SOURCE: De Aruña, Laura Niesen. “The ‘Incredible Indigo Sea’ within Anglo-American Fiction.” In Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, edited by Temma F. Berg, Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Jeanne Larsen, and Elisa Kay Sparks, pp. 125-50. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, De Aruña examines the treatment of racism and sexism in several fictional works that also deal with imperialism in the Caribbean.]

I began to feel I loved the land and to know that I would never forget it. There I would go for long walks alone. It's strange growing up in a very beautiful place and seeing that it is beautiful. It was alive, I was sure of it. Behind the bright colours the softness, the hills like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills. There was something austere, sad, lost, all these things.

Jean Rhys, Smile Please

I

The Caribbean¹—the “incredible indigo sea,” as William Faulkner calls it²—maintains, beneath the high tide of Anglo-American fiction, a passionate but submerged interest in issues of identity and difference, of self and other, and of early childhood. Any list of Caribbean characters in British or American fiction reveals women whose high energy is sublimated in secondary roles³: Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Cora Munro in James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), Eulalia Bon in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Bertha Antoinette Mason in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In the two British novels, Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the women are a mirror image of one another.⁴

This essay examines the intersection of racism and sexism within an imperialistic context, a nexus evident in each of these texts. As Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out, racism is “the display of contempt and aggressiveness toward other people on account of physical differences (other than those of sex) between them and oneself” (171). This definition is particularly useful in looking at the novels presenting West Indian women because a simple extension of the definition to include differences of sex shows the common basis of racism and sexism in intolerance of difference. And since sex and race are the two most obvious and irreducible signs of difference, the intersection of both in West Indian women renders them extremely vulnerable to sexual racism.

But what is the context in which the attitudes toward the intersection of gender and race occur? All of these novels, with the exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, are written by writers who are not themselves West Indian. And, as Gayatri Spivak points out, it is impossible to read modern English literature without establishing the “fact” that imperialism was considered a crucial part of the “cultural representation of England to the English” (243). The role of literature in the production of acceptable cultural representations was taken for granted by the author and the contemporary readers of Jane Eyre. Insofar as North American novelists reproduce sexist and racist representations of West Indians, they are imitating the “mother” country and contributing to the longevity of stereotypes about Caribbean peoples. This is the case in Last of the Mohicans and Absalom, Absalom! While I start this essay by examining the West Indian woman in a classic nineteenth-century British text, Jane Eyre, and continue by showing similar attitudes in those nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American texts, I shall end with another British novelist, Jean Rhys. The significant difference here is that although Rhys is white, she is the only West Indian in this group, and she has, significantly, reinscribed Jane Eyre within Wide Sargasso Sea.

There is a problem in looking to a white woman writer as the most promising of all these novelists. As Abdul R. JanMohamed has stated in a recent article, the comprehension of the “Otherness” found in the African-Caribbean woman is possible only “if the self can somehow negate or at least severely bracket the values, assumptions, and ideology of his culture” (65). Although Rhys cannot claim fully to understand the “Otherness” of most West Indian women, because most are African-Caribbean rather than white Creole, she does seem able to return to Bertha Mason the dignity taken away by Brontë. In Rhys's fiction, we also see a successful “syncretism” between the white Creole woman Antoinette and the black Creole woman Tia. JanMohamed would argue that such an attempt is almost impossible. Comprehension of the “Other,” he says, “entails in practice the virtually impossible task of negating one's very being, precisely because one's culture is what formed that being” (65).

This social determinism denies the possibility of attaining a critical perspective on one's own culture; it is also not an accurate description of Jean Rhys's fiction. JanMohamed claims that colonialist literature attempting to explore the racial “Other” is only another form of ethnocentrism: “Such literature is essentially specular: instead of seeing the native as a bridge toward syncretic possibility, it uses him as a mirror that reflects the colonialist's self-image” (65). Yet, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys defies this pessimism. As I shall show, Antoinette does negate the self in sacrificing that self and thus transcends the values, assumptions, and ideology of her culture. She demonstrates that syncretism is possible between white Creole women and African-Caribbean women if the women can “bracket” the sexism, racism, and imperialism that are thrust upon them.

Because the two British novels Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea are mirror images of one another, I shall begin and end my argument with two of the most important Caribbean women in Anglo-American fiction, one of whom only hints at syncretism, while the other fully explores this possibility. Both of these novels concentrate on the distortions in identity experienced by women in patriarchal cultures. Jane Eyre struggles to maintain an identity separate from Mr. Rochester's; and Bertha Antoinetta Mason struggles to preserve her sense of personality from insanity. Nancy Chodorow has used psychoanalytic object-relations theory to explain how sex, gender, and family organization determine a sense of personality in women—and men—in Western cultures (7). Chodorow argues that early development of both males and females depends on the quality of bonding between the mother and the child. Whereas their early relationship is characterized by a close, symbiotic relationship, the child gradually comes to perceive the mother as separate. In fact, the child develops a sense of self only by realizing that it is separate from the mother. This sense of self is what I shall term an identity. Chodorow argues that female identity formation is a different process from male identity formation. Young females experience themselves as less separate from their mothers than young boys and tend to define themselves in relation to others (93). Young boys, on the other hand, move more quickly to a fixed self-concept that identifies with the father figure, although they are left with anxieties surrounding issues of masculinity and autonomy that seem to affect their later relationships with women. A young girl's self-concept is more dependent on the mother-daughter bond; and a woman's ability to merge with the mother while preserving a sense of individual existence and importance is crucial to a stable personality.⁵ The mother-son bonding, on the other hand, while equally intense at the early periods, is less likely to extend itself in oversymbiosis and narcissistic overidentification on the mother's part. Consequently, the son has an easier time establishing a sense of a separate ego but a more difficult time in developing relational interaction.

Both Brontë and Rhys present women in the process of finding, in Jane's case, and losing, in Antoinette's case, an individual identity. In the novels by these women writers, then, there is a greater emphasis on the women characters' struggles to define themselves as “subjects”—separate from others; whereas in the novels by Cooper and Faulkner, the women are more often seen as “objects”—the already defined “Other” who is a passive victim of various economic, social, sexual, or racial strategies. Chodorow's theory suggests that such a difference is the result of the women writers' heightened sensitivity to the struggle of young women in developing a self-concept.

