1. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” p. 6.
2. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
3. See Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse, pp. 23-24, and “The Relation of the Whole to the Part,” p. 17.
4. See Suleiman and Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text, and Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism, for essays, overview, and evaluation, and for annotated bibliographies. A more recent collection, Flynn and Schweickart, Gender and Reading, does indeed concentrate on “what will happen to reader-response criticism if feminists enter the conversation” (p. 39). See especially Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” pp. 31-62.
5. As Schweickart describes the situation, “[F]eminist readings of women’s writing opens [sic] up space for another, equally important, critical project, namely, the articulation of a model of reading that is centered on a female paradigm. . . . The dialogic aspect of the relationship between the feminist reader and the woman writer suggests the direction that such a theory might take” (Gender and Reading, p. 52). My discussion of Rhys and her work offers a description of one such female paradigm.
6. Iser, The Implied Reader; Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 71.
7. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” p. 12.
8. Wilson, “Readers in Texts,” p. 860.
9. Gallop, “Writing and Sexual Difference.”
10. Quoted ibid., p. 803.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 804.
13. Fetterley, The Resisting Reader.
14. Millett, Sexual Politics.
15. Woolf to Hugh Walpole, 1932; Letters, p. 142.
16. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 279. All further page references within the text are to this edition.
17. Rich, “XXI,” p. 36.
1. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel.
2. Hernadi, “The Erotics of Retrospection,” p. 244.
3. For another view of a performative text that focuses on a male novelist, see Wadlington, Reading Faulknerian Tragedy. Wadlington examines many of the same concerns that are highlighted in this study, presenting what he calls an “anthropology of rhetoric.” The masculine writer I myself would pair with Rhys in this regard is William Faulkner.
4. Miles, “Portrait of the Marxist,” p. 31.
5. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 52.
6. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” pp. 245-64.
7. Kolodny, “Some Notes on Defining a ‘Feminist Criticism,’” p. 90.
8. Morgan, “Feminism and Literary Study,” p. 816.
9. Baym, Woman’s Fiction, p. 19.
10. Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading,” p. 463.
11. Lacan, “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” pp. 38-72; orig. written in 1956 as the opening text of Ecrits. Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” pp. 31-113.
12. Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading,” pp. 463-64; emphasis in original.
13. Kolodny, “Dancing through the Minefield,” p. 18.
14. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” p. 35.
15. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 73.
16. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 258.
17. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 81.
18. Moers, Literary Women; Spacks, The Female Imagination.
19. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 78.
20. Ibid., p. 73.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., pp. 75-76; my emphasis.
23. Ibid., p. 76.
24. Ibid.; my emphasis.
25. Just as I explore a single writing practice or paradigm in this study, DuPlessis’s Writing beyond the Ending identifies and catalogs close to a dozen strategies by which modern women writers have attempted to write beyond a conventionally masculinist aesthetic.
26. Ibid., p. 85.
27. Jehlen, “The House of Mirth and Portrait of a Lady.” See also Jehlen’s “Archimedes.”
28. Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 5.
29. Ibid.
30. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 98.
31. Ibid., p. 101.
32. Arnold, “Lesbians and Literature”; emphasis in original, p. 29.
1. Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, whose title essay appears in translation (tr. Claudia Reeder) in New French Feminisms; Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together”; Cixous and Clement, Lajeune nee; and Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa.”
2. Gielgud, interview on “The Dick Cavett Show,” Fall 1981.
3. Russ, The Female Man, pp. 213-14.
4. Ibid.; my emphasis.
5. Wharton, The House of Mirth, pp. 141-43.
6. Brontë, Villette, pp. 179-80.
7. Ibid. In Sexual Politics, Millett calls Lucy’s description “deliberately philistine” (p. 202).
8. Brontë, Villette, pp. 234-35.
9. Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 141.
10. Brontë, Villette, p. 234.
11. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 424; my emphasis.
12. Strouse, Alice James, p. 118.
13. See Heath, “Difference,” p. 57. See also Showalter’s The Female Malady, pp. 147-54, for an incisive discussion of Charcot’s practice at the Salpêtrière.
14. Ibid., pp. 57-58; emphasis in original.
15. Ibid., p. 58.
16. Strouse, Alice James, p. 118.
17. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” p. 39.
18. Ibid., p. 37; my emphasis.
19. Ibid., p. 38.
20. Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James, pp. 15-16; emphasis in original.
