MODERNISM IN THE BASEMENT: SUBVERSIVE DISCOURSE IN WIDE SARGASSO SEA 113

 opposition of colonialism and gender is deconstructed here.
 Rochester's story, which could easily be an interruption of Antoinette's
 story, is instead a partial mirroring of it. This loss of distinction between
 their respective experiences signifies a consequent need for narrative
 redefinitions which would reflect the changing positions within cross-
 cultural encounters. But Rochester denies this impulse towards
 convergence, and the narrative returns to the traditional plot of a
 politics of imperialist domination. Part three, which extends the
 mirroring technique, reflects a different image of Antoinette, one
 reduced to hopelessness, exile and madness. Such a refusal to structure
 the narrative order in terms of black and white and their simplified
 dialectic implies Rhys's reluctance to "pay back" the imperial narrative
 order "by the same coin" she would rather unsettle it in her own
 terms, through a characteristically modernist amorphousness.
 In such an amorphous world, perhaps it would not, after all, be too
adventurous to accept Mary Lou Emery's suggestion of the employment
of Obeah techniques in the discourse of the novel to use Spivak's
words, its project of "self(ing) the other." Such a reading does indeed
seem relevant if one notices how in the colonial setting of the novel,
the European mind tends to conflate the feminine and the dark Other
of the colonies, as Freud did when he described women as the "dark
continent." As Emery points out, "Where Antoinette's enslavement to
Rochester parallels the history of the black Africans in the colonies,
hers is a sexual slavery, different yet the same. Thus she joins a
community of black women in her final leap, while borrowing from all
of black and native cultures in her quest for place"(60). It is therefore
easy to see how Christophine's obeah makes its power felt in the formal
alteration of realism in the novel's narrative pattern.
 Entering "Obeah Nights," Wide Sargasso Sea transcends its own
modernism the established paradigms of its discourse, at any rate.
In a way Rhys parallels Spivak's project here, her caveat against the
complacence of the First World feminist in her easy assumption of
kinship with the poor, marginalised, disempowered woman of post-
colonial cultures and her applause of Kristeva's essay "On Chinese
Women." Just the way Spivak offers a critique of feminist individualism
of the dominant (white) culture (of which Jane Eyre is a product), the
touch of Obeah and Anancy in Rhys's discourse" makes it a critique of
white male modernism which has often sought to disown her.