Despite the tendency of the male writers to repress the West Indian woman as subject in their texts, we still have a tradition of vital women characters spanning two centuries, into and beyond the 1960s. Why, then, has our literature resolutely repressed the energy of the Caribbean, whether Creole or African-Caribbean, and elbowed her out of major social roles, or even critical inquiry?⁶ The question is doubly important because, as Ronnie Scharfman argues, psychological oppression does not always lead to loss of identity and victimization among the West Indian women presented in Caribbean literature (Scharfman 88-89). In comparing a French Antillean novel, Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle (Simone Schwarz-Bart) with Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Scharfman finds a loss of personality in Antoinette and a strengthening of personality in Télumée. Antoinette fails in all of her personal relationships, and descends into madness. But the French novel celebrates the success of Télumée, whose ego survives a disastrous romantic relationship because she feels herself part of an African-Caribbean community and is nurtured through a strong bonding with the women in her family. Antoinette's major problem is that her mother rejected her and refused to acknowledge her as a separate person. This, combined with the pressures of imperialism and sexism, pushed her into insanity. Télumée is nurtured by her grandmother, who affords her the identity that is usually offered by the biological mother, and is able to establish strong ego boundaries so that she does not experience diffusion when her sexual relationships end.

However, the case is very different for the West Indian women in the Anglo-American novels that recreate the English cultural assumptions of imperialism. These women live at the margins of societies populated by men who are not only not Caribbean, but invariably—whether husband, lover, or friend—white and Anglo-Saxon. The males in several of these novels, most notably Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester, prefer to love and to be loved by Victorian “dolls”—short, “slim,” passionless, blonde women. Yet these men marry or cohabit with dark-haired women of average stature: Bertha Mason is a Jamaican Creole, black-haired and olive-complected, and as large as her husband; Cora Munro is dark, passionate, and African-Caribbean; Eulalia Bon is of mixed French, Spanish, and black blood; and Rhys's Bertha Antoinette Mason, who seems to be a Creole, appears “not English or European either” to her husband (67). In a letter to Diana Athill, Jean Rhys says she intended Antoinette to be “dark” and mysterious, “with some French or Spanish blood, perhaps with the seeds of madness, at any rate hysteria.”⁷ Race, as well as gender, is of course at issue here since all of these women suffer from intolerance of difference. In each case, the woman is experienced as doubly “Other” because she has physical and sexual characteristics that mark her as different from the more powerful male. Whatever is “foreign” causes uneasiness.⁸ Yet, when the woman is “dark” and Caribbean (her partner's coloring is irrelevant)—either by complexion (i.e., black or brown hair and eyes), or nationality (Spanish or French), or race (African-Caribbean)—she is even more easily targeted and identified with the “Other”—whatever differs from the dominant group and is therefore foreign, alien, and “bad.”

The pairing of the dark-featured woman with a feared lack of control, of letting go, or sexual passion, is a classic misogynist gesture in European literature. In fact, there is an entire critical literature on the preference of male writers for light over dark “maidens.”⁹ In North American literature as well there is a tradition of the dark-dangerous woman contrasted with the pale-sexless woman ideal, who is less threatening. Again, racism and sexism intersect. When light and dark women are paired in the same novel, they can represent two sides of the human psyche, although they are rarely regarded in the same way.

We find these fears associated with “dark” women in a novel written by a woman. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic that “dark” Bertha Mason functions symbolically as the “fair” Jane Eyre's “double.” Bertha projects Jane's repressed sexuality and anger about her dependent position in society (Madwoman 360). Even though Brontë attempts, at least unconsciously, to heal the psychic split between Jane's two selves through her identification and sympathy with Bertha, the “dark” woman remains the animal part of the self that must be punished through immolation.

Brontë was never really able to demonstrate the syncretic possibility of a relationship between Jane and Bertha. Moreover, whatever identification takes place between Jane and Bertha is so suppressed as to be missed by most readers; their functions as “doubles” was not discovered until Gilbert and Gubar pointed this out. Such identification may have been an impossibility in a culture—or cultures—obsessed with the project of cultural imperialism in the West Indies.

The presentation of “dark” women as the dangerously sexual and racial “Other” is exactly what we do find in the North American novels written by authors who have converted the British imperialistic project to their parallel, “pioneer” conquest and subjugation of their new world. I shall look at some objects of these attitudes and argue that the Caribbean women in these novels are presented as experiencing very similar emotions. All of them (whether they are white Creoles, black Creoles, or of mixed ancestry) are perceived as the “racial” and sexual “Other” in their imperialistic-patriarchal society. This society experiences uneasiness about the culture it is exploiting, and this uneasiness unconsciously becomes a part of the fiction.

II

An early British example of such victimization is the disastrous marriage of Edward Fairfax Rochester and Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). The woman is the daughter of Jonas Mason, a merchant, and Antoinetta Mason, a Creole, both of whom were living in Jamaica when Rochester was sent there by his father and his elder brother Rowland (276). Rochester is manipulated by his father, who refuses to leave him any portion of the estate, and arranges, behind Edward's back, to have Mr. Mason give over his daughter and a fortune of thirty thousand pounds in marriage to his son. Edward is taken in by this farce, marries Bertha, and only later suffers from severe marital incompatibility. Even more disturbing is the discovery of his mother-in-law's fate as an irretrievably alcoholic woman incarcerated in an asylum (291).

