Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishness

Returning to the much-noted relationship between Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and noting the central role of architectural structures in both texts, this essay analyses the ways in which the later novel 'revisits' and 'reinhabits' its forerunner. It is argued that the symbolic architecture described by the texts is inseparable from the discursive practices of the 'imperial archive.' Following Derrida's analysis, however, 'archive' names not a consolidated synchronic signifying order but a series of 'consignations' which remain temporally unintegrated. Indeed, the archive works against its own principle of order in ways which are acted out by the structural 'decomposition' (and 'self-immolation') of Brontë's text, and further exacerbated by Rhys's revisiting of it. If Brontë's text performs the vicissitudes of the imperial (and patriarchal) archive, Rhys's offers an allegory of a postcolonial revisitation haunted by its own ambivalent relationship to the literary archives of empire.