Abstract
This chapter looks at three generations of texts, beginning with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It establishes the important connection between two literary responses to Victorian literature, namely the wider neo-Victorian genre and a more specific subset of it, which reconsiders the nineteenth century from a postcolonial perspective. These two are yoked together in Jane Eyre’s literary daughter, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is considered by many critics to be the foundational neo-Victorian text. I then read three Anglo-American neo-Victorian novels which return to both Brontë’s and Rhys’s models. In particular, I focus on how these later works reorient the narrative focus away from the empowered Creole Antoinette (Bertha Mason) in Wide Sargasso Sea back to the British characters of Jane Eyre.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Robert J.C. Young (2001) provides a clear distinction between ‘imperialism ’ and ‘colonialism ’, two facets of empire. ‘Imperialism ’ refers to the structure of an empire ‘that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and which was developed for ideological as well as financial reasons’, while ‘colonial ’ refers to the structure of an empire ‘that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company’ (16).
- 2.
‘A mere domestic novel’ is how Charlotte Brontë described Jane Eyre after the book was published in 1847: ‘A mere domestic novel will I fear seem trivial to men of large views and solid attainments’ (qtd. in Thomas 2008: 1). John Sung Han (2014) argues that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is the ‘prescient blueprint for building the first marriage plot into the genre that would later become the domestic novel popularised by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’ (529).
- 3.
It is interesting to note that Jean Rhys ’ own life (1890–1979), like neo-Victorian fiction, crosses the boundary of the Victorian and the modern.
- 4.
Caribbean revisiting of Jane Eyre can be found as early as 1859. In Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre (2008), Sue Thomas studies Cousin Stella; or Conflict (1859) by Henrietta Camilla Jenkin, a white Creole . The book is, according to Thomas, ‘the first Caribbean reworking of Jane Eyre’ which ‘prefigures aspects of Wide Sargasso Sea ’ (104). Jacques Tourneur’s film I Walked with a Zombie (1943) also relocates the story of Jane Eyre to the fictional Caribbean island of St. Sebastian (Burstein , ‘Oh, The Futility! Adapting Jane Eyre’).
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys changes the temporal setting from 1799 to 1809 in Jane Eyre to the 1830s and 1840s to explore the immediate aftermath of the emancipation of the West Indies, an event that has significant bearing on the economical, psychological and personal development of her central character, Antoinette. Sylvie Maurel (1998) believes that Rhys’ reference to the Emancipation can be read as her triumphing over Brontë’s influence (137).
- 5.
See Patsy Stoneman’s Brontë Transformations (1996) for a discussion of fictive works revisiting Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century.
The Brontë siblings, like Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, also receive biofictional treatment in neo-Victorian novels, especially Charlotte Brontë, who is the subject of novels such as James Tully’s The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë: The Secrets of a Mysterious Family (1999), Michèle Roberts’s The Mistressclass (2003), Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane (2009), Syrie James’s The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (2009) and Juliet Gael’s Romancing Miss Brontë (2010). Jill Jones’s Emily’s Secret (1995) and Denise Giardina’s Emily’s Ghost (2009), on the other hand, primarily focus on Emily Brontë, while Jude Morgan’s Charlotte and Emily: A Novel of the Brontës (2010), first published under the title The Taste of Sorrow in 2009, is about both sisters. Branwell Brontë takes centre stage in Robert Edric’s Sanctuary (2014) and D.M. Denton’s Without the Veil Between (2017) explores the experience of Anne Brontë . Like Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Charlotte Brontë’s incomplete Emma Brown (1853) also inspires writers to ‘complete’ the work, as is the case of Clare Boylan’s Emma Brown (2003).
- 6.
In 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know (2010), John Sutherland identifies Robert Graves’s The Real David Copperfield (1933) as the origin of the ‘so called post-Victorian Victorian novels’. Sutherland sees these ‘post-Victorian Victorian novels’ as consuming the past, that they ‘chew the gum other writers have left behind them’ (114). In ‘Using the Victorians: The Victorian Age in Contemporary Fiction’ (2000), Robin Gilmour writes that Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight (1940) and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953) are early examples of ‘the kind of work which is inward with the period and the conventions of its literature, and draws on the meanings which these have come to have for us today’ (189). Jonathan Loesberg (2007) also singles out Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight as ‘the first version of the genre ’, by which he means ‘some form of binocular narrative, a narrative structure that makes us explicitly aware of seeing the Victorian period from a contemporary standpoint’ (363).
