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revised 1st July, 2004.
Forthcoming in: Globalization, Diaspora, and Caribbean Popular Culture eds. Keith Nurse and Christine Ho, Ian Randle.
The concept of 'the Caribbean' most globally familiar today is the product, largely, of the tourism industry. Even reggae, in spite of its roots in ghetto culture, Rastafari and resistance to Babylon, has been reincorporated into the Caribbean-as-tourism product, so that there is nothing incongruous, it seems, in guests sampling 'creole' cuisine in hotel dining rooms across the region to the strains of 'Excuse me while I light my spliff'. The clichés of sun, sea, sand, sex and palm trees are by now so intrinsic to the popular concept of 'Caribbean' that they can be left unspoken, the tourist brochures holding out instead the promise of an experience 'Just beyond your imagination'. And this slogan points, indeed, to another essential function of Caribbean-as-signifier - its limitless potential for the fulfilment of fantasy. Ironically, the oppositional politics of reggae only serve to support and promote this idea of freedom from articifial or societal restraint, making of the Caribbean an arena for the playing out of other people's aspirations. In the process, the region itself is emptied of meaning, becoming, instead, another luxury commodity, an 'incarnated sign' promising fulfillment of a lack encountered elsewhere.1
What this means for the inhabitants of the region, and for their own signifying systems, is an interesting question. Next to sugar and bananas, the Caribbean's greatest export has been cultural; and next to music, which principally means reggae, it is the imaginative literature which takes us closest to a countervailing system of self-representation to that imposed from outside. Its power, however, can only be limited, since in today's world the printed word has been superseded by the image, above all the cinema industry of the United States. The work of film critics Mbye Cham (Ex-Iles, 1992) and Keith Warner (On Location, 2000) documents the impact of the industry on popular taste, both in the world at large and at home, 'now deeply attached to the ceaseless flow of entertainment from American television, film and video.'2 The power of the image resides elsewhere, where it is manufactured, and from where it is marketed and distributed globally. The consumer, while being fully cognisant of this fact, is powerless to do anything about it. As writer and film-maker, Michael Gilkes comments: 'The perception of the average Caribbean citizen is that it is 'de people' television, i.e., it belongs to someone else; the government, private enterprise, foreign interests. Them, not us.'3 Keith Warner details the ways in which the Caribbean is disadvantaged in terms of establishing its own cinema industry by the overwhelming financial and technical superiority of the American cinema machine. This means, inevitably, that the popular view of the Caribbean continues to be constructed by Hollywood in films like How Stella Got Her Groove Back and the James Bond series.
For this reason, the production of a film-of-a-book by a Caribbean writer is an event worthy of some attention, raising questions of the translation, not only of text to screen, but of a local reality to one accessible to a global audience. As I write, the arrival of the celebrated Merchant/Ivory team in Trinidad to film V.S. Naipaul's novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957) has already given rise to controversy about the casting of an Indian star rather than a local actor in the central role. And yet, it must be recognised that a novel cannot attain the same global reach as a film, however canonical or paradigmatic of West Indian identity and culture it may be. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, while it may be counted as one of the Caribbean's chief cultural exports, still circulates chiefly in academic and educational circles as a set text and reference point for postcolonial feminist critics.4 My interest in this chapter, however, is less with the novel itself, than with its re-presentation through the medium of not one, but two film versions, and with the way new meanings are produced by the imposition of a 'textual system' which incorporates novelistic narrative, screenplay, visual images and sound through the use of technology. Rhys's novel has entered the collective consciousness as an evocation of a creole identity characterised above all by multiple points of view. 'There is always the other side, always', the note which resonates throughout the novel, is as much a key to Rhys's modernist method as it is to Antoinette, the protagonist's, sense of self. But it also suggests the possibility of further meanings and points of view beyond the text; how these meanings might be mobilised through the medium of film, and the interrelationship between director, spectator and critic, are what I want to explore.
The two film 'versions' of Rhys's text are Sargasso! A Caribbean Love Story, a Banyan (Trinidad) production made in 1990, filmed by Banyan director Christopher Laird and directed by Guyanese writer, Michael Gilkes, with a cast and crew entirely from the Caribbean; and Wide Sargasso Sea, a Fine Line Features release, produced in 1993 by Laughing Kookaburra Productions and directed by the Australian, John Duigan, with a cast of mainstream actors. It's immediately evident, if only from the titles of the production companies, that these films focus point of view in particular ways. Firstly, there is the point of view of the film-maker, his reason for making the film, his relationship with the material, and most importantly his access to what Christian Metz calls 'the outer machine of cinema' - the funding, technology, expertise, distribution, marketing and so on. Secondly, there is the point of view of the implied or actual audience: whether local, familiar with the terrain, watching an aspect of its cultural history brought to 'life' on the screen, or foreign, distanced and, considering the endless requirement of consumer capitalism for increasingly exotic objects, engaged in a species of cultural tourism. Within the collective notion of audience, there is of course also the individual spectator, and particularly the question of that spectator's gender. The third point of view that is brought into play is that of the protagonists within the narrative itself, the relationships between them, and between them and the spectator/audience.
