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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Murdoch, H Adlai

Thompson claims, and "perpetuate the very silence it denounces by its own disregard and/or distortion of colonial history" (n.d., 3). These opposing (mis)readings of Bertha's textual inscription, of the key question of whether she is determined, both racially psychologically, by this "darkness" or if she is indeed a white Creole, draw n specifically racialized typologies which will overdetermine the largely bin re-presentations of subjectivity in the novel, which are themselves base on the elaboration of fixed markers of racial and cultural difference.

On the other hand, Susan Meyer's recent study of the interpolation of race in Victorian women's fiction ses the figure of race as critical to the narrative structure of Jane Eyre, since she reads the text's tropes and figures as signs that "all insistently and conventionally mark Bertha as black ... the ambiguously dark blood Bertha has inherited from her maternal line becomes fully evident" (1996, 69) However, as I shall argue, such a reading of the text overstates the case for racially typing Bertha as black, and indeed the ambivalence connoted by thi "ambiguously dark blood," the result of Bertha's racially Creolized genealogy , determines the novel's appropriation of colonial signs into metropolitan contexts, producing its strikingly dissonant elaboration of cultural identity.

While her Creoleness is indeed inscribed in the text, Bertha's Creole lineage paradoxically remains both ear and unclear. While this Creoleness is an integral part of Richard Mas n's attestation to the marriage between Rochester and Bertha in Spanish own, Jamaica, whether or not she is both racially and culturally Creole rem ts at issue; she is given in the text as the daughter "of Jonas Mason, merchant, and of Antoinetta his wife, a Creole" (Bronte 1847, 366). While the p ace of Antoinetta's inscription is unquestioned, her race remains an unanswe red question; in Jamaica's contemporary population structure, consisting o a relatively small white planter class, an overwhelmingly large black slave class, and a growing category of free colored people, she could be white, lack, or any of several shades in between. When Rochester himself confir her Creole parentage some pages later, it is more to inscribe tropes of mad ess and debauchery as the product of her West Indian heritage than to stip ate her racial makeup: "She came of a mad family:-idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!" (369). This racial indeterminacy leaves Bertha Mason's social and cultural identity an open question, and permeates the novel's textual vocabulary, producing a latent discursive instability that ultimately governs Jane's confrontation with her counterpart when Bertha finally appears in Jane's mirror.

For Jane, self-representation takes place from the outset under the sign of slavery and oppression, but as the narrative progresses, the discourse is increasingly at odds with itself in its terms for those "other" civilizations whose social practices Jane uses to construct comparative patterns of oppression and tyranny. Indeed, in addition to the African slaves who serve as her primary metaphor, Jane manages to draw parallels of marginalization with Indians, Turks, Persians, and native American Indians and to establish several unflattering associations between the British and Roman empires. But by conflating this succession of so-called "dark races" into an apparently unified trope of subaltern suffering, the discourse misapprehends the identitarian strictures governing racial and cultural difference. When the text does not distinguish between these disparate paradigms of imperial culture, it ultimately reinscribes and reinforces the very divisions and dualities whose binary logic it seeks to bridge through the undifferentiated individualism of metropolitan identity. When she is attacked by John Reed, the loathsome son of her benefactors, for example,Jane compares him to "a slavedriver," a dictator "like the Roman emperors," and claims for herself the status of his victim, since "like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths" (Bronte 1847, 8; my emphasis). This double comparison between slavery and subjection to Roman rule inscribes Jane as gendered metropolitan subject squarely between two discontinuous frames of reference, where the only commonality between contemporary slavery and ancient Rome is the slave culture that supposedly binds them together. When, at Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst punishes her by making her stand on a stool, she couches her response to fellow pupil Helen Burns' silent gesture of support in parallel terms: "It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit" (73; my emphasis). By playing upon the contemporary awareness of social injustice that helped bring about the recent abolition of slavery, Bronte assimilates Jane's subordinate social status to one of oppression and human bondage, but at the cost of appropriating the colonial signifier and attempting to disconnect it from its cultural signified. For as a freeborn metropolitan white woman, Jane's social condition cannot realistically be assimilated to that of either slave or victim; this outrageous, if not offensive comparison has the unwarranted effect of either debasing Jane as subject or alleviating the brutality of slavery, implying in any event an equality between various types of victimage.This orientalization of subaltern subjects inscribes an ambiguity that prepares the textual framework for the binary patterns and tropes that insistently ignore the Creole.