Kristeva, Intertextuality, and Re-imagining “The Mad Woman

in the Attic”

Kristy Butler

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp.
129-147 (Article)

Published by Department of English, Georgia State University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sli.2014.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/604072

Access provided by University of Sussex (15 Aug 2018 07:45 GMT)

Kristy Butler

Kristeva, Intertextuality, and Re-imagining “The

Mad Woman in the Attic”

How can one discover truth I thought and that thought led me nowhere. No
one would tell me the truth.
—Mr. Rochester in Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 62

Truths must be told. As an object of discovery, truth is often linked to

language. However, as the presumed Mr. Rochester figure in Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea states, the truth is elusive and can often lead to dead
ends and few guideposts. Similarly, meaning as a related object of dis-
covery also engages with language. As Jacques Lacan outlines in Écrits,
the arch of meaning between the signifier and the signified is a fluid and
potentially infinite arch of analysis. When meaning cannot be fixed to a
single signifier, confusion abounds. However, at what Lacan terms the
point de caption, or the “bow tie,” meaning is fixed so that articulation
and analysis are made possible in language (681–82). Thus, as a semiotic
system, language engages with structures. Importantly, these structures
can also become unstable.
One theorist at the epicenter of linguistic and semiotic criticism and its
effects upon social theory is Julia Kristeva. Traversing through the levels of
language, her theories provide critics and scholars alike with several points
de caption by which language can be explored and analyzed. This essay
will discuss her analysis of language as a structure of social codes that
create false ending points. Specifically, this essay traces the development
of her theories of the ideologeme and intertextuality as a way to approach
knowledge and perspective from multiple utterances. In so doing, textual
readings, particularly of narrative, multiply from different viewpoints. As
Kristeva asserts, the intertextual is not simply stories building upon other
stories. Intertextuality is a process, a fluid state of oscillating interpreta-
tions that seeks to expose the plurality of meaning, both in texts and,
indeed, at the most basic level of the signifier. The value of intertextual
readings or re-readings of stories lies in their ability to open up a text to
new perspectives while at the same time avoiding hierarchical categoriza-

129Spring 2014 © Georgia State University

Studies in the Literary Imagination 47.1,
Kristeva, Intertextuality, & Re-imagining “The Mad Woman in the Attic”

tions. Interrogating the structure of truth as an object of language allows

the polyphonic to replace the logocentric. Therefore, the last section of
this essay examines how intertextual readings can be used as tools to
explore and to define female identity in narrative from the nineteenth into
the twentieth century. Specifically, it explores the intertextual relationship
between Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and
questions the role that literary criticism has played in amplifying Jane’s
voice and silencing Bertha’s. It is only through intertextuality that both
voices are harmonized, expanding and deepening the reading of both
texts. Moreover, Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology will guide this
narrative analysis. Hauntological readings demonstrate that the literary
ghosts of one text can haunt others. The hauntological traces of such
ghosts mirror Kristeva’s notion of looping. As one story finishes (or as
Kristeva believes, it is arbitrarily ended), another begins. Where these
loops intersect, enriched readings emerge.
Crucial to understanding Kristeva’s approach toward intertextuality
theory is her interrogation of linguistics, specifically poetic language
as focal object in the pursuit of truth. In Desire in Language: A Semiotic
Approach to Literature and Art, Kristeva discusses the ethical implications
of language structures as social codes (24). Importantly, Kristeva asserts
that with the development of linguistics as a scientific discourse, rigid
rationalizations became embedded within “the social contract in its most
solid substratum” (24). Consequently, she argues, the truth is disassoci-
ated from what she calls the speaking subject in such a way that truth and
meaning are pre-determined within the discourse that facilitates its search.
Displacing the subject in this way eclipses truth (24). Kristeva’s solution
requires changing the focus of linguistic objects of study so that linguists
can analyze language systems as “articulation[s] of a heterogeneous pro-
cess, with the speaking subject leaving its imprint on the dialectic between
the articulation and the process” (24). Such a shift defines Kristeva’s use
of “poetic language,” what she considers separate from the social contracts
of “ordinary language” and “a practice for which any particular language
is the margin” (25). Arguably, then, for Kristeva, a discovery of truth and
meaning begins outside the structural systems or perspectives that formal
discourse and rigid social mores construct. That is, texts and perspectives
at the margins should guide linguistic explorations.
In locating the object of linguistics at the margins, one must question
the idea of discourse itself. Indeed, Kristeva states that instead of a single
discourse, “contemporary semiotics takes as its object several semiotic
practices which it considers as translinguistic” (Desire 36). In so doing,

