“하얀 바퀴벌레”: 어두운 크리올의 그림자

Abstract

This study situates Charlotte Bront’s Jane Eyre in the historical context of the contemporary English colonial enterprise in Jamaica of the West Indies, placing a particular discursive emphasis on the thematic and ideological importance of Bertha Mason’s Creole identity. Partly problematizing the conventional psychoanalytical reading of Bertha as the alter ego of Jane Eyre and partly modifying some of the recent postcolonial critics’ obscure identification of Bertha’s cultural distinction, I argue that Bertha’s white Creole identity should secure a more solid locus in the scholarly discussion of Jane Eyre than some recent critics claim it has. Bertha’s madness, a critical catalyst of the story proper, appears too strong an ideological marker that foregrounds the dirty side of the English imperialism in the West Indies. The textual allegation of Bertha’s madness merely as the legacy of the Masons is arguably a wretched evasion of the due responsibility of the English colonialists for the Creoles in the English colonies. What is particularly disturbing in the representation of Berth as what Gilbert and Gubar call a “mad woman in the attic” is that its relentless defacement of Bertha’s humanity hinges upon the uncomfortable historical reality that the Creole women, as opposed to the Creole men, were made the frequent targets of the aborigines’ deep-rooted antagonism to the English colonialism. Jane Eyre artistically reenacts the dark side of the English colonial project, first by making Rochester embody the scarred English colonial conscience and then by severing any possible female bonding between Bertha and Jane. Thus the death of Bertha and Rochester’s downfall around the end of the novel hardly exert a redemptive power over the story’s gloomy ideological complexities. If we deftly historicize Jane Eyre with Bertha's destroyed human dignity in mind, Bertha persistently figures as the sad poltergeist of the English colonial violence hovering across the Atlantic Ocean as well as in the domestic area.