THE TITLE OF this “Postscript” is purposefully sententious. Its subject and context are themselves framed in terms that are unavoidably moralistic, not a fashionable stance in a discussion of literature in the late twentieth century.1 On the other hand, as Kenneth Burke reminds us in A Grammar of Motives, “our word ‘morality’ comes from a Latin word for ‘custom.’”2 If we look at the word that way, buffered by the more commonplace aura of “custom,” we are relieved of some of the burden of explanation, and excuse, for its use. Rhys’s point of view can itself be considered a moral one, as it is given voice in the character of Antoinette and also as it is presented in the aesthetic stance demonstrated in the structure of Wide Sargasso Sea. Likewise, given the weight of the father-text in all its forms in the novel, the institutionalized and religious overtones of such a secular lesson are not inappropriate; nor is such explicitness out of place in an academically oriented discussion, given the origin of the universities in our culture. Furthermore, in the concluding remarks concerning a novel that attempts to answer the kinds of questions that many of us are asking ourselves within such institutionalized formats, to formulate possible answers as a kind of lesson (only one among many that might be taken from the novel, and generalized as well) does not seem out of keeping with the spirit in which the questions themselves are asked. To identify this formulation as a lesson suggests its possible place on an agenda for our future consideration of the ways our culture sees itself and reflects what it sees in our aesthetic productions.
Julia Kristeva asks what is perhaps the most sweeping question of all. As with those questions that we have already posed, the model offered by Rhys’s novel helps us answer it as well. Noting that “it is in the aspiration toward artistic and, in particular, literary creation that woman’s desire for affirmation now manifests itself,” Kristeva asks, “Why literature?”3
Kristeva attempts to answer her question by posing a series of others, most of them rhetorical: “Is it because, faced with social norms, literature reveals a certain knowledge and sometimes the truth itself about an otherwise repressed, nocturnal, secret, and unconscious universe? Because it thus redoubles the social contract by exposing the unsaid, the uncanny? And because it makes a game, a space of fantasy and pleasure, out of the abstract and frustrating order of social signs, the words of everyday communication?”4 An even lengthier series of questions and counter-questions soon follows. In the penultimate paragraph of the essay she posits conditions for an answer to the original question. In answering it, she describes what we can call the “lesson” of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in much the way that Hélène Cixous describes a novel like Rhys’s in posing and answering her questions concerning a woman’s text. Kristeva writes:
It seems to me that the role of what is usually called “aesthetic practices” must increase not only to counter-balance the storage and uniformity of information by present-day mass media, databank systems, and, in particular, modern communications technology, but also to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond itself,5 to demystify, therefore, the community of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalizes and equalizes. In order to bring out—along with the singularity of each person, and, even more, along with the multiplicity of every person’s possible identifications (with atoms, e.g., stretching from the family to the stars—the relativity of his/her symbolic as well as biological existence, according to the variation in his/her specific symbolic capacities. And in order to emphasize the responsibility which all will immediately face of putting this fluidity into play against the threats of death which are unavoidable whenever an inside and an outside, a self and an other, one group and another, are constituted. At this level of interiorization with its social as well as individual stakes, what I have called “aesthetic practices” are undoubtedly nothing other than the modern reply to the eternal question of morality.6
As I emphasize throughout my discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea, it is not only the thematic import of the novel that carries the lesson but also the “aesthetic practice” demonstrated there that makes its most forceful assertion and furnishes the weight of its argument. The model of the woman’s text, the dream-text, presents the strongest argument for the morality of the paradigm it offers, as well as providing evidence for our highest evaluation of the distinction of Rhys’s literary achievement.
I have used the words “model” and “paradigm” almost interchangeably throughout most of my discussion. Now is the time to make a clear distinction between them. The woman’s dream-text does offer a model. We need feminine texts—that is to say, texts consciously founded in the mother-text: novels, fiction, narratives, essays—from both women and men. But the example offered in Rhys’s presentation of the dream-text is not simply a “model.” It is a paradigm. In explanation I offer a set of “pocket definitions” from The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English, less exhaustive than its parent-text, but therefore of more commonplace use. Any of these definitions adhere strictly to the more authoritative parent-text.
A paradigm, defined as “the inflexions of a word tabulated as an example,” is an example of how we “modify [words] to express grammatical relationships.” “Grammar,” defined not only as the “science of the sounds (phonology), inflexions (accidence), and constructions (syntax), used in a language,” is also the “study” of that entity described as “the general principles on which existing modes of verbal expression rest,” as we are all too (un)comfortably aware. I use the word “grammar” precisely to talk about the expanded “grammar” of our language use as it is expressed in our aesthetic constructions. Kenneth Burke implicitly defines what he means by “grammar” when he asks, “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?”7 Adding Burke’s reminder that our sense of morality corresponds in some manner or kind with our customs, we observe that a new “paradigm” is what Rhys’s dream-text offers, and what she makes plain thematically as well.
