lntertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies Volume 2 Issue 1 "Crisis / La Crise" Editors: Lauren Clark and Matthew Hayward Article 6 2011 lntertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Kristy Butler Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.dit.ie/jofis Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Butler, Kristy (2011) "lntertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea," Journal of FrancoIrish Studies: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 6. doi:10.21427/D7QX69 Available at: https://arrow.dit.ie/jofis/vol2/iss1/6 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License Butler: lntertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in <i>J Intertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Kristy Butler, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick There is only one heroine in a story, and we typically become quite possessive of her. We champion her causes, mourn her losses, and cheer triumphantly her successes. There’s only room for one heroine in a story. Other women may orbit her on the periphery, but it is not their story in which we invest. Sidekicks at best, these secondary figures merely accentuate and facilitate the heroine in her quest. They are mirrors, not of themselves, but reflections of the heroine as she appears in relation to others. For example, the harshness of one character refines the gentille nature of the heroine, her courage amplified by another’s frailty. In so doing, the heroine consumes the narrative and its focus; moreover, this is pleasing to the reader, for it instills in one the sense of knowing intimately the thoughts, emotions and true nature of the focal female. As Charles Burkhart states: “We know (if only unconsciously) what a good story is because we have heard and read and seen so many stories [. . .] [i]t believes in itself so much that we believe in it” (Burkhart 1973, 63). And for more than 150 years, we have believed in Jane Eyre. From the first pages of the novel, Jane elicits sympathy. She is poor, plain and parentless. Left in the ‘care,’ if one can call it that, of her Aunt, Mrs. Reed, Jane is an outsider to her own family. Her spritely nature results in her confinement to the red room, a ghostly chamber of terror she describes as a cell: “no jail was ever more secure” (Brontё 2001, 11). At this stage, the reader wants nothing more than to see Jane obtain a sense of family, of belonging, of love—what develops in Brontё’s female Bildungsroman. Jane’s coming of age tracks her degradation at Gateshead, the friendship and loss she experiences at Lowood, and ultimately her grafting to the Rochester family at Thornfield Hall. Her journey is not without complications or disappointments, but in the end all merge to construct a heroine that has triumphed over adversity. Moreover, she has done so by her own strength and intelligence, 93 Published by ARROW@DIT, 2011 1 Journal of Franco-Irish Studies, Vol. 2 [2011], Iss. 1, Art. 6 challenging the social mores of the time. Jane questions authority, religion and the assumed inferiority of women to their male counterparts. She states: Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer. (Brontё 2001, 93) Rachel DuPlessis, in Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, points out that character-writing of women in the nineteenth-century was highly problematic. The author was forced to negotiate a woman’s place in a tradition that elevated romance and Bildungsroman. A female protagonist could begin a coming of age tale, an adventure to discover herself, but unlike her male counterparts, each quest necessitated an ending in marriage and familial harmony (DuPlessis 1985, 3). According to Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics, the era of women writers in the 1840s, known as the Feminine, is marked by mimicry of the male tradition, specifically in women writers’ use of male pseudonyms (Moi 1988, 56). She goes on to argue that, as Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert have asserted, historically “[w]omen are denied the right to create their own images of femaleness, and instead must conform to the patriarchal standards imposed on them” (Moi 1988, 57). So it is with Jane, a heroine who can challenge institutions and negotiate her position within them, but who, ultimately, cannot escape the institution of marriage. Conveniently, she does not wish to escape her matrimonial fate. In the end, she and Mr. Rochester enjoy a fairy-tale ending, an ending that would have been expedited if not for the “mad woman in the attic.” This essay explores the ways in which characters experience crisis internally, and demonstrates the ameliorating function of intertextual readings such as the one that occurs between 94 https://arrow.dit.ie/jofis/vol2/iss1/6 DOI: 10.21427/D7QX69 2 Butler: lntertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in <i>J Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Such readings provide a forum for voices on the periphery. Specifically, Bertha Mason experiences a crisis of voice and a crisis of location as she is transformed from her French Creole identity, which is wild and unyielding to colonial mores, to her English identity, which is merely a personification of phallocentric expectations of the female as a subordinate and tool for patriarchy. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud’s concept of the dark double and the role of the unconscious in identity formation, Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, and Luce Irigaray’s view of language as a colonizer of the female voice, this essay aims to examine how the colonized female, Antoinette/Bertha Mason, is constructed by the text of Jane Eyre and its elevation of English identity and language. Moreover, it reveals that only through intertextuality can Antoinette reclaim her French identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea from the crisis it experiences as Bertha in Jane Eyre. She is removed from her island home where she experiences her maturation toward womanhood to an island where she endures her construction toward madness. There is only one heroine in a story, so perhaps it is forgivable if we have managed to forget her. Brontё makes no effort to hide her presence; her chilling laughter and ghastly form haunt the text and haunt Jane. Bertha is the spectre of Thornfield Hall, but her vaporous laughter transforms into tangible terror. As Jane describes it: This was a demonic laugh—low, suppressed, and deep—uttered, as it seemed, at the very key-hole of my chamber-door. The head of my bed was near the door, and I thought at first the goblin- (...truncated)