21. Strouse, Alice James, p. 118.
22. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 85.
23. Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences” and “Female Sexuality.” See also Lacan, “Seminar on The Purloined Letter.”
24. Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 199.
25. Ibid., p. 202.
26. Ibid., p. 204.
27. Brontë, Villette, p. 233.
28. Russ, The Female Man, p. 159.
29. The entry for St. Teresa (1515-82) in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 3rd ed., reads as follows: “a Spanish saint and author, who entered the Carmelite sisterhood and became famous for her mystic visions. Her works include ‘El Camino de la Perfecci6n’ and ‘El Castillo interior.’ She was great not only as a mystic, but as an energetic reformer of the Carmelite Order and a foundress of new convents. Her ‘Book of the Foundations’ narrates her ceaseless journeys for this purpose and the continually growing labour of organization.”
30. Adams, “Ecstasy,” p. 57.
31. Grahn, The Work of a Common Woman.
32. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 219.
33. Ibid., p. 220.
34. Ibid., p. 227.
35. Hoffmann, “The Sand-Man,” pp. 210-11.
36. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 226.
37. Hoffmann, p. 205.
38. Russ, The Female Man, pp. 158-59; my emphasis.
39. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 226.
40. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 15 and passim. For a discussion that adds even greater moral resonance to our questioning of the proprietorship of the gaze, see de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, a collection of essays that treats an overtly visual medium, focusing on women and cinema in that intersecting area defined by the subtitle (Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema).
1. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, p. 20.
2. Ibid., p. 21.
3. Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative’, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980) and New Literary History 13 (1982); Jelinek, ed., Women’s Autobiography, and James Olney, ed., Autobiography.
4. Bruss, The Autobiographical Act, p. 14.
5. Jelinek, ed. Women’s Autobiography, p. 4.
6. See Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence for a recent restatement of the masculine point of view concerning the rules governing the “internal development of literature,” as Rene Wellek and Austin Warren call it (Theory of Literature, p. 235).
7. Jelinek, ed., Women’s Autobiography, p. 6.
8. Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is, Bruss tells us, “in many ways an act groping for an appropriate form,” an “autobiography [that] was at best a side effect of his actual intention to give witness to abounding grace in the place where he had discovered it” (p. 34). About her last exemplar, Vladimir Nabokov, Bruss remarks that in Nabokov’s blend of parodic autobiography and fiction, in Lolita, “Humbert’s confessions parallel in ways too numerous for accident the confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau” (p. 129). The masculinist’s attitude toward autobiography, his description of it as well as his practice of it, would seem not so different from the emphasis on the “individual” in masculine fiction.
9. Jelinek, ed., Women’s Autobiography, p. 6.
10. Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading,” p. 464.
11. Rich, “XXI”; my emphasis.
12. Miller, “Women’s Autobiography in France,” p. 260; emphasis in original.
13. Ibid., pp. 270, 271; emphasis in original.
1. Marks and de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms, p. 6.
2. As Marks and de Courtivron observe, Simone de Beauvoir broke this pattern in theoretical or critical writing in 1949 with The Second Sex, because at the time she did not consider herself a feminist. “Her text does not defend, does not answer previous attacks. Although she recapitulates them, the center of her study is elsewhere. . . . The focus of the argument is an analysis of process rather than an enumeration or realignment of categories. It took eight centuries for this shift to take place” (p. 7; my emphasis).
3. Gauthier, “Is There Such a Thing as Women’s Writing?,” p. 163; emphasis in original.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 164.
6. Miller, “Emphasis Added,” p. 42.
7. Ibid.
8. Gauthier, “Is There Such a Thing as Women’s Writing?,” p. 162.
9. Ibid.; emphasis in original.
10. Ibid., pp. 162-63; emphasis in original.
11. In “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” Elaine Showalter recommends to us an “analysis of female culture . . . carried out by. . . Shirley and Edwin Ardener,” who “have tried to outline a model of women’s culture which is not historically limited and to provide a terminology for its characteristics” (p. 199). The shift in terminology that Showalter suggests can inform our own analyses is based in a shift or change in our descriptive vocabulary.