Rochester's cold-blooded marriage was not unusual when great fortunes were made in sugar cane, and the revenues made the West Indies England's prized possession. Creole and African-Caribbean daughters of wealthy planters inherited large fortunes that would be transferred by law, through marriage, to their husbands unless a prenuptial arrangement protected them. In a letter to Francis Wyndham, Jean Rhys claims that many women like Bertha were taken back to England and, once used, discarded like sallow, shopsoiled dolls: “The West Indies was (were?) rich in those days for those days and there was no ‘married woman's property act.’ The girls (very tiresome no doubt) would soon once in kind England be Address Unknown. So gossip. So a legend.”¹⁰

By the time Rochester would have visited Jamaica, the island where he met Bertha, its economy was on the decline. In 1838, the Emancipation Act abolished slavery in Jamaica, bringing an economic crisis for the plantation owners because they lost their right to free labor (Dash 202). To make matters worse for the planters, in 1846 the British government withdrew its protection of Jamaica's sugar market, then in competition with Cuba and Brazil (Dash 202). All the sources of power became muddled. According to Cheryl Dash, the Creoles' position was difficult and ambivalent: “Very few whites chose to remain and live on the estates and those who did were consequently ostracized and felt to be not quite as good as the ‘real British’ were.”¹¹

In Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Mason family might have felt serious financial constraints that tempted them to hold back “secrets”: Bertha's mother in the asylum, her alcoholism, her son's mental retardation (he is called a “dumb idiot,” Jane Eyre 291). They were eager to bring Rochester into the family—even at the cost of thirty thousand pounds. Both sides asked few questions. As Rochester remarks, “Her family wished to secure me, because I was of good race; and so did she” (290).¹²

Although candor was withheld on both sides, Rochester is embittered by what should have been obvious: he regrets that his wife is not a childlike porcelain doll, but a dark-haired, tall, olive-complected woman. He feels that such betrayal releases him from his marital vows in order to marry Jane Eyre, who is more “English.” Added to attempted bigamy is his evaluation of Bertha's mental breakdown as a kind of inherited curse: “Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations!” (277). We suspect that the dark complexion of the “Creole's” family and her gender are more repugnant to Rochester than the family's problems. As a result, Bertha is presented as the product of a three-generation ancestral curse.

Surprisingly, and despite his curious middle name, Edward Fairfax Rochester is olive-complected, “swarthy” (172), and himself dark (272). He comes to hate his equally “dark” wife, finding her “intemperate and unchaste” (291), without offering much evidence for the former and none for the latter. Yet he confesses to a list of “mistresses” such as Céline Varens, Giacinta, and Clara (296). After Richard, Bertha's brother, thwarts Rochester's plans to marry Jane, he seeks self-justification by telling Jane about his Caribbean experiences. He clearly disliked Jamaica on emotional and irrational grounds, and attempted to displace his discomfort and uneasiness onto the “demon” Bertha. A negative prejudice is clear in his descriptions. The night especially is transformed into a hell, with a bottomless pit inhabited by the devil-Bertha:

It was a fiery West Indian night; one of the descriptions that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates. Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulphur-streams—I could find no refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull like an earthquake—black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was setting in the waves broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball—she threw her last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest. I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out.

(293 emphasis added)

This is a self-confessed projection of the landscape of Jamaica as hell.¹³ It runs with sulphur streams, red-hot cannon balls, and a Lucifer incarnate who makes Rochester literally ill. Nature itself is thrown into disorder by this place. The land suffers earthquakes and hurricanes; the air is cursed with sullen black clouds; and bloody glances fall from the moon.

The tirade is simply a description of Rochester's state of mind. Bertha is a convenient scapegoat for his hatred of his father since she is now financially dependent on him and emotionally unstable. Apparently, Rochester hates the tropics and the women inhabitants; and for a time he hates all women. “Last January … sourly disposed against all men, and especially all womankind (for I began to regard the notion of an intellectual, faithful, loving woman as a mere dream), recalled by business, I came back to England” (297). His feelings about England, on the other hand, are completely positive. They represent security, hope, purity, and life—everything he believes is debased in Jamaica. Directly following the Jamaica passage is a glowing portrait of home that posits a British elysium to the Jamaican hell. “The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty; my heart, dried up and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living blood—my being longed for renewal—my soul thirsted for a pure draught. I saw hope revive and felt regeneration possible” (293 emphasis added).

Rochester's homeland is a place of hope and life whereas the foreign place is a hell of despair. Rochester confuses fear and insecurity for reasoned motivation, so that his self-justification does not seem to him to be a rationalization. He hates Bertha because she is alcoholic, insane, and brutalized. He has turned her into an animal, a brutalized Caliban whom he has manipulated and rejected. But he also hates her because his father and the Masons manipulated him, and his culture shock must be displaced. The genuine question becomes: Is Rochester, who “puts aside” a wife because “her tastes were obnoxious” to him (291), not partly responsible for the effects of this rejection? At the very least we might expect compassion—not hatred, even though that is never the case with the powerful man and his Caliban.

Instead, Rochester dehumanizes Bertha and treats her as if she were a caged animal who must remain in the upstairs bedroom. Gayatri Spivak has cited many examples of Bertha's dehumanization to animal status in Jane Eyre. Spivak sees this degradation as a product of the nineteenth-century British belief in “imperialism as social mission” (247). Through Bertha Mason, Brontë blurs the boundary between human and animal, thus representing the opportunity or even “duty” of the imperialist to civilize the “not-yet-human Other” (247). After the wedding is broken up by Richard Mason, Rochester attempts to justify himself by showing them the “embruted” (278) woman whom he has rejected to “seek sympathy with something at least human” (278). Jane herself calls Bertha a “clothed hyena” (279) and seems to agree with Rochester's attitudes. Such feelings are evident in the well-known passage, which Spivak also quotes, describing the visit of the wedding guests to Bertha's chamber. “In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: 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 head and face” (278). In the case presented here the dehumanization is more than self-imposed disintegration. Bertha is unquestionably turned into an animal, even by Jane, who in some respects is sympathetic to her. In Jane Eyre, insanity results from the internalization of “racism” and sexism directed at West Indians, since the breakdown of a “dark” foreign woman occurs directly after a relationship with a powerful male.¹⁴

III

In North America, too, the literary presentation of West Indians, especially women, has been egregious and perverse. The new world's literary tradition prolongs the exploitation of the Caribbean woman, at least as presented in fiction. American authors turn the West Indies into a mythic wilderness ready for a new generation of shrewd Puritans to pummel and pluck it. As early as 1826, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans examines prejudice, especially as directed toward native Americans. Even the novel's epigraph, the words of the suitor, the Prince of Morocco, from The Merchant of Venice (II.ii. 1-2), reflects Cooper's emphasis on xenophobia or what we have called racism. The “dark” prince asks “Mislike me not for my complexion, / The shadowed livery of the burnished sun.” Yet, the novel sacrifices a young West Indian woman. Because she is Caribbean, Cora Munro is prevented by death, the novel's deus ex machina, from marriage to the Mohican Indian, Uncas. Intermingling of races always threatens to occur in this novel but is always thwarted by death. Earlier, Cora's father was distraught that Duncan Heyward, a white southerner, was interested in his elder daughter Cora. Ironically, Heyward loves Munro's younger daughter Alice, whose mother was English. Alice is the “fair one” (23) while Cora is “dark” and “dark-eyed” (25).

