SOURCE: "Of Heroines and Victims: Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre," in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XVII, No. 3, Autumn, 1976, pp. 540-52.

[In the following essay, Porter examines Rhys's portrayal of alienated and dispossessed female protagonists and the interrelationship of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre.]

Between 1927 and 1939 Jean Rhys published four novels and a collection of short stories. The novels all have in common a central figure who is an alienated woman and a modern setting, chiefly the years between the two world wars in Paris and London. Whether or not they are actually written in the first person, they adopt the point of view of their solitary heroines, of women who are more or less attractive and more or less mature, but who remain enigmatic and remote. Dependent on but invariably abandoned by men, they seem obscurely destined to drift from man to man and from one dingy hotel room to another. Although they come close to breakdown—this is most apparent in the fortyish Sasha Jansen of Good Morning, Midnight—the novels end characteristically with an abrupt gesture that stops the action short before breakdown can occur. Such, however, is not the case with Jean Rhys's latest heroine, the first wife of Charlotte Bronte's Rochester. In the remarkably new departure in her art that is Wide Sargasso Sea, which was first published in England in 1966, Jean Rhys follows her central character beyond the self-imposed limits of her earlier fiction and, as a result, gives fresh significance to her whole oeuvre. At the same time she subjects Jane Eyre itself to a provocatively new critical reading.

As Ford Madox Ford observed on the occasion of the publication of her earliest volume of short stories in 1927, Jean Rhys naturally assumes the point of view of the underdog. In her latest novel it is point of view she consciously carries to an extreme. If all her heroines are in one way or other victims of men, the mad captive of Thornfield Hall is interpreted as the most hideous example of the power exercise by men over women. Jean Rhys's implied point of departure for Wide Sargasso Sea is Charlotte Bronte's description of Bertha Rochester as seen properly for the first time by Jane Eyre:

In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backward and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not at first sight tells it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its face.

Such "madness" is accepted by Jane Eyre, though not altogether by her author, as a given. The subhuman creature is explained in terms of a degenerate heredity; she is the mad daughter of a mad mother. But Jean Rhys takes us back to the beginnings of the journey that led from birth in Jamaica to the attic cell at Thornfield. The thematic continuity with Jean Rhys's preceding novels resides in the fact that she affirms in Wide Sargasso Sea that Bertha Rochester was not born mad but made so, and made so, both singly and collectively, by men.

Unlike her other novels with a contemporary setting, Wide Sargasso Sea derives its leading characters and their situation from another work of art. Jane Eyre provides the impulse for an imaginative tour de force and at the same time dictates a mode and a style that are new in Jean Rhys's fiction. This time she has written an historical novel with an exotic setting; in the words of a blurb on the paperback edition, it is "a novel of unforgettable romance and terror. A 'triumph' of Caribbean Gothic!" And the reasons for such a setting and such a mood are clear. In order to comment effectively on Jane Eyre and extend its meaning in previously unperceived ways, Jean Rhys had to create a novel that would be largely continuous with Charlotte Bronte's work in terms of style and period and would stand comparison with the original. Thus although Wide Sargasso Sea is not a fully autonomous novel because an understanding of its meaning depends on our knowledge of Jane Eyre, it achieves its purpose because it is a remarkable work of art in its own right.

To begin with, since in Jean Rhys's striking interpretation the anguish which only ends with the burning of Thornfield has its origins in the realities of colonial society, she had to find a way of suggesting the deep differences and the hidden connections between nineteenth-century England and the Antilles. The Gothic of moor and manor in Jane Eyre had to be set off against the lush and stranger horror of the Caribbean islands during the heyday of colonialism. And just as Charlotte Bronte found it appropriate to use the first person in order to heighten the suggestiveness of her work, so Jean Rhys recreates the islands in the consciousness of her two narrators. She invents a prose not for Jane Eyre but for the first Mrs. Rochester and Rochester himself, one that would differentiate their voices from each other and from that of Charlotte Bronte's heroine. The nature of the Creole girl and of the husband she will share with the English governess are to be revealed as significantly different from the way they seem in the original work.

As a result, there emerges a subtle analysis of the relations between the sexes in the age of colonialism, of the multiple hidden connections among class, race, and sex. That Jane Rhys succeeds so well is due in the first place to a use of the language that is new for her. Thus, on the one hand, Wide Sargasso Sea often employs a lyricism that is resolutely avoided in the novels set between the wars, but it is a functional lyricism that incorporates both beauty and terror and simultaneously defines the limited consciousness of the two narrators. The speech of the girl who will become the first Mrs. Rochester is generally swift and elliptical. It is in no way that of a madwoman, but is shaped by the author to suggest the naivete and the hope, the terrors and the longings that haunt her.

