or scoop up the eternal sea but they can do a lot. The trees and flowers they destroy will grow again and they will be forgotten” (Smile 82). Here, her sense of the island is geological, its core the mountain formations and “eternal” ocean only alterable by massive tectonic shifts, and its vegetation a renewable force whose recovery rests on unalterable natural cycles. Between them is the rich volcanic topsoil, the “land,” from which sprouted this vegetal abundance, teeming with

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frightening insects and arachnids, but home to tall imposing trees and wondrous fauna. This geological fixedness echoes the description quoted in the book that Anna Morgan peruses in Voyage in the Dark: “A goodly island and something highland, but all overgrown with woods … And all crumpled into hills and mountains as you would crumple a piece of paper in your hand—rounded green hills and sharply-cut mountains” (9). Likewise, Rhys’s understanding of ecological processes and animal behavior in the wild—as she deploys it in “The Insect World”—is rooted on the sustaining ability of nature (even in its cruelest or scariest manifestations, given her fear of insects) to recover or adapt after moments of trauma and—most importantly, given her concerns about nature taking over, obliterating, the passage of humans—to proliferate despite human intervention: And the insects. Not only the rats, snakes and poisonous spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millions of termites in the earth-coloured nests from which branched out yards of elaborately built communication lines leading sometimes to a smaller nest, sometimes to an untouched part of the tree on which they were feeding, while sometimes they just petered out, empty. It was no use pocking at a nest with a stick. It seemed vulnerable, but the insects would swarm, whitely horrible, to its defence, and would rebuild it in a night. The only thing was to smoke them out. Burn them alive—oh. And even then some would escape and at once start building somewhere else. (351–352)

The power and persistence of the Dominican forest ecology, its cruelties and violence notwithstanding, as we see in the passage above, are presented here as elements outside of human control, as proof of the resilience of the ecological processes that preserve the forest despite human intervention. Not so with Dominica’s birds, whose very survival depends on the stability and resilience of the forests, but which are at the mercy of those who disregard the sporting prohibitions against shooting sitting birds. In her writings, Rhys filters her concerns with the possible destruction of the Dominican forests through worries about avian extinctions, especially the possible disappearance of the Sisserou and the siffleur de montagne (the mountain whistler). Parrots occasionally appear in her writing—most dramatically in Wide Sargasso Sea, to which I will return—but here I am concerned with Rhys’s awareness of the endangered status of Dominica’s iconic parrot in “On not Shooting Sitting Birds” and Smile

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Please. She was clearly fascinated with the notion of endemicity, of belonging exclusively to a particular place, and it is tempting to read in her many discussions of herself and her belonging to the island an awareness of her own “endemicity” in her relationship to Dominica. She often claimed the endemicity of some of Dominica’s most salient bird species—the Sisserou, the siffleur de montagne and the diablotin, most particularly—as a vital part of the uniqueness of the landscape of her home island (despite her occasional misinformation about which birds held endemic status). The highly endangered Sisserou—a striking purple-and-green parrot featured on Dominica’s flag and its coat of arms, and quite literally a “flagship” species—is an endemic parrot considered to be among the oldest Amazona species in the world. It is also the largest of the Amazona genus, averaging about 19 inches in length. A beautifully stately parrot, its plumage is remarkable for its combination of colors: wing feathers in a dark shade of green with black-edged tips, the chest a dark shade of imperial purple, with orange-red eyes rimmed in dark brown. Long living, they have been known to survive for over 70 years in captivity. Shy and reclusive, Sisserous are found primarily in Dominica’s elfin forests, the zone of stunted windblown trees growing at high altitudes just above the timberline. The “national” narrative that earned the Sisserou its flagship status underscored the stability and survival of the West Indian parrot population before human occupation: “The species had survived the ice age, the colonization of islands by new predators and competitors, natural introduction of disease organisms and a long history of recurrent hurricanes and volcanic eruptions, only to begin disappearing at an alarming rate since human occupation began, a process accelerated by the rapid expansion of the human population following the European colonization of the islands” (Ricklefs 2406). Previous extinction rates were so low, that indeed, like in the case of the Sisserou, “the oldest lineages in the West Indies may represent descendants of the original inhabitants when the islands were first available for colonization” (Ricklefs 2407). In Dominica, home to the only surviving communities of Caribs (the Kalinago people living in their own territory in the island’s northeast coast) the Sisserou’s ancestry forms part of a narrative of indigeneity, of native persistence and endurance, linked to its retaining the vestiges of endangered familial lines. It is part of a narrative, widely repeated throughout the Caribbean, that reminds us constantly that Dominica, with its deep extant rainforests, rare

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species of fauna and flora, its unspoiled beauty, its Kalinago population, its Sisserou, remains the only island Columbus would recognize. The Sisserou’s iconicity—coupled with its endangered status and identification with the Dominican forest—held a clear fascination for Rhys. In the context of my discussion, I am particularly interested in three instances in her writing where she focuses on the Dominican parrots; the Sisserou and the “second” Dominican parrot, Amazona arausiaca (the Jaco, or red-necked parrot), a lovely endemic green parrot with blue feathers on its face and forehead, named after the spot of orange and reddish feathers around its throat—more abundant than the Sisserou yet listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In “On not Shooting Sitting Birds,” Rhys’s narrator tells a “false story” about having been lost in the forest as an island child, a forest where “There are no parrots now … or very few,” adding that “There’s a Dominican parrot in the zoo—have you ever seen it?—a sulky bird, very old I think” (Collected Short Stories 329). (The London Zoo in Regent’s Park did indeed have a specimen of the Amazona imperialis on display at the time Rhys arrived in London from Dominica.) In Smile Please, she describes a visit to the zoo with her aunt, “a special journey” to see the Sisserou: The grey bird was hunched in on himself, the most surly, resentful parrot I had ever seen. I said “Hello” to him but he wouldn’t even look at me. “Of course he is very old,” said my aunt. “Nobody knows how old.” “Poor bird,” I said. (Smile 100)

There is in these two interconnected narratives—fictional and autobiographical alike—an opening into the elements that sustained Rhys’s identification with the island’s biogeography as the embodiment of her place of origin and belonging (the “mine, mine” that speaks to her identification with place): the dream of walking alone in the forest and the nightmare of captivity, the surliness, sulkiness, resentment that overwhelms the spirit of an ancient creature born to fly free over majestic mornes (mountains) and which in Rhys’s narrative has lost its strikingly colored plumage to appear grey and lusterless. Grey, old, and on the verge of extinction, a response that reminds us of Rhys’s uncanny ability, as Stella Bowen described it, of unveiling the “underworld of darkness and disorder” that remains out of our control (Bowen 195–196). As if to underscore this nightmare of captivity and humiliation, Rhys also describes the plight of

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caged hummingbirds kept in most deplorable conditions in the zoo; the sight of captive parrots and hummingbirds, species deeply identifiable with the forests of her island home, left her with “such an impression of hopeless misery that I couldn’t bear to look” (Smile 100). Endangered island birds, this time parrots and the siffleur de montagne, return in another short story, “The Whistling Bird,” where the narrator speaks of a song about a man who kills his sweetheart, buries her in the Dominican forest and is haunted by a whistling bird calling him back to the mountain where she lies. In Voyage in the Dark, Anna recalls the call of the solitaire as “one note, very high -up and sweet and piercing” (Novels 93). In “The Whistling Bird,” characters recall the bird, wondering about its possible extinction: She said, “The whistling bird—you remember. The mountain whistler?” “Of course.” “My mother called it the siffleur de montagne, le solitaire. I expect there aren’t any left now.” “Perhaps a few.” “What about the parrots? Long ago the forest was full of parrots, green and grey. There isn’t one now.” “Parrots,” I said, “are different. There’s money in parrots. Who’d buy a mountain whistler? If it were caught, it would probably die.” (Collected Short Stories 400)

There is in this brief dialogue evidence of a number of ecological anxieties we can discern in Rhys’s writings about Dominican nature—particularly the forests as habitats for birds she feared were headed for extinction. Here, Rhys indicates her understanding of how human predatory behavior and the desirability of the Sisserou in the parrot pet trade had driven down the populations of both the solitaire and the Sisserou in the forests of Dominica. Listed by the IUCN today as endangered given its limited population (250–350 individuals before Hurricane Maria struck a devastating blow to the island in 2017), it is as rare as it is beautiful, and as a result highly coveted by unscrupulous parrot collectors. As a protected species, habitat loss and a low reproductive rate are the major threat to the survival of the species today, but during Rhys’s childhood and adolescence poaching for feathers, food (parrot soup was considered a Dominican delicacy), and the exotic bird trade were already bringing the number of Sisserous in the wild to dangerously low numbers.

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Rhys’s anxieties about the Dominican forests were heightened toward the end of her life, during a brief period of “environmental activism”— albeit from a distance—that followed the resumption of her correspondence with fellow writer Phyllis Shand Allfrey, author of The Orchid House (1954). The two had met in London in the mid-1930s, when Rhys had been living in a small flat in Paultons Square in Chelsea while married to her second husband, Leslie Tilden Smith, and Allfrey, living in Fulham, was just settling into a life of political activism with the Labour Party and into her own writing. They saw each other only occasionally since they moved in very different circles, and Phyllis found Jean to be rather moody, “with outbursts of bad temper” (Frickey 2–3). But Phyllis, a great admirer of Jean’s writing, had been very helpful to her friend during the war, when her marriage to Smith was collapsing and she had lost contact with her daughter Maryvonne, who had been staying with Jewish friends in the Netherlands when the Nazis had invaded. After the war, with Phyllis engrossed in her political work (she left London for Dominica in 1954, just after the publication of The Orchid House, to cofound the Dominican Labour Party) they lost contact. In February 1973, a visit to Dominica from a group interested in filming Wide Sargasso Sea afforded Allfrey the opportunity to contact her old friend after a silence of almost 20 years. “Many times I nearly lifted pen to paper to write you a note of joy [on the success of Wide Sargasso Sea],” Allfrey wrote, “but I believe it was that very success which put me off— was afraid you would think I was one of those acquaintances who just bask” (PSA to JR, 8 February 1973). Rhys replied immediately, “delighted” to have heard from Allfrey again after so many years. Living then in a “pretty cottage” at Cheriton Fitzpaine, where it was “Too quiet!,” she was “[k]eeping her fingers crossed” about the film, pleased that it would be partly shot in Dominica (JR to PSA, 23 March 1973). (A film of Wide Sargasso Sea would not be made until 1993.) Thus, they began an irregular correspondence lasting until Rhys’s death in 1979, which allowed her “to keep fresh in her mind the singular ambiance of Dominican life” (JR to PSA, undated). From mid-1974 through the summer of 1975, their letters focused on Dominica’s threatened rain forests. The passion for Dominica’s natural beauty was one the two friends had always shared; it has figured very prominently as a theme in both The Orchid House and Wide Sargasso Sea. It quickly became a central focus of their correspondence, whose resumption had coincided with a moment of economic crisis during which

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Dominican prime minister Patrick John (1974–1979) began exploring agreements with British timber firms for the exploitation of the island’s unique reserves of precious woods. Alarmed into immediate action, Allfrey, publisher and editor of a weekly newspaper, The Star, joined a small group of local environmentalists in founding the Dominica Conservation Society, an organization whose immediate goal was that of creating a Dominica National Park to protect the forests from commercial exploitation. Allfrey’s credentials as a conservationist were of long-­ standing: the 1955 Constitution of the (then ruling) Dominica Labour Party—of which she was cofounder—had included a clause pledging the party to work toward the preservation of “the natural beauty of Dominica.” In response to the government’s logging plan, Allfrey and her husband Robert Allfrey coauthored a manifesto for conservation on behalf of the Society. In The Threatened Forest, they argued vigorously for the conservation of what they saw as the pristine conditions of Dominica’s rainforests and for the protection of the abundant wildlife within them, while anticipating eco-tourism as a viable economic option. They wrote thus: Dominica is in itself one vast national park—a jewel in nature’s own crown from which gems of huge forests cannot be wrenched without spoiling the whole emerald tiara … The people require jobs, and the Government has given them cause to believe that among other dreams the timber industry will be revived and the great felled giants of the Dominica forest will be sawn up and processed for export, thus providing work for a few, but at what a price. Dominica could be, with the founding of the national park, and the overall protection of the island’s beauty, a sort of mecca for natural beauty-­ lovers who can afford to travel and who want to tread little or untrod paths and explore the glories of “elfin woodland,” the tremendous rain forest, multi-colored hot springs and mysterious lakes, including a boiling one. Let nothing disturb the whole ecology of such a marvelous small land, or Dominica’s national park, flanked by acres of stripped hillsides, will within less than twenty years be only a “scientific memento.” (Allfrey Papers)

The document, which Allfrey sent to Rhys, reverberated deeply against the latter’s deep identification with Dominica’s forests, transferring Allfrey’s sense of urgency to Rhys while offering us a glimpse into her understanding of the forests both to her vision of her island and to her very concept of islandness. Rhys’s letters about the proposed deforestation unveil a mounting apprehension about the destruction of a natural beauty whose memory had sustained her idea of home through the decades of

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absence and had played a vital role in the reengagement with writing that led to the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea. In 1959, she had written to Francis Wyndham to explain how she could only write “for love,” and there were only two places the thought of which “make(s) me want to write”: “Paris (or what it was to me), and Dominica (a most lovely and melancholy place where I was born” (Letters 171). After writing After Leaving Mr McKenzie, she added, “the West Indies started knocking at my heart. So ‘Voyage in the Dark’. That (the knocking) has never stopped” (Letters 171). Allfrey, asked once if Dominica “still resembled the enchanted place that Jean Rhys knew as a child,” would attest to the lasting power of the landscape that had spurred her friend’s creativity: “The hills, blue and green, are still so incomparably beautiful. If you had been able to see this morning’s dawn, it was a marvelous morning and still is a gorgeous day, you’d have thought you understood Jean for her obsession” (“Jean Rhys: I’ll Have to Go on Living”). Throughout 1974 and 1975, with the forests at serious risk, Rhys fluctuated between zeal and despondency, fearing that what was “happening in the smaller West Indian islands [is] a great pity … and the fact that no one protests or cares is just as bad” (JR to PSA, 10 July 1975). She feared they were “up against complete indifference” (JR to PSA, 4 August 1975). Keen nonetheless to find avenues to bring attention to what she understood as an impending disaster, and displaying an uncharacteristic degree of political drive, she sought help from a friend, Francis Wyndham, then a young writer for the Times, to help her find a publishing venue in the London press for an essay by Robert Allfrey on the threat to the forest. “Do try & write an article that will stress the other side of West Indian politics. Tell your stories,” she wrote, keeping a steady pressure on Phyllis “to write what is really going on for it needs saying badly” (JR to PSA 25 October 1975). This would be by far the most intense period of correspondence between the two friends, with Rhys’s letters arriving every 10 to 14 days during the summer of 1975, as compared with the more characteristic rate of a letter every six to eight weeks. But ultimately the friends would find relief in the government’s abandonment of the logging proposal, having ascertained that the plan faced substantial public opposition at the time when the government was facing other serious challenges. They could bask in having done their best in fostering that opposition: in 1975, when John had traveled to London to discuss the logging accords, Allfrey, as president of the Dominica Conservation Society, had sent a cable to the Foreign Office in advance of his arrival—THE PEOPLE OF

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DOMINICA PROTEST THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST— leaving an infuriated prime minister to face embarrassing questions. Rhys, by nature and experience apolitical, seemed drawn during this period to political conditions in the West Indies and to the environmental crossroads that pitted employment and exploitation of natural resources against the island’s fragile ecology—a prospect facing most newly independent Caribbean nations as they searched for new foundations for their economies. For Dominica, the Caribbean’s “nature island,” the threat was particularly poignant as the Dominica Rhys knew—the landscape that featured so prominently in the Dominica sections of Wide Sargasso Sea, where she “tried to put in some of my love of the place where I was born” (Letters 172)—was considered the most unspoiled of all Caribbean islands. She was, nonetheless, keenly aware of the ever-present threat to the continued health of the forests. In her return voyage to Dominica in 1936, in search of the heartbreaking beauty of her childhood, Rhys already faced the consequences of environmental mismanagement, which she conveyed through a brief anecdote about pollution of the streams in Smile Please. She had attempted to sip water from the river, being “very thirsty and perhaps ha[ving] some vague, superstitious idea that if I drank the water I’d come back” (Smile 38). On being told by the guide not to drink the water, that it was “very dirty now” and she’d be ill, she records her encounter with purported pollution as disillusionment: “How many times had I drunk from that river when I was thirsty? There are supposed to be three hundred and sixty-five rivers in the island. One for every day of the year, Were they all dirty? … No, it wasn’t as I remembered it” (Smile 38). The forests and trees of Dominica on whose behalf Rhys and Allfrey were so willing to battle had featured prominently in Wide Sargasso Sea and The Orchid House, and their representations—closely linked as they are to Dominica’s forest ecology—offers perhaps the closest textual links between the two novels—and the two friends. For anyone familiar with the density, wondrous strangeness, and eerie cacophony of the Dominican forests, Rhys’s representations of these environments as haunting spaces, as landscapes of otherness, seems less otherworldly and more like a magnified reflection of the foreigner’s reaction to an encounter with spaces that seem uncanny in their overpowering difference. The art is that of turning what is most essentially a realistic, accurate depiction of the forest into a space of threatening “islandness” that speaks for the internal turmoil of the characters. It also speaks to issues of coloniality that go back to the initial point of encounter between indigenous communities living

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sustainably on the islands of the Caribbean and Europeans bent on transforming that landscape into a producer of capital. The transition in the novel between Jamaica’s plantation economy, with its despoiled landscapes, and the virginal forests of Dominica—reminders of the pre-­ Columbian landscapes of the islands of the Caribbean—can only underscore that connection. In “Environmental Identity: A Conceptual and Operational Definition,” Susan Clayton proposes that one part of the way in which people form their self-concept is through “a sense of connection to some part of the nonhuman natural environment, based on history, emotional attachment, and/or similarity, that affects the ways in which we perceive and act toward the world; a belief that the environment is important to us and an important part of who we are” (45–46). For people to forge an environmental identity, “the natural environment must influence the way in which people think about themselves” (49). Rhys’s environmental identity, so profound as to replace her allegiance to nation or citizenship, brings her close to the Greek roots of the concept of endemicity—among one’s people, at home, native. In texts like Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark and through many of the Creole narrators of her short stories, she infuses her characters with the same level of endemicity or indigeneity that marks her own environmental identity, and which is expressed most eloquently through their relationship to the forest and its trees. Antoinette’s delight in trees, for example, signals the character’s identification with Dominica as the natural domain of the indigenous and the Creole. Trees are central to a lovely sad song Christophine sings about cedar tree flowers which only last for a day and to the days Antoinette spends with Tia by the bathing pool before their relationship is strained, when Antoinette would “lay in the shade looking at the pool—deep and dark green under the trees, brown-green if it had rained, but a bright sparkling green in the sun” (469). They root Antoinette to the landscape, signaling the potential consequences of the uprooting that will result from Rochester’s ultimate betrayal. In what may be her last moment of happiness in the text, Antoinette lies down in Christophine’s cottage looking at a “sky that was dark blue through the dark green mango leaves, and I thought, ‘This is my place and this is where I belong and this is where I wish to stay.’ Then I thought, ‘What a beautiful tree, but it is too high up here for mangoes and it may never bear fruit,’ and I thought of lying alone in my bed with the soft silk cotton mattress and fine sheets, listening” (108).

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In passages like these, Antoinette echoes Allfrey’s Stella, whose contact with the selanginellas and rare begonias dancing between the tree ferns when she returns to Dominica after living in the United States is an affirmation of her Dominican roots: “I came back for this, Stella murmurs, savouring paradise, feeling for a few minutes divinely happy, craving nothing more” (68). Allfrey, like Rhys, roots her own environmental identity on Dominica’s forests (her grandfather’s estate in St. Aroment would play a similar role in Allfrey’s connection to Dominica’s environment that Bona Vista plays for Rhys), an identity she’ll share with her own characters in The Orchid House. Stella, one of three sisters returning to the island after living abroad, will put her arms around the trunk of a flamboyant tree, enjoying what she describes as its “marvelous roughness,” recalling the deep sadness she would feel at the smoothness of everything surrounding her in New  York City (44). Stella, like Antoinette, will respond to the landscape—the forest and the trees—as extensions of her sense of belonging to a place whose most salient characteristic is the magnificent power of nature represented by its tropical rainforests. Stella penetrates the forests about which she had dreamt in her absence as “a vision so exquisite that she was now almost afraid to open her eyes” without trepidation or fear, anticipating an immersion into happiness: “It is more beautiful than a dream,” she muses, “for in dreams you cannot smell this divine spiciness, you can’t stand in a mist of aromatic warmth and stare through jungle twigs to a spread of a distant town, so distant that people seem to have no significance; you cannot drown your eyes in a cobalt sea, as sea with the blinding gold of the sun for a boundary!” (51). Her approach to the forests and trees of Dominica will echo her memories of an immersion in nature she associated with surprise and wonder. In The Orchid House, Stella’s embrace of the trees is an affirmation that Dominica’s trees, unlike those of her farm in New York, are not for cutting down. They exist in a realm outside of capitalist exploitation and therefore need to be protected from those bent on destroying the forest for profit: “The hired men hauled out four-foot lengths and sawed it with an old machine built out of a Model T engine,” piling it outdoors for the season. She warns Lally that “it is a mistake to live in a country where chimneys are necessary. Death to chimneys, is my motto” (45). For Rhys, as she once wrote to Diana Athill, part of the struggle of completing Wide Sargasso Sea had to do with conveying how Rochester could be “magicked by the place which is (or was) a lovely, lost and magic place but, if you understand, a violent place. (Perhaps there is violence in

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all magic and all beauty—but there—very strong)” (Letters 269). The Dominica of Rhys’s memory was a place of almost other-worldly beauty, but also a place haunted by fearful creatures, some real (as in the insects she loathed) and obeah practitioners, some products of the local folklore, zombies, loups-garoux, and blood-sucking soucriants. Dominica’s exuberant nature, presented so vividly and movingly in Wide Sargasso Sea, teems with insects: beetles, butterflies, labelles, roaches, and waterbugs seem to multiply at will. I recall spending the first few days of my first visit to Dominica leaping away from the disconcertingly diverse insects, birds, bats, rats, and lizards emerging out of the forest at every turn—some familiar from my childhood in the Puerto Rican countryside, others startlingly strange. For Rhys, they represented one of the chief reasons for not returning to Dominica, as she was constantly urged to do by Allfrey. “I’m sure you can guess that I would love to come back to Dominica, and think of it constantly,” she wrote in reply to one of Allfrey’s frequent entreaties. “You are quite right: I ought to die where I was born.” But, she did not quite see how it could be managed. She was still “a bit shakey” after a fall, and “don’t laugh—I am afraid of cockroaches and other insects. I know this will sound ridiculous but it dates from long ago. However nice people were, I couldn’t expect a bodyguard to kill every cockroach, could I? But I still think of it, and try to plan some way of doing more than thinking” (JR to PSA, n.d.). In writing Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea, she claims she had “no facts at all. Or rather I had one—the place. Again a real place…. “the place my father bought” was “way up—mountains, forest—oh incredibly beautiful but wild—I do not like writing about places much. Still—a great effort and I could be back there, remember—be there” (Letters 277). Her Dominica, seen through her eyes as a mosaic of impressions of light and shadow, filtered through the senses, could be both melancholic, wondrous nature and nightmarish, lurking menace. In the Dominica sections of Wide Sargasso Sea, the melancholic, wondrous delight in nature will belong to Antoinette—who shares with her creator an identity anchored weakly in society, but strongly in a nonhuman forest and animal presence—while Rhys conjured the nightmarish, lurking menace as the means to textually “magic” Rochester, whose own identity is so keenly anchored in British society and its rules. Antoinette, by contrast, is characterized as unable to fully grasp the political and economic forces that would ultimately seal her fate, deeply connected as they were to the specificities of colonial laws and mores; she appears instead to accept the tensions and hierarchies of her

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island society as bigoted but unmovable essences. Lacking a social, political, or economic standpoint through which she could make sense of her world, it loomed before her as arbitrary and senseless, translated instead through a powerful natural world—that of the tropical forests of her home island—that although at times terrifying was the object of her awe and love. The question for the characterization of Rochester, then, was how to “magic” him into an understanding of how deeply Antoinette’s environmental identity was bound to the forests and to invite him to share that identification. The test the forests present is whether he is capable of seeing them through her eyes, of connecting to the awe she feels before the forests. Of course, the preordained answer to this—given the novel’s pretext in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—is no. Hence Rhys’s textual task to force a confrontation between Rochester and Antoinette’s beloved forests that would reveal his incapacity for the kind of awe that Alfred Russel Wallace described when first stepping into the equatorial forests: “When, for the first time, the traveller wanders in these primeval forests, he can scarcely fail to experience sensations of awe. There is a vastness, a solemnity, a gloom, a sense of solitude and of human insignificance which for a time overwhelm him” (62). In “Approaching Awe, A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt locate awe—an experience that “can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways”—“in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear” (297). An individual experiencing the power of Dominica’s primeval forests—as both Rhys and Allfrey illustrate in their novels—would share the “overpowering and novel sensory experience that causes confusion and amazement” of those whose environmental identity is bound to the forests: “When the confusion lifts, the person is transformed and embraces new values, commands, and missions” (Keltner and Haidt 299). Rhys’s Rochester, however, is a character not open to awe, incapable of experiencing the “upper reaches of pleasure” in contact with the forest, he never transcends the “confusion and amazement” that open the way to epiphany, he is fated to remain “on the boundary of fear”: “I began to walk very quickly, then stopped because the light was different. A green light. I had reached the forest and you cannot mistake the forest. It is hostile. The path was overgrown but it was possible to follow it. I went on without looking at the tall trees on either side. Once I stepped over a fallen log swarming with white ants… I stood still, so sure I was being watched that I looked over my shoulder. Nothing but the trees and the green light under the trees”

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(520). For Rochester, lost among “the enemy trees,” the forest’s power— hostile, overgrown, with tall, ever-present trees—rests more on its ability to obliterate architecture and civilization—the very elements he’s been raised to value most as the well-educated second son of the British quasi-­ aristocratic upper class. His concern is primarily with the ruins of formerly prosperous states that remind him of the forest’s ability to obliterate the built past, a concern central to his terrifying experience when lost in the forest and which remind us of Rhys’s frustrating search for the Imperial Road the forest had swallowed in her absence: A track was just visible and I went on, glancing from side to side and sometimes quickly behind me. This was why I stubbed my foot on a stone and nearly fell. The stone I had tripped on was not a boulder but part of a paved road. There had been a paved road through this forest. The track led to a large clear space. Here were the ruins of a stone house and round the ruins rose trees that had grown to an incredible height. (520)

Textually, the episode in the forest allows Rhys to explore his otherness—to mark him as a nonendemic, and most specifically, as one not open to the allure of the forest, one who will never belong. In her reading of Wide Sargasso Sea, Carol Margaret Davison reads Rochester as responding to “his wife’s vulnerability with domination but comes to the realization that he may never dominate the island. Like the nation that will remain haunted, … by a sense of its transitory social reality, Granbois taunts and haunts Rochester with the fact that his power is ephemeral and relative” (150). And thus, I return to the parrots. In Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Ursula Heise writes about works that focus on the possible extinction of an individual species or taxon as deploying “the genre conventions of elegy and tragedy in such a way that the endangerment of a particular species comes to function as a synecdoche for a broader environmentalist idea of nature’s decline as well as for the stories that communities and societies tell about their own modernization. … [N]arrating the endangerment of a culturally significant species becomes a vehicle for expressing unease with modernization processes or for an explicit critique of modernity and the changes it has brought about in humans’ relation to nature” (60–61). That Rhys was concerned with the potential extinction of the birds of the Dominican forest is easy to ascertain from her writings, as was her understanding of the iconic status

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and endemicity of the island’s parrots, which emerge from her work as symbols of the threatened forests. The anxiety pulsating through her texts when she writes about the island’s birds is that of the island’s endemic bird species—the parrots, most especially—not surviving the persistent capitalist push to make the land economically productive in the name of modernization. Graham Huggan, writing about parrots and mimicry in Derek Walcott and Jean Rhys, describes the latter’s use of a parrot—Coco, Antoinette’s mother’s pet, burned alive in the fire that destroys Coulibri—as a bird of ill omen through which Rhys establishes a grotesque parallel with Bertha Mason’s death on Jane Eyre. The parrot’s death is not a harbinger of good things to come: “Certainly it is not for the arsonists in Rhys’s novel, whose inadvertent killing of the parrot signals bad luck; nor is it for Rhys herself, whose prefiguration of the death of her protagonist Bertha (nee Antoinette) appears to herald a different kind of fate—that of a novel which sets out to rewrite a canonical British text only to find itself precipitated back into the very conditions that govern its precursor” (Huggan 651). But it is through the parrot that Rhys will find a path out of the quandary posed by her complex dialogue with Jane Eyre. Coco returns to the text in its final pages, when Antoinette dreams Bertha Mason’s death in Jane Eyre interspersed with earlier moments in Wide Sargasso Sea when Antoinette spent time with Tia at the Coulibri pool. It is during this dream that she hears the resurrected parrot’s call—“Qui est là? Qui est là?”—blending with the voice of “the man who hated me” calling Bertha’s name. And it is at that moment that the thought of flying enters the text, when the “wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings”—parrot wings?—“It might bear me up, if I jumped to those hard stones,” and then she sees the pool and “Tia was there” (574). Huggan, in his essay on parrots in Wide Sargasso Sea, concludes that “Rhys’s novel maintains a consistent tension between the obligation to reproduce its precursor text and the will to disobey it,” arguing that “the dialectic remains unresolved” (657). The parrots, and the forests for which they stand, however, offer an interpretative path out of the novel’s dialectic; Coco resurrected, the forests having expelled a potential foe bent on imperial exploitation, they have the power to “dismantle the master’s house” while rejecting the master’s tools (Lorde 110). Rochester wills the hurricane months to come and rip the trees from their roots, and yet, ultimately, the “black snake-like forest” will force him out while “the shabby white house” seems to cry as he goes: “Louder and louder it called:

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Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from a long slow death by ants. But what are you doing here you folly? So near the forest. Don’t you know that this is a dangerous place? And that the forest always wins?” (561). The forest—as Rhys knew from childhood experiences of estates and roads “swallowed up” back into the wild—has indeed taken the honeymoon cottage into its fold. In 2009, accompanied by friends eager to find the spaces that had inspired Wide Sargasso Sea and guided by Lennox Honychurch’s instructions, we set out to find the cottage. The initial climb is still as Anna Morgan describes it in Voyage in the Dark: “Everything is green, everywhere things are growing. There is never one moment of stillness—always something buzzing. And then dark cliffs and ravines and the smell of rotten leaves and damp. That’s how the road to Constance is—green, and the smell of green, and then the same smell of water and the dark earth and rotting leaves and damp … When you see the sea again it’s far below you” (93). Then, with the help of a squatter farmer tending his plot of dasheen (taro) and tannia (malanga), we veered off the main path into the deeper forest. The path to Amelia, where the cottage was originally located, had, according to our helpful farmer, “bushed up.” “Bushed up” it had indeed. We scrambled over fallen logs, slipped on wet leaves that covered pools of mud, got painfully bitten by oversized Dominican ants, but we finally reached the clearing in the dense forest where the ajoupa was once located. The site is remote and wildly overgrown. An evocative stone grotto appears once to have been used for cooking. A brook runs past what once could have been a kitchen. A steep but not deep ravine leads to the river. Just a few meters away there is a lovely waterfall. Amid the masses of wildflower, one of us had a rare encounter with one of Dominica’s most distinctive forms of wildlife— a tet shyen boa, a constrictor that grows to approximately 12-feet long. It took no notice of us. The charming space was alive with a variety of birds, including a few dozen hummingbirds. (Paravisini-Gebert)

Rhys’s brief period of environmental activism coincided with a pivotal moment for Dominica’s forest conservation. Her efforts in support of the goals of the Dominican Conservation Society in their opposition to Patrick John’s logging venture—modest as they were—came at a moment when local political movements, looking toward independence, had begun to establish links between nationhood and the survival of parrot species chosen as national symbols and to conscious efforts to expand the birds’

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habitat through the reduction of deforestation and the protection of mature forests—efforts “increasingly strengthened by the recognition of the aesthetic, cultural and scientific values of the unique flora and fauna of the West Indies” [Ricklefs 24]. Parrot conservation has become increasingly central to sustainable ecotourism programs in islands like Dominica (where the Syndicate Parrot Preserve in Morne Diablotin offers an opportunity to see small flocks of the highly endangered Sisserou in flight) or the St. Vincent Parrot breeding program at the Kingston Botanical Garden, where knowledgeable guides share the compelling story of their endangered national bird, the Amazona guildingii. They give evidence of the development, throughout the Caribbean region, of a consideration of “endemic parrot populations and their habitats as very important, unique assets” (Colmore et al. 392) and help explain the extraordinary measures some of the island governments and NGOs have supported for their conservation. These efforts are deeply rooted in the power of narrative, in the ability to create compelling stories that touch people “at profound levels and evoke or instill the values, feelings and meanings that result in behavior respectful of the parrots and their habitats” (Johns 1235). In Dominica, the image of the Sisserou is now a ubiquitous one throughout the island— present in everything from tourist brochures and websites to t-shirts and kitchen magnets—reminding everyone daily of the interconnectedness between citizenship, the protection of the island’s forests, and the survival of the parrots that inspired Antoinette to fly.

Works Cited Allfrey, Phyllis Shand. The Orchid House. Ed. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Bowen, Stella. Drawn from Life: A Memoir. Sidney: Picador, 1999. Charles, Ronald. “Forestry! In Our Face; All the Time!” Government of Dominica Web Portal. Undated. Clayton, Susan. “Environmental Identity: A Conceptual and an Operational Definition.” In Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature. Eds. Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003, 45–66. Christian, Colmore S., Thomas D.  Potts, G.  Wesley Burnett and Thomas E. Larcher Jr. “Parrot Conservation and Ecotourism in the Windward Islands.” Journal of Biogeography 23:3 (May 1996): 387–393. Davison, Carol Margaret. “Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House: Revolution and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic.” In

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Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. New York: Palgrave, 2003, 136–154. Frickey, Pierrette. The Dominican Landscape: In Memory of Jean Rhys.” Jean Rhys Review 3:1 (Fall 1988): 2–10. Hayward, Philip. “Towards an Expanded Concept of Island Studies.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 10: 1(2016): 1–7. Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Huggan, Graham. “A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys, and the Uses of Colonial Mimicry.” Contemporary Literature 35:4 (Winter 1994): 643–660. “Jean Rhys: I’ll Have to Go on Living.” Recorded on April 15, 1981 or Radio Three, British Broadcasting Corporation. Johns, David M. “Growth, Conservation, and the Necessity of New Alliances.” Conservation Biology 17:5 (October 2003): 1229–1237. Keltner, Dacher and Jonathan Haidt. “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion.” Cognition and Emotion 17:2 (2003): 297–314. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007, 110–114. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Searching for the Honeymoon Cottage.” Repeating Islands, 13 March 2009. https://repeatingislands.com/2009/03/13/ is-110-searching-for-the-honeymoon-cottage/ Rhys, Jean. The Collected Short Stories. Introduction by Diana Athill. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987. Rhys, Jean. The Complete Novels. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985. Rhys, Jean. Letters (1931–1966). Ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. London: Andre Deutsch, Ricklefs, Robert, and Eldredge Bermingham. “The West Indies as a Laboratory of Biogeography and Evolution. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences. 363:1502 (July 2008): 2393–2413. Wallace, Alfred Russel. “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology: Classic Papers with Commentaries. Ed. Robin L. Chazdon and T. C. Whitmore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 52–62.

