閣樓中的殭屍：探討《夢迴藻海》的克里奧爾化和帝國主義現象 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士論文指導教授：邱彥彬先生 Advisor: Yen-bin Chiou 閣樓中的殭屍：探討《夢迴藻海》的克里奧爾化和帝國主義現象 The Zombie in the Attic:. Creolization and Imperialism 政治in Wide Sargasso Sea. 大. 立. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i Un. 研究生：陳念芸 Name: Nien-yu Chen 中華名國 103 年 1 月 January 2014. v.

(2) The Zombie in the Attic: Creolization and Imperialism in Wide Sargasso Sea. A Master Thesis 政治to 大 Presented Department of English, 立. ‧ 國. 學. National Chengchi University. ‧. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. by Nien-yu Chen January 2014.

(3) Acknowledgement My warmest thanks go to Dr. Yen-bin Chiou, associate professor of department of English of National Chengchi University, for his inspiring guidance and encouragement throughout my research for this work. I would like to extend my heart-felt thanks to my family. My parents’ support and blessing and, especially, my husband’s cooperation and efficient support have made this work possible.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. iii. i Un. v.

(4) Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………..……iii Chinese Abstract……………………………………………...…………v English Abstract…………………………………………...…………….vi Chapter 1. Introduction………………………………………………………1 2. Chapter I: The Critique of Imperialism, and Creolization in Wide Sargasso Sea………………………………………………………………21 3. Chapter II:. 立. 政治大. From Rhys’s Magic to 4. Chapter III:. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. Zombification…………………………………………………...59 Rochester’s Zombie, and His. sit. y. Nat. Zombification…………………………………………………...85. io. er. 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………..109. n. Works Cited……………………………………………………………131 a. iv l C n hengchi U. iv.

(5) 國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班碩士論文提要論文名稱：閣樓中的殭屍：探討《夢迴藻海》的克里奧爾化和帝國主義現象指導教授：邱彥彬研究生：陳念芸論文提要內容：在十九世紀英國女性作家夏綠蒂．勃朗特所著的小說《簡愛》（. Jane Eyre）中，女主人翁簡愛（Jane Eyre）親眼目睹了糾纏著羅徹斯特莊園居處的女. 政治大勃朗特的筆下，對柏莎行徑的不解透露出其英國維多利亞時代的帝國主義主導意識立. 鬼魂：如野獸般，在黑暗中潛伏的一個不明生物－柏莎．梅森（Bertha Mason）。在. 。茲此，多明尼加女性作家珍‧瑞絲（Jean Rhys）撰寫了《夢迴藻海》（Wide. ‧ 國. 學. Sargasso Sea），不僅作為呼應《簡愛》的前傳，還挑戰簡愛對柏莎的主觀偏見，並. ‧. 嘗試從瘋狂、殭屍化現象解釋女主人翁安東娃妮塔（Antoinette）（柏莎）發瘋的原因。而從印度後殖民主義學者史碧華克（Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s）提出的壓迫. y. Nat. io. sit. 第三世界被殖民者現象－第三世界系統（thirdworldism）理論，可做為解釋壟罩整本. n. al. er. 小說之下的權力運作體系與對克里奧爾人的種種影響和迫害。在瑞絲的筆下，她寫. i Un. v. 出安東娃妮塔遭受到丈夫羅徹斯特的帝國主義式、專權統治般的對待，更進一步，. Ch. engchi. 他對她施行了「殭屍化」（zombification），成為屬於他的女殭屍。本論文以瑞絲的文本架構為基礎，從史碧華克的「世界化」（worlding）和馬提尼克學者格里頌（ Édouard Glissant）的克里奧爾化現象（Creolization）討論顛覆帝國主義現象的可行性；並且，透過分析被當代整體社會種族體系否認克里奧爾身分的女主人翁處境，進一步解釋她對羅徹斯特施行殭屍化和失敗；而後，作為反擊，羅徹斯特對其妻的終極殭屍化。最後，透過分析女主人翁被囚禁在英格蘭閣樓中所經歷的夢境，闡述她如何從中自我覺醒，並促成了她至終戰勝自我的去殭屍化現象（de-zombification）。. v.

(6) Abstract. A monstrous, unknown creature lurking in the night was the description of the ghost woman haunting Rochester’s manor in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – Mrs. Bertha Mason – as witnessed by the protagonist, Englishwoman Jane Eyre. Beneath Brontë’s writing, the author’s contempt for Bertha revealed the underlying dominant consciousness of British Imperialism in the Victorian age. Dominican female writer Jean Rhys’s novel Wild Sargasso. 政治大 Rhys’s Wild Sargasso Sea served as a prequel to Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Rhys attempted to 立. Sea offered a different perspective of the “mad woman in the attic” than that of Brontë.. ‧ 國. 學. explain that a multitude of reasons contributed to the madness, or zombification, of her heroine, Antoinette Cosway. In Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concepts. ‧. on postcolonial critique, Spivak introduced the notion of Western “thirdworldism”. sit. y. Nat. suppressing the colonized populations, which will be incorporated later in this thesis.. n. al. er. io. In contrast to Brontë’s version of the heroine’s psychopathic personality, Jean Rhys had. i Un. v. endowed an utterly different life on Antoinette. Rhys’s Creole heroine pointed out the fact. Ch. engchi. that she suffered deeply from an identity crisis under Rochester’s tyrannical attempts to westernize and imperialize her. In the end Antoinette became the “crazy wife,” a lifeless being like a zombie. From uncovering the imperial system that Western countries imposed on the third world, I will further explain the generalization of zombification as the outcome of imperial discourse. For the purpose of this thesis, I will apply to Édouard Glissant’s hermeneutic of Creolization, and Spivak’s ideas such as ‘deworlding,’ to discuss a new anti-imperial possibility for Rhys’s different portrayal of the heroine in Wide Sargasso Sea. Furthermore, through the negation of Antoinette’s Creoleness, I will discuss the issues of why Antoinette. vi.

(7) fails to zombify Rochester, and in the opposite how Rochester performed the zombification successfully. As a result, I will focus on the analysis of Antoinette’s series of dreams in the attic of Thornfield Hall, which is seen as her awakening in the triumph of fulfilling her dezombification.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. vi. i Un. v.

(8) Introduction. “In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not... tell; it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.” (Jane Eyre, p. 295.). 立. 政治大. An unknown creature lurking in the night, with clothes covering its body;. ‧ 國. 學. similar to a human being, but rather it appears like a wild animal that crouches at the ancient inner cage. This is the picture of Bertha Mason described in Jane Eyre. The. ‧. monstrous metamorphosis indicates the antagonism towards the Creole otherness. y. Nat. sit. depicted by the nineteenth-century English novelist Charlotte Brontë was challenged. er. io. many years later, by Jean Rhys’s version of Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea.. al. n. iv n C U of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea The Dominican novelisthJean e nRhys, h iauthor g cthe published in 1966, dedicates this prequel of Jane Eyre to tell a different story for Antoinette. “The novel rewards those who give it not just a careful close reading,” as critic Thomas Loe suggests, “but who also explore its potential for extra-textual stories and avenues of meaning.” Rhys provides a new avenue for her readers to interpret Antoinette’s case, an “open text” that offers a way to engage in the “constructive activity” (Todd Bender 97-8). She sees her heroine as a victim, who is dehumanized under Brontë’s pen that dramatizes her as a cursed beast. For Rhys, sympathizing with Antoinette, she attempts to reopen Antoinette’s case, and refutes 1.

