1 Jean Rhys (Dominica 1890- Exeter, UK 1979) Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
2 What do we mean by Women of Color?(Adapted from Cartographies of Struggle by Chandra Mohanty – in Google Drive) It designates a social and political constituency, not a biological trait. It designates people of African, Caribbean, Asian and Latin American descent, and Native Americans in the United States.
3 It also refers to “new immigrants” to the United States in the last three decades: Arab, Asian, and so on. (p.52) With the rise of transnational corporations that dominate contemporary economic systems, factories have migrated in search of cheap labor. At the same time a massive migration of ex-colonial population to Europe and the USA has created multi-cultural and multi-racial societies.
4 ‘Women of color’ identifies an alliance by choice, not skin colorThe potential commonality of these group of women is their oppositional relation to sexist, racist and imperialist structures. (p.49) Women of color are allies by virtue of these values, which bond them across their diverse ethnicities, cultures, gender and racial identities. Think of transversal alliances
5 Why does this definition matter to our reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea?Wide Sargasso Sea offers a counter-reading of a classic of British literature: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) WSS lays bare Bronte’s and Jane Eyre’s limited (and limiting) view of women’s roles and agency. It shows the subjective nature of points of views, and how meaning depends on who gets to speak, and who gets silenced.
6 The Caribbean The Caribbean looks like a comma separating, but also uniting, north and south america, but symbolically and historically three continents: europe, the americas and africa
7 The Carribean
8 The Complex Location of Wide Sargasso SeaMost of the novel is set on the island of Jamaica (although it is not named in the novel, critics have agreed that the island described is Jamaica) during the years immediately after the Emancipation of the slaves across the British Islands (1833) A time of turmoil, when the island still bears the marks of colonial history in the presence of the now destitute (mainly Creole) plantation owners, the freed slaves, and the arrival of Englishmen in search of fortune.
9 What do we mean by Creole??The meaning of the term ‘Creole’ varies in different societies and over time. it is used in the British, Dutch, French and Hispanic Caribbean and also in parts of the north and central American mainland (Louisiana Creoles), in much of south America and in Sierra Leone. The root of ‘Creole’ is the Latin word criare= ‘to bring up’, ‘to educate’ From it, the Spanish word criar →Criollos: children who were born in the Spanish islands (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico) of Spanish couples. The term dates back to the practice of these children being breastfed by women slaves. This experience ‘naturalised’ them, and made them ‘Creole’.
10 What do we mean by Creole??Creole as an identity category refers to cultural belonging, not race – Creoles indigenous to the space by virtue of their cultural imprint in the Caribbean: language, food, religious practices, dress codes… The creole is made of the material, the fabric of the island. Racial features are not what defines the creoles, but \belonging and indigeneity is.
11 Arnaldo Roche-Rabell We Have to Dream in Blue (1986)
12 Creole is also one element in a rigid power structure(Stuart Hall “Negotiating Caribbean Identities”) It is impossible to approach Caribbean culture without understanding the way it was continually inscribed by questions of power. For centuries you could read off from the populations to the cultures, and from the cultures to the populations, and each was ranked in an order of cultural power.
13 White Creoles What lies underneath the term White Creole across the Caribbean and in the Global South (characterized by plantation economy) is the mark of slavery. In Europe white creoles were (are?) perceived as hybrid individuals – tainted by their proximity to slaves (the symbolic and literal gesture of a slave woman breastfeeding a white child) On the islands, the white creoles existed between the two extremes of ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’, ‘colonizer’ (i.e the British, French, Spanish) and ‘colonized’ (i.e. African slaves). (Percy Hintzen ‘Race and Creole Ethnicity in the Caribbean’)
14 The White Creole Woman ‘The white Creole woman has a lax fiber, her voice is soft and spiritless, and every step betrays a languor and lassitude (..) she is generally lascivious and overdressed’, featuring ‘proud nonchalance of bearing’ and ‘languorous apathy (…) she is ‘pliable as wax and melts like butter’. The Penny Cyclopedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’, (Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1837), pp. 1–7.
15 John Singer Sargent Madame X (1884)Parisian woman, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, Daughter of French creoles – descendant of plantation owners in louisiana
16 Annalee Davis Putting on my Blackness (1987) Acrylic on canvasKathy Yearwood Collection It was not until years after I made this painting that I read Jean Rhys’ Smile Please – her unfinished autobiography. She wrote of a moment when she looked out her window onto a street carnival and was deeply aware of her separateness as a white Creole and longed to have been an integral part of what she could only be a spectator of. Putting on my Blackness is a self-portrait where I look out the window in a vulnerable state, aware of the separate spaces a divided nation inhabits. Desirous to build real dialogue, I don a black skin, in an effort to bridge the divide.
