The Corruption Of Sexuality In Charlotte Rhys's Jane Eyre

In a parodic festivity, Antoinette/Bertha not only mocks Jane Eyre’s self-regulated individual identity but also turns upside down the patriarchal sexual politics, celebrating herself as a woman who is a sexually lewd and gluttonous of excess. Her blatantly scandalous behaviour is no longer a marker of social corruption; instead, it becomes a transgressive form of resistance to counteract patriarchal ideology of the ornamented relation between normality and morality, defeating the arch-rival of purity and conformity. The Creole heroine is no longer a sexual object of a male gaze as she redefines her subject position while disturbingly inverts and subverts the traditional sexual politics based on the binary opposite of active male/passive female.

In a figurative depiction of her thirst for Rochester, the Creole woman extensively uses the word “death” to appeal to charm and excite him: death as a metaphor for

It asserts and denies, it buries and revives” (11-12). They not only communicate concretely her merritment and triumph but also her sarcasm and criticism. Rhys makes her female protagonist perform her deeds out of her deliberate intent to destroy the myth of patriarchal and colonial oppression and the female other’s powerlessness rewriting thus, her passive position in the Brontean narrative. Indeed, the red colour of fire not only stands for her burning passion and violent fury seething with her but also for her belonging to the Jamaican world characterized by its warmness. Her laughers can better translate her laughers at the long-standing dominant discourses, endowing herself with much space to redeem her sexuality in an erotic red colour scene and to release herself from the confines of otherness claiming her belonging to the West Indies. To explain more, Bertha is willingly and actively engaged in a carnivalseque scene of deconstruction: she simultaneously laughs at the dominant discourses, mocking and deriding her debased story of the Brontean text/dominant discourses while burning Rochester’s mansion and participates in the event of her self-fulfilment, yet