Compare How The Writers Of Wide Sargasso Sea, Sula And The Fat Black Woman’s Poems Use Narrative Voice

}Coursework Question: “Woman must write herself, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history.”

In the light of this quotation, compare how the writers of Wide Sargasso Sea, Sula and The Fat Black Woman’s Poems use narrative voice.

By encouraging woman to “write herself”[1], Helene Cixous as a post-structuralist feminist thinker is commanding the reassessment and reinvention of the perpetuated construction of ‘woman’ as an object. These limited constructions of the female self are warranted by the philosophy of phallocentric conceptions, dictating beliefs about women by males. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published 1847, we find Bertha’s voice is marginalized and trivialized, thus reduced to a stereotype and one-dimensional identity based on female hysteria and propagated by the hegemony of patriarchy. The effect of such marginalization has forced women and female writers to model themselves and their female characters against ideologies appropriated for them rather than inventing their own reality. Cixous passionately encourages discourse in literature, both written and to-be-written, through inventing a new personal archetypal woman, developed independently of suppression. Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison and Grace Nichols are insurrectionary writers that emulate Cixous’ revolutionary approach to the rediscovery of female selfhood. Through the use of narrative voice and the written forms they use, for example Nichols’ poetic form versus Morrison’s and Rhys’ novels, each writer successfully develops an insurrectionary text that rejects classic gender roles. I intend to explore the ways in which each writer ruptures and transforms the realities around the context of their female characters in order to birth a unique individual female experience.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys serves as a prelude to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. As a result Rhys is confronted with what Gilbert and Gubar express as a literary “monster”[2]. Unlike Morrison and Nichols who are free to invent their journey of rupture and transformation as they please, Rhys is limited in a sense, as she must firstly humanize a solidly dehumanized female character in order to complete Cixous’ task. In Jane Eyre, Bertha lacks appropriate representation and depth, often becoming a symbol rather than a fully realized character. Thanks to patriarchal dogmas in the late 19^th century, females in literature throughout the Romantic era are developed via a stereotypical gender classification (mother, daughter, wife, whore, lunatic) dictated by the male view. The inevitability of the ‘mad woman in the attic’ presents Rhys with a dilemma when attempting to birth a unique female experience, as the fate of her female protagonist, Antoinette, is predetermined. As conveyed by Gilbert and Gubar, the monstrous nature of Bertha (Rhys’ Antoinette) is defined according to her deviations from the male ideology of the perfect female. Rochester (who serves as the hegemonic voice of western society within the book) labels Antoinette as an “obstinate child”[3], stubborn and childish because of her romanticism of England. He goes on to say, “reality might disconcert her, bewilder her”[4] and thus undermines her opinion when in truth, a weatherworn England is rightfully abstract to a permanent resident of Jamaica, female or otherwise. This serves as a perfect example of what Rhys’ aim is in Wide Sargasso Sea to disrupt history and restructure the limited representation of Bertha, the “lunatic…cunning as a witch”[5], by presenting her as a humanized and marginalized unique character. The multi-voiced narration throughout the novels is what creates the realism behind the social context Antoinette is re-envisioned within. The reader is given access to both Rochester and Antoinette’s’ voice through dual narrative and dialogue, which enables us to witness the deterioration of Antoinette’s selfhood. An inanimate semantic field is littered through Rochester’s narrative in relation to Antoinette (“Doll”, “Marionette”) and he eventually goes as far as to rename her “Bertha” thus depriving her of all personal identity and effectively dehumanizing her. This produces the symbol we’ve come to know in Jane Eyre “I`ll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She`s mad but mine, mine…”[6]. Just as we witness Antoinette’s deterioration through Rochester’s narrative, we gain a better understanding of her as an individual devoid of marital oppression through her own personal narrative in Part One of Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette’s memory of her Creole heritage shapes her as a character, her recollection of Tia’s aphorism, an allusion to the negative image Creole people such as Antoinette suffered from in Caribbean islands like Jamaica after the abolition of slavery in 1833 “plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now,” illustrates the complex life experienced by Antoinette and reiterated through creolized English, the life that lacks representation in Bronte’s version of events. Rhys characterizes the reasoning behind Bertha’s apparent lunacy to create her own reality, thus ‘rupturing’ Bertha’s (Antoinette’s) assumed identity using a multi-voiced narrative similar the effect created by Morrison in Sula.

