Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents the year’s third lecture. The lecture will be given by Dr Cathleen Maslen, who currently teaches Shakespeare studies and comparative literature at the University of Western Australia. The lecture will be based on a chapter from Dr Maslen’s forthcoming book, Too Late for Truth : Melancholia and Nostaglia in the Novels of Jean Rhys (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). As usual excellent wine (and orange juice) will be available
When: Monday March 19 4.30 PM
Where: Education and Humanities 3.041
Title:
“Shine Bright as You Die” Narcissism, Melancholia and Dead Mothers in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
JeanRhys’s famously harrowing depictions of feminine marginality and abjection continue to fascinate, perplex and at times appal feminist and post-colonial scholars. My approach to reading Rhys is distinguished from existing feminist and post-colonial criticism, because I interpret Rhys’s work as a specific encounter between Western literary traditions of melancholy and nostalgia, and the representation of gender and race.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys famously reinvents Brontë’s Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad Creole wife in Jane Eyre, as the tragic Antoinette Cosway, betrayed by her husband’s sadistic manipulation of English law and values. Departing from most readings of this novel, in this paper I contend that Rhys does not represent Antoinette as a completely sympathetic victim, but rather emphasises her investment in the melancholy, nostalgia and narcissism of her English oppressors.
With reference to postcolonial commentators such Gayatri Spivak and Paul Gilroy, I analyse Antoinette’s ambivalence towards Annette, her ‘insane’ white Creole mother, fatally traumatised by the Emancipation of Afro-Caribbean slaves by the English (1831) and the concomitant restructuring of colonial society. I also investigate Antoinette’s fraught relationship with her black friend Tia, and Rhys’s strange characterisation of Christophine, Antoinette’s black ‘nurse’ or surrogate mother. In particular, I consider the implications of Christophine’s tangential, third-person status in the novel, which have been much-debated by post-colonial scholars. Has Rhys unjustly expelled this powerful black woman to the margins of her text, or merely observed the limits of her own authority, as a white author, to represent the experience of black slavery?
I conclude that Rhys’s interest, as a novelist, in the nostalgic white Creole woman and her idealisations of black culture demands that readers pay careful attention to the racial sensibilities of Rhys’s long-suffering white women. What is the precise political import of a white woman’s melancholic identification with her black ‘other’? Is it possible to endorse Rhys’s elegiac depictions of a traumatic white experience of colonialism without usurping or detracting from black discourses of mourning?
