CHAPTER

FIVE

DECDNSTRUCTING STEREOTYPES: JEAN EARL RHYS AND LOVELACE

Thus far, we have seen how the representation of West Indian personhood and presence is problematised in the West Indian novel by the force of an imperialist discourse which informs novehstic structure. It is not simply that some critical practices such as New Criticism and structuralism tend to depoliticise literature by foregrounding structure and form. If it were merely a matter of emphasis, then a politically engaged criticism would simply have to emphasise the political aspect of literature in order to legitiinise its claim and itself as bonafide literary praxis. However, the tendency to view such politically engaged criticism as a somewhat bastardised relation of legitimate Uterary criticism which examines paradox, ambiguity and binary opposition rather than ideology, is itself an indication of the power of literary discourse to obscure ideology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a similar point regarding the nature of much literary criticism and the reading of nineteenth century British literature. Spivak states: It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was
112

Deconstructing Stereotypes 113

a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious 'facts' continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success ofthe imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.'

Thus far I have argued that the observations made by Spivak in relation to nineteenth century British literature are crucial to an understanding of the producticin and criticism of the West Indian novel. It is important to recognise, as the earlier analysis has attempted to demonstrate, that the relationship between repressed personhood or otherness in the West Indian novel and repressive imperialist discourse is not a simple paradigm of the powerless overcome by the powerful. The relationship, as we have seen, is complex, and the complexity reveals itself in the West Indian novel as narrative contradictions, inconsistencies and omissions. Recalling Nietzsche's dictum that power manifests itself by opposing that which resists it, the analysis has attempted to show the ideological nature of the forces at work in the West Indian novel. As we have observed, even novels such as DeLisser's/ne's Career which manifest all the seductiveness and pitfalls of imperialist discourse, simultaneously reveal narrative cracks of resistance to such discourse. Alternatively, novels such as Roger Mais's oeuvre which consciously stmggle against the effects of imperialist discourse, also exhibit lapses and weaknesses in the resistance effort. Since literary theory and criticism may always be seen to contain the seeds of value judgement even though such may not be necessarily foregrounded, the foregoing analyses in this work also suggest value judgement. While avoiding the dogma of literary prescription, the logic of the analyses and argument thus far suggests that among other criteria, the West Indian iiovel may be evaluated according to its recognition of the conflict between imperialist discourse and the representation of that which resists this discourse, both in content and form. That is to say, an important part of the criteria for assessment of the West Indian novel ought to be narrative awareness of conflict between imperialist discourse and the representation of resistances to this discourse. Several of the novels examined so far have revealed varying degrees of awareness regarding such conflict. Indeed, of all ofthe novels analysed thus far, Roger Mais's work exhibits the greatest degree of self-conscious narrative technique, and by implication, the most acute awareness of the conflict between discourse and representation.

