Who blames me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it . . . and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously: quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
JEAN RHYS’S Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) was published long after Good Morning, Midnight (1939), the last of her early novels. Concerning her attitude following the publication of this earlier novel, Rhys told Elizabeth Vreeland, “... I was very hopeful. But then war was declared, almost immediately, and they didn’t want books... I was forgotten and gave up writing. . . . And then I wrote some short stories. And then there was this thing about doing Good Morning, Midnight on the BBC radio. And then I started The Wide Sargasso Sea.”1 When Vreeland asked, “Where did the idea come from of reconstructing Bertha’s life—the Jane Eyre heiress who sets fire to the house and jumps from the parapet?” Rhys answered,
When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I’d write the story as it might really have been. She seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I’d try to write her a life. Charlotte Brontë must have had strong feelings about the West Indies because she brings the West Indies into a lot of her books, like Villette. Of course, once upon a time, the West Indies were very rich, and very much more talked about than they are now.2
Rhys did not say that she wanted to give a life to Brontë’s Bertha or even that she wanted to explain Bertha or her life. What she wanted to do was to “write her a life.” Rhys’s response tells us much about what the act of reading can mean for a woman, since a woman has not had a satisfactory share of “reality,” and it reveals Rhys as a writer. Rhys tells us how a woman joins the two acts, reading and writing, into one.
As a reader, a woman, psychosexually conditioned as she is, invariably takes into account the eccentric relational contexts as well as the explicitly centered text of what she reads. Rhys used one such contextual reading as the structuring principle of Wide Sargasso Sea—the dialogic response to our own dreams which our reading of Freud has helped us to understand. This response necessitates reading our own text as if it were the text of another. Such an ex-centric model, as we realize in reading Rhys’s novel, is a way of maintaining our difference(s) while at the same time affirming the strength to be found in a collective, collaborative response to the texts and contexts in which we find ourselves.
Rhys placed her response as a reader not only in relation to Brontë’s text, but also within the context to which she felt Brontë was responding, one that Rhys claimed as her own. Rhys’s background was West Indian, Creole, and colonial, a culture already in decline in the mid-nineteenth century while still being a source of profit for the British. In responding to her reading of Brontë’s text, Rhys sought not only to correct an omission, but also to correct what she considered a misreading of “Creole women,” part of whose identity was shaped by the British exploitative context. In short, Rhys writes as a reader of both text and context. And since her own text, instructive as it is, is inevitably drawn from and produced within her own historical and cultural context, the text that she produces invites a similarly writerly response from her own readers. The pattern that Rhys presents depends on the reader’s response to a text that she recognizes, in which she sees herself, and that, as a writer, she—the reader—continues with the addition and inscription of her own difference.
In Voyage in the Dark Rhys shows us the heroine-narrator’s language practice, her muted idiom in contrast to the dominant idiom. In Wide Sargasso Sea her presentation expands to include a full delineation of contexts in opposition. Wide Sargasso Sea focuses on the woman’s idiom by showing it in relation to other women, who are also “native speakers” of the muted idiom. The completed movement represented by Wide Sargasso Sea, the full delineation of our textual space, is mirrored in the “completed sentence” we find there, in contrast to the “incomplete sentence” that Anna Morgan/Jean Rhys—co-narrators of co-texts—were unable to complete in the earlier novel. The movement toward completion displaces the text of the dominant idiom, using it both as fixed place of metaphor for the definition of her own text and as a fixed frame for its weave. Rhys inverts the place of metaphor that has allowed the masculine sentence to stand, inadequately, as the sole model for a completed discourse in the cultural tradition that is itself modeled after “their” sentence.
Just as woman-as-metaphor has served as the place to fix a man’s desire in the aesthetic and institutionalized structures of our culture, so here Rhys makes use of a man’s text, the place of that text, to fix the desires of her own. The displacement of the male text and the structural metaphor it represents ultimately display a woman’s text. While Rhys’s presentation of the masculine text is rigorous in the seemingly accurate psychological narration of itself, of “himself” as Rochester is read, especially by male critics, Rhys nevertheless uses the male text as a fixing place in much the way that the discourse of “Man” in our culture has used “Woman,” but with a difference. The placement of the masculine text does not silence his text—he still tells his own story—as the woman’s text has been silenced. In his displacement, he becomes the defining litany of his own speech, and a recital of the reasons for it.
In examining her own life, in writing her own text, and in allowing the primacy of her heroine-narrator’s text to dictate its relation to the dominant text, Rhys created a novel that demonstrates one kind of appropriate feminine aesthetic. The whole of Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen to complete the “woman’s sentence” that, more than fifty years ago, Virginia Woolf despaired of finding.3
The completed sentence is a metaphor emphasizing the relation of the woman’s muted text to that of the dominant text of our culture. Rhys’s text offers another, more serviceable metaphor that emphasizes the relationship among women. I suggest that in Wide Sargasso Sea the “clue,” the “pattern,” in Rhys’s words, is the movement of the shuttle of the dream as it moves among the women in the novel (and the women of Brontë’s novel, including Brontë herself; and the women of Rhys’s other books; and Rhys herself; and us, her readers). The dream, the “sub-conversation” of Voyage in the Dark, has here become explicit in the narratives that form the novel. The fixed initial framework or warp of the text can be construed as the masculine text (represented by Rochester’s narration and motivation) through which the moving shuttle of the woman’s text weaves the pattern we come to see, the weft or woof of the text.
Rochester is not among the dreamers in the dream. He offers only the initially flexible, finally resistant warp against and through which the women weave the text of the dream. The shuttle is passed from dreamer to dreamer, woman to woman. Rochester is not left out of this web of text, but he can only resist, as the already taut thread of the warp set up on the loom is prepared to do. The resistant framework, the warp of the dream, is “his” world. As Rochester tells Antoinette, “But my dear, you do not know the world.” That is his “reality,” as he tells us. Antoinette, a woman, knows another reality, expressed in the dream she has seen with her own eyes. This reality can be seen in the way that Antoinette reads her own context, and that of others, and it is expressed in the way Rhys reads and rewrites Brontë’s text and its context, as well as her own.
Rhys presents the masculine text in the place it has claimed, defining and redefining itself while the woman’s text works around and through it. In so placing her text, in writing outside the confines of the masculine text, using the spaces of silence that the self-imposed borders of the dominant text clearly mark, Rhys isolates the dominant text as a fixed point in the weave of her own.
If we view the presentation of a woman’s text as a kind of dream (“a tale,” as Brontë’s Jane Eyre says, “that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously”4) to which another woman, the reader, responds in terms of the language practice we share, we see that our response to that text is analogous to the relationship we have to our own dreams. Just as Rhys, in writing Wide Sargasso Sea, is responding as a reader to Brontë’s text, to her own life, and to her own earlier texts, so are we both writer and reader of our own dreams. Brontë’s text uses Jane Eyre’s dream-texts at crucial points, adding a dimension to the text that also emphasizes its difference from that of Rochester, the conscious teller-of-tales. In picking up the strand of the dream-text of Brontë’s novels as the structural principle of her own, Rhys shows us how we can read another woman’s text: as our own dream, and at the same time as an “other’s” dream.
Brontë could point to her “double” but she could not overcome the internalized censor who prevented her from actually writing her. Over a century later Rhys could do so, but she was able to overcome the censor only by shaping an apparently accurate transcription of what in itself could be construed as a “dream,” a “fictitious narration” resembling those from which Freud drew his ideas about the dream-work.
Dreams, as Freud has shown us, constitute themselves as both place and language. The narrator of a dream can be identified only in our recognition that she is in the dream, that she has a place in the network of relationships producing the narrative of the dream. She is not, specifically, its narrator; she is part of the narration, of what is being narrated. As a reader of her own or of another’s dream, the dreamer writes her response in her reading of the dream, a reading that is a continuation of the dream to which she is responding. She narrates her continuation of it and thus interlaces the continuation, her reading, into the first narration. The “narrator” remains herself and an “other” at the same time. She remains the same and yet different from herself.
The narrative, the dream, is thus collectively authored—even if its several “authors” are the same person, first as indeterminate writer, then as responding reader—but without the finality the word “authored” suggests. The narrative of the dream is passed on; it invites its continuation. Each reader in her turn, even if she is the “same” reader, and each reading in its turn participates in the narrative and continues it.
The relationship between parts of a dream furnishes its meaning for us; we do not find a meaning imposed by a subject who places herself at the center of the construct as its “author.” Rhys’s choice of this structuring principle, which emphasizes relationships and the process of how things and people interrelate, creates the woman’s text and allows the metaphor of the dream to represent it.
Rhys was herself under the constraint(s) of what we might call the “check and stimulus” of Brontë’s dream-text.5 “Check and stimulus” refers to those points of recognition—of likeness, as well as of difference—that produce our own reading of a text. Rhys’s culture resembled Brontë’s in many respects. Yet Rhys was born more than seventy years later and into a colonial culture, that first difference Rhys noted even as a child. This notation was a first point in the building of the “spectral architecture” of her own novel. This spectral architecture is what we see as individual readers; it is the text we begin to build in response to the text we read. Her position as a reader in her own context allows Rhys to provide us with a sense of similar constraints in our reading of her novel. The dream—Antoinette’s dreams, Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre’s dreams, Brontë’s text, and her own—provides the narrative framework of the novel; at the same time, as a dream, it narrates itself, constituting within itself both context and language. The checks and stimuli of this dream-principle expand our fundamental conversation.
Freud’s description of our dream-work explains some of the reasons why we recognize the artistry of Wide Sargasso Sea. Freud’s analysis of a case of hysteria in the young woman he called Dora in some ways represents the masculine text that offers the framework, or warp, for the weave of the feminine text. His reading of the “uncanny”—which, according to Julia Kristeva, can be related to the “unsaid”6—helps to reveal the mechanisms within both the muted feminine and the dominant masculine texts in Rhys’s book. This double exposure is a narrative of the irreducible difference between a woman’s reading and a man’s.
Such an expanded view is what Wide Sargasso Sea affords us. Rhys makes the collective enterprise clear, the reading of ourselves and others that compels our own writing. The model offered by her text invites response and continuation, not only of another woman’s text, but of other texts of difference as well.
THE BLUEPRINT FOR Wide Sargasso Sea derived from the “spectral architecture” of Rhys’s reading of Jane Eyre is the basis of the realized structure of Rhys’s novel.7 This text, both response-representation and outline, provides the overtly identifiable, direct links with Brontë’s novel.
The second dream-text entails the transformative processes of Rhys’s own novelistic dream-work, contrasted with Brontë’s novel. Rhys’s dream-text is constituted by a set of relationships dependent on the prior relationship of mother and daughter-narrator; in contrast, the relationship to the father determines the masculine text, Rochester’s narrative.
The foremost element in the first dream-text emphasizes what Rhys’s own contextual reading defines as the conspicuously silent, unvoiced moment in Brontë’s novel. This is the moment of the Creole madwoman, whose laughter and night visits are her only manifestations in the life she and Jane Eyre share in Thornfield Hall. Rhys’s novel seeks to emphasize that the two women do indeed share a text.
Another structural link with Brontë’s novel, and a major constraint on Rhys’s, is the fated quality of Antoinette’s life. This element unwinds in Antoinette’s literal dreams as they are described serially, beginning in the narrative of her childhood and culminating in the narrative of her life and final actions at Thornfield Hall. Descriptions of the dream(s) foreshadow and shadow—that is to say, follow or double—the unfolding formal text of the novel. Serial description, the evolution of Antoinette’s dream, parallels the progress of the life, the story told to us in and by the narratives that form the novel. Rhys’s inclusion of these literal dreams can be seen as one technical response to Brontë’s own use of Jane Eyre’s dreams; as such, it emphasizes a sharing-of-the-text: Antoinette/Jane’s; Brontë/Rhys’s. Rhys’s writerly response includes an answer in technique as well as a readerly response to content.
The third link uniting Brontë’s text and Rhys’s is the point at which Rhys’s novel explicitly intersects Brontë’s. For a time the two texts cohabit the same space, when Grace Poole, another of the silent women of Jane Eyre, begins to speak in Rhys’s novel. Grace Poole’s speaking voice, which is silent or monosyllabic in Brontë’s novel, offers the overt signal of the origin of Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. With Grace Poole’s voice, Rhys links her text to Brontë’s and bridges Brontë’s with her own, entering Brontë’s text at the same time, interrupting its narrative arrangement to complete her own. Antoinette’s narrative also places her text in the “present tense” of Brontë’s. After Grace Poole’s introduction, Antoinette’s narrative begins in the simple, present tense of description, a static locating of self in a place:
In this room I wake early[. . . .] Grace Poole, the woman who looks after me, lights a fire[. . . .] The woman Grace sleeps in my room. [. . .] There is one window high up[. . . .] There is no looking-glass here[. . . .] The door [. . .] is kept locked. It leads [. . .] into a passage. [. . .] When night comes [. . .] it is easy to take the keys. [. . .] I [. . .] walk into their world. [. . .] They tell me I am in England but I don’t believe them. [. . .] This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England. (pp. 146-48)
The narrative then resumes in a more conventional past tense and continues so to the end of the novel. We are “with” Antoinette in Thornfield Hall, where Brontë’s novel places her and where, from the beginning of Antoinette’s dream, she was predestined to find herself and to “end” her dream, as that “dream” of Brontë’s directed her to do. Antoinette, and Rhys, faithfully execute the scenario of Brontë’s dream, telling us that she has done so: “That was the third time I had my dream, and it ended” (p. 153). That dream may be ended; her own is not, however, and Antoinette/Rhys’s narrative continues to its own conclusion.
Grace Poole’s introduction to the culminating narrative also raises a voice for the collective case. Grace Poole’s point of view is specifically that of a servant, a position that she is allowed to explicate. The entire introductory passage (pp. 145-46) is italicized, further emphasizing her voice and point of view. Drawing the other women of Brontë’s into a relation to one another, she also places Antoinette in relation to herself and to the others:
“I know better than to say a word. After all the house is big and safe, a shelter from the world outside which, say what you like, can be a black and cruel world to a woman. Maybe that’s why I stayed on.”
The thick walls, she thought. [. . .] above all the thick walls, keeping away all the things that you have fought till you can fight no more. Yes, maybe that’s why we all stay—Mrs Eff and Leah and me. All of us except that girl who lives in her own darkness, (p. 146)
In the same passage that returns us to Brontë’s text, we are also given verbal and conceptual cues that return us to the thoughts of the child Antoinette after she has awakened from the first and inchoate version of her dream, a “bad dream.” Afterwards the little girl “lay thinking”: “I am safe. There is the corner of the bedroom door and the friendly furniture. There is the tree of life in the garden and the wall green with moss. The barrier of the cliffs and the high mountains. And the barrier of the sea. I am safe. I am safe from strangers” (p. 23). Grace Poole’s adult concerns echo the child’s sentiments;” ‘. . . a shelter from the world outside’. . . The thick walls . . . keeping away all the things that you have fought till you can fight no more.” We could also put it the other way around: the child’s sentiments echo Grace Poole’s adult concerns. Interweaving of texts and narrative creates circularity, as well as vertical intersecting and horizontal continuing effects. These are informed by the repetition-with-difference inscribed by the speaker’s or the narrator’s context and narrative starting point. With Antoinette’s childhood dream we are given the forecast of the novel’s development and of Antoinette’s “fate” as predetermined broadly by Brontë’s text.
