Double (de)colonization and the feminist criticism of Wide Sargasso Sea

College Literature, Spring 1999 by Mardorossian, Carine Melkom

Mardorossian is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign. Her particular areas of scholarly interest are Victorian fiction and Caribbean literature.

The shifts characterizing the history of Jean Rhys criticism since the publication of her last novel in 1966 are evidence that the social and political meanings of a text are not solely determined by the ideologies of the time of its production but are constantly reformulated in the process of their reproduction by critical discourses. In this paper, I review the feminist criticism of Rhys's great Caribbean novel Wide Sargasso Sea. This survey will also provide a unique template for the study of the development of feminist literary theory and criticism since the second wave insofar as the novel itself played an important role in the evolution of feminist critical trends. Indeed, when white AngloAmerican feminists took up Rhys's West Indian novel as a successful corrective to the imperialism of their cult feminist text Jane Eyre, a new page was effectively turned whereby they realized that any claim to totality and representativeness-including their own-could inadvertently result in the exclusion of some groups from that totality. Over the last decade, this knowledge has successfully been incorporated in feminist theorizing, all the more so since feminists already had a lot at stake in proliferating ways of knowing and in recuperating the social meaning of texts traditionally written to promote an exclusionary and patriarchal system of values. It is in keeping with such a feminist tradition that I set out to analyze the critical literature on Wide Sargasso Sea and would like to suggest ways of destabilizing the fixed textual-political meanings which have circumscribed the novel lately and have failed, in my opinion, to do justice to its complex representation of Caribbean racial relations.

The history of Rhys criticism is characterized by a succession of polarizations that cannot be explained solely as a result of the complexities of her work and that testify to the disparity of diachronic as well as synchronic reading processes. Molly Hite mentions, for example, the conflict in the 70s between "mainstream" critics who praised Rhys's skill at distancing herself from her characters, and feminist critics who read Rhys's work as a straight projection of her life and an "authentic" reflection of women's social and psychic realities (1989, 20-21).1 Another polarization that also originated in the 70s separated Rhys's Caribbean from her (Western) feminist critics until well into the 80s. West Indian critics were the first to draw attention to the specific Caribbean cultural and historical influences that shape the world of her fiction and to acknowledge the difference the "West-Indianness" of her writing makes.2 Feminists, on the other hand, often obscured the Caribbean politicohistorical dimension of her novels by treating it either as the background against which the female protagonist's oppression by and resistance to patriarchy were set or as the scene of an imperial/colonial duality which was then subsumed into a metaphor for the male/female relationship.3

Rhys embarked on rewriting Bronte's Jane Eyre from the perspective of the subjectified colonial because she was "vexed at [Bronte's] portrait of the `paper tiger' punatic, the all wrong Creole scenes" (Wyndham and Melly 1984, 262). She explained that "I've never believed in Charlotte's lunatic, that's why I wrote this book" (296) .... The Creole in Charlotte Bronte's novel is a lay figure-repulsive which does not matter, and not once alive which does. . " (156). Yet, the first feminist interpretations failed to see how Rhys's interrogation of the mechanisms of imperial domination extant in Bronte's text necessarily affected their analysis of gender in Wide Sargasso Sea. By subordinating the text's racial to its sexual politics, they ironically reproduced the same kind of erasure that Rhys had initially set out to correct and that Spivak so powerfully exposed in her 1985 essay:

In this fictive England, [Bronte's Bertha] must play out her role, act out the transformation of her "seW' into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction .... At least Rhys sees to it that the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as an insane animal for her sister's consolidation. (Spivak 1985, 270)

It took the challenge of women of color, Jewish women, lesbians, working class women and their allies to demonstrate the limitations of the second wave feminist politics and criticism. The interpretation of feminist novels as the struggle of a heroine against oppressive patriarchal forces was soon scrutinized and criticized for positing a distinctive and essential female condition and ignoring the varied circumstances of women's oppression. Such First World and Eurocentric bias was particularly salient in 1970s feminist readings of Wide Sargasso Sea that represented Rhys's West Indian protagonist as facing the same sexist constraints and ideologies as the heroine of Bronte's imperial narrative. Antoinette Cosway and Jane Eyre were seen as two sides of the same coin: both victims of the workings of a homogeneous system of sexual domination. By the mid-80s, however, the recognition that race, ethnicity, class, and nationality functioned as interlocking systems of oppression and formed a "matrix of domination" (in Patricia Hill-Collins's words) disrupted the monolithic category of Woman these readings postulated. A new paradigm examining the articulation of gender along the axes of race, class, and nationality emerged and effectively displaced previous interpretations of the Antoinette/Rochester dyad in Wide Sargasso Sea.4