When Heyward asks to marry one of his daughters, Munro assumes he means Cora. He feels obligated to explain her heritage to Heyward, and in doing so reveals many experiences similar to Mr. Rochester's. Like Rochester, Munro feels deprived of the wealth commensurate with his class. His poverty forces him to break off with his fiancée, and serve in the navy, eventually reaching the West Indies: “I had seen many regions, and had shed much blood in different lands, before duty called me to the islands of the West Indies” (187). Munro marries an African-Caribbean woman in the West Indies and, unlike Rochester, is able to control feelings of alienation; the couple has a daughter, Cora. Since he is Scottish, Munro believes that island slavery is England's fault, and that he held no reservations about his wife, who also made him a wealthy man.

But now that his wife is dead and he lives in the United States, Munro apologizes for his daughter's heritage. A defensive tone, a need to justify himself, creeps into his conversation with Heyward. Munro's apologia for Cora, which is unnecessary for his English daughter, reveals unconsciously held assumptions. Edward Rochester, in his justification, tells Jane about the “Creole's” mother whom he suspects is alien and dangerous. Notice that in Munro's speech the same emphasis falls on the mother as transmitting “unfortunate” social class.

There [the West Indies] it was my lot to form a connection with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady whose misfortune it was, if you will,” said the old man, proudly, “to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people. Aye, sir, that is a curse entailed on Scotland by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people. But could I find a man among them who would dare to reflect on my child, he should feel the weight of a father's anger!

(187-88)

His emphasis on “fortune,” and “misfortune,” and “unfortunate” clashes with his posture as defender of his daughter. He is like Huck Finn whose decision to “go to hell” rather than accept Jim's slavery is dependent on the belief that what he has done, or intends to do, defies his sense of society's proper order. Although Munro says he accepts his daughter, he has really been very much a part of what Spivak calls the social mission of imperialism. He does not mistake the reactions of his fellow North Americans. Had Duncan been interested in Cora, he would now have second thoughts. He is conscious of a prejudiced feeling as “deeply rooted as if it had been ingrafted in his nature” (188), and his eyes fall to the floor in embarrassment. Munro is incensed that Heyward then speaks of Alice rather than Cora. Ironically, Munro does not realize that he has also contributed to the “unfortunate” position of Caribbean women like his wife and daughter. As a military officer, he cannot dissociate himself from the king of England or his “foreign and trading people” since Munro's duty in the West Indies certainly involved enforcement of British control and came as a reward after he had “shed much blood in different Lands” (187), presumably at the direction of the same king.

In twentieth-century North American literature the belief in the West Indies as a place for exploitation does not fade but gains force. Speaking even casually of the Caribbean, North American novels characterize it, without irony, as the new world's safety valve. Jamaica, for example, gives the poor, ambitious, and shrewd, that is, unscrupulous, white male an opportunity to “get rich quickly.” This mythologizing process continues into the 1920s when Jay Gatsby, the center of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby (1925), goes to the West Indies in his first money-making venture. The Caribbean marks a turning point in James Gatz's career, a shedding of his old name and a rebirth as Jay Gatsby. Dan Cody, Gatsby's mentor, is a “pioneer debauchee” in the tradition of the pirates. He raids and rapes the earth, particularly by extracting metals—copper in Montana, silver in Nevada, and gold in the Yukon.

To young Gatz, Dan Cody's yacht represented everything that was worthwhile. The pioneer-piratical spirit of plundering other places—new places outside the Middle West, appealed vastly to him. The meeting linked James Gatz with the spirit of money grabbing: “And when the Tuolumne left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too” (126-27). Exploitative, nonproductive extraction of the earth's resources is part of Cody's business ethics. Even his boat, the Tuolumne, is named for a town made famous during the early California gold rush. That era is also associated with the West Indies, when sugar cane started after the mining projects had exhausted the metal deposits. Both of these places, the West and the West Indies, are related by family to the Barbary Coast, the haunt of legendary and historical pirates.

The most blatantly destructive attitudes toward the West Indies in North American literature are held by the protagonist of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Sutpen, a poor, southern, and white West Virginian, has a tremendous imagination and a grotesque sense of self-creation through courage, cleverness, and unscrupulousness. As a “successful,” or at least wealthy Mississippi planter, Sutpen tells his friend Colonel Compson that a “boy symbol” (261) was created the moment that he was rejected at the “big house” and ordered, by a black servant, to go to the back door. Instead of despising the class and slave-based society, the boy resolves to gain its weapons and become powerful within it.

Sutpen went to the West Indies because by that time, the 1820s, it was rumored to be a place to make quick fortunes with slave labor. As an oversized gradeschooler, Sutpen hears his teacher recount the Caribbean myth through a text. “What I learned was that there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich, it didn't matter how, so long as that man was clever and courageous” (242). No one knows why Sutpen chose Haiti, but Faulkner knew that it was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and the place where slaves had revolted to gain their freedom earlier than on other islands. When Sutpen arrives the uprisings were still occurring. Overseer for a French planter, Sutpen saves the plantation when the slaves burn all of the cane fields and assault the house during an eight-day seige. The planter, his daughter, and Sutpen hold on until the ammunition runs out and he walks out to calm the slaves through his sheer ability to endure their machete cuts. Next morning the drums have stopped; Sutpen is engaged to the daughter, Eulalia Bon.

He is involved, unwillingly, in the same type of intermarriage as Colonel Munro. Sutpen finds that his mother-in-law, whom he thought “Spanish,” was also part African-Caribbean. A man imitating the 1820s southern aristocracy could not admit this marriage to his design. After the child Charles Bon is born, Sutpen calls on his design and calmly explains the racial impediment to wife and father-in-law, who probably did not understand these imported attitudes toward equality and caste. On his side, Sutpen, like Rochester, believes the family deceitful because they hid “secrets.” On the other side, Eulalia and the planter would not have thought mixed heritage a divisive issue, or even an important subject in a prenuptial agreement.