1 1 4 B Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel

Mais tends to concentrate his counter-discursive activity ir. the narrative act, but approaches which concentrate on strategies of canonical incursion also achieve a destabilising effect and thus participate in counter-discursive activity. One such West Indian novel is Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is an example of what Mikhail Bakhtin (in The Dialogic Imagination) refers to as the "heteroglot" voice. Rhys's text, published more than a century after Gharlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, challenges and destabilises the would-be monolithic voice of this English canonical text. Indeed Wide Sargasso Sea may be read and comprehe nded on one level with no reference to Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre may also still be read and comprehended with no reference to Rhys's text. However, such readings in disregard ofthe existence and interconnectedness of both texts implicitly eschew dialogue in favour of monologue. Reading Rhys's text in light of its rapprochement with Bron te's novel has been recognised as part of post-colonial critical strategy.^ S^uch readings allow both narratives to participate in a cultural and political i;ontext which is de-emphasised if not actually repressed when each text is read in isolation. Reading Wide Sargasso Sea against Jane Eyre de;stabilises the monologic Eurocentricity of Bronte's narrative, and creates an aperture in the discourse of both texts through which the critic may read against imperialist and patriarchal representations of reality and truth. The additional value of inter-textual critique and reading Wide Sargasso Sea as a "writing back" to Jane Eyre, relates to the ideological positioning ofthe West Indian novel as a genre. A deconstructive reading of Wide Sargasso Sea facilitates the ideological repositioning of the West Indian novel in relation to the English novel. In other words, the filial (historical) relationship between the West Indian novel and the English novel is mitigated by tlie ideological subversion discernible in Wide Sargasso Sea. Such a reading of Rhys's novel develops on previous analyses of her narrative as a "writing back" to Jane Eyre, but moves the argument into a discussion of the historical vs the ideological relationship between the West Indian and the English novel. Wide Sargasso Sea gives a voice to Europe's Other, represented as mad Bertha in Jane Eyre and effectively silenced in Bronte's :ext. Bertha's "madness" functions as a site of resistance in Jane Eyre as it threatens the "love story" plot which seeks to dominate the greater part of Bronte's novel. The mysterious figure in the windowless room at Thomfidd Hall gives energy to Bronte's narrative by maintaining intrigue in the plot. Long after the reader has successfully constructed Jane's character and unravelled the intricacies of Edward Rochester's selfhood, he or she is still intrigued by the mystery of the figure in the attic.

Deconstructing Stereotypes 115

The savage attack on Richard Mason heightens the mystery of Thomfield Hall and leads the reader to suspect that Rochester's marriage plans will remain problematised until the final great mystery in the plot is resolved. Bertha's madness is the subterranean force against which the explicit narrative oijane Eyre has its existence. Her madness and inarticulateness is the resistance or counter-discourse which energises the dominant features of the novel's plot by providing these features with a locus of resistance against which they can foreground their dominance. Paradoxically, the site of resistance which allows the dominant features ofthe plot to be articulated simultaneously threatens the integrity of the dominant discourse. Marriage is foregrounded in Jane Eyre as the institution which provides the "natural" environment for woman's emotional and financial needs. The institution also provides the patriarchal system with its foundation in male dominance, the right and security of property and a systematic means of structuring inheritance along patrilineal lines. However, Rochester's marriage to Bertha undermines much ofthe security and apparent naturalness which the institution is deemed to provide. Bertha destroys Thomfield Hall before she dies and inadvertently causes Rochester to lose his sight and the use of a hand, symbolically subverting male vision and the means to possessing or grasping what the vision surveys. Figuratively speaking, the seeds of imperialism, (that is, vision and the power to seize what one surveys) are symbolically denied germination at this juncture in Bronte's text. Although such a counter-discursive reading inheres in Bronte's narrative, the resistance to imperialist discourse in Rhys's text facilitates this reading. Bronte's text resolves the inherent discursive conflict by asserting the dominant values of Western patriarchy. Jane Eyre's choices as the narrative progresses towards an ending are limited to marrying St John Rivers and going to India as his missionary helpmate or marrying Edward Rochester to become his helpmate. She may either commit to marriage and assistance in the colonising effort in India or she may do so at home; these two choices which participate in the corroboration of patriarchy and Empire are the only choices Jane is offered. She marries Rochester and, significantly, they produce a male child. The patriarchal order, implicit in Rochester's securing a legitimate male heir, and the imperial mission, represented by Rivers's missionary zeal in India, are thus reasserted in the closing chapters of the novel. Nevertheless, Bronte's narrative, facilitated by the counter-discursive acts foregrounded in Rhys's text, may be seen to manifest moments of narrative resistance to its own apparently overwhelming dominant discourse.