On the other hand, when discussing the neo-Victorian novel in New Directions: Writing Post 1990 (2010), Fiona Tolan favours Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967), which appeared one year after Wide Sargasso Sea, as a precursor of the genre (26–17).
- 7.
1966 can be considered a defining moment for the contemporary’s return to the nineteenth century. This year finally saw the publication of Jean Rhys ’ Wide Sargasso Sea after personal issues had hindered her earlier completion of the work—according to Coral Ann Howells (1991), there is some evidence that ‘Rhys had written a version of her Jane Eyre novel by 1939’ (105). In retrospect, the delay may have been fortuitous; had the novel been published earlier, the audience may not have been as receptive to its postcolonial and feminist reworkings of Jane Eyre. Although Wide Sargasso Sea is usually seen as the first neo-Victorian novel, its publication was part of a larger intellectual and artistic revisitation of the Victorian era that occurred in the 1960s. For example, Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England was also published in 1966. Marcus’ book and the wider availability of nineteenth-century pornography at the time encouraged a readjustment of attitudes towards Victorian sexuality and gender relations, a readjustment which provided neo-Victorian writers with fruitful topics for exploration. John Fowles ’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), another novel in the neo-Victorian canon published in the 1960s, was written in this same intellectual environment. Also published in 1966, James Laver’s Victoriana celebrates a rekindled taste for Victorian art and collectables. In a similar vein, the ‘Victorian Collector’ series (1961–1968), edited by Hugh Wakefield, was ‘one sign of this new-found enthusiasm for nineteenth-century knick-knacks’ (Taylor 2004: 7). This interest in Victorian objects might have been a response to the passing away of the last generations of Victorians in the 1950s and 1960s. Their disappearance, according to Kate Mitchell in History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterlives (2010), contributed to the ‘rehabilitation of Victoriana’ around this time (54). Mitchell’s comment primarily regards material goods such as accessories, clothing and furniture, but this same atmosphere may explain an interest in reworking and rewriting elements of Victorian literature. Another cultural trend that may have led to the rise of neo-Victorianism was the shift of focus in historical studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s away from ‘grand historical narratives of wars, prime ministers, governments and economic change’ to ‘fragmentary records of “ordinary” individuals and their “experience” of historical change’ (Maidment 2005: 153). This new view of the past may have contributed to the representation of marginalised personae in neo-Victorian fiction.
- 8.
John Thieme (2001) points out that West Indian critics such as Wally Look Lai and Kenneth Ramchand study Wide Sargasso Sea without making any reference to Jane Eyre (79).
- 9.
Wide Sargasso Sea’s ‘Caribbean ’ status is not uncontested. The Jamaican Edward Kamau Brathwaite believes that works by Rhys, ‘a white creole expatriate West Indian-born novelist’, should not be considered West Indian (Hulme 1994b: 74). However, other West Indian critics such as Wally Look Lai, Kenneth Ramchand, John Hearne and Louis James are happy to claim Wide Sargasso Sea as a significant Caribbean novel (ibid.).
- 10.
By using the term ‘contain’, I am consciously making reference to Homi Bhabha’s idea expressed in an interview with Jonathan Rutherford (1990): ‘A transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by the host society or dominant culture, which says that “these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid”. This is what I mean by a creation of cultural diversity and a containment of cultural difference’ (208, emphasis original). The use of the term ‘cannibalise’ is also conscious. The neo-Victorian genre can be seen as cannibalistic, not only because of its aggressive incorporation of Victorian elements, but also because there is a tendency among critics of this genre to characterise anything with some nineteenth-century elements as neo-Victorian.
- 11.
The Orchid House (1953) by the Dominican author Phyllis Shand Allfrey is said to be another intertext in Wide Sargasso Sea (Thieme 2001: 84).
