Intro
As good postcolonialist Shmoopers, we can't mention Jane Eyre without bringing up Jean Rhys' retelling of Bertha Mason's story, Wide Sargasso Sea. And honestly, what's more postcolonial than a novel that attempts not just to re-write a canonical English novel, but also to re-frame that very novel with its suppressed colonialist roots?
Wide Sargasso Sea takes Bertha and gives her a voice, a history, heck—an entirely new name (in Rhys' version, Antoinette is Bertha's real name; Rochester renames her as just one of his acts of unpleasantness). In Rhys' novel, Antoinette/Bertha enters what is more or less an arranged marriage, a contractual agreement between Rochester's family and hers. You also get to see how Rochester really just doesn't get the Caribbean or Antoinette, even though he's totally willing to sleep with their black servant.
But it's not all from Antoinette's/Bertha's point of view. The novel—like so many contemporary novels (Rhys was way ahead of her time)—switches between Antoinette's and Rochester's perspectives. Adding Rochester's perspective not only allows Rhys to avoid "'suppressing"' a character (as Bronte did with Bertha); it lets Rhys toggle back and forth between the "'oppressor"' (Rochester) and the "'oppressed"' (Antoinette and the other women in the novel).
Quote
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, 'because she pretty like pretty self' Christophine said.
She was my father's second wife, far too young for him they thought, and, worse still, a Martinique girl. When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed—all belonged to the past.)
Another day I heard her talking to Mr. Luttrell, our neighbour and her only friend. 'Of course they have their own misfortunes. Still waiting for this compensation the English promised when the Emancipation Act was passed. Some will wait for a long time.'
Analysis
This is a super-important passage and not just because it's taken from the beginning of the novel (although that helps). In these paragraphs, Rhys shows you the root of Antoinette's troubles. Yeah sure, it's the colonial past, but it's more than that, too.
It's the fact that Antoinette and her family—especially her mother, who's Creole—exist in this weird netherworld, without a community. They're lower than the whites ("'We were not in their ranks"') and they don't belong with the blacks, as their Jamaican black servant Christophine insinuates when she makes a small dig at Antoinette's "'pretty"' mother.
From Antoinette's mother, we also learn that it's been some time since the Emancipation Act, or the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and the English are supposed to compensate ex-slaveowners for their financial "'loss"' (aka, their freed slaves) but haven't done anything about it yet. What's more, we get that Antoinette, her mother and the rest of her family are—like their neighbor Mr. Luttrell—part of the fading, colonial order, when they used to own plantations and slaves
We know what you're thinking—aren't Antoinette/Bertha and her mother supposed to represent the "'colonized"'? How can they be both the "'colonized"' and the "'colonizer"'? See, this is why postcolonialists like this book: it shows how labels like "'colonizer"' and "'colonized"' really aren't that simple. You can have someone like Antoinette's mother who's both because of her mixed ancestry. Take that for complexity, Miss Brontë!
So that brings us to the whole idea of colonial mimicry a la Homi Bhabha: Antoinette's mother is perfectly poised to be that character who's "'almost the same, but not quite"' (so, for that matter, is Antoinette.) Her mother speaks in perfect Queen's English to Mr. Luttrell, but what she says highlights her outsider status. She speaks about the ex-plantation owners as "'they"' and doesn't include herself or Mr. Luttrell in that "'they,"' even though they were both part of the plantation business (she married into it; Mr. Luttrell was a plantation owner too). As a result, she compels us to view the other slave owners as pitiable—first, because they're actually waiting for compensation, and second, because the whole system has turned on them.
But, of course, we're not really supposed to pity them. What's interesting is Antoinette's mother's tone: how she acts as if she's above all these "'misfortunes."' A Creole woman who acts superior to white slave-owners? How dare she! Who does she think she is? A postcolonialist??!