116 a Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel

Bertha's madness, as indicated earlier, is the counter-discourse or narrative otherness which subverts the apparent naturalness of Eurocentric reason. When she enters Jane's room to tear the bridal veil apart, her act is symbolic of un-reason's potential to rend asunder the apparent naturalness of reason. Significantly, Jane is initially unsure whether this encounter with Bertha is an apparition or dream rather than actual experience, and Rochester attempts to reassure her by constituting the experience as a dream. Consciousness seeks to banish to the relative safety of the uncc nscious that which threatens its order. However, Bertha's otherness leaves an indelible mark on the consciousness which sought to relegate her selfhiood forever to the subterranean crevices of its unconscious. If, therefore, Bionte's novel manages to subvert an oppressive patriarchal and imperialist discourse at intervals, as it articulates the experiences of its protagonist, its liindamental resource for such an achievement is the inarticulateness and peripheral presentation of the mad Bertha. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea articulates Bertha's silence and explores the nature of her marginalisation. Wide Sargasso Sea ends with Antoinette, who is the mad Bertha of Jane Eyre, rehearsing the act of arson which will destroy Thomfield Hall and scar Rochester for life in Bronte's novel. Within the logic of chronological sequence, the narrative events in Wide Sargasso Sea prefigure those in Jane Eyre, and Rhys's narrative destabilises the apparent primacy and discursive authority of Bronte's text. Rhys's strategy is important from at least two perspectives. Rhys's articulation of Bertha's repressed voice gives force aid presence to an alternative sensibility and way of seeing which patriarchal and imperialist discourse attenuate injane Eyre. In this way, Rochester's representation of Antoinette as mad Bertha functions as one possible representation of Antoinette rather than as the definitive statement which fixes her as unalterably Other in Bronte's text. Additionally, Rhys's strategy of narrating events which chronologically predate those in Jane Eyre frees Wide Sargasso Sea, at least contextually, from the stigma of being newly arrived as West Indian text in the world of literature. Rhys's narrative strategy in Wide Sargasso Sea subverts tlie canonicity oi Jane Eyre and the subsequent characterisation of so-called emergent literatures as fledgling and secondary, by constituting events in Wide Sargasso Sea as the cause for which events in Jane Eyre arc the effect. Indeed, Rhys's novel may have been published more than a hundred years after Bronte's, but the counter-discourse informing Rhys's narrative is coexistent with Bronte's discourse injane Eyre.

Deconstructing Stereotypes 117

Rhys's narrational strategies emphasise Antoinette's perspective. Her voice and point of view structure the narrative in Part One and Part Three of the novel; Rochester narrates Part Two except for the section recounting Antoinette's visit to Christophene which Antoinette narrates. Symbolically then, Rochester's perspective is encapsulated by Antoinette. Antoinette's narration of her childhood experience fuses her own naive analyses with adult admonishment and advice which she does not understand but nevertheless internalises: France is a lady with black hair wearing a white dress because Louise was born in France fifteen years ago, and my mother, whom I must forget and pray for as though she were dead, though she is living, liked to dress in The chUd also grapples with what is for her the unassimilable contradictions of Christianity, and this orthodoxy eventually fails her at her mother's funeral: I prayed, but the words fell to the ground meaning nothing.'' Rhys skilfully structures the trauma of Antoinette's childhood as an allegory of the coloniser/colonised relationship. Recalling Hobson's assessment of the colonised in Imperialism as childlike and inferior, Antoinette's recollection of childhood is filled with images of her own helplessness and designated inferiority. She experiences multiple marginalisation as child, female and Creole. The discourse of the patriarchal and colonial world in which she lives resists her efforts to represent herself as greater than the stereotype which imprisons her. Rhys's narrative thoroughly explores the complexity of Antoinette's discursive imprisonment and, indeed, Antoinette's actual imprisonment in Thomfield Hall is almost anticlimactic, coming at the end of such repressive, discursive bondage. Rhys uses Antoinette's inter-relationship with the Caribbean landscape to represent a Creole sensibility and perspective in contradistinction to Rochester's Eurocentric way of seeing. Antoinette often seeks solace in the tropical landscape; she is part of it and it belongs to her as much as it belongs to the recently emancipated Blacks who refer to her as "white cockroach". Her sense of belonging to a community is problematised by a destructive racism which separates her socially from the Black population and epistemologically from the White European population, represented by Rochester. She therefore asserts the only connection left to her: the Caribbean landscape. Tragically, this landscape represents for Rochester the otherness which he feels obhged to repress in order to have his Eurocentric perspective remain intact.