- 12.
Brontë also uses the West Indies, obliquely, in The Professor (1846). According to Susan Meyer (1996), the character William Crimsworth likens a female student to ‘a runaway West Indian slave’ (61). In Villette (1853), Brontë again makes reference to the West Indies. In that book, M. Paul Emanuel is forced to depart for Guadeloupe and it is implied that he dies on the return journey.
- 13.
- 14.
The Tempest , especially its representation of Caliban , has inspired Caribbean rewritings . According to Peter Hulme (1992 [1986]), Caribbean (con)texts include George Lamming’s non-fictional work The Pleasures of Exiles (1960) and the novel Water with Berries (1971) and Kamau Brathwaite’s poem ‘Caliban ’ (1969) (128–129). Also see Thomas Cartelli’s ‘After The Tempest : Shakespeare , Postcoloniality, and Michelle Cliff’s New, New World Miranda’ (1995).
- 15.
See, for example, E. Pearlman’s ‘Robinson Crusoe and the Cannibals’ (1976), Dianne Armstrong’s ‘The Myth of Cronus: Cannibal and Sign in Robinson Crusoe’ (1992), Minaz Jooma’s ‘Robinson Crusoe Inc(orporates): Domestic Economy, Incest, and the Trope of Cannibalism ’ (2001) and Paul Ferguson’s ‘“Me Eatee Him Up”: Cannibal Appetites in Cloud Atlas and Robison Crusoe’ (2015).
- 16.
The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe both provide reference points for postcolonial writers to revisit. Helen Tiffin (1989) writes, ‘a mapping and dismantling of particular, canonically enshrined imperial texts constitute a major part of post-colonial writing: re-writing of The Tempest by writers from Australia and particularly Canada , the West Indies , and Africa; of Robinson Crusoe by Marcus Clarke, J.M. Coetzee , and Samuel Selvon ; of Heart of Darkness by many writers; and perhaps most famous of all, Jean Rhys ’ rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘ Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea’ (xx).
- 17.
Franco Moretti (1998), however, argues that while the British colonies were ‘very profitable’ (24), it is likely that without them the English ruling class such as the Bertrams in Mansfield Park or the British economy in general (both in fiction and in reality) would have still been sustainable (24–29). He also argues that Austen’s use of the West Indies is for ‘strictly symbolic reasons’ (27, emphasis original).
- 18.
Not only is the Caribbean indispensable in a discussion of cannibalism , it is also very important in a study of postcolonialism . According to Carine M. Mardorossian (2005), ‘That the region functions as the exemplar of the new global order explains why its literature is seen as especially representative in postcolonial studies today’ (4).
- 19.
Peter Hulme discusses five versions of ‘Europe encounters America ’: Columbus and the cannibals, Prospero and Caliban , John Smith and Pocahontas , Robinson Crusoe and Friday, and Inkle and Yarico (xiii).
- 20.
Brontë herself was aware of failing to portray Bertha humanely. She wrote in a letter to W.S. Williams on 4 January 1848: ‘It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too predominant’ (qtd. in Smith 2000, emphasis original).
- 21.
In her article ‘Shutting up the Subaltern : Silences, Stereotypes , and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys ’ Wide Sargasso Sea ’ (1999), Carine M. Mardorossian is incredulous that ‘Critics have impressively read against the grain of the husband’s narrative in the novel’s middle section in order to interpret the white Creole’s life and identity’ (1072). Although it is not true that Rhys’ representation of Rochester has been completely ignored by scholars (see, for example, Michael Thorpe’s ‘“The Other Side”: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre’ [1999]), critics have tended to focus on Rhys’ representation of the Creole woman as the author herself repeatedly emphasised that it was Brontë’s depiction of Bertha that provoked her to rewrite the Victorian text.
- 22.
- 23.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, the character Daniel reiterates this prejudice: ‘This young Mrs. Cosway is worthless and spoilt, she can’t lift a hand for herself and soon the madness that is in her, and in all these white Creoles , come out’ (60, emphasis added).
- 24.