On the other hand, at the same time that Jean Rhys invents a language that expresses the form and content of the consciousness of her two leading characters, she also uses extensively the Creole speech of the black population. Whether or not it is historically accurate insofar as it is a precise transcription of the spoken language of black Jamaicans and others in the nineteenth century, Jean Rhys's Creole convinces of its authenticity both because it possesses the characteristic of all pidgin and Creole language to simplify and eliminate redundancies in the standard language, and because it has the energy and precision of a vehicle that satisfies all the communication needs of its speakers. As used particularly by the black servant, Christophine, and by Antoinette Cosway's self-proclaimed half-brother, Daniel Mason, it establishes itself as an alien and powerful medium when set against the relatively pedestrian standard English of Rochester.

Central to Jean Rhys's vision of the nineteenth-century Antilles is her sense of the ubiquity of suspicion, fear, and hate. A colonial society that had institutionalized slavery means a society deeply divided according to a complicated caste system founded on gradations of skin color and place of birth. Colonialism fosters the myth of irreconcilable differences between groups, objectified, for the writer, in the very speech which is the medium of her art. Jean Rhys gives a specific concrete form to the knowledge that the history of colonialism is written into the varieties and levels of human speech. In the words of a contemporary linguist, the very existence of pidgins and Creoles is "largely due to the process—discovery, exploration, trade, conquest, slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism—that have brought the peoples of Europe and the peoples of the rest of the world to share a common destiny."

That experience which is mirrored in language of races thrust together but culturally and socially separate within the same limited living space is also present in the earliest perceptions of the little girl whose life will end in Thornfield Hall in faraway England. Her earliest consciousness is of differentness and isolation. As a Creole girl whose mother is from another island, she is despised not only by blacks and the native-born English but also by the Creole ladies of Jamaica. She is a "white cockroach" to the former and a "white nigger" to the latter. For Antoinette Cosway, in the beginning is a sense of loss and degradation: though white, she is less than "English"; as the daughter of a former slave-owning planter, she is mocked by the ex-slaves as a poor white; finally, her mother rejects her female offspring in favor of the half-wit brother.

When Rochester comes into her life, she is an odd blend of knowledge and innocence, having perceived far more than she can fully apprehend. And Rochester's failure to care enough for the feelings and the fate of his vulnerable childbride is represented by Jean Rhys as a paradigm of male cruelty towards women. For in her version, it is not Rochester who is the innocent party; it is not he who is deceived and trapped into an alliance with a mad heiress, but she who is sought out by a fortune hunter and his family, sexually exploited for a time, and when once she has grown dependent on his love and his lovemaking, rejected: "… you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can't do without it. It's she can't see the sun anymore. Only you she see. But all you want is to break her up."

In Wide Sargasso Sea, therefore—and here the facts are taken straight from Jane Eyre—Rochester provides an example of how the colonial system operated for the benefit of England's established families. As the younger son of a father determined to preserve the integrity of his wealth and property by bequeathing it all to his first male child, Rochester is required to seek his own fortune by marrying the daughter of a wealthy plantation-owner from the West Indies. Marriage to Antoinette Cosway is looked upon as a business arrangement by means of which caste and class are traded off against a substantial sum of cash. The fortune of the plantation-owner's daughter is exported to the homeland after having first been "washed" through marriage into an appropriate family. Rochester's affluence will in part be founded on slavery.

If the fate of the first Mrs. Rochester is bound up with her colonial origins, as is barely hinted in Jane Eyre, it is also determined by the character of male sexuality and the cultural modes through which such sexuality finds expression. Rochester, of course, has been taken to be the most conventional figure in Charlotte Bronte's novel, an embodiment of the darkly brooding Byronic hero stricken with romantic melancholy, on the one hand, and as a wish-fulfillment figure, a dominant highly sexualized male, on the other. By the very fact that she adopts his point of view, Jean Rhys to some extent demythifies the figure; to see the West Indies through his eyes is to see what a relatively conventional and class-conscious nineteenth-century English gentleman might well have perceived. But Jean Rhys is not simply reductive. The journey to the Antilles to procure a rich wife is also in her handling a journey to Rochester's own heart of darkness—a journey for which even in Jane Eyre he will eventually be called to account.

