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Jamaica Kincaid and the Canon: In Dialogue With "Paradise Lost" and "Jane Eyre." - West Indian writer; British novels
MELUS, Summer, 1998 by Diane Simmons
If Lucy is Lucifer, her mother remains god, and, in a sense the daughter, a young West Indian au pair recently arrived in a North American city, repeats Lucifer's defiant gesture. She has set up her own new world far from her mother's domain. This is not paradise regained; the harsh northeastern winter contrasted to Caribbean warmth and lushness shows how much Lucy has lost. Still she is granted more success than Milton's Lucifer, for in the new world she seems to have some hope of successfully challenging the creator's power, gaining the kind of vision and control her mother had at home. Lucy seems to stand outside and above, able to see into other lives without being seen herself. At the close of the book Lucy has, to a certain extent, managed to escape the sway of her god-like mother, to come into her own powers. Her Lucy, unlike Milton's Lucifer, remains human and hopeful, if still waiting to find a life to go with her new freedom and power. But though Lucy no longer seems to be obsessed by guilt or to agonize over her fall from grace, she cannot forget the lost glory, or the all-powerful mother, "large, like a god ... not an ordinary human being but something from an ancient book" (150).
While Kincaid stays within the framework of Milton's story in her identifications with Eve and Lucifer, and her connection of the mother and colonial authority with Milton's God, she takes a step outside that frame in her collection of surrealistic short stories, At the Bottom of the River. Milton never challenges God's role as creator or imagines his characters outside God's creation; he is content to leave paradise a site of punishment. But Kincaid's narrator sees that her only hope lies in imaginatively creating a new paradise, one that no longer revolves around cold, narcissistic power. Here the protagonist, like Satan, finds herself in a "pit." She emerges by retelling the story of paradise, searching again for a garden, but one that is not the creation of a narcissistic power which demands that one yearn for that which one can never have. In the collection's last story, Kincaid explores a dreamscape which seems to represent both the lost childhood and the lost Africa. Kincaid's paradise is not Milton's Eden, a place that is already the site of a power struggle. Rather she creates a landscape where things exist for their own sakes, not yet having come to the attention of any power interests, not yet worked into any system of values which can then be used in a scheme of domination:
And in this world were many things blessed with unquestionable truth and purpose and beauty. There were steep mountains, there were valleys, there were seas, there were plains of grass, there were deserts, there were rivers, there were forests, there were vertebrates and invertebrates, there were mammals, there were reptiles, there were creatures of the dry land and the water, and there were birds. And they lived in this world not yet divided, not yet examined, not yet numbered, and not yet dead. I looked at this world as it revealed itself to me--how new, how new--and I longed to go there. (At the Bottom of the River 77)