CHAPTER 9

Jean Rhys Getting the “Feel” of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea Sue Thomas

Wide Sargasso Sea is the first of Rhys’s novels not to be set in a historical period through which she lived. For her, this raised questions of “facts” (Letters 176) and, in Part Two, imagination (277) around getting the “feel” of the West Indies and character in the 1830s and 1840s (144). Rhys tells Selma Vaz Dias in 1957, “I don’t believe anybody has the ‘feel’ of the West Indies as they were in the 17th 18th and part of 19th century at all. Should say perhaps the 18th, 19th and part of twentieth” (144). She insists that her narrative has to be “convincing”, “plausible” (158, 159). In Smile Please, Rhys remembers growing up in Dominica “ador[ing]” her great-aunt Jane Woodcock “more than anyone else in the world.” After a family rift and Rhys’s expatriation, she “gradually forgot her” and eventually “heard of her death with scarcely a pang” (21). Rhys returns to her memories of her great-aunt in the late 1930s and the late 1950s, periods in which she was “getting down all” she “remembered about the West

S. Thomas (*) Department of Creative Arts and English, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_9

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Indies as the West Indies used to be. (Also all I was told, which is more important). I called this ‘Creole’ but it had no shape or plan” (Letters 153). From the 1930s onward, she repeatedly insists that the West Indies of her childhood had “vanished … never was anything more vanished and forgotten.”1 Recalling in Smile Please a 1936 visit to Geneva, the Lockhart family estate, Rhys writes, “But there was nothing, nothing. Nothing to look at. Nothing to say. Even the mounting stone had gone” (21). The draft materials Rhys collectively names “Creole” are a project of salvage. Rhys’s memories of her great-aunt Jane’s oral stories (and songs) are, she suggests in a 1959 letter, helping her develop and hone a more precise sense of place, situation, and history, located in the subjective points of view of characters. Great-aunt Jane’s creative art and practice—quilting— also comes to provide Rhys with a metaphor for thinking about the crafting of Wide Sargasso Sea. Jane Woodcock was from St Kitts, the history of which, like Dominica’s, is marked by imperial control having shifted among European powers. Both islands were claimed as French colonial possessions as recently as various times in the eighteenth century. In Smile Please, Rhys draws out one cultural trace of this history in noting that Great-aunt Jane “talked about ‘beaux’ and ‘belles’ instead of ladies and gentlemen” (20). In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys is attentive to the legacies of regional movement and migration of people between and among islands and of what Laura Doyle in a series of essays has termed “inter-­imperiality,” the complexity and imbrication of multiple imperial histories at particular geopolitical sites. I tease out fresh genealogies of story in Rhys’s meticulous crafting of the “feel” of her novel by attending to her memory of her great-aunt Jane Woodcock and her stitching of musical allusion into the design of her narrative. Among the Jean Rhys Papers at the University of Tulsa, there are two stories set in the turn of the twentieth century West Indies, seemingly dating from the late 1930s, that feature a great-aunt modelled in part on Jane Woodcock: “The Cardboard Dolls’-House” and “MY GREAT-AUNT JEANNETTE LIVED IN her room.”2 Like the Jane Woodcock of Smile Please, the great-aunt in each story is a quilter who has made the young protagonist a cardboard doll’s house. Great-aunt Jeannette “stitched always at a patchwork,” with “dazzling… colours,” “every mingling of colours,” which mirrored the tropical landscape.3 In “The Cardboard Dolls’-House,” Great-aunt Jane’s capacity to capture the vibrancy and subtlety of the landscape in her patchwork and her West Indian accent are signs of her belonging in the Caribbean. Rhys represents Woodcock in

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Smile Please as old-fashioned, backward-looking in her tastes: wearing a “lace cap” and “her short white hair in ringlets as they used to do when she was young” (20), singing “old songs her mother had taught her but I’ve forgotten those songs” (21). A Lady of Shalott figure, great-aunt Jane is more comfortable in “her room” (her “castle”) and with “her patchwork. The lovely colours she used!” (19)

The “Feel” of the West Indies In a 1959 letter to her daughter Maryvonne Moerman, Rhys acknowledges Jane Woodcock as a source for the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea: “All the facts in this book are stories she told me of her youth. When I’m awfully fed up and weary I think of her—and start damned book again.” “Now she is my favourite thought except you and Ruthie [her granddaughter]. She is very vivid for me. I can remember her dresses and caps” (Letters 176). Rhys also has to negotiate the secrets in family memory of plantation slavery and its aftermath, secrets around family debt, her great-­ grandfather James Potter Lockhart’s will, slave compensation having to be paid to his creditors and the ways this history played out in La Guerre Nègre (see Thomas, “Ghostly”). Angier posits that Woodcock was the model for Aunt Cora in Wide Sargasso Sea (16), significantly narrowing her influence on Rhys’s writing of the novel. In a letter to Selma Vaz Dias in January 1959, Rhys writes, “There’s a lot of cutting, joining up—all that patchwork—and one major difficulty to be solved” (129). She explains her progress on the novel to Moerman in May 1959, “About my book. It is done in the way that patchwork would be done if you had all the colours and all the pieces cut but not yet arranged to make a quilt” (162). Rhys reiterates to Vaz Dias in 1963, “this book is complicated and a bit like a patchwork” (237). Rhys meticulously unpicks, cuts and repurposes fabric from not just Jane Eyre, great-aunt Jane’s stories and her own memories of place; she works into her designs and redesigns allusions to William Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth, Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly and Heart of Darkness, Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Revenant,” the British colonial romance (“the white slave-owner who rejects his white wife in favour of his brown-skinned house slave”) and popular songs.4 In “Songs My Mother Never Taught Me,” a draft vignette for Smile Please, Rhys writes of the ways in which her historical memory and feel for a period and place were shaped by popular contemporary songs which

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became earworms. The title of the vignette, which alludes, like “old songs her mother had taught her,” to Antonin Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” pointedly suggests Rhys’s sense of the greater worldliness, modernity and unsentimentality of her own experience by comparison with her great-aunt’s. The lyrics of “Songs My Mother Taught Me” are sentimental: Songs my mother taught me, in the days long vanished; Seldom from her eyelids were the teardrops banished. Now I teach my children each melodious measure. Oft the tears are flowing, oft they flow from my memory’s treasure.

Three of the songs Aunt Cora sings in Wide Sargasso Sea—the Jacobite standard “Charlie over the water,” “Cheer Up, Sam! or Sarah Bell,” and “Tapping at the Garden Gate” (89, 28)—are songs identified as part of a great-aunt Jane’s repertoire in “The Cardboard Dolls’-House.” The fineness of Rhys’s design and stitching of musical allusion in Wide Sargasso Sea is illustrated by Antoinette’s memories of Aunt Cora singing “Tapping at the Garden Gate” and “Cheer Up, Sam!” and Antoinette”s song, “Adieu foulard, adieu madras,” which the Rochester figure remembers as being among the songs she tried to “teach” him, “for they haunted” him (54). The first-person voice of “Tapping at the Garden Gate” addresses a girl—a “sly puss,” “sly little fox.” Policing illicit female sexuality and animalizing it, the voice causes the girl to “blush and falter” by hinting that she knows that it is the girl’s secret courter who “tap[s]” “at the garden gate” “[e]very night about half-past eight” (“Tapping”). Antoinette tells Aunt Cora that she does not “like that one”5 and asks instead for “Before I was set free” (“Cheer Up, Sam!”), but falls asleep before her aunt reaches the sexually suggestive innuendo of the refrain (Rhys, WSS 28). “Cheer Up, Sam!” is a US jig, a minstrelsy favourite.6 Its second line, “Before I was set free,” was, Rhys tells Wyndham in September 1962, her working title for Wide Sargasso Sea, “whatever its other name may be” (Letters 215). The verses of the song are in the first-person voice of a black fieldworker in Alabama, stereotypically named Sam; the refrain offers choric comment on his situation. Sam has been abandoned by his “deceitful,” “perjured” love Sarah Bell, a “yellow girl,” who “fled” their relationship to live with a “white man … with dollars.” He sings:

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I had not much to give her Yet all I had I gave; But wealth and fortune don’t belong To one that’s born a slave.

The chorus urges him to “Cheer up … don’t let your spirits go down,” reminding him punningly of the availability of prostitutes—“many a belle,/That we know well,” “looking for” him “in the town.” The lyrics of the chorus sexualize and cheapen Sam’s desire for love. Sam’s “poor heart is breaking”; he “sigh[s] and wish[es]” he “never had been born” (“Cheer Up, Sam!”). Like other minstrel songs “Cheer Up, Sam!” “stag[es]” racialized “lines of property and sexuality” (Lott 23). Sam’s melancholy also becomes a sign of his psychological castration by the social and economic capital of the white man, represented as inherent. That capital and its place in the seduction and social mobility of the mixed-race concubine feature, too, in “Adieu foulard, adieu madras.” Jacqueline Couti places the doudou (sweetie) of the song in a genealogy of French exoticization and eroticization of the “mulatto woman” of Martinique and Guadeloupe “[s]ince the eighteenth century[.] … Caribbean white Creoles and travellers to the island extolled the bounty of this Venus-like figure, whose beauty and sensuality were irresistible” (131, 133). In political terms, the doudou has been read as a colonial “longing for total possession by” the imperial power (Burton 81). Martinique and Guadeloupe are neighbouring islands of Dominica, the history of which has been shaped by imperial rivalry between Britain and France: In 1627 the English took theoretical possession without settling, but by 1632 the island had become a de facto French colony; it remained so until 1759 when the English captured it. In 1660 the English and French agreed to leave the Caribs [the Kalinago] in undisturbed possession, but in fact French settlers went on arriving, bringing enslaved Africans with them. Dominica changed hands between the two European powers, passing back to France (1778) and again to England (1783). The French attempted to invade in 1795 and 1805 before eventually withdrawing, leaving Britain in possession. (“Dominica”)

Today Dominica is a member of both the British Commonwealth of Nations and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. A French-based Antillean Creole is the everyday language. The inter-­imperial continuity of French cultural presence in the Dominica of Rhys’s novel is

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most apparent in personal names (Baptiste, Amélie), place names (Granbois, Mounes Mors), nouns (ajoupa, morne, béké, soucriant) and fashion (à la Joséphine). The Rochester figure insists on English words: “summer house” for “ajoupa” (52), a “creolised French word” for an “Afro-Arawak folk cottage” (Emery 68), and “mountain” for “Morne,” the latter a substitution Antoinette tells him is “ugly” (Rhys, WSS 100). Emery reads such “conflicts over naming” as part of Rochester’s “militarisation of paradise” (68, 67). Of “Adieu madras, adieu foulard” (the title varies slightly), which dates from 1769 to 1770, Edwin Hill comments: “As a character in the repertoire of French colonial mythology, the doudou” of the song “represents the Creole woman of colour desperately in love with a French man but stranded in her colonial place” after he departs the island. “Caged in by geography, culture, and colour, she melancholically sings, in the Doux parler des îles (‘the sweet speech of the islands,’ Creole), her hopeless plight of seduction, love and abandonment” (20).7 The song, usually attributed to the French governor of Guadeloupe François Amour, marquis de Bouillé (20), a “classic formulation” of the doudou “stereotype” (Burton 81), was a biguine standard played in French bals nègres from the 1920s to the 1950s (Hill 24). Rhys would have heard it in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Aurally the song mixes Creole lyrics and European musical style (24). Hill points out that the “movement of thirds in the melody suggests hearing the song as a lullaby… Consideration of Adieu madras as a lullaby both places women as important agents of this musical production, and suggests the role musical culture assumes in the pedagogy of colonial sentiment” (25). Christophine, who, like Antoinette’s mother Annette, is from Martinique, sings French-based Antillean Creole songs to Antoinette when she is a child. Her repertoire includes what is remembered as “Adieu foulard, adieu madras,” “The little ones grow old, the children leave us, will they come back?” (“Ma belle ka di maman li”—“My beautiful girl is singing to her mother”),8 and the one about the cedar tree flowers which only last for a day. The music was gay but the words were sad and her voice often quavered and broke on the high note. “Adieu.” Not adieu as we said it, but à dieu, which made more sense after all. The loving man was lonely, the girl was deserted, the children never came back. Adieu. (Rhys, WSS 11)

The song about the cedar tree flowers alludes to 2 Peter 3.8: “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”9 Etymologically “adieu” derives from à dieu, meaning “I commend you to

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God” (“Adieu”). Christophine’s inflection of the word(s) differs from Antoinette’s as remembered by the Rochester figure. Christophine interpellates Antoinette as “doudou” (68, 90, 91), “doudou ché” (68, 90) and “Doudou, ché cocotte” (43). The first instances of her addressing Antoinette as “doudou” and “doudou ché” follow Antoinette’s request that Christophine supply an obeah remedy for the loss of love between her and the Rochester figure and Christophine advising her not to cry. Through this form of address Rhys is both representing French-­ based Creole endearments as a legacy of the nurse-child relationship and identifying Antoinette’s distress as a sign of her taking on the mantle of the doudou of French legend. Within the wider scene she implicitly draws a contrast between Antoinette’s doudou-like response and Christophine’s injunction to her, “Have spunks and do battle for yourself” (69). In “Adieu madras, adieu foulard,” the Creole mistress laments the departure of her lover, and with this the luxuries she will no longer enjoy: Farewell madras, farewell scarf Farewell silk dress, farewell necklace My sweetie is leaving Helas, helas! It’s for ever My sweetie is leaving Helas, helas! It’s for ever[.] (Hill 20)

Hill notes that the singer’s “term of endearment … ‘doudou’” for her lover “becomes her proper name, for she only serves as a sign for the desire of the other” (27), and that “[t]he song represents the colonizer’s presence and absence as the creative force behind the doudou’s musicality” (34). “[L]oss” becomes “the very marker of her identity. … Melancholia marks her emotional posture, eternal waiting her colonial place” (26). She is “unthreatening by virtue of her pathetic, beautifully helpless” state (27). Suggesting that the doudou’s “waiting signals constant sexual availability,” Hill argues that she is a figure of both “lascivious[ness]” and “faithfulness” (37). In Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934), Francine’s “only English song” is a variant of “Adieu madras, adieu foulard”: Adieu, sweetheart, adieu, Salt beef and sardines too, And all good times I leave behind, Adieu, sweetheart, adieu. (28)

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“Salt beef and sardines” are more staples than luxuries like a “silk dress” or “necklace.” Dominican expatriate Anna Morgan remembers the song after she has spent Walter Jeffries’s first gift of money on clothes, been called a tart and given notice by her landlady, sent for Walter and taken “ammoniated quinine” for possible influenza (27). Rhys implies here Anna’s latent awareness of the meaning of and fate entailed in the acceptance of the gift. By the twentieth century “Adieu madras, adieu foulard” “was often sung and played to bid farewell when transatlantic ships left the [Caribbean] port” bound for Europe (Hill 22). Anna’s memory of the song cuts to a memory of “crying” on her departure for England (Rhys, Voyage 28); in the first version of the ending, the last two lines resurface in Anna’s post-­ abortion haemorrhage, reframed as a farewell to Dominica (Voyage Part IV 382).

Imagining “Magic” Writing to Francis Wyndham in May 1964, Rhys avers in Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea that it “was so impossibly difficult. I had no facts at all. … The characters though had to be imagined—not one real fact. Not one. No dialogue. Nothing” (Letters 277). Earlier in May she had told him of a breakthrough occasioned by Diana Athill’s suggestion that Antoinette and her husband, “the unfortunate couple,” experience “a few weeks of happiness … before he gets disturbing letters”: “As soon as I wrote that bit I realised that he must have fallen for her—and violently too. The black people have a good word for it—‘she magic with him’ or ‘he magic with her.’ Because you see, that is what it is—magic, intoxication. Not ‘Love’ at all” (262). Athill remembers the “early version” of Part Two she read as “indeed thin: the marriage became a disaster almost immediately, before it had been given time to exist” (162). Antoinette singing to the Rochester figure in the voice of the doudou is her magic. He is entranced by her “as a sign for the desire of the other” and by seemingly being the “colonising creative force behind” her “musicality”. In the scenes of emotional parting (drawing her future as a prisoner in Thornfield Hall) and departure from Granbois, he veers between longing to be addressed again in the voice of the doudou and emotional and epistemic battery of Antoinette, now renamed Bertha. Rhys’s representation of that battery draws on a European literary tradition—Jane Eyre, Othello, Macbeth, Almayer’s Folly, Heart of Darkness, “Le Revenant”—and repurposes Brontë’s allusions to Aesop’s fable of the oak and the reeds battered

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by storm winds. Rhys reframes these intertextual resonances through allusion to Derek Walcott’s “The Royal Palms … an absence of ruins,” a poem published in the February 1962 issue of the London Magazine, which also featured Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” and “Ruins of a Great House,” published in In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962). In an unpublished 1962 letter to Jamaican expatriate author Eliot Bliss, Rhys writes of being captivated by Walcott’s poetry and of her eagerness to read In a Green Night. Filtering his memory of Antoinette’s talk of hurricanes through topoi drawn from Aesop’s fable of the oak and the reeds, Rhys’s Rochester imagines the effect of their violent winds on royal palms and “abject” bamboos (WSS 98). The hurricane winds, which he promptly Anglicizes as “blast” (98–99), become a metaphor of Rochester’s battery of Antoinette-renamed-Bertha, identified in Christophine’s insistence to him that “all you want is to break her up” (92). Rhys’s Rochester figure thinks: Some of the royal palms stand (she told me). Stripped of their branches, like tall brown pillars, still they stand, defiant. Not for nothing are they called royal. The bamboos take an easier way, they bend to the earth and lie there, creaking, groaning, crying for mercy. The contemptuous wind passes, not caring for these abject things. (Let them live) (98)

Blackened at this point through racialized othering by Rochester in the wake of his meeting with Daniel Cosway, Antoinette stands defiant, like the royal palm, with “hatred in her eyes” for him (102). Stuart B. Schwartz explains that “salt water driven by the storm winds” of hurricanes “often stripped trees or blackened those that remained” (41). In having her Rochester figure allude to the fable of the oak and the reeds, Rhys is carefully stitching him into the design of Jane Eyre, in which Brontë also draws on topoi from the fable. When Jane resists Rochester’s demand that she become his mistress, she remembers his “fury” (317), “A wild look raised his brows—crossed his features … I shook, I feared—but I resolved” (316). Rochester sees her as “at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand! (and he shook me with the force of his hold.) I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her.” Recognizing that it is her “spirit— with will and energy, and virtue and purity”, and not the “brittle” bodily “frame” that he “want[s]”, Rochester lets her go and tries—unsuccessfully—to elicit her pity (317–318).

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Rhys’s Rochester figure recalls of Antoinette during the departure from what Amélie calls the “‘honeymoon house’” (Rhys, WSS 38): I’ll watch for one tear, one human tear. Not that blank hating moonstruck face. I’ll listen. … If she says good-bye perhaps adieu. Adieu—like those old-time songs she sang. Always adieu (and all songs say it). If she too says it, or weeps, I’ll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She’s mad but mine, mine. What will I care for gods or devils or for Fate itself. If she smiles or weeps or both. For me. (99)

She refuses to yield to him like the bamboos do to the hurricane. Rhys implicitly draws an analogy between the doudou and the bamboos. Royal palms are native to parts of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean; bamboos are exotics. At Coulibri bamboos are grown beside the great house and the glacis, a terrace used for drying coffee beans,10 repurposed as plantation work cycles came to a halt (11). Rhys subtly suggests that, like bamboo, the doudou is an exotic import of plantation culture. The Rochester figure sees Antoinette, rather than yielding, instead “staring out to the distant sea. She was silence itself.” He remembers thinking, “Sing, Antoinetta. I can hear you now.” He silently wills her, “Do not be sad. Or think Adieu. Never Adieu.” “And you must laugh and chatter as you used to do” (101). He recalls the songs in French-based Creole and English she would sing to him and her oral storytelling, her informal “pedagogy of colonial sentiment.” The doudou, though, is also part of the menace, the exoticism, the strangeness, that so troubles the Rochester figure in Dominica. He first articulates this to himself in thinking of his new wife, “Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (39). His disorientation is expressed through his sense of the excess and threat of its tropical biosphere: “Everything is too much … Too much blue, too much purple, too much green” (41). He finds the route to Granbois “[n]ot only wild but menacing. Those hills would close in on you” (41). He is disconcerted on his walk past “a sparse plantation of coffee trees, then straggly guava bushes” into a forest of “enemy trees” to discover ruins of earlier French occupation of the island (62–63): “part of a paved road,” “the ruins of a stone house and round the ruins rose trees that had grown to an incredible height” (62). The prospect of engulfment—“the undergrowth and creepers caught at my legs and the trees closed over my head” (62)—becomes entangled with a

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sense of the precariousness of European imperial enterprise. After Antoinette confronts and bites him, and then withdraws to the bedroom with a comforting Christophine, the Rochester figure remembers “[t]hat green menace. I had felt it ever since I saw this place. There was nothing I knew, nothing to comfort me.” Listening at the door of the bedroom, struggling to distinguish their voices, he hears the French-based Creole songs: “whatever they were singing or saying was dangerous. I must protect myself” (90). Leaving Granbois, the Rochester figure notices Antoinette “there in the ajoupa,” his reversion to French perhaps signalling an exoticizing recognition of her, and looks back at the “shabby white house … More than ever it strained away from the black snake-like forest. Louder and more desperately it called: Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death by ants. But what are you doing here you folly? So near the forest. Don’t you know that this is a dangerous place? And that the dark forest always wins?” (100) The word “folly,” too, draws out the fragility of colonial enterprise, resonating through allusion with Almayer’s Folly and Heart of Darkness; for Rochester, though, the “shabby white house” comes to stand for Antoinette. Folly refers to a disproportionately “costly structure”; yet folly in other senses—“madness” and “lewdness” (“Folly”)—becomes the tenor of Rochester’s representation of Antoinette. Of the creative process, Rhys insists that books are “mysterious not mechanical” (Letters 155). By focusing on her attention to “facts” and “imagination” in getting the feel of the 1830s and 1840s, I highlight new genealogical layers of her crafting of story and craft as a writer. My discussion of musical allusions draws out the subtlety of her treatment of human/ animal and racialized frontiers of property, sexuality and desire and of the tensions between the Rochester figure’s desire for and repudiation of Antoinette and his sense of their stakes.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Rhys’s letter to Vaz Dias on 16 October 1956 (Letters 133). 2. For a discussion of the stories, see Thomas, “Jean Rhys’s Cardboard Doll’s Houses.” 3. Rhys, “MY GREAT-AUNT JEANNETTE LIVED IN her room,” quoted in Thomas, “Jean Rhys’s Cardboard Doll’s Houses” 46.

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4. On the allusions to Shakespeare, see Thomas, Worlding and Little. On the allusions to Baudelaire, see Taylor-Batty. Rosenberg addresses the British colonial romance in Rhys’s writing (184–191). The quotation is from 184. 5. In “The Cardboard Dolls’ House,” Rhys emphasizes the relative sexual naivety of the protagonist Phoebe, who, not picking up the sly reference to the secret courter, finds the song slightly scary, imagining an amorphous creature tapping outside at night (3). 6. The song was popularized by Christy’s Minstrels (“Cheer Up Sam”). 7. Murdoch notes the allusion to the song (159–160) but does not examine its reach. 8. Rhys gives the translated title in the first version of the ending of Voyage in the Dark (382). 9. Rochester overhears the song “about one day and a thousand years” when Christophine is trying to comfort Antoinette (Rhys, WSS 90) and alludes to the lyrics when he thinks about Baptiste’s indifference to the age of the rum at Granbois: “A hundred years, a thousand all the same to le bon Dieu and Baptiste too” (98). 10. On the structure and use of the glacis, see Monnereau.

Works Cited “Adieu, Definition of.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UP, 2018. Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. 1990. Revised ed., Penguin, 1992. Athill, Diana. Stet. Granta, 2000. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith, introduction and revised notes by Sally Shuttleworth. Oxford University Press, 2000. Burton, Richard D.E. “‘Maman-France Doudou’: Family Images in French West Indian Colonial Discourse.” Diacritics, vol. 23, no. 3 (1993), pp. 69–90. “Cheer Up Sam.” The Traditional Tune Archive. https://tunearch.org/wiki/ Annotation: Cheer_Up_Sam. “Cheer Up, Sam! Or Sarah Bell.” American Song Sheets, https://library.duke. edu/digitalcollections/songsheets_bsvg100116. Couti, Jacqueline. “The Mythology of the Doudou: Sexualizing Black Female Bodies, Constructing Culture in the French Caribbean.” Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought, edited by María Cristina Alcalde, Susan Bordo and Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. U of California P, 2015, pp. 131–139. “Dominica.” The Commonwealth. http://thecommonwealth.org/our-membercountries/dominica/history. Doyle, Laura. “Inter-Imperiality.” Interventions, vol. 16, no. 2 (2014), pp. 159–196.

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Doyle, Laura. “Inter-imperiality: An Introduction.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 64, no. 3 (2008), pp. 395–402. Doyle, Laura. “Inter-imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée.” PMLA, vol. 130, no. 2 (2015), pp. 336–347. Emery, Mary Lou. “On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism.” Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran. Edinburgh UP, 2015, pp. 59–81. Hill, Edwin. “Adieu Madras, Adieu Foulard: Musical Origins and the Doudou’s Colonial Plaint.” Ethnomusicology Forum, vol. 16, no. 1, 2007, pp. 19–43. King James Bible. British and Foreign Bible Society, n.d. Little, Judy. “Signifying Nothing: A Shakespearean Deconstruction of Rhys’s Rochester.” Jean Rhys Review, vol. 7, nos. 1–2 (1996), pp. 39–46. Lott, Eric. “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy.” Representations, no. 39 (1992), pp. 23–50. Monnereau, Élie. The Complete Indigo-maker: Containing, an Accurate Account of the Indigo Plant; Its Description, Culture, Preparation, and Manufacture. With Œconomical Rules and Necessary Directions for a Planter How to Manage a Plantation, and Employ His Negroes to the Best Advantage. To Which Is Added, a Treatise on the Culture of Coffee. P. Elmsly, 1769. Murdoch, H. Adlai. “The Discourses of Jean Rhys: Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy.” Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran. Edinburgh UP, 2015, pp. 146–167. Rhys, Jean. “The Cardboard Dolls’-House.” Jean Rhys Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Rhys, Jean. Jean Rhys: Letters, 1931–1966, edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. Andre Deutsch, 1984. Rhys, Jean. Letter to Eliot Bliss. 1962. Jean Rhys Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Rhys, Jean. “MY GREAT-AUNT JEANNETTE LIVED IN her room.” Jean Rhys Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Rhys, Jean. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. 1979. Penguin, 2016. Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark. 1934. Penguin, 2000. Rhys, Jean. “Voyage in the Dark. Part IV (Original Version),” edited by Nancy Hemond Brown. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott. Indiana UP, 1990, pp. 381–89. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L. Raiskin. Norton, 1999. Rosenberg, Leah Reade. Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Schwarz, Stuart B. Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina. Princeton UP, 2015. “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” http://www.andersonroe.com/ songs-my-mother-taught-me.

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“Tapping at the Garden Gate.” http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/ballads/ GrD4807.html. Taylor-Batty, Juliette. “‘Le Revenant’: Baudelaire’s Afterlife in Jean Rhys.” British Association for Modernist Studies conference, U of Birmingham, 30 June 2017. Thomas, Sue. “Ghostly Presences: James Potter Lockhart and Jane Maxwell Lockhart in Jean Rhys’s Writing.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 57, no. 4 (2015), pp. 389–411. Thomas, Sue. “Jean Rhys’s Cardboard Doll’s Houses.” Kunapipi, vol. 26, no. 1 (2004), pp. 39–53. Thomas, Sue. The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Greenwood, 1999. Walcott, Derek. “The Royal Palms … an absence of ruins.” London Magazine vol. 1, no. 11 (Feb. 1962), pp. 12–13. Walcott, Derek. “Ruins of a Great House.” In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960. 1962. Jonathan Cape, 1969, pp. 19–20.

CHAPTER 10

“Broken Parts”: Wide Sargasso Sea and the Poetics of Caribbean Modernism Mary Lou Emery

In a landmark essay published in 1964, the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris prescribed what he called a “vision of consciousness” for the Caribbean novel: And it is right here—if one begins to envisage an expanding outward and inward creative significance for the novel—that the monument of consolidation breaks down and becomes the need for a vision of consciousness. (“Tradition,” 142)

Arguably, that creative vision had already appeared in Jean Rhys’s fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. With the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, it took an even more innovative form, marking the moment when, as Harris anticipated, “the monument of consolidation breaks down.” We Thanks to the editors, Erica L. Johnson and Elaine Savory, and to Ania Spyra for helpful comments regarding an earlier draft of this chapter. M. L. Emery (*) Department of English, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_10

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could read Brontë’s Jane Eyre as the broken monument, the now-­fractured text in a previously consolidated literary canon. But more precisely for Harris, it was the monument he termed “consolidation of character”—the prevailing method of realist fiction—that suffered a creative break. Harris urged Caribbean writers to reject realism by directly addressing a modernity founded in slavery and the “broken” Caribbean environment. That trope of brokenness appeared again in the modernist Caribbean aesthetics formulated in the late 1960s by Kamau Brathwaite and again later by Derek Walcott. It has characterized a narrative poetics that, in many ways, Jean Rhys anticipated in her early novels and fully realized in Wide Sargasso Sea. In this chapter, I explore the direction Wide Sargasso Sea gave to the modernist currents that converged in the 1960s. These include an earlier modernism of the 1920s through the 1950s in which Rhys played a significant part. In its radical revisions of literary and colonial history, Wide Sargasso Sea carries those earlier decades of Caribbean modernism forward into the revolutionary 1960s. Reading this landmark novel in light of Harris’s literary manifesto, we find a profound break from realist models of character into a “fulfillment of the person” that questions colonialist versions of history and offers a deep mapping of the Caribbean landscape. In that fulfillment, an alternate aesthetic emerges, one that rejects the sovereign individual of the European nation-state, imperialist conquest, and bourgeois Enlightenment. Instead, it sketches the possibility of another form of wholeness, partial and dynamic, generated from the “broken parts” and obscured past of the Caribbean.

Caribbean Modernism, Modernity, and Rhys’s Early Novels “Modernism,” as a term used by literary critics, has recently undergone extensive revision. We now speak of alternate, multiple, and global modernisms that extend well beyond the boundaries set by earlier Eurocentric definitions. In previous accounts, modernism in the arts responded to intense changes of modernity—rapid urbanization, dramatic advances in technology, and the traumas of World War I—by breaking with nineteenth-­ century European conventions in new experimental forms. It was international in scope but centered in major cities of Western Europe, London, and New York from around 1870 up to World War II. The new models

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challenge this earlier version, extending modernism’s reach, both geographically and temporally. But what is most important in the new models of modernism is their relationality—that is to say, they recognize that what emerges in one region of the globe does so in often discrepant relation to cultural events and movements in another: sometimes in counterpoint, sometimes as interruptions and breakthroughs. These multiple modernisms make their breaks both from and within uneven, asymmetrical relations of economic and political power. It is not coincidental that the proponents of the new modernisms often cite the work of a Caribbean intellectual—Édouard Glissant—and his notion of a “Poetics of Relation” as a major influence on their thinking.1 Conditions of empire, Glissant argues, generate reversals of cultural projection. At first the metropolitan center sends its culture and values outwards toward the colonial periphery, then the influence begins to change direction, moving from periphery to center, and in a third phase, “abolishes the very notion of center and periphery” (29). What emerges, even if unrecognized, is a global network of entangled histories, cultures, and subjectivities. Writing in 1990, Glissant identifies the Caribbean plantation as “one of the explosive regions” where such networks of Relation become most visible. He argues for the plantation as a major contributor to modernity, a laboratory where cultures collide, creating multilingual, creolized forms of artistic expression. Earlier, in the 1960s when Rhys was writing Wide Sargasso Sea, C.  L. R.  James also identified the plantation as a foundational site of modernity.2 For James, it was central to global systems of economic exchange and distribution and, in the case of large sugar plantations, to methods of factory production. He recognized the innovative literary modernism of writers such as Aimé Césaire, Wilson Harris, and George Lamming as erupting from the region’s modernity, part of a revolutionary consciousness extending from the Haitian Revolution. Lamming, too, identified the insurgent plantation slave as the catalyst for a new sense of language, and Harris looked to the enslaved African in his call for a new kind of novel, one in which consolidation breaks down in favor of a “vision of consciousness.” Not all proponents of the new relational modernisms refer to the plantation as a matrix of modernity. However, it is clear that, in these recent versions of modernism, cultural theories of the Caribbean have played a significant role. And Rhys appears differently in the relational models, no longer an outsider among modernists of the Left Bank or Bloomsbury, or

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among writers labeled West Indian. Instead, her writing resides at the heart of what has been called “colonial modernism,” or alternately, “postcolonial,” “transnational,” geo- , environmental, “plantation,” or “planetary” modernisms.3 In many ways, Rhys’s writing has made these new critical concepts possible and meaningful. Consider, for example, Rhys’s early novels as responses to the conflicted forces of early twentieth-century modernity. In all of her novels of the 1920s and 1930s, we find transnational crossings of female characters who are both animated and damaged by the forces of world war, economic depression, homelessness, and a racially differentiated yet global commodification of women’s bodies and labor. Rhys’s writing in this period does more, however, than respond to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century international, political, and economic conflicts. It reveals the damage done by a modernity founded in the slave trade and plantation, alongside a class system dependent on racism, colonialism, and the exploitation of women. In these early novels, we find the legacies of the plantation surfacing in London or Paris, extending the narratives to a planetary scale.4 This is especially the case in Voyage in the Dark where the larger colonial system becomes visible, along with an ambivalent racial politics and modernist aesthetics. The “vision of consciousness” Rhys creates in characterizing Anna Morgan is one increasingly fractured by names from an old slave list, songs in Creole, passages from guide books, and multiple other fragments of a displaced plantation memory, culminating in the chaotic breakdown of the final carnival scenes. As discussed in a later section of this chapter, Wide Sargasso Sea develops further this poetics of brokenness, tapping into an even longer history of conquest in the Americas. But even novels that do not explicitly refer to the West Indies, such as Good Morning, Midnight, allude to the Caribbean and transnational crossings of culture and people. These gestures are not always explicit in Rhys’s spare prose, but are present, nonetheless, through intimate details of consciousness, the memories and perceptions of women deemed outsiders and strange. Looking back on the early decades of the twentieth century—considering the emergence of consumer culture; increasing appearance of women in public as service workers and consumers; the labor movements in Europe and the Caribbean; and the shifting of old empires in the midst of world war—we can read Rhys’s characters as figures located at the crossroads of multiple conflicts and possibilities of modernity.

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And as Caribbean intellectuals such as Glissant, Harris, Lamming, and James have stressed, this modernity has its origins in the eighteenth century and a profound paradox: in an era dedicated to liberty and the rights of man, one of those rights—the right to property—includes the enslavement of human beings. In the context of this paradoxical modernity, the Caribbean is more than a geographical location. Rather it becomes a relational matrix for a modernism that, in Rhys’s writing, extends in time and geographical space, becoming all of those things: colonial, postcolonial, transnational, environmental, plantation, and planetary.

Before, After, and Beyond Windrush Arriving in England in 1907, Rhys preceded emigrants such as Una Marson, Claude McKay, C. L. R. James, George Lamming, and Wilson Harris by decades. Her writing participates in a circuitous and relational modernism that extends from the 1920s and 1930s through the 1960s. It includes Marson, McKay, and James in an early transatlantic Caribbean modernism developed in counterpoint to the Anglo/European/US modernism of the period.5 Experiencing the exile so often considered a requirement for modernist writers, they created innovative, experimental fiction and poetry that broke with conventions of Standard English, incorporated blues and jazz, reflected on modernist visual aesthetics, and portrayed the interwar years from the sharply illuminating perspectives of colonial outsiders. Later émigrés of the Windrush generation, such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, and Harris, have been credited with inaugurating Caribbean modernism. And critics have read their metropolitan novels in dialogue with Anglo/European/US modernists such as T.  S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and James Joyce.6 However, these writers of the 1950s also looked back to the interwar Caribbean modernists. For example, Lamming’s writing in The Emigrants, published in 1954, echoes scenes in Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, published 20 years before. In a passage reflecting on the novel as a genre, Lamming’s narrator comes close to quoting the last lines of Voyage, gesturing to Rhys while vowing to “start all over again … start all over? … again…” (14). Portraying the perceptions of new arrivals as they journey by train to London, Lamming seems again to pay homage to Rhys, evoking the train’s rhythms in a collage of voices and advertisements for Ponds cold cream, razor blades, paint, and insecticide. The lengthy passage recalls Anna Morgan’s ironic commentaries on

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Bourne’s Cocoa and especially the streaming interior monologue conveying her perceptions, intercut with her voice and that of her stepmother, as she views England for the first time through a train window: “This is England, Hester said and I watched it through the train-window divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else—what are those things—those are haystacks—oh those are haystacks—I had read about England ever since I could read—smaller meaner everything is never mind—…” (17). Lamming’s arrival in England along with others of the Windrush generation created, in turn, a more collective “West Indian” cultural identity for writers and artists. Theirs was an identity different from, yet pioneered by, the experiences of earlier emigrants, including Rhys. Recalling that Kenneth Ramchand described Voyage in the Dark as “our first novel of Negritude” (3), and considering Claude McKay’s role in sparking that movement, it also seems important to at least mention the relational networks generating transatlantic Anglophone and Francophone modernisms. These would include the Harlem Renaissance and the surrealism and environmentalism of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. And given the post-slavery plantation setting of Wide Sargasso Sea, the possibility of a trans-American plantation modernism linking Rhys with writers such as William Faulkner and Jean Toomer also emerges. Though we may not have evidence for the direct influence on Rhys of these various modernisms, we can, I think, be aware of their cultural currents and confluences during the decades when Rhys was writing Wide Sargasso Sea, beginning in the 1930s and continuing to its publication.