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“the text is defined as a trans-linguistic apparatus that redistributes the

order of language” and provides multiple meanings so that a single com-
municative meaning yields to “different kinds of anterior or synchronic
utterances”; consequently, the value of the intertextual can emerge (36).
Permitting multiple utterances means that each voice neutralizes the
power of one over the other (36).
The deconstruction of linguistic hierarchies is essential to under-
standing the intertextual. The foundations of this approach lie in the post-
structuralist theories established by Mikhail Bakhtin. In an interview with
Margaret Waller, Kristeva discusses her own intertextual encounters with
Bakhtinian approaches to language and meaning, specifically his concept
of dialogism: “I had found Bakhtin’s work very exciting…. He was moving
toward a dynamic understanding of the literary text that considered
every utterance as the result of the intersection within it of a number of
voices.… I think that my interpretation remains, on the one hand, faithful
to his ideas, and demonstrates, on the other, my attempts to elaborate and
enlarge upon them” (“Intertextuality” 189). The intersection of voices to
which Kristeva refers is what Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia.” In “Discourse
of the Novel,” he says of these voices that each carries a unique inflec-
tion, an imprint of its particular world view. As the voices intersect, they
reflect the consciousness of real people, specifically writers, and transform
meaning as they oscillate between fiction and real life (Bakhtin 291–92).
Despite its philosophical tone, Bakhtin’s concepts are rooted in semiotics.
For him, each signifier of language is in part a pre-existing, pre-fashioned
tool but is renegotiated and takes on specific meaning when it is used
by a particular speaker with a particular purpose. Only then is language
personal (293). The role of the writer, Bakhtin believes, is to focus on nar-
rative because through the narrator, the reader enters a dual existence: the
story of the narrator and his interactions with the world created for him
including, “a belief system filled with his objects meanings and emotional
expressions,” and the writer’s story. To ignore this second plane, “the inten-
tions and accents of the author himself,” is to fail in understanding the
work (314).
One can see this idea at work in Kristeva’s own understanding of lan-
guage systems, particularly her idea of communicative language rather
than the language of poetics. Like Bakhtin, Kristeva asserts that the narra-
tive element is fundamental to intertextuality, providing the “subject” with
“access to more options for working things out with respect to moments
of crisis, hallucinations, loss, and risk of psychosis” (“Intertextuality”
193). In the novel, Kristeva believes the human condition can be explored

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in ways that are real and powerful: “I sometimes have the feeling that
the human condition, insofar as it involves the use of speech, is very
fragile, and that writing explores that fragility. I try to find examples of
literary texts where this fragility appears to have maximum visibility”
(“Intertextuality” 203). The fragility of the human condition is mirrored
by the fragility of language systems, and Kristeva is clear that textual
arrangements and rhetorical divisions are not without complications. She
sees the role of semiotics as one that attempts “to define the specificity
of different textual arrangements by placing them within the general text
(culture) of which they are apart and which is in turn part of them” (Desire
36). This process creates another component of intertextuality theory, the
ideologeme. Kristeva defines the ideologeme thus:

The ideologeme is the intersection of a given textual arrangement

(a semiotic practice) with the utterances (sequences) that it either
assimilates into its own space or to which it refers in the space of
exterior texts (semiotic practices). The ideologeme is that intertex-
tual function read as “materialized” at the different structural levels
of each text, and which stretches along the entire length of its trajec-
tory, giving its historical and social coordinates. (Desire 36)

The intertextual is a linguistic “productivity” according to Kristeva (Desire

36). By this she means it is a tool that generates meaning by producing a
space of intersection between the textual and the contextual. Importantly,
one must recognize Kristeva’s differentiation between the ideologeme of
the symbol, and the ideologeme of the sign, which presents closed mean-
ings and perspectives of reality as a unified object. In narrative, these
symbols manifest as the ideologeme of the symbol in the development
of epics, myths, and folklore, as John Lechte explains in his book, Julia
Kristeva (103). Alternatively, Lechte describes the ideologeme of the sign
as “characterized by non-disjunction: opposites, alterity, and negation can
often appear in the same figure, or identity,” as a unified idea (103). Thus,
the intertextual encounters one finds in the novel reflect complex systems
and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The ideologeme of the sign dem-
onstrates the open-ended nature of the novel, which, in turn, embodies
Kristeva’s overall characterization of speech and language as a system well
able to negotiate contradiction (103–04).
In her own words, Kristeva differentiates the ideologeme of the sign and
the symbol in these terms:

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A difference between the sign and the symbol can, however, be seen
vertically as well as horizontally: within its vertical function, the
sign refers back to entities both of lesser scope and more concretized
than those of the symbol. They are reified universals become objects
in the strongest sense of the word.… The semiotic practice of the
sign thus assimilates the metaphysics of the symbol and projects it
onto the “immediately perceptible.” The “immediately perceptible,”
valorized in this way, is then transformed into an objectivity—the
reigning law of discourse in the civilization of the sign. (Desire 40)

