SAIKAT MAJUMDAR


chaotic ambiguities as her modernist unsettling of epistemological
certitudes that characterise the form and texture of the entire novel -
and it is no less a potent a challenge for that. As Howells points out,
"...the portrait of Rochester is by no means entirely hostile, for the
shift to a colonial perspective reveals another side to cross-cultural
encounters which is absent in Jane Eyre"(108)., Initially enamoured of
the exotic ambience and the Creole girl he marries, Rochester falls
prey to the desire for a world which, with its 'otherness,' lies beyond
his grasp and thwarts the authority of imperialism as the standard of
absolute value. To borrow Kristeva's terms, the "semiotic" discourse
of the text threatens to engulf the "symbolic" one the fluid, murky
territory of desire and dream comes close to undermining the Law of
the Father. It is at this moment that Rochester resists this unsettling
flux. "But such disorientation borders on nightmare, and as strangeness
becomes estrangement, Rochester resumes the traditional stance of
male imperialist authority, denying that experience and silencing the
woman's voice which speaks out of that place" (Howells 109). In such
moments, the text almost becomes self-referential, indicative of the
modernist fluidity of form and texture that has successfully managed
to disorient established epistemological and narrative orders and the
imperialistic assertions of its textual ancestor.
 The reflexivity becomes clear when one considers the larger
ambiguities within this process of textual subversion which is indeed
as complex as the disorientation of Rochester and his white male
authority. Jane Eyre, like Wuthering Heights, belongs to the Gothic
tradition, a tradition which secretly celebrates the Freudian 'Id' and
its dark, destructive impulses threatening existing social and
psychological orders from within thus the imperialist establishment
is already under potential threat in such a Gothic tale. It is in these
peripheral, covert possibilities of subversion that Jane Eyre is, as it
were, haunted by the subversive entry of its post-colonial revision as
much as Rhys as colonial subject is haunted by the imperial text. One
couldn't think of a more disturbing disorientation of the 'anxiety of
influence,' nor perhaps one that is more quintessentially modernist.
 This power-struggle has been reflected with all its inherent
ambiguities in the three-part structure of the novel. Instead of the
autobiographical quest narrative of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea
employs a characteristically modernist form as in Nostromo, To the
Lighthouse or A Passage to India. The first and the third parts of the
novel are narrated by Antoinette, with a gap in the middle dominated
by Rochester's voice in the second part. It is easy to see how the binary