(9) Brontë’s Western-based standpoint. Her observations of a girl who is a vagabond drifting between the communities of ‘legitimated’ Englishness and ‘heterogeneous’ Creoleness, Rhys sees Antoinette as an outlaw from her contemporaries. Therefore, this becomes the motivation for Rhys to rewrite Antoinette’s story.. Beside her harsh attack on the Western imperialized tyranny the English civilization builds and her fight over the female identity on plantation soil, one of the unique ideas which Rhys’s Caribbean writing reveals, is that she left potential traces of the symbology of zombiism. Encountering with the encroachments of Western. 政治大. criterion, Rhys indirectly implants the mysterious atmosphere of zombiism in her. 立. writing, from Antoinette’s proctor, Christophine’s, Afro-Caribbean witchcraft, or. ‧ 國. 學. “obeah”, the love potion concocted by Christophine and the room with white power and candles when Rochester enters, to Antoinette’s terrifying appearance of the white. ‧. face and dark eyes. Professor Edna Aizenberg writes in her "'I Walked with a. y. Nat. sit. Zombie': The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity" study that she defines. n. al. er. io. Antoinette as a nymphomaniac. In her description, “Rochester comes to perceive. Ch. i Un. v. Antoinette’s honeymoon pleasure-in-sex as the crazy nymphomania of a ‘dark alien,’. engchi. a ‘white nigger’ too dangerously imbued with an eroticized Caribbean Africanness” (463). Aizenberg’s interpretation of a Caribbean “nymphomania" who excessively desires for intercourses is reinforced and reaffirmed by Rhys’s hints of pointing Antoinette’s potential of uncanniness to the outcome of zombiism. If the zombie exists in Rhys’s writing, then, there must be the certain portrayal of zombification in the novel. Hence, I will present two performers of zombification in my thesis, one is Antoinette with her love potion, and the other being Rochester, with his white obeah of renaming Antoinette to the European-styled “Bertha”. In my study, I’ve discovered that the master-slave bond they’ve shared is so intense, that both of them are dreaded 2.

(10) by each other, which induces their cravings to conquer love — through the zombification of the other.. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the historical narrative of colonialism in the Caribbean during the Victorian Age provides clues and interpretations of zombiism during the reign of the First World countries of Europe. Jean Rhys introduces the world of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism to readers, to show that under the rule of the First World countries, Third World countries are subjugated and its natives are exploited. The West Indies is predominately colonized by the nineteenth-century. 政治大. British Empire. The Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presents the. 立. term of “worlding,” that under the governing of authoritative norms of the First World. ‧ 國. 學. countries, the colonized objects are thus being re-defined and Westernized as the Third World. The “axiom of Imperialism” thus is constructed within the structure of. ‧. Marxian master-slave relation. As Rhys invites the tradition of Afro-Caribbean. y. Nat. n. al. Ch. er. io. the exotic zombiism is inevitably conjectured.. sit. voodooism into her text, the purpose of paralleling the Western imperial violence to. i Un. v. In my thesis, it is my intention to apply to Spivak’s imperial critique on. engchi. “thirdworldism” (289) and the Martinique philosopher Édouard Glissant’s hermeneutic of Creolization, to challenge the Western imperial system through deconstructing the dominant discourse of imperialism. Although Glissant’s poetics of Creolization, according to my study, is posited on the utopian-like dream, or an ambiguous expectation of a new land that seemed to be out of reach. But, after all, Creolization does provide a way to imagine and envisage a different viewpoint on postcolonial studies. Aiming to solve the dimensional racial conflicts in Wide Sargasso Sea, Glissant’s Creolization suggests an approach in dealing with the crosscultural conflicts between Jamaican blackness and the Cosways’ Creoleness, as well 3.

(11) as the clash between an imperialistic Rochester and a Creole girl, as diversity. For Glissant, the Unitarian ideal generated from the world criterion maltreats the people whose existences lived outside the defined First World zone. They are deemed as a group undefined, unqualified to any field of biology, culture and nation. Thus, Creolization gives answer to the outcasts that in which once the world is finally in the state of “de-worlding,” the state of diversity is displayed, which I will discuss it later in chapter I. After I explain the historical structure of imperial movements, Spivak’s term of “worlding” (235), and the optimistic alternative from Glissant’s poetics of. 政治大. Creolization, I will continue to discuss Rhys’s strategies of the making of zombies.. 立. First, the obstacle to declare the possibility of zombiism in Antoinette’s case is shown. ‧ 國. 學. for the absurdity of cataloging the heroine into a zombie may be seen as a ridiculous. ‧. suggestion to allude to, however, as critic Thomas Loe suggests, “(the) fashioning. sit. y. Nat. links in the design of the novel one extremely potent central image associated with. io. er. Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea needs more attention,” which references, “the figure. al. of the zombie.” Second, if Antoinette is, in the end, registered as whether being in a. n. iv n C semi-zombified state or becomes a genuine , Loe suggests it may be farh e zombie i U ngch fetched but can be expounded in its extremes. That is to say, the making of the. zombie figure risks equating to the post-modern Haitian walking dead creatures which is “too fanciful an allusion to be taken seriously even within the context of the hallucinatory fictive world created in Wide Sargasso Sea” (35). Even though the difficulty of recognizing the pattern of zombies in Rhys’s narrative exists; but still, there is anticipation in conceiving the narrative if we can find affordable evidences to sustain the paradoxical premise of zombiism.. 4.

(12) One of Rhys’s plans to make her zombie existence conclusive is through Rochester’s discovery of the book The Glittering Coronet of Isles by an unnamed author. This book documents the description of Afro-Caribbean witchcraft, or obeah, and an existence of a zombie: “A zombie is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead” (Rhys 67). By associating Antoinette’s wilderness, mysterious temper and exoticism to the form of a zombie, Antoinette the zombie is thus evoked by Rochester’s own dread; and his fear for a zombie is later revealed by the maid Amelie’s taunt: ”Your husban’s he outside the door and he look like he see zombi” (Rhys 91). When analyzing the content of zombiism, the post-modern. 政治大. impression of a zombie is usually a deformed walking corpse who craves human. 立. flesh, as portrayed in many of Hollywood’s movies. In my study of the Caribbean. ‧ 國. 學. folklores, during the conjuration of obeah, the performer, or the boker holds a ritual. ‧. and casts a curse upon a corpse in order to seize the soul of the dead, in result. sit. y. Nat. enslaving the dead. In describing the details of zombiism, I refer to Canadian. io. er. anthropologist Wade Davis’s study Passage of Darkness (1988), in which details the. al. researches on zombiism, the process of zombification, and a few cases to sustain its. n. iv n C authenticity. As Thomas Loe suggests, h e n gDavis i Uthe “detailed ethnoc hoffers. pharmacological credence and explanation for zombies and revealed Rhys’s use of zombie as a significant allusive base and central metaphor for the structural design for her novel.” Hence, the design of the zombie metaphor proves Davis’s own solid testimonies. In addition, Rhys emphasizes that the key point for making a zombie came from the human inborn dread which is ingrained in Rochester’s feeling for Antoinette. His fear of being out of control and of his wife’s unbridled behavior, Rochester turned to recognize her as a potential danger. Through his gimmickry of carefully treating 5.

