 Quickly on to Sadie Watson. So Sadie, it's over to you. Thank you very much, Amara. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm really pleased to have been asked to chair the next two papers of this session focusing on literature and music, respectively. My name is Sadie Watson and I'm a research fellow based at Moeller in London, but I also sit on the Society's Research Committee. And in that role, I would like to echo the previous chair's supportive comments on the society's renew commitment to funding, supporting and presenting research on legacies of colonialism and empire. So our first paper in the session looks at Jean Riss's book, Wideside Gasso C, based, of course, on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, written more than 100 years before. This paper is given by Dr Linda Grant, who has taught at Royal Holloway University of London, and in both the English and Classics departments at Birkbeck and Queen Mary, with a research focus on discourses of love and the erotic with a particular interest in women's writing. As most of you will know, of course, Linda is also our governance officer at the Society and has helped organize the event today. So she's had a busy time. Linda, I'm going to pass over to you. Thank you. Thanks very much, Sadie. And yeah, traditionally just try and get the PowerPoint working. Okay. So why talk on literature when the Society of Antiquities is primarily interested in material history? Well, here's a quotation from Margaret Busby, who is the chair of the 2020 Book of Price panel. Margaret says, the best novels often prepare our society for valuable conversations and not just about the inequities and dilemmas of the world. So I originally was going to say, I'd like to see this talk on Why Tech SoC is deeply complementary to and in dialogue with all of the other wonderful papers that we've heard and we're still to hear. But having listened to the papers, I'm actually quite surprised at how many deep connections there are between what I'm going to say about a novel and some of the things that people have been talking about, particularly I think with Catherine's research. Now there are many theoretical and critical approaches to reading this book. But what I'll be focusing on today are the ways in which it positions itself as a postcolonial text, and the uses of what I've called symbolic geographies. That is the way it uses houses, gardens, forests, a church and the sea to construct meaning. So a little bit of context, first of all, just to remind ourselves why Tech SoC is a prequel to a postcolonial reception off and a response to Jane Eyre written in 1847. It tells the story of the first Mrs Rochester, known as Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, but renamed as Antoinette Cosway in Why Tech SoC, who is also of course the iconic mad woman in the attic. SoC thus reopens a narrative that had been completed in Jane Eyre. Now Jean Rhys on reading Jane Eyre was particularly struck by the mutedness of Bertha Mason, the cruel heiress to whom Rochester is married, whose diary he takes and who he then looks away in the attic of Thornfield Hall. So was this subsidiary story to the larger one of Jane Eyre's own journey that sparked Rhys' imagination, not least because she herself had a somewhat shared heritage with Bertha Mason. So Jean Rhys was born in 1890 on the Caribbean island of Dominica to a Welsh father, sorry, who arrived there as a ship's doctor and a white Creole mother. So here means a white naturalized Caribbean citizen, though it's a slippery term which can also be used to Caribbean people of African descent, as well as being applied to animals and plants imported by colonialists. It certainly has suspect beginnings and is a marker of colonialism's distaste for the hybridity which it itself engenders, but which it finds fearful for its very uncontainability. So Jean Rhys did work on wide sagacity in 1939, but burned the manuscript when it was half completed. She returned to it in 1949, and an earlier version of the first part talking about Antoinette's childhood was published in 1964 in the literary journal Art and Literature. She finally finished book in March 1966, and it was published in October that year, and won the Royal Society of Literature Award. So colonial literature has been theorized as a writing back from the colonized or formally colonized so called margins to the Imperial Center, often meaning a metropolitan center. It's a broad term encompassing literature from about or written by authors with heritages from Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America, amongst others. The center may be located in Europe, the US, or any other center of empire, as well as across Britain. More recently post colonial literature has also been seen as overtime, changing what the center even means. So it's an active and evolving rather than a passive taxonomy. So this is our book, wide sagacity takes us from the decaying and ruined slave work sugar plantations of Jamaica, which some of us have just been hearing about directly into the heartland of empire, Thornfield Hall, the big house of Jane Eyre that represents wealth class patriarchy. The recent self was aware of being a colonial voice and unsettling established literary and imperial hierarchies can be seen from a letter that she wrote to a friend in 1949. When she says, I think of calling it the first Mrs Rochester with profound apologies to Charlotte Bronte and a deep curtsy