Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso

Sea , and the Decomposition of Englishness

Trevor Hope

College Literature, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 2012, pp. 51-73 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2012.0001

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 Revisiting the Imperial Archive:
Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and
the Decomposition of Englishness

Trevor Hope

hile the relationship between Trevor Hope teaches at Yasar

W Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre,

published in 1847, and Jean Rhys’s
1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea has already
University, Izmir, Turkey. He is
currently completing a book enti-
been much discussed by critics, the point of tled Mourning People: Nation,
this essay is to return once again to the site of
Archive, and Melancholia.
this textual encounter and revisit the two
novels in order to address the question of
their relationship precisely in terms of revisi-
tation.1 Specifically, the argument made here
is that Rhys’s subversive return to Jane Eyre
and to the earlier novel’s central gothic edi-
fice, Thornfield Hall, is a revisitation of nov-
elistic discourse as an instance of colonial dis-
course and of a particular discursive structure
which I shall call the ‘imperial archive.’ The
way in which the later text variously re-
evokes, re-inhabits, but also displaces and
threatens to destroy the architectural struc-
ture at the heart of its predecessor will be
understood as part of the process whereby it
‘decomposes’ Jane Eyre as a textual structure,
52 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

an argument that depends upon the sense in which, in the earlier novel,
architectural and textual structures are already, as so often in gothic literature,
elaborately intertwined. The notion of the archive emerges at the point
where textual and architectural structures frame and inhabit each other.
Furthermore, I will speculatively propose that this particular instance of tex-
tual revisitation might be read to some degree as paradigmatic of the
encounter between two inextricably intertwined discursive structures or, as I
shall be arguing, between two archives—namely the imperial and the post-
colonial.
The notion of the imperial archive necessarily evokes the concept devel-
oped by Thomas Richards in his The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the
Fantasy of Empire (1993), and I share Richards’s concern to place the specif-
ically literary productions of empire within a larger discursive economy.
Richards’s approach, however, appears surprisingly to owe more to the disci-
plinary model of knowledge/power found in Michel Foucault’s later texts
than it does to the Archeology of Knowledge (2002), a work that bears a stronger
kinship to the primarily Derridean notion of archive that I attempt to artic-
ulate here. It is specifically the manner in which archive works against the
ideal of a singular and integrated structure, and the ways in which the
archive, while appearing to coordinate a regularity of signifying practices into
a unified corpus, also and in principle subverts its own ideal unity that, draw-
ing on the work of Jacques Derrida, I want to emphasize here. I argue that
it is precisely this model that offers an understanding of the way in which a
later literary text, Wide Sargasso Sea, revisits and re-inhabits the architecture
of an earlier text, Jane Eyre, so as to emphasize its internal heterogeneity, a
process that I term ‘decomposition.’
It is clearly not insignificant that many gothic texts are named after the
shadowy edifice that not only dominates their setting but is also at the heart
of their symbolic concerns: The Castle of Otranto, Castle Rackrent, and
Northanger Abbey offer just three early examples of such ambiguous naming.
In the last of these, Jane Austen exploits to comic effect the parallels between
her protagonist’s supposed entrapment within the confines of the house and
the manner in which she is actually the captive of a structure of fantasy, the
prisoner of an edifice entirely literary, and the victim of her own reading
habits. The induction of the reader into the gothic edifice is often double:
both an ushering into that house, castle, or abbey that is its central topos, and
an initiation into a structure of knowledge or fantasy, characterized typically
by paranoia. If the architectural serves within the terms of the gothic text as
the material projection of this epistemological structure, the projection may
offer an uncannily self-conscious perspective on the construction and organ-
ization of fantasy. This is in turn connected with the fact that the protago-
 Trevor Hope 53

nists of gothic texts are so often themselves also readers. We might go so far
as to say that, among other things, gothic structures typically offer an allego-
ry of reading. Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea are replete with scenes of read-
ing, scenes that often foreground the architectural staging of encounters with
texts, as readers in the novels retreat, for example, to libraries and window
nooks: spaces marked off, set aside, and framed by a mode of architectural
organization that I shall relate to the notion of the archive. If both of these
texts at one level portray the reader securely caught and housed within the
structures of imperial fantasy, the particular question posed here is to what
extent Wide Sargasso Sea offers an allegory of postcolonial re-reading in its
particular mode of revisiting and re-inhabiting an earlier literary and discur-
sive structure.
Neither Jane Eyre nor Wide Sargasso Sea, of course, is named after its cen-
tral architectural structure, although Thornfield Hall emerges as the privi-
leged edifice in the textual encounter between the novels. It is key to my
argument about the ambivalence of both novels towards the structures that
they simultaneously inhabit and produce that there is no single building that
monopolizes either narrative structure, and that notoriously these are texts
about displacement as much as inhabitation. If Wide Sargasso Sea in some
ways violently decomposes the topographic and textual structures of Jane
Eyre through various modes of geopolitical dispersal and displacement, this is
in itself a re-inhabiting of the modes of displacement internal to the work-
ings of structure in Jane Eyre. The triumphant conflagration of Thornfield
Hall in Wide Sargasso Sea may at one level mark a vengeful attack upon the
earlier textual structure, and yet it clearly remains faithful to a mode of
destruction (and indeed auto-destruction) initiated by Jane Eyre itself. If the
burned ruins of Thornfield Hall emblematize a destruction, the undoing of
an edifice, that decomposition turns out not simply to be anarchically anti-
structural, but provides the very principle of the structural relationship
between the two texts, as a destruction or deconstruction inseparable from
repetition, and thus a revisiting and a reconstruction.
The identification between textual and architectural structure in Jane
Eyre begins as early as the famous opening chapter, which explores the
orphaned Jane’s ambiguous relationship to the house (Gateshead) and house-
hold of her cousins and her aunt, Mrs. Reed. At the opening of the novel
Jane—unable to take a walk outside because of the cold and snow, but also
excluded from the familial huddle around the warm fire of the drawing room
inside—sits cross-legged “like a Turk” in the window seat, and in a gesture
which ambiguously repeats her simultaneous enclosure and exclusion, draws
“nearly close” the red curtain, leaving her in a “double retirement” (Brontë
1994, 9). On the threshold of the novel, then, Jane, this “heterogeneous
54 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

