#reading the wiki for this book and seeing the leaps some scholars have made to try and read it as anticolonial....is....wild.......
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familyabolisher · 2 years ago
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Hello hope ur well. sorry to be so nosy but a goodreads friend liked your jane eyre review onto my timeline and I read this: “jean rhys takes this up but she does it badly” I’m dying to know what this means (sorry in advance if u have talked abt it before)
From the review in question:
i think what caught me the most this time around is charlotte brontë's v clear preoccupation with colonial holdings and their relationship to her notions of english girlhood; through bertha of course (the fear that a white woman from a jamaican former slaveowning family might somehow be tainted by her proximity to foreignness + Blackness and put at a remove from ~englishness by the fact is ... yeah. jean rhys takes this up but she takes it up badly so whatever.)
I was referring to Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel wherein she revisits Bertha Mason as Antoinette Cosway and traces her marriage to Rochester and eventual suicide at Thornfield Hall in a manner that intends to give texture and clarity and depth to a character that Brontë’s text was thought to have discarded.
WSS is like … wildly racist, frankly. Antoinette Cosway is from a white Jamaican family impoverished by 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, and lives on their sugar plantation until the newly emancipated Black Jamaican populace burn it down and kill her disabled brother. Rhys opens the novel with the suggestion that Antoinette and her family are isolated from other white people in Jamaica due to their poverty, highlighting the preservation of their whiteness as being a process of retaining property ownership in order to set the stage for the novel's marriage market plots; Antoinette and her mother each enter into abusive marriages with intent to restore their prosperity (which, ofc, would in effect restore their whiteness). Throughout, the central concern of the text is the inaccessibility of whiteness proper that would alleviate Antoinette's suffering, but this is never matched with a serious recourse to interrogate the Cosways' position as white Jamaican slaveowners; the sympathy that the novel intends to generate for Brontë's character sits very badly with me against the knowledge that that process of narrative construction rests on a) slavery and b) a relationship to the novel's Black characters that at best relegates them to secondary positions in relation to Antoinette and at worst paints them as aggressors on par with the white upper classes who remained prosperous post-emancipation.
Related to this current of racism running through the text is the fact that Rhys doesn’t really take up the issue in Jane Eyre that I pointed out in the original review, ie. that Brontë repeatedly appeals to Englishness as a desired state and relies on proximity to racialised, colonised people as a shorthand for inferiority and incivility. Bertha Mason, whilst somewhat sympathetic in Brontë’s text, is wayward, promiscuous, unpredictable, animalistic, 'dark' and 'discoloured,' and these are properties ascribed to her on the basis of the proximity she is given to Blackness (she is from Jamaica and it's possible to read her as being mixed race, certainly subject to an anxiety of racial impurity, though Rhys' Antoinette is white). Antoinette as a character remains constructed around the notion that her proximity to Blackness simply by virtue of having grown up in Jamaica is an 'othering' mechanism; the novel is frustrated that Antoinette can't be 'white' in Rochester's eyes, not that Antoinette's relationship to whiteness is one defined first and foremost over her family having owned slaves. Like, the text provides sympathy and interiority to Antoinette/Bertha, but it doesn't ... challenge Brontë's initial assertions in any real way.
WSS also has pretty significant currency as a ‘postcolonial text’ at least in the UK (I don’t know about elsewhere), which imo speaks to the incoherence of that category, lmao. I was introduced to WSS as a ‘postcolonial text’ at undergrad on a module that essentially aimed to trace the history of ‘the novel’ and thus appealed to WSS as the synecdoche of ‘postcolonial literature,’ despite the fact that Rhys was very much a white woman whose family owned a plantation in Dominica. In 2022, it was put on a list of ‘Commonwealth literature’ celebrating the Queen's jubilee—it’s a fucking wild list and a great example of the imperialist nostalgia that shapes the culture in this country, but like, Rhys being on there alongside Black and brown authors (and also other white British writers who upheld the colonial regime eg. Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark) indicates this flattening of colonial subjectivity into one lump category of ‘citizenship’ wherein Rhys can make as much sense as a ‘postcolonial’ ‘Commonwealth’ author as can, say, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o or Chinua Achebe or Arundhati Roy &c. &c. I guess WSS just feels especially egregious for how easily its racism can be obfuscated as it gets folded into this category of literature that we might assume to be about and for racialised/colonised people.
(nb. I have only read WSS once, six years ago, so if I’ve forgotten plot details then like … sorry lol. I remember enough to know why it pissed me off to no end at the time sksksksk)
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