This document summarizes key points from an English literature class. It discusses Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea and how it engages in intertextuality by rewriting Jane Eyre from Bertha Mason's perspective. The professor emphasizes that readers can interpret texts differently and rewrite traditions to explore new possibilities and perspectives not authorized by the original authors. Readers are encouraged to make works more "writerly" by actively participating in constructing meaning rather than passive reception of authorial intent.

1. ELIT 46C
Day 22
THERE’S MORE THAN ONE
ANSWER TO THESE QUESTIONS.

2. Business / Participation
“Work-to-Contract” is OVER! I’ll be fully responsive on email again!
I’m still working through Paper 2. Look for it by the end of the
weekend.
Check out the OPTIONAL discussion forum to make up some discussion
points.
Final Exam: Next Thursday, 9:15-11:15 AM.
◦ I cannot stress enough how important the lectures on Dalloway and
Sargasso will be for this exam.
◦ NO BLUE BOOKS. I will provide paper.
◦ Re-read the assignment on Canvas. I cleaned up the wording a bit.
Participation for today:
◦ 3 points for showing up on time and being awesome.
◦ 1 point for saying something during discussion (or asking a question).
◦ Please answer two additional questions on your slip:
1. Most and least favorite texts of the quarter?
2. If you are transferring, where?

3. If you were to write fan fiction,
what would it be about?
What fictional universe or
characters would you write about or
explore?

4. The Uncanniness of Part Three
“I drank some more rum and, drinking, I drew a house surrounded by trees. A large house. I
divided the third floor into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman—a child’s scribble,
a dot for a head, a larger one for the body, a triangle for a skirt, slanting lines for arms and feet.
But it was an English house.” (148)
What do you make of this passage?
Not the content or plot here, but how did you experience this moment in the novel?

5. The Uncanniness of Part Three
“I drank some more rum and, drinking, I drew a house surrounded by trees. A large house. I
divided the third floor into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman—a child’s scribble,
a dot for a head, a larger one for the body, a triangle for a skirt, slanting lines for arms and feet.
But it was an English house.” (148)
What do you make of this passage?
Not the content or plot here, but how did you experience this moment in the novel?
The characters that Rhys has been working with are no longer entirely free.
They are driven by a narrative necessity that is outside of Rhys’s control.
They are now increasingly scripted by the “original” narrative here.
And this passage feels like a “wink” to the reader from Rhys.

6. Antoinette’s memory of her future
“I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread
across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I
must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon
now.” (168)
And she does remember: she remembers her own end as if it has
happened before.
Which, of course, it has—in Brontë’s novel.
◦ left with a moment in which Antoinette is remembering something that
happened later, but in an earlier novel.
◦ this scene (and many others) calls attention to the temporal
convolutions that this novel raises.
The question that I want us to think about is “what is the ‘original’
narrative here?”

7. Caroline Rody: “Rhys seems to have stirred the literary universe
into animation, to have summoned up and then actually changed
literary history. We can no longer think of our cherished heroine
Jane Eyre in the same way, having glimpsed her once as Rhys’ mad
Bertha glimpses her: a play girl humming to herself as she walks
warily through the house of a man who, unbeknownst to her, has
already destroyed the life of the woman who watches her pass.
And of course, we can never think of Bertha Mason in the same
way, having read of her lonely youth and spurned love, and
remembering most of all the way she stands at the end of Rhys’s
narrative, doomed by triumphant, torch in hand, about to fall once
again to the death literature originally gave her—but not just yet.”

8. Intertextuality
The way that novels influence each other is via
the device of intertextuality.
◦ concept originally named and described by Julia
Kristeva.
◦ idea that texts can be mosaic of references
(some intentional, some not) to other texts.
◦ relation between texts such that the meaning of
any given text is not isolated in that text—it is
only through its relation to other texts that we
develop meaning.
The meaning of Jane Eyre does not reside only
in the words of that narrative; rather, the
meaning of Jane Eyre happens in the web of
texts that connect to that novel (both before
and after).
◦ the Bible, Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe and the
gothic tradition, Jane Austen and the domestic
tradition, Milton, the newspapers, etc.
◦ Jean Rhys adds another connection in the web
from which Jane Eyre draws its meaning.
Wide Sargasso Sea reweaves a portion of that
web.
Antoinette/Bertha exists not in either of these
novels, but in the conjunction and connection
of these novels.

9. Where does Antoinette “live”?
“When night comes, and she has had several drinks and
sleeps, it is easy to take the keys. I know now where she
keeps them. Then I open the door and walk into their
world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have
seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where
everything is coloured dark brown or dark red or yellow
that has not light in it. […] This cardboard house where I
walk at night is not England.” (162-63)
What does this mean?
Why the references to cardboard here?
They also seem a bit odd, right?

10. Intertextuality is a good thing.
Rody:
“It is thus a dramatically energized, radically participatory literary universe that Rhys’s work
seems to open for us […]. One closes the book with the sense that all sorts of possibilities exist,
which might now tremble into being, that if Bertha Mason Rochester’s story can be told with
such a poignant, searing strength, there is no limit to the number of other characters whose
lives might reveal themselves, similarly surprising and compelling, to our reading eyes;
Christophine and her knowledge of “other things” seems a foremost possibility.”
And here we arrive at some of the key points of fanfic:
◦ participatory fictional universe
◦ all of kinds of possibilities exist
◦ you, as the reader/writer, can explore them
◦ and they form part of (and deepen) a text’s web of meaning

11. As I said on Day 1 of this course, this tradition that we read might
feel alien to you.
How did you find ways to connect to it?
How did you make the works that we read more “yours”?
(If you did.)

12. Alien and (potentially) alienating
These are mostly stories about people who are
not like you—who do not share your race,
class, religious/ethnic, or sexual identity. Look
around—most of us don’t see ourselves
represented in these works.
What’s more, these are stories written by
people who are often actively hostile to people
like us.

13. Reading differently
But one of the key things I’ve wanted you to get out
of this class is that you don’t have to take this
tradition at face value. You don’t have to read it on its
own terms.
You can read this tradition differently—calling
attention to things that it didn’t want to talk about.
We did this with many of our readings: racism,
classism, homophobia, misogyny, etc.
You can rewrite this tradition. You can tell stories in
this tradition that aren’t “authorized” by the original
author’s intention!

14. Readerly / writerly
I am working with a distinction originally proposed by French
critic Roland Barthes: readerly (lisible) /writerly (scriptible)
For Barthes, there are two kinds of texts:
◦ readerly: texts that act with authority and pretend to tell you exactly
how the world is. Encourage a passive reading by the reader. He
thinks most novels are like this.
◦ writerly: texts that require the reader to participate in the
construction of the text’s meaning. To make decisions and
interpretations and choices.
But here’s the thing: we don’t have to locate this attribute in the
texts themselves. We can read any text in a more readerly way
or in a more writerly way.
Keep in mind this continuum as you go on with your work in
English.
◦ sometimes you will feel like you need to do old-fashioned readerly
readings, but sometimes you won’t need to (or want to).

15. Lingering questions?

16. That’s a wrap!
Take care, take care, take care.