Humour and Subversion: D.M. Thomas's Charlotte v/s Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Koestler, one of the major theorists argues that humour is motivated by aggressive and/or apprehensive, self-defensive or assaulting impulses. The study of humour is significant and poignant in the fact that it is interdisciplinary in nature which draws insights from philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, film, and literature.  One of the oldest and most developed theories of humour was adopted by Kant and refined by Schopenhauer which states that humour happens when there is an incongruity between what we expect and what actually happens. The incongruity theory states that humour is perceived at the moment of realization of incongruity between a concept involved in a certain situation and the real objects thought to be in some relation to the concept.

In literature, humour can often be perceived in the form of satire to ridicule particular people, themes, prejudiced conceptions or objects of focus in a particular text in order to point out inherent problems or to provide a deviant reality so as to instigate or bring about change. Subversion, parody or appropriation are forms of satire which take an original text and alters it to make a new meaning. Rather than simply repackaging the themes, issues or characters of the original texts they attempt to ridicule their accepted readings and canonical interpretations.

Wide Sargasso Sea, the magnum opus of Jean Rhys is designated as a subvertive reading which succeeds in breaking the master narrative, Jane Eyre. The work breaks open the fissures in the canonicity of Jane Eyre specifically and the British imperial project more generally by giving the suppressed Bertha Mason a voice, giving her a different name (Antoinette), relocating the action to the West Indies, and changing the frame of reference. Though a dismantling of the European canon, Rhys's text itself has now been amounted the status of a canon often endorsed as the highly sophisticated example of postcolonial subversion.

This paper is an attempt to liberate the circle of criticism from the clutches of canonising paradigm, be it imperial, colonial or postcolonial. With a view to maim and to undermine the universal  acquiescence enjoyed by Wide Sargasso Sea, the work purports to focus on a meagrely mentioned rewriting of Jane Eyre, Charlotte penned by D. M. Thomas who gives a subtitle The final journey of Jane Eyre to his text evidently conferring it the status of a sequel.

This paper studies how D.M. Thomas uses the basic elements of Jane Eyre, as antithetical to Wide Sargasso Sea, to tease the tangle of Victorian melodrama into a new form. By focusing on his transporting the action to modern day Martinique, the paper examines changing patterns of slavery and colonialism. An attempt will also be made to investigate how he has pursued the unforgettable characters of Jane and Rochester through time, starkly and unflinchingly exposing their sexual and moral actions for the modern reader. The paper highlights the touch of humour manifest in the way the author has freed the Victorianist text from the constraints of Victorian modesty and subservience, attiring the modern "Jane Eyre" as sexually and politically enlightened. Humour is also involved in the alternative reading of what happened after the 'happily ever afters' in Jane Eyre as well as in the intertextual affiliations the text holds with its literary rival Wide Sargasso Sea. Hence, the inherent, congenital humour in the text is analysed as an extension of the deconstructive project to explore the gaps and silences of the original canonical text, Jane Eyre and to augment the chasm and reticence of the canonical subvertive text, Wide Sargasso Sea.