118 Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel

As we have recognised already, landscape and the various discursive attitudes associated with it function as a site of ideological force; and conflict in the novel. Rhys is acutely aware of this, and employs landscape and its effect on the characters in Wide Sargasso Sea as part of her narra tive strategy. Rochester refuses to assess the Caribbean landscape in temis other than colonial stereotypes. The complex heterogeneity of the Caribbean landscape will not, however, permit him to facilely substitute homogenising; stereotypes, and he is unable to resolve his conflict with the Caribbean e nvironment. Unlike Antoinette, he cannot "write" his response to the landscape and the physical and metaphysical upheavals which it produces in him. His inability to narrativise his Caribbean experience is manifested in his observation that: As for my confused impressions they will never be written. Tliey are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up.'* The landscape and vivid colour of the Caribbean overwhelm him, and his reaction to the tropical environment signals the development of an everwidening chasm between his cultural sensibility and Antoinette's perspective. Rochester's attitude to the Blacks in the Caribbean is similar to Mr Mason's stereotypical categorisations. Rochester also sees them as lazy and childlike, but unlike Mr Mason, he credits them with the potential for danger. Mr Mason characterises the Blacks as harmless children, and Rochester sees them as wanton children. Rochester comments on the half-caste servant, Amelie: A lovely little creature but shy, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like much else in this place."^ The natives, Creole and Black alike become fused with the perceived sensual excesses of the tropical landscape, and this homogeneous mass then functions as Europe's Other or its cultural and epistemological alterity. Rochester's attempt to describe his Caribbean experience to Jane inJane Eyre functions as a reaffirmation of the pseudo-scientific racial, and cultural stereotypes which plague the Eurocentric unconscious. The: "blanks" in Rochester's mind, which cannot be written in Wide Sargasso Sea are written over in Jane Eyre by the stagnant categorisations of Eurocentric stereotypes. Rochester in Jane Eyre describes his debilitating tropical experience to Jane: Bitter and base associations have become the sole food of your memory; you wonder here and there seeking rest in exile: happiness in pleasure1 mean in heartless,sensual pleasuresuch as dulls intellect and blights feeling.' This "heartless, sensual pleasure" which dulls the intellect is for Rochester the underside of intellectual activity and reason, and this perceived hedonism

Deconstructing Stereotypes 119

is therefore constituted as un-reason or madness. Madness functions as the classic stereotype of unfathomable othemess dwelling in the depths of the Eurocentric unconscious. Eventually in Wide Sargasso Sea, everything associated with a Caribbean sensibility is construed by Rochester as evidence of irrationality and unreason. Christophene, the Martiniquan servant who is Antoinette's friend and conlidante challenges Rochester's assessment of his situation in the Caribbean. He refuses to accept her as competent or worthy to intervene in his discourse, and he dismisses her language as "horrible". The signifiers used by Rochester and Antoinette to describe their Caribbean environment frequently diverge, and when Christophene and Antoinette converse in Creole, Rochester senses the possibility of his marginalisation. Antoinette's facility with creole and Rochester's discomfort with it also function metaphorically in Rhys's novel to elucidate the nature of the struggle between orality and literacy. Antoinette is trapped by the power and authority of a narrowly defined and disproportionately powerful literacy. She is a victim of the "English law" which determines that her thirty thousand pounds inherited from her stepfather should go immediately to Rochester, upon their marriage. The letter which Rochester receives from Daniel Cosway, characterising Antoinette as a victim of congenital insanity precipitates Rochester's resolute treatment of her as a lunatic. Thus the power of the written word, even in the guise of Daniel Cosway's poor facility with language, supersedes anything that Antoinette can tell Rochester. The scribal exerts authority over the oral and Daniel is able to represent Antoinette as insane. Hereafter, Rochester will always locate Antoinette's discourse within the un-reason and un-reality of madness. When Rochester renames Antoinette "Bertha", the act is a sign of his authority as naming subject and her subjection as object named. Antoinette responds to his act of renaming by declaring: Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that's obeah too." Despite the more obvious triumphs which the scribal is able to claim in its subjection of orality, Rhys foregrounds the relative value and power of orality in her narrative. Antoinette, for example, curses Rochester and turns the power of the word against him. Rochester recalls: Then she cursed me comprehensively, my eyes, my mouth, every member of my body . . .'-" The power of Antoinette's curse is located in the mysticism of prophesy. The body which Antoinette curses in Wide Sargasso Sea is burnt and mutilated injane Eyre. Thus the invective of the future mad woman in the

