双重“他者”的自我认同——从后殖民女性主义视角解读《藻海无边》

赵 洋

双重“他者”的自我认同
——从后殖民女性主义视角解读《藻海无边》

赵 洋

内容提要：本文拟从后殖民女性主义视角解读吉恩·瑞斯的代表作《藻海无边》， 深入探究克里奥尔姑娘安托瓦内特所受到的双重压迫以及她为了自我认同所做的努力。在后殖民语境下，女主人公安托瓦内特成为了双重“他者”：克里奥尔身份使她处于居间地带，既难以被白人认同，也不能被黑人认同；另一方面，父权统治下的女性也遭受到男性的压迫。但同时，安托瓦内特也在进行着各种反话语实践，如：对男性凝视的回视、被正视的女性身体以及与当地土著的共谋等。她的自我认同有力地打破了殖民地语境下的主/奴，父权话语下的男/女二元对立思维模式，为之后的女性主义及后殖民反话语实践开辟了道路。

后殖民女性主义 双重“他者” 自我认同

Ⅰ. Introduction

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominicaborn British female writer Jean Rhys. Writing back from Jane Eyre， it revises charlotte Bronte's story by presenting the life of Rochester's fi rst wife， called Bertha in Jane Eyre and Antoinette in this work，from the time of her youth in Jamaica to her unhappy marriage to Mr. Rochester. Resolving the riddle of madness of the creole woman， the novel is warmly welcomed by the public and generated remarkably diverse interpretations， concerning about of racial inequality， creole identification， as well as power relationships between men and women.

current critiques are mainly concentrated on two dimensions: feminist criticism and postcolonial criticism. Feminist theories endeavor to challenge the relegation of women to the margins of male society and reposit them at the center of the literature. For instance， Elizabeth Abel looks into the internal division between the inner self and a mechanicalexternal one，［1］Missy Kubitschek claims that assimilation is invalid as a personal strategy while we need to remain "true to the ancient lights"［2］， and Lee Erwin focuses on the relationship between the narrative strategy and female subjectivity.［3］Since the late 70s， Wide Sargasso Sea has become the focus of attention in postcolonial paradigm. Helen Tiffi n maintains that the binary opposition between men and women， West Indies and Britain， reflects the hierarchy of the master and slave， colonizer and colonized.［4］Moreover， Silvia cappello studies postcolonial discourses in the novel， analyzing the subversion of the imperial privilege of the center in order to give voices to the periphery.［5］

Insightful and thought-provoking as those critiques are， neither feminist criticism nor postcoloni al criticism can alone make a comprehensive analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea. In effect， the creole woman represented by Antoinette is doubly marginalized in the novel， suffering both from oppressive patriarchal and imperial forces. The effort of self-identification is complicated in that the gender problem is interwoven with race and nationality， thus requiring a comprehensive reexamination from postcolonial feminist perspectives. Therefore， this essay aims at looking into the complexities of the heroin's identity and identification efforts from postcolonial feminist perspectives， with the focus on①how she is marginalized under both colonial and patriarchal hegemony； ②what resistance strategies are applied in order to regain subjectivity.

II. Theoretical Framework: Postcolonial Feminism

Feminism and postcolonialism are two representative discourses of the minority in the western intellect. By the mid-80s， nonetheless，postcolonial feminism has emerged in recognizing that race， ethnicity， class， and nationality functioned as interlocking systems of oppression and formed a "matrix of domination" thereby establishing a new theoretical space between feminist and postcolonial discourses.［6］The most important influence of such combination is the rediscovery of the "Third World Woman" . Western feminists paying attention to white women and post-colonialists mainly targeting at third world men， women from the third world has for a long time been neglected and arbitrarily categorized into a homogeneous entirety without considering the differences of race， class and culture. Mohanty criticizes the western feminists' distorted depiction of the third-world women as "underdevelopment"， who are automatically and necessarily defi ned as: religious，family oriented， legal minors， illiterate， domestic and sometimes revolutionary.［7］Such stereotype reveals that western feminists still harbor strong cultural prejudices towards the third-world women even though they express sympathy for their sufferings.