to. What we can see here is a mix of humility and reverence given to the canonicity of Bronte's position, but also a kind of apologetic acknowledgement that her book will serve to de center and destabilize Jane Eyre, which was also such a source of inspiration to Reese, why does I guess I see knowingly calls out the extent to which Jane Eyre pushes the voice of the Creole eras out of Bronte story and makes no mention of the source of her wealth, which serves to maintain the status of Thornfield. In reopening a canonical text to Reese is interrogating the very concept of the cannon, the extent to which it can ever be said to be finished, and particularly draws attention to what it excludes. In this sense, Reese anticipates Edward Said's well known chapter in culture and imperialism 1993, which unpacks her Jane Austen's Manfield Mansfield Park is remarkably casual about the fact that the Bertram's wealth comes from slave work sugar plantations in the world. However, and the reason why I've chosen this book to discuss today is that why is I guess I see isn't a simple or straightforward vindication of post colonialist and feminist sense sense of subjectivity. It's far more ambiguous, troubling and complicated. And it's this radical ambivalence that makes it such a rich book to work with and to think with. Once I guess I see following Jane Eyre is set in the 1830s after the 1833 slave Emancipation Act on the opening page. Antoinette hears her mother talking about her neighbors and sorry I've just realized I can't see my own quotes because I've got zoom open. Yeah, we just move that out of way. Antoinette's mother says of course they have their own misfortunes, still waiting for this compensation the English promised when the Emancipation Act is passed. Now this is a reference as we've heard from Catherine's paper to the vast compensation paid by the British government to British Caribbean slave owners for the loss of their property when slaves were freed. In these places Antoinette's family, her father, Mr Cosway was a slave owner, and her now widowed mother and act is impoverished as the sugar plantations have fallen into decay and disuse their economic model crashed now that they can no longer run on slave labor. Annette herself is, quote, the widow of a slave owner, the daughter of a slave owner. Her father then marries Mr Mason is the father of the Richard Mason from his first marriage to be meeting Jane a wealthy man who's come out to Jamaica from England. And as the guests at their wedding assert, he came to make money, as they all do, some of the biggest states are going cheap. Mr Mason is essentially an English speculator, who we learn has also owns an estate on Trinidad and property in Antigua, and he intends to import labor from what is termed the East Indies to work them. It is Mason who gives Antoinette her diary and who arranges her faithful marriage to Mr Rochester. So Antoinette's status as the daughter of slave owners problematizes some of the more positive readings of this book, which sees it as a bold critique of imperialism and patriarchy. She's deeply embedded within the structures of imperialism and exploitation, a challenging position, and one which restreats with softness and intelligence. She refuses to look away from the realities of the colonial condition. There are also more complicated delineations of identities in the book. So the very opening lines of this book and this is in Antoinette's voice. They say when troubles come close ranks. And so the white people did, but we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, because she pretty like pretty self. Now those phrases, the English and the white people are used as exclusionary categories, Antoinette and her family are not often, but they're not either part of the group of the disapproving Jamaican ladies. One of the colonial ideas which this book resists is that the terms the Caribbean or the West Indies can have any meaningful cultural significance. In fact, the individual islands have their own particular characteristics, their own cultural and colonial histories, their own indigenous peoples with different languages and different land and seascapes. In the opening section of the book set in Jamaica, we see that both the black servants and the white British disapprove Antoinette's mother, who comes from Martinique, an island colonized by the French. Christopher II, who is given to Antoinette as a wedding present by Mr Cosway, is regarded with suspicion by the Jamaican servants because she's also from Martinique. And as a child, Antoinette, quote, couldn't always understand her patois songs. Antoinette goes on, she says her songs were not like Jamaican songs, and she was not like the other women. Later again in the book, one of the servants tells Rochester that the English and French fought like cats and dogs on the island. So the contours of colonialism are both fraught, but also multiple. So from its opening, why do I guess I see complicates racial categories. Antoinette's family are displaced from both the white English and the black Jamaicans. As a child, as a child tier during he says to Antoinette before her mother remarries, quote, real white people, they got gold money. So skin color is only provisionally a meaningful signifier within the book, and is inextricably bound up with financial and economic status. One of the pressing psychological anxieties of Antoinette throughout the book is this question of where does she belong. And she says to Rochester. So between you, I often wonder who I am, and where is my country, and where do I belong, and why was I ever born at all. This is a book which invites us to feel sympathy, deep sympathy for Antoinette and her mother and it, you may both be oppressed by men, but which also challenges us by having the same women benefit from even feel nostalgia for a time made secure and comfortable for them, because of the institution of slavery. Now one of the most traumatic incidences for Antoinette is when a group of former slaves burned down the plantation house at Calibri, a beloved child at home. On the symbolic level, this looks forward of course to the end of Jane Eyre and the fire which destroys Thornfield, another house financed by the profits of slavery by Antoinette's dairy which is given to Rochester, and actually has a figure on it in Widesack SFC, 30,000 pounds, half of Mr Mason's great fortune. But the material traces of slavery are everywhere in this book. We see it in the landscape where the estate before it's burned has gone wild. Now that it is no longer slave tended. And Antoinette says, our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible garden of Eden, the tree of life grew there. Gone wild, all Calibri estate had gone wild, like the garden, gone to bush. We see it also in the names of places such as the village on the honeymoon island, ominously named massacre, and the ruins of plantation houses either abandoned or burned scar the landscape. We also, of course, see it in the people. When the malicious Daniel, for example, meets with Rochester, part of Daniel's surely legitimate spite is against his father, Mr Cosway, also, of course, Antoinette's father. And he says, my father, old Cosway, with his white marble tablet in the English church at Spanish town for all to see it have a crest on it and a motto in Latin and words in big black letters. I never know such lies pious they write up, beloved by all, not a word about the people you buy and sell like cattle. And we've already been inside this church when Rochester recalls his own marriage there. And he describes it as with marble memorial tablets on the walls, commemorating the virtues of the last generation of planters, all benevolent, all slave owners, all resting in peace. And Mr Cosway, we're told repeatedly impregnated his female slaves. And though he frees Daniel's mother when she's pregnant, no kind of consent is clearly possible within the bonds of slavery. When Daniel goes to his father asking for some money to buy shoes, Cosway mocks him and calls him. What's your name. I can't remember all their names, he says, it's too much to expect of me, dismissing but not disclaiming his innumerable mixed race illegitimate children born to his enslaved women. Beneath this almost matter of fact retelling in the book lies a depth of sexualized violence and violation, which leaves its legacies in the children of slaves, and in the case of Antoinette in the child of a slave owner. One of the interesting developments in critical approaches to post-colonial literature is the analysis of the effects of the psychological trauma of colonialism. Now, a phrase that is repeated throughout this book in various different terms is, but that was a long time ago. Nobody remembers now. There's no wild ignorance that permeates the text, but it's perhaps more accurately seen as a psychological repression, as a response to the psychic scarring of colonialism and slavery. When, for example, Antoinette tells Rochester that the name of the honeymoon village is massacre, he asks, and who was massacred their slaves. Antoinette is audibly shocked, not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now. Later again, when Rochester gets lost and stumbles across the ruins of a stone house in the middle of a forest, he asks Baptiste about the road to it. There was a road here once, where did it lead to? No road, he said. But I saw it, a pave road, like the French made on the islands. No road. There was a road here sometime. No road, he repeated obstinately. In most cases, we're left not knowing what happened in the past in either the village or that stone house, and that very silence becomes an ominous portent, alighting our imagination to all the things that might have happened in that haunted landscape. The kind of refusal is not a reconciliation with a troubled past. And instead, it's precisely this silence, this unsayability, which allows the wounds of history to linger and fester. What this book shows is that the institutions of empire, particularly slavery, have despoiled and corrupted nearly all human relations, and that deliberate forgetting is a symptom of unhealed trauma, a repression, rather than a therapeutic move towards reconciliation. So what about the title? So this is a novel where place is deeply significant. Modelled on Jane Eyre, Antoinette makes her journey from the dilapidated plantation house to the Convent School first in Spanish town, then to Grombois on the unnamed honeymoon island, and then to the attic, of course, in Thornfield. But if we take a step back, the Sargasso Sea is a part of the North Atlantic, and it's thus inextricably linked to the slave ship routes. There's a myth that somewhat like the Bermuda Triangle, that it's a dangerous place for shipping, which could get tangled in the weed floating on its surface and become trapped. Now Rhys wrote a poem in the voice of Rochester, just as she was finishing writing