120 Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel

attic irrevocably impinges upon the narrative injane Eyre as this narrative seeks to silence the un-reason of Rochester's Bertha. When Rochester has his final conversation with Christophene, she argues that he has decided upon Antoinette's madness, and that the doctors have merely concurred with his decision.'" He responds with contempt for everything associated with Antoinette and the Caribbean, and concludes: I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable pluce." Christophene assures him that his statement has implications of which he knows little, and when his utterance is considered in light of the tragedy at Thomfield Hall injane Eyre, we recognise that Rhys's narrative is again highlighting the mysticism and power ofthe prophetic utterance. The force and presence of Caribbean obeah (orality and prophesy) engage the power of European obeah (literacy and the law) to destabilise the authority of the latter. Wide Sargasso Sea sensitively examines the nature of the oppressor/ oppressed relationship, and demonstrates that within the facile categorisations of powerful and powerless there exists a vast range of complexities. In addition, through its strategy of writing itself jisjane Eyre's pre-text, it examines and exposes many ofthe ideological assumptions of Bronte's novel; this is simultaneously its most laudable artistic and ideological achievement. Against the background of the theoretical arguments which this book engages, it is possible to see Wide Sargasso Sea as a truly engaged West Indian novel. The work demonstrates an awareness ofthe cruci;il relationship between patriarchal and imperialist domination. That is to say, the narrative represents Rochester's domination of Antoinette as the private manifestation of an ideological and political structure which produces and sustains imperialist domination of one group of peoples by another. Simultaneously, the novel examines the anti-hegemonic resistances which threaten the security of dominant ideology, and achieves all of this in the context of a "Third World" novel which ideologically re-writes and re-reads the canonical text, Jane Eyre. Few West Indian novels, even more recent works than Wide Sargasso Sea, can justifiably claim all of these achievements. The inter-connectedness of imperialist and patriarchal thought can hardly be over-emphasised. As the analysis has already shown, imperialism's domination of so-called subject peoples constituted these peoples in terms quite similar to patriarchy's construction of womanhood. As; Ashis Nandy argues in JTje Intimate Enemy: Since about the seventeenth century, the hyper-masculine over-socialised aspects of European personality had been gradually supplanting the cultural

Deconstructing stereotypes m ^Z^

traits which had become identified with femininity, childhood, and later on, 'primitivism'. As part of a peasant cosmology, these traits had been valued aspects of a culture not wedded to achievement and productivity. Now they had to be rejected as alien to mainstream European civilisation and projected on to the 'low cultures' of Europe and on to the new cultures European civilisation encountered. It was as part of this process that the colonies came to be seen as the abode of people childlike and innocent on the one hand, and devious, effeminate and passive-aggressive on the other,'^