Rhys’s narrator, even as the child Antoinette, both underscores her predestination and suggests the strategic open-endedness of Rhys’s narrative method: “I woke next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing” (p. 23). This passage, along with the adult Antoinette’s brief description of the shipboard crossing, locates the significance of the novel’s title. Neither the “barrier of the cliffs and the high mountains,” the fastness of the island of Dominica, which shelters Antoinette in her own context, or finally and especially the “barrier of the sea”—the wide Sargasso Sea—that lies just northeast of her island, between her island and the passage to England, proves a barrier.
When Antoinette woke on board ship, “it was a different sea. Colder. It was that night, I think, that we changed course and lost our way to England” (p. 148). Even the original destination—the England she had early imagined with curiosity and interest—is “lost” in the crossing of that sea that is finally no “barrier.” “This cardboard house,” she tells us, “where I walk at night is not England” (p. 148). It is the illusory, but by no means benign, legally sanctioned construct of her husband—the “stranger,” the “someone who hated me,” as he is called in the first dream (p. 23); “the man who hated me,” as he is more specifically identified in the last dream (p. 155). He is a stranger who crosses geographical “barriers” but who cannot or will not attempt to traverse the cultural and psychological boundaries that separate him from the woman who becomes his wife. In this sense only is the wide Sargasso Sea a “barrier.” It marks an impassable psychological boundary. It could have served as a crossing point, a conduit; it remains a gulf, impassable except superficially and by force. The “wide Sargasso Sea” marks the place of Rochester’s trespass, and of his failing. It is at the same time a barrier that Antoinette—wrenched out of her own context, wherein she had already tried to cross “barriers,” of color, culture, and class—discovers to be a means of her own passage to self-discovery.
In the false England to which she was forcibly brought and in which she is forcibly incarcerated, Antoinette finds the means to identify herself. She writes the end of her dream: “Now at last,” she tells us in the last few lines of her narration, “I know why I was brought here and what I have to do” (pp. 155-56). The joining of Brontë’s text and Rhys’s “brought” Antoinette to Rochester’s (and Brontë’s) “England.” It is Rhys’s text alone that discovers her. The two dream-texts come together in Part Three of the novel to form a single dream-text. In the final paragraph we are returned to the single individuating text of Rhys’s narrative.
Rhys’s last novel is the logical culmination of the whole of her written text, the end of the “voyage in the dark” that she and her heroine-narrator began in the early novel. Anna Morgan, the heroine-narrator of Voyage in the Dark, could see the “ray of light,” external to her and not in her control, not “in her hands,” which “came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering” (Voyage, p. 159). Antoinette, the “girl who lives in her own darkness,” completes the voyage, shielding the flame of the candle with her hand so that it can light her “along the dark passage,” so that the “remembering” may be continued in a writing of the dream-text which can be seen as a common text of our lives. “I will remember quite soon now,” she assures us shortly before the endings of both dreams—Brontë’s and her own, the one that isn’t “her own,” and the one that is.
Wide Sargasso Sea represents Rhys’s achievement of the aesthetic destination toward which the early novel Voyage in the Dark sets itself. The closing passages of Wide Sargasso Sea show the heroine-narrator’s arrival at a psychological destination, one consistent with the overall achievement, both cultural and conceptual, that has been actively at work in women’s lives and intellectual pursuits for more than a hundred years. Grace Poole’s words, quoted above, expressly set the stage for the enactment of what Gilbert and Gubar identify as a characteristically nineteenth-century drama of “enclosure and escape.”8 Rhys carries the drama the crucial step forward. As Grace Poole’s introduction concludes: “Yes, maybe that’s why we all stay—Mrs Eff and Leah and me. All of us except that girl who lives in her own darkness. [. . .] she hasn’t lost her spirit. She’s still fierce. I don’t turn my back on her when her eyes have that look. I know it” (p. 146). It is Antoinette’s look that Grace knows, the “look” in Antoinette’s eye (the metaphoric as well as physiologically moving organ of dreaming) where her “spirit,” which she has not lost, remains.
The rhetorical surfacing of this inner activity is the public presentation of a woman’s constitution of herself in the practice of her writing. As dream-subject and narrator, she is the author of the text of difference represented by a dream-text. The dream-text is addressed directly to members of her audience who themselves want to address and engage “others,” readers for whom, indeed, the figurative “look in the eye” is something they “know.” These readers respond by recognizing the possibility of a figurative writing of their own texts of difference in relation to people with whom they feel a mutuality of experience, but from whom they nevertheless and inevitably differ. In the response of these readers, as well, is a recognition of their asymmetrically constrained dialogue with the already established, dominant text.
The narrative model derives from a woman’s relation to her mother. By extension, such a model can be applied to a person of either sex. Rhys’s textual model can ultimately be considered a gender-free paradigm. At this moment in our culture’s history, however, it is women who “naturally” partake of this process—of its advantages and disadvantages. The woof or weft of the text remains the “feminine,” and the warp, the “masculine”; the feminine text is the dream-text that forms the weft of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
As I noted earlier, the dream as it is used in Wide Sargasso Sea is the “explicitation” of the “sub-conversation” of Voyage in the Dark. The “muted idiom” has been expanded to delineate and display the woman’s context that had formerly been all but invisible, specularly and textually muted. The sub-conversation formerly had not been spoken;the woman’s context had not been displayed. Rhys reveals this context in the interplay of text(s) and subtext(s) that forms the aesthetic base of her novelistic presentation and technique.
The relationship between text and subtext, and the distinction between them, is central to a description of a dream-text as it is offered in Wide Sargasso Sea. To show this I will use definitions provided by two disparate sources: Stanislavski, the teacher, and Freud, the psychoanalyst. These descriptions, both provided by men near the turn of the century, are not as disparate as they might seem at first glance if we consider them in terms of the theater metaphor that I discussed previously.
The word “subtext,” wrote John Russell Brown, comes “from Stanislavski’s writings about the actor and is still particularly associated with the ‘method’ of acting that was first developed while Chekhov was writing for the Moscow Art Theatre.”9 The subtext was defined as
the manifest, the inwardly felt expression of a human being in a part, which flows uninterruptedly beneath the words of the text, giving them life and a basis for existing ... a web of innumerable, varied inner patterns inside a play and a part, ... all sorts of figments of the imagination, inner movements, objects of attention, smaller and greater truths and a belief in them, adaptations, adjustments and other similar elements. It is the subtext that makes us say the words we do in a play.10
We might put beside Stanislavski’s definition of “subtext” Freud’s almost contemporaneous description of how we can view the “dream-work” that produces the dream we experience:
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error.11
Freud described the method of reading these “symbolic relations” by likening them to a picture puzzle, a rebus in which we “try to replace each separate element by a syllable or a word that can be represented by that element in some way.” Words lose their usual meanings and stand in for something else, even for some thing, and vice versa. Words themselves can become “things” in dreams: “The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort.”12
These two passages share similar impulses toward an analysis of preconscious “expression”—of seemingly different kinds. Stanislavski’s “adaptations, adjustments, and similar elements” are readily comparable to the explicit mechanisms of the dream-work (“condensation,” “displacement,” the capacity for “representability,” and “secondary revision”) as Freud defines them in The Interpretation of Dreams.13 Similarly, just as the process by which the manifest content of a dream becomes a picture-puzzle as a result of the transformations accomplished by the dream-work, so the process of the actor’s interpretation of his or her role through a response to the subtext is similar to the production of the manifest content of the dream. The latent content, the “dream-thoughts” especially, as they are transformed in the dream-work, can be likened to that “inwardly felt expression” of Stanislavski’s, which “flows uninterruptedly beneath the words of the text, giving them life and a basis for existing.”14 Indeed, the text that the actor presents and the subtext have a relationship with the dream-content and the dream-thoughts respectively, although Freud’s view that they are like two versions of the same subject matter in two different languages is potentially more textualist and more radical. Just as the two cooperate in the process of the dream-work, just as the dream-thoughts are transcribed by the dream-work to produce the manifest content (the dream we perceive and recollect after the work), so, similarly, does the subtext flow “beneath” the words of the text that is represented by the actor’s performance. As Brown points out concerning Shakespeare’s dialogue, it is the “subtext” that has “for centuries, been sought out and expressed through gesture, bearing and elocution, in order to give a ‘personal and exact life’ to [the] dialogue.”15 This attempt can be viewed as the professional actor’s mimicking of the more literal transcription of the dream process.
In basing the text of Wide Sargasso Sea on the subtext of Brontë’s novel in relation to the subtext of her own/her heroine-narrator’s life, patterning the presentation of the novel on the relationship between the two, Rhys gave “a personal and exact life”—her own in part, specifically Antoinette’s—to her text. This endeavor began in her attempt to “try to write [Brontë’s Bertha] a life”; not to “describe” her life, but to write it. In doing so, she has written a life for many women, at least as we discern our life in our language practices.
Implicit in any text are numerous subtexts, one of which, in all likelihood, will dominate a given reader’s response. Rhys makes this relationship clear in her response to Brontë and in the methods of presentation she chooses for the display of her own text. Any subtext is likely to erupt into a full-blown text, the latent content of the one becoming the manifest content of the other. The unwritten dream-thoughts of the first “dream,” the first text, become the manifest, written text of its successor. The “lie” in the text is the mark of a subtext, what is latent in the newly manifest material; in other words, the lie, the silence in the text, is the marker of the subtext of the newly found, the most recently written, text.
As a writer, Rhys may be said to be conscious of what is only implicit in our recognition or analysis of our dreams, and of the “dream-work” that produces a dream rather than a novel. The system of the dream-work is closed and self-referring to the extent that it is accessible to the interpreter. Its processes transcribe material that is confined and bounded by internal relationships. Neither the dream nor the system that produces it can go outside itself; the dream and its “meaning” exist only within the relationships that make up the “work.” Rhys’s overt thematic and technical attempt concerns the problem of communication with another system. Thus Rhys’s novelistic attempts at communication are outside the private grammar of our dreams. It is Rhys’s achievement that she has captured some of the sense of a “simultaneity in time,” characteristic of dreams, in a narrative structure: “dreams take into account in a general way the connection which undeniably exists between all the portions of the dream-thoughts by combining the whole material into a single situation or event. They reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time. Here they are acting like the painter who, in a picture of the School of Athens or of Parnassus, represents in one group all the philosophers or all the poets. It is true that they were never in fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountain-top; but they certainly form a group in the conceptual sense.”16
Rhys’s use of the “dream-thoughts” of the subtexts is a technique by which she transcribes Antoinette’s life onto the page while at the same time remaining within the constrained framework of Brontë’s text. She gives one voice to more than one text, moving from the dream-thoughts to the manifest content of her novel, in which text and subtext are, indeed, “like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages.” She interweaves the texts and the subtexts with which she is working into a single text, Wide Sargasso Sea, achieving the intersection and synchronicity that mark a dream-text. The “performance” that Stanislavski emphasized becomes integral to a representation of the dream-structure, to the presentation of a dream-text—a narrative—written and read “in time,” that nevertheless achieves the “simultaneity in time” that characterizes a dream.
Efforts to communicate with another system or context and the barriers to such a communication are both given in the metaphor of the dream. Dreams operate both thematically and stylistically in Rhys’s more overt expressions of theme, especially in relation to Rochester, and, more significantly, in the technique that allows the dream-text to emerge as an expression of the context shared by the women in the novel.
Two elemental idioms are opposed in Rhys’s novels. There is the muted idiom of women—here white, black, and colored women (the black and colored men, with the exception of Daniel Cosway and the “Young Bull,” occupying a position auxiliary to the women). And there is the dominant idiom of white men. The two are represented in Wide Sargasso Sea by the mutually exclusive contexts we are given for Antoinette and for Rochester. Their contexts are seemingly “fixed”; and they meet but do not blend. The original lack of the one’s understanding of the other and of the other’s background is, early in the novel, tagged a “dream,” something blurred and “unreal.” These “dreams,” Dominica and England, are blatantly opposed in a verbal interchange early in Rochester’s narration:
“Is it true,” she [Antoinette] said, “that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.”
“Well,” I [Rochester] answered annoyed, “that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.”
“But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?”
“And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?”
“More easily,” she said, “much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.”
“No, this is unreal and like a dream,” I thought, (p. 67)
The explicit struggle between the two idioms or contexts represented by Antoinette and Rochester are specifically their “ideas” of themselves and the world: this is the thematic starting point for the novel. The technical expression of Rhys’s thematic concerns, however, opens up this dialogue to more crucial concerns: the circuit of the dream that represents the relationship and the “conversation” between, and among, the women’s texts. The “self” Antoinette asserts in her last narrated action(s) in the novel is constituted in its relationship to many others, all women. The act of self-assertion and self-constitution that the act of writing itself signals for Rhys is drawn for us as a circuit exclusive to women. All of the women share the dream in contextual—as well as “textual”—opposition to the men.17 The dream is finally the overriding metaphor for “context” as well as of “text,” both of self and of idiom.
Note that Rochester’s last remark in the interchange is not spoken aloud. He thought, “No, this is unreal and like a dream.” Significantly, Antoinette here speaks of writing between women for what is perhaps the only time in the novel: “one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me [. . .] this place London is like a cold dark dream.” This is another kind of marking in the text, the marking of a male/female difference, as well as an indicator of where to look and where not to look for the operation of this feminine circuit. A written exchange between women is the starting point for an attempted conversation and hoped-for exchange with Rochester. Antoinette’s response to her friend’s letter is very unlike Rochester’s present response, or his later response to Daniel Cosway’s letter. (Cosway’s letter serves Rochester only as proof that his own biased misgivings about his wife are “true,” rather than affording an opportunity for possible understanding.) The “dreams” of the two, Rochester and Antoinette, remain to be acted out in a conflict in which the “dream” sanctioned by “law” is forcibly dominant. But the dream set in motion among the women empowers their own placing of themselves in the textual dialogue.
The subtext, then, is by no means “hidden”; rather, it is strongly marked. The interplay between text and subtext becomes the vehicle for the display of the mechanisms for the achievement of Rhys’s text, Antoinette’s individuation, and their novelistic representations. Subtext thus becomes all important to the woman’s text. Unlike the masculine model of discourse, it is a consciousness of myriad subtexts that engenders the production of our texts and our reading and understanding of them. Brontë’s subtext becomes “versionalized” in Rhys’s manifest text; the subtext that Stanislavski suggests is imperative for the manifest performance of the actor indeed becomes the technique for the performance of the novel’s text. Finally, consciousness of subtexts becomes the model for the presentation of ourselves to ourselves.
What is muted in Brontë’s text becomes the occasion for Rhys’s more audible orchestration. As she transcribes her version, she marks new subtexts that are themselves silent in her own text. On another level, we, the readers, are brought back to that most elemental concern, the formulation of our own subjectivity, a making of ourselves as subject. Rhys has taken us the extra step. She has turned the nineteenth-century plot inside out. The subtext, the “hidden plot,” becomes the basis for the technique that itself opens the plot, revealing the narrative technique itself to be the key that opens the door, as well as our eyes, to the full display of the plot. We see not only what it is, but how it works.
The power of the dream places the women in the textual dialogue. The fundamental conversation with which Rhys began her work is expanded into an exploration of a woman’s context, through its dialogue with a man’s and, more crucially, through the conversation between and among women. “Subtext” becomes the crucial element in the presentation of any text of difference. Subtext can become the text of the woman’s novel through differentiation from a man’s or from another woman’s, by building upon its predecessor’s marked subtext. Differentiation from the masculine text versus differentiation from another female text reveals that the masculine narrative serves only as a fixed frame for the weave of the feminine dream-text. The feminine text has a unique relation to another woman’s text; its crucial elements are derived from the other’s text, the one a direct response to the other. The source of origin here is “The Other.” But this Other is another woman.
