2 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
2.1 Empire, Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Identity
In the following chapter, I intend to take odds with the notion of ‘de-scribing’ Empire
and to coin the concept of ‘re-inscription’ as a starting point to comment on the issues
of postcolonial discourse. The issues of identity in Wide Sargasso Sea, which will be
dealt with later in the book, are closely related to the settlement and colonial history
of the Caribbean islands. At the same time, it is also my intention here to make the
general suggestion that much of what has been perceived of as postcolonial both in
its oppositional (post-independence colonies as the historical phase after colonial­
ism) and complicit (occurring as a confluence of colonialism and modernity) forms is
perhaps better understood as post-imperialism:
“[…] The trauma and the burdens of colonial relations between the colonizer and colonized as
well as the after-effects of anti-colonial violence continue to echo in contemporary debates […]
over language, ethnicity, immigration, gender relations, race, political ideology and religion in
former colonies and in metropolitan Europe.” (Le Sueur, 2003, p. 4)
However, culture has always tended to be associated with the nation or the state; this
differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’. Culture in this sense is a source of identity, accompany­
ing rigorous codes of intellectual and moral behaviour that are opposed to the permis­
siveness associated with such relatively liberal philosophies as multiculturalism and
hybridity. James Clifford turns the positioning discourse in The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography towards the modern condition of societies in which “it is
increasingly difficult to attach identity, meaning, or ‘authenticity’ to a coherent culture
or language or to a (presumably essentially modernist) discourse which attempts to
do so” (Clifford, 1988). But, because of imperialism, all cultures are involved in one
another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extremely differenti­
ated. Thus, people could think of the imperialism as a protracted, almost metaphysi­
cal obligation to rule subordinate, inferior or less advanced peoples. In disavowing the
culturally differentiated condition of the colonial world, the colonizer is himself caught
into the cultural borders of the postcolonial anxiety: “Culture can be seen as a field in
which forces of identity, (…), and the state exert a centripetal pull against the centrifugal
forces of cultural difference, linguistic variation, and carnival” (Donald, 1988, p. 33).
“The first stage of a process of de-scribing Empire is to analyse where and how our view of things
is inflected (or infected) by colonialism and its constituent elements of racism, over-categori­
zation and deferral to the centre. The processes of history and European historicizing continue
to warrant attention, but they should not seduce us into believing that de-scribing empire is a
project simply of historical recuperation. The hegemony of Europe did not end with the raising of
a hundred national flags… The postcolonial is especially and pressingly concerned with the power
that resides in discourse and textuality; its resistance, then, quite appropriately takes place in and
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44 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
from the domain of textuality, in (among other things) motivated acts of reading. The contestation
of postcolonialism is a contest of representation”. (Tiffin and Lawson, 1994, p. 109)
The description above reinforces the idea of binary oppositions. The process of cul­
tural exposure of the empire is not this simple, because we no longer have one or more
groups ‘writing empire’ and politically engaged members of Western institutions on
behalf of the subaltern or ‘other’, reversing this process and simultaneously ‘de-scrib­
ing empire’. In this sense, ‘de-scribing’ Empire refers to the postcolonial study in which
the coloniser or ‘settler-invader’ is forever on the back foot. This ‘revolutionary’ stance
is at odds with the process of centripetal diffusion by which Empire is fragmented and
de-creates the energies by which hybridised identity is emergent (Fig. 3.1).
Fig. 2.1: The British Empire (1890). Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/
The_British_Empire.png Accessed on April 7, 2013
Beyond these barriers, the description of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is, according
to Edward Said, inextricable bound of the development of Empire settled in the Carib­
bean ‘dreaming’ and Creole oral mythology:
“Of all the major literary forms, the novel is the most recent, its emergence the most debatable,
its occurrence the most Western, its normative pattern of social authority the most structured;
imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would
argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other.” (Said, 1994, p. 84)
The cultural limits between ‘old’ and ‘new’ interpretations of a colonial subject are
usually seen as nebulous, existing largely in the eyes of their practitioners. So it is
with imperial history. Nevertheless, cultural domination is having a decisive effect
both on the ruled and their rulers. This domination involves more than physical coer­
cion; it bears in the minds of the dominated and those who dominate them. Obvious
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Empire, Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Identity 45
systems of domination are based on assumptions about ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races,
some peoples having attained ‘civilisation’ while others remain sunk in ‘barbarism’ or
‘savagery’, from which they will only escape by external intervention. This mapping
of colonial territories, the writing of the history of their peoples through ethnographi­
cal or anthropological researches is considered exercises of power.
Imperial ways to see the world had a deep effect both on its colonies and on
British Empire. Colonial elites declined those aspects of British individual’s sub­
jective consciousness that entrusted them to inferiority. Identities are a fundamen­
tal concern of the new imperial history, which perceives nations not as elementary
entities, but as imagined constructions, constantly being reimagined. The British
sense of a nation came to depend on the imposing of the imperial power over others.
