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Jamaican Ladies and Tropical Charms

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1920-1222

Erin Mackie,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

In her novel Voyage in the Dark, Jean Rhys' protagonist Anna Morgan reflects on the hallucinogenic distance between her Dominican home and the England to which she has been transplanted: Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together (8; my emphasis). This lack of coherence registers the colonial relation between England and the Caribbean as an enjambed structure of competing realities. The disorienting shifts between the reality and unreality of England and the Indies, between the thing itself and the dream fantasy of something else, is figured as a condition of colonial consciousness that also affects the characters in Rhys' later novel Wide Sargasso Sea. There these competing realities repeat in debate between Antoinette and her husband: 'is it true,' Antoinette asks, 'that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so'; he answers, 'that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream' (80). The difference between England and the Indies, between the English and the Creole, frequently figures as an epistemological and metaphysical rupture across which each side is unrecognizable by, and unreal to, the other. In the colonial consciousness this perplexing difference may be redoubled, as is the case with Anna Morgan and Antoinette Cosway. Here, the subject regards herself alternately in the frames of England and the Indies. Thus the Creole experiences a self-alienation that leaves her always only partially, potentially real. For the white Creole, as we see so emphatically in Wide Sargasso Sea, the frame that might identify the West Indian is itself fractured along black/coloured/white, slave/servant/master, and African-Creole/Anglo-Creole lines. Looking at representations of the sea in three texts--the anonymously authored 1720 The Jamaica Lady, or, The Life of Bavia, Herbert de Lisser's 1929 The of Rosehall, and Jean Rhys' 1965 Wide Sargasso Sea--I examine in this article this perilous distance, this wide Sargasso Sea that lies between England and her colonies, and that appears in the gap between the words and lady, making an oxymoron out of the term Jamaican as well as a bitter irony of the epithet White Witch in de Lisser's title. From the early eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century this gap has frequently acted as a space for the contemplation of how the colonial condition speaks to the way that fears about colonial degeneracy and the production of fraudulent value typically merge with misogynist fears of feminine capriciousness and sexual/reproductive illegitimacy. (1) Specifically, my interest here is how this gap between and lady is perceived and constructed, as well as how this rupture across which England and the Indies confront and contest one another comes to be filled with occult content: witchcraft, obeah, voodoo. This evocation of the occult, I will argue, attempts to control, traverse, and exorcise the highly charged differences that create it. In Rhys' mid-twentieth-century rewriting of Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason as Antoinette Cosway, in de Lisser's early twentieth-century sensationalist depiction of the infamous Annie Palmer, the (ethnically) white witch of Rosehall killed in the 1831 pre-emancipation uprisings, and in the early eighteenth-century burlesque anti-colonial narrative The Jamaica Lady, or, The Life of Bavia, the white woman's distance from the socially legitimating status of lady is filled and confirmed by her proximity to the occult. (2) Charges of witchcraft, whether of the European or African-Caribbean variety, are brought against these women in efforts to explain and counteract their charms. While all three women, Antoinette, Annie Palmer, and Bavia, are subjected to specifically colonial and male policing in order to expose and to nullify their allegedly magical powers, the relationship of each character to her so-called powers varies in ways that reveal historical differences in the interactions between England and the Indies, the African-Caribbean and the Anglo-Caribbean. …