Discussion Question: Jane Eyre, A Post-Colonial Reading
A post-colonial reading would suggest that Bronte's character, Jane Eyre, benefitted from colonialism? In what way? Rhys' /Wide Sargasso Sea/ picks up some of the traces in its plot. Explain.
Leaving aside the possible, if problematically unsure, Irish lineage of the Eyre name, which would lend a particular significance to her position in this colonial world; the benefit Jane experiences from colonialism seems to stem from Rochester's sojourn in the West Indies. Her employer, and eventual partner, secures his financial stability, and hence creates employment for Eyre, by marrying the daughter of a wealthy British colonist. He, in turn, brings the money of a West India merchant, money that would not exist without colonialism, back to England and this has a knock-on effect for those who enter his life.
Rhys takes up the story of Bertha Mason, the daughter and wife in question, only from her point of view. In Wide Sargasso Sea we are privy to a narrative from one to whom these lands are native, as opposed to the connotation inherent in Bronte's portrayal that there is something exotic and in some way magically evil about these distance shores. This difference in perspective is particularly interesting when one considers the differing upbringings of the authors, since Rhys herself was raised in Dominica. Therefore it is only logical that any preconceptions Bronte's location within the imperial nucleus might surface in her writing, consciously or not, would not be shared by Rhys.
Regardless of whose perspective one believes, however, Rochester's perception is of a hereditary madness in his bride, and this leads him to take the steps he deems necessary to subdue her. His abandment of the marriage he entered into and the ensuing effects of his wife's confinement (if indeed Bertha was not mad before her asylum, it is likely she would be as a result of it), allows Jane to persue a relationship she otherwise would not and, eventually, marry her suitor. This is another instance in which colonialism, and its occumpanying conceptions, may have benefeitted Eyre, if indeed we follow a more Rhysian approach to the narrative.
In some ways these two sides of colonialism, the colony and the metropol, become, in WSS and JE mirror images: each is the the exotic other. For JE, living in England, the colony becomes a source of wealth and yet she is completely free of the dissipation and subjugation felt within the colonies. For Antionette/Bertha living in the colonies, England is a distant, shimmering "dream", it is a wealth of culture that is hard to comprehend. Ultimately, the unidirectionality of colonialism, that is the appropriation of resources and the control of productivity, hurts the colonialists as well as the colonized. This is dramatized by Jane Eyre's good fortune and Bertha's utter loss.
2 comments:
Leaving aside the possible, if problematically unsure, Irish lineage of the Eyre name, which would lend a particular significance to her position in this colonial world; the benefit Jane experiences from colonialism seems to stem from Rochester's sojourn in the West Indies. Her employer, and eventual partner, secures his financial stability, and hence creates employment for Eyre, by marrying the daughter of a wealthy British colonist. He, in turn, brings the money of a West India merchant, money that would not exist without colonialism, back to England and this has a knock-on effect for those who enter his life.
Rhys takes up the story of Bertha Mason, the daughter and wife in question, only from her point of view. In Wide Sargasso Sea we are privy to a narrative from one to whom these lands are native, as opposed to the connotation inherent in Bronte's portrayal that there is something exotic and in some way magically evil about these distance shores. This difference in perspective is particularly interesting when one considers the differing upbringings of the authors, since Rhys herself was raised in Dominica. Therefore it is only logical that any preconceptions Bronte's location within the imperial nucleus might surface in her writing, consciously or not, would not be shared by Rhys.
Regardless of whose perspective one believes, however, Rochester's perception is of a hereditary madness in his bride, and this leads him to take the steps he deems necessary to subdue her. His abandment of the marriage he entered into and the ensuing effects of his wife's confinement (if indeed Bertha was not mad before her asylum, it is likely she would be as a result of it), allows Jane to persue a relationship she otherwise would not and, eventually, marry her suitor. This is another instance in which colonialism, and its occumpanying conceptions, may have benefeitted Eyre, if indeed we follow a more Rhysian approach to the narrative.
In some ways these two sides of colonialism, the colony and the metropol, become, in WSS and JE mirror images: each is the the exotic other. For JE, living in England, the colony becomes a source of wealth and yet she is completely free of the dissipation and subjugation felt within the colonies. For Antionette/Bertha living in the colonies, England is a distant, shimmering "dream", it is a wealth of culture that is hard to comprehend. Ultimately, the unidirectionality of colonialism, that is the appropriation of resources and the control of productivity, hurts the colonialists as well as the colonized. This is dramatized by Jane Eyre's good fortune and Bertha's utter loss.
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