The colonial empire, for instance, helped to shape British perceptions of masculine
and feminine roles. According to Oxford English Dictionary, the word colonialism
is described as: “a settlement in a new country… a body of people who settle in a
new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state;
the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants
and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up” (Oxford
English Dictionary, 76). Because colonialism was pure oppression, evil and nothing
more than a form of a neo-slavery, the native resorted in the end to violence. The
prefix ‘post’ aims at decolonizing the future. The colonial subject who identifies
with the coloniser and learns ‘white’ or ‘European’ habits ends up as a rejected in
both worlds. In many ways the process of imperialism is disseminated from within.
The elite creoles, writes another critic, Mary Louise Pratt, “sought aesthetic and ide­
ological grounding as white Americans” and attempted to create “an independent,
decolonised American society and culture, while retaining European values and
white supremacy” (Pratt, 1992, p. 175).
In Marginality as a site of resistance, Bell Hooks says: “This is an intervention.
A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclu­
sive space where we recover ourselves, where we meet in solidarity to erase the category
colonized/colonizer. Marginality is the space [site] of resistance. Enter that space. Let us
meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators” (Hooks, 1990, p. 152).
In the light of the postcolonial theories, studying both dominant knowledge
and the marginalized ones as binary opposites perpetuates the existence of the two
concepts of postcolonialism and postimperialism as homogenous entities. Homi
K. Bhabha argues that: “the postcolonial world should valorize spaces of mixing;
spaces where truth and authenticity stand in ambiguity. This space of hybridity
offers the most profound challenge to colonialism” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 113). One man­
ifestation of the ongoing nature of imperialism is the neoimperialism or neocoloni­
alism. For Robert Young:
“Neo-colonialism is... the worst form of imperialism. For those who artifact it, it means power
without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In
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46 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at
home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power
could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colo­
nialism neither is the case.” (Young, 2001, p. 11)
In the quotation above, Robert Young sees neocolonialism as being advanced first
through “development and dependency theory” and then through “critical devel­
opment theory” (Young, 2001, p. 49-56). As a consequence to this fact, some theo­
rists depict a world made up of developmental inequities, arguing that metropoli­
tan centres, in seeking to be even more developed, ‘under-develop’ the peripheries
through exploitation. In this regard ‘development’ has to incorporate other dimen­
sions like culture, gender, society and politics as well. Taking into account the
post-development theory, Young asserts that there has been a movement towards
‘popular development’. It is in this context that Young notes the potential convergence
between developmental theory and postcolonialism, the latter being characterized
by continuing forms of colonial traditions, bounded with resistance, reconstruction
and transformation. Historically speaking, in the former Caribbean slave colonies, the
types of subordination were often covert forms of resistance.
Différance
C
center
The Subaltern
Colonial Mimicry
Hybridity
Fig. 2.2: Postcolonialism vs. Postimperialism
Exploring the relationship between discourses of cultural hybridity and projects
for social equality, postcolonialism also deals with conflicts of identity and cultural
belonging. For Timothy Mitchell, “Colonising refers not simply to the establishing of
a European presence, but also to the spread of a political order that inscribes in the
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Empire, Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Identity 47
social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood and a new means
of manufacturing the experience of the real” (Mitchell, 1991, p. 154).
While in economic terms imperialism was about profit, first and foremost it
was about the imperialist psyche, the representation of the white European, be this
reflected in the Rousseau-istic idea of the ‘noble savage’, or the one bringing enlight­
enment to the ‘indigenous heathen’. Following this idea, the postcolonialism often
ensures the existence of empire using the image of the ‘other’. As Gayatri Spivak has
observed the attribution of a unified speaking voice and an authentic native ‘essence’
to the colonised, far from destabilising imperialistic cultural practices, actually serves
to reconstitute the Subject of the West: “The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives
an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while providing a cover for this
subject of knowledge” (Spivak, 1985, p. 87).
Recent studies focused on cultural geography’s “preoccupation with immaterial
cultural processes, on the constitution of intersubjective meaning systems, on the
play of identity politics through the less-than-tangible often-fleeting spaces of texts,
signs, symbols, psyches, desires, fears and imaginings” (Philo, 2000, p. 33) and on
the neglect of the material processes “which are the stuff of everyday social practices,
relations and struggles, and which underpin the social group formation, the constitu­
tion of social systems and social structures, and the social dynamics of inclusion and
exclusion” (Philo, 2000).
In Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, Jean Rhys negotiates between producing
more complex accounts of colonial encounters, ambiguous identities and relations
and retains a critical perspective on the material and cultural costs of colonialism.