“Broken Parts of an Enormous Heritage” Rhys completed Wide Sargasso Sea in a decade of radical social change, including movements for black power in the Americas and conflicted transitions from colony to independent nation in regions throughout the British Empire. It’s evident, however, that Rhys did not participate in the radical politics of the period or even fully support the changes they brought to the Caribbean. Nor was she part of the Caribbean Artists Movement, which supported the breakthrough work of Afro-Caribbean writers such as Kamau Brathwaite. However, in thinking about the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea during this decade, we can take a cue from C.  L. R.  James, who was fully engaged in the era’s politics. In an “Appendix” to the second edition of

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The Black Jacobins, issued just three years before the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, James celebrates modernist writers of the Caribbean. This is the essay in which he insists on the modernity of the plantation, its “modern system” (392). And in the “voluminous literature of anti-colonialism” then emerging from the Caribbean, he finds “something new” and revolutionary (414). James discusses Césaire at length, also Lamming and Naipaul. Turning at the end to Wilson Harris, he describes Harris in terms that recall the strangeness readers sometimes find in Rhys and her characters: “one of the strangest of living novelists” (416). Harris’s novels were just beginning to receive critical attention, but his essays of this period are equally important. Along with those of Kamau Brathwaite, they articulate a Caribbean modernist poetics of the 1960s and early 1970s. We can read the essay by Harris cited at the beginning of this chapter as a literary manifesto—a bold rejection of realism, including that of the protest novel, and urgent call for a newly conceived Caribbean, a radically transformed psychology of the individual, and a modernist Caribbean aesthetic. Harris describes the natural environment of the West Indies as “broken into many stages in the way in which one surveys an existing river in its present bed while plotting at the same time ancient and abandoned, indeterminate courses the river once flowed” (141). These multiple river courses correspond to “the broken parts of an enormous heritage,” including ancient American, European, and African civilizations. Seeking to reconcile the fragments, Harris turns to “the individual African slave” (143). Immediately, he acknowledges that “to assume that the slave was an individual is historically absurd” (143) for he or she was an object of property, lacking education, citizenship, and social status of any kind. But for Harris, that condition of impossibility provides an alternative for the creative imagination. He urges the Caribbean writer to reject consolidation of character or “the sovereign individual” and, instead, to allow the broken parts “to act on each other in a manner which fulfils in the person the most nebulous instinct for a vocation of being and independent spirit” (142). One of the writers Harris mentions is James, and, though he admires The Black Jacobins, he also faults James for following a realist model in his portrait of Toussaint L’Ouverture. James misses, Harris argues, the potential in Toussaint’s apparent flaws. Instead of tragic hesitation and uncertainty, Toussaint may have “had peculiar doubts about the assumption of sovereign status and power” and “a conception of wider possibilities” (149, 150). Thus, the Caribbean, in Harris’s vision, figures as ground for a new, yet more “original,” concept of individuality that rejects

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sovereignty and requires instead a modernist Caribbean aesthetic of “fulfillment.” Rooted in experiences of enslaved Africans, grounded in stillpresent Native traditions, it promises a universal subjecthood that draws upon fragments of “ancient and abandoned” civilizations, allowing them to act upon more dominant cultures of the present. Brathwaite, too, adopted the trope of brokenness as the precondition for “something new,” an alternate, improvised wholeness. He found in the improvisations of jazz an African diasporic poetics that offered a model for the West Indian novel. In an essay published in 1967–1968, Brathwaite reads a number of works by Caribbean writers through a jazz aesthetic, rooted in a “creole culture … a creole way of seeing” (108). The irregular rhythms of jazz break with narrative and poetic conventions of the English literary tradition; at the same time, jazz offers, in his reading, a poetics for collective reunification of broken cultures.7 Brathwaite was working in the mid-1960s on his remarkable epic trilogy The Arrivants. His London performance in 1967 of the poem’s first book, Rights of Passage, was described at the time as “absolutely electrifying.”8 The rhythms of jazz, blues, calypso along with the spoken word in all its varied Caribbean forms give energy to the poem in performance and also on the printed page. Broken lines, broken words, and ellipses, for example, convey an ancestral past of violent separation and fragmentation. However, that brokenness becomes the ground for reconnection and spiritual creativity. The poem’s central persona, Tom, speaks in multiple voices, shattering the stereotype from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and becoming a composite, creolized figure, a visionary artist.9 And the poem’s final book, Islands, concludes with a powerful sense of openness and potential, drawing on both jazz and Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions: “now waking / making // making / with their // rhythms some- / thing torn // and new” (269–70). In an essay published in 1974, Brathwaite famously expelled Rhys from the category of West Indian writer on the basis of her white Creole heritage, and in a later piece he stressed the political stakes involved in what he saw as critical battles over her affiliation.10 However, in light of a modernist Caribbean poetics of “broken parts” and “fulfillment,” their writing, if not their identities, come into perhaps unexpected relation. The language of breakage, syncopation, improvisation, and “fulfillment of character” still works to illuminate Rhys’s creation in Wide Sargasso Sea of Antoinette (Bertha) Cosway Mason (Rochester).

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“In Her Own Darkness” In characterizing the first Mrs. Rochester of Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Rhys repeatedly invokes the language of “broken parts.” The Martinican former slave and obeah practitioner Christophine accuses Antoinette’s husband: “then you want to break her up” and “all you want is to break her up” (92) and again, “I warn her. I say this is not a man who will help you when he sees you break up” (94). This breaking of a nineteenth-century Euro-Creole heiress finds formal expression in the novel’s structure. Abrupt shifts in narrative point of view and interruptions of one voice within another contribute to the sense of violent fragmentation. When Part Two opens with “Rochester’s” military metaphors for marriage (“So it was all over, the advance and retreat”), the shift from Antoinette’s voice to his not only startles the reader but conveys the supposed union of their wedding as a war, their relationship as a chasm. When Christophine’s voice interrupts Rochester’s inner monologue, echoing in his mind like an incantation, we realize that his consciousness, too, is breaking up: Now every word she said was echoed, echoed loudly in my head. ‘So that you can leave her alone.’ (Leave her alone) ‘Not telling her why.’ (Why?) ‘No more love, eh?’ (No more love) (92)

Ironically, this is the same passage in which Christophine accuses Rochester of breaking Antoinette, and in the midst of their syncopated lines, Antoinette’s voice breaks through in a disembodied plea: “And I came to you. Oh Christophine. O Pheena, Pheena, help me” (93). Alien elements fracture Rochester’s composure and certainty, making him vulnerable and also cruel. All these broken parts play against one another, including dialogic eruptions into the narrative of Daniel Cosway’s letter, of letters Rochester only imagines writing and those he does, of passages from a book about obeah, of songs, and lines from plays and poetry. The jump to Grace Poole’s voice at the beginning of Part Three breaks the narrative again, opening it to the crucial scenes of Brontë’s novel, uncannily reimagined. Antoinette’s voice in this final section is one of profound alienation, a prisoner unaware that she has become “the ghost of a woman

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who they say haunts this place” (111). Denied property, name, and status of any kind, she hardly qualifies as an individual. She has disintegrated to such an extent that she does not recognize herself; yet Grace Poole sees that even “in her own darkness,” Antoinette, now Bertha, “hasn’t lost her spirit” (106). Rhys’s narrative conveys the full extent of Antoinette’s breakup: she is “broken” by impossible cross-racial and cross-island affinities, by patriarchal law, and colonialist betrayals. However, even as she steps into the script provided by Jane Eyre (“her own darkness”), she does so as a fulfillment of her dream consciousness. In the powerful concluding scene, Antoinette sees and hears the many conflicting parts of her heritage—the “lovely English girl” in the painting of “The Miller’s Daughter,” the plantation garden at Coulibri, the call in French of the parrot Coco, the voice of her English husband, the aid she receives from Christophine, and the image of her black childhood friend Tia—all appearing before her in a dream of flying, her hair “stream[ing] out like wings” in the wind (112). As in the poetics urged by Harris, the broken parts “act on each other,” and she is “fulfilled” in spirit as she takes flight from the battlements of Thornfield Hall. Through this concluding “vision of consciousness” and fulfillment of character, Rhys rejects realist consolidation, embracing instead a Caribbean past of broken parts and offering an alternate, improvised form of wholeness. The scene recalls Alejo Carpentier’s In the Kingdom of this World, translated into English in 1957, and Ti Noël’s vision just before his elusive disappearance when he sees emblems of the plantations on which he has labored, all rising into the air. It also recalls Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, published in 1960. In the “strange” lyrically disjointed prose of Harris’s first published novel, a profound death and rebirth takes place, transfiguring the plantation owner and adventurer Donne, his dreaming twin, their culturally diverse and multiracial crew, and the “folk” they have been pursuing. The novel’s final line performs, in what Michael Sells calls a “mystical language of unsaying,” their fulfillment: “Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed” (152).11 The unsaid referent for “what” in this sentence resonates in its deeply self-referential knowledge with Antoinette’s revelation at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do” (112) (my emphasis). And in Wilson Harris’s later reading of Antoinette’s final dream, the scene also looks forward,

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anticipating Milkman’s flight in Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon.12 In all of these narratives, a “vision of consciousness” displaces any attempt at character consolidation and opens the imagination to an individuality more “original,” in Harris’s words, than that of the sovereign or autonomous individual of European modernity. By reimagining Bertha Mason Rochester in the fullness of her multiple possibilities, Rhys also calls attention to what Harris terms the broken environment and “abandoned” landscapes of the past. For example, when Antoinette’s husband asks her about the town named Massacre, he assumes that slaves were the ones massacred. But Antoinette replies, “‘Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now’” (38). And indeed, the massacre involved, as Judith Raiskin and others have noted, the murder in 1674 of 60–70 Carib men, women, and children along with the half-English, half-Carib son of Sir Thomas Warner by his brother, Warner’s legitimate son.13 Though only a brief moment of dialogue, the allusion to Massacre recognizes, while repeating, an active forgetting of this past. It reveals the eclipse of a history shaped by the broken parts of Caribbean identities—in this case, identities that don’t fit with dichotomies of slave and free, or native and European. Other examples abound in this densely allusive narrative. Some involve linguistic code-switching, such as the words glacis and ajoupa—both are words that refer to creolized architectural forms of the veranda. Their repeated insertions in the text offer glimpses of the suppressed creativity of African, Amerindian, and Maroon builders in the Americas.14 Another example involves unrepresentable words of an unrecognized language. When Rochester proclaims that he “would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place” (96), he is incapable of understanding Christophine’s response: “She began to mutter to herself. Not in patois. I knew the sound of patois now” (97). Presumably the obeah charm that secures Rochester’s fate, the words remain absent, shadowed by his ignorance and suspicion. Nevertheless, their negative space reveals the possibility of a culture and past barely glimpsed through the occlusions of Rochester’s voice. Wide Sargasso Sea does not recreate Brontë’s madwoman in the attic in order to reconsolidate her character as, for example, a victimized Caribbean heiress. Rather, her brokenness makes possible a new kind of fiction through an alternate realization, an improvisation and fulfillment, of the person. And it makes possible again a newly configured Relation of literary texts—as both bond and break with Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but also, as in the

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examples I’m suggesting, unexpected connections with the strange West Indian prose of Wilson Harris, the jazz poetics of Brathwaite, the marvelous realism of Carpentier, and what some have called the African American magical realism and revisionary modernism of Toni Morrison. * * * Wilson Harris did not write about Wide Sargasso Sea until 1980 and 1985. However, just following its appearance in 1966, he published two novels which, for the first time, featured female protagonists. In Tumatumari, published in 1968, a young woman dreams of carving a date found in papers written by her father, who is called simply the Chair of History. But her hand slips, and the numbers are transposed. The altered date, now a pictographic rock carving, opens a gateway to an alternate past, not recorded in her father’s patriarchal and nationalist histories. It is a past that spans the globe. Her sense of herself expands also through a web of ancestral kinships and immediate family relationships that her father’s history had suppressed. These include her dark-skinned brother whom her father had hidden away, her sister’s black baby given up for adoption in the United States, and an “East Indian” woman struck down in an accident with her father’s car. I can’t say whether Harris was influenced by Wide Sargasso Sea as early as 1968, and it’s not a perfect match, but still, I can see in this fictional character a figure for Rhys, deliberately slipping her hand, transposing the apparent “facts” of history, including literary history, and opening to view in Wide Sargasso Sea similar eclipses of voices, cultures, languages, and identities suppressed through the consolidations of colonial histories and nineteenth-century English fictions. In her Caribbean modernism of the 1960s, Rhys puts those broken parts into play, creating a fulfillment, rather than consolidation, of the person and an expanded sense of the enormous heritage of the Caribbean.

Notes 1. Glissant retains in translation the French “Relation” to signify consciousness of a totality (though always approximate) rather than suggesting a relationship between one thing and another (Poetics of Relation, 27). 2. James, “Appendix,” The Black Jacobins, 2nd edition. 3. For examples of Rhys’s centrality to global, geo-, plantation, and planetary modernisms, see the collection Geographies of Modernism (eds. Brooker

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and Thacker), where two essays on Rhys appear, one by Chris Gogwilt, another by Anna Snaith (NY: Routledge, 2005). More recently, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (eds. Wollaeger and Eatough), three essays featuring Rhys appear, one by Mary Lou Emery, one by Peter Kalliney, and another by Janet Lyon (OUP, 2012). A number of critics refer to Rhys as a postcolonial writer and/or a modernist writer. For example, in Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys, Dell’Amico argues for the “colonial voice” within Rhys’s modernist fiction and places her as a postcolonial writer. More recently, Johnson and Moran, editors of Jean Rhys: Twenty-First Century Approaches, introduce the volume as one that “explores Rhys as a modernist and as a postcolonial writer” and describe her as a “global modernist” (3). See Berman’s Modernist Commitments for discussion of Rhys as a transnational modernist. In Modernist Voyages, Snaith follows Rosenberg (Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature) in discussing Rhys as a transnational, Caribbean modernist. For an ecocritical approach, see Savory, “Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences.” 4. For discussion of the plantation in Voyage in the Dark, see Emery, “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary.” 5. Some critics distinguish Rhys from these other early Caribbean émigrés due to her isolation from them and her white racial identity. However, both Rosenberg and Snaith have argued for reading her alongside Marson and McKay. Rosenberg argues for the similarities in their work and states that Rhys shares with McKay, for example, a “fundamental vision of the Caribbean and of Caribbean literature” (182). Snaith stresses that Rhys’s “racial politics are markedly different” from those of white Anglo/ European/US modernists due to her position as a Creole which destabilizes categories of racial difference. Modernist Voyages, 134–135. Rosenberg, Donnell, and others have also challenged the persistent reading of Anglophone Caribbean literature as having its beginning in the mostly male writers of the Windrush generation. See Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature; Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature; and Rosenberg and Brown (eds.) Beyond Windrush. 6. See Brown, Migrant Modernism and Pollard, New World Modernisms. 7. Much later in his Nobel acceptance speech, Derek Walcott also spoke of the brokenness of Caribbean cultures, comparing the region to a shattered vase, and celebrating the role of art as a force of love in recreating wholeness: “the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger that that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole” (The Antilles, np).

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8. Andrew Salkey quoted in Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972, p. 61. 9. See Pollard, New World Modernisms, for discussion of Brathwaite’s poetics and his engagement with T. S. Eliot’s concept of tradition. 10. Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens and “A Post-Cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars.” 11. For an expanded discussion of apophasis, or “the language of unsaying,” in Palace of the Peacock, see Emery, Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. 12. Harris, “Jean Rhys’s ‘Tree of Life.’” 13. Raiskin, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, p. 38, n. 4. 14. For a full discussion of the significance of these multiple linguistic terms for “veranda” in Wide Sargasso Sea, see Emery, “On the Veranda: Rhys’s Material Modernism.”

Works Cited Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernisms. Columbia UP, 2012. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford UP, 1973. Brathwaite, Kamau. Contradictory Omens. Savacou Publications, 1974. Brathwaite, Kamau. “Jazz and the West Indian Novel.” Roots. U of Michigan P, 1993, pp. 55–110. Brathwaite, Kamau. “A Post-Cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars.” Wasafiri, vol. 11, no. 2 (1995): 69–78. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker (eds.). Geographies of Modernism. Routledge, 2005. Brown, J. Dillon. Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel. U of Virginia P, 2013. Dell’Amico, Carol. Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys. Routledge, 2005. Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. Routledge, 2006. Emery, Mary Lou. “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 48–80. Emery, Mary Lou. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge UP, 2007. Emery, Mary Lou. “On the Veranda: Rhys’s Material Modernism.” Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Johnson and Moran, 2015, pp. 59–84. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. U of Michigan P, 1997.

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Harris, Wilson. “Jean Rhys’s ‘Tree of Life.’” Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, edited by Andrew Bundy, Routledge, 1999a, pp. 118–122. Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock. Faber, 1960. Harris, Wilson. “Tradition and the West Indian Novel.” Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, edited by Bundy, Routledge, 1999b, pp. 140–151. Harris, Wilson. Tumatumari. Faber, 1968. James, C. L. R. “Appendix: From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vintage Books, 1963, pp. 391–418. Johnson, Erica L. and Patricia Moran. “Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys.” Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Johnson and Moran, Edinburgh UP, 2015, pp. 1–17. Lamming, George. The Emigrants. Allison and Busby, 1980. Pollard, Charles. New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. U of Virginia P, 2004. Ramchand, Kenneth. “An Introduction to this Novel.” The Lonely Londoners, by Sam Selvon, Longman Group, 1987. Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark. W. W. Norton, 1982. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Judith L. Raiskin, W. W. Norton, 1999. Rosenberg, Leah. Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature. Palgrave, 2007. Savory, Elaine. “Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences.” Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Johnson and Moran, Edinburgh UP, 2015, pp. 85–106. Sells, Michael A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. U of Chicago P, 1994. Snaith, Anna. Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945. Cambridge UP, 2014. Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. The Nobel Lecture. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992. Walmsley, Anne. The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972. New Beacon Books, 1992. Wollaeger, Mark and Matt Eatough (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Oxford UP, 2012.

PART III

Sex and Gender

CHAPTER 11

#Metoo in Wide Sargasso Sea Carine Mardorossian

Tarana Burke, the African-American activist and originator of the Me Too Movement, must have found it ironic when the campaign she started to promote “empowerment through empathy” among women of color became associated with white women. Today, some even believe it to have been invented by white actresses in Hollywood, especially after the broader movement was embraced by celebrities.1 This pitting of black women against white women, this moment when solidarity based on gender is recast as division based on race, is as old as the history of the feminist movement, as is the invisibility of black women’s agency on which it is premised. As I reread Wide Sargasso Sea in light of this familiar story of antagonism, I could not help but be struck by the overlooked subtle #metoo moment of that narrative, namely when the black creole maid Amélie turns to her white British “master” Rochester and admits that she finds it in her heart to be sorry for his wife Antoinette too, the white creole woman whose family’s demise after Emancipation was obviously and

C. Mardorossian (*) University of Buffalo, SUNY, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_11

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understandably the cause for celebration to the members of the ex-slave class like her. Maybe the brief and fleeting moment of alliance Amélie summons is best left alone. Maybe it is a symptom of wishful thinking on my part. Or maybe, just maybe, it behooves us to recognize the black woman’s foundational gesture of empathy, its long line and history which leads up to Me Too via Tarana Burke but can be traced back to Oprah Winfrey, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Sojourner Truth, as well as many fictional heroines like Christophine, Tituba, and yes, Amélie the maid. None of these women characters, and least of all Amélie, can be conflated with the stereotype of the black woman who works faithfully for a white family and nurses its children. After all, Amélie has no qualms calling Antoinette, the master’s wife, “white cockroach,” hitting her back when she herself gets slapped, and flirting then sleeping with the master in plain view of his forlorn and desperate wife. The empathetic words she whispers must at the very least give us pause, if not, as I propose here, constitute the beginning of an interrogation of the workings of racial tensions in relation to gender oppression.2 This chapter proposes to use the representation of sexual acts in Wide Sargasso Sea to help us think through the workings of agency, gender and race in contemporary US responses to sexualized forms of violence. In other words, I am proposing to draw insights about how sexualized violence is understood today on the basis of fictional sex acts in Jean Rhys’s important 1966 novel, acts which, although they are not explicitly identified as violent, are nonetheless tied to a long history of gendered and racialized violence. More specifically, I want to analyze two scenes involving sexual relations that eventually go awry and that allow us to figure out a way out of the impasse which acts of solidarity in the name of gender rightly run into in the name of race. This is not meant to suggest that “all sex is rape” (to evoke the bastardized rendition of Andrea Dworkin’s or Catherine McKinnon’s feminist writings on sexual violence). It is self-evident that not all sex is rape or should be criminalized as such since the criminalization of rape for which feminists fought would lose all meaning without a rape/not rape distinction. This chapter does not purport to show that the sex acts that are not represented as actionable in Wide Sargasso Sea would in a contemporary context become any more so. Instead, I argue that while “all sex is certainly not rape,” this does not mean that “all sex that is not rape” is ok.

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The representation of sexual violence in Wide Sargasso Sea allows us to ask important questions about the workings of forms of oppressions on a continuum of micro- to macro-aggressions that may or may not involve a judicial response. My article is therefore about the forms of sexual activity for which there may not be legal redress but that are not free from coercion despite the presence of consent. These are forms of coercion that Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’s sophisticated and mediated approach to oppression exposes in all their gendered and racialized variations. Sometimes, sex acts that derive from or imply an “individual choice” are neither individual nor just about choice. Rather, while not criminalized, they derive from a long history of sexualized violence whose legacies we still live with. Whereas the law today applies to all irrespective of gender, Rhys’s novel reveals that in relation to crimes that are inherently gendered and racialized (such as sexualized or domestic violence), a gender-neutral legal definition of rape may not adequately address the oppressive dynamics it purports to redress. In other words, in the continuum that goes from sex to rape, a humanist rather than legalistic understanding of power dynamics is key to understanding how defining sexualized violence is to the “making of culture” (in Lawrence Kramer’s words). Specifically, the following sexual act in Wide Sargasso Sea, one that is not represented as rape in the novel, nonetheless needs to be read in the context of the long and racialized history of sexual and racial violence and rape since slavery. Rochester’s sexual play with the black creole servant Amélie in the novel may not be criminalized within the purview of the law but is unimaginable outside the stereotype of black female sexual availability that is itself inseparable from the history of sexual violence. Inversely, I will show how a scene that, in today’s parlance and our era of backlash, would ironically be represented as resorting to a “date-rape drug” or enacting reverse discrimination is not, in fact, doing either. The passage I have in mind immediately precedes the first one I mentioned about the aftermaths of the sexual relations the nameless Rochester has with the maid Amélie. It is the scene that follows a desperate Antoinette’s plea to her nanny Christophine, the Martinican obeah woman, to concoct a love drink that would help her “charm” her husband back. Christophine insists that obeah is not for békés yet gives a desperate Antoinette a potion which, as predicted, does not achieve the desired effect. We can conjecture about the reasons why the potion does not function as the love elixir which it was meant to be. Raiskin remarks, for

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instance, that it is unclear “whether the hex fails because [o]beah is essentially a practice of the black community […], or whether Christophine meant to poison the white master to free Antoinette” (139). Raiskin’s second suggestion corroborates the unnamed husband’s paranoid suspicion, but Jean Rhys’s own discussion of the scene in Smile Please and her poem Obeah Night throw a different light on this interpretation. To understand such a scene in terms that would speak to our contemporary concerns, we need to consider the narrative point of view in which it is represented alongside these different sources. Such analysis will clarify the ways in which the novel makes visible the inseparable workings of racialized and gendered oppression in the colonial context. This is a process through which race and gender function in tandem to reproduce colonialist hierarchies at the same time as the narrator is shown to identify with so-called ideals of “propriety” and gentlemanly conduct. In light of the impasses of anti-rape discourse today, this line of inquiry will help toward the theorization of the necessary imbrication of agency, rape, gender and race not only in the Caribbean context but also in the contemporary United States. In her nonfiction writings, Rhys herself is careful to distinguish between obeah (about which she had heard but whose workings she was not clear about), the potion (which Christophine has declared to be ineffective outside of the context of black cultural traditions) and Rochester’s hypnotic and hungover state (which Rhys identifies as deriving from lust and his “angry love”): The second clue was when Miss Anthill suggested a few weeks of happiness for the unfortunate couple—before he gets disturbing letters. As soon as I wrote that bit I realized that he must have fallen for her—and violently too. The black people have a good word for it—“she magic with him” or “he magic with her.” Because you see, that is what it is—magic, intoxication. Not “Love” at all […]. In obeah these drinks or sacrifices or whatever have this effect: The god himself enters the person who has drunk. Afterwards he (or she) faints, recovers, and remembers very little of what has happened (they say). I wouldn’t know. Not Mr. R. He remembers everything including the fact that he has felt a bit uneasy in the early happy days and asked her to tell him what’s wrong, promised to believe her, and stand by her, and she’s always answered “Nothing is wrong.” For, poor child, she is afraid to tell him, and cries if he insists. So he strides into her bedroom, not himself, but angry love and that is what the poem is about. Even when the love has gone, the anger is still

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there and remains. (No obeah needed for that!) And remains. (Wyndham: 262)

This passage is important for two reasons. First, because it does not deny the potency of obeah, which Rhys does not doubt but about which she does not know enough. Secondly, because she discusses the potential effects of “obeah drinks or sacrifices or whatever” as distinct from—so not to be conflated with—the “being magic with her” and “intoxication” that defines Rochester and Antoinette’s lovemaking, something which, she insists, both blacks and whites will recognize irrespective of their differences. In other words, just because Rochester claims to be poisoned does not make it so. Indeed, Rhys explains, those who ingest obeah potions remember “very little of what has happened (they say)” but Rochester “remembers everything” (Wyndham: 262), so for Rhys, his behavior and hypnotic state have a lot to do with his drinking and “angry love” and nothing with the obeah he is so determined to blame for his lack of self-­ control which itself derived from rumors pertaining to Antoinette’s sexual agency. He cannot cope with that agency or recognize it (not even by rejecting it as when Christophine suggests that he “leave the West Indies if you want her no more” (158)) since its repeated suppression is what his sense of masculinity depends on. Without Antoinette as marionette, he would not make sense. He needs her so he can, through her, blame obeah for what happened, thus vilifying the black creole culture while denying his wife her agency (he tells Christophine “you are to blame for all that happened here, so don’t come back” (159)). The “angry love” that drives him (who is “not himself”) is also of course euphemism for domestic violence, a form of violence that had yet to be recognized or even named as a social problem, either in Rhys’s own time (since it took the second wave to bring domestic violence and rape onto the public agenda) or, and even less so, during the post-­Emancipation times depicted in the novel; indeed, in the context of slavery and its aftermaths, the white man’s aggression was perceived as just normative masculinity or as the prerogative of the “master” who was seen as either entitled to or, were things to go wrong, as seduced by an inherently available and promiscuous black female sexuality. Indeed, it is significant that immediately on the heels of his passionate lovemaking with Antoinette, Rochester proceeds to sleep with Amélie, the servant whose “darker skin” and “thicker skin” trouble him; he is doing it not just to put his wife (who could witness it all through a thin partition) in her place but also to

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re-establish his own sense of self as a “master” with access to black female sexuality at all times. And again, in a passage which echoes Amélie’s empathic comment, it is yet another black creole woman who recognizes and highlights the white creole woman’s objectification at a moment the latter is not herself able to do so. In a final confrontation with Rochester, it is Christophine who exposes him for what he is, a perpetrator of domestic as well as colonial violence: “I know what you do with that girl as well as you know” she tells him, and “I undress Antoinette so she can sleep cool and easy: it’s then I see you very rough with her eh?” She then proceeds to tell the story of an islander named Rupert who chopped off his wife’s nose with a machete, then cried like a baby “I don’t mean it. It just happened” in front of the exasperated doctor Christophine fetched for help and who is trying to find a solution to this recurring marital abuse. Christophine concludes her brief and pointed storytelling with a “Plenty Ruperts here you notice?” In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is consistently black female characters who are telling it like it is and calling a spade a spade in the face of the recurring masculinist and colonialist abuse that defines their world. It is significant in this respect that it is not just Amélie and Christophine who decide to leave right after the debacle, but also the black creole cook whom Rochester is surprised to see walking out of the kitchen. “Why?” he asks as he sees her leaving with “a huge bundle [her mattress] on her head” (142), and Baptiste answers, because she “won’t stay in this house” and “no good to talk to her” (142). And although Baptiste goes on to reassure Rochester that the little girl Hilda “will do as I tell her. Hilda will stay” (142), she too has left by the time Rochester inquires about her whereabouts again: “Hilda is not here. … Hilda has left—yesterday” (167). In Wide Sargasso Sea, “when trouble comes” in the form of Rochester’s “angry love,” black creole women “close ranks” by walking out, because they recognize abuse when they see it, and they know what Antoinette will soon learn the hard way, namely that Rochester does not discriminate between black and white creole women on the basis of their race, but rather uses race, along with gender, to discriminate against both. Like most oppressors, Rochester casts himself in as the victim of the colonizing circumstances he has created, even resorting to references to zombification to bring his point home.3 Ironically, but only in abstract terms, he may actually be the victim of the structural, hegemonic masculinity whose workings require the repetitive subordination of otherness for his sense of self to persist. In that sense, he is indeed “not himself,”

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precisely because there is no self outside of the relational identity that needs to put down its feminized and racial other to shore itself up. His masculinity entails no selfhood that would pre-exist its construction through that hierarchical relation. That is how he feels he exists, that is why he remains nameless, and why he cannot leave his puppet wife behind. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Christophine knows only too well what happens when the white béké lays claim to a weaponized victimhood and unleashes the full force of the law against his racial and gendered others: No more slavery! She had to laugh! “These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing. They got magistrate. They got fine. They got jail house and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up people’s feet. New ones worse than old ones—more cunning, that’s all. (26)

This slippery nature of oppression may very well be the result of a notion of “contingency” which postmodernism popularized in the twentieth century, namely the belief that metanarratives are suspect because of the self’s situatedness. Since identities like victim and perpetrator are not fixed, then it has become conceivable to believe perpetrators who claim abuse at the hands of their victims (the “witch hunt” syndrome) and to blame victims for their own oppression. Since nothing is stable, then it seemed to make sense to challenge any and all claims of objectivity or moral redress. Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in relation to sexual violence in this country. If from one moment and context to the next, identities mean different things and the same individual can occupy a position of victim at one time and abuser at another, then the very concept of accountability is considered problematic. How can we hold anyone or anything accountable for any oppression at all? In this essay, I argue that Wide Sargasso Sea shows us how we can and why we should. Contingency may necessitate a more complex understanding of the workings of power but it does not undermine claims of sexualized oppression in the name of race or vice versa. Its unavoidability need not compromise or question our longstanding feminist and egalitarian principles. Similarly, for the French philosopher Michel Foucault, demonstrating the contingency of identities previously believed to be fixed did not mean that this made the effects of oppression any less consequential. The term homosexual, as he showed, may only have been configured and fixed as an identity in the 1870s, but that knowledge did not diminish the need for resistance in his lifetime. For Foucault, contingency meant that in

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fighting oppression, the language and classificatory logic with which homosexuality staged a needed resistance would have to be chosen carefully so as not to reproduce the dominant discourse’s oppositional dynamic. It did not mean that the fight would be any less arduous. So why this detour through Wide Sargasso Sea to expose contemporary cultural practices and responses to sexualized violence? Because Jean Rhys’s extraordinary novel is timeless for the way it exposes the ideological constructions and assumptions surrounding race and gender. It brings into relief how the understanding of one depends on preconceptions about the other, and how this contingent and shifting relationality drives and justifies injustice in a way that is more difficult but imperative to pinpoint and deconstruct. In other words, the novel’s two scenes will help us examine sites of sexual interaction where the violence of historical and colonial encounters is inscribed on social and domestic relations in such a sustained way that it no longer even counts as violent, or even as problematic. It just is the way things are. It is so normalized that it is the attempt at addressing it that may cause discomfort, and even justify retaliation. Specifically, Wide Sargasso Sea offers an ideal lens through which to dissect our underlying cultural assumptions about sexualized violence as a necessary evacuation of race across the board. It is, after all, an ur-feminist novel which after being celebrated for exposing gender oppression was, in the late twentieth century, taken to task for its representation of race relations. Indeed, while feminist critics were at first unanimous in acclaiming Rhys’s representation of her white creole heroine Antoinette’s subjectivity, they later came to see it “as guilty of the usurpation of race” (Gregg: 88), in other words, as complicit with racist depictions of black creole subjectivity. I engage elsewhere the debate that ensued about whether the novel’s ideological norm is racist or exposed as such. For the purposes of our discussion of sexual violence here, however, I will focus on the work the novel does to expose the incontrovertible interdependence of race and gender: when critics choose to focus on gender, they realize they have to account for race, and inversely, any discussion of colonial relations necessitates a consideration of the workings of gender. We can all agree that Wide Sargasso Sea at the very least exposes this interconnection, no matter on what end of the conservative versus progressive readings of the novel we fall. We can also hopefully all agree that Rhys’s novel usefully foregrounds how victim subjectivities are constructed through gendered and racialized structures that are inseparable, and how rape and race have not only been inextricably linked historically, but still are.