Although all three writers intend to accomplish the same result they differ in their choice of insurrectionary writing modes, Morrison and Rhys opting for novels as their platform for rupture and transformation whereas Nichols’ chooses poetic form to express her revolt against classic female roles. Morrison and Nichols are able select the subjugation their female characters are exposed to within their texts, thus decisively craft the rupture of phallocentric ideals. Whilst preparing to write Sula in 1970, Morrison had already undergone what she entitles the “depressing experience”[7] of having her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, harshly critiqued as a purely (although purposefully) aesthetic representation of the black community by both black and white critics alike. Upon the review of her critics Morrison found the most common question concerning The Bluest Eye was whether “black people are – or are not – [as she portrayed them]”[8]. The triviality of the question is what I believe drove Morrison to explore “the friendship between women [Sula, Nel and Hannah] when unmediated by men or color”[9], therefore rupturing phallocentric masculine ideals. Morrison creates an independent reality in Sula by adopting the use of a free-indirect narrative style. Using the story of Shadrack as a framed narrative, Morrison introduces both the complex and detailed narrative in Sula as well as the attitudes of the community within in The Bottom. “Nothing ever interfered with the celebration of National Suicide Day… it was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both… If one day a year were devoted to it, the rest of the year would be safe and free”[10]. The narrator’s initial focus on Shadrack’s journey through metaphorical emasculation ruptures the notion of masculinity within the narrative. It therefore acts as a precursor to Sula’s reintroduction and therefore foreshadows the rupture of ideals surrounding femininity within The Bottom.

Similarly in Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys uses part one of the text to supply the reader with an introduction to Antoinette as a rediscovered character, “these were all the people in my life – my mother and Pierre, Christophine, Godfrey, and Sass who had left us”[11]. The personal documentation of Antoinette’s’ earlier life is what informs the inevitabilities that later unfold as well as rupturing previous ideals formed around her character. This use of character informed narrative is similar to the satirical ‘fat black woman’ in Nichols’ poetry. As a new insurgent writer, Nichols’ addresses a societal pitfall in the construction of a superficial ‘universal beauty’. In Looking at Miss World she tackles the superficiality of modern culture “…the beauties yearn// the fat black woman wonders//when will the beauties// ever really burn”. By using the fat black woman as a persona, Nichols tackles western ideologies of female self-worth. Her use of free verse specifically embodies the persona’s indifference to the dogma of the patriarchal structure, the lack of poetic structure serving as a physical manifestation of her rejection of conformism. The self-permissive female characters that frame the context of each poem are what inform the narrative agenda of Nichols’ poetry.

Morrison and Rhys choose to host the invention of their ‘new insurgent writing’ within the form of a novel, unlike Nichols’ who approaches such insurgent writing via poetic form. Mikhail Bakhtin comments on the heteroglot (a term neologized by Bakhtin conveying the transcending qualities of language such as perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning) nature of the novel, stating how it is “multiform in style and variform in speech and voice”[12] consequently enabling the novelist to “appropriate ideological discourses already in circulation”[13]. This means that the novel (unlike lyric poetry, which can trap writers into a seemingly “monological”[14], a neologism by Bakhtin denoting a single-perspective narrative) does not express a single voice or point of view and is thus more effective at transforming and rearranging such ruptured ideological discourse to achieve a different effect. Although Nichols’ poetic form may be viewed as a hindrance to some as it seemingly depends on a restricted first person narrative, her poetic form is instead liberating, exercising the concept of heteroglossia as its ability to switch seamlessly between African American Vernacular and Creolised English is what prevents a “monological”[15] reading of her texts. For example in The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping, Nichols responds to supremacist philosophies of womanhood by breaking through language barriers and incorporating creole English with modern English, rupturing and transforming though her language style “Fixing her with grin// and de pretty face salesgals// exchanging slimming glances”[16].The free verse form she uses exemplifies her insurrectionary aim, refusing to conform to any poetic structures such as iambic pentameter to emulate the liberation of the female. This use of language and form gives real urgency and meaning to the text that is equal to, or even more proficient than, that used within a novel. Melissa Johnson comments on the “transgressive, binary-defusing way, the fat black woman… becomes a powerful and hopeful figure” through her embodiment of the audacious character, thus it can be argued that Nichols’ poetic register equips her with the lexical techniques and personal register needed to effectively reject and reform. Nichols’ insurgent use of poetic techniques is what enables her to create reactionary impressions of womanhood as effectively as Rhys and Morrison within a more constricted form. Morrison purposefully makes the choice as a woman to write in the form of a novel in an attempt to effectively ‘write herself’. Similarly Rhys’ novel is an attempt to “write back”[17], the post-colonial concept devised by Bill Ashcroft denoting the re-envisioning conical beliefs about race. The efforts of all three writers are attempts to rupture patriarchal doctrines of womanhood and through these efforts they develop insurrectionary texts that explore unique female voice.