Postcolonial criticism does also itself recognize this point. Helen Tiffin, for example,
whose work has done much to popularize the ideas associated with the postcolonial,
talks in terms of postcolonial strategies rather than of some heterogeneous realm of
the postcolonial:
“Postcolonial counter-discursive strategies involve a mapping of the dominant discourse, a
reading and exposing of its underlying assumptions, and the dis/mantling of these assumptions
from the cross-cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified ‘local’… Wide Sargasso Sea
directly contests British sovereignty – of persons, of place, of culture, of language. It reinvests its
own hybridized world with a provisionally authoritative perspective, but one which is deliber­
ately constructed as provisional since the novel is at pains to demonstrate the subjective nature
of point of view and hence the cultural construction of meaning.” (Tiffin, 1987, p. 23)
The strategies are plural and the standpoint ‘local’. The argument here might begin
to sound like, but should not be confused with, a Lyotardian valuation of petits récits
over the supposedly impossible grand narratives. Smaller narratives focus on local
topography, so that the maps can become fuller. ‘Local’ knowledge in the sense of the
word is situated, particular, and ‘native’.
To conclude, the term ‘Creole’ moves beyond any attempt at a Manichean divid­
ing line between native and settler, black and white. Interestingly enough, the small
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48 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
indigenous population of the Caribbean does trespass on Wide Sargasso Sea, though
it is the category of the creole, which permeates the book’s narrative and becomes the
embodiment of its radical instability.
2.2 British Caribbean: Re-envisioning Cultural Identity
Besides viewing the cultural identity as an attempt to locate a single, essential black
Caribbeanness and to see the Caribbean as one homogeneous culture to which all
black Caribbeans belong, Hall tends to analyze cultural identity as something that is
not “an essence, but a positioning” (Hall, 1996, p. 395). The idea that cultural iden­
tity can be viewed as rooted in a history, is not only enclosed in his use of the term
‘positioning’, but it is also positioned or placed both from within the culture and from
outside of the culture; it refers to geographical positions and boundaries at which and
in which cultural identity is rooted. What Hall tries to imply here is that cultural iden­
tity is not only rooted, but also en-route(d), since it is transformed or transplanted into
something new or different. In this respect, cultural identity, while neither a static or
active entity, is constantly being repositioned from within and outside of the culture.
Furthermore, Hall uses the metaphor of vectors: “[we] might think of black Car­
ibbean identities as ‘framed’ by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the
vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture” (Hall,
1996, p. 395). Rooted in the cultural theories of identity, Hall’s approach comes up
with the need to return to the postcolonial theories by recognizing the “difference
and rupture” of the black Caribbean cultural identity or identities. Hall seems to use
the term ‘vector’ in the geometric sense that one can sketch the Caribbean identity
between the two line segments of continuity and rupture, redirecting the use of the
word vector in terms of routes or courses or directions. The directional allusions of the
word vector point to a cultural identity that is en-route and constantly changing and
to the movement of peoples to and from the Caribbean, namely to diaspora. So, where
one can figuratively plot the location of cultural identity, one can only do so while
acknowledging that it is constantly moving in some direction.
In this sense, Hall argues that in different geographical locations, one finds dif­
ferent cultural identities; this approach points to Hall’s rejection of the way of think­
ing about cultural identity that searches for a singular Caribbean essence. To support
this, Hall gives as examples of this cultural difference in relation to each other, the
islands of Martinique and Jamaica, noting that the “richer, more ‘fashionable’” Fort
de France contrasts with the “visibly poorer” Kingston – which is not only visibly
poorer, “but itself at a point of transition between being ‘in fashion’ in an Anglo-Afri­
can and Afro-American way” (Hall, 1996, p. 397). Of a particular interest here is that
the boundaries that make the differences, become sights of movement in themselves.
Thus, the culture and identity of Martinique, one island of the Francophone Carib­
bean and Jamaica, one island of the Anglophone Caribbean are en-route in different
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British Caribbean: Re-envisioning Cultural Identity 49
directions, despite any cultural similarities they might have, that is, despite the routes
that position the two islands as rooted in a historically common experience.
While Hall sustains the idea that Caribbean cultural identity is not homogeneous
and fixed in a singular history, his argument – beyond the idea that the difference
and rupture is found in the Caribbean – is indicated by the cultural differences found
in separate islands. He notes that “[a]t different places, times, in relation to dif­ferent
questions, the boundaries are re-sited. They become, not only what they have, at
times, certainly been – mutually excluding categories, but also what they sometimes
are – differential points along a sliding scale” (Hall, 1996, p. 396).
It is in the act of leaving for “any long absence” that Hall begins a new cultural expe­
rience, not always rooted in the Caribbean, rerouted or re-rooted in the non-Caribbean
diaspora. This experience of relocation does not only determine a change in the per­ceived
cultural identity of the diasporic subject in relation to the Caribbean, but it also has an
effect on the positioning of Caribbean cultural identities from outside of the metropolitan
culture, into which the exilic/diasporic subjects re-route and re-root.6
The idea of spatiality is a transgressive cultural tool in the study of the Carib­
bean topos, showing its engagement with the category of ‘space’ that still remains
the major criterion for the structuring of identities in the region. Beyond the concep­
tual instrumentality of hybridity, the attempt to dismantle the concept of space as an
essentialist category in postcolonial accounts depends on a re-charting of the topog­
raphy on the edge of the empire and of traditional notions of space and geography:
“The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is
all about. Now when a coincidence occurs between real control and power, the idea
of what a given place was (could be, might become), and an actual place – at that
moment the struggle for empire is launched. This coincidence is the logic both for
Westerners taking possession of land and, during decolonization, for resisting natives
reclaiming it. Imperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the primacy
of geography and an ideology about control of territory” (Said, 1994, p. 78).