12. Ibid., p. 200; my emphasis.
13. Showalter herself dismisses this focus using the very words Gauthier offers: “The holes in discourse, the blanks and gaps and silences, are not the spaces where female consciousness reveals itself but the blinds of a ‘prison-house of language’” (p. 193).
14. A brief account of her life forms the first chapter of Thomas Staley’s study, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, on which Rhys was working at the time of her death on May 14, 1979, contains a corrected chronology of the events in her life. Her birthdate, for example, is often given incorrectly; Staley presents it, for instance, as 1894. The correct date is 1890. Three more recent books update the chronology and presentation of Rhys’s life and work. See Angier, Jean Rhys, for a usefully brief treatment of Rhys’s life and work discussed chronologically and in tandem. Also see Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, pp. 437-41, 448-50 and passim, which places Rhys against the context of the literary community of the Left Bank in the Paris of the first four decades of this century, noting that “like the women of her fiction, Jean Rhys did not find a place for herself on the literary Left Bank; she was an outsider among outsiders” (p. 448). Selma James, Ladies and Mammies, pp. 57-95, offers a brief but cogent and insightful analysis of Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in terms of Rhys’s identity as a white West Indian woman, always the foreigner, the alien.
15. Wyndham, Introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea, p. 9.
16. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” p. 7.
17. Pritchett, “Displaced Person,” pp. 8-10; my emphasis. Pritchett’s use of the word capital here is precise in the context of a world in which money in the hands of men makes all the difference.
18. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” p. 7.
19. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” p. 30.
20. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” p. 7.
21. Pritchett, “Displaced Person,” p. 10.
22. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” p. 31.
23. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 104.
24. Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 9. All further page references in the text are to this edition.
25. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 20.
26. See overview and discussion in Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic; Showalter, A Literature of Their Own; Moers, Literary Women; Baym, Woman’s Fiction; and Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading.”
27. See Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, pp. 25, 27, 140-41, and passim.
28. See Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces.
29. It can be argued that such privileging of the “novel” as an art form is precisely what Woolf was working out in the essays and in her later work. See Furman, “A Room of One’s Own: Reading and Absence.” She writes: “A Room of One’s Own . . . investigates the topic of women and fiction, and in the process asserts itself as both a theoretical discourse and a fiction, an explicit statement and a literary endeavor (‘I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here . . .’). Thus, one way of reading A Room of One’s Own seriously is to look for embodiment of its ideological content within its artistic expression” (p. 100). I agree with Furman that in Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own, as well as in the attempt represented by The Pargiters, Woolf is seeking new “artistic formulations” and successfully and [auto]biographically displaying a text of “self” that she has not presented before.
30. The phrase is Colette’s. See Miller, “Women’s Autobiographies in France,” p. 269: “We are given in the autobiographies [of women] clues telling us where to look, or not to look, for what Colette calls the ‘unsaid things.’”
31. Rhys, Smile Please, pp. 20-21.
32. Hoffmann, “The Sand-Man,” p. 185.
33. See Eisenstein and Jardine, eds., The Future of Difference, pp. 1-70. Also see Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering; and Gardiner, “On Female Identity and Writing by Women,” pp. 347—61. Gardiner’s essay includes specific discussion of Rhys.
34. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 64.
35. Bowen, Drawn from Life, p. 167.
36. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” p. 7.
37. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” p. 31.
38. Mellown, “Characters and Themes,” p. 464.
39. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” p. 31.
40. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” p. 7.
41. See Olney, ed., Autobiography, pp. 17-18.
42. Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” p. 220.
43. Athill, Foreword to Smile Please, pp. 6-7.
44. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” pp. 30—31.
45. Ibid., p. 31.
46. Mellown, “Characters and Themes,” p. 470.
47. Ibid., p. 467; my emphasis.
48. See Nebeker, Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage, Chapter 3, “Voyage in the Dark,” especially pp. 39, 43-46. Also see James, Jean Rhys, p. 34.
49. See Rhys, Smile Please, pp. 103-5. Nebeker also notes this biographical, and autobiographical, incident; see note 48, above.
50. Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” p. 223.
1. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” p. 7.
2. Wyndham, Introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea, p. 6.
3. Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 84. All further page references in the text are to this edition.
4. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 20.
5. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, pp. 76-77. All further page references in the text are to this edition.
6. See Ellmann’s discussion of the novel’s possibilities in women’s hands. Her discussion is not thoroughly optimistic, but she touches on the problematical aspects of the “under-life” and the “sub-conversation” that women are advantageously positioned to present (Thinking about Women, pp. 221-29).
