Grotesque Symbolism In Jane Eyre

Accordingly, the third part of WSS is based on Antoinette’s third dream in which she visualizes herself dying in fire that she sets in Rochester’s mansion. The grotesque imagery of Antoinette’s death represents an unfinished metamorphosis of death and birth, of growth and becoming. Her jump into the burning pool should not be read as a defeated suicide. Instead, it is a kind of triumph that liberates her from the oppressive discourses manifested in her feelings of flying like a bird as she says: “the wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings” (123). Her fall thus, is a kind of victorious carnivalesque rebirth that celebrates the revelry of life and death. Indeed, death is highly estimated in Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque as he

in Malpas 57). Thus, in her narrative she recuperates new forms of being for her heroine who embraces the multiplicity of selves and the fluidity of her evolving subjectivities. Her self-splitting female protagonist breaks down the conventional boundaries of fixity dwelling in the the realm of openness that celebrates the futurity of her identity and the flexibility of her perpetual state of becoming. By offering a plausible past life for her Creole protagonist, Rhys endows Bertha Mason with an alternative identity through giving her the name of Antoinette Cosway. Quickly after her mother’s marriage to Mr. Mason Rhys’s female protagonist who becomes Antoinette Cosway Mason, as she tells us “I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839” (29). Antoinette’s nomadic identity that resists closure and finality is further addressed in the novel when she gets married to Edward Rochester. According to the English Law, Rhys’s heroine is given the last name of her husband to become Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester. Within this accretion of names Antoinette

the dualistic polarities about identity and culture are revised in the cooperative form of ‘both/and’. She “initiates new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation,” while revising the dualistic polarities about culture and identity cooperating them in the mutual form of ‘both/and’ (Bhabha 1). To explain more, Her condonation of Rochester’s calls “Bertha! Bertha” that define her as an English woman and her leap into fire where she sees the figure of Tia, her black Caribbean alter ego, should not be read as a movement towards her personal cancellation in which she seeks a complete identification with the black girl. Instead, it is an instance of rebirth in which Antoinette acknowledges her belonging to the Caribbean world and, thus, asserts her hybrid identity, embracing her in-betweeness and celebrating both parts, black and white, of her national identity. She seeks to bypass the Sargasso Sea in a triumphant self-fulfilment and self-awareness. By making her heroine heralds to the celebration of her hybridity, she enables her to transgress “the gates separating outer and inner realities, but this time by her own choice and with the knowledge of her own power. She finds this power in her ability to act where she actually is-in the midst of two worlds […] in the wide Sargasso Sea,” as Mary Lou