In approaching the imperialist configurations of space from a gendered perspec­
tive, some feminist critics have sought to dig into the body space underpinning the
representations of England and abroad, home and away, underscoring the relative
nature of spaces and their contingent meanings.7 The fluid space of subjectivity in the
essentialized notions of identity becomes thus dependent on the concept of ‘trans­
6 Roots, as James Clifford argues, are not antecedent to and do not determine routes. Places that
traditionally connote rootedness are merely provisional and contingent points of permanence. In his
work on travel and mobility, Clifford declares that ostensibly stable concepts like ‘home’ have always
been asserted retroactively and essentialized only against a ubiquitous history of movement.
7 See, for example, Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: an analysis of women’s travel writing and
colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991) and Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism (New
York: Guilford Press, 1994). Eschewing a solely individualistic understanding of female travelers as
transgressive proto-feminists, and escaping the constraints of patriarchy in the home country for an
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50 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
parent space’ which Gillian Rose and Alison Blunt address in Writing Women and
Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. In this regard, building on the work of
Henri Lefebvre, Blunt and Rose write: “Transparent space assumes that the world can
be seen as it really is and that there can be unmediated access to the truth of objects
it sees; it is a space of mimetic representation” (Blunt and Rose, 1994, p. 5). Thus,
the colonial margins were instrumental in reinventing the metropolitan and English
centre even as indigenous traditions were being eroded by the experience of colonial­
ism. Recognizing the incomplete project of colonialism and its spatial and temporal
ramifications, Gikandi sustains that the postcolonial paradigm is most useful as a
strategy for re-reading the convergence of structural continuity in the face of temporal
disruption, of understanding memories in the midst of reconfigured desires.
Displacement creates thus a dynamic where “each itinerary taken, each reading
constructed is at the same time active in its uniqueness and reflective in its collectiv­
ity” (Trinh Minh-Ha, 1992, p. 23). Consequently, “the notion of displacement is also
a place of identity: there is no real me to return to, no whole self that synthesizes the
woman, the woman of color and the writer; there are only diverse recognition of self
through difference, and unfinished, contingent, arbitrary closures that make possible
both politics and identity” (Trinh Minh-Ha, 1992, p. 157).
Homi Bhabha further connects the theme of cultural displacement to the larger
issues of cultural identity and national identity. He notes that there is a clash between
the performative national narrative that fixes people as objects with claims to histor­
ical origins, and the processual one, which marks the people as subjects perform­
ing their own narratives in the day-to-day acts of living. In the creation of this split
space, “the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the
nation” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 142).
The recursive nature of the processual appears as cultural displacement where
repetition at different stages is accompanied with difference, so that any homogeniz­
ing descriptions are impossible. People are poised at the acknowledgement of the
difference between the “totalizing powers of the social as homogenous, consensual
community” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 143-144) and the contestory forces of disparate inter­
est and identities. In line with these aspects, the national space “becomes liminal
signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heter­
ogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense loca­
tion of cultural difference” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 145-146). Within the interstitial spaces
marked by the processual “the minority discourses […] speak betwixt and between
times and places” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 158).
adventurous taste of the exotic, Mills and Blunt proffer a notion of identity predicated on positionality
and a travel subjectivity constituted by the discourses of gender, race and colonialism.
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Exoticness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea 51
2.3 Exoticness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea
The notion of an endless and exotic space reflected in the title of Jean Rhys’ novel
includes the possibility of hidden meanings as well as an intense feeling of the
unknown and the inexpressible, which permeates the entire story and becomes an
important source of the sublime.8
The self-conscious use of exoticist techniques and modalities of cultural rep­
resentation might be considered less as a response to the phenomenon of the post­
colonial exotic than as a further symptom of it, a result of the commodification of
cultural difference.
