Rupture and Redoubleing across Wide Sargasso Sea

I am working with Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, a twentieth century re-writing of the story of Bertha Rochester (crazy wife of Rochester locked in the attic in Jane Eyre who eventually burns down the house and is the cause of Rochester's blindness and permanent injuries). Jean Rhys writes the story of Antoinette Cosway-Mason-Rochester, a women raised in the West Indies during the waning of colonial rule in the islands. Rhys writes Antoinette/Bertha's madness (as well as the madness of her mother) as a construction forced upon her by circumstances, particularly the manipulation of the circumstances of her life by the men who had control over her money and by her husband.

Antoinette's situation is always difficult: she is the in-between person--the liminal figure, the hybrid (although, to be clear, not exactly by the specific definition laid out in certain postcolonial theory by Homi Bhabha). I will call Antionette the hybrid in that she occupies the space between the binary opposition of colonizer and colonized. This space allows for play, which inherently breaks down--ruptures--the stability of the binary, which depends on absolute values of opposition. Antoinette is the hybrid by nature of her Creole birth (the term 'Creole' is interesting within a poststructuralist discussion because it has multiple meanings, and any use of it is always ambiguous therefore, even when expressly confined to one of it's meanings or the other. 'Creole' can refer to a person born in the islands, but usually it is a person of mixed descent who was born in the islands. This can be a person of mixed French and English background, or it can mean a person of mixed racial background--usually one 'white' and one 'non-white'--however, Creole can also be used to infer a person who is technically of purely English background (for example), who has lived in the islands and has adapted to the islands in a way which makes them certainly not 'English' although they are not definable as anything else). She is unrecognizable as English to Rochester, yet neither is she indigenous or descendant from the slave population. It is a Catch-22: that Antoinette cannot be defined as English, yet neither can she be defined as anything but that.

The landscape of the islands in Wide Sargasso Sea comes to symbolize the ambivalence and liminality of Antoinette. She identifies with it, she is at times characterized by comparison it, and she is at once comforted and afraid of it. Antoinette's attitude toward the landscape is directly contrasted to her husband's (Rochester, although he is never named as such) reactions to it, which echo his reactions to her. At first, Rochester is enchanted and really overcome by the beauty and richness of the landscape of Antoinette's childhood summer house, which represents the space between civilization (man-made things) and nature. He sees the landscape as foreign and overwhelming, but approaches it with wonder and pleasure. Eventually, however, the colonialist Rochester is and represents (on the symbolic scale) takes over (along with certain other forces), and he sees the island's wilderness as menacing, its beauty maliciously manipulative, separating him from his 'natural' English coolness and rationalism. He views his wife and the island as extensions of one another, and moves to reestablish colonial dominance over both of them. This is when Antoinette's madness begins its construction in earnest. Antoinette is reinscribed by her husband as crazy, right down to the changing of her signifier--her name--from Antoinette to Bertha. She is taken out of the islands (a context in which she is not stable, by any means, but in which her ambivalence is somewhat more acceptable), and she is confined out of site in England, where she can be entirely controlled by Rochester (or so he thinks).

This represents strongly how the process of colonial discourse works--when you, the colonizer, name something (especially with a name you chose and understand), you put it into your terms. You give it a set list of characteristics and definitions, which you take out of its context and place in your own (so you define yourself in terms of the other--the colonizer reaffirms his dominant image of himself by placing himself in opposition to the negative characteristics he has attributed to the colonized, such as irrationality and madness); and by naming and defining, you claim knowledge, and by claiming knowledge, you claim control.

This seems to work well enough for colonialists and for Rochester, but the rupture, which is always already built into this process of constructing identity of the other within colonial discourse eventually shows itself. In this case the rupture is Birtha/Antoinette, who seems to be well confined, and then bursts out and burns down the house. Thus, she embodies the space between the binary--the site of play which proves the instability of the colonial structure.

Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS) as a whole can be seen as a Derridian "rupture and a redoubling" of the canonical text of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Wide Sargasso Sea serves as evidence of the rupture which occurs within Jane Eyre due to the text's own ambivalence and breaking down of traditional power binaries normally reinforced by the hierarchical canonization of texts, such as economic and social constrictions placed on women in the setting of the English "country house" or upper class, country society. Wide Sargasso Sea redoubles in that it both returns to the site of Jane Eyre to retell/rewrite the story of Jane Eyre (an act inherently deconstructive because it suggests multiplicity of meaning through its very existence as an alternative telling of the tale); but it also redoubles in the sense that is multiplies or increases the rupture of traditional discourse which is begun or ambivalently treated in Jane Eyre.