7. Gauthier, “Is There Such a Thing as Women’s Writing?,” p. 163.
8. Ibid., p. 164.
9. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 143.
10. Ibid., p. 127.
1. Rhys, Smile Please, pp. 104-5. Subsequent page references are incorporated into the text; unless otherwise noted, parenthetical page references in this chapter are to Smile Please.
2. Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” p. 223.
3. Ibid., p. 224.
4. Ford, “Preface to a Selection of Stories,” p. 148.
5. Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” p. 225.
6. Plante, “Jean Rhys: A Remembrance,” p. 267.
7. Ibid., p. 266.
8. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 133. Plante’s is a journalistic biography, a first-person account that self-dramatizes and becomes, in part, his own autobiography. Rhys’s remarks are overtly autobiographical.
9. Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” p. 229.
10. Ibid., p. 232.
11. Pritchett, “Displaced Person,” p. 8.
12. Abel, “Women and Schizophrenia,” p. 157.
13. Ibid., p. 158.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 163.
16. Ibid., p. 176; ellipses in original.
17. Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, pp. 100-101. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
1. Rhys’s short stories are collected in Tigers Are Better Looking, which includes a selection from The Left Bank; and Sleep It Off, Lady. Athill’s foreword (pp. 7-8) gives a brief account of the circumstances of the radio production. Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” p. 234; first ellipses in original; second ellipses, mine.
2. Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” pp. 234-35.
3. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, pp. 79-80.
4. Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 95-96.
5. “The eye (so active always in fiction) gives its own interpretation of impressions that the mind has been receiving in different terms ... so that all the time [as we read] ... we have been aware of check and stimulus, of spectral architecture built up behind the animation of variety and scene” (Woolf, “Phases of Fiction,” p. 117).
6. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” p. 31.
7. The “dream book,” as Rhys called Wide Sargasso Sea in a letter to Francis Wyndham (The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 214), was variously titled “Dream” (p. 208) and “Le revenant” (p. 213). “It [Wide Sargasso Sea] should have been all a dream I know with start and finish present day” (p. 216). Concerning finishing the novel, Rhys wrote to Diana Athill, “So the book must be finished, and that must be what I think about it really. I don’t dream about it anymore” (p. 301).
8. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 85.
9. Brown, Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance, pp. 52-53.
10. Ibid., p. 53.
11. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 311-312.
12. Ibid., p. 312.
13. Ibid., passim.
14. Brown, Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance, p. 53.
15. Ibid., p. 55.
16. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 349.
17. With the exception of the black men, the local islanders, who (except for the “Young Bull,” who is a stranger like Rochester) serve in a position auxiliary to the women. They are not men who represent or use the power offered by the system through which Rochester and the colored man, Daniel Cosway, for example, define themselves.
18. Williams, “The Flamboyant Tree,” p. 39.
19. Ibid.
20. See Rabinowitz (“Assertion and Assumption,” pp. 408-19) for another view of the way in which these “gray areas” may offer “the firmest reality in a novel” (p. 416).
21. Gauthier, “Is There Such a Thing as Women’s Writing?” p. 162, emphasis in original; Nebeker, Jean Rhys, p. 169.
22Nebeker, Jean Rhys, p. 135.
23. For a differently focused discussion of identity and the mother-text in Wide Sargasso Sea, see Scharfman, “Mirroring and Mothering.”
24. Gardiner, “On Female Identity and Writing by Women,” p. 348.
25. Freud, Dora, p. 81. Freud’s footnote here tells us, “In answer to an inquiry Dora told me that there had never really been a fire at their house.”
26. Rhys may have read this analysis of Freud’s. Staley writes, “. . . in the 1920’s . . . Rhys found a book on psychoanalysis, but to her the man who wrote it was surely wrong. She hoped then that someday a man would write about women fairly—an unfulfilled hope which provided her with another impulse to write” (p. 4). Staley does not give us the specific source of this information, however. Concerning Rhys’s reading habits in general, see Nebeker, Jean Rhys, p. 204; Plante, “Jean Rhys,” pp. 277-78; and Vreeland, “Jean Rhys,” p. 236; for the time during which she was writing Wide Sargasso Sea, see Nebeker, Jean Rhys, p. 127. Also see The Letters of Jean Rhys. In addition, the Jean Rhys collection at the University of Tulsa includes a large collection of letters, manuscripts, and autobiographical material; the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds some additional material, primarily a small collection of letters.
