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Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

MADNESS OR MASK OF PREJUDICE? –

REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMAN’S MISCEGENATION AND SEXUALITY

IN

WIDE SARGASSO SEA AND JANE EYRE

Heleno Alvares Bezerra Junior

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para

obtenção do grau de mestre no curso de Mestrado em

Literaturas de Língua Inglesa do programa de Pós-

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Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................……...4

Resumo.....................................................................................................................................……...5

Abstract.....................................................................................................................................……...6

Epigraph....................................................................................................................................……..7

Introduction...............................................................................................................................……..8

Chapter 1 – History and Cultural

1.2-Madness, Racial and Cultural Hybridism in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea........................68

Conclusion ...........................................................................................……………………………..95

Bibliography................................................................................................................................…...97

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Acknowledgements

me, I recall many people without whom I would not have come thus far. Actually, I am extremely

indebted to Maria Conceição Monteiro, my current supervisor and someone I appreciate not only for

her professionalism, dedication and competence but for humbleness, sensitivity and friendliness.

Thank you, Conceição, for feeding my thoughts, for allowing me to acquire self-confidence and for

reminding me that success and simplicity come under the same letter. You are brilliant and I will

other collaborators in my learning process I would like to make notice of: Heloísa Toller, Leila

Assumpção Harris, Lúcia de LaRocque, Maria Aparecida Salgado, Valéria Medeiros and, in

particular, Peonia Viana Guedes. In different ways, you all contributed to my progress and made me

see that literature and passion come together.

affording my studies up to the under-graduation. Mom and dad, I recognize your effort to offer your

three children the same opportunities and for caring about my health when hard times came. I have

been gifted with your friendship, affection, mindfulness and for rejoicing with my achievements.

Very many thanks to Fernanda, my wife, who motivated me to resume my studies and who has

supported me all the way. Darling, it has been fantastic to take the Master’s with you, to tell you

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Miscegenation and Sexuality in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre”, esta dissertação objetiva

mostrar como Jean Rhys, autora do primeiro romance, questiona verdades científicas presentes na

narrativa de Charlotte Brontë através da paródia, sobretudo a forma com que a loucura é retratada

em Jane Eyre. Através da intertextualidade, o trabalho enfoca a crítica da autora caribenha a

pensamentos eurocêntricos e a forma com que a mesma transforma hereditariedade feminina em

opressão patriarcal, depravação em liberdade sexual, hibridismo biológico em hibridismo cultural,

degeneração racial em identificação com o negro. Além do mais, o trabalho aponta como o realismo

mágico de Rhys tanto retoma quanto subverte o gênero gótico em Jane Eyre ao desconstruir

verdades vitorianas.

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showing how Jean Rhys, writer of the former novel, questions scientific truths found in Jane Eyre.

Through intertextuality, the research highlights the Caribbean’s author’s criticism to Eurocentricism

and focuses on the way she transforms female heredity into patriarchal oppression, depravation into

sexual freedom, biological hybridism into cultural hybridity, racial degeneration into identification

with blacks. Besides, it points out how Rhys’s conveyance of magic realism both resumes and

subverts the gothic in Jane Eyre by deconstructing Victorian truths.

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Sargasso Sea is a critically acclaimed rewriting of Jane Eyre (1847) in which the twentieth-century

fictionist revisits and reevaluates Charlotte Brontë’s

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novel in different ways. Among many things,

Wide Sargasso Sea is a narrative that points out manifestations of prejudice in the matrix text and,

therefore, subverts the English writer’s deployment of the creole madwoman. As Rhys confesses in

her letters, her parody of Jane Eyre is meant to contest the reifying manner in which Brontë

conceptualizes the nineteenth-century Caribbean woman and to plot the other side of Jane Eyre

(RHYS, 1991: p. 21).

from a post-colonial perspective, it subtly absorbs and re-inscribes certain passages from the former

narrative with a lot of creativity.

novel, full of symbolic references which, besides criticizing Brontë’s masterpiece, comprises history

and exploits the Caribbean cultural universe. Considering that it took Rhys twenty-one years to

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homogeneous, consisting of an archipelago where the French and the English both imposed their

differences through slavery.

Cosway, a deceased miscegenated Jamaican slave-owner once married to Annette, a beautiful young

white creole, come from a slave-owning Martinique family. The story starts when Antoinette is still

a child and suggests that the family’s bankruptcy as well as her father’s death have to do with the

Emancipation Act, which gave the slaves the right to be free in 1833.

marrying Mr. Mason, an English gentleman who, for underestimating the political articulation of the

ex-slaves, gives them the opportunity to set fire onto Coulibri and burn Pierre: Antoinette’s baby

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very often and staying in her bedroom with the hair uncombed. According to Rochester, the hatred

England secretly and locks her in a room at Thornfield Hall. Since then, we are acquainted with

Antoinette’s memories and plans of revenge. While identifying with blacks in the last stage of her

life, she remembers how Coulibri is knocked down and decides to set fire to Thornfield Hall just as

the ex-slaves had destroyed her beloved home. At last, Antoinette imagines she will fly off the

battlements the same way Coco, her mother’s old parrot, flew out of Coulibri. Refreshed by the

incoming wind, she fancies about soaring away towards freedom and does so.

look at the historical events cited in the text. Otherwise, he/she will not able to figure out why

Antoinette’s family lives in a chaos and why the English appear in a superior position in the story.

