Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (24 page)

But a generation of feminist criticism has taught us to take a closer look at this marathon of achievement—Jane crossing hurdle after hurdle on her way to the finish line—and to interpret the novel’s features in a far more ambiguous and disturbing way. Namely, we are asked to see in the figure of the monstrous Bertha Mason Rochester—bestial, violent, full of oaths, corpulent, sexually overflowing—an alter ego of the little, wrenlike Jane Eyre, a displaced double that seems to tell us: what you chase out the door may come back in through the window. Bertha can be read as a portrait of Jane’s repressed appetites and desires. Every time she breaks into the narrative—and her strange laugh seems indeed to punctuate things—she tells us about the dynamics of child abuse, about the story of child abuse, given that she is its result. Remember
Wuthering Heights:
punish Heathcliff enough, and you produce an ogre who will punish everything in sight. Can we not say as much here: punish Jane enough and you produce Bertha? For she is the very spirit of revenge, going into action whenever Rochester’s bullying and toying become unbearable, by mounting a counterattack: trying to burn him alive in his bed, tearing up her wedding veil in front of the horrified Jane so as to warn her of ever becoming Mrs. Rochester, and ultimately settling scores with the patriarch at book’s end by torching the castle and doing her best to dismember its owner, costing him an eye and a hand.

How does one get a bottom line on this kind of fissured fiction, with its play of shadows and roaming spirits? How to measure this coming of age, given that Jane now seems spread out in multiple fashion? At first blush, on a straight, univocal reading—the reading the book always gets initially—Jane seems a winner, a plucky, feisty survivor who indeed overcame rough odds and finished by getting what she wanted. This remains true at second blush as well, with Bertha as her double, but it is considerably more complicated and offers us a radically more vexed and fascinating notion of maturation: namely, that it is never a simple sprint to the finish line, that each step of its trajectory is likely to leave traces in the psyche, that one’s own story is inevitably a murky collective affair, filled to the brim with other figures who swim in one’s orbit, who seem to mingle in one’s blood, who might be alternate faces. And here would be the prize that literature itself offers us: that fuller reading, the assessment that measures both surface achievement and the depth charges underneath. “Reader, I married him” is no less stunning a statement in both versions, but it has the feeling of an earned, suffered, and painfully just reward in the more spectral reading of the novel, for it writes large what our so-called victories consist of, which may often include blood, tears, scars, and assorted ghosts to boot.
Jane Eyre
asks us to rethink—to think more deeply—how we got to where we are, how we became who we are.

Not all readers are prepared to read Bertha as Jane’s displaced rage. Some will hold on to their more congenial views of the feisty Jane making her way through thick and thin, without needing a ghostly double. Others, of a more postcolonial bent, have argued that it won’t do to reduce Bertha (from the colonies) to some kind of “return of the repressed” for the nice white girl, that Bertha is entitled to her own history. More than a century later, Jean Rhys succeeded brilliantly in writing just that history.
Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966) is the haunting prequel to
Jane Eyre
, and it teaches us everything we could wish to know about the making of monsters, about how you end up being Bertha Mason Rochester. Its heroine, Antoinette, is formed and deformed in front of our eyes: (heartbreakingly) deprived of love and tenderness by her mother, incessantly “othered” by her peers (not white enough for the blacks, not English enough for the whites), haunted by the memory of her ancestral house set on fire by angry natives (the very ones who call her “white cockroach”), permanently frightened by the conditions of her life, Antoinette desperately seeks what she is to know of happiness in her union with the handsome, sick, manipulated Edward Rochester, come to Dominica to find a wife.