The two themes of colonialism and male sexuality come together most strikingly during the meeting between Rochester and the demonic Daniel Mason. The latter's letter is by itself a brilliant piece of writing that suggests the profound deviousness and complex self-hate of the social outcast which turns him into an informer and a destroyer of other people's happiness. It is, in any case, Daniel Mason's function to play Iago to Rochester's swaggering Othello, only on this occasion, in terms of color, the roles are reversed. It is Daniel Mason who confirms the white male's buried fears in relation to his colonial bride. Thus, the concluding remarks of Rochester's embittered interlocutor reverberate in a mind that is suspicious both of his wife's blood and of her physical attractiveness: "'Give my love to your wife—my sister,' he called after me venomously. 'You are not the first to kiss her pretty face. Pretty face, soft skin, pretty colour—not yellow like me. But my sister just the same….'"

Daniel Mason's claims mean that for Rochester his wife is double contaminated. In the first place, she is henceforth associated with the yellow-skinned Daniel; she is derived at the very least from a perverted source, from a lecherous, alcoholic father who had sexual relations with black women. In the second place, he is haunted with the idea that she was not pure but sexually experienced before he married her. The play on the word "pretty" suggests the psychic mechanism through which he will now reject her. Hers is a prettiness made squalid by his own obsessions, that face which had made her attractive to him is now her ugliest feature; since it arouses desire, it becomes the face of desire. To look at her is to be reminded of her double impurity. Therefore, since he cannot be rid of her, she will be shunned, broken and finally shut away.

Although the relationship of Wide Sargasso Sea to Jane Eyre is not entirely reciprocal—the one is fully autonomous, the other it not—there is reciprocity to the degree that Jean Rhys's novel constitutes a formidable critical essay on the nineteenth-century work. The modern author alerts us to latent meanings in the original that remind us of its singular power. Wide Sargasso Sea may develop hints from her own work in ways that would have surprised Charlotte Bronte, but it is the genius of the nineteenth-century novelist to have created a symbolic structure that accommodates itself easily to the insights of the twentieth-century writer. Now that the shibboleths of nineteenth-century realism have been discarded and the rather narrow modernist view of "the art of the novel" significantly modified, it is impossible to dismiss Jane Eyre patronizingly as a form of Gothic sport or as the wish fulfillment of frustrated sexuality. Wide Sargasso Sea pays homage to what modern French critics refer to as "the plurality" of substantial literary texts by bringing to consciousness some of the hidden implications of Jane Eyre, which it both develops and challenges.

To begin with, the secret that is for so long hidden away at Thornfield is finally revealed to Jane, but its meaning is not interpreted. From Jean Rhys's point of view, Jane Eyre's own question concerning the mystery receives no satisfactory answer in Charlotte Bronte's novel: "What crime was this, that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?—what mystery, that broke out, now in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night? What creature was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman's face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey?" Jean Rhys's answer, as has already been noted, is that the "creature" was once an ordinary woman, who had the misfortune to be raised in Jamaica in the 1830's and 1840's, a white planter's white daughter, who discovered she did not belong where she was born and had no place else to go, a woman put up for sale by one man and purchased for his own purposes by another.

In the light of Wide Sargasso Sea, the mad Bertha Rochester of Jane Eyre can be seen as a living image of Rochester's shame and guilt that he can neither destroy nor forget, though he has the power to lock it away out of sight of the world. As a member of the colonial nouveaux riches, she is felt to be inferior to England's fine old families; as a daughter of a former slave-owning plantation-owner, she is a living reminder of the sordid origins of his affluence; as an exotic and beautiful woman raised on a tropical island, she is associated with a sensuality that both tempts and torments Rochester; as a Creole, the racial purity of her blood will always remain suspect in Rochester's eyes. No wonder Thornfield (Thorn-field, Thorn-filled) appears so malevolent; its grandeur disguises greed and concupiscence and pride. The purifying fire that destroys it and the incarnation of Rochester's guilt is in Jane Eyre a necessary prelude to the harmonious relationship achieved at the end. Rochester has to be punished and Jane herself put to a further test before their successful union is possible. It is a remarkable tribute to the force of Charlotte Bronte's insights that in spite of her professed Toryism she intimates how the manor house is a monument raised on the foundation of human exploitation. For the sake of his soul Rochester has to give up his baronial dwelling, the symbol of a power rooted in sex and class arrogance.

