Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction 9788376560687, 9788376560670

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Cristina-Georgiana Voicu Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction

Cristina-Georgiana Voicu

Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Associate Editor: Anna Borowska Language Editor: Barry Keene

Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

Copyright © 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu ISBN (paperback): 978-83-7656-066-3 ISBN (hardcover): 978-83-7656-067-0 e-ISBN: 978-83-7656-068-7 Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Associate Editor: Anna Borowska Language Editor: Barry Keene

www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © IStock/ cdwheatley

With profound love to my family for all their support and encouragement Cu profundă dragoste familiei mele pentru susţinere şi încurajare

There is always the other side, always. — Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Contents 1 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts  15 1.1 Cultural Identity and Diaspora  15 1.2 Types of Cultural Identity  20 1.3 Hybridity versus Cultural Alterity  26 1.4 The Postcolonial Social Contract and Caribbean Modernism  33 1.5 The Caribbean (Is)landscape as Homeland  35 1.6 Caribbean Cultural Creolization  37 1.7 Imagining the “Black Atlantic”: Trans-Racial Identity  39 2 Retracted: Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism  43 2.1 Empire, Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Identity  43 2.2 British Caribbean: Re-envisioning Cultural Identity  48 2.3 Exoticness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea  51 3 Constructing Cultural Identity in Jean Rhys’ Fiction  59 3.1 Ethnocentrism versus Eurocentrism  59 3.2 Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity  60 3.3 Fractal Identity  68 4 Jean Rhys and Intertextuality  75 4.1 Authorship  75 4.2 (Postcolonial) Intratext and (Metaphorical) Intertext  77 4.3 Intertextual Metaphors  81 5 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction  86 5.1 (Power-)Text  87 5.2 (Pre-)Text  93 5.3 (Power-)Textualization  108 6 Final Conclusions  117 Bibliography  128 List of Figures  136 List of Tables  137 Index  138

Acknowledgments This book could not have been completed and become reality without the patience, dedication and expertise in British and American Studies of several persons. I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Dr. Odette Blu­ menfeld and Professor Dr. Sorin Pârvu from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Faculty of Letters, English Department, for all their guidance and assistance during the writing and research process of this book. I am also extremely grateful to everyone at the University of Graz (Austria), Center for the Study of the Americas, especially to Professor Dr. Ulla Kriebernegg, for encour­ aging me to do this academic research. There was a wonderful opportunity to meet Professor Dr. Gary Francisco Keller from Arizona State University during my research stays in Graz who continued to guide me through the Caribbean and Latin-American universe. My appreciation also goes to Erienne Rojas for her support and help in editing my manuscript. I am also indebted to my sister, Researcher Dr. Amalia Voicu who encouraged, perhaps unknowingly, my love of, and obstinate belief in conceptual thinking. My greatest thanks, however, go to my parents, Mihai and Melania Voicu for their unfailingly loving support, for sustaining me in my research and for keeping me company up to the very last frantic minute.

Foreword Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction exposes my interest in hybridity, a concept within the larger one of cultural identity, alluding to the mixture, combina­ tion, fusion, mélange especially generated by the processes of migration. It is a long journey through different genres, continents, cultures, critical approaches and men­ talities and a joint result of several important factors. Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction is a study on the Caribbean and Caribbean literature, and Rhys’ writings in particular, thus addressing various kinds of readership. According to the metaphor of mélange, cultures are present as ‘flowing’ together like body fluids, hence the existence of a ‘fluid identity’. Starting from the acknowledgment that (cultural) hybridity is paradoxical in its essence and that only an ambivalent attitude is able to encompass its contradictory wholeness, the book reveals the concepts of racial identity, ethnicity or masculinity that contribute to the reinvigoration of the aspects specific to Caribbean culture as described in the work of Jean Rhys. In the context of the above, my endeavor in writing this book is concentrated on the study of the identitarian phenomenon. Consequently, Jean Rhys’ use of the 1st person pronoun marks the point in which the pre-existing and repeatable language system articulates with the existence of the self as a unique and unrepeatable person in a specific social and historical situation. In other words, the act of creating the self is not an option in her case, but an obligation. This is only natural since we have to create ourselves; Bakhtin argues our self “does not have an alibi in existence,” so the ‘self’ is not given to us. As far as the opportunity of the chosen topic is concerned, I can state that at the level of content, this book aims at constituting a theoretical framework circum­ scribed to the concept of cultural hybridization within postcolonial experience and the analysis of certain situations of existential ambivalence that operate at the boundary between sign (colonial difference) and symbol (imperial authority). Thus, bringing forward issues related not only to cultural identity, but also to alterity, racism and colo­ nialism in the context of transcending cultural limits. At a methodological level, the topic brings together two reputed fields: the area of postcolonial literature (addressing mainly identitarian concerns) and the field of cultural practices, in an integrated crit­ ical research that combines cultural studies with textual analysis. Consequently, by applying the theory of cultural hybridity as a mirroring-space of identitarian dynamics in Jean Rhys’ work, I have the opportunity to prove that postcolonial identity neces­ sarily becomes a hybrid between two cultures, founded on destruction through adap­ tation – hence the tetrad: take over, adaptation, promotion and development. Colo­ nizers destroyed, annihilated, and yet took viable elements from the former culture. The idea that postcolonial culture is in fact a hybrid culture derives from the notion of deterritorialization, in the sense that we witness an ever-intense traffic between cultures – a consequence of colonization – accompanied by a mélange of uprooted

10 

 Foreword

cultural practices, and producing new hybrid and complex forms of culture. Conse­ quently, I believe that the notion of ‘deterritorialization’, in a larger sense in­cludes what Garcia Canclini calls “the loss of the ‘natural’ relation between culture and the social and geographical territories” (Canclini, 1995, p. 97). Thus, from the point of view of cultural experience, what becomes important to my critical discourse is the way in which this widening of social relations affects the character of the real place. Hence, the duality of the cultural settings in Jean Rhys’ fiction by which the charac­ ters usually move about; on the one hand, familiar aspects, i.e. the protagonists stay ‘at home’ and on the other hand, the alien features rather ‘placed’ in that place by distant forces. In this sense, the experience of ‘dis-location’ in postcolonial society is not an alienating experience, but an experience of cultural identity ambivalence. Coming back to the concept of hybridity, the book refers to a space between two pure areas. On the other hand, though, it is a sine qua non of human cultures that does not contain purity zones; as is the case with transculturality processes (mutual borrowings between cultures). Moreover, the notion of hybrid culture can prove useful in understanding the type of cultural identity that comes to the fore in the ‘transna­­tio­n­al’ cultural space. Consequently, I have undertaken an analysis of the ‘hybrid’ seen as metaphor and correlated with the exploration of cultural changes suggested by the notion of deterritorialization. This perspective stresses the alienating, individual­izing and contractual aspects found in close relation, not with a real space but rather with an anthropological one: “a space that cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity […], a non-place…” (Augé, 1995, p.63). Consequently, the concept of deterritorialization encapsulates the idea of place transformation with both positive and negative features, yet resisting the temptation of interpreting it as a simple impoverishment or dissolution of cultural interaction. Thus of interest for the topic of this book is an investigation of the intrinsic ambivalence of deterritorialization; when applied to the ‘life experience’ of the characters in Jean Rhys’ works, wherein becom­ ing ‘naturalized’ is taken as such in the current flow of experience. In the first part of the book, I establish the key concepts most appropriate for my investigation and insist upon the dialectic relationship between identity/self and alterity. In the second part, I continue with the exploration of the transliterary content of Jean Rhys’ fiction, identifying the Creole and racial identities in the postcolonial society and analyzing them from an integrated textual-cultural perspective. My analysis of Rhys’ fiction evinces an example of postcolonial literature as a space for multiple encounters and negotiation between writer, reader and work, which highlights the variability of literary boundaries and the dialectics authenticity, fiction and Rhys’ novel as autobiography, transtextuality and the work as ideotext. The approach is causal (see the search for correlations between the concepts the critical discourse relies on), functional (a foregrounding of the phenomenon of hybridization within the postcolonial system), and actantial (consisting in the anal­ ysis of cultural identity as an effect of the dynamics of contradictory forces). Such forces include the Caribbean culture versus Eurocentrism, master versus slave,



Foreword 

 11

margin versus center, necessity versus happening, and essence versus phenomenon. The personal contribution in this respect relies on the introduction of the concept of fractal identity, an identitarian hologram whose parts, when broken or destroyed ‘identically’ preserve the features of the whole. The premise from which I start is that the literary work, seen as a form generated by the principle of diversity and struc­ tural complexity, can be interpreted as a fractal model (applied to Rhys’ characters), meeting specific compositional rules defined by Mandelbrot’s theory. The five fractal principles are primacy detail, non-linearity, the primacy of contemplation, internal omotetia and fractal dimension, all of which can be found in Jean Rhys’ fiction. More­ over, the fractal living space is one of continuous experience. In this sense, the fractal perspective of Jean Rhys’ characters restores the link between I and Other; the fractal dimension of the self integrates the presence of a fluid continuum, the ego no longer being an individual but a knot of identitarian relations. Thus, the notion of ‘person’ is restored; the ego regains a different identity, entirely different from the existing onto­ logical models, which see the man as an autonomous universe. Its nature as recon­ sidered in Jean Rhys’ fiction foregrounds a fictional decentralization of the characters that have the consciousness of identity fragmentation. My approach pinpoints the strong connection between two reputed fields: post­ colonial literature and cultural studies. Mirroring each other, the two identities – cul­ tural and textual – simplify and complicate one another in a mise en abyme. Looking inside this abyss, I aim at acquiring a dialectic vision of postcolonial literature as both authentic and poetic. It is thus clear from the above that I combine the ana­ lytic approach with the synthetic one in a monographic project regarding Jean Rhys’ fiction. At the level of content, I analyze the postcolonial cultures based on the mutual relation between the practices and cultural identities that Jean Rhys tries to define and explore in her fiction. I try to synthesize the definitions and descriptions of the basic concepts such are the hybridization as ‘identitarian fractality’, deterritorializa­ tion as a general cultural condition followed by reterritorialization and miscegena­ tion, etc. I also discuss in detail the experience of hybridization as one which escapes incorporation (in which cultural hegemons absorb and reshape subordinate cultures according to their own image and for their own purposes), remaining marginalized in a ‘border zone’ and modifying the texture of cultural experience. Moreover, the second part of the book, which is mainly analytical, draws par­ ticular attention to the experiential study of uprootedness, separation and metamor­ phosis, mélange and creolization. The analysis focuses on the ambiguity of cultural identity; more so, on the relation between colonizers and colonized, with reference to man’s condition in a society based on abuses, violence, discrimination, and the characteristics of the colonial empire. Consequently, between cultural identity and hybridization, multiple relations establish under the shape of mutual interactions and at the level of ontological reality. As far as the methodological foundation of this book is concerned, I can say that it relies on a critical reading of concepts, methods and accepted theories, and fore­

12 

 Foreword

grounds a psychological exploration of the relation between the identity of the self and the identity of the other, hence the connection between self and alterity. In terms of methodology, I applied a logical, systematic construction of a conceptual scheme, combining explanatory-theoretical methods with demonstrative ones employing not only analysis, comparison and analogy, but also theoretical reflection. In my critical discourse, the stress falls on the exploration of cultural identities and identitarian structures created by the phenomenon of cultural hybridization. Consequently, it pertains to the field of cultural studies, preserving the pluralism of ideas and rather emphasizing discontinuity and textual deconstruction than con­ tinuity, features emphasized in criticism dealing with postmodernist writing. The approach can also be viewed as transversal (the exploration of cultural identities in Jean Rhys’ fiction) and longitudinal (the postcolonial period).

Preface The simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim to absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity. This book contends that a proper consideration of colonial elements, long viewed as only incidental, illumi­ nates a colonial continuum in Rhys’ work beginning with her earliest publications. In other words, the textual analysis evinces Rhys’ consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examines the ways in which her racial representations interplay with the depictions of gender and sexuality. Thus, commenting from a consciously gen­ dered and racial position, I combine close textual analysis with theoretical discussion as I trace common themes, such as racial violence, cross-cultural identities, and the denial or erasure of race. I also examine the depiction of white male protagonists; exploring the ways in which such depictions require a trans-racial, cross-gender per­ formance on the part of the woman writer. My exploration begins with the cultural identity theory, and then it goes on with the description of the concept of hybridity and its use in cultural studies, followed by a critique of assumptions referring to ethnicity, marginality and alterity. A discus­ sion of cultural creativity, syncretism, diffusion, and race leads onto a consideration of how syncretism and hybridity seem to do duty as terms for the management of the more esoteric cultural aspects of colonialism. My critical discourse focuses on cultural creativity – innovation and authenticity, ownership of cultural forms, and of sincretic modes of cultural mix. This links hybridity to the more explicit identitar­ ian terminologies and constructs hybrid artifacts as commodities of difference in the context of culture. In Chapter Two, I argue that, in contrast to some culturally discordant under­ standings of self and others offered by the constitution of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ that have emerged in Caribbean culture, the postcolonial period engages language and symbolic postcolonial culture, liberating ‘re-descriptions’ of masculinity for the contemporary Caribbean. In other words, it is imperative that issues of masculinity are carefully attended to in the Caribbean. In this respect, emancipation is not free from the physical chains that accompany enslavement but more subtly, it is a call for breaking the hold of cultural chains that hold Caribbean peoples in bondage. As socially constructed, the hegemonic masculinity in the Caribbean is a major cultural symbol that prevents true emancipation in the region. As opposed to the masculine dominant identity, the white female Creole identity in the postcolonial Caribbean is within the multi-layered complexities of a geographically fragmented and imperially constructed region. Chapter Three focuses on the cultural identity in Jean Rhys’ fiction. Here, I provide an in-depth exploration into the multifaceted topic of cultural differences. To under­ stand the dynamics of cultural differences in various contexts and settings, I examine an array of topics. These include the formation of Creole identities, ethnicity and

14 

 Preface

masculinity. My intent here is to facilitate a deeper understanding of and sensitivity toward racial relationships. The chapter also reveals how abstract concepts such as cultural difference, identity, diversity, hybridity, individual racism, and ethnocen­ trism actually operate in Jean Rhys’ novels. Chapter Four explores the concept of intertextuality in four novels of Jean Rhys, where applying plural intertextualities illustrate the shifts in the narrative perspec­ tives, and blurs the limits between the world of fiction and reality. In this respect, I employ an intertextual strategy interrogating Rhys’ texts within cultural matrices – that provides a wider web of relevant circumstances from which to account for her transforming views. In the final chapter, I explore the ambiguities and struggles of the construction of the female racial identity in Caribbean contexts, with particular attention to moments of textual rupture, which signal the possibility of fluid identity. In constructing a new female Creole identity, Rhys employs a variety of narrative techniques, which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the transformation of con­ sciousness and of society. Within recurring patterns of racial dynamics, a West Indian female racial identity emerges in the body of Rhys’ fiction as her white heroines iden­ tify, both consciously and unconsciously, with black slave women, and seek another form of ‘blackness’ through alcoholic oblivion. The conclusions include my final comments, after having argued that “the margin speaks” in Rhys’ fiction. I consider that probing into Rhys’ gallery of portraits with feminist and postcolonial tools and looking for the racial, ethnic, gender and class representations provide a viable reading. A complete list of references, primary sources (Jean Rhys’ own work) and secondary sources (criticism on her work), is included at the end.

1 I dentity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts 1.1 Cultural Identity and Diaspora1 In this subchapter, I explore identity and as an adequate term to use when referring to cultural identities in the Caribbean region. Ultimately, I intend to argue that these cul­ tural identities fit diaspora in all senses of the term. Firstly, I discuss the term identity itself, exploring arguments by different critics on the concept. Secondly, I apply the concept of diaspora to the cultural identity formation in an attempt to compensate for the western perspective. The concept of identity is complex and different meanings of it are evident to offer good starting points for an investigation of the concept of identity. If in need of a definition, one looks first to dictionaries. Here is the most relevant entry for identity in the Oxford English Dictionary (10th edition, 1999): “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is” or “the distinct personality of an individual regard­ed as a persisting entity” (Oxford English Dictionary, 705). In addition to this, Beller and Leerssen also assert that: “Identity becomes to mean being identifiable, and is closely linked to the idea of ‘permanence through time’: something remaining identical with itself from moment to moment” (Beller and Leerssen, 2001, p. 1). They reveal “the other side” of identity by referring to what they call the synchronic meaning of the concept of identity. This refers to the “unique sense of self” (Beller and Leerssen, 2001, p. 4) that a person has about his own. This type of identity, also called “ipse identity” (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 78) implies a first person perspective. From this point of view, this sense of self is representing one’s autobiographical narrative with the ever-changing actions and reactions experienced in the real life. The process of rewriting the story of some­ body’s life enables the person to reinterpret past experience and is essential for acting as a person with a sense of self in the present and the future. Moreover, the identity of a person (ipse identity) cannot be captured in typologies of roles or of fixed (group) characteristics used to describe the identity of individuals (idem identity), which takes a more objective, or third person perspective. The way somebody identifies himself/ herself and is categorized by others – does influence their identity. The narratives people invent to each tell the story of their life and negotiate this self-construction; nar­ ratives are largely determined, of course, by their interactions with others. However,

1 Diaspora (namely a collective memory and myth about the homeland) refers to those social groups which share a common ethnic and national origin, but live outside the territory of origin. These groups have a strong feeling of attachment to their “homeland”, making no specific reference to eth­ nicity, or to a particular place of settlement. All diasporas, either independent of national and ethnic background or treated as a single group in which ethnical boundaries are crossed and considered as being hybrid and globally oriented. © 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

from the point of view of the individual sense of self, people need a certain amount of control over the borders between self and others. Following the analysis above, I would argue that identity could figure into the explanation of action in two main ways, which parallel the two sides of the word’s present meaning. Recall that either “identity” can mean a social category or, in the sense of personal identity, distinguishing features of a person that forms the basis of his or her dignity or self-respect. The use of different theories and methodologies by different critics has affect­ed the ways in which researchers conceptualize identity, and it has resulted in the simul­ taneous use of different terms that describe identity as a socio-cultural con­struct. In agreement, I opted for the term cultural identity, which was defined as “an individu­ al’s realization of his or her place in the spectrum of cultures and purposeful behavior directed on his or her enrollment and acceptance into a particular group, as well as certain characteristic features of a particular group that automatically assign an indi­ vidual’s group membership” (Sysoyev, 2001, p. 37-38). In this respect, individuals’ cultural identity as a construct consists of a countless number of facets. Most commonly referred to and described in literature are the following facets or types of one’s cul­ tural identity: racial, ethnic, social, economic, geopolitical, gender, religious, ability/ disability, language, professional, etc. (fig. 2.1). Each of these facets represents a spe­ cific category of which a person has specific membership(s). Socio-economical Language

Racial/ethnic Individual’s Cultural Identity

Gender

Geopolitical/territorial

Other

Religious

Fig. 1.1: Individual’s Cultural Identity (Sysoev, 2001)

Following the concept of cultural identity, Stuart Hall’s thesis is that rather than think­ ing of identity as an “already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent” (Hall, 1996, p. 145), we should instead think of “identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete but always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Hall, 1996, p. 167). Hall points out that there are two leading ways for thinking about cultural identity. The traditional model views identity:



Cultural Identity and Diaspora 

 17

“[…] in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common…” (Hall, 1996, p. 393).

Stuart Hall disapproves the view of cultural identity as something that can be defined “in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (Hall, 1996, p. 393). For Hall, however, it is better to envision a “quite different practice, one based on ‘not the rediscovery but the production of : identity’”. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past” (Hall, 1996, p. 423). Such a viewpoint would entail acknowledging that this is an “act of imaginative rediscovery” (Hall, 1996, p. 425), one which involves “imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas” and leads to the restoration of an “imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past” (Hall, 1996, p. 428). Africa, he stresses, is the “name of the missing term, (…) which lies at the centre of our cultural identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked” (Hall, 1996, p.432). The second model of (cultural) identity acknowledges ‘what we really are’ or rather ‘what we have become’. From this point of view, cultural identity is a: “[…] matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.” (Hall, 1996, p. 394)

To be precise, “[…] the uprooting of slavery and transportation and the insertion into the plantation economy (as well as the symbolic economy) of the Western world […] ‘unified’ these peoples across their dif­ ferences, in the same moment as it cut them off from direct access to their past.” (Hall, 1996, p. 396)

Difference “challenges the fixed binaries which stabilize meaning and representation and show how meaning is never fixed or completed, but keeps on moving to encom­ pass other, additional or supplementary meanings” (Hall, 1996, p. 397). The question is where “does identity come in to this infinite postponement of meaning?” (Hall, 1996, p. 397) Thus, “meaning continues to unfold beyond the arbitrary closure which makes it, at any moment, possible. There is always something left over” (Hall, 1996, p. 396). Drawing upon the notions of both displacement and deferral, Hall implies that the Caribbean is neither an isolated and autonomous place, which exists in a social and historical vacuum, nor the past separable from the present. The Caribbean iden­ tity is a “‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always con­

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 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

stituted within, not outside, representation” (Hall, 1996, p. 91); a symbolic journey which a Caribbean or black Diaspora must discover. Thereby, the concept of identity defines itself in terms of sameness vs. difference. More particular, difference (in the sense of difference, according to Dérrida) is always there within apparently ‘similar’ identities; though temporary fixity is necessary in the process of identification, “there is always something ‘left over’” (Hall, 1996, p. 55). In understanding the concepts of identity and assimilation, terms such as “dias­ pora” and “hybridity” become other ways to analyze the nature of identity. Thus, we can see home and exile as two dynamic ends of what Byfield comments as “the cre­ ation of diaspora is in large measure contingent on a diasporic identity that links the constituent parts of the diaspora to a homeland” Byfield, 2000, p. 2). However, the discourse about identity looks like a clash between those who see a relatively fixed, coherent and racialized identity and those who perceive identities as multiple, provisional and dynamic. This latter group (Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1990) prefers, instead, the metaphor of hybridity to capture the ever-changing mixture of cultural charac­ teristics. Early studies of diaspora were largely anthropological and focused on the ‘survival’ of cultural traits from Africa in the New World. To a large extent, this issue of displacement and authenticity sets up the background for what follows. Some sustain that there was an annihilation of cultural characteristics during the middle passage and did not consider Africa as a reference point, while others consider the African culture as being a surviving one and took this as an evidence of a desire to return. These returns connect to a racialized and gendered hierarchy: “we must always keep in mind that diasporic identities are socially and historically constituted, reconstituted, and reproduced” (Patterson and Kelley, 2000, p. 19). The circumstances in which this takes place are highly organized within the imperial cultural configurations, but one fixed thing is that “the arrangements that this hierarchy assumes may vary from place to place but it remains a gendered racial hierarchy” (Patterson and Kelley, 2000, p. 20). In what concerns the dynamics of identity within diaspora, several typologies were adopted during the nineties, in order to understand and describe the diasporas. In this perspective, for Alain Medam, the typology of the diasporic structure should be based on the opposition between the “crystallised diasporas” and the “fluid dias­ poras.” From the point of view of homeland, Robin Cohen created a new typology of diaspora based on diversity, namely: “1. Labour diasporas; 2. Imperial diasporas; 3. Trade diasporas; 4. Cultural diasporas (the Caribbean case)” (Cohen, 1997, p. 85). The last type of diaspora – the cultural diaspora with the Caribbean case became one of the most stimulating and productive types. In its one cultural dimension, the diaspora discourse emphasizes the notion of hybridity, used by post-modernist authors to mark the evolution of new social dynamics seen as mixed cultures. One of the most important metaphoric designations of roots for diasporic hybridity is the rhizome, a term developed by Guattari and Deleuze. The rhizome becomes thus a useful motif because it describes root systems as being a continuous process that spreads continuously in all directions, from random nodes, creating complex net­



Cultural Identity and Diaspora 

 19

works of unpredictable shapes that are in constant process of growing. In this sense, the French Caribbean is a good example of the occurrence of the concept of hybridity. Edouard Glissant presents a clear reference to rhizome identity. In this respect, James Clifford also developed a reference to “travelling cultures” founding its correspondence in the Black diaspora and in the work of Paul Gilroy (see the concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’). In this perspective, this current was concisely expressed by Cohen in his quotation: “diasporas are positioned somewhere between ‘nation-states’ and ‘travelling cultures’ in that they involve dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense, but travelling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the nation-state’s space/time zone” (Cohen, 1997, p. 95). As Paul Gilroy describes, the nation-state is the institutional means to finish dias­ pora dissemination (diasporic translocation), on one side, through assimilation and, on the other side, through return. I am also at a converging point because all these researches lead to different questions about the connection between trans-na­tionalism and diasporas. In Gilroy’s view, the concept of diaspora is foreground as an antidote to what he calls “camp-thinking” (Gilroy, 2000, p. 84), which involves oppositional and exclusive modes of thought about people and cultures that rest on basis of purity and cultural identities. In contrast with this approach, the diasporic identities are conceiva­ ble as being “creolized, syncretized, hybridized and chronically impure cultural forms” (Gilroy, 2000, p. 129). Notably, the diaspora concept can be “explicitly antinational” and can have “de-stabilizing and subversive effects” (Gilroy, 2000, p. 128). It offers, “an alternative to the metaphysics of race, nation and bounded culture coded into the body, diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belong­ ing” (Gilroy, 2000, p. 123). Diaspora is also “invariably promiscuous” and challenges, “to apprehend mutable forms that can redefine the idea of culture through reconciliation with movement and complex, dynamic variation” (Gilroy, 2000, p. 129-130). To conclude, if we turn back to Hall’s notion of diasporic identity we can see that his type of identity is one based upon difference and hybridity. It rejects old “‘imperialising’ and ‘hegemonising’ forms of ‘ethnicity’” (Hall, 1996, p. 401). It is “defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity… hybridity” (Hall, 1996, p. 402). Therefore, the diasporic identity can more often express the experi­ ence of migrancy and settlement, of ‘making’ one’s home than a fixation to a ‘homeland’ of diasporic cultures. For much of this subchapter I have suggested that a diasporic con­ sciousness as classically conceived is opposed to the process of creolization. As the story of Wide Sargasso Sea is set in Jamaica and Dominica only a few years after the abolition of slavery, coming to terms with its consequences is one of the key themes in the novel. Although slavery is already over at the point of the beginning of the novel, both the black and white people have to face the consequences of the shared history of slavery. The novel analyzes the black people even further, following the shift from slavery to freedom.

20 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

1.2 Types of Cultural Identity If multiple identities have to be conceived as a cultural pattern, according to the four primary axes that allow cultural identities to form described by David Winterstein, we can identify four types of cultural identities: “nested or embedded identities (con­ ceived as concentric circles), ‘marble-cake’ or mixed identities (where the components are inseparable at different levels and they influence each other), cross-cutting or overlapping identities, separate or exclusive identities. The first axis is the inclusion, a set of attributes that an individual uses to communicate with a group. The second is the exclusion or the ensemble of means by which the group differentiates itself from others and the third defines itself as a point of identification within a culture’s value system. The fourth axis is related to space, which helps to associate a cultural group with a specific territory” (Winterstein, 2003, p. 123). Within these four axes, the cul­ tural norms are implied and meanings that work together to create the phenomena are known as cultural identity. As Fig. 2.2. shows, there are certain identities nested or embedded within others. I will refer to those identities towards the bottom as lower order identities (marble-cake or mixed) and those toward the top as higher order identities (separate or exclusive identities). Nested identities form the end of the chain to a higher order iden­ tity and the end of a lower order identity.

Nested Identities

separate or exclusive identities marblecake identities

cross-cutting identities Fig. 1.2: Nested Identities and Cross-Cutting Identities (Ashfort and Mael, 1989)



Types of Cultural Identity 

 21

The nested identities (e.g. personal identities) have at least three key dimen­sions: inclu­ sive/exclusive, abstract/concrete and distal/proximal. Because higher order identities are more inclusive, abstract and distal, there tends to be at least some overlap in the range of nested identities. The degree of inconsistency and conflict between nested iden­ tities may fluctuate in time as new identitarian issues arise. Iron­­ically, such flashpoints may facilitate shifts by rendering multiple identities, al­though such shifts are likely to trigger heightened anxiety. A second reason that shifts between nested identities is that identification with a given level tends to generalize to other levels such that the sub­ jective importance of the implicated identities tends to generalize as well. Because the culture provides the context in which local identities may flourish, culture may come to be seen as one’s ‘home’ or the ‘vehicle’ for expressing one’s local identities. The cross-cutting identities (e.g. social identities) include formal and informal collectives. The larger rings depicts identities that cross-cut multiple nested identities, including identities that extend beyond the boundaries. Although the rings converge on the ‘marble-cake’ or embedded identities, cross-cutting identities may converge on any nested level. The traditional conceptions developed in order to study individual identity form a useful basis to analyse the possibilities of new postnational collective identities. At the individual level, the first approach to be taken into account is essentialism. Taking into account the collective level, according to which identity is given by social attribu­ tions, another level, the individual one arises, according to which identity is given by natural features building an identitarian essence. Another approach to individual iden­ tity is constructivism, which creates, builds and rebuilds identities, rather than being culturally pre-ordinate. Another view to discuss is the model of narrative identity that considers the biographical structure as a condition for thinkability of collective identity. Within the context above, the social structure and culture contrast two notions of individual identity. In the former, identity is ascribed, inheriting in the social and family several roles the subject occupies; in the latter, identity is chosen and respon­ sibilities are freely taken up. Deprived of structure, the subject is driven into culture; denied an identitarian role, he or she demands an individuality which will make up for that which has been relinquished. Furthermore, cultural identity is considered to be the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as he or she is depend upon by his/her belonging to a group or culture. On the other hand, Mouffe states that: “When we accept that every identity is relational and that the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference, the determiners of an ‘other’ that is going to play the role of a ‘constitutive outside’, it is possible to understand how antagonisms arise. In the domain of collective identification, where what is in question is the creation of a ‘we’ by the definition of a ‘them’, the possibility always exists that this ‘we/them’ relation will turn into a relation of the friend / enemy type” (Mouffe, 1993, p. 2-3).