Indrani Sen (2002), for example, writes that the Victorians believed ‘women were more prone to mental illness than men because of their reproductive system’ and ‘nineteenth-century science located madness as caused by female hereditary and carried by women’s bodies’ (32). Also see Jill L. Matus’s Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (1995) and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985).
- 25.
Bertha is also associated with cannibalism in Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven (1987): ‘Yes, Bertha was closer the mark. Captive. Ragôt. Mixture. Confused. Jamaican. Caliban . Carib. Cannibal . Cimarron. All Bertha. All Clare’ (110).
- 26.
As David Leon Higdon (1985) contends, Wide Sargasso Sea ‘was more than a response; in many ways it was autobiographical with Rhys finding an objective correlative in Bertha Mason’s sufferings’ (105). Peter Hulme in ‘The Locked Heart: The Creole Family Romance of Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1994b) likewise contends that Rhys’ book is ‘a kind of extended autobiography or creole family romance’ (76) and he argues that Rhys has incorporated her personal memory and family history/relationships in the novel. Finally, Helen Carr (1996) believes that in Wide Sargasso Sea, ‘many of the details are drawn from [Rhys’] own Caribbean childhood’ (21). That is to say, Rhys has put part of herself into the book and is thus in some way in communion with Brontë’s text.
- 27.
In this chapter, I use ‘Bertha’ to refer to the character in Jane Eyre and ‘Antoinette’ for the character in Wide Sargasso Sea, although the two are intertwined and converge in parts of Wide Sargasso Sea.
- 28.
After Windward Heights, Maryse Condé has continued to explore the relationship between Caribbean literature and cannibalism . In 2003, she gave a seminar entitled ‘Cannibalism and Caribbean Literature’ at Princeton University and wrote the novel Histoire de la femme cannibale (The Story of the Cannibal Woman). A collection of colloquium papers, Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé , Cannibalism , and the Caribbean Text (2006) is devoted to Histoire de la femme cannibale specifically and Condé’s ‘provocative approach to writing of the French Caribbean’ (Broichhagen et al.: vii) generally.
Condé shares a literary heritage with Rhys: they both rewrite texts by British female authors, and those by sisters at that. It is additionally significant that the Brontës first wrote under male pseudonyms in a predominantly male-centred literary world (‘Currer Bell’ and ‘Ellis Bell’ are Charlotte Brontë’s and Emily Brontë’s pseudonyms, respectively), and that the first Caribbean female writers also wrote in an environment that was, at least at first, male-oriented. It is therefore appropriate that Condé and Rhys have drawn inspiration from Charlotte and Emily Brontë . According to Patsy Stoneman in Brontë Transformations (1996), many women novelists of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century wrote ‘critical or biographical commentaries on the Brontës’ (78). In their fictional responses to the sisters’ novels, both Condé and Rhys follow their literary forebears in ‘coming to terms with the Brontës’ (ibid.).
Considering their aesthetic and biographical affinities, it is perhaps unsurprising that some scholars have studied their work in tandem. Although Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights was originally written in French (La migration des coeurs) in 1995 and translated into English by Richard Philcox (Condé’s husband) in 1998, the book is often discussed with Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. For example, Melody Boyd Carrière’s Ph.D. book Displacement and the Text (2007) discusses Caribbean and Italian women writers writing in a tradition that regards them as ‘Other’, using both Wide Sargasso Sea and Windward Heights, among other works, as primary sources. Emily Taylor Meyers’s Ph.D. book Transnational Romance: The Politics of Desire in Caribbean Novels by Women (2009) again employs Rhys’ and Condé’s novels to discuss how the Caribbean women writers rewrite the romance to explore issues related to sexual politics. Lastly, Carine M. Mardorossian in Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (2005) studies novels including those by Rhys and Condé to reconsider the idea of ‘difference’ in a variety of contexts geographical, sexual and racial.
- 29.
Interestingly, in Jane Eyre, the vampiric quality of Bertha is alluded to several times. Richard Mason describing Bertha in the following terms: ‘She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart’.
- 30.