While the structure of the book contains a terminal site of resolution with
the closing of what Kristeva calls loops that act as expositional cycles, the
implications of what the narrative presents and represents, that is, textual
criticism and discourse, transcends the confines of the book bindings.
Indeed, Kristeva is clear: “nothing in speech can put an end—except arbi-
trarily—to the infinite concatenation of loops” (56).
Consequently, while the author asserts control over the expositional
loops that occur along the horizontal plane within the physical space of a
particular narrative, texts emerge above, below, and along the margins of
the vertical plane. In turn, new narratives form their own loops that are
themselves subsequently destabilized. Thus, the ideologeme of the sign
creates “a network of multiple and always possible deviations (surprises
in narrative structures), giving the illusion of an open structure” (Kristeva,
Desire 40). At the same time, these loops reinforce one another in a chain
of meaning that grows longer and stronger as more loops develop, estab-
lishing a discourse of the text. Moreover, the repetition of related yet alter-
native interpretations authenticates all voices, each a bond of an intertex-
tual chain. In the semiotic systems of the symbol, contradictions could not
coexist and thus were resolved by establishing binaries through models of
non-equivalence. However, the semiotic practice of the sign relies upon an
inability to cleanly separate these objects; in place of non-equivalence, a
hierarchical relationship forms between the contradictory objects. Yet, is
this not a clear contradiction to the intertextual and its claim to eliminate
hierarchies of meaning? One perspective that resolves intertextuality’s
apparent contradiction is that the ideologeme of the sign is the creation
of ordered planes of a particular text. Consequently, each text contains a
separate trajectory, complete with its own social and historical complica-
tions that act as both a separate human experience and an opportunity for
intertextual encounters and textual mutations.

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These textual mutations are symptomatic of Derridian hauntology as

well. Derrida’s concept of hauntology, as a “dimension of performative
interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing
it interprets,” was born out of a desire to identify the discourses that
dictate the public sphere, specifically in terms of hegemony (51, 37).
Indeed, Kristeva’s criticisms of linguistic discourse as a pre-determining
structure for meaning amid rigid social contracts offer a useful approach
to both fiction as a system of language and a catalyst for the hauntological
lens through which one can interrogate and interpret systems of power
that control language. Hauntological interrogations of these systems and
their manifold manifestations allow one to re-imagine the object of study.
Consequently, the space of the hauntological works with the ideologeme
of the sign in that it also creates a “productive” text where the polyphonic
can emerge as a symbol of the era and yet as a timeless representation, a
linking of mutating deviations requiring resolution. Thus, as each looping
of the hauntological specter appears, an intertextual encounter is made
possible.
Furthermore, re-imagining the object of study also requires one to
acknowledge the constructions of the object, both in its real form and as
a construct. For Derrida, the relevance of hauntology lies in the tension
between “the thing itself and its simulacrum” (10). Ultimately, the specter
transcends the power of the thing itself. In the tangible world of the onto-
logical, the present is the only reality where past, present, and future are
separate. However, hauntological dimensions refract time and space so
that “what seems to be out in front, the future, comes back in advance:
from the past from the back” (10). In terms of repetition, what one sees in
the present, a word or a phrase, is haunting in the future. In dialogue with
Kristeva, Derrida’s emphasis upon the ordering of time and the instability
of this ordering mirrors her perspectives on semiotics and the ordering of
words to create trans-linguistic worlds. So it is with the haunting presence
of the specter within narrative, as one that transcends time and space,
returning in a new form and yet the same form; the specter underpins
Kristeva’s assertion that language, and arguably, its structures, exists as
an infinite series of loops. Endings are merely arbitrary constructions.
Therefore, in one’s search for meaning and truth in language, it becomes
clear that the real object is elusive and complex, while the meaning of the
simulacrum is superficial and arbitrarily determined. It is only through
a blending of perspectives of the textual and contextual that one may
approach the real object (meaning).

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With an understanding of the theoretical foundations and presupposi-

tions of intertextuality and the language systems that enable its readings,
one must now consider the implications of these findings for readers as a
practical application of knowledge. One question haunting the intertextual
is how one can engage it as a tool for reading and re-reading stories and
what ethical implications does this practice hold for the reader in seeking
out an object of truth, Kristeva’s speaking subject? To that end, concerning
the construction of women in narrative, what advances are made possible
within the loops of the intertextual? Finally, will these loopings be linked
indefinitely as Kristeva argues of all speech, haunted one might say, by the
male gaze upon the female subject? Journeys toward the dialogic and the
intertextual begin with familiar steps that most consider involuntary when
reading. Mainly, one must enter the perspective of the narrator and other
supporting characters.
Negotiating the complexity of conflicting identities, including one’s own
viewpoint, requires the reader to engage in different levels of meaning
simultaneously. In so doing, the reader confronts a dominant problem
facing the postmodern reader: a call “to reconcile representation, the
imposition of content, with the play of form … a play of psychic pluraliza-
tion” (Kristeva, “Intertextuality” 191). Kristeva adds that intertextuality is
particularly relevant to postmodernity in that content, as well as form, is
called into question. Thus, texts are always recalling one another, she says.
Importantly, this resurrection surpasses mere allusion; rather, with each
visitation, “true meaning of the text is found in the oscillations between
origin and multiple meanings” (191). In reading the polyphonic and “psy-
chic pluralization” at work in a novel, one also evokes the intertextual.
Consequently, as one reads the novel as a continuous development of con-
tent and form within a bounded text, an enriched and multi-level interpre-
tation unfolds. This process extends to intertextual interpretations among
novels as well. Kristeva cites instances of the intertextual in William
Faulkner’s work and the Bible, arguing that one cannot fully understand
the complexity of the novel if one cannot access the significance of its ties
to other works and the contextual conditions that inform Faulkner’s own
interpretations of its significance (191).
Arguably, Kristeva’s example of the influence of biblical texts and the
historical context of the times are merely additional frames through which
one interprets literature. In engaging these frames, one also imposes
additional restrictions upon the text itself, a practice Kristeva rejects as
antithetical to the nature of speech and language. Alternatively, it is also

