• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1199-1212
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• 2011

This paper is to scrutinize Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea through a Marxist criticism. While critics were industriously excavating discourses of feminism, post-colonialism, and racism in the novel, they tended to regard the Marxist attribute as supplementary material and to diminish the significance not considering as an independent subject to be examined. However, the novel, in which all the major relationships are based on capital, exemplifies class conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. Marx and Engels believe that the foundation of our society is capital and that society evolves through class conflict to obtain more capital, and thus they assert people's relations are the product of the commodification of individuals. Furthering their study, Louis Althusser specifies the power system through the (repressive) state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. With the theories of the thinkers' above, this paper analyzes the relationship between Annette and Mason, Antoinette and her nameless husband, allegedly Rochester, Rochester and Amelie, and Rochester and Daniel Cosway. This paper offers an alternative reading of a classical feminist and post-colonial text.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.339-365
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• 2011

Charlotte $Bront{\ddot{e}}^{\prime}s$ novel Jane Eyre has long been doted on as one of the canonized texts of British literature since its publication. Seemingly, this romantic novel has nothing to do with plantation based on slave trade. However, paying a keen attention to the fact that Jane's enormous inheritance results from wine plantation at a colony, this essay re-interprets Bertha's drinking and madness as evidence of imperialism. For the porter/jin Bertha and Grace Poole enjoy might have some suspicious connection with wine, the very root of Jane's great expectations. Jean Ryes' Wide Sargasso Sea, writing Jane Eyre back, records Bertha as "a white resident of the West Indies, a colonizer of European descent" (326). However, Jane Eyre, in my interpretation, describes Bertha pretty much as a black Creole. At any rate, the view that the white West Indians are tainted by miscegenation proves contemporary racism and is reflected in the text through Bertha and her mother's intemperate drinking and madness. Drinking and madness are stigmatized as the evidence of the so-called "bad blood"; embodying the stereotypes of drinking, madness, and sexual corruption, Creoles, the very inescapable product of imperialism, provide a convenient excuse for justifying imperialism for purity, civilization, and moral cleanness. In this way, Jane Eyre needs to be re-interpreted politically and historically in the context of colonialism. British imperialism pursues a tremendous amount of profits through grape plantation and wine trades; however, it cleverly leaves in the colony the associated images such as intemperate drinking and madness. Bertha, transferred from Jamaica to Britain, takes in these negative images of "savageness." Transcending the narrow confines of feminist criticism obsessed with doubling between Bertha and Jane, this essay, accordingly, reads Bertha the prisoner in the attic as the captive for perpetuating imperialism. This reading hinges upon interpreting Rochester and St John as colonizers bearing the so-called "white men's burden" to cultivate and civilize savages much like crops such as grapes and sugarcane in the colonial plantation.