Like in a looking glass

 

Hello and welcome to the Yellow Donkey’s brand new English version! I hope you will find both entertaining and useful our series of articles in English. You are going to find here at regular intervals film and book reviews, articles on current issues as well as some more serious scientific writings:) Anyway, your topic suggestions, ideas and observations are very much welcome!  

Let’s start with a piece of literature. I’ve chosen a postmodern story, the Wide Sargasso Sea. The novel is written by a novelist and short-story writer Jean Rhys and it’s set in post-colonial Jamaica. Ok, to understand its importance in the western literary canon, you need some background information. Perhaps you are familiar with the 19^th century gothic novel Jane Eyre. If you happen to have read it or seen its film version, you remember Jane’s master, Mr. Rochester. Yeah, he looks too handsome to believe it to be true in the BBC’s movie adaptation and naturally, both in the novel and film version, falls in love at first sight with the heroine. However, his residence keeps a dark secret: a mad wife locked up in the attic...

Jean Rhys approaches the story from a postmodern point of view. She makes a pastiche from Jane Eyre and rewrites it from the mad wife, Antoinette’s perspective. Meanwhile the mysterious woman kept in the attic is a characterless being, who represents only an obstacle to the lovers in Jane Eyre, she is given a very sensitive voice in Wide Sargasso Sea. Moreover, the author, who comes from the West Indies, the same place where she sets the novel, adds to the story a new thematic content, which deals with Jamaica’s racial distinctiveness.

I provide you a fragment of one of my earlier works, which investigates the heroine, Antoinette’s search for identity. You can also watch one of the film adaptations of the novel. Here’s the trailer of the latest from 2006. I like it, however, its main focus is the heroine’s life, offering an explicit sensual representation of it and it’s less concentrated on the novel’s social motive. Enjoy!

The heroine's search for identity in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

After the British had conquered the Spanish Caribbean territories, they established a sugar plantation society. Jamaica was one of the most prosperous territories of the period; at the same time it experienced an extreme reliance on slavery. The social consequence brought by the institution of slavery was a strong division of class and race.

The abolition of slavery in the West Indies was realized in 1833. However, the intention of former slave-owners immediately after the emancipation was to maintain the basic relations of property and power in the colonies. Whereas they intended to keep the former slaves working on the estates as wage labourers, the ex-slaves had an entirely distinct conception of liberty. Moreover, on those islands which were not entirely occupied, such as Jamaica, the freedmen were even less dependent on their masters. Similarly, from those estates which could not provide appropriate conditions the freedmen withdrew from service. Jamaica was one of those islands where the most dramatic consequences of the abolition took place.

According to Bridget Brereton, the post-colonial Caribbean society was divided into three major sectors: the white upper class, the coloured middle stratum and the freed Afroamerican masses. The white community was a numerous minority. It was the dominant group which possessed power. From the sexual relationships of the slaveholders and the Afroamerican servants developed a significant community of coloureds, the Creoles. The Creoles did not possess the rights which the upper class did, but neither they considered themselves members of the Afroamerican community.  In spite of the fact that the former slaves represented the most numerous group, they were completely excluded from political rights.

What is the heroine’s perception of identity? Which social group does she identify with? Antoinette’s formation of identity is, apart from her innate self-concept, to a large extent conditioned by the background, which is, as Francis Wyndham calls it, an “inbred, decadent, expatriate society”.

Antoinette struggles with identity through her entire life. Her “blurred identity” does not allow her to belong to either of the social classes present in the novel. Regarding the social class of the white elite, Antoinette experiences a high degree of alienation. She meets only a few people from this social class, but these encounters are negative experiences for her. “When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past” (Rhys 17). When the Luttrells visit Coulibri, she is laughed at by the ladies. This particular experience later contributes to her total alienation from the white elite.

Antoinette, as a child, wants to belong to the community of former slaves. That is especially due to the period of time, when her family lived in severe poverty. At that time, she kept a close friendship with an Afroamerican girl, Tia, who was her only friend: “I was growing up like a white nigger”. There is one significant incident during their friendship. Tia steals Antoinette’s clothes and Antoinette has to put on Tia’s clothes. This occurrence carries an explicit symbolic meaning: Antoinette seems to belong more closely to the Afroamericans in their clothes. Moreover, at the moment of leaving Coulibri Estate, she actually identifies herself with them, thanks to the strong feeling of alliance with Tia:

“Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her.” (Rhys 45).

This strong sense of identification does not change when she is actually hurt by those who she thinks she belongs to. Despite being thrown with a stone and hurt seriously, Antoinette looks at Tia and says: “It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass” (Rhys 45).

Antoinette is a unique individual character who cannot be categorized into any of the social or racial groups present in the novel. Antoinette definitely cannot be considered to be a new colonizer, as she clearly has sense of fellow feeling and compassion with the ex-slaves. She is not part of the Afroamerican community either due to her origin and the social conventions which are the remnants of the colonial mistress - servant relation. These obstacles which cause her failure of identification with any of the social classes put forward her loss of individuality and final collapse.   

Sources:

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton  & Comp., 1982. Print.

Blahníková, Kateřina. The impact of colonialism on the lives of heroines in the novels by Jean Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Masaryk University in Brno, 2005. Print.

Knight, Franklin W. and Palmer, Colin A. The Modern Caribbean. Eds. Knight, Franklin W. and Palmer, Colin A. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Print.

Bridget Brereton. “Society and culture in the Caribbean.” The Modern Caribbean. North

Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Print.

Colin A. Palmer. “Identity, race and black power in Independent Jamaica.” The Modern

Caribbean. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Print.

Senechal de la Roche, Roberta. “Collective Violence as Social Control.” Sociological Forum.  11/1, 97-128. JSTOR.Web. 10 May 2011.