Wide Sargasso Sea brings about an intersection between race, gender, and familial constructs with such intensity as to have repercussions and challenges for the field of theory, in its intersection of the feminist, the psychoanalytic, and the postcolonial. Like her protagonist, Jean Rhys was a creole `white nigger' (85) born into the layered colonialism of the late nineteenth century Caribbean, and paid the price in her life of a stigma which converted an intransitive and involuntary condition of hybridity into what her society claimed was the embodiment of a transgression against nature. Body and skin-colour could not avoid being read as indelible signs of a mixed racial origin. To have been born a hybrid meant having to face calumny, ingest guilt, and contend with self-negation. Birth became miscegenation, a condition in which the wish for self-debasement has to be fought as the black child in Blake tries to, or as Shakespeare's Perdita manages to, in her spirited defence of `gilly-flowers', Nature's so-called bastards, which she reminds her elders are no less natural than products of other more `legitimate' beds. Her experience is one of exile and alienation from home, where home is a comprehensively split notion which encompasses the absence-in-presence of the parental, the social, the cultural and the racial. The incomprehensibility of why you were somehow `wrong' could not alleviate the unbearableness of being made to feel always so `wrong'. Jean Rhys' protagonist, Antoinette, explains why she is referred to by the local population of her native island of Jamaica as a `white cockroach' (102).

For her and her mother life is a trauma in which `some things happen and are there for always even though you forget why or when' (68-9). The craft of the novelist which shapes the struggle to redeem lives already branded by a `crime' that they are not conscious of having committed, whose recursivity, however, they had to suffer, as a kind of surplus or overflow, a helpless and terrible repetition beyond recuperation. What belies the despair, or underlies and overlays it, is a resistance which takes succour in the narrativity of art. Rhys constructs a semi- or quasi-autobiographical journey which might be described as an allegory in the shape of a moebius. This is wound or twisted around a protagonist who might be said to be a metonymic function of the author's predicament, in the manner in which a charm can be said to relate intimately to the evil it is meant to ward off, or the way an inoculating virus resembles the parent virus against whom it is used to develop protective antibodies in the host, or the way a lightning-rod is married to the bolt of lightning it must earth, or the way the shield of Perseus kisses the gaze of the Medusa it will freeze, or the way Orpheus might have averted with averted gaze the destiny of losing Eurydice a second time.

The novel is exemplary, not in the enormity of the damage sustained by the author (and/or persona) in reaching the point from which such a narrative could be written, but in the resourcefulness with which the novelist exorcizes through art the rapacity of a universally appetitive will to power, a will rooted in weakness, insecurity and malice. Rhys gives her protagonist three separate first-person narratives. Rhys' personal dreams written down in a Black Exercise Book thirty years before Wide Sargasso Sea was conceived, eventually find their way into Antoinette's recurrent nightmares.¹ Rhys is intent on letting her protagonist capsize in order for her narrative to excoriate the Law. Author and protagonist are thus split.

The climactic time of incendiary madness is narrativized by Rhys with concision, thus foregrounding the enforcing events which induced the final of many self-immolations. By cross-hatching one narrative subjectivity against another and one narrative time against another, the gradual inevitability of Antoinette's dereliction and decomposition is given a dispassionate Cubist-like perspective. A polyphony of multiple narrative voices and shifting time-frames deliberately fragments linearity even as it organizes the narrative momentum into the shape of two large prelude-like waves: in the first, the protagonist loses her mother's primary attention to a succession of husbands and a male idiot sibling, and then the mother loses her favourite child and her sanity when her home is burnt down by a racist mob who have long resented her hybridity, her mixed marriages and the property she has inherited from them. In the second movement, the daughter who never knew a true father, and then twice lost a mother, now loses herself and her property to a man whom she cannot hold either in love or even lust. A foster-mother supplicated and importuned for black-magic — `obeah' (88-9) — proves of no avail. The daughter cannot hold a husband in one sense just as she never had a father to hold her in another sense, and the foster-mother ends up, almost against her own will, betraying the daughter to confinement and the fate of the madwoman in the attic, thus repeating the mother's betrayal in never having been there fully for the daughter.² The girl who lost her home, her sibling, her mother and their parrot to a fire that razed everything down to ashes, can only find relief in a second fire to mirror the original one, so that she is finally cleansed of her self. There is no phoenix in this fiction. All the mirrors Antoinette looks into in order to imagine a self for herself are distorted or cracked. When the mob sets fire to her house, a servant girl with whom Antoinette used to play casts a stone at her (38).