In her discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea, Sylvie Maurel (1998) identifies moments of Jane Eyre’s ‘creeping into’ Rhys’ novel, singling out Rhys’ use of the verb ‘to bewitch’ and her ‘verbatim quotation’ from Brontë’s text (135–136).
- 31.
Putting British and American writers together here is by no means an attempt to evade America’s own colonial past. Rather, it is to emphasise a close linguistic and cultural affinity between texts from those countries than exists in work produced elsewhere.
Not discussed in this chapter is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), which according to Susan Civale (2016) features ‘a Jane-like figure whose quest for acceptance and narrative ownership is bound up with her initiation into adulthood’ (345). The cannibalism of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea is not restricted to Anglo-American works. In ‘The Autobiography of My Mother: Jamaica Kincaid’s Revision of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea’ (2006), Joanne Gass discusses the relationship between Kincaid’s novel and Brontë’s and Rhys’. She contends that The Autobiography of My Mother (1995) ‘hybridises’ Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea ‘in order to subvert their colonialist repression of the voices of the originally repressed Caribs ’ (65). Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (2002) also writes that the Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré ‘establishes a thematic link to Jean Rhys —and through her to Charlotte Brontë —that underscores the importance to her work of recognising a female tradition’ (253).
- 32.
Haire-Sargeant is an Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has written academic work on Wuthering Heights; D.M. Thomas is a British novelist, whose most famous book is The White Hotel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981; lastly, Emma Tennant is also a British novelist, known for her reworkings of classic stories, a number of which are neo-Victorian.
All three neo-Victorian writers use the names of characters from the Brontës’ novels in their book titles, signalling explicitly the intertextual relationship between their books and their canonical models, an approach similar to the reworkings of Dracula which incorporate the name of the original novel in theirs, to be discussed in Chapter 4.
- 33.
Another West Indian novel, V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas (1975), which Grace Moore (2008) believes follows Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (139), also amalgamates elements from both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights . It ‘alludes explicitly to Jane Eyre by naming two of its central characters Roche and Jane, and expands the allusion to Emily Brontë through its location in a commune named Thrushcross Grange’ (Innes 2007: 54). Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother might have been inspired by both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as well (see fn. 31). Also, according to John Thieme (2001), Canadian Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976) ‘contains incidental allusions to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre’ (73). Finally, William Faulkner’s Absolam, Absolam! (1936) draws on both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. When he was a young man, the protagonist Thomas Sutpen worked as an overseer in the Caribbean. He married the wealthy daughter of a planter and had a son, Charles Bon, but repudiated the marriage when he learnt that the woman was of mixed race. He then returns to start another plantation in Mississippi and has a son and a daughter, Henry and Judith. The son from the first marriage, however, comes to Mississippi and establishes himself as the best friend of Henry and the suitor for Judith. Sutpen’s marriage to the mixed-race first wife is reminiscent of Rochester’s to Bertha in Jane Eyre, while the incestuous love between Charles and Judith recalls Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights.
- 34.
Perhaps Haire-Sargeant’s book is in some sense a response to Rhys’ following take on the reception of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights: ‘I wonder why people are so Jane Eyre conscious? And why Wuthering Heights is neglected? I suspect it’s because Rochester is white-washed—the cruel devil. Heathcliff is not’ (qtd. in Higdon 1985: 109–110). Elsewhere, Elaine Savory (1998) writes, ‘Rhys thought of her idea of Rochester as connected to Emily Brontë’s character Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights but the Gothic intensity of Heathcliff is far from the mundane emotional limitations of Rhys’ Rochester’ (254).
- 35.
It has also been speculated that Heathcliff’s three-year absence in Wuthering Heights is spent in the West Indies, an interpretation adopted by Emma Tennant in her neo-Victorian novel Heathcliff’s Tale (2005), although Susan Meyer’s (1996) discussion of Heathcliff as fighting in the American Revolutionary War is perhaps more convincing (114–116). Jeffrey Caine’s Heathcliff (1977) also explores the story of the eponymous hero’s missing years in Emily Brontë’s novel, this time in London.
- 36.
