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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Murdoch, H Adlai

-Fearful and ghastly to me-oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face-it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments! 4 --Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.

-This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brows furrowed; the black eye-brows wildly raised over the bloodshot eyes. (Bronte 1847, 358)

The myriad forms ascribed to Bertha's color and mien in this passage constitute the place and space of difference; it is here that she will be identified and named. As such then, the passage merits an especially close reading.

At the outset, Jane describes the face whose reflection she has seen in terms of its character, attempting to ascribe attributes of some stripe to the unsettling phenomenon she has just witnessed. Thus she describes the face as "fearful," "ghastly," generalized adjectives that convey the shocking effect of this apparition upon her rather than representing the distinctiveness of what she has seen. So far, then, the face is simply disturbing; none of its features yet sets it apart from a generic, racially undifferentiated visage. The first precise indications of difference then follow; the face becomes "discoloured" and "savage," the latter appellation simply placing it into the broad, undifferentiated category of the Western world's supposedly uncivilized other. But an effect of discoloration suggests something out of kilter, a sign, perhaps, of disease or infection, a temporary aberration or affliction rather than an unalterable inscription of racial identity. The combined effect of these characterizations places increasing significance upon Bertha's distance from the delineation of metropolitan subjectivity, joined by a growing inability to locate her cultural connections.

As this face acquires more detail, we are given the "roll of the red eyes" and the "fearful blackened inflation" of its features. While, for Meyer, these reddened eyes suggest a drunkenness that Bronte associated with Africans since her childhood (1996, 69), their rolling, unfocussed gaze can also suggest madness or delirium, the precise attribute of her maternal lineage as attested to by Rochester himself. Despite its "inflation," or swollen character, however, this last characterization cannot be conflated into unmistakably Negroid features. Further, the face is notably "blackened," not "black," suggesting a change effected from the outside rather than an intrinsic racial or ethnic distemper. In other words, the inscription of Bertha Mason remains insistently, inscrutably interstitial; she is neither a fully-fledged metropolitan subject nor its sociocultural other, the captious African counterpart to the oppressed middle-class Englishwomen that Jane represents. Her domain lies between both worlds, an overdetermined sign whose ambiguous frame of reference returns to destabilize the metropolitan figure who beholds her own subjective displacement in the mirror's double reflection.