It is the masculine libidinal culture that drives the repression of female and therefore is the philosophy all three writers reject and reform in their texts. The repressed voices Morrison, Rhys and Nichols seek to reinvent are what Gayatri Spivak denotes as the ‘alien subaltern’, a group that is culturally, sexually, and or geographically external to the imperial power. Spivak labels such alienation from the ‘superior’ phallocentric structure as ‘othering’ “a process by which the [imperial force] can define itself against those it colonizes, excludes and marginalizes.”[18] To Morrison, Rhys and Nichols, the hegemonic ‘imperial power’ is the supremacist male consequently they aim to speak out against the place “reserved place for women by the phallocentric Western World”[19]. I believe all three writers successfully give viable voices to the ‘alien subaltern’ in an attempt to combat the harmfulness of established phallocentric and Eurocentric views. This is where we find the inception of the transformation and the beginnings of a new myth. Nichols’ creates a viable voice for her marginalized persona ‘the fat black woman’ by making her flawed. Although critics such as Mara Scanlon critique the apparent naivety of the character, claiming Nichols’ poetry is “snared in biologism assuming an unproblematized selfhood”[20] I find that Nichols’ intentionally employs the persona’s physicality as a weapon, therefore successfully desexualizing the female form “Swing my breast in the face of theology”[21]. In The Assertion the fat black woman claims her physical attributes for herself “this is my birthright”, using them for her own purpose “Heavy as a whale… the fat black woman sits and refuses to move”. This simile adds depth to ‘The Fat Black Woman’ as a character, portraying her as a steadfast individual rather than the stereotypical indecisive female. Agnes Suranyi also comments on “Morrison’s determination to undermine stereotyping as well as the false idealization of Black characters”[22] because of the instrumental role her flawed characters play in her narratives, making them multifaceted depictions of modern women.

Morrison also creates multifaceted characters thanks to her choice of form. The forgiving parameters of a novel allow Morrison to rupture and transform her characters within the eyes of her readers through her free-indirect narrative style. As a result of this narrative style Sula is depicted in several ways and thus cleverly presented as a multifaceted and complicated female character. She his represented initially by the townspeople as a necessary evil “The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over”[23], then portrayed by her childhood friend as a missing piece “It was like getting the use of an eye back, having a cataract removed”[24], finally even as a “pariah”[25] through her own eyes. The multiple narrative voices encompass the views of the community, the individual and the self. The immersive reality produced by the free indirect style gives viable voices to characters otherwise subject to omission, thus giving a credible account of Sula’s transformation throughout the text. Similarly the use of dual narrative throughout Wide Sargasso Sea aims to make readers privy to the rare voice of the oppressed alienated subaltern (Bertha) in order to rediscover Antoinette as rich and fully realized multidimensional woman. Over the progression of the story through either Rochester or Antoinette’s’ first person narrative we find the construction of Antoinette’s journey. In part one through her first person narrative she “writes [her] name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica”[26], owning and embracing her creole identity. However in part two of the novel we see through Rochester’s first person narrative how his objectification of Antoinette is causing her to change “I scarcely recognized her voice. No warmth, no sweetness. The doll had a doll`s voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice”[27]. Finally we return to Antoinette’s narrative in part three and find she addresses her own loss of self in a very personal way “There is no looking-glass here and I don`t know what I am like now…The girl I saw myself was not quite myself. They have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?”[28]. The novel chronicles her eventual insanity due to her loss of self this is mirrored through the regressive portrayal of Antoinette’s personal selfhood using first person narrative. In Loveact by Grace Nichols, the female is initially subject to suppression “He want to tower above her// he want to raise her ebony// haunches”[29]. The crawling enjambment and short lines used in the poem “but time passes// Her sorcery cut them// like a whip// She hide her triumph// and slowly stir the hate// of poison in”[30] echoes the timely overthrowing of the hegemonic power. Here Nichols uses the indirect first person narrative style of the poem (evident due to the creolized English) to give a viable and authentic voice to the oppressed subaltern’s unique position, thus ‘rupturing and transforming’ the poem’s female protagonist.