To begin with the Duigan film, the first question is, why Sargasso? It is noteworthy that Keith Warner, commenting on Duigan's film, was obviously unaware of the existence of the Gilkes version when he wrote: 'It is interesting to speculate on what type of film a Caribbean director would have made', going on to quote 'Trinidadian Peggy Mohan, a freelance film director living in India', as saying: 'If I can think of a book which I really admired and wished to be the one to make into a film it's Wide Sargasso Sea. It was badly made into a silly film by a stupid Australian director - I was the other one bidding for it at that time...'(Warner, 53). The fact that Duigan had bought the film rights to the novel meant that Gilkes was allowed only to work with the minimum of text, a fact which contributed, no doubt, to the truncated, episodic nature of the film. Yet Duigan, as we shall see, though in possession of the complete text, chose to omit key elements which radically altered its meaning. Why he did this, and what alternative meaning he brought into play as a result, may become clear from viewers' reactions, such as this one by Jamaican novelist Michelle Cliff: 'A soft-porn romp in the tropics, a sort of Emmanuelle goes to Jamaica, complete with jungle rhythms...from wet dream to castration nightmare...this film is terrified of the dark'.5 For her, the film fails as a visualisation of Rhys's novel because the film-makers lack any knowledge of what she describes as 'the female terrain, actual and metaphorical, of an island like Jamaica', and are therefore unable to 'deal with the racial complexity of Antoinette Cosway'. Cliff, like Antoinette, is a self-declared 'white cockroach', descendant of what - quoting another reviewer - she calls 'the doomed planter class of the Caribbean'. Her objection goes to the heart of the Hollywood use of the Caribbean-as-setting from the 1940s onwards, as noted by Warner:
...films set in the Caribbean had more to do with how the outsider coped with everything from surviving "hot, humid nights pulsating with tropic rhythms"... to finding a doctor with up-to-date training ; from learning the latest dance steps.... to dealing with crooked politicians; and from acquiring the natural lilt of the language to understanding the language of the supernatural. (Warner, 41).
Though the difference in point of view between the two films may partly be explained by the cultural background of the directors, I believe it goes deeper than that. Fundamentally it is a question of how cultural positioning shapes not only the representation of character, but the whole cinematic project, including how each film is conceptualised, the intervention it is intended to make as entertainment or education, and ultimately the shape and meaning of the film itself. Without needing any other evidence, as a viewer I would unhesitatingly place Duigan's film in the category of mainstream commercial cinema or what, following a fairly well established convention, I will loosely call 'Hollywood'. The fact that it is based on a novel by a West Indian author in no way detracts from this, since, as the film theorist Metz points out, cinema was from the outset the progeny of 'the Western, Aristotelian tradition of the fictional and representational arts...for which its spectators were prepared...by their experience of the novel, of theatre, of figurative painting, and which was thus the most profitable tradition for the cinema industry'.6 In other words, what characterises the Hollywood film is a particular relationship to realism, which assumes transparency of meaning and the stability of the enunciating 'I' - exactly the pieties which Rhys, as a modernist writer, calls into question. The aim of the Hollywood film is, by creating a flawless surface, perfect in its verisimilitude, to suspend the viewer's capacity for disbelief, naturalising its techniques and concealing from view the vulgar mechanics of production. To quote Colin MacCabe, it is to erase the distinction between the 'the spectator as viewer, the comforting "I", the fixed point, and the spectator as he or she is caught up in the play of events on the screen...Hollywood cinema is largely concerned to make these two coincide so that we can ignore what is at risk'.7 It is in this respect that the Duigan film betrays its generic codes: as Michelle Cliff suggests, Jamaica is no more than the exotic site for an erotic fantasy. If the terrain, as Cliff puts it, is female, in that case, whose is the fantasy and what is 'at risk'?
Psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship - most famously Laura Mulvey's early polemic, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' - propose that, regardless of the actual viewer, it is the male gaze to which commercial cinema is addressed.8 In other words, the viewer is invited to identify with the male protagonist, who drives the narrative and bears the power of the Look. The object of the Look, who functions as seductive image but not as carrier of narrative meaning, is the woman. The gender implications of this for this for the viewer are obvious, and Mulvey's formulation has been much debated by feminist film critics (Doane, Gledhill, Studlar) seeking a less overdetermined role for the female spectator. I shall return to this point, but for now what I want to establish is the conventions within which the Duigan film functions, and to counterpoise these with the Gilkes version, as a way of determining how their differences of meaning are produced. For instance, the Rolling Stone review of Wide Sargasso Sea states that: 'The film flaunts its NC-17 rating, perhaps to remove the stigma of its literary origins for the Basic Instinct set.'9 In terms of generic codes, this comment places the film firmly in the category of adult sex movie, with its eye on a specific market - young, sophisticated, with a penchant for transgressive sexuality and heightened suspense.