27. In this discussion I inevitably simplify much that is valid and useful in the complex of Freud’s perceptions and analytical practice. Similarly, much of Dora’s case is not discussed. However, a generalized application of this sort can perhaps be of some comprehensive use. Two excellent collections of essays offer detailed readings of Dora’s case and of Freud’s analysis: In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, ed. Bernheimer and Kahane, and The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Garner, Kahane, and Sprengnether. See also Showalter, The Female Malady, pp. 15861.
28. Freud, Dora, pp. 86-87.
29. Rhys, Smile Please, pp. 132-33.
30. Freud, Dora, pp. 87-88; emphasis in original.
31. Ibid., p. 88.
32. Freud, Dora, pp. 140-42. Because of his professional interest in her case, Freud felt, I think, a genuine regret at Dora’s stopping of the treatment. But some of her “revengefulness” apparently hit home, and his remarks, some of them perhaps inadvertent, show us something of the man, rather than the analyst. We should keep in mind that Freud may have offered the proof of his “humanity” to us deliberately.
33. Ibid., p. 142.
34. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” pp. 631-60, especially p. 648.
1. Some commentators, Cummins and Thorpe among them, view this aspect of characterization in the novel as a positive reinforcement of Rhys’s “sympathetic” rendering of Rochester. It is a mark of sympathy for the character. However, in my reading of the novel, it does not suggest a positive view of him vis-à-vis Antoinette; their positions are not equalized or neutralized by virtue of the sympathy that Rhys extends to Rochester (see Thorpe, “The Other Side,’” p. 103). Characterological readings inadvertently displaying a masculinist bias are often at work in commentary on Rhys.
2. Cf. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 104, 121, 146-47.
3. Kamuf, “Writing Like a Woman,” p. 289.
4. Quoted ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 298; emphasis in original.
7. Cummins, “Point of View,” pp. 370-71; Staley, Jean Rhys, p. 100; Thorpe, “The Other Side,’” p. 103.
8. Kamuf, “Writing Like a Woman,” p. 289.
9. Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?,” p. 53; emphasis in original. Cixous’s theoretical work has been especially compelling for American readers. However, so far she has not applied her theory and general analysis to a specific textual examination of an individual woman’s fictional work. In explicating the ways in which a “womantext” reveals itself, she has looked to male texts, describing the feminine in the work of Jean Genet, for example, or, more recendy, using Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass as the basis for her discussion (pp. 231-51). Her own novels—Vivre l’orange, for example—attempt to demonstrate her theory, but in my reading they seem primarily to demonstrate the aspect of her thinking that is the least helpful in a general application of her overall theory. This aspect shows itself in “Castration or Decapitation?” in Cixous’s final emphasis on the “tactility” and deliberate “archaism” in the feminine text (p. 54). The metaphorization of a woman’s body, even if the maneuver is in a woman’s hands, is for me the least useful of Cixous’s suggestions and descriptions, as it would appear to be for others (see Miller, “Women’s Autobiography in France,” p. 271, for example). Finally, Cixous’s theory itself becomes diffuse if it rests solely on general description, no matter how acute, and on masculine examples of fictional revelations of the “feminine.”
10. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” p. 16.
11. Kamuf, from the title to her essay, “Writing Like a Woman,” p. 89.
12. Staley, Jean Rhys, p. 100.
13. Cummins, “Point of View,” pp. 370—71.
14. Kamuf, “Writing Like a Woman,” p. 289.
15. Freud, “Uncanny,” pp. 220-21; emphasis in original.
16. Ibid., p. 221.
17. Ibid., pp. 224-25.
18. Ibid., pp. 225-26.
19. Ibid., p. 226.
20. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” p. 15; emphasis in original.