The condition for collective identification (we vs. them) - ‘my blood, my family, my kin, my clan, my nation, my race’ - is an ever-present and potentially violent expulsion of

22 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

those who are not ‘my blood, my family, my kin, my clan, my nation, my race’. The existing of one nation presupposes other identical nations, with the consequences that cause Hegel such anxiety and which might be phrased as “if the other is so like me, the other is within” (Hegel, 2001, p. 89). I, thus, consider that the individual, then, is an effect of multiple identifications. For example, if I was born and brought up in England, I may mainly identify myself as English; but if, as a child, I am taken for some time to Jamaica, I will have to live into that identity. Paul Gilroy writes: “I am not against the nation…I am against the rhetoric of cultural insider(ism), because I think it is too readily limited to unaccept­able ideas of homogeneous national culture and exclusionary national or ethnic belonging” (Gilroy, 1994, p. 72). Thus, if identity is understood as an effect of discourse, national identity in a national culture can never achieve the unified homogeneity it wishes for itself. In this case, I have to admit that there can be no escape from identity; and further that all identity defines itself precisely by establishing an inside (in-hereness) and an outside (out-hereness), so that all identities, to a certain degrees, practice insiderism together with an exclusionary force. In this case, Anthony Smith concludes that: “Of all the collective identities in which human beings share today, national identity is perhaps the most fundamental and inclusive. Not only has nationalism, the ideological movement, pen­ etrated every corner of the globe; the world is divided, first and foremost, into ‘nationstates’ – states claiming to be nations – and national identity everywhere underpins the recurrent drive for popular sovereignty and democracy, as well as the exclusive tyranny that it sometimes breeds. Other types of collective identity – class, gender, race, religion – may overlap or combine with national identity but they rarely succeed in undermining its hold, though they may influ­ ence its direction.” (Smith, 1991, p. 143)

All collective identities (clan, nation, region, ethnic group) identify its-self by denying the other, demarcating inside from outside and stretching a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. To summarize, the relationship between individual identity and collective iden­ tity focuses on two directions of thought: one that claims that individual identity and collective identity are conflicting and that collective identity is not likely to replace the individual one; and the other that argues that collective identity is constructed on an entirely different basis than individual identity and the two can coexist. On one hand, I argue that collective identity cannot compete with individual identity because it does not have deep-rooted memories that can induce a sense of loyalty the same way individual identity does. On the other hand, I emphasize that individual identity and collective identity do not clash, because their bases for allegiance are different. Because these are not fixed, there is no reason to believe that these new con­ structs cannot become as powerful as the national ones and that, indeed, they can override national identity. Second, although collective identity is to a large degree based on principles of popular sovereignty and civic rights, it still needs a shared ‘culture’ to connect people at an emotional level.



Types of Cultural Identity 

 23

Another aspect I want to emphasize here is that nation is a form of collective identity, which becomes possible only in the conditions of modernity. Hence, national identity is an ‘object’ of modernity. It is widely known that nation is a form of social philosophy, a way of thinking focused on promoting the interests of a particular social group.2 In this respect, Anderson is right to emphasize that nation, like the rest of human culture, is ‘imagined’ in the sense that it is constructed rather than being the result of a natural process: “I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” (Anderson, 1991, p. 5-6)

What is very interesting for me is that Anderson’s work refers to anthropological data, as he maintains that the concept of “nation” is truly a cultural construct, a manufactured artifice. Thus, for Anderson, it is “imagined”. Nation and identity begin with one’s family and closest friends, and slowly move out from this center. An example, two residents of the same country may live in completely different geographical climates, having very little in common with each other. Furthermore, Raymond Williams also comments that: “‘Nation’ as a term is radically connected with ‘native’. We are born into relationships which are typically settled in a place. This form of primary and ‘placeable’ bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance. Yet the jump from that to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial.” (Williams, 1983, p. 180).

Subsequently, by repeating this internalisation of an idealised reflection of itself, the subject aspires to a homogeneity and permanence identifying its unity in an image of the body as a unified whole and fearing a corresponding image of the body in pieces. The individual, then, is an effect of multiple identifications. Nation is almost certain to be more heterogeneous in its membership than a pre-national grouping, more mixed by race, class, gender, regional loyalty. At the same time, it is composed of two separate aspects, a modern state and a culture. It occupies a “symbolic rather than territorial space” (Samuel, 1989, p. 16). In this sense, national cultures provide discursive narratives. In National Identity, Anthony Smith explains the concept of national identity by setting forth five essential characteristics: a historic territory or ‘homeland’, which becomes “a repository of historic memories” (e.g. Caribbean homeland) (Smith, 1991, p. 14). On the one hand, a colonial order imposed the myths and symbols of national cultural identity and caused the conquest of European civilization; on the

2 See Breuilly’s statement: “To focus upon culture, ideology, identity, class or modernization is to neglect the fundamental point that nationalism is, above and beyond else, about politics and that politics is about power” (Breuilly, 1993).

24 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

other, the negation of these myths and symbols associated with the popular culture and resistance to a system of oppression. In short, the national cultural identity is largely a hybrid of European, African, Amerindian and Asian cultures: in other words, essentially Creole. Therefore, the struggle for cultural identity involves struggling for the hegemony of the popular Creole culture over a culture associated with European traditions and the recuperation of myths and symbols largely suppressed by the local elites. Culture here takes both the narrow sense of creative expression and its wider anthropological meaning, and the way of life of a distinct population. It becomes possible for me to say that, on the one hand, “nationalism… is an ide­ ological movement for attaining and maintaining the autonomy, unity and identity of a nation” (Smith, 1991, p. 74). On the other, there is a national credo against a colonial power: “nationalism is a reaction of peoples who feel culturally at a disadvantage” (Plamenatz, qtd. in Kamenka, 1976, p. 24). I shall start my analysis of the cultural identity asserting that culture in itself is not static; it is very fluid. Culture evolves, adapts and adopts. In this sense, traveling identities are part of an initiation step. The journey is an apparently linear and fixed path, while wandering/adventure has some unforeseen and sinuous implications. However, the apparent purpose of an imposing a trip overlaps the apparent lack of purpose that characterizes the adventures. Within the oscillation between negritude and negriceness, the African-descend­ ent experiences are the symbol of mobility. Involved in such a moveable identity, “[…] the subject develops different identities in specific moments. These identities are not unified around a coherent ‘self’” (Hall, 1992, p. 13). This mobility, which features the African-descendent identities, sustains the double consciousness of the existential experience that instigates the black subject to move within the westernized world. To sustain this, Du Bois explains that when he lives the double consciousness, the black subject “feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (DuBois, 1994, p. 2), thus creating a so-called ‘hyphenated’ cultural identity. The concept of négritude refers to those traveling identities and cultures, coming from Africa, going to the Caribbean, and then advancing to Europe. In such an expe­ rience of leaving from one place to reach another, the ship turns itself into the meta­ phor of displacement, being able to develop a ‘traveling alterity’: “Because the womb of the slave-ship is the place and the moment, in which the African lan­ guages disappear, as they never put together in a slave-ship, or in the plantations, people who could speak the same language. Thus, the persons found themselves dispossessed of all kind of elements of their daily life.” (Glissant, 2005, p. 19)

This consideration brings the concept of signifyin(g) which implies the idea of traveling and navigating cultures; influenced by cultural mobility, signifyin(g) intends to account for inter­



Types of Cultural Identity 

 25

textuality in African-descendents’ experiences. In the African-descendent literary scenario, signifyin(g) explains “how black texts ‘talk’ to other black texts” (Gates, 1988, p. 26). Glissant is of the same opinion, when he suggests that the identity is open and develops a double root, which, according to him is the identity that comes from creole­ ness, “that is, from the rizome-like identity, from the identity no longer as one solitary root, but as a root moving toward and encountering other roots” (Glissant, 2005, p. 27). However, in thinking about travel, the identitarian questions: what becomes the sense of home? Is home merely a place to depart from, or can we see travel as leading us to think about how homes must also be cultivated through movement? James Clif­ ford argues that “Cultural centers, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things” (Clifford, 1997, p. 3). Home is not a place that one leaves behind, but a geographical point of reference, a sense of place that serves as an anchor for the travel. According to James Clifford, the cross-cultural or ‘border’ experiences of travel are not viewed as acculturation, where there is a linear progression from culture A to culture B, nor as syncretism, where two systems overlap each other. Rather, Clifford understands these cross-cultural or ‘border’ experiences as instances of historical contact, “with entanglement at inter­ secting regional, national, and transnational levels” (Clifford, 1997, p. 7). Inspired by Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact-zones’, a contact approach emphasizes the intercultural interaction that takes place within these spaces of interaction and exchange. In his study on rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep identifies three stages at work in transitional events such as births, marriages, and deaths: separation (the prelim­ inal stage), transition (the liminal stage), and incorporation (the postliminal stage). While the passage itself involves an ambiguous threshold, the completion of a rite of passage establishes the individual’s identity within a new social category or phase of life. It is entirely fitting that in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette, who spends so much of the novel rejecting carefully constrained categories in order to inhabit conceptually blended spaces, would steal at the end of the novel a set of keys. She breaks from the contained space of a bedroom into a passageway – a dark passageway because it is a mysterious space that fulfills her earlier yearning for “shifting shadows” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 48). Importantly, though, this passage has no destination. The candle is present, Antoinette says, “to light me along the dark passage”, but here the novel ends, without her being led anywhere (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 156). She remains caught in a space that ought to connect two particular states, but is itself neither here nor there. The perpetual liminality of a failed rite of passage mirrors the dissolution of discrete concepts by which metaphor verges on madness. While successful liminal transition reads as a metaphor for metaphor itself; entrapment within a liminal space is a metaphor for madness. If the inability to recognize the boundaries of the meta­ phorical space is the inability to maintain sanity by grounding experience in discrete concepts, then the breakages of Antoinette’s associative context leave her caught within the space of metaphor, where ‘this’ can no longer be distinguished from ‘that’.

26 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

In my opinion, this dark passage of the liminal space also echoes the middle passage of the slave ships, whose captive human cargo benefited Antoinette’s family for years before the abolishment of slavery. Dionne Brand, a member of the Afri­ can-Caribbean diaspora, describes the diasporic experience as one of feeling discon­ nected from the lands on both sides of the ocean: “There is the sense in the mind of not being here or there, of no way out or in. […] Caught between the two, we live in the Diaspora, in the sea in between. Imagining our ancestors stepping through these portals one senses people stepping out into nothing; one senses a surreal space, an inexplicable space. One imagines people so stunned by their circumstances, so heart­ broken as to refuse reality. Our inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplica­ ble space” (Brand, 2002, p. 20). Wide Sargasso Sea, like metaphor, is a dark passage of shifting shadows that is useful to cross, but which, in the face of violent discon­ nections such as those that Antoinette experiences, can become its own desolate des­ tination: “We are always in the middle of the journey” (Brand, 2002). In what follows, I provide an exposition and comparative discussion on hybrid­ ity and diasporic creolization, as a way of understanding mixture and exoticness. By engaging with the historical moment and ideological structure of European colonial­ ism, along with conceptualizations of race (whiteness), gender (femininity), and cul­ tural location (creolité), I show how the central characters and their subjectivities are explicitly shaped and influenced by the conceptual and physical realms they inhabit.

1.3 Hybridity versus Cultural Alterity There is a much more telling argument, which states that the rhetoric of hybridity associated with the Caribbean identity, and broadly speaking in particular with its ‘creolization’ counterpart, suggests a new framework that continues to mark Carib­ bean identity as an ‘exotic’ other. Transgression concepts3 can be applied to serve various interests just as it is the case with the idea of purity. Hence, we should always be attentive to the question of whose interests are served by articulating identity in terms of ‘hybridity’, rather than ‘purity’ in specific instances. In this sense, hybrid­ ity will be used to help focus our understanding of these diverse concepts which are against purity, focusing on the experience of the migrant/exiled as a particularly dis­ placement experience of their position ‘on the margin’ of cultures, of dislocations and relocations. In the words of Stuart Hall: “You have to be familiar enough with it [the centre] to know how to move in it. But you have to be sufficiently outside it, so you can

3 It is to be mentioned that culture works according to the following functions: one is Homi Bhabha’s ‘fixed tablet of tradition’ and the second is a location for the development of culture (referring to the process of cultural change and hybridization). In this respect, the former is not geographically dependent, whereas hybridisation is often specifically related to a place, locale or situation.



Hybridity versus Cultural Alterity 

 27

examine it and critically interrogate it. And it is this double move, or what I think one writer after another have called, the double consciousness of the exile, of the migrant, of the stranger who moves to another place, who has this double way of seeing it, from the inside and the outside” (Hall, 1996, p. 381). Hence, the formation of double consciousness is not simply a cognitive process of constructing self-knowledge or self-identity. Rather, DuBois’s conception of ‘double con­ sciousness’ embraces a human reflexivity (a volitional human activity) that questions self as a supreme being. In short, the formation of double consciousness is a nexus of inter­ connected processes of generating and re-generating dialogical human relationships. I should call attention to the fact that speaking of ‘mixture’ presupposes the exist­ ence of something that can be mixed. A counterargument to this could be that hybridity is not about mixture in nuce, since purity never existed; rather, hybridity is about dis­ placement. That is, focusing on hybridity involves focusing on Hall’s concept of ‘posi­ tioning’, rather than on ‘mixing’ of cultural forms. It involves focusing on the relation between the ‘centre’ and the ‘margin’ in one way or the other, be it the relation between the West and the rest or between majority and minority or on how the penetration of the centre by the marginalized undermines the dominant position of the centre. On one hand, in relation to diaspora, hybridity is perceived as a process of cul­ tural mixing wherein the diasporic subjects change different aspects of the host culture and reconfigure them under the ‘shape’ of a new hybrid culture or “hybrid identities” (Chambers, 1996). On the other hand, “hybrid identities” also imply the existence of non-hybridity: “[...] the idea of hybridity, of intermixture, presupposes two anterior purities... I think there isn’t any purity; there isn’t any anterior purity... that’s why I try not to use the word hybrid ... Cultural production is not like mixing cocktails.” (Gilroy, 1994, p. 54-55)

In other words, the language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable sim­ ilarities with the patterns of thought that characterized Victorian racial theory. It is very important to signal the fact that the ‘cultural clash’ associated with the idea of cultural survival through fusion, mixture, miscegenation or creolization provoked a clash in the colonial rule, attempting to unravel the violent consequences of a para­ noid ‘first contact’. The driving imperative here is to save centred, bounded and coherent identities: placed identities for placeless times. Purified identities are constructed through the purification of space, through the maintenance of the territorial boundaries and fron­ tiers, being also situated at the heart of empire. This can be understood in terms of “a geography of rejection which appears to correspond to the purity of antagonistic com­ munities” (Sibley, 1995, p. 410). Purification aims to secure both protection from and positional superiority over, the external Other. In this case, William Connolly argues: “When you remain within the established field of identity and difference, you become a bearer of strategies to protect identity through devaluation of the other; but if you transcend the field of

28 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

identities through which the other is constituted, you lose the identity and standing needed to communicate with those you sought to inform. Identity and difference are bound together. It is impossible to reconstitute the relation to the second without confounding the experience of the first.” (Connolly, 1991, p. 329)

Jennifer DeVere Brody suggests, “Purity is impossible and, in fact, every mention of the related term hybrid, only confirms a strategic taxonomy that constructs purity as a prior (fictive) ground” (DeVere Brody, 1998, p. 11-12). Stuart Hall is of the opinion that “unsettling, recombination, hybridisation and ‘cut-and-mix’ carries with a transformed relation to tradition”, one in which “there can be no simple ‘return’ [to] or ‘recovery’ of the ancestral past which is not re-ex­ perienced through the categories of the present” (Hall, 1996, p. 30). In constructing identity, Paul Ricoeur suggests that: “When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our discovery. Suddenly, it becomes possible that there are just others, that we are ourselves an ‘other’ among others.” (Ricoeur, 1965, p. 278)

I want to signify here that the wish to replace ‘purity talk’ with ‘hybridity talk’ also has very different power effects, depending on the context and who defines the situation. However, as I prepared this book I became more and more interested in what might be described as a Creole diaspora – an ostensibly oxymoronic category given my earlier arguments a way of looking at postcolonial identity as fluid, relational and always in flux. I explain this fluidity of identity by referring to Homi Bhabha’s innova­ tive formulation and application of the concept of liminality in his text, The Location of Culture. Thus, Homi Bhabha analyzes the liminality of hybridity as a paradigm of colo­ nial anxiety. He uses liminality, like hybridity, to refer to the moment or place, where a thing becomes its alterity. It is an “interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative” space (Bhabha, 1994, p. 103). Bhabha’s critique of cultural imperialist hybridity means that the rhetoric of hybridity became more concerned with challenging essentialism and its application to sociological theories of identity, multiculturalism, and racism. There is also a nostalgic attempt to revivify pure and indigenous regional cultures in reac­ tion against what are perceived as threatening forms of cultural hybridity. Moreover, Bhabha stresses the interdependence of colonizer and colonized, in terms of hybridity. The hybrid identity positions itself within this third space, as “lubricant” (Papas­ tergiadis, 1997, p. 56) in the conjunction of cultures. The hybrids’ potential is with their innate knowledge of ‘transculturation’, their ability to transverse both cultures and to translate, negotiate and mediate affinity and difference within a dynamic of exchange and inclusion. They have encoded within them a counter hegemonic agency. At the point at which the colonizer presents a normalizing, hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategy opens up a third space of/for rearticulating negotiation and meaning. My first term in postcolonial studies, ‘hybridity’ commonly refers to “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” (Ashcroft,



Hybridity versus Cultural Alterity 

 29

2003, p. 118). Hybridization displays many forms including cultural, political and lin­ guistic ones. Moreover, Ashcroft sustains how “hybridity and the power it releases may well be seen as the characteristic feature and contribution of the postcolonial, allowing a means of evading the replication of the binary categories of the past and developing new anti-monolithic models of cultural exchange and growth” (Ashcroft, 1995, p. 183). On the contrary, Papastergiadis reminds us of the emancipative potential of nega­ tive terms. He poses the following question: “should we use only words with a pure and inoffensive history, or should we challenge essentialist models of identity by taking on and then subverting their own vocabulary?” (Papastergiadis, 1997, p. 258) This question transforms the concept of hybridity into a “celebrated and privileged kind of superior cultural intelligence owing to the advantage of in-betweeness, the straddling of two cultures and the consequent ability to negotiate the difference” (Hoogvelt, 1997, p. 158). It is thus not at all surprising that the creative production of diasporic hybridity takes the form of a delicate double-matter: denial and appropriation as such in the name of a perennial ‘homelessness’ and at the same time engaging in the polemical politics of representation. Characterized by a symptomatic DuBoisian ‘double con­ sciousness’, the diasporic hybridity has to both ‘enjoy itself as symptom’ and simul­ taneously transform the political body where it resides as ‘symptom’. The concept of diasporic hybridity reveals a dynamic construction, which creates cultural mixing in the context of colonialism (Brah, 1996; Hall, 1996; Gilroy, 2000). At another level, the view of diasporic hybridity as layered in history includes the pre-colonial, colonial/imperial and postcolonial post-imperial periods, each with dis­ tinct sets of hybridity, as a function of the boundaries that were prominent (Fig. 2.3). Thus, we can distinguish three types of hybridity: a) Hybridity across modes of production (this gives rise to mixed social formations); b) Hybridity before and after industrialization; c) Hybrid modes of regulation (besides nations with overtly hybrid identities, there are hybrid regions or zones that straddle geographic and cultural areas). My second example is much closer to what Robert Young distinguishes between ‘organic’ and ‘intentional’ (Young, 1995) modes of hybridity (fig. 2.4.). We are thus facing a dualism in hybridity theory between the positive hybridity, which is dynamic, progressive, diasporic, rhizomic, subversive, anti-essentialist, routes-oriented and based on cut-and-mix; and a negative hybridity, which is essentialist, roots-orient­ed and based on simple ideas of combining two wholes to make a third whole. The dynamic processes of cultural practice, which displays their own tensions between roots and routes, characterize this scheme: being and becoming. Many critics (such as Hall, Bhabha and Spivak) consider that hybridity could have possible positive effects in different cultural contexts. In this respect, Papastergiadis notes, “At the broadest level of conceptual debate there seems to be a consensus over the utility of hybridity as antidote to essentialist subjectivity” (Papastergiadis, 1997, p. 273). Moving on Bakhtin and Hall, Robert Young introduces a type of hybridization

30 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

that is ‘organic’ (Bakhtin’s term) and that it merges different identities into new forms. He goes on to describe a second more radical form of hybridization that is ‘inten­tional’ and disaporic, “intervening as a form of subversion, translation, transformation” (Young, 1995, p. 25). He argues that, “Hybridization as creolization involves fusion, the creation of a new form, which can then be set against the old form, of which it is partly made up. Hybridization as ‘raceless chaos’ by contrast, produces no stable new form but rather something closer to Bhabha’s restless, uneasy, interstitial hybridity: a radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, the permanent revolution of forms” (Young, 1995, p. 25).

postcolonial

Hybrids modes of regulation

colonial

Hybridity before and after industrialization

pre-colonial

ce tan ral s i u g-d ult lonoss-c de cr tra

nd st a ue ire q con emp tic lan -At ery s n tra slav r ula ng a i tr de the tra

Hybridity across modes of production

Fig. 1.3: Patterns of Hybridity as layered in History

The two diasporic forms of hybridity (the first one identified by Young with the process of ‘homogenization’) are opposing each other: “hybridity has not slipped out of the mantle of the past” and has not yet been “fully redeployed and reinflected” by cultural theorists (Young, 1995). Young points out that these two forms of hybridity are in an historical relation of chronological change, in which the older, anachronis­ tic, negative form is balancing a newer, more positive form. In this dynamic context, the effect is that these types of hybridity “constantly overlap and interweave,” being framed by the same historical background (Young, 1995). In his fundamental distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘intentional’ hybridity, Bakhtin refers to ‘organic hybridity’ as, “unintentional, unconscious hybridization (…), as one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of languages.



Hybridity versus Cultural Alterity 

 31

We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization, by means of mixing of various ‘languages’” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 358). He goes on to declare that “the mixture remains mute and opaque, never making use of conscious contrasts and oppositions… [Yet] such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new worldviews, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 360). According to Bakhtin, “an intentional hybrid is first of all a conscious hybrid” that is, “an encounter within the area of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousness, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 358) (Fig. 2.4).

‘organic’ (unconscious, liminal, single voiced) “unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of languages. […] language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization, by means of mixing of various ‘languages’ “

Hybrid-ity colonizing subject

colonized ‘Other’

“an encounter within the area of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousness, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor”

‘intentional’ (conscious, dialogical, double voiced ) Fig. 2.4.Intentional OrganicHybridity versus Fig. 1.4: Organic versus

Intentional Hybridity

Similarly Bhabha drawing on Derrida, also stresses the performative dimensions of cultural Actions enunciation: “the place of utterance is crossed by the difference of writing… [which ensures] Eventsmimetic and Happenings Form 1994, p. 36). Thus, the that meaning is never simply transparent” (Bhabha, ceremonial opening of the bridge defines a liminal space. Seen = offrom Bhabha’s perspective, both types of hybridity (he does not distinguish between them) frame the already men­ Story Existents Characters Content tioned ‘third space’ in which the ambivalences of the colonial encounter are enacted. (Content) Settings In other settings, in the Western thought, the ‘other’ is seen as a threat, alter-ego things, etc., as pre-by OxfordSubstance or an enigma of the self.People, The definition offered English Dictionary describes processed by the author’s = of cultural codes

Content

Narrative Structure of

Form

32 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

alterity as “The state of being other or different; diversity, ‘otherness’” (Oxford English Dictionary, 78). At the other end of the spectrum, one finds such terms as mimesis or copy. Cultural alterity is a pattern of perceiving those outside a group, whatever that group might be, as inferior to another group. Those who do not fit, who are not includ­ed, are considered as forming the Other. In other words, all groups have a ten­ dency to develop some expectations, and that some people who do not meet those expectations become the Other. In addition to that, whenever an In-group defines itself, an Out-group automatically creates itself (e.g. those who are not included). W.E.B. Du Bois talks about the pain of such exclusion based on his racial identifica­ tion and ‘double consciousness’. Thus, the need for ‘belongingness’ can lead to the belief that if we can come to a consensus amongst ourselves, then we have achiev­ed something valuable as a social group. This agreement then becomes normal and commensurate expectations are generated. When these expectations are not met, we consider the others who do not meet them ‘deviant’, or not like us, namely the Other. Firstly, this phenomenon, in which otherness mediates, related to Lacanian’s idea of seeing others through a screen. The three categories include the other seen through a screen, the other seen as a screen, and the other as a medium for exchange. In the first category, the screen symbolizes a boundary, which represents a space of exclusion or lim­ itation between the self and the other, or individuals and their unconscious. In the case of the second category, the screen identifies with the others. The screen thus becomes like a surface for projection. What one perceives are the stereotypes of the others; projection in this case tends to obscure the other’s identity with a dynamic relationship between fact and fantasy. The third category, the other seen as a medium for exchange, departs from the metaphor of the screen being in this case the place for interaction. When the self refers to the individual, one must wonder to what extent a person can actually know one’s own mind. Thus, the identity of the individual is constituted by being borrowed from the Other. In this way, the unconscious provides an example of an-other in the tension between the subject and the ego. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon gives an account of the colonial envi­ ronment inherently engendering inferiority complexes for the colonized because “the black is a black man; that is as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated” (Fanon, 1967, p. 183). Fanon describes his mission in his book to be “the liberation of the man of colour from himself” because of the prejudice and stereotyping arising from the cul­ tural differences, the excluded seeks and desires to prove his humanity, his same­ ness, to the included and find solidarity with the white man. The Other as a screen emphasizes that the power disparities can change the other into a blank screen. The process of negotiating Caribbean identities involves the question of defining the people. Fanon speaks of what he calls “a passionate research directed to the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-con­tempt, resignation and abjuration, some beautiful and splendid area whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and others” (Fanon, 1967, p. 67).



The Postcolonial Social Contract and Caribbean Modernism 

 33

1.4 The Postcolonial Social Contract and Caribbean Modernism Nevertheless, the social contract is neither ‘natural’ nor permanently fixed. Rather, according to some philosophers such as Locke or Rousseau, the contract itself is the only one, which meets the general interest. Rousseau argues that the subject can be selfish and decide that his personal interest could overcome the collective interest. However, as part of a collective body, the individual subject puts aside his egoism to create a ‘general will’: “[The social contract] can be reduced to the following terms. Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” (Kelley and Masters, 1990, p. 139)

Or a total control upon oneself, according to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No, that would mean but the continuation of [Rousseau’s] idea. The social contract is an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society. In this, the notion of commutative justice, first brought forward by the primitive fact of exchange… is substituted for that of distributive justice… Translating these words, contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of business, and you have commerce, that is to say, in its highest significance, the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially produc­ ers, and abdicate all pretension to govern each other.” (Proudhon, 1989, p. 34)

Social contract theory can also apply to different territories, taking into account that a society, which has effective governance or influence over a territory, is the sovereign over that territory, and therefore the true, legal owner of all that the said territory encompasses: “I think that the person who makes this argument is already assuming that the government has some legitimate jurisdiction over this territory. And then they say, well, now, anyone who is in the territory is therefore agreeing to the prevailing rules. But they’re assuming the very thing they’re trying to prove – namely that this jurisdiction over the territory is legitimate. If it’s not, then the government is just one more group of people living in this broad general geographical territory. But I’ve got my property, and exactly what their arrangements are I don’t know, but here I am in my property and they don’t own it – at least they haven’t given me any argument that they do – and so, the fact that I am living in “this country” means I am living in a certain geographical region, that they have certain pretensions over – but the question is whether those pretensions are legitimate. You can’t assume it as a means to proving it.” (Long,2004, p. 89)

Within this context, colonialism, once the imperial hegemony of the West, has changed the cultural differences for its own historical purposes. The histories of why one country (Britain, in this case) was able to obtain mastery over another have used cultural disparities as a justification; the discontinuities between the interests of colo­ nizer and colonized make a coherent history of their exchanges.

34 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

Starting from the “emphasis on the epistemological break between colonizer and colo­nized, postcolonialism renews the post-modern questioning of historicism”4 (Hamilton, 1996, p. 178). According to this, if justice is abandoned and the colonizer is defined as inferior or irredeemably ‘other’, the effects on the colonizers can still be disconcerting: “The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called in question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonization – the history of pillage – and to bring into existence the history of the nation – the history of decolonization” (Fanon, 1967, p. 327). Also vital for postcolonial thinking is the consequence that the more unjust is the domination upon the slave, the more his or her existence will remain unknowable. The other may conform to the expectations, but only in the so-called self-ignorance. In the social contract, the ‘other’ is the outline of the familiar, viewed as the boundary of its outside, sharing its own self within. Thus, when that circumference is disturbed, the inside is also disturbed, as well as the outside. Homi Bhabha writes that “The White man’s eyes break up the Black man’s body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 60). From Fanon’s perspective ‘colonialism’: “…is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content by a kind of perverted logic it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it… The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.” (Fanon, 1967, p. 169)

Therefore, in the social contract framework, the resistance to colonialism means that the past is given back its value. It is not just history as a narrative that is coercive here, but the dialectical assimilation of native traditions to the colonial ideology of progress: “After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism of the colonized man. This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others.” (Fanon, 1967, p. 198)

In this episteme of the new humanism, there is a re-examination of the idea that the postcolonial social contract deals with the methods through which a culture gathers others to its own point of view. In a typical way, this appropriation determines the colonial subjects not to obey, this fact adding a subversive ‘disobedience’ to their ‘civility’, keeping also a suitable distance between them and their masters, between the colonizers and the colonized. However, dismissed or repressed, the native culture floats free of regulation.

4 The concept of historicism used here in terms of ‘Hegelian historicism’ disproves rationalism and universalism.



The Caribbean (Is)Landscape as Homeland 

 35

For Fanon the ‘colonial world’ is seen as a ‘Manichaean world’ (Fanon, 1967). The oppressed would still mirror their oppressors, although this time, from the position of power. However, their identity would still be prescribed as before. To escape this Hegelian master/slave cycle, the postcolonial social contract produces ‘another knowledge’ of both positions, through a parodic distance and not scien­ tific mastery. Because of their Western episteme or way of knowing, “Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing true knowledge about non-Europe” (Ahmad, 1992, p. 178). In connection with these, Paul Gilroy thinks that, race is “a distinct order of social phenomena sui generis” (Gilroy, 1987, p. 27) and not just an epistemological aid to a knowledge of global power-struggles. In any case, the Caribbean culture not consolidated by the national ‘other’ but adopting its position, seems to have little difficulty in staking out a critical position by fitting antagonistically to authoritarian norms. With Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, postcolonial writing is able to invade the classic story and myth through unconventional entrances because it has the key to the b(l)ack door. The encroaching British culture implodes along with the epistemo­ logical distinction between same and other on which it is founded. The Caribbean are already acculturated, otherwise, they would not be human. To try, then, to cultivate them, ostensibly with a view to their humanity, must actually be to do something else – to dehumanize them by violating the shape of their already existing humanity. The classic excuses of colonialism become nonsense. Finally, the social contract deals not with freedom, but with political subordina­ tion. This fact constitutes an important reading of the social contract theory because it allows us to understand the social contract as an ideological underpinning of so-called social systems of servitude. To this end, there is a historical abstractness of the contract itself because of its fictitious nature. In this respect, for example, Car­ ibbean modernism is seen as a refashioning reterritorialization with respect to Euro­ pean, and Western presence and models that can’t, and couldn’t, be ignored.