The moral of Rhys’s story, and the morality of the text it displays, is what the woman’s text—here, a woman’s novel—can offer. Rhys offers new inflections on the “word of the father,” the text that Burke explicates at such length and upon which he rings so many changes without leaving its framework. Rhys offers a new grammar, the general principles on which new modes of verbal expression might rest: that of the woman’s idiom. She is, however, using the form or genre called “the novel,” which was given to us by the grammar of masculine preoccupation with the written word. She uses some of the customs of that convention, eschewing others, to offer the unconventional: a paradigm that gives us a set of new inflections to “express grammatical relationships,” which is to say, the relationships that exist in our culture before we express them in the language we use with one another.
I am not suggesting a structuralist formulation or interpretation as that term has come to be understood and is described by Jonathan Culler, who accurately qualifies the description: “In simplest terms, structuralists take linguistics as a model and attempt to develop ‘grammars’—systematic inventories of elements and their possibilities of combination—that would account for the form and meaning of literary works.”8 My reading of Rhys’s novel does not depart from the more traditional view that the novel, as a genre, can itself be considered a model for the relationships in the culture that produces it, mirroring, as we like to think a novel does, “real life,” the life we lead in the societies of our culture and in our personal—our autobiographical—lives. And I emphasize that in the paradigm Rhys offers, and in the grammar of the idiom through which the paradigm is revealed, her novel concerns itself foremost with the ethics of the community and cultures of which she felt herself a part. My own concerns as a reader are compelled by a similar point of view. If there is a structuralist component here it is in the positing of a positive restructuring of our normative possibilities, of the ways we look at ourselves and others in our society. In short, as Kristeva puts it, the novel can be viewed as one kind of “modern reply to the eternal question of morality.”
The novel as an artifact is also an object for, and a tabulation of, the displaying of these new inflections. It shows us the new shape that the “written word” can assume in a woman’s hand, in the fixing on the page of a woman’s voice in her own idiom, even if the fixing of that voice opens itself in the process of its representation to a modifying repetition and rewriting. A woman’s text based on this model cannot be univocal, and it does not make an unequivocal statement. It has many voices, even if its “author” signs her name to it, the publisher affixes her name to it and thereby signs it also, even as Antoinette ultimately affixes her signature to her dream. But the signature is shared even there, for the place of Antoinette’s signing of her name in Rhys’s novel is also the space that is occupied in common with Brontë’s text. In addition, the place for the fixing of the signature is also the place—the seeming closure—in which is signaled the opening out of her text, the invitation to its rewriting and the beginning of another text of difference.
Just as Rhys reveals to us that “that strange person or thing called God” is not one book, but two, so the vision that Charlotte Brontë reveals, in her own transmuted autobiography, Villette, is a figure that she finally recognizes as having “upon her something neither of woman nor of man.”9 The woman’s text offers a gender-free paradigm, one preeminently suited for a departure from the confining paradigm of the single book, the father-text, whose grammar indeed is founded in “the general principles on which existing modes of verbal expression rest.” Rhys structures her novel to show us how a muted text can be revealed to dominate a formerly “dominant” text.
Such a presentation demonstrates a basically moral concern: how human beings, with our likenesses as well as our differences, can express those differences without the strategies of exclusion and appropriation implicit in the masculine model. The rhetorical performance of Rhys’s novel is the demonstration of an answer to Kristeva’s question: “Why literature?” The key to a new literature can be found in the model for a woman’s rhetoric, a model that we can also call her mother’s book—the mother’s book, for a woman’s rhetoric is not exclusive to women. The mother’s book belongs to all women and men.
THE TITLE OF this book is “Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text.” As a reader may have noticed, I do not use the plural designation until late in the work, for only upon full realization of the collaborative and collective endeavor that produces an individual woman’s novel does the accuracy of calling such a novel a women’s text become clear. The mutuality of purpose attendant upon the act of women reading women and women writing women is demonstrated in the move from the nineteenth-century woman writer’s hidden plot—the “muted” idiom gone underground and presented “slant,” while the overt presentation remains couched in the dominant idiom —to the overt display of the two idioms in conflict that Rhys presented in 1934 in Voyage in the Dark. Rhys gives the emergent feminine pattern an especial clarity in the structure of the dream-text of Wide Sargasso Sea, in which we see the collaborative process of women’s reading and writing to yield opportunities for a recognition of our common text as well as of our individuating, contextually based texts of difference.
“How OLD was I when I smashed the doll’s face?” Rhys begins an anecdote from her childhood. “I remember vividly the satisfaction of being wicked. The guilt was half triumph.”