thing,” breaches the first principle of structure, the distinction between the
inside and the outside (17).
The identification of the textual and architectural thresholds through the
marking (and unsettling) of the boundary that takes place in Jane’s drawing
of the curtain is further compounded by the fact that Jane has withdrawn a
book from the collection contained in a bookcase in the very room to which
she has herself withdrawn; taking flight from enclosure, she also seeks refuge
from her cold exile in a reading which itself confounds the proprieties of
space. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, “Jane breaks the rules of the
appropriate topography of withdrawal” (1985, 246). Even as she symbolical-
ly withdraws from the space of the house, and even as she withdraws a text
from that collection, or archive, that is the bookcase, Jane’s attempted self-
exile is troubled by her entry into the symbolic ‘space’ of the book that she
reads. This book read by Jane the “Turk” is, we are told, Bewick’s History of
British Birds, and if Jane will repeatedly be identified with avian imagery, it is
crucial that through the identification with the bird she is also at one level
identified with the nation (Brontë 1994, 9).There is a sense, indeed, in which
reading here is revealed to be a strategy of identification (and interpellation)
in national terms. To enter the text is to enter the fantasy of national belong-
ing at a time of familial ostracism, to deny her heterogeneity in national
terms even as she comports herself “like a Turk,” perched precariously on the
borders of national domestication. The structure of enclosure will be insep-
arable from the problems of exile, however, since the book that supposedly
offers Jane the solace of reading (and a place of identification) as an alterna-
tive to the “cold winter wind” (9) and the coldness of exclusion from the
familial hearth will also transport Jane (along with its own putatively British
avian ‘characters’) to the “bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova
Zembla, Iceland, Greenland…” and plunge her into a “reservoir of frost and
snow” (10).The repeated scenes of reading throughout the text, and through-
out the various domestic structures in which Jane will subsequently find her-
self, are thus from the very beginning associated with the irresolvable para-
doxes of a simultaneous inclusion and exile, of identification and exclusion
within the structures of nationhood. Spivak also makes clear the ways in
which, through identification with Jane as a reader, the novel’s reader is inter-
pellated, along with Jane, into individualism (1985, 246). The nation, I will
argue, becomes inseparable from the problem of textual structures and their
ability to interpellate their reader. The problematic and even paradoxical
form of this interpellation, however, is once again clearly marked by the fact
that it is precisely in the moment of ensconcing herself with the ‘British’
book that Jane’s reading persona is constructed “like a Turk.” Jane’s literary
habits will continue to be emphasized, and the other reading material in the
 Trevor Hope 55

Gateshead chapters ranges evocatively from the (conventionally) feminized

topography of domestic enclosure of Pamela to the masculine allegorical tra-
jectory of Gulliver’s Travels.2
The notion of archive that I explore below is introduced here in spatial
terms, through the identification of textual and architectural structures, and
the notion that Gateshead is a house of books and site of reading. Already in
the first chapter, however, the archive is also dealt with in terms of what we
would have to call a ‘political economy’: issues of ownership and appropria-
tion are already raised as problems of the archive in this chapter, as we are
told that Jane has “possessed herself of [the] volume” (Brontë 1994, 9) that,
at the end of the chapter, John Reed (the eldest son) will reclaim as his right-
ful property. As self-proclaimed owner of the house and its contents, John
feels the inappropriateness of Jane’s withdrawal of the text from his bookcase,
his collection, his archive: “I’ll teach you to rummage my book-shelves: for
they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years” (12). In
a trebly symbolic redeployment of Jane’s strategies of readerly withdrawal, he
instructs her to move away from both window (means of flight) and mirror
(site of imaginary inclusion through identification) before using the book as
a projectile weapon against her, seemingly underscoring the failure of her
own attempts at discursive appropriation. John’s reassertion of the order of
readerly property and propriety against the disruptive intervention of this
‘heterogeneous’ female, however, accompanies the concession that Jane has,
indeed, disturbed the order of ‘his’ archive by rummaging through his book-
shelves. I take this disturbing of the archive by its protagonist to be symbol-
ic of the text’s ambiguous relationship to a larger textual and discursive order
that I shall characterize as both national and imperial, although it is surely
immediately apparent that the archive is also, to steal a richly revealing pun
from Derrida, “patriarchival” (Derrida 1996, 4). This disordering rummaging
through the archive in which the text finds itself enclosed and from which,
at the same time, it attempts to withdraw, will be further intensified when we
consider the ways in which Wide Sargasso Sea will return to the architectur-
al sites of Jane Eyre, and to the earlier textual structure, in a demonstration of
its own postcolonial ambivalence in relation to the imperial patriarchive.
While it is important to notice the way in which the principle of struc-
ture is breached from the very beginning of the text and in the identification
of architectural, textual, and national orders of enclosure and heterogeneity,
the core of my argument, and arguably the core of the text as archive, lies not
in Gateshead but in the description of the third floor of Thornfield Hall
offered in chapter eleven. The chapter begins with the narrator drawing the
reader’s attention to the manner in which she “draw[s] up” the curtain, as if
this is a new scene in the play (Brontë 1994, 95). And indeed the entire chap-
56 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

ter revisits, if it does not exactly undo, the strange logic of enclosure and
sequestration associated with Jane’s drawing the curtain “nearly close” in
chapter one. Jane’s earlier withdrawal is again evoked in two further passages
in this chapter before we reach the sanctum of the third floor:
After breakfast, Adèle and I withdrew to the library, which room, it appears,
Mr. Rochester had directed should be used as the schoolroom. Most of the
books were locked up behind glass doors; but there was one bookcase left
open containing everything that could be needed in the way of elementary
works. . . . I suppose he had considered that these were all the governess
would require for her private perusal.(Brontë 1994, 104)
The library—the architectural/textual archive no less—to which governess
and pupil withdraw, repeats the ambiguities of the first threshold, the window,
through the figure of the glass doors that both enable withdrawal and hold
in reserve. The structural economy of the house and its bookcases is complex
for, just as part of the archive is withheld by these glass partitions and part is
specifically pedagogically addressed to Jane and her pupil, so too is the house
segregated in such a manner that a portion of it has been set aside (or held in
reserve) for its pedagogical workings (“which room … Mr. Rochester had
directed should be used as the schoolroom”). Jane’s new withdrawal with her
pupil, Adèle, is another site of induction, associated once again with the read-
ing of books. Even the Governess’s putative “private perusal” has already in a
sense been staged by the opening of curtains and of glass doors.
On their tour of the house a few paragraphs later, Mrs. Fairfax points out
to Jane the “vault”-like drawing room that lies through “a wide arch corre-
sponding to the window,” which is “hung like it with a Tyrian-dyed curtain”
(105). The curtain, not to mention the paradoxical “correspondence”
between the exterior window and the arch that opens onto an interior vault
again re-invokes—and here, in a certain sense, at the very topographical core
of the text—the problematics of enclosure, exclusion, and interior partition
and sequestration that mark the text’s own threshold, and the mention of
“Turkey carpets” and “ottomans” again recalls Jane’s own strange hetero-
geneity in the first chapter of the text (105). Tyrian, of course, is the reddish-
purple dye also known as imperial purple. If the whole house is a figure of a
national archive, it becomes tempting to suggest that it is one that has its
imperial outside or periphery on its inside, and that, indeed, the (interior as
much as exterior) thresholds of curtains and windows (as well as their corre-
sponding glass doors and arches) all remark the transection of the nation by
its imperial circumference. It is worth noting in this context that the reddish
curtains here and in chapter one also echo the scene of Jane’s imprisonment
in (or banishment to) the red room at Gateshead, the chapter in which she
is most hyperbolically identified with a “rebel slave” (14).3 Jane herself, that
 Trevor Hope 57