1.5 The Caribbean (Is)Landscape as Homeland In the process of locating the cultural identities to place, Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin argue that the concept of place in post-colonial societies is a “complex interaction of language, history and environment” (Ashcroft et al., 1995, p. 389). The Caribbean landscape is impenetrable, wild and lush and it is corrupt and untamable. It discloses great mystery and beauty but this merely tempts the greedy of heart to cry: “I want what it hides” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 189). The displacement and resettlement of Rhys’s protagonists is condemned to inbe­ tween-ity. Antoinette’s belonging to the Caribbean landscape can be observed in Wide Sargasso Sea through the colonial distance from what it must forever be her dream space: “we changed course and lost our way to England” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea,

36 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

213). Thus, the Caribbean islandscape becomes an illusory psychic space made out of the flashbacks of second-hand memories. In dealing with the loss of the Caribbean landscape as homeland, Rhys’s fiction foreshadows the issues of homecomings and alienating experiences of the white Creoles who oscillates between the lost ancestral cultures, harsh poverty-striken island societies and the hostile landscape of the metropolitan host cultures. Home­ coming then can only be a contradictory return to Caribbean imaginary or the Carib­ bean topoi. In Wide Sargasso Sea the opaque mirror which separates Tia and Antoinette becomes a penetrable pool only in illusory space. Not quite English and not quite ‘native’, Rhys’s Creole woman straddles the embattled scission between human and savage, core and periphery, self and other. For example, in Wide Sargasso Sea, after a disagreement, Antoinette accuses her friend of being a “cheating nigger” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 10) and Tia calls her a “white cockroach” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 9). Both girls are moved by the touching atmosphere of the moment because they feel that something has been lost. They see each other as in a mirror image. Moreover, if immediately after her mother’s second marriage Antoinette is glad “to be like an English girl” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 17), later she will come to wonder who she is: “So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 64). Jean Rhys’s novels, especially Wide Sargasso Sea, may be seen as an entry point to the analysis of the Other as ‘latent’ to the Western metropolitan centre and its dis­ courses. As the metropolitan space is unmapped, the Other therefore destabilizes the terrain on which Western appropriating strategies are conducted. To re-map the cen­ tre’s geographies and identities can be an act of resistance especially when metropol­ itan space is re-described from within the perspective of the Other. The oxymoronic conceptualization of the Other as absent/present defines the Other as never present, never now. Rhys’s postcolonial narrative strategies institute accordingly new stances about identity. Rhys’s postcolonial strategies of resistance seek to embrace a perspec­ tive whereby identity, space and temporality may be rendered contingent, shifting and uncertain. In Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s first autodiegetic novel, the illusory nightmarish return is to the fearsome though potentially liberating Caribbean space. In dealing with the absent Other of the metropolitan centre, Rhys’s novel does not only undermine the universal consensus of human rights and social equality as an impossible political and social utopia, but it also touches upon the limits of the finite thought of the Same, upon the inadmissible and the uncanny. They point to the uncertainty and ambivalence at the heart of the self and other, centre and periphery to make up that which exceeds the ‘historical’, the ‘social’, the ‘rational’, and above all the ‘Manichean’. Moreover, the relationship between identity and belonging focuses on two direc­ tions of thought: one that claims that the reinvented self expresses the simultaneity of home-exile; and the other one that argues that the existential anxiety is related to



Caribbean Cultural Creolization 

 37

the feeling of estrangement from the natural environment. First, a colonial who is trapped within the logic of a place that enforces her Caribbean status while insisting that she can never really be English, exposes his/her national identity itself that is always subject to confusion. Secondly, as long as Englishness is so unreliable, the Car­ ibbean ‘colonial identity’ too must remain in doubt. There are reasons to believe that both these views offer a broad picture of the relationship between the two ap­proaches of belongingness. Taking into consideration the ‘multi-relation’ that ‘shadows’ the region, a new cre­ ative and cultural context for Caribbean identity can be effectively forged. Essen­tially an artistic framework that draws on linguistic, cultural, and historical patterns of plu­ ralism within the region to express the totality of the Caribbean experience, ‘Creolité’, as Michael Dash continues, “is essentially a strategic defence of the ideal of diversity in a world threatened by the disappearance of cultural difference” (Dash, 1998, p. 239). Barbados, Jamaica and Martinique are among the remnants of a British-colonial empire which now only encompasses a few overseas departments, overseas territo­ ries and ‘collective territories’. While their historical past and colonial present relate them to a distant metropole, their history, socio-demographic profile, their cultural traditions and geographical location place them within a Caribbean continuum. They serve to anchor the fundamental role played by the struggle between the written and the oral word in the search for identity in the British Caribbean. This linguistic/liter­ ary struggle has also led to the creolizing the literary trace left by European authors in an attempt to open new perspectives on Creoleness.

1.6 Caribbean Cultural Creolization Cultures become creolized because of the fusion of disparate elements, which are both heterogeneous and local. The concept of creolization lies at the very center of discussions of transculturalism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, diversity and hybridization. Creolization is a form of cultural meaning, with different paths. The concept focuses on the cultural syncretism, as the source for cross-fertilization between dif­ferent cul­ tures. When creolization takes place, the individuals select particular elements from incoming or inherited cultures, investing these with meanings, different from those they owned in the original culture and then merge these to create totally new varie­ ties that replace the first forms. The creolized subject is thus a cultural element that stresses new common identity in the place of identification. A diasporic consciousness, by contrast, generally reflects a degree of anxiety with cultural identities in the current location. ‘Homeland’ is recovered through historical memory and social organization, the past providing a continuing pole of attraction and identification. Creolization means more than just mixture; it involves the creation of new cul­ tures. However, the cultural processes of creolization are not simply a matter of

38 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

constant pressure from the center toward the periphery, but a much more creative interplay of creole elements. Magical mimesis on the colonial frontier points to a basic empowering effect in terms of the imitation function, either by way of the pro­ duction of similes by mimicry or by contiguity and contact (a ‘creole continuum’), wherein a copy partakes the power of the original. This was made possible by means of a “rupture and revenge of signification” (Taussig, 1987, p. 5). If cultural contact and transmission occurs in not-so-related contexts, then I can characterize creoliza­ tion as a symbolic substitute, instead of the more neutral – and in my view, inac­ curate – concepts of “borrowing” or “conversation” ((Hannerz, 1992, p. 90) between cultures, depicted as forms of “Creole contagion” (Abrahams, 2002, p. 89). Imitating the symbols and gestures of powerful others ‘with an attitude’ is probably the most proper characterization to these metaforces of creolization. As Hannerz maintains: “Creolization also increasingly allows the periphery to talk back. As it creates a greater affinity between the cultures of the center and the periphery, and as the latter increasingly uses the same organizational forms and the same technology as the center […] some of its new cultural commodities become increasingly attractive on a global market. Third World music of a creolized kind becomes world music […] Creolization thought is open-ended; the tendencies towards mat­ uration and saturation are understood as quite possibly going on side by side, or interleaving.” (Hannerz, 1992, p. 265-266)

According to Hannerz and other writers cited above, the process of creolization has offered a space to create a new sense of home, a place to express its within cultural imperialism. Quoting Edouard Glissant, “[…] in the Caribbean there are a multitude of rela­ tionships” (Glissant, 1981, p. 84) mostly produced, shaped, either encouraged or pre­ vented by the European colonizing powers. Although it has come to refer to different people in different islands at different times, generally the ‘creole’ has always been the most indicative product of Caribbean interculturation and by far the figure that has most haunted its narrative imagery. According to Maryse Condé, the Caribbean creolization could be also associated with a “mangrove swamp” (Condé, 1995, p. 23), stretching between sea and earth.5 Mangrove roots, in fact, do not necessarily precede the tree as the latter may shoot down new roots from its branches. This lack of correspondence between roots and trees refers to the impossibility of cultural genealogy or authenticity in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, despite its lack of recognizable roots/origins, Maryse Condé repeats the fishermen’s definition of the mangrove as being “the roots of the sea”, without which the sea “would have no meaning” (Condé, 1995, p. 23). This interesting definition of the mangrove reminds us of the peculiar significance of Caribbean hybridity, which

5 The idea of the mangrove from the Caribbean Sea has at its core the metaphor of the Creole identities in Jean Rhys’ novels.



Imagining the “Black Atlantic”: Trans-Racial Identity 

 39

is not to be intended as an easy amalgamation irrespective of its different origins, but as the proud affirmation of a complexity, a Creoleness (a term coined by Edouard Glissant) without which the Caribbean would not exist (and without which, as a con­ sequence, what I refer to as the West will not be the same).

1.7 Imagining the “Black Atlantic”: Trans-Racial Identity The image of the ‘Black Atlantic’ is at once a metaphoric substitution, an illusion of presence and by that same token a metonym, a sign of its absence and loss. It is precisely from this edge of meaning and being, from this shifting boundary of other­ ness within identity that we can ask: ‘What does a black man want?’ The black man wants the objectifying confrontation with otherness; in the colonial psyche there is an unconscious disavowal of the negating, splitting moment of desire. In this section, I aim to explore the ambivalent, uncertain questions of colonial desire with a study case of Jean Rhys’ Caribbean writing. We can think of a corre­ spondence between the mise-en-scène of unconscious fantasy and the phantoms of racist fear (the language of colonial racism) and hate that stalk the colonial scene. In writing The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy wanted to devise a theoretical approach to understanding race that encompassed three crucial elements: the idea of race as fluid rather than static; as a transnational and intercultural, rather than strictly national, phenomenon; the focus here will be on analyzing resistance to racism as a phenomenon that emerged transnationally and diasporically. Gilroy seeks to provide a theoretical framework of race that bridges the hemi­ spheres. In order to do this, he takes the Atlantic as his preferred unit of analysis and uses it to ground his transnational perspective on race, with extent to transracial identity. In Gilroy’s view the ‘Black Atlantic’ represents the history of the migratory movements of people of African descent from Africa to Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Through these transnational lenses it can be viewed how ideas about nationality and identity were formed. In cultural criticism, the concept of the Black Atlantic focuses on traveling identities as well as on the process creolization (seen as a cultural artifact); thus, the Caribbean is a hybridized form of the cultural identity. The author maps the Atlantic Ocean as a way to categorize a whole series of trans­oceanic exchanges in the past and in the present and in so doing seeks to move beyond racially essentialist ways of thinking which posit a pure and singular black (or African) culture. In supporting the hybrid nature of black culture and the deep connections between the formation of modernity and the formation of black culture, Gilroy points to the fact that modernity is itself a hybrid phenomenon. The idea of movement (traveling) is central to Gilroy’s argument. Hence, the image of a ship forms a central metaphor in the text. Gilroy describes ships as microsocial systems that focus one’s attention on the circulation of ideas as well as identifying

40 

 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts

them as cultural and political artifacts. Slave ships are particularly central to Gilroy’s argument as he considers slavery as a fundamental moment for the emergence of modernity, modern ideas of race, and the Black Atlantic as, in his words, “a counter­ culture of modernity” (Gilroy, 1994, p. 34). It was the racism and modernity that led people of African descent to search for ways to construct oppositional identities and retain a sense of cultural integrity and forge common cultural memories. As referred to above, Gilroy denies ethnicity as a basis of identity, yet still alludes to a ‘Black Atlantic’ which needs some common inheritance. As a result, Gilroy evokes a ‘travelling culture’ in the African diaspora which is seen as liberating. According to Eceheruo, Gilroy ‘acts’ to restrain the essence of diaspora – the notion of exile. One thing we can learn from Eceheruo in order to problematise the question of identity is that no matter how complex and mixed a diaspora is “you cannot belong” (Eceheruo, 1999, p. 9). Whereas black people may have, as Gilroy sets forth, some space to manipu­ late this space is not limitless: “[…] the predicament for those who have a problem choosing where to belong is that they cannot quite get themselves to realize that their options in the matter are very limited indeed” (Gilroy, 1994, p. 11). Paul Gilroy does not have a choice of identities in this context of the “instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade” (Eceheruo, 1999, p. 9). So, the dynamics of identity within diaspora are highly complex and, to an extent, contingent on other factors. This process of ‘articulation’ “is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” (Grossberg, qtd. in Patterson and Kelley, 2000, p. 19). The main point here is to see that this enunciation is reinforced by racial and gender forces, so that individuals within diaspora are not free to determine their own identities. This fact points to the final element in the diasporic consciousness: the question of return. The individuals or groups have different relations to ‘home’ and return: some see Africa in idealistic terms, while others perceive home as a dynamic entity, so that it is without meaning to think of a genuine home to return to. The images we have here are multiple imaginings of home dependant upon the cultural circumstances and the level of consciousness. For example, in talking about the relationship between Car­ ibbean identity and the African home, Stuart Hall comments “The original ‘Africa’ is no longer there. It too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible” (Hall, 1996, p. 233). Such a personal interretation of the diasporic issue led Kwame Appiah to argue that “what­ever Africans share, we do not have a common traditional culture, common language, common religious or conceptual vocabulary” (Appiah, 1993, p. 26). Brah also gathers in his idea of ‘homing’ the power of return and home, in which there is a lingering desire that may or may not be realised in reality. Ece­ heruo approves this idea by saying that: “The power of the idea lies in the principle of it; that a return is possible forever, when­ever, if ever” (Eceheruo, 1999, p. 4). This ‘gathering of exile’ or ‘prophetic vision’ of the return from exile makes the diasporic identity different from other group identities.



Imagining the “Black Atlantic”: Trans-Racial Identity 

 41

Furthermore, in his article There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy focuses upon the linkage between a deterritorialised, diasporic black consciousness and the local and territorialized identity politics of whiteness, which produces a variety of ‘hybrid’ cultural practices and collective identities. He asserts that “Black Britain defines itself crucially as part of a diaspora. Taking into account the condition of the colonial world, we can see the colonizer caught in the ambivalence of paranoic identification, a Manichean allegory of his colonial consciousness. In this case, the white man is projecting his fears and desires on ‘them’. From this Manichean per­ spective, the native’s violence is a force intended to bridge the gap between the white as subject and the non-white, the Black man as object. Moreover, this fact reflects his view of the psychic structure of the colonial relation: the opposition between the native and the settler zones, like the overlaying of black and white bodies. In a Hege­ lian sense, this flash of ‘recognition’ fails to acknowledge the colonial relation: “And yet the Negro knows there is a difference. He wants it […] The former slave needs a challenge to his humanity” (Fanon, 1967, p. 21). In the absence of such a challenge, Fanon argues that the colonized can only imitate, never identify. Beyond the permeable boundaries of the colonial desire, the white masked black man lurks. Thus, it becomes possible to cross, even to shift those boundaries, for the strategy of the colonial desire is to stage the drama of identity at the point at which the black mask is trying to reveal the white skin. At the margins, the transformative forces in-between the black body and the white body changes the psychic of the ra­cialized subjects. Thus, in the Caribbean colonial discourse the stereotype of the mulata evokes contradictory feelings: fear and desire. At another level in the stratification of the social structure, the population of black ex-slaves who maintain their own kind of independence is placed. For instance, Sandi and Daniel Cosway, Alexander Cosway’s illegitimate children, both occupy this in-between position between black and white people. Moreover, Antoinette and her mother recognize their dependence on the black servants (Christophine), showing a respect that combines fear and resentment. In Rhys’ fiction every text includes fragmented elements of Afrocentric identity that acknowledge the culture of the Black Atlantic. Thus, in her fiction Rhys transgresses these Black ‘cultural aesthetical references’ under the form of ancestral Black legacy such as: Caribbean voodoo, obeah folk magic, religious practices from the West African culture that ‘crossed’ the Atlantic, towards her Dominican homeland. The rhetorical and stylistic strategies of the Afrocentric orality, strategies of parody, satire, and masquer­ ade anf folklore interrogate the colonial and metropolitan power structures in Wide Sargasso Sea through “forms of verbal artistry such as calypso that require economy and highly developed verbal play [and] permit a depth of signification without many words” (Savory, 1998). Albert Gilson writes that in the metropolis “she was subject to disparage­ ment reserved by the English for West Indian colonials whose racial identity was suspect and whose social position was questionable at best” (Gilson, 2004, p. 636). ‘The Atlantic world’ is a useful concept here, long a staple of slave-trade studies, recently given a cul­

Cristina-Georgiana Voicu

Retracted: 2 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism From the book Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction Retraction This chapter has been retracted by the Publisher due to concerns that have been raised by a third-party. The chapter includes without accreditation several passages from the article “Re-Orienting the Gothic Roman” by David McInnis that was published in the journal Ariel – A Review of International English Literature, Volume 39, Issue 3 (2008), pp.85-105.

3 Constructing Cultural Identity in Jean Rhys’ Fiction 3.1 Ethnocentrism versus Eurocentrism As previously mentioned and starting from the perspective of the image of a distinct Car­ ibbean society reflected as a mixture of both African and European cultures, the cultural process has to be seen as a dynamic and informing counterpoint at the centre of imperi­ alism. This Eurocentric culture codifies and observes everything about the non-European (the ‘other Europe’) or peripheral world. In this respect, I can say that at the heart of the European culture during the many decades of imperial expansion lies Eurocentrism. This experience allowed ‘European men of business’ the power ‘to scheme grandly’. Soyinka claims that the concept of negritude is that lower term which “accepted the dia­ lectical structure of European ideological confrontations but borrowed from the very compo­ nents of its racist syllogism” (Soyinka, 1976, p. 27). In this case, the Europeans are analytical, the ‘other Europe’ being ‘incapable of analytical thought. Therefore, the other ‘is not highly developed’ whereas the European is. T.S. Eliot declared that “when we speak of ‘European Culture’, we mean the identities which we can discover in the various national cultures…There can be no European culture if these countries are reduced to identity” (Eliot, 1971, p. 120-121). First used by William G. Sumner, after he observed the difference between the ingroups and outgroups, ethnocentrism was considered to be the tendency of a group (in-group) to consider its members and values as superior to the members and values of other groups (out-groups). The use of this term has become quite complex: “thinking one’s own group’s ways as superior to others” or “judging other groups as inferior to one’s own”. In addition, Agnes Heller writes of how “‘ethnocentricism’ is the natural attitude of all cultures towards alien ones” (Heller, 1984, p. 271). In such descriptions, ethnocentricism becomes a term for how the self or subject imposes itself upon or constitutes the other as alien to itself, in a relation of active antagonism. In this connection, ethnocentrism therefore implies a complacent cultural supe­ riority or an implicit racism. Ethnocentrism therefore reinforces or directly asserts a particular cultural identity. Whether ethnocentrism is that of a dominant or a mar­ ginalized culture, the term connotes an exclusive, ‘centred’ perspective. I should also point out that for Jacques Derrida ethnocentrism, respectively ethnology is: “primar­ ily a European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them. Consequently whether he wants to or not – and this does not depend on a decision on his part – the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentri(ci)sm at the very moment when he denounces them. The necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency” (Derrida, 1978, p. 282). However, since a person is used with his/her birth culture, it must be difficult for the person to see the people’s behaviours from a different culture and from the viewpoint of that culture rather than from his/her own. In this case, the ethnocentric person may also adopt a new culture, rejecting his/her birth culture, considering that the adopted culture is somehow superior to the birth culture. © 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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When, for example, in the closing chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon encourages his ‘brothers’ to “leave this Europe where they are never talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them”, where “they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience” (Fanon, 1968, p. 79), he contends that humanism expresses itself in the cultural legitimation of colonialism. In general, ethnocentrism puts someone’s ethnic, national and religious identity as the norm to judge other countries and cultures, or even subgroups in their own society. Since the other cultures or groups can never fully conform to the standards or criteria defined by another group to apply to itself, it tends to imply a biased judge­ ment about ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Their own cultural context is automatically perceived as positive, as good and any deviation from this will be interpreted as a weakness, as something ‘uncivilized’, or as morally inferior. Eurocentrism is a mental attitude to perceive non-Europeans as less relevant, less modern, less civilized, and less than equal. In the context of the ‘internal’ production of identity, the ‘external’, ‘other’ culture is not really the topic, but only a pretext for fabricating a positive self-image. The reality of ‘the other’ does hardly matter, since it is only an arbitrary occasion for self-reflection. The arbitrary transfer of difference into a negative value judge­ ment historically has been linked to uneven power-relations. In this sense, Euro­ centrism can be seen because of colonialism by Western powers, being more a cul­ tural product than a historical entity, which also points out that ‘European identity’ is rather a construction than a ‘reality’. European imperialism has impelled these hegemonic conceptions: “Without significant exceptions, the universal speeches of modern Europe assume silence about the “non-European” world. There is incorporation, inclusion; there is direct rule, there is coer­ cion; but, rarely, there is recognition.” (Said, 1994, p. 9)

Rattansi adds that: “identities, relationally and contingently formed, are constituted by power relations, and are always open to ‘dislocation’ and threatened by the ‘out­ sid­er’ or ‘other’ which in part defines the positive elements” (Rattansi, 1994, p. 31). To conclude, the European identity concept, as far as the ‘Otherness’ is con­ cerned, can lead to ethnocentrism or ‘Eurocentrism’, which is not simply a question of prejudices and errors. Within a culture, the individual creates his/her own ghetto (identity) where he/she does not want to be criticized and becomes self-satisfied.

3.2 Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity Dealing with the history of cultural borrowings, “culture is never just a matter of own­ ership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among dif­ ferent cultures” (Said, 1994, p. 262).



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Ethnicity and identity are two dynamic constructs. On one hand, identity is the recognition that certain features of the individuals belong to certain categories. On the other hand, ethnicity includes the entire cultural characteristics that are recog­ nized to be common in a group, and yet different from those of other groups. If an individual belongs to a specific group, this is called ethnic identity. In these social groups, ethnicity is greatly involved with individual identity. Accordingly, ethnic identity is obvious found in these groups. In such groups, characteristics of groups other than kinships are used as a marker to symbolize ethnicity and express their identity against other groups. In such conditions, the processes of conflicts and con­ flict resolution move on. Thus, some people become conscious about their identity and seek an answer from ethnicity that has lost the basis for identity. Stuart Hall argues that “ethnicity in the form of a culturally-contrasted sense of Englishness and a particularly closed, exclusive and regressive form of English national identity, is one of the core characteristics of British racism” (Hall, 1996, p. 29). He does this in order to “decouple ethnicity… from its equivalence with nationalism, imperial­ ism, racism and the state, which are the points of attachment around which a distinc­ tive English ethnicity has been constructed” and for the need “to develop a new cultural politics and a new conception of ethnicity… which engages rather than suppresses dif­ ference” (Hall, 1996, p. 30). This point is, by no means, a gradual shift from national and ethnocentric forms of racism to Eurocentric or pan-European forms of racism. The concept of identity, as rooted in the positivist framework, was developed by Erik Erikson in his Identity: Youth and Crisis. By modifying and expanding Freud’s stages of psychosexual development, Erikson places a greater emphasis on the social context of the process of identity formation, by stating that one cannot separate “the identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crisis in historical development because the two help define each other and are truly relative to each other” (Erikson, 1974, p. 23). Identity crisis becomes thus the core concept characterizing the individ­ ual’s lifespan, as he/she tries to discover the answer to permanent questions such as “Who am I”, “Where do I come from?” or “What do I want to become?”. Erikson’s theory makes reference to the roles society, history, and culture play, but he never explic­ itly addresses the role of subculture or the in­terplay of race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and sexuality. His insight into the development of personal identity, however, might prove useful in respect to subsequent psychological theories, as he clearly asserts the idea of identity not being given per se, to the individual by the society, but rather “searched for” through one’s personal efforts. This search for identity is apparently completed in Erikson’s view through an ability to grasp a positive outcome of the identity crisis, and consequently, through an ability to accept the historical and social input one receives and to establish a sense of continuity with the present and the future. By developing a commitment to peer recognition, the individual become thus, in Erikson’s terms, a participant in a relation of “psychosocial reciprocity” which later enables him to gain a “sense if knowing where one is going” (Erikson, 1974, p. 118). As he explores the process of identity formation, Erikson identifies the crisis in

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the adolescence period, when the identity confusion stage takes place. However, as James Marcia later argues, this search for identity is not necessarily bound to a specific period of the lifespan, although it might originate there. Extending Erikson’s research, Marcia focused on the idea of identity as a result of choice. Instead of seeing the mind as absorbing outer input and identity being created through effort of the individual to cope with the peer’s requirements, he proposes the model of exploration followed by commitment. The identity crisis is thus perceived as a repeatable moment in which the individual re-evaluates his/her options as well as the social status, in order to commit to a specific path. It is also why Marcia’s four-stage development in not necessarily linear, as crisis might occur in various moments of one’s experience. This is the point where the psychological framework leaves room for cultural interpretations of identity, as we are able to shift perspective from the individual experience in general, to that of a minority subject. While the foreclosure stage (in Marcia’s terms), characterized by an acceptance of identity as given or imposed, could thus correspond to identity being inscribed in one’s ethnic being in the traditional background of colonial studies, the moratorium stage could stand for the active exploration of alternatives characterizing the contemporary ethnic subject. Identity within an ethnic environment purports yet another set of questions, which, whilst implying a similar developmental staging, also add a mark of cultural recognition. As Stuart Hall’s asserts, “identity emerges as a kind of unsettled space, or an unre­ solved question in that space, between a number of intersecting discourses […] Identity is a process, identity is split. Identity is not a fixed point but an ambivalent point. Iden­ tity is also the relationship to the Other to oneself” (Hall, 1989, p. 6). The psychological approach therefore enables cultural critics to enlarge the vision upon the subject to a vision on the entire community, but, however paradoxical, bearing in mind the individ­ uality of each member as well as of his/her experience as a “different” subject. To a certain extent, the concept of ethnicity, has replaced the idea of race, and it is this particular instance that left room for constant reevaluation, even from within the essentialist approach. Ethnic group, in this view, is very much like ‘race’, as biological implications always tend ‘to creep back in’ (Tonkin, 1989, p. 17). Furthermore, she concludes that ‘ethnicity’, then, is an abstract noun, “derived by non-vernacular morphological pro­ cesses from a substantive that does not exist” (Tonkin, 1989, p. 17). The ‘Ethnic group’ is a collocation often used in covert synonymy for another term, ‘race’, and ‘ethnic­ ity’, becomes an attribute which aspires to a more positive status as an ‘analytical concept’. Tonkin, as well as more elaborate studies such as Thomas Eriksen’s Ethnicity and National­ism, emphasize the ambiguity surrounding the term, insofar as to justify its appeal to current research. However, Eriksen dismisses the racial identification of ethnicity in social anthropology, all the while admitting that “in everyday language the word ethnicity still has a ring of ‘minority issues’ and ‘race relations’, but it oth­ erwise refers to aspects of relationships between groups which consider them­selves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive” (Eriksen, 2002, p. 3). Erik­



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sen’s major concern, however, is not that of identifying the meaning of ethnicity itself, but rather analyzing the different opposing tendencies towards its social and aca­ demic perception. Hence, his study identifies the two ongoing debates regarding the perception of ethnic identity. On the one hand, the primordialist view collides with the instrumentalist, as he elaborates on the common ancestry the members of ethnic groups share. While agreeing that ethnicity sometimes brings forward common cul­ tural grounds, the instrumentalists focus on their political use and hence reverse the origins of ethnic groups from being ancestral to being rooted in a particular historical moment. The use of ethnicity as an instrument of social difference results in a view upon ethnic identity as an outcome of the knowledge of a common ancestry. Its effec­ tiveness in influencing the process of identity formation revolves around the way in which this knowledge is put to use. It is in this point that Eriksen declares ethnicity as a “fluid and ambiguous aspect of social life” (Eriksen, 2002, p. 32) and stipulates the fact that, whether on an individual or a community level, it can be manipulated by different agents. Identity, before being assumed, is therefore a matter of necessity and choice. Ethnic identity is negotiated, and by assuming different cultural positions, the subjects often confront another issue, namely that of whether or not to make eth­ nicity relevant. It is among Eriksen’s goals to blur the boundaries of essentialist views of race and ethnicity and introduce the complex positioning of the ethnic subject in a modern environment, where the melting pot “never occurred” (Eriksen, 2002, p. 8) and hence the criteria which constitute it vary correspondingly. Eriksen study is rel­ evant as it encompasses the idea of ethnicity being inscribed among the features of identity, all the while leaving it as an open subject, to be debated upon, from within and the outside of an ethnic community. While acknowledging the fluidity of the concept, Eriksen provides the idea of ethnic variation, based both on his research in the Caribbean and his approval of Frederik Barth’s theory of ethnic boundaries. The later states that research on ethnic­ ity should be focused on the boundaries that delimit and perpetuate the existence of a specific group (such as language, food), and not necessarily on the ‘cultural stuff’. In this way, both anthropologists deny the approach to ethnicity as characteristic to specific cultural units, allegedly called ‘ethnic groups’. Instead, they advocate the idea that ethnicity is not an isolated issue and that identity must be defined from within, from the members’ perspective. In Barth’s terms, ethnic membership must therefore be acknowledged in order to fully influence their “basic, most general iden­ tity” (Barth, 1998, p. 15). In this line of anthropological studies, Richard Schemerhorn’s explorations of ethnic groups as minorities, based on the assumption that these are necessarily “parts of a larger society, having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood” (Schemerhorn, 1970, p. 12) serve as a striking opponent. It is the opinion largely shared by previously mentioned primordialist ide­ ologies, which nevertheless influenced a number of essentialist views on identity as