Yet Duigan need not have gone so far afield in search of a topic to fulfill this expectation. A glance through the list of his other productions makes clear his preoccupation with the problem of representing 'otherness': Flirting (1993) features Thandie Newton as a young black South African student in Australia, who forms a relationship with a boy from the neighbouring prep school; Newton appears again in The Journey of August King (1995), as a runaway slave girl in North Carolina; Romero (2000) features Raul Julia as the anti-establishment Archbishop of El Salvador; Molly (2000) casts Elizabeth Shue in the role of an autistic woman. Perhaps, then, his excursion to the Caribbean may be seen in the light of a fascination with relationships - both personal and political - between different cultures. It is not, I think, too big a jump to speculate that the root of this fascination is Australia's unique double position as an English colony and a major Pacific power; or even to go further, to take into account the troubled relationship within Australia itself between white majority and aboriginal population. A tentative provisional reading of the film might then profitably be through the lens of antipodean, rather than Caribbean, racial politics. The casting of Karina Lombard as Antoinette speaks further to this issue. As Rhys makes clear, Antoinette is a white creole. As such, she can hope for a white, preferably 'pure-bred' (English) husband, to rescue her from the taint of poverty and white niggerness. Why then the choice of a brown-skinned 'native' woman in the role? Lombard's own family history multiplies the ironies. Her maternal grandparents were Lakota Indians who moved to Tahiti, where her mother married a Swiss banker. Her father, she says in an interview, left her mother in Tahiti, taking the children:
I grew up in Europe away from my mother and away from the culture. She was basically put away from us. We couldn't really talk about her. So I was never really educated about my native culture. Even if I tried to reject that part of me - which could have been really easy because my family really discouraged anything that had to do with my mother - I couldn't because the heritage is inside of me...Since I've been working, I've always made sure that native Americans be represented in the best and most truthful light possible.10
Wide Sargasso Sea was Lombard's first major film, after which she went on to appear in numerous others, including, notably, the pro-native American Legends of the Fall (1994), and as a 'native woman held captive in a world of gangs, violence and greed' in Last Man Standing (1996), in which she says of her character: 'She's the only pure soul. Sort of a holy woman in a very dark world. All these characters are obsessed with her because she's so pure and has a beautiful light about her...She had a history and a culture...These changes gave the film a very different dimension.' Extrinsic information like this is a helpful means of decoding the sub-text of Duigan's film. It seems clear, that, as 'incarnate sign', Lombard is both dispossessed Aboriginal (Australian and North American) and marginalised Pacific islander, as well as exotic sexualised woman. While Duigan's impulse to a sympathetic portrayal of the 'other' is commendable, not only is it a mismatch with Rhys's West Indian character, the film language in which it is couched overwhelms any possibility of rendering the essential ambiguities of Rhys's text.
To turn now to Michael Gilkes's Sargasso! it is quickly evident that it occupies radically different territory. In an article entitled 'Inside the people TV' in the UNESCO publication Reflections 1991, Gilkes gives a detailed account of the whole process whereby his version of Sargasso was produced. He begins by introducing the Trinidadian television company, Banyan, which made the film, in the context of who controls television images in the Caribbean. As we all know, the vast bulk of programming is recycled from the US, in the form of soaps, sit coms, talk shows and feature films, resulting, according to Gilkes, in 'a passive overseas clientele', consumers of American mass popular entertainment. In this context, intelligent, locally made programmes are an urgent requirement. As Gilkes says: 'We in the Caribbean, always more acted upon than acting, need to re-establish those priorities which "the people's TV" should serve: literacy...education and meaningful information. The involvement of our educational institutions, therefore, in TV and radio production and programming is essential' (Gilkes, 1991). A number of regional institutions were involved in Sargasso! It was a project of the University of the West Indies, dealing with a novel which features on both its own courses and CXC booklists. Money was contributed by all three campuses and the filming was done in Dominica by a Trinidadian production company with reduced fares from the regional airlines, and the personal support of Dame Eugenia Charles, then Prime Minister of Dominica. The director and all the cast and crew were West Indian. Interestingly enough, Sargasso! was made in the wake of a big budget foreign production in Dominica of The Orchid House, thus focussing all the issues of comparative access to 'the outer machine'of cinema in a very concrete way. With a budget of $30,000, Gilkes said it was like trying to make a soap to compete with Days of our Lives 'with a miniscule budget and little more than a belief in the value of what we were doing'. In these circumstances, the whole project depended heavily on personal commitment and public good-will. As Gilkes puts it: 'It was much more than a pilot programme: it was an exercise in community relations, in social and cultural integration, in regional communications, in personal discipline and human relationships...in the creating of a Caribbean film, drawn from a Caribbean work that would speak to Caribbean people about the complex privilege of being a Caribbean person'. (Gilkes, 1991) In this project, they received universal co-operation, including the involvement of the entire population of the village of Soufriere in the fire sequence. Presumably, then, these facts alone answer Cliff's stricture that to realise Rhys's complex vision requires 'a knowledge of the female terrain, actual and metaphorical' of the island setting, so that it can become more than exotic adjunct, so that its meanings, its hidden topography, can be released.