Faulkner is opening the major focus of the book—the immorality and self-destructiveness of the southern plantation system—to indict not only the United States, but all of the Americas. The problems of slavery and racism were Haiti's problems, as well as the curse of any place in the Americas where the sheen of the conquistadores' gold came from the blood of the slaves. Faulkner indicates that the history of Haiti's slave-based, sugar cane economy that brought injustice and violence should have been an early 1820s lesson for North American plantation owners. To Faulkner, the West Indies is a metaphor of a major disaster of the Americas: “… a theater for violence and injustice and bloodshed, and all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty, for the last despairing fury of all the pariah-interdict and all the doomed—a little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea” (250). The phrase “all the pariah interdict” opens the focus even further to include any victim of discrimination in any place. Specifically, we are asked to consider the similar situation that will occur in the South: “The South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage” (260).

Sutpen “puts his wife aside” as if he were a biblical patriarch especially selected by God for another marriage. But Eulalia Bon cannot be placated by a monetary settlement, nor can her son Charles. Twenty-eight years after Sutpen leaves Haiti, Charles is Henry Sutpen's intimate friend and the fiancé of Henry's sister Judith. Whether Charles's actions were motivated by revenge is unclear; but painfully clear is Sutpen's second refusal to acknowledge his first son and his grim decision that Henry must kill Charles to prevent—not incest—but miscegenation.

Because Bon himself seems to disapprove of mixed marriages, he carries a fatal self-hatred within himself, an infection spread from exposure to southern Americans like his father. Like Edward Rochester, but without his xenophobia, Bon would commit bigamy in marrying Judith since he has a “contractual arrangement” with an “octoroon mistress.” Like his father, Bon is willing to “put his wife aside” and dooms himself to repeat his father's injustice: Bon prefers Judith, an American Jane Eyre accepted by the culture, over his first “dark” wife.

In Absalom, Absalom!, as often happens in Faulkner's novels, misfortune plagues three southern generations, until the House of Sutpen is destroyed by the ancient curses of bigotry and slavery. One disaster follows another through four generations. Henry kills Bon when they return to Sutpen's Hundred after the Civil War and spends his life running in fear of retribution until coming home to die. During the war the plantation is ruined; later Judith dies nursing Sutpen and Eulalia's grandson. Bon's son, Charles Etienne De Saint Velery Bon, suffers immense confusion about his identity; he attempts to resolve the problem by marrying a dark-skinned woman, and is periodically beaten by others who perceive him to be white. His son experiences a symbolic change of name to “Jim Bond,” which downgrades him from good (bon) to enslaved (bound). Suffering the double bond of racism and Sutpen's initial rejection, Bond is alienated from the family; and by the novel's end his whereabouts are unknown.

In contrast to Brontë, Faulkner uses his narrators to present Sutpen's rapacity in the West Indies with irony; his injustice brings his own failure and degradation. The reach extends furthest in Faulkner since he always places the issue of Haiti and the West Indies in a large moral context as a battleground of blood, greed, and death. Faulkner's imagined evocation of Haitian history is wonderfully concrete, sensitive, as well as the most memorable in North American fiction. The narrative voice moves beyond the breadth of the characters' understanding without overt moralizing. Haiti is:

… a little lost island in a latitude which would require ten thousand years of equatorial heritage to bear its climate, a soil manured with black blood from the two hundred years of oppression and exploitation until it sprang with an incredible paradox of peaceful greenery and crimson flowers and sugar cane sapling size and three times the height of a man and a little bulkier of course but valuable pound for pound almost with silver ore, as if nature held a balance and kept a book and offered a recompense for the torn limbs and outraged hearts even if man did not …—the planting of men too; unsleeping blood that had vanished into the earth they trod still cried out for vengeance.

(250-51)

Faulkner is aware of the paradox of oppression and a greenery punctuated with crimson flowers—the bloody red hibiscus. The island's physical beauty is the scene of spiritual unrest, cruelty, and the need for vengeance. A primal bloodshedding incurring fratricidal guilt that will not easily vanish, even after the end of slavery, is this passage's greatest insight. And yet, even in Faulkner's passage there are some negative overtones. The African-Caribbeans are pictured as passive during hundreds of years of oppression when in reality the resistance to slavery and brutality was fierce. In attempting to suggest that African blood spilled on the earth led to further violence, Faulkner chooses the verb manured to describe this process and thereby negates his intentions and reveals some of his own ambivalent attitudes. Thus, even Faulkner's generally sympathetic attempt to convey the experience of African-Caribbeans is tainted by the Anglo-American tradition of cultural imperialism. Both the West Indian men and the women in Faulkner's novels remain victims.

IV

In the last and most recent novel to be examined, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), we return to the victimization we first saw in Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys tells the story of the “creolized” West Indian women—those who have some European or American heritage but have made the islands home and subsequently forgotten any direct link with “unreal” England, France, Spain, or America. Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and the short story collections in The Left Bank (1927) and Tigers Are Better Looking (1927; rpt. 1968) are the best explorations of the creolized group, whose confusion in identity after the colonial era is rarely recognized.

Unlike the male novelists—Cooper, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner—whose Caribbean women remain victims, Rhys attempts to redeem West Indian women through a recreation of the childhood, adolescence, and marriage of Jane Eyre's Bertha Antoinetta Mason. Unlike Charlotte Brontë, who dehumanizes Bertha and thrusts her into a cage, Rhys reinscribes Bertha in her text and gives her back the humanity stripped by the nineteenth-century context. In addition, Rhys is interested in Antoinette's psychological dignity and sets about explaining and understanding her descent into insanity as a result of a personality diffusion caused by her mother's indifference to her. Rhys implies that her insanity is partly the result of living in a colonized environment; but she is also interested in the difficulties of creating an identity that is flexible, yet secure enough to survive the marriage to Rochester. Rhys investigates the mother-daughter bond between Annette and Antoinette and shows the destruction caused by the mother's refusal to acknowledge the importance of her daughter. A careful look at Wide Sargasso Sea shows that the destructive relationship between Antoinette and her mother Annette is at fault for much of Antoinette's precarious sense of herself.