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Let’s rewind and remind ourselves of the ways in which our very understanding of sexual violence today derives from the cultural register developed during slavery and post-slavery contexts and the interracial conflicts of the nineteenth century. The history of the normalization of rape in culture or “rape culture” first occurred in the context of blackness, with black women being stereotyped as so sexually voracious and promiscuous that their victimization through sexual violence was rendered utterly invisible. Although it was not acknowledged as such that was a “rape culture.” Secondly, it was also through the myth of the oversexed black male body that rape was historically brought to the public agenda as a serious, criminal issue. Without the criminalization of black masculinity, rape would probably have remained a private and interpersonal affair. Because of it, however, by the 1890s, rape was so irremediably configured as the violation of white women by black men that this dominant narrative of rape came to justify the oppression of black men, in the form of fraudulent rape charges that were then routinely invoked as grounds for lynching. What is more, as Maria Bevacqua explains in Rape on the Public Agenda, the same racism that brought rape to the public’s attention in the nineteenth century also characterized the arrival of rape on the public agenda in the 1970s. Indeed, the tough-on-crime rape policies that emerged then were primarily adopted to protect the nation’s (white) women against black criminality. The legacies of this inextricable history of rape and race’s interrelationship are prominent in Wide Sargasso Sea. In keeping with stereotypes of promiscuous black femininity derived from slavery, Rochester treats the black creole maid Amélie as sexually available, going so far as to give her money immediately after sex. It is ironic that he refers to it as a large gift she should be grateful for (“It was a large present but she took it with no thanks and no expression on her face” (140)) when Antoinette calls him out for the small sum his present entailed. His behavior actually prompts Antoinette to make the following link explicit: “You abused the planters and made up stories about them, but you do the same thing. You send the girl away quicker, and with no money or less money, and that’s all the difference” (146). For all the squabbles she had with her maid and despite the scene she just witnessed, Antoinette knows whom and what to blame for what transpires between her husband and Amélie. Rhys herself prepares us for this reading since the nameless colonialist’s narration in the second section introduces us to his point of view through a surprising triangulation that reveals how the young maid caught his eye a long time

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before he acted on his desire. This is when Rochester has just married Antoinette “for better or worse” (65) yet introduces her alongside Amélie, both women equal in his eyes, and equally subordinated to his masculinist, authoritative gaze. In light of his recent nuptials, the triangulation is bound to be unexpected to a contemporary reader: Everything finished, for better or for worse. There we were, sheltering from the heavy rain under a large mango tree, myself, my wife Antoinette, and a little half-caste servant who was called Amélie. (65)

Rochester, so recently married, presents Amélie on par with his new wife rather than as part of the group of helpers who were hired to accompany them, “the two porters and a boy” (65). In the next paragraph, his attention is still on the young girl whose words he recalls and whom he goes on to describe as “a lovely little creature but sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps” (65). He clearly only has eyes for the creature whom the brutal history of slavery has promised him, and not for the wife he has already secured as a not-so-prized possession. The myth of an infinitely available black female sexuality is one Amélie or Antoinette may not always be able nor willing to articulate, resist or think themselves out of (Amélie leaves to go find rich men in Rio) but Antoinette temporarily sees through the workings of its legacies when she points to the similarity between her husband and the “old planters” (146) he criticized but was quick to emulate. Her gesture of empathy echoes that of the young girl. The sexual encounter Rochester stages with Amélie is not rape except maybe in the eyes of history. It is the outcome of a brutal system of exploitation that normalized the unquestioned sexual availability of the black woman as the planter’s prerogative, and with which Amélie makes do to survive. Her internalized consent re-enacts a transgenerational form of sexualized violence she does come to recognize as something other than mutual desire (“Another complication. Impossible. … I had no wish to touch her and she knew it” (emphasis mine, 140)). As Homi Bhabha’s work has helped us see, there are stereotypes about others which one deploys to exploit (Rochester) and there are stereotypes about oneself which unconsciously or consciously drive one’s behavior (Amélie). It is in the liminal space between her “master” thinking of her as sexually available and Amélie assenting to it that the specter of resistance emerges (Bhabha). It is also in that space that, I argue, solidarity is made

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possible, in the form of Amélie’s fleeting moment of empathy for the white creole woman who is caught up in a Stockholm syndrome of her own. This moment of alliance is one the white creole woman echoes when she compares Rochester to the old slave-owning planters. Both women are caught between the internalization of the racial stereotype through which the white man demeans them and their awareness of its workings, albeit only through their empathetic comment. Amélie, while playing the stereotypical role Rochester has assigned her by virtue of history, has nonetheless insight into it. And Antoinette’s attempts at performing whiteness are similarly replaced by her awareness that the man who will literally keep her hostage by the end is no different than the old planters he was so keen to condemn. The brilliance of Wide Sargasso Sea is that it reveals the brutal, demeaning and uninterrupted effects of the race-based beliefs derived from colonialism, while exposing the contingency of race and identity. It reveals something we have such a hard time fully recognizing today, namely that the contingency of identity can be as effective a tool of power as its essentialized counterpart and not what should make us question its hold on people’s behavior and consciousness. In Rochester’s narrative, for instance, the “white fiancée” who looks at first “like any pretty English girl” (71) and whom he goes on to marry is gradually and increasingly racialized as black in a process that obviously has little to do with signs of corporeal difference or any essential notion of race. Rochester has been receiving “disturbing letters” from Daniel Cosway, letters that raise questions about his wife’s sexual transgression outside of marriage and which, in addition to her status as a not-quite-­ white creole, leads Rochester to suddenly and increasingly recognize signs of blackness in her physiognomy. Antoinette’s racial identity, “a Creole of pure English descent” (67) therefore undergoes a “darkening” process (“she looked very much like Amélie” (127)) that cannot just be explained through any essentialized reference to race, precisely because it is represented as a shifting, relational and contextual process. Indeed, it is not just in the eyes of one character, her husband, that Antoinette’s racial identity changes drastically but also, and maybe more importantly, from representatives of one social class to another. To Rochester, who tries to contain his wife’s racial indeterminacy by referring to a blood-based notion of racial classification, Antoinette becomes ultimately no different than Amélie. To the black creole characters, however, the white creoles that once enslaved them are closer to the

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white end of any putative racial classification. Instead of emphasizing a shared black identity with Antoinette on the grounds that she is “colored,” her childhood friend Tia and later the maid Amélie contest this essentializing move and dismiss any commonality by resorting to stereotypes such as “white nigger” and “white cockroach.” What their comments bring to light, in other words, is a “white skin, black masks” that provides an interesting counterpoint to Fanon’s “black skin, white masks.” Antoinette does at times come to realize the constructedness of the categories through which Rochester looks at the world [“You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too” (147)], but at first, she is mainly shown trying to live up to her husband’s preconceived views and beliefs. After their initial estrangement and before trying a love potion, she tries to win him back by telling him the truth about her past but confirms instead his suspicion that she has inherited her mother’s madness and promiscuity (which in turn reproduce stereotypes of the “hybrid degenerate” Victorians were so keen on). At one point, we see her wearing the white dress he liked so much, “but it had slipped untidily over one shoulder” (127). Antoinette herself is incapable of realizing that in Rochester’s eyes, her attire actually associates her with (black) female sexual wantonness and prostitution since her only frame of reference is her favorite childhood picture she is striving to emulate, “‘The Miller’s Daughter,’ a lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders” (36; emphasis mine). For much of the narrative, Antoinette seeks to live up to an ideal whiteness even though she is more in tune with black models than with the white standards to which she strives and is expected to adhere. She has naturally and unconsciously adopted many of the black creoles’ practices and beliefs, for which she ironically also incurs repulsion: “Don’t put any more scent on my hair. He doesn’t like” (79), but mostly, in the name of love, she spends most of the narrative wanting to be white, even thinking of herself as such, unaware that her husband sees her increasingly as black. And it is interestingly the “disturbing letters” that seal his change of attitude toward her, who then goes from looking like “any pretty English girl” (71) to being “very much like Amélie” (127). The latter whom Antoinette, by contrast, refers to as one of the “light brown girls” (146) he prefers, is to him “much darker” (140) than he thought after their sexual intercourse. And last but not least, to the black creoles, Antoinette may have white skin but she also wears a black mask, as testified by the “white cockroach” (101) comments.

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Race is not stable as a category of identity but it is predictable in the ways in which it works to be appropriated as a tool of power in any of its permutations. No matter how variable its meanings or associations, it works to reify the same colonial and masculinist power relations. One party (Antoinette) may see her relationship as white on white and may have the right skin hue for it, but that does not mean that she is seen as white in her marriage. Neither does it mean that in either instance, her relationship is any less oppressive. Her gender oppression is not alleviated by her whiteness, since her body provides the site through which Rochester’s anxieties about the black man play itself out. While as a black woman, she is seen as promiscuous and stereotyped as a wild animal that needs to be locked up in an attic, as a white(r) woman, she either is subjected to domestic violence or becomes the body on whose exclusive possession Rochester’s racial superiority depends. Whether Sandi is still in the picture or not is irrelevant to Rochester whose very identity is tied to the purity and ownership of white femininity. Antoinette is punished not just because she got him drunk to get him back (an unforgivable sign of female sexual agency in itself) but because her love for a black man enacts a racial leveling that threatens his sense of racial superiority and identity. Fast forward to 2020. We still live with the legacies of the second wave of the women’s movement, which both brought domestic violence and rape on the public agenda, a feminist intervention which was also used and appropriated in the service of racism. There is no question that black criminals get punished for the same crime at a higher rate and more harshly than their white counterparts, and when the crime is interracial even more so. Still, in light of the statistics of interracial rape that are as low as 7%, we have been led to believe that rape is not about race. But the fact that rape is mostly intraracial should not obscure the fact that because of the historical imbrication of rape and race, all responses to rape are racialized, and ineluctably so. Just like the Antoinette who, when desperate to be white, could not recognize the workings of racist assumptions in her own relationship, so have we, in our cultural response to rape, omitted to see the encroachment of racist and supremacist thinking when racial difference is not visible. In so doing, we have also obscured the real sites of empathy and solidarity for which the black female “subaltern” (to borrow Spivak’s term), who has been doubly oppressed, has nonetheless paved the way for decades if not centuries, in literary as well as historical accounts.

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Wide Sargasso Sea reveals a world in which both black and white women are used and abused for the re-enactments of the white colonialist’s fantasies of racial superiority. The compromised purity of the white woman which drives Rochester’s rage has, in other words, less to do with her, than with concerns about his racial authority. It matters little whether her relationship with the colored man was consensual, flirtatious, inexistent or benign. What would have mattered was that it remain inconceivable, which it no longer was once the “disturbing letters” and the gossip entered the picture. Rochester’s triangulating relationship with Antoinette and Amélie is ultimately not really about the women at all, but about the threat Sandi represents to his white masculinist sense of self and power, one he seeks to re-establish via his subordination of both white and black femininity. Today, the lopsided response to black-on-white versus white-on-white rape needs to be seen for what it is: as what exposes the harsher response in cases of black-on-white rape as one driven by an anxiety over white masculinity. It is therefore not really driven by a concern for the victim, who is merely used for the re-enactment and consolidation of white masculinity in relation to black masculinity. Were it otherwise, were it really about the crime’s feminized victims, or the injustice committed against their abused self, the response to white-on-white rape would be no less harsh, but it is, and predominantly so. The dominant response to rape reveals a form of “between men” at play (to evoke Sedgwick) but one in which the homosocial is replaced by the hierarchical. In other words, the fact that #metoo has revealed such a huge proportion of white women suffering for years in silence alongside their empathetic black sisters shows that sexual violence is only taken seriously in its interracial form. When sexualized violence or harassment does not involve a visible racial difference, then intervention is not deemed to be necessary or urgent. If rendering justice does not allow the re-enactment and consolidation of the racial hierarchies that buttress white masculinity, then it is not sought as persistently or vehemently. In other words, sexual violence is a “privilege” that is reserved for white masculinity so it can assert its superiority over black masculinity, hence the harsher response to black-on-white rape that threatens this triangulating dynamic. It is not sexualized violence per se that is considered a problem (as evidenced by #metoo); it is access to its privilege by anyone other than the besotten white masculine subject. Representations of—and responses to—white on white rape are no less about race than those associated with perceived or actual black-on-white

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rape. Rape is so imbricated in racism that the absence of visible racial difference evacuates the possibility or seriousness of violation altogether (#metoo) while its presence leads to the appropriation of the evidence of sexual violence in the service of a race-based rather than gender-based response. In contemporary instances of rape, the rape and abuse of white women, just like that of black women, is therefore rendered suspect at best and invisible at worst in ways that reverberate across racial boundaries. Feminist and black critical theory have therefore done a great job of drawing attention to the ways in which anti-rape discourse (1) has justified the oppression of black men by contributing to the myth of the black rapist or (2) risks obscuring the violation of the black female body. I have argued that in omitting to recognize the racist dynamics at play in the weak deterring response to white-on-white rape, we have failed to identify the possibility of solidarity that emerges between victims across racial boundaries and that black women have been showcasing for centuries. It is important, also for that reason, to recognize the racism that mobilizes the culture’s response to all instances of rape. The disproportionate response to perceived or actual black-on-white sexual encounters, violent or not, has always been about reserving the rights to the white female body for the white man, not about white women’s selfhood. White-on-­ white rape has always been practiced and normalized for the same reason. Historically, it mattered little whether the “rape” of the white woman was consensual sex, cat calling, whistling or actual sexual violence, or whether the white woman over whose purity the horrors of lynching were carried out was complicit with the atrocities committed in her name (she may or may have not been; the outcome remained the same). It is via the subordination of the white woman’s body as well as of black women’s bodies to fantasies of white masculinity that whiteness produces and reproduces its supremacist ideals. Historically, it hardly mattered whether black-on-white rape was real or fabricated for this principle to be in play. Today, it hardly seems to make a difference whether white women are victims of harassment or sexual violence for the same logic to apply. Were it not for the sexual availability of both white and black women, how else would white masculinity recognize itself as such and enact its fantasy of superiority over blackness? Today, when white women’s sexual violation is not taken seriously, dismissed and is turned on its head to portray white masculinity as the real victimized subject, that erasure is as much an effect of racism as the myth of the black male rapist or the invisibility of the rape of the black woman.

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In other words, in the dominant national imaginary, white women cannot be raped when (and because) their assailant is not black, while black women cannot be raped when (and because) their assailant is white. The common denominator in both cases is white masculinity. It is always racism that drives the response to rape when the absence of the black man evacuates the possibility that rape is rape, and it is always women who pay the price. In conclusion, it is precisely because white masculinity is at stake in the unspoken dynamics that mobilize the responses to the rape of both white and black women that solidarity between them is necessary and timely. In the words of the #MeToo movement founder Tarana Burke, “This is a call for public accountability” not a witch hunt.4 For too long now, the fight against rape has constantly been reframed as something other than what it is, a struggle to end it. That goal will only be possible if we account for the race-based dynamics through which normative masculinity asserts its white dominance through white-on-white as well as in racially marked rapes. As Wide Sargasso Sea demonstrates, everything may be contingent and contextual but “I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it” (181).

Notes 1. See Howard, Hilary. “The Tail of the Anita Hill Fury Got Us to #MeToo” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/nyregion/rebecca-traister-onwhy-women-are-angry-its-not-just-kavanaugh.html. 2. The fact that such patterns of compassion and understanding across history have either been invisible or reduced to internalized racism (black mammy syndrome) may have more to do, in other words, with our own inability to think beyond that stereotype. It is time to think seriously through what constitutes an extraordinary capacity for empathy by people who have every historical and personal reason not to display it. 3. I discuss the references to zombification in more detail in my book Reclaiming Difference. 4. See Anastasia Tsioulcas, “#MeToo Founder Tarana Burke Responds To R.  Kelly” May 1, 2018 https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/ 05/01/607448801/-metoo-founder-tarana-burke-responds-to-r-kelly.

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Works Cited Bevacqua, Maria. Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 85–92. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. New  York: Random House, 1978. Gregg, Veronica Marie. Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Howard, Hilary. “The Tail of the Anita Hill Fury Got Us to #MeToo” The New York Times 28 September 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/nyregion/rebecca-traister-on-why-women-are-angry-its-not-just-kavanaugh.html. Kramer, Lawrence. After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Mardorossian, Carine. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Raiskin, Judith L. Snow on the Canefields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Rhys, Jean. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. New  York: Harper & Row, 1979. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. New  York & London: W.  W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1992. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan, 1988. 271–313. Wyndham, Francis and Diana Melly, eds. Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966. London: André Deutsch, 1984.

CHAPTER 12

The Lineaments of Life and Death: Desire, Sexuality and Manhood in Wide Sargasso Sea Elaine Savory

Michael Kimmel’s book, The Gender of Desire, is centered on the contemporary United States, but his careful sociological analysis provides an important frame for this reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The literal center of Rhys’s novel and the largest portion of text are occupied by a man’s narrative. This man arrives in the Caribbean from England just after Emancipation and soon enacts masculinity as crude dominance of women. Though most readers and critics have assumed that Antoinette is the most important character in the novel, and there are certainly good reasons for so doing, this chapter reads the text for its representation of a particularly insecure masculinity in the unnamed husband.1 But this is not just any kind of insecure masculinity: it is an acculturation into plantation male white supremacy. This behavior stays with him as he takes his creole wife back to England and imprisons her.2 Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre is the original model for Rhys’s prequel version of Antoinette’s husband. He performs two culturally distinct forms of masculinity: the E. Savory (*) Department of Literary Studies and Environmental Studies, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_12

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plantation master, only inferred, who is still imprisoning his mad first wife when he appears in the novel, and the injured and impoverished man who is then a partner of whom Jane boasts by the novel’s end. The final bargain between Jane and her husband appears to be that he gets care and she gets a man who is tamed enough to be a proper mate. Kimmel rightly says codes of manhood are culturally learned: The boy’s sexuality will now come to resemble the sexuality of his father (or at least the way he imagines his father)—menacing, predatory, possessive, and possibly punitive. The boy has come to identify his oppressor; now he can become the oppressor himself. … Masculine identity is born in the renunciation of the feminine. … Women become a kind of currency that men use to improve their ranking on the masculine social scale. Masculinity is a homosocial enactment … its overriding emotion is fear. (Kimmel 31)

Wide Sargasso Sea’s dominant codes are English, white, nineteenth century and upper class. Jean Rhys has given us a psychologically insightful portrait of the web of influence which white male plantocracy exerts on upper-class English masculinity.3 Her text enables us to realize that the long shadow of plantation slavery on the behavior of white men in England can be as foundational to their lives as the money they made from slavery and employed to build or to sustain great houses, such as the one Rochester owns at the beginning of Jane Eyre.4 This chapter will argue that it is very productive to read both novels alongside the diaries of white male planters and slave-owners (Thomas Thistlewood, Britain) and James Henry Hammond (US South). It is also helpful to consider the social construction of gender codes as discussed in Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson’s collection Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire.5 In a metaphoric sense, Rhys, the declared heterosexual woman, importantly “queers” the gender map in this novel (and her other fiction) as she investigates the damage done to people by heterosexual and white male gender norms. Her life began in the aftermath of plantation slavery in Dominica, and while her last novel was not directed to the 1960s, when feminism was asking key questions about male and female gender codes, it appeared at a moment when it was read in that context (1966). Her novel not only writes back to Jane Eyre in terms of rehabilitating the monstrous wife but also examines how a husband who promised security comes to imprison his spouse, visiting on her a social death via near solitary confinement, in which she is guarded by Grace Poole.

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The present moment in which this chapter is written has recently witnessed disturbing public demonstrations of white male insecurity in confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court in the United States. These involved highly disturbing stories of evidently homosocially instigated sexual assaults on women.6 Also in this moment, the #MeToo movement has focused on calling out male sexual abuse regardless of race. It is this frame of reference which demands a rereading of Wide Sargasso Sea’s representation of manhood. Though the husband in Wide Sargasso Sea does not choose to remain in the Caribbean to become a planter, the money he receives from Mr. Mason, his wife’s stepfather, is Antoinette’s rightful inheritance from her dead father, and that money came directly from plantation profits built on enslaved labor. Mr. Mason, like the unnamed husband, is first sexually excited and captivated by the beauty and sensuality of a white Creole heiress, in his case Annette, Antoinette’s mother. Admittedly, she has only a run-down plantation to offer when he marries her. This causes gossip at the wedding, questioning his motives in choosing Annette “(w)hy should a very wealthy man who could take his pick of all the girls in the West Indies, and many in England too …?” (17). Even those dubious about the match seem to agree that Annette is very pretty and an extraordinary dancer (which suggests sexual appeal through skilled demonstration of her physicality). But the response to this idea is still puzzlement by the women who witness it, “Dance! He didn’t come to the West Indies to dance—he came to make money as they all do” (17). Of course, Annette is also from Martinique. Antoinette tells her husband St. Pierre is called the Paris of the West Indies, and that the style of her dress, which he likes, is called à la Joséphine (47). This name denotes all kinds of suspect associations between women, dress, seduction and power. It comes from being named for the very famous French creole plantation daughter (from Martinique) who married Napoleon. She was divorced when her Emperor husband needed a son and heir. Napoleon sent away the woman once known for promoting captivating sheer muslin dresses and replaced her with a more sober and solidly white consort.7 Kimmel’s position, following Sigmund Freud, is that manhood is equated with power over women as well as over other men (39).8 A sexually powerful woman, while at first very appealing—no small part of this is the promise of improvement of his status with other men by “conquering” her—cannot be allowed to appear to actually control him, even in small ways, because that will diminish his sociomanly credentials. Since mutual

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sexual passion requires mutual surrender, it is difficult for an insecure man to do this and emerge from the experience feeling in control. Mr. Mason is first enraptured by his new wife, but after he takes over as head of the Coulibri household, he is not inclined to listen to her or to the wise Aunt Cora. He needs to be in charge of things on his estate, despite his ignorance of local factors which may lead to danger. When Annette wants to leave Coulibri because she fears it is not safe for her delicate child Pierre, and gets support from Aunt Cora, he is “surprised and not at all pleased,” and he refuses her permission for more than a brief “change” (trip elsewhere). When Aunt Cora advises him not to talk about importing “coolies he called them,” he brushes her off as if he, the newcomer, knows more than she does (20, 21). At the moment of crisis, when the house is burning, Annette wants to save her pet parrot, and he just says, impotently, “I won’t allow it” (24). It is Aunt Cora who persuades Annette to desist from a public battle with her husband in front of the angry crowd of people recently emancipated from slavery and seeing their oppressors in trouble. Mason curses and then prays or stares, but again it is Aunt Cora who effectively faces down the angry man who threatens them all and thus obtains the moment’s space they need to get away. Mason is an opportunistic Englishman who comes to the Caribbean to make money. He does not handle the need to be the man in charge in his new environment with common sense. He is in this respect similar to Thomas Thistlewood, who migrated to Jamaica in 1750 and worked in various roles (overseer, “penkeeper”) until he eventually owned a small plantation. Douglas Hall, in his book on Thistlewood’s diary, says Thistlewood wanted to “try his fortune” in Jamaica, “like many others” (xvi).9 After his arrival in 1750, he first worked as “penkeeper,” then overseer. In 1767, he bought his small plantation (160 acres) and was already the owner of 30 slaves. He died in 1786, on this property, called Breadnut Island Pen. All this is bad enough, but Thistlewood’s diary gives us a disturbing entry into the world of a sexual predator—who was likely no different from most white males running plantations in the time of slavery. It would be useful to know what sort of young man he was when he arrived in Jamaica: was he already on the path to sexual depravity or was he a young man of no particular vices? Hall describes his impression of Thistlewood as a young man as “remarkably active, inquisitive and intelligent” (1). He lived at the Pen for the rest of his life. He never married. Trevor Burnard offers a detailed account of his sexual life drawn from Thistlewood’s

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own records.10 He had a long sexual relationship with an enslaved woman on his plantation (Phibbah). She lived in his house and managed his domestic affairs. He never paid her for sexual services (he recorded not only his sexual encounters but whether or not he paid and how much). While this was not a marriage, the relationship provided him with some of the services of a wife without his having to take on the responsibilities of a husband. His diary, according to Burnard, reveals he had sex with Phibbah 62 times in 1776, “always at night in his bed” (159). He additionally violated enslaved women all the time. In the year of his death, he had sex with six other women besides Phibbah (Burnard, 157). He rarely showed sexual interest in white women, and then only prostitutes, and he “mostly preyed on slaves who were answerable to him” (157). Burnard also points out that only “the very young and the very old” were really safe: he had sex with girls (some only fourteen or fifteen, and with Abba, perhaps even before puberty). He also violated heavily pregnant women (such as Abba, late in several pregnancies, and once two days before she gave birth and Franke, who miscarried eight days later). His records of such predatory abuse are brief and without comment. Hall includes this entry: “Sunday 23rd August, 1772: a.m. cum Abba; Tuesday 25th August, 1772: Anna brought to bed of a girl between 1 and 2  pm” (186). Burnard says Thistlewood’s records show he had sex with two women—“Egypt Susannah and Abba—172 and 169 times, respectively” (157) and overall with Phibbah, 2141 recorded times. Why he chose to keep such records is unknown but the workaday tone suggests he had no shame or empathy whatsoever. His notes on brutal punishments he handed out confirm this.11 Thistlewood had sex in many different places outside his house, where he might have been observed. As Burnard points out, molesting slave women was only partly about sex. It was really about displaying the kind of dominance which discarded public decency/dignity in exchange for status as the alpha white man on the plantation. It is easy to see how weak men could be tempted into this behavior, in their need to establish dominance. Kimmel reminds us that rape and sexual abuse are always about crude assertion of power: The casual rape of colonized women is a form of sexual terrorism—one that serves sexism by keeping women down and serves the other forms of domination by acting as a vicious reminder of the dominated men’s incapacity to protect “their” women. (93)

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It is not that men in England at the time were not capable of sexual abuse (Richardson’s Pamela is a fictional example).12 But those with power on slave plantations found no limitations on their public display of such behavior. James Henry Hammond (1807–1864), planter and slaveholder in South Carolina, is most known for a notorious speech given in the US Senate in 1858 in which he argued that “great civilizations require menials to perform the drudgery of life” (Rubin in ed. Bleser, vii). In his own words, such menials constitute “the very mud-sill of society and of political government” (Rubin vii). He went on to say who these people were, for a female South: A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose and we call them slaves. (Rubin vii)

Hammond’s “we” was clearly understood to be white Southerners, among whom men had far more status than women. Carol Bleser writes of him, “almost alone among the planter aristocracy, he clearly documents his proclivity for sexually exploiting his female slaves. In addition he debauched the young, the very young daughters of a fellow planter, his brother in law, a despicable practice then as now and certainly very dangerous then, when the code duello was still in fashion.”13 Bleser goes on to say Hammond’s wife wanted to preserve his memory and his enslaved mistresses stayed on his lands “decades after emancipation” (xvi). This does not prove they either loved or respected him, only that he provided them with something worth keeping for themselves (status, for the wife, and for the mistresses a place to live within his lands). Like Thistlewood, Hammond never questioned slavery. His behavior seems far more to be sinister than foolish when we think of his predations on women and girls. What seems to have destroyed his chance to be a decent human being (as it did for Thistlewood, Mr. Rochester in his treatment of his creole wife Bertha and the unnamed husband in his treatment of Antoinette) is his support for the practice of enslavement and sexual abuse of women who had no opportunity to refuse him. He chose to give up all self-restraint with regard to his worst impulses. Bleser reports that in “January 1839, the master of Silver Bluff purchased for $900 a seamstress named Sally and her one-year old daughter Louisa.

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Soon after their purchase, Hammond made eighteen-year-old Sally his mistress and by her he acknowledged he had children. When Louisa reached the age of twelve, Hammond took her as his mistress and by her he had several more children” (18). Hammond’s own account of his molestation of his nieces by marriage (which began when they aged 13–18) is shamelessly frank. He says their affection for him was expressed by clambering all over him, and his hands then were permitted to “stray unchecked over every part of them and to rest without the slightest shrinking from it, in the most secret and sacred regions, and all this for a period of more than two years continuously” (173). Eventually this came to be known.14 His defensive arguments in his journal are full of self-deceit and amorality: he argues that he would not be believed if he told his side of the story in public. He says “how utterly powerless I have been and still am in this affair.” He does think he should be condemned for molesting his nieces, but he argues that “the very greatest men that have lived have been addicted to loose indulgences with women. It is the besetting sin of the strong, and of the weak also, of our race.” It is not clear what he exactly means by race, we can assume white men. His examples include “President Harrison got his wife’s niece with child.” He then goes on to ask that the degree of temptation he suffered be understood: (h)ere were four lovely creatures from the tender but precocious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19 (in 1840–41), each contending for my love” (172–3). So, “(i)s it in flesh and blood to withstand this? Is there a man, with manhood in him and a heart susceptible to any emotions of tenderness, who could tear himself from such a cluster of lovely, loving, such amorous and devoted beings? Nay are there many who would have the self-control to stop where I did? Am I not after all entitled to some, the smallest portion of, credit for not going further?” (173). If this is not enough evidence of “blame the victim, ease the perpetrator,” he also reveals his complete lack of empathy for those he enslaves, “(I)f my negroes increased as they ought, I should feel I had a fund growing for my children” (107). He expects his slaves to reproduce to enable his children to have an easy life. Hammond can, remarkably, after all this, find it possible to maintain the belief that “(M)y wife loves me” and “I believe I approach her ideal in person” (213). He asserts he has kindness and respect for her as his wife, the mother of his children (at least those born in marriage) and his household manager, but he has “not sought to be immaculate” (213). It is clear

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that he fundamentally believes that being a man of his type in his world entitles him to any woman he fancies at any time, while maintaining a legal marriage for the sake of producing heirs. Like Thistlewood, he has a striking lack of empathy for his victims, and even for those with whom he claims to have a close relationship (his respect for his wife can only be described as remarkably limited in extent). Clearly unrestrained dominance destroys the humanity of those men who indulge in it. One pathway for planters was to make enough money to be an absentee owner (like Thomas Bertram in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park): such a man wielded a lot of power over subordinates, which could include sexual power (over female servants and any other woman available as prey).15 But some social restraints were certainly in place at least in Austen’s fictional world: the man did not like to see his worst self visible to his own close family. Coming to Rochester in Jane Eyre with this frame of reference gives a new impetus to exploring the details Brontë provides. As a young man, Rochester acquired a wife and her money in the Caribbean, though now he has also inherited his father’s estate after his older brother’s early death. Brontë clearly wants her reader to notice his physical appearance. He is not exactly a hero in his looks, as Jane notes when she first meets him by accident (119–110). The next time she sees him, she is struck by his “very grim” mouth, chin and jaw (116). It is noticeable how closely Jane examines his body or “shape” as she calls it. Playing charades, Rochester is in disguise, and Jane notes that his “dark eyes and swarthy skin and Paynim features suited the costume exactly; he looked the very model of an Eastern emir” (179–80). Does this suggest harems and subordinated women? Certainly Rochester’s deliberate flirting with Miss Ingram, as well as what Jane notes as his style of courtship, “in its pride, irresistible” seems to indicate he is in control. Jane is however suspicious of all men and particularly of Rochester, even when she accepts to marry him. He gives away a good deal when he says “you please me, and you master me—you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm” (259). In short, he is turned on by female submission. When his marriage to Bertha Mason is revealed, and he tells the story of how it went wrong, he asserts she was at first “a charming partner—pure, wise, modest” (289). When Jane first sees this entrapped wife, who flies at Rochester in fury, she sees someone with “virile force” (291), an utterly unacceptable male style of power. Rochester

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bitterly says this violence is the “only conjugal embrace I am ever to know,” which demonstrates how utterly absorbed in himself he is—rather similarly to both Hammond and Thistlewood. At the time he says this, the wife, now reduced to a furious subhuman creature, is still existing in the attic, and he has no thought for her. Gilbert and Gubar argue that once Rochester has secured Jane’s love, he begins to treat her as “an inferior, a plaything” (355) and says, revealingly, “It is your time now, little tyrant … but it will be mine presently.” He talks of seizing her, and attaching her to a chain. She says she can never bear “being dressed like a doll.” But he has to admit to lack of respect for himself when he is found out in his marriage to Bertha Mason. It is important he is found out, just as it was important in Hammond’s own life, forcing him to at least make gestures toward reconciling decent domestic maleness with the appalling behavior he was concealing from his nearest relatives. In effect, Rochester is unmanned by the discovery: for his marriage has been outed by another man, Bertha’s brother, causing public humiliation—which then results in a long narrative to Jane in which he tries to explain himself. There are several germane elements here which might have caught Rhys’s attention as she was preparing her own text. He says if Jane were to go mad he would still love her, that it is not madness which makes him reject his creole wife. Forced to explain this, he turns to the circumstances of his marriage, and here the detail that he was recruited because he “was of a good race” is important (303). He says his bride was “of the style of Blanche Ingram; tall, dark and majestic” (303). Blanche is described as having an “olive complexion, dark and clear” (155) large, black eyes, raven-black hair, raven ringlets and an oriental eye (157). Jane (perhaps a little snarkily) says Blanche is “as dark as a Spaniard” (169). So Rochester is apparently courting a woman far from Anglo-Saxon, blue-­ eyed pallor. But he claims the marriage failed because he could not hold a conversation with his wife. Furthermore, the West Indies has something to do with it. The combination of a hot West Indian night, bad weather and his wife’s tempestuous mood is too much for him. Though the geography is in error (winds do not blow to the Caribbean from Europe, rather they come directly from Africa), he believes a soft breeze is European and that he needs to go home, to find an intelligent woman. He at first tries to be with mistresses, who ultimately disgust him “(h)iring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave; both are often by nature, and always by

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position, inferior; and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading” (310). There is no recognition that a man who buys either the sexual services of a mistress or the person of a slave is the one causing the entire situation of superiority and inferiority to exist. Interestingly, he is bested by Jane’s eye in her effort to resist him: “resolute, wild, free” (317). Rochester is a shameless drama queen as Jane leaves him, performing that skilled appeal of unmasked predator to the maternal in a woman to whom he appeals for forgiveness. But just before this he makes a truly alarming speech in which he seems to have to argue himself out of assaulting Jane’s body: If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage would only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling place. And it is you, spirit- with will and energy and virtue and purity- that I want: not alone your brittle frame. (316)

It takes Rochester being damaged physically and materially by the fire and the collapse of the house and Jane coming into money through inheritance, to level the playing field for these two to become a firm couple. Gilbert and Gubar cite critics, such as Richard Chase, who claim Rochester suffers a “symbolic castration” in his injuries in Jane’s eyes (368). But they go on to argue that he may be stronger than before, in fact, because he draws on his own inner resources instead of dominating his world (369). This seems somewhat generous. Rochester, even in his relatively enfeebled state, demands that his woman put him first in her life. Jane declares: “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh” (451). Clearly they enjoy a merging of equals which is full of joy, and also long lasting (Jane says she is supremely blessed, and they have been this way for a decade). However she does now have what in the Caribbean is called “vex-money,” the material means to walk away should this not work out (Aunt Cora’s gift of her rings to Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea is intended to provide this for her). This tale of both realistic skepticism and straightforward romantic hopefulness could be told today. The essential issue (or stereotype) remains the same: if a man splits off his need for sex from his needs for comfort, stability, support and the expectation of heirs through marriage), he is likely to seek them in different places. White men like Rochester,

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Thistlewood and Hammond have high status through the accident of birth providing them with gender, race and class privilege, which gives them power of choice with regard to fulfilling their sexual impulses. In Jane Eyre, the reader learns that only through suffering and loss can such a man perhaps earn the opportunity to discover the rewards of egalitarian loving are greater than those of conquest. Turning now to Wide Sargasso Sea, it is clear how brilliantly Rhys has understood the shadow of the plantation as a blight on all lives which it touches. Her novels never imagine an idyllic union between a man and a woman. Soon after the man who will be Antoinette’s husband arrives in Jamaica in Wide Sargasso Sea, he does promise trust, peace, safety and happiness to the woman doubtful about marrying him. At the beginning of the honeymoon, he gently carries a moth (admittedly he thinks it a male moth) to safety (48). He is not a planter and arrives after Emancipation. But will any man coming from England inevitably be quickly corrupted, as he adds male supremacy learned in England to the additional ruthlessness of white plantation male power, sexual and otherwise? Also is the helping of the moth impulsive, simple kindness alone or also affiliation with feminine virtues which he later crushes in himself? Antoinette has a favorite picture at Coulibri, called “The Miller’s Daughter” which depicts a “lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders” (21). After she looks at this, she notices her stepfather, “so sure of himself,” sitting at the dining table. Why would she not think this is the way to be female in England, the way an Englishman might like to see a lovely young woman? But after his visit to Daniel, her husband looks at the white dress he had once admired her wearing and thinks “but it had slipped untidily over one shoulder and seemed too large for her” (76). What was once read as attractive and sexually appealing turns slovenly in an instant. This despite the husband noticing, a little before this and without comment that Amélie wears a white dress, contrasting with her brown skin (72). It is a dress which Antoinette has discarded on the floor which makes him “breathless and savage with desire” (55). Before Daniel provides the homosocial poison which turns her husband entirely against Antoinette, sex between them begins intensely. This happens fast, for the first morning, until they are interrupted by Christophine, the husband is taken with the childlike plaits of his new wife, which he wishes to undo. Then it is not long before Antoinette whispers, “I never wished to live before I knew you. I always thought it would be better if I

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died. Such a long time to wait before it’s over” (55). His response is sinister, in his interchange of both the old meaning of dying as orgasm and actual dying: “You are safe,” I’d say to her and to myself. “Shut your eyes. Rest” (56). What is this business of his needing to feel safe? This reminds of Kimmel’s assertion that homosocial masculinity is full of fear: to stop feeling afraid you must somehow start feeling safe. To feel safe, as a man, you must be impregnable—even more so if you are a white man, surrounded by people you neither trust nor know well. Eventually, the husband blames Antoinette for his own inability to fully experience physical passion when he says, as they are leaving the honeymoon house forever, “She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would-or could. Or could” (99). He also finally feels the place itself is “unknown and hostile” (78). His dread in the forest is another example of his alienation from anything or anyone which stands apart from him. Rhys uses the poetic device of linked images or associations which economically reveal the complexity of this man. On the first night of the honeymoon, Antoinette tells Christophine he dislikes scent (which surprises her). But he never loses an opportunity, it seems, to notice flowers. His references include coralita on the dining table, a doomed young woman likened to a rose with a short life in a poem by Malherbe, small flowers falling like snow, a wild orchid which he accepts or not depending on how he feels about Antoinette and white sweet-scented flowers in two brown vases associated with Amélie. His response to highly scented flowers is particularly revealing. He has no idea that the two wreaths of frangipani left on the bed are a Caribbean tradition, signifying a marriage or anniversary of a marriage. Frangipani has a haunting scent, but he seems simply embarrassed by the idea of it, and when his wreath falls on the floor after he takes it off, he treads on it and the room is even more full of the scent once the petals are crushed (43). The first time he smells the very strongly scented river flowers which open at night he does no more than notice, but later, when he and Antoinette are quarreling, she says he dislikes the scent of the river flowers “so much.” Then as he prepares to take her away from all she knows and loves, he remembers a time when he longed for “night and darkness … when the moonflowers open” (102). He can only do this now he is about to be separated forever from them. The husband is emotionally scarcely more than a boy when he first encounters Antoinette. It is important to him that she seems like a child,

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with her plaits, as she lies in bed with him. He also thinks of her as a doll, and as he watches her listening to Baptiste, just before she is to leave, he sees “the doll’s smile” back, “nailed to her face” (103). At one point, early in their relationship, he rocks her like a child (49). What he wants in the end is for her to cry, to express her distress to him, so he could take her in his arms. What makes him furious and cruel is her refusal to give him that satisfaction, just as when she curses “every member of his body” (presumably including his penis), he is shocked by her knowledge of bad language. Yet he is sensitive to nature in the beginning, hearing rain falling as music: this too becomes perverse in the end, as he likens Antoinette to a tree which he intends to break. Christophine sees marks on Antoinette’s body which her husband made during sex, to which he refers as merely “love’s fierce play” (99). He is resistant to the vivid colors of vegetation on the island, because he must have a sense of control over everything to feel safe. When he sleeps with Amélie, it is to get control over Antoinette (he does it so she can hear, just as Thistlewood had sex in places where he could be heard or seen). Amélie calls him “master,” which affirms his control (and recalls the plantation). By the end of his narrative, he sounds more and more out of his mind as he thinks about how he has driven even the hate out of Antoinette’s eyes, and how he will always possess her and prevent any other man from having her, because she is “mine, mine” (99). His white male supremacy becomes more and more evident. He recalls that when he first saw Antoinette, he did not see her features as “not English or European” (39), though he does by the time they have traveled to the Eastern Caribbean for their honeymoon. He cannot understand how Antoinette can freely hug Christophine, and after sex, he looks at Amélie and sees “her skin was darker, her lips thicker than I had thought” (84). He gives her a large sum of money (Thistlewood paid off women at times). She has made him “satisfied and peaceful” but not happy. He admits to having no remorse when he has sex with her, but when he notices her traces of African heritage, he does not want to touch her. No doubt when Antoinette tells him the tragic story of her mother’s madness, incarceration and sexual abuse at the hands of her paid minder, he has unexpressed alarm at the idea that Antoinette’s own mother might desire interracial sex. A good deal of his change in response to Antoinette comes from him allowing Daniel to become his homosocial witness. Once the lost man, Daniel tells him that Antoinette’s family is sexually excessive, and she

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herself has had sex with Sandi, Daniel’s mixed race nephew, as well as himself, the husband’s racism and his sense of insecurity about his role as master of his wife come powerfully into play. Rhys gives the reader a great deal of detail about the sexual connection between the husband and Antoinette, how it moves from a gentle beginning to a violent intensity during which the husband is able to detach himself emotionally to watch her. He is always afraid, on guard, in this strange place, though he tries to soothe his own fears by telling her she will be safe. He recognizes he does not love her, cannot caress her, and no doubt this is because he cannot allow himself to move out of a controlling, nervous state of mind. He falls back in moments of emotional complexity on whatever cliché gives him most control. In this case he answers “(b) ecause I wished it. Isn’t that enough?” (54), to which Antoinette, a girl schooled to obey men, answers that it is enough, only that what happens if he stops wishing it? She is actually afraid to be happy. To which he responds as a British imperialist would—that she should never be afraid or if she is she should conceal it. This is also a very bad sign, for it means he is revealing his belief that suppressing vulnerability is the best path. Another night, she whispers to him, “If I could die. Now, when I am happy. Would you do that? You wouldn’t have to kill me. Say die and I will die. You don’t believe me? Then try, try, say die and watch me die.” On the surface, this is the trusting, open talk of a young woman in her first deeply trusting sexual flowering, but this is an already damaged young woman for whom trauma and disaster are normal—and pleasure and happiness are almost dangerous. Dying is a sort of refuge. Once again the husband’s response is appalling in its callousness and self-interest. He asserts, “Die then! Die!” Then he qualifies it, almost gleefully, in saying how he watched her die many times, “not in her way but in mine.” Which is to say he is not transported by sexual union and his own fulfillment with her, but remains on the outside of the experience, watching her “die” in the old English meaning of orgasm. This happens in daylight and at night, by moonlight and candlelight and in afternoons when the shutters are closed against the sun. The two of them are deeply sexually engaged, and he says she matches him in this. But there is an important difference: she is “more lost and drowned afterwards” (55). “Drowned” is an important word. It means to die in water. To be suffocated. This does not suggest the calm and delicious peace of sexual satisfaction, when two people slowly bring themselves to separation again, and maybe fall asleep. So here we have a man capable of bringing his mate to sexual climax while not in any

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way losing control himself. The nature of the eagerness he says he had, then, “for what’s called loving,” is merely sex. Greg Thomas’s work on “erotic schemes of empire” is relevant here. He says, of European (imperial) concepts of sex and gender, “(e)very practice of erotic identity should be defined in terms of egalitarian struggle. Existing conventions of sex differentiation are exposed as cultural and historical artifacts of empire” (25). It is easy to see how the husband in Wide Sargasso Sea reflects sexually the cultural and historical identity of empire. Thomas discusses Frantz Fanon’s representation of sexual pathology in colonial Algeria, via the example of the desire to unveil the Algerian woman. Once she is unveiled and seen by the colonial gaze, she is “perverse, and even a veritable nymphomaniac” (91). He goes on “(u)nveiling is equated with ‘breaking her resistance, making her available’, and reducing her to an object of possession” (91). Though Antoinette, at her husband’s invitation, unveils herself voluntarily, she is soon made into such an object. The detail that Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre is described by Jane as being “as dark as a Spaniard” (169) not only reveals skin consciousness in Jane, but also that Rhys’s choice to include Rochester’s close observation of tiny clues as to race or ethnic mixing is another intertextual connection. At root, this all emanates from a particular way of constructing gender. Andil Gosine argues that for European colonization, a white nationalist project, the “normal” human subject is always a white biological heterosexual male who feels threatened by (here Gosine quotes Beth Berila), “people of color, queers, women, or people of other nations” (156, my italics). Gosine cites Robert Young’s representation of nineteenth century anxieties about the mixing of races as “a fascination with people having sex,” which would of course result in “interbreeding” (157). Such anxieties are kin to the husband’s worries about the racial nature of Antoinette, her capacity for sexual enjoyment and surrender and his degree of control over her (an anxiety associated with heterosexual men which appears to be finally abandoned by Rochester by the end of Jane Eyre). Kimmel points out that “moments of most intense intimacy and connection are also moments of loss and abandonment. In sex, we are often at once in full possession of all of our senses and in danger of utter annihilation. … Confusion itself is frightening, accompanied by anxiety, threat, instability, uncertainty” (67). Rhys provides important details of the ways Antoinette’s justifiable anger pushes the husband away when he tries to come to her, thus shutting inside the fragile attempts at kindness and protection he made in the beginning.