Another reference to Wide Sargasso Sea in Tennant’s novel is Bertha’s nurse, Christophine, a character created by Rhys. In Adèle, the eponymous character says, ‘I had no idea then, of any connection between the man Jenny says I must know as Papa and the woman from the spice islands who sings to me as a Creole maid of Maman’s once did, songs my new playmate says come from an old woman who loved her, Christophine’ (55).
- 37.
The other two ‘negative’ female role-models for Jane, according to Gilbert and Gubar, are Blanche Ingram and Grace Poole (350). They also mention Mrs. Fairfax as an important female character (but not a negative role-model) in Jane Eyre. Interestingly, Tennant turns Mrs. Fairfax into the ultimate villain in Adèle. According to Heta Pyrhönen (2010), this treatment of her ‘may be related to Tennant’s goal of presenting a wholly new and unexpected twist to well-known intertexts. After all, previous adaptations have neglected both Adèle and Mrs Fairfax’ (114). These changes in narrative roles suggest the original text’s malleability for generating new fictions and meanings.
- 38.
In Jane Eyre, Adèle is described in unflattering but not damning terms. The girl has ‘no great talents, no marked traits of character, no peculiar development of feeling or taste which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of childhood; but neither had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her below it’ (JE).
- 39.
See, for example, Heta Pyrhönen’s Bluebeard Gothic : Jane Eyre and Its Progeny (2010) for a discussion of the trope of trauma in Adèle (110–116).
- 40.
There is scope for novels written from Céline Varens’s or Blanche Ingram’s perspectives, although ‘many feminist critics have focused on the Rochester-centred romantic triangles of Jane and Rochester and Bertha or of Jane and Rochester and Blanche Ingram’ (Godfrey 2005: 865).
- 41.
In The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993), Firdous Azim also points out Bertha’s supposed uneducability: ‘Recalcitrant and uneducable, she escapes the dominating and hegemonising imperialist and educational processes’ (182). Bertha’s and Adèle’s relative ‘educability’ is particularly interesting if compared to Jane’s own education and her role as a governess. Azim writes, ‘Jane, in the imperialist role of educator, carefully marks the differences between the European woman and Eastern harem inmates’ (181, emphasis original).
- 42.
A reference to the titles ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and ‘Shutting up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes , and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys ’ Wide Sargasso Sea ’ (1999) by Carine M. Mardorossian.
- 43.
My use of ‘centre’ follows Peter Hulme ’s example in Cannibalism and the Colonial World (1998), in which he uses the term to refer to ‘the cultural “centres” of Western Europe and North America ’ (5).
- 44.
Bernadine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008), in which ‘whyte Europanes’ are enslaved by ‘blak Aphrikans’, seems to participate in this re-evaluation process, not so much to take the history of African slavery lightly but to explore it in a new context.
- 45.
References
Abel, Elizabeth. ‘Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys’. Contemporary Literature 20:2 (Spring 1979): pp. 155–177.
Achebe, Chinua. ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989, pp. 1–20.
Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
———. ‘Rethinking Anthropophagy’. In Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 39–62.
Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London: Routledge, 1993.
Broichhagen, Vera, Kathryn Lachman, and Nicole Simek, eds. Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism, and the Caribbean Text. Princeton, NJ: Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton University, 2006.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Carleton, 1864 [1847].
Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. London: Faber & Faber, 1998 [1997].
Carr, Helen. Jean Rhys. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996.
Civale, Susan. ‘“Reader, I Did Not Even Have Coffee with Him”: Lorrie Moore’s Adaptation of Jane Eyre (1847) in A Gate at the Stairs (2009)’. Studies in the Novel 48:3 (Fall 2016): pp. 343–363.
Denton, D.M. Without the Veil Between. Maine: All Things That Matter Press, 2017. https://www.allthingsthatmatterpress.com/aboutus.htm.
Dickens, Charles. ‘Nurse Stories’. In The Uncommercial Traveller. London: Chapman and Hall, 1861 [1860].
Dixon, Robert. ‘Cannibalising Indigenous Texts: Headhunting and Fantasy in Ion L. Idriess’s Coral Sea Adventures’. In Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn (eds.), Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific. New York: Routledge; Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, 2001, pp. 112–125.