is to say, is simultaneously excluded, marked as outcast, and inducted,

sequestered, withheld, and withdrawn by the workings of the archive.
It is when we finally reach the third floor of the house that we have in
some sense penetrated the heart of that archive which is both house and text:
[S]ome of the third-storey rooms, though dark and low, were interesting
from their air of antiquity. The furniture once appropriated to the lower
apartments had from time to time been removed here, as fashions changed:
and the imperfect light entering by their narrow casement showed bed-
steads of a hundred years old; chests in oak or walnut, looking, with their
strange carvings of palm branches and cherubs’ heads, like types of the
Hebrew ark; rows of venerable chairs, high-backed and narrow; stools still
more antiquated, on whose cushioned tops were yet apparent traces of half-
effaced embroideries, wrought by fingers that for two generations had been
coffin-dust. All these relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the
aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of memory. (Brontë 1994, 106-07)
This shrine, with its oak doors and “wrought English old hangings” portray-
ing “effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human
beings” (107), is, surely, not just ark but archive: a structure of memory, and in
particular an archive both national and imperial, despite—or perhaps precise-
ly because of—the manner in which those very English hangings, like Jane’s
red curtains, draw us on a gradated progression into the uncanny—strange…
stranger… strangest. The ark, the shrine, or archive, is the coordination of a
memorial system and structure, the turning of the heterogeneous signs of the
past into a compelling monument of identity, its maintenance and furnishing
through a regime of collecting, appropriation, and ordering whereby the
great house becomes a version of the national museum.
Let us consider Derrida’s description, in Archive Fever (1996), of the ideal
order of the archive:
Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony
in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In
an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity
or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute man-
ner. (Derrida 1996, 3)
Derrida’s point here is that the notion of consignation also and in principle
(ab initio) breaches the very ideal of order that it sustains: for if consignation
designates at one level the gathering of signs whereby order triumphs over
contingency, to consign is also simultaneously to put on reserve. In terms of
the central themes of Derrida’s work, writing as a memorial inscription
involves setting down on a place, depositing on a material ‘substrate.’ The ark
of preservation is thus simultaneously the place of setting aside, of separation,
of sequestration, of putting on reserve and partitioning: the once ‘appropri-
58 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

ated’ historical bric-a-brac of the third floor has now been ‘removed,’ or set
aside on the inside; the “archontic” gathering of presence in the archive, as
Derrida would have it, is also the place of the withdrawing of being, the place
where identity disaggregates or decomposes back into the very heteroge-
neous signs out of which it is consolidated. The seemingly liminal problems
raised by the question of Jane’s appropriation into or withdrawal from the
margins of the domestic and discursive structure lie in fact at the very heart
of the principles of the archive. Within what appears structurally, architec-
turally, to be the innermost inside, we find the re-inscription of partitions,
doors, and curtains.The partition itself in fact becomes the site of the inscrip-
tion of nation, as the latter appears woven into the very fabric of those
accommodating “wrought English old hangings,” with their avian as well as
human “occupants.”
Treating psychoanalysis as a theory of the archive, Derrida specifies that
the Freudian description of the psyche in fact limns the topography of the
archive:
[T]his model also integrates the necessity, inside the psyche itself, of a cer-
tain outside, of certain borders between insides and outsides. And with this
domestic outside, that is to say also with the hypothesis of an internal substrate,
surface or space without which there is neither consignation, registration,
impression nor suppression, censorship, repression, it prepares the idea of a
psychic archive distinct from spontaneous memory, of a hypomnesis distinct
from mneme and from anamnesis: the institution, in sum, of a prosthesis of the
inside. (Derrida 1996, 19)
Thornfield certainly, along with all of the domestic archives of Jane Eyre, is
just such an archive, bearing its ‘outside,’ its space of withholding and with-
drawal, its place of consignation and reserve, on the inside, confounding the
very order that it concomitantly describes and contains, wrecking the abode
of memory. As Derrida surely would insist, the logical heart of that archive
(with its “strange carvings” as well as its bookcases and libraries) is irreducibly
caught up in inscription.
As a strategy of national identification, the archive attempts, as Ernest
Gellner (1983) might say, to piece together a seamless narrative out of a nec-
essarily heterogeneous congeries of “scraps and patches”: “The cultural shreds
and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions,” he
observes, and “[a]ny old shred and patch would have served as well.”
However, he insists that “in no way does it follow that the principle of
nationalism itself, as opposed to the avatars it happens to pick up for its incar-
nations, is itself in the least contingent and accidental” (1983, 56). At one
level, Gellner’s analysis of the role of writing in the historical articulation of
the nation also invokes writing as the paradigm of the archive: “Literacy, the
 Trevor Hope 59

establishment of a reasonably permanent and standardized script, means in

effect the possibility of cultural and cognitive storage and centralization” (8;
emphasis added).While centralization (or that element of “consignation” that
can be identified with “gathering” in Derridean terms) is obviously a key
part of the functioning of the archive as I conceive it here, Gellner’s charac-
terization of the function of writing seems uncritically to reiterate the
archive’s own ideal of itself as unified and consolidated. This view is surely
connected with a general account of the development of language that is
characterized by an almost Rousseauian phonocentrism, according to which
the “explicit” and “rule-bound” language of the modern nation is contrast-
ed with the idiom of the “closed local communities of the agrarian or trib-
al worlds,” in which “context, tone, gesture, personality and situation were
everything” (33). In Jane Eyre the connections between the archival function
of the house, its operation as a museum, and the workings of monumental
inscription do at some level work to consolidate fragmentary signs into an
account of national identity that appears “permanent and standardized.”
However, we shall see that the very attention that the text pays to the
processes of gathering, stitching, or consignation that consolidate the archive
necessarily remarks the vicissitudes of appropriation and segregation that
undermine the ideal of the faultlessly integrated structure. The text, or col-
lection of signs conceived as an achieved synchronic order, disaggregates back
into a history of contingent acts of collecting, patching, and stitching. As it
not only raises the curtain to the third floor in order to reveal the inner
workings at the heart of the domestic archive, but also draws our attention
precisely to the fabric of those curtains and hangings themselves, the text
constantly exposes the material substrate of inscription that undoes the very
ideality of the archive that it is supposed to sustain. The putative ideality of
national identity is thus decomposed into signs that remark the historical
contingency, appropriative force, and epistemological violence of the archive
as the product of a political (and specifically imperial) economy. The archive
that is the third floor of Thornfield must thus always be both contained and
sequestrated, locked away as the collection of invisible—or at least “half-
effaced” (Brontë 1994, 106-107)—signs that threaten, if rendered transparent-
ly legible or allowed to circulate freely, to subvert the very structure that they
are mobilized to secure. The archive, that is, poses a perpetual latent threat to
the very order it sustains, and Thornfield, like all of the domestic structures
in Jane Eyre, is haunted by the ambivalence towards the archive that marks all
gothic texts, and which has often been identified with the Freudian ‘uncan-
ny’ and the ‘return of the repressed.’ This ambivalence is perhaps made most
explicit in that subgenre of the gothic which mobilizes literal museums as the
setting of national, imperial, and often explicitly racial nightmares.4
60 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

