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Through her redeployment of Gothic conventions, Jean Rhys discloses the hidden mechanisms of colonial history which is invested with demonic power. Its ghosts trap the characters into repetitive patterns, while Christophine's obeah is defeated by the witchcraft of the dominant idiom. However, the compelling representations of the metropolis are disrupted by delirious lines of flight, by the 'secret' which cannot be accounted for by European knowledge systems.
Charlotte Bronte's Gothic typically locates otherness in 'the undifferentiated realm of the alien tropics'.1 Characterized as a dehumanized, impure lunatic, Jane Eyre's Creole, the main prop of the Gothic in the novel, clearly stands out as 'a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism',2 especially as this marginal other is only instrumental in bringing a central, undeveloped self to completion. Metaphorizing the unacceptable longings and impulses that Jane must channel before she attains a civilized form of selfhood, Bertha, the Gothic other, is subordinated to and must be sacrificed for the welfare of the self. The whole plot is bent on her erasure which coincides with the resolution of conflict. Once the Creole heiress lies lifeless on the pavement of Thornfield Hall, Jane, the plain English governess, makes a triumphant entry into the realm of the civilized subject. Thus, Jane Eyre's Gothic reflects the drama of imperialism, and Gayatri Spivak is certainly justified in reading the novel 'as an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer'.1
Cast in the supporting role of the colonial other, Bertha is also the epitome of the spoken for. Featuring in the text first as an unspoken as well as unspeakable secret, she is then no more than an object of discourse, a discursive construct that comes to textual existence in an embedded narrative told from the perspective of Rochester. The embedding, which replicates at the level of narrative structure Bertha's confinement to the third-floor cell of Thornfield Hall, makes her out as a mere representation in Said's sense of the word, a discursive formation which, far from being predicated upon first-hand experience or reality, entirely relies 'upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed upon codes of understanding'.2 Rochester's second-hand tale is embedded in Europe's frame...