Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

WOMEN OF COLOUR: RECONTEXTUALISING ‘OTHERNESS’
ine, but which is also illustrative of the negative stereotypical portrayal of
the Caribbean woman: base, lascivious and cursed, not to mention savage
and untameable. 46 A salient example of this damaging stereotype is seen
when Jane, the narrator, describes Bertha Mason:
A fierce cry seemed to give the lie to her favorable report: the clothed
hyena, rose up, and stood tall on its hind feet. [...] The maniac bellowed:
she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors.
I recognized well that purple face—those bloated features. [...] The
lunatic sprang and grappled his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his
cheek: they struggled. She was a big woman, in stature almost equalling
her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest—more
than once she almost throttled him, athletic as he was. 47
The Antillian woman is presented as fierce, and animalistic. She is not
human. In Jane’s eyes, and thus the reader’s imaginings, she is a savage.
The severity of Jane’s description coincides with Rochester’s condemnation
of his wife, Bertha. He celebrates her beauty, but only tongue-in-cheek,
pointing out that it hides negative traits. Describing how he first met Bertha,
Rochester recalls:
Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was
no lie. I found her a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram; tall,
Lowndes, 1774); Phillips Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence
in Jamaica from 1801-1805 (Kingston, Institute of Jamaica, 1966); See
also: Gikandi (1996), op. cit., chapter 4 ‘Imperial Femininity: Reading Gender
in the Culture of Colonialism’ pp. 119-156.
46
For discussion and examples of this image see: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(1847) The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. ed. by Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York, Norton, 1996. pp. 472-784), p. 674;
See: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New
Haven, Yale UP, 1979); Gayatri Spivak’s essay ‘Three Women’s Texts’ in The
Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 269-272; See
also: Evelyn O’Calaghan, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West
Indian Fiction by Women (London, Macmillan, 1993); Evelyn O’Callaghan,
‘The Bottomless Abyss: ‘Mad’ Women in Some Caribbean Novels’, in Bulletin
of Eastern Caribbean Affairs 11, no. 1 (1985), pp. 45-58; Evelyn O’Callaghan
‘Interior Schisms Dramatised: The Treatment of the ‘Mad’ Woman in the
Work of some Female Caribbean Novelists’, in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean
Women Writers and Literature ed. by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine
Savory Fido (Trenton, Africa World Press, 1990), pp. 89-110; O’Callaghan
‘Engineering the Female Subject: Erna Brodber’s Myal. Paper presented at
the Caribbean Women Writers Conference, St. Augustine, Trinidad, 24-27
April.
47
Charlotte Brontë, op. cit., p. 674.
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •