Edward Rochester and the margins of masculinity in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.

What makes the retreat back to "England" impossible is that Rochester has seen and lived enough in the West Indies to have recognized the "truth" of the game of legal and legitimate subjects under the Law, to know that he is not, and will never be, anything other than a subject who is haunted by the recognition that "Edward Rochester" was always-already "lost" before he was found in any ideological imagining. It is certainly no accident that his final passage in Part Two is marked by the presence of the same stream-of-consciousness, "insane" narrative flow that marks Antoinette's, though their voices are still quite distinct. The calm, rational Edward Rochester recognized and imagined within the English order remains, but only as an attempt to veil the "madness" and misrecognition which has come to the fore in the West Indies and which cannot be erased. As Friedman has suggested, Rhys's novel casts the credibility of "Edward Rochester" in doubt, but not because he has been rewritten as "...his own author [who]...creates a narrative in which he is no longer insufficient, in which he achieves mastery" (122), because he possesses the awareness that his attempts to do so ultimately lead him back to a position of insufficiency and "slavery." Though he will hide Antoinette/Bertha away in an "English" house, she will nonetheless remind him constantly of the fictive nature of this hiding, and of the identity he has created that is founded on keeping "her" hidden. Rochester's credibility is in doubt not just in the eyes of the reader, as Friedman maintains, but in his own eyes as well. When one approaches Bronte's text after reading Rhys's, this change makes it difficult for readers of Jane Eyre to position Rochester as a stock representative of the patriarchy, because he cannot see himself as such, even before his supposed emasculation/maiming during the Thornfield fire. At the end of Rhys's novel Edward is at the margins of Victorian masculinity precisely because he is aware of the fictive nature of the dominant narrative, though he is unable at this point to identify securely with any other imagining of himself. He has become like Sandi in that he is aware of his "marginal" position, but he is as yet unwilling to explore the potential for redefinition present in the aporias created by the recognition of insufficiency/lack, the possibility of a male subjectivity that does not participate fully in phallic economies.

Bronte's Edward will, however, move in this direction as Jane Eyre unfolds. Rhys's novel, in presenting the reader with a Rochester who has lost complete belief in the dominant narratives of male subjectivity, enables one to envision his character in a somewhat different light than one might be accustomed to, both before and after the burning of Thornfield by "Bertha." The Rochester that Rhys creates is not so much a wholesale revision of Bronte's existing creation as a reillumination and reemphasization of aspects that are present, though perhaps not stressed, in the Rochester of Jane Eyre. Reading Rhys's Rochester "first" allows for the recognition that Bronte's Edward Rochester, far from being a man who quite unproblematically occupies the position of Victorian patriarch and who retains this position after his inconveniently mad wife and obstacle to his freedom is eliminated, represents a man who is quite at odds with the dominant narrative of being an "English Gentleman" and who does not attempt to reenter this narrative after his position within it has been rendered untenable by Bertha/Antoinette's act of revenge.