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Kalman, Meredith

English

2007

M.A.

This thesis works off of the premise that Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has provided the prototype of the ideal heroine in English-language literature since its publication in 1847. It begins by briefly illustrating what Edward Said refers to as the worldliness, of two novels, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Michelle Cliffs No Telephone to Heaven (1987), that present alternative protagonists for the twentieth century. Noting that the evolution of postcolonial politics and thought has influenced the twentieth-century novelists' counter-narratives to Jane Eyre, the argument employs Judith Butler's gender theory, Michel Foucault's theory of power, and Raymond William's Marxist theory to explain the context of each novel and demonstrate that a major theme running through each novel is a consideration of the power to narrate one's story and identify oneself. The two main chapters are devoted to Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea respectively. The first chapter, "Hinting and Untold Stories: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre," considers Jane Eyre contrapuntally, bringing to light the history of Jamaica which the novel does not reference, but on which its plot relies. The chapter explains that its dealings with Jamaica are not peripheral, but key to the storyline. I will posit that it is impossible to understand Jane Eyre and nineteenth-century British culture without acknowledging that they were fundamentally invested in imperialism. The novel and its depictions of the heroine and the villain are products of Victorian colonial ideology, and yet it questions certain fundamental assumptions of that ideology by reminding the reader that its own narrative empowers the colonial frame of reference.
The second chapter, "Responding to Whispers: Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, " contends that Rhys and Cliff destabilize Bronte's "othering" of the black woman by humanizing the villain of Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason and that the effects of nationalist and women's liberation movements around the world can be seen in Rhys' work. This chapter explains the historical setting in which the novel was published and how the character and novelist may have been affected by that setting. It then examines the novel's answering back to Jane Eyre, especially in their critiques of the colonizer's representation of the colonized and the power of Antoinette's narration. The conclusion, "Michelle Cliffs No Telephone to Heaven and the Aftermath of Wide Sargasso Sea," investigates the implications of the inability of the protagonist, Clare Savage, to identify with either Jane or Bertha and the problem of these narrow categories for women in the modem age. It is posited that the narrator's words becoming indistinguishable from Clare's destabilizes the distinction between the reader and the writer, and ultimately Jane and Bertha. Using Homi Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridity, I comment on the evolution of the Jane and Bertha categoi-ies in the modern world and the worn-out distinction that came about during a different dominant narrative of the world.