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being inscribed in a group’s social and psychological structure. While these views originate in Clifford Geertz’s ‘primordial ties’ that interact with the drive for personal identity as well as in Max Weber’s “belief in blood relationship” as the starting point for political action, they have been frequently argued for, especially by those within the ethnic communities, who acknowledge their difference or excess based on a dif­ ferent or even absent set of criteria. Among the reference points that linked anthro­ pological studies and minority views in recent research, literature has played an important part as the means through which identity is acknowledged and assumed. Following the identity crisis of the mid-twentieth century, ethnic groups have largely de-constructed the previous labels of ethnicity, both in terms of social recognition and literary manifestations. While anthropologists were more interested in the dynamics of group interaction, cultural critics focused their attention on identity as the core element of progression. To this purpose, ethnicity transferred its fluidity onto the concept of identity as constructed rather than assumed, and the extent to which label­ ing influences this construction became more relevant than the actual label itself. In Invention of Ethnicity, Werner Sollors argues that ethnic identity is “not a thing, but a process   – and it requires constant detective work from the reader, not a settling on a fixed encyclopedia of supposed cultural essentials” (Sollors, 1989, p. 15). While analyzing the premises upon which these essentialist views are founded, Sollors nev­ ertheless acknowledges the fact that it is almost impossible to separate the historical upbringing of a community, its pre-assumed identity triggered by cultural traits such as religion, customs or myths, from the ‘modernizing features’ among which ethnicity seems to have been the most ‘fashionable’ one. Furthermore, by seeing ethnicity as a ‘cultural construct’, he also foregrounds the limitations of the theory, as being “not a category that explains other phenomena, but rather as that which needs to be under­ stood and explained” (Sollors, 1989, p. 8). This disorientation is thus specific to the masculine dominant discourse, unable to cope with the insertion of minority litera­ ture into mainstream. Furthermore, the reluctance to acknowledge a particular ethnic identity is also caused by the sole fluidity that ethnicity employs, in that various minority cultures appear to bear similar characteristics, hence seem interchangeable. In a more recent analysis, Deborah Madsen identifies this space as “a neither, nor territory” (Madsen, 2001, p. 78). Immigrant identity has traditionally been associated with a lack of physical place of residence and the appropriation of a new one. In this respect, configurating an identity in a place that does not recognize the subject as being a natural inhabitant is often a matter of compensating a lack, may it be of a home, of cultural roots or of a monolithic identity. The ‘outside the map’ configura­ tion, however, serves as a counterpart to these almost integrative perceptions. The immigrant identity is located in a space that is neither here (as in the actual space of physical and spiritual residence), nor there (as the real or imaginary homeland), but in a new place, in-between and above the two territories. Writing the identity becomes in this way an act of recognition in itself, and while ethnicity is no longer recognized as innate, it becomes a part of the process through



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which communities appropriate this in-between space. It becomes relevant in this context to refer to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which discusses the concept of nation as an ‘artifact’ of political creativity. Unlike political propaganda, literature serves the urge of small communities to create their own sense of belonging­ ness, but not to an inclusion into a larger nation-state, but rather to a spiritual commun­ ion with fellow-members. In this respect, developing an ethnic identity in the context of nationalist movements does not equal an awakening to self-consciousness, but rather an ‘invention’ of it. Cultural critic Homi Bhabha takes the argument even further in stating that the identity of the postcolonial subject is constantly being narrated, and the concept of ethnic communion arises from a shift of perspective. Instead of being inscribed in a text, as if it were a priori element of cultural determination, ethnicity results from the written narrative of minority groups. In the absence of an unspoken ethnic voice, which traditional criticism tends to assume in the creation of marginal lit­ erature, when ethnicity becomes a product, an outcome of the process of identity for­ mation? The movement from the essentialist to the constructionist ap­proaches is thus visible not only on the level of the exterior perception, but also in the way in which members of the community themselves de-center the focus on cultural dif­ference and place it on cultural identity as process. Stuart Hall attributes this decentering to four major intellectual shifts in modern literary and psychosocial scholarship: the de-au­ thorization of Western rationality as the source of universal knowledge and truth; the theoretical postulations of Marx regarding the historical construction of the subject; Freud’s grounding of identity in psychic processes; and Saussure’s concept of sub­ jectivity as a construct of language (Hall, 1989, p. 15). By challeng­ing the previous stability of the subject as being rather than becoming, the concept of identity came to be reconceptualized as something that “happens over time, that is never absolutely stable, that is subject to the play of history and the play of difference” (Hall, 1989). Masculinity was not always deemed as an area of research and problematization. Undoubtedly, the Eurocentric racism was a major factor in the maintenance of the myth of masculinity. One sure result of the rise of feminist theory was to question this static notion of male gender identity as if (all) elements that seemed to comprise its essence were quite untouchable. In this respect, the construction of gender identities is interpreted not along the lines of the manifestation of inner essences but seen as socially constructed as well as historically shifting. This approach seeks to critique the praxis of masculinity and strives towards emancipation, a greater freedom and human dignity for all: “...much philosophy in the Continental tradition is concerned with giving a philosophical cri­ tique of the social practices of the modern world that aspires towards a notion of individual or societal emancipation.” (Critchley, 2001, p. 54)

Far from being contradictory, the conceptions of masculinity are thus acknowledged as constructions that emerge from society and are inherently contingent:

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“The phenomenon of masculine gender constructions is recognized as an ideology that exerts a profound influence on the structure of society. Masculinity has emerged as a critical area of enquiry in the field of gender and cultural studies and is embedded in sexism, modernism, cap­ italism and imperialism”. (Nurse, 2004, p. 3-4)

A problem that could arise would be that of the constructs of masculinity, which some tend to become dominant or hegemonic. True to their ideological nature they exist in opposition to and at the expense of other configurations of ethnicity with racial and sexist overtones. These often perpetuate the ‘us-them’ binary that fosters disin­ tegration and disconnection among human beings. The subjectification of the ‘other’ through ‘difference’ (e.g. stigmatization, stereotyping) has proved to be fundamental to the “constitution of hegemonic masculinity” (Nurse, 2004, p. 7). In the Caribbean region much of the hegemonic hyper-masculine attributes seem to come out from Jamaica. The notion of hegemonic masculinity coins the idea that a particular construct of what it means to be a real man emerges and lodges itself as the dominant paradigm toward which all others must aspire. To sustain this, in Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Edward Rochester is no longer being able to see himself as “a tall fine English gentleman” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 94) within the dominant pa­triarchal frame as a whole male subject. Thus, Rhys’ Edward is part of a world which does not recognize him and in which the dominant Colonial power resists patriarchal order. Being in a “marginal” position, he cannot explore the pos­ sibility of a male subjectivity whihc does not participate in the masculine narrative of self-definition. Rochester’s silence compromises his masculinity; he refuses to speak in order to assert his homogenous and hegemonic self. This silence effec­ tively blocks the understanding of the male character of Rochester and ironically colonises and subdues his voice and so, in a way, blocks the understanding of the male in general and of his masculinity in particular. In the process of construct­ ing the masculine identity as inherently related with silence, the text silences that identity. The self-image of Edward Rochester at the end of Part Two in Rhys’ novel is one of a hateful man who cannot draw out anything but pity on the part of the reader. The quotation below shows exactly what Edward has lost, namely, the belief in the nature of phallic power and by extension his recognition of himself as a male subject: “I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 172).

Rhys’ Edward Rochester wants to negotiate his position regarding the powerfull male narrative(s)/subjectivity, and he wishes for others to reconcile themselves to his con­ jectures. Rochester must be seen as an identity in flux, emphasizing an important aspect of his character, namely, his masculinity, a characteristic that might otherwise



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be missed by readers who might be too ready to read Edward as an entire representa­ tive of patriarchal values. Exploring the concept of masculinity, both directly and metaphorically, Rhys rep­ resents the legal inferiority of women as an injustice. For example, Rochester marries Antoinette for her money; he gains £30,000 and control over not only her assets and inheritance but also her movements. He expresses his intentions of making financial provisions for her, but is under no legal obligation to do so. Locking his wife in the attic may be morally indefensible, but in the 1840s it was entirely within his rights to do so, and may even have been considered as the right and proper course of action; Jane Eyre certainly does not question his actions. Rochester’s power over Antoinette is symbolised by renaming her Bertha despite her opposition on several occasions. Indeed, Antoinette loses her original identity entirely as her name is changed to reflect first Mr. Mason and Richard Mason’s power over her, and then Rochester’s supremacy. Women of the nineteenth century would not have expected to retain their names following adoption or marriage, so losing Cosway in favour of Mason and later Rochester is not to be regarded as unusual or abusive. Losing her first name and being called Bertha, however, is peculiar to Antoinette, and is an emphatic rein­ forcement of the idea that she is losing her identity as much as her inheritance upon marriage. The extent of Rochester’s power over Antoinette is further inferred when he ruins Granbois for her: “I used to think that if everything else went out of my life I would still have this, and now you have spoilt it” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 88). At the beginning of the honeymoon, Antoinette is more powerful than her husband, as she knows the island, the servants and customs, but she slowly loses this ascendancy because Roches­ ter, by grace of his gender alone, is seen as the master over the land and its inhabitants. Rochester blames his early passivity on weakness from the fever; in the beginning of the honeymoon, he goes swimming, and has breakfast instead of making love because Antoinette tells him to. When Rochester perceives Antoinette as sane, the power balance between the characters is much more even – when she gives money to the blacks at Granbois he doesn’t question her right to do so – but he gains the upper hand by reducing Antoinette’s sense of identity when he renames her against her wishes. Rochester rationalises away his early fondness for his wife, denying he ever loved her and viewing his attachment to her as a weakness. He describes his tender pleas that she goes through with the wedding as “half-serious blandishments and prom­ ises” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 53-54), and dismisses the romance of the early days of their honeymoon as the folly and ignorance of youth. Christophine, unencumbered by both marriage and British marriage laws, advises Antoinette to leave Rochester when it becomes apparent that the marriage has broken down irretrievably, but Antoinette knows this is not an option because Rochester not only owns her wealth and property but also has legal control over her body. Rochester is highly aware of his power over his wife as he premeditates her imprisonment: “she’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 165). The reader’s complacent

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acceptance of perceived superiority is defied in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rochester, faced with the different geography, climate, food, fashion and culture of the West Indies, compares them continually and unfavourably to England and Europe: “Everything is too much…Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 41). The Jamaican language is described in a derogatory manner as “debased French patois” instead of being recognised as having a complex linguistic heritage from Europe, Africa and the West Indies. Only the European influence is considered valuable by Rochester, who ignorantly dismisses Island culture as worthless and invalid. Rochester stepping on the honeymoon wreath of frangipani flowers, crushing it beneath his heel and care­ lessly leaving it on the floor, is a metaphor for his contempt for the West Indian culture, concisely symbolizing his refusal and inability to adapt. To conclude, Rochester cannot accept the West Indies as reality even after he comes to know them well, and yet is annoyed when Antoinette thinks of England as “like a cold, dark dream”, reinforcing the imperialist concepts of English superiority.

3.3 Fractal Identity This section proposes a rhetorical discourse on cross-cultural identity or the so-called fractal identities. The emphasis of this section is on the individual’s discursive con­ struction of its own identity. In its discursive construction, our identity is constructed and we are positioned through texts written by other people. Situated between Benítez-Rojo’s chaotic postmodern perspective and Edouard Glissant’s classical modern rhizomic one (according to which the subject remains in its integral dimensionality), the fractal imagery of identity or the notion of ‘cul­ tural fractality’ or identitarian fractality that I intend to introduce begins to emerge from the fractal geometry which proceeds from the contrary fact that the identitarian dimensions can be non-integral, some of them being fractional. Thus, the cultural dimensions, in this light, are fractional, one being ‘in-between’ them. Where fractal­ ity prevails, the repeated magnification of its representation reveals each finer level of details which remains constant through successive magnifications. The conceptual leap I am now asking the reader to make is to accept that the cultural patterns are more like coast lines or speech waves than the fixed Euclidian figures (squares or circles). Mandelbrot coined the term ‘fractal’, from Latin fractus, broken to describe the endlessly, recursive and self similar patterns, not only because fractals look frac­ tured, but because the scalar perspectives and dimensions within which they arise are fractional, a notion explained above. This is the pattern which I have in mind as model of identitarian fractality, that of an ‘artificial intersubjectivity’, itself reposing, in its turn, on the principle that memory and cognition of the cultural identity are fractally structured in clusters within clusters, which are in turn within clusters.



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In this subchapter, I show how this process of identity (re)construction can be viewed as a complex system. In other words, the “self” is constructed through the emergence of several other “selves”; each of these selves interacts with the others, influencing and being influenced by them. In this respect, I can say it is a complex system, once it is compounded by several parts. However, the occurrence of these many selves does not only cause the fragmentation of the social identity, but it also helps create a sense of “wholeness”. In my interpretive paradigm, I also introduce the concept of fractal identity, an identitarian hologram whose parts, when broken or destroyed, ‘identically’ preserve the features of the whole. The premise from which I started was that the literary work, seen as a form generated by the principle of diversity and structural complexity, can be interpreted as a fractal model (applied to Rhys’ characters), meeting specific composi­ tional rules defined by Mandelbrot’s theory. Thus, all five fractal principles (primacy detail, non-linearity, the primacy of contemplation, internal omotetia and fractal dimension) are to be found in Jean Rhys’ fiction. In this sense, the fractal perspective on Jean Rhys’ characters restored the link between I and Other; the fractal dimension of the self integrates the presence of a fluid continuum, the ego no longer being an individual, but a knot of identitarian relations. In this sense, I suggest using the notion of ‘fractalized identities’ instead of ‘fragmented identities’ due to the fact that the word “fragmented” refers to “broken pieces”, as if the emerged identities were considered isolated constructions of one’s self. Finally, based on the “butterfly effect” and the notion of identity as a complex system, the process of identity reconstruction could be described. Thus, borrowing the properties of fractals, I suggested the term fractalized identities to emphasize that the process of identity emergence through Jean Rhys’ dis­ course does not fragment the individual into pieces, just makes the self more complex. However, while the internal fragmentation of the self has no connection with the external factors such as one’s sociohistorical location (first property of fractals), the second property of the fractals, self-similarity, evokes the idea of the whole. In other words, no matter the number of internal fractalizations, the parts are interconnected into a whole which is self-similar to the parts. According to Wenger, “[identity] is neither unitary, nor fragmented. It is an experience of multimembership, an intersec­ tion of many relationships that you hold into the experience of being a person, at once one and multiple” (Wenger, 1998, p. 135). From this quotation, we can acknowledge that the fractal identities influence each other in order to form a sense of ‘wholeness’. Based on these considerations I can say that, each fractal identity has all the prop­ erties of all the other fractals, and the identity as a whole keeps all the features of its component parts. Therefore, I argue for the usage of the metaphor “fractalized iden­ tities” to refer to the process of identity emergence and reconstruction. The under­ standing of identity as a complex system also enables us to acknowledge the fact that one of the reasons that each human being is unique in some way is because he / she is socially constituted. Moreover, it is also important to emphasize the importance of the bifurcation points in the cultural identity trajectory.

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If culture is organized fractally, then the identitarian fractality which strongly occurs in Jean Rhys’ middle novels implies a continually recursive mise-en-abyme, in which the images of the cultural identities, exposed to the hegemonic forces, dissolve and resolve into another infinitely layered realm of self-similar images. To return to the Caribbean paradigm, I can say that there is admittedly no intrinsic reason why the Caribbean is a better place than elsewhere to talk about cultural fractality. Paradox­ ically, the prominence of the Caribbean cultural identities is largely a backhanded effect of Eurocentrism. Yet what Benítez-Rojo called the ‘supersyncreticism’ of the Caribbean does justify its relevance as paradigm. Thus, the prefixes of supersyncreti­ cism and hyperhybridity are, in this context of fractality, exponential, and so interfere with the simple basis of their roots. Once hyperhybridity obtained, a window into cultural fractality opens. Though fractal boundaries (to keep working the same met­ aphoric vein) are extremely complex, the vast majority of the remaining ‘identitarian fractality’ can be quickly divided into in’s and out’s. So, it would seem that the anal­ ogous dichotomy of the cultural identities in the Caribbean region can be phrased as one between have’s and have not’s, or between us and them: “If someone needed a visual explanation, a graphic picture of what the Caribbean is, I would refer him to the spiral chaos, of the Milky Way, the unpredictable flux of transformative plasma that spins calmly in our globe’s firmament, that sketches in an ‘other’ shape that keeps chang­ ing, with some objects born to light, while others disappear into the womb of darkness; change, transit, return, fluxes of sidereal matter” (Benítez-Rojo, 1996, p. 4).

A close reading of this extended passage reveals the Caribbean interconnectivity through a ‘scientific’ imagery reminiscent of fractals. Thus: “…transcultural narratives might be possible as the ability of one narrative to create an emo­ tional response in more than one culture, even if the character of this response will vary from culture to culture. In this case transcultural narrative understood as a narrative common to two cultures is indeed still an impossibility, but the ability of a narrative to be translated and prolifer­ ated across cultures with differing functions would be possibile.” (Pan, 2004, p. 19)

From here there is a short step to the notions of ‘identity narrative’ and ‘narrative as identity’ proposed for cross-cultural identity by Charles Taylor who explores narrative as the most proper way to make sense of identity and by Paul Ricoeur, who argues that identity is actually quite self-narrative. Once again, narrative, and therefore identity, is conceived of as formally idealist: “It is indeed in the story recounted, with its qual­ ities of unity, internal structure, and completeness which are conferred by emplot­ ment, that the character preserves throughout the story an identity correlative to that of the story itself” (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 143). For Benita Parry, the cross-cultural identity is not regarded as some sort of hybrid identity, but as a “being in becoming” (Parry, 2004, p. 102). She also offered for the transcultured self the following definition which could serve very well for intertextuality as well:



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“As a working definition, the transcultured self may be described as one who… can dwell in travel, that is, who can temporarily acculturate to the other’s world, but without losing hold of the self. It is not a hybrid identity, but a being in becoming, one which is brought to a fuller rec­ ognition of itself through confrontation with difference and, simultaneously, to the sense of its own limitations.” (Parry, 2004, p. 102)

Now, it is important to note how these fractal identities interact in a way that gives a sense of “wholeness”. For example, in her narrative, Wide Sargasso Sea, after men­ tioning several of her identity fractals (Tia, her black friend, Christophine, her nurse, Rochester, her husband), the protagonist makes a final strong statement before the end of the book: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 155-156). With this statement she shows that the sense she has of herself was constructed from the interaction of her fractal identities. She also mentions the fact that all the knowledge acquired by these fractals is going to be used in the emergence of a forthcoming fractal identity: “a West Indian Creole woman”, not quite English, not quite native, which she mentions when she talks about her leaving to England. Finally, at the end of Antoinette’s narrative, we can ‘listen’ to the dialogue that is established between the narrator and the prospective readers. As Bakhtin has stated, all utterances have a conclusive character in the sense that they allow for a response from one “other”. Moreover, the narrator constructs her own voice with the voices of her previous narrators. In this respect, I am trying to demonstrate here how the Caribbean paradigm might contribute in constructing the narratives of fractal identity in three of Jean Rhys’ novels. For example, in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Rhys begins to raise more the issues of non-British, non-European origins. She intensifies the dislocation of her heroine, much of Julia’s private and social identity appearing to have been erased as a result of her displacement: “It was always places that she thought of, not people” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 9). Likewise, her appearance proves to be strangely disconnected from traditional markers of identity: “Her career of ups and downs had rubbed most of the hall-marks off her, so that it was not easy to guess at her age, her nationality, or the social background to which she properly belonged” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 125). In her second novel, Voyage in the Dark, originally called “Two Tunes”, Jean Rhys recounts Anna Morgan’s experiences in a modernist language that reflects the frag­ mented identity of the typical de-centered modernist subject. As in many other mod­ ernist texts, the heroine of the novel goes through authentic extremes. We see in Anna’s existence a juxtaposition common to the modernist form, in this case of the exotic and the urban, alongside the multiplicity of voices in the novel that represent Anna’s frag­ mented identity. What is interesting is to look at the different voices that constitute Anna’s identity and how she ends up in an inner space of illness where she can be safe from the real world. Anna Morgan’s life is a continuous search for her identity. Within the entire novel she is an observer of her own split self. She masks her own identity by trying to be what others expect her to be. Her cross-cultural identity is constructed

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through the fragmentation or disembodied images of different narrative voices. Anna is thus portrayed through different tones and voices articulated within her consciousness which try to usually define Anna’s identity as a child or a virgin. This contradictory experience that Anna suffers in her own flesh leads her towards a dark existence that will eventually give rise to a state of unconscious illness. This state of unconsciousness is her mask of sanity through which she tries to unmask her contradictory identity. Her masks are given by characters such as Walter, Muddy, Ethel or Laurie. The novel starts with a reference to the main spaces where Anna feels the major split of her identity: England and the West Indies. This can be considered the first bifurcation, namely, the West Indies which represents this idealized world where Anna feels herself in opposition to the world in England where she has to pretend to be someone different all the time: “Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, gray. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 1). One of the narrative voices that Anna perceives in this “English world”, namely Maudie, characterizes Anna from the beginning as a “lady”: “There is one thing about you, you always look ladylike” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 12). Anna’s reaction is that nobody wants to look like this, but throughout the novel she will try to confirm this identity that she is given. The second bifurcation takes place when Anna is named “Hottentot’, in order to construct her identity. In my opinion, this is even a more pejo­ rative way to portray Anna for the racist connotation this term carries, “She was born in a hot place (...) the girls call her the Hottentot” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 13); in other words there was not quite a true bifurcation of her identity system at this point. Anna is not even the one that utters the adjectives by which she is addressed; the other characters speak for her most of the time. Like Walter, Anna keeps silent while he “smiled as if he had sized me up” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 14). Up to this point, Anna has been portrayed as a child, Hottentot, a lady, or virgin: “the virgin she calls me” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 16). Throughout the entire novel Anna tries, at least before Walter leaves her, to conform to the different identities she is given. Yet, her feelings do not harmonize with her external way of acting: “I was thinking it was funny I could giggle like that because in my heart I was always sad [...]” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 15). This contradictory life is slowly killing Anna. The third bifurcation happens when Walter leaves her and a new fractal identity emerged with new pat­ terns of behaviors. She does not have anything to fight for and she starts receding into her illness, which is a kind of salvation. The “looking-glass” (the meta-symbol of her consciousness) is a recurrent image that reflects the way Anna feels when she is constantly portrayed as what she is not: “I walked up to the looking glass and put the lights on over it and stared at myself. It  was as if I was looking at somebody else” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 23). Anna cannot recognize herself because she is defined by others. “Have you ever noticed how different some looking glasses make you look?” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 38). She is not being able to recognize herself because she is what others want her to be. As



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much as Anna gets involved with Walter, she becomes even more his creation. “I want to be with you. That is all I want” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 50). “When he kisses me, I am hopeless, resigned, and utterly happy. Is that me?” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 57). Anna is afraid of being rejected, of being seen as “Other”, of not knowing who she is, “I’d been afraid for a long time. There is fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown [...]” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 96). Here, the fourth bifurcation point occurs and we see the contradiction of her fractal identity. Anna shows here that she is not what others want her to be. According to Laing’s analysis of the split-personality or fractal identity in Good Morning, Midnight, aspects of Anna’s identity conflicts become part of her life narra­ tive. Here, Rhys, beyond the experience of fragmentation, suggests that the complex world of Sasha Jensen’s psyche mirrors the portrayal of Laing’s schizophrenic initial sense of a divided self, from the network of intra-psychic relationships that replace the relationships with the external world. As Laing explains: “The individual’s self-relationship becomes a pseudo-interpersonal one, and the self treats the false selves as though they were other people whom it depersonalizes… From within, the self now looks out at the false things being said and done and detests the speaker and doer as though he were someone else. In all this there is an attempt to create relationships to persons and things within the individual without recourse to the outer world of persons and things at all. The indi­ vidual is developing a microcosmos within himself…” (Laing, 1960, p. 128)

The real action of Good Morning, Midnight occurs in Sasha’s cross-cultural microcos­ mos, where the most important identitarian actors are her different selves and the other actorial catalysts of her internal drama. Sasha’s first reference to her past sug­ gests the complex self-relations that underlie the surface of her aimless stay in Paris: “Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair sham­ pooned and set. Nobody would know I had ever been in it. Except, of course, that there always remains something…Never mind, here I am, sane and dry, with my place to hide in. What more do I want?... I’m a bit of an automaton, but sane, surely – dry, cold ans sane. Now I have forgotten about dark streets, dark rivers, the pain, the struggle and the drowning…” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 45)

The metaphor of drowning used by Rhys is aimed at introducing Sasha’s crossed/frac­ tal identity; she is literally ‘half-drowned’ and she has gained her sanity at the cost of her emotional life. Throughout the entire novel, Rhys plays with this image of a carefully maintained body (“a bit of an automaton”) and a self that has split off from it and remains at some distance. Thus, Laing’s analysis must be seen as the key to the consequences of Sasha’s split relationships with others. According to him, the split of the mental self from the physical body deprives it of contact with the underlying reality; the mental self renounces the chance to ‘realize’ itself through actual relation­ ships and in time, the original threat of a hostile reality is made of the fear that any real experience will compress the transcendent self into a real one.

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To conclude, I may say that the identity paradigm and the cultural fractality in Jean Rhys’ novels remain bound or framed within the limits of existing power rela­ tions, despite the harmonious impressions left by the images of a ‘kaleidoscopic iden­ tity’ that the rhizome of the identitarian discourses might suggest.

4 Jean Rhys and Intertextuality 4.1 Authorship In this subchapter, I will focus on feminist literary criticism, starting with two feminist critics who try to define what it means to be a woman writer in a patriarchal culture. Essentially, the “anxiety of influence” is about the writer’s “fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors assume essential priority over his own writings” (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000, p. 46). Bloom’s Oedipal model of the ‘strong poet’, whereby a “man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating his poetic father” is undoubtedly a masculinist model but one, as such, eminently suited to understanding the patrilinearity of Western literary history and the “psychosexual and socio­sexual con­ texts by which every literary text is surrounded” (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000, p. 47). By using a model of women’s cultural difference, I could argue that feminist critics can also incorporate ideas about their language, bodies and psyche, but they will “interpret them in relation to the social context in which they occur” (Showal­ ter, 2001, p. 197). Cultural theories identify women’s “collective experience within the cultural whole”, whilst simultaneously acknowledging important differences amongst women writers. Just to concentrate on the notion of the ‘wild of women’s culture’, a zone spatially, experientially and metaphysically rushed outside the dom­ inant boundaries, we may see that spatially it is a ‘no-man’s’ land; thus, forbidden to men, and experientially, includes parts of female lifestyle unlike those of men. In both these areas there are corresponding male zones, not open to women. Met­ aphysically, however – in terms of consciousness – there is no corresponding male experience alien to women. All male consciousness is within the boundaries of the dominant structures and thus accessible or structured by language. Although they have never experienced it first hand, women may know what male experience is like, since it has been the subject of myth and legend. But man can never know what is in the wild. It is always imaginary. “In their texts it becomes the place for revolutionary women’s language – the language of everything that is repressed” (Showalter, 2001, p. 201). Furthermore, the ‘wild zone’ represents the true arena for an examination of women’s difference. It is here that we will locate the essence of femininity. A cultural model of feminist criticism and women’s difference establishes the female tradition as a “positive source of strength and solidarity” as well as a “negative source of pow­ erlessness”. Since women exist within two traditions simultaneously, feminist critics must address themselves to both dominant and muted structures. Using the cultural model of gynocritics for Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, we will get two different perceptions of reality corresponding to ‘dominant’ and ‘muted’ groups. Within the text these two axes come in a variety of forms. The most obvious is the male/female dichotomy. But there is also a racial divide, primarily between the British and Jamaican communities (e.g. the protagonist’s white Creole origin of mixed Euro­ © 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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pean and Negro descent). Frequent references are made to the differences between the naturally wild landscape of the Jamaican countryside, and the memories of the cultivation and urbanization of England, representing the conflict between nature and culture. And perhaps most importantly, there is the contrast between madness and sanity. Gathering the ‘negatives’ from all the above oppositions, the novel con­ centrates on a portrayal of ‘Otherness’, of cultural negativity as defined by Western civilization’s system of signification – the ‘muted’ group. But it also challenges the classification system itself by depicting cultural negativity as a source of power and strength. Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen as an attempt to find a matriarchal and ‘natural’ female discourse. Metaphorically, we can trace the wild zone of the Jamai­ can landscape and lifestyle as a platform for that discourse, a space within, which the muted groups can speak. Yet the dominant culture is ever-present; embodied in British imperialism and personified by Rochester – hence the importance of the concept of madness in the novel, which must immediately become a relative term in its position at the centre of the debate about alternative perceptions of reality. For example, Wide Sargasso Sea deals with the gulf, due both to cultural and gender differences, between the experiences and lifestyle of its young Creole heiress – her perception of reality – and that of Rochester, the British, male imposter, which might be described as Jane’s hunger, rebellion and rage. By displacing Brönte’s Roch­ ester into an alien culture, Rhys attempts an inversion of the dominant ideology in order that she may allow the muted group to speak. The novel is initially concerned with Antoinette’s insecurity (and that of her whole family), due to their racial origin. Neither Antoinette nor her mother has either money or blackness to secure them an identity. Jean Rhys creates heroines whose desires rebel against the patriarchal domina­ tion of their social milieu and their subsequent oppression are enacted if not by them­ selves then by one or more ‘Others’ in the texts, such as Antoinette Cosway. Gilbert and Gubar continue to describe how female authors create characters that can, by virtue of their being unconventional or ‘mad’, enact the author’s, or indeed, the ‘vir­ tuous’ main character’s hidden desires to overturn the established order. Like Brontë, Rhys is drawn to using architectural spaces and doubling to represent the scarred, split female – and in this case, West Indian – psyche. She appropriates a metropol­ itan text and tries to dismantle its power through formal subversions and thematic contestations. In Rhys’ postcolonial, modernist prequel to Jane Eyre, the Caribbean mansions of Coulibri (burnt tragically down during the narrator’s childhood) and (decaying), Granbois set the scene for the heroine’s descent into madness. Antoinette’s ‘wicked’ stepfather, a British colonist, arranges her match with Rochester. Although there are moments of affection in their young marriage, Rochester cannot ‘read’ his foreign wife, and grows suspicious of her. He privileges a lying male relative’s slander about the family he’s married into over Antoinette’s emotional version of the truth, thus shat­tering her confidence. Her stability is further threatened when her black servant



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Amelie sleeps with Rochester, a liaison that furthers both Rochester’s need to assert power over Antoinette and Amelie’s scheme to improve her life (Here, and in other treatment of black characters, I can argue that Rhys shows the racist tendencies, which she ultimately rails against, in Brontë). Within the house of Granbois, a thin curtain separates Amelie and Antoinette, and Rochester says the two look alike – they are doubles. Their similarities highlight the opposing paths they take: Amelie uses her sexuality to further her own ends, while Antoinette remains in thrall to her husband, with no survival instinct in a hostile environment.  When the wavering Antoinette is re-christened ‘Bertha’ by Rochester, he consolidates his double-colonization of her. Spirited away from her Caribbean home, the last source of her waning mental strength, she comes to Thornfield, where she sets the house on fire in the book’s final pages. She re-enacts the fire that destroyed her childhood home and overall sense of safety, but she also reenacts the pivotal moment, which readers know from Brontë’s narrative, thus intertwining the two novels’ symbolic critique of male oppression. 