Wide Sargasso Sea, as Angela Williams has observed, is “the only novel which Jean Rhys says she chose to write.” The first four novels seem to have been written from a “psychological necessity, from ‘a wish to get rid of this awful sadness which weighs me down so much.’”18 These problems, however, are not a particular type of woman’s alone, and the model of representation that Rhys uses has more than personal application. “[P]ossibly because it was not primarily written for therapeutic reasons,” Williams suggests, “[it] may be seen as an analysis of these problems rather than a delineation.”19 Rhys’s novel thus offers a critical analysis, underscoring the modes of our perceptions and the arena of their action. Rhys’s analysis resides in the pattern of the novel’s narrative strategies and in the central mode of re-presentation, that is to say, in the working out of the dream-text.
Two characteristics are essential to the model for a woman’s novel that I call a “dream-text,” to the aesthetic pattern it assumes, and to its rhetorical appeal—its ability to evoke persuasively an active response from its readers. First, the narrative processes of the text suggest a collaborative authorship, a plurality of narrators or near-narrators; second, the text overtly suggests the presence of its own subtexts. The subtexts are those texts of difference that are (almost) censored in the narrative but that are negatively present as “gray” areas in the text.20 They can be rendered positively through the process of a reader’s response, that response lifting the subtext into plain view. The “spectral architecture” produced in the response offers the text that becomes the manifest text in a continuation of the prior text.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, Rhys is completing what is for her the salient subtext of her own early novel, Voyage in the Dark, as well as the salient subtext of Brontë’s Jane Eyre. There is, however, another subtext in Voyage that remains a subtext in Wide Sargasso Sea. That subtext is the text(s) of the colored and the black women in the novel; much less marked, although present, is the text of the black and the colored men. This women’s text remains unwritten by Rhys, although some of its component parts are incorporated into the subtext that has surfaced in Wide Sargasso Sea, and, as we see in examining the manifest text of that novel, this unwritten text, the marking of it, is crucial to what Rhys apparently considers her own text.
Both of these essential characteristics—the plurality of voices and the marking of the salient subtext—are signaled in the beginnings and endings of Antoinette’s two enclosing narratives. The first words of the novel’s first section echo the ominous and emblematic talisman—“they say”—that we recognize from Voyage in the Dark: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self Christophine said” (p. 15). In these few lines we are given three verbal links with the subtext of Voyage in the Dark: (1) the contextual placement of the heroine-narrator (“outside” and ambivalently placed in relation to her “whiteness,” this itself a movement toward the subtext); (2) her identification with her mother, which will form the basis for the intertextuality among all the women; and (3) the initial and most overt markings of the salient subtext of this novel, that of the black woman who also serves as “spokeswoman” for the heroine-narrator. “Also,” I say, when the very fact of her “use” in Rhys’s narrative presentation marks this salience. The ease with which I speak of her “serving,” especially in a technical capacity helping a discussion of “aesthetics,” “literature,” “culture,” is itself a mark of the context that Rhys and I share. The ending of this first narrative section closes not with Antoinette’s voice, but with that of Sister Marie Augustine, one of the many female caretakers in the novel: “She said, as if she was talking to herself, ‘Now go quietly back to bed. Think of calm, peaceful things and try to sleep. Soon I will give the signal. Soon it will be tomorrow morning’” (p. 51).
The two enclosing narratives move from one woman’s voice to another, voices significantly not the primary narrator’s. Part One ends with one woman’s voice—Sister Marie Augustine’s; Part Three, the final section of the novel, begins with the voice of another woman, Grace Poole. These narratives move also from saying to knowing, the movement with which we are familiar from our reading of Voyage in the Dark. Grace Poole’s words “They knew . . .” are an appropriate bridge from Rochester’s text to Antoinette’s. They also perform the more crucial function of interweaving the women’s voices into the text of the heroine-narrator. Grace Poole’s introduction begins with a discussion of Rochester gleaned from what “they” say, offered, according to Grace, as what “they knew”: “’They knew that he was in Jamaica when his father and his brother died,’ Grace Poole said. ‘He inherited everything, but he was a wealthy man before that. Some people are fortunate, they said, and there were hints about the woman he brought back to England with him’” (p. 145). This transition from Rochester’s text to Antoinette’s—Grace Poole’s voice reported within quotation marks—moves effortlessly in the weave of the woman’s text. Her introduction concludes with a description of Antoinette: “I’ll say one thing for her, she hasn’t lost her spirit. She’s still fierce. I don’t turn my back on her when her eyes have that look. I know it” (p. 146).
Antoinette’s voice takes up the narration at this point, linking her text, in her turn, with what has come before, in her relation to Sister Marie Augustine and in the interrelation between the voices of her caretakers:
In this room I wake early and lie shivering for it is very cold. At last Grace Poole, the woman who looks after me, lights a fire with paper and sticks and lumps of coal. [. . .]
The woman Grace sleeps in my room. [. . .] She drinks from a bottle on the table then she goes to bed[. . . .] But I lie watching the fire die out. When she is snoring I get up and I have tasted the drink without colour in the bottle. [. . .] When I got back into the bed I could remember more and think again. I was not so cold. (pp. 146-47)
Sister Marie Augustine’s functions are comparably described, and the two descriptions are “like two different versions of the same subject-matter,” similar actions performed by different women in different situations. The “situations” are the “same,” one that Antoinette as dreamer and Rhys as writer are rewriting as they approach the culmination of the manifest dream-text, the formal achievement of the novel. Specifically, the Sister’s response is to the young Antoinette’s awaking from a dream, the dream that is at the core of the narrative dream-text and that culminates in the narrative that Grace Poole introduces:
Now Sister Marie Augustine is leading me out of the dormitory, asking if I am ill, telling me that I must not disturb the others and though I am still shivering I wonder if she will take me behind the mysterious curtains to the place where she sleeps. But no. She seats me in a chair, vanishes, and after a while comes back with a cup of hot chocolate.
I said, “I dreamed I was in Hell.” (pp. 50-51)
Shortly afterward the narrative closes with the words of Sister Marie Augustine, to be picked up and threaded into the narrative in the novel’s final section by the final female caretaker of Antoinette’s dream, Grace Poole.
Although the most important caretaker figure is Christophine, her strong and clarifying voice is omitted from this section, as is any image of her person. Her notable absence in this section is the strongest marking of a “missing” text, a crucial subtext. Antoinette does call to her, but this call is not “voiced” in the text; it is not given within quotation marks, and when she calls, “a wall of fire” answers her. As a spokeswoman for Antoinette, however, Christophine is central to the drama acted out in the events reported in Rochester’s section, both in dialogue with him, and with Antoinette in the nine-page portion of “Rochester’s” narrative that Rhys pointedly gives Antoinette for narration (pp. 89-98). Here Rhys gives us the unravelling point of her manifest text.
In an uncharacteristically clumsy passage, Rhys connects Antoinette’s dreaming (not her dream-text) with Brontë’s novel. Christophine has suggested that Antoinette leave Rochester, but the passage following seems to reveal that she cannot because, as she puts it, she must “dream the end of my dream.” Antoinette’s dream is the fate that the plot of Brontë’s novel has already provided for her. We may read that “end” as inescapable; if it is within the framework of a “dream-text” that Rhys writes her own way out of that end, then it is within the confines of Antoinette’s dream(s), the dream-text as Brontë has already defined it, that Rhys’s fictionalized character, Antoinette, must remain, even if her text does not. She must seek out the end of the dream that Brontë has foreordained for her:
I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you. I will be a different person when I live in England and different things will happen to me. . . .
[....] 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? In that bed I will dream the end of my dream. But my dream had nothing to do with England and I must not think like this, I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about roses and snow. And snow. (p. 92)
In this passage Rhys appears to want it both ways: Antoinette “knows the house” and “the bed” where she “will dream the end of [her] dream.” In other words, she may be read to know, as we do, that she is “in” Brontë’s novel. On the other hand, “my dream had nothing to do with England and I must not think like this,” she admonishes herself. Antoinette’s own text, Rhys’s own text, finally has “nothing to do with England,” i.e., Brontë’s context, Brontë’s version of their shared text. Her narrative-constituting of herself—Antoinette’s self, the text of self that is Rhys’s novel—is different from the preordained, constrained text originating in someone else’s needs or desires.
Rhys’s text continues, with Christophine questioning the reality of such a place and of such a placing for Antoinette:
“England,” said Christophine, who was watching me. “You think there is such a place?”
“How can you ask that? You know there is.”
“I never see the damn place, how I know?”
“You do not believe that there is a country called England?”
She blinked and answered quickly, “I don’t say I don’t believe. I say I don’t know, I know what I see with my eyes and I never see it. [. . .] If there is this place at all, I never see it, that is one thing sure.” (pp. 92-93; emphasis in original)
Christophine here speaks for the dreamers, who trust their eyes, their seeing. Antoinette manifests, for the moment, the influence that Rochester’s “dream” (“I knew that my dreams were dreams,” he says [p. 137]), his idea of reality, has had on her, despite his suspicions of his failure to influence her. She even uses his word—“obstinate” (p. 78)—for Christophine. “I stared at her,” Antoinette narrates her response, “thinking, ‘but how can she know the best thing for me to do, this ignorant, obstinate old negro woman, who is not certain if there is such a place as England?’ She knocked out her pipe and stared back at me, her eyes had no expression at all” (p. 93). And in this moment their gazes are fixed, the one in the other. “I sleep so badly now,” Antoinette says to her. “And I dream.” “I don’t meddle with that for you,” Christophine answers, referring specifically to aiding her with “obeah,” knowing that Antoinette must continue to “see” with her own eyes, must continue her dream.
“When she bent her head she looked old and I thought, ‘Oh, Christophine, do not grow old. You are the only friend I have, do not go away from me into being old’” (p. 94). Antoinette knows that Christophine is her “friend” precisely in response to Christophine’s firm convictions of what she “knows,” what she sees. And later Christophine helps Antoinette sleep. She will not “meddle with” her dreaming, but she does induce and watch over its prerequisite, her sleep. Our active dreaming, our seeing with our own eyes, helps us awake from Antoinette’s dream.
The dream as constraint and as necessity is created thematically as well as structurally. It moves through all the narratives of the novel and oversees them as well. The dream frames that narration that is (almost) Rochester’s alone, and it shapes the dimensions of the woman’s context in the book as it is revealed to us through Antoinette’s narration. The feminine weavers, the other “dreamers,” are revealed in their more integral place in the text, in their relations to Antoinette’s specific dreams, and in their relations to her and to one another; in short, in their part in the plot or action of the story told by the narrative and by Rhys’s interweaving of them into the strategy of her narrative.
AFTER SHE HAS WOKEN from her dream, the seventeen-year-old Antoinette remembers trying to pray after her mother’s death. She recalls that “the words fell to the ground meaning nothing” (p. 51). She then notes in an emphatic one-line paragraph: “Now the thought of her is mixed up with my dream.” Indeed, the caretaker role played by Antoinette’s mother—no matter how inadequately in the actual events of their life together—is central to the casting of the form of the dream-text as Rhys develops it. The words, which “made no sense” to Rhys or to her character Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark, are a part of that “large book” identified with the father. They are not the metaphor of choice for the making of her world, even if they offer the means for her expression of it. The symbolic cast of Rhys’s world, and of Antoinette’s, is dependent on the mother and her text.
The story of this dream is in part a rewriting of the fairy tale of the princess who wakes from a long sleep. But here no prince serves as the agent of her awakening. Rather, the heroine-narrator wakes to a world of the women in her life, and finally she wakes to herself. Antoinette wakes after her first dream, the first and inchoate version of the dream given to her by Brontë, to her mother; then she awakes to her Aunt Cora, who assures her, “you are safe with me now,” after her mother has been taken away; then to Sister Marie Augustine; and to Christophine (Christophine, who, finally, would not wake her to “misery”); and finally to Grace Poole in the attic of Thornfield Hall.
There is, too, the shadow form of a woman present during the shipboard incident in which Antoinette is given something to make her sleep, but, in fact, Antoinette has been abandoned by the caretakers who have helped her dream. The unidentified woman is present, but it is not she who asks Antoinette to drink, and she is not there when Antoinette awakes. Antoinette awakes alone and to “a different sea.” “A woman came and then an older man[. . . .] The third man said drink this and you will sleep. I drank it and I said, ‘It isn’t like it seems to be.’—’I know. It never is,’ he said. And then I slept. When I woke it was a different sea” (p. 148). The other important female figures in Antoinette’s dream-text are Amélie and Tia, both images of self or “mirror-images” for her. Amélie is an ambivalent figure; Tia is the defining mirror-image whose recognition awakens Antoinette to herself, and revives her from the dream-as-sleep of Brontë’s dream.
As one of the markers of the subtext, Tia’s name resolves the heroine-narrator’s text momentarily for its formal closure. Tia remains the “looking-glass” for the heroine-narrator’s resolution of self and narrative. Amélie, Antoinette’s ambiguous double, is not present in the final narrative; nor is Christophine, her caretaker and spokeswoman, except for the “unvoiced” call to her for “help.” Only Tia, her mirror-self, is present in image and gesture: we see her. Other caretakers are there: her mother, especially in her question, as well as her presence “in” Antoinette herself; her Aunt Cora, in her “work”; even the caretaker Sister Marie Augustine is present, a reverberating voice as Antoinette’s narrative is passed from her care to Grace Poole’s.
Christophine’s voice is notably absent, as her person is absent, except for the dubious apotheosis represented by her embodiment in the “wall of fire” that Antoinette sees “protecting” her, the fire that Christophine’s earlier consistent support and example “allow” Antoinette to set herself. Amélie has long since withdrawn. The space these two figures might have occupied looms large. Their silence “speaks”; it is “telling.” This silence, their absence, reveals the subtext which is not written. This is the text that Rhys has omitted in the culmination of her writing, from the construction of her final manifest dream-text. The outline of some of her dream-thoughts, however, can be seen in the marking of the censored subtext. And it is relevant with regard to the written male text (which includes, as Christophine calls it, “Letter of the Law”) that Christophine and Amélie figure as spokeswoman and ambivalent mirror-image, respectively, for Antoinette, the white Creole colonial, in her narration and in the completion of her narrative. Similarly, Antoinette, the white woman in relation to the white man, the Creole in relation to the Englishman, is the figure for the completion of his desires, the writing of his text. Well might Christophine remark that she has nothing to do with reading and writing. When Rochester asks her if she wants to say good-bye to Antoinette, she replies:
“I give her something to sleep—nothing to hurt her. I don’t wake her up to no misery. I leave that for you.”
“You can write to her,” I said stiffly.
“Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know.”
And “she walked away without looking back” (p. 133). Significantly, this is the last time we see her, although Rochester recapitulates some of her conversation, her dialogue with him, later in his narrative.
Some reference points in Brontë’s text are helpful here, bringing together as they do some of the half-formed images of Brontë’s own dream-text. Figures who remain “unspeaking” or silent in Brontë’s text, except as they appear in a dream or in specular images, are revealed to Jane Eyre only in the “looking-glass” of the symbolism of the dream, or in the literal looking-glass of her bedroom at Thornfield Hall. They are images that bear the label “censored” in the very form of their manifestation in the talkative Jane Eyre’s narration. In a “trance-like dream” that occurs after Jane has refused to live with Rochester, she is “transported to the scenes of childhood”:
I dreamt I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of the obscure ceiling. I lifted up my head to look: the roof resolved to clouds, high and dim; the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever. I watched her come—watched with the strangest anticipation; as though some word of doom were to be written on the disk. She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart—“My daughter, flee temptation!”