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possible that presenting every interpretation as equal diminishes meaning

rather than refines it. Herein lies the challenge of reading along the dual
plane.
The ethical implications for the reader as he or she utilizes the intertex-
tual lens are that only fragments of truth and meaning emerge. Kristeva
acknowledges this complication when she describes creative subjectivity
as a “kaleidoscope” (“Intertextuality” 190). She states: “I myself speak of
a ‘subject in process’ which makes possible my attempt to articulate as
precise a logic as possible between identity or unity, the challenge to this
identity and even its reduction to zero, the moment of crisis, of emptiness,
and then the reconstitution of a new plural identity” (190). What results
of these plural identities in twentieth-century writing is not just fragments
of identity where an author can create various characters in an act of dia-
logic imagination; instead, the text acts as a space where the fragmentation
also “may appear as fragments of character, or fragments of ideology, or
fragments of representation” (190). Consequently, when considering the
fragments of identity and of representation in general, one must work to
assimilate a larger work, a task made easier, yet still quite complex, by the
reading of the contextual elements of the narrative that work to inform the
reader about the character and the nature of his or her fractured/fracturing
world. Thus, the ethics of intertextuality require oscillations between past
and present interpretations and constructions of characters as “subject[s]
in process.” Furthermore, it requires recognition of fractured representa-
tions that rely upon contextual analysis to approach the reality of the
world or characters within the narrative—an act of the hauntological.
The danger here is that in reconstructing the subject, ideology will act as
guide. Alan Singer writes that in listening for the polyphonic voice, one is
also attuned to the voice of ideology, which “enchants us into a stupor of
uncritical reflection” (75). While Singer speaks of this dialogic threat in
terms of Bakhtinian discourse, one can hear the echoes of Kristeva who
criticizes linguistic discourse as an apparatus of uncritical reflection as
well—one that has lost focus of the true subject.
Singer notes that for both Kristeva’s “subject-in-process” and Bakhtin’s
concept of dialogue, the motivations of agency that guide interpretation
require interrogation. Thus, intertextual readings require one to consider
not only the many voices that emerge from the text but also the motiva-
tions behind their utterances. One can find Derridian hauntology useful
in this task, as it seeks to interpret that which continues to resurrect
itself within society, the ghosts that assume new forms but similar mean-
ings. In a hauntological analysis of the loops within literature and among

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texts, one can interrogate their relationship to one another and trace the
ideology at work in interpreting each text. These interpretive strategies
are ongoing. When reading and re-rereading stories, the vertical plane
of the metanarrative operates as a source of contextual representations
that invites the reader to understand a particular telling of the novel as a
“subject-in-process” that in some ways responds to previous interpreta-
tions. Particularly noteworthy is the recognition that many subjects have
languished uninvestigated and without agency throughout literary history.
Yet by embracing Kristeva’s idea of narrative loops, perhaps the reader can
move the story beyond the ending, and untold stories can become visible
in the intertextual sphere.
Critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis asserts that narrative and ideology operate
in similar terms but on different levels. Whereas ideology organizes the
world on a large scale, narrative acts as a “system of representation by
which we imagine the world as it is” (DuPlessis 3). Inclusive in this world
view is an idea of what stories are worth telling and in what manner or
under what rules storytelling may proceed (3). In terms of intertextual
encounters, this idea of narrative as a system, complete with its specific
codes, suggests in one way that there are limits to the trajectory of lan-
guage. It must operate within a pre-determined structure. Furthermore,
the ideologeme as signifier or object, and, in the case of narrative, the
character as object, operates within a system of pre-determined endings, as
Kristeva asserts. For DuPlessis, the question of what stories can be told is
closely tied to many of the issues of feminist criticism and the idea of “the
untold story, the other side of a well-known tale, the elements of women’s
existence that have never been revealed” (3).
Beyond simple exposure of the muted voice, one complication of
Kristeva’s theory is whether or not intertextuality and its representations
of the world as it is can enact crucial changes that would do more than
simply illuminate the suppressed voices within narrative. If intertextuality
fails to move the discourse beyond these representations, are these textual
and hauntological loops merely illuminations of hegemony at work that
resist change as infinite trajectories of language itself? To approach this
question, one should consider that historically, narrative formulas have
maintained a strong grip upon the construction of the subject/character. In
terms of constructing the female in literature, the dominance of the mar-
riage plot seems inescapable, particularly symptomatic of the nineteenth-
century novel. As DuPlessis asserts, authors during this time persevered
in their attempts to “see to it that Bildung and romance could not coexist
and be integrated for the heroine at the resolution” (3). This is surprising

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since, as DuPlessis acknowledges, “these two discourses in their main part

