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Wide Sargasso

Wide Sargasso Sea, the Jane Eyre prequel (though Rhys moves the dates back), beginning in the years after the 1833 Emancipation Act

Folks

• Antoinette, an allegory of the zombi culture, the slave-owning generations of Creoles (ie, before the Emancipation Act of 1833, which destabilized the economy, lead to many deaths and the ruin of various estates, and brought in a new generation of European speculators like Mason, who are now the new upper class) now known as “white cockroaches” and abhorred b/c of the link to slave-owning and ridiculed b/c they have lost. This class is a class of the living dead: people who have outlasted their time, outlasted the mode of production that created them. The madness of her family can be read as the scourge of history. She says that the day Coulibri was burned to the ground (and Tia threw the rock at her) scarred her for life and “ruined” her and her wedding-day.

• Rochester, unnamed in the book. Controls a little over half of the narrative. In fever-induced stupor decides to marry Antoinette: at first, his only sin is that he’s too young. The Caribbean is too much for him, too much color scent passion everything, but it seduces him until he hears of the secrets behind it. Like Othello, driven mad by jealousy and doubt, he becomes a paranoiac who treats Antoinette in such a way that drives Antoinette permanently mad, while it leaves him free to recover sanity through his possession of Antoinette, supported by the corrupt legal and religious system of the Europeans. His seduction by the culture is narrativized by the decreasing lack of control he exerts over his narrative, as it is invaded by the Creole: little by little, the voices of Antoinette, Christophine, Daniel Cosway, and Creole songs and endearments begin to take over his consciousness, making it little more than a quilt of mixed voices. But again, his possession of power and status brings him “right” in the end.

Themes

• Burning
  • Burning of Coulibri by ex-slaves parallels burning of Thornfield by Rochester’s own prisoner
  • Parrot Coco burning (Qui est la? Qui est la?) going down in the flames of burning Coulibri as Antoinette goes down burning with Thornfield
  • What does the burning do? The second one stopped what the first started (the madness of Annette ending in the madness of Antoinette); they start new narratives (first one starts Antoinette’s, second starts Jane’s)
  • Revolution and social protest: she saw that she was brought there to burn it down: her destiny to bring revolution back to the center, back to the heart of England
• Legality
  • Rochester uses the strong legal arm against Christophine, against her obeah
  • The magistrate Mr. Fraser is contacted to catch Christophine again
  • At the mention of legal processes, that’s when Antoinette attacks Richard
  • “Justice” Antoinette knew was a “cold” word and a “lie” (her mother did not get justice: she was locked up and made permanently insane)
• Madness: you don’t have it: men controlling you takes you over the edge
  • Her mother was MADE mad
    • She was broken-hearted by the loss of her beloved son (whom no one could understand b/c he was mentally challenged) and upset that her husband had refused to listen to her very appropriate warnings
    • Her husband didn’t listen to her
    • Her husband blocked her physical movement
    • Her husband shuts her up
    • Her husband abandons her
    • They ACT LIKE she is mad, TREAT HER like she is mad, and that makes her mad.
    • They won’t let her grieve
  • Same with Antoinette
    • Each one of her “mad” behaviors was prompted by a man trying to control her
    • He doesn’t let her drink (physically restraining her)
    • He takes her from her beloved Granbois
    • He refuses to love her; he uses her body and money and throws her husk away
• Obeah: human interaction in matters of life and death
  • Beauty: Antoinette and Annette with their beauty have power to “bewitch” men into marrying them
  • Christophine: the obvious obeah
    • She has the love potion that just makes Rochester very sick
    • We see various signs of her obeah: the dead chicken, the severed hand, an offering of flowers on a haunted estate
  • Rochester: the true obeah
    • Christophine notes that Rochester is “breaking Antoinette up”
    • Antoinette says him stealing her name “is obeah too”
    • He controls her and virtually kills her, making her a zombi
• Zombi
  • Two types: the dead coming alive, or the living made dead
    • Dead coming alive: When she’s young, she doesn’t know if objects are live or not (Freud’s uncanny 19)
    • Historical/cultural definition: person without independent will or self-motivated action
  • Antoinette’s two deaths (compare to Rochester’s two deaths, the real and the orgasm): “the real one and the one people know about:” between the two deaths, you are a zombi
  • He makes her a zombi: that’s what her “insanity” is
  • Everything is haunted: Ant says Coulibri was haunted at night; Rochester thinks the space around Granbois is haunted; he says that they are haunted by “ghosts” when they worry about her past; Christophine says Ant looks like a “soucriant” (a crying ghost)
    • Remember, Rhys’ early draft of this book (1939) was called Le Revenant (the ghost)
• Setting
  • “Alone in the most beautiful place in the world”
  • Coulibri was drowning in flowers but they couldn’t afford a hair ribbon
  • Contrasts natural plenitude with an unjust or broken social order
• Religion
  • Just another institution that is on Rochester’s side
  • Antoinette is a skeptic, not relying on God, who she says is indifferent
  • But Rochester blandly asserts his belief….
• Doctors
  • Also an institution used against rebellious women
  • Christophine says that Rochester will get any of the Spanish Town doctors to pronounce Antoinette insane just because he wants them to
  • She likes the “old style doctors” who don’t make moral judgments but just repair the body and leave the mind up to the people themselves
  • She makes a connex between these doctors and (their close alliance with) the legal side of things, the police
• Work/Class
  • You could argue that it’s the threat Mason makes to import workers from the East Indies that sparks the riot and burning of Coulibri: it’s a worker’s riot that’s the same as any protest against workers imported into England from Scotland or Ireland
  • White cockroaches: the Cosways are the (old) lower class, while the Masons are the (new) upper class