“Mother, I will,” Jane answers (Jane Eyre, p. 281).
We may recall several interconnections as we read the text of this dream. We also see the contrast between Rhys’s text and Brontë’s, especially as revealed in those dreams of Jane Eyre’s that are integral to Brontë’s presentation of the manifest text of the eponymous novel Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre’s dream can be compared with two other of Brontë’s visions—that of the actress Vashti in Villette, and that of the figure Jane sees in her bedroom and whose appearance and actions she describes to Rochester and therefore to us. This figure, as emphasized traditionally, is a monstrous “double” for Jane. This double, we discover, is similar to two other female figures who inspire Jane/ Brontë with awe: her mother, the Moon, and Vashti, the inflammatory actress. Both of these figures, like the monstrous Bertha in her night visitation to Jane, wake Brontë’s heroine from a kind of sleep, literal or figurative. This is Jane’s description of Bertha’s night visit:
“On waking, a gleam dazzled my eyes: I thought—oh, it is daylight! But I was mistaken: it was only candlelight. ... a form emerged from the closet: it took the light, held it aloft, and surveyed the garments pendent from the portmanteau. . . . The shape standing before me had never crossed my eyes within the precincts of Thornfield Hall before; the height, the contour, were new to me. ... It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell. . . . presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass. . . . Just at my bedside the figure stopped: the fiery eye glared upon me—she thrust up her candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes. I was aware her lurid visage flamed over mine, and I lost consciousness: for the second time in my life—only the second time—I became insensible from terror.” (Jane Eyre, pp. 249-50)
The “scenes of childhood” to which Jane Eyre refers, in which her mother, the Moon, appears to her, are, of course, that scene at Gateshead when the child Jane was unjustly and cruelly confined to the “red-room.” The result of this experience, as she describes it to Rochester, was that for the first time in her life she “became insensible from terror,” here described as being “struck into syncope.” She provides us with this direct link to her childhood in her ongoing dream-text, just as Antoinette’s dream-text begins in childhood and is directly linked to childhood experiences of the dream and of “reality.”
Jane’s discussion with Rochester concerning the visit from the “form,” the “shape” that Jane had never seen before in Thornfield Hall, expressly locates all of these events in the context of the ongoing dream-text that Jane is writing in conjunction with the events of the novel, a dream-text that Rhys incorporates into her own. When Rochester suggests that the visit from Bertha—a figure he knows and recognizes—is “the creature of an over-stimulated brain,” she replies, “Sir, depend on it, my nerves are not at fault; the thing was real: the transaction took place” (Jane Eyre, p. 250). “And your previous dreams: were they real too?” he questions, just as the Rochester of Rhys’s novel more destructively questions Antoinette’s “dream” and her “reality.” These earlier dreams form “the preface,” as Jane says (Jane Eyre, p. 249), to the visitation from Bertha, the form or figure she cannot, and will not, recognize.
Jane’s earlier dreams offer details that Rhys incorporates into Rochester’s own “dream” of the Dominica he encounters and of the Thornfield Hall “in ruins” that he will come to know. Jane’s dreams seem to link past and future within Brontë’s text, as Rhys’s dream-text does on a larger scale, incorporating Brontë’s own text. More cogently, however, these earlier dreams of Jane’s closely parallel the dreams of the “stranger” that the child Antoinette experiences and the “reality” she encounters in her life with him. For both women, the dreams originate in childhood; they focus on the role of “the mother” in the child’s life, and, in her absence or inadequacy, on the role of other female caretakers.
The dream that immediately prefaces the appearance of Bertha, the woman to whom Jane awakes from her dreaming, contains elements of the dreams of Antoinette as child and as adolescent, the first and second versions of Antoinette’s dream. In the case of each woman’s dreams, the woman (or girl) who is the narrator-protagonist is fleeing. Jane flees the “temptation” of sexuality. It could be argued that the young Antoinette also flees what is usually called “budding sexuality.” More pertinently, Antoinette flees an intimacy with the stranger, who proves himself to be the one who flees her sensuality. In Jane’s dream she is pursuing Rochester (even if in fact he is the pursuer). In Antoinette’s dream there is no pursuit. In the first, she is “not alone,” “someone who hated me” is present. In the second, “someone” has become the “man who is with me.” In her first dream she has not yet fully entered Brontë’s; in the second dream she has, and the situation is given, and the end of the pursuit accomplished. Only struggle and possible escape remain.
The immediate framework for Jane’s prefatory dreams is the evening Rochester is away from Thornfield Hall. It was dark, the wind rising. “On sleeping,” Jane tells him,
“I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep I was following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me; rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms and wailed piteously in my ear. I thought, sir, that you were on the road a long way before me; and I strained every nerve to overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat you to stop—but my movements were fettered; and my voice still died away inarticulate; while you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther every moment.” (Jane Eyre, pp. 247-48)
“I dreamt another dream, sir:” Jane continues,
“that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin. ... I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high, and very fragile-looking. ... I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms—however much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road: I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years, and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic, perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me: at last I gained the summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the narrow ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap; you turned an angle of the road; I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke.” (Jane Eyre, pp. 248-49)
Following this narrative, Rochester says, “Now, Jane, that is all,” with an air of finality and admonishment for letting “these dreams weigh on your spirits.” He also says, “I am close to you,” noting a state of affairs that is all too central to Antoinette’s dreams. “All the preface, sir; the tale is yet to come,” Jane replies (Jane Eyre, p. 249). The tale yet to come is a description of Jane’s visitation from Bertha, Rhys’s Antoinette. Rochester denies Bertha’s reality, says that “the woman was—must have been—Grace Poole.” The rest, he claims, are “figments of imagination; results of nightmare” (Jane Eyre, p. 251).
The child of Jane’s dream is the child she was at Gateshead, locked in the red-room by her Aunt Reed. Rhys conflates the child Antoinette and the woman she becomes with Brontë’s (Jane’s) child and woman, dreaming herself into Brontë’s arms and rescuing the child Jane into a single individual. Jane might see herself as caretaker of the child who was herself; Rhys extends this condition of the constitution of self to the caretaker figures who people her dream-text, the kinds of figures who, in fact, offer Jane the model for the care of self that she can only “dream” in her relation to Rochester. Preeminent among them is her mother, the Moon, whose dream takes her back to the “scenes of childhood.”
The “mother” figure of the Moon, who speaks to Jane and reveals herself to her in “human form,” comes from the waking dreams she has while incarcerated in the red-room; an actual caretaker is at her bedside when she awakens from the “first time” in her life that she “lost consciousness.” The red-room is identifiable with the attic of Thornfield Hall, both places of incarceration and the “madness” of intensified or exacerbated introversion.
“Daylight,” in Jane’s narrative of her imprisonment in the red-room, “began to forsake the red-room”:
I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. . . . Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room. At this moment a light gleamed on the wall. . . . while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern, carried by some one across the lawn: but then, prepared as my mind was for horror ... I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie [the lady’s maid] and Abbott [the housekeeper] entered. (Jane Eyre, pp. 13-14)
Bessie “pleads” for her, but Mrs. Reed “thrust” her back in the room and locked the door. “. . . and soon after she was gone,” Jane concludes, “I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene” (Jane Eyre, p. 15). At the beginning of the next chapter, she describes her awakening from the “fit”:
The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had a frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars. I heard voices, too, speaking with a hollow sound, as if muffled by a rush of wind or water: agitation, uncertainty, and an all-predominating sense of terror confused my faculties. Ere long I became aware that some one was handling me; lifting me up and supporting me in a sitting posture, and that more tenderly than I had ever been raised or upheld before. I rested my head against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy.
In five minutes more the cloud of bewilderment dissolved: I knew quite well that I was in my own bed, and that the red glare was the nursery fire. It was night: a candle burnt on the table; Bessie stood at the bed-foot with a basin in her hand, and a gentleman sat in a chair near my pillow, leaning over me. (Jane Eyre, p. 15)
A basic similarity to the child Antoinette’s feelings of “security” upon awakening from her dream in familiar surroundings is found in the next paragraph, along with a contrast that is at extreme variance with Antoinette’s ideas of what constitutes this “security.” “I felt an inexpressible relief,” Jane tells us, “a soothing conviction of protection and security, when I knew that there was a stranger in the room, an individual not belonging to Gateshead, and not related to Mrs. Reed.”
This passage marks a fundamental break between Wide Sargasso Sea and Brontë’s dream-text, even an opposition to it. Bessie, the female caretaker here, is Jane’s staunchest ally in the house, although her status in the house and in society is depicted as vitiating her support. However, the male figure is precisely a “stranger,” and Jane remarks that his presence provides “an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and security.” The stranger himself asks a question similar to that which Antoinette’s mother’s parrot Coco would ask of any stranger who approached. “Well,” he asks, “who am I?” and Jane realizes that she does know him. He is Mr. Lloyd, “an apothecary, sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when servants were ailing: for herself and the children she employed a physician.” It is Bessie who asks, “Do you feel as if you should sleep, Miss?” “I will try,” Jane answers. As befits a servant, Bessie’s place is “at the bed-foot”; the man, the “stranger” is seated comfortably at Jane’s bedside, leaning over her.
It is appropriate that in Jane’s awakening from the real childhood experience that was like a “nightmare,” she wakes to two figures, a woman and a man. Her awakening is not exclusively to women, and there is no primary caretaker, like Christophine, who can offer the example of the waking dream, of seeing with her own woman’s eyes. When Jane awakens as an adult to the figure at her bedside who looks with her “fiery eye” upon her, “close to my face,” she “became insensible from terror.” She could not return the look; she could, in fact, only look at her when she saw “the reflection of the visage and the features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass.” She could see “Bertha” only in the looking-glass, the actual woman she could not see without terror. The shape at her bedside looking her straight in the eye was a caretaker she could not admit. Her own identification seems to be with the masculine caretaker, and, in fact, in the dreams that preface the visitation from Bertha, it is in attempting to follow Rochester that she “fell, and woke.” In contrast, at the end of that dream of Antoinette’s, which is Brontë’s, the dream that signals the beginning of the “real” ending of Antoinette’s narrative, Antoinette “jumped and woke” in response to her recognition of her mirror-image, Tia. She did not “fall”—she jumped. And, as I have already observed, the dream passes on to Grace Poole, who awakens with the remark, “I must have been dreaming” (p. 155).
On the other hand, when Rochester says with finality, “Now Jane, that is all,” she answers, “All the preface . . . the tale is yet to come.” The tale yet to come is “Bertha’s” story, the story of the woman caretaker to whom Brontë cannot directly respond. In completing this tale, Brontë’s as well as her own, Rhys signals a drawing together of texts (which includes her own Voyage in the Dark) by returning her own text to the image of Brontë’s “mother,” the Moon, an image that frightened Jane as a child and offers her the “answer” when she is an adult. The “moonlight” that frightened her as a child, but which at the time she thought “some coming vision from another world,” becomes in the later dream the “white human form” who resolves her problems for her. This, so she tells us, was the dream in which she “lay in the red-room at Gateshead”: it is patently a rewriting of that waking dream. Jane herself identifies it for us as “the light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision.” Rhys incorporates this rewriting in her own dream-text in the figure of the “real” mother and “real” female caretakers. These caretakers help her, and Brontë, achieve the end of the text that Brontë set in motion, but that Brontë could not complete in her own manifest text, in her own time and place.
The light, the mundane “lantern” of conjecture, becomes the candle on the table that reveals Bessie and the male caretaker standing by. More significantly, it is the candle that Bertha, with her “fiery eye,” held aloft to look finally into Jane’s face, into her eyes if Jane could have returned the look. Bertha “thrust the candle close to my face,” she tells Rochester, the candle whose “gleam dazzled” her eyes and woke her from her dream of him to the figure of Bertha. The candle, in Rhys’s text, becomes the candle that lights Antoinette to the end of her “voyage,” to the end of her text and of Brontë’s: “the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage” (p. 156).
In Antoinette’s early dreams we may note some details placed in seemingly deliberate opposition to those of Jane’s dreams. In Antoinette’s second dream, the one most comparable to Jane’s prefatory dreams (in which the night is not only dark but “gusty”), the narrator specifically tells us “there is no wind.” Most importantly, however, there is no light—not candle, or lantern, or moonlight—until the light of the fire in her culminating dream-text. But here, at the last, Antoinette/Rhys has taken Brontë’s “light,” that of the mother Moon, and of Bertha’s light, the candle, as the guiding light for her final dream and text.
Brontë’s (Lucy Snowe’s) response to the actress represented by Vashti in Villette is similar to her response to the Moon. At the same time, however, it contains a key to her rejection of a similar figure in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre, published four years after Villette, represents an odd and significant retrogression, one that casts doubt on this aspect of Brontë’s presentation and piques our interest. In appearance Vashti is not unlike the “white human form” of the mother, Moon, who “spoke” to Jane’s “spirit,” “immeasurably distant . . . the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart.” Both of these figures resemble Bertha as first described, “a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back,” her dress “white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud I could not tell.” This is the description of Lucy Snowe/Brontë’s encounter with the performance and figure of the actress Vashti as it is recorded in Villette:
She rose at nine that December night; above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment day. Seen near, it was a chaos ... an orb perished or perishing—half lava, half glow.
I had heard this woman termed “plain,” and I expected bony harshness and grimness—something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen . . . turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.
For a while ... I thought it was only a woman, though a unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognised my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength—for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.
It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.
It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral. (Villette, pp. 233-34)
In the movement of this description, and in the one-line descriptions with which it concludes, we see the two conflicting responses at work in Jane Eyre. The Vashti in whom Lucy Snowe “found . . . something neither of woman nor of man,” “in each” of whose “eyes sat a devil,” is at once the mother, Moon, “inclining a glorious brow,” who can gaze and gaze and gaze at Jane with benevolence and who can speak to her “spirit,” as a “daughter,” and the figure of “Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate,” the one Jane sees in the figure of the woman looking at herself in a mirror with a wedding veil (Jane’s) thrown over her head. Her “visage” Jane describes as “fearful and ghastly to me—oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments” (Jane Eyre, p. 249). “Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?” Jane asks Rochester. The sensational answer is that it reminds her “Of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre” (Jane Eyre, p. 250), an answer calculated to warm the heart of any Victorian gentleman.
The two images of Vashti, then, can be split into the two we find in Jane Eyre: the benevolent and strengthening mother, the Moon, in “human form”; and the “foul German spectre—the Vampyre,” the figure of Bertha, “a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.” This last assessment, of course, is Rochester’s view of Bertha in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and it is also his view of Antoinette in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Brontë chose the “immorality” of the vision in her text of Jane Eyre. In this sense, Rhys herself incorporates not only the censored text of Jane Eyre, but the other text of the same figure that Brontë included in her initial response to the woman (the French actress Rachel, Elisa Felix), a real woman, and the response a response to an actual performance, recorded in Villette.