At the end of his discussion of realism in cinema, Colin MacCabe makes this statement:
The filmmaker must draw the viewer's attention to his or her relation to the screen in order to make him or her "realize" the social relations which are being portrayed. Inversely, one could say that it is the "strangeness" of the social relations displayed which draws the viewer's attention to the fact of watching a film. It is at the moment that an identification is broken, becomes difficult to hold, that we grasp in one and the same moment both the relations that determine that identity and our relation to its representation. (MacCabe, 92)
Michael Gilkes disrupts the surface verisimilitude of Sargasso! in various ways, not all of them, perhaps, intended (the film's production values being determined by its small budget), but primarily by emphasising its educational function. The expectation of formulaic romance, aroused by the film's subtitle, 'A Caribbean Love Story', is subverted even before the film begins. In a voiceover introduction Gilkes places Rhys and her work historically and culturally. Then a female voiceover, over a photograph of Rhys in old age, dramatises what she hoped to accomplish in writing the novel. She wanted, the voice tells us, to 'put the creole woman onstage', to redeem her from the margins of Brontëaut;'s Jane Eyre where she shrieks horribly and attacks Rochester, but has no inner life of her own. The effect of this is to make two things clear from the outset: that this film is not a transparent representation of 'reality', and that it reconstructs a literary narrative which is itself a modernist response to a classic realist canonical text. No question here of 'removing the stigma of its literary origins' from a film which opens with a tribute to the novelist herself, but nor is it merely an 'illustration' or a teaching aid. It functions independently as a piece of cinema, while recognising the filmic qualities of Rhys's text - the preoccupation with point of view, with visual imagery, colour, landscape and so on. The novel is concerned, above all, with disrupting the illusion of 'truth' by the adoption of modernist strategies of representation which highlight the provisional status of 'reality', much as Antoinette's mother is described by Rhys as hating a strong light, preferring 'the shifting shadows...more beautiful than any perpetual light could be' (WSS, 48). In this, the role of the actors is key. We are accustomed by the Hollywood star system to protagonists who represent a wish-fulfilment fantasy for most of us. In the psychoanalytic terms of Laura Mulvey's explanation of spectatorship (and pace later formulations of femininity as masquerade), cinema offers the spectator two possibilities: the position of voyeur, who gains erotic pleasure from the act of looking, and the position of narcissist, in which we misrecognise ourselves in the more perfect human image on the screen. Cinema manipulates our fascination with this process by creating 'ego ideals' through the Hollywood star system, which has a crucial function in the marketing of film. In this respect, it is worth noting that Karina Lombard is described in the Newsweek review as 'the beachblanket siren who seduces Tom Cruise in The Firm', during the shooting of which she was kept under close surveillance by Cruise's wife, herself the major star Nicole Kidman, who 'feared for her marriage.'11 Publicity and the public airing of the stars' private lives are part of the 'outer machine' by which cinema is able to unsettle the line between reality and fantasy. Lombard, in other words, is already established in the collective consciousness of 'the Basic Instinct set' as a seductress, both on and off screen. (If Nicole Kidman is afraid of her, she must really be dangerous.) Nathaniel Parker, who plays Rochester in this version, is described in another review as 'a classically trained British actor with a handsome face and body and an abashed, gentle manner' which show 'definite star quality'. Lombard, meanwhile, though all the reviewers agree that she can't act, 'is slender and perfectly molded, and, like Parker, naked a great deal'.12 The invitation to both voyeurism and narcissism is explicit here. The Gilkes film, though it does not of course operate totally outside these categories, for to do so would be to deprive us of the pleasure which is film's primary function, does succeed in unsettling them, and in shifting the ground of identification.
Gilkes's actors, while by no means amateurs, are far from being Hollywood screen idols. They are also familiar faces to many of us in the Caribbean, to an extent which dismantles the distance and mystery which are an essential component of screen worship, and if they are not familiar, then certainly they are recognisable. All are West Indian, and all but Rochester speak with a Caribbean inflection, which Karina Lombard does not: she speaks a French-accented English, justified presumably by Antoinette's French creole heritage from her mother, but functioning in the film as a marker of exoticism. Again, it is important to Rhys's construction of the novel's relationships and the textual meanings which arise from them that she be local - as Christophene says: 'She is creole girl, and she have the sun in her.' WSS, 130). None of the female figures in the Gilkes film could be described as 'slender and perfectly molded' with the exception of Amelie, the black creole maid. Antoinette's mother, who in Rhys's version is 'pretty like pretty self' (WSS, 15), 'and what a dancer..."light as cotton blossom on the something breeze" '(WSS, 25), is matronly, Aunt Cora is old, Rochester is balding, and Antoinette lacks the haunted ambivalence of Rhys's character, so that it is hard to imagine her actually being overtaken by an obsession which shades into madness. Similarly, when Duigan does use a Caribbean actor, as with Christophene, played by the striking, thin-featured Jamaican actress, Claudia Robinson, it results in a piece of miscasting which distorts an essential aspect of the story's relationships as dramatised by Rhys. (In her review, which undertakes a faithful cross-referencing of film and novel, Elaine Fido exposes the multiple ways in which the film 'flattens Jean Rhys's sense of important differences in Caribbean culture', not the least of its lacunae being the omission of Dominica altogether and the locating of the 'sweet honeymoon house' in the Jamaican hills instead.13) Gilkes's Christophene, though large and motherly and therefore closer to the Mammy stereotype in appearance, delivers her lines with a chilling authority and in the 'correct' - Dominican - accent. My point in this whole comparison is that one of the most powerful ways by which film seduces the viewer, the offering of more perfect versions of our own flawed selves, is partly denied us in the Gilkes film, so that we are always aware we are watching a construction involving 'real' people, never entirely immersed in voyeuristic fantasy, and this in turn encourages the viewer to retain a margin of critical distance. By this, I suggest, rather than being positioned as consumers of a product whose meanings are contingent on the capitalist machinery which produced it, we are positioned as participants in the creation of new meanings which actively interrogate the imperialist cultural impositions of the mainstream cinema industry.
