Authorial obeah and naming in Jean Rhys wide sargasso sea

1. Authorial “Obeah” and Naming in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea
ABSTRACT:
Building on the critical discussion around the importance of naming and mirrors in Wide
Sargasso Sea, the essay focuses on Rhys’ differing treatment of the two central
characters, contrasting Bertha’s “real” name of Antoinette with the Man, who is denied
a name and a human identity, even while giving him a voice and agency. It is argued
that this mirrors Bronte’s treatment of Bertha, and is a component of her critique of
English imperialism. At issue, in part, is a character’s “right” to a name, which the
author/creator reserves for herself, exploring that question through the confusion and
slippage of character names throughout the novel, and instances where characters
question each other’s right to name themselves. Ultimately, the magic or “obeah” of
the novel revolves around the power of language, and in naming/non-naming her
central characters, the author exercises that power, reversing the power dynamic of
Jane Eyre by giving Antoinette identity while making it clear that the Man has no right to
his own name.
KEY WORDS:
Literature, English. Rhys, Jean (1894-1979), Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Bronte, Charlotte
(1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847), naming, identity, mirroring, obeah.
Since the publication of Gayatri Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism” there has been a good bit of writing about the
importance of naming and mirrors in Wide Sargasso Sea,1 centering around the
function of character and place names and their political implications. I’d like to

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extend that discussion by examining the names/identities of the two main
characters and how the author uses them to aid understanding of the text. Rhys
tells the story of Antoinette’s re-creation as “Bertha” of Jane Eyre, by The
Man/Rochester, but she also denies him his own name, exerting a final meta-
power reserved by the author.
Rhys uses several characters from Jane Eyre, but Antoinette/Bertha and
The Man/Rochester are the only ones she chooses to re-name. In doing so, she
signals that the relationship between these two characters is central to her
commentary on Bronte’s work. Rhys, however, handles their re-naming in
different ways. While giving Bertha a new name, which she posits as her original
and true name, she deliberately withholds a name from her male leading
character. These are powerful acts of re-writing, indicating the specific ways
that she wants to re-cast those characters. Her rejection of Bronte’s name for
the character Bertha tells us that Bronte’s “madwoman in the attic” was not
born that way, she had to be made into Bertha by her contact with The Man and
what he represents.
The Man is a different case, but also relates to her commentary on Jane
Eyre. By denying him a name while acknowledging his narrative centrality, she
effectively reproduces Bronte’s treatment of Bertha. First, he is “Other” to
Antoinette, as Bertha is “Other” to both Jane and Rochester. And ultimately she
doesn’t even become a “real” character – she is a flat, terrifying embodiment of
what is abhorred by Rochester and English society. Compare this to “The Man”

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relative to Antoinette’s Creole society. His namelessness suggests that he is not
really a character either – he is the embodiment of the English colonial project,
its preoccupation with power, money and control, and its fear of and
unwillingness to try to understand what is alien to it. Bronte’s Bertha has a kind
of power, but it is only negative and destructive, although her exercising of that
power inadvertently benefits the protagonist. The Man’s power is likewise
negative and destructive, although (an important difference) it first benefits the
female protagonist, both sexually and emotionally, and then destroys her. Rhys’
treatment of her “Rochester” character in this similar but mirrored fashion
invites us to look at Bronte’s treatment of Bertha and Rochester differently.
Rhys’ association of naming with power is most evident in the man’s
“violent” attempt to rename Antoinette as Bertha, and I would like to examine
the context in which the first instance of this re-naming occurs. Following her
visit to Christophine, she returns home and lays bare a number of her secrets in
an attempt to engage him emotionally. After she finishes, there is the following
exchange:
After a long time I heard her say as if she were talking to herself, ‘I
have said all I want to say. I have tried to make you understand. But
nothing has changed.’ She laughed.
‘Don’t laugh like that Bertha.’
‘My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?’