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As if trying to make sure the reader understands what she is doing, Rhys provides alternative examples of being male. Boys have to learn the code of adult manhood. So there is a boy, as nameless as the husband himself, who cries, right at the end of the husband’s narrative. Antoinette says the boy loves the husband and just wants to be with him, not even to get money from him (102). He angers the husband who says “I could have strangled him with pleasure” (102). Then the boy follows them, still crying, as they leave. The last words of the husband’s narrative are “Who would have thought that any boy would cry like that. … For nothing. Nothing” (104). This is important: it should send the reader back to the moments where the husband is trying to communicate with his father in England. The father was the architect of the plan to marry Antoinette, but clearly the husband cannot tell all of his experiences. His letter is formal and he sounds as if he can manage all he has been sent away to accomplish. Much later, as he prepares to take his mad wife away to England, he writes a truthful letter in his head which he will never send, which accuses his father: “You had no love for me at all. Nor had my brother. Your plan succeeded because I was young, conceited, foolish, trusting. Above all because I was young. You were able to do this to me” (97). No wonder this boy, now adult, has shut away all capacity for feeling. Now, by his anger, he is trying to teach the boy who cries that tears are not going to produce reciprocal affection. The other important example is Baptiste, who is strong enough to subtly resist the husband, and whose manhood is capable of empathy and support for Antoinette. It is Baptiste who tells the husband, after he sleeps with Amélie, that the cook is leaving, and refuses to explain why (85). When the husband asks if Baptiste is leaving, he responds “No … I am overseer here.” The husband notices “he did not call me ‘sir’ or ‘master’” (85). From then on Baptiste does the things he is expected to do, such as providing meals, but rarely smiles and only speaks to answer a question. This passive resistance to a man who pays his salary and who is known to lack sensitivity is an important clue to understanding that Baptiste knows the husband is actually only “strong” when he is cruel and unfeeling. But perhaps ironically Baptiste’s visible expression of sadness provokes the husband to think “these people are very vulnerable,” and then “How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy. Six, five, even earlier” (61). It was necessary I was told, and that view I have always accepted.” In fact, he judges anything, Baptiste’s face, Antoinette’s eyes, dramatic mountains, which bring a challenge to him to be melodramatic and unreal.

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When he is lost in the forest, it is Baptiste who comes to find him—lost and scared in the forest. Baptiste is stern and in charge, unsmiling until they are out of the deep woods, when he finally seems to have “put his service mask on the savage and reproachful face I had seen” (63). Baptiste knows how to fake it, but clearly his brooding face registers the conflicted emotions of having to save this abusive white man for Antoinette. The husband seems ill when they get back, and Baptiste addresses him as master, as if to allow him some authority because he is in need (“weak”). Baptiste is also the one to speak kindly to Antoinette just before she finally leaves: to the husband he mutters something with a stiff bow. As they turn the corner away from the house, the husband remembers he has never known if Baptiste has another name (104). Rhys’s Baptiste is a good man, with strong and clear ethical values by which he stands, and there is no indication that he exploits those around him over whom he has power. In many ways, these two male characters also “queer” the space of white heterosexual male dominance. Neither provokes violent responses from the husband but both demonstrate what it is to have courage enough to feel emotions and to exhibit them. Even the nameless boy is older than the husband was when he learned not to do that. What is noticeable here is the absence of mothers (Antoinette’s and also the husband’s). Thomas argues that slavery (and logically therefore its immediate cultural aftermath, the world of this novel) so eradicated the idea of “man” or “woman” among the enslaved and created a hierarchy in which only white men and white women defined gender roles. Therefore, following Sylvia Wynter, he argues that colonial gender roles must be disrupted and replaced: that the “whole complex of white racist imperialism” needs to be defeated, “including its many sexual demons” (160). This is undeniably true. But it is also important to grant to Rhys, a writer born in Victoria’s reign and quite capable of both operating as a white colonial writer (revealing the limitations of her experience) that over and over again she knows more than the white writer normally can or will know about race and gender (demonstrated by her consistent if usually defeated attempts to thwart her given identity). In her own autonomous creative space, she constructs a world in which Baptiste is the holder of the authority of beneficent and powerful manhood, despite the constraints of his role as servant, and always unafraid to be kind, a world in which a young boy is not prevented from crying in public. Rhys’s text is a powerful indictment of the absolute failure of colonialist, upper-class European (English) culture to raise boys to become good

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men. This justifies her allocation of so much space in the novel to the husband’s voice. In so doing, she does “queer” normative ideas of gendered colonial and plantation space. The unnamed husband (unmanned by Rhys also by his lack of a name in the text) is reduced at the end of his narrative to an often whining, nearly hysterical rant of ineffective self-­ justification, becoming clearly the victim of his own commitment to a racist, heterosexual, hierarchical script of his own existence. Much of the behavior recorded by actual white male plantation owners in their diaries and fictional nineteenth-century upper-class Englishmen is not fundamentally different in kind. Thomas is absolutely right. Taking apart what makes certain men behave this way requires dismantling the machinery of hundreds of years of the plantation and its deep, cruel shadow over all of us. Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings” (1990), seeks to ask questions about ways European cultural imperialism operates, through the metonym of Shakespeare’s character Miranda in The Tempest. If Caliban tries to have sex with Mirada, to “people the island,” it is because she is the only woman available. But Rhys has written another kind of question into her text. Antoinette is a liminal figure, white but not quite white, financially insecure, driven from her childhood home because she is one of the infuriating emblems of past abuse of a majority of people on the island. European racist imperialism represented by her husband, captures and imprisons her. Rhys’s tale does not excuse the origins of Antoinette’s life, shaped by her racial and economic privilege, but it depicts her as a silenced, enraged, oppressed figure within the world of privilege in England, a kind of Caliban there, who will burn down the master’s house. Particular lineaments of life and death—focused around sex in this novel—are what still haunt us all after plantation slavery. What we can do to transform them (for, as Wynter says, they also are a crucial element in the environmental degradation of our world), is the most imperative question we face.

Notes 1. It is important to remember that re-naming is a key part of colonialism— whether of places or people being claimed by a colonizing power. Rhys’s strategy of denying a name to the husband who himself changes the name of his wife without her desire or permission, from Antoinette to Bertha (the latter being the name of the imprisoned wife in Jane Eyre.).

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2. Rhys’s dating of the novel’s action is specific. In a letter (August 22, 1962), she says the time of the fire is “1839,” when the “white creole girl” is about 14 (Letters). Though emancipation was made legal in 1833, it became fully implemented only in 1838. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, so it was written in the immediate period after slavery was ended in British territories. Rhys wrote in a letter (February 5, 1959) that she had read Jane Eyre “too much” and had to discard “all” she had written at that point, because it was a “bad imitation” (Letters 161). In both novels, the shadow of the slave plantation is cast over all characters. 3. Carole Angier specifically links the unnamed husband to Rhys’s lover, Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, citing both the husband’s account of his ability to hide his feelings after instruction to do so as a young child, and Rhys’s view that Lancelot’s feelings battled with his upbringing (65). 4. Apart from long known slave money funding for such revered institutions as Oxford University and for aristocratic mansions such as Harewood House in Yorkshire, recent historical research has uncovered the devastating truth about the huge extent to which money was made by slave-ownership in Britain, which Catherine Hall and her team of scholars describe as being hidden from view by “strategies of euphemism and evasion” (2014, 1). Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park was begun in 1811, just four years after abolition of the slave trade, and well before slavery was abolished in British colonies. In the novel (whose title likely signals the name of the judge, Lord Mansfield, in the Zong case), Austen’s representation of the male patriarch, Thomas Bertram, makes clear his dual roles as head of an English household and owner of a slave plantation in the Caribbean. Austen admitted Thomas Clarkson, the indefatigable fighter for Abolition. 5. I recognize that using the term “queer” in this context might not sit well with everyone. I understand that to generalize its usage away from the LGBT community could cause some concern, but it is used with great respect, for the important frame it can give to a subversive effect of Rhys’s writing. 6. For example, this form of behavior was illustrated in the October 2018 confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanagh on his way to a seat on the Supreme Court. 7. Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma. Andrea Stuart represents Napoleon as being very distressed at separating from Joséphine, at least while he was in her presence, but he went ahead with the divorce, remarriage and he got his male heir. 8. Kimmel argues that though feminists often argue that men feel powerful, men actually feel powerless as individuals even though their gender holds power collectively. This makes them angry (39–40). Kimmel says only a tiny proportion of men believe they are powerful (41).

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9. Thistlewood was 29 when he arrived in Jamaica in 1750. At the time, Jamaica was “the most productive of the British slave-plantation, sugar-­ producing colonies in the West Indies” (Hall, xix). A bitter irony is that Thistlewood’s diary is an important source of names for enslaved people on his plantation, because such information, “by daily record over thirtysix years” is rare (Hall xxi). 10. Thomas Thistlewood’s papers are now available in the Beineke Library at Yale in digital form. Hall only quotes from the diary, as does Burnard. 11. Punishment was designed to terrorize because as Burnard says, whites “were in an extremely precarious situation in mid-eighteenth century Jamaica. … Africans outnumbered Europeans by a ratio of 9 to 1, and slave revolts and Maroon attacks were common” (138). 12. In Richardson’s 1740 novel, of course, virtuous Pamela, by holding out against her employer’s advances, secures marriage to him and a good life. 13. This managed duels and was forbidden in 18 states of the United States by 1859. It died out in the north first. It was a way for men to settle serious disputes, usually ending in the wounding or death of one. It did require a certain recklessness or courage. 14. In his journal he claims he was “worn down” with fatigue and “anxious cares” and on the night he is accused of molesting one of his nieces, he was “almost literally incapable of sexual connection” (Bleser 172). 15. Edward Said’s well-known essay “Jane Austen and Empire” actually loosely connects Mansfield Park and Wide Sargasso Sea, but seems so vague as to be unhelpful in doing so. Said says Austen’s novel prefigures “later English history as registered in fiction,” among which are “these distant but convenient treasure spots” in novels such as Wide Sargasso Sea (93). Said seems to have barely comprehended Rhys’s novel, which was not written just to provide “local metropolitan benefit” but as a counter to a novel in the English canon, a challenge to British (local metropolitan) readers.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Dent, 1998. Ed. Bleser, Carol. Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Burnard, Trevor. Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

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Gilbert, Sandra L. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Gosine, Andil. “Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature.” Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Eds. Mortimer – Sandilands and Erikson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010: 149–172. Hall, Catherine et al. Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hall, Douglas. In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1989. Kimmel, Michael. The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith Raiskin. New York: Norton, 1999. Rubin, Louis D. “Introduction.” Ed. Bleser, Carol. Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988: i–xiv. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded. New York: Penguin Classics, (1740) 1985. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Stuart, Andrea. The Rose of Martinique. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003. Thomas, Greg. The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Eds. Wyndham, Francis and Diana Melly. The Letters of Jean Rhys. New  York: Viking, 1984. Wynter, Sylvia. “Afterward: Beyond Miranda’s meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman.” Eds. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990: 355–372.

CHAPTER 13

Vulnerability and Authenticity: The Wisdom of Wide Sargasso Sea Katy Cook

A number of familiar labels have attached themselves to Rhys’s characters— unsettled, licentious, mad, depressed—a minority of which tend to be positive or flattering. Wisdom, in particular, is rarely associated with Rhys’s heroines, whose narratives tend to bring to mind unsettling experiences, turbulent relationships, and, at times, crippling anxiety. Hidden amongst the outward peril her characters endure, however, are countless lessons in empathy, courage, and authenticity. Such illustrations of psychological wisdom are demonstrated throughout Rhys’s novels, but nowhere so abundantly as in Wide Sargasso Sea, which embraces an attitude of vulnerability, prioritises intentionality, and compellingly warns against the dangers of repression and emotional dishonesty. This chapter will aim to illustrate the wisdom inherent in Rhys’s final novel and the myriad ways in which Antoinette’s narrative overwrites the critical reception and labels of her earlier texts and heroines. The backstory that Rhys weaves for Bertha Mason in her depiction of Antoinette Cosway in many ways resembles the narratives of her earlier

K. Cook (*) Katy Cook Consulting, San Diego, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_13

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heroines. True to the depiction of the “Rhys Woman,” Antoinette is similarly out of place in her culture, endures multiple traumas, and has complex familial relationships marked by neglect. The Caribbean setting is also more fully developed in Wide Sargasso Sea, giving Rhys unprecedented opportunity to explore the unbelonging Antoinette experiences in Jamaica and England, which are both traversed in the course of the novel. Despite the more obvious parallels, however, Rhys’s final novel is distinctive in its psychological portrayal of its heroine, who, unlike the characters from Rhys’s early novels, demonstrates a high degree of authenticity, insight into personal relationships, and empathy for others. The vulnerability that Rhys writes into her final heroine’s character underpins each of these previously unexplored qualities and marks Antoinette as the most psychologically mature, authentic, and wise of Rhys’s protagonists. In order to appreciate the wisdom Antoinette demonstrates in Wide Sargasso Sea, it is essential to understand vulnerability—particularly, any misconceptions or connotations it may bring to mind—as well as its importance to our psychological wellbeing and relationships. Despite the age of Rhys’s novel, which was published in 1966, its themes predate the trendiest of psychological topics: namely Brené Brown’s research, multiple best-selling books, and viral TED talks, which collectively address vulnerability and shame. While “trendy” in one sense, Brown’s work touches on an innate and long-standing issue within literature: the problem of traditional—and largely masculine—definitions of bravery and displays of courage. In both her talks and books, Brown equates vulnerability with awareness of our feelings, emotional honesty, and the courage to share these with others. When we practice vulnerability, we are engaging with the full range of our experiences and emotions, including our insecurities, imperfections, fears, and dreams. Brown explains that the tendency to shy away from these typically emanates from either an unwillingness to share “something where there are no guarantees” of how it or we will be received (“The Power of Vulnerability”), or the association of vulnerability “with dark emotions like fear, shame, grief, sadness, and disappointment—emotions that we don’t want to discuss” (Daring Greatly 33). If we are able to engage with these emotions, however, Brown explains that we will often find vulnerability to be “the cradle of the emotions and experiences that we crave,” “the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity,” and “the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity” (33). The ability to acknowledge and share our feelings with others in an authentic way is a strong marker of emotional health and a means to

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establish connection with others, whereas an inability to engage with vulnerability can lead to isolation, anxiety, and irreparably damaged relationships. The textual appraisal of vulnerability in Wide Sargasso Sea at first appears similar to Rhys’s previous works, where relationships are treated with scepticism and attempts are repeatedly made to foster separation from others in order to protect oneself. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the portrayal of vulnerability is more complex, in that each of Rhys’s characters exhibits different capacities for self-reflection, emotional honesty, and the capacity to share these with others. The most disparate portrayal of vulnerability in the novel is between Antoinette and her husband, who manage their emotions and their relationships to others in wholly different ways. In Antoinette’s troubled childhood, for example, people are experienced as more dangerous and less desirable than snakes, nests of fire ants, and physical pain. And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think ‘It’s better than people.’ Black ants or red ones, tall nests swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin—once I saw a snake. All better than people. Better. Better, better than people. Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer. (12)

Though she appears terrified of people, Antoinette recognises that in severing her attachments to others, she has lost some essential aspect of herself. Despite the trauma and loss she faces—including the death of her father and brother, the loss of their family home, and the emotional neglect, madness, and eventual death of her mother—Antoinette remains willing to engage in relationships and share her experiences and feelings with others, fully aware of the sacrifice and uncertainty it entails. Antoinette’s capacity for vulnerability somehow survives an uncommon number of disappointments, including her relationships with her friend, Tia, and her mother, Annette. Antoinette meets Tia after the latter chases her home, singing the abusive refrain: “Go away white cockroach, go away, go away. … Nobody want you. Go away” (9). Their unlikely friendship somehow persists until their home, Coulibri, is burned to the ground; when Antoinette runs to Tia, her friend takes aim at her skull with a sharp rock, putting an end to their odd and turbulent relationship. A similar pattern of disappointment emerges in the heroine’s dynamic with her mother,

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who perpetuates a pattern in Rhys’s novels that María Reventós describes as a matrophobic, wherein a series of unresponsive and emotionally detached maternal subjects are experienced as either absent or dismissive. Reventós argues that this “discourse of maternal exclusion” is demonstrated in Annette’s open neglect for her daughter, who she repeatedly ignores, brushes away, and explicitly dismisses from her presence (289). In a psychoanalytic reading of the novel, Anne Simpson observes that Rhys creates a mother in Annette who is genuinely incapable of offering love to her daughter, who repeatedly fails to mirror Antoinette’s attitudes and behavior, and who thereby demonstrates how a child’s sense of her own reality may be steadily eroded. (116)

Annette’s neglect is compounded by the fact that she cares for and dotes on her son Pierre, but fails to offer Antoinette the same love and affection. Typically, a child in such conflict would turn away from one parent to another; in Antoinette’s case, however, there is simply nowhere else to turn. Readers familiar with Rhys’s previous work might expect her protagonist to respond to such mistreatment with emotional distance or self-­ imposed isolation. And yet, rather than retreat from relationships altogether, Antoinette continues to form connections with others throughout her adolescence and early adulthood. At the convent where she lives after her mother’s mental health deteriorates, she befriends Hélène, Germaine, and Louise, as well as Sandi, with whom she has her first romantic relationship. Following the hurtful treatment from her own mother, Antoinette also seeks out a series of maternal substitutes, including Christophine, Aunt Cora, and the convent’s nuns. Where Rhys’s previous heroines were often withdrawn, disengaged, or in conflict with substitutive maternal characters, in Wide Sargasso Sea, R. McClure Smith argues that there is a “proliferation of alternative mother-figures” (123) wherein Antoinette can continue to seek out the identification, mirroring, and love she missed in the original mother-daughter relationship. This “matriarchal pantheon” (Nebeker 137) demonstrates both the possibility of alternatives to primary familial relationships and the necessity of remaining engaged in the pursuit of connection with others. Antoinette’s approach to relationships underscores her adaptability as well as her capacity for vulnerability, particularly the “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure” that it requires (Brown, Daring 134). Where other characters

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in the novel—including Annette, Tia, and Rochester’s character1—remain wary and protective of their emotions, Antoinette’s attitude towards love and connection remains open and forthcoming, despite patterns in previous relationships that suggest those she loves may hurt her. Nowhere is this contrast so apparent as in Rhys’s depiction of Rochester, in whom we find an exemplar of stoicism and emotional distance. Guarded and vigilant in matters of connection and intimacy, Rochester is Antoinette’s psychological antithesis, and Rhys’s best example of the consequences of a lack of vulnerability. Rochester’s attitude towards emotional honesty is exposed early in novel, soon after his character takes over the novel’s narration in Part II. In one of their late night conversations, he asks his new wife why she hugs and kisses Christophine and states that he couldn’t do the same. It is unclear whether Rochester’s hesitance towards physical affection is due to his lack of familiarity with the islanders, or a reluctance to show affection more generally. During the same exchange, Antoinette confesses to her husband that she is “not used to happiness. … It makes me afraid,” to which Rochester replies: “Never be afraid. Or if you are tell no one” (57). Rochester’s attitude towards emotions and vulnerability aims broadly to avoid both, which are characterised as dangerous, particularly when shared with others. Antoinette’s attitude towards vulnerability is markedly different from her husband’s; she recognises and is able to communicate her feelings with others, including Christophine and Rochester, despite the lack of reciprocity from the latter. If the cornerstone of a happy and healthy life is indeed based on the quality of one’s relationships (Mineo), which are earned over time by emotional honesty and vulnerability with those close to us, Antoinette is the first of Rhys’s characters to display the qualities necessary for such connections to arise. In contrast to Antoinette’s attitude towards relationships and connection, Rochester exhibits not only an unwillingness to engage in vulnerability, but also judgment and disdain for those who do. He served the food with such mournful expression that I thought these people are very vulnerable. How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy. Six, five, even earlier. It was necessary, I was told, and that view I have always accepted. (64)

Having learned to avoid emotional connection in his youth, he finds Antoinette’s forthcoming nature attractive but ultimately unbearable.

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Repeatedly throughout the couple’s honeymoon, Antoinette attempts to forge an emotional connection by sharing her feelings and experiences with her husband, including the trauma of her childhood and the rejection from her mother: “she—she didn’t want me. She pushed me away and cried when I went to see her. They told me I made her worse” (85). Each time Antoinette moves towards Rochester emotionally, he moves away, and repeatedly convinces her to hide her true feelings. In response to the above disclosure, for example, Rochester encourages his wife to “put the sad things away. Don’t think about them and nothing will be spoiled,” while admitting to himself and the reader that his “heart was heavy as lead” (85). Rochester’s character does not hide his contempt for those who portray vulnerability or his unwillingness to be complicit in such an exchange, which he perceives as weak and unacceptable. The notion that vulnerability should be equated with weakness is an enduring but erroneous misconception, which Brown calls “the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous.” When we spend our lives pushing away and protecting ourselves from feeling vulnerable or from being perceived as too emotional, we feel contempt when others are less capable or willing to mask feelings, suck it up, and soldier on. We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism. (Daring 33)

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed explains that in addition to falsely equating emotionality with weakness, many also associate emotions with passivity: “[t]he fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others. Softness is narrated as a proneness to injury” (2–3). Ahmed calls the association between passivity and emotion “instructive,” in that such a correlation works as a reminder of how ‘emotion’ has been viewed as ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason. To be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous. … Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement. (3)

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Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay also point to the relationship between the feminine and emotional vulnerability: “masculine positions are effectively built through a denial of their own vulnerability. This denial or disavowal requires one to forget one’s own vulnerability and project, displace, and localize it elsewhere” (4). The tendency to ascribe emotions to a gendered space of feminine energy is in some ways problematic and oversimplified, particularly as Rhys’s reading of vulnerability is not explicitly gendered; both males and females in Wide Sargasso Sea demonstrate a shocking inability to emote. What is important is that Rochester’s avoidance of his emotions—which include uncertainty, softness, vulnerability, and dependency—allow him to remain in control, but comes at the cost of his relationships and his ability to connect to anyone in an honest and meaningful way. Place plays a pivotal role in each of Rhys’s novels, but it is especially significant in Wide Sargasso Sea, as the setting of the novel so closely mirrors Rhys’s own Caribbean origins. The return to the trauma, loss, and confusion of the Caribbean marks a willingness to explore the discomfort that Rhys’s home holds in each of her previous novels, where it is alluded to but never serves as the primary setting. Angela Smith argues that the wildness of the island is repeatedly associated with “[t]he scarred psyches of Antoinette and her husband,” which “are mirrored in the hidden roads, decaying houses and suppressed stories of Granbois” (xx). While Antoinette seems to welcome the complexities and contradictions of the vibrant, undomesticated island and her inner world, Rochester struggles to make sense of or connect to either. Rochester’s aversion to Antoinette’s emotions is mirrored in his ambivalence to Granbois and his surroundings; he is simultaneously fearful of and drawn to the novel and hidden elements of the new world around him. “It was a beautiful place—wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing—I want what it hides—that is not nothing’” (54, italics in original). The very elements that make the island beautiful and interesting to Rochester—its “wild,” “alien,” and “disturbing” qualities—are ultimately the same things he fears. Ahmed explains that vulnerability often involves a “fear of ‘the world,’” in which one’s surroundings serve as “the scene of a future injury … which shrinks bodies in a state of afraidness … which may involve a refusal to leave the enclosed spaces of home, or a refusal to inhabit what is outside in ways that anticipate injury” (70).

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Even if she had wept like Magdalene it would have made no difference. I was exhausted. All the mad conflicting emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane. I was tired of these people. I disliked their laughter and their tears, their flattery and envy, conceit and deceit. And I hated the place. I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty, which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it. So we rode away and left it—the hidden place. Not for me and not for her. (Rhys 111)

Simpson notes that the seemingly incompatible feelings and experiences around Rochester—the “secret” and the “magic” and the “loveliness” of Antoinette and the island—are at once “compelling and unbearable to him” (123). Despite his initial attraction to the hidden qualities of both Granbois and his wife, Rochester ultimately cannot endure the vulnerability, openness, and risk that embracing them would demand. In contrast to her husband, Antoinette’s character has the remarkable ability to tolerate the positive alongside the unpleasantness of her experience on the island, which is simultaneously filled with grief and joy, longing and contentment, beauty and darkness, love and loss. It is a mark of her psychological maturity and differentiates her from other characters in the novel who less effectively manage the emotional turmoil of their experiences. Unlike Antoinette, Rochester does not have the psychological skills to tolerate such inconsistencies. Rather than engage with discomfort or feelings that he cannot understand or reconcile, he chooses instead to protect himself, in an attempt to control the world around him. I listened. Christophine was talking softly. My wife was crying. Then a door shut. They had gone into the bedroom. Someone was singing ‘Ma belle ka di’, or was it the song about one day and a thousand years? But whatever they were singing or saying was dangerous. I must protect myself. (96)

Whatever desire Rochester possesses for his wife is systematically suppressed due to the perceived danger of her emotions, experience, and narrative. Ahmed explains that, for people unwilling to engage vulnerably with others, such as Rochester,

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openness itself is read as a site of potential danger, and as demanding evasive action. Emotions may involve readings of such openness, as spaces where bodies and world meet and leak into each other. Fear involves reading such openings as dangerous; the openness of the body to the world involves a sense of danger, which is anticipated as a future pain or injury. (69)

By keeping emotions and authentic experiences at a distance, Rochester avoids the discomfort of openness and remains safe from the influence of his wife and her world. Simpson describes the conflict within Rochester as deeper, however, than an avoidance of something merely uncomfortable: “his hatred of the place is a hatred of the true, but the true is what he also so desperately craves. When he quashes his longing for Antoinette, he kills the possibility of his own psychic awareness” and access “to recognition of the darkness in his own psyche” (122). Thus, not only does Rochester abandon the opportunity to connect with his wife, he loses the chance to connect with a deeper and more authentic aspect of himself. The means by which one evades situations that require vulnerability are vast, but often involve the avoidance of relationships that require intimacy and connection. It is perhaps not surprising, according to Brown, that love is the most indiscriminate act of vulnerability, wherein one is required to wak[e] up every day … loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow—that’s vulnerability. Love is uncertain. It’s incredibly risky … loving someone leaves us emotionally exposed. (Daring 34)

The tension between desiring love and connection and struggling to tolerate the vulnerability it requires is an uncomfortable and, for some, intolerable position. Part of the difficulty of vulnerability results from its reciprocal nature, in which sharing must be passed between those interacting in both directions, not just from one person to another. This requires both parties to act in accordance with the principles of vulnerability, which include emotional honesty, a tolerance for emotions, and “raw truth and openness” (41). According to Brown, while we love seeing vulnerability in other people, “we’re afraid to let them see it in us. We’re afraid that our truth [and] what we have to offer isn’t enough without bells and whistles, without editing, and impressing” (41).

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Engaging with Antoinette’s inner world and emotions would thus force Rochester to examine his own. Simpson explains that because what Rochester truly fears is the exposure of “the tangle of wild unconscious impulses that … are his truth,” he is therefore unwilling to risk his psychological safety for the chance to connect with others, and instead treats his own feelings and those of others, as terrors “from which he must run and hide, as if his life depended on it” (124). Though he is ostensibly afraid of Antoinette, what actually terrifies Rochester is located in a deeply internal and inaccessible part of himself. Ahmed explains that “what threatens from the outside only threatens insofar as it is already within,” and that what we truly fear is simply the abject—whether it comes “from without or within” (86)—as it threatens to expose our own truths and inner realities to ourselves and others. According to Brown, our capacity to engage in vulnerable acts is highly correlated to our individual experience of shame. Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging” (Daring 69). The experience of shame can be attributed to “something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal we’ve not lived up to, or a goal that we’ve not accomplished [that we feel] makes us unworthy of connection” and is typically a result of early childhood experiences (68–69). When we are acting out of shame, we are more likely to fear judgment, rejection, and disconnection from the other and are less likely to willingly demonstrate vulnerability. Rochester’s aversion to vulnerability appears rooted in his upbringing, in which he states he “learned” and “was told” to hide his emotions (64). This pattern continues both in his marriage to Antoinette and in his strained relationship with his father, to whom he communicates via letters throughout the text. I walked up and down the room and felt the blood tingle in the finger-tips. It ran up my arms and reached my heart, which began to beat very fast. I spoke aloud as I walked. I spoke the letter I meant to write. ‘I know now that you planned this because you wanted to be rid of me. You had no love at all for me. Nor had my brother. Your plan succeeded because I was young, conceited, foolish, trusting. Above all because I was young. You were able to do this to me …’ But I am not young now, I thought, stopped pacing and drank. … I could imagine his expression if I sent that letter and he read it. (104)

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Ahmed explains that, particularly in more masculine, Western traditions, in addition to the desire to control emotions and prioritise rationality, there is a tendency to divide emotions into those that are “appropriate” and those that are not. The hierarchy between emotion and thought/reason gets displaced, of course, into a hierarchy between emotions: some emotions are ‘elevated’ as signs of cultivation, whilst others remain ‘lower’ as signs of weakness. The story of evolution is narrated not only as the story of the triumph of reason, but of the ability to control emotions, and to experience the ‘appropriate’ emotions at different times and places. (3)

Rochester sends another letter with none of the emotion or honesty of the one he writes in his head, which is abandoned and repressed. Owing in part to his upbringing, sense of shame, and fear of vulnerability, Rochester seems destined to spend his life emotionally isolated, reciting letters in an empty room that are never sent or heard by anyone. Despite the similarity of their familial wounds, Rochester refuses to share his experience, thoughts, or feelings with his wife. In order to manage his feelings of shame and avoid engaging authentically with Antoinette, Rochester distances himself from his wife and aggressively asserts his dominance over her. Brown explains that, In order to deal with shame, some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves, and keeping secrets. Some of us move towards by seeking to appease and please. And some of us move against by trying to gain power over others, by being aggressive, and by using shame to fight shame. … All of these strategies move us away from connection—they are strategies for disconnecting from the pain of shame. (Daring 77–78)

Brown also mentions that we may use all or some of these strategies simultaneously. In addition to his profound emotional detachment, Rochester exhibits a deep longing to control his wife. The most obvious expression of this is his systematic subjugation of Antoinette’s identity, starting with the erasure of her name. The degree of dominance associated with renaming another human being without his or her consent suggests a profound level of shame and unworthiness in the aggressor, who, in dismissing another’s identity, seeks to silence their narrative (Johnson 29). Deborah Kimmey explains that, “[i]n most linguistic traditions, naming is an exercise of appropriation. … They who are relegated to the margins are

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refused direct access to self-definition. Such oppression may appear to be abstract, but its effects are palpable” (117). Rochester, however, does not stop at appropriation and emotional distance; he begins to dream of the day when Antoinette is not only nameless, but “only a memory to be avoided, locked away” (112)—a dream that does not take long to materialise. Shortly after he begins calling her Bertha, the couple leaves the Caribbean for Rochester’s English home, Thornfield Hall, where he imprisons Antoinette in the attic. In an effort to avoid his own experience of neglect and unworthiness, Rochester imposes the same fate on Antoinette, who suffers tremendously as a result of his suffering. Rochester’s act of repressing both his feelings and his wife’s identity is mirrored in the “thick walls” of the house in which she is imprisoned. In the final section of the novel, Grace Poole describes Thornfield as a place not only of safety from unwanted emotions but a container for the “fierce” emotions of Antoinette, who refuses to be silenced: Past the lodge gate a long avenue of trees and inside the house the blazing fires and the crimson and white rooms. But above all the thick walls, keep away all the things that you have fought till you can fight no more. Yes, maybe that’s why we all stay—Mrs Eff and Leah and me. All of us except that girl who lives in her own darkness. I’ll say one thing for her, she hasn’t lost her spirit. She is still fierce. I don’t turn my back on her when her eyes have that look. I know it. (116)

Trevor Hope argues that, like any psychological reality that cannot be faced, the unbearable contents of the attic must always be “contained and sequestered, locked away” to prevent any “signs that threaten … to subvert” that which they are meant to protect (59). Grace Poole’s assessment of Thornfield’s inhabitants in comparison to Antoinette is in keeping with Rhys’s portrayal of her heroine’s consistent attempts to break through to others and maintain her authentic voice. In an environment that cannot tolerate such displays of authenticity, those who exhibit emotion or vulnerability are either perceived or portrayed as mentally ill, as Rochester and his staff incorrectly label Antoinette. Lori Lawson notes that although “Rochester’s thinking and behavior appear to be considerably more disturbed and unwarranted than Antoinette’s,” it is “Antoinette who is labeled as ‘mad’ and locked away” (24–25). In such cases, what many label madness, Shoshana Felman suggests, may simply represent the “capacity for suffering, for emotion” (224).