This is perhaps the moment to return to the parallels between textual

and architectural structures typical of the gothic novel from which this dis-
cussion began. The archive for Derrida is crucially both a material place and
space, and an economy of the sign. To say that Jane Eyre’s architectural struc-
tures are, in fact, archival—which is to say that they work against the very
notion of structure insofar as it takes as its ideal the gathering of signs into a
perfectly synchronic order—is also to say something about the structure of
the text, or rather to say something of the text’s own impossible, anti-struc-
tural architecture. The text is itself, of course, no more nor less than an econ-
omy of signs, and yet we shall see how, with its inwardly secreted texts (those
letters, for example, that it holds on reserve in its inner spaces), it too is an
archive rather than a structure of signs.That is to say, its signs can never be gath-
ered into the perfect ideality of a single coordinated order, and thus always
more or less tend towards a decomposition which, however, is never fully dis-
connected from the workings of archival gathering.
At the beginning of the final section of Wide Sargasso Sea, “Mrs. Eff ”
(presumably an avatar of Jane Eyre’s Mrs. Fairfield) is said by Grace Poole to
“fold a letter away” (Rhys 1982, 177) in a manner which surely emblema-
tizes the way in which these textual structures contain, secrete, and set aside
their own signs, consigning them to a kind of interior reserve, what Derrida
calls the “domestic outside” (Derrida 1996, 19). Nancy Armstrong’s descrip-
tion of Thornfield as a kind of domestic museum is thus extremely insight-
ful, and she is surely right to suggest that “Jane finds the inside of the house
to be thoroughly lettered… colonized by the conduct books as well as by
novels like those Austen wrote” (1990, 205). She captures, I believe, the struc-
tural problems of the novel much more fully when she argues that “[e]ach
room within Thornfield Hall is a familiar site to readers of fiction, and each
is a different citation,” suggesting a literary and architectural version of
Gellner’s scraps and patches, than she does when she urges consequently that
“all the rooms are brought together into a single house of fiction” (207). It
is precisely in its failure to integrate spaces, order “citations,” and coordinate
memory into a single “house” or structure that the archival architecture of
the novel re-inscribes the problems of nation and empire, even as it also
attempts in some ways to withdraw from them. This failure confounds
Armstrong’s attempts to read the domestic novel’s construction of a “psy-
chosexual” interiority as inherently depoliticizing, “detache[d] from any ref-
erent in the world” (212). “She [Brontë] deliberately brings alien cultural ele-
ments within a domestic framework,” argues Armstrong, “and destroys their
cultural otherness” (210). If “she” here is the marker of the forces of archival
ordering, then this may be partially true, in accordance with the ideal of a
perfect archival “consignation.” Yet Armstrong’s resistance to psychoanalysis
 Trevor Hope 61

leads her to underestimate the ways in which ‘she’ (Brontë, or Jane, or Bertha
insofar as these all in a sense become names for the agency of the archive) is
also impelled by what Derrida calls “archiviolithic” forces, those elements of
heterogeneity which are not contingent accidents that belatedly affect a
once-pristine order, but which are the necessary consequence and prerequi-
site of archival conscription (Derrida 1996, 10). The Freudian death drive is,
for Derrida, a name for this archiviolithic tendency operating from the very
beginning within and against the principle of archival preservation, and I
wish to posit that the impossibility at the heart of the textual archive—“The
archive always works, and a priori, against itself ” (12)—is inseparable from an
impasse within the national/imperial archival (as well as patriarchival) order.
When Wide Sargasso Sea arrives as a ‘supplement’ to this textual archive, in a
sense it remarks nothing new at all but an originary and entirely structural
breakdown (an irreducible heterogeneity) within Jane Eyre ‘itself.’ It adds itself
to the text, that is to say, not as a belated sequel; the later text, the ‘prequel,’
is, in fact, a prosthesis of the ‘inside,’ and one which makes intensely visible
the disjunctures that are the very condition of possibility of the
national/imperial patriarchive, those lines of structural (im)possibility that it
attempts to consign, banish, and exile to its deepest and most concealed
inside. Jane Eyre clearly does, as Armstrong charges, domesticate its signs; and
yet by rendering the domestic in archival terms (and, indeed, assuming the
form of a domestic archive), it also re-inscribes within its innermost depths
the very alterity from which it attempts to “detach” and distance itself.
Accordingly, far from simply alienating itself from the constraints of the ear-
lier novel’s domestic form, Wide Sargasso Sea too re-inhabits this textual
domicile in ways that reaffirm its principles of decomposition.
Beyond the emblematic Englishness of oak doors and hangings—noting
again the neat coincidence between the nation and the threshold or parti-
tion—we might ask what it is that makes the secrets of the third-floor archive
national. The confounding and yet utterly logical answer lies in the secret
domiciling of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first, West Indian bride in this out-
house of memory; for at the hidden heart of English identity in the structure
of the novel is the heterogeneous sign, the sequestrated memory of imperial
origins, the carefully preserved secret that the stately home of England is, as
Edward Said (1994) argued in the case of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, built
on imperial foundations and an economy of slavery. The domestic archive is
also an effect of the appropriation, centralization, and capitalization of a dis-
persed economy of labor and exchange. Its heterogeneity must be effaced so
that the supposed legitimacy of class and colonial privilege at the imperial
center can be maintained, which can happen only at the expense of the
62 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