White Sargasso Sea, which is helpful here. So Rochester's voice in this poem says, perhaps love would have smiled then, shown us the way across that sea. They say it's strewn with wrecks and weed infested, few dare it, few are still, escape. So the Sargasso Sea figures in the book as the uncrossable and nearly unnavigable distances between people. In the poem, it's between Antoinette and Rochester, but also figuratively between the representatives of the colonial subject Antoinette and the Imperial Centre Rochester, who briefly appreciates the seductive enchantment and beauty of the island, as well as of Antoinette herself, before rejecting both. Rochester says, everything is too much, too much blue, too much purple, too much green, the flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. But the sea, the Sargasso Sea doesn't only lie between the protagonists, but can also be seen as representing the goals constructed by colonialism itself. That have twisted, distorted and corrupted so many of the relationships in this book, whether that's between slave owning Mr Cosway and the mixed race and dispossessed children he's engendered, or the ex slave community, divided by loyalties, resentments and mutual suspicions. The sea is wide for almost everyone in this book and almost uncrossable. Now we've been concentrating on colonial subjectivity in our discussion of Antoinette, but this is also a book openly receptive to feminist theory and I just very quickly want to talk a little bit about that. So Antoinette is a woman who is disoriented, displaced, dispossessed and disenfranchised, despite having the privileges of being a slave owner's daughter and a wealthy man's stepdaughter. The £30,000 that Mr Mason leaves her is appropriated by his son, Richard Mason, in order to purchase Rochester, and the money is transferred in total to her husband with nothing left for the security of Antoinette itself. When Rochester later rejects her, it's in terms all too frequently applied to women. She is intemperate and unchaste, quote, words that she internalizes when in the attic. And he's all too eager to accept the scurrilous stories that Daniel tells about Antoinette. Her other faults in his eyes are her, quote, madness and her foreignness, again qualities that frequently gendered feminine in literary terms. Even when admiring Antoinette's beauty, Rochester thinks long, sad, dark alien eyes, cruel, pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either. In a series of transactions, Antoinette is passed through main hands her father, Mr Mason, Richard Mason, Rochester, who doesn't just marry her and take her money, but renames her Bertha Mason as another gesture of control and possession. So what we can see are a series of psychic blows, which which shatter Antoinette's sense of identity, already fragile from her unstable position within the complicated colonial hierarchy, her sense of colonial disposition, where she's not allowed to belong either wholly to Jamaica, or to the England she's heard of, but in which she doesn't really believe. For one of the paradoxes created by colonialism in this book is that Antoinette seems to long for an emotional affiliation with the black characters in the book. Christopher becomes a kind of surrogate mother to her. And in the convent school, Antoinette wants to do her hair like Helen, who appears to be mixed race. When Helen explains what to do, Antoinette says, Yes, but Helen mind does not look like yours, whatever I do. And Helen, her eyelashes flickered, she turned away too polite to say the obvious thing. Earlier in the book, we have a poignant image of the potent effects of the legacies of slavery on two young girls, Antoinette and Tia, the daughters respectively of slave owner and enslaved. After the burning of the plantation house, Antoinette sees her playmate and runs towards her quote, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been. But tier picks up a jagged rock and throws it at Antoinette. And quotation from Antoinette, I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up, she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself like in a looking glass. So as mirror images of each other of each other, the two traumatized young girls are both interchangeable and also somehow always divided. So to conclude then, this is a book that is haunted in all kinds of ways. There are the spectres of slavery in the ruined plantation houses, the abandoned sugar works and the water wheels which haven't turned in years. There are the overgrown colonial roads that once led somewhere and are now denied. There are the descendants of slave owners and slaves, whose parents are memorialised in Latin tablets and the English church in the former case, or a mind or remembered for being the vulnerable objects of male slave owners sexual desire in the latter. But Antoinette is also likened to a ghost at various points in the book. And she always feels like someone displaced in both time and space. She's particularly at the start of her marriage, does she does she seem to experience happiness. And that is ephemeral and fleeting. All too soon, she's wandering the corridors of Thornfield at night, afraid to look about her in case she sees the ghost of which she has heard Grace Paul and others speak. This suggests that Antoinette, in her incarnation as the mad woman in the attic, is herself an embodiment of a colonial history that was certainly more or less airbrushed out of Jane Eyre, and