(the narrative middle) are among the most important fictions of our tradi-
tion” (3). Thus, the dissonance between self-identification and the require-
ments of the romantic tradition forced women to choose between these
two experiences in literature. Rather than constructing the individual out
of a fragmented self as Kristeva’s “subject-in-process” with complex desires
and motivations, one sees that the nineteenth-century female faced “the
tension between selfless love and self assertion” (7). DuPlessis further
states that the female faces a structure of limits in comparison to her male
counterparts, one that often represses her role or significance (7).
Ultimately, the hegemony present within the social structure of the novel
of the nineteenth century favors the male gaze as a figure moving forward
in history and dismisses the female, who is constructed in terms of restric-
tion and is depicted in a state of arrested development. Consequently,
she is unable to progress throughout literary history alongside the male
protagonists. DuPlessis attributes this reluctance for change in narrative
structures to uneasiness with societal change in general, which requires
an acknowledgement of discontent with the status quo. Indeed, readers
“are naturally drawn to those events, emotions, and endings which are
recognizable, apparently corresponding to ‘experience’” (DuPlessis 20).
Thus, it is crucial for intertextuality theory to operate as an applicable
tool against any discourse that holds meaning as a pre-determined or as
a hierarchical structure to organize the same. Through the lens of the
intertextual one can examine the relationships among perspectives yet
avoid preference toward any one viewpoint over another. The looping of
narratives must then be at once a history of interpretations and at the same
time must resist categorizing one interpretation as authoritative. Perhaps
utilizing intertextuality in this way will open up even the most analyzed
texts to new readings. In doing so, the sources of hauntological specters
that intertextual readings illuminate can reduce the reader’s easy reliance
upon blind affirmation of hegemony and its specters, who too often guide
familiar readings.
Destabilizing semiotic and narrative structures allows female protago-
nists of the past, present, and future (the shadowy ghosts of literary his-
tory) a chance to move freely toward their own self-identification as their
male counterparts have done for centuries. Indeed, Thais Morgan identi-
fies the significance of intertextuality theory as a reading practice resistant
to pre-determined literary tropes: “By shifting our attention from the tri-
angle of author/work/tradition to that of text/discourse/culture, intertextu-
ality replaces the evolutionary model of literary history with a structural

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or synchronic model of literature as a sign system” (239). Morgan’s overall

argument is that intertextuality, while freeing the reader from the confines
of literary discourse, also presents equal dangers of entrapment within the
discourse of popular theory, which has its own influences, as Singer also
cautions. However, this complication does not diminish the importance of
Morgan’s assertion that shifting the focus of literature away from author/
work/tradition to text/discourse/culture allows the text to transcend pre-
scribed expectations and therefore enables a more expansive reading of
what drives the text and one’s approach to it. In so doing, one sees pre-
scribed realities as complications.
As Kristeva writes in Le Texte du roman: “The ‘truth’ of textual produc-
tivity is neither provable nor verifiable—which would mean that textual
productivity pertains to a domain other than that of verisimilitude. The
‘truth’ or the pertinence of scriptural practice is of another order; it is unde-
cidable” (trans. in Lechte 104). Approaching the undecidable is crucial for
intertextual readings of narrative and the representations of its characters.
Furthermore, undecidability invites the reader to widen the exploration of
the text to larger social and cultural implications, as Morgan asserts. Thus,
in bypassing the individual psychology of Antoinette/Bertha Mason, Rhys’s
exploration of this legendary “mad woman in the attic” transforms into a
greater survey of madness and the cultural and literary conditions that have
silenced her voice in favor of a more socially digestible figure, Jane Eyre.
Importantly, Wide Sargasso Sea is not just a retelling of one woman’s
descent into madness, an individual psychology as Morgan says; rather, it is
an intertextual looping of author and the dominance of previous readings.
The reliance on a pre-determined discourse creates madness and forces
the construction of insanity upon certain characters as a means to adhere
to tradition, arguably an ideologeme of the symbol. When one sees the
discourse at work as a cultural reading throughout literature, not just at a
particular literary moment, one also sees, as Morgan does, the evolution of
the literary sign system. To re-imagine the madwoman in the attic requires
a re-imagining of madness itself and how it persists in the construction
of the female protagonist, the development of the ideologeme of the sign.
This characteristic is often linked to some contradictory quality about
her heritage, appearance, or behavior that becomes monstrous. However,
through the intertextual lens, what proves truly monstrous is the heritage
of systems that create monstrosity while claiming to despise it. The covert
ideology of the mad woman in the attic imitates the linguistic discourse
Kristeva criticizes in that it, too, loses sight of the speaking subject in
favor of a pre-determined truth. Rhys and other writers who explore the