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Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos (Leeward Islands), Anguish Island, British Honduras (Belize), the

however, were composed by Martinique, Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and Guadeloupe (integrated by

Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre, Marie-Galant, la Désirade, les Saintes, Saint-Bathélemy).

a hostile atmosphere among them, provoking social and political divergences which not only

pervaded the eighteenth century but that grew stronger in the nineteenth century. At the very

opening of Wide Sargasso Sea, we learn of cultural differences between Jamaica and Martinique. As

Antoinette narrates, her mother Annette was always prejudiced in Jamaica for being Martinique:

“The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother (...) because she was pretty (...), worse

still, [she was] a Martinique girl”

. In spite of the Jamaicans’ disdain, Antoinette speaks of

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British, its dwellers were bilinguals due to a massive settlement by families from Martinique and

feels cozy at her summerhouse in Dominica: because that is the place where she can exercise her

double cultural identity more freely, without the duty of having to be totally British- or French-like.

process that must be carefully observed from the eighteenth century onwards. Owing to this, I am

now going to present the uplift and the decadence of the colonial activities that shattered the

Jamaican economy in the first half of the nineteenth century and triggered so many social

transformations. As Lowell Joseph Ragatz points out in The Fall of the Planter Class in the British

Caribbean (1763-1833) (1971), during the eighteenth century, plantations were vital to the economy

of the United Kingdom. Most of the materials the early European industries worked with came from

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enterprise was the tropical heat. Climatic conditions made an economic system based on free

natives to extinction but that catalyzed the transatlantic importation of Africans to Central America.

The production of cotton, sugar-cane and tobacco was responsible for a terrible saga, for plantations

depended on African slaves who, after surviving diseases, underfeeding, dehydration on board of

hired vessels, led a subhuman lifestyle in Central America (RAGATZ, 1971: p. 10-20). According

to Parry and Sherlock, the enslaving system was the indispensable handmaid of the sugar industry

(1956: p. 95). In conformity with this affirmative, Rhys’s Rochesters comments, “Slavery was not a

matter of liking or disliking. (...) It was a question of justice” (WSS, p. 94).

the expense of tobacco, the greater the need of importing forced workmanship; but provided that to

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two reasons. On the one hand, blacks refused to work as slaves; and on the other hand, mulattoes

planters started idealizing political independence. However, their inexperience in battles made them

very vulnerable to attacks.

unilateral and contradictory since it expected to maintain slaving labor. Amidst so many conflictive

and discrepant expectations, polemics and discordance only increased in Paris. After all, the

institution of slavery was under fire in France. Montesquieu’s ideas of egalitarian conditions for all

inspired the Amis de Noirs (Negroes’ Friends), a body recently formed that fought for the end of

slavery. While the Amis de Noirs voraciously demanded that the National Assembly should legislate

on the rights of free persons of color, colonial representatives like Moreau de Saint-Méry defended

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have successfully invoked this power and by its aid have become our

equals – then France must renounce all hope of preserving her

colonies (Apud PARRY & SHERLOCK, 1956: p. 162-3).

promised not to legislate on colonial matters but they finally came down on the side of the Amis de

Noirs. The decree of 15 May 1791 provided that persons of color born of free parents, if qualified in

other respects, should be entitled to vote for the provincial and colonial assemblies, which had been

established by royal decree only four years earlier. As expected, the white inhabitants disobeyed the

decree; the local governor refused to enforce it; and there was much wild talk of secession from

France. The mulattoes in some parishes were already in arms, demanding what they regarded as

begun, it clearly could not be suppressed by the few thousand white inhabitants and the handful of

regular troops available. The mulattoes and semi-whites, already emancipated, feared the slaves as

much as the whites did; but suspicion and prejudice prevented any effective alliance. The most

incredible savagery was conducted on both sides. It has been estimated that in the first two months

2,000 whites were killed, 180 sugar plantations and 900 coffee and indigo settlements were

destroyed. Thousands of slaves died either fighting, by famine, or at the executioner’s hands. The

total white population of the province cannot have been more than 10,000 against slaves who

western mountain were soon the only places under white control in the north province.

another. Led by Rigaud, the hybrids were gaining the upper hand, except in Port-au-Prince, where

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‘commissioners’ sent out to enforce the rule of liberty, equality and fraternity. In this, they were

disorganization. Their leader, Sonthonax, faced with royalist resistance, had no choice but to

associate himself with the revolted slaves, who in June 1793, at his instigation, entered and sacked

the town of Cap Français. In August, he proclaimed a conditional emancipation. This decree, when

subsequently confirmed by the republican government in France, had momentous consequences.

However, it alienated mulattoes and semi-whites both in Martinique and in Saint-Domingue in a

way that many of them became slave-owners. All these social changes in French islands also

affected the British territories like Jamaica and, little by little, mulattoes and creoles would also

become plantation-owners in the Anglophone West Indies (PARRY & SHERLOCK, 1956: p. 106-

65).

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coffee planters would recover their old productivity was never answered. The outbreak of the

alarmed the government of Jamaica which, while awaiting for reinforcements, darted to a

disadvantageous position. Though considerable forces eventually arrived from England, they were

all fresh ‘unseasoned’ troops, unprepared and insufficient to extinguish the guerilla (PARRY &

SHERLOCK, 1956: p. 165-7).

four years of wasting war, the invasion petered out because of the yellow fever and by the

behalf of the miscegenated. In 1800, Toussaint put a stop to indiscriminate massacre in French

colonies, respected his contracts with England, ordered his mobs of ex-slaves back to work and