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In contrast to her husband’s disapproval of vulnerability, inability to tolerate emotions, and limited self-awareness, Antoinette exhibits what might be called emotionally heroic qualities, including honesty, vulnerability, self-awareness, forgiveness, trust, and compassion. While these may not always be pleasant or easy qualities to embrace, they are authentic representations of Antoinette’s experience and inner world, which she not only personally tolerates and tries to make sense of, but is also brave enough to share with others. Brown reminds us that “[t]ruth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness,” (Daring 37) as Rochester and others may characterise them to be. In place of distance and stoicism, Antoinette chooses to prioritise engagement and genuine emotion, which makes her Rhys’s first heroine who is also a true hero. Kubitschek observes that “Antoinette fits the conventional definition of a hero, one who participates in large actions of great intensities” (25). Simpson defines Antoinette’s accomplishments as largely emotional and psychological triumphs: “Antoinette continues to seek the truth of herself and the power that the fire represents; her story is one of more ambition, however vexed, than [Rochester’s] attempts simply to snuff her out will allow” (124). Antoinette’s ability to connect and engage with her own feelings and those of others, despite multiple traumas and setbacks, indicates a high level of emotional maturity and a new kind of heroism, characterised by risk and emotional freedom rather than safety (Branson 22). Even her death is in line with these values, which Anderson argues is not an “act of self-­despair—but a final aggressive act of assertion, reaffirmation, and self-­ liberation” (60). Her final act is a vulnerable one, in which she moves towards visions of figures in her life who have hurt and disappointed her, embracing her memories and the feelings associated with them. Curtis suggests such an ending represents an important shift in Rhys’s oeuvre (which, importantly, ends with Wide Sargasso Sea) and that while “[o]bviously and literally, death is death, and there is the end … because Rhys focuses upon the paradox of transforming the hour of death, Antoinette’s death should probably be read in terms of transformation and paradox” (195). This transformation marks the prioritisation of connection, authenticity, and emotion and the reward of a “wider, if wilder, inner reality” (Anderson 61) than Rochester and the other invulnerable characters in the novel are able to endure. Rhys paints a world in Wide Sargasso Sea that encapsulates Brown’s fear that, as a species, we are in the process of “losing our tolerance for

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emotion and … vulnerability” (Daring 34). This concern is echoed by modern cultural and affect theorists, such as Sarah Bracke, who suggests that “neoliberal subjectivity is built on a denial of vulnerability, which is deemed shameful, and on a disidentification with dependence, need, and other kinds of vulnerability” (59). The contrast between Antoinette’s reality and Rochester’s—where the vibrant, wild, undiscovered Caribbean is repeatedly juxtaposed with a comparatively cold, unfeeling English culture—portrays two perspectives both starkly opposed and seemingly irreconcilable. Beneath the difference in landscape and geography, the most profound difference between Antoinette’s world and Rochester’s has nothing to do with their external conditions, but rather their capacity to tolerate internal, psychological spaces. Emery suggests that Rhys’s novels in general offer “an intensely personal rather than social vision” that highlights themes of “individual consciousness and perception” (418). To these more general themes of psychological awareness and consciousness, Wide Sargasso Sea adds the concepts of compassion, vulnerability, and the belief, as Simpson succinctly puts it, “that feeling, and feeling deeply, is the condition that makes us human” (142). Rhys’s insistence that vulnerability and feeling are markers of true courage and emotional bravery echoes Brown’s counsel that only by embracing the discomfort and risk of vulnerability can we ever experience true connection and meaning. Vulnerability isn’t good or bad: It’s not what we call a dark emotion, nor is it always a light, positive experience. Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe that vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to life. (Daring 33)

The ability to reach out, connect, and speak her truth—vulnerably and authentically, free from judgment and fear of rejection—is Antoinette’s fundamental accomplishment and the final and most beautiful lesson of Rhys’s oeuvre.

Note 1. It is worth noting that Rhys leaves Antoinette’s husband’s character unnamed. Though the character is accepted to be Rochester, nowhere does his name appear in Wide Sargasso Sea.

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2015. Anderson, Paula Grace. “Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: The Other Side/’Both Sides Now,’” Caribbean Quarterly, 28 (1982), 57–65. Bracke, Sarah, “Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Branson, Stephanie. “Magicked by the Place: Shadow and Substance in Wide Sargasso Sea.” Jean Rhys Review 3 (1989): 19–28. Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead. St Ives: Penguin Life, 2012. Brown, Brené. “The Power of Vulnerability.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, June 2010, www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Curtis, Jan. “The Secret of Wide Sargasso Sea.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31 (1990): 185–97. Emery, Mary Lou. “The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys’s Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Twentieth Century Literature 28 (1982): 418–30. Felman, Shoshana. “Madness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason.” Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), 206–28. Hope, Trevor. “Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishness.” College Literature 39 (2012): 51–73. Johnson, Erica L. Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro. London: Rosemont Publishing, 2003. Kimmey, Deborah A. “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: Metatextuality and the Politics of Reading in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Women’s Studies 34 (2005) 113–31. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. “Charting the Empty Spaces of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 9 (1987): 23–28. Lawson, Lori. “Mirror and Madness: A Lacanian Analysis of the Feminine Subject in Wide Sargasso Sea.” Jean Rhys Review 4 (1991) 19–27. Mineo, Liz. “Over Nearly 80 Years, Harvard Study Has Been Showing How to Live a Healthy and Happy Life.” Harvard Gazette, 2017 [accessed 23 October 2018] Nebeker, Helen. Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage: A Critical Study of the Novels of Jean Rhys. Montreal: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1981.

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Reventós, María Dolores Martínez. “The Obscure Maternal Double: The Mother/ Daughter Relationship Represented In and Out Of Matrophobia.” Atlantis 18 (1996): 286–94. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin, 2000. Simpson, Anne. B. Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Smith, Angela. “Introduction” in Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin, 2000. Smith, R.  McClure. “‘I Don’t Dream about It Any More’: The Textual Unconscious in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 26 (1996): 113–36.

PART IV

In Dialogue with Wide Sargasso Sea

CHAPTER 14

“I so wanted to hand Emma a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea”: Wide Sargasso Sea and Contemporary Re-workings of Jane Eyre Kylie Mirmohamadi

When contemporary authors set out to adapt, re-tell, transpose or spin off a “classic” literary text, they are writing not only from (or against) their ur-text(s), but in the light of all the other texts that have followed and flowed on from it. This is especially true in the case of Jane Eyre, a work which has been the subject of a number of influential re-readings and re-­ writings, from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, to the fictional re-workings of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys’s novel, in particular, has shaped responses to Jane Eyre so profoundly that it has become one of the fixed lenses through which contemporary spin-off writers and their readers see and represent Brontë’s novel, both in direct reference and by way of its profound cultural and literary influence. Some fifty years after its publication, Wide Sargasso Sea is located alongside Jane Eyre and its spin-offs in

K. Mirmohamadi (*) Department of English, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_14

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an almost inescapable web of literary relationship, and one that is constantly reiterated online, in electronic editions, literary blogs, reviews and author interviews. This chapter examines the impact of Wide Sargasso Sea on some contemporary re-workings of Jane Eyre, identifying its looming presence, both in text and in paratext, and positing that these novels work on and from Wide Sargasso Sea as well as Jane Eyre. In this account of the conjoined afterlives of these texts in contemporary literary culture, I pay particular attention to what Simone Murray calls “the digital literary sphere”—the ever-proliferating online literary sites which include “book review websites, self-cataloging library networks, author home pages, publishers’ portals, online book retailers, archived writers’ festival panel sessions, and recorded celebrity author readings” (Murray 2018, 1). The shift to digital literary platforms has offered authors greater scope to elucidate the multiple strands of reference, influence and authority that tie their texts to those of Rhys and Brontë. It has also rendered reader response visible and given it immediate expression. In blogs and in the comments sections of blogs and articles, and through reviews on websites such as Goodreads, readers can highlight their own practices of connection and intertextual referencing between Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Eyre and other texts. In her introduction to a book of essays on prequels, coquels and sequels, Armelle Parey observes that fiction that draws upon earlier texts can work to transform understandings of those texts. So Wide Sargasso Sea changes, for example, the way that readers see Bertha when they encounter her in the pages of Brontë’s novel (Parey 2018, 19). I would like here to cast the influence of Rhys’s famous novel forward and outward as well, by highlighting the way that it has worked upon subsequent re-writings of Jane Eyre, and tracking its trajectory across the reception of the contemporary texts, Mr. Rochester (Shoemaker 2017), Thornfield Hall (Stubbs 2014) and A Breath of Eyre (Mont 2012). In this way, the chapter applies Andrea Kirchknopf’s concept of the “adaptive chain of literary texts,” in which a later novel “revises Jane Eyre as well as Wide Sargasso Sea” (Kirchknopf 2014, 107), to a new set of texts, shifting the focus into the realm of the digital, and the expanding practice of online reader reviewing. In doing so, it makes some suggestions about the changing ways in which Rhys’s novel has been received and re-written, especially in the light of the often-­ unstable meanings attached to feminism and female agency in contemporary Anglophone cultures.

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Like the other two novels with which this chapter is concerned, Sarah Shoemaker’s novel, Mr Rochester, is a novel expansion (Parey 2018, 11), which combines elements of the prequel and coquel, by telling the story of Edward Rochester in the first-person voice, from his childhood up until the end of the events of Jane Eyre. This narrative approach is prefigured by a statement on the cover that inverts one of the most famous lines in Jane Eyre by announcing “Reader, she married me.” The novel plays a recuperative role for the character of Rochester by incubating sympathy for him through its account of his childhood loss and neglect. The story of his betrothal and marriage emphasises both Bertha’s (often racialised) otherness—her “simple shifts that the negro women wore, which all them— even Bertha—had pulled up above their knees”; her “wild mercurial spirit”; her agitation which was soothed by Molly’s song “in some African language” (Shoemaker 2017, 186, 188, 192)—and his innocence (Shoemaker 2017, 183, 184, 186). The reader is intended to share the Rochester character’s sense of betrayal when Bertha is revealed to be what he calls “a mad wife who looked and acted like a harridan” (Shoemaker 2017, 221). This act of readerly identification with Rochester ensures that at the conclusion of the novel, which tracks alongside that of Jane Eyre, his character is seen as rewarded, by marriage with Jane, for the trials of his childhood and youth. He rescues his own character in his unsuccessful attempt to rescue Bertha from the fire at Thornfield Hall; by his own account, that he “risk[ed] my life to save the woman who had spent fifteen years destroying it” (Shoemaker 2017, 436). Thornfield Hall, a minor character elaboration (Rosen 2016), focusing on Thornfield’s housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax, performs very different cultural work from Mr Rochester. The novel re-imagines the story of Jane Eyre from this alternative point of view, from when a young Alice Fairfax joined the household as Edward Rochester’s father’s housekeeper (and sometimes physical comforter) until after she and Grace Poole have fled with an almost fully recovered and recuperated Bertha, and a baby brought into the household by the housemaid Martha. Stubbs’s Bertha is prodigiously talented in both dressmaking and mathematics and her symptoms of agitation are a combination of her unresolved grief for a child taken from her when they left Jamaica and some type of unspecified emotional instability. Their eventual utopia of female domesticity is funded by money given as a pay-off from Rochester for the servants’ complicity in keeping the secrets of Thornfield Hall. It is finally achieved after Mrs Fairfax adds a fictional layer onto the fiction of Jane Eyre, by passing off Martha’s incinerated

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body as Bertha’s, enabling Rochester’s marriage to Jane while Bertha lives still, and at the same time absolving them of deliberate bigamy. Eve Marie Mont’s young adult novel, A Breath of Eyre, is a time-travel narrative in which the protagonist, Emma Townsend, is periodically transported to the narrative space and time of Jane Eyre, during which she develops an understanding of and sympathy for Bertha Rochester. Combining the school tale with a coming-of-age narrative, in which Emma eventually learns that her mother has suicided after a miscarriage and also begins her first (almost) sexual relationship, this novel uses her changing responses to both Jane Eyre and the people around her to chart her development and growth in understanding. The character of Bertha is key to Emma’s out-of-time experiences, because it is in a moment of recognition that “this was not Bertha. This was my mother … the spirits were giving me the chance to speak with my mother through the dream” that her emotional resolution begins. Correspondingly, Emma’s reading of Jane Eyre shifts, too, as is reflected in her amended, “brand-new ten-page essay about Bertha Mason” (281), who “had emerged as a more fascinating study than Jane,” prompting Emma to ask “[w]ho had she been before society and Rochester had sucked the soul from her?” (Mont 2012, 281). While the influence of Wide Sargasso Sea is discernible in the plot, settings and characterisation of these novels—for instance, in repeated references to obeah (see Shoemaker 2017, 206–7), in the mobilisation of postcolonial themes such as the politics of nomenclature (see Stubbs 5, 6, 27–8, 57) and in the privileging of sympathetic representations of Bertha Mason (see Mont 2012, 281)—it emerges most explicitly in the marketing, reception and commentary which surrounds and attends these novels, and which is often and increasingly carried out in the digital literary sphere. In March 2012 some early reviews of Mont’s novel, A Breath of Eyre, were posted on her blog, on her author website. These included an enthusiastic Kirkus review, in which the reviewer observed that “Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is clearly a referent here.” By importing this statement from its original site into the individualised, purple-backgrounded, space of the personal website, Mont was not only giving her author imprimatur to this reading (an act which retains its cultural weight in the allegedly “democratised” reading environment of the literary web), she was displacing it into an environment that invites further (usually positive) reader commentary and reader/writer interaction. A commenter, who was yet to read the novel, nonetheless picked up on the Rhys connection and, addressing Mont directly, claimed, parenthetically, that “reading Wide

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Sargasso Sea completely changed what I thought of Mr Rochester forever, so I’m glad you’ve thought of that angle too.” Less than two hours later, Mont had responded by affirming that “I loved Wide Sargasso Sea when I read it in college. But it didn’t make me love Bronte’s Rochester any less.” This interaction not only illustrates the broader assertions of this chapter—that the reading, writing and circulation of novels which re-imagine Jane Eyre are influenced also by Rhys’s novel—it highlights the significance of the digital literary sphere in contemporary systems of publication, marketing and reception. The personal website has become, Simone Murray observes, “the standard minimal accoutrement of contemporary authorship,” although writers are also expected to maintain a presence across a variety of digital platforms (Murray 2018, 35).1 Mont could “perform” her authorship, as Murray would have it, in this confessional statement, and the one that followed it, that “[r]eviews are such an angst-producing part of this process,” through the comments section on her blog, as well as in book signings, giveaways and launch parties, all of which are discussed and publicised on the website and blog. This crossover between a digital authorial presence and more traditional literary activities associated with book cultures dismantles the prevalent codex/ digital binary and runs counter to anxious narratives of decline surrounding the impact of the internet on print publishing. Mont’s debt to Rhys is “clear” to the Kirkus reviewer, and also to the blog reviewer who is frustrated by the way in which Emma thinks that the notion that “a certain character from Jane Eyre gets a bum rap … was an original and controversial idea” and in consequence, “so wanted to hand Emma a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys” (“A Breath” 2012).2 By providing this evidence of their intertextual cross-referencing, these reviewers bolster their claims to the authority to assess these novels, replicating in many ways the type of gatekeeping which the internet purportedly allows readers to bypass.3 However, the same determination to read A Breath of Eyre in the light of Wide Sargasso Sea can also be found in the more unwieldy and less-controllable (by the author) online literary space of the Amazon-owned reading website Goodreads. Literary scholars have just begun to develop the analytical possibilities that reside in the “community reviews” that scroll beneath the cover images, publishers’ promotional text and copyright information on Goodreads (e.g. Thelwall 2017). Even the use of the term “community” here plays into the repeated claim of stakeholders across the digital literary realm that their activities encourage connection and the congregation of

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virtual bodies of readers, rather than fetishizing the disembodied lone reader of codex-centred cultures.4 The digital environment, moreover, allows reader/reviewers to locate their responses to fiction within an archive of their own literary activities and utterances and wider systems of fandom. The function which allows readers of one review to access with one click all the Goodreads reviews written by the same reviewer reinforces the multidirectional cast of this referencing. A reviewer may come to read and comment on these novels by way of their ongoing and demonstrable engagement with multiple texts of historical fiction, women’s writing or young adult fiction as well as, or even in place of, an interest in Jane Eyre, or Wide Sargasso Sea. In many ways, this digital archive breaks down the conventions of literary criticism by contextualising literary responses and judgements within an individual and curated reading remit shaped by personal taste, rather than in reference to formalised systems of categorisation, or interpretation, such as neo-Victorian, modernist, Gothic or postcolonial. In the case of the three novels with which this chapter is concerned, the reader reviews on Goodreads are an opportunity to pinpoint more specifically how some readers view re-workings of Jane Eyre through texts other than Brontë’s novel, and especially through the lens of Wide Sargasso Sea. In such reviews, readings of all novels in the adaptive chain seem to emerge from a strangely de-politicised literary environment, in which the use of “point of view” narration is more likely to be seen as an outworking of genre alone, than as a narratorial strategy. While Rhys’s “construction of Antoinette’s voice” is usually read as “as much a political as an artistic [decision]” (Peters 2006) for example, in these later accounts, the use of first-person narration, and the mobilisation of minor character elaboration, is often unmoored from any project to vocalise gendered, raced or classed experience, or to illuminate the “other side” of empire and colonialism. References to Rhys’s novel are peppered throughout community reviews of each of these novels. In the case of A Breath of Eyre, they often occur in critique of Mont’s novel (Goodreads n.d.-a). “Natalie,” for example, measures Mont’s novel against Rhys’s as well as Jane Eyre, in a review that concludes that even though she (the reviewer) doesn’t “mind discussing different views of Bertha” and “quite enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea,” Mont was “too harsh in her treatment of Rochester.” As is common on this site, the title of Rhys’s novel here is also a hyperlink to Wide Sargasso Sea’s Goodreads page.

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A number of other reader-reviewers also observe that Mont is traversing discursive territory laid out by Rhys. “L.Petunia” claims that “siding with Bertha over Rochester is NOT a ‘revolutionary’ idea like Emma makes it out to be; I’ve heard it a lot of time and there’s a whole book, Wide Sargasso Sea, that deals with it,” and “Kat” resorted to the aggressive mode of capitalised text when she claimed to have “spent sizeable chunks of this book screaming, ‘WOW, SOMEONE SURE READ WIDE SARGASSO SEA.’” Taking on a reader-advisory tone that characterises these review sections, “Melyssa Williams,” herself an author on Goodreads, counselled “[f]or a scary and wonderful read, try Wide Sargasso Sea, not Breath of Eyre.” “Ellen” found it “interesting that the author chooses to address Bertha’s plight or her side of the story and make it seem as though no one had ever thought of the feminist issues within Jane Eyre. There was no mention of The Wide Sargasso Sea or literary critiques such as ‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ even as a footnote or anything like that.” While this commentary points to a retained association of both Brontë’s and Rhys’s novel with the influential literary readings of second wave feminism, its accusation that Mont disavows her feminist forebears also indicates shifts in popular conceptions of feminism, and the place of both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea within its contemporary configurations. While Mont’s novel does include a major Haitian character, whose aunt’s religious practices presumably echo the obeah in Rhys’s novel, the popular version of “feminism” that emerges across reader reviews of all these novels is often stripped of the intersectionality that should shape contemporary feminist discourse. Instead, it relies on universalising white and generalised notions of gender and an emphasis on individual subjectivity. The reductive tendencies of the model of personal rebellion in popular feminist publishing work at times, Anna Leszkiewicz recently argued in the New Statesman, to “whitewash” objectionable political and racial attitudes from their “sterilised” and “sanctified” accounts of women. While, these books are “a net positive,” she avers, “an individualistic approach to feminism elides the fact that most of its successes, from suffrage to civil rights to legalising abortion, are thanks to grass-roots collective action” (Leszkiewicz 2018). Community reviews of Mr Rochester on the Goodreads site (Goodreads n.d.-b) are even more heavily weighted with reference to Wide Sargasso Sea. This reader-led interpretation runs independently from the online utterances of the author, who does not mention Rhys’s book either on her

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website or in promotional videos posted on her Facebook page, or in her YouTube interview (“Mr Rochester” 2018), or in a Q and A feature on Deborah Kalb’s book blog (“Book Q&A’s” 2017). Many community reviewers, however, point out the shared features, themes and approaches of Mr Rochester and Wild Sargasso Sea, suggesting that their reading of Shoemaker’s novel had been shaped by their pre-existing knowledge of and engagement with Rhys’s. Almost all these reviews overlook the modernist and postcolonial contexts of Wide Sargasso Sea, casting it instead as a prior, and seminal, re-working of Jane Eyre, in the same vein as Shoemaker’s novel. “Dannii Elle” notes that it “bears many similarities and yet tells a very different story, to another Jane Eyre retelling, Wide Sargasso Sea,” while “Wanda” attributes these similarities directly to authorial intent by claiming that Shoemaker “remained very true to Brontë’s Jane Eyre and even managed to incorporate aspects of Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.” In a classification manoeuvre which will be touched upon later in this section, “Tan Clare” re-configures the politics of literary history by bracketing Rhys’s novel with Brontë’s as the canon against which Shoemaker is writing, when she/he reassures “readers who shun this book thinking it will end up being like another Wide Sargasso Sea, I’d like to put your fears to rest, as it differs from that canon.” “Michelle” thought she “had gotten my fill of Eddie Rochester from ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ but instead it looks like there is room in my library for two different sides of young Rochester.” The two novels are again juxtaposed when “Mellissa” expresses her readerly desire for “more Bertha,” commenting that “I’ve attempted to read ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea’ but found it lacking as well,” and in the assessment from “Cheryl” that Shoemaker’s novel contained “some good twists and turns that I never imagined, despite having read The Wide Sargasso Sea.” As these comments suggest, Wide Sargasso Sea is a key referent in both positive and negative critical assessments offered in reader reviews of Mr Rochester. “Erin,” while aware of the “ire” that this declaration might raise, pronounces Shoemaker’s novel to be “so much better than Wide Sargasso Sea,” and “Jean”’s opinion that Mr Rochester is “[m]uch better than other Eyre spinoffs” is accompanied by a parenthetical comment that “I didn’t like ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ though it’s well thought of, nor others of this ilk.” “Charlene” notes that she was made “a bit nervous” by the premise of Shoemaker’s novel because she “disliked the characterization of Rochester” in Wide Sargasso Sea.

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Other reader reviewers maintain the paradigm of reading Mr Shoemaker alongside, and in relation to, Wide Sargasso Sea, but diverge from these positive assessments. For “Jennifer Kepesh” Bertha’s mental illness is “dealt with in a much more realistic (and also, feminist) way in The Wide Saragasso Sea,” and “Deborah” contrasts Shoemaker’s Rochester with the same character in “Jean Rhys’s brilliant prequel.” She advises other readers to “[s]tick with either Charlotte Bronte’s classic or Jean Rhys’s wildly imaginative telling of Rochester’s Jamaican years in ‘Wide Sargasso Sea.’” This comment points to a matrix that emerges strongly from the community reviews of Mr Rochester and the other two contemporary texts with which the chapter is concerned. Many of them, positive and negative, bracket these later texts together with Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, in what “Bunni” calls “the triumvirate of Jane Eyre lit (JE, WSS, and this one)” which can be held up “as being canon.” While community reviews on digital platforms usually work to flatten out distinctions between types of texts that would be upheld within the disciplinary traditions of literary studies, Rhys’s novel is here afforded special status. In this triangulated relationship, Wide Sargasso Sea is not only a text that comes chronologically before the other texts that work from Jane Eyre, it is a co-progenitor. In the promiscuously intertextual environment of digital fandom, where “everything is canonical” (Gatiss 2010), Rhys’s text is often singled out as being “more” canon than others. A review from “Nancy” highlights an assumed relationship between the Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, by stating that she has “read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea which redeems Bertha from madness.” What makes this review particularly pertinent to my argument is its intimation of the way in which sites such as Goodreads shape as well as record reader response. Her reference to Wide Sargasso Sea was prefaced by the observation that “[a]ccording to a Goodreads poll there are 94 books inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre.” For “Jeanine,” Shoemaker’s novel marks the completion of a triangulated narrative: “As a huge fan of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, this book just completed the story for me.” “Amy Heap” claims in her review that Mr Rochester works from two ur-texts, rather than just from Jane Eyre, when she confidently asserts that “Mr. Rochester takes Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, and endeavours to tell the story of Edward Fairfax Rochester from his childhood.” “Katharine” also offers an account of Mr Rochester as the textual progeny of both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. She imagines the difficulty of “tell[ing] a story about one of literature’s best known romantic

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male leads, featured in not one but two prior novels” as Edward Rochester “played a key role in both” Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. This sense of three writers, working in trio to construct a narrative, permeates her comment about the representation of Rochester “[i]n the sections where Shoemaker has the most latitude, i.e., those not covered by Brontë or Rhys.” There are far fewer Goodreads reviews of Thornfield Hall then either Mr Rochester or A Breath of Eyre (38, as opposed to 469 and 386 respectively) (Goodreads n.d.-c) and correspondingly far less referencing of Wide Sargasso Sea (Goodreads n.d.-d). “Charlene,” who also cross-posted her review on The Eyre Guide website, gave the novel a luke-warm recommendation, when she concluded her review by suggesting “[i]f this sounds like an interesting story to you and you are intrigued by seeing Bertha Mason redeemed or by a lightweight reworking of Jane Eyre in the vein of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, then this might be a good read for you.” “Chapterhouse Publishing” invoked the processes of canonisation and literary classification when it grouped Stubbs’ novel with both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea under the status of “classic,” claiming “this time it’s a completely different take on his first wife as that given either in Charlotte Bronte’s novel or from that in the more modern classic Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys.”5 A review by “Jessica” is clearly intended to suggest an expert reading through its mobilisation of the language of the discipline of literary studies: “I found the path to what a friend has diplomatically termed an ‘auspicious denouement’* a little predictable and thoroughly too convenient for a modern audience more familiar with Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and other tales of the Gothic and post-Colonial genres.” Like Mr. Rochester and A Breath of Eyre, Thornfield Hall was promoted and discussed across the “digital literary sphere.” Reviews of Stubbs’s novel that originated or appeared online reveal that it, too, was read in relation to Wide Sargasso Sea as well as Jane Eyre. Indeed, the triangulated association between Rhys’s novel, Jane Eyre, and subsequent re-workings is so strong that one online reviewer drew a distinction between the revisionary work of Stubbs’ novel and that of Wide Sargasso Sea, even though she admitted to not having read the latter (naomifrisby 2014). A review on the “A Girl with her head in a book” website, for example, recounted the reviewer “think[ing] back to what I can remember of Jean Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea’ as well as Jane Eyre (and other re-workings of classic texts)” in order to give a reading of Stubbs’ novel (Review).

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Reviews of Thornfield Hall not only constantly invoke, name-check and provide accounts of Wide Sargasso Sea, but also make claims for the special status of Rhys’s novel. A review in the online edition of the Independent comments that Thornfield Hall “wisely makes no attempt to compete with that finest example of derivation, Jean Rhys’s account of the first Mrs Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea, worthy of iconic status in its own right” (Jakeman 2014). Similarly, the Readers’ Digest online review of Thornfield Hall read the novel in relation to Jane Eyre and other spin-off treatments, noting the precedent of “Jean Rhys’s modern classic Wide Sargasso Sea” (Gani n.d.). These statements of literary categorisation suggest that just as Jane Eyre must be taken into account in any reading of Thornfield Hall, so must Wide Sargasso Sea. Online utterances from Stubbs herself reveal the inescapability of the correlation between her text and Rhys’s novel, as well as Brontë’s, even (or, perhaps, most strongly) when she is attempting to disavow a narrative equivalence. Asserting the accessibility of her novel against Rhys’s modernism, Stubbs, in an online interview, characterised Wide Sargasso Sea as difficult to understand because of its lyricism, while its different voices “confused me” (Thornfield Hall 2014). Her intimation that Rhys had taken too many liberties with Brontë’s text was re-iterated in an interview which describes Thornfield Hall as “utterly different in tone and scope from Jean Rhys’s haunting novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea,” citing Stubbs’ assessment that “Jean Rhys took liberties with the original I would not dare to take. … She moved the characters to Dominica, she changed their names” (Sharratt n.d.). Elsewhere, Stubbs credits Wide Sargasso Sea with providing the creative impetus for Thornfield Hall. “It made me think,” she claimed in an interview appended to her novel, “about Bertha as the person she might be, not just the stock figure of the raving mad woman.” She claims further that the genesis of her novel lay in direct response to Rhys’s narrative, as it was “[w]hen I first read Wide Sargasso Sea [that] I thought of writing a sequel.” Dismissing the destinies of Brontë’s characters as laid out in Jane Eyre as “dull,” however, she went on to write Thornfield Hall, which she characterises as “a sort of iPad version of Jane Eyre,” with the electronic tablet’s ability to zoom, magnify and change orientation (Stubbs 2014, 298). This convergence of elements—the way in which the project to re-­ imagine Jane Eyre is perceived and conceived within reference also to Rhys’s novel, and the incursion of digital platforms and delivery systems in the literary realm—encapsulates the concerns of this chapter.

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Global literary cultures return again and again to Brontë’s text; re-­ interpreting, re-imagining and re-telling Jane Eyre on page and screen and stage. However, since its publication in 1966, the writing, reading and critical reception of texts whose primary claim is to be re-working Jane Eyre have also necessarily been carried out in reference to Wide Sargasso Sea. In the environment of the digital literary realm, with its ever-growing capacity for searching, hyperlinking and cross-referencing, Rhys’s novel will continue to be transformed, and transformational, as text and intertext in Jane Eyre’s cultural, literary and digital afterlives.

Notes 1. Mont’s website, perhaps reflecting the demographic of her readers, is the most developed author platform. Sarah Shoemaker has a rudimentary site, while Jane Stubbs appears to have no dedicated author website or blog. 2. This review is cross-posted on Goodreads, showing how online reviewers can also use multiple platforms to promote their brand and maximise their exposure. 3. This is less evident in the three YouTube reviews for Mont’s book, none of which mention Rhys’s novel, and one reviewer appears not to have read Jane Eyre. 4. Of course, these two realms are not mutually exclusive, and in many instances digital platforms not only work to bolster the marketplace for printed books, and to sell the idea of the dedicated individual reader of books, they nurture and even intensify the ongoing fetishisation of the codex, as the book is imagined as an endangered object. The ubiquitous presence of imagery about and pictures of books on online literary sites are obvious examples of this. 5. This reviewer, associated with an editorial and publishing advisory business, was active on Goodreads in June/July 2018 and read 57 books. The Stubbs review was posted also on their blog and their “sister site,” Chapter and Verse Reviews.

Works Cited “A Breath of Eyre Book Review.” 2012. The Librarian Writer, 21 April 2012. https://libwriter.blogspot.com/2012/04/breath-of-eyre-book-review.html. Accessed 13 December 2018. “Book Q&A’s.” 2017. Deborah Kalb Books, 18 August 2017. http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2017/08/q-with-sarah-shoemaker.html. Accessed 13 December 2018.

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Brontë, Charlotte. 2016. Jane Eyre. Ontario: Udon Entertainment Manga Classics. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene (2000). Gani, Farhana. n.d. “Review: Thornfield Hall – Jane Stubbs – ‘A Jayne Eyre spin-­ off that’s actually good!’” https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/books/ book-reviews/review-thornfield-hall-jane-stubbs-a-jayne-eyre-spin-off-thatsactually-good. Accessed 14 December 2018. Gattis, Mark. 2010. Commentary on “A Study in Pink,” Sherlock DVD, BBC. Goodreads. n.d.-a https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12267739-abreath-of-eyre?from_search=true. Accessed 14 December 2018. Goodreads. n.d.-b https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29773957-mrrochester?from_search=true. Accessed 14 December 2018. Goodreads. n.d.-c https://www.goodreads.com/?int=gca_doodle. Accessed 14 December 2018. Goodreads. n.d.-d. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23337613thornfield-hall?from_search=true. Accessed 14 December 2018. Jakeman, Jane. 2014. ‘Historical fiction round-up: Spin-offs open a worthy new chapter for the Brontës. The Independent, 27 November 2014. https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/historical-fictionround-up-spin-offs-open-a-worthy-new-chapter-for-the-bront-s-9888029. html. Accessed 14 December 2018. Kirchknopf, Andrea. 2014. Re-Writing the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the Nineteenth Century. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co. Leszkiewicz, Anna. 2018. “Why is publishing suddenly obsessed with ‘rebel’ women?” New Statesman America, 4 July 2018. https://www.newstatesman. com/rebel-girls-nasty-badass-women-history-feminist-books-publishingtrend-review. Accessed 29 December 2018. Mont, Eve Marie. 2012. A Breath of Eyre. New York: K Teen. “Mr Rochester.” 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MezAkDBGNa8. Accessed 13 December 2018. Murray, Simone. 2018. The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Naomifrisby. 2014. “Thornfield Hall  – Jane Stubbs.” The Writes of Woman, 4 December 2014. https://thewritesofwoman.com/2014/12/04/thornfieldhall-jane-stubbs/. Accessed 14 December 2018. Parey, Armelle. 2018. “Introduction.” In Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, ed Armelle Parey, 11-26. Milton: Routledge. Peters, Mike. 2006. “Reading politically: Mike Peters discusses Wide Sargasso Sea from a post-colonial perspective.” The English Review, 16.3: 34+. Accessed 12 October 2017.

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“Review: Thornfield Hall, Jane Stubbs.” https://girlwithherheadinabook.co. uk/2015/01/review-thornfield-hall-jane-stubbs.html. Accessed 14 December 2018. Rhys, Jean. 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton (1999). Rosen, Jeremy. 2016. Minor Characters Have Their Day. New  York: Columbia University Press. Sharratt, Mary. n.d. ‘Mary Sharratt talks to debut author Jane Stubbs about Thornfield Hall’. Historical Novel Society. https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ mar y-sharratt-talks-to-debut-author-jane-stubbs-about-thornfield-hall. Accessed 14 December 2018. Shoemaker, Sarah. 2017. Mr Rochester. London: Headline Review. Stubbs, Jane. 2014. Thornfield Hall. London: Corvus. Thelwall, Mike. 2017. ‘Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads’. Journal of Librianship and Information Science 50.4: 1-28. “Thornfield Hall by Jane Stubbs: Interview and extract.” 2014. Nudge, 1 December 2014. https://nudge-book.com/blog/2015/03/thornfield-hallby-jane-stubbs/. Accessed 25 September 2017.

