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Christophine's provocative role in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea has generated a tremendous quantity of inquiry: the turn to Christophine arose largely out of debate over Spivak's watershed essay "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" from 1985. Spivak ignited a firestorm in Rhys criticism with her oft-quoted passage:
Christophine is tangential to this narrative. She cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native. No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self. (253)
It is difficult to find an analysis of Christophine since 1985 that does not use Spivak as a point of entry.1 Within two years of Spivak's essay, Benita Parry challenged Spivak's assumptions about Christophine's unrecover- able native voice. Parry views Christophine as an independent woman with a vital and retrievable voice. Parry contends, "What Spivak's strategy of reading necessarily blots out is Christophine 's inscription as the native, female, individual Self who defies the demands of the discriminatory discourse impinging on her person" (38). Parry sees Christophine as a defiant, native woman who is a powerful presence in Wide Sargasso Sea.
Numerous critics have positioned themselves with, against, or between Spivak and Parry. Mardorossian's work on narrative focalization and Christophine 's role in Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the more incisive of these positions. Mardorossian contends the novel does not reinscribe blackness in a subservient role through Antoinette's narration, but rather complicates the reader's identification with the white Creoles (1071). 2 Mardorossian's contention that the novel is not composed in the interest of white Creoles is a valid concern that clouds Spivak's idea of Wide Sargasso Sea being written for white Creoles; Mardorossian also questions Christophine 's portrayal by Parry and others as a free, independent native woman whose voice confronts the repressive system without difficulty (1071). She rightly complicates the idea that Christophine is only a powerful, black obeah woman; many of these interpretations are perilously close to re-inscribing stereotypical colonial roles.
In these discussions and exchanges concerning Christophine...