“Qui est là?”: Negative Personhood in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

While Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is widely acknowledged as an incisive example of "the Empire writing back," critical approaches in this vein have focused primarily on the role of Rhys's polyvocal narration in realizing her postcolonial rewriting of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). Shifting focus from "who speaks" to "who is there" (Qui est la?) and following Gayatri Spivak's injunction that we read legal codification as a constitutive part of imperial violence, this essay interprets Rhys's novel as an exacting meditation on the violence of legal discourse on personhood in the 1830s and 40s.1 In Rhys's novel, British legal fictions proliferate examples of "negative personhood," rendering former slaves and creole women alike as socially and civilly dead.2 Recasting the events of Jane Eyre from their original timeframe of 1790-1810 to 1830-45, Rhys deliberately situates the West Indian part of her novel after the Abolition Act (1833) and during the apprenticeship period in Jamaica (1834-38).3 In doing so, Rhys brings the legal arguments circulating around appren- ticeship and personhood in the West Indies into the heart of the story, highlighting the ways in which the law both constitutes and disables persons. As Annette's former slave Christophine declares, "No more slavery! She had to laugh! 'These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing'" (471).

In order to explore the ways in which legal developments during this period impact the events of Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS), a central part of this essay puts Jamaican anti-obeah laws and abolitionist tracts that report on the apprenticeship period in conversation with Rhys's novel. Overall, I read the law as a constitutive part of WSS because the novel not only asks the reader to think in terms of the law, but also exposes the violence of the law-a generative regime that framed and reframed the various subjects of empire in the West Indies during the apprenticeship period and beyond. Indeed, the novel narrates the legal event of dispossession: that peculiar status of being owned for your own...