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Proposal and Second Essay Assignment are now posted on the Website

• Proposal due March 29• Second Essay due April 7

• Began with Kipling – saw his conflicted perspective on imperialism and empire

• Kipling, I argued, destabilizes the dominant notions of colonialism by providing multiple perspectives through Kim’s impersonations, undermining Creighton’s role as “heroic” figure, foregrounding the lama and the notion of pilgrimage, and the novel’s lack of closure

• Conrad – openly critical of the colonial enterprise; destabilizes Marlow’s perspective with the frame narrator who is telling Marlow’s story; quest gone wrong: no boon, knight fails, no union of lance and grail

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• Forster – critique of the British behaviour, the politics of imperialism, although some critics have called that critique ‘feeble’;

• free and indirect discourse to provide perspective of colonized subjects;

• indeterminacy of caves to reflect confusion of modernism,

• offers consolation of cyclical time: monsoons follow the drought, life flows into the void

• All writers are English or - in Conrad’s case – a naturalized English citizen living in the U.K., writing about colonialism

Wide Sargasso Sea

• Shift to explicitly post-colonial perspective• Author is a woman from a former colony of Britain – first

writer who is from a former colony• character of Antoinette provides perspective of female,

colonized subject• Doubly critical: gender and post-colonial issues• Proposes a potential prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s novel,

Jane Eyre

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• Matt’s lecture gave informed lecture on Jane Eyre• If you haven’t read it, you have the background story• Note that the Norton version of Wide Sargasso Sea also

contains some excerpts of Jane Eyre• Matt’s thesis that the ghosts of Bronte’s novel are the

metaphors for what history has elided or left out of the official account

• What is missing is the source of the colonial ‘stuff’ or materiality that forms an integral part of English life and how it got to England

• Tea a very good example; the word has come to be associated not only with a beverage, but an entire cultural practice that we associate with English life, to the extent that we imagine that tea is grown, produced in England (eg. ‘Earl Grey tea’)

• The character of Bertha Mason Rochester from Jane Eyre is an embodiment of Rochester and Britain’s refusal to admit the exploitative aspect of colonialism

• Bertha’s role in Jane Eyre is a small one, but it cannot be ignored

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• Matt suggested that Brontë is only partially aware of the underlying significance of Bertha’s presence

• Therefore, only partially aware of the spectre of colonialism that haunts the novel

• In representing the circumstances of the period, Brontëhas also captured the ways in which colonialism infuses English culture and the darker underbelly of that colonialism

“In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing: and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face….The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors” (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre 250).

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“… [my father] told me Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was no lie. I found her a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram; tall, dark, and majestic...All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me. I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her” (260).

Letter from Jean Rhys to Diana Athill – 1966“I came to England between sixteen and seventeen,

a very impressionable age and “Jane Eyre” was one of the books I read then.

Of course Charlotte Brontë makes her own world, of course she convinces you, and that makes the poor Creole lunatic all the more dreadful. I remember being quite shocked, and when I re-read it rather annoyed. “That’s only one side – the English side” sort of thing.

(I think too that Charlotte had a “thing” about the West Indies being rather sinister places – because in another of her book “Villette” she drowns the hero, Professor Somebody, on the voyage to Guadeloupe, another very alien place – according to her)… (144).

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to Selma Vaz Diaz (1958):I’ve read and re-read Jane Eyre of course, and I am

sure that the character must be “built-up”. I wrote you about that. The Creole in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a lay figure – repulsive which does not matter, and not once alive, which does. She’s necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry – off stage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. (Personally, I think that one is simple. She is cold – and fire is the only warmth she knows in England)” (136—7).

• Rhys project is to bring that spectre of Bertha ‘on stage’, to force the inhumanity and the dark secrets of colonialism into the English collective consciousness

• know from her letters that Rhys worked on manuscript as early as 1939, but destroyed it

• 1949 – “It’s about the West Indies about 1780 something” (Rhys)

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• In Jane Eyre, Rochester eventually discovers that his brother and father plotted against him, keeping the truth from him of Antoinette’s mother and brother’s madness in order to get the substantial dowry

• Rochester finds Bertha incapable of conversation: “whatever topic I started immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile”

• She was “intemperate and unchaste”, “gross, impure, depraved” (Jane Eyre)

Jean Rhys

Brief Biography• b. Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, August 1890

(although Rhys often gave her birth date as 1894)• in Rouseau, Dominica• mother: Minna Lockhart Williams, a Creole of Scottish

and Irish descent; family were slave owning and had house burned down in 1830s

• father: William Rees Williams, Welsh ships doctor who settled in Dominica

• mother Catholic, father Anglican (grandfather was an Anglican priest and exposed to religious practices of black Dominicans who had roots in Africa)