The difference between Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys as far as Rochester is concerned is, first, that the latter explicitly adds race, where the former perceives sex and class, and second, that the modern author sees him as unredeemable, whereas her nineteenth-century predecessor demonstrates how he might be reformed. The harsh pessimism of Jean Rhys concerning relations between the sexes confronts a relative optimism in the Victorian author that is founded on faith in moral energy and the regenerative power of human feelings. Charlotte Bronte's mythic tale embodies the tragedy of an overreacher, a Byronic rebel, who like Faust himself is saved through the power of a woman's love. The robust originality of the English novelist's work, however, resides in the fact that her heroine is far more complex than Goethe's loving and passively suffering Gretchen, and if she avoids the fate of Jean Rhys's women, it is because in her own patiently determined was she learns how to resist and survive. It is paradoxically the Victoria author who furnishes the model of a woman who triumphs in a male dominated society, triumphs, moreover, in ways that are not attributable to authorial wish-fulfillment, but to a series of concrete choices that the heroine makes on the basis of her sense of what is right for herself.

Above all, the secret of Jane Eyre's triumph resides in her instinctive understanding of the fact that, especially when coupled with a sense of class superiority, male sexuality is a potentially destructive force. She is both drawn to and frightened by the energy of the wild rider who falls from his horse in an opening encounter that prefigures the end. But until what is merely a temporary physical disability in the beginning becomes a permanent condition of the whole man at the denouement, she never fully gives herself to Rochester. For a long time her apparent submissiveness as social inferior and as a woman disguises a determination not to submit to his will to possess and dominate. The sexual teasing to which she subjects him during the period of their first engagement is not simply a matter of Victorian hypocrisy. She does not shelter behind the exigencies of nineteenth-century morality merely to excite the more. The game she plays is vital, since it enables her to retain control over a potentially dangerous situation; it is dictated by an instinct for self-preservation. And the same thing is true of her decision not to become Rochester's mistress. To have yielded to him in that way would have been to give herself completely into his power. As the fate of Jean Rhys's Antoinette Cosway suggests, under such circumstances Rochester could not be trusted not to break what he so completely possessed.

It is not finally until Thornfield has been destroyed and Rochester has been obliged to put away the aggressive accoutrements of his sex and class—the horse and those weapons, spurs, boots and crop, by means of which one mounts and dominates it—that Jane Eyre finally consents to be his bride. Consequently, the blindness and maiming that Rochester experiences as a consequence of the burning of Thornfield are not simply a matter of his punishment for past sins—whether those committed in connection with Bertha, as Jean Rhys would have it, or, in the more conventional view, because of his decision to commit bigamy. Rochester has to be spiritually humbled and physically impaired before marriage between him and Jane Eyre on the basis of equality is possible.

The form the punishment takes is itself significant because it suggests that in Charlotte Bronte's work, too, the cause of the suffering in the past and its avoidance in the future are related to the character of Rochester's sexuality. The fire in the blood which drew him to his Creole wife and later to his foreign mistresses—to Parisian and Viennese women in the two contemporary European capitals of sexual pleasure—has to be controlled without being extinguished. Yet the idea of an asexual, passionless marriage that St. John Rivers proposes is felt by Jane Eyre to be as sad as the merely sexual unions that characterize Rochester's past. The implication is that love without sexual consummation is as destructive of human happiness as the sexual drive that seeks to dominate and humiliate and finds its ultimate expression in a rape. Sex, as both Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys remind us, can be dehumanizing and demonic. Consequently, Rochester loses the sight of those eyes which saw and in seeing, desired, and of one of the two hands that caressed and overpowered. From henceforth the only beauty he will experience is that which can be felt and heard; he will know only the warmth of a physical presence and the sweetness of a disembodied voice. Rochester's is such an extreme case that it requires the radical surgery of blindness before he can see fully through Jane's outward plainness in order to appreciate an inner beauty that is nevertheless of the body.

Whether or not we approve of all the implications of Rochester's impaired potency, Jane Eyre is no simple "castrating female." She is prepared to have Rochester only on terms of equality. Only a marriage founded on mutual respect and mutual need could hope to prove happy and durable. Before he could become a husband and a father—see in this respect his previous treatment of Adele—Rochester had first to suffer and to be taught how to love. In her novel of the orphan/governess turned wife, therefore, Charlotte Bronte creates one of the great portraits of women in literature, next to whom Jean Rhys's characters appear as almost willing victims. In Jane Eyre's extraordinary instinct for survival and self-affirmation, a balance is struck between spirited independence and loving solicitude, tough-mindedness and generosity. She has the strength of character to resist the power of men in a society dominated by men and to choose the right man a the right time on terms that fulfill her own deepest needs.