17 The White Creole Woman in WSS..Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early 19th century, whose dowries were only an additional burden to them The product of an inbred, decadent society resented by the recently freed slaves whose superstitions they shared, they languished uneasily in the beauty of their tropical surroundings, ripe for exploitation. (Introduction by Francis Wyndham, Wide Sargasso Sea, p.11) What aspect of the novel prevent it from offering a spectacle of the character of the white creole woman?
18 The White Creole Woman in WSSWide Sargasso Sea unearths the complex identity of a white Creole woman White creole women are an abomination: they embody the danger of racial contamination and moral debasement. On the other end, they are viewed as exotic , lusty and passionate, but a threat, and a treat to Englishmen. By doing so, the novel re-defines whiteness: whiteness is no longer just the sign of racial or sexual purity. Creole whiteness is an abomination – why is this abomination more expressed in white creole women?
19 The novel
20 Why Sargasso Sea? Connections are stalled in the sargasso sea. They are attempted, but they stall – Why? A seemingly calm sea in the Atlantic, with no land boundaries but delimited by ocean currents. It is characterized by seaweeds called sargassum.
21 Intertextuality and Time Frame of Wide Sargasso Sea1843 publication of Jane Eyre (Britain at the time boasts a huge empire in the Caribbean and India) Jare Eyre is set approx .at the start of the 19th century (1830ca) 1966 Publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, soon after the decolonization and independence of Jamaica from the UK (1962) 1840s setting of Wide Sargasso Sea (after Emancipation of slaves across the British colonies, in 1833) Wide Sargasso Sea is a posthumous narrative prequel to Jane Eyre, but it is above all a mastework in its own right The Rhys novel and the film, however, hardly need "Jane Eyre" in order to exist. The story is complete in itself - sad, haunted, inevitable.
22 Closing ranks… They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. (15) And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between you and I often wonder who I am and where my country is and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. (93) Borders shift and one category of individuals is left out
23 …becomes an opportunity to explore ‘the other side’They are children. They won’t hurt anyone… Unhappy children do hurt flies ( 32) You don’t like, or even recognize, the good in them, she said, and you won’t believe in the other side’.(29) Mr. Mason doesn’t look hurt – I argued. ‘Great mistake to go by looks’ said aunt Cora, ‘one way or another’ (33) Where else do we see examples of this in the novel?
24 ‘there is always another side…’I wish I could tell him (Mr. Mason) that out here is not at all like English people think it is. I wish…(p.31) Her (Christophine’s) coffee is delicious but her language is horrible and she might hold her dress up. It must get very dirty, yards of it trailing on the floor. When they don’t hold their dress up it’s for respect, or for feast days or going to Mass (…) You don’t understand at all. They don’t care about getting a dress dirty because it shows it isn’t the only dress they have (77-78) Antoinette - and Annette - provide Rochester with constant reality checks – slaves are not children, and their actions and habits have a cultural meaning, tht is are creole to the space out of which they are born. Lack of communication and understanding between A. and R
25 Example of connected opposites: vulnerability→ controlAnd the woman is a stranger. Her pleading expression annoys me. I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks. (63) She had given way, but coldly, unwillingly (…) poor weapons, and they had not served her well or lasted long. If I had forgotten caution, she had forgotten silence and coldness. The woman, like the island, is excessive
26 suspicion→ desire Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking: ‘What I see is nothing – I want what it hides – that is not nothing’. (79)*
27 Indifference →objectificationIf she was a child she was not a stupid child but an obstinate one (…) Nothing That I told her influence her at all. (85) I won’t tell you that I scarcely listened to your stories. I was longing for night and darkness and the time when moonflowers open (153) ------ 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. (p. 133) Names matter
28 Zombification Very soon she ‘ll join the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. Hey can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter (…) Yes, they’ve go to be watched. For the time comes they will try to kill, then disappear. (156)
29 Madness-Sanity …you bewitch with her (Daniel Cosway’s letter, 87)I thought these people are very vulnerable. How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy…it was necessary, I was told, and that view I have always accepted. (93) Passion and vulnerability vs. indifference
30 Suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False.Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest’s a lie (…) the mad conflicting emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane (155)
31 I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rainI 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. ..above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life I would be thirst (sic.) and longing for what I had lost before I found it. (156)
32 ‘Madness’ in the writing method: Antoinette meets BerthaQuickly, while I remember the hot classroom (31) I must know more than I know already. For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I shall lie in has red curtains and I have slept there many times before, long ago. How long ago? ( 67) (after the third dream) I was outside holding my candle. Now at least I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. 171
33 The looking-glass There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I? (162)
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