constant repudiation—or “fold[ing] . . . away” (Rhys 1982, 177)—of the

violences of colonial accumulation.
If Bertha Mason is the necessary reserve that the archive will capitalize
into the principle of national identity, she thus becomes the concealed prin-
ciple of Jane’s own breached and heterogeneous Englishness, just as the
Masons’ familial house in Jamaica is the double (or prosthesis) through which
the archival principle of Thornfield’s secrecy is undone: “[T]hough two
rooms off,” says Rochester, recounting the process whereby he learns in
Jamaica the secret of his first bride’s madness, “I heard every word—the thin
partitions of the West Indian house opposing but slight obstruction to her
wolfish cries” (Brontë 1994, 305; emphasis added). Partition, need it be said,
is the very principle of the archive, as those West Indian words are consigned
to the sequestrated vaults of Thornfield, the domestic-imperial museum. If
West Indian walls “leak” (Rhys 1982, 29), and appear to avow what is to
remain hermetically concealed behind sturdy English curtains and doors
(even, we are supposed to believe, when made of glass), ‘West Indianness’ sim-
ply becomes the noisy secret that permeates the imperial archive, like a
“clamorous peal that seemed to echo in every lonely chamber, though it
originated but in one” (Brontë 1994,108).
Nor of course is Jane, Rochester’s second wife, immune to archival
haunting by the first wife, the imperial one, let us say, of whom she is the
national double. In the second chapter, when Jane is locked in the famous
Red Room at Gateshead, we have been given the necessary clues to con-
clude, at least in retrospect, that it too is a vault and museum that functions
on fully archival principles. With its “tabernacle,” it too must house not just
the sequestered Jane, who here more than anywhere else represents herself as
a “rebel slave,” but also the sacred ark of memorial identity (Brontë 1994,
15,14). We are told of a “certain secret drawer in the wardrobe, where were
stored divers parchments” (16) that Mrs. Reed occasionally withdraws to
review, and it surely becomes impossible not to identify this drawer and the
signs it retains with both the “secret inner cabinet” (306) of the third floor of
Thornfield and the dressing case from which, when Jane returns to
Gateshead, Mrs. Reed instructs her to take out the letter sent from her Uncle
John in Madeira (236). This letter is the very text that ties the orphaned Jane
back to a legitimate identity, a sign withheld by Mrs. Reed which must now
be restored, but it is a text which leads infallibly, once again, back to the
imperial periphery. John Eyre is the Madeira agent for the Caribbean busi-
ness of the wealthy Richard Mason, Bertha’s brother. The letter announces
John’s intention to bequeath Jane his accumulated wealth, and when she
inherits the legacy that makes it possible to become the second Mrs.
Rochester, she too has capitalized on an identity whose secret finds its ori-
 Trevor Hope 63

gins in the trade in sugar, wine, and human beings that drives these transat-
lantic exchanges. As Nancy Pell puts it, “Jane’s legacy was built by her uncle
on English trade with the West Indian Colonies and on slavery, on the same
base, in short as Bertha Mason’s attractive dowry. Jane accepts this inheri-
tance” (1977, 415).5 The disclosure of the letter consigned to the domestic
vault does not simply effect the triumphant revelation of Jane’s identity; it
reveals the very principle of sequestration, partitioning, and withholding that
simultaneously forges and breaches identity from the very beginning. The
appropriating and accumulating of a wealth whose origins must remain
obscured (from which the text, in a sense, will indeed struggle to “detach”
itself) is here perfectly echoed by the textual economy of withholding and
preservation. The first sentence of this letter, incidentally, begins, “Will you
have the goodness to send me the address of my niece, Jane Eyre” (Brontë
1994, 236). We might fruitfully ponder the ways in which the imperial mis-
sive both fails and ultimately succeeds in reaching its destination, the point
being surely that its actual addressee is the vault, the archive, just as Jane, final-
ly discovering the reason why all of the letters she addressed to Thornfield
after her departure have gone answered, realizes they have been so many
“epistles to a vault” (420). If this letter is the scrap of text that most obviously
interpellates Jane as a national and imperial subject (granting her symboli-
cally a name along with a familial and pecuniary legacy), the apparent failure
of the text to reach its destination, its withholding by the very archive that it
conscribes, again depends on the manner in which empire has become the
heterogeneous supplement that both doubles and “half-effaces” national
identity. Far from “patching,” this scrap of textuality threatens in a sense to
“unstitch” the fabric that furnishes English identity.The reason that Jane’s let-
ter remains unanswered is that the house, the archive, has of course mean-
while gone up in flames.
Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 novel by the Dominican writer Jean Rhys,
takes us back to the Caribbean childhood of “Bertha Mason,” born
Antoinette Cosway, and yet, as I have suggested, it also obsessively revisits
Thornfield Hall. The house is the setting of Bertha/Antoinette’s sequestra-
tion once again in the third and final section of the novel; but more inter-
estingly, it is already multiply prefigured through a kind of textual
découpage/collage in various domestic settings in the Caribbean, especially the
two houses (and estates) of Coulibri and Granbois. The Caribbean landscape
is littered with the burned ruins of the old estate houses, the domestic
archives of the destruction associated with slave rebellions and post-emanci-
pation resentments: “Certainly many of the estate houses were burned. You
saw ruins all over the place” (Rhys 1982, 133). Lee Erwin (1989) focuses at
length on the significance of the burning of houses and of the ways in which
64 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

this implies an identification between Bertha and those who set fire to the
family estate in Wide Sargasso Sea. The remains of the domestic archive con-
jure up an image of life in the ruins of imperial history, and the names of
abandoned (and haunted) structures include “Nelson’s Rest,” an appellation
that would be utterly parodic, given the far from quiescent nature of the past
in the text, were it not that the linguistic hybridity of the Caribbean archive
suggests that this connotes as much Nelson’s remains (restes in French) as a
placid domestic abode. Significantly, such ruins are tabooed, subject to a seg-
regation that prevails in the post-emancipation landscape: “Mr. Luttrell’s
house was left empty, shutters banging in the wind. Soon the black people
said it was haunted, they wouldn’t go near it. And no one came near us”
(Rhys 1982, 18). The memories that haunt the imperial archive may well be
shunned, kept secret, and set aside, but the ‘shutters’ (which shut in? or shut
out?), like the curtains, doors, and windows of Thornfield, speak a noisy
ambivalence once again at the site of the domestic/archival boundary.
To return to the parallels between textual and architectural structures,
the multiply fragmented and refracted echoes of burned and ruined struc-
tures across the text become, surely, a figure for the problematic, and even
impossible, structure of the text itself. Notably, Bertha/Antoinette’s child-
hood house “leaks like a sieve” (Rhys 1982, 29), although it will later be
patched up by her stepfather, Mr. Mason. The leaking of the house is associ-
ated with a textual structure into which multiple, often barely distinguishable
and sometimes unattributed, voices infiltrate. Commenting on the signifi-
cance of the text’s formal characteristics, Laura E. Ciolkowski argues that
“The competing narrative frames, authorial voices, and shifting points of
view… reenact the struggles over meaning that are embedded within the fic-
tions of colonial identity and English imperial control” (1997, 340).
Thornfield, moreover, is barely more than a literary conceit in the text. It is
first evoked through the pen of the (unnamed) Rochester, precisely, it would
appear, as an antidote to the sense of ubiquitous “leaking” associated with the
pervasive voices of gossiping servants:
However much I paid Jamaican servants I would never buy discretion. I’d
be gossiped about, sung about (but they make up songs about everything,
everybody. You should hear the one about the Governor’s wife). Wherever
I went I would be talked about. I drank some more rum and, drinking, I
drew a house surrounded by trees. A large house. I divided the third floor
into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman—a child’s scribble,
a dot for a head, a larger one for the body, a triangle for a skirt, slanting lines
for arms and feet. But it was an English house. (Rhys 1982, 163)
It is noteworthy that, even as the function of the house seems to be to con-
tain, its integrity as a structure is immediately challenged by the association
 Trevor Hope 65