In this respect， postcolonial feminism aims to criticize the white-centricity in western feminism，and to reinterpret the western feminist canons from the postcolonialist point of view. It exposes how the patriarchal society， together with the white mainstream discourse construct the third world women as the "other" and also multiple counterdiscursive strategies are applied in order to fi ght for the rights of the third-world women. In Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea， the interrelations of gender and nationalities begin to be recognized and explored. Antoinette is doubly marginalized in postcolonial patriarchal society， and the complexity of her identity and identification could be interpreted from the perspective of the postcolonial feminism.

III. Enigma of the Double "Other": Racial Barrier and Patriarchal Dominance

A white creole girl living in Jamaica， Antoinette is caught between the English imperialist and the black native since she was born. Growing up at the time of post-Emancipation as the descendant of the plantationowners， she suffers her childhood without protection，accepted neither by the black native community for her predecessor's domination of Jamaica， nor the Europeans colonizers for her contaminated black blood in the barbarous land and culture. The melancholy of homelessness is already stated at the beginning of the novel: "They say when trouble comes close ranks， and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother，'because she pretty like pretty self' christophine said."［8］

Believing that she belongs to part of the black society， Antoinette is intuitively inclined to bridge the gap between black and white， between enemy and friend. As Spivak points out， Rhys "reinscribes some thematics of Narcissus" in recounting Antoinette's development，［9］among which the most noticeable mirror image is that between Antoinette and Tia the black servant girl. They appear to be intimate friends on the surface， yet their difference and distance are always there and become even clearer after a disagreement，when Antoinette accused her friend of being a "cheating nigger" and Tia called her a "white cockroach"［10］. The fragile connection fails to stand even the smallest test in that the they never truly acknowledge each other deep down in their heart: Tia harbors the hatred for her companion's white skin that resembles the oppressor，and Antoinette unconsciously regard the black as the deceitful and cunning other. The episode best revealing the complex relationship between the white creole and the black is when Antoinette leaves coulibri the night it was burn. Both girls are moved at that touching moment in that they suddenly realized they can never be the same. The mirror image is broken because what is refl ected is somehow similar but still different. Discarding the illusion， they are separated in reality by the ideological barriers that are embedded in colonialist discourses of white supremacy.

In Wide Sargasso Sea， gender， race and nationality appear to be interlocking systems of oppression. If the doomed friendship with Tia exposes the destructiveness of racial barriers in the colony， Antoinette's relationship with Rochester is both a sexual encounter and the enactment of a colonial which clearly shows the objectification and commodification of women in patriarchal colonial society.

As a white creole woman， Antoinette is under constant male gaze from the white patriarch Rochester，and the beauty of the former is understood as something wild and strange based on western values. coming from Britain the center to caribbean the periphery，Rochester has a strong sense of Englishness and is highly influenced by the European culture， prejudices and presumptions about the creoles. When he and his wife spend their honeymoon on the island， he begins to notice her beautiful appearance as well as her "creolity": "her eyes...are too large and can be disconcerting...Long， sad， dark， alien eyes. creole of pure English descent she may be， but they are not English or European either."［11］The charisma of such beauty lies in its alienation and difference as a creole woman， which triggers Rochester's curiosity and superior feelings in that she belongs to "not English or European either". Antoinette is reinvented as a "redeyed， wild-haired stranger"， a mad girl who will "loosen her black hair， and laugh and coax and fl atter"［12］. The stigmatization of female self-indulgence and sexual appetite severs for the global interest of the English empire and the creole woman must be the object of sustained legislative scrutiny from the white patriarchy by which the relationship of English self and ethic other is established in defending their hegemony.

Furthermore， the commodification of women is clearly indicated in the doomed marriages of Antoinette and her mother Annette in which neither is connected with love. Annette loses her mind when her beloved son，Pierre， dies on the night of the coulibri's destruction. The tragic stemming from her English husband's lack of understanding of the local people， Mason autocraticallyannounced that Annette is crazy and imprisoned her in the country where she was virtually raped by the two black caretakers. The tragedy of Annette preludes the future imprisonment of her daughter， and indicates the hard reality that when women lose their monetary value or beauty， they can be always labeled as mad，then locked away and be discarded. Rochester directly admitted his numbness even before they marry: "when at last I met her I bowed， smiled， kissed her hand，danced with her. I played the part I was expected to play. She never had anything to do with me at all."［13］

Ⅳ. counter-discursive Strategies: Self-Assertion of the creole Woman

In view of the formation of identity as a "process of identification"， Stuart Hall stresses that the formation of identity is "subject to the play of history and the play of difference"［14］. In other words，identity no longer remains stable but is a process of becoming， and thus the borderline between man/ woman， master/slave can be blurred and crossed to break colonial and patriarchy hegemony. Antoinette strives to assert herself in a doubly marginalized position， with multiple counter-discursive strategies including the returned female gaze， the envisaged body and sexuality， and the combined voices of both black and white creoles.

