2. Business/Participation
Sorry that the papers are taking a while.
Finish Wide Sargasso Sea for Thursday.
Final exam: Thursday, June 29, 9:15-11:15 AM
◦ Format: 4-5 passage IDs, one essay.
◦ Wilde to Rhys (everything since the midterm).
◦ Study like you did for the midterm.
◦ The essay prompt will almost certainly be about
Mrs. Dalloway and/or Wide Sargasso Sea.
Participation for today:
◦ 2 points for participating in the group activity
AND someone from your group reports back.
◦ 1 point for an individual contribution to full
discussion.
3.
4. Jean Rhys
1890: born in Roseau, Dominica. Welsh father and Creole
mother.
1907: leaves Dominica for school in England.
1908-09: Academy of Dramatic Art in London; flunks out;
refuses to return to Dominica; has an affair with a wealthy
older man who leaves her with a pension.
1919: moves to Holland and marries a Dutch journalist and
poet.
1920-22: Vienna, Budapest, Paris; a son is born and dies.
1923-24: husband imprisoned. Meets Ford Madox Ford in
Paris and becomes his lover; first publications.
1927-28: two additional novels published.
1929: returns to London.
1933: divorces Dutch husband
1934: Voyage in the Dark
1936: visits the Caribbean
WWII: Rhys lives in England; her ex-husband and daughter
participate in the resistance in Holland; her ex-husband is
arrested and sent to a concentration camp (he survives).
1945: begins work on Wide Sargasso Sea.
1966: Wide Sargasso Sea published.
1978: “knighted” (becomes Dame Rhys).
1979: dies.
6. British Imperialism in the Caribbean
Dominica (Jean Rhys)
1805: small British colony established there.
1831: “Brown Privilege Bill”: political rights for
free people of color.
1833: Slavery Abolition Act: slavery ended
throughout British Empire (except India) in 1834.
1838: first British colony in Caribbean to have
legislature controlled by majority of African
descent.
1865: British replaced legislature with half
appointed legislature.
1896: Direct colonial government reestablished;
rights of people of color were limited.
1936: Local residents reestablish majority in
legislature.
1978: Became an independent republic.
Jamaica (Antoinette Cosway)
English colony from 1655-1962
In the nineteenth century:
◦ decline in profitability of sugar after 1807 abolition
of the slave trade (prevented importation of slaves).
◦ 1831: Baptist War: slave rebellion of about 60,000
of the 300,000 slaves.
◦ 1834: abolition of slavery.
◦ The population in 1834 was 371,070: 15,000 were
white, 5,000 free black, 40,000 mixed race, and
311,070 were slaves.
◦ failure to convert freed slaves to a “sharecropping
class” importation of cheap wage labor from
India, China, etc.
7. The Sargasso Sea
Calm waters in the mid-Atlantic.
Center of four circulating currents—a gyre.
Filled with Sargassum seaweed that floats
there and gets stuck—becomes a complex
ecosystem.
Very clear, very deep blue water.
Legends (Portuguese sailors): seaweed can
trap ships there.
8. Wide Sargasso Sea
Discuss the following questions in groups:
1. What did you expect from this book? Did it deliver? What was unexpected?
2. What is the relation between this book and Bronte’s narrative? In what ways does this book
connect to Bronte’s narrative? In what ways does it challenge Bronte’s narrative?
3. What kind of narrative/subjectivity does it provide for Bertha? How does that affect our
reading of the character in Jane Eyre?
4. What picture of the Caribbean does the novel provide? How does it differ from Bronte’s
England?
5. How would you describe the style here? How does the style relate to Jane Eyre?
Participate in your group for 2 points—but only if someone in your group
says something in the full discussion afterward.
9. Mirroring / Parallels / Resemblances
There is a lot of deliberate mirroring in this
novel (sometimes literally, right?). Much like in
Jane Eyre.
But there is also a great deal of structural
mirroring—a novel of resemblances/parallels
between characters and events.
◦ both within this novel and between WSS and JE.
I want to suggest that one of the reasons the
novel is doing this is to warn us of the dangers
of this style of thinking/reading.
One resemblance:
Jane’s and Antoinette’s childhood.
◦ How are they similar?
◦ But what kinds of essential differences does this
type of reading gloss over?
10. Similarly, I think the novel tempts us to read Antoinette and Grace Poole (and maybe even
Jane) as resembling each other:
‘Then all the servants were sent away and she engaged a cook, one maid and you, Leah. They
were sent away but how could she stop them talking? If you ask me the whole country knows.
The rumours I’ve heard—very far from the truth. But I don’t contradict I know better than to
say a word. After all the house is big and safe, a shelter from the world outside which, say what
you like, can be a black and cruel world to a woman. Maybe that’s why I stayed on.’
The thick walls, she thought. Past the lodge gate a long avenue of trees and inside the house
the blazing fires and the crimson and white rooms. But above all the thick walls, keeping away
all the things that you have fought till you can fight no more. Yes, maybe that’s why we all
stay—Mrs. Eff and Leah and me. (160)
How are they portrayed as similar here?
But what kinds of essential differences must we remain cognizant of here?
