Rendering the shadow – the vampirism of Wide Sargasso Sea

 

Jamaican vampirism involves the practise and belief in the figures of Obeah. Obeah is at once the shadow world where the living dead reside, and the practitioners in the art of controlling shadows. In the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, the Obeah are represented by the servant woman, Christophine, who is present throughout the novel, gives Antoinette a potion to seduce Rochester, and becomes embroiled in his consciousness as an echo of his confused and differentiated rationality. For example, “There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up.” P.46 (WSS).

We learn about Jamaican vampirism through the perspective of the young Rochester, who has travelled to Jamaica to take a Creole bride and find his fortune. The taking of the bride becomes a struggle with eroticism; the finding of the fortune becomes a fight between what he knows to be true and the other world of half-truths and lies from whence the Obeah assails him. “It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing – I want what it hides – that is not nothing.’” P.54 (WSS).

Antoinette is not yet a vampire. However, she becomes endowed with vampiric qualities as the separation between herself and the rational Rochester becomes apparent and grows. She desires him, yet he also appalls her. She uses her power to overcome her emotional weakness, but to what end? Antoinette’s vampiric nature feeds at night and through sex, yet it also drives her mad. “She is in your blood and your bones.” P.61 (WSS) and, “Not that blank, hating, moonstruck face.” P.107 (WSS).

One might reasonably ask the question: What are the author’s intentions with regard to Antoinette? Bertha in Jane Eyre is a negative picture of a woman gone mad and adding an unexplained Gothic element to the story. She is present as a bad dream, a wild animal, she is a black mark against the aspirations of Jane Eyre, and she is a fateful aspect that is programmed to conflagration. Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea treads parallel tracks. Yet these tracks are opened out and articulated, they are often explained in terms of the negative attraction and repulsion that they coalesce and produce. In other words, Jean Rhys explores the very motive forces of vampirism by bringing into the light that which Charlotte Brontë hid in the attic. Antoinette is not Obeah, but she is immersed in its power and she is sensitive to its movement: She is a puppet moved by vampirism.

It is fitting at this point to draw a line between the Antoinette of Jean Rhys, and the writing of Virginia Woolf. “She says that it is necessary to eliminate, to eliminate all that is resemblance and analogy, but also ‘to put everything into it’: eliminate everything that exceeds the moment, but put in everything that it includes - and the moment is not the instantaneous, it is the haecceity[1] into which one slips and that slips into other haecceities by transparency.”[1] Antoinette and Bertha are joined in this manner. They are fundamentally different fictional characters, created at different times and for different purposes. Yet the thread of vampirism that gives rise to alternate realities that are countered and other to average waking consciousness joins them. For example, the madness of Bertha is the wild look in Antoinette’s eyes: “I was longing for night and darkness and the time when the moon-flowers open.” P.107 (WSS).

Antoinette is not yet mad. She still has control because the source of her magic is close at hand, and the lush surroundings of Martinique covers her wanderings and restlessness and her inability to concentrate on the magnification of her will. She conceives of England as a dream. She longs for her Englishman to be in love with her. But it is not to be. The becoming vampire takes hold of her to fill the gap between her wishes and the reality of the situation. She is caught in a torpor that at least she knows that she can control. For example, “She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would – or could. Or could. Then lie so still, still as this cloudy day. A lunatic who always knows the time. But never does.” P.106 (WSS).

