Antoinette
to Rochester: “There is always the other side, always ” (Wide Sargasso Sea)
Wide
Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre that attempts to imagine
the early life of the Creole Bertha
Mason through the character of Antoinette Cosway. It charts Antoinette's journey (the later
Bertha Mason), from her life in the Carribean to her marriage to Mr. Rochester who renames her Bertha, declares her mad and
then shifts her to England. In light of
the aforementioned quote, I couldn’t help thinking how accurately it spells out
the problem I have found in Bronte’s novel which propagates the English
imagination; it simply fails to understand or domesticate the character of
Bertha Mason, the Creole or the other in
this case , and ultimately sees confinement and captivity as a mean of
making that which is unknown into a non
existent entity. The novel represents the colonizers vision that does not
want to know the colonized subject but is afraid of unfamiliarity as well.
Bertha Mason needs to be viewed as a Creole subject from the West Indies who
existence is a threat to the English
establishment. This inability to truly define the Creole is found in Jane's remark
“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”
Therefore, in Jane Eyre the Creole character of
Bertha Mason is at a disadvantage. It does not have a
human identity I would say
because notice how her character oscillates between different identities – “ strange wild animal”, “ a hyena”, a lunatic, and a madwoman” All these images reflect a deviation
from the English norm and thus the ultimate identity of a madwoman that
Rochester transposes upon her shows her as someone dysfunctional in the English domestic setup. The treatment of
Bertha in Jane Eyre as someone who is relegated and made silent, elucidates the
dominant/submissive, and colonizer/ colonized, master/slave tropes of imperialism. She never speaks for
herself, others speak for her. On the contrary in Wide Sargasso Sea the
character of Antoinette who represents later Bertha of Jane Eyre has a voice of
her own which can speak for itself , for the Other side to which it belongs in
the colonial framework- the West Indies.
Rhys the author of Wild Sargasso Sea wrote:“ When I read Jane Eyre as a
child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics, and all that?
What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I
immediately thought I’d write the story as might really have been. She seemed
such a poor ghost. I thought I’d try to write her a life.” In light of
this intention , the Creole Antoniette Cosway emerges as someone who is seen as
carving an identity that is denied to her in the English sphere. In my
opinion, the re-imagining of the colonial Other as post-colonial Self is a
device to correct the injustice of the English colonizer for subjugating and
silencing Bertha Mason. The
purpose of Wide Sargasso Sea is to show
that when the Creole (Antoinette) enters the English territory, her former self is is repressed and suppressed beneath a new
English identity which it doesn’t fit into. Thus it has no Self really in
the English setup. Secondly,Bertha's
madness in Jane Eyre s is seen as a result of her Creole blood: “Her
mother the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard” So Antoinette
again in order to rebuff the crude English imagination and false racial stereotypes, functions
in Wide Sargasso Sea to show that her
madness is not the result of her Creole blood. In fact, it is caused by unmitigated
circumstances in her life and Rochester’s treatment of her. Moreover,
Antoinette follows her fate, functioning within boundaries predetermined by Bronte
in Jane Eyre. In my opinion, the success of Wide Sargasso Sea lies in
determining whether Antoinette accepts her fate as a madwoman or not- something
which ‘Jane Eyre’ remains silent about: Antoinette does accept her situation in life
to the extent that she refers to herself as the ghost within the English
imagination :“It was then that I saw her
– the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a guilt frame
but I knew her”. This lends insight into the Creoles helplessness towards
its own subjugation. Although. Bertha will show her resistance later, yet it
will be a futile resistance leading to her death. Nevertheless, the
Creole in Wide Sargasso Sea attempts to correct the misreading of the Creole
woman in Jane Eyre, give a voice to the
muted speech of Bertha and offer a new way to look at the
concept of madness. In short Antoinette struggles to complete the
incomplete Bertha of Jane Eyre.
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