4.2 (Postcolonial) Intratext and (Metaphorical) Intertext In her middle novels, Rhys moves from the third-person narration of her first two novels to first-person narration by the heroines themselves, with a consequent, new emphasis on the heroines’ subjective lives. On the other hand, in her early novels like Voyage in the Dark, Rhys suggests that her heroine suffers from a sense of internal division between a responsive but co­vert inner self and a mechanical external one. In relationship with the ‘self’ stands the concept of ‘whiteness’. Clearly, rather than a racial concept, whiteness is presented in the text as the symbol of economic privilege and removal from multiple oppressions. For example, coming from a higher economic stratum, Antoinette, the protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea is privileged or ‘white’; yet, it is a relative privilege since, as a woman, she is exposed to patriarchal oppression, which makes her ‘partially white’ and closer to the social marginalization as a ‘woman of colour’. What is crucial is the ‘real…self’ in contrast to and in conflict with the language of the so-called external world, that is, a world that is not part of us or under our control. In my view, there is no such entity as the ‘external self’. There is one self (‘oneself’) and what is external to it. In this respect, there is no relationship or interaction between this self and the external world, and that oneself is not versional­ ized according to context and circumstance. Another ‘self’ related problem Rhys explores in Voyage in the Dark finds is that once this self is formed (Anna’s ‘real’ self), the protagonist of the novel, Anna can find no way of confirming it in England to which she later moves. Undoubtedly, Anna’s problem of self-constitution is origi­nally based in literal context, but that is only a beginning. Anna finds refuge from the exterior world in alcohol. This provides her with a strong feeling to dream. In this respect, reality and dreams begin to blur and her exist­

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ence is no longer external but a set of internal events occurring in her mind. Thus, her inner world is reduced to writing and lying in bed. By writing, she is able to express her internal thoughts. For example, through writing letters, she is able to give up all the anger and frustration of her existence. This shows the desperation of the writer and the unconscious character of her letters: “I love you I love you but you’re just a goddamned rotter everybody is everybody is everybody is (...)” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 104). This discontinuity of the narrative focuses more on Anna’s feeling of alien­ ation. She is locking herself into a more interior world from her own psyche. Anna’a need to live gets more difficult every minute: “I’m nineteen and I’ve got to go on living and living and living” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 109). Anna is, thus, reaching an extreme point in her existence: “It’s funny when you feel as if you don’t want anything in your life except to sleep (...). That’s when you can hear time sliding past you like water running” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 113). It is as if Anna was leaving her body: “I felt too much like a ghost” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 114). Moreover, Rhys finishes a lot of Anna’s thoughts repeating the same word, again and again. After becoming pregnant, Anna enters into a world of illness and despair. We can, thus, feel the isolation Anna experiences in this world of geographical disloca­ tion, psychological fragmentation and cultural alienation. Everything starts getting confusing for Anna. She dreams about a ship: “And the ship was sailing very close to an island, which was home except that the trees were all wrong. They were English trees” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 164). After this dream, in the last paragraph of part three, Anna leaves the real life: “Everything was always so exactly alike – that was what I could never get used to. And the cold” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 179). From the final quotation, we can see that nothing has changed in her life and at the end of the novel everything is the same. In this static stage, Anna starts a new life where she can unmask her identity and be herself. In the opening paragraph of Good Morning, Midnight the act of writing is estab­ lished immediately as a revelation of the speech con­text that is a metaphor and an instrument of oppression and power. We can also note the constraining quality of the ‘speaking’ room, which is like all the others, where the heroine-narrator finds herself – the rooms ‘going on endlessly’, just as the words on the (masculine) page do. Is this a paradigmatic schizophrenia? It is difficult to think so. The split-personality may fit the woman’s situation; the girl-child is brought up to respond, at least externally, to other people’s desires. Working out of this Freudian ‘Olympia complex’, the business of a thoughtful woman’s growing up remains in the form of automatic language responses that a woman sheds incompletely and only with deliberate, considered action. What is valuable for us in Rhys’ fiction is the identification of the locus of the speech. A few observations must be made concerning After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the novel written and published after Quartet. Rhys, of course, did precisely that: she left her books ‘about’. Rhys expressed her voice in Voyage in the Dark after she had used the third-per­ son, the so-called omniscient point of view in Quartet and After Leaving Mr. Mac-



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kenzie. In Voyage in the Dark, she discovers that the otherness of a woman’s voice is best displayed by adhering to that exact otherness. In making this technical shift, Rhys gives us not only a portrait of the ‘victim’, as her heroines are often de­scribed, but also, and more importantly, a portrait of the victimized speaker. She is a speaker whose native language practices are in pro­found contrast to, and collusion with, those very language practices that arc the instrument of her victimization. For example, in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, neither Horsfield nor the woman understands what she is trying to say. The attempt is highlighted by a picture of a woman that Ruth, the woman to whom Julia was talking, “had on the wall”: “And all the time I talked I was looking at a nun picture she had on the wall – a reproduction of a picture by a man called Modigliani. Have you ever heard of him? This picture is of a woman lying on a couch, a woman with a lovely, lovely body. Oh, utterly lovely. Anyhow, I thought so. A sort of proud body, like an utterly lovely proud animal. And a fate like a mask, a long, dark face, and very big eyes. The eyes were blank, like a mask, but when you looked at it a bit it was as if you were look­ing at a real woman, a live woman. At least, that’s how it was with me (…). Well, all the time I was talking I had the feeling I was ex­plaining things not only to Ruth – that was her name – but I was explaining them to myself too, and to the woman in the picture.” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 40)

All this explanation is not what Horsfield wanted or expected: “It seemed to him that for a festive evening it had not been very festive” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 43). For Rhys and for us, however, the scene represents something we do want and even expect: we see in the description, the possibility of the beginnings of a conver­ sation, not just between but among women, ‘real’ women, ‘alive’ women, who have taken off their masks. Due to this strong narrative-structuring principle, we are baffled when the her­ oine-narrator seems, as she does on occasion, to slip into another character’s mind. This is be­cause she has focused our attention on the dialogue-spoken and unspo­ ken – that we are following, not on the individual character’s response or reactions (which is what Rhys attempted to present in her first two novels). It is Rhys’ chorus of voices, under her single direction, to which we attend. It is obvious that Rhys depends on all the voices being controlled by the single speaker, the writer as a hero­ine-narrator. Paradoxically, if she deserts this role of con­ ductor, the other voice seems wrong, discordant. Another voice jars, except in direct exchange (and except for the heroine-narrator’s ‘other’ voice – that italicized ‘voice’). In Voyage in the Dark, when Walter Jeffries and Anna are talking, the narrator plunges into speculation concern­ing what Jeffries is thinking or feeling: “When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and that he hated me, and it was funny sitting there and talking like that, knowing he hated me” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 83). The dialogue is, in this sense, concrete, especially as it is perceived, heard, and repeated to us through the consciousness of the heroine-narrator. When she departs

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from this structure, we feel that the writer has slipped. Rhys’ technique wavers when the narra­tor speculates outside the framework of reported dialogue and at­tempts to break into any consciousness other than her own; except as we discern the mecha­ nism of it in reported speech, Rhys’ major structuring and narrative device – reported dialogue, both spoken and unspoken – commands our fullest attention. In Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a narrative line drives thematic issues such as desire, hatred, death, and violence. However, the line cannot be contained within Rhys’ text. It ‘plunges’ into Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, as well, and under­ scores signs that one can recognize as mirror images of the primary marks in Wide Sargasso Sea. Other times, the characters do not realize how desire and hatred frequently mirror each other – when Rochester expresses his hatred for Antoinette, he does not perceive the desired facet of his emotion. Similarly, both Antoinette and Jane believe themselves to desire Rochester, but they do not often admit to the hatred they feel for the patri­ archal society he embodies. Charlotte Brontë uses the word ‘reflect’ numerous times in her novel to describe what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “To turn one’s thoughts (back) on, to fix the mind or attention on or upon a subject; to ponder, meditate on” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1203). The language of this definition implies an internal occasion of mirroring. In Jane Eyre, Jane learns to understand herself and her needs; as a result, she achieves a distinct, if a bit simplified, sense of identity. Jean Rhys, on the other hand, externalizes this process toward the formation of selfhood. O’Callaghan notes, “Stylistically, this facilitates the representation of a world of fluid boundaries between self/other; living/dead; mad/sane; dream/reality” (O’Callaghan, 1993, p. 6). Much of Rochester’s apprehension is grounded in his fear of himself and his own ‘primitive’ desires. Rochester’s trouble with the lush Caribbean landscape9 is the most significant aspect of his feelings of alienation in the West Indies. At first, he is lured by the island of Dominica just as he is by Antoinette: “It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 51-52). One sees that Jane’s fears and desires are not so different from Antoinette’s, and, as a result, one understands that Jane’s narrative is unsuccessful because she contin­ ues to repress her true identity in the face of Rochester’s patriarchy. Antoinette, on the other hand, achieves self-realization through her madness. O’Callaghan explains, “…it is possible to view the madwoman’s strategy of ‘opting out’ of all role models/ images/stereotypes as a refusal, if not a deconstruction, of the arbitrary boundaries of a divided patriarchal colonial society” (O’Callaghan, 1993, p. 47).

9 The Sargasso Sea is an area of the North Atlantic Sea, bordered by the Gulf Stream and enclosing the Bermuda Islands. It is characterized by weak currents, very little wind, and a free-floating mass of seaweed called Sargassum. The area gave rise to many legends surrounding the fate of ships that supposedly lost their way in the weeds, became entangled, and were never heard from again.



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4.3 Intertextual Metaphors Rhys’ metaphors reach a new pitch of vividness and power through imagistic detail, but also draw on the natural dimensions of intellectual and sense experiences, includ­ing color, shape and texture. Such focused patterning and reworking of her own metaphors creates a sense of fatalistic inevitability, generating a hypnotic, spellbinding effect. Rhys’ intertextual reference reflects Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s theories in The Madwoman in the Attic. They demonstrate how the mad wife functions as Jane Eyre’s truest and darkest double or repressed selfhood, often through Brontë’s use of the looking-glass motif. In Wide Sargasso Sea, instead of experiencing an epiphany of Lacanian self-discovery, Antoinette seems unable to recognize herself in the mirror: “The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 147). In fact, Antoinette’s side of the story is ultimately disregarded, so that her plight is reminiscent of the female writer, discounted by such male theorists of intertextual­ ity as Barthes and Bloom. Barthes’s The Death of the Author and Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence significantly ignore or underplay the female writer’s efforts to break into art, to demarcate her own creative spaces. A metaphor for intertextuality, the patchwork, shows that the textual is in fact textile. However, it also signifies a growing sense of the inevitability of fate: the pattern of Antoinette’s destiny, like the pattern of the bedspread, is nearly finished. Nancy Miller similarly suggests that theories of intertextuality such as Barthes’s have employed a whole mythology of weaving and making webs whilst, at the same time, underplaying or even erasing those myths’ connection to women’s efforts to break into art. As the following discussion attempts to show, Antoinette’s subsequent experi­ ence of the convent is connected with her search for refuge (“the nuns are safe. How can they know what it can be like outside?” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 50), which is ironically voiced in Grace Pool’s description of Thornfield (“After all the house is big and safe, a shelter from the world outside,” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 146). Hence, the heroine’s existential anxiety: “I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 85) is relating to the feeling of estrangement from her natural environment. The wildness of the Caribbean landscape (e.g., the motif of a hurricane) escapes the power of the human reason and threatens those who embody it. The female affiliation complex suggests it is helpful to think of the creative, inter­ textual space as a kind of metaphoric, amniotic sea, or Julia Kristeva’s semiotic chora. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva finds that intertextuality functions within the semiotic chora, that is the womb or receptacle of becoming, a space of pre-lin­ guistic, prelapsarian plenitude initially totally identified with the maternal body. This is similarly located within the songs of her substitute mother and nurse, Christophine: “I couldn’t always understand [Christophine’s] patois songs she also came from Mar­ tinique but she taught me the one that meant, the little ones grow old, the children leave us, will they come back? and the one about the cedar tree flowers which only

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last for a day” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 170). Christophine’s songs provide examples of complex metaphors because they make use of culturally based conceptual frames. Consequently, Antoinette defines her reality in terms of the metaphors of her nurse’s songs, and then proceeds to act on the basis of that reality. By adopting a title which evokes intertextuality, Rhys suggests that, for her, repe­ tition is by no means a fruitless, plagiaristic imitation. Within the metaphorical, inter­ textual sea of stories, there are as many different interpretations of stories as there are people to read them. For Antoinette, the sea of her own story changes its meaning as it flows into the unreal cities of the famous Victorian novel: “When I woke it was a different sea. Colder. It was that night, I think, that we changed course and lost our way to England” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 181). Antoinette’s search for identity allegorically mirrors the result of Britain’s empire-building technique of sending the colonial people to the place of the Other in order to (re)write the history of the modern world through the Empire’s eyes. Jean Rhys uses metaphorical names to infer that the male narrator is a substitute for England as he tries to make Antoinette English. Another aspect of Antoinette’s identity is tied up with that of her mother, Annette. Using the mother-daughter relationship, Jean Rhys also makes an analogy of the impe­ rial/colonial relationship between Britain as the motherland and the West Indian colo­ nies. Although Rhys’ aim was to expose Antoinette’s husband as the person responsi­ ble for her madness, by paralleling Antoinette’s forced madness to Annette’s imposed insanity, she illustrates the anonymity of the act. In other words, white English men did not drive their Caribbean wives mad; they “named” them mad. The enormous clash between subjects (“Rochester”) and objects (Antoinette) by the end of the novel reveals that Rhys can only imagine a Caribbean identity separate from England. The analysis of Antoinette’s relationship with her husband envisions that Wide Sargasso Sea is a national allegory because its use of the search for individ­ ual identity is a metaphor of the Caribbean struggle for its own sense of self beyond the Other (a positive Caribbean identity beyond colonialism) created by the British (post)colonialism. Rhys’ careful focus on naming and the outcomes are echoed in her best-known novel. The issues of a British fictional creation of history/myth through writing, Rhys used her own identity by changing her name, which exposes how important a name is to the self in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys, thus, reveals the effects of naming and the labels names, while calling into question the permanent existence of identity. Annette’s parrot, Coco, even stresses this recurrent theme, persistently asking, “Qui est là? Qui est là? [Who is there?]” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 25). When Antoinette’s husband calls her Bertha, at the end of the novel, the “namer” seeks to control her identity, the female identity being thus threatened. However, while not naming Antoi­ nette’s husband (the male European colonizer), Rhys kept the European colonial dis­ course by maintaining the ambiguity of his namelessness. In other words, Rhys did not fully manage to rewrite Jane Eyre and, by extension, British colonial fiction.



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After all, Rhys’ intention was to write Antoinette’s story, as that of the “mad Creole” (Rhys, Letters, 136) from Jane Eyre, namely to recreate the ‘true’ story of Bertha Mason. Antoinette does not create her identity entirely on her own. At first, Antoinette learns to split identity between black and white. At this point, Antoinette’s first identity fracture occurs. In the opening lines of the novel, Antoinette explains: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 9). Later on, she tells the reader how she was called a “white cockroach” by a little white girl and “white nigger” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 13-14) by her black friend, Tia. Thus, in the colonial consciousness Antoinette is perceived as the “Other” by both the black and the white Jamaicans. When Antoinette goes to the convent, the nun who receives her reinforces the capacity of the English men to construct women’s identities by naming them. When Antoinette reveals her first name, the nun responds: “You are Antoinette Cosway, that is to say Antoinette Mason” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 31), thus internalizing two different (cultural) identities and a multiple personality. In other words, while her husband calls her the wife of an Englishman, Antoinette must define herself by the (white) men who have a relationship to her, namely her father and stepfather. Within a very short time, Antoinette has learnt this idea: “I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 31). Antoinette not only accepts the new name each time one is given, but she also allows them to fuse and follow her. The fact that Antoinette uses the denomination “née,” usually indicating a maiden name left behind after marriage, emphasizes Antoinette’s increasing volume of names from the men to whom she is passed. Therefore, until the end of the novel (especially in conjunction with Jane Eyre), it might be proper for us to call her Antoi­ nette Bertha Cosway Mason Rochester, thus expressing a mixed identity. It is hardly surprising why Antoinette has so much trouble fixing her identity: while she has numerous identities to choose from, none were self-chosen and each of them is the product of the colonial influence, especially Britain’s influence. The most damaging names are those given by her husband, who has such mixed feelings about her and cannot accept her as she is; he finds numerous occasions to rename her, thus negotiating her multiple identities. During Antoinette’s marriage with her husband, the different occurrence of names finally leads to her destruction at Thornfield Hall. When her husband calls Antoinette “Bertha” in order to make her less dangerous, Antoinette refuses to recognize the negative effects of her re-naming. In this sense, the dialogue below is eloquent: ‘Don’t laugh like that, Bertha.’ ‘My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?’ ‘Because it is a name I’m particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 81)

Veronica Gregg contends that it does matter: “In renaming Antoinette Bertha, the husband does not succeed in changing her, but in splitting her identity” (Gregg,

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1995, p. 98). When Antoinette finally gains control of the narration again, she, too, realizes that: “Names matter, like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 107). Her husband agrees that “Antoinette” is dangerous, threatening, unknown, Creole. Now, Antoinette knows how much power her husband holds in renaming her, but she cannot understand the influence except by relation to obeah (tropical charms), a Caribbean magic. She tells him that: “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 88). However, her husband’s power springs from a magical ability that Antoinette has not encountered before; it springs directly from national authority. In connection with the historiography of the British Empire, by asserting a racial, cultural, and sexual dominance over the colonies, the British colonial empire endows men such as Antoinette’s husband with the power to deny colonial identities for the sake of preserving “Englishness”. The other name with which the husband endows Antoinette bears a greater sym­ bolic meaning: Marionette (a doll which is silent). Christophine confronts the husband about this name. However, this name represents the next stage in his effort to classify Antoinette’s identity. Rochester does not call her Marionette to force her to speak but to keep her from speaking of her own agreement. While Antoinette accepted the iden­ tity of Bertha to a point (“It doesn’t matter”), she had not abandoned control of her West Indianness, as displayed by her use of obeah to try to control him. Her husband realizes that Antoinette is a white Creole; that is, “Creole of pure English descent she may be, but...not English or European either” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 39). Because he cannot make Bertha (more) English, he transforms her into a Creole madwoman. Rhys’ male narrator must return to a former condition of the empirical identity-pro­ ducing apparatus: he must recreate and rename the Other, so as to preserve his own identity as white male English colonizer. Truly, each aspect of her identity encounters its Other in the West Indies; she is resistant to her husband, being “ethnic” (her whiteness), female, non-English, and colonized. The main focus here is on Antoinette’s identity, but these conclusions nec­ essarily bring us to the identity of Rhys’ male narrator, about whom Rhys acknowl­ edges that she “carefully [hasn’t] named the man at all” (Rhys, Letters, 145). Although critics call Rhys’ male narrator “Rochester,” this actually ignores an intentional narrative technique. Although Gregg believes that the “identity of the husband is constituted by the history and narrative of Europe and is dependent upon the ‘breaking up’ of Antoinette, the Creole woman” (Gregg, 1995, p. 103), leaving him nameless actually leaves the reader two choices as to his identity. Not having a name of his own means that his identity is shaped under the symbolic denominations such as: “Antoinette’s husband” or “the husband”, or even “Rhys’ male narrator”. From Rhys’ perspective, the Caribbean is dependent on the British Empire by forcing the male narrator to use Antoinette’s name as his identity. However, as “Rhys’ male narrator”, he has a different symbolic connotation, showing what Fanon called “the settler [who] makes history” (quoted in Gregg, 1995, p. 100). However, this



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“settler” keeps his anonymity. Rhys’ lack of naming entitles this man to claim the power given to “imperial Europe, which designates the West Indies as a blank space on which to inscribe the desires of the European man” (Gregg, 1995, p. 100). Jean Rhys defended the Creole woman’s story, while questioning British colonial ideology. In connection with Jane Eyre, “Bertha Mason” becomes Antoinette again in Wide Sargasso Sea, the responsibility for her madness being placed on her husband. Through the deliberate and crafted use of naming, Rhys forces the male European colonizer to occupy the role of object, while the female West Indian becomes the subject, just like in the Peircean semiotic triangle. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys helps to unravel the past and preserve the history that the British Empire tried to erase by “subjectifying” Antoinette and limiting the male narrator’s speech. In the words of Carole Angier, Rhys’ metaphors reach a “new pitch of vividness and power” (Angier, 1990, p. 78). This is because her image-based metaphors of, for example, moths, clothes and flowers, are rich in imagistic detail, but also draw on the natural dimensions of intellectual and sense experiences, including color, shape and texture. Moreover, they take on a mirror-like, self-reflexive quality, becoming intertex­ tual, not only with other texts but with their own cohesive word image, developed throughout the three parts of the novel. Such focused patterning and re­working of her own metaphors creates a sense of fatalistic inevitability, also generating a hypnotic, spellbinding effect, and a structural intensity/more frequently found in poetry rather than prose.

5 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction This chapter focuses on Jean Rhys’ narrative strategies, which help portray marginal women, who are exiled, both culturally and sexually. Being displaced from their native Caribbean, the trespassers on masculine territory walk the streets, yet living on the edges of respectability, sanity and dignity. Their fragmented perceptions and disjointed voices present the modern experience of exile and the decentered self. However, they do not omit to dissect the ways and means of power, money and sex. This is the more so since the need to sustain an artificial order gives rise to a psychic fragmentation, which is typical of the decentered self. By depicting such char­ acters, Rhys criticizes modernity’s tendency to order reality by constructing binary oppositions, which reduce people to homogeneous categories. She shows how this view is mistaken and destructive and highlights the heterogeneity of human existence and exposes the provisionality of truth and the instability of meaning by employing multi-vocality, irony, parody and images of doubles. While incorporating modern and postmodern devices of fragmentation, Rhys relies on Romantic notions of sublimity, passion, and the supernatural. On the other hand, the social isolation, faced by Rhys’ characters, develops the unique forms of interior monologue and of a fragmented style that, to borrow Wallace Stevens’ words, created a “violent order (in) disorder”. Rhys’ novels use languages other than English, with a powerful connection to the language debate in postcolonial literature. She is able to get the clichés of the English language from the past, and to reject much of the language of the empire, colonialism, class, and bourgeois morality by constructing a new discourse based on inner dialogue, indirect speech, letters and dreams, remnants of conversations, songs, poetry, quotes from books and prayers. Moreover, deep-rooted in the literary concerns of the mid-twentieth century, her novels feature a web of symbols and images that underlies plot and informs their fragments of dialogue. In short, plunging into the psyche of her principal characters, Rhys examines their fragmented identities and unconscious fears, focusing on an inner world that mirrors the impressions of an evocative physical landscape. On the other hand, the Creole demi-world illuminates a complex but overlooked genealogical moment in twentieth century literature: the point when the exhausted limits of modernist form revealed the line of postcolonial fiction. Rhys’ semi-canon­ ical tale of a chorus-girl turned prostitute, Anna Morgan, the émigré narrator of Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark, will thus become a novel of female flânerie, or one among the author’s several fictions of feminine self-destruction. In the following subchapter, I will try to reveal the complex transnationality of Jean Rhys’ fiction – the contrapuntal geography that oscillates between England and the West Indies – which gives rise to their transitional literary quality and produces a new geopolitics that challenges the continued relevance of the modernist narrative strategies. © 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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5.1 (Power-)Text My analysis begins with Charles Sanders Pierce’s contribution to semiotic paradigm, also due to Seymour Chatman’s narratology, providing a common basis for the semi­ otic analysis of cultural identity. Semiotics is usually defined as the study of signs and symbols and their transmission within cultures and between cultures. I will also analyze the relationship not only between the sign and what it represents, but also the manner in which the connection took place between the represented object and this particular sign because this sign is certainly a sign. In his semiotic writings from the late nineteenth century, Charles S. Peirce describes the signifying process, or semiosis, as a dynamic relation between three elements: a sign, an object and an interpretant. Peirce describes the relation this way: “A sign, or representamen, is something, which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign, which it creates, I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have some­ times called the ground of the representamen. The sign can, in principle, be anything – a gesture, a logo, an advertisement, a slogan, a product, a package, a narrative, a written text, a set of behaviors, or even an entire persuasive campaign. The object, which the sign stands for, is sometimes also called the referent – an equivalent to the notion of the world as it “is” in itself” (Peirce, 5). The relation between these three elements in the signifying process is illustrated in Figure 5.1. interpretant sign

emio sign

sign

referent/object

Object

interpretant

s

Ground

semiosis

sis

representamen

object

Fig. 5.1: Peirce’s Interpretation of the Semiotic Triad

The middle figure shows the relation of a sign. The difference from the first figure is that the interpreter, sign and object are linked to “ground.” In Peirce’s theory “ground” is a sort of idea in which the sign stand for its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to this idea. We shall, as we did in figure 5.1., also here replace “interpreter” with “agent.” The categories used are part of the

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“ground” itself. To make an interpretation is to understand how this “ground” works in giving meaning to specific subjects and observations. In an interpretation process, we can analyze the same “object” or observation as located in different meaning con­ texts by different agents and in different situations. An icon is a sign that has certain qualities in common with the object it stands for, for example, similarity. A picture of a person, thus, has iconic qualities because it is a sign that refers to that particular person through some degree of resemblance. An index is a sign that refers to its object because it is being affected by that object in some real way. The relation between an index and its object is, in other words, based on causality or physical connection. As it appears, both icons and indices are to some degree ‘motivated’ by their objects or referents. By contrast, a symbol is a sign with only conventional associations to the object it stands for. Although most signs have both iconic, indexical and symbolic qualities, language is mainly sym­ bolic, that is, related to its object through conventions or, as Peirce puts it “by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas which operates to cause the symbol to be interpreted as referring to that object” (Peirce, 8). In this subchapter, I will apply these concepts and principles to the notions of image and identity. The interpretation scheme of the Peircean semiotic model is as follows: 1. the representamen, or the sign-vehicle; 2. the (immediate) object, which is a semiotic projection of the external or repre­ sented reality (i.e., of the dynamical object); 3. the interpretant – the element which belongs to the realm of thought, mediation, cognition. This third correlate of the sign – the interpretant – is the meaning of the sign (Kalaga, 1997, p. 25). The interpretant is described by Peirce as “the proper significate effect” of the sign. According to the semiotic triad, this “proper significate effect” may be conventional “meaning” as in the sense Saussure gives to the signified; or a feeling, which Peirce calls an “emotional interpretant”; or it may be an action, which he calls an “energetic interpretant,” as in the “flight or fight” impulse (Colapietro, 1989, p. 35). First, I would like to analyze the relation between self and object. Peirce consid­ ered that “during any given moment of its life, the self is first and foremost a process in which some species of meaning is evolving” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 92). Peirce insists that the self is constituted within dialogue. Whether intra- or interpersonal, this process is such that the subject is in a condition of “always becoming” between the two sides of a conversation, between the two sides of semiosis. Although the “action of signs usually occurs between two parties,” the utterer and the interpreter as the representamen and interpretant need not at all be persons, “for a chameleon and many kinds of insects and even plants make their livings by uttering signs, and lying signs, at that” (Peirce, cited in Colapietro, 1989, p. 22). There is nothing necessarily “mental about either this quasi-utterer (‘a source from which a sign springs’) or this quasi-interpreter (‘a form into which a sign grows’)” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 19).

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What must be noted about Peirce’s triadic model is that his notion of the object-sign-interpretant relation corresponds in no way to Saussure’s sign-signifi­ er-signified relation. Undoubtedly, the relation is not mentioned in the way that Saus­ sure describes the relation between the signifier and the signified, and “in particular, the object is deliberately not characterised as being necessarily something that is rep­ resented or stood for by the sign” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 7). For Peirce, there is a particular relation of substitution between the repre­ sentamen and the interpretant in which interpretants are continuously transformed into representamens. In this case, Peirce’s position is that: “The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing can never be stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regres­ sion here. Finally, the interpretant is nothing more but another representation to which the torch of truth is handed along; and as representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite series”. (Peirce, 1985, p. 339)

An important implication of “unlimited semiosis” for the self would seem what Derrida saw later in the notion of the “trace.” Peirce proposes that within every utterance there are echoes of the utterances of others: the self is never simply a speaker: “There is no intuition or cognition, not determined by previous cognitions” Peirce, 1985, p. 284). Peirce describes his system as being one in which “the object determines the sign and, in turn, the sign determines the interpretant” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 14), but he also stresses the possibility that a sign may become active in relation to the object, in some way determining the object. This is because the object can in fact have two forms: the immediate object and the dynamical object. The first one “is the object as the sign itself represents the object, and whose Being is thus dependent on the rep­ resentation of it in the sign. This is how the object can be thought of as being deter­ mined by the sign” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 15). On the other hand, the second type of object, “is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the sign to its Representation” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 15). According to Colapietro, Peirce regarded the embodied self as “a perfect example of… a perfect sign” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 58). Peirce asserted that, like the self, “the perfect sign is perpetually being acted upon by its object, from which it is perpetually receiving the accretions of new signs… In addition, the perfect sign never ceases to undergo change” (qtd. in qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 58). The object within this model – identity – is discrete and discontinuous for every cycle of the function of semiosis: in each cycle it must be remade in some sense, in each cycle posited as a new (similar or dissimilar) object-identity. That is, each moment of interpretation becomes yet another representamen, the triangulation of the sign implies the object’s reconstruction. In what concerns the self, the dynamical object is seen, as “something apart from being represented” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 15). On the other hand, the immediate object is the sense of self or that identity that is attributed to the concept of the body-as-sign.