Although the word ‘exotic’ currently has a widespread application, it continues to
be commonly misunderstood. For the exotic is not, as is often supposed, an inherent
quality to be found ‘in’ certain people, distinctive objects, or specific places; exoti­
cism describes, rather, a particular mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders
people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively
manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery. The
exoticist production of otherness is dialectical and contingent; at various times and in
different places, it may serve conflicting ideological interests, providing the rationale
for projects of rapprochement and reconciliation, but just as easily legitimising the
need for plunder and violent conquest. Exoticism, in this context, might be described
as a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness
and familiarity. Within this circuit, the strange and the familiar, as well as the relation
between them, may be reworked to serve different, even contradictory, political needs
and ends. As Stephen Foster has argued, the exotic functions dialectically as a sym­
bolic system, domesticating the foreign, the culturally different and the extraordinary
so that “phenomena to which they apply begin to be structured in a way which makes
them comprehensible and possibly predictable, if predictably defiant of total famili­
arity” (Foster, 1982). Exoticism is a control mechanism of cultural translation which
relays the other back again to the same; but to domesticate the exotic would neutral­
ize its capacity to create surprises. Thus, while exoticism describes the systematic
8 Contemporary concepts of the sublime follow the ideas of Longinus (the experience of transcendence
as an effort to express and to share intense feelings) as well as those of Edmund Burke, in particular
his analysis developed in The Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful. In the period between Boileau and Kant, Burke contributed to the theme by creating a sharp
distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The feeling of the sublime, according to Burke, is
connected with fear and the instinct for self-preservation. Immanuel Kant, one of Burke’s followers,
in his Critique of Judgement defines the sublime as something which arouses the suprasensuous
faculty of mind and brings man to the realization of his freedom from all external constraints. The
link between the experience of the sublime and the feeling of powerlessness is further observed by
J.-F. Lyotard, who focuses on the desire to express the inexpressible in the process of overcoming the
feeling of emptiness.
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52 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
assimilation of cultural difference, ascribing familiar meanings and associations to
unfamiliar things, it also denotes an expanded, distorted, comprehension of diversity
which effectively limits assimilation “since the exotic is kept at arm’s length rather
than taken as one’s own” (Foster, 1982, p. 22). As a system then, exoticism functions
along predictable lines but with unpredictable content.
As a technology of representation, exoticism is self-empowering; self-referential
even, insofar as the objects of its gaze are not supposed to look back. For this reason,
exoticism has proven over time to be a highly effective instrument of imperial power;
the exotic splendour of newly colonized lands may disguise the brutal circumstances
of their acquisition. The exoticist rhetoric of fetishised otherness and sympathetic
identification masks the inequality of the power relations without which the dis­
course could not function. In the imperial context, this masking involves the trans­
formation of power into spectacle. For Said, exoticism functions in a variety of impe­
rial contexts as a mechanism of aesthetic substitution which “replaces the impress
of power with the blandishments of curiosity” (Said, 1993). The massification of the
exotic also entails a reconsideration of the conventional exoticist distinction between
the (imperial) “centre” and the “peripheries” on which it depends. The arrival of the
exotic in the “centre” cannot disguise the inequalities – the hierarchical encodings of
cultural difference – through which exoticist discourses continue to function. What
is clear, in any case, is that there are significant continuities between older forms of
imperial exoticist representation and some of their postcolonial counterparts. Two of
these continuities are the aesthetics of decontextualisation and commodity fetishism.
The three aspects of commodity fetishism – mystification (or leveling-out) of histor­
ical experience; imagined access to the cultural other through the process of con­
sumption; reification of people and places into exchangeable aesthetic objects – can
help the literary works of those much-traveled writers (such as Jean Rhys, in this case)
who are perceived as having come from, or as having a connection to, “exotic” places
to acquire an almost talismanic status. Exoticist spectacle, commodity fetishism and
the aesthetics of decontextualisation are all at work, in different combinations and
to varying degrees, in the production, transmission and consumption of postcolonial
literary/cultural texts. If exoticism has arrived in the “centre”, it still derives from the
cultural margins or, perhaps more accurately, from a commodified discourse of cul­
tural marginality, embedded in the valorized discourses of cultural otherness.
In contemporary cultural theory, marginality is often given a positive value, being
seen less as a site of social exclusion or deprivation than as a locus of resistance to
socially imposed standards and coercive norms. As the African-American cultural
critic Bell Hooks defiantly puts it:
“Marginality is a central location for the production of a counterhegemonic discourse that is not just
found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives…[Marginality is] a site one stays in, clings
to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives
from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.” (Hooks, 1990, pp. 149-150)
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Exoticness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea 53
This view is frequently echoed by large numbers of postcolonial writers/thinkers,
for whom marginality represents a challenge to the defining imperial “centre” or a
transvaluation of the lived or remembered experience of oppression. The embracing
of marginality is, above all, an oppositional discursive strategy that faces up to hierar­
chical social structures and hegemonic cultural codes. This strategy is self-empower­
ing, not just because it draws strength from opposition, but because it conceptualizes
the transformation of the subject’s relationship to the wider world. The postcolonial
deconstruction of the opposition between a monolithic “centre” and its designated
“margins” envisages the possibility of multiple centres and productively “intersecting
marginalities” (Ashcroft et al., 1989). The exotic is the perfect term to describe the
domesticating process through which commodities are taken from the margins and
reabsorbed into mainstream culture. This process is to some extent recip­rocal; main­
stream culture is always altered by its contact with the margins, even if it finds ingen­
ious ways of looking or of pretending to look, the same. Exoticism helps maintain this
pretence; it acts as the safety-net that supports these dangerous transactions, as the
regulating mechanism that attempts to manoeuvre difference back again to the same.