I want now to try and demonstrate this by a comparison of certain key motifs, sequences and technicalities in the two movie versions of Sargasso, and I'll begin with point of view. In question here are, from whose perspective do we view the action? Who is the bearer of the controlling Look? And, centrally, who is the object of the Look, who, if anyone, is fetishised? Is the ideal spectator, as posited by Mulvey, in fact male, resulting in woman as image, man as bearer of the Look? Or is there any space for subversion of this power relationship, which is intimately related to the construction of subjectivity within a textual system, and which includes the metanarratives not only of gender but also of colonial representation? Given that both versions are related to the pre-existing novel version, how does the process of selection work, what is brought to our attention and what is left out, and what does this all signify in terms of the meanings produced? I will look in particular at the relationship between what the Duigan reviewers refer to as 'voodoo', in other words obeah, and fetishism, cultural hierarchy and miscegenation. Like the novel, both films deal with something secret, something repressed, in turns desirable and terrifying. In the words of Rhys's Rochester: 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'. (WSS, 73) In its recognition of the importance of both what is seen and what is unseen, of how surface reality may both reveal and conceal and how the viewer's gaze may be deceived or may carry more than ordinary perception, Rhys's novel is already a filmic text. Gilkes's film acknowledges this in an early voiceover by Rochester, in words taken from the novel, in which he describes Antoinette as 'Creole of pure English descent ...but her eyes are disconcerting...those are not English eyes'. The image on screen is Antoinette's face, with the gradually transposed image of a waterfall which at first appears to be part of her face, then clarifies itself as an actual landscape. At the same time, we flashback to her childhood at the bathing pool, playing with Tia, in the scene where Tia calls her a white nigger and puts on her dress and runs away. The scene ends with a slow take of Antoinette looking after Tia, the first of a series of significant looks between the two characters, expressive of both relationship and difference. The looks that pass between them signify the existence of a once separate world inhabited by the two children on a basis of equality, but now in the process of being contaminated by the adult sense of difference. Thus, though the narrative shifts, as in the novel, between Rochester and Antoinette, the action is repeatedly interrupted by moments when activity is suspended, and all we see is the look that passes between the two girls, bypassing as it were the controlling male gaze. This particular instance, when Antoinette's gaze follows Tia, and the viewer's gaze then returns to her face to read its expression of pain and rejection, functions as a coda to Rochester's comment about her disconcerting eyes. It helps both to explain Antoinette's difference and distance from him, and to establish a plausible reason for her later madness. It also links her, at the level of symbol, with the landscape, the waterfall merging visually with her face suggesting her creole consciousness through her link with the topography of the island. Landscape therefore functions in this version as an extension of Antoinette's identity, at the same time as it is displayed at times for its own sake, as in the shot of rain forest through a veil of falling rain. It is a place where she is at home: she is shown as a child, escaping from people by hiding in a corner of the estate, gazing at a spider web. This is, of course, quite different from its function in the Duigan version, as the review titles indicate: Newsweek's 'Fear and loathing on location', Rolling Stone's 'Hot Nights and Naked Flesh in Jamaica', New York's 'Lust at Sea', which also speaks of 'a dark, voodoo emanation of the sullen tropics...so consistently exotic that it destroys its own meanings'.
The opening sequence of the Duigan film focuses on two things: the 'hatred' the blacks feel for Antoinette and her mother, and the obeah which protects them. Before any dialogue, the credits are projected over swirling Sargasso weed, an image which recurs three times in the film. The first is during Rochester's voyage out, when he witnesses a drowned sailor being pulled on board choked by weed (signalling the dangers for Rochester of the transition from England to the West Indies, as opposed to - as in the novel - the wrong turn the boat takes for Antoinette, landing her in a place which, she insists, isn't England at all). The other two instances are nightmares, in which the weed symbolises Rochester's emotional entanglement with Antoinette, and is also associated with her hair, itself a powerful sexual symbol, and linked in the film with black magic, enchantment, obeah, treacherous femininity and ultimately with Rochester's fear of difference, crystalised in Christophene's occult powers. Obeah, then, is metonymic of this film's repressed secret. It is seen as the source of Antoinette's fascination for Rochester, whose alternate desire and revulsion answer the psychoanalytic definition of fetishism, the underlying theme of film theorists (like Metz) who seek to analyse film in terms of manifest and latent content, paralleling Freud's concepts of the conscious and unconscious mind. Laura Mulvey, for example, in Fetishism and Curiosity, asks: 'What is it that has transformed the image of woman into a vehicle for the inscription of sexual fantasy and anxiety?'14 The short answer, if we accept Freud, is fear of castration, which the woman's body, by virtue of its lack of a penis, represents. Therefore:
To ward off castration anxiety, the female body's topography presents a facade of fascination and surface that distracts the male psyche from the wound concealed beneath, creating an inside and an outside of binary opposition. While the mask attracts and holds the gaze, anxiety produces a dread of what might be secretly hidden (Mulvey,1996, 63).