Revision of Jane Eyre as Modernism

• What’s wrong w/Jane Eyre?
  • Doesn’t properly show the Creole’s side; only shows English side of the story: absent colonial thread
  • Doesn’t recognize Rochester’s cruelty
• Little exposition
• Figurative language recorded with the same deadpan style as denotative language: just like the songs start to become entwined with their regular conversation, images and conceits are part of everyday language use
• As an intertextual rewrite
  • Different kind of “myth” than Eliot means, but certainly a more inclusive understanding of modernism’s intertextuality and self-reflexivity
• Multiplication of voices
  • Obviously, we have “Bertha” reborn, given her “real” name, Antoinette Cosway
  • But we also get Rochester’s point of view for quite awhile, and even Grace Poole moonlights as a narrator briefly
  • We see here a more overtly political use of the roving, mobile narrative voice used by for example Virginia Woolf: instead of Henry James peering over the consciousness of one person (focalization), it’s like you hang a microphone over a place and run around with it, picking up any voices you possibly can

Form as Modernism

• As a work that was labored over by Rhys for over twenty-five years, it is the ultimate example of the craftsmanship of modernism: published in 1966, perhaps one of modernism’s last fruits
• Extreme formal experimentation
  • Transfer of voices
  • Intercalation of voices (interruptions of others’ voices in the narrative, which is thematized by Rochester’s process of slowly going crazy as the Creole patois he scorns gets burned into his brain)
• Rhysian fragmentary style
• “Three part” form is taken from the Victorian baggy monster and made into something stilted: the short first and third parts are overshadowed by the large second part
• Heavy symbolism: the parrot Coco, shouting Qui est la? Qui est la?
• Discovery of the workings of the conscious mind
• Rochester’s part of the narrative goes insane 107-8, traversed by other people’s voices: his mind is the new narrative epistemology (ie, isn’t what modernists write insanity if you thought it as part of a person’s mind? cf Dalloway if you don’t count the paranoia of the soldier’s account)
• Thematizes the power of language
  • Antoinette’s critique of language
    • Will she recognize their power?
      • Yes: “Say die and I will die.”
      • Yes 86, 94: naming is powerful: renaming her Bertha Mason out of Antoinette Cosway is obeah b/c it’s “trying to make me into someone else”
      • No: “words are no use,” she says when she realizes they aren’t in HER power to control
  • 83: sound of a word is important; someone names a boy Disastrous b/c the name sounds pretty, but the priest demands another name
    • Separation of signifier and signified is acted out within the field of power
  • Words as political power: 54, 74
    • 54: Their disagreement about what to call things (ajoupa or summer home”)
    • 74: If beke say it’s foolishness, it’s foolishness: we know who has the power to name
    • Daniel Cosway’s description of himself struggling to write the letter shows he knows that his literacy is power (in this case, power of blackmail)
  • UPSHOT: we have two different views of language: one in which you are wrong or right (there is a right word and the wrong one is always wrong) or one that is much more flexible (you can name things what you want). Whether you take one view or another depends on power relations: those in power switch at will which “type” of language they will believe at the moment.
• Intercalation of other voices: italicized, place in parenthesis, or both; lots of songs; always remembering what other people said
  • Songs, though Rhys begins by inserting them conventionally (introducing them with the name of the song or the context in which they’re sun, marked off from text by text block, etc) gradually become grammatically correct parts of sentences, seamlessly integrated into speech.
• Intermixing of opposites: hatred and desire, life and death, Rochester thinks
• Interpretation
  • Antoinette always has to correct him: he misinterprets everything in the West Indies, especially the black population
    • Like Annette explaining to Mason that they have good reason to be upset, Antoinette has to explain that the ladies aren’t stupid they’re shy, that Christophine drags her dress to show she owns another not because she’s dirty.
  • Antoinette is a hermeneuticist: “There is always the other side, always,” she tells Rochester, responding to the rumors her half-brother Daniel Cosway has spread
  • But Rochester is a positivist: he demands to know the secrets of the island, and when he finally recognizes that he can’t, his narrative ends, and he packs them off to leave it
    • “I was certain that everything I had imagined to be true was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest’s a lie. Let it go.” He is upset about it, and he reacts with possession
    • When his habitual method of knowledge fails (use the books, interrogate, bring in the police if necessary), he reverts to property: he controls Antoinette and hatches a plan to control her completely (keep her out of hands of other men, keep her from enjoying herself, never let her go, physically entrap her)
    • Upshot? He realizes that he has been emptied after all the “conflicting emotions” (ie he seems like a zombi at that moment). He decides to try to forget everything, to lock it away, but his last words reveal that he thinks of himself as “nothing. Nothing.”

Quotes

• From Heart of Darkness, ix: “to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
• 81: “There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.”
  • Antoinette, musing on her mother’s death (when Rochester accuses her of lying about her the timing of her mother’s death, that is, he’s being positivist)
• 104: “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know.”
  • Christophine, last words to Rochester, who has used literacy (reading the book Mason left in Granbois to learn about obeah, writing letters to Fraser to bring powers of law against her)