To define the margins can thus be seen as an exoticising strategy: as an impossible
attempt to dictate the terms and limits of intercultural contact, and to fix the val­
ue-equivalence of metropolitan commodity exchange. To keep the margins exotic – at
once strange and familiar – is the objective of the mainstream; it is an objective which
it can never fail to set, but which it can never attain. Contemporary forms of exoticism
are arguably misrecognitions of these changes – attempts to ensure the availability
of the margins for the mainstream, and through this process to ‘guarantee’ the main­
stream, keeping it out of reach of harm. Spivak does not reject marginality per se, but
she rejects it as exotic – as a legitimizing category for different versions of cultural
otherness.
The confrontation and incorporation of exoticist discourse(s) in postcolonial
writing forms the principal subject of its main concept, the postcolonial exotic. Thus,
the postcolonial exotic occupies a site of discursive conflict between a local assem­
blage of more or less related oppositional practices of assimilative codes. More specif­
ically, it marks the intersection between contending value regimes: one regime – post­
colonialism – that posits itself as anti-colonial and that works toward the dissolution
of imperial epistemologies and institutional structures; and another – postcolonial­
ity – that capitalizes both on the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural oth­
erness and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally “othered” artefacts and goods.
This constitutive tension within the postcolonial might help explain its abiding
ambiguity; it also helps us better understand how value is generated, negotiated and
disseminated in the postcolonial field of cultural production. In this case, “strategic
exoticism” could be an option, but it is not necessarily a way out of the dilemma. The
self-conscious use of exoticist techniques and modalities of cultural representation
might be considered less as a response to the phenomenon of the postcolonial exotic
than as a further symptom of it; for the postcolonial exotic is, to some extent, con­
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54 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
sidered a pathology of cultural representation under late capitalism – a result of the
commodification of cultural difference.
Drawing on her own experience of the West Indies, Jean Rhys portrays the fate of a
young, unhappily married Creole heiress in a wider context of cultural differences, colo­
nial conflicts and racial hatred. Born in Dominica as the daughter of a Welsh doctor and
a white Creole mother, Jean Rhys came to England at the age of sixteen. Like her heroine,
she had to undergo a complicated search for identity, and Antoinette’s story reflects her
own sense of alienation and displacement. According to Rochester, it is her exotic origin
and Creole blood that causes Bertha’s lunacy and, accordingly, her propensity towards
sin and crime. The emotional intensity connected with the feeling of the sublime is linked
to “unconscious fears and desires projected on to other culture, peoples and places”
(Botting, 1996, p. 154) and insanity is viewed in terms that imply racial prejudice.
In Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea, the conflict between European and West
Indian consciousness is worked out through the same fatal relationship but from a
variety of points of view. As in Jane Eyre, on a surface level it is a conflict between
conventional attitudes and emotional excesses. In contrast to Jane Eyre, it becomes
the crucial subject of the narrative, and its psychological, social, historical and geo­
graphical aspects are employed without suppressing the effects of the irrational
and the mysterious. The ‘projective method’ of landscape description, which is an
important device of characterization in the novel, contributes to the escalation of the
conflict. By contrast with the wintry landscapes that form the setting of Jane Eyre,
the summery climate of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea is typical of Roman­
tic topography and evokes the space of the traditional Gothic romance. Rochester’s
violent denial of Antoinette’s exoticism is the result of his own identity crisis as an
Englishman in the West Indies. His trouble with the lush Caribbean landscape is the
most significant aspect of his feelings of alienation in the West Indies. At first, he
is enticed by the island of Dominica just as he is by Antoinette: “It was a beautiful
place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret love­
liness” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 51-52). He describes his lust for his wife in similarly
fierce terms as well; for example, “One afternoon the sight of a dress which she’d left
lying on her bedroom floor made me breathless and savage with desire” (Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 55). Then, the unfamiliar, oppressive heat, colors, tastes, and sounds
overwhelm Rochester’s senses and his consciousness. Combined with Antoinette’s
sultry manner, the warm climate makes him feel intoxicated and sexually defence­
less. As with Antoinette’s search for her reflection, Rochester feels as if he is drown­
ing: “Everything is too much… Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The
flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea,
41). Much of Rochester’s apprehension is grounded in his fear of himself and his own
‘primitive’ desires. The “extreme green” (Rochester) notes in the landscape may be
interpreted as an awakening of primordial emotions and ‘irrational’ powers, which
are anathema to him. The result of this turmoil is Rochester’s displacement of his fear
and desire for the land and people on to Antoinette:
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Exoticness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea 55
“I hated the place. I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets
of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated
its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she
belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst
and longing for what I had lost before I found it.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 103)
In Wide Sargasso Sea, the author’s response to Jane Eyre entails greater focus on a
single character (Antoinette/Bertha). The effect of doubling is a dilution of the self
as Antoinette’s identity is divided. Antoinette’s doubling with Annette, for example,
means that the madness that was seen as an integral and defining aspect of Bertha’s
character is revealed to have been shared by her mother too: “Look the crazy girl, you
crazy like your mother…” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 49-50). Antoinette’s childhood
double, Tia, further dilutes Antoinette’s sense of self when she takes her clothes and
by extension, her identity. Tia is an external projection of Antoinette’s self; she is the
active and powerful double that Antoinette wishes she could emulate, “fires always
lit for her, sharp stones did not hurt her bare feet, I never saw her cry” (Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 23). Tia’s presence in this last dream is explicable in terms of a yearn­
ing, on Antoinette’s part, to return to her childhood innocence and a renewed desire
to embody Tia’s strength and independence. Even as she contemplates the ultimate
act of will – self-annihilation – Antoinette is keenly aware of the psychological traits
she lacks.