(13) Antoinette as the other type of being, Rochester transforms his fear for zombies into performing real zombification upon her, which I will discuss in chapter II.. Chapter I: The Critique of Imperialism, and Creolization in Wide Sargasso Sea. In Chapter I, I will begin to introduce Spivak’s critique of imperialism and the implement of her anti-imperial project into Rhys’s text, appealing to uncover the imperialized administration embedded in the Caribbean plantations. It is my main argument that Rhys’s depiction of the nineteenth-century post-slavery time in Wide. 政治大. Sargasso Sea has manifested the contradictory situations between ex-slaves and ex-. 立. planters. For viewing both of the parties as victims living under the time of. ‧ 國. 學. imperialism, none of them escapes the imperative of “thirdworldism” (Spivak 243).. ‧. In Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” she. sit. y. Nat. undertakes the study of British literature to the literatures of European colonizing. io. er. cultures and discovers a narrative produced from the literary history, which is the. al. imperial apparatus of ‘worlding,’ of what now calls the “Third World” (243). The. n. iv n C U linguistic apparatus, term “worlding” comes from Spivak’s h adaptation e n g cfrom h i Derrida’s which considers the world organization is systemized and structured through the using of the dominant language and this linguistic system leads and controlled the operation of the global communities. Once an authoritative community holds the power of linguistic system, it is capable of narrating the world with “worlding” advantageously. In the interview with Elizabeth Grosz, Spivak states that our world is “bound up with the history of European imperial expansion from nineteenth-century British colonialism to twentieth-century US foreign policy-making” (Morton 18). The imperial history of Europe and U.S. undergoes a period of colonizing legalization, as 6.

(14) Spivak suggests, “when the colonizers come to a world, they see the undeveloped colonies as uninscribed earth upon which they write their inscription” (129). That is to say, throughout the legislative narration of “worlding” from the authorized communities, the distant Third World is prescribed for the following cultivations and rectifications, as Spivak suggests:. To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third. 政治大. World” as a signifier that allows us to forget that ‘worlding,‘ even as it. 立. expands the empire of the literary discipline. (Spivak 243). ‧ 國. 學 ‧. Hence, the “worlding” of the world is a conventionalized signifier for. sit. y. Nat. stereotyping any related colonized place. As for the Third World women, whose lives. io. er. are remained in its primitiveness, become the objects of “worlding” in the eye of the. al. Western cultures. They are rectified and their lives are deprived from the intrusion of. n. iv n C the West, in which the outcomehise the silence ofi their n g c h U voices. Moreover, the feminists’ seemingly moral acts of defining the Third World women, may be deem as “a basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm” (243). Rhys’s female protagonists, in common, have suffered from the “worlding” of the world. In Spivak’s study, she manifests Jane Eyre’s observation of Bertha as associated with a imperialized tone of the First World; through her witnessing, she objectifies Bertha as a beast, as Spivak suggests, Eyre “renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater than the letter of the Law 7.

(15) can be broached” (248). Thus, Eyre defines Bertha as a nonhuman being, “it” but “covered with clothing,” “snatched and growled like some strange wild animal” (Brontë 295). The installment of the allusion of animalism onto an unknown object, in Spivak’s term, is a making of “not-yet-human Other of soul making” (247). It is the “unquestioned ideology of imperialist axiomatics,” as Spivak suggests, that Eyre chooses to scar the colonized object within the axiom of imperialism in regards to protect her terrain of Englishness. Eyre’s English identity, as Catherine Hall suggests, is “not a fixed identity but a series of contesting identities, a terrain of struggle as to what it means to be English. Different groups competed for the domination of this. 政治大. space and the political and cultural power which followed from such domination.. 立. Englishness is defined through the creation of an imagined community … built on a. ‧ 國. 學. series of assumptions about ‘others’ which define the nature of Englishness itself”. ‧. (26). Hall’s explanation of Englishness locates in the imperial text has shown how. io. er. set” to the set of the “family-in-law” (Spivak 248).. sit. y. Nat. Eyre, being as an Englishwoman, is conditioned to move from the “counter-family. al. As Spivak expounds upon the work of axiom of imperialism prevailed in the. n. iv n C civilizational regions, I want to move on h toe seek h i Ufor the “worlding” barrier. n gacsolution By introducing Martinique philosopher Édouard Glissant’s hermeneutics of Creolization in “the Mediterranean of the Americas” (33), I will demonstrate his demand for regional independences. In Glissant’s arguments, “the Caribbean Sea,” for him, “is not a lake of the United State. It is the estuary of the Americas” (427) of which he affirms a new “regionally-specific identity” (Niblett 52). Glissant presents the composite identity engaged in a historical position as a site of cultural crossing. He opens a new defined space towards the “Other America” in his Poetics of Relation (1997), and re-emphasizes the possibility of the American Mediterranean transformed 8.

(16) through the estuary of Caribbean Sea: a passageway, a sea which “explodes the scattered lands into an arc” (33) that heads toward the American continent. Apart from the aggressive anti-imperialist means that rumble the postcolonial studies, Glissant tempts to secure the Mediterranean of the Americas by sliding into through a diversified canal. By informing a new concept of Relation /Creolization, Glissant in his “Creolization in the Making of Americas” presumes a composite, cross-cultural phenomena in the Mediterranean of the Americas:. a place of passage, of transience rather than exclusive, an archipelago-like. 政治大. reality, which does not imply the intense entrenchment of a self-sufficient. 立. thinking of identity, often sectarian, but of relativity, the fabric of a great. ‧ 國. 學. expanse, the relational complicity with the new earth and sea. It does not. ‧. intend toward the One, but opens out into diversity. (Glissant 5). sit. y. Nat. io. er. In Relation, it opens up a new thinking of a composite identity that can co-. al. exist with multiple cultures. Glissant’s offer of the “experience of diversity” is a. n. iv n C “long-unnoticed process it spawned” h e nwhich h i Uup the relational complicity with g c brings the new Oneness. It is through Creolization, “the repercussion of cultures, whether in symbiosis or in conflict” that we figure out a becoming image of “an unknown forever both near and deferred.” Instead of positioning as a fixed mechanism, literary critic Lorna Burns states that Creolization is a state of becoming, a production of varied interrelations of identities rather than “the discourse of filiation and genesis that legitimized the colonial project.” The discourse of filiation in Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse is defined as a way of insisting on “fixing the object of scrutiny in static time, thereby removing the tangled nature of lived experience and promoting 9.

(17) the idea of uncontaminated survival” (101). Rather an uninterrupted continuation of human history it is, it gets more arbitrary for it neglects the lived experience and blocks the process of a Creolized identity. From Spivak’s discovery of the imperialized narrative “thirdworldism” (243) constructed by the literary discipline of Western knowledge, to Glissant conjecture of Creolization in seeking the regional self-dependences of the Mediterranean of the Americas, I want to proceed to the scenes in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, to excavate the coalitions of the dimensional master-slave conflicts, and the insufficiency of a Creolized sphere. In my study, there are more than two scenes that fit the scenario of. 政治大. such conflicts in the novel. First, in the first part of the text, the conflict between ex-. 立. planters Cosway family and ex-slave blacks appears, from Annette’s dead poisoned. ‧ 國. 學. horse, the name of “white niggers” and “white cockroaches,” to the final torching of. ‧. the Coulibri Estate. Second, Rhys puts forward the conflict between Rochester and. sit. y. Nat. Antoinette as a miniature of master/slave, self/other relation. If we read Antoinette’s. io. er. otherness not as uncanniness but a key for Glissant’s passage to Relation, it is. al. possible that we can conclude with a different closure for Antoinette’s identity. In. n. iv n C reading Glissant’s Creolization, Professor h eDerek n g Attridge c h i Uin his The Singularity of Literature discerned it as the discourse that “brought into relation with ‘otherness’.” The otherness, according to Attridge’s explanation, is not a colonial other but an “other to the sum of a culture knowledge,” which “lies outside the current limits of understanding” (51). Therefore, it is my hypothesis that through Glissant’s Creolization, Rhys may bridge Antoinette’s otherness which leads to a new space of in-betweenness. As soon as we figure out that Rhys’s heroine lives, strolls between the two parties of white and black, that she walks on the boundary of Sargasso Sea,. 10.