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‘Because it is a name I’m particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha.’
(81)
It is her laughter, which he dislikes, that initially provokes this re-naming. Later
in the scene, after he has rejected her verbally but tried to comfort her physically (which
she then rejects), we have this dialogue, after she asks him to come in and say
goodnight to her:
‘Certainly I will, my dear Bertha.’
‘Not Bertha tonight,’ she said.
‘Of course, on this of all nights, you must be Bertha’
‘As you wish,’ she said. (82)
He will do as she asks, but she must “be Bertha” or he won’t engage with her in
any intimate way. In essence, he is personalizing the financial basis of their marriage,
demanding the right to determine her identity in exchange for his intimacy with her.
She recognizes the power he is trying to exercise over her through this re-naming. Here
she acquiesces, and it costs her. In their next encounter, she appears in a way that
could describe Bronte’s Bertha:
Her hair hung uncombed and dull into her eyes which were inflamed and
staring, her face was very flushed and looked swollen. Her feet were
bare. (87)
In narration, he refers to her as Antoinette, but again calls her “Bertha.” Her
response articulates her recognition of the ways that he uses language for power:

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“Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else,
calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.” (88)
She hopes, by naming his sorcery (using words to control another is a “magical”
exercise of power) to combat it, but because he is “a stone” (89), he can not/will not
respond. I will return to this point, as it illustrates part of what Rhys is doing by not
naming him.
Antoinette is given other names as well. Daniel, in his letter to the Man calls her
“Antoinetta” (57) and he later picks up on that in his conversation with Christophine
(100) conflating “Antoinette” and “Antoinetta” with “Marionette” and “Marionetta,”
suggesting another facet of the identity he wishes to project onto her – that of a puppet
whose actions are dictated by him. In that same letter, Daniel identifies himself as a
Cosway (Antoinette’s birth surname), but both she and Christophine dispute that.
Christophine says, “He is no Cosway either.” (94) When the Man tells Antoinette he had
a letter from “a man who calls himself Daniel Conway,” she says: “He has no right to
that name…(my emphasis) His real name if he has one, is Daniel Boyd.” (77) The “right”
to a name reflects power, weight, and identity. This question of the “right” to a name
brings us back to the Man.
By the act of non-naming, Rhys invites us to view him not as Bronte’s Rochester,
but as a stand-in or embodiment of English colonialism, especially his fear and hatred of
what he doesn’t understand and his need to control it (in part by naming or re-naming),
and certainly his need for power. Spivak mentions his lack of patronymic, but a further
reading is suggested by the fact that he has no name at all. Although he “wins” his

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battle for Antoinette’s money and identity, he ultimately flees the islands to return to
England. He recognizes the threat to his sanity and identity (which are closely linked)
that life in the islands holds for him. And in an act of authorial “obeah,” Rhys tells us he
has no “right” to a name. He may have the material wealth and power to destroy
Antoinette, but his own identity is so uncertain (even to himself) that he can’t face and
live in the fluid, dynamic, “sun-filled” world of his wife or release her to make a life
without him. He, therefore, has forfeited his right to a name. Or, put another way, his
need to fix identity through naming ultimately denies him his own. The artist, or author,
wields her mystical power, denying him a name even while giving him his own voice.
Antoinette/Bertha’s final act of destruction and self-assertion might be read as
liberating sacrifice -- Rhys wrote to a friend: “Her End—I want it in a way triumphant!”2 -
- Rhys’ choice to deny him a name tells us that, in the broadest sense, he is truly Other
and less worthy than the deeply flawed but “too-alive” world that has built her own and
Antoinette’s identity. She, as author, has a meta-power that trumps his “obeah” and
positions Bronte’s “madwoman in the attic” as a kind of tragic heroine, with both
characters standing in for important aspects of the cultures they represent. In re-
writing Bronte’s Bertha and Rochester, she now has a story; he doesn’t even have the
“right” to a name.
NOTES:
1. Spivak, Gayatrie, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critcal Inquiry,
Vol. 12, No. 1, Autumn, 1985. Other examples include: Erwin, Lee, "’Like in a Looking-
Glass’: History and Narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea”, NOVEL: a Forum on Fiction, Vol. 2,
Number 22, Winter 1989; Fumagalli, Maria, “Names Matter,” Journal of Caribbean
Literatures, Vol. 3, Number 3, Summer, 2003; Rody, Caroline. “Burning Down the
House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Included in Wide

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Sargasso Sea. Page numbers for Wide Sargasso Sea refer to: Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso
Sea. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.
2. Letter to Selma Vaz Dias, 137