between the third floor and a “dividing” that again partitions the structure
from within. Given the emphasis on the textual nature of this house with its
carefully inscribed divisions and sequestrations, it is hardly surprising perhaps
that when she is brought to England, Bertha expresses great skepticism about
the reality of the house she sees and indeed of the nation itself:
Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew,
made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world
where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light
in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the card-
board….This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England. (Rhys
1982, 180-81)
“But it was an English house,” Rochester insists, and the point is surely that
the house is a pure literary conceit (hardbound between “cardboard” covers),
one founded upon well-known (and specifically gothic) precedents (“I have
seen it before somewhere”), in which Antoinette’s future is re-echoed to her
and even proleptically pre-scribed for her (Rhys 1982, 163). The place that
Antoinette is to occupy is literally inscribed through a flourish of the pen, just
as Jane’s own withdrawal to the library/schoolroom has in fact been dictat-
ed by the orders of Mr. Rochester. Indeed, Antoinette’s entire identity (and
she is to be renamed “Bertha” through the whim of Rochester) is reduced
here to a literary conceit, a series of flourishes of the pen: a dot, a scribble, a
triangle, and sloping lines.
It is not only Antoinette, however, who finds elements of her fate pre-
scribed for her in the story of Jane Eyre, a story, it should be noted, that in
terms of the chronology of the plots, actually follows and thus logically
repeats elements of this belated re-inscribed ‘origin.’ On arriving at Granbois,
where the new couple are to set up their first marital home, it is Rochester
now who is tempted to withdraw into the space of the window: “Under the
open window a small writing-desk with paper, pens, and ink. ‘A refuge’ I was
thinking when someone said, ‘This was Mr. Mason’s room, sir, but he did not
come here often’” (Rhys 1982, 74). If the presence of paper, pens, and ink
suggests a more active relationship to the fate he will perhaps, unlike Jane and
Antoinette, be able to write for himself, the sense in which it is pre-scribed
is suggested by the inevitable presence of another (albeit significantly impov-
erished) version of the library, “a crude bookshelf made of three shingles
strung together over the desk,” containing a number of books: “Byron’s
poems, novels by Sir Walter Scott, Confessions of an Opium Eater, some shab-
by brown volumes, and on the last shelf, Life and Letters of….The rest was
eaten away” (75). The use of ellipses is frequent, especially at the end of the
many fragments of letters and stories that appear never to be fully integrat-
ed into this leaky and ruined archive of a text, and here it becomes associat-
66 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

ed with the sense in which the books that furnish this domestic setting have
become as ruined as the structures in which they find themselves housed.
Notably, though, this textual decomposition also suggests a moment of fail-
ure in terms of the pre-scribing of identity, since it is clearly a name that is
missing on the binding of the final incomplete volume, this indeterminate
life and perhaps uncompleted collection of letters.6 National identity itself
seems to have come unbound in this disintegration, since the binding of De
Quincey’s text is also missing its canonical reference to Englishness. If the
bookcase is, nevertheless, an image of imperial canonicity, a symbol of the
pedagogical prescription of identity by and from the imperial center, the
indeterminate nature of national/imperial inscription (and again interpella-
tion or conscription) seems to be multiply overdetermined in the image of
the partial and incomplete collection of texts worn and eaten away, reduced,
one might say, to scraps.7
As if to supplement the textual lacks remarked upon here, the narrative
immediately proffers a letter written by Rochester to his father, a letter that
apparently concludes by promising that he will “write again in a few day’s
time,” but which, as if remarking its own deficiency, then appends a further
supplement in the form of a postscript that ends with a promise that “my
next letter will be longer and more explicit” (Rhys 1982, 76). “There are
blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up,” concludes this section of the
text, having amply demonstrated the thwarted efforts at textual completion
(76). Elsewhere in the novel an anonymous correspondent writes that “I sit
at my window and the words fly past me like birds,” again uncannily revisit-
ing Jane’s flight into Bewick’s History of British Birds as she sits in the window
at Gateshead (98). At least provisionally completing (or rather setting aside)
his writing, Rochester notes, “I wondered how they got their letters posted.
I folded mine and put it into a drawer of the desk” (76). Once again, the
archive consigns through a preservation that is also a withdrawing and a
withholding, a folding away and putting on reserve. Just as Jane is to dis-
cover that her letters to Rochester have been “sent to the crypt,” so too is
it made clear here that the crypt is in fact nothing but a function of the
archive itself, furnished as it is with drawers for the consignation of its mis-
sives. Here, surely, the crypt to which Rochester’s letter is consigned is
again a national and imperial crypt. The drawer, like the bookcase, is in a
sense the symbol of the furnishing of the Caribbean as an imperial abode,
and again reading might be seen as part of the pedagogical mode of sub-
jectivation that performs such an important role in both texts, but the con-
signing of the letter to the drawer also marks the withholding and suspen-
sion of the national archive.
 Trevor Hope 67

If, as we have seen, the revelatory force of the narrative of Jane Eyre is
associated with letters secreted in drawers, Wide Sargasso Sea symbolically
supplements the textual archive of its literary predecessor; but it does so in
ways which, far from simply amplifying, augmenting, or tending to complete
the archive, render its problems of secretion, segregation, withholding, and
repression all the more compelling. The second narrative does not exactly
reinstate a missing story, a misplaced piece of a canonical literary archive
imagined ideally to be complete, as if Wide Sargasso Sea, with its meager
book-shelves, were supposed belatedly to restore the book that Jane has
(mis)appropriated to herself from the bookcase at Gateshead. Rather, like the
letter consigned to the drawer, the novel becomes a textual supplement that
remarks the necessary and, as Derrida would say, a priori partiality of the
archive. Wide Sargasso Sea as a postcolonial text that responds critically to the
culture of empire, revisits the British literary canon not (or not only) liber-
ally to extend and broaden it—“three shingles,” after all, being its entire sym-
bolic extent here (Rhys 1982, 75)—but also in order to subvert it from with-
in, taking residence inside the textual domicile of empire in order to bring
about its disintegration or even, indeed, its conflagration.
Both texts, do, of course centrally involve the conflagration of Thornfield
Hall as the key figure of the national/imperial archive. “Is there a fire in the
library?” Blanche Ingram ingenuously enquires in Jane Eyre (Brontë 1994,
192), and the answer is that fire is indeed not only to be found in that par-
ticular domestic archive, but is an omnipresent quality of houses in the novel.
Domestic fires are variously characterized in the text as “good,” “brilliant,”
“excellent,” “cheerful,” “genial,” “generous,” and “superb”; but fire, too, obvi-
ously participates in the violent ambivalence that characterizes the archive
itself, and when Jane wakes up in the Red Room, it is to the specter of the
fire as a “terrible red glare” (21). The red of the fire that will spread through
hangings and curtains is already, significantly, a quality of the furnishings it
will consume. The archive is self-immolating according to a strange transi-
tivity that is exploited in Wide Sargasso Sea, where Antoinette/Bertha’s red
dress functions as a symbolic mediator between curtains and flames: “But I
looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the
room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do” (Rhys
1982, 187). Fire, the element responsible for the conflagration of the archive,
here has a mnemonic force: it is a reminder of Antoinette’s destructive and (in
Derrida’s terms) archiviolithic vocation. In terms of the later novel’s habit of
disintegrating and reassembling the domestic archives of the earlier text, it is
notable that the room that Antoinette enters shortly after (although at this
stage perhaps only in a dream) is more reminiscent of the Red Room at
Gateshead than it is of Jane Eyre’s Thornfield: “It was a large room with a red
68 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