CHAPTER 15

Encryption as Transmission: The Secret Gardens of Wide Sargasso Sea Patricia Moran and Erica L. Johnson

When Antoinette hears of her mother’s death, in Wide Sargasso Sea, she thinks, “[t]here are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.” Antoinette’s summary of her mother’s two deaths gestures to the position of readers of Wide Sargasso Sea, who typically know before they open the novel that in it Rhys has created a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Hence the death of Bertha Antoinette Mason Rochester in Brontë’s text is the one the reader knows about; Antoinette’s story in Wide Sargasso Sea by extension becomes the narrative of the “real death”: it is, quite literally, a story from beyond an unmarked grave in literary history. “Real death” means that Antoinette exists in a state of precarity and ghostliness from the opening of Rhys’s novel. In what follows we want to suggest that the novel’s relation to its textual forebears is a relation unlike the influential Bloomian conceptualization of an Oedipal

P. Moran Department of English, City, University of London, London, UK E. L. Johnson (*) English Department, Pace University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_15

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anxiety of influence centred upon phallic inscription. Instead, Wide Sargasso Sea evidences a paradigm of literary influence as emanations from encryption and the haunting traces of the phantom, in a more hidden, feminine form of connection. We take this terminology from Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, who theorize the phantom as the symptomatic traces of transgenerational trauma. The phantom marks the incorporation of someone else’s shameful or painful secret, a secret that the haunted host does not know and indeed never knew.1 Abraham and Torok designate these traces as phantoms, ghosts, and revenants, deliberately invoking Germanic and Norse folklore “according to which only certain categories of the dead return to torment the living: those who were denied the rite of burial or died an unnatural abnormal death, were criminals or outcasts, or suffered injustice in their lifetime” (Rand 167). The child whose parents have such painful unprocessed secrets, they explain, receives from them “a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge … subjected to a form of ‘repression’ before the fact. The buried speech of the parent will be (a) dead (gap) without a burial place in the child. This unknown phantom returns from the unconscious to haunt its host and may lead to phobias, madness, and obsessions” (Abraham and Torok 140). This chapter traces the ways in which an author’s “buried speech” can create in the literary text an unknown phantom which haunts its host and which betrays its presence through uncanny traces. For, while Rhys does flag some of her literary influences, others circulate through her work more symptomatically. Thus while we freely acknowledge that we have no concrete evidence that Rhys read Daphne du Maurier’s wildly popular 1938 novel Rebecca, or that she saw Hitchcock’s hugely successful 1940 cinematic adaptation, Abraham and Torok’s conceptualization of the phantom as the encryption of painful secrets offers a way of encompassing influences that an author acquires through the cultural circulation of powerful and popular narratives.2 Indeed, within this context, we point to du Maurier’s repeated claim that she wrote Rebecca without ever having read Jane Eyre, although most readers easily perceive the clear parallels between the two.3 Rhys’s claim that she was not simply writing one more Jane Eyre adaptation, of which there had been “umpteen thousand and sixty already” (LJR, 159), underlines her awareness of those umpteen thousand and sixty adaptations; similarly, her desire to bring on stage the “mad Creole” who has hitherto always been heard raving “off stage” (LJR 156) underlines her awareness of the numerous stage and film adaptations of Jane Eyre (including

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Rebecca) that proliferated during the 1930s and 1940s, documented by Patsy Stoneman in Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. To this cultural repository we can add several other conjunctions: Rhys’s sudden decision to revision Jane Eyre in 1939, the year following Rebecca’s publication; Rhys’s move to Cornwall, the setting for the fictional Manderley, in the mid-1950s; and her description of the history of Cornwall in a letter to her granddaughter, which recapitulates the plot of du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn.4 A number of striking plot similarities link Rhys’s novel to both the fictional and cinematic versions of Rebecca.5 These include an illicit, semi-­ incestuous relationship between the first wife and her first cousin; marriages characterized by sadomasochism, including a dream common to both texts of following a sadistic man through the woods; and, perhaps most importantly, portrayals of the ruined estate—Manderley in Rebecca and Granbois in Wide Sargasso Sea—that to an English observer seem to be “going jungle, going primitive.” Even Rhys’s first title for her novel, Le Revenant (“The Phantom,” literally “The Returner”), seems to reference Rebecca’s missing boat, “Je Reviens” (“I come back,” as indeed she does, as an avenging spirit).6 In contrast to Jane Eyre, furthermore, both texts end with the image of the oppressive patriarchal home in flames, and Antoinette’s vision of moving through the room as she sets them on fire powerfully echoes Hitchcock’s cinematic rewrite of this scene, in which Mrs. Danvers similarly moves through the West Wing with a candle. Mrs. Danvers, the witch-like devoted servant and surrogate mother who carries out Rebecca’s revenge, suggestively parallels Christophine, Antoinette’s witch-like devoted servant and surrogate mother, who similarly comes to Antoinette’s assistance when Antoinette embarks on her mission to set Thornfield Hall on fire. Their witchy assistance in both cases transcends time and space: Antoinette summons Christophine’s spirit in the same way that Mrs. Danvers acts as Rebecca’s “poetic agent”: as Sally Beauman points out, “Like some avenging angel, Rebecca has marshalled the elements: she has risen from the sea to wreak revenge by fire” (Beauman 132). Beyond these parallels in plot, the uncanny power of the murdered Rebecca—who dominates the book that bears her name and whose triumphant repossession of Manderley pervades the eerie dream sequence that opens both the book and the film—signals a figurative reanimation that Rhys literalizes. Both the novel and the film of Rebecca portray the dead first wife as a ghost who, though unseen, is somehow more vivid and alive than the second wife.7 As Mrs. Danvers remarks to the unnamed

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protagonist, “‘You’ll never get the better of her. She’s still mistress here, even if she is dead. She’s the real Mrs. de Winter, not you. It’s you that’s the shadow and the ghost. It’s you that’s forgotten and not wanted and pushed aside’” (du Maurier 250). In fact, that is exactly what transpires: in the present day of the novel, the second wife imagines Rebecca in possession of the now-ruined Manderley, as if she and her husband have abandoned the mansion to the ghost. In the film, the bold initial “R,” surrounded by flames, dominates the final frame of the movie, as if Rebecca remains impervious to all attempts to eradicate her, as though the writing of Rebecca attests to her ongoing capacity to disrupt and overpower the living. Wide Sargasso Sea, of course, similarly upstages the second wife as well as Jane Eyre itself. Both Rebecca and Antoinette challenge the control and regulation of female sexuality, both are vilified on that basis, and both ultimately die for that crime. Describing his bargain with Rebecca, whereby their masquerade of the perfect marriage conceals her sexual freedom and renders the institution a “shabby, sordid farce” (du Maurier 278), Max denounces his murdered wife as “vicious, damnable, rotten through and through … incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency. She was not even normal” (du Maurier 275). Rebecca’s “unspeakable” sexual appetites wreak havoc with “the whole fabric of the social order,” as Alison Light has observed, violating the tacit norms that govern gender and family relations, class, property, and, of course, marriage (Light 15).8 Antoinette’s sexuality similarly unsettles Rochester and similarly transgresses social norms of family, class, and race. Like Max, the Rochester character depicts his wife’s sexuality as evidence of abnormality: “She’ll loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter (a mad girl, She’ll not care who she’s loving). She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would—or could. Or could” (165). Both novels depict the fight for control as a fight to the death, and while the husband seemingly triumphs, the “dead” wife has the last laugh: Max and his second wife wander abroad in exile after Manderley is destroyed; Antoinette’s vision of destroying Thornfield by fire will result in Rochester’s similar state of exile in Jane Eyre. Striking similarities also link the two novels’ characterizations of the rebellious wife. When Max attempts to curb Rebecca’s behaviour, “she flared up at once, cursing me, using every filthy word in her particular vocabulary … a sickening, loathsome scene” (du Maurier 279–80). Likewise, the unnamed husband recalls how Antoinette “cursed me comprehensively, my eyes, my mouth, every

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member of my body, and it was like a dream … with … this red-eyed, wildhaired stranger who was my wife shouting obscenities at me” (89). But perhaps the most compelling traces of encryption in Wide Sargasso Sea derive from du Maurier’s use of ruined gardens as an index of temperate, unchaste female sexuality in a context that is overtly racialized.9 In the eerie opening dream sequence, the narrator, long exiled from the burned, ruined, and abandoned Manderley, imagines a landscape that has been given up to the vengeful ghost. This opening sequence is rife not only with images of illicit unions and miscegenation but with images of battle between plants associated with Englishness and imported colonial plants that need constant pruning to appear domesticated:10 Nature had come into her own again and little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers. … The woods crowded, dark and uncontrolled. … The beeches with white naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace … squat oaks and tortured elms straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches … and thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants. … Scattered here and there among this jungle growth I would recognize shrubs that had been landmarks in our time, things of culture and grace. … No hand had checked their progress and they had gone native now, rearing to monster heights without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them. (du Maurier 1–2)

The narrator singles out the rhododendrons for special mention. Even in the past, these had been Rebecca’s signature planting, designed to stun the visitor approaching the house: “on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. … They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before” (du Maurier 66).11 The narrator is unsure she likes the effect of this bloody chamber: “to me a rhododendron was a homely, domestic thing, strictly conventional, mauve or pink in colour, standing one beside the other in a neat round bed. And these were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful, I thought, too powerful, they were not plants at all” (du Maurier 66). Rebecca had used these same red rhododendrons as a backdrop to her morning room, where they mass behind a statue of a satyr that speaks to Rebecca’s transgressive sexuality. In the opening dream

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sequence, the rhododendrons become apt emblems of Rebecca’s disruptive exuberance as her ghost reigns ascendant: I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the woods had done. The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origins. A lilac had mated with a copper beech. … Ivy held prior place in this lost garden … and soon would encroach upon the house itself. There was another plant too, some halfbreed from the woods, whose seed had been scattered long ago beneath the trees and then forgotten, and now, marching in unison with the ivy, thrust its ugly form like a giant rhubarb towards the soft grass where the daffodils had blown. Nettles were everywhere, the vanguard of the army. (du Maurier 2–3)

This “jungle growth” overpowers the English landscape, displacing the daffodils that Max had once celebrated to the narrator: “The daffodils were in bloom … and however many you might pick there would be no thinning of the ranks, they were massed like an army, shoulder to shoulder” (du Maurier 30). Tellingly, the narrator is associated with roses throughout the novel, which in turn are linked to a domesticated English femininity.12 Whereas Rebecca’s bedroom overlooks the uncontrollable and restlessly churning sea, the narrator’s bedroom overlooks the rose garden, which Max associates with his mother (du Maurier 76).13 du Maurier’s choice of the “slaughterous” red rhododendrons as emblematic of Rebecca’s transgressive power underscores the way in which Rebecca is repeatedly linked to racial and sexual otherness. As Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik have shown, Rebecca’s pallor, luxuriant dark hair, and voracious sexual appetites are traits traditionally associated with the figure of the vampire, who in turn “was often portrayed as having Jewish characteristics” (Horner and Zlosnik 111–112). Rebecca’s association with the rhododendrons furthers this reading of her as an exotic and dangerous other, for the famous Cornish rhododendron gardens came into existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through a kind of horticultural colonialism. Although a detailed explanation of this movement is outside the scope of this chapter, rhododendrons were brought into Cornwall by plant collectors and botanists hired by the managers of national public gardens and the wealthy owners of large estates; these hired collectors travelled to China, Tibet, Burma, Sumatra, and India to

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bring back seeds, often naming the resulting plants after English friends and relatives.14 This sense of exotic otherness suffuses the novel’s setting. Manderley is “a house of secrets,” “the sleeping beauty of the fairy tale,” “an enchanted house … a house bewitched, carved out of the dark woods,” approached by a “drive that twisted and turned as a serpent … twisted and turned like an enchanted ribbon through the dark and silent woods” (du Maurier 65).15 Rebecca’s spectral presence pervades this setting: That corner in the drive … where the trees encroach upon the gravel is not a place in which to pause, not after the sun has set. When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter, patter of a woman’s hurrying footsteps, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled satin shoe. (du Maurier 9)

The narrator increasingly feels menaced by her dead predecessor, particularly in the woods near the boat cottage, the site of Rebecca’s murder. Here the narrator feels that someone watches her, listens to her, and waits for her (du Maurier 158): “if a woman stood there behind the trees, her evening dress would rustle in the thin night breeze” (du Maurier 281). The exotic otherness of both his wife and her island similarly come to menace Rhys’s Rochester. He speaks of the landscape as excessive in phrases that echo the second wife’s reaction to the “slaughterous” rhododendrons in Rebecca: “Everything is too much. … Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near” (70). Yet it is also seductive, “wild, untouched … with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness” (87); as in Rebecca, the landscape—alien, secretive, and disturbing—emblematizes and enhances the wife’s transgressive otherness and excess. In her letters, Rhys describes how Rochester finds himself “magicked by the place which is (or was) a lovely, lost and magic place but, if you understand, a violent place. (Perhaps there is violence in all magic and all beauty—but there—very strong) magicked by the girl—the two are mixed up perhaps to bewildered English gent” (LJR 269). When Antoinette turns against him, so too does the landscape, for Rochester now finds it oppressive, animated by an eerie and uncanny force that recalls the narrator’s vision of a spectral woman who haunts the ruins of Manderley: “everything round me was hostile. … The trees were threatening and the shadows of the trees moving slowly over

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the floor menaced me. That green menace” (149). In leaving the island, Rochester phrases his repudiation of it in terms that mix hatred with desire and longing, terms that resonate with the narrator of Rebecca, whose memories of Manderley similarly mix yearning and fear: “I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know, I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness” (172). Antoinette’s incarceration in the “cardboard house” in Part Three of Wide Sargasso Sea is a material reminder of the death that people know about, the death that takes place between the paperback or hardbound copies of Jane Eyre and Rebecca. In contrast to these predecessors, Wide Sargasso Sea gives voice to the murdered wife, thereby transforming the phantom into what Hans W.  Loewald calls an ancestor. In analysis, Loewald explains, “the blood of recognition” reawakens the ghost to life: Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost-life and led to rest as ancestors … as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow-life … ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defences but haunting the patient in the dark of his defences and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects.16

In recounting the genesis of the novel, Rhys made her intention to turn the ghost into an ancestor explicit: “What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I’d write the story as it might really have been. She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d try to write her a life” (Vreeland 235). Antoinette functions as “the bridge and ultimately the redeemer of the plight of the spectral presence of the other woman” (Gott 57), upstaging Brontë’s novel—for who can reread Jane Eyre without Rhys’s Antoinette shadowing that reading?—just as Rebecca upstages the narrator, rendering the “living wife a ghost, a true dead woman” (Beauman 134).17 Wide Sargasso Sea thus countermands Rochester’s own ambition to turn his wife into a ghost: “they’ve got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it’s a long, long line. She’s one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away” (172).

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Yet while Rhys’s novel finally undercuts Rochester’s murderous ambition, that ambition calls attention to the process by which Antoinette becomes Jane Eyre’s secret. In his watchful suspicions, Rochester grapples with what he feels to be malevolent and mysterious forces. It is the mystery, above all, that troubles him as we see in his thwarted desires to understand the uncanny landscape—“I want what it hides,” he says—to uncover the secrets of his wife’s family and the secrets behind Antoinette’s “long, sad, dark alien eyes” (67). Wide Sargasso Sea is animated by secrets from beginning to end and yet, in contrast to most mysteries including Rebecca, the narrative does not arc towards a moment or even a process of revelation.18 Its secrets are not planted in order to be uncovered, but rather to remain buried. The secrets are ontological in that Antoinette is a secret from Brontë’s novel and, to return to Abraham and Torok’s term, she is a cryptophore who bears the secrets of others within her. Wide Sargasso Sea makes explicit the ways in which Antoinette becomes a cryptophore, even as the novel itself functions as a cryptophore text that remembers the secrets of other texts. For who are those “others … waiting to take their places” to whom Rochester refers? Who is in this “long, long line” standing behind the ghostly Antoinette? One of the others is Rebecca, as we have just shown. But our reading of Rebecca also shows just how intricate and haunting the traces of du Maurier are in Rhys. This is a notable element of Wide Sargasso Sea in that Rhys practices much more overt forms of reference as well; in many cases, she openly tags certain influences in her work—in fact, Good Morning, Midnight and Voyage in the Dark are veritable literary, cultural, and musical archives, so dense are they with pop culture and allusion. But as a voracious and secretive reader herself, much of Rhys’s inner intellectual life remains buried in her work, which is why we emphasize the trope of secrecy.19 Rhys uses secrets as floating signifiers: she does not create a dialogue between truth and falsehood so much as she alters the value of both (a dynamic of her writing that Laura Frost has identified, with regard to pleasure and pain).20 A secret is a paradox: what is contained in a secret is outside of knowledge—it is that which is unknown—yet its basic property is that it is knowable. Secrets can be kept hidden only because they can also be revealed. In Wide Sargasso Sea knowledge is based on an economy of secrets, some of which are never known, but they are integral to the narrative nonetheless. Rhys encrypts the power of the sexual and rebellious Rebecca, the threatening foliage of Manderley, and the strategy of articulating the narrative with a secret, just as du Maurier’s novel is animated by the secret of Rebecca’s murder, encoded as

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it is in the opening dream of Manderley falling into ruin due to the violence of the natural world. In thinking about the secrets and the gardens of these two novels, we follow Rhys’s encryptions to another novel that begins in the colonies and journeys to an English garden and that is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.21 The Secret Garden is a part of Wide Sargasso Sea’s genealogy insofar as it, too, is one of the umpteen thousand and sixty reinscriptions of Jane Eyre with its Gothic estate located on the moors, its eerie voices in the halls, the hidden child on whom the curtain is pulled back, and so forth.22 While The Secret Garden was published serially in 1910 and as a novel in 1911, which would have made Rhys a young adult by the time it came out, it first appeared in an adult magazine, enjoyed a readership of adults as well as children and, like Rebecca, was adapted to the screen.23 In fact, two film versions appeared during Rhys’s lifetime, the first as early as 1919 (in a silent film starring Mary Pickford) and the second in 1949 (partially in Technicolor). Rhys would no doubt have been drawn to the tale of a girl who is born in the colonies and “repatriated” to England when she is orphaned.24 Moreover, Mary is the child of a beautiful, vain, and negligent mother at whose feet her Indian Ayah lays the blame for Mary’s nasty temperament when she says, “Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too” (Burnett np). Elsewhere she is referred to as “that pretty, pretty woman” (Burnett np)—perhaps she, like Annette, was “Pretty like pretty self” (17). Another connecting trope is that of hidden doorways: in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette thinks about “Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else” (28), and in Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha digresses into a memory or dream of “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” (GMM 92). These doors essentially form thresholds to spaces of escape in much the same way that the door to the secret garden in Burnett’s novel opens onto an enchanted world, with Burnett’s secret garden as a literal version and possibly original source of this recurring simile. Moreover, when Mary first finds her way into the walled, secret garden in the middle of the otherwise “clipped” and cultivated estate of her uncle she, like the dreaming narrator of Rebecca, sees nature run riot:

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[O]ne of the things which made the place look strangest … was that climbing roses had run all over [the walls] and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. (Burnett np)

Just as the Coulibri garden is “overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell” (19) and just as it features orchids that are “snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root” (19), Burnett’s secret garden anticipates the grey sprays of Coulibri, the miscegenation of Manderley, and the riotous, uncanny nature of gardens composed of growth and rot, beauty and death, and ruins. Indeed, the patterns emphasize the process of ruination, an apt metaphor for the kind of psychoanalytic inheritance we are suggesting here. Freud likened the psyche to Rome, with its layers of ruins, and we are trying to show a similarly buried mode of influence in Wide Sargasso Sea. The ruins of the Secret Garden are marked by the way its crumbling walls are overtaken by the force of nature: “it seemed that green things would never cease pushing their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the crevices of the walls” (Burnett np). In the opening description of Manderley, “nature had come into its own again” with its “slaughterous” rhodeodendrons and choking ivy surrounding the “house [which] was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins” (du Maurier 3). Wide Sargasso Sea moves from ruined estate to ruined estate on its journey to the proto-ruins of Thornfield. Of course, Rhys wrote with the full knowledge that the “cardboard house” of Thornfield meets the same fate as Coulibri, yet she attends to the longer process of ruination. Even before it burns, the Coulibri Estate is described as having “gone wild like the garden, gone to bush” (19), and Granbois is surrounded by the ruins over which Rochester stumbles in the forest; he looks up to see “ruins of a stone house and round the ruins rose trees that had grown to an incredible height” (104). The crimes of the past—signified in this scene by ruins of

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what was most likely a sugar mill or auxiliary plantation building—exist unspoken, as when Rochester asks Antoinette about whether the town of Massacre was so named for a slave massacre and she replies simply, “’Oh no.’ She sounded shocked. ‘Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now’” (66). Yet buried and forgotten crimes still leave referents and ruins that mark their occurrence. Rhys’s encryption of untamed nature and ruins plays out as a distinct mode of literary influence through which her text absorbs and corroborates the secrets of du Maurier and Burnett. The gardens of Rebecca and The Secret Garden thus lie in what Abraham and Torok refer to as the “crypt” within their inheritor text: “the buried speech of the parent [text] will be (a) dead (gap) without a burial place in the child. This unknown phantom returns from the unconscious to haunt its host” (Abraham and Torok 174). This dynamic of encryption is one that Abraham and Torok explore in the context of mourning, arguing that the survivor of a loved one’s death will seek to psychically “swallow” that loss rather than cope with the reality of death. What is swallowed by Wide Sargasso Sea is also death and not only that but it is death of young and beautiful women. Indeed, while we could spend a good bit of time detailing the myriad parallels between The Secret Garden and Wide Sargasso Sea, it is this ontological mis-en-abyme that we would like to emphasize.25 Rhys’s encryption of The Secret Garden hinges not just on imagery, but on the more sinister secret that the garden contains: the reason it is locked and barred in the first place is that the garden is where Mary’s young aunt was killed by a falling tree branch. The secret is of a woman’s corpse, as is the case in Rebecca. The hidden door thus opens onto a quite literal crypt. To return to the Rochester character’s enigmatic thought about the “others” standing behind Antoinette, the corpses of Rebecca and Mary’s aunt underscore Antoinette’s precarity, contingent as she is on not only Jane Eyre but on these other haunting texts that encode danger and violence against young women. Abraham and Torok say that cryptophores display “apathy, insensitivity, unresponsiveness” and ultimately “absence from [one’s] own life” (Abraham and Torok 171). As a contingent figure, Antoinette hovers on the borderline of the in/animate; as Rochester observes of their brief courtship, she gives way “coldly, unwillingly, trying to protect herself with silence and a blank face” (54), and as we know he will see her later as a fully inanimate doll, and as a marionette. Ultimately, he looks at her “blank lovely eyes” and concludes, “She was only a ghost” (170). Antoinette does not become “The ghost of a woman who they say haunts this place”

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(187) once she arrives at Thornfield, so much as she is this spectral figure from the first pages of the novel in that she bears within her the secrets of other women and other texts. By building in these layers of contingencies, Rhys not only demonstrates a unique mode of cryptophoric literary inheritance, but she speaks to life in the twenty-first century. In the spirit of regarding Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, we close with the contemporary resonance of the intertextualities we have discussed. It would be hard to argue that precarity has not characterized other moments in time but its markers are prominent now, when nationalistic movements with racial and ethnic overtones reminiscent of the rise of fascism in the 1930s are defining political discourse, and such movements as Black Lives Matter rally around a call for basic survival. Even our profession is defined by precarity insofar as most US students emerge from university in a state of debt than can last for much of their adult lives, having been taught by a professorship composed in the majority of vastly underpaid contingent faculty with no health care benefits. In her work on precarity and dispossession, Judith Butler explains how the “self” hinges on a “relational sociability and affectability” with the consequence that when one is “violently misrecognized, [when one is] constituted as radically or uncannily unfamiliar by a recognizable self-same human, then the economy of recognition gets potentially and provisionally destabilized” (Butler 66). Not only is Antoinette violently misrecognized by her rejecting mother and her manipulative fiancé, but her intertextual contingencies underscore her precarity. However, she exemplifies both the perilous and the sustaining qualities of precarity as Lauren Berlant defines it: “a rallying cry for a thriving new world of interdependency and care that’s not just private, [and also] an idiom for describing a loss of faith in a fantasy world to which generations have become accustomed” (Berlant 166). Antoinette’s losses are manifold in the narrative and yet at the same time, by incorporating the secrets of others Rhys smuggles in the stories of multiple endangered women characters, thereby sustaining the insights of women writers who came before her.

Notes 1. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, Volume 1, edited, translated, and introduced by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp 157–61 and 165–205.

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2. At the “Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission” conference held at the Sorbonne 21–23 June 2018, Rhys’s granddaughter Ellen Moerman gave a presentation on the considerable library that Rhys left behind and confirmed that both Rebecca and The Secret Garden are in it. 3. As Bernadette Bertrandias notes, du Maurier never explicitly acknowledged the novel’s indebtedness to Jane Eyre, although most readers easily identify the commonalities; Angela Carter went so far as to denounce the way in which Rebecca “shamelessly reduplicates the plot of Charlotte Brontë’s novel” (“Daphne du Maurier’s Transformation of Jane Eyre in Rebecca,” Revue Littératures, Histoire des Idées, Images, Sociétés du Monde Anglophone 4, 4 (2006), 2. https://journals.openedition.org/ lisa/1774?lang=en 4. Carole Angier describes Rhys’s move to Bude in Cornwall as a “strange choice” and a “strange home”; Rhys stayed in Bude for four more years and in fact began the draft that would be published as Wide Sargasso Sea while living there (Jean Rhys: Life and Work [London: Andre Deutsch, 1990], 468, 470). Rhys recounts the “history” of Cornwall in a letter to her granddaughter of 24 October 1955 (LJR 124). 5. Patricia Gott compares Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea to Jane Eyre (“There is always the other side …’: The ‘Other Women’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre,” Revue Littératures, Histoire des Idées, Images, Sociétés du Monde Anglophone 4,4 (2006), 49–63. https://journals.openedition.org/ lisa/1809 Alison Light mentions in passing that Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites both Jane Eyre and Rebecca (“‘Returning to Manderley’: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class”, Feminist Review 16 (Summer 1984), 21. 6. Rhys describes writing an early version of Wide Sargasso Sea in a letter of 22 July 1962, in which she notes that it was “called Le Revenant then” (LJR 213). 7. The 1996 BBC production of Rebecca departs from previous film versions as well as the book in its inclusion of the “flesh-and-blood Rebecca, albeit in bits and pieces, in flashes of eyes and lips and one quick shot from far away” (Sarah Lyall, “Ghosts Abounding: Rebecca and Rebecca, New York Times [April 13, 1997], 19). The executive producer, Jonathan Powell, defended this departure, claiming that “We tried to create her presence without being too literal, to use images to create an impression … it was important to have a sense that she was there in corporal form, not just as a memory” (19). The perceived need to have a corporeal representation speaks to the vividness Rebecca embodies even in death. 8. Another excellent analysis of how Rebecca undercuts cultural norms governing gender, class, and race is that developed by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik in Daphne du Maurier (99–127).

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9. Anne Williams analyses the importance of landscape and the haunted house in Female Gothic fiction in The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Gott observes that an “indelible sense of place permeates Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea” in contrast to Jane Eyre (51). Heta Pryhönen sees “the intimate link between physical and mental space” as characteristic of the topography of what she terms “Bluebeard Gothic” (Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010], 22. Many critics discuss the sexualized and racialized nature of the narrator’s dream of the ruined garden. See, for example, Light, “‘Returning to Manderley’”, 11–12; and Horner and Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier, 101, 107. 10. Light notes that “The English garden has been overrun by natives in a kind of horticultural anarchy in which the proper order of class, family and Empire has been flouted. The passage neatly expresses social and racial disruption in terms of sexual—‘natural’—excess” (“‘Returning to Manderley’”, 12). Horner and Zlosnik identify the contrast between the ruined garden and the formerly manicured grounds as a trope “associated with the country house tradition of English writing,” in which “control and governance are metaphorically expressed through the disciplining of the land itself.” Because this exuberance is connected to Rebecca, the opening sequence thus embodies her “threat of illegitimacy and social disruption” (Daphne du Maurier, 101). 11. A number of critics have pointed out the ways in which du Maurier draws a strong contrast between the narrator’s “domesticated” femininity and Rebecca’s transgressive one through depictions of landscape. Light notes that the narrator “occupies the East wing overlooking the domesticated flower garden whilst the West wing, Rebecca’s, is dominated by the sight and sound of the sea, restless and disturbing” (“‘Returning to Manderley’”, 11). Similarly, Horner and Zlosnik observe that while “Rebecca’s charismatic sexual identity is associated with the heady scent of the azaleas and with the blood-red rhododendrons of the drive, that of the narrator is linked with the roses” that the East wing overlooks and that Maxim associates with his mother (Daphne du Maurier, 107). 12. See Light, “‘Returning to Manderley,’” 10; Horner and Zlosnik, 101. 13. Ibid. 14. For a brief overview of this history, see the account by Walter Magor, “A History of Rhododendrons”, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JARS/ v44n4/v44n4-magor.htm. See also Jane Brown, Tales of the Rose Tree: Ravishing Rhododendrons and their Travels Around the World (Harper Collins, 2004). 15. Descriptions of Manderley combine realistic and fantastic or fairy-tale elements. Beaumann writes that Manderley, based on du Maurier’s Menabilly

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or “House of Secrets”, is “part Grimm’s fairy-tale and part Freudian romance” (129). 16. Hans W.  Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-analysis,” in Essential Papers on Object Relations, ed. Peter Buckley (New York and London: New York University Press, 1986), 411. 17. Writing of Wide Sargasso Sea’s exposure of Jane Eyre’s “secret”, Mona Fayed remarks that “A story, any story, carries within it the possibility of repression, the exorcising of such ‘ghosts’ that would otherwise ‘haunt’ the narrative and intervene with it” (438). 18. Secrets are, of course, also integral to the Gothic tradition from which all of the novels we discuss here are in some way drawn. 19. The library that Ellen Moerman revealed at the 2018 “Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission/Lignes de transmission” conference in Paris would clarify much about Rhys’s reading practices were it to be catalogued and shared. 20. See Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (New York: Columbia UP, 2015). 21. Secrets, in The Secret Garden, are also ontological in the sense that both children are secrets at one point or another, as Gillian Adams shows in “Secrets and Healing Magic in ‘The Secret Garden,’” in The Secret Garden: A Norton Critical Edition, Ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (New York: Norton, 2006). 22. For a detailed reading of The Secret Garden as an inscription of not only Jane Eyre but Wuthering Heights as well see Gretchen Gerzina’s “When Mary Met Cathy: Frances Hodgson Burnett in Brontë Country” in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden: A Children’s Classic at 100, Eds. Jackie C.  Horne and Joe Sutlieff Sanders (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2011). 23. In her discussion of the reception of The Secret Garden, Anne Lunden notes that the novel was “initially marketed [and reviewed] as an adult book” (Lunden 159). See “The Critical and Commercial Reception of The Secret Garden” in In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2006). 24. As we noted earlier, The Secret Garden is apparently in the library that Rhys left (see endnote 3). 25. Another connecting detail deserving of more attention is Burnett’s use of the Yorkshire vernacular and Rhys’s use of patois.

Works Cited Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel, Volume 1, edited, translated and introduced by Nicholas T.  Rand. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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Beauman, Sally. “Rereading Rebecca.” The New Yorker. November 8, 1993. 127–38. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2011. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. Project Gutenberg, 2008. https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/113/113-h/113-h.htm Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. New York: Harper, 2006. Gott, Patricia. “‘There is always the other side…’: The ‘Other Women’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.” Revue Littératures, Histoire des Idées, Images, Sociétés du Monde Anglophone 4, 4 (2006): 49–63. https://journals.openedition. org/lisa/1809 Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Light, Alison. “‘Returning to Manderley’: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class.” Feminist Review 16 (Summer 1984): 7–25. Loewald, Hans W. “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-analysis.” In Essential Papers on Object Relations. Ed. Peter Buckley. New York and London: New York University Press, 1986. 385–418. Rand, Nicholas. “Introduction,” The Shell and the Kernel. Ibid. Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. New York: Norton, 1995. Rhys, Jean. The Letters of Jean Rhys. Eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. London: Viking, 1984. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1982. Vreeland, Diana. “The Art of Fiction.” Paris Review 21 (1979): 231–7.

CHAPTER 16

Burning Down Her Master’s House (Again): Marlon James Responds to Jean Rhys Ania Spyra

Marlon James does not consider himself “a historical novelist,” though he admits to being “obsessed with the past … with stories that weren’t told, or that weren’t told in a good way.” But even he found it difficult to accept a narrator who spoke in a voice he did not believe legitimate. In an interview, James said, “I was the last person to trust her voice, not because there wasn’t a precedent for dialect in storytelling, but because I’m from a background that still looks at dialect as inferior speech whose only place in fiction is to draw attention to itself or make fun of itself in a sort of lyrical blackface. But this narrator would not leave me alone” (Newton, np). When James chose to trust this narrator and gave her the reigns of the narrative, he stumbled across the language of The Book of Night Women (2009): a linguistic hybrid of “an imagined eighteenth-century slave vernacular layered with contemporary Jamaican Creole, particularly the versions associated with the working class and the urban sketel” (Forbes 6). Hence the narrative voice, which, as is disclosed only at the very end of the

A. Spyra (*) Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_16

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novel, belongs to Lovey Quinn, a daughter of the main character, a biracial Montpelier slave she calls Lilith, and her Irish overseer Robert Quinn. Is this hybrid dialect how Christophine’s daughter, had she had one, would have talked if she had the chance to narrate her mother’s life? Jean Rhys displayed a similar surprise at the strength of Christophine’s narrative voice (Gregg 42). While intended to play the role of the nurse and Obeah woman instrumental to the plot but not its subject, the character became “more important than [she] intended” (“Conversation,” 208, qtd. Gregg 42). In a letter to Diana Athill, Rhys pointed out that she saw “the most seriously wrong thing with Part II [was that she had] made the obeah woman, the nurse, too articulate” (297). She considered “cutting it a bit” but decided against it since “after all no one will notice” (297). She then explained Christophine’s articulateness as being an outcome of having “spent most of her life in a white household” (297). The implicit colonial bias that sees any culture as dependent on closeness to the Metropolis represented by the white household, augmented with Rhys’s belief in the basic inarticulateness of the “negro servant” and her ultimate invisibility to the readers (“no one will notice”), is exactly the type of silencing that begs to be filled by counter-discourse. Here, I propose that The Book of Night Women gives voice and full humanity to Christophine and other silenced characters like her. As I trace the many connections between Wide Sargasso Sea and The Book of Night Women, I posit that with its own pride of place in a different, postcolonial canon, Rhys’s novel is now open to inter-textual interventions. James responds to it because, while it put the complex entanglements of the colonial Caribbean on the literary map, it failed to tell the story of the enslaved or failed to tell it “in a good way.” James’s counter-discourse provides precisely the supplement needed to read Wide Sargasso Sea today, in an era of renewed reckoning with the legacies of slavery. Set on the infamous Jamaican plantation of Montpelier at the turn of the eighteenth century, The Book of Night Women relates how a group of slave women prepare and execute a rebellion that burns their master’s house. It predates—by about a generation—Wide Sargasso Sea’s setting after the Emancipation Act of 1833 that outlawed slavery in Britain and all its colonies.1 As such, it acts as a prequel to Wide Sargasso Sea, to remind us that Antoinette Mason was the daughter of a planter, and even if she was the victim of unfair marriage laws and prejudice against Creoles which assumed their sexual lassitude, addictions, and racial impurity, her family’s life on the island was supported by victimization of enslaved African

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people, especially women, to an incomparably more horrific extent.2 While this insight makes us re-adjust the lens through which we view the realities of New World Slavery, rather than point out only lacuna in Wide Sargasso Sea, James’s intervention allows us to appreciate Rhys’s prescient wrestling with slavery’s continuing legacies. Much as Rhys’s novel was an anti-­ imperial and feminist counter-discourse that aimed to show the repressed sources of British wealth and injustice of anti-Creole stereotypes that she still lived with, reading it alongside of James emphasizes that it is also a postslavery narrative, which critiques the system’s legacies in the transitional period of 1830s and 1840s. Rhys altered the time of Jane Eyre to coincide with emancipation to focus on a moment central to the construction of British Creole identity (Gregg 1995). James, in turn, adjusts the time period of Wide Sargasso Sea to return to the height of antislavery rebellions 30 years prior in order to emphasize that moment as crucial to the creation of Black Jamaican identity (Forbes 2017). What Rhys did for the former plantocracy, James does for the former slaves. If Rhys defined Creole identity in terms of masks and mirrors, Othering her Black and mixed-race characters, unable as yet to transcend the dichotomy between them, James asserts that the only way to define the essential hybridity of Jamaican identity is not a matter of reflections, but of an inextricable mixture perplexing to the characters themselves. Since he is no longer responding to the European canon, but to a new postcolonial and anti-imperialist one, he does not depend on Othering as the only form of identity creation. Inserting itself in the contemporary rethinking of race relations in the New World, James’s novel aims to give full humanity to characters merely instrumental in Wide Sargasso Sea. This is not to say, of course, that Lilith and Christophine should be read as the same fictional character, though their age could be approximate, since in 1838 Lillith would have been in her fifties. Also, in the framing sentence at the beginning and end of the novel the narrator admits that “Lilith” is not the name white people know her by: “You can call her what they call her. I goin’ call her Lilith” (BNW 3, 427). Both women are described as very dark skinned: Christophine is “much blacker” than other women (WSS 12), and Lilith has skin “darker than midnight” despite her “greenest eyes” (BNW 3) and a white overseer father. Lilith functions at times as a general stand-in for the descendants of slaves in Wide Sargasso Sea: Tia and Amélie as well as Christophine. Neither do I suggest that Coulibri in Rhys should be seen as the same structure as Coulibre in James, where it is set in the proximity of Kingston, rather than Spanish

