FROM JANE EYRE TO XUELA CLAUDETTE RICHARDSON: Reading Charlotte Bronte Through Jamaica Kincaid

While academic convention has read the postcolonial riposte to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) in and through Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), this chapter proposes to document Jamaica Kincaid’s work as an adaptation of Bronte’s novel and one that exposes the intersectionality of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and gender/sexuality in the making of the Victorian world. The term “autobiography” is embedded in both titles, both protagonists are, for all practical purposes, orphaned, and exposed early on in their lives, to completely loveless conditions, and both are angry, rebellious women. However, where Kincaid’s protagonist (Xuela Claudette Richardson) gives free rein to her anger in rejecting outright any and all conventions of romantic and familial/maternal love, monogamous conjugality, marriage, gendered identities, and Christian sentiment, Bronte’s titular protagonist navigates the rebellious streak in her nature through the echo chamber of the native character, Bertha Mason. This chapter builds up to the argument that Xuela is who Bertha would have been had she lived and had she not been confined to the attic, as Bertha was by Edward Rochester-a powerful native force that endures even as figures representative of the colonizer, the possessive patriarch, the colonial sycophant, and the monogamy-bound jealous woman wane in the face of her power.