(18) we can either victimize her in the work of “worlding” or envisage a way for her release through Creolization. In Rhys’s design of characters, I want to discuss the function of the heroine Antoinette’s proctor, the nanny Jamaican Christophine. Through Christophine’s eyes, she is the only objective witness in the whole transition from the colonized period to the time of slave emancipation. She survives from the time of slavery, and is associated with the mysterious Afro-Caribbean voodooism; she stands in between the relational conflicts and inspects them with exceeding distinction and cleverness. In favor of the Creole heroine and sympathized with her for the plights she undergoes,. 政治大. Christophine loves and supports Antoinette; in aiding her making the potion,. 立. Christophine risks getting arrested for performing the obeah. It is my intention, to. ‧ 國. 學. consider Christhpine as the Glissantian arbitrator who positions herself in the work of. ‧. Creolization. As Antoinette’s surrogate mother who judges Rochester’s imperialist. sit. y. Nat. doing, Spivak read Christophine as “an aporia of différance,” an “Other” who cannot. io. al. er. be “selved” for she can not be fitted and contained by a “canonical English text within. n. the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native” (253).. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. Chapter II: From Rhys’s Magic to Zombification. In this chapter, I want to give a detailed explanation for the allusion of zombiism by tracing back to the historical origin in the ancient Haitian mythology. In professor Edna Aizenberg’s “‘I Walked with a Zombie’: The Pleasure and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity,” she reads Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a magnified fulfillment for putting the symbology of zombiism into her text, that she redresses 11.

(19) “the other side of the master narratives and to undermine theirs authority by giving voice to confined, enslaved, repudiated ‘monstrosities’, threatening in-betweens, zombies.” Through the attributes of critic Wade Davis’s study on the zombiism in Passage of Darkness and the performance of zombification, he gives a thorough explanation on how a zombie is arisen from the Voodoo conceptualization of the soul. Davis defines a zombie as in “the altered state of the creature,” who “reflects the loss of ‘the essence of one’s individuality‘” (56). Similar to Antoinette’s state of madness during her prison in Thornfield Hall, I will give an analysis of how Antoinette’s loss of her consciousness is the result of Rochester’s zombification. Most of all, it is my. 政治大. main argument that not only does Rochester zombify Antoinette through his white. 立. through a dose of poison concocted by Christophine.. 學. ‧ 國. obeah, but also Antoinette’s desperateness does she perform the zombification ahead. ‧. In Davis’s research on the tradition of voodoo rituals, he finds that a human. sit. y. Nat. soul was made by two parts. One is the ti bon ange, and the other is the gros bon. io. er. ange. During the ritual, the ti bon ange, “the essence of individuality of one’s soul,”. al. plays an important part for it leaves the body in a slumber in which a victim is in the. n. iv n C U is deprived, he has no trance and experiences dreams. Once ah victim’s e n gticbon h iange consciousness but is still capable of reacting on the surrounding stimuli. After the. sorcerer, the Voodoo practitioner calls boker captured the victim’s ti bon ange, with the complicated follow-up procedures, the zombification is thus completed. In Rhys’s text, she pictures Christophine as a woman with great knowledge of skilled voodooism, in order to show her well-planned strategy and thus invites the readers to jump off the framework of canonical English text to imagine an existence of a zombie.. 12.

(20) When we look into Rhys’s making of her heroine a zombie, Antoinette is, as Aizenberg describes, “a sexualized, hybridized zombie woman with a narrative of imperial domination.” What’s more, she is a hot-blooded, “nymphomaniac” woman who craves and wants more. Antoinette is not the first zombie Rhys brings forth. In fact, the first appearance of a zombified victim Rhys invites in is Annette, Antoinette’s mother whom an insane woman is in the asylum after the fire; her insanity foreshadows Antoinette’s potentiel of becoming a zombie, when she is told that she is “crazy like your mother” that “she have eyes like zombie and you have eyes like zombie too.”. 政治大. In Rhys’s rewriting of the relationship between Antoinette and Rochester, and. 立. Antoinette’s wedding to Rochester is only based on a deal under the patriarchal. ‧ 國. 學. structure. Their union is not coming from love but for a great inheritance from. ‧. Antoinette’s stepfather Mr. Mason. In Rochester’s eyes, the marriage is nothing but a. sit. y. Nat. trade. As Rochester gets to know his wife who appears so unfamiliar, unpredictable,. io. er. wild and luscious, he can’t endure but reject her, and turns his abjection into the blind. al. fear. As a result, with an unknown fear, Rochester chooses to use his imperial power. n. iv n C of “worlding,” judging Antoinette h eandn making g c h iherUa zombie. Through what critic Romita Choudhury terms that Rochester’s rejection and resentment towards his. Creole wife is coming from “the unquestioned ideology of imperialism permeating the dominant discourse and canonicity of Brontë’s text,” empowering Antoinette seems reasonable. Through Rochester’s patriarchal domination we also see that he claims for an Anglo-Saxonised version of Antoinette. Critic Wally Look Lai asserts this relationship is “doomed to failure from the very start,” both parties are “so rooted in their separate worlds.” Because of their different family background and class. 13.

(21) origin, “they remain complete strangers to each other, for each of them the world of the other is like some mysterious and inaccessible dream” (44). After setting up the structure of Caribbean history and discussing the difficult situations between Rhys’s heroine and her English husband, I will move on to the topic of the practice of zombification with Davis’s explanation on the process of rituals, and describe the scenes in Rhys’s text that match the procedure of zombification. The crucial factor for the Voodoo ritual, as Davis suggested, is the making of zombie drug. With verification of the result from the laboratory analysis Davis finds that ”together with discoveries in the field and the biomedical literature .... 政治大. The consistent and critical ingredients in the poison appear to be marine fish. 立. containing known toxins capable of inducing a physical state that could allow an. ‧ 國. 學. individual to be misdiagnosed as dead.” (7). The drug with an effect of being. ‧. “misdiagnosed as dead,” could induce a “catatonic-like state resembling death.” In. sit. y. Nat. Rhys’s text, the zombie drug may be produced and used in Antoinette’s performance. io. er. of zombification upon Rochester. If Christohpine is concocting the zombie drug. al. instead of the aphrodisiac mixed with wine in Antoinette’s request, she is prepared to. n. iv n C U reaction of Rochester’s assist Antoinette in zombifying Rochester. h eLoe n gexplains c h i the poisoning indicated to the symptoms during the zombification: “I woke in the dark. after dreaming that I was buried alive” (90) This vision of suffocation is predicted and his feeling of “deathly cold and sick in pain,” as Loe suggests, are “the initial slowing down of the body metabolism that produces the catatonic first stage of zombification.” But how does Rochester counteract the course? Loes suggestes it was through his vomiting that he expels the drug out of his body so the effect is mitigated. In other words, Rochester’s de-zombification succeeds in his direct reaction to vomit, which “reduces[ed] his vulnerability” to be zombified. Through extracting the zombie 14.