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Town, but the two cities are only 25 kilometers from each other, and the imaginary plantation house could have been situated in between them. The Creole white woman, Isobel, “that hussy’s daughter, that Frenchwoman” (BNW 135), resembles at times Antoinette and at times her mother Annette, in many ways conforming to the Creole and French stereotypes that Rhys battled but which solidified in the time period of James’s setting. I emphasize these similarities to posit that counter-discourse changes the original text by merging with it. In its rewriting and repetition of the original tropes, referencing names, and situations of the original text, it adds depth and nuance to the original, acting much like the Derridean supplement that complements something already complete and completes by filling an original absence. Having read the counter-discourse, the reader will never see the original the same way. Thus, counter-discourse engages with the past to reveal its invisible structures and assumptions, not simply with the intention to replace them but to put them in question. In her essay on postcolonial, canonical counter-discourse Helen Tiffin observed that its operation “is dynamic, not static” (18). She drew from Wilson Harris’s meditation on creativity in adversarial contexts to define counter-discourse as a set of “textual strategies which continually ‘consume’ their ‘own biases’ at the same time as they expose and erode those of the dominant discourse” (18). The idea of consumption of its own biases, questioning of certainties and received perceptions, also finds reflection in the prevalence of fire in both novels, which—if only metaphorically—underlies the logic of counter-discourse. Hence, in my reading of the two novels, I focus on the scenes of fire as the moments when the texts most explicitly critique the biases of both their own time and that of their historical settings. Both aim not to dismantle the master’s house— dismantling would require using his tools, as Audre Lorde warned might prove impossible—but to burn it down entirely, in hopes of building a new structure on the site of the burnt-down ruins. Many structures burn in Wide Sargasso Sea and The Book of Night Women. Some are metaphorical structures, those of power and family, and others actual plantation houses, Coulibri and Montpelier, an overseer’s house and a mansion in England (the putative Thornfield Hall). The first fire in both novels envelops the Coulibri Estate.3 In James, the short sentence “Coulibre burnin’” (BNW 231) stands on its own as a whole paragraph announcing its importance as a pivotal point in the novel. While the main connotative meaning of Coulibri transforms entirely—from a beloved

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home, yearned for and imagined as the original paradise, to a feared place of unjustified torture—both novels show the structure as standing at the center of the tensions between the Creole plantation owners and their workers. The scene of Coulibri burning in Wide Sargasso Sea has been much commented on in Rhys criticism. Benita Parry, for example, noted how it conformed to the narrative of revenge of the former slaves, which depersonalized them—“They all looked the same, it was the same face repeated over and over, eyes gleaming, mouth half open to shout” (WSS 25)—and situated them at the human/animal frontier—“horrible noise … like animals howling but worse” (WSS 23)—much in the same way as Charlotte Brontë did with Bertha Mason (Parry 37). Others have noted, however, that Rhys doesn’t confine the narrative to the point of view of the Creole owners and offers instead a dialogic experience of the event.4 While Antoinette initially sees those who started the fire as plural “they”— the former slaves as a group—she also notices and records their singular, individualized voices: “so black and white they burn the same, eh?” and “you cry for her—when she ever cry for you?” (WSS 26) that name the historical memory of racism, inequality, and suffering that led to the event. Likewise, James presents Coulibre both as Isobel’s home, giving insight into her mourning when it burns, as well as a place of Lilith’s and other slaves’ unjustified torture. But his narrative re-focuses from the first to the latter, to allow for a deeper awareness of the forces and fears that led to its burning. The sinister reputation of Coulibre in The Book of Night Women precedes Lilith’s move there. When telling Lilith about her upcoming move Homer, her mentor and friend at Montpelier, acts “like she ‘fraid’” (BNW 174). Isobel outlines her own opinion on the difference between her home and Montpelier when she supervises Lilith as she packs to move: “No Coulibre nigger would have made the terrible mistake you made and live to make another” (BNW 180). The mistake she references is Lillith spilling some soup onto Isobel’s chaperone during a Christmas party, which, though she is raped and beaten, she survives. Outsized punishment for small mistakes is one of the ways The Book of Night Women—an exceedingly brutal, gothic novel—represents slavery’s horrors.5 The Roget family of Coulibre promulgates an incomprehensible, senseless level of violence, especially sexual violence. Even well-meaning gestures such as leaving flowers that inadvertently cause an allergic reaction are punished with hanging a young male slave upside down covered in honey, so his body can be tormented by “ants in the day, mosquito in the night” (BNW 201). Lilith’s defiance consists in washing off the suffering body, only to terrify

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other slaves with her disobedience: “They look at Lilith with the same wide-eye fear that they do the massa” (BNW 201). And while she performs no Obeah spells in the novel, such acts of resistance mark her as someone endowed with otherworldly power. The stifling feeling of injustice makes Lilith voice her resentment quietly, when bathing and sexually satisfying Massa Roget. When heard, she defends herself against his fury by drowning him and later pushes his alarmed wife off the stairs. To conceal the bodies and exonerate herself, she panics and “the only thing she can think of hiding in is fire” (BNW 229). Here, with the idea of hiding in the fire, the scene bears more resemblance to the closing dream of Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Antoinette— now Bertha—rebels against her imprisonment and knows she needs to set Thornfield Hall on fire. It has been read as burning of the master’s, the jailer’s house, since Antoinette could conceive of no other way to free herself. In both novels, the reader is encouraged to empathize with the arsonist’s motives. In both, the fire sides with and contains power that transcends the woman who decides to take the destructive step. While Antoinette “called help me Christophine help me and looking behind her saw that [she] had been helped … a wall of fire protecting” her (WSS 112), Lilith understands the fire to be an ancestral Yoruba deity, Opapala, “the goddess of hunger” (BNW 230) that possesses her. That Antoinette sees Christophine as a deity, an embodiment of power that can control fire, imbues the character with additional importance. Antoinette calls not on her own Christian or European deities to help her, but the African presences of her childhood. Her final jump contains the hope of a reunification with her Black childhood playmate Tia, even if it is to end in death rather than life (Brathwaite 36), because their actual closeness proved impossible at the moment of the burning of Coulibri. If Wide Sargasso Sea elides the aftermath of the Coulibri fire, The Book of Night Women fully exposes its violence. The chapter that follows Lilith’s escape from burning Coulibre focuses on the white characters, Isobel and Massa Humphrey, looking on the conflagration, and opens with Isobel “bawl[ing] out, Lawd! Woi! like a nigger girl” (BNW 231), stressing the commonality between the Creole and the slave in their speech and suffering. While Isobel cries and screams, the slaves “stand there and watch” (BNW 232). In Wide Sargasso Sea, no particular person stands accused of arson, though the narrative suggests “one of the new servants” named Myra, who Antoinette doesn’t like (WSS 18), Aunt Cora does not trust (WSS 21) and who, despite being charged with taking care of Antoinette’s

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brother, is not in his room when the crib is found aflame (24). The family disperses and ends up in Spanish Town; Antoinette is unconscious, memories repressed, and Tia and her mother are unaccounted for. Was there an investigation? What happened to those who used to work at Coulibri? The Book of Night Women answers such questions. It details how fire, by burning the occluding structures, reveals the depth of mutual suspicions and hatred between the slaves and their owners, as well as the differing reactions between the English and the Creole characters. The plantocracy seeks vengeance in an indiscriminate punishment of innocent slaves: branding, lynching, and public burning of their bodies. Only in the aftermath of the fire, while interrogating Lilith, Massa Humphrey comes to a surprised understanding that “you wish death on us all!” (BNW 233), which further proves Isobel’s assessment that he is “too much of the Englander. He knows nothing of the society of negroes” (BNW 180). Sent to an English boarding school early on, Massa Humphrey grew up in Europe. His positioning allows James to distinguish between the racism of the English and the Creole characters, much as Rhys is careful to do. In a dinner conversation with Isobel’s father, Humphrey announces, “my negroes are quite docile” (BNW 209), to which the Creole Massa Roget responds, “Your negroes are plotting” (BNW 209). Humphrey’s views of the slaves are reminiscent of Mr. Mason’s in Wide Sargasso Sea. Mr. Mason considers his workers “too lazy to be dangerous” and tells Annette she “imagine[s] enmity that doesn’t exist” (WSS 19). He also condescends Aunt Cora, telling her “live here most of your life and know nothing about the people … they are children—they wouldn’t hurt a fly” (WSS 21), to which Cora responds that “unhappily children do hurt flies” (WSS 21), aware of the incendiary potential of their shared history. Both Creoles, Cora and Roget, are proven right by the burning of the plantations; only they suspect the slaves’ humanity expressed in their vengefulness and plotting, which to the Europeans remain simply unimaginable (Trouillot 1995). Both novels acknowledge the inextricability of the relationship between the plantocracy and their slaves or former slaves, and both investigate the possibility of friendship in the relationships between Antoinette and Tia and Isobel and Lilith. The scene of Coulibre burning, although transposed in James’s novel to the two women’s grown-up years, has Isobel say to Lilith in her distress, “I wish I wasn’t a lady or a woman, but a nigger like you. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine me envying a wretched nigger like you?” (BNW 240). This wish to be free of her Creole and female identity, of the weight of ladylike expectations, reads familiar as it

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echoes Antoinette’s desire to stay with Tia after both the fire of Coulibri and the unnamed Thornfield Hall. The scene of Coulibri burning culminates in Antoinette coming eye-to-eye “like in a looking glass” with her Black childhood companion Tia: “We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river … she was all that was left of my life as it had been. … I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go” (WSS 27). Her hope meets the jagged stone in Tia’s hand: “blood on my face, tears on hers” (WSS 27). Again, much has been written about this encounter in Rhys criticism, but what is most salient here for the sake of my argument about James’s counter-discourse is Kamau Brathwaite’s statement that such a friendship would have been impossible at the time of emancipation (36). Brathwaite’s assertion that racist discourse always proscribed any interracial childhood friendships has been much quoted and contested, and James too suggests—perhaps in an anachronistic fantasy—that during slavery children played together until they grew into their racial identities: “the white pickneys reach the age when they become white and nigger become black and they don’t play together no more” (BNW 6). What is at stake here, rather, is the very definition of friendship. Both Lilith and Tia find companionship with Antoinette and Isobel, but never freedom from racism. If Lilith can play with “the girl from Coulibre who use to grab her hair and call her black sheep” (BNW 6), she cannot avoid having her hair pulled and being called racist epithets. Similarly, Antoinette’s last words to Tia, during their childhood play and well before she sees her with the jagged stone in her hand, are “you cheating nigger” (WSS 14). The child Isobel can test boundaries and “quest past the ratoon fields” (BNW 6), while Lilith already knows it would cost her life to do so. As children, they unite against the boys by “talk[ing] secret-like so the boys wouldn’t know,” and “the girl take Lilith hand and neither think it uncanny” (BNW 6). The camaraderie lasts until “one day the girl come to the plantation dress up in a bonnet like her mama and bawl out, Mama, pray tell why is this nigger addressing me” (BNW 6). A lady wearing a wide bonnet with hair, “curly and yellow,” tumbling out is also a description of adult Isobel when she first appears on Montpelier with the intention to seduce Massa Humphrey (BNW 89), further suggesting that she is the same girl from Coulibre who used to play with Lilith as a child. The two women are aligned throughout the narrative, but their relationship acquires a sinister closeness, because Isobel perceives of Lilith as sexual competition (Lilith embodies here the slave temptress stereotype played in

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Wide Sargasso Sea by Amélie). In order to punish her for an aspiration “to something greater than [her] fate” (BNW 181), Isobel decides to keep the slave “closer than a brother” as close as a “shadow” (BNW 181), and hence Lilith’s initial move to Coulibre. The closeness does not derive from friendship but control. In many ways, Isobel’s characterization in the novel returns to the stereotypes that Rhys fought to rewrite. Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774) is referenced in the narrative several times, significantly after the burning of Coulibre, when in desperate mourning, Isobel internalizes and voices the attitudes of the racist discourse of the time. She quotes the well-­ known thesis of Long’s History, which in her distress makes her see herself as “No better than a negro … no breeding nor bearing, no education on how one becomes a proper lady … Edward Long … think we are ignorant blackie lovers who are to be pitied” (243).6 The childhood companionship gets reformulated as ignorant affection across racial boundaries. While Long would have never approved of her version of white femininity, since she pursued Humphrey and was intimate with him before marriage, after her home burns down, Isobel further supports Long’s claims of Creole dissolution. She becomes addicted to opium and cross-dresses to visit an opium den in Kingston, where it is suggested that she sells sex in exchange for the drug. She also turns to Obeah to aid her pursuit of Humphrey. And if the distinction between Creoles and the English was seen as deriving from their proximity to slaves, it is in particular the slaves’ religious practices that racist narratives of the time found threatening.7 Thus, another inter-textual link between Isobel and Antoinette comes with their meddling in Obeah, the ultimate un-English behavior. In both novels, Obeah women are the powerful characters, who conceal their full power despite the white women’s belief in their transparency. In conversation with Lilith, Isobel states that she is glad to be “a Creole girl” because a “little of your black magic has rubbed off on me” (BNW 309). Once again, as in the moment of the Coulibre fire, the way she speaks sounds so much like the slave vernacular that Lilith marvels at her “opening her white lips so that a black voice come out,” but adds that “what she saying, thing that nigger even in them deepest blackness don’t talk about in daylight” (BNW 309) to stress that despite Isobel’s arrogant belief in understanding the slaves’ spirituality, she can only speak about it with ignorance. Earlier in the novel, the narrator suggests that “even white people whisper when they say Obeah” (BNW 51). Lilith reacts to Isobel’s confession by telling her—much like Christophine warned Antoinette (“Bad, bad

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trouble come when beke meddle with that,” WSS 68)—“not to be messing with them things” (BNW 309). In the same exchange, Isobel uses her interest in Obeah to distance herself from Humphrey: “Me say me Obeah him … You can fool people like the massa but you can’t fool me. I know all about your ways” (309). This is reminiscent of Antoinette’s “more proprietorial than empathetic” attitude to black people (Wickramagamage 36), because even if Isobel considers herself more akin to Lilith than Humphrey because of their shared colonial childhood, femininity, and grit—“‘You and I are colonial creatures, different though you certainly are … we’re cut from a more blunt cloth’” (BNW 308–9)—her belief can only be a projection: she knows nothing and doesn’t want to know anything about Lilith. What the narrator—and thus the reader—knows about Lilith and other titular night women is not available to the white characters in the world of the novel, much as Christophine’s interiority remains hidden from Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. And while critics have argued about Christophine’s representation, some having claimed that she transcends her silenced position and becomes “the first interpreter and named speaking subject” (Spivak, 273) who “delivers a frontal assault against antagonists, and as such constitutes a counter-discourse” (Parry, 38), the reader only perceives her through conversations with the white characters. Much as she did with Tia, Antoinette also reveals that she sees Christophine in terms of race as a “black devil” (WSS 81) and “ignorant, obstinate old negro woman” (WSS 67). And as Carmen Wickramagamage notes, “Antoinette’s attempts at an arbitrary and self-serving use of a culture-­ specific practice—obeah—deny Christophine an honourable retirement in her island retreat—and a dignified exit from the narrative” (37). Blind to the disparity in their social positions, Antoinette convinces Christophine to assist her with Obeah against her better judgment. Threatened with the letter from the judge, Christophine is forced to “walk away without looking back” from the narrative and from Gran Bois, aware of her own weakness in the face of English law (WSS 97). Despite the revolts, despite the emancipation, the law is still stacked against Christophine and those like her. Earlier in the novel, Christophine laughs when told that slavery had ended, aware of all the ways in which “new ones worse than old ones” with the intimidating power of their “magistrate,” “jail house,” “chain gang,” and “tread machine” (WSS, 15). Not being known by the white characters is a condition of survival. Christophine’s last words in the novel—“Read and write I don’t know.

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Other things I know” (WSS, 97)—sound different when put in context of how secret literacy is in The Book of Night Women. Lilith learns how to read from Homer, but does not reveal this ability even to her lover Robert Quinn,8 let alone to Isobel, to whom she always responds in the fewest, servile words. Such lack of understanding and dismissal by the white characters protects Lilith from punishment. Lilith gets away from the burning Coulibre, assumed innocent. Thanks to this opacity, Lilith, overwhelmed by her own guilt, personified as a shadowy dark woman throughout the novel, can grow into the heroine of her daughter’s story. She can also choose to behave differently to transform and nuance her attitude to revenge and her own white heritage during the second plantation burning, Montpelier. This time, though aware of the plans for the rebellion as one of the night women, Lilith does not participate in the setting of the fire. She decides “she shed enough blood already … she not shedding no more” (BNW 409). She spends the revolt standing guard over her father, Jack Wilkins, the former overseer, confused though she is about her own motives: “he be her pappy” and she is grateful for him saving her “from the field and … whipping” (BNW 409). With this decision, the skinny dark woman that symptomatizes her guilt and trauma throughout the novel “take leave of her” (BNW 410); this decision allows her also to survive the mayhem of plantocracy’s punishment that follows. If the fire at Coulibre began with Lilith’s bathing and drowning Massa Roget, the fire at Montpelier ends with Lilith giving a gentle bath to his raped and traumatized daughter (BNW 416). After the fire half-consumes Montpelier, Isobel and Lilith remain on the ruined plantation, both of them pregnant and without their partners, as Humphrey leaves for England and Quinn dies in the revolt. Lilith becomes the only person who “could go near Miss Isobel” (BNW 422). Though she still takes care of both Wilkins and Isobel, Lilith can “act like a free negro … do her own thing as be her mood” (BNW 422). Her freedom finds its fullest expression in teaching her daughter to write, “That was the most forbidden thing and it still be so, but there be no man, black or white, that can stop her now” (BNW 426). And perhaps this is what James offers as the way to rebuild after the fire: writing down a story that gives women their due. Lovey rewrites the history that remembers the rebellion as “the Great Atlas Revolt” (BNW 417), inserting a male name “cause such devious and nefarious thinking was beyond capabilities of the fairer sex, much less a bunch of goat-rutting savage womens” (BNW 412).

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What was occluded in Wide Sargasso Sea—the complex humanity of formerly enslaved characters, their lives beyond companionship and services they provided to Antoinette—becomes fully visible in The Book of Night Women. And here is how James’s counter-discourse transcends the limitations that Gayatri Spivak saw as characteristic to anti-imperial counter-­discourse. In her reading of Wide Sargasso Sea, Spivak claims that “No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self” (253). James responds not to a canonical, European text, but to a postcolonial novel that already tackled and transcended some of its own imperial assumptions. In this way, James achieves precisely the task of turning the Other of Rhys’s novel into a self: slaves are the heroines of the narrative. They are not domesticated. The Book of Night Women can set the record straight: the slave was articulate. She just didn’t dare or deign to speak her truth to her masters. Now she has spoken and written it down and so will her daughters and her daughters’ daughters.

Notes 1. See B. W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community. 2. Students’ responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have evolved across my ten years of teaching Rhys. In the era of Black Lives Matter, students find Antoinette an unlikeable, privileged white woman and are eager to engage with the racial dynamics of Antoinette’s nostalgia for patriarchal past of safety in the system that provided for her needs. Some recent scholarship has tackled this question. See for example Wickramagamage: “On the basis of her gender, the Creole woman may be absolved of direct involvement in the practice of slavery but the white Creole woman had nevertheless enjoyed a measure of comfort and luxurious living unknown to the dispossessed majority (the black slaves) among whom they lived. Christophine after all is one of her mother’s wedding presents, Coulibri her father’s legacy to the family, and Gran Bois her mother’s legacy to her. In other words, they had been beneficiaries of that inhuman system and had enjoyed the material benefits that had accrued to them as a direct result of that system” (33). By teaching it alongside The Book of Night Women, my hope is to supplement my students’ sympathies that naturally turned towards Christophine. 3. While the name of the estate derives from Rhys’ great-grandmother’s ancestral home in Dominica (9 f. 4), that the word itself derives from a Carib

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word for a humming bird permits native inhabitants of the Caribbean—otherwise conspicuously absent from either narrative—to receive their trace of presence. 4. My reading here is indebted to Veronica Marie Gregg’s Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole that outlines how the historical narratives of the time saw the Black anger as one “undifferentiated mass of Black hate, terror, and betrayal” which Rhys “counterpointed by the articulation of their political positions and their conflicting attitudes with respect to the fire” thus “emblematiz[ing] post-slavery disputes about labor conditions between the plantocracy and the working people” (94–95). 5. See for example Sam Vasquez and Curdella Forbes who read James’s espousal of horror tropes as commentary on the sexual economies of slavery. Vasquez focuses on the novel’s complex representation of interracial relationships and violence implicit in generalization about black and mixed-race women’s hypersexuality (45). She also notes that Lillith’s name “invokes the archetype of female sexuality, fecundity, and horror from mythology and midrashic literature” (50–51). Forbes reads James’s novel in the context of the colonial Gothic, which by naming of the ineffable and the abject reveals “the specific sex-gendered ways the historical horror of Caribbean slavery undergirded the enterprise of modernity” (5) and thus “a genealogy of crisis at the heart of postcolonial Jamaica” (2). 6. Long is another of James’s inter-textual inspirations, beside Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (among others). Long describes young white women who had “been bred up entirely sequestered in country parts, and had no example of forming themselves either by example or tuition, are truly to be pitied. We may see … a very fine young woman awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a Negro servant … her speech is whining, languid, and childish. … Her ideas are narrowed to the ordinary subjects that pass before her, the business of the plantation, the tittle-tattle of the parish, the tricks, superstitions, diversions, and profligate discourses of black servants, equally illiterate and unpolished” (qtd. in Zacek, 332). 7. See for example Erin Skye Mackie’s “Jamaican Ladies and Tropical Charms,” which analyzes three texts from the Caribbean to show that each represents the same trope of women “of purely European descent [who are] characterized as having unacceptably blurred the line between black and white, slave and master, by becoming involved with the practice of African-derived ‘tropical charms’ such as obeah and voodoo” (Zacek, 334). 8. On the problematic use of “lover” in this context, see Greg Forter, “A Good Head and a Better Whip.”

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Works Cited Brathwaite, Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1974. Forbes, Curdella. “Bodies of Horror in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and Clovis Brown’s Cartoons.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 21, no. 3 (2017): 1–16. Forter, Greg. “‘A Good Head and a Better Whip’: Ireland, Enlightenment, and the Body of Slavery in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women.” Slavery & Abolition 37, no. 3 (2016): 521–540. Higman, B.  W. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000. Gregg, Veronia Marie. Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. James, Marlon. The Book of Night Women. New York: Penguin/Riverhead, 2009. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom: The Crossing Press, 2001. Mackie, Erin. “Jamaican Ladies and Tropical Charms.” ARIEL: A Review of Literature 37 (2006): 189–219. Newton, Maud. “Interview with Marlon James.” Maud Newton Blog, April 17, 2009. maudnewton.com/blog/marlon-james-on-bossy-female-charactersand-more/. Accessed 26 February 2018. Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary Review 9, no. 1/2 (1987): 27–58. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 243–261. Tiffin, Helen, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse.” Kunapipi 9, no. 3 (1987): 17–34. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1995. Vasquez, Sam. “Violent Liaisons: Historical Crossings and the Negotiation of Sex, Sexuality, and Race in The Book of Night Women and The True History of Paradise.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2012): 38, 43–59. Wickramagamage, Carmen. “An/Other Side to Antoinette/Bertha: Reading ‘Race’ into Wide Sargasso Sea.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35, no. 1 (2016): 27–42. Zacek, Natalie. “Searching for the Invisible Woman: The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Britain’s West Indian Colonies.” History Compass 7, no. 1 (2009): 329–341.

Index1

A Abraham, Nicolas, 216, 223, 226 Abuse, sexual, 8, 166 After Leaving Mr. McKenzie, 100 Ahmed, Sara, 64, 68n17, 188–190, 192, 193 Allfrey, Phyllis Shand, 2, 92, 98, 99 Alvarez, Al, 77 Amazona arausiaca, 92, 96 Amazona imperialis, 92, 96 America’s Children, 83 Anger, 63, 64, 66, 67, 146, 175, 176 Angier, Carole, 5, 17, 19, 113, 179n3, 228n4 Athill, Diana, 103, 118, 234 Atwood, Margaret, 63, 65 Austen, Jane, 168, 179n4, 180n15 Mansfield Park, 168, 180n15 Authenticity, 42, 183–196

B Baudelaire, Charles “Le Revenant,” 113 Benjamin, Walter, 52, 53 Berlant, Lauren, 68n11, 227 Bevacqua, Maria, 151 Bleser, Carol, 166, 180n14 Bliss, Eliot, 119 The Book of Night Women, 9, 233, 234, 236–239, 243, 244, 244n2 Bracke, Sarah, 196 Brathwaite, Kamau, 2, 16, 126, 130–132, 136, 238, 240 The Arrivants, 132 Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean, 138n10

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Savory, E. L. Johnson (eds.), Wide Sargasso Sea at 50, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3

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INDEX

Brontë, Charlotte, 9, 33, 66, 105, 118, 119, 126, 133, 135, 168, 201, 202, 205–212, 215, 222, 223, 228n5, 237 Jane Eyre, 3, 8, 9, 23–25, 30, 46, 51, 57, 59–61, 71, 72, 75, 79, 105, 107, 113, 118, 119, 133–135, 161, 162, 168, 171, 175, 179n2, 201–212, 215–218, 222–224, 226, 228n3, 228n5, 229n9, 230n17, 230n22, 235 Brown, Brené, 184, 186, 188, 191–193, 195, 196 Burke, Tarana, 8, 68n20, 143 Burnard, Thomas, 180n10, 180n11 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 9, 224–226, 230n22, 230n25 The Secret Garden, 9, 224, 226, 228n2, 230n21, 230n22, 230n23, 230n24 Butler, Judith, 189, 227 C “The Cardboard Doll’s-House,” 112, 114, 122n5 Carpentier, Alejo, 134, 136 In the Kingdom of This World, 134 Carr, Helen, 2, 3 Césaire, Aimé, 127, 130 Césaire, Suzanne, 130 Color, 5, 26, 27, 30, 33, 34, 40–46, 48, 52, 55, 57, 95, 143, 173 The Collected Short Stories, 16 Conrad, Joseph, 84, 113 Almayer’s Folly, 113, 118, 121 Heart of Darkness, 113, 118, 121 Crabtree Club, 57 Creole, 3–5, 30, 41, 72, 84, 102, 112, 115–117, 120, 121, 128, 132, 137n5, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 161, 163, 166, 169, 234–239, 241, 244n2

D Death, 30, 35, 45, 98, 103, 107, 108, 111, 121, 134, 161–178, 185, 195, 215, 216, 218, 222, 225, 226, 228n7, 238 Didion, Joan, 61 Dominica, 2, 4, 6, 7, 16–19, 62, 74, 75, 78, 80, 91–105, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115, 118, 120, 162, 211, 244n3 Du Maurier, Daphne, 8, 9, 201, 216–221, 223, 225, 226, 228n3, 229n11, 229n15 Rebecca, 8, 201, 216, 217, 221–224, 226, 228n2, 228n3, 228n5, 228n7, 229n9 Duigan, John, 5 Dvořák, Anton, “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” 114 Dworkin, Andrea, 144 E Ecological, 94, 97 Eliot, T. S., 129, 138n9 Emery, Mary Lou, 7, 116, 137n3, 196 Empire, 17, 67n5, 93, 127, 128, 130, 175, 206, 229n10 Encryption, 215–227 Enslavement, 129, 166 Environmental degradation, 91, 178 F Fanon, Frantz, 154, 175 Faulkner, William, 20, 85, 87, 129, 130 Felman, Shoshana, 194 Feminism(s), 4, 63–66, 68n17, 162, 202, 207 Flowers, 25, 26, 34, 40–42, 45, 47, 52–59, 63, 93, 102, 116, 172, 185, 221, 224, 225, 229n11, 237

 INDEX 

Forbes, Curdella, 233, 235, 245n5 Ford, Ford Madox, 3, 20, 76, 80, 84 Forest, 34, 35, 45, 73, 91–109, 120, 121, 172, 177, 225 Foucault, Michel, 3, 149 French creole language, 115 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 62, 163, 225 G Gambetti, Zeynep, 189 Gautier, Théophile, 57 Gender, 2, 3, 5, 8, 17, 19, 30, 60, 65, 66, 143–146, 148, 150, 155, 162, 171, 175, 177, 179n8, 207, 218, 228n8, 244n2 Geneva, Dominica, 112 Ghosts, 4, 32, 133, 216, 218–220, 222, 226, 230n17 Gilbert, Sandra M., 169, 170, 201 Glissant, Édouard, 127, 129, 136n1 Gommiers, 92 Goodison, Lorna, 16 Good Morning Midnight, 74, 85, 128, 223, 224 Gosine, Andil, 175 Greenhorn, Stephen, 5 Gregg, Veronica Marie, 150, 234, 235, 245n4 Gubar, Susan, 169, 170, 201 H Hall, Catherine, 179n4 Hall, Douglas, 164, 165 Hammond, James Henry, 162, 166, 167, 169, 171 Harlem Renaissance, 130 Harris, Wilson, 7, 125–127, 129, 131, 134–136, 236 The Palace of the Peacock, 134, 138n11 Tumatumari, 136

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Heise, Ursula, 106 Hemingway, Ernest, 3, 84, 85 Homosocial, 156, 162, 171–173 Honychurch, Lennox, 108 Horner, Avril, 220, 228n8, 229n9, 229n10, 229n11 Huggan, Graham, 107 Hugo, Victor, 57 Hulme, Peter, 2 I Indigeneity, 95, 102 Insects, 92, 94, 104 “The Insect World,” 94 J James, C. L. R., 127, 129–131 The Black Jacobins, 131 James, Marlon, 9, 233–244 The Book of Night Women, 9, 233, 234, 236, 237, 239, 244, 244n2 Jane Eyre, 30, 33, 73, 76, 178n1, 179n2, 208–210 John, Augustus, 57 Johnson, Erica, 9, 23, 137n3, 193 Joséphine, 179n7 Joyce, James, 3, 129 K Kalinago people, 95 Kimmel, Michael, 161–163, 165, 172, 175, 179n8 Kimmey, Deborah, 193 Kincaid, Jamaica, 16 Kirchknopf, Andrea, 202 Kramer, Lawrence, 145

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INDEX

L Lamming, George, 13, 127, 129–131 The Emigrants, 129 Lenglet, Jean, 17 The Letters of Jean Rhys (LJR), 216, 221, 228n4, 228n6 “Let Them Call It Jazz,” 119 Lockhart, James Potter, 112, 113 Long, Edward, 241, 245n6 Lorde, Audre, 64, 107, 144, 236 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 131

Morrison, Toni, 135, 136 Song of Solomon, 135 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, 162 Munro, Alice, 16 Murray, Simone, 202, 205 “MY GREAT-AUNT JEANNETTE…,” 112

M MacInnes, Colin, 59 Magic, 29, 62, 104, 105, 118–121, 146, 190, 221, 222 Maher, Brendan, 5 Maida, Chrisila, 6, 23–28 Malherbe, François de, 172 Manhood, 161–178 Mardorossian, Carine, 7–8 Morrison, Toni Song of Solomon, 135 Marson, Una, 129, 137n5 Martinique, 115, 116, 163 Masculinity, 32, 147–149, 151, 156–158, 161, 162, 172 Massacre, 93, 135, 226 McKay, Claude, 129, 130, 137n5 McKinnon, Catherine, 144 Melville, Herman, 86 Metanarrative, 149 #MeToo movement, 3, 8, 68n20, 158, 163 Mirmohamadi, Kylie, 8 Modernism(s), 3, 4, 7, 19, 125–136, 211 Caribbean, 7, 125–136 Moerman, Maryvonne, 113 Mont, Eve Marie, 202, 204–207, 212n1, 212n3 Moran, Patricia, 9, 137n3

O Obeah, 62, 64, 66, 80, 86, 104, 117, 133, 135, 145–147, 154, 207, 234, 238, 241, 242, 245n7 Obeah Night, 146 Oliver, Sophie, 6, 67n1 “On Not Shooting Sitting Birds,” 94, 96 The Orchid House, 98, 101, 103 Orientalism, 57 Ové, Horace, 14

N Nebeker, Helen, 186

P Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 2, 7, 108 Parey, Armelle, 202, 203 Parry, Benita, 237, 242 Passion, sexual, 45, 164 Patriarchy, 32, 48 Phillips, Caryl, 2, 6, 13–22 Dancing in the Dark, 21 The Lost Child, 16 A View of the Empire at Sunset, 6, 14, 16 Plantation, 5, 7, 8, 86, 93, 102, 113, 120, 127–131, 134, 136n3, 137n4, 161–166, 171, 173, 178, 179n2, 179n4, 180n9, 226, 234, 236, 237, 239, 240, 243, 245n6

 INDEX 

Plantocracy, 5, 83, 162, 235, 239, 243, 245n4 Power, 3, 7, 8, 19, 45, 65, 66, 76, 92–94, 100, 103, 105–107, 109, 112, 115, 127, 130, 145, 149, 153, 155, 156, 163, 165, 166, 168, 171, 177, 178n1, 179n8, 193, 195, 217, 220, 222, 223, 236, 238, 241, 242 Predation, sexual, 66 Prinzhorn, Hans, 39 Q Queer, 162, 177, 178, 179n5 Queer Ecologies, 162 Quick, Diana, 5, 7 R Race, 3, 5, 17, 20, 35, 60, 65, 68n15, 86, 143, 144, 146, 148–151, 153, 155, 156, 163, 166, 167, 171, 174, 175, 177, 218, 228n8, 235, 242 Racism, 61, 68n15, 128, 151, 155, 157, 158, 158n2, 174, 237, 239, 240 Raiskin, Judith, 2, 135, 145, 146 Ramchand, Ken, 14, 130 Rape, 3, 8, 144–147, 150–152, 155–158, 165 Red, 26, 35, 39–48, 52, 53, 57–59, 62, 64–66, 158, 185, 219–221, 224 “The Revenant,” 4 Revenants, 216 Reventós, Maria, 186 Richardson, Samuel, 166, 180n12 Pamela, 166 Roccanova, Alexa, 6 Rosen, Jeremy, 203

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Rubens, Bernice, 84 Rubin, Louis D., 166 S Said, Edward, 180n15 Sanity, 32, 44, 48 Savory, Elaine, 2, 6, 8, 43, 45 Schwartz, Stuart B., 119 Selvon, Sam, 129 Sexuality and abuse, 163, 165, 166, 173 and death, 178 interracial, 156, 173 Shakespeare, William, 8, 113, 122n4, 178 Macbeth, 113, 118 Othello, 118 Shoemaker, Sarah, 202–204, 208–210, 212n1 Simpson, Anne, 186, 190–192, 195, 196 Sisserou, 92, 94–97, 109 Slavery, 3, 5, 8, 113, 126, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 162, 164, 166, 177, 178, 179n2, 179n4, 234, 235, 237, 240, 242, 244n2, 245n5 Sleep It Off Lady, 74 Smile Please, 80, 92–96, 101, 111–113, 146 Songs, Wide Sargasso Sea, 114 Spender, Stephen, 83 Spivak, Gayatri, 155, 242, 244 Spyra, Ania, 9 Stoneman, Patsy, 217 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 132 Stuart, Andrea, 179n7 Stubbs, Jane, 202, 204, 210, 211, 212n1 Supremacy, white, 161, 171, 173 Sustainability, 102, 109

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INDEX

T Teale, Polly, 7, 71–73, 76–78, 80 Thackara, James, 6, 83–87 Thistlewood, Thomas, 162, 164–166, 168, 169, 171, 173, 180n9, 180n10 Thomas, Greg, 175, 177, 178 Thomas, Sue, 7 Tiffin, Helen, 236 Tilden Smith, Leslie, 98 Toomer, Jean, 130 Torok, Maria, 216, 223, 226 Transgenerational trauma, 216 Trees, 17, 34, 41, 42, 45, 46, 52, 91–109, 116, 119, 120, 152, 173, 194, 220, 221, 224–226 Trevor, William, 16 Trouillot, Michael-Rolph, 239 V Vaz Dias, Selma, 111, 113 Violence, 3, 9, 60, 63, 76, 80, 94, 103, 144, 145, 147–152, 155–157, 169, 221, 224, 226, 237, 238, 245n5 Voyage in the Dark, 4, 14, 20, 58, 92, 94, 97, 100, 102, 108, 117, 122n8, 128, 129, 137n4, 223

Vreeland, Diana, 222 Vulnerability, 7, 8, 77, 86, 91, 106, 174, 183–196 W Walcott, Derek, 15, 16, 107, 119, 126, 137n7 In a Green Night, 119 Warner, Earl, 5 Wasafiri, 2 White male supremacy, 173 Wide Sargasso Sea, 1–9, 14, 23–25, 27, 29–49, 51–67, 71, 72, 75, 77–80, 85, 86, 91–109, 111–121, 125–136, 143–158, 161–178, 183–196, 201–212, 215–227, 234–239, 241, 242, 244, 244n2 Windrush, 129–130, 137n5 Woodcock, Jane, 111–113 Wyndham, Francis, 29, 77, 84, 100, 114, 118, 147 Wynter, Sylvia, 177, 178 Y Yeats, W. B., 61 Z Zlosnik, Sue, 220, 228n8, 229n9, 229n10, 229n11