Just as important as what her doubles take from her is what Antoinette herself
loses. Over the course of the text, she gradually becomes distanced from herself until
she finally becomes her own Other, Bertha. The process starts at least as early as
Antoinette’s time in the convent, where she cannot see herself because there is “no
looking-glass in the dormitory” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 46). This divorce from self
is further developed during her analogous confinement in Thornfield Hall: “There
is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching
myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself
yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her.
But the glass was between us – hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they
have taken everything away” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 147).
Her transformation culminates when Antoinette finally does glimpse herself in a
mirror, unexpectedly: “It was then that I saw her – the ghost. The woman with stream­
ing hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso
Sea, 154). In this moment of forced recognition, Rhys “makes Antoinette see her self
as her Other, Brontë’s Bertha… the so-called ghost in Thornfield Hall” (Spivak, 1985).
So weakened and deteriorated is Antoinette’s identity by the novel’s end that there
is not even an Antoinette to see in the mirror; only Bertha remains. Under the pres­
sure exerted by the Rochester-figure, Antoinette has been reborn as the Bertha-figure.
She is forced to recognize herself as she is perceived, and in the process is forced to
abandon her own conception of her identity that she had previously held as an accu­
rate, inviolable truth. This splitting can be explained in psychoanalytic terms. After
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56 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
the formation of the ego – which Lacan refers to as the mirror stage – the child’s desire
will become more specifically narcissistic than erotic, as he becomes captivated no
longer by the mother’s body but by his identity as perceived, as the imaginary com­
plement of his lack. Antoinette’s forced acceptance of this Other image signals her
acquisition of a new level of consciousness and, as it were, a new fashioning of iden­
tity. Her new identity is bound by the constrictions imposed by the colonizer-husband
– it is not one that is self-fashioned. Furthermore, Antoinette’s earlier attempt to kiss
herself in the mirror suggests a narcissistic yearning for the self who is, of course,
thwarted by the mirror that mediates the encounter between self and reflection. Her
subsequent glimpse of herself as Bertha reveals the complete loss of her former self,
no longer attainable even in the form of a reflection. This is a metaphor for psycho­
logical development and maturity, for the emergence of the Other’s fully individuated
identity from the shadow of the colonizing self; a metaphor which acknowledges the
degree to which the two are for a time co-dependent, but which also ultimately allows
for the Other to be considered separate.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, there is a strongly analogous passage in which the same
theme, the theme of the Other, is treated with greater pessimism. In this scene, Antoi­
nette and her childhood friend Tia enter a virtual “narcissus-mirror” stream to swim.
Antoinette somersaults at Tia’s request, but turns and “came up choking” (Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 21), clearly distressed by the experience. Although it would be easier
for the colonial mindset if the two Others (Tia and Antoinette) could be successfully
collapsed into one counterpoint to the imperial self, Rhys’ point is that though they
are both Others. Tia and Antoinette are substantially different even from each other
and cannot be merged.