As a young woman in Dominica, Rhys read her father's copy of Jane Eyre. Interested and disturbed by Brontë's “madwoman,” Rhys incubated a fictional vindication of the abused West Indian for most of her adult years and then for the twenty years she took writing Wide Sargasso Sea. As Rhys explained to Francis Wyndham, this was her most deeply felt novel: “But I, reading it [Jane Eyre] later, and often, was vexed at her portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above all the real cruelty of Mr. Rochester.”¹⁵

Rhys intended to create a past for Bertha Mason as a West Indian woman rather than a lunatic. Taking us back more than one hundred years, Rhys recreates the atmosphere of Antoinette's childhood in the 1830s, only a few years after the Emancipation Act of 1833 had freed the slaves in Jamaica. Her father is dead, and her mother, Annette Cosway, is self-absorbed and “pretty like pretty self” (17). Antoinette clings to her African-Caribbean duenna Christophine and friend Tia, whose warmth, superstition, and animism she shares. Tia and Antoinette separate after a fight over money—three pennies—and an exchange of insults. Antoinette calls Tia a “cheating nigger” (24); Tia is able to defend herself and add spite, calling Antoinette a “white nigger” (24).

When a group of enraged islanders burns the house, the family escapes only because their parrot catches fire—a bad omen. Seeing Tia in the crowd, Antoinette runs to her, despite their fight. Tia is the only reminder of Antoinette's former life, so she tries to find a reflection of her identity in Tia's eyes. But the violence has gone too far and ruins their desires.

As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not. When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass.

(45)

But the two young women do not meet again. That evening Annette's son Pierre dies. She loses her mind and is placed under the “care” of a man who rapes her periodically while Mr. Mason is away on “business.” Antoinette spends most of her time at her convent school wishing she were dead, or thinking about death.

When Antoinette is seventeen Mr. Mason invites Rochester to the island to meet her, and here the story merges with Jane Eyre. Rhys grants some sympathy to Rochester as overwhelmed by his new environment, but he soon develops into the bigoted Rochester of Jane Eyre. He is even more disconcerted by their move to the French-speaking and wilder island of Dominica. Because the jungle is too lush for his sensibility, he projects his bewilderment onto his wife and resents her as too flamboyant.

In a new twist to the story, Rochester is captivated by the island's beauty within a few days, in spite of his insecurity; and Antoinette becomes a symbol of that too. Just as he envies the jungle, he also envies her liveliness, freedom, and open sexuality. But resentment of his father and fear of potential island violence are involved in his attitude toward her. He believes she has a “hidden secret,” which he does not realize is her female sexuality, that will reveal the place to him. Particularly mysterious is the bathing pool. “It was a beautiful place—wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing—I want what it hides—that is not nothing’” (87). The description applies to the beautiful and disturbing qualities of both the woman—especially her hidden womb—and the place itself. And for Rhys, violence was always part of the West Indian “magic” under which Creoles and visitors fell. Rochester, she believes, was “magicked” by the place and the woman but was too weak to preserve either.¹⁶ Antoinette is a symbol of the island's elusiveness and its danger; he is unconsciously preparing to reject both the island and the woman.

Rochester is clearly emotionally involved with Antoinette but also fiercely jealous, repressed, and unable to match her liveliness and sensuality. Antoinette is a “dark” beauty whom Rhys intended to be, like the Brontë's Bertha, part Spanish or French. Because she is a “dark” West Indian woman, Antoinette is an easier target for Rochester's venom. He regards her “breeding” suspiciously and, shocked by the island's intermingling of races, wonders about Antoinette's heritage: “She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (67). Noticing Rhys's preference for dark-skinned characters in her novels, Helen Nebecker argues that Antoinette is a mulatto: “Antoinette, herself, is, by heritage, creole, though by implication of mixed blood” (Nebecker 139). Either way, Rochester's attitude is racist because he is scapegoating a woman whose “darkness” facilitates a rejection of what he perceives as physically different.¹⁷

Rochester throws Antoinette's fragile emotional stability into utter confusion once he believes the stories told about her and her mother. He withdraws, refusing to call her “Antoinette,” but using “Bertha” and “Marionetta” (puppet) as substitutes—attempts to dehumanize her and turn her into the not-quite-human “other” that he can manipulate. Antoinette had believed her husband to be the one escape from her obsession with death, but now Christophine accuses him of driving his wife insane: “Everybody know that you marry her for her money and take it all. And then you want to break her up, because you jealous of her” (152). Rochester in fact will treat her abominably, label her insane, and lock her in an attic; but he is not indifferent to her. Despite himself, he is drawn to her with a fiercely destructive force that propels him as much as her. When Christophine suggests that Antoinette might marry someone else, he feels “a pang of rage and jealousy” (159). He will not allow her to forget him or to love anyone else: “Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she'll have no lover, for I don't want her and she'll see no other” (165). In Brontë's account, we accept Rochester's version of the story even though the author does not present many of Rochester's inner thoughts. In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys attempts to go more deeply into Rochester's mind to explain the genesis of his hatred for Antoinette. Yet we finally dislike him much more than we did after reading Jane Eyre; and we realize that Antoinette is not congenitally insane but, like her mother, driven insane.

We finally have very little sympathy for Rochester, who turns into a monster. He hates his father and brother, the climate, his wife's sexuality, the landscape, Antoinette's friendships with African-Caribbean women, and her acceptance of African folk traditions. Leaving the island, he feels sexual disgust for his wife and a curious attraction for the island, for which Antoinette is now symbol: “She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it” (172). Strong sexual disgust, created by not only the sexual difference but also the perceived racial difference is crucial in defining Rochester's reaction to Antoinette. Again, the intersection of sexual and racial difference provokes aggression and contempt. By the time Antoinette reaches England, her personality has shattered and she is ready for her keeper, Grace Poole. Had Antoinette developed a strong sense of identity in Jamaica, she might have survived psychically. But the cruelty Rochester carries, unconsciously, is part of the island's victimization and has destroyed any sense of herself or of security from her family.

Christophine's advice to Antoinette is to become self-reliant: “Get up, girl, and dress yourself. Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world” (101); but “spunks” are not engendered by Antoinette's past experience, which was a continual rejection by her neighbors, the former slaves, and her mother.