Each writer engages with the multifaceted nature of narrative voice and deploys it as an intercessor, chronicling the journey between the ‘rupture’ and ‘transformation’ resulting in the eventual development of a unique and autonomous selfhood. This method of rupture and rediscovery, or “mythopoeisis”[31], a term coined by Scanlon principally signifying the creation of a new myth, is elemental in in Morrison’s’, Rhys’ and Nichols’ quest to ‘write herself’. Mythopoeia is arguably most fully realized within Grace Nichols’ Fat Black Woman’s Poems as she invents a poetic persona through narrative voice that enables her to essentially invent her own reality guiltlessly. Unlike Derek Walcott whom adopts a Homeric and westernized depiction of the Caribbean in his epic poem Omeros, Rhys favors a more traditional embodiment of the black female in an attempt to “overturn white, Eurocentric ideals of beauty, as beauty is personified as a fat black woman” [32]. Nichols’ mythopoeic reestablishment of the black female self in Beauty is her rejection of western philosophies towards beauty (i.e. Botticelli’s Venus) epitomized by her use of visual language. The declarative introduction of the poem “Beauty// is a fat black woman”[33] unforgivably redefines the very meaning of beauty and constructs a new definition. Her endeavor is further supported by her use of messianic imagery “while the sun lights up// her feet”[34], illustrating a rarely explored erudite depiction of the black female within literature – along with her allusions to purity, “walking the fields// pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheek”[35], which reject the overtly sexualized and erotic stigma of the attached to the black woman. It is within the rejection and reinvention that mythopoeia is born.

Although Antoinette’s narrative voice is unavoidably progressively dismembered, by narrating Antoinette’s story through dual viewpoints preluding the condemning events of Thornfield Hall, Rhys creates an intimate insight into her character that grants her creative reign over her construction of Antoinette’s selfhood. Rhys aims to humanize Antoinette and develop her as myth separate from ‘The Mad Woman in the Attic’ by using Antoinette’s narrative voice "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name,"[36] as well as Rochester’s “The doll had a doll`s voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice”[37] his term of address a clear example of her othering. Morrison creates her own myth in the form of Sula Peace, the eponymous heroine of the novel just as Rhys creates the character of ‘The Fat Black Woman’. Morrison aims to highlight importance of self and character discovery, and does so through Sula’s dialogue “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself”[38]. Sula’s declarative is insurrectionary in itself as it presents a female who rejects her typical gender role and opts to live a life for herself, a life free of the responsibility enjoyed by men (characters such as Ajax). Sara Blackburn comments on this, saying “It`s possible, to talk about "Sula" as allegory __ about people so paralyzed by the horrors of the past and by the demands of life that they`re unable to embrace the possibilities of freedom until the moment for it has passed.”[39] Morrison makes Sula mythopoeic by refusing to present her in opposition with the white community or a domineering male presence. Morrison purposefully makes no allusion to the Jim Crow laws throughout Sula although the time span of the novel, 1919 to 1965, overlaps with the period of time the Jim Crow laws were enforced (1890 to 1964). By doing this she develops a female character with an identity independent of suppression and thus an unobstructed device used to explore selfhood.