Note again the lack of voice in the presentation of the “spectre” who is Bertha, contrasted with the explicit and central place given to the speaking voice of the mother, Moon, and to Vashti (whose “passions” “tuned her voice to the note of torment”). Brontë’s description of Vashti includes the visual, aural, and emotional impression of her performance; finally, however, the total impression and “incarnation” of her being that so passionately moves Lucy/Brontë is summed up in the key words of her final, formulaic descriptions: “sight,” “revelation,” and “spectacle.” The impact of the woman Vashti on the woman Charlotte Brontë/Lucy Snowe is visual, and it is in Vashti’s “eyes” that “a devil sat.” What this implies is “something neither of woman nor of man.” In other words, Vashti crosses a gender barrier, crosses the conventional borders of a woman’s presumed context, to make the spectacle of herself that Brontë sees. It is there—in the eyes—that the immorality of the unconventional, passionate, and powerful woman resides. And it is in her own “eyes” that Brontë measures the power and the shock of it. The presence—or absence—of voice here is significant.
The only voice that speaks aloud in Jane’s dreams is the mother’s, the Moon’s. When Jane is “straining to overtake” Rochester, she “made effort on effort to utter [Rochester’s] name and entreat [him] to stop—but my movements were fettered,” she says, “and my voice still died away inarticulate,” in contrast to Antoinette, who voices her cry to Tia, voices the crucial name of recognition. Jane cannot voice Rochester’s name; she has no voice in her dreams except to “hush” the “feeble” infant in her arms. In her encounter with Bertha, neither of them speaks, and Jane, as already emphasized, cannot exchange or maintain the fixing or the searching look of the other woman.
Conversely, it is not the voice alone that renders the impression of a woman in active response to another woman, as Brontë’s response to Vashti’s visual impact makes clear. It is the movement from sight to a voicing of recognition—the melding of the two in that movement—that results in the aesthetic expression of that recognition. Joining hand and eye to create the possibility of a voicing is the crux. This joining is a crucial step in the constitution of self and of a woman’s “text,” both literally and figuratively.
In that place of “recognition,” the eyes, is the subjective designation of the relative state of madness or sanity, woven into Wide Sargasso Sea as an element given by Brontë’s text. According to Rochester’s narration, Antoinette is a lunatic and he is “sane.” In a description of the mad Antoinette, whom Rochester distinguishes from himself, the “voice,” important as it is, comes after the fixing in place of this crucial and relative distinction. As the description continues, the voice gains importance: “She lifted her eyes. Blank lovely eyes. Mad eyes. A mad girl. [. . .] I scarcely recognized her voice. No warmth, no sweetness. The doll had a doll’s voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice. [. . .] the doll’s smile came back—nailed to her face. [. . .] I was [....] Sane” (pp. 140-41). The voice is finally inseparable from the marking that can be attributed to the “eye,” and the “doll’s voice” itself is silenced, so that the eyes remain the characterizing vehicle for “sanity” or “madness.” The voice is stopped, proving the mark of the eyes: “the doll’s smile came back—nailed to her face,” effectively stopping the voice. The eyes remain the receptacle for the mark of one who has taken the “mistaken” path, the “mistake,” as Rochester calls it, the “mis-take,” the “wrong path,” the “wrong” dream (pp. 78, 85). Antoinette, too, later attempts to explain to Rochester how he is “mistaken” (p. 107).
In the opposition of these two dreams, these two “takes” on reality, the written word—specifically letters—and “Letter of the Law,” as Christophine calls it, effects the seeming ascendancy of Rochester’s dream over Antoinette’s. Rochester knows that the dream is what he attempts to dislodge. He cannot follow Antoinette into that dream, since he knows, as he tells us in his narration, that his “dreams were dreams” (p. 137). He knows the difference between the “real” world and “dreams,” and the “real world” is his. “Ah,” Brontë’s Rochester cries in Jane Eyre when Jane has just announced that her “uncle in Madeira is dead, and he left me five thousand pounds”—“Ah, this is practical—this is real!” (Jane Eyre, p. 382). We hear the same voice in even a seemingly minor comment from the unnamed “Rochester” in Wide Sargasso Sea. (“She was undecided, uncertain about facts—any fact” [p. 73].) Rochester’s world can only serve as that fixed frame—threads in the pattern, but frame nevertheless—the warp, through which the shuttle of the women’s dream passes and repasses as Rhys, the woman writing, weaves the text of their dream, her dream-text.
As Rochester’s plaint emphasizes (“Nothing that I told her influenced her at all” [p. 78]), he first attempts to mute or silence Antoinette into conformity with his view of a woman’s role by verbal persuasion or coercion. Proof of his successful coercion is Antoinette’s silence—marked by the mask, the “doll’s smile stopping the voice,” the smile “nailed to her face.” The doll’s face is worn by the black women at Carnival; the men’s masks are characterized solely by the “squinting” eyes. The basic marking of difference, however, lies in the eyes; more, in the seeing.
This marking of difference holds true for a woman’s writing as well. The seeing, more than the voice, differentiates a woman’s text. The presentation of a woman’s seeing, a display of what and how she sees, distinguishes her writing (writing, which is made to be seen, which signifies the convention of seeing) from a man’s. Imposition of the mask is an analogy for the marking of the literary subtext, a marking ritualized and parodied but, in its parody and ritual, clear in its implications. The ritual is a public acting out of the opposition inherent in living within a culture’s subtext, and of the necessity of that subtext for the dominant text’s expression.
Rhys is “writing” the “dream,” and the preeminent organ metaphorized as the agent of dreaming is the eye (and the “I” that is pluralized in the dream-work). By means of the voices that pass on the narrative in a kind of relay—Sister Marie Augustine’s, Grace Poole’s, Brontë/Jane’s lack of a dream-voice, Bertha’s silence being given voice in Rhys’s text—and by the explicit passing on of the dream shown us in the conjunction of Antoinette’s “I jumped and woke” and Grace Poole’s “I must have been dreaming,” we see a continuous weave. Early in the novel Sister Marie Augustine would not take Antoinette “behind the mysterious curtains to the place where she sleeps” (p. 50). By the end of the novel the “transfer” of the dream is completed. The “sleeping” and the “dreaming” are in the open, a common place.
Who, we might well ask, is dreaming here? The only sure answer is that it is a woman. Recall Xavière Gauthier’s emphatic “If there is a madman, then it’s definitely the Woman,” or, as Helen Nebeker puts it, “a poor mad woman—who sees so clearly.”21 The dream we are given seems common property, belonging to the women throughout the text of Rhys’s novel, both in the intratext (the continuous narrative of all Rhys’s heroine-narrator’s, especially Anna Morgan of Voyage in the Dark, and of her own life), and in the intertext that brings the women of Brontë’s text(s) into the circuit of the dream. The circuit of exchange for the writing of this dream-text is closed to the men in the text(s), including Brontë’s, of course; the dream is open to all the women involved.
The dream is preeminently Rhys’s. She inscribes, in a woman’s hand, in a woman’s voice, the dream that Charlotte Brontë and her heroine-narrator Jane Eyre—Brontë’s “text”—could only describe as a partially seen “vision.” This vision is of a ghostlike figure, indeed Jane Eyre’s “mad double,” a figure that of necessity she kept “hidden,” even from herself, perhaps especially from herself. The account of what is made “real” in Antoinette’s dream-text is not given to the reader as “real action” that she, and we, “see” in Brontë’s novel. In Brontë’s original text the action happened off-stage; this is also an omission that Rhys sought to correct. Brontë’s depiction of the actions that Antoinette’s final dream foresees is told to Jane Eyre and fleshed out in part by hearsay in the account of the fire given to her by a man who witnessed it. This male witness could give Jane Eyre only a partial view, one made up in great measure of what “they say” about the events.
Rhys’s achievement is that she writes the dream collectively without sacrificing the compelling narrative device of an individual protagonist, that single voice we are accustomed to “trust,” with whom we conventionally identify as we read. The only sure dreamer is given us, however, in our realization that in Rhys’s dream, as described by Freud’s general description of our dream-work, the full expression of the narrator and of the narration can be found only in the process of relationships that constitutes this woman’s text. This process includes all the women in Antoinette’s world and, by extension and example, all of us.
THE FIRST VERSION of the dream that represents Brontë’s subtext is given to the child Antoinette. “I went to bed early,” Antoinette tells us, “and slept at once”:
I dreamed that I was walking in the forest. Not alone. Someone who hated me was with me, out of sight. I could hear heavy footsteps coming closer and though I struggled and screamed I could not move. I woke crying. The covering sheet was on the floor and my mother was looking down at me.
“Did you have a nightmare?”
“Yes, a bad dream.”
She sighed and covered me up. “You were making such a noise. I must go to Pierre, you’ve frightened him.” (p. 23)
As we see, Antoinette’s mother, Annette, is there when she wakes up, and she provides some comfort, although the child’s brother is foremost in Annette’s mind. The little girl seems not to care. After her mother leaves her, she continues, “I am safe. [. . .] I am safe from strangers.” However, the dream has begun; the continuation of Brontë’s subtext is set in motion. “I woke next morning,” we are told, “knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing” (p. 23).
The impetus of the dream is an interchange with Tia, the little black girl with whom Antoinette plays. Christophine seems to have arranged for Tia to come to Coulibri precisely to fill a need in the white girl’s life. On the morning of the day that closes with the dream, Tia dares Antoinette to turn a somersault in the bathing pool, “like you say you can” (p. 20). “I never see you do it,” Tia says. “Only talk.” Antoinette attempts the somersault, accepts the dare that is recapitulated in the final dream of Part III. Tia announces that she’s lost the bet anyway; the somersault wasn’t “good.” They exchange words. Antoinette calls Tia a “nigger”; Tia responds, “Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger” (p. 21). “All that evening,” Antoinette says, prefatory to describing her dream, “my mother didn’t speak to me or look at me and I thought, ‘She is ashamed of me, what Tia said is true.’”
Later in the narration, the scene of the fire at Coulibri offers the mirror-image of Tia for Antoinette—each the negative of the other. It is the last scene of Antoinette’s childhood at Coulibri; it is also the last time she is with her mother, who wouldn’t “speak” or “look” at her on the evening of the dream, the last time she is with her before her mother disappears from her life:
Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not. When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass, (p. 38)
Unlike Jane Eyre, who can see her double, her “other” self, only in a literal looking-glass, for the time being these two children seem able to acknowledge their separation and one another, even if only with “blood” and “tears.” On the other hand, the description is Antoinette’s; we can read Tia as her alter ego. Tia remains silent, however. We do not know, except through their fixed and mutual stare, and her tears—and the “jagged stone” in her hand—what Tia sees. Certainly part of what Antoinette “sees” is the jagged stone, although she “did not see her throw it.” But the effects of that stone, or one like it, its “double,” produce the tears and the blood that are integral to the doubled image in the “looking-glass.”
The second time Antoinette describes the dream, she specifically announces its serial nature: “This was the second time I had my dream.” The dream and her description of the circumstances that set the stage for it arise after a visit from her stepfather at the convent. He allows her to know what fate has in store for her. She is fearful of what it may mean to be outside the world of the caretaking sisters and the company of the other girls, with “strangers”—not only men, but people outside her own milieu:
Again I have left the house at Coulibri. It is still night and I am walking towards the forest. I am wearing a long dress and thin slippers, so I walk with difficulty, following the man who is with me and holding up the skirt of my dress. It is white and beautiful and I don’t wish to get it soiled. I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen. Now we have reached the forest. We are under the tall dark trees and there is no wind. “Here?” He turns and looks at me, his face black with hatred, and when I see this I begin to cry. He smiles slyly. “Not here, not yet,” he says, and I follow him, weeping. Now I do not try to hold up my dress, it trails in the dirt, my beautiful dress. We are no longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees. I do not know them. There are steps leading upwards. It is too dark to see the wall or the steps, but I know they are there and I think, “It will be when I go up these steps. At the top.” I stumble over my dress and cannot get up. I touch a tree and my arms hold on to it. “Here, here.” But I think I will not go any further. The tree sways and jerks as if it is trying to throw me off. Still I cling and the seconds pass and each one is a thousand years. “Here, in here,” a strange voice said, and the tree stopped swaying and jerking, (p. 50)
Ending her account of the dream, Antoinette continues her narration with a description of the actions of Sister Marie Augustine, whose “part,” as Helen Nebeker accurately observes, is “brief but not minor.”22
Antoinette refers to the continuation of her dream and dreaming in “her” portion of Rochester’s section (pp. 89-98). This portion of the narration also describes her journey to Christophine’s, which is synchronous with Rochester’s journey into the forest. For both of them it is a time of crisis and explanation. They both seek a kind of knowledge, the “magic” that controls or might help each of their lives. Both “see” something finally, but what Rochester “sees,” or at least its important element, doesn’t concretely exist. That element resides in his own unstable psychological construction of the events. In Antoinette’s case, it is initially put more simply. “It’s you, Antoinette?” Christophine calls out when she sees her approaching, “Why you come up here so early?” “I just wanted to see you,” Antoinette answers (p. 89).
In the narration of her conversation with Christophine, Antoinette interjects her own thoughts about England, about her ideas of England, and about her unhappiness. Rhys concludes these thoughts of Antoinette’s with an overt reference to the “end” we know is coming for her, the end of the dream as Brontë’s text has ordained it for her: “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? In that bed I will dream the end of my dream. But my dream had nothing to do with England and I must not think like this. I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow. And snow” (p. 92). “This must happen,” as Antoinette observes in the narration of “the second time” she had her dream. Here Antoinette claims the dream that is not her dream but that is the continuation of another woman’s text, the subtext of which she does indeed claim in order to make it a text. Here she also makes manifest the influence that Rochester has had on her, even though he thinks (despairingly, as has already been noted) that he has had no influence over her at all (p. 78).
Christophine then continues the conversation that Antoinette’s narrative has momentarily broken off. She pointedly signals the disruption, and the continuation, that is Antoinette’s contemplation of her dream. Her instinct concerning the kind of “help” Antoinette’s own “dreaming” needs is accurate. Christophine reminds her that she hasn’t seen England and that it is only with a woman’s own seeing that she knows a thing. A woman’s dreams must be her own. When Antoinette tells her, “I sleep so badly now. And I dream,” Christophine necessarily replies: “I don’t meddle with that for you” (p. 94). The value of the dream-text consists in the seeing, the writing of one’s own text. To be, to remain, another’s subtext—to remain in, or live out, another’s dream—is the lie.
The dream that is used as general metaphor for context in Antoinette’s early exchange with Rochester and as the structural recapitulation of Brontë’s censored dream-text takes on its full power as the book comes to its conclusion and Antoinette’s “dream” in the last section becomes “reality.” Rhys’s text, Antoinette’s narrative, moves in its weave from the voice of one caretaker figure to another. Finally we hear Antoinette’s own voice, the voice that begins the narration of this text and that will ultimately claim the dream, and the dream-text, as its own: “In this room I wake early and lie shivering for it is very cold. At last Grace Poole, the woman who looks after me, lights a fire with paper and sticks and lumps of coal. [. . .] In the end flames shoot up and they are beautiful. I get out of bed and go close to watch them and to wonder why I have been brought here. For what reason? There must be a reason. What is it that I must do?” (p. 146).
Later Antoinette looks at her red dress on the floor—the dress that, to her, represents her island—and recalls herself on her island in her own context. In her movement toward remembering, Antoinette knows the red dress is significant; we can contrast its color with that of the dress she was wearing in her second dream—a white dress, the color of a wedding dress, the color given her by Brontë’s text. Most of all, the red dress represents the mark of herself for Antoinette, her name. In the convent, stitching her signature into a canvas of “silk roses on a pale background,” she tells us, “Underneath, I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, nee Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839” (p. 44). Herself, her name, her place, her time—in “fire red,” the color she chooses for the signing, the writing of her name. Antoinette thinks the dress should be able to effect recognition of her; as she tells Grace Poole, for example, her stepbrother, Richard Mason, would have “known” her if she had worn the red dress. Grace Poole looks at her and says, “I don’t believe you know how long you’ve been here, you poor creature.” Antoinette answers strongly: “‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘only I know how long I have been here. Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter. Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has meaning’” (p. 151).