Two dolls had arrived from England[. . . .] One was fair, one was dark. Both beautiful. But as soon as I saw the dark doll I wanted her as I had never wanted anything in my life before. While I was still gazing my little sister made a quick grab.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh no, I saw her first.”
But when I tried to take the doll away she yelled and my mother rushed to her rescue.
“You must let your little sister have it. You don’t want to grow up a selfish little girl whom nobody will love, do you?”
“I don’t care.”
“Silly. You ought to be pleased she’s so happy.” Etc., etc. “Now here’s the fair one. She’s just as pretty. Even prettier. And look, her eyes open and shut.” “I don’t like her,” I said. “Don’t be silly. Don’t be selfish.” With the fair doll in my arms I walked away. “Where are you going?”
“Into the garden.” I walked out of the sun, into the shadow of the big mango tree. I laid the fair doll down. Her eyes were shut. Then I searched for a big stone, brought it down with all my force on her face and heard the smashing sound with delight. (Smile Please, pp. 30-31)
“There was a great fuss about this,” Rhys tells us. “Why? Why had I done such a naughty, a really wicked thing?”
I didn’t know. I was puzzled myself. Only I was sure that I must do it and for me it was right, (p. 31)
Indeed, figuratively, to “smash the doll’s face” was the “right thing” for Rhys to do, and in her writing practice she has done just that. She shows us the woman breaking out of the Olympia complex, out of the constraints that would make her doll-like—silent, immovable, unseeing—even if she does have eyes that “open and shut.” When the child Rhys lays the “fair doll” down in the garden, the doll’s eyes, she notes, are “shut.” She smashes the unseeing mask of the doll’s face with a stone, just as in Wide Sargasso Sea the heroine-narrator’s alter-ego, Tia, picks up a stone to hurl at the face of the little white girl, Antoinette. And, also “in the garden,” the man “Rochester” is almost able to “see” himself as something “other” than himself, only to discover finally that he is the “doll,” the manipulated marionette.
Iconoclasm takes on a heightened, near-literal meaning when we look at the interwoven text of Rhys’s life and work in the culture(s) of which she is a part. Rhys was a native speaker of more than one muted idiom in a culture controlled by the iconography of the “fair doll” and its putative fathers. In smashing the doll’s face, breaking the icon, she gives voice and movement to a women’s text. In so doing she shows us how other muted speakers can break the frames of perception in which they have been bound by the constraints of the dominant idiom and its culture. The women’s text as Rhys presents it is iconoclastic in more ways than one. It shows the man to be prisoner of his own constructions; he maintains his own prison and tightens his own bonds. The dominant idiom is shown to be caught in its own inflexibility. The women’s text, in contrast, moves among its collaborative players in a shared narration that opens out to a continuation of our common story, with the addition of difference—without which there is no collaboration, or finally, and not paradoxically, the possibility for a commonality of understanding.
In smashing the doll’s face, a mask not unlike the Carnival masks worn by the black women on Dominica and featured prominently in Voyage in the Dark, the mask of the doll that native speakers of all muted idioms have worn so uncomfortably for so long, Rhys shows us our powers of movement, speech, and sight.
After the incident related above, the child Jean, in her Great-Aunt Jane’s arms, declares, “They are always expecting me to do things I don’t want to do and I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.” In those arms, too, she realizes that she might weep for the fair doll as well (p. 31). Rhys’s adult comments echo the child’s original response to her situation. Concerning her experience as a young woman, Rhys remarked, “I don’t speak their language and I never will.” In the last years of her life, she wrote, “I have plenty to say. Not only that, but I am bound to say it. [. . .] I must. [. . .] I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death” (p. 133).
Rhys has given us one answer to the “eternal question of morality,” to Kristeva’s question “Why literature?” The “wicked thing” she did in smashing the doll’s face, like the “low” and “immoral” spectacle of the actress Vashti to which Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe gives witness, was to remove the mask of the muted speaker, to speak her own language in her writing life and to put such a spectacle on display for us. In Brontë’s text, Lucy Snowe remains a moment. In Rhys’s, the smashing of the doll’s face takes center stage. Rhys faced and met the “responsibility,” as Kristeva puts it, of putting “into play [the “fluidity” that “brings out” both the “singularity of each person” along with the “multiplicity of that person’s possible identifications” and the “relativity” of that person’s “symbolic as well as biological existence”] against the threats of death which are unavoidable when there is an inside and an outside, a self and an other, one group and another.” In her aesthetic practice, Rhys shows us a way out of the bounds of an oppositional cultural text that attempts to maintain itself by adoption and imposition of the “unifying” tool of a dominant idiom. She smashes the doll’s face so that we all might see and, in turn, remove the other masks we wear, masks that have muted and constrained too many of us for too long. Indeed, Rhys has “earned her death,” and in doing so, she leaves us in no doubt of the answer to the question, “Why literature?”