(22) poison out of one’s body, Rochester is then restored to his self-consciousness. By discussing the zombificaiton performed by Antoinette that is failed in Rochester’s counteract through vomiting, in return, Rochester turns to zombify her with his white obeah of renaming.. Chapter III: Rochester’s Zombie, and His Zombification. As we can see, Rochester’s carry out of dehumanizing his Creole wife reveals an underlying ideology of imperialism, which prompts him to imperialize the. 政治大. “colonized female subject” through a series of patriarchal commands and sexual. 立. abuses. I will put forward an inquiry of the imperial myth accompanied with. ‧ 國. 學. Englishness, to discuss the glitterati Rochester’s English identity in the nineteenth-. ‧. century Victorian period, so we can understand why in his deep-rooted belief, he. sit. y. Nat. disgusts at his wife so intensively who is supposed to be colonized. The imperial myth. io. er. is, according to Professor Kathleen J. Renk, the “spectacle of Empire” which is. al. originated and altered from the Christian doctrine of “English/queen mother” in the. n. iv n C colonial world. For the purposeh ofeingratiating itheU n g c h British queen, or the Victorian. mother, “the aristocracy,” noted by critic Jan Morris, “had long followed the example of the monarchy;” to show the empire’s superiority and divineness, it procures a way to dominate, cultivate the natives in the colonies through an imperial project out of the queen’s mercy, converting the colonial people into the offsprings of “English mother” (37). As an Englishman who is also endowed with the British “English/queen mother” system, Rochester thereby inevitably reinforces the imperial project to cultivate Antoinette. From analyzing the English imperial myth to the norms of Victorian womanhood, I want to argue that it is Rhys’s purpose to uncover the imperial violence 15.

(23) of Rochester through her Caribbean-oriented manifestation of zombiism in Antoinette’s case. For Rochester and Antoinette, the motive for both of them using the obeah is the fear of being enslaved, and the desire of making a “love slave.” Rochester’s fear is what Aizenberg defined as “the imperialist’s fear of slave rebellion;” and Antoinette’s fear obviously is the lack of love. So each one takes the offensive. Rochester’s shallow, skin-deep affection for Antoinette makes him nothing but an “imperial buyer,” who objectifies the colonized female subject into a product. The objectification of Antoinette, thus, helps Rochester fulfill his project of making a love. 政治大. slave through the baptism of renaming; and through this Bertha zombie making,. 立. Antoinette loses her last Caribbean connection with her mother Annette. By emptying. ‧ 國. 學. out Antoinette’s identity, Rochester succeeds in making the Other, the zombie in the. ‧. attic. Loe argues that Rochester’s renaming of Antoinette is a way to erase her. er. io. sit. y. Nat. Caribbean identity and to enslave her as a zombie:. al. Rochester’s narrative repeatedly stresses the doll-like, marionette qualities. n. iv n C of Antoinette, which resemble h ethen descriptions g c h i Uof zombie behavior, and he follows through as well with the ritual zombification process of robbing her of her previous identity by ‘baptizing’ her with the new name of Bertha, a practice he has begun earlier...” (Loe 34-42). Moving from Rochester’s renaming in West Indies to the attic in England, Antoinette ends up in becoming a mad woman, a “ghost woman” with a “blank lovely eyes.” Her imprisonment in the Thornfield Hall, as Davis suggests, may be seen as a completed zombification; for a victim should “be socialized into a new existence” and 16.

(24) isolated and fed with “a debilitating diet.” Surprisingly, in Loe’s argument, he thinks Rochester’s zombification is in the end failed, for he moves his zombie away from the West Indies, which is a magical bond with his white obeah. Threatening the British motherland, Bertha zombie “provides a destructive incubus working against him on his home territory” (Loe 35). Although Antoinette’s madness is diagnosed by Western conventional psychology, but as Rhys invites the version of the allusion of zombiism in the story, she offers a different angle and a new vision for readers to understand Antoinette’s state.. 立. 治政 Conclusion 大. ‧ 國. 學. In my conclusion, after discussing the practice of zombification, it is my. ‧. intention to discuss the possible de-zombification of both the English husband and the. sit. y. Nat. heroine. First, I will discuss Rochester’s de-zombification, which is casted by. io. er. Christophine’s Caribbean obeah through his counteraction of spewing the zombie. al. drug out. Second, I will argue that Antoinette in the last part of the novel also. n. iv n C experiences the process of de-zombification, h e n g c hthrough i U the dreams of her selfawakening as her “grounded revolt” (Choudhury 365).. Antoinette is a Creole Other who fights over her identity through many obstacles in Rhys’s version. As Glissant argues, the plight for a colonized object is described in the Marxian-like structure that, which a colonized one is in the inferior zone of periphery, fighting against the center of imperialism. The outcome, as the counter-colonial study shows that, the marginalized community is always facing the destiny of objectification, mapping, and the making of Other under the axiom of imperialism. But, on the contrary, Glissant’s poetics of Creolization may give the 17.

(25) subaltern a voice to speak. Through Antoinete’s dreams, a scene of seeing Tia who calls her on the edge reveals Antoinette’s urge for freeing herself from the Other scenario. For Antoinette, she realizes that the true place for her after her leaping off the burning house is the Sargasso Sea in-betweenness, which is in Glissant’s final ideal of fulfilling “the Caribbean Sea.” I want to argue that through Antoinette’s awaking from the slumber, she is capable of retrieving her Creole identity and counteracting the zombification by her using of the “mirroring” (Spivak 248) and her subconscious seeking in the past of West Indies. In my study, Antoinette’s potential of de-zombification is seen possible, for. 政治大. Rochester’s white obeah lacks the accuracy of Afro-Caribbean Voodoo procedures,. 立. and the powerlessness of his magic in England leaves the zombie a possibility to. ‧ 國. 學. dispel the curse. In the final scene of Antoinette’s captivity in the Thornfield Hall, the. ‧. literary critics deconstruct her dreams in displaying a sequence of symbols like. sit. y. Nat. homeland, a red room, a red dress, and the encounters with Tia and Rochester through. io. er. the multiple interpretations. Renk expounds upon the red room is more than a parallel. al. to “Jane Eyre’s experience in the infernal, godless red room;” rather, it is “the ritual. n. iv n C U she enacts identifies her with magical resistance discourse of h e n gtocthe h icolonizer’s. hegemonic power.” Through enacting the ritual of her red vision, Antoinette recalls the past of West Indies and fights against the ghost woman she sees in the mirror. In Antoinette’s final dream, she finds herself in the burning house, and later, on one hand, she follows the voice and finds out the image of her childhood companion Tia on the edge, calling her and asked her if she is frightened. On the other hand, a man’s voice calling Antoinette Bertha is behind her. Through the work of mirror images, critic Belinda Wyndham suggests that Antoinette searches for the existence of the “femaleness which is aligned with blackness and historylessness” 18.

(26) (149). Yet, Choudhury argues that the “an uneasy balance” between the white identity and the “hybrid Jamaican images... culminating in the vision of a black girl” (29) forces Antoinette to not engage in. In the opposite, instead of choosing from one side of the communities “as if Antoinette has glimpsed the failed possibility of achieving a composite culture,” with “no looking glass,” Antoinette awakes in the Creolized place, the in-betweenness of Sargasso Sea. For my concern, it seems difficult to discuss Antoinette’s last death expanding to the torching of Thornfield Hall and her suicide continued in Jane Eyre. In Spivak’s study, she prefers to define Antoinette as a true victim for her suicidal death. “Now at. 政治大. last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.” Antoinette’s last words, in. 立. Spivak’s regards, is her determination to become a sacrifice for achieving the greater. ‧ 國. 學. consummation of imperial mission:. ‧. sit. y. Nat. In this fictive England, she must play out her role, act out the. io. er. transformation of her “self” into that fictive Other, set fire to the house. al. and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist. n. iv n C heroine of British fiction. this as an allegory of the general h e nI gmust i U c hread. epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer. (Spivak 251). In other words, Spivak deems Antoinette’s death as a completion of imperil mission, regardless of her final self-awareness, and sees her as nothing but a tragedy, authorized by Jane Eyre as being a feminist individualist in the realm of thirdworldism. But for Rhys, in my argument, she gives an ambiguous ending of 19.

