Re-memories, Herstories and Hybrid Identities in Marie Helena John’s Unburnable and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.
Manuela Esposito (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”)
As W.J.T. Mitchell points out in Landscape and Power (2002), landscape is “both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, … both a real place and its simulacrum”, so it is more than a mere background. The starting point for this paper consists in considering landscape as a means to explore cultural codes, different histories, multiple identities. My proposed path of textual analysis concerns Unburnable by Marie Helena John and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, stressing on the element of fire. Following the contrasting features of fire, Unburnable moves between past and present, Washington D.C. and Dominica, love and sex, obeah and Catholicism, making duality central to the formation of the Afroamerican identity. The feminine genealogy of Matilda, Iris, Lillian brings to the re-writing of history, narration and re-narration of the past, opening up memory. Unburnable is the voyage of Lillian from Washigton D.C. to her native country: Dominica, the Caribbean island with ‘fire within her belly’, but it is also a voyage in her interior fire. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys gives voice to the silenced Bertha in Charlotte’s Bronte’s Jane Eyre, giving her the possibility to express her other, different world. Antoinette Mason is firstly deprived of her surname and then of her name changed in “Bertha”, and she tries to fight in order to defend her identity. Wide Sargasso Sea is the voyage of Antoinette in the sea of histories of women before her, claiming her positive alterity, and staging her resistance through the element of fire. Lillian and Antoinette share many features: their disease in their bodies and in the society, their madness, and their suicide. Their final leap is a way to become free and to reconnect to their ancestral histories. The aim of the paper is to explore the issues of displacement, memory, identity, history, through the critical means of landscape and fire.