11. Identity AND Difference
I want to suggest that the novel is both modeling and portraying a dialectic of identity and
difference.
What this kind of process does is that it creates a type of sympathy (or resemblance), but then
also refuses or withdraws that sympathy.
I want to suggest that the novel enacts in multiple ways this outreach of identification followed
by the refusal of sympathy.
12. Antoinette and her mother
Antoinette and her mother.
◦ both similarly situated.
◦ Antoinette reaches out in sympathy, attempts to connect.
“I put my arms round her and kissed her. She held me so tightly that I couldn’t breathe and I
thought, ‘It’s not her.’ Then, ‘It must be her.’ She looked at the door, then at me, then at the door
again. I could not say, ‘He is dead,’ so I shook my head. ‘But I am here, I am here,” I said, and she
said, “No,’ quietly. Then “No no no’ very loudly and flung me from her.” (44)
Rebuffed—refusal of her mother to recognize a bond of sympathy.
13. Antoinette and Tia
Antoinette as “white cockroach” and Tia as Black.
◦ novel continually calls attention to this in the early passages.
◦ tempting to read their social positions as similar.
But the novel refuses this to us (and to Antoinette): the scene with Tia the night of the fire.
“Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had
been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. 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.” (41)
What’s happening here?
This moment makes it very clear here that, despite the temptation to read the Creoles and the free blacks as
inhabiting similar positions, this is not possible.
What is the essential difference that the novel refuses to ignore in this moment?
14. The Imperial Subject (And Can She Speak?)
Despite the mirrorings/resemblances/parallels, there is
a difference in subject position between Antoinette
and Tia, between the white and black colonial subjects.
If we ignore this, or collapse it, we end up falling into a
trap that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has complained
about:
◦ The way in which we can end up reading the racially white
daughter of slaveholders as a symbol for colonial
oppression.
◦ Substitution of a white experience to stand for a Black
experience.
There is something very problematic about this, and
Spivak suggests that many readings of both Jane Eyre
and Wide Sargasso Sea fall into this trap.
It’s an erasure of the Black subject of imperialism.
Spivak: the novel has rendered harmless or
domesticated any Black voices which could offer a
challenge to imperialism.
(Philosophically she argues that it must be this way.
There is no way to critique imperialism from the
position of an imperial subject. But we don’t need to
go into this. See “Can the Subaltern Speak?”)
In support of this, Spivak focuses on Christophine.
◦ describes her as “tangential to this narrative.”
◦ “she is simply driven out of the story, with neither
narrative nor characterological explanation or justice”
15. Can Christophine Speak?
Imperial Knowledge vs. Native Knowledge
What is imperial knowledge? Who are the
imperialists in the novel? What do they know
in this novel?
◦ lack of knowledge.
◦ refusal of local/native knowledge.
But does this lack of understanding matter?
How do they feel about it? How do they make
up for it?
Imperial knowledge is the action of power.
Remakes the subject of knowledge.
In contrast, what does Christophine know?
◦ feminist knowledge
◦ obeah knowledge
◦ what the imperialists are doing and how/why
they do it?
Is she able to speak/practice this knowledge?
16. ‘Tell the truth now. She don’t come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she
don’t come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it’s you come all the long
way to her house—it’s you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have.
Now you say you don’t love her and you break her up. What you do with her money, eh?’ Her
voice was quiet but with a hiss in it when she said ‘money’. I though, of course, that is what all
this rigamarole is about. I no longer felt dazed, tired, half hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready
to defend myself.
[…]
‘You think you fool me? You want her money but you don’t want her. It is in your mind to
pretend she is mad. I know it. The doctors say what you tell them to say. […] You meddle in
something and perhaps you don’t know what it is.’
[…]
When I looked at her there was a mask on her face and her eyes were undaunted. She was a
fighter, I had to admit. Against my will I repeated, ‘Do you wish to say good-bye to Antoinette?’
‘I give her something to sleep—nothing to hurt her. I don’t wake her up to no misery. I leave
that for you.’
‘You can write to her,’ I said stiffly.
‘Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know.’
She walked away without looking back. (143-46)
17. Christophine’s knowledge
What is going on here?
◦ Christophine as astute reader of the situation.
◦ She knows things. Has knowledge.
◦ This knowledge is a threat to Rochester and he
recognizes that.
◦ Rochester recognizes her as an almost equal.
◦ R’s lack of understanding and his power to
redefine the situation.
Why does she have to walk away at this point
in the narrative?
Benita Parry: “If [Christophine] is read as the
possessor and practitioner of an alternative
tradition challenging imperialism’s authorized
system of knowledge, then her exit at this
point appears both logically and entirely in
character. […] But when the novel transfers to
England, Christophine must leave the
narrative, for there here craft is outlawed”
18. But what does Antoinette know?
The question that I want to leave you with today:
◦ IF the imperialists “know” a form of authorized
knowledge that depends on the workings of power
◦ and IF Christophine represents a different kind of
knowledge that resists imperialism
Then, what does Antoinette know?
First lines of the novel:
“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and
so the white people did. But we were not in their
ranks. They Jamaican ladies had never approved
of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty
self’ Christophine said.
What does Antoinette know here?