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intertextual actively destabilize discourse. Yet, can the neglected subject

return to the forefront of literature, cast anew and free from the mad-
ness of tradition? As one reads in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette does not
escape her fate. Instead, her journey toward confinement and insanity is
explained in her own words, making the descent into man-made prisons
and man-induced madness all the more tragic. While she cannot escape the
intertextual loops the novel shares with Jane Eyre, Rhys’s attempt to shift
the focus once more upon the speaking subject as a “subject-in-process”
and the search for identity proves crucial at the level of the signifier. There,
one must interrogate the shift in signification that occurs when Antoinette
is transposed as Bertha. It is there that her journey toward the attic begins
and her identification as the speaking subject ends.
From its first pages, Wide Sargasso Sea cannot escape the intertextual.
Part one is narrated by Antoinette, at first unnamed, but who the reader
later learns is Bertha Mason, the infamous “mad woman in the attic” of
Jane Eyre. However, this loop is not the first to appear in the novel; that
connection is never made directly and is developed slowly as the narrative
unfolds. The intertextual references that appear at the beginning of the
narration in one way abolish past histories in a return to Eden. Antoinette
states: “Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible—the
tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild” (Rhys 10–11). The overgrown
paths and dilapidated Coulibri Estate invite the reader to interpret this
island as an abandoned place, mirroring the representation of the focal
female, Antoinette Mason. Moreover, it is a narrative space with secrets
buried under overgrown paths and where knowledge between fact and fic-
tion, evil and good have lost meaning. Antoinette confesses she has never
gone near this tree (Rhys 11). Perhaps in terms of the larger narrative dis-
course, Antoinette has never been allowed near the truth of her own story.
Rhys’s wordplay with the implications of the tree of life further illuminates
the abandoned and deathly existence to which Antoinette/Bertha has been
living in the shadows of her more appropriate counterpart, Jane. Thorunn
Lonsdale writes, “Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was itself an innovative and
radical text, but Rhys reveals the way in which the marginalized Jane in
turn marginalizes others” (59). Even within the context of this opening
chapter of the novel, the temptation to revert back to Jane as a beginning
point is strong. After all, Jane appears as the focal female of the narrative
long before Rhys re-imagines Bertha as a woman outside of the attic in Wide
Sargasso Sea. Perhaps a return to Eden marks the beginning as an eraser
of histories. To approach the subject, Bertha, one must first encounter
Antoinette—in her world. Such a reading then offers a secondary interpre-

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tation of the wildness of the island and offers an explanation for the novel’s
origin in Eden and its wildness. Wildness in this case is not madness or
lack of order; rather, it is the work of the intertextual that begins outside of
the sign and structure of the novel. It begins in the wild. It begins before
truth and meaning were pre-determined.
As the story unfolds, structure threatens to invade the narrative, particu-
larly the structure of the marriage plot, another static representation of a
closed reality acting as an ideologeme of the symbol. Yet, it is Antoinette’s
wildness and the unorthodox island life that persist in countering such an
invasion. Importantly, Antoinette’s unbridled spirit is continually likened
to her mother Annette’s, thereby creating a history of behavior that pre-
supposes similar fates. Notably, the similarity between their names acts as
a semiotic structure that links their significations within the text as well.
In particular, just as the text presents Annette as an overtly sexual woman
whose participation in the marriage plot ultimately drives her into mad-
ness, so, too, Antoinette is elusive and resistant to societal customs, but her
eventual participation in marriage necessitates her journey toward a crazed
existence that readers associate with Bertha Mason.
By writing Annette and Antoinette as wild figures in Wide Sargasso Sea,
Rhys recasts their subsequent madness as an act of rebellion. Whereas
the marriage plot signified domestic tranquility in the nineteenth-century
novel, Wide Sargasso Sea recasts it as a precursor to familial tension and
discord. In corrupting the nature of the marriage plot, Rhys creates an
ideologeme of the sign. The text still engages with the trope as literary
discourse, complete with its societal and historical implications, yet Rhys
writes a female protagonist that works outside the structure, despite her
location within it as a wife. Her deterioration as a result of the closed
reality is an intertextual opening of an alternative view of the mad woman
in the attic before she went “mad.” In an uncanny reversal, the bless-
ings of marriage for the nineteenth-century woman become burdens in
a twentieth-century re-imagining of her character as a complex outsider
who embodies the contradictory spirit of the ideologeme of the sign, as
well as postmodern anxieties regarding form. Moreover, symbols such
as the home become corrupted when tainted by the marriage structure.
After her mother’s wedding, Antoinette describes her childhood home of
Coulibri as an uncanny place, particularly Christophine’s room, where she
had spent many hours before. In the time following the marriage however,
the place is transformed:

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I knew her room so well.… Yet one day when I was waiting there I
was suddenly very much afraid. The door was open to the sunlight,
someone was whistling near the stables, but I was afraid. I was
certain that hidden in the room (behind the old black press?) there
was a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its
throat cut, dying slowly, slowly. Drop by drop the blood was falling
into a red basin and I imagined I could hear it. (Rhys 18)

Antoinette states that the way people spoke about Christophine and Obeah
transformed the room. Speech changed her perspective. Where conven-
tions such as marriage and western custom act as social code, all that fall
outside their structure, particularly the supernatural, become menacing.
One can read intertextual traces of this in Jane Eyre and her experience of
the red room:

The red room was a spare chamber, very seldom slept in; I might say
never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead
Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation
it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in
the mansion…. The carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed
was covered in crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn color, with
a blush of pink in it…. Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was
in this chamber he breathed his last;… I was not quite sure whether
they had locked the door; and when I dared to move, I got up, and
went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure. Returning, I had
to cross before the looking glass;… and the strange little figure there
gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and
glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect
of a real spirit. (Brontë 10–11)

In both scenes, the marriage plot (Annette’s marriage to Mr. Mason

and Mrs. Reed’s marriage to Jane’s uncle) places each girl in an unsettling
space. The safety of home and the familiarity of the domestic space is
tainted by the discord marriage has brought to each family; consequently,
the marginalization each girl experiences results in fear. Furthermore, the
supernatural element of a dead man’s hand and haunted spaces transforms
the space into one of death and isolation. Indeed, marriage is a marginal-
izing social structure. In both novels, the rebellious nature of each girl
is countered by institutionalization, Jane to Lowood and Antoinette to

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the convent. However, while Jane remains self-reliant and excels in her
studies, ultimately achieving what is expected of her in a bildungsroman,
at the convent, Antoinette feels her identity slipping away from her, and
her feelings of imprisonment intensify. Even the act of cross-stitching
with Louise, the girl Antoinette is paired with and who acts as a literary,
intertextual double for Jane’s Lowood companion, Hellen Burns, stifles
Antoinette’s sense of self. In response, Antoinette tells Louise that her
needle is “sticky” and “swearing” (Rhys 31). She declares that she will
write her name in “fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary
Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839” (31). Antoinette cannot conform
to the patterns of cross-stitch or to the prescriptions of convent life. Thus,
her name, as she knows herself, becomes increasingly important to her
and to the events of the novel. In this way, Antoinette embodies the ethical
linguistics that Kristeva demands. In a return to the subject, the name is
crucial to obtaining and retaining meaning. Antoinette herself declares:
“Names matter” (106).
Antoinette recognizes this truth in other texts as well. She becomes
frustrated with a stories of the saints Mother St. Justine reads to the girls
as they stitch because not all the saints’ lives are explained, particularly
St. Innocenzia’s: “We do not know her story, she is not in the book,” she
laments, “The saints we hear about were all very beautiful and wealthy.
All were loved by rich and handsome young men” (Rhys 32). Thus, the
insidious reprisal of the marriage plot pursues Antoinette once more.
Shortly after this passage, Antoinette learns that she will experience first-
hand what kind of martyrdom this sainthood demands. Her stepfather
has arranged her marriage to an Englishman, who subsequently assumes
the narration of the novel. While not named, the character is a construc-
tion of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre. Interestingly, his nameless existence
does not diminish his power over the narrative in the same way that a
nameless female might. Instead, his character consumes other identities
to form meaning for himself and for those he wishes to control, mainly
Antoinette. This practice proves complex when Antoinette’s rebellious oth-
erness becomes a site of uncertainty, as does her island home. He states:
“As for my impressions they will never be written. There are blanks in my
mind that cannot be filled up” (45). Ameliorating this uncertainty is the
promise of marriage, a familiar structure, which will join their identities
and provide her with a new, familiar name. Like St. Innocenzia, the reader’s
perspective of Antoinette’s life is henceforward colored by the male gaze.
And like the other saints, Antoinette’s story continues from this point only

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after she has married a handsome young man. Perhaps Rhys’s motivation
in following the structure of the saints is to prove how destructive these
social structure systems can be. Where once Antoinette was beautiful,
wealthy, and self-reliant, her induction into marriage transforms her into a
“red-eyed wild-haired stranger” to her husband and a stranger to herself.
As his narration describes, Antoinette does not submit easily to her fate.
In fact, the morning before the wedding, she calls off the engagement.
Rochester speaks with her about her reluctance and promises her “peace,
happiness, safety” (Rhys 47). In so doing, he reinforces the semiotic struc-
ture of the marriage plot that situates the female in a state of dependency.
Antoinette’s reliance upon her husband for security unsettles her. She asks:
“Why did you make me want to live? Why did you do that to me?” He
answers, “Because I wished. Isn’t that enough?” (54). In this exchange,
Rhys creates a dialogue that interrogates the construction of the female as
a product of male desires. Bertha is his creation. Like Victor Frankenstein,
Rochester appears reckless in his fashioning of his creation. He creates
an image of Antoinette that suits him without regard for her desires.
While marriage tempers Jane’s rebellious nature, Antoinette transforms
from rebellious to monstrous. Even in Jane Eyre, Bertha is a demon-like
figure that must be exorcised from Thornfield Hall if Jane is to have her
happy ending. Literary discourse favors Bertha’s expulsion because her
presence challenges the legitimacy of the marriage plot, which presumes
happiness not complication. The introduction of madness in the mar-
riage plot unsettles Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea as well, with similar
consequences (56–59). The insertion of madness into the narrative allows
Rochester to contextualize his wife’s rebellious nature, not as a threat for
power but a fight for sanity. Thus, he begins to reconstruct the subject to
suit his desires. He begins to call her Bertha and plans to take her away
from the wildness of the island to his home in England. Antoinette resists
but cannot escape him. She says, “Running away from him, from this
island is the lie. What reason could I give for going and who would believe
me?” (68). She acknowledges that in entering the marriage plot, she has
forfeited control of her life. As a result, she defiantly attempts to maintain
her own identification and avoid the death of “Antoinette.” She explains to
Rochester: “There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people
know about” (77).
Indeed, the dual nature of life and death is another intertextual encounter
within the novel between Rhys and Brontë’s narratives. Antoinette’s real
death occurs in Wide Sargasso Sea when she marries Rochester. He con-
sumes her identity and renames his creature Bertha. Repeatedly, Antoinette

