MODERNISM IN THE BASEMENT: SUBVERSIVE DISCOURSE IN WIDE SARGA.SSO SEA 111

convinces us that this reflection is hardly coincidental, as most authors
who have been considered as being somehow part of this 'anxiety of
influence' often show a similar Oedipal element in the relationships
between the main characters of the texts they create themselves.
Romantic poets, whom Harold Bloom considered to be locked in an
Oedipal struggle with their great ancestor, Milton, are good examples.
In Keats's Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, a younger generation of gods,
the Titans, are overthrown by the Olympians in Shelley's Prometheus
Unbound, Demogorgon overthrows his father figure Jupiter. Even the
great ancestor Milton is said to have shown a similar Oedipalism in his
depiction of the struggle between Satan and God the Father in Paradise
Lost. If this a predictable instinct, Wide Sargasso Sea, which is fighting
a similar Oedipal battle against Jane Eyre, would reflect this struggle in
the relationships between its characters. Sylvie Maurel has pointed
out the repetitive patterns the text is caught in, "if only because it is a
rewriting of Jane Eyre", drawing attention to the metaphor of the
stagnating mesh of Sargasso "In its dormant waters, repetition has a
creative function; both lethal and fecund, the Sargasso Sea is the seat
of cyclical renewal, of creation within repetition" (129). Repetition and
anticipation are central aspects of the text, giving it a dominant aura of
premonition and a 'plot of predestination.' Among other patterns of
repetition, blood does indeed form one major pattern of determinism.
"Antoinette cannot unknot family ties, and as the story unfolds, she
looks more and more like her mother" (133). Maurel goes on to say: "In
an attempt perhaps to bring the curse of genealogy to an end,
'Rochester', having found out that Antoinnette was named after her
mother, decides to call her Bertha. Ironically, as he is trying to undo
one filiation, he creates another, this time between Wide Sargasso Sea
and Bronte's novel" (133-134). It is therefore hardly coincidental that
Rhys, who is clearly rebelling against the ancestral text and its
established imperialistic values by deconstructing the epistemological
certitudes of the Victorian narrative order with her modernist fluidity,
attempts at a gesture of breaking the Oedipal interlocking by refusing
to refer to Rochester by his patronymic.
 It might seem strange that Rhys chooses Rochester, a rather
malignant character and one representative of the very white male
imperialistic values she is deconstructing, to make this rebellious
gesture that is of such central significance to her writing here. However,
it must be clear to any careful reader that Rochester is no simplified
villain, no product of direct, unmitigated hostility. Rhys's challenge to
the colonial establishment is as fluid and disorienting, as riddled with