The label Freud adopted for this 'mask', or rather for the fascination excited by the mask, was 'fetish', the same label adopted by Marx to signify the capitalist obsession with commodities. By this act of naming, both Marx and Freud were drawing attention to the nineteenth century's obsession with its own exotic other, the 'savage' practice of fetish worship by which 'primitive' and 'civilised' could be distinguished and imperial expansion rationalised. According again to Mulvey, popular cinema brings these two forms of fetishism together, as
...popular cinema, itself a commodity, can form a bridge between the commodity as spectacle and the figure of woman as spectacle on the screen. This, in turn, leads on to the bridging function of woman as consumer, rather than producer, of commodities (Mulvey, 1996, 8).
It is easy to trace the connection between Lombard's fetishised body and 'voodoo', for this is explicitly made at the visual level in several scenes. I will discuss two of these: the first time Antoinette and Rochester make love in their 'sweet honeymoon house', and a subsequent scene after Rochester has received the letter from Daniel Cosway. In the former, the lovemaking is intercut with what Michelle Cliff tellingly calls 'jungle rhythms' - unmistakably African drumming which is carried on right outside their bedroom window, accompanied by black bodies dancing, gleaming with sweat, suggestive of lasciviousness and black magic, the whole performance amounting to a primitive ritual which appears to orchestrate the sexual encounter, the drums building to a crescendo at the moment of orgasm. This sequence is followed by Antoinette's dream of visiting her mother and her mother's display of madness. Then we see Rochester wake up, find the bed empty, go to the window and look out. As we follow his gaze, we see Antoinette and Christophene sitting together in the darkness below, and hear them murmuring softly to each other. We register Rochester's bafflement and alienation, his suspicion, the suggestion of threatening and dangerous femininity in league against him.
The second scene follows Rochester's reading of Cosway's letter, which makes explicit two things so far only hinted at through the visual imagery: the possibility that Antoinette is mad, and the possibility of miscegenation - that she may be the half-sister of the 'dirty little yellow rat', and may thereby be the bearer of a secret taint. Rochester returns to the house to witness another scene of dancing, this time involving Amelie and Antoinette. During Rochester's absence, we have seen Antoinette, alone at home, leave the house and come outside to join in, and the provocative and challenging response from Amelie, resulting in something like a contest between the two. Similarly dressed, both in green, both with their hair piled on top of their heads, the two women look astonishingly alike - 'the degenerate white creole woman...whose colored sister was the tragic and overly sexualised mulatta'15 - lending substance to Cosway's warning, and identifying Antoinette even more closely with an alien, 'primitive', 'African' culture. (This scene can also, as Warner points out, be seen as a reprise of Rita Hayworth's Caribbean films, Affair in Trinidad (1952) and Fire Down Below (1957), in both of which the star performs a sensuous dance. 'Already we can see the pattern emerging: put a character in a tropic setting, add some pulsating rhythms, and sensuality ripples forth' (Warner, 43.)
The theme of miscegenation, and the thrilling hint of possible deviancy, is picked up at the level of media gossip by the New York reviewer, describing Lombard's ancestry, in which, she claims, 'truth is stranger than romance':
Lombard's maternal grandparents were Lakota Indians who left the American plains to follow a tribal leader to the island of Tahiti. There, her mother met and married the wandering scion of a great Swiss banking fortune...'With such a strange childhood, you either become a drug addict or an actor', she says. (New York, May 3, 1993)
The New Yorker reviewer is similarly mesmerised, describing Lombard's face as a 'Gauguin portrait come to life'.16 Miscegenation, linked to madness, excessive sexuality, femininity and obeah, is, notwithstanding the director's intentions, the repressed of the Duigan film. This is ironic, since it is unlikely to be the Australian director's conscious intention that we identify with the point of view of a nineteenth century Englishman. Again, it is the film's generic language which subverts any possible alternative viewpoint, inexorably leading us back to a reading of race as 'incarnate sign'. At a ball in Spanish Town, Rochester is summoned to 'do his duty by the wallflowers', after which we see a lugubrious row of deliberately unlovely Creole heiresses, flanked by a row of black menservants. Nothing is said, but a look is passed between one of the ladies and the black servant nearest her, a look which discomforts and incriminates her and makes her withdraw her gaze. The repressed secret is seen here to underpin the whole of Creole society, and functions as a powerful mechanism for the identification of the viewer with Rochester, cast in the role of innocent Englishman appalled by the truth which is apparently being revealed. Obeah, which the English ladies at the ball had just been discussing in relation to Christophine, is the magic spell which shields the guilty secret from view. (Again, the irony is striking: we also know that what it hides is the 'truth' of Lombard's ancestry, the facts of Aboriginal/native American displacement and dispossession.) The very next scene is Antoinette's visit to Christophine to beg for a charm to bring Rochester back to her bed, intercut with Rochester's furtive encounter with Cosway, the 'dirty little yellow rat', in the bamboo grove. The film weaves the incidents together in such a way as to establish a metonymic link between miscegenation (the terrible possibility of Antoinette's relationship to Cosway), and its symptoms: madness and promiscuity, racial and sexual impurity. In the light of the film's symbolic register, Christophene's response to Antoinette: 'Obeah is too strong for a white man. It will only cause trouble', foreshadows the desperation of Rochester's predicament. His life is literally at stake, so that when he awakes from Antoinette's love potion, dreaming of Sargasso weed, it is neither surprising nor shocking that he immediately, as though to punish her, has sex with Amelie, with animalistic violence, standing up against the wall outside her bedroom window. Amelie here is pure stereotype, the sexually available and lascivious black woman, without loyalty or shame. The same scene in the Gilkes version shows Amelie as rescuer, who leads Rochester away and tenderly cares for him, feeding him mouthfuls of food like a child while he watches her, in a scene which gently parodies Tom Jones. Although Amelie is the seducer here, she is also attributed with feelings and a measure of agency and dignity.