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rebels against this new identity stating, “My name is not Bertha; why do
you call me Bertha?” (Rhys 81). Echoing his response about the origins of
his love for her, Rochester replies, “Because it is a name I’m particularly
fond of. I think of you as Bertha” (81). Arguably, his fondness for the name
is actually fondness for an identity he can control. He tells her, “I can be
gentle too. Hide your face. Hide yourself but in my arms.… My lunatic. My
mad girl” (99). In naming her Bertha, he also names her lunatic and mad
girl. His instruction to hide herself in him is not a promise of comfort but
a demand for control. As easily as he constructs Antoinette’s identity as
Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea, he can dismiss her as monstrous in Jane Eyre
and avoid responsibility for the life he destroyed long ago and has long for-
gotten. Consequently, the fiery end to “the mad woman in the attic” in Jane
Eyre is simply the death people know about. Yet, it is through the intertex-
tual dialogue between deaths that one gains understanding of each life, as
both Bertha and Antoinette. In this exchange, the focus need not fall to a
more familiar and more digestible counterpart like Jane. Such a tendency
mimics the semiotic system of the symbol that resolves contradiction by
creating binaries. Ironically in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century, the “mad woman” is
not discussed on her own terms; rather, the discourse focuses on Jane.
Bertha is merely her hidden self, “a nightmare specter … and indeed the
most threatening-avatar of Jane” (359).
To counter this ongoing and reflexive comparison, Rhys refocuses the
exploration of meaning on the speaking subject to create a narrative loop
that begins and ends from Antoinette’s perspective. Importantly, this char-
acterization does not resolve the problematic presence of Jane through
non-equivalence. In the last section of the novel, Rhys re-creates scenes
from Jane Eyre so that an intertextual intersection is clearly made. This is
not so that readings of Brontë’s classic can be undone; rather its purpose
is to enable a specter to speak. In this deviation, Antoinette can finally
provide her own answers from behind the attic door. There is then a shift
in the hierarchy between contradictions, one that favors her perspective,
if only for this particular deviation. Kristeva writes that non-disjunction
in the novel is “an agreement of deviations: the two originally opposed
arguments … are connected and mediated by a series of utterances whose
relation to the originally posited opposition is neither explicit nor logi-
cally necessary” (Desire 51–52). Significantly, the events and characters
that underpin certain utterances are challenged by non-disjunction at the
novel’s resolution. Kristeva writes about the totality of the novel and the
utterances it supports: “these laudatory descriptions become relativized,

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ambiguous, deceptive, and double: their univocity changes to duplicity”

(52).
Similarly, the marriage plot is as powerful in Wide Sargasso Sea as it is
in Jane Eyre. However, the story of Jane Eyre builds confidence in its own
tale of happiness in marriage as an ultimate resolution. Specifically, it is a
certain kind of marriage and a particular kind of wife that suits this mar-
riage plot. Jane embodies her perfectly. However, a narrative deviation in
the character of Bertha challenges this construction, and the symbol of
marriage is preserved by Bertha’s death and Jane’s subsequent marriage
to Mr. Rochester. Antoinette’s narration of marriage as an end in Wide
Sargasso Sea serves as a larger deviation in this semiotic system where the
meaning of the marriage plot is mediated implicitly through a re-telling
that disturbs the original oppositions. In Rhys’s text, Antoinette assists
the reader in interrogating this tradition. In witnessing her transformation
from Antoinette to Bertha, one can see that the madness that has come to
define her character is a direct result of the madness imposed upon her by
the male gaze and the traditional marriage plot. In disrupting the social
code and the system of signs that dictate literary discourse, a return of
this hauntological ghost destabilizes pre-determined truths and forces the
reader toward meaning that focuses on the speaking subject, once only
regarded as a monster, a menace, a mute.
Disturbing constructions of language and identity have also been acts
of re-imagination for Kristeva. As her interrogations of semiotic systems
and the social implications they necessitate continue to evolve, her work,
particularly that of intertextuality, continues to influence both writers
and theorists alike. The development of her ideas demonstrates that it
is through a suturing of different perspectives that meaning and truth
begin to materialize, not as a pre-determined point, but as a process.
Furthermore, in engaging her notions of the ideologeme as both symbol
and sign, one sees reading as an ethical practice: one that either moves
understanding toward objects of meaning and truth, or one that persists
in the past and reflects a lack of engagement with the reality of the Other,
eclipsing it completely. Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is just one of many
examples of intertextuality at work in narrative. The novel demonstrates
how language and social codes control one’s understanding of the Other
and how intertextual encounters can enrich one’s understanding of the
speaking subject and the world in which he or she is continually created
and re-created and located within the loops of the bounded text. It is for
the linguist, the theorist, and the reader to insist on journeys toward the

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dialogic and to listen for the speaking subject in progress and its multiple
utterances of truth and objects of meaning, both of which prove elusive
and approach the undecidable.

Independent Scholar

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