In light of Nandy's observation, it is interesting to analyse the dramatisation of the struggle between the hyper-masculine, over-socialised personality and the innocent, passive aggressive traits in Earl Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment. The traits associated with a peasant cosmology are represented by the shouter-baptist faithful in Bonasse. Eva, the first-person narrator embodies many ofthe positive qualities associated with Black West Indian womanhood. She is supportive of family, and has a keen sense of herself as an individual. She has a strong sense of community values. Her husband Bee, who is the pastor of the Baptist church tries his utmost to bridge the ever-widening gulf between the old, folk ways of Bonasse and the new dispensation so fervently touted by men like Ivan Morton and defended by automatons like Prince the policeman. Perhaps it is the village stick-fighter Bolo who most fully represents the de-valued and oppressed peasant culture. Bolo's sensitivity, despite his physical prowess and decisiveness in the gayelle, personifies the traits which Ashis Nandy argues were rejected by Eurocentric ideology and projected onto so-called low cultures. Lovelace has his narrator Eva characterise Bolo:
. . . [T]his Bolo was a special man; and not only to us, the women, to everybody. If you have a house to build or a dead to bury, you could call him to lend a hand, and though he's a man who fears nobody, he knows how to laugh, and if you down to cheer you up, and he could feel sorry."

Bolo internalises stereotypical male and female attributes as a complex unity rather than as mutually antagonistic principles. Indeed, it is not that Bolo is an "alienated idealist" as Marjorie Thorpe suggests in her introduction to the Heinemann edition ofthe novel (1983). Bolo forces both the village community and the Eurocentric ideologues to examine the falsity of idealism grounded in a separation of male and female principles. He embodies both principles, as already indicated. Corporal Prince, for example, exhibits the hyper-masculine behaviour which meets the approval of those whom he serves. His emphasis ofthe stereotypically masculine traits makes him devoid of compassion. Eva characterises Prince's behaviour:

122 Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel

Tall, stocky as a gru-gru tree, this policeman show no sympathy or respect or mercy for people black like he. He was the law. The whitsman send him to do a job, and he do it, like a tank or a tractor or an elephant gone mad, bowling over and uprooting and smashing without human compassion or reasoning.'*

Thus when Bolo tells the villagers that Prince must be kitted, he is attempting to re-establish an equilibrium of mate/female principles. In other words. Prince is engaged in hyper-masculine behaviour in the sense outlined by Ashis Nandy in his assessment of imperialisti: masculinity. Femininity, represented as otherness, is repressed in the dominant group and projected onto the dominated group. Bolo recognises that consequently, the villagers of Bonasse have been emphasising the hyper-feminine traits which are projected onto the subjects of Empire. The villagers react to the oppressive, hyper-masculinity of the establishment, represented by Prince, with a degraded femininity, epitomised by Primus. Such reaction traps them in a stereotyped otherness which reinforces the establishment notion that they are civilisation's rejects. Bolo intuitively understands this and struggles against it. The men speak of deliberations with the officials although they know that this is futile. Stick-fighting has become a caricature, where the faint of heart take up handkerchiefs in Buntin's bar and challenge legendary Bolo to a choreographed display of manhood. Bolo asserts his manhood in an attempt to re-establish a iaalance in the psyche ofthe village. Significantly, at the point in the narrative where Bolo admonishes the villagers to kill Prince, Lovelace has his narrator Eva provide an assessment of the men's discomfort with Bolo's suggestion. Eva's assessment foregrounds the positive feminine response of compassion and restraint, and in this way, gives greater resonance to the efficacy of Bolo's position. Eva comments:
In a woman's way, I could understand why these men don't know what to say. I know as well as they that we talk to the authorities already and that ain't solve nothing and the main thing to do should be . . . I w ouldn't say kill. No, not kill Prince, but at least do something to make him feel. . . But I know this is not a easy thing for them to decide to do. And I don't mean that they not brave. The men have to think about more than their bravery. Because once you start against the police, you have to continue. So I know is something they have to give proper consideration to; but eiven so, I agree with Sister Ruth when she say, 'But we talk to them already, and they never listen. What they want us to do?'"