The act of writing, of using language to organize consciousness functions simultaneously as re-enactment, heuristic and therapy. Hysteria, breakdown and despair are confronted, not evaded.³ The exorcism of art works through articulating clearly that which threatens to break, tear, wrench. The daughter who was never properly acknowledged by fathers, and unable to relate adequately to men as lovers or husbands, write themselves into a space in which the desire of the male is held up to a close and scorching scrutiny. The daughter frees herself by writing the mother out of her life, reckoning the damage the mother sustained and the damage she passed on to the daughter as unwitting legacy, a curse whose poison has to be digested in the blood of the daughter, and bled as ink onto the canvas of the novel, for the white magic of art to inscribe its redemptive and its rebuking hieroglyphs. The unspoken or smudged out palimpsest on which the narrative is written points to a daughter who has been pulled off like a splinter from the maternal body, without a chance for what is most desired, an imaging of her self in the mirror of the mother. The difficulty for a girl `in detaching herself from the mother in order to accede to the order of signs as invested by the absence and separation constitutive of the paternal function' is made worse by the absence of the father.⁴ It withholds paternal authorization, and puts the origin of the subject in question. Husbands — displacements of the male authority for the woman's identity — in failing to confer upon the woman the social role and the domestic rites of a wife, redouble the effect of the originary displacement.

The relation between author and protagonist in Rhys is prophylactic. The fate of Antoinette, the woman from whom the man withholds even her name, the woman who cannot make all the fragments cohere, is like a project of naming through which the woman-as-author, who was registered at birth under the name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, renames herself Jean Rhys.⁵ She must not, will not become the madwoman in the attic, but knows that she is too often too close to that condition. She writes herself an alter-ego to serve as sacrifice on the twin altars of patriarchy and the missing mother. Her text also offers homage and administers a rebuke to her literary foster-mother — Charlotte Brontë — a woman whose Jane Eyre half-subverts the progeny she has engendered. The construction of Antoinette's narrative is an unravelling of the weave into which Brontë worked her fantasy of Jane and Bertha and Rochester. The deconstruction is possible because Brontë's fiction wears the threads of its repression loosely on the sleeve of its own feminine wish-fulfilment. Rhys discloses what in Brontë is never completely enclosed. The names of mother and daughter in Rhys are a near-reversal of those in Brontë; the name the man insists on using for Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea — Bertha — is the name of Rochester's first wife in Jane Eyre. By constructing her novel in the form of an antidotal fable to that of Brontë, dependent yet resistant, Rhys is able to marry the personal through the mediation of the intertextual with the allegorical without sacrificing any of its pungency. By deconstructing a potentially self-deconstructive text such as Jane Eyre, Rhys is able to shape her own materials into a systematically antithetical relation which feeds cannibal-like on Brontë's compromised femininity.

Denial, in Wide Sargasso Sea, takes the form of the failure to love. The unnamed man extrapolated out of Brontë's Rochester, himself a second and hence a dispossessed son, with a father to work out of his own system, is incapable of anything beyond a mechanical lust fumbling about in a stupor, split from love and care. His rejection of the guilt at the failure to love recoils on the dispossessed woman in the form of hatred. She becomes like a mirror, first wiped clean of her own self-hood, into which he then projects his self-hatred, which he finally breaks up as he might a doll, chanting to her the lulling and demeaning refrain `Marionette, Antoinette' (127), in an attempt to get rid of his own guilt. The silvering at the back of the mirror is his lust for her money, a small, ugly stop-gap for the lack he can never fill. Towards the end, for her, lost in his England, `There is no looking-glass here and I don't know what I am like now' (147). The only wish Antoinette can nurse successfully in Wide Sargasso Sea is to die, and like her mother, she dies more than once: `There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about' (106). `Say die and I will die' she says to her husband; in response he declares to the reader that `I watched her die many times. In my way, not hers' (77). What Rhys identifies is man's practice of voodoo or obeah upon woman: the plural deaths women are made to suffer at the hands of men who acquire power over them.

Rhys scores a threnody for the defeat of the feminine as the only tragic indictment of the masculine available to her Antoinette and Anette. The repossessing a sense of the value of ordinariness, of the mundanity of work, and of belonging to a place is underscored as precisely that which is denied to Rhys' Antoinette. Her husband's deliberately casual adultery with a coloured servant in Antoinette's house distastes and dispossesses her of the only place she had learned to identify herself with as her natural habitat and patrimony (90). England, his home, and the house he builds there with her money, transports what had first seemed to her its dream-like unreality into the numbness of nightmare. The tragedy is that he appropriates and desecrates what he neither appreciates nor understands, a person emblematic `of a beautiful place — wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness' (73). The feminine in Rhys gets wrecked on the failure of love.

Notes