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Peirce’s model provides a model that explains the sense of the self’s continuity. It is a model in which the sense of continuity is relational. Peirce’s conclusion is that there is a tendency to admit a personal self, but he asserts that they “will admit a personal self in the same sense in which a snark exists; that is, there is a phenom­ enon to which that name is given. […] It is an illusory phenomenon; but still it is a phenomenon” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 63). Peirce’s metaphor for the object as the “ground” of the sign, then, becomes somewhat pointed, because it must now be seen as a ground upon which the self may never be touched: a discomforting condition for Cartesianism’s self to realize itself in. In understanding Jean Rhys’ narrative, I shall start from Seymour Chatman’s position who finds that narrative is a combination of “a what and a way,” where the what is the story of a narrative, and the way is its discourse. He also pushes for an idea of narrative as semiotic, meaningful structure in its own right, suggesting that “narrative structure imparts meanings […] precisely because it can endow an other­ wise meaningless text with eventhood, characterhood, and settinghood, in a normal one-to-one standing-for relationship” (Chatman, 1978, p. 25). Chatman continues to outline Roman Ingarden’s distinction between the ‘real object’ and the ‘aesthetic object’, a useful way to think of story and discourse. Instead of asking what the author should or should not do, we should ask: What are the ways we recognize the presence or absence of a narrator? What is plot? Character? Setting? Point of view? (fig.5.2.). Another aspect is Chatman’s stress on the distinction between the narrator and the author. The narrator might or might not be present in the narrative while the author is – he or she is instead the real person behind the work and is always there. In this respect, he analyzes the structure of a short narrative using a list of constitu­ ents: stasis, process, events, actions, happenings, character, setting, etc. He also indi­ cates how the reader makes inferences from what he sees, and thereby constructs the story: the mode of telling (mediating, presenting, diegetic), and the mode of showing (unmediated, exposing, mimesis). Relevant to the macrostructure of the story are such concepts as types of plots. Events make up the things that happen, and this is the content, but the arrangement of these events as presented to the reader is a matter of discourse. The presentation of sequence implicitly conveys causality. Readers interpret consecutive events as caus­ ally related. The first topic on the subject of discourse is the narrative spectrum, which is largely pulled from Wayne Booth. The essence of this spectrum revolves around the conflict between showing and telling, or presentation versus mediated narration, or mimesis and diegesis. As we come to recognize a narrator as distinct from a character, we see that Ethos can apply in fiction to the narrator only. Starting from the diagram above, Antoinette’s insanity in Wide Sargasso Sea becomes the central narrative. The story progresses in widening circles of understanding as the reader sees the action through the eyes of one or more witnesses. Thus, the reader struggles with multiple, unreliable narrations in order to deduce the true state of

colonizing subject

colonized ‘Other’

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linguistic consciousness, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor”

affairs. This is as much to say that the plot is open to multiple, contradictory inter­ pretations (fig. 5.3.). So, the questions that arise through the novel are: Was Antoi­ ‘intentional’ nette guilty of unchaste acts with her cousin Sandi? double Or is shevoiced mad and (conscious, dialogical, ) only imagining such scenes? Is the voodoo charm of Christophine ‘really’ magic? Or is it, as Rochester thinks, just poison? Fig. 2.4. Organic versus Intentional Hybridity Actions Events

Happenings

Form = of

Story

Existents

(Content)

Characters

Content

Settings People, things, etc., as pre-

Substance

processed by the author’s

= of

cultural codes

Content

Narrative Structure of

Form

narrative transmission

= of Expression

Discourse (Expression) Manifestation

Verbal

Substance

Cinematic

= of

Balletic

Expression

Pantomimic Fig. 5.2: Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative

Fig. 5.2. Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative

To conclude, Jean Rhys insists on literary allusions, multi-focality and on various facets of the same reality, which stands for the disconnected form of the narrative structure, and the casual reference to the intertextual relationships of her stories. We can notice, as the story unfolds, that it follows the psychological process of the speaker, revealing Antoinette as an incipient madwoman (fig. 5.4.). In other words, the story shifts freely from fictive reality to fantasy. For example, at the end of the novel, the madwoman Antoinette describes, in detail, aspects which corre­ sponds point for point to Brontë’s description: her setting fire to the house and per­ ishing in the flames despite Rochester’s efforts to save her. But now she knows what she must do and within a few lines she takes up the candle to enact the vision she has just “dreamed.” Thus, the reader is soon entangled in a hopelessly confused web of shifting levels of “reality” in the tale.

(Narrative

author expression)

Discourse

Implied

Fig. 5.3: Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative Structure

Source:  Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. London: Cornell University Press, 1978

author]

[Real

(“No” or Minimal narrator)

Unmediated transmission

for plot Setting

Existents

content)

(Narrative

Story

significance

Degree of

(IS)

Stasis

(DOES)

Process

(Plot)

Events

Satellites

Necessity

Characters

Statements

Mediated transmission Narrator narratee

Kernels

Identity

audience]

audience

Mood

Quality

[Real

Implied

Happenings

Trait

Aspect

Agency

Actions

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Through the structure of a past event reported in the fictive present by unreliable dramatic speakers, the writer forces her audience into a constructive role, like a jury, building up the story in their own mind. In other words, we could compare a reader of fiction to a jury in a schematic way and see that where a jury tries to find “reality.” the reader of fiction is forced to construct a second fiction (Tab. 5.1.): Tab. 5.1: Chatman’s Representation of Fiction Real Event

Real Reporter

Real Reader

1. Real accident

2. Witness

3. Decides whether witness’report matches event

Unstated Fiction

Stated Fiction

Constructed Fiction

1. Unstated fictional event, the affair

2. “unreliable” narrators’ report

3. Audience constructs what they imagine unstated fiction to be

In reality, the reader’s judgment that a report is unreliable means that it does not correspond to the real event. In fiction, the “unreliable” report means a story so con­ structed as to force the reader into a constructive activity, perhaps because the fiction as stated has internal contradictions or seems incomplete.

5.2 (Pre-)Text In her novels, Rhys reorders the fragmented elements of the Afrocentric identity. Het­ eroglosia and calypso permanently infuses her texts: interplay of voices, condensed imagery, rhetorical processes on satire and interrogation, and themes of betrayal, exploitation and oppression. In addition, she also chooses a marginal, ambiguous, double language, therefore creating a modernist text. I tried to analyze more symbols that define the identity of characters: dreams, visions, pictures, characters’ names, place names, colors, fires, animals imaginary. So, using symbolism was a form of sub­ limation. By the extensive use of images and symbols, Rhys always tries to deepen and expand her style. The narrative structures of Jean Rhys’ fiction are made of an alternation of states of consciousness, including daydreams, memories, fits of rage or madness, moments of awakening, drunkenness, sexual ecstasy, and nightmares. Her novels rely upon a variety of alternative narrative techniques to advance the plot, including letters and book excerpts, overheard conversations and gossip, and perhaps most importantly, multiple points-of-view in a juxtaposition of antithetical entities or the so-called un-reconciled oppositions and contrasts: black / white, sun / shade, life / death, slave /

 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction

Fig. 5.4: Lost in The Bermuda Triangle

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master, truth / fiction, day / night, past / present, sympathy / hatred, attraction / repul­ sion, knowledge / denial, familiar / strange, male / female, England / West Indies. Referring to the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys decides to begin her action with Antoinette’s narration then to shift to Rochester’s and finally to close with Antoinette’s disintegrating narration, introduced and contextualized by the voice of Grace Poole. What is interesting about Antoinette’s narration is how desperately and ingeniously she uses narrative techniques such as the “illusion of sequence” (Mitchell, 1981, p. 13) and linear chronology to delay the final secret, climax, closure of her story, which is her descent into madness and death. For example, an earlier version of Part I had Antoinette commenting on her child­ hood: “I got used to a solitary life and began to distrust strangers…” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 8), which is an unnecessary commentary and whose signification is more effectively revealed by Antoinette’s reactions to ensuing events. Similarly, the final version cuts “but it was understood that she would not approve of Tia” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 9), leaving “My mother never asked me where I had been or what I had done” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 13) to stand as an even more poignant indictment of her mother’s neglect. As it is quite clear from the above, the movement of the narration is determined not by chronology but by associative memory. Antoinette has structured her narra­ tive deliberately and, although as we shall see, the sequence of events are connected by associative memory rather than by temporality or causality, Antoinette’s narrative is forcibly contained by a motif that determines her memories and her retelling of them. Conversely as stated earlier, she, herself is held together by the act of narrating. To measure time is a measure of how closely one is in touch with reality. Accord­ ingly, Antoinette makes an effort to measure time and to progress from childhood, to school, to marriage. Rochester called her “a lunatic who always knows the time. But never does” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 165). In Part One, Antoinette begins her story with an oblique reference to the Emanci­ pation Act, “when trouble comes close ranks” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 17), contin­ ues with the anecdote of Mr. Luttrell’s suicide, then recounts the poisoned horse inci­ dent (each episode ‘marooning’ them further), and moves on to Pierre’s feebleness, and a description of the wild garden. Like her mother, she is suffering a division of the self where she undergoes what she calls the real death, the death of the mind, and becomes blank, doll-like, and inhuman, in waiting for the second death, the death of the body. She succumbs to certain narrative habits that are revelatory of her present dis­ turbed mind. She repeats the adverbs ‘always’ and ‘never’. Within the opening pages, Mr. Luttrell “was gone for always” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 9); Pierre’s doctor “never came again” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 27); Antoinette “never went near” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 87) the orchid in the wild garden at Coulibri; “The Wilderness of Cou­ libri never saddened me” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 64); Christophine “never paid them” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 78); “I never looked at any strange negro” (Rhys,

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Wide Sargasso Sea, 87), “My mother never asked me where I had been or what I had done” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 13). In one sense, the use of “always,” along with the repetition of “still,” (“she still rode about every morning” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 21) and “sometimes” (“sometimes we left the bathing pool at midday, sometimes we stayed till late afternoon” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 105) is iterative and durative, implying continuity over a certain duration of time in the past. In other words, the repetition of adverbs (whose very repetition would connote iterativity) in fact implies the opposite – closure, a finality. The frequency and persis­ tence of repetition evokes this sense of finality and desperate sadness. With similar effect, Rhys often resorts to the verbal auxiliary ‘would’. In reporting angry conver­ sations between her mother and Mr. Mason, Antoinette describes their dialogue by reporting “he would say,” “she’d speak,”; ‘would’ is here used in the habitual mode. The impression the reader receives is again iterative – this argument occurred over and over again. Antoinette also creates this effect by remembering that “Mr. Mason always said” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 32). In Part II, Rochester reports one of the dialogues between him and his wife Antoi­ nette (“‘Now come for a walk,’ she said, ‘and I will tell you a story,’” Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 82) in which Antoinette describes her dream of watching rats and her moonlight sleep to explain her present state of mind. Rochester’s narration of their dialogues also becomes a mode for her clarification of sequence: “… Is your mother alive?” “No, she is dead, she died.” “When?” “Not long ago.” “Then why did you tell me she died when you were a child?” “Because they told me to say so and because it is true. She did die when I was a child. There are always two deaths, the real one, and the one people know about.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 124)

As she begins her final narrative, Antoinette/Bertha says: “In this room, I wake early and lie shivering for it is very cold” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 146). The present tense indicates that the judicious distance of her first narrative is obliterated. She has lost all sense of measured time and place for she refuses to believe “this is England,” and of self for she does not recognize the woman with streaming hair, surrounded by a gilt frame as herself. Rhys uses different narrative techniques to present differing points of view, those of both Rochester and Antoinette, encouraging the reader to analyze each character and even to dispute their interpretations of events, while Brontë in Jane Eyre wishes the reader to accept Jane Eyre’s account of her life without question. Wide Sargasso Sea is a broader narrative than Jane Eyre, encompassing different cultures and races. Rhys’ characters are shown to be shaped by many forces, while the influences of Brontë’s characters are assumed to be known by the reader. The madwoman in the attic, a stock character in the nineteenth century Gothic fiction, is portrayed in terrifying but simplistic detail by Brontë, and disputed in Wide

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Sargasso Sea. Jane Eyre accepts Rochester’s interpretation of Antoinette’s sanity because she has heard the screams and witnessed the psychotic episodes of arson and attempted murder for herself, and knows nothing of Bertha’s personal history, but Rhys encourages the reader to question the origins of this madness by explor­ ing how Antoinette lost her identity and sense of belonging. Antoinette’s actual state of mental health is hard to determine accurately; it is interpreted by Rochester and Daniel Cosway as madness, but Antoinette’s behavior and own narration reveal little. Rochester assumes Antoinette is mad because she alternates periods of extreme emotion with periods of blankness, and because he doesn’t accept the cultural and racial differences between them. He defines sanity in terms of his own emotional nature: “I was exhausted. All the mad conflicting emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 172). Rochester’s own sanity is questioned by Rhys. He lived in Jamaica for a month before his wedding, three weeks of which were spent in a debilitating and confusing fever. His sense of dislocation at Granbois during his honeymoon is explicit: “As for my confused impression they will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 145). Rhys’ use of circular narrative, flashbacks, and the altering narration of Rochester and Antoinette contributes to the sense of fragmentation and dislocation of both characters, suggesting that madness is a result of many complex factors and cannot be ascribed to the facile Gothic novel explanation of heredity. The issue of voice in other novels is a specific transition from free-indirect style to stream of consciousness. In free-indirect discourse, the narration adopts the point of view and mode of speaking of the character or world described, thereby giving a sense of the perspectives through which life is viewed. Free-indirect style highlights the specificity of point of view, but also shows the way we see the world through received and conventional styles of speaking. There are not subjects who speak, but manners or styles from which subjects or point of view are created. The novel Good Morning, Midnight is paratactic. It opens with a paratactic descrip­ tion of Sasha’s hotel room in the present tense which, emphasizes that the simple physical presence of the room combats and overpowers her emotions: “Now the room springs out at me, laughing, triumphant. The big bed, the little bed, the table with the tube of luminal, the glass and the bottle of Evian, the two books, the clock ticking on the ledge, the menu…” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 178). The enumeration quality reinforces Sasha’s sense that the objective world is antagonistic to the efforts of her fragile consciousness. In contrast to this use of language to emphasize the fixity of physical reality, Rhys uses wordplay to characterize the subjective side of Sasha’s experience. A verbal world of sounds detached from references is constructed by Sasha’s susceptability to the suggestive power of words. Thus, in Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight, there is a far more intense impersonal­ ity of voice. The first one for example is the dominant use of the noun-phrase: “The Cinema Danton. Watching a good young man trying to rescue his employer from a mercenary mistress” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 89). Here there is the descrip­

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tion without a subject who sees or who describes. Objects and scenes are listed as though a camera or inhuman and impersonal eye surveyed the scene. Indeed, the idea and image of the camera is crucial to Rhys’ style and imagery. Her central charac­ ter not only spends time in the cinema, watching films twice or leaving them early – as though art did not have any form outside its mode of consumption – her fiction operates like a cinematic eye: “At four o’clock next afternoon I am in a cinema on the Champs-Elysees, according to programme. Laughing heartily in the right places. It’s a very good show and I see it through twice” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 15). Towards the end of the novel, she reflects on the way in which her mind is taken over by the ‘film mind’ where the self is a spiritual automaton replaying cultural clichés. More importantly, Good Morning, Midnight works with a cinematic time of triggered flashbacks, with the past intruding not in any coherent or logical style but as though scenes were cut and pasted in montage. The novel Good Morning, Midnight opens with a disembodied voice attributed to a room, and the language of things dominates the novel. The world is described, not as it is before the viewing eye of a specific subject, but as already formed by the jargon of hotel room marketing: “That’s the way it is, that’s the way it goes, that was the way it went… A room. A nice room. A beautiful room. A beautiful room with bath. A very beautiful room with bath. A bedroom and sitting-room with bath. Up to the dizzy heights of the suite. Two bedrooms, sitting-room, bath and vestibule. (The small bedroom is in case you don’t feel like me, or in case you meet somebody you like better and come in late.) Anything you want brought up on the dinner-wagon. (But, alas! the waiter has a louse on his collar. What is that on his collar?... Bitte schon, mein herr, bitte schon. ...) Swing high. ... Now, slowly, down. A beautiful room with a bath. A room with bath. A nice room. A room” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 29). Phrases and clichés from advertising, popular song and everyday life interrupt the narration; such phrases are neither quoted nor attributed, and are repeated until the end of the text. Where Rhys uses cinematic technology to create an impersonal visual scene, she uses the disembodied voices or radio and telephones to create a speech without a speaking subject – a language that says nothing and deadens life. In other words, the ruthlessness, barbarism and fragmentation of modern life are belied by a retreat into commodities, cliché, banality and fantasy. Rhys’ critique of the nihilism of life is directly intertwined with a critique of capital. All time has been reduced to the same; there is no tomorrow and no past that does not come in other than as a trauma. The meaningless repetitive nature of urban life is a result of the commodification of time: “Always the same stair, always the same room” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 28); the art that might allow us to live – without a thought for economy or efficiency are also enslaved to capital. “A white-haired American lady and a girl who looks like her daughter are talking in the hall, “look here, look at this. Here’s a portrait of Rimbaud. Rimbaud lived here, it says”. “And here’s Verlaine... Did he live here too?’” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 33).

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In modernism, women become more and more associated with shopping, com­ modities and popular culture. Women are both commodities – the women she works with can’t be distinguished from the mannequins: “the mannequins and saleswomen are all mixed up” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 35); and they are also targeted as the site where the desire for commodities can be manufactured. The narrator views women buying clothes, hats, shoes and then reads a menu with pictures of women asking to ‘spend more money’: “In spite of everything, the wires from Paris always buzzing send more money” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 38). The despair in Good Morning, Midnight opens the circulation of capital time through episodes of loss, waste and non-profit: “And five weeks afterward there I am, with not one line, not one wrinkle, not one crease. And there he is, lying with a ticket around his wrist because he died in a hospital. And there I am looking down at him, without one line, without one wrinkle, without one crease” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 52). However, there are two key moments of hope in the text, when she first receives the painting that she will then subsequently pay for: “I am surrounded by the pictures. It is aston­ ishing how vivid they are in this dim light. ... Now the room expands and the iron band round my heart loosens. The miracle has happened. I am happy” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 83) and when the gigolo refuses to take the money for the sexual encounter that she later lives through only at the level of the imaginary: “Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliché. Everything is born out of a cliché, rests on a cliché, and survives by a cliché. And they believe in the clichés – there’s no hope” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 36). The body movements have an important meaning for Sasha when she describes her friend’s actions in order to understand her own identity within the city: “Half-shutting her eyes and smiling the smile which means: ‘She’s getting to look old. She drinks’” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 11). To Sasha, bodies are the place where people in the city say things they can’t or won’t say aloud, and this fact is crucial. Sasha is confused over her inheritance when it is presented to her, but she claims, “When I saw the expression in his eyes I knew exactly why she did it” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 42). Sasha can communicate only by reading bodies; only through the body she can make a connection to another person. It is her trust on bodies to determine her feelings towards people that reflects the status of bodies as the place for developing relationships. Looking at dolls in a shop Sasha thinks: “what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart – all complete” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 18). The dolls are the epitome of successful womanhood not by any suggestion of their personality or accomplish­ ments, but because each part of their bodies – skin, hair, eyes, heart – is artificial. What makes the body ‘complete’ and successful in the city, then, is being artifi­ cial. The city values such artificial bodies because they correspond to the city itself. Unlike natural bodies, the city appears to go through changes but remains funda­ mentally the same.

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Towards the end of the novel, Sasha relates a vision of “the world” that seems to actu­ ally indicate ‘the city’, which is the only world presented in the novel. She claims that: “All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms have those eyes – others have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily beautiful. But the grey sky, which is in the background, terrifies me…” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 187)

In what concerns the identity performance of the body in the narrative is that Sasha teeters between two extremes: the deteriorating old women and the unchanged arti­ ficial dolls. Yet, just as her own body offers different readings to different people, Sasha cannot read the bodies of others to determine her position, try as she might. That Sasha herself is incorporated into this system of the city becomes clear when a stranger tells her that “Englishwomen have melancholy expressions. It doesn’t mean anything” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 47). The constructed nature of ideal bodies in the city inhibits the ability of characters to confidently read each others bodies, and thus threatens their relationships. Sasha ultimately refuses to accept the one human relationship because she fears that it will change her body and betray her connec­ tion to the city. What has happened to Sasha is that she has attempted to let nothing happen to her, to let no mark upon her body jeopardize her place in the city. The true tragedy of the book is that Sasha fails even at this, unable to keep up with the harsh standards the city sets. Ultimately, the novel suggests the only way to remain truly unchanged is through death, and as long as the city promotes this ideal, people will be no more than ghosts, and their relationships will not survive. In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, a technical tour de force and a brilliant evocation of psychic disorientation and despair, Rhys works from the first-person narrator to the third-person point of view, yet the narrative voices are so close to those of the protag­ onists that the limit between narrator and character inevitably becomes blurred. The characters, dependent on the largesse of others, think but do not voice their critiques, for which the narrative itself provides the only outlet. In this novel, the reader feels as if he/she is in the presence of a writer, who is trying to tell it as it really was, to pull back the curtain of social decorum and say: “Look! This is what we’re really like to one another!” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 45) Voyage in the Dark opens with a stark description of the split between Anna’s two lives: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 9). Anna begins her narra­ tive with this statement of the discontinuity between her childhood self of the West Indies and the new self born in England. She associates this side of her nature with Francine and with being black; hence the conflict between her loyalty to Francine and to her English stepmother Hester, each representing the spiritual mother of one of Anna’s sides.

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Moreover, the conflict between Anna’s two halves and the gradual loss of her authentic self are mirrored in the novel’s style; when Anna remembers the past, the style changes, suggesting the qualities of her inner life. At the most immediate level, the contrasts become evident: the descriptions of the past are full of adjectives and those of the present are comprised of disjointed sentences that suggest both repeti­ tiveness and lack of unity. In Quartet, although the narrative focus still moves through the events, the realis­ tic level is frequently blended with open-ended images and dreamlike visions that are strictly controlled or achieved by the direct and simple style. This technique, which becomes a dominant characteristic of Rhys’ later fiction, is related to the form of the entire novel. This concentration on the interiority of the text, allied with the harsh realism, creates a much deeper engagement between the reader and the work of art. When she opposes the voice of a society that represses women, Rhys uses calland response narrative technique. She sometimes creates this device when some secondary characters repeat the protagonists’ concerns and reflect their values, thus avoiding the repeated stance of the omniscient narrator, and maintaining the moral relativism of her modernist universe. Marya Zelli in Quartet (1928), Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark (1934), Sasha Jansen in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) all share the Kafkaesque condition of drifting through life as through a night­ mare. The only truly realized feminine character in her work, Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, shares her sisters’ feeling of life as unreality or rather as a reality she can only cope with through a final self-inflicted violence and the redemption of death. The most used symbol in Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea is the symbol of the dream and foresight: “Is it true that England is like a dream? One of my friends wrote and said London is like a cold dark dream” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 126). In devel­ oping Antoinette’s identity, Rhys has no doubt inspired through the idea of Jane’s dreams and premonitions. For example, Rochester and Antoinette stop in a village named ‘Massacre’ where it is raining and rather grey, and Rochester takes an instant dislike to the place because of the name and the inhabitants, both of which he describes as “sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 38); words which appear to convey his whole attitude to all those who surround him. Later, Rochester describes the night the couple spent in Massacre, emphasizing that he lay awake all night listening to cocks crowing; a biblical symbol of deception (for example, when Jesus says to Peter: “before the cock crows, you shall deny me thrice”). Interestingly, this line appears in the novel further on when Rochester confronts Antoinette about her history. In what concerns the symbolism of title, just as the name Jane Eyre can be seen to reflect Jane’s character, the title of Rhys’ novel can be seen to reflect the develop­ ment of its plot. The Sargasso Sea is almost still but at its centre has a mass of swirl­ ing currents, an image suggestive of Antoinette’s character, and of the turmoil of her imprisonment and the method of her escape. Antoinette is aware from a young age

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of the element of entrapment/imprisonment that hangs over the West Indies; the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the symbolism of fire distinguishes between the representa­ tions of the burning emotions, which surround the character of Antoinette, and her descent into her ‘zombie-like’ state, which describes Rhys’ insanity and spiritual death through Obeah, a form of the Caribbean magic. Rochester discovers this black magic and is even accused by Antoinette of performing it on her: “You are trying to make me into someone else, that’s Obeah too” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 147). It is Rochester’s calling of ‘Bertha’ after he discovers Antoinette’s history, and that her mother’s name was close to her own, which sparks this outburst by Antoinette. Fires occur throughout the novel, symbolizing destruction and hatred passions, or even death, magic and incantation (e.g. the fire that burned down Coulibri Estate and pre­ dicted the madness of Antoinette’s mother; the use of candles and the moths that are burnt by their flames, all these foreshadowing Antoinette’s own tragic end). Describing the events of the Coulibri fire, Antoinette recalls Coco’s gruesome death in vivid detail. Thus, the symbolism of birds foretells Antoinette’s own doom. She experiences, perhaps, an unconscious presentment of her own final moments, falling from the burning battlements of Thornfield Hall. The image of a cool, dark landscape that opposes Jamaica’s brightness introduces the symbolism of forests and trees. Following a strange, faceless man, Antoinette finds herself in a foreign place that portrays her future ‘entrapment’ in England. Another forest omen resides in the name of the honeymoon estate, Granbois, which translates into ‘great forest’. In the forest, Rochester seems to be facing the consequences of his own actions: a ruined house in the woods, a clear image of his English estate that will be finally burned and abandoned. The symbolism of the garden at Coulibri Estate is compared by Antoinette to the biblical Garden of Eden, with its luxurious excess and lost innocence. In her own words, the garden has ‘gone wild’, assaulting the senses with its brilliant colors, strong odors, and snarling overgrowth. The flowers look pretty sinister; one orchid is described as being ‘snaky looking’, thus, recalling the biblical fall and man’s decay into greed and sensuality. The decadent Creole lifestyle as portrayed in the novel – upon exploitation – finds its natural counterpart in the fallen garden. As I hope to have shown here, Rhys makes use of the literary device of symbol­ ism in her writing. In this aspect of the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, my appreciation of the characters and themes is enriched by the symbolism inherent in such narrative elements as dreams, visions, landscapes, characters’ names, place names, fire, and even the title. In Rhys’ fiction, the colonizer’s attempt to unveil the Caribbean woman does not simply turn ‘the veil’ into a symbol of resistance; it becomes a technique of camou­ flage, a means of struggle. The veil – once signifying the cultural limits of a woman – now masks the woman, transgressing the colonial boundary. In this respect, a common symbol associated with identity for the heroines of Rhys’ novels is cloth-

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ing.10 The type of clothing entirely depends on the person who is wearing it. Clothing is also a means of information about the person wearing it. Therefore, it becomes a reflection of one’s perception of him or her self, which led us to the concept of personal identity. A person’s choice of clothing and accessories as personal belongings (e.g. clothing that is worn or carried, but not part of a person’s main clothing) is as important as identification through the color of hair, height, skin and gender. It is a cipher; a code that needs deciphering in order to understand what kind of person is underneath it. The cultural context offers a great number of these “cryptograms” and therefore, gives people a variety of opportunities to reveal their identity. Therefore, every item of clothing carries a strong message about its owner and thus every owner “nests” a certain value in it, depending on temperament, mindset or mood, or even cultural background. So, the clothing of a person is a means of communication with the outside world. It is the way of telling people about the inside world, about the “state” and the “status” of its owner and his/her cultural context. As every person belongs to a clearly defined culture and has the right to reveal it, personal identity may sometimes be replaced by cultural identity. In this case, cul­ tural identity is the type of identity that is connected to a certain culture or a separate social and cultural group. It also brings people belonging to a definite culture, high­ lighting in the same time the differences with other people. Also, in terms of culture, clothing reveals either the historical roots of a person or the roots of the group he/she belongs to. Clothing, thus speaks about a memory of the history of race and racism, colo­ nialism and the question of cultural identity. For example, taking on the garments of another allows the individual a release from their own existence, “the promise of transgressive pleasure without any material penalties of actual change” (Thomas, 1999, p. 9). In Wide Sargasso Sea, the cross-dressing moment is described in the changing process of dresses (identities) between Tia and Antoinette. Antoinette’s desire to be just like Tia, to take on her cultural identity is very well expressed in the above-mentioned scene, with the notion of re-dressing thereby representing a form of escape from her own (inner) misery. However, following the critique of this idea, Thomas goes on to say that such cultural re-dressing does not contribute to the metamorphoses of the existing hier­ archies of power; the cross-dresser can always “reveal or revert to her First World identity beneath the re-dressing of difference” (Thomas, 1999, p. 9). It is important to note that Tia’s supposed freedom within Wide Sargasso Sea masks the fact that she was obliged to play with Antoinette, and did not necessarily choose to do so of her own agreement. When forced to wear Tia’s dress, Antoinette feels “sick…hating

10 Even if the dress is generally considered to be a symbol in the context of class and race, it is predominantly concerned with the placement of the Creole subject within the European social hierar­ chies rather than with the placement of the black woman within a colonized white culture.