It is a catastrophic marriage, written with remarkable acuity on the part of Rhys, for they are all victims. Rochester longs for parental approval, knows he is being used (as a pawn for his father and brother’s interests) in wedding Antoinette, is initially intoxicated with desire on their honeymoon. Yet things go too far; he risks, in their besotted and ungovernable sexual encounters, losing himself and all boundaries, so he soon comes to fear and to hate this alien woman with her terrors and needs and strange skin and stranger eyes. One might argue that sexuality itself is being deconstructed here, that it wrecks definitions and parameters, that it is unownable. The entire colonial project is cued to secure ownership, and Rhys’s plot is to obey exactly that logic: Antoinette in a cage, brought to England. (Rhys originally wrote Rochester more simply but then realized that this young couple had to have had its moment of magic and that that sexual magic could be the ultimate trigger of the male anxieties and cruelties to come. This is brilliant and beyond what would have been thinkable for Brontë.)

The price must be paid. Rochester is told (by a jealous relative, another unloved son) that Antoinette is unchaste, has lovers (which may be true); he realizes he can never understand her, can never make his peace with these primitive people and their exotic voodoo customs, so different from England. If he cannot have her to himself—it is the ultimate colonial dream: to possess the very jewel of the culture one expropriates—he has no choice but to punish her, destroy her. Thus we are witness to a grotesque building project: the fashioning of a monster, the making of a coarse, foulmouthed, murderous creature whose fate will be to be locked up on the third floor of Thornfield Hall, while waiting for the propitious moment to set fire to it, as a repeat version of the fire that annihilated her Edenic home. The career of Antoinette Bertha Mason Rochester is an exemplary tale of growing up into horror.

It is also artisanal in the worst sense. Monsters are not born but made. Antoinette’s childhood of deprivation and fear segues into a passionate but desperate relationship with a man who sequentially courts, desires, uses, fears, and destroys her. (He also takes her fortune.) It is the Frankenstein story recast as love story. He caps her education into horror, step by step, from the Caribbean on to jolly old England and the third floor of Thornfield Hall. He is no Gothic monster but an all-too-anxious male, also deprived of tenderness, alienated by these dark-skinned creatures who are not English, trapped into a fiery conjunction that will destroy him if he does not destroy it first. So he does, with grisly thoroughness, beginning with (noisily) fornicating the servant girl and closing with the removal of the dazed Antoinette marionette to a ship sailing for the pasteboard England that can never be home. Rochester leaves a host of cadavers in his wake: Christophina, Antoinette’s marvelous black nurse, is slated for arrest; the servants are disbanded; and the trophy wife is taken back home as a beautiful, kept-behind-bars ghoul. As said, we’ve been taught recently to code this fable as “colonialist,” as a testament to the European exploitation of the non-West; but it is useful also to see it as a nightmarish version of human development gone amok, as a case study of what love gone wrong can produce, as outright proof of how malleable a human being is, as a laboratory experiment in deformation.

Let me add still a further note here. Rhys, experiencing herself as a maladapted transplant her entire life, shows an extraordinary kind of imaginative generosity in reprising Brontë’s novel, in “making a life for the poor ghost” she saw in Bertha Mason Rochester. Rhys started with the posited monstrous adult—the obscene Bertha of Brontë’s devising—and wrote her backward into the past, intuited that a great deal of earlier horror had to subtend, to “finance,” the performance shown in the English text. What you know us to be is not so much what we are but what we have become, what life has made of us. And that development is no natural process: it is a saga of human and ideological (and racial) forces, of vectors crossing, of wires crossing, of the constitutive work of time. Could we see this had Rhys not shown us?

One final word about
Wide Sargasso Sea:
I have come to see it as the saddest book in my teaching repertoire. It is not as tragic or profound, perhaps, as my favorite modernists such as Proust and Woolf and Faulkner, but it hits me—me the professor of comparative literature who lives in three countries, speaks a batch of languages, and routinely teaches literature from all across the Western canon—where it hurts: it exposes the myth of cross-cultural understanding. What aches most about this awful story is the neediness and vulnerability of both Antoinette and Rochester, and one wants—I want—their relationship to be possible. Rhys refuses to demonize Rochester but sees him as an unloved son, just as Antoinette is an unloved daughter. There lies the first, perhaps unsurvivable, abuse. Then comes the second pitfall, the one that makes me unhappy: they cannot bridge their cultures. Rochester cannot will himself into believing that people from the colonies, most especially the beautiful one with the strange eyes whom he has married, are quite real. Antoinette suffers the same failure of vision, feeling that the England of her new husband is but a cardboard world, without resonance, even though it is the prison in which she is destined to finish her days. Yes, they have their moment of ecstasy in the Garden, and this too poisons their life, since the Eurocentric Rochester cannot abide the sexual fury she awakens in him.