Rhys’ text resists the positing of a single, immutable Other against which the
colonizing self can oppositionally define its identity. Instead, Antoinette apparently
loses her identity, which is symbolically appropriated by Tia, who now wears Antoi­
nette’s clothing: “I looked round and Tia had gone. I searched for a long time before
I could believe that she had taken my dress – not my underclothes, she never wore
any – but my dress, starched, ironed, clean that morning. She had left me hers and
I put it on at last and walked home in the blazing sun feeling sick, hating her” (Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea, 21). Antoinette’s failure to successfully reconstitute herself after
this exchange is allegorized when Tia mirrors her one last time, in an incident which
sees Antoinette’s one-time friend turn against her and side with the black villagers. As
Coulibri burns, Tia attempts to destroy Antoinette’s physical identity:
“Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my
life as it had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As
I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her… When I was close I saw the jagged stone
in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running
down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at
each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 38)
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Exoticness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea 57
Tia’s attempt to kill Antoinette, her mirrored image, anticipates Antoinette’s own
self-annihilation as the Bertha-figure of Jane Eyre and externalizes her subconscious
desire for the liberation of death. These events also foreshadow the colonial encoun­
ter represented by the Rochester-figure’s arrival as the colonized Other. Antoinette
has her identity erased by this interaction with Tia, thus emphasizing the inherent
risks involved in such exchanges. The failure to reconstitute the self to be reconsti­
tuted or even extricate the self from the Other after a temporary merging of identities
is an anxiety which becomes fully realized in Antoinette’s marriage. After marrying
she loses not only economic independence, but her very name: “Bertha is not my
name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 121). Doubly subjected to control, she loses her maiden
name through marriage and her first name through her husband’s violent, colonial
renaming of her as “Bertha”. The patriarchal oppression of marriage and colonialism
are thereby depicted as being linked. Antoinette’s identity was, of course, precari­
ously balanced from the start, for she exists as she does in the margins of race, and
on the border of European whiteness and Caribbean indigenousness: “Creole of pure
English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 56). Antoinette and her family occupy a liminal position in Jamaican
society: they are rejected by the English and alienated from the locals. She is dubbed
a “white cockroach”, a foreigner-within: “That’s what they call all of us who were
here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard
English women call us white niggers. So between you, I often wonder who I am and
where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea, 85). The balance between dominance and marginalization is
crucial: the Other’s presence is tolerated only as long as there remains a potential to
subdue it and indoctrinate it in the ways of the self, for the purposes of strengthening
the self. The Other emerges as a source of concern when it threatens to overrun the
self and undermine its identity, assimilating itself so successfully that the self runs
the risk of culturally degenerating to the level of the Other instead of civilizing it.
This loss of boundaries between self and Other at the very site of invasion has an
unimaginably destructive potential in English Gothic romances, but it is important to
remember that it is the anxieties attendant upon the entrance of intruding colonizers
in an imperial context that provides the impetus for much postcolonial writing. The
fear and the very real consequences of imperial invasion register clearly in postcolo­
nial texts like Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the tension between Caribbean culture and
European values and power structures is keenly felt. The loss of Caribbean culture,
debased and made subservient by the imposition of European laws and customs,
bears striking parallels to the Gothic fears of reverse colonization. Christophine is
quick to recognize the essential similarities between the introduction of European
law and the recently abolished system of condoned slavery it purports to redress: “No
more slavery! She had to laugh! These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing.
They got magistrate. They got fine. They got jail house and chain gang. They got tread
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58 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism
machine to mash up people’s feet. New ones worse than old ones – more cunning,
that’s all” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 22-23). Antoinette soon falls victim to this very
law, as is intimated in the following exchange between her and Christophine:
“He will not come after me. And you must understand I am not rich now, I have no money of my
own at all, everything I had belongs to him.”
“What you tell me there?” she said sharply.
“That is English law.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 91)
For all her attempts to avoid the laws of the invaders by resisting marriage, Christo­
phine, who claims, “I keep my money. I don’t give it to no worthless man,” (Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea, 91) ends up as poor as Antoinette in a land where European
powers and not indigenous ones decide wealth and poverty, slavery and emancipa­
tion The erasure of Caribbean culture at the hands of their oppressors is evident in
a telling scene where Antoinette’s husband is welcomed to Granbois with a gift of
frangipani wreaths. The Rochester figure crowns himself with one of the wreaths, but
in contradiction of Antoinette’s assertion that he looks “like a king, an emperor,” he
then declares, “I hardly think it suits my handsome face” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
62). One need hardly explain the symbolism of what follows: “[I] took the wreath off.
It fell on the floor and as I went towards the window I stepped on it” (Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 62). Perhaps the fullest expression of the success of the colonizer is the
acceptance and internalization of the colonizer’s beliefs by the Other. The detrimen­
tal effects of the aggressive and arrogant European power structures imposed on the
“Oriental” lands and their peoples, and the consequent damage to local culture and
customs, exemplify what it was that the English feared, as reflected in the reverse-col­
onization anxieties of Gothic fictions.
To sum, up although postcolonial texts differ substantially in terms of the sensa­
tionalism they encourage and the emphasis they place on effect-driven strategies of
reader involvement, they are interested in issues of representation and can be seen
to employ similar representational topoi in their engagements with the unknown. In
particular, the exotic tropes and the fear of the foreign lend themselves admirably to
explorations of postcolonial anxieties over loss of identity on the individual and cul­
tural levels in direct consequence of colonisation. A fuller account would consider in
greater detail related issues such as the role of women and madness, superstition and
‘civilization’, sexual desire (both repressed, as it finds a metaphorical place in coloni­
zation), the relationship of the past to the present, and a consideration of patriarchy
and paternalism (and female-empowering alternatives) as they pertain to imposed
and traditional models of society.
Therefore, a link was formed between the traumas of the past and the ways in
which identities are shaped.
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