The New York review, in describing the scene where the house burns down and the parrot catches fire and dies, declares: 'The blacks receive the flaming bird as a fetish. The whole movie is a fetish, ominous and lurid and rather incomprehensible. The gothic opacity probably finds its source in Rhys's veiled manner' (NY, May 3, 1993). An interesting ellision is made here between two kinds of magic - that of film and obeah - and Rhys's style, as though the film's apparent 'incomprehensibility' (which is far from the case - the meanings are clear to anyone who cares to see them) were Rhys's, not the film-maker's responsibility. The film rewrites Rhys's narrative of colonial domination as one of voodoo ritual in the service of exotic and forbidden sexuality, for which Antoinette's madness is the necessary penalty.
To see how this works, we only need look at the other version, and, reverting to the subtitle, A Caribbean Love Story, ask whose love story? In the Duigan version, there are two lovers: Rochester and Antoinette. In the Gilkes version, there are three. Sandi, Antoinette's 'coloured relative', who features in the novel and the Gilkes film, is excluded from the Duigan version, as, incidentally, is Tia. The obliteration of these other relationships has the effect of isolating Antoinette, removing her from any meaningful context which would lend psychological plausiblity to her own inner drama. She becomes, in effect, a cipher: Rochester's fetish, his object, without a life of her own. The emblematic scenes both films share, with the bathing pool as central symbol, accordingly take on quite different meanings. In the Duigan version, the pool is the scene of untamed sexuality between Rochester and Antoinette, with the crab claws lurking in its deepest waters representative of Antoinette's guilty secret - her transgressive eroticism and her impure blood, for both of which, madness is the necessary penalty. In the Gilkes version, there are two childhood scenes at the pool, one with Tia and one with Sandi, in which edenic innocence is suggested rather than sexuality. The game she and Sandi play of 'watch me die' foreshadows the later scene with Rochester: 'Say die and I will die', but as a reverse mirror image. Instead of the acting out of domination and submission which culminates in an actual rape in the Duigan version, Gilkes's film suggests the mutuality of a shared childhood which dismantles the rigid binary of gender. Sandi appears no less than five times in Gilkes's film: apart from the bathing pool scenes, he rescues Antoinette from the black boy who taunts her on her way to school, and is seen most crucially in the flashback at the end, just before Antoinette sets fire to the house in England. In contrast to Rochester, the relationship with Sandi is one of equality and likeness, a far from guilty secret. It also has the effect of establishing Antoinette as subject of her own narrative, not simply object of Rochester's, which in turn unsettles the positioning of the ideal male spectator. Through the scenes with Tia and Sandi, Antoinette is transformed from passive object of desire, to the carrier of her own meaning, and the viewer is thus invited to identify with her as well as with Rochester. The sub-title suggests a sub-text - that beneath the narrative of colonial and sexual domination is another narrative, the 'Caribbean love story', as opposed to the English gothic romance which must end in tragedy, or the Hollywood sex drama featuring the deadly femme fatale, whose threat to the hero must be contained or destroyed.