In Wide Sargasso Sea， Jean Rhys writes back to Bronte's Jean Eyre and gives voice to Rochester's mad wife Bertha. The "canonical counter-discourse" suggested by Helen Tiffin gives us an opportunity to hear the other side of the story and to explore the gaps and silences in the founding imperialist novel. As the narrator in chapter One and chapter Three，Antoinette returns the male gaze by the female's point of view thereby challenging the English hegemonic vision. One of the most frequently quoted episodes is the description of coulibri's Edenic grown wild that is seen from Antoinette's perspective:

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible—the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell...It was a bell-shaped mass of white， mauve，deep purples， wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.［15］

In confrontation with Jane Eyre's soothing and romantic English landscape， the garden of coulibri witnessed by the creole girl Antoinette is mysterious and seems dangerous. The wildness of the caribbean landscape displaces the western founding myths and functions as the resisting force from the "other" against the canonical version of the Garden of Eden.

"Fighting mad to tell her story" as Rhys claims，Antoinette persists in reexamining many of the basic elements in imperial and patriarchal discourses and strives to speak out her own voices. As Rochester attempts to incorporate her into the suppressive English civilization， by reinventing her as "Bertha Mason"， she endeavors to keep her subjectivity and refuses to be domesticated in terms of race and gender， retorting that "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else， calling me by another name"［16］. Despite she was at last imprisoned at Thornfi eld Hall， Antoinette once again resumes control of the narrative and her seemingly "natural" incapacity for rational thought is no longer reduced to the concept of essential femaleness，but symbolizes the colonial subject's resistance to masculine rationality and imperial dominance.

Moreover， sex and body are always the core concern of postcolonial feminist critiques. According to Judith Butler， body is never a "natural phenomenon" because it is already contaminated by culture.［17］Rejecting to see it as a passive receiver，she argues that the female body can also be active and powerful in resisting patriarchal discourses.

In Wide Sargasso Sea， Rochester attemptingto maintain the patriarchal dominance must put his imperial house in order， as ciolkowski states，"by countering the brazen challenge that is posed by the creole woman who threatens to carry reproduction outside the domain of the English patriarchal family"［18］. Yet the racial mixing and sexual relationships between black and white are commonly seen in Wide Sargasso Sea， advertising a contamination of the pure English blood that would inevitably cause the "degeneracy". Rochester expresses his horror of when comparing his wife Antoinette to the half-caste servant girl， Amelie—"For a moment she looked very much like Amelie. Perhaps they are related， I thought. It's possible， it's even probable in this damned place"［19］.

Antoinette's hybrid female body—half black， half white—severely threatens the integrated British identity of Rochester， who constantly worries about being "poisoned"—a metaphoric dissolution of the binary opposition between self and other. After having sex with Antoinette， he was disturbed with terror by the bodily pollution by the "bad blood". Different from western feminists who emphasize sex liberation of women，postcolonial feminism nonetheless stresses on the right to have sex and be the "mother". Antoinette's sexual encounter with Rochester can be viewed as a radical rebellion against the postcolonial patriarchal discourse that regulates the hierarchic rights of motherhood. The terrain of colonial difference is blurred as Rochester discloses the identifi cation and disidentifi cation between the English white man and the colonial "half-caste"， and he could not reject the fact of contamination hard as he tried to "vomit".

cultural hybridity， as Bhabha suggests， can function as both repressive and subversive forces since it represents an ambivalent space that is not necessarily the resolution of a confl ict between two cultures but an area of tension.［20］Situated in the liminal space belonging to neither white nor black， Antoinette is also endowed with an opportunity of dynamic cultural interaction thereby to assert her self-hood. In spite of the failed complete identification with the black natives， the condition of suffering from the same kind of domination helps the black and white creoles to form combined resisting voices， though temporary and unstable it might be，against the postcolonial patriarchal hegemony.