Deconstructing

Stereotypes

1123

Eva's recollection of Sister Ruth's cryptic "What they want us to do?" hints at the villagers's exasperation in the face of Corporal Prince's draconian repression and Ivan Morton's ineffectual representation of village interests. Eva's compassion and restraint become aligned with Bolo's recognition that assertive force is necessary. Eva agrees with Sister Ruth that all other avenues have been exhausted, and at this point in the narrative there is ideological concord between Eva (positive feminine traits) and Bolo (positive masculine traits). Both Prince and Ivan Morton, in their eagerness to be efficient instruments of Empire, repress those qualities and traits associated with nurturing and compassion. Ivan Morton's rejection of Eulalie, the village belle and the woman whose femininity complements Bolo's masculinity, is a symboUc rejection of the village beliefs and traditions denigrated by a Eurocentric ideology. Indeed, Eulalie's fascination with Ivan Morton rather than Bolo is symbohc of her rejection of village mascuHnity, that mascuhnity which is informed by concern and compassion even when it recognises the need to be radically assertive. Narrative comment provided by Eva corroborates this assessment:
Poor Eulalie. Some say she was a fool to throw 'way her chances with Bolo, who she know, and go with Ivan Morton. But when I look at it, I see that what happen with Eulalie was showing something bigger that was happening in the village right under our nose. What was happening was that the warrior was dying in the village as the chief figure."'

The villagers in Bonasse have become the submissive, childlike group which corroborates the self-presence of individuals like Prince and Ivan Morton. The villagers participate in the stereotype of the dominated group and thus facilitate the sense of correctness and imperial mission of the dominant group. Bolo recognises that the village's repressed manliness necessitates an exaggerated display of aggressive masculine behaviour. Indeed Bolo's actions represent political commitment rather than alienated idealism. As Eva comments:
It look as if he despise Bonasse people, as if every time he see a man, he want to cuff him down or kick him; and those of us who know him before he went to prison, had to say he was going crazythough for me his craziness had too much sense in it.'^

Bolo, as Eva recognises, is methodical and resolute rather than crazy. Significantly, he chooses Primus who, more than any of the village men, has repressed positive male behaviour. Bolo intends to use the confrontation with Primus to resurrect the village's displaced manhood. However, the villagers fail yet again to take up Bolo's challenge to reassert their positive

124 Deconstruction, imperialism and the West Indian Novel

masculinity. The final confrontation between the villagers and Bolo results, not only in his death, but the death of Primus's young daughter Muriel. The symbolism ofthe dual sacrifice suggests that prolonged repression of either positive male or positive female principle results in the eventv al destruction of both principles. Positive masculinity and positive femininity are used here in contradistinction to hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity which Ashis Nandy associates with imperialism. The village sacrifices male and female, symbolising the diminution of positive aspects of these two principles over time. The sacrifice is also an offering to the Spirit, so long repressed and denied by the shouter-baptists. Eva's husband Bee who is the pastor of the shouter-baptist faithful hesitates too long. He is unwilling, for a long time to re-establish the equilibrium between masculine and feminine traits. As a result of his continuing compromise, in the presence of establishment demands. Bee eventually dichotomises masculine and feminine traits and participates in hyper-feminine response. Thus, the final thematic emphasis of the novel is focused upon the departure of the Spirit from the shouterbaptist congregation, and its re-manifestation in the pan-yard. The church has become unworthy of receiving and maintaining the Spirit because it has repressed it for too long. The narrative emphasises this eventuality by indicating that even though the law prohibiting traditional shouter-baptist worship had been repealed, the Spirit still was not manifested in the congregation. Indeed, the conclusion of We Wine of Astonishment liighlights the changing features of resistance to oppression, demonstrating that the spirit of a people repressed for too long in one manner, will seek an alternative means of expression. However, the novel's conclusion also suggests that prolonged extremism of any kind, whether the hyper-masculine behaviour of the oppressor or the hyper-feminine behaviour of the oppressed, precipitates the destruction of the human spirit. Lovelace's novel implicitly acknowledges the inter-connectedness of imperialist stereotypes and the stereotypes of patriarchy. Ths work's antiimperialist stance is to be found not only in its thematic concerns but also in its structures of narration. Eva's narration repeatedly calls attention to orality as narrative source, and "folk" tradition as philosophical critique. The repetition of phrases throughout the narrative such as "Arid how all this come to happen", and "Let me tell you", links events in the text as it fractures the conventional expectations of a certain formality and "literariness" in novelistic narration. The reader, especially perhaps a West 1 ndian reader, hears Eva's voice while he or she reads the narrative stru<;tured by the