which is still problematically understood today. Certainly there have been scholarly responses to this book, which note that it is still written in the service of a white woman's experience, however much her subject position is inflected by colonial discourse, and that's certainly true. But I say that that's part of Reese's authenticity. She doesn't appropriate a black perspective, and she complicates and broadens what we understand white colonial experience to be. By writing empire and slavery back into a canonical book like Jane Eyre, Whitesug Assay see prizes open one version of history, showing it to be radically incomplete, and instead suggests that the ghost of our colonial past may well have been locked away in this figurative attic, but that it is still alive, still potent and still able to wander the corridors of our presence. Thank you. I'm turning myself on and off. Sorry, that was wonderful, Linda. Thank you very much. Really fascinating paper. And there aren't many questions in the chat, so that means I get to use my chair's prerogative and ask the first one as well. I love the quote that you used from Reese at the very beginning about saying her book was a deep courtesy to Bronte. I found that quite moving actually. And I just wondered how, how you think traditional readers of Bronte might have might have viewed Reese's book and your work actually that you're doing now. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I think one of the things about the time at which Reese is writing so 1966 is is a really interesting time or if we think about, you know, what is happening in Britain. The Empire Windrush has already arrived. We certainly have kind of some male black writers who are starting to write about colonialism. So we have somebody like B.S. and Paul, for example, from Trinidad, we have Sam Salvin, you know, who's who's writing about, I think it's Jamaicans in London. And one of the things that I think Reese does is she's very conscious of the fact that she's writing both as a white subject of colonialism, which is quite a kind of rare perspective to take. But she's also very, very conscious of the female status, I think of her characters as well. And anybody who's kind of read, you know, any other books by Jean Reese, there's very much this idea of the sort of the Reese woman, who is always somebody who's very fragile, and yet strangely strong. I mean, there's almost a kind of glamorous victimization about the kind of women that she writes about. So to that extent, you can kind of see how, you know, readers of Jane Eyre, and to some extent, it depends obviously on how we receive Jane Eyre. You can see how readers of Jane Eyre could actually, you know, absorb what's happening here. Because in some ways, Antoinette has, you know, she had Jenny does in some ways kind of reflect Jane's, although it's almost in the inverse direction. So whereas Jane is obviously moving towards that idea of, you know, some kind of kind of selfhood, Antoinette is kind of moving in the opposite direction. But one of the really interesting things, just to finish off on that, that I think is that the book doesn't end with the fire at Thornfield. It ends with Antoinette dreaming about the fire at Thornfield. And it ends with her saying, so now I know what I'm here to do, but we don't quite know what that is. So there's a really interesting relationship between the two. But we can, on one hand, think, you know, yes, of course, you know, she burns down Thornfield and she jumps to her death. But there's also a kind of openness that perhaps she doesn't die at the end of Widesirk SOC. And perhaps there is, you know, something, if not hopeful, at least kind of open-ended about her fate. Brilliant. Thank you very much. It's fascinating stuff. But I've got a couple of questions that I'm going to have to ask one, I'm afraid, because we've got a minute left. I'll go with the one that pops in the box first from John Hines. How comfortable can we be treating Mr. Rochester as conventional or representative of any particular group? Yeah, and that's a really interesting question again. And one of the things about the way in which Rochester is represented, on one hand, we can kind of see him as, you know, being the kind of patriarchal figure. And the way that, you know, he renames his wife and he sleeps with the black servant and, you know, and all of that kind of thing is going on. And yet at the same time, he also represents a younger generation who actually isn't kind of, you know, on board with the whole slavery thing. I mean, he talks about, you know, the planters. I mean, he's kind of, he is upset at the idea of planters memorials saying that they all rest in peace. So he is, he is part of that kind of, you know, abolition generation to some extent, ideologically. And yet what we see, you know, when he's actually in Jamaica is that while he has the potential to kind of open up to this idea of the sort of the magic and the nature of both Jamaica itself and to Antoinette, he almost deliberately also closes it down. And I do think that, you know, again, there's kind of lots of different ways that we can think about him. And, and again, you know, this idea of radical ambivalence in the book, I think is really the kind of the keynote of the book. So, so yes, there's a doubleness, I think about Rochester there. Fantastic. Well, thank you on behalf of everyone listening and watching again, Linda, for that really great paper. Thank you.