We might recall here Rhys’s remarks concerning her heroine in Voyage in the Dark: “there’s no more time for her as we think of time. That’s how she feels, I’m certain.” Similarly, in describing her second dream, when Antoinette tells us she “will not go any further” with “the man who is with me” and clings to the tree to preclude going further, she writes, “Still I cling and the seconds pass and each one is a thousand years. ‘Here, in here,’ a strange voice said, and the tree stopped swaying and jerking” (p. 50). The “strange voice” becomes her own in the “simultaneity in time” that marks a dream-text, the narrating voice of the dream that rescues her from Brontë’s text and from Brontë’s dream, just as recognition of the “fire red” of her signature signals the beginning of the remembering, which we can see as a re-membering of her self (her selves). She will now make an effort to save herself—unlike her refusal of the second dream when, “sick with fear,” she tells us, “I follow him [. . .] but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen” (p. 50). She is remembering her own dream, and Brontë’s dream is coming to its end. Antoinette “let the dress fall to the floor, and looked from the fire [which Grace Poole had set; Grace’s making of a fire is the first of her actions described by Antoinette when she takes up the final narrative] to the dress and from the dress to the fire” (p. 152). When Antoinette looks at the dress on the floor, “it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something that I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now” (p. 153).
The next sentence recalls the serial nature of the dreams, recording their progress and Antoinette’s. She tells us, after telling herself that she would “remember quite soon now”: “That was the third time I had my dream, and it ended” (my emphasis). “I know now,” she emphasizes, “that the flight of steps leads to this room where I lie watching the woman asleep with her head on her arms.” She herself is now watching over a sleeper and dreamer. The “flight of steps,” or a “wall” as she calls it also in her second dream, is the wall that leads Jane Eyre, in her dream, to a view of the receding figure of Rochester. For Antoinette, the steps lead to a room “where I lie watching the woman asleep with her head on her arms.” Not Rochester, certainly, and not any man—the sleeper is instead a woman, another dreamer. Soon, when she calls to Christophine for help, Christophine doesn’t answer. Rather, Antoinette looks behind her and sees that she has been “helped” by the fire, emblem of signature, of the writing of self.
Antoinette’s caretakers had been concerned to take care of the “cold” she felt, her “shivering”; even Grace Poole remarks, just prior to Antoinette’s looking back and forth between dress and fire, “Well don’t stand there shivering,” “quite kindly for her,” as Antoinette observes (p. 152). In the final case it would seem the warming fire is “self-starting.”
The narration now carries us through what we know is the “end” of the dream and the “end” of the text that Antoinette—Brontë’s Bertha—is narrating for us. But Rhys has given us a dream within a dream. We reach the end of the dream as we know it from Jane Eyre, as we knew it from the beginning, just as Antoinette does, from the inception of her dreaming; however, at its climax, Antoinette wakes up: “I called ‘Tia!’ and jumped and woke” (p. 155). Fully awake, she then “lay still, breathing evenly with my eyes shut,” and it is Grace Poole who says, “I must have been dreaming.” After Grace goes back to sleep, Antoinette gets up, takes the keys, unlocks the door, and is, we know, on her way to making the dream “reality,” as Brontë’s script has written it and as she herself will open and expand it.
IN ANTOINETTE’S final dream, the outline of whose events we know from Brontë’s prior text and which Antoinette is soon to enact, she sees an overview of the context of her life in the fire that she herself has already set and will set:
out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. [. . .] Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it. I saw the grandfather clock and Aunt Cora’s patchwork, all colours, I saw the orchids and the stephanotis and the jasmine and the tree of life in flames. I saw the chandelier and the red carpet downstairs and the bamboos and the tree ferns, the gold ferns and the silver, and the soft green velvet of the moss on the garden wall. I saw my doll’s house and the books and the picture of the Miller’s Daughter. I heard the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger, Qui est la? Qui est la? and the man who hated me was calling too, Bertha! Bertha! The wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings. It might bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones. [.. .] Tia was there. She beckoned to me and when I hesitated, she laughed. I heard her say, You frightened? And I heard the man’s voice, Bertha! Bertha! All this I saw and heard in a fraction of a second. And the sky so red. Someone screamed and I thought, Why did I scream? I called “Tia!” and jumped and woke. (p. 155)
The “strange voice” Antoinette hears in her second dream is identified here. It is her own, the voice of one who had been a “stranger” to her but is no longer. The “someone” of her first dream—identified with Rochester—has become herself, a woman, the one that she seeks; unlike Jane Eyre, who, in her dreams, seeks Rochester. A woman speaks when Jane returns to her childhood and turns to a rewriting of the “light” that visited her and became the human form she identifies with the mother. Here the two texts—Rhys’s and Brontë’s—do coincide, for it is also here that Antoinette returns to the “mother-text” in answering her own question.
Antoinette’s last words are to Tia; indeed, the child’s name is the only word in this passage indicated as being spoken or called aloud. Even “Rochester’s” calling Bertha! Bertha! remains “unvoiced” within our conventions of the printed text. Rhys/Antoinette marks the subtext and her use of it at this culminating moment: Tia, her “mirror-image,” an image that she, Antoinette, claims for the writing of her text, “‘Tia!’”—“like in a looking-glass,” the looking-glass of the fire, written in red, like her own name, her signature.
“There is no looking-glass here,” Antoinette tells us earlier in the narrative, “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?” (p. 147). Antoinette does not claim “that ghost of a woman whom they say haunts this place” (p. 153). Of course she will not claim “her”—especially as “they say” she is; moreover, “this place,” “England,” is not her place. Antoinette cannot “see” herself here, in his place, Rochester’s England. She doesn’t want to see, to encounter, “that ghost of a woman.” In this she is like Brontë’s Jane, who cannot or will not recognize the figure of the woman, Bertha, who is leaning over her bed and looking at her, except as she sees Bertha’s features in the looking glass as the woman contemplates her own reflection. What Antoinette wants to see—with some pathos—is “herself.”
In one of Antoinette’s forays into the house, she goes out into the hall, as she is used to doing; “it was then I saw her—the ghost”—Brontë’s version of her, of “Bertha”: “The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her. I dropped the candle I was carrying and it caught the end of a tablecloth and I saw flames shoot up. As I ran or perhaps floated or flew I called help me Christophine help me and looking behind me I saw that I had been helped. There was a wall of fire protecting me” (p. 154). This is the incident that we are first given to believe results in the fire that ends her life, within the framework of Brontë’s text, before Antoinette wakes up from the dream. The “woman with streaming hair” can be identified as Antoinette’s mother, particularly as her sexuality is emphasized; but it also—because of Antoinette’s own identification and bond with her mother—all the more Antoinette. She “knew her.” This recognition “takes her back to herself,” as the phrase has it, “recalls” her to herself. In a logical process of association she calls to Christophine, who “answers” her—allows her to answer herself—in the “wall of fire protecting me.” In her “life” that she sees in the fire, her mother’s question and the parrot Coco’s question upon seeing a “stranger” becomes central to her life and to the dream’s culmination: Qui est la? Who is there? Recognition of the image of Tia allows her to answer; the use, the naming of the name, allows her to wake and continue her narrative, her text, even when the dream—Brontë’s dream of her—is ended. The subtext marked by the use of Tia’s name remains unwritten; it is the salient strand in the weave of a tapestry that is not closed and that demands a reweaving.
Rhys’s use of the dream, doubled in the last segment of this final narration—itself the “end” of the external description of events from Brontë’s text—tripled, multiplied, with the inclusion of the dream(s) Antoinette records for us in Part I of the novel (pp. 23, 50), becomes the place where all the strands of the dream-text are brought together. Rochester’s England, Brontë’s dream—the wrong context—ends.
Christophine arranged for Tia to fill the gap in the child Antoinette’s life. Tia’s image calls up all the images of Coulibri, the events during the fire there, and what they represent for Antoinette. Just as Christophine provided the opportunity for Antoinette to find her own image in the child who was “like a looking-glass” for her, so this fire, provided by the unvoiced calling of Christophine’s name, is the larger “looking-glass” in which a whole “life” can be seen. Seeing the life, however, focuses finally on that figure who fills the gap in Antoinette’s life, who completes her recognition of “self” and enables her to answer her mother’s question, Who is there? In effect, Rhys/ Antoinette completes the desire of her text here by using Tia, just as Rochester uses Antoinette to complete the desires of his text. The difference is in the opening out, the seeing of oneself in another. As is clear from the closing of Rochester’s narration, he sees “Nothing” (p. 142), having tried to accomplish his “seeing” exclusively in words. Antoinette sees Tia, another woman, another girl-child, and, in seeing her, sees herself. It was the mother-text that seemed originally to offer safety. In answering the question posed by that text, Antoinette/ Rhys reaches the end of the journey, the destination toward which her own text, as well as Brontë’s, had set her.
ANTOINETTE’S MOTHER, Annette, is the original caretaker, the first woman we see standing by her bedside, the woman who provides comfort after the “bad dream.” Of all the women to whom she wakes, Antoinette’s mother seems to provide a partial key to the genesis of the dream, to the motor force that precipitates the incipient text seeded by Brontë’s. Antoinette’s relationship with her mother seems to exacerbate the uncertainty in Antoinette that allows the dream-text to surface, the mother’s role in this sense confirming the ontological uncertainty that is the result of, as well as a central fixing place for, the interracial incident with Tia: the hurtful, perhaps truthful, name-calling. Nevertheless, in the child’s mind, she remains in her mother’s keeping, “safe” from strangers. She is not safe, however, from her bond with her mother, from an identification with her for good or ill, just as she cannot and does not want to deny her bond and her desire for identification with Tia.
In the culminating moments of the dream in Part III, the dream from which Antoinette awakes to complete her task, she answers her mother’s question, the parrot Coco’s question, Qui est la? After her “bad dream,” the child Antoinette is concerned solely that her mother be there, that she feel “safe,” that the space they share remain inviolate. I have already described the immediate framework and points of reference for that dream, as I have also described how the child’s dream is the beginning of the dream that is the framework for Rhys’s novel, the beginning of an explicit response to Brontë’s text. But another “dream,” the mother-text, encompasses Brontë’s text as well as Rhys’s and our own. This text, in which Antoinette’s mother serves as the protagonist, is a “dream” that is rooted in what the novel presents as reality, a part of Antoinette’s life, indissolubly woven into and from the context of that life.
The mother-text begins with a fire that serves as the object and the starting point for rewriting in the last dream-narrative, the burning of the house at Coulibri. The family members have made their way outside, where a crowd of blacks is waiting:
It was very hot on the glacis too[. . . .] I saw tall flames shooting up to the sky, for the bamboos had caught. There were some tree ferns near, green and damp, one of them was smoldering too.
“Come quickly,” said Aunt Cora, and she went first, holding my hand. Christophine followed, carrying Pierre[. . . .] But when I looked round for my mother I saw that Mr Mason [. . .] seemed to be dragging her along and she was holding back, struggling. I heard him say, “It’s impossible, too late now.”
“Wants her jewel case?” Aunt Cora said.
“Jewel case? Nothing so sensible,” bawled Mr Mason. “She wanted to go back for her damned parrot. I won’t allow it.” She did not answer, only fought him silently, twisting like a cat and showing her teeth.
The parrot was called Coco, a green parrot. He didn’t talk very well, he could say Qui est la? Qui est la? and answer himself Che Coco, Che Coco. [. . .]
“Annette,” said Aunt Cora. “They are laughing at you, do not allow them to laugh at you.” She stopped fighting then and he half supported, half pulled her after us, cursing loudly, (pp. 34-35)
When the family comes outside, there is a “roar” in front of them, of the crowd’s voices, and a “roar” behind them (p. 34). They are caught between the voice of the crowd and the voice of the fire. Annette is already like an animal, like Coco, who, protective and “bad tempered” after his wings had been clipped, “darted at everyone who came near her” (p. 35). The struggling woman is “caught,” not only between the roar of the fire and of the crowd who set the fire, but in the arms of the Englishman, Mason, who “half supported, half pulled” her when she “stopped fighting.”
Later we shall see Annette as her daughter sees and describes her, in the arms of the black (or colored) “man who is in charge of her” (the text is ambiguous) (p. 130): “she seemed to grow tired [. . .] and the man lift[ed] her up out of the chair and kiss[ed] her [. . .] and she went all soft and limp in his arms and he laughed” (p. 111). The struggling, fighting woman becomes “limp,” in the arms of the “cursing” white man, the Englishman, and then, reiteratively, in the arms of the “laughing” black man. Then “somebody yelled,” breaking the silence, “’But look the black Englishman! Look the white niggers!’ and then they were all yelling, ‘Look the white niggers! Look the damn white niggers!’” (p. 35). The “somebody” in the crowd who breaks the silence emphasizes the reversing of images between which the Creole family is caught, but especially between which Annette and her daughter are caught, as Tia’s assertions to Antoinette had earlier identified them.
Coco is first mentioned and described in this account of the fire in a specific interruption of the account of Annette’s struggles with Mr. Mason. The interjection proceeds as if in fact a fire weren’t raging: “Our parrot was called Coco[. . . .] After Mr Mason clipped his wings he grew very bad tempered, and though he would sit quietly on my mother’s shoulder, he darted at everyone who came near her and pecked their feet” (p. 35).
Coco, the parrot with “clipped wings,” causes the crowd to become silent again: “The yells stopped.”
I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.
[. . .] I heard someone say something about bad luck and remembered that it was very unlucky to kill a parrot, or even to see a parrot die. They began to go then, quickly, silently, and those that were left drew aside and watched us as we trailed across the grass. They were not laughing any more. (p. 36)
Because of an island superstition, because of the sacrifice of Annette’s parrot, the family is saved. Had the parrot’s wings not been clipped, he might have saved himself, perhaps with other consequences for the family. The parrot, who couldn’t “talk very well,” could, as a result of his own survival instincts and the very restraints that had been inflicted on him, effect the escape of the woman to whom he belonged and whom he tried to defend while he was alive. The collaboration between the constraints delivered by an outsider, the Englishman Mr. Mason, and the beliefs of the islanders—that coming together—that saves Annette and her family. Coco’s worth to her, then, is implicit in his death: in that death, his question becomes her own. Annette could not, like the parrot, answer the question, “Who is there?” Her daughter can.
Antoinette is enabled to answer in part through the very strength of the “spirit” of the place where she was born and raised. The same spirit allows the parrot’s imminent death to invoke a belief that causes the island’s black people to turn away from watching that death—in contradistinction to the reaction of the bystanders who watch Charlotte Brontë’s “Bertha” fall to her death from the battlements of Thornfield Hall. From this same spirit Antoinette derives whatever strength she does have, whatever sense of “self” she retains under the seeming mutations that Rochester has forced upon her. Grace Poole “knows” that spirit, as she notes in her last observations before Antoinette’s voice takes over the final narrative: “I’ll say one thing for her, she hasn’t lost her spirit. She’s still fierce” (p. 146).
“Who is there?” is the question invoked following the aftermath of the fire in an auditory image of Antoinette’s mother as the child describes it. Antoinette awakens to the next of her female caretakers, her Aunt Cora, who tells her, “You’ve been very ill, my darling.” [. . .] “But you are safe with me now. We are all safe” (p. 38). These reassurances are spoken in almost the same words Aunt Cora uses in the midst of the fire itself: “Don’t be afraid, you are quite safe. We are all quite safe” (p. 33). When her Aunt Cora tells Antoinette that her mother is “in the country. Resting,” Antoinette observes, “What was the use of telling her that I’d been awake before and heard my mother screaming ’Qui est la? Qui est la?’ then ‘Don’t touch me. I’ll kill you if you touch me. Coward. Hypocrite. I’ll kill you.’ I’d put my hands over my ears, her screans were so loud and terrible. I slept and when I woke up everything was quiet” (p. 39).
Later in the novel, two descriptions of Annette’s life “in the country” reveal that her “rest” is permanent; her “self” has seemingly “died,” even as her parrot did. Antoinette describes her mother as she saw her in her last visit; Christophine’s remarks concerning Annette, also addressed to Rochester, occur in her critical dialogue with him. Both accounts are made to Rochester as a direct result of his charges against Antoinette after he has received the incriminating “evidence” of the letter from Daniel Cosway.
This is Antoinette’s account, as she speaks to Rochester:
“Pierre died [. . .] and my mother hated Mr Mason. She would not let him go near her or touch her. She said she would kill him, she tried to, I think. So he bought her a house and hired a coloured man and woman to look after her. For a while he was sad but he often left Jamaica and spent a lot of time in Trinidad. He almost forgot her.”
“And you forgot her too,” I could not help saying.
“I am not a forgetting person,” said Antoinette. “But she—she didn’t want me. She pushed me away and cried when I went to see her. They told me I made her worse. [. . .] One day I made up my mind to go to her, by myself. Before I reached her house I heard her crying. I thought I will kill anyone who is hurting my mother. I dismounted and ran quickly on to the veranda where I could look into the room. I remember the dress she was wearing—an evening dress cut very low, and she was barefooted. There was a fat black man with a glass of rum in his hand. He said, ‘Drink it and you will forget.’ She drank it without stopping. He poured her some more and she took the glass and laughed and threw it over her shoulder. It smashed to pieces. ‘Clean it up,’ the man said to the woman, ‘or she’ll walk in it.’
“[. . .] My mother did not look at them. She walked up and down and said, ‘But this is a very pleasant surprise, Mr Luttrell. Godfrey, take Mr Luttrell’s horse.’ Then she seemed to grow tired and sat down in the rocking-chair. I saw the man lift her up out of the chair and kiss her. I saw his mouth fasten on hers and she went all soft and limp in his arms and he laughed. The woman laughed too, but she was angry. When I saw that I ran away.” (pp. 110-11)
At this point Antoinette says to Rochester, “I have said all I want to say. I have tried to make you understand. But nothing has changed.” (Conversely, in relation to the dream-text, the circuit among the women, we recall Antoinette’s remark following her first dream: “I woke next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing” [p. 23].) She laughs, and Rochester replies, “Don’t laugh like that, Bertha.” “My name is not Bertha,” she responds, “why do you call me Bertha?” “Because it is a name I’m particularly fond of,” he answers her. “I think of you as Bertha” (p. 111). Of course we know, because Antoinette told us before, when she visited Christophine, that this is not the first time he has called her Bertha: “He hates me now. [. . .] When he passes my door he says, ‘Goodnight, Bertha.’ He never calls me Antoinette now. He has found out it was my mother’s name. ‘I hope you sleep well, Bertha’—It cannot be worse” (pp. 93-94).
Antoinette’s realization that “I have said all I want to say” in relation to Rochester is a different kind of lesson from that of the dream-text, of what she wants to say, and how to say it, in relation to women. Hers is a realization that reaffirms, finally, the positive bond with her mother, with the mother-text in the achievement of her own text, when she names herself in recognition of herself.
“It doesn’t matter,” she replies to Rochester. “I will tell you anything you wish to know, but in a few words because words are no use, I know that now” (p. 111). (Again, we can recall that after her mother’s death, in relation to her and to the dream, she has already observed that “the words fell to the ground meaning nothing” [p. 51].) Any attempt at conversation with Rochester, of a dialogue between them, is at an end. He has named her, finally re-named her, and she knows that words are “no use” anymore: “I know that now.” That form or aspect of the struggle is at an end. She has, for Rochester, “become” her mother—a “drunken, lying lunatic.” He will see to it. Antoinette, finally, will use that identification just as Rhys has used it, to expand the “meaning” of “Bertha’s” name in her struggle with Rochester for the maintenance and achievement of her self, her own text of self.
The question Antoinette’s mother’s parrot asks, the question her mother Annette asks, Qui est la?, has been answered by Rochester: you are your mother, you are like your mother. See, your name is now your mother’s—but especially your mother’s as I choose it, “Bertha,” not Annette, the name she used. Hence, on the battlements of Thornfield Hall, when Antoinette hears the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger, Qui est la? Qui est la?, she also hears “the man who hated me” calling Bertha! Bertha!—that part of her mother’s “self” that Rochester chose to name, an identification that is not Antoinette’s except as she chooses to find it in her mother. The voice of the man gives his answer to the question of her existence. The recollection of the parrot gives Antoinette the idea that she can, perhaps, fly. Of course, the notion is suicidal even as a memory, for the parrot with its clipped wings could not be expected to escape the burning house. On the other hand, Antoinette can answer the dare of her chosen mirror-image, Tia, and it is this choice that makes the decision for her in the context of her own “naming,” written in the red sky—the screen on which the final dream-text is seen, is dreamt for us, before Antoinette “wakes.”
Christophine’s account of Antoinette’s mother is given us in her critical dialogue with Rochester. She has told him, “It’s lies all that yellow bastard tell you.” Referring to her assertion, he says—he isn’t “asking,” despite the question mark—“And that her mother was mad. Another lie?” Christophine explains:
“They drive her to it. When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away. They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. Question, question. But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her. They won’t let me see her. I try, but no. They won’t let Antoinette see her. In the end—mad I don’t know—she give up, she care for nothing. That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk. That man, and others. Then they have her. Ah there is no God.” (pp. 129-30)
Rochester “reminds her,” “Only your spirits.” “‘Only my spirits,’ she said steadily” (p. 130), the “spirit” that Rochester perceives as fear, a fear of the “spirit of a place.” The same spirit gives Antoinette the center and the strength to be unafraid; it is a “spirit” that has not left her, as Grace Poole notes. “In your Bible,” Christophine continues, “‘it say God is a spirit—it don’t say no others. Not at all. It grieve me what happen to her mother, and I can’t see it happen again. You call her a doll? She don’t satisfy you? Try her once more, I think she satisfy you now. If you forsake her they will tear her in pieces—like they did her mother’” (p. 130). Rochester has, of course, already set that process in motion. But in remembering, in “re-membering” herself and the women who have helped her reach the end of her dream-text, Antoinette effects the wholeness that the process of remembering, through the dream-text, implies. In the vision of the child, Rhys, we remember that “God” is a book. But there are two versions of this book—a father-book and a mother-book, the mother-text. Plainly, she chooses the mother-text for her expression of self and for her model of aesthetic re-presentation. Rochester, just as plainly, can only follow the father-text. Antoinette/Rhys knows, however, that the two texts make up this “strange thing or person,” God, the concept—a “spirit” (for Christophine, “spirits”). Antoinette tries to explain, in another context, what this “thing or person” might be. Rochester has said, “I feel very much a stranger here[. . . .] I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side.” Antoinette replies: “‘You are quite mistaken[. . . .] It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out long ago when I was a child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you call on so often’” (p. 107). She is talking about her island, but also about her mother, for the mother’s “indifference” to the child is part of the context for recognition of self that both offer. However, it is in the holding two in one—the island, her mother—and in the safety in recognizing the indifference of both, as in her conception of God, that one can “love” this “indifference.” Antoinette/Rhys, as a woman caught in the dilemma of relationships, “sees” and “knows” this spirit. It is not in acting antagonistically against difference, against “strangers,” that human beings can achieve this “indifference,” as Rochester seems to think. Rather it comes through noting the difference and then crossing the gap or blending it in, as Antoinette attempts to do.
In the closing moments of Antoinette’s dream-narrative, Rhys disposes of the hard-won and insisted-upon identities—with mother and with mirror-image—that have carried the heroine-narrator this far. At the same time she completes Brontë’s text even in its own terms, allowing us to see the figure of the mad “Bertha” jumping to her death from the battlements of Thornfield Hall, just as it was reported by the male eyewitness of Brontë’s story. Obviously, Antoinette identifies herself momentarily with her mother’s parrot, which in turn is identified, as we see, with her mother’s attempt to escape the “man who hated me,” the “stranger.” The parrot’s call is the question asked upon a stranger’s approach: “Who’s there?” The stranger, as it turns out, is herself, just as the “answer” to the question is “herself.”
Antoinette’s dream-narrative effectively displaces the locus of Antoinette’s identity and then, seemingly, for the contemplation of the space of her own, manifest text, rids her of the consequences of that displacement. In the movement from mother to parrot, the question of the one already the central question of the other, Antoinette moves from the parrot’s call to the image of Tia, to whose gestures she responds, whose voice she hears. “All this,” Antoinette tells us, “I saw and heard in a fraction of a second” (p. 155). The further displacement occurs in another split second in terms of the writing, a rapid movement not only representative of the “simultaneity in time” proper to a dream-text, but also reminiscent of, learned from, the kind of displacement that has proven its own efficacy in the masculine text.
“Someone screamed,” she writes, “and I thought, Why did I scream? I called ‘Tia!’ and jumped and woke” (p. 155). From the parrot’s “call,” through her mother’s question, to Tia’s voice, which she hears, to “someone’s” scream—her own: this is the line of movement that accomplishes the maneuver. (Do we repeat the reading of the text and recall the “someone” who “hated” her in her earliest dream? Do we equate the two to provide us with another kind of mirror-image, that of Rochester as a distorting mirror-image of Antoinette? Do we begin yet another circular reading, another kind of repetition, another kind of dream-text?) We move to the single word that Antoinette’s narrative describes as voiced—a woman’s name, a little black girl’s name, the name of her alleged “mirror-image”: Tia! Although Tia has not appeared in the novel except as a child, we can say that, as Antoinette’s alter ego, she has grown with her. Conversely, the adults are gone, and to effect her achievement of self, Antoinette returns to the time and the place in which the image of her alter ego was originally fixed. She awakes by means of this talisman, this magic. Antoinette’s accomplishment of self, of knowing “what I have to do,” is achieved by the fixing in place of the black child, her “looking-glass,” whom Antoinette/Rhys has used to secure her own image. The saving grace, if we may call it that, the difference, is in the original attempt, which was a desire for a fusion, a melding of self and self.
In rendering a woman’s text, a collectively woven text, the writer ultimately jettisons the most salient subtext(s) to assert her own. Yet, since she retains the weave, she reopens the text, at its formal closure, to a repetition and a rewriting. The adult Christophine and the adult Amélie are missing here. Only the child Tia is used to bolster the white Creole woman’s assertion of self. As she has “grown with” Antoinette as her alter ego, Tia, whose subtext is the most salient in the story, has also been repressed in the text. The subtexts of the two adult women, Christophine and Amélie, would perhaps unbalance, if not overwhelm, the mechanism at this point in a culminating narrative, since Antoinette’s use of Tia here can be said to constitute a return of the repressed. For if the text is dependent on the subtext, the mark of the subtext must be deep, its absence felt and signaled in the writing so as to mark the possibilities of the continuation that is implicit in a dream-text. The censored material in effect completes the manifest text. This may be a lesson that the woman’s text will help us to “unlearn”; such a lesson may be a “necessity” we wish ultimately to discard. And Rhys does at least make what we may call a notation of the even more recessive subtexts of her novel. These subtexts, a single subtext in the sense that I will describe them, are those of Amélie and Sandi.
Antoinette’s description of her mother’s dilemma is a pointer to this subtext. Her ambivalence in designating the “color” of the man who “is in charge of” Antoinette’s mother, Annette, calls our attention to this submerged, almost hidden text. At one point he is identified as “coloured”; at another as “black.” In fact, “he” may be more than one man, as Christophine’s description of the situation suggests. This ambivalence points us to the two figures who seem to have some independence from the manipulations of the societies in which they live. Sandi is the successful, light-colored cousin of Antoinette, with whom, in another story, she might have lived “happily ever after,” the single male figure who offers her care, tenderness, and safety (pp. 42, 141-52). Amélie is the only figure who “goes her own way” within the framework of the story, who is able to “feel sorry” for both Rochester and Antoinette, saying to Rochester, “Yes [. . .] I am sorry for you. But I find it in my heart to be sorry for her too” (p. 116).
The two of them—female and male—seem to represent for Rhys a possibility closed to the other characters, and they remain shadowy figures, only partially formed, not fully integrated into the text. Their shared characteristics are two: their color (not black, not white, but a blend of the two) and their independence. Neither has made a pact with the white culture in a way that constrains their actions, as, for example, Daniel Cosway has. They remain the subtext of an ideal, just as Tia—the desired object for fusion and Antoinette’s alter ego—represents the “mix” that the two of them, a little black girl and a little white girl, might be seen to make into an “ideal.” The difference is that Rhys wrote one of these subtexts—Tia’s—into the story; the other—Amélie and Sandi’s—remains a notation or mere registering of Rhys’s own ultimately ambivalent attitude toward race. It is to Rhys’s credit, at least from the point of view of our reading, that she marks her own censorship in this way.
The salient subtext, then, is unambiguously marked. The “mother-text,” however, remains the most ambiguous text of all in its seemingly overt presentation, overarching as it does both text and subtext (including Brontë’s), encompassing both, offering the original locus for anxiety and identification. The mother-text is made central to both from the opening lines of the novel and woven tightly into the black/white dichotomy: the “Jamaican ladies” in whose “ranks,” those of the “white people,” Antoinette and her mother do not belong, “never approved of” her mother, “because she pretty like pretty self,” as Christophine explained (p. 15). A point of Rochester’s text, seemingly taken from Brontë, makes the mother-daughter bond the thematic crux, interwoven as it is with all the texts. The mark of this thematic crux is his renaming, rechristening, his wife Antoinette with her mother’s alleged name. Significantly for our view of Rhys’s text as a response to Brontë’s, Antoinette’s name in relation to her mother’s is a point of Brontë’s text from which Rhys makes a deliberate break, a break that involves a telling inversion.
In Brontë’s novel, the formal document of Rochester’s marriage to Richard Mason’s sister “Bertha” includes the names of her mother and father as well as her own name. Her father (not a stepfather as in Wide Sargasso Sea, but her natural father) is Jonas Mason. Her mother is named Antoinetta and her daughter, Rhys’s Antoinette, is named Bertha Antoinetta Mason. The mother’s name in Rhys’s text is here given as the daughter’s, Bertha, and the mother in Jane Eyre’s text is designated solely by the name—or a near equivalent—that is her daughter’s alone in Rhys’s—“Antoinetta” (Jane Eyre, p. 255). The nature of the revision marks a curious, compelling insistence in the matter of names and naming. Rhys’s inversion of the names of mother and daughter suggests an “identification” of the daughter with the mother even more pointedly than does Rhys’s text itself. (Rhys does give us a direct textual cue in Rochester’s final emotional monologue. Antoinette, who has become “silence itself,” is addressed cynically: “Sing, Antoinetta. I can hear you now” [p. 138].) Rhys’s avowal, spoken by Antoinette, that “He has found out it [Bertha] was my mother’s name” (p. 94), is a seeming collusion with Rochester’s text, if not with Brontë’s. On the other hand, with some irony Rhys’s acting “for” Antoinette makes an early claim to the identification that both Brontë’s Rochester and Rhys’s Rochester seem to “force” upon Antoinette against her will.