It may be, as Wide Sargasso Sea provocatively implies, that Jane Eyre's ultimate happiness is founded on the suffering of another woman that Bertha Rochester's madness and horrible death were necessary in order to chasten Rochester's male arrogance. There is certainly something uncharacteristic about the way in which Jane Eyre leaves he husband's version of his first wife's past unexamined. It may even be that she herself unconsciously harbors a combination of nineteenth-century parochialism and racism that made it normal for her to associate colonial living with the idea of degeneracy and madness. Nevertheless, the man she marries is profoundly different from the one whom Jean Rhys regards as the tormentor of Bertha.

Whether Jean Rhys fully intended it or not, the contrast between the two women characters is, in any case, highly instructive. Although Jane Eyre begins as apparently the most disadvantaged, she has a resourcefulness and a positive sense of self that are altogether lacking in Antoinette Cosway. It is perhaps providential that she is without face or fortune and, as a consequence, is the object of neither male cupidity nor, for a long time, of desire. But there is far more than providence involved. From the memorable opening chapter of Charlotte Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre is revealed as someone who knows she must fight back to survive. At the same time, although the English girl may be an unloved orphan, she has the rich cultural resources of the Victorian middle-class available to her—in that same opening chapter, in resisting her tyrannical boy cousin she can call upon Goldsmith's History of Rome for support. The Creole girl, on the other hand, grows up in a milieu without books and finds support in a traditional value system only briefly during the years of her convent education. Elsewhere she encounters the bitter cultural conflicts and moral ambiguities of colonial life.

There is thus a singular appropriateness in Jane Eyre's situation as govern-ess, since the very word implies the way in which she finally forces respect for her situation and her sex. The enlightened self-discipline of her conduct invests the word's root with an unexpected significance, and the suffix itself is suggestive of a proud acceptance of her womanhood. Unlike the heiress, whose status derives from another and is therefore alienable, the penniless orphan is self-possessed as well as self-made; since she owes nothing to anyone, she is owned by no one. Her triumph is perhaps all the more remarkable, but it is grounded in Charlotte Bronte's firm sense of the complex interrelatedness of socioeconomic and psychic realities. Jane Eyre is not, as has sometimes been suggested, the heroine of a fairy tale. Hers may be the triumph of a plain, middle-class woman over the obstacles of wealth and class and beauty, as well as over the antithetical demons of aggressive male sexuality (Rochester) and inhuman religious fervor (St. John Rivers), but it is a triumph that is fully motivated in psychological and socioeconomic terms. If Jane Eyre negotiates a course that leads to self-fulfillment in the face of great odds, it is because she is first made independent by circumstances—a poor orphan is socially and economically as well as psychologically a completely autonomous individual—and earns the difficult art of maintaining will, intelligence, and feelings in delicate equilibrium. Unlike Antoinette Cosway, Jane Eyre knows how to govern as well as to give and which, under changing circumstances, is the humanly appropriate choice.

The difference between the two characters is perhaps revealed most strikingly in the use made by both authors of names. It is characteristic of Jean Rhys's compressed insights that she should invent a new name for Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Rochester. In that way, not only is her Antoinette Cosway, like all women, seen to give up her father's name for her husband's—thus implicitly acknowledging how, legally and psychologically, her identity derives from a man—Rochester also requires her to change her own first name. By substituting the dullness of Bertha for the French-flavored prettiness of Antoinette, he is, in Jean Rhys's version, insisting that his wife is his creature who must conform her conduct to the name he bestows on her. To name, as we know, is magically to possess.

Jane Eyre, on the other hand, never gives up her name. In the combination it suggests of plainness in the outward form ("plain Jane") and spirited inwardness (air, eyrie), it continues to define her even after her marriage. Therefore, although as we learn in the concluding chapter, her autobiography was written after ten years of happy marriage to Rochester, the title of her story is not that Mrs. Rochester one might have expected but Jane Eyre. To the end, her independent but loving female identity remains unsubdued by the Roman severity of her husband's name (Roche = rock, chester 〈 castrum). It is, in fact, he who as husband gives up his peremptory surname—so suggestive of male forthrightness and self-sufficiency and with echoes of the rhyming word "Master"—for the gentler Christian name, Edward.

