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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Murdoch, H Adlai

The contemporary British novel had long been rife with colonial contexts and associations. Indeed, Britain, to all intents and purposes, led the continent in this regard, as Said points out: "Nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions to the facts of empire, but perhaps nowhere with more regularity and frequency than in the British novel" (1993, 62).The link between home and away was indissoluble to the extent that issues of identity, property, and social progress in the metropole were largely predicated upon successful management and regulation overseas. As Said again reminds us, "the values associated with such higher things as ordination, law, and propriety must be grounded firmly in actual rule over and possession of territory. What assures the domestic tranquility and harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other" (1993, 87). Thus the myriad colonialist tropes of Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) provide telling examples of various metropolitan figures drawn on contemporary colonial practice, engendering a plausible pretext for the advancement of the novel's English setting that results in the ineluctable imbrication of both colonizer and colonized. As Margaret Cezair-Thompson puts it in her reading of jane Eyre, "As a colonialist text it plays an important role in the postcolonial literary tradition, bequeathing a legacy of marginality that the postcolonial writer and critic must come to terms with in the decolonization and reconstruction of national literatures" (n.d., 3). Indeed, most of the novel's major characters, including Rochester, his imprisoned wife Bertha, and even Jane herself are associated with colonialism and slavery. Rochester, while British by birth, lived in Jamaica, acquired a Jamaican wife during his sojourn, and made a fortune by trading in goods whose production was based on slave labor. The subliminal threat signified by these subtexts of colonialism and slavery extends to the complex framework of Rochester's secret marriage. As Said suggests, "Bertha Mason, Rochester's deranged wife in Jane Eyre, is a West Indian, and also a threatening presence, confined to an attic room" (1993, 62). It is of critical importance that Bertha, Rochester's mad, violent spouse, is a Caribbean Creole, and as we shall see, the necessary indeterminacy of her inscribed identity destabilizes the re-presentational subjectivity of Jane herself.

This inscription of Antoinette (Bertha) Mason as a Caribbean Creole is elaborated and interrogated in Jean Rhys' inter-textual Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Purporting to be the untold story of Bertha Mason's life prior to her marginal appearance in Jane Eyre, this "prequel" to Bronte's text deliberately destabilizes received, supposedly singular notions of "colonizer," "colonized," and "Creole" as they were used in nineteenth-century British prose. By revealing and underlining the doubleness and instability in contemporary conceptions of social relations and "racial" categories, Rhys undermines key notions of knowing and perception, principally, in Judith Raiskin's words, "by insisting on the fluidity of the categories and of the power relations inscribed in them" (1996,102). Concentrating on the shifting trope of Bertha's Caribbean Creole heritage, Raiskin shows that the term creole itself, and particularly its contemporary shifts in meaning from "white, native West Indian" to "'colored' native of mixed racial origin" (97), allowed Rhys to mine its critical implications of instability, undoing the binary opposition of self and Other upon which the Victorian novelistic tradition was largely based, as well as its concurrent notions of definitive social and cultural division.