Shutting Up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

This paper explores Wide Sargasso Sea's articulation of race and gender in context of a debate that has been waged within feminist postcolonial studies around representation of racial otherness. On one hand, critics like Benita Parry contend that we need to recover historically repressed knowledges and to construct the speaking of subaltern, a conception of native as historical subject and agent of an oppositional discourse.' On other, Spivak and her followers emphasize that our very effort at resuscitating subaltern's voice/self by invoking historical contexts reproduces epistemic violence of imperialism: it imposes on subaltern Western assumptions of embodied subjectivity and fails to acknowledge that other has always already been constructed according to colonizer's self-image and can therefore not simply be given his/her voice back.2 Spivak and Parry both invoke Wide Sargasso Sea's representation of black Creoles to illustrate their respective approaches. For Parry, black nurse and obeah woman Christophine is source of a counterdiscourse that is rooted in historically potent function of black magic in African and West Indian cultures. For Spivak, an unmediated access to subalterns' histories is impossible because Christophine is tangential to a narrative written in interest of white Creole protagonist (Three Women's Texts 253). I argue that each position can only partly account for Rhys's complex delineation of West Indian social and racial relations in Wide Sargasso Sea. By analyzing largely ignored distinction between narration and focalization in text, I show that novel does not, as Spivak argues, appropriate blackness in service of Euro-Creole subject constitution. In fact, it constantly thwarts an easy identification with white Creole protagonist, showing her as ensnared by colonialist assumptions which she unsuccessfully and often grotesquely attempts to replicate. Wide Sargasso Sea thus exposes conventional cultural constructions through which Antoinette, like Rochester, represents her racial others, but it paradoxically also resists assigning subaltern function of a mere repository of Eurocentric assumptions. As Parry points out, representation of black Creoles in Wide Sargasso Sea does allow for emergence of countermeanings. I dissent with Parry's argument, however, when she celebrates an unproblematical articulation of West Indian world from an authentic black perspective and puts defiant Christophine in role of selfdetermining agent Antoinette failed to become. Indeed, moment Christophine