Donaldson, Elizabeth J. ‘The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness’. NWSA Journal 14:3 (Fall 2002): pp. 99–119.
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988 [1975].
———. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995.
Edric, Robert. Sanctuary. New York: Doubleday, 2014.
Eshleman, Clayton and Annette Smith. ‘Introduction’. In Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Ferguson, Paul. ‘“Me Eatee Him Up”: Cannibal Appetites in Cloud Atlas and Robison Crusoe’. Studies in Ecocriticism 19:2 (2015): pp. 144–156.
Fowles, John. ‘Notes on an Unfinished Novel’. In Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1977 [1969], pp. 136–150.
Gass, Joanne. ‘The Autobiography of My Mother: Jamaica Kincaid’s Revision of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea’. In Linda Lang-Peralta (ed.), Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006, pp. 63–78.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000 [1979].
Gilmour, Robin. ‘Using the Victorians: The Victorian Age in Contemporary Fiction’. In Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (eds.), Rereading Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, pp. 189–200.
Godfrey, Esther. ‘Jane Eyre, from Governess to Girl Bride’. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45:4 (Autumn 2005): pp. 853–871.
Gutleben, Christian. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2001.
———. ‘Palinodes, Palindromes and Palimpsests: Strategies of Deliberate Self-Contradiction in Postmodern British Fiction’. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 26 (2002): pp. 11–20.
Haire-Sargeant, Lin. H: The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights. New York: Pocket Books, 1992.
Han, John Sung. Style 48:4 (Winter 2014): pp. 529–542.
Heilmann, Ann. ‘The Haunting of Henry James: Jealous Ghosts, Affinities, and the Others’. In Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds.), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 111–130.
Higdon, David Leon. Shadows of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/20/as-byatt-intellectual-women-strange.
Howells, Coral Ann. Jean Rhys. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Huggan, Graham. ‘A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys, and the Uses of Colonial Mimicry’. Contemporary Literature 35:4 (Winter 1994): pp. 643–660.
———. Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.
Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1494–1797. London: Routledge, 1992 [1986].
———. ‘The Place of Wide Sargasso Sea’. Wasafiri 10:20 (1994a): pp. 5–11.
———. ‘The Locked Heart: The Creole Family Romance of Wide Sargasso Sea’. In Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1994b, pp. 72–88.
———. ‘Introduction’. In Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 1–38.
Innes, Catherine Lynette. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Joyce, Simon. ‘The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror’. In Christine L. Krueger (ed.), Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, pp. 3–17.
Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007.
Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
———. ‘Foreword’. In Kristen Guest (ed.), Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, pp. vii–viii.
Kohlke, Marie-Luise. ‘Tipoo’s Tiger on the Loose: Neo-Victorian Witness-Bearing and the Trauma of the Indian Mutiny’. In Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (eds.), Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2010, pp. 367–397.
Lerner, Laurence. ‘Bertha and the Critics’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 44:3 (December 1989): pp. 273–300.
Levine, Philippa. The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset. Harlow: Longman, 2007.
Loesberg, Jonathan. ‘The Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality: Foucault and Neo-Victorian Historical Fiction’. Clio 36:3 (2007): pp. 361–389.
Maidment, B.E. ‘Mr. Wroe’s Virgins: The “Other Victorians” and Recent Fiction’. In Nick Bentley (ed.), British Fiction of the 1990s. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 153–166.
Mardorossian, Carine M. Cannibalizing the Victorians: Racial and Cultural Hybridity in the Brontës and Their Caribbean Rewritings. Ph.D. diss. University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign, 1998.
———. ‘Shutting Up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea’. Callaloo 22:4 (Autumn 1999): pp. 1071–1090.
———. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonalism. Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
———. ‘Unsuspecting Storyteller and Suspect Listener: A Postcolonial Reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 37:2–3 (April-July 2006): pp. 1–24. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-167378944/unsuspecting-storyteller-and-suspect-listener-a-postcolonial.
———. ‘Unsuspecting Storyteller and Suspect Listener: A Postcolonial Reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 37:2–3 (May 2007): pp. 1–24.