While acknowledging that a film can never be the 'same' as a novel, what I have tried to explore in this chapter is the process of transformation of meaning that takes place as a result of the globalisation of cultural forms. In rereading a text for contemporary purposes, how respectful is it necessary to be of its local meanings? How much attention should the film-maker pay to the techniques of representation through which those meanings are generated? In the absence of these, is it too prescriptive and moralistic to speak of misreading and misrepresentation? Does this imply that there is a 'truth' embedded in the original text which must somehow inform the film version for it gain credibility? And does it matter if local 'truths' (or, in Wilson Harris's term, local 'myths') are subverted if the outcome is global exposure for a Caribbean text? For some sort of answer, I return to the whole question of Rhys's style, and the way style itself constitutes meaning in the novel, with a glance at the way this has been read by different commentators. For Wilson Harris (here quoted by Peter Hulme): 'Wide Sargasso Sea is West Indian to the extent to which regional myths "have secreted themselves...unaware" into the fabric of the novel' (Hulme, 1994, 7). This 'fabric' consists of the modernist techniques whereby Rhys poses her challenge to 'the rock-fast nineteenth century convention' of the realist novel, techniques so 'subtle, ambiguous, poignant' as to be easily mistaken, according to Harris, for 'the logic of pathos, (for the) psychology of pathos'. Veronica Gregg takes further this discussion of Rhys as modernist writer, demonstrating her 'determination to wrest from the discursive field of the English novel a language, a set of signs which opposes, transgresses even, the assumptions of that discourse.'17. In language reminiscent of the language of film technique, Gregg maintains the importance of point of view to Rhys's method, speaking of how 'The angle from which the object of representation - Antoinette's life - is to be seen is presented through the husband and his point of view; but his consciousness and utterances are analyzed and often corrected by the techniques with which they are developed and rendered' (Gregg, 416). Gregg here recognises the filmic devices by which Rhys's text proceeds, (camera) angle determining perspective on manifest content.
Rhys's novel yields best, it seems to me, to this sort of technical approach, similar to the linguistic analysis to which it is subjected by Jamaican linguistics scholar, Barbara Lalla. By tracing the manipulation of such apparently incidental features of her writing as deixis, Lalla shows how 'Rhys achieves her effects of memory, trauma, dream/vision/hallucination, her effective shifts in setting, her tightly bound narrative structure of episodes from different areas of timeframe embedded in a disturbed present...(thus) unfastening the normal anchors of the speaker's perspective'.18 The outcome of all this, Lalla suggests, is that the novel refuses closure, leaving us finally with only a repeated question: 'Who am I?' or, as the parrot reiterates: 'Qui est la?' This kind of attention to the aesthetics of text, so much the province of film criticism, assists greatly in decoding the meanings of Rhys's novel, but also applies to the film versions under discussion. For instance, the New York reviewer's complaint about the Duigan film: 'The gothic opacity probably finds its source in Rhys's veiled manner, with its strange combination of pride and deep-running masochism' (New York, 1993, 64), is, I suggest, traceable to a misunderstanding of that very manner and what it reveals as well as conceals. The problem with the Duigan film is not so much Rhys's manner, as the manner of the movie itself, which transposes onto a modernist text a populist commercial one, thus imposing a reading already embedded in the strategies of Hollywood popular cinema. In film, as in the novel, then, style and meaning are one and the same, and to overlook this is to allow yourself, as Duigan does, to become a spear carrier for Hollywood. Gilkes, in his careful recreation of those aspects of Rhys's text which I call 'filmic' - point of view, angle, perspective - reads the novel through its own devices, by which it questions the structures of meaning inherent in realism as an ideological as well as aesthetic outlook In other words, he pays tribute to the 'regional myths' which have secreted themselves into the novel's fabric, so that the film speaks its opposition to the global Hollywood project.
1 'I propose that we regard luxury goods not so much in contrast to necessities (a contrast filled with problems), but as goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs.' Appadurai Arjun: 'Commodities and the politics of value', in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 38.
2 Bruce Paddington quoted in Keith Warner, On Location (UK: Macmillan, 2000), iii.
3 Michael Gilkes, 'Inside the People TV' in Reflections 1991, a UNESCO publication.
4 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, published by Andre Deutsch, 1966 (quotations from Penguin edition, 1986).
5 Michelle Cliff: 'Adrift in Female Terrain', Ms. July/August 1993, 76-78.
6 Christian Metz: The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1982), 39.
7 Colin MacCabe: 'Theory and film: principles of realism and pleasure', in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. G. Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy (Oxford University Press, 1992), 79-82.
8Laura Mulvey: 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989).
9 Rolling Stone review: 'Hot Nights and Naked Flesh in Jamaica, circa 1840', acquired via Internet, no date available.
10 Karina Lombard interview: www.nativecelebs.com/profiles.
11 Newsweek review: 'Fear and Loathing on Location', April 26 1993.
12 New York review: 'Lust at Sea', Mar 3 1993, 64.
13 Elaine Fido, 'A Creole of pure English descent? Review of the film Wide Sargasso Sea', Jean Rhys Review, Vol 6, No 2 (1994), 11-16.
14 Laura Mulvey: Fetishism and Curiosity (Indiana University Press and British Film Institute, 1996), 63.
15 Supriya Nair, 'Creolization, orality, and nation language in the Caribbean', in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (UK: Blackwell, 2000), 240.
16 New Yorker review: 'Monsters', April 19 1993, 110
17 Veronica Gregg: 'Ideology and autobiography in the Jean Rhys oeuvre', in From Commonwealth to Postcolonial, ed. Anna Rutherford (Dangaroo Press, 1992), 416.
18 Barbara Lalla: 'Womb of Darkness: Journey and Identity in Wide Sargasso Sea', paper presented at the Ninth Triennial Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, August 1992.
© Jane Bryce, 2004.
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