Since the beginning of my career, I have been advising people to learn other languages and to live and study abroad, as well as read books from many different cultures. It is, I feel, the great model for education, the only way of widening your view of the human, of fathoming that others from faraway places and times (encountered in print as well as in person) are real. Exposure to other cultures is the royal way to become truly civilized. It is the growing-up formula in which I have invested my own life as teacher. And as writer: this book, like all my books, is written in exactly that spirit. Why else do comparative literature? The path to understanding (and peace) goes across the bridge from home to abroad. Jean Rhys’s beautiful but heartbreaking book suggests otherwise: the Sargasso Sea that separates Rochester from Antoinette, me from you, is too large to be crossed.

We know that children die. Not only do they die of disease and other ills that remain with us, but some of them seem outright sacrificed either by their culture’s arrangements or, closer to home, by the toxic, life-sapping impact of family itself. The nest can kill. This takes us a step beyond what we’ve seen up to now, for even the abuse story is strangely a testament to human resilience as well as vulnerability: Cathy and Hareton survive to marry at the close of
Wuthering Heights;
Jane acquires money, family, and husband by the end of her trajectory; Antoinette/Bertha’s case is grimmer, but she lives on to become an avenging angel. Yet growing up damaged is not the same thing as being wiped out altogether, as if according to a systemic logic that rids the world of children, through either intention or no less lethal neglect.

Pat Barker’s fine, quasi-documentary novel about shell shock in World War I,
Regeneration
, develops this sacrificial view with considerable eloquence, and the chief protagonist, W. H. Rivers, espies here the oldest dirty trick in human history, with us from Abraham’s willingess to sacrifice Isaac all the way to present-day politics: the old ask the young to show their obedience by being willing to die, and those who live will in turn move into this same august position of power when they become old and require it of their own children. It is as if civilization tirelessly sought to invert the Oedipal story by having the fathers crush their progeny. We’ll see more of this in the latter part of this study.

Barker is writing about the horrors of war. But we can find evidence of such a dystopian vision in works of literature that have nothing to do with battle or the power of the nation-state. Such works are, in some ways, still more disturbing, because they seem to point to a more primitive kind of bargain that has been reached concerning the rights and prospects of children. Let us look at several radically different versions of “murdered children” in texts by Dickens, Ibsen, Kafka, and Faulkner. We will want to ponder: What is the operative logic here? What order—political, economic, moral, libidinal—requires this sacrifice?

No novelist is more identified with sacrificed children than Dickens. Many of his young characters come through alive, even if damaged. As far back as
Oliver Twist
we have the spectacle of children being exploited by the new urban order, even though Oliver comes through unscathed. Dickens later learned to write this story with ever more power and reach. David Copperfield’s manifold struggles against adversity rehearse much of the deprivation and heartache that young Dickens himself experienced. I have already discussed the injured Pip of
Great Expectations
, and a good number of the great late novels toil in this vineyard, yielding figures such as Esther Summerson of
Bleak House
and Little Dorrit of the book bearing her name, each persevering against considerable odds: illegitimacy in one instance, poverty in the other. These are among Dickens’s finest and most complex portrayals of children.

But the death of children exerts a sometimes morbid fascination for Dickens, as if he were staging the outcome he himself most feared while growing up, using the novel form as a kind of affective workout to rehearse/avoid such a fate. Readers wept at Little Nell’s death; and one remembers little Paul Dombey’s demise. Such pathos-loaded scenes may come across as sentimental today, especially given how angelic and innocent the little ones are, how undeserving they are of their fate. But Dickens can be tougher than this, and I want to turn my sights to the figure who is arguably the most victimized in the whole of Dickens: Jo the orphan boy in
Bleak House
.