Part of Antoinette is already dead because her mother found a daughter tiresome and preferred her son Pierre. Ironically, she and Antoinette are related by imagery suggesting physical and emotional similarity. The daughter inherits the mother's frown that “might have been cut with a knife,” her sitting posture (head bent), her alcoholism, and her hysteria. The mother fatefully refuses to admit a connection with the female child. “She pushed me away, not roughly but calmly, coldly, without a word, as if she had decided once and for all that I was useless to her. … ‘Oh, let me alone,’ she would say, ‘let me alone,’ and after I knew that she talked aloud to herself I was a little afraid of her” (20).

The mother's inability to help the daughter form a sense of worth, as Chodorow has taught us, is a complex doom for Antoinette.¹⁸ Any problems in the process of mother-daughter bonding lead to distortion in the daughter's self-concept: “In all of these cases, the mother does not recognize or denies the existence of the daughter as a separate person, and the daughter herself then comes not to recognize, or to have difficulty recognizing, herself as a separate person” (103). The daughter will feel unrecognized and “empty of herself,” therefore experiencing boundary confusion in relation to her ego. When Annette denies attachment and symbiosis, Antoinette's diffusion is assured.

In Part Three of the novel, which Antoinette narrates in part, she tries to remember something she “must do.” Then she dreams of the night their house at Coulibri burnt and experiences a reconciliation with the self she had been seeking since that night, when her life changed and Tia deserted her.

The wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings. It might bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones. But when I looked over the edge I saw the pool at Coulibri. Tia was there. She beckoned to me and when I hesitated, she laughed. I heard her say, You frightened? And I heard the man's voice, Bertha! Bertha! All this I saw and heard in a fraction of a second. And the sky so red. Someone screamed and I thought, why did I scream? I called “Tia” and jumped and woke.

(190)

This is the novel's end and its climax because it predicts action beyond the novel's time frame: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage” (190). Antoinette will recreate the events of her dream. She sees herself and Tia as belonging to the same group. Given the choice between Rochester, who is calling her, and Tia, who is re-calling her to their intense friendship, Antoinette achieves a new confidence, jumps, and wakes. Given her imprisonment, her legal helplessness and confusion, torching Rochester's baronial cage is the one act of liberation and assertion she could have chosen, and does choose, to achieve what Christophine calls the “spunks” to battle for herself. Unlike Brontë's Bertha who turns, in rage, to biting Richard and attacking Rochester, Rhys's Bertha realizes her revenge in a human way that surprises her captors and reasserts her presence, even though it costs her life.

Identity is a pressing issue in recent fiction such as Wide Sargasso Sea because it affects both the male and female literary characters from the Caribbean. In the culture itself, integrity and dignity have been continually assaulted by exploitation and racism. In the fiction, women characters act, perhaps at the unconscious level, as metaphor for the failure of the imperialistic powers to admit full humanity to the islanders, especially those who live in the “mother” country.¹⁹ Do the vengeance cited by William Faulkner and the “cruelty” of Rhys's Rochester negate the possibility of syncretism in Anglo-American literary creations? The answer is certainly no because we find in Rhys's Antoinette and, retroactively, in Brontë's Bertha, an assertion beyond death, a refusal to be ground down and out of literary consciousness. The problem studied here is literary; and so is the solution of one text (Rhys's) talking to another (Brontë's) and, through this conversation of daughter with literary foremother, redeeming the humanity of the “dark” Caribbean woman.

Rhys reinscribes the “dark” Caribbean women in her text and restores her dignity, giving Bertha back to herself and to us, the readers. More importantly still, Rhys manages to create the syncretism between Tia and Antoinette, two women characters, which some critics have claimed is impossible. Despite the rejection of her mother, Antoinette is able to compensate for this intimacy by reestablishing a bond with her childhood friend Tia. Wide Sargasso Sea—because it is written by a West Indian woman who understood on a deep level the nexus of racism, sexism, and imperialism in the West Indies—succeeds in “bracketing” the ideology, values, and beliefs of colonialist literature. Antoinette is able to negate herself in her final moment to merge herself with Tia. It is significant that such syncretism takes place between two women characters who find in one another's eyes a mirror—the reflexive and affirming intimacy they have found nowhere else.²⁰

Notes

1. In this essay, the term West Indian is meant to be synonymous with Caribbean. This essay must also select a few islands from the Caribbean or West Indies. Specifically, I shall refer to Dominica, Haiti, and Jamaica; generally, however, the essay's focus is on certain experiences that are common to those people, especially women, who emigrate from a Caribbean island to England or the United States. Although I can induce no definitive conclusions from these examples, they do point to two hypotheses—that Anglo-American fiction takes a negative attitude toward the Caribbean woman; and that the link between an imperialistic power's exploitation of a colony and the degradation of colonials is implicit in Anglo-American fiction. If this is the case, much more should be said about the hidden assumptions in literary presentation.

2. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 250. The phrase “incredible indigo sea” refers specifically to Haiti, where Thomas Sutpen married his first wife, Eulalia Bon.

3. My evidence here cannot include every Caribbean woman in British and American literature, but only a selected group of fictional characters familiar to North American readers.

4. Jean Rhys, Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was born in Roseau, Dominica, in 1890. Throughout her life she claimed to identify with both the English and African-Caribbean cultures. Her parents were Welsh and Jean herself left the island in 1907, to return only once, during the 1930s, before her death on May 14, 1979. Because Rhys spent most of her life in England, Cornwall, and Devonshire, I place her among the British writers rather than the native Caribbean writers. See Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (Berkeley: Creative Arts, 1979).

5. Since its publication in 1978, Nancy Chodorow's Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) has become the standard reference in feminist psychoanalytic object-relations theory about ego formation and gender differences in psychological development. See Part II: “The Psychoanalytic Story,” Chapter 5: “Gender Differences in the Preoedipal Period,” 92-110, for specific information. A brief but cogent summary of Chodorow's theories is presented in Judith Kegan Gardiner's article, “On Female Identity and Writing by Women,” Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 177-91.

6. There is much confusion about the word Creole. The term has referred to many groups of people, including the European settlers in the West Indies (or Caribbean), the African emigrants in the West Indies, and the French population in Louisiana.

