The Mind's Eye: Focalizing “Nature” in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

This article contrasts the ideas of nature on which Charlotte Brontë builds her Bildungsroman Jane Eyre (2001. New York and London: Norton) with those on which Jean Rhys builds her revisionist prequel Wide Sargasso Sea (1968, Harmondsworth: Penguin). The argument is that Jane Eyre exemplifies the idea of nature which has dominated the Western narrative of rationality. This derives from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, and from myths which recreate the lost garden on earth. Wide Sargasso Sea, by contrast, rewrites English landscape and vegetation into a “dreamscape of desire and dread” (Howells, Carol Ann. 1991. Jean Rhys. Hemel Hempstead:Harvester Wheatsheaf, 112), undermining the teleological and patriarchal assumptions of the Bildungsroman. Both Brontë and Rhys dramatise their protagonists’ focalization so as to reinforce—or subvert—conventional notions of character and identity.

Keywords:

• Bildungsroman
• Eden
• focalization
• hegemony
• nature
• Nature/Culture
• patriarchy
• postcolonial revisionist history
• teleology

Notes

See for instance Carl Plasa, Moira Ferguson, Nancy Harrison and Mary Lou Emory on slavery within the colonial project, the many voices of the woman's test, the subversion of patriarchy and Western gender relations by Jamaican and Dominican communities, and the creation in Wide Sargasso Sea of ‘dialogue, plural identities and dialogue’ (Emery, xii).

On the pictorial, and often visionary, quality of Brontë's imagination as revealed in her Roe Head Journal, see Christine Alexander in the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre, p. 397; on the pictorial in Jane Eyre see Lawrence J. Starzyk and Jane Stedman.

Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic mounts a feminist reading in which protagonists like Jane Eyre challenge patriarchy through their own personality and creativity.

For an account of Brontë's narrative strategies in counterpointing the voice of Jane as experiencing self against her voice as narrating self, see Jerome Beaty.

Compare the natural image of the tree so important to Jane Eyre with the imagery of vegetation depicted in Wide Sargasso Sea. On Dominica vegetation grows horizontally as often as vertically, and this natural phenomenon may be linked to social clan structures which differ from those in the West. Stephen Muecke contrasts the images associated with kinship in the West from those associated with kinship in indigenous societies: The dominant metaphor or model for kinship is the vertical hierarchical model of the tree. With patriarchal society, power relations, as well as family names, descend hierarchically from the forefathers. This model has been taken over in the structural organisation of the state and of bureaucracy. But a more frequent and nomadological function of kin relations is to establish sideways relations, links between different family groups on the basis of belonging to clan or “skin” groups. (Muecke, 220)

Christophine's obeah is a form of secret power related to the organic and the indigenous.

See Franco Moretti.