carpet and red curtains. Everything else was white” (Rhys 1982, 188). Finally,
the red of the carpet and curtains will spread as they, and by extension the
whole domestic archive of hangings, partitions, and furnishings, are con-
sumed from within by their own redness, their terrible inflammatory quali-
ty: “I laughed when I saw the lovely colour spreading so fast” (188).
In accordance with the logic of découpage, of the disaggregation and
structural reassembly of the central motifs of the earlier text, references to fire
are also widely scattered throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, and are repeatedly
associated with the self-immolation of endless insects: “A great many moths
and beetles found their way into the room, flew into candles and fell dead on
the tablecloth. Amélie swept them up with a crumb brush. Uselessly. More
moths and beetles came” (Rhys 1982, 80). When one particular moth, a “big
fellow” and a “gay gentleman” so large he is mistaken for a bird, is “[m]ore
stunned than hurt” and survives his particular attempt at self-immolation
(181), one is tempted to imagine him as an avatar of Brontë’s Rochester
(who is wounded but not destroyed by the fire at Thornfield). But at anoth-
er level these insects seem to conjoin the avian characteristics of Jane and the
incendiary tendencies of Bertha/Antoinette. At a simpler level, there is sure-
ly also a reworking of a seemingly minor incident in Jane Eyre that, never-
theless, plays an important role insofar as it suddenly reintroduces the impe-
rial periphery into the heart of the novel. In the garden at Thornfield, dur-
ing a moment of pastoral romance, an emissary of the Caribbean makes an
unexpected and apparently ominous appearance in the form of a large moth:
“‘Look at his wings,’ said [Rochester], ‘he reminds me rather of a West Indian
insect; one does not often see so large and gay a night-rover in England;
there! He is flown’” (247). The complex decomposition and re-combination
of these associations in Rhys’s novel is reinforced at three other points. When
Coulibri is set fire to (seemingly as an expression of the resentments of parts
of the Black community), Antoinette’s mother’s “loose hair” is said to have
burned (39). Again, at the end of the text a more complex set of associations
is evoked:
I heard the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger, Qui est là? Qui est
là? And the man who hated me was calling too, Bertha! Bertha! The wind
caught my hair and it streamed out like wings. It might bear me up, I
thought, if I jumped to those hard stones. (Rhys 1982, 190)
The reappearance of Coco the parrot here is significant, for this is one of two
places in the text in which the scene of Bertha Rochester on the roof of the
burning Thornfield is evoked. When Jane returns to Thornfield in Brontë’s
novel, the scene is described by the host of the inn:
“And then they called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was
standing, waving her arms, above the battlements, and shouting out till they
 Trevor Hope 69

could hear her a mile off: I saw her and heard her with my own eyes. She
was a big woman, and had long black hair: we could see it streaming
against the flames as she stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed,
Mr. Rochester ascend through the sky-light on to the roof; we heard him
call ‘Bertha!’ We saw him approach her; and then, ma’am, she yelled and
gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement.”
(Brontë 1994, 423)
An even more detailed reworking (or textual montage) of this scene is pro-
duced in Wide Sargasso Sea during the description of the fire at Coulibri:
“I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the
glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his
clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire” (Rhys
1982, 42-3).
The logic of this chain of associations between insects, birds, Jane, and
Bertha/Antoinette (and perhaps also Rochester), is to underscore that the act
of vengeance wrought upon the imperial/domestic patriarchive is not so
much an act that comes from outside—whether we take the ‘outside’ to be
the imperial periphery from which moths are sent, or the Black Jamaican
community from the surrounding Spanish Town, or indeed that Ottoman
Empire which has haunted Jane Eyre’s domestic interiors—as an act of self-
immolation perpetrated by the archive’s own residents and conscripted sub-
jects. In a sense, the vandalistic assault on the archive comes from within, and
indeed from the innermost inside, which is to say from those spaces—third-
floor oubliettes, but also libraries and schoolrooms—that have been held in
reserve as the very heart of the archive and also, according to the logic of
archiving as analyzed by Derrida, segregated and set aside as a “prosthesis of
the inside.” This is to remind us that moths, beetles, parrots, and fireflies, as
well as Jane and Bertha themselves (or indeed perhaps some compound of
Jane/Bertha), are the texts’ privileged archivists, the guardians of the archive
(since it is their appointed place) as well as its designated violators. Coco,
with his wings clipped by Mr. Mason, Antoinette/Bertha’s stepfather, is sure-
ly an image of the domestic constraint to which the female characters are
subjected, a reminder of the patriarchal circumscription that makes of the
domestic sphere, set aside for women in the texts, a prison if not a crypt. He
also becomes a parody of Jane’s inscription or circumscription within the
textual domain of Bewick’s History of British Birds, whose inhabitants have
already turned out, as we have noted, to be strangely exiled from their puta-
tive national home.8 It is thus ironic that, with his suspicious questioning of
those who enter (“Qui est là? Qui est là?”), Coco is also supposed to have the
capacity to discriminate between strangers and ‘insiders’ to domestic space.
Graham Huggan emphasizes the significance of Coco in terms of a mimic-
70 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