Matibag, Eugenio. ‘Self-Consuming Fictions: The Dialects of Cannibalism in Modern Caribbean Narratives’. Postmodern Culture 1:3 (May 1991). http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3matibag.html.
Maurel, Sylvie. Jean Rhys. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Meyer, Susan. ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’. Victorian Studies 33 (1990): pp. 247–268.
———. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Mitchell, Kate. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Moore, Grace. ‘Twentieth-Century Re-workings of the Victorian Novel’. Literature Compass 5:1 (2008): pp. 134–144.
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London; New York: Verso, 1998.
O’Connor, Erin. ‘Preface for a Post-postcolonial Criticism’. Victorian Studies 45:2 (Winter 2003): pp. 217–246.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’. In Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 229–257.
Plasa, Carl. Charlotte Brontë. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Pyrhönen, Heta. Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and its Progeny. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Renk, Kathleen J. Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin, 1969 [1966].
Rumsey, Alan. ‘The White Man as Cannibal in the New Guinea Highlands’. In Laurence R. Goldman (ed.), The Anthropology of Cannibalism. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999, pp. 105–121.
Rutherford, Jonathan. ‘The Third Space’ [Interview with Homi Bhabha]. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 207–221.
Sagan, Eli. Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage Books, 1994 [1993].
Savory, Elaine. Jean Rhys. Cambridge, England; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Sen, Indrani. Woman and Empire: Representation in the Writings of British India, 1858–1990. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002.
Simek, Nicole. ‘Eating Well, Reading Well: Condé’s Ethics of Interpretation’. In Vera Broichhagen, Kathryn Lachman, and Nicole Simek (eds.), Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism, and the Caribbean Text. Princeton, NJ: Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton University, 2006, pp. 103–122.
Smith, Margaret, ed. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: Volume Two 1848–1851. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’. Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985): pp. 243–261.
Staley, Thomas F. Jean Rhys: A Critical Study. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Stoneman, Patsy. Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996.
Sutherland, John. Curiosities of Literature: A Book Lover’s Anthology of Literary Erudition. London: Arrow, 2008.
———. 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know. London: Quercus, 2010.
Taylor, Miles. ‘Introduction’. In Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representation and Revisions. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 1–13.
Tennant, Emma. Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London; New York: Continuum, 2001.
Thomas, D.M. Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre. London: Duck Editions, 2000.
Thomas, Sue. Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Thormählen, M. ‘The Lunatic and the Devil’s Disciple: The ‘Lovers’ in Wuthering Heights’. The Review of English Studies 48: 190 (May 1997): pp. 183–197.
Thorpe, Michael. ‘“The Other Side”: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre’. In Judith L. Raiskin (ed.), A Norton Critical Edition: Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Tiffin, Helen M. ‘Rites of Resistance: Counter-Discourse and West Indian Biography’. Journal of West Indian Literature 3:1 (October 1989): pp. 28–46.
Tolan, Fiona. New Directions: Writing Post 1990. Harlow: York/Longman, 2010.
Vreeland, Elizabeth. ‘Jean Rhys: The Art of Fiction LXIV’. The Paris Review 76 (1979): pp. 219–237.
Walcott, Derek. ‘The Figure of Crusoe’. In Robert D. Hamner (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Boulder, CO; London: Lynne Rienner, 1993 [1965].
Walton, John K. ‘Home and Leisure’. In John M. Mackenzie (ed.), The Victorian Vision. London: V&A Publications, 2001, pp. 50–73.
Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [2002].
Williams-Wanquet, Eileen. ‘Towards Defining “Postrealism” in British Literature’. Journal of Narrative Theory 36:3 (Fall 2006): pp. 389–419.
Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; Barbados: Press University of the West Indies; Oxford: James Currey, 1998.
Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.
———. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001.
Zabus, Chantal. ‘A Calibanic Tempest in Anglophone and Francophone New World Writing’. Canadian Literature 104 (1985): pp. 35–50.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ho, TM. (2019). Contesting (Post-)colonialism: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Three Neo-Victorian Rejoinders. In: Neo-Victorian Cannibalism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02559-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02559-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02558-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02559-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)