One must also analyse the relationship between Antoinette and Rochester as it appears in Wide Sargasso Sea in order to discover the secrets of vampirism that the novel lays bare. The haecceity, through which Antoinette falls in abeyance of Obeah and the natural power of the surroundings, also includes Rochester. His rationality and his will cannot keep him whole in the light of the imminent break up of the white colonial self in the tropics. For example, his weakness for pleasure is demonstrated through the fact that he has sex with the servant girl. He activates the pleasure principle and the mechanisms of control and release that it implies. Georges Bataille has expressed the situation accordingly: “And surely pleasure isn’t found unless conventional arrangements are destroyed and a fearful world is brought into existence. But the converse is just as true. We’d never find the unlucky flood of light that reveals the truth if pleasure didn’t support our insupportable steps.”[2]

Rochester is caught in this classic double bind. His rationality and will have become detached from action and move on a fluid plane that has Obeah, the tropical intensity and Antoinette’s sexuality as complementary and inter-locking poles. In other words, the more he tries to reactivate his colonial project and unify his intentions with the results, the more his awareness of their detachment increases, and the plane begins to define a sense of becoming that we may express as a vague essence /or/ vampirism. To let his rationality and will and language roam free, and to wander over the plane in a vast abandon, is an option induced by the rum and the pleasure principle. Yet the freedom which this movement inspires, is not one that rationality or will or language may easily recognise. Therefore, Rochester is trapped, he is wholly imprisoned in his own becoming that defines the victims of vampirism: “She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.” P.111 (WSS).

The white male colonialist is hereafter agonised through his relationship with vampirism that is set into motion in Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette flies free at last as she ignites herself and Thornfield and the notion that money or an estate or an inheritance may possess someone. We feel pity for Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre as the blind and crippled victim of the madwoman in attic; yet this pity is tinged with the break up of reason that we know the character has gone though in the West Indies. Rochester is not innocent. His colonial expedition failed. However, it defined a negative space in which vampirism could grow and proliferate in itself using tropical eroticism as a cover. Eroticism plays games with the subject, as it lurks in wait for one, and just when one puts it into words, the description itself will transmute and offer up another exploration (of eroticism and the subject). One may perceive a lapsus or linguistic hole where eroticism has taken over and drilled an intoxicated passage through consciousness. Roland Barthes has expressed this idea thus: “In this way the transgression of values that is the avowed principle of eroticism is matched by – if not based on – a technical transgression of the forms of language, for the metonymy is nothing but a forced syntagma, at the very level of speech, a counter-division of objects, usages, spaces, and properties that is eroticism itself.”[3]

The confusion is clear. Rhys employs the echo to effect the action of transgression in the mind of Rochester. This echo contains the words of the Obeah Christophine, who works in the shadows to initiate a plane of becoming, on which Antoinette may properly exist and Rochester may fall into. He is caught on this plane. The re-structuration that happens to him in Martinique is thereafter carried forward and played out through the Gothic element in Jane Eyre. Vampirism is in this sense an instance of retroactive introspection. The subject is drained of his vitality through a latent relationship which may be activated in memory or proximity with the plane of becoming as defined by eroticism, the tropical heat and Obeah. This is why Rochester cannot bear to be in Thornfield, as being in the same house as Antoinette configures the plane that assails him. As he states in Wide Sargasso Sea in anticipation of this situation: “I too can wait – for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked, and like all memories a legend or a lie.” P.112 (WSS).

Rochester is the victim of vampirism and Antoinette is the carrier of the disease. Jane Eyre is portrayed by Brontë as the Christian angel who brings the light of education, innocence and love into this instance of vampirism. Jamaican vampirism defies Christianity, as it is a counter movement to its morality and codes. Evidence from the colonialists points to the superstitious and malicious nature of Obeah. They depict it as the opposite of Christian purity. The working of the shadow, or the ‘duppies’ as the living dead were termed, is the anti-thesis to the reincarnation of the morally perfect body of Christ. The Obeah caused consternation amongst the Christian settlers. They were the cause for rumour, gossip and fear. They roused the moral sensibilities of the foreigners tending their plantations, because the Obeah represented an extreme that might point to an ancient practise, more powerful and profound than the Christian beliefs of the colonialists. Ultimately, this tension is what survives and it is also what drives the vampirism of Wide Sargasso Sea.

“Blot out the moon

Pull down the stars

Love in the dark, for we’re in the dark

So soon, so soon.” P.110 (WSS).

 

References

WSS = Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997).