(27) Antoinette walking in the corridor with a candle held in her hand; for she envisages a different story for Antoinette’s death against the accusations of her deliberate arson which highlights her insanity. She fails to recognize herself as situated in either the English whiteness or the Jamaican blackness, in one way, is her giving up on connecting to the two parties for she is aware of the fact that both parties never approve her; but in another way, it is through her understanding that the Creoleness belongs to nowhere but in the gulf of Sargasso Sea: “now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do” (189). By lighting up the candle, with the fire that symbolizes the rebirth in her hand,. 政治大. Antoinette walks into the “dark passage.” As critic Wilson Harris suggests, it is the. 立. process of “shadow catching,” which is the religious practice of Caribbean obeah by. ‧ 國. 學. lighting up the candle, the lighter or the “believer” may restore her shadow and. ‧. retrieve her destiny from dispelling the darkness. To conclude, Antoinette’s de-. sit. y. Nat. zombification, in Choudhury’s assumption, describes that it is “not simply passivity. io. er. or an inability to think, but an inability to think differently, so de-zombification is not. al. the emptying out of the mind but the confrontation of a heavily inscribed terrain criss-. n. iv n C U cross by histories.” In Glissant’s view, h hee speculates the for beginning n g c h i possibility. one’s Creolization is “to dream or to act,” which, paralleling to Antoinette’s reaction of walking on the dark passage, in Glissant’s term, is her final quest for fulfilling the Creolization – “becomeing Caribbean.”. 20.

(28) Chapter I: The Critique of Imperialism, and Creolization in Wide Sargasso Sea. “She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She doesn’t come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No. IT’s you come all the long way to her house -- it’s you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have. Now you say you don’t love her and you break her up. What you do with her money, eh?” [ And then Rochester, the white man, comments silently to. 政治大. himself] Her voice was still quite but with a hiss in it when she said. 立. “money.” (Rhys 130). ‧ 國. 學 ‧. Compare to Charlotte Brontë’s description of the debased Bertha in the. sit. y. Nat. Western world in Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys presents a story of a hybrid Creole in the 19th. io. er. century West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea. Through the description of Antoinette’s. al. vagabound life, Rhys builds up a structure of colonialism and racial complications,. n. iv n C and places her heroine among the h etermoils i U blacks and whites. By n g cofhcolonized. “rescuing the white Creole madwoman from the denigrating descriptions of her found in Jane Eyre” (Olaussen 65), Rhys recurs the story of Antoinette and dedicates it to her innocent upbringing during the time of nineteenth-century Victorian age. Some treats the doing of Rhys as a way of projecting herself onto the Creole girl, so Rhys insists on writing for Antoinette. In Rhys’s letters, she restates the necessity to reconstruct a story of a confused Creole identity within the political context of particular colonial discourse as a matter of great importance. Influenced by the cultural and historical reformations from the British education, Rhys says, “it might 21.

(29) be possible to unhitch the whole thing from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, but I don’t want to do that. It is that particular mad Creole I want to write about” (Rhys 153). In an unpublished letter to actress Selma Vaz Dias in 1963, Rhys herself says: “I don’t think that English people have the slightest idea of the real West Indies in 1830’s.” As a reformist, she challenges the “History” of European discourse (Gregg 72) and invokes the case of the Creole identity for readers to examine. Therefore, in contrast to Brontë’s “paper tiger lunatic Bertha Mason” (Rhys 262), Rhys undertakes a reconstruction of Antoinette’s case with a texture of Caribbean historical basis. As critic Veronica Marie Gregg suggests, Rhys “uses and. 政治大. reworks historical and autobiographical data as a means of resisting the cannibalizing. 立. of West Indian history by the dominant European narratives, while producing the. ‧ 國. 學. Creole’s version of that history” (72). That is to say, by endowing her heroine with a. ‧. voice, she challengs the dominant canonical English text of European narratives.. sit. y. Nat. In my first chapter, first, I will try to explain the term “Creole” for looking. io. er. through Rhys’s making of the Creole protagonist, which “overtly and even. al. aggressively constructs a West Indian subject position” (Gregg 72). Second, I will. n. iv n C U and determined under discuss the colonized term – the Third h World, e n which g c hisi created the Western authorized system. By introducing the concept of author Kathleen J. Renk’s study on the imperial myth and the hermeneutics of Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of imperialism to my study, I will discuss the situation for the colonized subjects during that particular period, to support Rhys’s view of her obejectified Creole heroine. Last, I will apply to the Martinique philosopher Édouard Glissant’s hermeneutic of Creolization, to challenge the imperial system of the First World through deconstructing the dominant discourse of. 22.

(30) imperialism, and offer an alternative for the heroine in her realization of the Creole identity. In Rhys’s text, it is her request for telling Antoientte’s story from an unbiased Caribbean stance, to go against the contemporary dominant European narrative. Within her understanding of Afro-Caribbean knowledge, Rhys’s heroine is placed in the sequence of inequitable turmoils, from the deportation of the Coulibri Estate, the betrayal of her English husband to the dehumanization by Rochester’s renaming. Former Columbia University professor, Laura E. Ciolkowski, in her “Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: Colonial History, English Fiction, and British Empire” indicates. 政治大. Antoinette “has come to stand for a form of ‘native’ resistance to English patriarchal. 立. power for many contemporary feminist readers of Rhys’s text;” with Rhys’s. ‧ 國. 學. endeavor, she “ultimately discloses a certain complicity with the very English. ‧. patriarchal logics she challenges.” Rhys endows a certain belief that, as Ciolkowski. sit. y. Nat. argues, not as “an exposé of empire” but as “the occasion to confront the ever-shifting. io. thoughts” (340).. er. relations between complicity and resistance that mark all aspects of feminist. al. n. iv n C In Rhys’s design of the h nineteenth-century e n g c h i UWest Indies where the slave. emancipation has just begun, the gap between the former slaves and the former plantation owners is existant during Antoinette’s childhood. For the blacks (negros) who are formerly enslaved, they resents their ex-governers’ children including the Cosway family, for they are termed as the Creoles – the hybrids, and offsprings resulted in the crossbreeding of white planters and Jamaican natives. According to poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s study, the term of the Creole is originated from the etymological combination of the Spanish words: criar (to create, to imagine, to establish, to found, to settle), colono(a colonist, a founder, a settler,) and criollo; 23.

(31) which means a committed settler, or “one identified with the area of settlement, one native to the settlement though not ancestrally indigenous to it” (Brathwaite 1015105). The Oxford English Dictionary standard definition defines a Creole as a person who is born and naturalized in the West Indies or other parts of America, Mauritius, etc., but of European or Africa Negro race. In short, he who bears the name of Creole has no “connotation of colour.” In other words, as H. Adlai Murdoch, Tufts University Professor of Francophone Studies, states, “a Creole can be either white or black, colonizer or colonized,” and embodies the identity of “doubling, difference, and dislocation on the cultural and performative planes” (254). As Dr. Lorna Burns, a. 政治大. researcher at the University of St. Andrews, suggests, a Creole is considered a hybrid,. 立. distinguished by other new theoretical approaches.. 學. ‧ 國. inter-racial mixing subject, the “New World experience” (99) in the need of being. ‧. In literary critic Veronica Marie Gregg’s observation, the white pioneers who. sit. y. Nat. lands and settles down on the plantations of the West Indian soil, with a group of. io. er. black slaves they ownes, are viewed with the superior positions. Gradually, through. al. the inter-racial marriages with the locals including blacks, the mix-blood offsprings,. n. iv n C the “Mulatto Ascendancy” (22) takes over h etheir n gforefathers’ c h i U titles of plantation owners. They inherites the plantaions and the slaves, “in which the slaves are. enslaved as surely as the descendants of their former bondsmen” (Gregg 70). But, in the nineteenth-century, the master-slave relation faces the first collision when the slavery emancipation treaty is released during the 1830’s. Thus, they becomes the “apprenticed labourers” (22). Which means, the blacks are no longer enslaved to white colonials, and becomes free men. In various confrontations with their former plantation owners, especially the white Creoles, the blacks “intoxicated with freedom, abandon the helpless plantation owners” (94). The existence of Creoles, as Gregg 24.

(32) suggests, is thus being assembled by “the sociohistorical, discursive fabric of the colonial West Indies,” and is characterized in the “discursive self-destruction articulated within the historical specificity of racialized slavery in the Caribbean” (38). As a result, the white Creole plantation owners have no claims for the blacks; worse, they become the subjects of contempt and scorn. For they are the hybrids with an “inextricably disqualification in the system of ethnology” (38), resulting in what Gregg terms as the artificial compound in postcolonial rhetoric. In the end, the term of Creole is formed, added to the category of the “recruitment of the silenced, degraded. 政治大. black/ mulatto” (40). Condemned and unfitted in their post-slavery society, the former. 立. Creole plantation owners are hereby positioned as the excluded white niggers with no. ‧ 國. 學. regional independences.. ‧. As a muddled, complex subject matter, Rhys concerns the Creole subjects. sit. y. Nat. with a linking of the colonial discourse in the Caribbean history. Juging the European. io. er. enterprise which is seen with “little knowledge of the region and ... depends[ed] upon. al. a willed ignorance,” the colonized subjects are thus deem as “an always constructed. n. iv n C narrative of the Other within and metropolitan discourses” (11). Which is to say, h by en gchi U once the making of the Other race is constructed within the imperial project of. “worlding,” the history of West Indies risks being recognized as the production of the Third World. In Spivak’s examination, through the operation of Western imperialism, the colonized people are classified into the group of uncivilized in the axiomatic norm of “thirdworldism” (Spivak 289). Thus, the colonials are obligated to exercise the imperial mission in the Third World through the work of imperial “worlding” (Spivak 243); which, according to Spivak, is a conventionalized signifier for stereotyping any related colonized place. In addition, Spivak’s term of “subaltern” (257) is one of the 25.

(33) results from the work of “worlding,” adopted by Southern Utah University professor Kyle William Bishop. Bishop presents a new rank of colonial world classifying the term of zombie into the sixth level “sub-subaltern” (71), which I will expound upon this subject later in Chapter II. As critic Veronica Marie Gregg warns, the work of “worlding” in the “colonialist discourse is not mere representation but an event that helps to create ‘History’ and shape materially the lives of people in the metropolis and the periphery” (15). Through the making of the other “History,” Gregg concludes, the unknown Other Creole, “the legend of the mad West Indian was established” (84). In Rhys’s arrangement, under the structure of colonialist discourse, her first. 政治大. step is to sell her Creole girl to the English imperialist through the commercial trade.. 立. By presenting Antoinette’s need for a husband, who inherites a great fortune from her. ‧ 國. 學. father but needs a husband to earn the inheritance, Rhys prroceeds Antoinette’s story. ‧. with a miserable foreword. Gregg finds the evidence to confirm the existence of cases. sit. y. Nat. similar to Antoinette’s. According to Gregg’s documents, after the release of the. io. er. slavery pact, many plantation owners leave wealthy dowries to their daughters, and. al. yet there are restrictions for them to inherit that money unless they are married. So, a. n. iv n C young man like Rochester, who as a second h e nsongofcanh English i U family with no rights to the family inheritance, are desperate to find a wealthy wife. As Gregg assumes, Rochester “would marry the girl, grab her money, bring her to England -- a faraway place -- and in a year she would be an invalid. Or mad” (84). With the urgency to proclaim a money-spinner, so to speak, Rochester is truly an imperialist who claimed his property from a colonized object for the sake of financial concerns. Before Antoinette’s selling of her marriage to a British master, during her childhood, Rhys inscribes her with an orphan-like, motherless life. Starting from Rhys’s first-person narrative of the girl Antoinette in the first part of the novel, she 26.

(34) describes Antoinette’s confusions in her encounters with other blacks. In Antoinette description, she witnesses her mother Annettes, who is excluded from the whole community. Hinted by a suicide of their neighbor Mr. Luttrell, Rhys foretells the collapse of the socio-systemic structure of plutocracy, and moves on to the eventual persecution of the Cosway family by burning down the house as a symbol of eradicating the threat to the black society. Before explaining the inscribed structure of the Third World in Spivak’s study, I want to take a look at the Coulibri Estatein, for it not only represents the symbolism of the Cosway family’s rise and decline, from the imperial movement to. 政治大. the slave emancipation, but also the link to Antoinette’s memory of the West Indies. 立. when she is captured in England. In Rhys’s writing, the house incorporates the past,. ‧ 國. 學. the beauty and heavenliness of West Indies, which is demolished later by the new. ‧. order of the post-slavery society. Rhys embodies the house in the form of Edenian. sit. y. Nat. Garden, with the typical Caribbean beauty, it is transcended to the state of “the. io. er. Romantic sublime” as described by critic Nicholls and Watt. Affected by the. al. transcendent prospect of the “virgin soil mapped out in thriving plantations,” the. n. iv n C U “turned to the East” (14). Westerners are attracted to the Caribbean h e n g cbeauty h i and Futhermore, as critic Andrew Wilton describes, the sublime landscapes of the. Caribbean enable the viewer “to accomplish the leap from the ‘local’ and trivial to the grand and universal” (20). In Antoinette’s retrospection, the Edenian garden of Coulibri Estate is “large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible -- the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild” (Rhys 17). But, different from the biblical garden Antoinette anticipated, as Gregg describes, the present West Indian post-slavery period is not a “sui generis” but “the nightmare of history.” “All the human relationships are marked by slavery and the plantation society” (85), as she concludes. 27.

(35) The decline of the Coulibri Estate, of the West Indies is eventually in the state of “ruinate” (Thomas 157), the decaying plantation which “reverted to the tropical vegetation” (156) is now squatted by the former slaves. In this post-slavery society, Antoinette’s memory of the past and exuberant Edenian Garden is then turned into the abandoned runis mercilessly. Later, we see it is through the state of ruin which Antoinette strives to survive, with “an ability to transcend the materiality of place” (Thomas 156), she suffers from Rochester’s “green menace” and anticipates a chance to “go home;” which, is a home of “the ruinate land of Coulibri of her early adolescence” (157). Responding to Antoinette’s reminiscence of the house, critic. 政治大. Michelle Cliff concludes that, “as individuals in the landscape, we, the colonized, are. 立. also subject to ruination, to the self reverting to the wildness of the forest” (40).. ‧ 國. 學. As citic Michelle Cliff suggestes, the “self” which goes against the exotic. ‧. wilderness, can be seen as the self of European ideology attempting to cultivate the. sit. y. Nat. colonized wild. In literary critic Kathleen J. Renk’s study, it is the “the Victorian. io. er. myth of the family” (Renk 7), which is shaped by the religious appeal of Christianity. al. and rooted in the imperialist movements. The imperialistic myth is, in Renk’s. n. iv n C explanation, “the hierarchal systems and h hegemony, i U limiting categories, and e n g c hdiscrete, an inexorable colonialism” (7) pervaded in the Caribbean. Through the demystification of the Victorian myth, we can understand the meaning of the mission. Granted by the “queen mother” (29) of the British Empire, the imperial movements are thus proceeded for the purpose of protecting the daughters in the “garden” or the “angel of the house” (32) from the unknown East. Also, for the purpose of propagating “a noble and supposedly superior English race” (29), the cultivation of building English morals is deemed necessary, including the West Indian colonies, otherwise is referred to as the “Little Englands” (32). 28.