ry that offers a critique of both patriarchy and imperialism (1994, 654). And
surely, as a creature defined by his vocation as supposed mimic, through his
mnemonic and reiterative echolalias (that are re-echoed even in his very
name), Coco also functions as the very principle of the archive itself, he who
is most closely associated with the reproduction of the archive; just as Jane,
as governess, is both interpellated into the archive (through books and spaces
set aside specially for her) and designated to reproduce it pedagogically.
However, if the architectural structures of the two texts are indeed indis-
tinguishable from the textual structure, the obsessive revisiting in Wide
Sargasso Sea of the burning of Thornfield—a proleptic repetition, let us
remember, a compulsive acting out of a conflagration that, in terms of the
chronological order of the two plots, has not yet taken place—is also a figu-
ration of the text’s will to structural self-immolation. Carole Angier reports
that Rhys, after an argument with her second husband, Leslie Tilden Smith,
had burned the typescript of an early version of the novel in order to pun-
ish him (1990, 371). Strikingly, Angier asserts that the ostensible attempt to
punish Tilden Smith “had punished Jean herself even more,” and connects it
with a tendency in Rhys to “deliberate, irrational, self-destructive violence”
(371, 372). In a letter in which she reports to Francis Wyndham that the ear-
lier manuscript had, in fact, been lost in the course of a move—an account
which Angier presents as a ‘disguise’ for the likely self-destructive impulse—
Rhys also reports that the manuscript “came to life or back again (in a way)
when I met Selma [Vaz Dias]” (1985, 213).The title of this earlier manuscript
was “Le Revenant,” wonderfully capturing the principle of ghostly revisita-
tions that seems compulsively to haunt the text’s relationship to Brontë’s
novel as well as the persistence of the motif of vengeance wrought through
textual self-immolation.9
The cardboard structure to which Bertha/Antoinette sets fire is, we have
suggested, as much book as it is house. The title of one of Rhys’s short sto-
ries is “The Day They Burned the Books” (1987), and the titular books
include the Encyclopedia Britannica, Froude’s English in the West Indies and,
marvel of marvels, British Flowers, Birds and Beasts. In considering the rela-
tionship between these two texts, these two archives, the focus of our atten-
tion is obviously likely to be drawn to the burning of textual archives, of
libraries and bookcases along with Bewick’s History of British Birds, Gulliver’s
Travels, Pamela, De Quincey, Byron, and Scott. It is with a certain political sat-
isfaction, then, that we could read the textual conflagration staged by Rhys
quite simply as an act of simultaneous feminist and postcolonial anti-canon-
ical and anti-archival revenge, one that attempts a violent transformation of
the Caribbean’s literary and discursive landscape just as its physical landscape
is revealed to be covered in the burned and ruined structures of colonial
 Trevor Hope 71

habitation. There, surely, is an emblematic response to the question of

Anglophone literatures in international contexts.10 And yet the question is
more complicated than this. According to these texts, the conflagration that
would destroy the imperial and patriarchal archive can only be performed
precisely through a revisitation and rehabitation of the very structures to be
destroyed. Since the postcolonial archive inhabits and haunts the inner
sequestrations of the imperial archive—the reserved spaces of its nooks and
chests and drawers—then, like Coco the parrot, it is necessarily caught up in
repetition even as it dreams of flight from its colonial domicile. The act of
revenge, like Bertha’s destructive rage, must therefore be implicated at some
level with a self-immolation. But there again, what we are reminded of in the
revisiting of the imperial archive is that it too was always breached and burn-
ing, “fevered” according to Derrida, sequestrated and partitioned from inside,
in principle, from its very beginnings. The destructive Bertha is, it must be
repeated, accordingly also the quintessential figure of the archivist. Wide
Sargasso Sea is only an act of ‘revisiting’ in a very strange sense: as ‘prequel’ it
is a repetition of events that have not yet happened, or rather an assault on
the precise principle of an origin, an arche, that is not already archival, caught
up in recollection and repetition. After all, when we hear Antoinette’s moth-
er screaming “Qui est là? Qui est là?” at the time of the fire, echoing the
echolalic speech of Coco, the very principle of the priority of some supposed
‘original’ speech act seems to come under pressure at the very moment of
the archive’s conflagration.
The structure of Jane Eyre already contains, and finds its ontological prin-
ciple in, its repetition, a repetition that simultaneously initiates and destroys
the archive, just as it contains its archivist, the archiviolithic Bertha Mason.
Rhys’s novel, I am suggesting, in its processes of ‘decomposition,’ does not
simply revisit the architectural and textual structures of the canonical novel
that it appropriates as its archive. It becomes, in fact, an allegory of the very
act of archival revisiting that it simultaneously performs. It is not simply that,
as a text, Wide Sargasso Sea hovers between the emblematic figures of a
domesticated Jane, who, we remember, begins the text by “possess[ing her-
self] of a volume, ” and a vandalistic Bertha, who has set fire to books, book-
cases, curtains, hangings, and all; it is that a certain overinvestment in imperi-
al memory and the gleeful unleashing of anti-mnemonic forces appear,
according to these texts, to be inseparably intertwined in the revisiting of the
imperial archive.
72 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]

Notes
1 The most famous reading of the two novels in terms of imperial dynamics
remains that of Gayatri Spivak in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism” (1985). Her argument that Wide Sargasso Sea constitutes an act of ‘rein-
scription’ is related to what here I am calling a ‘revisiting’ (1985, 244).
2 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) relate the
narrative logic of Jane Eyre to a feminist rewriting of the allegorical journey of John
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Their reading too pays close attention to the topographies
of the house, beginning with Jane’s ambiguous withdrawal into the window, and
notes the significance of the bird imagery with which it is associated, although they
do not link this with the problematics of nation and empire.
3 For a reading of the importance of slavery and emancipation in Jane Eyre that
takes a biographical approach, see Maryanne C. Ward (2002).
4 Examples of this include Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Ring of
Thoth” or the 1932 film The Mummy. It is a motif that recurs throughout the nov-
els of Sax Rohmer.
5 On the economy of sugar and slavery in the Caribbean, and on the particular
commercial connections between Jamaica and Madeira, see Richard B. Sheridan
(1994), especially page 313.
6 For Spivak, the missing portion of the title suggests the absent ‘patronymic,’
and it is certainly interesting that this is followed by a scene of letter-writing in
which the son might be seen as attempting to make reparation to the father through
promises of a supplementary writing (1985, 252).
7 According to Carine M. Mardorassian, the use of ellipses in Wide Sargasso Sea
is one of a number of formal devices whereby the text actively exposes the colo-
nialist assumptions of Antoinette/Bertha in particular (1999, 1072).
8 Don Randall has kindly pointed out to me that the name of the estate itself,
Coulibri, associates it with the hummingbird (French: colibri; Spanish: colibrí) and thus
to the problematics of home and flight, withdrawal. Coco’s name could thus also be
understood as echoing (and mocking) the name of the house and even the very
principle of domiciliation. It is also possible that Coulibri contains echoes of the ser-
pent or viper (French: couleuvre; Spanish culebra) that underscore the suggestion that
the Caribbean is simultaneously the site of an imagined paradisiacal originary inno-
cence and the location of an imperial ‘original sin’ that haunts the characters of the
novels, as its legatees, from its disruptive place in the archive.
9 I am much indebted to a very careful reader for College Literature for pointing
out the significance of the title of the earlier manuscript and the story of its having
been burned.
10 An earlier version of this paper was first given as a paper as the conference on
‘Anglophone Literatures in International Contexts.’
 Trevor Hope 73

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