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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Murdoch, H Adlai

By deliberately underlining and subverting the doubled, dissonant trope of Creole identity, Rhys undermines our notions of the oppositional relation between self and Other; the very discursive act of bringing this text into being undoes the presumed instability of the "mad Creole," as Raiskin explains, by "claiming a subjectivity for a character denied a stable position in any cultural or social space. Antoinette's 'various' social positions shift with every change in her name and put her in-between the symbolic orders of English culture and black Caribbean culture" (1996, 109). By pointing out the impossibility for this subject of belonging completely to either of the dominant social and "racial" categories, Rhys interrogates the key issues of colonialism, race, and otherness that "are so normalized in Bronte's text that they barely create a ripple in the story of Jane Eyre's 'progress' (1996, 114)." But it is by projecting a complex cast onto this fluid framework, generating "nativist" Creole subjects inscribed through the conflict between the desire to belong and the recognition of exclusion, that the metropolitan counterpart attains a discernible, if transitory capacity for degrading Creole subjects.

In this way, Bronte's characterization of Bertha Mason as a foil constructing a social identity for Jane Eyre and, by extension, the nineteenth-century female metropolitan subject, offer mediating racial and cultural terms and structure Bertha's cultural marginalization. As the OED definition indicates, the contemporary understanding of the Creole was at best ambiguous, the very absence of a specific connotation of color suggesting plural possibilities of double differentiation and opening vistas of discursive possibility and of cultural and identitarian ambivalence. The discourse of Jane Eyre does little to dispel this lack of clarity, since terms like "dark" or "blackened," although appearing within the text itself, were not exclusively applied to Blacks or Asians. Of greater import, however, are the implications of Bertha's definition as a Creole, for it is here, I contend, that the text constructs key ambiguities of race and culture upon which her own metissage, as well as the framework of Jane's metropolitan subjectivity, are ultimately drawn.

Critics have long disagreed over whether Bertha Mason is white or black. Gayatri Spivak, for example, characterizes Bertha as a "white Jamaican Creole," a "native subject" who, by virtue of her Creole status, remains excluded from the claims to individuality that metropolitan subjectivity bestows upon Jane (1986, 266-67). In this case, however, in a key point that Spivak's opposition of Antoinette to her black servant, Christophine, appears to elide, the fact that Creole whites were themselves also natives does not necessarily imply the exclusion imposed on slaves and their descendants, as the structure of plantation societies tended to privilege whiteness, whether indigenous or imported. Gilbert and Gubar have also described Bertha Mason as Creole subject as "Jane's truest and darkest double: she is . .. the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress . . ." (1979, 360). But while the ground of Bertha's presumptive whiteness remains unclear in Spivak's text, the terms of Gilbert and Gubar's definition lean more toward the psychological than the racial; Gilbert and Gubar do not use "darkness" in racial terms. They avoid the text's thorough articulation of racial tropes. Indeed, their construction of Bertha as Jane's "darkest double" almost constitutes a study in itself, a discursively constructed cultural evasion: with figures of race undergirding the tenor of the text, Bertha's racial positionality-as well as any critical refusal to acknowledge its significance-becomes crucial to her subjective structure. This fatally flawed discursive displacement of Bertha's ethnic and cultural lineage simply gets the Creole scenes wrong, as Cezair--