(36) As the education of English knowledge progressed throughout the colonies, Renk further expounds upon the idea of Victorian womanhood, “Queen’s Garden” (29). This term is extended from the rhetoric of English art critic John Ruskin’s “Of Queen’s Gardens” as Renk described:. Forming a triumvirate of ascending maturity, the three princesses are genteel goddesses of leisure. Like the delicate pastel flowers, the girls in the garden, as Ruskin suggests, ret, reside, and grow “effortlessly.” The flowers in the background seemingly from a dense wall that. 政治大. protects the monarchial descendants, and the “daughters” of empire. 立. from all harm. They and the family reside in a mythic realm, a garden,. ‧ 國. 學. a heavenly nook presided over by the queen of the garden, the English. ‧. mother, the queen mother, and implicitly by God ... As daughters of. sit. y. Nat. empire, they will propagate a noble and supposedly superior English. io. er. race. (29). al. n. iv n C The rhetoric of Ruskin’shGarden, e n gaccording c h i Uto Renk, obligates the women to protect the garden of the English mother through supporting the English superiority, “with a notion of England as a heaven on earth” (29). To shape the English womanhood, it is only through “the cultivation of women’s morality” (10). Endorsed by the Christian credos, author Mrs. Sarah Ellis, in her “Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits,” states that the “True Home” of British Empire entails the qualities of domesticity and self-sacrifice. The English women, in other words, should be recognized as keepers of “nation’s moral wealth” (18), as leaders of a “new era” by setting up the norm of “female sovereign” (80). As imperialists 29.

(37) encounter with the “homeless,” uneducated people in the colonies, their urges to civilize the untamed are thus revealed, waiting to “spread[ing] light, wisdom, morality and order as they gather the ‘homeless’ nations at their feet” (31). In critic Jan Morris’s view, the drive to imperialize the colonies is reflected as a spectacle that “plays[ed] an important role in British imperialism and in the transmission of English ideology” (12). Intended to “overawe the natives,” the English colonials present the “elaborate ritualistic ceremonies” (12) to demonstrate their power and build the Anglican Church on the lands. Morris argues that this is the initial phase of “Queen’s Progress” (11) for inviting the monarchy of British. 政治大. aristocratism in. By building the churches, the schools, the country house estates and. 立. other institutions, “the Victorian ideology” (Renk 32) is thereby slowly inserted into. ‧ 國. 學. the colonies.. ‧. As the Queen legitimates the imperial project, the imperial troops march. sit. y. Nat. forward to the colonies, work to civilize and shape the moral characters in the colonial. io. er. world. As a result, many natives receive the Western educations. But, the rectification. al. of the colonized, paradoxically, has never introduced them into the English family. In. n. iv n C the end, they are marked as both members h eand n gnonmembers. c h i U Although in the. nineteenth century the historian James Froude discerns the colonized people in the West Indies as Britain’s “scattered offspring, ” still, according to his study, the citizens of the colonies are “not so enamored of constitutional theory that they will patiently see their fellow-country men in less favored situations swamped under the vote of the coloured races” (325). That is to say, Froude here indicates that the genuine offsprings of the Great Britain are still the white-raced colonists. The master from the first world, with the privilege to tame the slaves, is deemed as the key to dominate in the East. In the Victorian age, the imperial project is 30.

(38) disguised in the good intention to purify the slaves accompanied with Christianity, which aims to fulfill the holy work of God by humanizing the savages and making them pledge to the British motherland. In Kathleen J. Renk’s book Caribbean Shadows & Victorian Ghosts, a picture drew by Thomas Jones Barker’s The Secret of England’s Greatness (1861) is shown in describing a scene of an African prince, receiving a book of the Bible from the Queen for he asks for advice on how to build a great empire. The painting itself is incarnation of the “prescribed Victorian-colonial relationship that codifies the supremacy of England over the conquered,” showing how “England ‘subdued’ the so-called uncivilized through the power of God’s word”. 政治大. (2). Here, the queen represents the “Christian enlightenment” (3) intending to save the. 立. “fallen” African prince implied as the “primitive pagan darkness;” through the. ‧ 國. 學. bowing to the superior conqueror, the colonized should “gladly accept the modes of. ‧. discourse that transform the primitive into the civilized” (4). Thus, “the revelation of. sit. y. Nat. Victoria’s imperial secret” (4) is revealed and the master-slave relation is consolidated. io. er. in the colonial world.. al. The meaning of the master, the slave owner is reinforced and explained in the. n. iv n C eighteenth century, by the apologist h e Edward i Uin The History of Jamaica. He n g c hLong. considers the master, the slave owner as the “beneficent and revered father-figure” protecting the slaves from the “monstrous parent Africa.” The slaves are in awe of him, with no “abject prostration of real slaves,” but as a “common friend and father” (271). As Long describes, the power of a slave owner is almost equal to an ancient patriarch; who is obliged to soothe and rectify the people. Long also stresses that the British plantation owners discover a way to bond with the slaves which is to welcome them into the Victorian family. Within the realm of the family, the slave owners take care of the natives; and are discerned as leaders like Moses in the Bible who is 31.

(39) ordained by God to guide those “wandering people.” Renk presents another picture of a “bucolic scene,” in which the patriarchal slave owner is surrounded by a bunch of slaves, adoring and smiling at him,”awaiting[s] his beneficent touch” (64). But, at last, the cultivated natives are still regarded as the outsiders under the first world criteria; worse, they are described in such a debased tone that “they are now everywhere degenerated into a brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody, mistrustful, and superstitious people” (353-54). They are seen as the “fathers to theirs slaves” (Renk 64) who rule the plantations. With the holy, religious values of justifying the imperial activity in the name. 政治大. of God, as critic Benita Parry suggests, the West takes over the plantations and. 立. constructs “the European self” (18). Furthermore, in privileging Europe’s “diverse. ‧ 國. 學. modes of self-presentation,” Parry continues, “in the triumphalist culture of. ‧. colonialism-as-imperialism,” the Europeans facilitates the “imperial project” to. sit. y. Nat. marshal into the colonies.This is activated by “a cultural hegemony where western. io. er. norms and values are equated with universal froms of thought” (18). By legitimating. al. the imperialist movement as a way to purify the untrodden lands, the Euro-centric. n. iv n C authorities position the “European self,” hand i U continents as e ntreat g cthehdiscovered. “other,” “uncultivated” and “inhuman.” As Caribbean writer Marlene Nourbese Philip states, the patriarchal mechanism of Europe “has traditionally designated certain groups not only as inferior but also, paradoxically, as threats [...] Women, Africans, Asians, and aboriginals [...] constitute the threat of the Other – that embodiment of every thing which the white male perceived himself not to be” (295). Therefore, the imperial mission of taming the “unmanageable” (Renk 66) is now justified. Critic Anouar Abdel-Malek describes the contemporary imperialism as a hegemonic imperialism that “exercising to a maximum degree a rationalized violence 32.