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her”, without realization of what she said to make Tia steal her clothes: “you cheating nigger” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 8). In Voyage in the Dark, the dress becomes an esoteric symbol. For Anna, clothing represents a way to show who she is: “Out of this warm room that smells of fur I’ll go to all the lovely places I’ve dreamt of. This is the beginning” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 28). She even sells some clothing order to raise money to pay her rent. But for Anna’s landlady, Anna’s new clothing is symbolic of sexual promiscuity. She needs to buy new clothes or else she thinks the man she is going out with won’t marry her. In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Julia Martin’s attempts to look pretty, wearing her fashionable clothes, to give others the impression that she is well off, thus aug­ menting her relatives’ disgust when she asks them for cash. She considers selling her fur coat but at the same time thinks: “People thought twice before they were rude to anybody wearing a good fur coat” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 278). In Quartet, Rhys uses clothing and make-up to convey the Heidlers’ power and Marya Zelli’s lack of it. Thus, Lois Heidler wears “With assurance a drooping felt hat which entirely hid the upper part of her face” and when her eyes do appear “there was a suspicion, almost a deadened look in them” (Rhys, Quartet, 11). In the short story “Illusion,” the clothes are never worn, but indicate that the sensi­ ble Miss Bruce is afflicted “with the perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved, which is the real curse of Eve” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 154). Miss Bruce is embarrassed that her friend knows she collects clothes and she asserts at the end of the story that she would never make such a fool of herself as actually to wear them. In short, Jean Rhys used clothing to illustrate the emerging complexity and mul­ tifaceted nature of an individual’s identity. I should pinpoint here that the dialogue between the art form and the culture takes place without the detailed authorization of the writer, who is finally de-author­ ized once her text enters the linguistic sphere. Thus, a linguistic sign or a lexical rep­ etition such as ‘laugh’ or ‘smile’, which appears to signify a new order, turns out to identify the mechanisms of a discourse integration as a tension between identity and alterity. It is the uncanny and subversive anti-literary stance Christophine assumes, in her defiant: “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 104), which comes closest to achieving this stance. Aunt Cora exposes concepts of difference and otherness within her language; Christophine boldly and proudly asserts her difference from that language in its totality. The frequent repetition of ‘laugh’ and ‘smile’ will be analyzed in a selection of extracts from Wide Sargasso Sea, in which these items occur under different types of laughter. Thus, a linguistic sign, which appears to signify a new order, turns out to identify the power structures of the novel. The occurrences seem to fit into two basic types of laughter: a social and neg­ ative one, and an individual and positive one, an incubus and a succubus. In Part I, Antoinette is described as an outsider in the Jamaican world, from which she feels separated by barriers of race and class, upheld by a negative form of laugh­

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ter: the laughter of mockery and derision or its variant, the laughter of deception and hypocrisy. For example, in passages 1, 5, 6, and 7, Antoinette and her mother become the butt of the natives’ laughter. In this respect, the mockery and derision is hidden behind a false smile of friendliness, behind a mask, associated with the guests at her mother’s wedding (passage 3) and with Rochester at his own wedding (passage 9). At one stage, Rochester had actually forgotten to put on his mask of friendliness and the true derisive ring of his laughter was revealed to Antoinette (passage 10). His weak excuse that the mockery was entirely self-directed reassures Antoinette and thus seals her fate. Nevertheless, Antoinette and her mother Annette are associated with the laughter of gaiety and happiness, of naturalness and spon­ taneity (passages 2, 4, 8, 11, 12). This type of smile can also turn into the laughter of wildness and passion (passage 13). As a result, Rochester is determined to destroy Antoinette’s passion, and laughter (passage 14). For this, he locks her in the attic, where Antoinette’s laughter turns from a natural one into one of madness and despair (passage 15). We can also graphically represent the different types of laughter (Fig. 6.1.): laughter of mockery and derision social laughter (negative power)

laughter of deception and falseness

Laughter laughter of naturalness and spontaneity individual laughter (positive power)

laughter of madness and despair

Fig. 5.5: Types of Laughter

It is at the same time a moment of insight and revelation, where she sees her whole life mirrored in the sky. Indeed the sentence ‘I saw’ is repeated no less than thirteen times in the final scene. [1] “My mother usually walked up and down the glacis, a paved roofed-in terrace which ran the length of the house and sloped upwards to a clump of bamboos. Standing by the bamboos she had a clear view to the sea, but anyone passing could stare at her. They [the natives] stared,

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sometimes they laughed. Long after the sound was far away and faint she kept her eyes shut and her hands clenched.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 17)

[2] “She [Antoinette’s mother] would ride off very early and not come back till late next day – tired out because she had been to a dance or a moonlight picnic. She was gay and laughing – younger than I had ever seen her and the house was sad when she had gone.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 23)

[3] “I was bridesmaid when my mother married Mr. Mason in Spanish Town. ... I carried a bouquet and everything I wore was new – even my beautiful slippers. But their eyes slid away from my hating face. I had heard what all these smooth smiling people said about her when she was not listening and they did not guess I was.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 24)

[4] “Yes, what a dancer – that night when they came home from their honeymoon in Trinidad and they danced on the glacis to no music. There was no need for music when she danced. They stopped and she leaned backwards over his arm, down till her black hair touched the flag­ stones – still down, down. Then up again in a flash, laughing.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 25)

[5] “‘How do you know that I was not harmed?’ she [Antoinette’s mother] said. ‘We were so poor then ... we were something to laugh at. But we are not poor now,’ she said.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 27)

[6] “‘Annette… They [the natives] are laughing at you, do not allow them to laugh at you’.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 35)

[7] “Some of them [the natives] were laughing and waving sticks, some of the ones at the back were carrying flambeaux and it was light as day… And I was afraid, because I knew that the ones who laughed would be the worst.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 36)

[8] “We [Antoinette and Rochester] came to a little river. ‘This is the boundary of Granbois.’ She smiled at me. It was the first time I had seen her smile simply and naturally. Or perhaps it was the first time I had felt simple and natural with her.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 59)

[9] “[In 9 and 10, Rochester remembers how he got to know Antoinette:] It was all very brightly coloured, very strange, but it meant nothing to me. Nor did she, the girl I was to marry. When at last I met her I bowed, smiled, kissed her hand, danced with her. I played the part I was expected to play. She never had anything to do with me at all. Every movement I made was an effort of will

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and sometimes I wondered that no one noticed this. I would listen to my own voice and marvel at it, calm, correct but toneless, surely. But I must have given a faultless performance.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 64)

[10] “‘But don’t you remember last night I told you that when you are my wife there would not be any more reason to be afraid?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Then… you laughed. I didn’t like the way you laughed.’ ‘But I was laughing at myself, Antoinette.’ She looked at me and I took her in my arms and kissed her.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 66)

[11] “Her [Antoinette’s] little fan was on the table, she took it up laughing, lay back and shut her eyes. ‘I think I won’t get up this morning’.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 72)

[12] “All day she’d [Antoinette]… smile at herself in her looking-glass (do you like this scent?), try to teach me her songs, for they haunted me… she’d laugh for a long time and never tell me why she laughed.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 76)

[13] “She’ll [Antoinette] loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter (a mad girl. She’ll not care who she’s loving.) She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would – or could. Or could” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 135-136) [14] “I tell you she [Antoinette] loves no one, anyone. I could not touch her. Excepting as the hurri­ cane will touch that tree – and break it. You say I did? No. That was love’s fierce play. Now I’ll do it. She’ll not laugh in the sun again. She’ll not dress up and srnile at herself in that damnable look­ ing-glass. So pleased, so satisfied. 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.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 136)

[15] “I [Antoinette in Thornfield Hall] saw the sunlight coming through the window, the tree outside and the shadows of the leaves on the floor, but I saw the wax candles too and I hated them. So I knocked them all down. Most of them went out but one caught the thin curtains that were behind the red ones. I laughed when I saw the lovely colour spreading so fast, but I did not stay to watch it.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 154)

Humor is thus used as a postcolonial strategy in Jean Rhys’ novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, deconstructing as it does the frontier mentality of the nineteenth century colonialism and racism and masking a reflection on the process of creation linked with all forms of denial. Rhys confronts these issues, but she chooses to do so in ways that are often

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ironic or even manifestly grotesque, for she sees identity construction as inextricably intertwined in a contested Caribbean landscape. Homi Bhabha sees these interac­ tions differently. In his essay “Signs Taken for Wonders”, Bhabha suggests that: “The discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance, do not simply or singly refer to a person or to a dialectical power struggle between self and Other, or to a dis­ crimination between mother culture and alien cultures […] the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridisation rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority.” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 34)

Inherently paradoxical, the quotation above is interpreted as the confrontation between colonizers and colonized. In the Hegelian notion of master and slave, the colo­ nial figures become, in a way, dependent on their subjects and in attempting to deny or resist this dependence, they seek to express superiority through stereotypes and stigmatization. The colonized, on the other hand, while submitting to colonial author­ ity, begin creating a hybrid identity that is in opposition to that imposed on them by the colonial outsiders. Rhys uses humor as Bhabha suggests, to critically analyze and question any notions of colonial cultural superiority and to undermine attitudes that are patently false and liable to continue generating conflict if not confronted by their illusory power. The postcolonial purpose of Rhys’ humor is to target attitudes of racism and misplaced colonizing zeal. Here, the humor encourages readers to question the belief systems that led to the various events and conflicts in the novel. Laughter thus becomes more than a cathartic device; it requires the reader to respond to these aspects of the text and acknowledge the existence of a new hybrid identity. To conclude, the tension between identity and alterity – “one belongs either to one group or to another; one is either in or out” – culminates in a “frightening consol­ idation of (…) assertions of cultural superiority, mechanisms of control, whose power and ineluctability reinforce… the logic of identity” (Said 1994, p. 56). The most funda­ mental challenge between ‘laughter’ and ‘smile’ is to confront the relation of superior to subaltern identity that is embodied in the construction of Otherness. Moreover, the ‘smile’ is a symbolic act of something that is not felt, but done purely for the sake of it. The point about this kind of experience is that it could serve to decentre a hegemonic and self-assured culture.

5.3 (Power-)Textualization Jean Rhys’ stylistic techniques reflect not only the externality of the materialistic culture, but also the deployed sense of tradition and circumscribed abstraction, and the multiple and contradictory temporality serialization. Some short stories reflect the exotic characteristics of Jean Rhys’ fiction and illustrates the idyllic image of the Antilles. The novels enrich the notion of ‘text’ in an imaginative manner, starting with the signs system. Their status remains divided between the anxiety of influence and

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the anxiety of authorship over the intertextual configurations, as a coping strategy to the postcolonial narrative texture. All Jean Rhys’ novels and short stories take for granted the cruelty and brutality of human behavior, which we are always so eager to ignore. She deals in dejection, cowardice and squalor. She exposes drunkenness, passivity and isolation. She never compromises with a bright picture of life. Her bohemians have no glamour. There is no real intimacy in her world. The figures wandering through her texts are virtu­ ally homeless, they have no family, no friends, and they are barely surviving on the margins of society. There is no poetic justice in her stories, no reward for the virtuous, no punishment for the wicked because hers is a world where conventional values are either unknown or discarded. Moreover, Ford Maddox Ford was aware from the very beginning that Rhys would find trouble in securing an audience and after her initial succès d’estime she would more or less be forgotten. Her work was too gloomy; her books too angry and unhappy and her heroines too remote from an optimistic picture of a woman’s condition. Recog­nizing her talent for compression and her preference for misfits and outsiders, Ford encouraged her to write in the traditionally marginal form of the short story: “Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society […] an intense awareness of human loneliness” (O’Connor, 1985, p.  19). These words written by Flannery O’Connor, when trying to define the short story, would fit Rhys’ oeuvre as a whole and not only her short fiction. However, we want to show how the short story was the literary form that best suited her vision of life and to suggest that even in her novels, she went back repeatedly to the fragmen­ tary and episodic structure of the stories. While it would be impossible (and perhaps even undesirable) to attempt a defi­ nition of the short story as a genre, it is possible to agree on a set of characteristics common to most stories. The brevity of the form imposes an economy of words and a capacity to select those that will maximize the effect sought for. It forces the elision of what went before a certain moment and of what happens next; it leads the writer to evoke feelings and atmospheres rather than to tell us about them – it works by sug­ gestion rather than by statement. Living in a world almost totally isolated from any human contact, the women in Jean Rhys’ short stories persistently refuse to abandon their stubborn freedom from social ties. They suffer from their exiled condition yet they refuse to belong as if they were doomed never to be at home wherever they went. They find no support in other people. Men abuse them. Women reject them. They are free and therefore danger­ ous to the ordered well-behaved lives around them. One of the rare narrative situa­ tions where another woman understands the heroine’s distance from a sheltered and respectable existence is also a good example of Rhys’ modernist writing technique. As always in Rhys’ fiction like Outside the Machine (1960), no illusion of a better life lasts long enough to be taken seriously either by the heroine or by the reader. In this story, the heroine relates her experience in an English hospital in Paris. In her

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first day in the hospital, Inez thinks: “The day after I come out of this place something lucky might happen” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 79). Relentlessly the days go by, the initial sadness is exchanged for despair: “No, this time I won’t be able to pull it off, this time I’m done” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 97). And each new episode confirm the heroine’s knowledge that she does not belong in the “stable, decent world” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 81) of the English hospital. In this situation, every day counts and Inez hopelessly counts her days in hospital as a momentary pause before confronting the menace of the outside world. Overheard bits of dialogue, glances, and occasional remarks combine with the narrator’s inner voice to evoke the atmosphere of the place for the reader. As Inez felt from the start, the enclosed space of the women’s ward is part of the destructive texture of society, not a delay from life’s struggle. “Up and down”, “in and out” – this cinematic quality, as so often in Jean Rhys’ prose, is objectively given. Leaving the hospital, Inez is just as frightened of life as before: “Because you can’t die and come to life again for a few hundred francs. It takes more than that.” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 100) This example of a lonely existence where there is no possibility of escape is typical of Jean Rhys’ fiction. Throughout her work, I found the same skillful combi­ nation of objectively presented dialogue with the interior monologue of the narrating consciousness. Such focus on the contrast between what people say – in bits and frag­ ments of heard conversations – and what the narrator silently experiences is one of the techniques used by the author to emphasize the isolation of her figures. In Rhys’ short fiction, the reader never receives a complete portrayal of anyone. There are only glimpses of other people’s feelings or motives. Through her heroines, the ‘film-mind’ floats a succession of disconnected images and random memories – fragments which the author pieces together, episode after episode, time and again dissolving any (narrative) exceptions of a sheltered exist­ ence, in a stubborn attempt to build for the reader a coherent puzzle out of her dis­ membered experience of life. Through the understated elliptical style of her prose, Rhys used her own displacement to challenge conventional patterns, institutional­ ized structures of power, accepted narrative strategies and protocols for seducing or persuading the reader. As a woman writer, Rhys knew that her fiction was directed towards the new image of woman and disrupting the pervasive twentieth-century myth that the world is ours for the taking. As Elaine Fido perceptively wrote: “Rhys’ language... which tends to be carefully defined, clear and exact, disciplined seems almost to symbol­ ize the element which her major female characters lack, i.e., a capacity to impose a particular order on the world. Rhys’ very syntax contains and defines her heroines in their chaotic and aimless experience” (Fido, 1991, p. 5). In Again the Antilles, the narrator’s identification with Papa Dom, however, is obstructed by the promise of social power she gains by siding with the white English (male) colonialists. The story allows us to see Rhys, simultaneously, asking challeng­ ing questions about cultural identification and race, of the sort that Frantz Fanon

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asks later in Black Skin, White Masks, and disclosing through the unconscious of the text itself, the racial and political ambivalence of the ‘settler discourse’ and particu­ larly of native white women. It is, nevertheless, the power of Rhys’ texts and of Anglocentric education, not to mention the economic necessity that sends colonial-born writers to England to pursue their literary aspirations. The creation of the colonial subject, therefore, takes place not only in the colony but in the ‘Mother Country’ as well. At the centre of Rhys’ writing is her extremely powerful deconstruction of this ‘family’ – the ‘mother’ country, England or France, and her ‘children’, the colonies. The metaphor of ‘family’ for political relations is not haphazard, but highlights the exploitation that Rhys sees at the heart of both the political and social family systems. Just as Rhys focused her attention on Charlotte Brontë’s off-stage Bertha and discovered a story that had not yet been told, so we could have the opportunity to find rich and important stories embedded in Rhys’ own texts. If the story Rhys tells critiques the metaphors that sustain colonialist politics (metaphors linking race to culture or family to Empire), the story embedded within it reveals the collusion and participation in this politics of even such an astute critic. Consequently, the effects of the colonization process were generally the same almost everywhere. By means of power (in all its social forms) and exploitation, the colonizers created an alterity, an ‘other’ or a ‘margin’ in order to define themselves as ‘centre’ – a system which evaluated and valued everything in relation to the stand­ ards of the economically developed, civilized Western Europe. As a consequence, the concept of ‘Eurocentrism’ developed. Taking into consideration Cixous’s account: “I learned everything from this first spectacle. I saw how the white (French), superior, plutocratic, civilized world founded its power on the repression of populations who had suddenly become ‘invisible’, like the proletarians, immigrant workers, minorities who are not the right ‘colour’. Women. Invisible as humans. But, of course, perceived as tools – dirty, stupid, lazy, underhanded, etc. Thanks to some annihilating dialectal magic, I saw that the great, noble, ‘advanced’ countries established themselves by expelling what was ‘strange’; excluding it but not dismissing it; enslaving it. A commonplace gesture of History: there have to be two races – the masters and the slaves” (Cixous, 1986, p. 115), In using this in the analysis of Jean Rhys’ short story The Day They Burned the Books, I ask the questions: are there instances of racism, sexism and colonialism in the short story? Who is the ‘margin’/’centre’? The study’s aim is to prove that in fact this is what the short story is all about. Jean Rhys’ short story The Day They Burned the Books deals with the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, by focusing on the condition of the woman in a society given to abuse and discrimination. The relationship between Eddie’s parents has to be analyzed from several angles, all leading inevitably to the same descriptive oppositional pair: master and slave. Mr. Sawyer’s alcoholic (and consequential racist) outbursts result in him abusing (verbally and even physically) his wife. However, she responds to his violence with

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silence. Her silence is metonymic of the profounder silencing the ‘marginal’ world of the slave. Throughout the short story, there is not even one instance in which she speaks, and all her opinions are expressed indirectly. In G.C. Spivak’s opinion “there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak” (Spivak, 1985, p. 112); therefore I can only come to the conclusion that Mrs. Sawyer will permanently find herself in a silent position. But does she? Let us postpone the answer to this question for now. There is also the (more obvious) racial dimension of this relationship – Mrs. Sawyer is a ‘coloured’ woman,11 whereas her husband is white. During his drunk­ enness he makes a point of her skin’s colour: “Look at the nigger showing off [...] You damned, long-eyed gloomy half-caste, you don’t smell right” (Rhys, The Day They Burned the Books, 458), thus reinforcing the inferior position she has been thrown into by her sheer racial features. The racial aspect of the master-slave relationship undeniably favors the first, the master of the dichotomy within the imperial discourse and thus associates his whiteness with the mark of superiority. Eddie’s and the narra­ tor’s skin color also situates them at the top of the racial pyramid, and though born in the Caribbean, they think of Great Britain as ‘home’. However, their situation is more complex, if we take into account that the very place of their birth provides them with the status of ‘other’ in the eyes of the English boys and girls they meet, who identify them not as English, but as ‘horrid colonials’. In other words, we face here a duality of placement within the colonial system of power. Moreover, this duality is symbolized by Eddie himself. Physically ‘he is the living image of his father’ with his ‘pale blue eyes and straw-coloured hair’ and the ghost- like color of his skin, which makes him ‘inherit’ the master, ‘centre’ status of his father; but the narrator also mentions that he is ‘silent as his mother’ (emphasis added) – silence, as mentioned before, being a feature of the oppressed. Postcolonial theorists oppose the printed (lifeless) culture of the colonizers to the oral (lively) culture of the native, which ultimately brings about the latter’s silencing within the imperial discourse. Therefore, it is not by accident that Mrs. Sawyer hates the room built by her husband to store the books and she hates the books as well. In his attempt to identify himself as ‘centre’, Eddie practices some sort of cultural fetish­ ism: “My room” Eddie called it. “My books,” he would say, “my books.” At a certain point in the development of the short story, Mr. Sawyer dies quite young we might suppose, but the cause of his death is never mentioned. However, prior to his death, one particular incident draws attention: during one dinner party, he humiliates his wife once again, this time in public by pulling Mrs. Sawyer’s hair in an attempt to prove that it is ‘not a wig, you see’. Although in extreme pain, Mrs. Sawyer pretends that this is one more of the ‘mysterious, obscure, sacred English

11 It is interesting that immediately after mentioning the fact that she is ‘coloured’, the narrator jux­ taposes the qualities she possesses: “though a decent, respectable, nicely educated coloured woman, mind you”; this statement points to the idea that the text is written from a white person’s position.

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jokes’ of his and laughs it off; later on, she puts some of the pulled hair in an enve­ lope, and since hair is ‘obeah’ (i.e. magic) ‘Mr. Sawyer ought to look out’. If we are to attribute a mystical dimension to his death, this incident is not insignificant. Several weeks after Mr. Sawyer’s death, Mrs. Sawyer enters the room in which the books are kept and starts pulling the books out of the shelves, piling them into two heaps – good-looking books which are going to be sold and books ‘condemned’ to be burnt. One of the books she decides to burn (although judging from its very good condition, it should go to the pile of the books to be sold) has Christina Rossetti as an author. At this point, the narrator makes a rather strange statement: “(...) by a flicker in Mrs. Sawyer’s eyes I knew that worse than men who wrote books were women who wrote books – infinitely worse. Men could be mercifully shot; women must be tortured” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 460). First, Mrs. Sawyer’s gesture clearly discloses an attitude of liberation, an assertion of her independence brought about by her husband’s death. Secondly, the following question arises: why would she decide to ‘torture’ a member of her own gender? Following Spivak’s argument again might provide us with some answers. In her opinion, as soon as the subaltern tries to acquire a voice, she must move into the dominant discourse to be understood. From the first viewpoint, it can be argued that Mrs. Sawyer turns herself from being tortured into a torturer, thus taking her husband’s place. We obviously are dealing with a movement from the marginal position in her case; where/what is her voice then? As mentioned before, she never speaks throughout the whole short story. The answer is that logos is replaced by fire and thus fire, symbolically, becomes her voice. From the second point of view, an interesting phenomenon takes place. As far as Mrs. Sawyer is concerned, we know that her skin-color puts her in an inferior posi­ tion, but nevertheless something in her physiology makes the narrator admit that she is aesthetically superior to her own mother: “she has (...) quantities and quantities and quantities of hair” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 461) as Eddie (proudly) puts it. In other words, the color of the skin is replaced by the quantity of hair as a superiority standard. This is one reason for hair being ‘obeah’ – because it transmutes the centre of power. Mrs. Sawyer is a woman doomed to live in her own native land, which unfortu­ nately no longer belongs to her and her people, but to the mighty colonizers. She is a woman living in an age when women are not yet fully entitled to rights equal to those of men, at least in practice, and she is also colored, a fact which confers her to an even lower status in the discriminating, colonial society she has become part of. She is first mentioned in relation to her husband, Mr. Sawyer, a peculiar man who doesn’t quite belong among the other British settlers, and who doesn’t even like the Caribbean, but has nevertheless chosen to live here and also marry a local woman. Thus, Mrs. Sawyer is first mentioned as the “coloured woman” to whom Mr. Sawyer is married. This min­ imalist mention of a human being foreshadows the way she is described further on. The narrator chooses, however, to describe her as a “decent, respectable, and nicely educated” woman, distancing herself from the view of the biased society, who sees

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Mrs. Sawyer as a mere colored woman. Unfortunately, her husband also shares this view. In his drunken moments, he abuses her both verbally and physically, calling her a “nigger”, a “damned, long-eyed gloomy half caste” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 462). However, his wife never answers back. Her silence is puzzling to the narrator, but through this symbolic silence, however, Mrs. Sawyer seems to express the profounder silence of the ‘marginal’ world of the slave. She is indeed a slave in her husband’s eyes, a fact clearly emphasized by his behavior towards her. Throughout the short story, there is not even one instance in which she speaks, and all her opinions are expressed indirectly. She is submissive, she keeps her house­ hold, is a good mother, and she also tries to understand the “mysterious, obscure, sacred English” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 462) which her husband fre­ quently pokes fun about. The expression, “mysterious, obscure, sacred English joke” emphasizes the rift that exists between the two people in particular, but on a larger scale, the rift between the English colonizers and the colonized. It expresses the fact that whatever the English do or say is to be accepted; it is not to be debated because it is “sacred” and English, even though it is not right or fully understood. It seems that Mrs. Sawyer is fully aware of this, and of her condition as the colored wife of a white man, subjected to the discrimination of the society and worst of all, to that of her husband. The narrator ironically observes that even though she has to go through all sorts of abuse silently, she does have compensations: a pleasant home in a nice area, a large garden and a fine mango tree, which is very prolific. These are indeed compensatory, but not to measure up to the amount of abuse she is being subjected to, in order to be able to erase it from her mind and heart. For the colonized also have feelings, a fact which the colonizers often seem to forget. At a certain point in the development of the short story, Mr. Sawyer dies. Everybody says “how nice Mrs. Sawyer had looked, walking like a queen behind the coffin and crying her eyeballs out at the right moment” (Rhys, The Day They Burned The Books, 461). The word ‘queen’ can be ambivalent in this context. She might be described as being dignified and respectable, proper looking, according to the rules of decorum in such a situation. Also, what the narrator might want to suggest is that she is walking proudly and even triumphantly behind the coffin, having finally escaped the oppression of her husband. She is described to have cried “her eyeballs out at the right moment,” which could mean that she feigned her distress and wanted to show that she was truly upset by overdoing it. Several weeks after Mr. Sawyer’s death, Mrs. Sawyer enters the rooms in which her husband’s books were kept and starts sorting them out, either to be sold or burned. Mrs. Sawyer’s gesture clearly discloses an attitude of liberation; she realizes that with her husband’s death she has become independent. She can now rebel against the things, which she cannot accept, once her husband is out of the way. This can be described as a movement from “margin” to “centre,” the position of the privileged. In her son’s eyes, she turns from a state of tortured into the torturer. “Now I’ve got to hate you too. Now I hate you too” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 462), she

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has to assert herself and “voice” her frustrations. However, she chooses to take more radical action than speaking, screaming or shouting; logos is symbolically replaced by “fire” – she burns the literary manifestations of the colonizing society. Mrs. Sawyer changes radically. If in the beginning, the narrator thought that “she must have been pretty once” but that it had “gone by,” now that her husband was dead: “She looked beautiful, too-beautiful as the sky outside which was a very dark blue, or the mango tree, long sprays of brown and gold”. She becomes more beautiful than, thus superior to, the narrator’s mother, because Mrs. Sawyer “has (...) quan­ tities and quantities and quantities of hair” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 461), the color of the skin being replaced by the quantity of hair, as a superior token, helping to transgress the centre of power. Going back to the initial question: does Mrs. Sawyer find herself permanently in a silent position? No, but this means that she is no longer in a subaltern position either. Thus, it is not by chance, her comparison with a ‘queen’, when she walks behind her husband’s coffin. The title of the book the narrator grasped from the “condemned” pile, Fort comme la Mort, means that Mrs. Sawyer has the strength to extricate herself from a double slavery – as a woman and as a colonized subject. She has proved to be strong enough to survive abuse and even reach a state of happiness through inde­ pendence, thus setting an example for many other people who find themselves in similar conditions. In short, The Day They Burned the Books could be considered a complex study of social and cultural relationships developed within a space and tormented by a tumul­ tuous history of colonization. And within this space, juxtaposing the condition of ‘col­ onized’ to that of ‘woman’ automatically determines double enslavement: a position that Rhys’ character, Mrs. Sawyer, proves she can transgress. As a conclusion, this chapter reflects my endeavor to analyze Jean Rhys’ fiction that displays a consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examines the ways in which their racial representations interplay with her depictions of gender and sex­ uality. Part of my analysis was also to show how Rhys employs a variety of narrative forms which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the trans­ formation of stream of consciousness technique. The autobiographical narrative often involves “the desire to create a portrait of growth and maturation,” which “informs, indeed often incites, life writing” (Marrone, 2000, p. 89) and cannot be claimed to be wholly invented. The autobiographical pact (Tab. 6.1.) has changed over time to overcome autobiography, although the author’s personal life has a very relative value. One of the acknowledged values of this style of writing is still recognized by the re-siz­ ing effort of self and the search for a “shelter” of the ego (which Jean Rhys often calls “home”). In this respect, Jean Rhys’ novels and short stories are more than an auto­ biography, going beyond the latter by the general human values that it claims (e.g. marriage seen as a rite of passage, searching for self through work, decay (by alcohol) and descent into the depths of self.

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Tab. 5.2: The Autobiographical Pact (Philippe Lejeune, 1975) grammatical → person identity ↓

I

YOU

HE

narrator = principal character

classical autobiography (autodiegetic)

autobiography in the 2nd person

autobiography in the 3rd person

narrator ≠ principal character

biography in the 1st person (witness narrative) (homodiegetic)

biography addressed to the model

classical biography (heterodiegetic)

The figure of the persona helps us to clarify the relationship between the writer – the historical person – and the characters, which the writer creates. The situation becomes even more difficult when the writer uses the first person singular pronoun, ‘I’.

