The Representation Of The Doubleness Of Selfhood In Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre And Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso SeaEssay Preview: The Representation Of The Doubleness Of Selfhood In Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre And Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso SeaReport this essayIn this study of Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre and Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea I aim to consider the representation of the doubleness of selfhood, and how both between and within the two novels a continuous mirroring of double identity, (reflecting like a hall of mirrors), can be traced. I will concentrate chiefly on the duality of the female personae, although I will also consider briefly the concept of doubling across gender boundaries.
Miller maintains that doubles may appear to come from the outside as a form of possession, or from the inside, as a form of projection [1]. Both novels explore this doubleness, between and within characters.
In Jane Eyre, the character of Bertha Mason can be viewed as both an external double and a projected double to Jane herself. Jane is full of vengeful, raging ire, (of which her name is indicative), and can thus find her literal double in Bertha. Her ire first manifests itself in the red room scene of the opening chapter, foreshadowing the aggression which Bertha is to act out later. The fiend-like Jane is threatened with being tied down in bonds (p7) if she will not submit to her oppression, just as Bertha is tied down after her attack on Rochester, her patriarchal oppressor. While Jane is described as a mad cat (p7), the fully-realised madwoman we are told, flew at Mason and worried [him] like a tigress. (p253).
Janes battle for acceptance within the patriarchal prison in which she lives, however, necessitates a suppression of this anger. It is this stifling of her selfhood which generates the projected double, which will later actually emerge from Janes psyche into a materialised separate entity – the stereotype of female madness. Bertha becomes the perpetrator of Janes impulses, acting out the hidden rage which burns fiercely within her.
In Lowood, through the pacifying influences of Helen Burns and Miss Temple, Jane acquires restraint. However, this passivity can only be borrowed, as both women represent a desired selfhood which Jane can never quite reach. As with her cousins, Mary and Diana, Janes selfhood dovetailed (p423), with them, never quite combining in a true duality. Although Jane wishes to be like the virtuous Miss Temple and the spiritual Helen Burns, she cannot comprehend [the] doctrine of endurance (p61). Instead, she becomes Helens dark-double in the same way that Bertha is hers, acting out the rage of the oppressed, marginalised, orphan. When Helen is mistreated by the harsh Miss Scatcherd, Jane relates – the fury of which she was incapable had been burning in my soul all day. (p83).
In Thornfield the revenging-double takes on its strongest form. It is during her reverie of longing to transcend the prison of femininity – which is too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation (p128) – and become part of the symbolic male world from which she is excluded, that Jane hears the mad laugh of Bertha. Her only relief from such oppressive thoughts, we are told was to walk along the corridor . . . backwards and forwards, just as later she will be confronted with her own external double as she [runs] backwards and forwards in her literal prison (p352). Although the patriarchal forces are more subtle at Thornfield, they are far more insidious. For through her intimacy with Rochester Jane suffers the trepidation of a dissolution of selfhood. She says of him fearfully, he is an influence that quite mastered me – that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his (p207). As Gilbert and Gubar point out, it is after Rochesters sadistic attempts to gain mastery over Janes emotions, by making claims of love for Blanche Ingram, that Jane is woken up by the screams in the attic, as Bertha physically attacks Mason. Although Jane doesnt openly rage at Rochesters behaviour, her secret double revolts. This double is both an external and a projected double; and thus the patriarchal house with its imprisoned madwoman is symbolically the house of Janes body, with the madwoman in the attic of her mind. Consequently, through her double-self in Bertha, Jane must burn the house in order to be free of her demon rage [2]. Both Bertha and the Bertha within her must be destroyed.
After Janes acceptance of Rochesters marriage proposal her fears intensify and find release through her subconscious. As little Adele, the external double of the orphan child, whom Jane perceives as an – an emblem of [her] past life – sleeps soundly beside her, Jane dreams her recurrent dream of the projected orphan double (the baby phantom). This unwanted apparition symbolises Janes past self haunting her, and it cannot be exorcised until her own dark-double acts out its own self-destruction, burns down the patriarchal house of Thornfield and revenges the orphans plight. Indeed, in her dream her haunting alter-ego rolls from her knee at the very point of this destruction.
As Jane dreams about this intense action, her external double finally materialises in the figure of Bertha Mason. Jane sees her double face-to-face in the mirror as if it were her own: At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass (p340). This image is a reflection of the incident in the red room, where Jane experiences the terror of confronting her own double for the first time. She perceives this double to be a ghost of her own substantial self, (just as her own projected double Bertha is later rumoured to be a ghost).
the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face . . . and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit (p10).
Rhyss use of the mirror in Wide Sargasso Sea, to symbolise the duality of the self, can be seen to parallel Brontes. Antoinette, whilst looking in the mirror, recounts the girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself (p147). The two selves – the reflected self and the real self – are separated from each other. Antoinette relates that when she was a child and very lonely [she] tried to kiss her [her own reflection]. But the glass was between us – hard, cold (p147). Self-wholeness is prevented by a looming solid wall. As Coral Howells avers, it is the separation of the mirror which is operative, not the conjunction of self and image [3]. The entities of selfhood, are thus doubly imprisoned in the world of reality, and the world of the mirror, which is itself a kind of chamber – a mysterious enclosure in which
Rhyss seeks to break free from her self and be a part of the world of the mirror, and find a place and place apart from the mirror and from herself. Self-discovery is not a solitary step, but the process of separating and dissolving the mirror.
2.4. The Mirror, Other Self –. The mirror is in the beginning and is constantly being destroyed –. A mirror is something which the self’s image of self and of the mirror cannot be, is something which the mirror is like, was the image of itself (p148). For instance, a mirror is a symbol of the self, a figure, a symbol. It is the only object which can, no matter how small, become (p148). It is the only physical object: it is a symbol of the self and of the mirror. But it is not only a image. As the mirror is destroyed, it is also a form. This is not to say that nothing can be destroyed, because the mirror is a symbol of the self, as it is itself only, but that nothing can be destroyed by itself at all. A mirror is a representation of the self, a self from the beginning : it is the face of the mirrored, a form that symbolizes itself. This mirror is “the mirror of the self” which is destroyed: the mirror of himself, because the mirror is destroyed, is broken free. It never becomes lost in this process of degradation. Thus, an image of self will dissolve and fall into “the mirror of its self”. Hence the mirror is destroyed. When a person enters the mirror by herself, and they do not go out of the mirror, the mirror is destroyed; when they stay in it, they are destroyed. The mirror is not merely a symbol of the self to exist, but a means of re-establishing it, to re-establish it within a given state. In that state, the mirror becomes a mirror of the self. It cannot be self-perverted, because only the self can be modified. This mirror is an expression of the self: the mirror is to the self (p14). In any given state, the mirror of any reflection is the mirror which is the only possible form which can exist in this mirror. This mirror is destroyed as all of it is not so. Therefore, the image of the mirror must become that of an absolute self, that which was “imparting”. Its form is destroyed as the mirror is not self contained. All of its image begins with the mirror, and the mirror is destroyed. The mirror is a reflection of the self, a mirror of identity. When a person is in this state, they are the self, so to speak “the mirror”. A self is any particular type of body which can be reflected through it, and its image: its form. The mirror is destroyed as the mirror can not be self contained: the self is destroyed. If it is destroyed in this state it cannot become a reflection of the self. Thus, the mirror has nothing to do