Names are thematically important here; they are important stylistically as well, in Antoinette’s final naming of herself through calling the name of her alter ego Tia in the last dream-narrative. However, again the more crucial story is acted out in the subtext. Naming is a symbolic act: naming of self is an accession to self through the distancing of language, as in “THIS is myDIARY “; naming of others is a means of appropriating their qualities for one’s own purposes. The subtextual movement and its genesis are again a key to the transcription at work in the production of the manifest dream-text. It is the mother-text and its subtext that are basic to the weave of Rhys’s text and to Antoinette’s dream-text. Antoinette answers her mother’s question here by appropriating the subtext of her alter ego, Tia. In doing so, she can be said to return not only to a repression of her own, but to the even more profound repression in her mother’s text. It is not that the mother-text gives the text its meaning in this way. Rather, the mother-text provides the direction(s) of its movement, which in turn provides for its full display of release and repression.23
In posing the question of the mother-text, Qui est la? Who is there?, Rhys also anticipates what Judith Kegan Gardiner calls “a central question of feminist literary criticism”—“Who is there when a woman says ‘I am?’”24 Rhys takes up this question in Wide Sargasso Sea, posing and answering it within the text’s own literary and historical framework, while at the same time attempting to suggest the way to an answer for us in our “real lives.” The suggestion is that we attend to that “book” of our mother’s, as Rhys did in her writing, rather than to the other book, the “large book standing upright and half open” that “made no sense to me.”
The dream-text, then, is embedded in the mother-text, in the mother’s story. In examining the story of Antoinette’s mother and Rhys’s use of it, we encounter the dream-mother of one of the other young women with whom we have previously been concerned—Freud’s Dora. So wide-reaching is the net of the mother-text in any woman’s story.
FREUD’S ACCOUNT of Dora’s dreams is an important part of what was meant to be not only a showpiece for the analysis of a typical case of hysteria, but also an early example of the use of dream analysis. “A periodically recurrent dream,” Freud wrote, “was by its very nature particularly well calculated to arouse my curiosity.” The first of Dora’s dreams had recurred on at least three successive previous occasions and then again more recently when she was under Freud’s treatment. He “determined to make an especially careful investigation of it.”
Here is the dream as related by Dora: “A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed myself quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.’ We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.”25
A comparable capsule version of Antoinette’s account of the fire at Coulibri is as follows:
I woke up and it was still night and my mother was there. She said, “Get up and dress yourself, and come downstairs quickly.” [. . .] “There is no reason to be alarmed,” my stepfather was saying as I came in. [. . .] “Come quickly,” said Aunt Cora[. . . .] But when I looked round for my mother I saw [. . .] she was holding back, struggling. I heard [my stepfather] say, “It’s impossible, too late now.” [. . .] “Wants her jewel case?” Aunt Cora said.
“Jewel case? Nothing so sensible”[. . . .] “She wanted to go back for her damned parrot. I won’t allow it.” (pp. 32-35)
Reading these two accounts juxtaposed, it is difficult not to believe that Rhys is deliberately using and refuting Freud’s reading of Dora’s dream, but no reliable published source verifies the suspicion.26 Rhys may or may not have consciously included Dora’s “rescue” in her effort to “rescue” Brontë’s Bertha. There is sufficient textual evidence, however, for us to compare the two accounts and the use to which they are each put by their separate authors—Freud and Dora in the one case, as co-authors, and Rhys in the other. I will not here discuss Freud’s reading of Dora’s first or second dream in all of their particulars, although the second, too, could be drawn fully into the framework I want to suggest. My intention is to point to those parts of Rhys’s novel and of Dora’s dream that are held in common and to suggest how they seem to interact.27
One of the pivotal questions Freud asks Dora concerns the “jewel-case,” a central element both in Dora’s dream and in Antoinette’s account of the fire at Coulibri. Concerning Dora’s mother and the jewel-case, Freud presses Dora with a leading question: “I daresay you thought to yourself that you would accept [jewelry from her father that her mother was not “very fond of”] with pleasure?” She replies, “I don’t know. I don’t in the least know how Mother comes into the dream.” Freud’s footnote here is that this reply—“I don’t know”—was “the regular formula with which she confessed to anything that had been repressed.”28 We might recall the words of the “interrogator” in “The Trial of Jean Rhys”: “The phrase is not I do not know’ but I have nothing to say.” Rhys’s reply, as we might also recall, is that she had “plenty to say. Not only that, but I am bound to say it.”29
Freud asks Dora, with some delicacy, “Perhaps you do not know that jewel-case’ [Schmuck-kästchen] [along with “box” in the second dream: the words are used similarly in English] is a favourite expression for the same thing that you alluded to not long ago by means of the reticule you were wearing—for the female genitals, I mean.”
“I knew you would say that,” Dora replies. Freud’s footnote here, as we might expect, is that this is “a very common way of putting aside a piece of knowledge that emerges from the repressed.” “That is to say,” Freud continues, “you knew that it was so,—. . . You said to yourself:
“This man is persecuting me; he wants to force his way into my room. My jewel-case’ is in danger, and if anything happens it will be Father’s fault.” For that reason in the dream you chose a situation which expresses the opposite—a danger from which your father is saving you. In this part of the dream everything is turned into its opposite; you will soon discover why. As you say, the mystery turns upon your mother. You ask how she comes into the dream? She is, as you know, your former rival in your father’s affections. In the incident of the bracelet, you would have been glad to accept what your mother had rejected. . . . Then it means that you were ready to give your father what your mother withheld from him. . . . Now bring your mind back to the jewel-case which Herr K. gave you. You have there the starting-point for a parallel line of thoughts, in which Herr K. is to be put in the place of your father just as he was in the matter of standing beside your bed. ... In this line of thoughts your mother must be replaced by Frau K. ... So you are ready to give Herr K. what his wife withholds from him. That is the thought which has had to be repressed with so much energy, and which has made it necessary for every one of its elements to be turned into its opposite. . . . Not only that you are afraid of Herr K., but that you are still more afraid of yourself, and of the temptation you feel to yield to him. In short, these efforts prove once more how deeply you loved him.”30
“Naturally,” Freud observes, “Dora would not follow me in this part of the interpretation.”31
Rhys might have considered and rejected Freud’s interpretation in her presentation of events at Coulibri, in her use of the “jewel case” and the significance it might hold for her and for the readers of her “dream.” In Dora’s dream, it is understood that her mother wanted “to stop and save her jewel-case” and that her father would not allow it. In Antoinette’s account of events, her Aunt Cora suggests that the jewel case is a proper object to be saved. Indeed, Cora’s question, “Wants her jewel case?” seems almost too pointed and abrupt in its interjection in the account, and Mason’s reply, “Nothing so sensible[ . . .] She wanted to go back for her damned parrot. I won’t allow it,” draws our attention back to the parrot, the seemingly central element in the account.
The significance of Aunt Cora’s question, however, becomes clear much later in the book, in Antoinette’s nine-page interruption of Rochester’s narration. Rhys’s return of the narrative to Antoinette at this point is a strategic placing of material essential to the dialogue that the novel enacts, as is the specific dialogue that will soon take place between Rochester and Christophine. This portion of Antoinette’s narrative clarifies the extent of her unwitting complicity with Rochester’s as yet unfocused manipulations. In talking with Christophine, trying to think of whom she can “trust,” she recalls her Aunt Cora. In this recollection the significance of a woman’s “jewel case” in a nineteenth-century marriage (in a class in which a woman might expect to have jewelry of any value) becomes unequivocally clear to her readers, if not thoroughly clear to Antoinette. She describes a quarrel overheard prior to her marriage, a quarrel between her Aunt Cora and her stepbrother, Richard Mason:
“It’s disgraceful,” [Cora] said. “It’s shameful. You are handing over everything the child owns to a perfect stranger. Your father would never have allowed it. She should be protected, legally. A settlement can be arranged[. . . .] That was his intention.”
“You are talking about an honourable gentleman, not a rascal,” Richard said. “I am not in a position to make conditions, as you know very well. She is damn lucky to get him, all things considered. Why should I insist on a lawyer’s settlement when I trust him? I would trust him with my life,” he went on in an affected voice.
“You are trusting him with her life, not yours,” she said[. . . .] [. . .] She [Aunt Cora] was too ill to come to my wedding and I went to say good-bye, I was excited and happy thinking now it is my honeymoon. I kissed her and she gave me a little silk bag. “My rings. Two are valuable. Don’t show it to him. Hide it away. Promise me.”
I promised, but when I opened it, one of the rings was plain gold. I thought I might sell another yesterday but who will buy what I have to sell here? . . . (pp. 95-96)
Antoinette’s Aunt Cora knows the value of a woman’s “jewel case.” It was the only economic recourse, under the law, that she might have if she found herself in extremity, her only independence of means. This resource was what Antoinette’s Aunt Cora tried to provide her by the gift of her rings. However, we may also see “independence”—and violation—in terms of both sex and money. The two are often integral to the same social transactions and cultural valuations.
We have then, in Rhys’s novel, two specific instances of a “denial” of Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s dream. Antoinette’s mother does not want to save her “jewel-case” as Dora’s mother did; instead, Annette wants to save “herself” figuratively, her parrot, Che (which might also be read, if inaccurately, as a corrupt form of that self-accession through language-distancing: “C’est”) Coco, dear Coco, a treasured self. And it is another woman, Aunt Cora, who introduces the significant object, the jewel case, into a heightened discussion at the moment of the fire, for reasons eminently practical from a woman’s point of view.
The furious Antoinette later demonstrates her own knowledge of how important legal and economic resources—access to legal and economic systems—can be. In fact, not until the final narrative does Antoinette demonstrate the antagonism toward this dual “power,” which she might well have felt earlier, perhaps as a child. Then, it was her mother alone who seemed to feel, and to suffer, the consequences of a lack of those resources. “It was when he said legally’ that you flew at him [Richard Mason, her stepbrother, who, as Aunt Cora points out, had “trusted” Rochester with Antoinette’s “life”],” Grace Poole tells her (p. 150). Later, when she is in the room that we recognize as Rochester’s from Brontë’s text, Antoinette remarks, observing that the room is “like a church” but “without an altar,” “Gold is the idol they worship” (p. 154). In this room she “felt very miserable” despite the “softness” of the couch upon which she was sitting (p. 154).
Another Freudian psychoanalytical tool whose efficacy Freud hoped to demonstrate in this case study, along with a close interpretation of dreams, was “transference,” especially in the relationship between analyst and patient. Freud was, he tells us, “obliged to speak of transference, for it is only by means of this factor that I can elucidate the peculiarities of Dora’s analysis. Its great merit, namely . . . unusual clarity ... is closely bound up with its great defect, which led to its being broken off prematurely. I did not succeed,” he confesses, “in mastering the transference in good time.” “For how,” Freud asks the reader, “could the patient take a more effective revenge than by demonstrating upon her own person the helplessness and incapacity of the physician?”32
Later in his life, Freud introduced a revision of his discussion of Dora’s case, in juxtaposition to his discussion of transference:
The longer the interval of time that separates me from the end of this analysis, the more probable it seems to me that the fault in my techniques lay in this omission: I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life. I ought to have guessed that the main source of her knowledge of sexual matters could have been no one but Frau K.—the very person who later on charged her with being interested in those same subjects. Her knowing all about such things and, at the same time, her always pretending not to know where her knowledge came from was really too remarkable. I ought to have attacked this riddle and looked for the motive of such an extraordinary piece of repression. . . . Before I had learnt the importance of the homosexual current of feeling in psychoneurotics, I was often brought to a standstill in the treatment of my cases or found myself in complete perplexity.33
Let us note the “gynaecophilic” love that Freud emphasizes as the “strongest current in [Dora’s] mental life.” It is not female homosexuality that I would emphasize, unless we speak in terms of a “lesbian continuum,” as Adrienne Rich has done, meaning a primary bonding, rather than the sexual interest or focus between and among women.34 Rather, it is literally “gynaecophilia,” love of women. Just as the passionate or sensual love between Rochester and Antoinette is not the point at issue in Wide Sargasso Sea, so the love among or between women that I emphasize as a key to Rhys’s text is not one of sensual passion. It is instead a feeling founded in kinship, recognition, and mutuality, whose genesis is to be found in the mother-text, the bond with the mother.
In Antoinette’s account of the fire at Coulibri, Rhys is in one sense revising Dora’s dream. She brings some of the dream’s latent content to the surface so that, as Freud calls it, “such an extraordinary piece of repression” becomes manifest in the written framework of Rhys’s novel.
When Antoinette awakes, not only from her first childhood dream but also during the fire at Coulibri, her mother is there—not, as in Dora’s dream, her father. Throughout the events of the novel, when Antoinette wakes, a woman caretaker is standing by. Antoinette, as we have seen, watches over another woman sleeping and dreaming near the end of her narrative. When Antoinette “finishes” the dream(s) of which she had given us earlier accounts (the first dream in inchoate form, the second in a more complete, more formal account, as well as the “dream,” the mother-text, that her mother’s drama represents), the several dreams come together: her text and Brontë’s, her dream(s) and Brontë’s, her narrative and Brontë’s. The dreamed events of Part Three complete the events narrated in Part One, culminating in the rewriting of the burning of the house at Coulibri and especially her mother’s part in her dream-text. In a sense, this completion of her own text completes one aspect of Dora’s dream as well, that “part” of Dora’s “pathogenic material”—the “current of feeling” that she withheld from Freud, “a part of which,” he confesses, “I was in ignorance.” This “part” of Dora’s material for dreaming, pathogenic or not, is the mother-text. Its significance in any woman’s life is that it is the “strongest current in her mental life,” as Rhys’s text demonstrates by displaying the structure and the elements of a woman’s “dream-text.”
The question central to the dream and to feminist literary criticism is also the question central to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The parrot, after his wings were clipped, persisted in defending Annette even as he had done throughout his life: Qui est la? Who’s there? Who is there? The answer is to be found in responding to one’s “mirror-image,” even if one sees in the looking-glass the negative of herself, the other, not oneself; one answers in speaking to that other in return. “’Tia!’” Antoinette responds, calling her name, not misnaming her, acting in response to that recognition, to “write” her own name. Rhys recognized her own life in that of Brontë’s Bertha. So might Charlotte Brontë and her Jane Eyre in a different time and place. Rhys also binds her earlier heroines to her last, especially her heroine-narrators, and especially the young Anna Morgan of Voyage in the Dark.
Among the many women here, kinship moves in several directions and through several mediums, through race and class, even through hostility, mistrust, and envy. Our common text is indissoluble. It admits of no final allegiance but the acting out of our common “dream,” which may be found in our waking lives, our common waking lives, as well as in the dreams and dream-work of our “sleep.” We wake to the women who make and reinforce this context of our lives, that life of ours that we “dream” when we “sleep.” Rhys is one of these women; her model, the book of her mother’s; her knowledge, that there is more than one book that makes up that “strange thing or person” called God: there is no such thing as a book, one book, one text. Rhys’s heroine-narrator replies to Rochester—firmly, passionately—when he asks, “Is there another side?”: “There is always the other side, always” (p. 106).