Wide Sargasso Sea illuminates and is illuminated by Jane Eyre Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this relationship is the way in which Charlotte Bronte's novel plays a generative role in the creation of a work that had previously eluded Jean Rhys. It is apparently through the mediation of Jane Eyre that the contemporary novelist found a satisfactory way to distance and objectify early experiences that had only surfaced briefly and intermittently in her previous fiction What, given its origin in literature, looks like the least personal of Jean Rhys's novels is, in fact, a deeply mediated work that has an intensely personal character. That this is the case is confirmed by the light Wide Sargasso Sea sheds on all Jean Rhys's earlier works. The turbulent tale of the nineteenth-century Creole girl is crucial to an understanding of the author's frequently enigmatic modern heroines.

To read the first four novels is to be aware that the stories they tell concern a fundamentally similar woman at different stages on the journey from early womanhood into middle age. But beyond that, one comes to perceive the existence of an itinerary which, since she returns to it with an obsessive insistence, seems to be deeply rooted in Jean Rhys's own experience. Yet, through the objectifying power of her art, it achieves an almost mythic generality. Nowhere completely written-up in a single novel, the itinerary exists as a kind of structural model that can be abstracted from the novels taken together and that reflects back revealingly on any given novel. Although the typical Jean Rhys work may be said to start at a point beyond hope—it concentrates on the problems of minimal living without expectation and recounts a few final desperate gestures that serve only to confirm despair—a whole past is suggested either through swift and elliptical flashbacks or through brief meetings with those whom the heroine once knew intimately. Often as a consequence only of hints and suggestions, there emerges a well-defined portrait of a woman's life in time. It is an itinerary from which, until Wide Sargasso Sea, the earliest and the final movements are largely missing.

In the beginning is the memory of a birth on a sun-drenched but haunted island. There follows the uprooting and removal to England, the usually unacknowledged absence of a father, the experience of rejection by a distracted mother who confers her remaining love on a younger sibling, youth in England in a vaguely respectable but relatively poor middle-class family, the departure from home and the restless wanderings in search of happiness in an inhospitable island, the early love affairs and disappointments, the attachment to a foreigner who takes the woman into exile to the continent, the unhappy experience of exile and the failure of the marriage and, finally, total alienation and self-destructive despair. Beyond that lies madness.

The significance of Wide Sargasso Sea is that it shows so clearly for the first time the sources of the life experience that ends with alienation in Paris. In all of Jean Rhys's novels with a modern setting, the heroines are shown during the final stages of their journey. They are by then largely passive women who permit themselves to be manipulated and exploited by men. Their only revenge is irony and their only resistance an occasional gesture of violence that is directed at themselves often as at others. Deep within they seem to harbor a gloomy form self-hate that draws them to men who are not good for them, like the Heidler and the Stephan Zelli of Quartet—to successful, well-connected men who briefly enjoy their bodies or to marginal social types like themselves who share their own rootlessness and vulnerability. Yet it is only finally through the intense scrutiny to which she subjects Charlotte Bronte's profoundly Victorian novel in her own that Jean Rhys reveals so sharply the roots of the behavior she evokes in her pre-World War II fiction.

What in the novels from Quartet through Good Morning, Midnight is presented as predicament without cause, almost as a woman's destiny within a world made immutably by men, is shown to have its origins in a life begun in colonial society. Those women who wander the streets of a Paris that is so unlike Hemingway's "moveable feast" carry within them a sense of homelessness and of worthlessness that is socioeconomic, racial and even political before it is existential. Their mature experience of sexism reinforces an early but undeclared familiarity with colonialism. As well as daughters of absent fathers and unloving mothers, Jean Rhys's women are also "white niggers" without a homeland. They have learned to believe they deserve little and they get no more than they believe they deserve.

That is why their situation is expressed most poignantly in a lament by the character whose even greater misfortune was to have been born a Creole girl in nineteenth-century Jamaica: "So between you both I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all." All Jean Rhys's modern women are victims, sisters of that Antoinette Cosway who in a transaction between men is taken into exile and transformed into Bertha Rochester. The heroic alternative model suggested by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is not entertained in Jean Rhys's fiction because the heroism that against all odds fashions its own fate is founded on self-esteem. The contrasting experiences of the two Mrs. Rochesters suggest the mechanisms according to which a plain and abused English orphan might regard herself more highly than a beautiful colonial heiress.