The polyphonic narrative used within Sula encourages an immersive reader experience through a non-linear narrative, some chapters of the story containing multiple point-of-views based on the same occurrence of events. Sula becomes mythopoeic through these multiple views using free indirect speech, a style of third-person narration that adopts the characteristics of third-person whilst infusing the primary essence of first-person direct speech. In part two of Sula, Morrison writes Sula’s return to The Bottom as “accompanied by a plague of robins”[40]. The ominous imagery created by the third person narrator foreshadows Sula’s adverse effect on the community and further creates a mythological mystique around her character. Morrison simultaneously makes use of the ‘essence of first-person’ by presenting a collective speech from the perspectives of ‘the community’ “She was dressed in a manner that was as close to a movie star as anyone would ever see”[41]. This metaphor exemplifies the mysterious presence emitted by the character of Sula when being perceived by the community “as anyone would ever see”. Because Sula as a character does not abrogate and appropriate herself to her surroundings but rather to her own needs, the indirect interpretation of Sula’s character encourages Sula’s transformation into a myth. Similarly Nichols’ fat black woman also refuses to abrogate and appropriate herself, “refusing to be a model of her own affliction”[42] in Trap Evasions. The use of mythopoeic imagery within the poem “mountains in her mites”[43] enables the fat black woman with a selfhood independent of the men that categorize her as a means for reproduction, just as Beauty enables the fat black woman with a selfhood independent of Western ideologies. Alternatively Rhys develops Antoinette, and her surroundings in Jamaica itself, as an individual and unique experience before inevitably destroying her complexity therefore we are given insight into Antoinette as an individual autonomous to her symbolic origins “Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer.”[44]. Rhys writes Rochester as a supremacist male attempting to abrogate and appropriate Antoinette and her surroundings depicting them as “too beautiful… to much…to colorful”[45] and therefore something that must be controlled. Rhys’ use of hyperbolic language expresses Rochester’s anxiety towards the unknown thus the motivation for Antoinette’s dehumanization. Nevertheless however, Rhys still initially develops a mythopoeic female character thanks to her initial refusal to abrogate and appropriate herself to the societal labels forced on her as a Creole woman, therefore accepting Cixous exhortation to an insurrectionary feminine mode of writing.

In light of Cixous thesis, the authors of Wide Sargasso Sea, Sula and The Fat Black Woman’s Poems use narrative voice to break apart their contextual socio-historic circumstance and, in the moments of lucidity and liberation that follow, transform the meaning of female selfhood in history and in the unforeseeable. Each writer implements their own style of literary methods in order to mold narrative voice as they see fit, Morrison and Rhys favoring double-voiced and polyphonic prosed narrative and Rhys inversely adopting personal poetic register (all experimenting with unique position and framed narrative reliant on perspective). Ultimately, Rhys, Morrison and Nichols all strive to create progressive writing that works coherently with the ‘woman’ it was written to liberate, by constructing a female worldview independent of suppression without character limits or restrictions based solely on idiosyncratic selfhood rather than generalized phallocentric and Eurocentric appropriations. In conclusion, Rhys, Morrison and Nichols write woman. Rhys, Morrison and Nichols write themselves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Toni Morrison, ‘Sula’ (1973)

Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984)

Jean Rhys, ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1966)

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1971)

Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (1998)

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (1968)

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1975)

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)

Chimamanda Adichie, The Danger of the Single Story (transcri pt)

Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa (1981)

Wally Look Lai, The Road to Thornhill Hall

Mara Scanlon, The Divine Body in Grace Nichols’ The Fat Black Woman’s Poems’ (1998)

S.L. Welsh, Grace Nichols’ Northcote (2007)

Agnes Suranyi, ‘The Bluest Eye and Sula’ (2007)

Sinead Caslin, Feminism and Post-colonialism (2010)

Gayatri Spivak, A critique of postcolonial reason (1999)

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)

SARA BLACKBURN, ‘You Still Can`t Go Home Again’, Books of the Times, December 30, 1973, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/morrison-sula.html [accessed 19/02/2014, 18:43]

[1]Helene Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1981) pg1

[2] Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) pg609

[3] Jean Rhys, ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1966) pg78

[4] Jean Rhys, ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1966) pg78

[5] Charlotte Bronte, ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) pg420

[6] Jean Rhys, ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1966)