   As a general term, Creole can refer to most people living in the West Indies. The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition: “In the West Indies and other parts of America, Maurituis, etc.: orig. A person born and naturalized in the country, but of European (usually Spanish or French) or of African Negro race: the name having no connotation of colour, and in its reference to origin being distinguished on the one hand from born in Europe (or Africa), and on the other hand from aboriginal.” (See The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1. A-O. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1163.

   Modern usage often implies a white man or woman, sometimes distinguished as “creole white”: “a descendant of European settlers, born and naturalized in those colonies or regions, and more or less modified in type by climate and surroundings.” (Oxford English Dictionary 1163). In this paper “Creole” indicates “white Creole” while “African-Caribbean” means “black Creole.”

7. Jean Rhys, “To Diana Athill,” Sunday 20th [1966], The Letters of Jean Rhys, eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Viking, 1984), 297.

8. See also the dialog between the Caribbean woman Anna Morgan, from Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark (1934), and her English stepmother, Hester, whose xenophobia draws her into hatred of Anna's friendship with their black cook Francine. While they are living in Dominica, Hester's fear and discomfort open up a well of racist thinking. She says to Anna: “I tried to teach you to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a nigger and of course I couldn't do it” (Voyage 65).

9. For a detailed discussion of the pale woman-dark woman contrast, see Claire Rosenfeld, “The Shadow Within: The Conscious and Unconscious Use of the Double,” in Stories of the Double, ed. Albert Guerard (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967). Examples of novels that contrast the “dark” and “light” woman are Herman Melville's Pierre, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance.

10. Jean Rhys, “To Francis Wyndham,” Thursday [1964], The Letters of Jean Rhys, eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Viking, 1984), 271.

11. Cheryl Dash, “Jean Rhys,” West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King (London: Macmillan, 1979), 202-3. In Jean Rhys's story “The Day They Burned the Books,” the narrator voices the Creoles' resentment of their position. Disliked by most islanders because their ancestors were slaveowners, they are also snubbed by the British who consider them provincial. “I was tired of learning and reciting poems in praise of daffodils and my relations with the few ‘real’ English boys and girls I had met were awkward. I had discovered that if I called myself English they would snub me haughtily: ‘You're not English; you're a horrid colonial.’” [See Jean Rhys, “The Day They Burned the Books,” Tigers Are Better Looking (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968), 42-43.]

12. In the context of the mid-nineteenth century, the word race, when used without an article, indicates family or social rather than racial background. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as primary definition: “Denoting the stock, family, class, chiefly in phr. of (noble, etc.) race. (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. vol. II. P-Z. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 87.

13. Rochester draws this conclusion himself: “‘This life,’ said I at last, ‘is hell: This is the air—those are the sounds of the bottomless pit!’” (293).

14. In an early short story, “Mixing Cocktails,” Jean Rhys's narrator speculates on this type of prejudice. She ascribes it to a human desire to bring everyone to the same level. “So soon does one learn the bitter lesson that humanity is never content just to differ from you and let it go at that. Never. They must interfere, actively and grimly between your thoughts and yourself—with the passionate wish to level up everything and everybody.” [See Jean Rhys, “Mixing Cocktails,” The Left Bank: Sketches and Studies of Present-Day Bohemian Paris (London: Cape, 1927), 89].

15. Jean Rhys, “To Francis Wyndham,” April 14th [1964], The Letters of Jean Rhys, eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Viking, 1984), 262. Rhys made a similar statement in 1968. “The mad wife in Jane Eyre always interested me. I was convinced that Charlotte Brontë must have had something against the West Indies, and I was angry about it. Otherwise, why did she take a West Indian for that horrible lunatic, for that really dreadful creature? I hadn't really formulated the idea of vindicating the mad woman in a novel but when I was rediscovered I was encouraged to do so.” [See Jean Rhys, “Fated to Be Sad,” Interview with Hannah Carter, The Guardian, 8 August 1968, 5.]

16. In a letter to Diana Athill, Rhys claims that Rochester is infatuated with Dominica. “I have tried to show this man being magicked by the place which is (or was) a lovely, lost and magic place, but, if you understand, a violent place. (Perhaps there is violence in all magic and all beauty—but there—very strong) magicked by the girl—the two are mixed up perhaps to bewildered English gent, Mr. R., certain that she's hiding something from him.” [See Jean Rhys, “To Diana Athill, April 28th [1964], The Letters of Jean Rhys, eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Viking, 1984) 269.]

17. Rhys creates a more violent version of this situation in the short story “The Day They Burned the Books.” Mr. Sawyer, an Englishman, settles in the Caribbean and comes to hate everything about it. He marries a “coloured” woman and when drunk abuses her verbally, and sometimes physically as well, pulling her hair out one night at a dinner party and yelling: “You damned, long-eyed, gloomy half-caste, you don't smell right.” See Jean Rhys, “The Day They Burned the Books,” Tigers Are Better Looking (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968), 41. Notice the similarity in the responses of Mr. Sawyer and Mr. Rochester, who cannot stand to look at the “long” eyes of these women. They cannot live in harmonious relations with women whom they perceive as alien.

18. Scharfman uses philosophical and psychoanalytic theories of mirroring to explain this dysfunction. “In Jean Rhys' novel, the lack of such a mirroring bond—the mother's refusal or inability to allow her small daughter to perceive her reflection in a loving gaze—is at the source of Antoinette's fatal quest for identity” (Scharfman 90). For this argument, Scharfman draws on Jacques Lacan's discussion of the alienated image of him or herself that the infant perceives in the mirror. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” Écrits: A Selection, 1966, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7. The crucial importance of positive mother-daughter bonding to a child's ego is the focus in Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

19. Scharfman sees this relationship in stronger terms. The women such as Annette Cosway Mason are raped, which is a symbol of the island's rape. Speaking of Rochester and Antoinette's marriage, Scharfman claims that “The failure of their relationship functions as a metaphor for the failure of the colonial experience. Having raped what is left of the islands, the imperial power does not forgive them for wanting any part of the debts incurred” (103-4). The problem with this metaphor is that Annette, Antoinette's mother, is raped by former slaves, not the former slaveowners. The players in this insidious game should be differentiated more clearly.

20. I would like to thank my colleagues Janet Haugaard (University of Puerto Rico at San Juan) and Stephen Clark (Cambridge University) for their suggestions on the first and second drafts of this paper.