6 Final Conclusions Identity itself is regarded as a cultural phenomenon, implying that its construction is both symbolic and social. In the first part of the book, I look at the self as articulated with the concept of nation because, in order to exist as an integral and contained formation, its boundaries need to be defined. The best way for them to be drawn is to place them against the national background. Conversely, the nation requires the subject because national narratives encourage personal narratives to build their own ‘geography of the self’. Moreover, the nation extrapolates the subjects’ narrative to build a magnified narrative for the collectivity. However, if we refer to the Caribbean people, the notion of exile is also important for their sense of home. In their case, ‘traveling’ does not refer transparently to the journey between the Caribbean and Europe. The voyage describes colonial subjects’ movements across the Atlantic Ocean to England, and refers to the Caribbean subject’s journey back to the Caribbean after a period of absence. In this context, the placement and the signifying process of the return voyage is of utmost importance for Jean Rhys’ narratives. The presence of an exiled subject in a text undermines the assumed points of reference; the concept of exile demands an explication of traveling identities and a description of the bound­ aries that define ‘home’ and ‘away’. As Hellen Carr has suggested: “‘homelessness’ is the terrain of Rhys’ fiction,” “dealing as it does with those who belong nowhere, between cultures, between histories” (Carr, 1996, p. 14). For James Clifford, the met­ aphor of travel takes place over a pre-given space and reaches a dynamic, rather than a static conception of location. Clifford’s views of a “traveling culture” becomes especially significant here in that “native” culture, as a non-static entity, is not only affected but also transformed by the intrusion of “imperialist” cultures, implying a ‘thereness’, a homeland and thus a place of an eventual return. The concept of hybridity focuses on two directions of thought: one that claims that the reinvented self expresses the simultaneity of cultural identities, and the other one which argues that the existential anxiety is related to the feeling of estrangement. Thus, the concept of hybridity contains in nuce the idea of mixture, combination, fusion, mélange. The metaphor of hybridity, in which cultures are seen as ‘floating together’, leads to the existence of a ‘fluid identity’. On the one hand, hybridity may imply a space between two pure identities; on the other hand, it can be understood as a sine-qua-non condition of the human cultures, which do not contain pure iden­ tities, as trans-cultural processes are taking place. As a discursive construction, the rhetoric of hybridity also analyzes the relationship between cultural hybridity and alterity, dealing with the creation of new transcultural forms, namely the diasporic hybridities (‘shifting homeland’ and ‘travelling identities’), from within the ‘contact zone’, produced by the colonizing process. The idea that the postcolonial culture is a hybrid one derives straight from the notion of de-territorialization, which enhances the disappearance of the relationship between culture and place and the mixture of the uprooted cultural identities. It is a © 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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view that deals with borders, the overlaps, and the in-between places, between two or more cultures. The analysis of cultural alterity starts from the premise that it is precisely from this shifting boundary of otherness within identity, that the concept of hybridity wants to objectify confrontation with otherness. In other words, the place of the Other must not be imagined as a fixed phenomenological point, opposed to the self, representing a culturally alien consciousness. The Other must be seen as the necessary negation of a primordial/pure identity – cultural or psychic – that introduces the system of differ­ entiation, which enables the ‘cultural alterity’ to be signified as a symbolic, historic reality. Thus, if the subject of desire is never simply myself, then the Other is never simply an It-self. The subchapter foregrounds the fact that, as a principle of identifi­ cation in the relationship between hybridity and cultural alterity, the Other bestows a degree of objectivity. However, identification, as it is spoken in the desire of the Other, is always a question of interpretation for it is the elusive recognition of myself with a one-self. Moreover, the book also refers to the ambivalent, uncertain questions of the hybrid colonial desire. We can think of a correspondence between the mise-en-scène of unconscious fantasy, the racist fear (the language of colonial racism) and the hate that stalks the colonial scene, seen as a depersonalization of the colonial man. In dis­ avowing the culturally differentiated condition of the colonial world, the colonizer is himself caught in the ambivalence of paranoic identification. The white man does not deny what he fears and desires by projecting it on ‘them’. By following the trajectory of colonial desire in the company of the colonial figure, it becomes possible to cross, even to shift the Manichean boundaries of colonial consciousness. But the strategic return of that difference that informs and deforms the image of identity, in the margin of Otherness, displays identification between hybridity and cultural alterity. In con­ clusion, the disavowal of the Other always exacerbates the ‘edge’ of identification and reveals that dangerous place, where hybridity and cultural alterity are twinned. Another issue of the book relies on the observation that while cultural hybridiza­ tion highlights the individuals, the social contract contextualizes individuals as parts of the connected social units. In this respect, the book attempts to reveal the social contract (collusion) of racial stereotypes as a cultural and social fabrication. Inside this intertextual discourse, fascination with the ‘spectacle’ of the Other, of the image of the colonial Other becomes a trope of desire for the hybrid identities. In highlighting the consubstantiality of space, location and cultural belonging, I started from the premise that identities are shaped by embodied and embedded nar­ ratives, located in particular places. Thus, in Jean Rhys’ novels, e.g. it is not spaces which ground identification, but places. A space becomes a place by being invested with meaning, a social signification that produces identity. In the case of the Carib­ bean, identity is relational with respect to a large community, which can locate the individual in its history and territory. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson reminds us that the nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest



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nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1991, p. 6). In other words, the protagonist is the point of identification for the reader, who is through this process inserted in the imagined representation of the nation in Jean Rhys’ novels. For example, In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is so closely identified with her tropical islands that they seem to be the extension of each other. The land­ scape becomes engendered through this close identification, and Antoinette becomes a manifestation of place. In the Caribbean world, Rhys suggests that memory is mal­ leable and imagination is influential; reality, if it exists, is different for each individ­ ual. To attempt to discover a final interpretation of Wide Sargasso Sea, then, is to make the same mistake as Mr. Rochester, attempting to fix something that by its very nature is variable. Starting from the premise that creolization means more than just mixture, the cultural transmission under situations of displacement and de-territorialization sug­ gests the recognition of powerful ‘others’. We couldn’t but notice that creolization is the force that brings human cultures into relation with one another, a process of relation that neither reduces the other to the same, nor resolves itself in a reified, unchanging form. The self is important to Caribbean identity because due to a history of slavery, métissage, creolization and colonization, the question of “Who am I” acquires a more profound significance and becomes loaded within the cultural and racial themes, which are not to be found with the same intensity in the European setting. I posit that, in order to understand the self as it functions in the Caribbean, it becomes important to analyze the way in which the process of creolization took place in the interaction between the Caribbean and Europe. In analyzing Rhys’ novels, it is quite clear that the ambivalence of cultural identity in Rhys’ novels is to be found in the cultural Creoli­ zation occurring among overlapping and conflicting Caribbean boundaries, histories and identities. The book also approaches Paul Gilroy’s concept of ‘Black Atlantic’ as a reality of modernity and double-consciousness. While a term like ‘black’ or ‘white’ appears to stand on its own in delineating a particular content, that content is actually deter­ mined as much by what it negatively excludes as by what it positively designates. Such is the meaning of the dialectical dead-end, where Hegel’s master finds himself in his famous master-slave phenomenology and the real condition of dominance in the ‘Black Atlantic’. The portrait of Caribbean exoticism is connected to the postcolonial theory, which analyzes the more complex and insidious forms of cultural imperialism that has replaced colonialism. Thus, postcolonial theory is above all a reflection on differ­ ence, and as such is a discourse about the Other, but it is also, and more importantly, an address to the Other. Throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, e.g. we see the English strug­ gling to maintain their tenuous grasp over the island while simultaneously grappling with the reality that this domain is very different from Europe. Rochester’s intense

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need to control Antoinette represents the British struggle to maintain economic control over an area they consider their territory. Antoinette’s identity remains thus in flux. The question of her identity also addresses questions inherent in any discussion of colonization: for example, how the colonizer (her husband) confuses and destroys the identities of the colonized (Antoinette, renamed Bertha at the end of the novel), and how empire dislocates and depersonalizes both place and people. In proposing an analytical discourse about the emergence of a new postcolonial identity, the book also attempts to analyze the situation or conditions that deter­ mine the colonial Other to produce a new cultural encounter. Thus, Fanon offers us an acute sense of these processes of production when he writes, “the black soul is a white man’s artifact” (Fanon, 1967, p. 28). In Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, the Carib­ bean region finds itself unified around a certain persistent and irreducible Otherness within their boundaries and it is this core of strangeness within, this self-differences which qualitatively distinguishes the Caribbean from the conventional poetics of nation-making in Europe. The Caribbean constitutes the “definitive” community of others, a community in which one never precisely knows who one’s neighbor is. I also suggested that there are sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) because there are no longer real environments of memory (milieux de mémoire). This links place to its historical axis, spaces of identity to questions of collective memory and tradi­ tion. In Wide Sargasso Sea, respectively, identity becomes a question of memory, and memories of home in particular. Heimat/homeland, in this sense, is not a mirage, but a dangerous illusion, centering on shared traditions and memories; it is a mythical bond rooted in a lost past, a result of the search for a rooted, bounded, whole and authentic identity. In order to describe the cultural identity in the Caribbean region, the book pro­ poses an articulation of the related issues of doubling, hybridity and métissage within a framework that writes the difference of the region as both British and West Indian. Antonio Benitez-Rojo calls the Caribbean culture: “a supersyncretic culture characterized by its complexity, its individualism, and its instability, that is to say Creole culture, whose seeds had come scattered from the richest stores of three con­ tinents” (Benitez-Rojo, 1996, p. 46). It seems legitimate, therefore – in the light of multivalence in the resulting admixtures that have become the primary markers of Caribbean cultural identity – to locate the constant slippages of the Caribbean creole. This primary framework embodying the elements of dynamism and displacement, multiplicity, indeterminacy that have become the region’s defining sign and whose relational space has sought to re-envision the cultural identity. In a sense, then, the interstitial complexities mapped by the British Caribbean territories are a correlative of the ultimate regional paradox: the identities produced by the process of creoliza­ tion mediated by the traces of culture, but tied to the metropole in a political double bind that renders them neither completely British nor West Indian, but more than the sum of both. Indeed, this doubleness of the British Caribbean integrates and repro­ duces a cultural axis of Caribbeanness that articulates the interstitiality of the British



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Caribbean postcolonial condition and implicitly illustrates what Stuart Hall terms as: “the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cul­ tural experience of black subjects” (Hall, 1996, p. 443). Thus, Barbados, Jamaica and Dominica are among the remnants of a British colonial empire. While their historical past and colonial present relate them to a distant metropole, their cultural identities place them within a Caribbean continuum. The description of the Ethnocentrism versus Eurocentrism deals with the unwrit­ ten Eurocentrism, which first emerged as a discursive rationale for colonialism (the process by which the European powers reached positions of hegemony in the world). Indeed, J.M. Blaut calls Eurocentrism: “the colonizer’s model of the world” (Blaut, 1993). But, claiming subjectivity remains a questionable strategy for the Caribbean. Ironically, if the Caribbean asserts subjectivity it is also an enactment of its denial. When the Caribbean says ‘I’, it is also saying, ‘I have internalized the colonizing dis­ course of the West’. For the Caribbean, saying yes to the ‘I’ also means saying ‘no’ to (it)self. The book first focuses on the interconnections of the two social and cul­ tural practices and suggests that it is important to note the chronological simultane­ ity between the formation of “the self” in European thought, the European project of national consolidation and the colonization of the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas. However, this state of things could not last for long because it is the aware­ ness of this absence that is responsible for the strong assertion of self in Caribbean allegorical autobiography. The affirmation of the self in the Caribbean novel proves to be studied as an over-determined formation, responding to pressure from multiple sources: the metropole’s involvement in perpetuating ‘third-world’ allegorical nar­ ratives – a genre promoted as unsophisticated by some – and the Caribbean need to reassert a subjectivity that has been historically denied. Following a close reading of the conceptual framework of post colonialism, the book analyzes ethnicity as concepts that refer to the learned cultural behaviors and cultural identities that are acquired. Ethnic identity is neither given nor fixed. It devel­ ops after an individual internalizes and maintains the characteristics of that ethnic­ ity. While identity has originally been regarded as primordial and natural, something stable, durable and immovable, its meaning has been viewed as a lifelong changeable process. First, the individual possesses a subjective identity, which develops during the process of socialization. At the same time, the individual has several collective identities. Moreover, collective identities are formed at the expense of such concepts as the enemy and borders, i.e. by excluding non-members from the collective (us vs. them). Thus, it becomes clear that identity is conveyed through self-perception but also by the perception from others; therefore identity can only be experienced in the collective. Ethnic identity, likewise, is not a cultural property of a group, but has a relational character, as “group identities must always be defined in relation to that which they are not” (Eriksen, 2002, p. 10). This perspective presupposes that agents themselves, to a certain extent, have the power to actively decide on or consciously manipulate their identities in multiple ways and for a variety of purposes. Moreover,

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ethnic classifications “serve to order the social world and to create standardized cog­ nitive maps over categories of relevant others” (Eriksen, 2002, p. 60). Ethnicity, thus is “a matter of social [and not rarely also political] organisation above and beyond questions of empirical cultural differences: it is about ‘the social organisation of cul­ tural difference’” (Barth, 1998, p. 6). The processes of ethnic identity formation then attain their greatest importance when they are elevated to particularly important aspects of personal identity as happens in situations of change, when ethnic groups’ boundaries seem threatened or are not recognized by others. In other words, ethnic ideology has “an immedi­ ate appeal because it offers answers to ‘perennial problems of life’: the questions of origins, destiny and, ultimately, the meaning of life” (Eriksen, 2002, p. 45). Following Mandelbrot’s pattern of fractality, I demonstrated that fractal identi­ ties in the already mentioned novels are broken, irregular, fragmented, grainy, ramified, strange, tangled, wrinkled. These wrinkled structures may extend over space, over time, or over both, creating fractured identities (self/other, mind/body, culture/ nature, male/female). Using these fractal lenses, I also conceptualized the characters’ identities in three of Jean Rhys’ novels as an open, multileveled system, which exists in the interior phenomenological space of their minds. The second, applicative part of the book focused on the above mapping of cul­ tural identities in parts of Jean Rhys’ novels: Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Quartet and short-stories. Each text weighs pretextual, textual and transtextual components with a view to identify­ ing the rhetoric that brings together all the signs into a signifying whole and places into perspective the signs of blackness and whiteness, self and other, home and exile. In this respect, Said’s analysis in his ‘Introduction’ to Culture and Imperialism, points to a significant discussion of the relationships between imperial endeavour and cultural expression of both the colonizer and the colonized; Edward Said identi­ fies the colonial text as “an exile’s book” (Said, 1993, p. 27). Implicit, however, in the natural imagery of Said is the premise that exile in its keenest sense occurs in rela­ tionship to the homeland. In the tradition of widely studied Caribbean writers in exile in Britain, Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea captures the experiences, peculiar conditions and history rooted in the Caribbean Creole plantocracy. George Lamming captures this experience in one of his essays entitled “The Occasion for Speaking” from the collec­ tion of essays, The Pleasures of Exile, in which he anticipates Said’s above-mentioned insights: “The pleasure and Paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am… and yet there is always an acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head” (Lamming, 1960, p. 50). Terms like ‘anxiety of influence’ and ‘anxiety of authorship’ also interact in this book. In brief, for an ‘anxiety of influence’ the woman writer substitutes what Gilbert and Gubar have called an ‘anxiety of authorship’, an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority, which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex.



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The book also shows the interactive movements between the intratext and inter­ text cycles (the so-called, ‘hermeneutical circle’), resulting in a further understanding of the themes in Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight or Wide Sargasso Sea, and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. The reader experiences a textual memory, because that determines the possibility to seize the presence of other’s text (intertext) within the author’s text. If the intertext (the ‘middle’ text) has the semiosphere of a reference system, the intratext or the extratext refers to the microsystem of the author’s text. Frequently described as an autobiographical account of a disappointing and exploit­ ative love affair that Rhys had shortly after arriving in England as a young woman, Voyage in the Dark is Rhys’ most intimate expression of the sense of exile she experi­ enced as a result of the single journey that would change her life forever: the irrevers­ ible journey from Dominica to England. The subtly divided world of Good Morning, Midnight, in which Sasha’s Caribbean past approaches her European experiences, finds full expression in Voyage in the Dark through Rhys’ presentation of a “fifth-gen­ eration West Indian” who never names her island to others, but whose island past stands against the opposing world of England. The writing here is fragmented as it contrasts detailed descriptions of the warmth and color of the Caribbean with the coldness and loneliness of England. As Rhys says of her character, Anna Morgan, in one of her letters, “The girl is divided, two people, really. Or at any rate one foot on sea and one on land girl” (Rhys, Letters, 241). Anna/Rhys is here reading a man’s book. In following her own ‘book’, her own reading of herself and others, fixing her language on the page in contrast to the male writing, structuring the frame, displaying the ‘real’ and the unspoken dialogue, Rhys wrote her own book. In doing so, she tried to clarify the ‘blur’ that is the masculine language context. In the opening paragraph of Good Morning, Midnight the act of writing is estab­ lished immediately as a revelation of the speech context that is a metaphor and an instrument of oppression and power, i.e. we can note the constraining quality of the ‘speaking’ room, in which the heroine-narrator has found her(self). She outlines its structures, interjecting her own voice into the flowing structure of the ‘voice’ of the room. For Rhys, the act of writing is the presentation of a body of language; the corpse of masculine discourse as she experiences it, thereby inserting her own ‘unspoken’ half of the dialogue into the body of the masculine idiom. Thus, she brings her own idiom to bear upon the oppressor’s in preparation for the making of the woman’s text in her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. She finally performs a verbal operation to the body of language that constitutes the male idiom to expose its almost inflexible frame. The ‘other half’ of the discourse becomes in the end, the dominant pattern in the weave of the text of Wide Sargasso Sea, exposing, like in an intertextual mirror, the biases behind Brönte’s representation of the canonical text. Charles Sanders Pierce’s contribution to the semiotic paradigm and Seymour Chatman’s narratology provide a common ground for the semiotic investigation of cultural identity. Semiotics is commonly defined as the study of signs or symbols and

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their transmission through and between cultures. I also analyzed not only the rela­ tion between the sign and what it represents, but how the connection was formed between the thing represented and that particular sign. According to Peirce’s theory, a sign is comprised of two inseparable parts: a signifier (signifiant) and a signified (signifié). The relation between these parts is arbitrary, as evinced by different terms for the same concept in different languages. Saussure also differentiates between speech-acts (parole) and language (langue) to further differentiate the need to study the language system as a whole, not simply instances of that system. All signs bind some signifier to some signified, that is, an expression (a content of possible percep­ tion) to a meaning (a content of conceptualization). Certainly, ethnic identity – and its emphatic form – racism can be perceived as a product of a semiotic process of identity construction. Pierce’s sign is a proposition, which unifies and creates intelligibility; his semiotics is not a study of language, so much as it is about how meaning is pro­ duced. Thus, I claim that the narrative structure contains wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation. Narrative is a structure by these terms, and furthermore, it is a semiotic structure. As a semiotic structure, it is divided into quadrants by expression and content, and substance and form. Discourse is the expression of narrative, while content is the story. Both of these have elements of substance and form. The experi­ ence of reading is a part of the discourse. I also focused on presenting a continuing dialogue with the dominant language and at the same time making the place of a woman’s own language explicit; Rhys gives us a paradigm for a new postcolonial text. Rhys’ novel incorporates modern and postmodern devices of fragmentation, while also drawing on Romantic notions of sublimity, passion, and the supernatural. For example, the counterpoint is the main structuring device employed in Voyage in the Dark, where repetition, alliteration, internal rhyme and additive syntax reflect the mind-numbing effect that the environ­ ment has on the characters. The inner monologues are used to highlight the contra­ dictions that Rhys experienced in the decaying colonial system, which are reflected in the displaced and alienated character of her heroines, whose transient and expa­ triate lives are in the metropolitan centers of Paris, London and Vienna; therefore, revealing a profound ambivalence about cultural identity. This sense of homeless­ ness and dislocation, so pervasive in them, challenges not only the colonial models of master nations and narrations with their ontologies of belonging, but more impor­ tantly a depiction of the white race. Whiteness is both homogeneous and fractured. Unlike Creole identity, which is understood to be mixed, whiteness is accorded only to those who are supposedly ‘pure’ white. In the recent historical past this was not so clear-cut; some Europeans were sometimes excluded from whiteness and at other times they enjoyed a halfway status as almost white, but not quite (unlike those with partial African heritage, no matter how light). This sense of identity dislocation refers to every aspect of the character’s identity through the narrator’s inner monologue of Good Morning, Midnight: “I have no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 44).



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The novel Wide Sargasso Sea is presented as using a deliberate anachronism to articulate the identity of the West Indian Creole of the post-slavery period. My focus is on how this identity was reached. Thus, in one of her letters, Rhys wrote of the impor­ tance of linking facts with fiction and of putting fiction in reference to specific social and historical events to get to a ‘truth’ through the reconstitution and reordering of facts. As a result in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys makes a case for the white female Creole character, using history, her imagination, and facts, to her advantage. The novel Good Morning, Midnight is paratactic. It opens with a paratactic descrip­ tion of Sasha’s hotel room in the present tense, which emphasizes that the simple physical presence of the room combats and overpowers her emotions: “Now the room springs out at me, laughing, triumphant. The big bed, the little bed, the table with the tube of luminal, the glass and the bottle of Evian, the two books, the clock ticking on the ledge, the menu…” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 178). The enumeration quality reinforces Sasha’s sense that the objective world is antagonistic to the efforts of her fragile consciousness. In contrast to this use of language to emphasize the fixity of physical reality, Rhys uses wordplay to characterize the subjective side of Sasha’s experience. A verbal world of sounds detached from references is constructed by Sasha’s susceptibility to the suggestive power of words. When she opposes the voice of a society that represses women, Rhys uses calland response narrative technique. She sometimes creates this device when some secondary characters repeat the protagonists’ concerns and reflect their values, thus avoiding the repeated stance of the omniscient narrator, and maintaining the moral relativism of her modernist universe. Throughout her novels, Rhys re-orders the fragmented elements of her Afrocentric identity. Heteroglossia and calypso infuse her texts: the interplay of multiple voices, the condensed imagery, the rhetorical devices of satire and call-and-response, and the themes of betrayal, exploitation, and oppression. In addition, she also chooses a marginal, ambiguous language and the double meaning, creating the modernist text through her exiled characters and their dismantled narratives. I also analyzed several symbols that would delineate the characters’ identity: dreams, visions, landscapes, characters’ names, place names, fire, animal imagery, and even the titles. Using symbolism is a form of sublimation. By the extensive use of images and symbols, Rhys tries to deepen and extend her style. As an argument, clothing generally represents the subject’s worldly appearance or status. Sometimes, it may represent the attitudes toward the characters themselves and towards the others. Mostly, it represents the way that we appear to the world. Clothes are not symbolic of Jean Rhys’ characters’ private self, but rather of their social self. In Jean Rhys’ novels, the protagonists wear clothes that usually foreshadow the role they are about to take on. Our examination of the clothing and imagery maps out this symbol as possibly the most significant because of its direct relationship to the protagonists in Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Quartet. The characters’ clothes have the power not only to emphasize but also to show exactly how and what

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the characters are feeling. In Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, the feminine clothing that Antoinette, the protagonist, wears in her dream is representative of an ideal fem­ ininity: the white dress is the symbol of virginity and of her mother. At the end of the novel, Antoinette’s attachment to her red dress is particularly poignant. She clings to the dress as a reminder of her past, believing she can smell the Caribbean land­ scape in its folds. Taking into account the potential sense of identity afforded by the dress, it is by touching and staring at the dress that she loses herself in to her sensory, organic world of memories. Significantly, the dress is red – a color that symbolizes the passion and destruction, which led to her captivity by madness. Instead of anchoring her to reality and identity, the red dress speaks to Antoinette only of suicide and arson: “I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 153). Antoinette’s distrust of the garment, her feeling that she is being tricked into associating herself with the feminine symbol of the dress, emphasizes the role that gender plays in the matter of agency. Another example is when Antoinette and Tia exchange clothing and their roles are symbolically reversed; without money, Antoi­ nette is no longer entitled to the nicer clothing of a white Creole girl. Finally, this book points out that a cultural process has to be seen as a dynamic and informing counterpoint at the centre of imperialism. The Eurocentric culture cod­ ifies and observes everything about the non-European (the ‘other Europe’) or periph­ eral world. Rhys’ novels demonstrate how a dialogue between the art form and the culture from which it has arisen takes place without the explicit authorization of the writer, who is to some extent de-authorized once their text enters the lexical sphere. Thus, a linguistic sign, which appears to signify a new order, turns out to identify with earlier power structures as a tension between identity and alterity. In Rhys’ novels, ‘laughing’ is a symbol of healing while ‘smiling’ is a symbol of regeneration, both of them being fluid signifiers, elusively shifting, depending on who uses them. The power of textualization focuses on Jean Rhys’ short stories, showing her sty­ listic control in moving within characters and in observing them objectively, without irony. Her modernist stylistic techniques reflect the externality of commodity culture along with its dislocated sense of tradition and includes abstraction, serialization, and multiple and conflicting temporalities. Some of them, such as “Outside the Machine” and “Again the Antilles” from The Left Bank collection of short-stories, reflects Rhys’ exotic characteristics in her fiction and depicts the idyllic image of the Antilles. Others, focus on her childhood in the Caribbean, namely on the simplistic sketches of the narrowness of small-island life (“The Day They Burned the Books”). Throughout her short-stories, as I have hoped to show, Rhys creates “the syntax and vocabulary needed to bridge the gap between the outcast and society” (Wilson, 1986). Refusing, in her themes as in her style, to compromise with any techniques capable of orienting the reader to an easy acceptance of her texts, like “saying any­ thing that anybody liked” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 65), Jean Rhys persisted throughout her work in transfiguring her experience of life into the direct concrete



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prose, which effectively articulates “an area of society, a type of person, not yet admit­ ted to the general literate consciousness” (Lessing, 1973). However, I have looked to show how the short story was the literary form that best suited her vision of life and to suggest that even in her novels, she went back repeatedly to the fragmentary and episodic structure of the stories.

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List of Figures Fig. 1.1: Individual’s Cultural Identity (Sysoev, 2001)   16 Fig. 1.2: Nested Identities and Cross-Cutting Identities (Ashfort and Mael, 1989)  20 Fig. 1.3: Patterns of Hybridity as layered in History  30 Fig. 1.4: Organic versus Intentional Hybridity  31 Fig. 2.1: The British Empire (1890)  44 Fig. 2.2: Postcolonialism vs. Postimperialism  46 Fig. 5.1: Peirce’s Interpretation of the Semiotic Triad  87 Fig. 5.2: Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative  91 Fig. 5.3: Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative Structure  92 Fig. 5.4: Lost in The Bermuda Triangle  94 Fig. 5.5: Types of Laughter  105

List of tables Tab. 5.1: Chatman’s Representation of Fiction  93 Tab. 5.2: The Autobiographical Pact (Philippe Lejeune, 1975)  116

Index After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie 42, 71, 78, 79, 100, 104, 122, 123, 125 alienation 54, 78, 80 alterity 9, 10, 12, 13, 24, 28, 32, 104, 108, 111, 117, 118, 126 autobiography 10, 115, 116, 121 Black Atlantic 19, 39, 40, 41, 42, 119 black Diaspora 18, 19 body 9, 14, 19, 23, 24, 29, 33, 34, 41, 45, 49, 56, 67, 73, 78, 79, 81, 89, 95, 99, 100, 122, 123 border zone 11 Caribbean creolization 38 Caribbean culture 9, 10, 13, 35, 57, 58, 120 Caribbean identity 17, 26, 37, 40, 48, 82, 119 Caribbean landscape 35, 36, 54, 80, 81, 108, 126 Caribbean magic 84, 102 Caribbean modernism 33, 35 Caribbean woman 102 clothing 56, 89, 103, 104, 125, 126 collective identities 21, 22, 41, 121 colonial identity 37 colonialism 9, 13, 26, 29, 33, 34, 35, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 57, 60, 82, 86, 103, 107, 108, 111, 119, 121 colonial subject 44, 45, 111 colonization 9, 28, 34, 57, 58, 77, 111, 115, 119, 120, 121 colonized 84, 103, 108, 111, 114, 115, 120, 122 colonizer 28, 33, 34, 41, 43, 45, 56, 58, 82, 84, 85, 102, 111, 118, 120, 121, 122 colonizing society 115 Creole identity 13, 14, 124 creoleness 25, 37, 39 creolité 26, 37 creolization 11, 19, 26, 27, 30, 37, 38, 39, 119, 120, cross-cultural identity 68, 70, 71 cross-cutting identities 20, 21 cultural alterity 32, 26, 118 cultural hybridity 9, 28, 46, 117 cultural identity 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 39, 48, 49, 50, 59, 65, 68, 69, 87, 103, 119, 120, 123, 124, cultural imperialism 38, 119 cultural studies 9, 11, 12, 13, 66 decolonization 34, 49 de-territorialization 117, 119 Diagram of Narrative 91, 92

diasporic hybridity 18, 29 diasporic identities 18, 19 discontinuity 12, 30, 78, 100 displacement 17, 18, 24, 26, 27, 35, 50, 54, 71, 110, 119, 120 diversity 11, 14, 18, 19, 32, 37, 52, 69, 121 double-colonization 77 double consciousness 24, 27, 29, 32, 39 ethnic identity 61, 63, 64, 65, 122, 124, 63, 121 ethnicity 9, 13, 15, 19, 40, 42, 43, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 121, 122 ethnocentrism 14, 59, 60, 59, 121 Eurocentrism 10, 59, 60, 70, 111, 121 European identity 60 exoticism 51, 52, 53, 54, 119, exoticness 26, 51 fluid identity 9, 14, 117 fractal identity 11, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, fractality 11, 68, 70, 74, 122 fragmentation 11, 17, 69, 71, 73, 78, 86, 97, 98, 124 free-indirect discourse 97 Good Morning, Midnight 73, 78, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 122, 123, 124, 125 hegemony 24, 33, 43, 121 historicism 34 homeland 15, 18, 19, 23, 35, 37, 36, 41, 64, 117, 120, 122, homelessness 29, 117, 124 hybrid identity 28, 70, 71, 108 hybridity 9, 10, 13, 14, 18, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 46 hybridization 9, 10, 11, 12, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 118 hyperhybridity 70 identity 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 88, 89, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 108, 116, 118, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, identity crisis 54, 61, 62 identity dislocation 124 identity performance 100 identity theory 13 immigrant identity 64

Index  imperial discourse 112 intertextuality 14, 25, 70, 75, 81, 82 Intertextual Metaphors 81 Letters 83, 84, 123 marginality 13, 45, 52, 53, margin/centre 111, 114 marooning 95 masculinity 9, 13, 14, 60, 65, 66, 67, mélange 9, 11, 117 métissage 119, 120 mimicry 38, 46 mixed identity 83 mixture 9, 18, 26, 27, 31, 37, 59, 117, 119 mode of showing 90 mode of telling 90 modernity 23, 39, 40, 43, 86, 119 multiculturalism 28, 37, 43 multiple points-of-view 93 narration 77, 84, 95, 96, 97, 98 narrative strategies 36, 86, 110 narrative techniques 14, 93, 95, 96 nation 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 34, 43, 45, 50, 65, 117, 118, 119, 120 national identity 22, 23, 37, 50, 61 nationalism 22, 23, 24, 61, 62 négritude 24 nested identities 20, 21 obeah 41, 84, 113, 42, 102 otherness 32, 39, 51, 52, 53, 60, 76, 79, 104, 108, 118, 120 overlapping identities 20 personal identity 16, 61, 64, 103, 122 postcolonial cultures 11 postcolonial exotic 51, 53

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postcolonialism 34, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53 postcolonial literature 9, 10, 11, 86 postcolonial narrative 36, 109 postimperialism 45, 46 purity 10, 19, 26, 27, 28 Quartet 42, 78, 101, 104, 122, 125 race 13, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 35, 39, 40, 43, 50, 57, 61, 62, 63, 103, 104, 110, 111, 115, 124 racial identity 9, 14, 39, 41 racial stereotypes 118 rhetorical processes 93 rhizome 18, 19, 74 self-identity 27 semiotic triangle 85 signifying process 87, 117 social contract 33, 34, 35, 118, stream of consciousness 97, 115 stylistic techniques 108, 126 subaltern 44, 108, 112, 113, 115 syncretism 13, 25, 37 The Day they Burned the Books 111, 112 113, 114, 115, 126, Tigers are Better-Looking 42, 104, 110, 126 traveling alterity 24 traveling identities 24, 39, 117 veil 102 Voyage in the Dark 36, 42, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 86, 100, 101, 104, 122, 123, 124, 125 whiteness 26, 41, 57, 77, 84, 112, 122, 124 Wide Sargasso Sea 19, 25, 26, 35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 71, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 95, 96, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126