Ghosts in the mirror: Colonialism and Creole indeterminacy in Bronte and Sand

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Murdoch, H Adlai

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The colonial encounter raises myriad possibilities for reinscribing the terms of subjectivity in the post-colonial condition. Issues of alienation, difference and desire framed the imperial will to conquest, at the pinnacle of the colonial project in the midnineteenth century. Despite their differences, both France and Britain as European colonial powers came to represent the Creole as the unnamable third term, the impossible indeterminacy excluded by the colonial binary's neither/nor dyad. Because discursive form provided the key to authority and control over a myriad of people and places, literary tropes helped construct, elaborate, and reinforce a hierarchical, race-based discourse of inequality.This essay, then, compares the tropological subversion in unwonted reflections of the Creole in two nineteenth-century texts: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and George Sand's Indiana. Both texts seek to contain the complexities of the Creole by negating these disturbing, dangerously indeterminate figures whose subjectivity is paradoxically both unacknowledged and restrained, reflecting a colonial dyad that signifies metropolitan notions of lack and excess. For both Jane Eyre and Indiana-despite their disparate political and sociocultural contexts--are defined by a climactic subjective moment in which their female metropolitan protagonists are forced to give way to an instability signified by a Creole counterpart reflected in the mirror. When this Creole figure confronts the gendered metropolitan subject in the mirror of the colonial imagination, the resultant reversal and discursives undermine those presumptions of subjectivity and knowability that undergird the colonial site. Both scenes, then, inscribe critical contexts that allow us to question colonial binaries through their links to identity, alterity, and knowledge.

Held in thrall to the comprehensive discourse of domination and desire in the colonial text, contemporary figures of racial division tended to subsume the "exotic" differences produced by the encounter with the Other, allowing metropolitan authors to ignore colonialism's nascent ambiguities and to appropriate a variety of figures of blackness as repressed elements of the social whole, constructing simulacra of identity that reveal to the reader the dependent framework of metropolitan subjectivity, and provoking the interwoven Creole complexities to increasingly critical strategies of substitution. Principles and patterns of literary re-presentation, then, help shape the imaginary alienation that marks colonial identity, as Homi Bhabha remarks, "The visibility of the racial/colonial Other is at once a point of identity ... and at the same time a problem.... [T]he recognition and disavowal of`difference' is always disturbed by the question of its re-presentation or construction" (1994, 81; emphasis in the original). As literary discourse re-presented the authoritarian violence of the colonial encounter through figures of cultural subjection and exclusion, transposing its hierarchies of self and Other into conventions of class and gender, metropolitan subjectivity was forced to confront the binary relation between metropolitan lack and Creole excess in the alterities of the Creole's erupting, unavowed, supplementary pluralities.

The psychological interaction between the subject and its mirror reflection also informs the principles underlying this reading. To sum up, in Lacanian terms, the mirror stage acts as a site of misrecognition and alienation, a moment of crisis that also doubles as the source of secondary identifications. But while these Creole figures do not necessarily act as the metropolitan subject's ideal reflection, they do allow her to be defined through an external image, in a process which, as Kaja Silverman points out, "is to be defined through self-alienation." More important for this subject and her colonial context, perhaps, are the binary patterns of ambivalence that emerge from such structures; as Silverman continues, "it entertains a profoundly ambivalent relationship to that reflection ... unable to mediate between or escape from the binary oppositions which structure all of its perceptions" (1983, 158). It is precisely this alienated binary thinking, I contend, that grounded not only contemporary colonial discourse, but also the forms of metropolitan subjectivity through which the pluralisms of the Creole were ultimately dismantled and disavowed.

The destabilizing function of Creole figures in canonical metropolitan texts suggests that the conventions circumscribing nineteenth-century French and English articulations of identity excluded the complexities and contradictions implied by the term "Creole" itself A product of the colonial encounter, the term "Creole" has been variously used to describe, or define, both of the oppositional categories that mark the schismatic vision of society imposed by colonial ideology. In fact, the 1989 edition of the OED defines the word "Creole" as a substantive whose primary context occurs "In the West Indies and other parts of America, Mauritius, etc.: orig. A person born and naturalized in the country, but of European (usually Spanish or French) or of African Negro race: the name having no connotation of colour, and in its reference to origin being distinguished on the one hand from born in Europe (or Africa), and on the other hand from aboriginal."1 In this way, a Creole subject can be white, black, or the product of both ethnic groups; indeed, s/he may be either metropolitan or African, or, for that matter, colonizer or colonized, figuring an ambiguity that both mediates and ruptures the dominant strategies of containment and difference inscribed as the traditional corollary of the colonial encounter. This undefinability and strategic slippage of the Creole expose colonialism's false opposition of cultural traits and mine the unstable ground of social and cultural self-invention. By strategically locating these ambivalent articulations of the Creole, these authors find their oppositional constructions of metropolitan subjectivity unsettled and undermined by the uncanny contingencies of its multipartite mosaic.