christophine， originally a wedding gift to Annette，is practically a mother-like fi gure to Antoinette. She is different from other women in Antoinette's eyes: "she was much blacker—blue-black with a thin face and straight features. She wore a black dress， heavy gold earrings and a yellow handkerchief... She had a quiet voice and a quiet laugh."［21］Treating her as her equal，Antoinette greatly trusts and relies on christophine for her purposes. It is also christophine the obeah woman that Antoinette turns to when not knowing how to solve the problem with her husband. As a native， female，individual self， christophine accuses Rochester's maltreatment of Antoinette as she fails to defend for herself. Her speech is so powerful as to repress that of Rochester and manages to reduce the English imperialist's discourse to a mere echoing， acknowledging with the grudging respects that "she is a fighter， I had to admit". The alliance between the black and white creoles helps Antoinette to defy the dominance of discriminatory discourse thereby to assert her self-hood.

V. conclusion

To conclude， the creole woman represented by Antoinette is doubly marginalized in Wide Sargasso Sea. On one hand， she can identify with neither white community nor black natives because of the racial barrier；on the other， women under patriarchal discourses are objectified and commodified in postcolonial patriarchy society. Nonetheless， Antoinette， being the double "other"，strives to assert her selfhood through multiple counter discursive strategies， including the returned female gaze，the envisaged body and sexuality， and the combined voices of both black and white creoles. The heroin's self-identification efforts powerfully disrupt the repressive dualism and essentialism of colonial and patriarchal discourses， thereby paving the way for future feminist and postcolonial counter discursive practices.

【Works cited】

［1］ Abel， Elizabeth. "Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys". contemporary Literature 20.1979（2）， pp. 155-177.

［2］ Kubitschek， Missy. "charting the Empty Spaces of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea". A Journal of Women Studies， 1987， 9（2）， pp. 23-28.

［3］ Erwin， Lee. "'Like in a Looking-Glass': History and Narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea". A Forum on Fiction 22， 1989（2）， pp. 143-158.

［4］ Tiffin， Helen. "Mirror and Mask: colonial Motifs in the Novels of Jean Rhys". World Literature Written in English 17，1978， pp. 328-341.

［5］ cappello， Silvia. "Postcolonial Discourse in Wide Sargasso Sea". Journal of caribbean Literatures 6， 2009（1）， pp. 47-54.

［6］ Mardorssian， carine. "Double ［De］colonization and the Feminist criticism of Wide Sargasso Sea". college Literature 26， 1999 （2）， p. 81.

［7］ Mohanty， chandra. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and colonial Discourse". Feminist Review 30， 1988， pp. 61-88.

［8］［10］［11］［12］［13］［15］［16］［18］［19］［21］Rhys， Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. England: Penguin Book， 2001.

［9］ Spivak， Gayatri. "Three Women's Texts and a critique of Imperialism". critical Inquiry 12，1985（1）， pp. 243-261.

［14］ Hall， Stuart. "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference". Radical America 23. June， 1991（1）， pp. 9-20.

［17］ Butler， Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discussion Limits of Sex. London: Routledge， 1993.

［20］ Bhabha， Homi. The Location of culture. New York: Routledge， 1994.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 postcolonial novel by Dominica-born British author Jean Rhys. This essay aims at looking into the complexities of the heroin's identity from postcolonial feminist perspectives， with the focus on ① how she is marginalized under both colonial and patriarchal hegemony； ② what resistance strategies are applied in order to regain subjectivity. It is indicated that Antoinette， being a double "other"， manages to assert her self-hood through multiple counter discursive strategies， including the returned female gaze， envisaged sex and body， and the combined voices of both black and white creoles. The heroin's self-assertion powerfully disrupts the repressive essentialism of colonial discourses， paving the way for future feminist and postcolonial counter discursive practices.

postcolonial feminism double "Other" self-assertion

Zhao Yang is from The School of English and Foreign Studies， Beijing Foreign Studies University. Research interests are British and American Literature.

赵洋，北京外国语大学英语学院，研究方向为英美文学。

Title: Identifi cation of the Double "Other" —A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea