Ghostly Presences: James Potter Lockhart and Jane Maxwell Lockhart in Jean Rhys’s Writing

After the Honorable James Potter Lockhart died on 22 October 1837, aged sixty-three, his widow, Jane Maxwell Lockhart, “[e]rected” a tablet “SACRED” to his “MEMORY” in St George’s Anglican Church in Roseau, Dominica. The tablet highlighted his high office in the colony—President of the Legislative Council, the upper house in the local parliament, comprised of nominees of the governor of the Leeward Islands—and noted that “[h]e administered the government four times.”¹ This was as Acting Lieutenant-Governor. As a child and adolescent Jean Rhys (1890–1979), the great-granddaughter of James and Jane Lockhart, would look at heirloom portraits of them in the dining room of the home of her grandmother on the Geneva estate. In Slavery and the Culture of Taste Simon Gikandi observes that in the plantation slavery period (when these portraits would have been commissioned) “the presencing of virtue and rank depended on portraiture, ‘considered as the public commemoration of greatness.’”² Rhys left an anguished unpublished account in her Black Exercise Book of the late 1930s of her experience of looking at the portraits, for this act of looking brought out the conflictedness of her feelings about slavery, its legacies, and the gendered performance of whiteness. The account of the experience in her posthumously published autobiography is far more anodyne. “I tried to write about Geneva and the Geneva garden in Wide Sargasso Sea,” Rhys explains in Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979). “At one time the estate must have been very prosperous but now, what with one thing and another, the profits were small. … On top of everything else some of the Lockharts had made eccentric wills.”³ Themes of the vignette “Geneva” in Smile Please are family silences and the fallibility of family memory, particularly around the Lockhart generations that included James, Jane, and their children. In September 2012, I unexpectedly discovered a cache of letters by James, Jane, William Brade Lockhart (James’s eldest son by his first marriage), and William King (James’s largest creditor at his death). I also located documents related to Jane and seven of James’s children’s legal complaint against King’s and James Parkinson’s work as executors of his proven will. The fortunes of James and Jane Lockhart haunt unpublished materials Rhys calls “Creole,” aspects of Rhys’s representation of old Cosway and Annette Cosway, later Mason, in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Smile Please. The letters, legal documents, slave registration and slave compensation records, and letters by James’s friend Alexander Dalrymple suggest that the combination of “misfortunes,” “compensation,” and “Nelson’s Rest” on the opening page of Wide Sargasso Sea; “a hut and a bit of land for herself”; emancipation, means and property; Bel-Ami; and the idea of a cross-generational reach of privation⁴ may point to what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok would term a crypt in the Lockhart family memory. They theorize that across generations family secrets may be “preserved in a crypt within language.”⁵ Abraham writes of what he terms the phantom: “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left in us by the secrets of others.” The “words used by the phantom to carry out its return … are often the very words that rule an entire family’s history.”⁶ He insists that haunted language “constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm.”⁷

In “The Locked Heart: The Creole Family Romance of Wide Sargasso Sea,” Peter Hulme argues that an examination of “local” West Indian particularities in Wide Sargasso Sea demands that the novel be read “as a reworking of the materials from Jane Eyre inflected by the received traditions of a planter ‘family history.’ In other words, literary production is viewed here less as a matter of individual creativity than as a transgenerational formation from ‘event’ to ‘family memory’ to ‘literary text.’”⁸ Drawing on new archival research and the concept of the crypt, I develop a finely grained reading...