Deconstructing stereotypes m 125

literary device of first-person narrator. Certainly, such experimentation with narrative is now common enough to have itself become part of literary convention, and Lovelace's achievement is not cited for the value of its novelty. Rather, it bespeaks a resistance effort to canonical structures, and indeed the growing conventionality of such narrative style is evidence of its effective infiltration as a strategy of resistance. Not only does the Empire "write back", but it also "back chats" through writing, invoking both the irreverence associated with the challenging of authority, and the presence associated with the plentitude of the voice. It is significant in the context of anti-imperialist strategies in the West Indian novel, that several novelists employ the creole "voice" to destabilise traditional narrative expectations (Roger Mais) and to fundamentally structure the narrative in their work (Earl Lovelace, Ema Brodber). Erna Brodber's Myal for example, like Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment, employs creole and the storytelling ease and familiarity associated with folk experience to structure the narrative. Brodber uses several registers in the continuum of Jamaican English to recount the events of Ella O'Grady-Langley's troubled life. The reader is informed of the circumstances of Ella's conception and the unfortunate plight of her unwed mother in the following manner: . . . [T]his new officer came to town with no wife and needed a housekeeper. As is also usual, the housekeeper was before long in the family way. What was unusual, was for said housekeeper to refuse to move to Kingston's anonymity to be kept by her baby-father and to opt to go back to her country bush of yam vines, coco roots and coconut trees. A big white man in a police officer's uniform would stick out a mile there. Poor pink O'Grady, dissonant as a skinned bull, didn't feel he could cope, so although he did have every desire to do right by Mary, things had to finish, done, end: they had was to part, my dear.'" The standard English formality of the first two sentences gives way to the infiltration of the colloquial, "baby-father" in the third sentence, and as the narrative progresses, the Englishness of "dissonant" in the last sentence is in sharp contrast to the Jamaicanness of, "they had was to part, my dear". Not only does this excerpt exemplify the interpenetration of creole and standard English "voice" in Brodber's narrative, but the creolisation of the narrative structure bespeaks an appropriate blending of form and content, in light of the anecdote narrated. Brodber's Myal parallels the spirit thievery of Mass Levi's obeah with the spirit thievery of imperialist domination. The recurrent phrase throughout

126 Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel

the novel, "The half has never been told" is an indication of the focus of the novel's polemic. Myal, like Wide Sargasso Sea, is an attempt to tell the other half, so that the story may be made complete. Wide Sargasso Sea and The Wine of Astonishment are fine examples of anti-imperialist writing, demonstrating in different yet equally successful ways, that resistance to dichotomizied thinking is an essential aspect of the anti-imperialist struggle. These novels foreground the constituted differences between the scribal and the oral, man and woman, and nrietropole and colony to demonstrate the inter-connectedness of all and the residue of one in the other. In deconstructive terminology, each of these novels foregrounds imperialism's alterity and simultaneously subverts any notion of alterity as a stable categorisation. An excerpt from Ema Bixadber's Myal candidly and concisely details the issues which have been addressed in this chapter and indeed in the analysis thus far. The excerpt speaks of the undying hope of oppressed peoples and their struggle to reclaim selfhood: My people have been separated from themselves White Ken, by several means, one of them being the printed ^vord and the ideas it carries . . . Our people are now beginning to see how it and they themselves, have been used against us. Now, White Hen, now we have people who can and are willing to correct images from the inside, destroy what should be destroyed, replace it with what it should be replaced and put us back together, give us back ourselves with which to chart our course to go where ve ^vant to go."