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"There is always the other side, always."
-Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea
Bessie Head's A Question of Power and Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea are narratives that represent an intersection between race, gender and familial constructs of such intensity as to have significant repercussions for the interactive discourses of the feminist, the psychoanalytic and the postcolonial. One way of dealing with this intersection is through two profoundly simple, ubiquitous and paradoxical fables. The first we recognize, after Jacques Lacan, as the fable of the Law: "The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating" (Lacan 66). A self-nominated Prime Mover, an individual or a group, says that this or that shall be thus or thus, and given the power to exact its will, any action against that will constitutes a transgression of the Law. The second fable ensues upon the first, as effect upon cause, or as punishment upon transgression. It tells of how the Lawmaker deals with the Lawbreaker by enforcing a repetition onto the act of transgression, by planting a lie: "Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow" (Rhys 108). What began as a notion of freedom, by being kept outside the pale of the Law, can be taught disavowal. Julia Kristeva explains "Denegation or disavowal [Freud's Verleugnung] is a specific mode of defence which consists in the subject refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception" (Kristeva 215). The result, according to Kristeva, is twofold: hallucination and displacement.
The two fables are paradoxical in their insistence on upholding a principle of uniformity which the will that engendered them must have violated in order to come into being as the Law. That which says that the Same will not let any Other be must first have departed from the Same in order to become its Other. It is the universal applicability of the two fables that brings together the uniquely specific and the generically typical in Bessie Head, the coloured girl born into the systematic racism of 1930s South Africa, and Jean Rhys, the Creole "white nigger" (Rhys 85) born into the layered colonialism of the late nineteenth century Caribbean, each...