• attended convent school in Dominica

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• at 16 – sent to private girls school in Cambridge, England; aunt was to provide supervision and familial connections

• passed entrance exams for Academy of Dramatic Art in London

• 1910 – father died; left with no financial support; mother wanted her to return to Dominica, but Rhys refused

• got a job in chorus of a musical and toured Britain using name of Ella Gray

• began affair with Lancelot Hugh Smith, a wealthy stockbroker from an established family who was 20 years her senior; she had an abortion; Smith continued to support her for several years even after their relationship was quelled

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• ~1914 – she began a diary; drifted from modeling, theater work,

• 1917 met Jean Lengelet who was half-French and half-Dutch

• 1919 – they married and moved several times, living in Paris, Budapest, Prague, Brussels, Vienna

• first child, Owen, died• Lenglet’s work was mysterious – worked for government

but was also reported to have engaged in black market trading in foreign currency, embezzling, selling stolen art objects, and worked as a spy

• 1922 – returned to Paris and Rhys had a daughter, Maryvonne

• Maryvonne did not live with her mother until she was three

• Rhys translated Lenglet’s articles into English for money; editor was impressed with Rhys’ writing and asked to see her work; Rhys showed the editor her diaries

• diaries were edited and sent to Ford Maddox Ford, a writer and editor of a periodical of modernist writing, transatlantic review

• Ford suggested the pen name of Jean Rhys; writings became The Left Bank, and Other Stories; takes up underside and marginalized figures

• 1923 – Lenglet was jailed and Rhys destitute; began an affair with Ford although Ford was living with the painter, Stella Bowen

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• after the affair, Rhys wrote a novel of the ménage à trios, but editors fears libel charges from Ford and changed the names of characters and the title to Postures (later published as Quartet in U.S.)

• when Lenglet was released from jail, he wrote his version of the situation, called Barred, which Rhys translated despite passages which were critical of her

• 1927 Rhys left Lenglet and went to England; married Leslie Tilden Smith, a literary agent

• Smith very supportive of her writing; handled the domestic chores, typed her work and worked as agent with her publishers

• very productive period for Rhys; she wrote 3 novels in the 1930s and began a draft of Wide Sargasso Sea

• 1936 – returned to Dominica with Smith for a visit

• 1945 – Smith died • 1947 - Rhys married Max Hamer, Smith’s cousin; Rhys

stopped writing and many people believed that she had died

• 1957 – BBC dramatized Good Morning, Midnight and Rhys was “found” alive in Devon, England

• 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea was published to acclaim; Rhys was 76, made fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

• 1978 Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)

• Rhys continued to write until her death in 1979

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• 1931 After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie• 1935 Voyage in the Dark• 1939 Good Morning Midnight• 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea • 1979 Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

Translations• 1928 Francis Carco, Perversity• 1932 Eduard de Neve [Jean Lenglet] Barred

Wide Sargasso Sea• won Royal Society of Literature award, W.H. Smith

award

to Francis Wyndham, 1958 “This is to tell you something about the novel I am

trying to write - provisional title “The First Mrs. Rochester.” I mean, of course, the mad woman in “Jane Eyre” …

I have no title yet. “The First Mrs. Rochester is not right. Nor, of course, “Creole.” That has a different meaning now. I hope I’ll get one soon, for titles mean a lot to me. Almost half the battle. I thought of “Sargasso Sea” or “Wide Sargasso Sea” but nobody knew what I meant” (135-6 in Norton Critical Ed., ed. Judith L. Raiskin).

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• Sargasso Sea – geographical region, full of sargassumalgae

• lore was that ships became entangled in the weeds and were pulled under water

• Carson’s article in Norton edition – the sea is outside time: plants live for decades, some for centuries

• see also Ezra Pound’s poem, “ Portrait d’ une Femme”

Portrait d’ une Femme

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,London has swept about you this score yearsAnd bright ships left you this or that in fee:Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.Great minds have sought you – lacking someone else.You have been second always. Tragical?No. You preferred it to the usual thing:One dull man, dulling and uxorious,One average mind – with one thought less, each year.Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sitHours, where something might have floated up.and now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

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You are a person of some interest, one comes to youAnd takes strange gain away:Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something elseThat might prove useful and yet never proves,That never fits a corner or shows use,Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,These are your riches, your great store; and yetFor all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,Strange woods half-sodden, and new brighter stuff;In the slow float of differing light and deep,No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,Nothing that’s quite your own.

Yet this is you.Ezra Pound