21. Strouse, Alice James, p. 120.
22. Ibid., p. 118.
23. The hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden, is also Narcissus’s place. Rochester, like the dreamer-lover in the Romance of the Rose, finds himself looking not only into (and “through”) the “eyes” of the lady in that secret place, a place where earlier he had stayed “for hours, unwilling to leave” (Wide Sargasso Sea, p. 73), but finally—and primarily—what he sees is his own image; and, like Narcissus, he loses what he thinks he has found. The allegory here, like that of the Romance, comes to center itself on the impediments, the “thorns and briars,” of the garden and its possibilities. The man, the Narcissus-figure, loses himself finally for love of his own image, unlike Antoinette who finds her self in response to an other, the mirror image of her alter-ego. In finding and seeing “the lady’s eyes” in the secret place, the man also realizes he cannot sustain the vision. And the place of vision and reflection itself becomes the locus of a redoubled image and reflection of himself and his world. “Her” eyes become his and the moment of seeing becomes the occasion for a return to the strictures and constraints of his world, the “real” world, as it opposes the dream of the garden.
24. Thorpe, “The Other Side,’” p. 103.
25. As Luengo points out, the Gothic and neo-Gothic influence on Rhys’s presentation is not thoroughly remarked (“Wide Sargasso Sea and the Gothic Mode,” p. 232). See also Ramchand’s discussion of what has been termed “Caribbean Gothic” in “Terrified Consciousness,” pp. 224-25, and Helman, “Charlotte Brontë’s New Gothic,” pp. 165-80.
26. Rochester never fully accedes to the “Symbolic” (to use Lacanian terminology) represented by the Name of the Father. (See Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, pp. 239-40. Also see p. 210 for the concept of the “Imaginary” and pp. 250-52 for a description of the “Mirror-phase,” which “is said to constitute the matrix and first outline of what is to become the ego.”) One could, in other particulars as well (e.g., the lack, the “blanks” in Rochester’s mind that can never be “filled up”), make an elaborate allegory or scenario using the Lacanian scheme. The man, “Rochester,” “fits” as exemplarily into the Freudian as into the neo-Freudian construct; Rhys’s rendering and observation of the man are that acute.
27. Cf. Hartman, “The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature,” and his use of what Sophocles calls “the voice of the shuttle”: Philomela’s weaving of the “tell-tale account of her violation [by Tereseus] into a tapestry (or robe)” (p. 337). The misreading of the phrase from Hartman’s masculinist perspective is implicit from the outset. (See Culler’s remarks on the attitude of Hartman’s work [On Deconstruction, p. 44].) Hartman writes: “The power of the phrase lies in its elision of middle terms and overspecification of end terms” (p. 338). My point here is to emphasize the extent to which Hartman’s reading of “the voice of the shuttle” is at odds with Rhys’s use of the technique represented by the idea of the shuttle. Rhys’s rendering of the woman’s “sentence” completed in Wide Sargasso Sea refutes the “elision of middle terms” and the “overspecification of end terms,” a “tension” that her text resolves.
28. Like Brontë, Rhys has scattered literary allusions throughout her text, although Rhys’s use of the masculine father-texts, both major (e.g., Shakespeare) and minor, in the culminating passages of “Rochester’s” narrative, is precise and strategic. The more general reasons for the many literary allusions and references found in both, and in each case, offer an area of speculation interesting in itself. How unconsciously dependent, we might wonder, were either of the women in some of their allusions? How dependent may they have been on the authority conferred by the allusions, in contrast to what is merely writerly recall and inclusion, cultural texturing, and the like? These questions arise as corollaries to their obviously deliberate and iconoclastic use of such allusions.
29. Cf. Hamlet Ill.iii.73-95.
30. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 354.
31. Rochester, “A Song,” p. 51.
32. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, II.i.30-33.
33. Ramchand, “Terrified Consciousness,” pp. 224-25.
1Pace, John Gardner. See On Moral Fiction.
2. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, p. 15.
3. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” p. 31.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. Cf. her earlier remarks, pp. 15-16; and see her distinction between the terms semiotic and symbolic in “From One Identity to Another,” pp. 133-34.
6. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” pp. 34-35.
7. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, p. xv. The three “doctrines” with which Burke is centrally concerned in his use of the term “Grammar” are not surprising, given the context with which we are concerned: they are the areas that concern what Christophine calls “Letter of the Law,” and certainly the other two categories with which Burke involves his discussion—the Rhetoric and the Symbolic—“hover about the edges” of his “central theme, the Grammar” with its illustrations from “theological, metaphysical, and juridical doctrines” (p. xviii).
8. Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 22; also p. 29 and passim.
9. Brontë, Villette, p. 234.