Antoinette in Bengal?

Pressupositions, Patriarchy and the “Third Space”

In the essay White, Male, and Middle Class, Catherine Hall claims that “Englishness
is not a fixed identity but a series of contesting identities, a terrain of struggle as to what it
means to be English.” (Hall 9) The same idea of “Englishness” is interesting to look at,
especially in the context of translation and cultural translation. Jean Rhys’s famous novel
Wide Sargasso Sea critiques and explores what it means to write in English amidst “cultural
translation”. Rhys text embeds the politics of colonialism, gender and explores the
“geographies of English fiction”. The character, Antoniette Cosway, known by most as
Bertha Mason, the woman locked up in Rochester’s attic is a symbol of cultural hybridity;
she occupies the position of the “abject”1 and her position in the narratives of colonialism,
marriage, gender itself stands as a resistance to existing structures of power and systematic
violence.

The adaptation of Antoniette Cosway into the local Indian context of the 21st century
would be challenging and it is important that the translator keeps in mind the presuppositions,
as Riffaterre suggests in his essay “Transposing Presuppositions on the Semiotics of Literary
Translations” literary translation has to occur in such a way such that it reproduces the
features of the original but not in the same way, must be visibly derivable from the formal or
semantic given that determined the production; the implicit and requisite conditions of the
text has to be negotiated and established in the target text as well. (Riffaterre 132) As
mentioned above, Antoiniette Cosway occupies the position of an “abject” is the position of
in-between subject and object. If I attempt to culturally appropriate her character in
contemporary Bengal, I would essentially situate her as a woman belonging to a Garo tribe,
married to an upper caste upper-middle class man and also try to re-appropriate her position
in discourses of colonialism, marriage and gender.

Firstly, we need to keep in mind that in the novel “Jane Eyre” as well as in Jean Rhys’
cultural adaptation “Wide Sargasso Sea” Mr. Rochester marries Bertha Mason (as named in
Jane Eyre”) or Antoinette Cosway as named in Wide Sargasso Sea only because she was the
rightful heir to a fortune of her family, and it is through marrying her that Mr Rochester
would be able to achieve prosperity. Anthropological studies reveal that Garo tribes have
traditionally been matrilineal. So, in the culturally adapted tale, her husband marries her for

1 The abject is an idea introduced by Homi Bhabha; it is the position between the subject and
the object, the self and the other.
her inheritance. It is essential to remember that Jean Rhys had written the story of Antoinette
Cosway keeping in mind.

Secondly, we need to keep in mind the post-colonial myth of exoticisation, othering

and alterity. In Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester is not in love with Antoinette but is in awe of
her, to him she is a mysterious creature of a sexual nature. Unlike the gender roles women
were expected to play in Victorian England she had a fierce nature. The traditions, rituals and
festivities celebrated by Antoinette’s family intimidate him as he does not understand them at
all. Such a situation would be possible in the context of interaction between a Garo woman
and a Bramhin man as in the case of Garo community, gender roles for men and women are
very different. For example, in terms of sexuality, Garo communities are accepting of the idea
of sexual initiation before marriage, which might not be the case for a Bramhin family. Just
the way Rochester finds the sexual agency of his wife intimidating, even in the cultural
adaptation the Bramhin man would find the working sexual agency of his wife not just
provocative or bold, but also not complying to the social standards of Bramhin communities.

Coming to the question of the kind of benefit one would achieve from the cultural
adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea into the context of 21st century contemporary Bengal would
lead us to the model of hybridity. In the discourse of Translation Studies, a piece of work
offers itself as a model of textual hybridity when it holds within it the relations that brought
the text into existence. According to Bhabha, who builds on the ideas of Walter Benjamin’s
“Task of a Translator”, the translated work has to be viewed as an overlapping of cultures or
a contact zone of two cultures which gives the rise to a third space. The notion of hybridity
also holds special significance in contexts where is high historical consciousness of cultural
and linguistic mixing. Firstly, in both the contexts there is certain sense of cultural linguistic
mixing: similar to Wide Sargasso Sea, the interaction between a Garo woman and Bramhin
man would also lead to a certain linguistic and cultural mixing. Secondly, when we talk about
the notions of a “third space”, it becomes very useful in the context of third world women.
Western academia has frozen the third world woman in time and space and the
homogenisation of their experiences lead to the undermining of the various situations third
world women might be facing all around the world. By transposing the character Antoinette
Cosway, a Creole Caribbean into the context of an Indian tribal women and it leading to the
emergence of the “third space” between the source text and the target text, we can understand
how firstly, patriarchy works in complex structures of oppression, and secondly, we can
outline the similarities in the situation of third world women belonging to different
communities, while at the same time acknowledging the differences.

However, the limitations of this cultural adaptation would be the loss of representation
of a Creole identity as the identity of “Creole” cannot be repeated in a situation of
contemporary India. In that sense, the complexities of the identity of being a Creole may not
be embedded in the cultural adaptation. However, the questions and themes raised by Jean
Rhys i.e the differences in culture leading to alienation, the complex nature of patriarchy, and
the role of gender in marriages.

Another very important aspect that has to be kept in mind is the language that has to
be employed by creating a cultural translation: The writing style of Wide Sargasso Sea is
fragmented, the syntax is simple, however, the tone and the focalisation of the text keeps
shifting. When the translator is creating the new text, it is necessary that he uses literary
styles suitable for the representation of the Garo community, as Jean Rhys did. Also, Garo
literature before independence primarily existed in the form of oral narratives. The first
secular literature of the Garos came out in 1938, as previous to that most of the literary
narratives that existed were translations of the Bible due to British invasion. The style of
literature played an important role in the creation of a modern Garo identity. However, Garo
literature written in English is minimal; most of their literature exists in the Garo language
which is a Tibeto-Burman language. The language of the cultural adaptation has to be suited
in such a way that it reflects the nature of Garo literature and identity.

“Wide Sargasso Sea” is a resistant narrative, and the authorial intention of the text was
to show resistance. Tymoczko, in his essay “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary
Translation”, discusses that post-colonial writing is a metaphor for translation; he calls
translation the activity of “carrying across”; it is essential that the idea and the nature of this
resistance is reflected in the target text. (Tymoczko 20) One of the significant ways in which
we can understand this resistance is through the idea of “untranslatability” introduced to us
by Walter Benjamin and later on Homi Bhabha: the untranslatable nature of a translation is in
fact a point of resistance, a negation of complete integration and the will of the text to survive
on its own.
 Work cited

Benjamin, Walter. The task of the translator. Vol. 69. Illuminations, 1968.

Bhabha, Homi K. The location of culture. routledge, 2012.

Ciolkowski, Laura E. "Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: Colonial History, English Fiction,
and British Empire." Twentieth Century Literature 43.3 (1997): 339-359.

Hall, Catherine. White, male and middle class: Explorations in feminism and history. John
Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Marak, Caroline R., ed. Garo Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 2002.

Rhys, Jean. Wide sargasso sea. WW Norton & Company, 1982.

Thorpe, Michael. "" The Other Side": Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre." Ariel: A Review of
International English Literature8.3 (1977).

Tymoczko, Maria. "Post-colonial writing and literary translation." Post-colonial translation:

Theory and practice(1999): 19-40.