'COLONISING'
WITHIN THE MARRIAGE :
Jean Rhys complex text, Wide Sargasso Sea, came about as an attempt to re-invent
an identity for Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane
Eyre, as Rhys felt that Bronte had totally misrepresented Creole women
and the West Indies: 'why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all
that? It is clear that Rhys wanted to reclaim a voice and subjectivity
for Bertha, the silenced Creole, and to subvert the assumptions made by the
Victorian text. She does so with startling results. In her quest to
re-instate Bertha's identity, Rhys raises issues such as the problems of
colonisation, gender relations and racial issues. She explores the themes
of displacement, Creolisation and miscegenation. However, the aim of this
essay is to look at the marriage contract within the text, its effects on
the participants' sense of selfhood and its comparisons with the colonial
encounter.The marriage contract, for Rhys, is ultimately cast as a colonial
encounter in the novel. However, the problem of displacement and a shaky
sense of one's own identity are already well established in the first part of
the text, long before the marriage takes place. It seems that Rhys wants
to bring the problems of the Creole existence to the fore at the very beginning
of the novel, and lay emphasis on Antoinette's feelings of alienation: the
white Creoles are neither part of the black slave community or accepted as European
either (a lack of belonging that Rhys knew all too well) Though this is a
childish taunt in the novel, the truth of it is that nobody does want
Antoinette; not even her own mother:
'Antoinette is also alienated from the meagre remains of her family itself,
and, most specifically, from her mother's love.The second part of the novel
marks the beginning of the marriage between Antoinette and the English
gentleman (normally identified as Rochester from Jane
Eyre; he will be referred to as such for the remainder of the
essay). The Marriage contract itself, interestingly, is negotiated
and put into action by a series of men: Rochester's father and brother,
Antoinette's stepfather and, subsequently, her step-brother, Richard Mason.
When Antoinette herself puts up a half-hearted resistance to the marriage, both
Rochester and Richard Mason step in to push the contract along. Already,
Rhys, within the marriage, establishes action as a male characteristic and
inertia as female. In part
II, Rochester takes over from Antoinette as narrator. Also, the feelings
of displacement and problems of identity are shifted onto him. Rochester,
at Granbois, experiences a complete lack of power normally exercised by the
English gentleman, at once having to deal with the strange otherness of the
West Indies and cope with the rejection by his father and brother.
According to O'Connor 'he experiences what it is like to be a woman'. The
marriage has placed him in the position of the female: without power, without
knowledge and without a sense of an English or metropolitan identity. He
is the 'dispossessed coloniser, unable to reconcile his English identity with
the strangeness of the periphery, frustrated with his inability to know and control the
place. Antoinette, on the other hand, appears to have gained a sense of
belonging at Granbois from the onset of the marriage. She says of the
place: 'this is my place’ and
'here, I can do as I like'. Rhys, here, links knowledge and power: as
Antoinette has knowledge of the island, she is in the position of power, a
situation that embitters Rochester as time goes on: 'Her [Antoinette's]
pleading expression annoys me. I have not bought her, she has bought me.
Of course, as this is all told from Rochester's view-point, we can never actually
know if this is how Antoinette really feels. To Rochester, she seems to
be simply another aspect of the West Indies' otherness that he cannot connect
with.Rhys takes care to portray Rochester's crisis of identity in the West
Indies as she does the Creoles'. The development of the marriage into a
colonial allegory takes place as Rochester begins to try and deal with the
problems of displacement. Rhys writes him directly into the roles of
coloniser at the point where he changes Antoinette's name to Bertha, attempting
to change the Creole other he imagines in her into something 'knowable'.
He then demonstrates his sexual power over her by denying her a physical
relationship with him, yet sleeping with Amelie within her hearing, driving her
further away from her new-found sense of identity and back into the sense of
placelessness she felt in the novel's first part. Finally, Rochester,
assuming 'the traditional stance of male imperialist authority...silencing the
woman's voice ‘physically
displaces her, splitting her from the West.
At this point in the novel, Rochester's role as coloniser and Antoinette's as
colonised within the marriage are fully realised. Rochester, in the
position of power, has successfully taken possession of Antoinette's wealth, property
and identity. Antoinette, stripped of all three, has made the transition
from Rhys' text to the imperial construction of the mad woman in the attic of Jane
Eyre.
