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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Murdoch, H Adlai

The contradictory traces of this disjunctive representation of slavery and oppression continue to surface in the narrative; the shower of gifts rained upon her during her engagement to Mr. Rochester, for example, elicits a similar comparison: "I thought his smile was such as a sultan might ... bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched," and she suggests in return that he seek out "the bazaars of Stamboul without delay; and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here" (Bronte 1847, 277-78). However, the orientalization of the narrative, in its references to "sultan" and "Stamboul," shifts the frame of reference from Africa to the Orient and enacts a series of contradictions in which the subtleties of cultural diversity illuminate Bronte's ambiguity on the question of difference. By using slavery to conflate the worlds of Africa and the Orient, in conjunction with the orientalist stereotype implicit in a phrase like "bazaars of Stamboul," Bronte's text insists on joining fixed definitions of difference, such that opposing cultures, similar only in their alterity, appear to become interminably interchangeable with each other, a discursive phenomenon that Edward Said has tellingly described: "it is enough for us here to note how strongly the general character ascribed to things Oriental could withstand both the rhetorical and the existential force of obvious exceptions. . . The unisons are made within general categories, not between categories and what they contain" (1978, 101-02). This substitution reduces even the suggested consanguinity of colonial cultures to an unrecognizably amorphous abstraction in which difference from the ones difference that the Creole complexities of race, gender and culture render insistently double is translated into marginalization. Through this rhetorical sleight of hand, Bronte rehearses the very discursive gesture through which colonial discourse imposed an "Otherness" upon the colonial subject that dislocated it from any specific figural or cultural foundation.

This, then, is an overview of the discursive and cultural contradictions that culminate in the climactic moment of Jane's apprehension of Bertha's reflection in her mirror. So far, we have sought to show that since the Creole framework that undergirds the inscription of Bertha Mason-the pivot of the novel's plot-is critically and profoundly ambivalent, this unacknowledged ambivalence shapes the descriptive discourse of the novel, and particularly the multiple metaphors of oppression that figure Jane, such that they themselves are also fatally paradoxical. Such a development suggests that the key metropolitan context of the novel, which derives its distinction from the network of Caribbean slavery and cultural difference to which it stands in singular opposition, is irreparably divided. It thus displays a pattern of split sensibilities that are repeatedly undermined by the substitutive supplementarity of the Creole figure. With the discourse of metropolitan subjectivity articulated as the other of this unacknowledged Creole ambivalence, it must itself also undergo irregularity and dislocation. Thus it is that finally, at the key moment of Jane's replacement by Bertha's reflected image, a subtle combination of ambiguity and insubstantiality invades Jane's recounting of it: