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Counterfaiths: Religious Visual Culture and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

We remain part creole, part colonial, seeking many-ancestoried conclusions. Our tides flow down the river, meet a holy but not wholly receptive sea.

—Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 1974[1]

“Well, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else,” Jean Rhys, shortly before her death in 1979, said to David Plante, as he relates it in Difficult Women (1983).[2] Rhys cautioned that the story would sound familiar; however, she had told him “part of it, but not all” (Plante, Difficult Women, 47). The familiar part involved Rhys and her husband, Max, at their cottage in Devon, the stress of that time in her life, and how she, by that point, “quite gave up” on working on Wide Sargasso Sea, the Caribbean text that would mark her celebrated return to the literary scene in 1966, decades after her European, metropolitan novels of the thirties (48). Rhys related the trauma of Max’s death and how, after a bottle of wine, she would put on his RAF medals, step out on the porch and shout “Wings up! Wings up,” in perhaps an echo of the escape into theater she found as a young woman in Europe (48). “I think I must have been pretty nearly crazy at this time,” she confessed (48). But the new—and surprising—part comes at the end. Rhys recounted, as she also does in Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979), that she struck up a friendship with the local clergyman who came to visit her at her brother’s request. She found that she “liked him very much” and that he “didn’t talk of religion at all” (49). He returned “almost every week” (49). He listened to her as she related her fear and hatred of others and her fear of leaving her home. “Now,” Rhys continued to Plante, “this is what I never told you before, what I’ve never told anyone” (49):

He asked me one day if I would take Communion. I said I didn’t know if I believed. He said, “You were baptized, weren’t you?” I said yes. So the next time he came he came with Holy Communion, with the host, and I got down on my knees, stuck out my tongue, and he placed the host on it. And then, you know, I started to write, and I finished the novel. If there was any fairness in the world, I would have dedicated it to him, but of course I didn’t. (49–50)

If this, her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, has been frequently read to imagine the act of writing as empowered with the enchanting force and syncretic spiritualism of Obeah, Rhys more clearly drew from Christian religious visual culture, particularly the stained glass of Christian churches in Dominica and England, to significantly shape the novel’s narrative structure and its portrayal of female subjectivity amid imperial patriarchy.

Modernist writers saw in stained glass new possibilities for metaphor as well as literary form, particularly as they sought to explore and represent female spirituality amid overwhelmingly patriarchal religious traditions. In Trilogy (1944), H.D. poeticizes stained glass as imprisoning female spirituality. In “Tribute to the Angels,” the feminine power of the divine, Psyche:

is not shut up in a cave

like a Sibyl; she is not

imprisoned in leaden bars

in a coloured window;[3]

Preferring instead “the bare, clean / early colonial interior, / without stained-glass, picture, / image, or colour,” H.D. associates stained glass with the “medieval jumble // of pain-worship and death-symbol” that for her marked much of the European Christian inheritance (“The Walls Do Not Fall,” in Trilogy, 27). Turning to religious visual culture as a context for contesting ways of being religious—colored and leaden stained glass (the medieval Christian) versus “bare” and “clean” spaces (the “early colonial” Christian)—allows H.D. to explore how each kind of Christianity affects female spirituality. For her, stained glass visually encodes patriarchal imprisonment while an empty visual “without” signals freedom and openness. As Jane de Gay argues, Virginia Woolf similarly saw an imprisoning function in Christian stained glass. De Gay reads Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) and its description of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, as one where the ordering divisions of the colored windows are part of a structure “designed to control” and to “lay claim to what the institution sees as holy.”[4]

But for others such as Ronald Firbank the beauty and permanence of stained glass helped explore religious hope in the face of human mortality, while its form as parts assembled into a whole aligned with modernist concerns to seek coherence through the fragmentary. In Firbank’s Vainglory (1915), Mrs. Shamefoot hopes, with Lady Castleyard, to “erect . . . a window in some cathedral to their memory,” “a miracle of violet glass.”[5] The novel’s form as a sequence of collected vignettes preserved forever through Firbank’s writing reflects the formal structure of stained glass itself. Amid a wider “craze” of “commemorating” oneself with church stained glass, Mrs. Shamefoot seeks in such a window a kind of aesthetic immortality (76):

So intense was her desire to set up a commemorative window to herself that, when it was erected, she believed she must leave behind in it, for ever, a little ghost. And should this be so, then what joy to be pierced each morning with light; her body flooded through and through by the sun, or in the evening to glow with a harvest of dark colours, deepening into untold sadness with the night. . . . What ecstasy! It was the Egyptian sighing for his pyramid, of course. (20)

Modernist irony finally undercuts her religious sincerity as the thought of death darkens the window’s light. For Firbank, the frozen immortality suggested by stained glass is always tinged with sadness, an affective parallel to Vainglory’s quick movements from sincerity to the undercutting bite of ironic humor. Speaking of the same cathedral that would so inspire Rhys, Ely Cathedral, Mrs. Shamefoot exclaims, “Oh, Ely’s beautiful. But how sad!” (114). Unlike H.D.’s metaphorical prison or Woolf’s institutional control, Firbank’s sense of stained glass shaped his aesthetic and affective structures, allowing him to probe with sincerity and irony reigning British religious sensibilities, to ask whether their glory was, in the end, in vain.

In this essay, I show how the unexamined influence of the religious visual culture of stained glass on Jean Rhys’s work helped determine the seemingly simultaneous narrative structure of Wide Sargasso Sea and how it shaped Rhys’s late engagements with female resistance within systems of male power through the creation of what I call a counterfaith. The concept of counterfaith develops Richard Kearney’s postsecular exploration of anatheism, a “renewed quest for God after God,” one that is “a letting go of our notion of an all-powerful divinity who ‘saves us,’ namely, the anthropomorphic deity of Western myth and metaphysics.”[6] This “letting go” opens “the option of retrieved belief” as a way to afford new possibilities beyond past binaries such as belief and disbelief (Kearney, Anatheism, 126, 7).

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys signals an affinity for such a movement beyond past conceptions of God through the subtle juxtaposition of Mr Mason’s and “Rochester’s” patriarchal “Almighty God” of “power and wisdom” with Christophine’s and Antoinette’s sadder wordplay on goodbye and god, Adieu/à dieu: “The music was gay but the words were sad and her [Christophine’s] voice often quavered and broke on the high note. ‘Adieu.’ Not adieu as we said it, but à dieu, which made more sense after all. The loving man was lonely, the girl was deserted, the children never came back. Adieu.”[7] As Hent de Vries observes, following from Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, adieu marks “a gesture in which the address and a certain suspension—an à Dieu and an adieu, a going toward God and a leave taking—coincide in an enigmatic way.”[8] This enigma is that of “a turning toward” along with a simultaneous “turning away from” (217), which, by turning away from the temporality and teleology of a classical conception of divinity, would “say farewell to the omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God of ontotheology and with the same gesture face the oblique or nether flip side of God, the other—un- or a-godly—face of the other, the faceless face of no god, Niemand, pas de dieu, a-dieu” (de Vries, “Adieu,” 218).

Occurring within the same “enigmatic” conceptual space opened by de Vries’s à Dieu and adieu, Kearney’s anatheism moves beyond received dogmatic and doctrinal categories, “Creation, Salvation, Miracle, Sovereignty, Judgment,” and turns instead toward ambiguity and mystery, to the affects of “wonder and bewilderment,” with “an aesthetic openness to the gracious and the strange” (Anatheism, 7, 11, 14). Anatheistic moments, like the general structure of anatheism, occur “when the sacred and secular meet to provide the recipient with a license to suspend the diktat of dogma in order to imagine different options of belief or disbelief (or both)” (11). The idea of a counterfaith pursues one such option through a mode of belief that is both critique but also creation, a simultaneous adieu and à dieu.

Counterfaith works through three senses of the term. The first counters, or argues against, an existing faith. The second draws on counterfeit to imply the act of copying or emulating but with the intent either to deceive and pass or to undermine the authenticity of the original or subvert the idea of authenticity itself. The third sense asserts one faith as a counter, in the sense of counteroffer, to another version of faith, again implying a critique of existing faiths but also the simultaneous creation of an alternative faith of one’s own. Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea suggests such a counterfaith, one that appropriates the structuring and valorizing power of religious visual culture in the form of Christian stained glass for a critique of patriarchal and imperials forms of Christianity, all toward the end of creating a female vision of faith, one that is ultimately both tragic and emancipatory (and so, perhaps, finally more authentically Christian). Rhysian counterfaith resists and undoes the prevailing ideas of religious authority and orthodoxy through hesitation, irony, and uncertainty even as it creates new forms of qualified sincerity and unity amid brokenness from the resources of these same Christian traditions.

Counterfaith develops recent contributions to the question of modernism and religion by identifying how a writer like Rhys, not thought to be religious, simultaneously critiques a religious inheritance but also constructs from it an affirmative form of faith. Since Pericles Lewis’s challenge to the reigning “secularization hypothesis” in “Churchgoing in the Modernist Novel,” one line of inquiry in the new modernist studies has explored the imbrication of modernism and religion, particularly modernism and forms of Christianity.[9] Lewis argues against “secularization” as simple religious decline, showing instead that modernist writers “sought to understand religious experience anew” through anthropological innovations and developments in sociology.[10] Suzanne Hobson has since shown how angelic figures in modernism mark “an attempt to re-engage with the cultural history of religion in the twentieth century with the aim of examining both its regressive and its critical or transformative character.”[11]. Anthony Domestico has demonstrated that T. S. Eliot, David Jones, and W. H. Auden were “unembarrassed by theology’s epistemological and ontological claims,” which produced what he terms a “theological modernism”: “a literature of ideas that was also modernist,” “where theological speculation generates and sustains poetic creation.”[12] Matthew Mutter, in turn, has identified a “profound ambivalence in modernism” about secularization, reading for forms of secular restlessness in Wallace Stevens, Woolf, W. B. Yeats, and Auden.[13] Erik Tonning has argued that “Christianity was, at the birth of Modernism, a force to be seriously reckoned with by all.”[14] He maps out its influence across Joyce, Jones, Eliot, Ezra Pound, Auden, and Samuel Beckett, showing how these writers afford a host of “varied and nuanced” views toward Christianity, including “‘struggle and rejection’, ‘conversion’, ‘return’, ‘appropriation’, or ‘the impossibility of overcoming’” (Tonning, Modernism and Christianity, 126). Tonning has called for further, more interdisciplinary work, with a need for studies of “Modernism and Christianity across the arts” and “beyond the confines of Anglophone writing” (125).[15]

But as Elizabeth Anderson justly contends, despite these promising new directions in work on modernism and religion, “women writers are still under-represented,” with Woolf and H.D. the exception.[16] As Anderson observes, “women’s position on the margins of traditional religious and academic institutions . . . tends to give them an experience of lived religion that is less formal and often adversarial or heterodox. With leadership in the academy and church closed to them, writing became a forum for women to explore spiritual ideas and experiences” (Material Spirituality, 5). Rightly noting that “[m]ost scholarship on modernism and religion deals only passingly with material culture as such,” Anderson combines “gender analysis alongside the study of materiality” to examine how forms of female spirituality took shape in writers including Woolf, H.D., Mary Butts, and Gwendolyn Brooks (5, 7). Most recently, Susan Stanford Friedman has provocatively noted the continued failure of modernist studies to more broadly complete the turn to the question of religion and modernism, arguing that “[i]n its prevailing assumption of modernity’s secularization of the early twentieth century, modernist studies lags behind . . . current debates in religious studies on the historical and contemporary entanglements and politics of religion and secularism.”[17] Friedman uses and calls for a “comparative approach” to take up “questions of how religion figures into the workings of empire and the anti-colonial movements it spawned” (“Configurations,” 93). This approach “assumes the agency of writers from different parts of the world—not as sites of absolute difference but as writers aware of and participating in the global flows of culture, including religious cultures” (93).

Attending to Rhys’s productive engagements with religious visual culture responds to Friedman’s call to expand modernism and religious studies into “the workings of empire,” to trace its transformations along “global flows of culture,” even as my attention to the literary and the visual arts also responds to Tonning’s call for deeper study of the many “creative constructions” of Christianity within modernism, particularly as these have manifested in interdisciplinary forms (Modernism and Christianity, 125). Given that so much of the work in modernist studies and religion has been focused on male writers, reading religious visual culture in Rhys also responds to Anderson’s appeal that we expand modernism and religion to include more women’s writers, with particular attention to how material culture afforded new modes of spiritual expression, given that participation in “academy and church” was “largely closed” to women (Material Spirituality, 5).

Rhys drew narrative and temporal structures for her feminine counterfaith from the visual form of Christian stained glass, which provided a way to cohere the fragmentation of Antoinette’s Creole identity into a single sacred mosaic in the novel’s final vision. Mary Lou Emery’s observation that Rhys undertook “a quest for ‘elsewhere’ as an alternate history and community” finds a potential shape in Rhys’s encounters with Catholic nuns, which offered her a model of comfort and female community that Wide Sargasso Sea imagines as possible modes of interpersonal connection and small-scale resistance amid systems of patriarchal control, particularly the British Empire and the Catholic Church.[18] A religious view of death as open to an indeterminate transcendent horizon of hope beyond material life afforded Rhys the potential for some kind of conditional “triumph”—her term—for her female characters, even within the totalizing control of imperialism and religious patriarchy.[19] These readings of religion in the late Rhys locate the source of her fragmentation, indeterminacy, and critique of patriarchy not only in modernism, postmodernism, and women’s writing but—perhaps surprisingly given the still dominant assumptions of these same discourses about religion—in appropriations and rewritings of religious visual culture, ones that helped her imagine a powerful counterfaith all her own.

“I won’t say I believe, and I won’t say I don’t believe”: Jean Rhys, Religious Misfit

In the closest reading to account for the spiritual forces Rhys saw in her work, Elaine Savory reads Wide Sargasso Sea as “the novel as Obeah.”[20] In Savory’s analysis, Obeah shows how Rhys “thought of writing as summoning spirits or drawing on a level of consciousness far beyond the logical or rational, which gave her the free space in which to survive her difficult life and to ‘earn’ a proper death” (“Poor Devil,” 217). Savory correctly describes the spiritual meaning Rhys saw in the act of writing. But as Steve Pinkerton points out, Obeah informs Rhys’s imagination considerably less than forms of Christianity that she encountered throughout her life, particularly her attraction to what she saw as a sometimes-warm Catholicism and her rejection of a consistently cold, racist, and imperially aligned Protestantism. Taken as a whole, kind references to nuns alone are substantially more plentiful in her fiction, letters, and other writing than references to Obeah. Pinkerton argues that, against this disproportionate emphasis, her biography, much of her writing, and specifically scenes of entering and thinking about churches in her earlier novels “underscore the fact that Christianity was an equally important, and arguably more influential, component of Rhys’s upbringing and education. Catholicism in particular . . . left an indelible mark on the author.”[21] He identifies in such moments in Rhys’s early novels before Wide Sargasso Sea “vacillations . . . between spiritual yearning and religious antipathy” (Pinkerton, “Religion in Rhys,” 89). He also adds religion to the long-observed division in Rhys between cold, gray England and warm, colored Caribbean: “England is cold, gray, Protestant, dead; the West Indies warm colorful, by turns Catholic and obeah, but in any case alive” (94).

Rhys is rightly read as an outsider, white in the Caribbean, Caribbean in England, a woman in a patriarchal world. Mary Lou Emery claims she even held an “outsider’s place within modernism, an ironic position to hold in a movement often known for its outsider sensibility.”[22] Her religious views were no exception. As Pinkerton shows in a survey of the available sources, Rhys’s life demonstrates the imprint of her early encounters with forms of religious belief, Catholic, Anglican, and Obeah, as well as her enduring ambivalence about, but affective attraction to, certain Christian spaces, rituals, and identities. In Smile Please, Rhys recounts her childhood encounter with the Catholic cathedral in Dominica, a cathedral she had heard was “a hideous place.”[23] But when she finally saw its interior, she “thought it beautiful. Instead of the black people sitting in a different part of the church, they were all mixed up with the white” (Rhys, Smile, 65). “[T]his pleased me very much. I thought it right,” she remembers (65). Like Joyce’s famous aesthetic attraction to Catholic ritual, Rhys felt moved by the church at the level of affect rather than cognition. She found the space “beautiful,” and found herself caught up in the physically emphatic rituals of the mass: “I was fascinated by the service,” she writes, “the movements of the priest, the sound of the Latin, the smell of incense” (65). Following that experience, she vowed to become a sister. But this devout phase was short-lived and brought to its end by the failure of prayer to produce real results, specifically when it didn’t save her dog, Rex (70).

While Rhys underwent a far from clear ascent to institutional religious belief, she demonstrated a sense of the transcendent on her own terms. Plante recounts and directly reprints Rhys’s description of an epiphanic experience of profound meaning at La Napoule in southeastern France, quoted here as reprinted in Plante:

At La Napoule I felt tired and left the road to sit by the sea. You could do that in those days. I can’t describe what happened. No words, no words, there are no words for it, except perhaps, in a still unknown language. I felt a certainty of joy, and terrific, terrific happiness, not only for me, but for everyone. I knew that the end would be joy. I felt, too, a part of the sea, the sun, the wind. (Difficult Women, 56).[24]

Rhys’s description of what Charles Taylor would call “fullness”—a presence, certitude, orientation, sense of meaning—recalls the showings of Julian of Norwich—“But all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well”—and rhymes with Auden’s description of his sudden sense of agape, where he felt the existence of his friends who were with him “as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it,” which he later expressed poetically in “A Summer Night.”[25] Unlike the youthful certainties of Rhys’s temporary devotion, this experience and its attempted description aligns directly with no religious tradition while drawing on the impulses and ideas of wholeness, joy, and final bliss often contained in those traditions.

The most revealing of Rhys’s exchanges with Plante concerns the topic of death, where Rhys, who often remained noncommittal about doctrinal religious belief, uses longing to gesture toward life after death and then to describe works of art as expressions of faith, their timelessness likely reminding her of something that transcends the artist’s own death. Plante recounts,

She said, suddenly, “David, I think you’ve just seen my ghost.”

I asked, “Do you believe in a life after death?”

She smiled. “Well, how can one be sure unless one has died? But I think there must be something after. You see, we have such longings, such great longings, they can’t be for nothing.”

“But you don’t have any definite faith?”

“Oh, whatever faith I have I find expressed in man-made things, and to me the greatest expressions of faith I’ve ever seen are Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” (Difficult Women, 57)

For Rhys, these things did not take the place of faith, but were instead expressions of it.

What these biographical anecdotes demonstrate, and what they echo in her late fiction, is Rhys’s ambivalent distance from institutional forms of religion coupled with an enduring appreciation for and experience of elements of warmth and sources of affirmation within these traditions. They show the aesthetic appeal for her of religious ritual and visual culture. They show her desire for an eternal, timeless view of all life, one that ends in joy. And they show her attraction to a transcendent horizon of hope beyond our physical existence, in a faith expressed through art. Stained glass afforded her a visual encapsulation of these attractions and desires, in an aesthetic shape that would in turn shape the narrative structure of her most celebrated novel.

Christian Stained Glass and the Shaping of Wide Sargasso Sea

The fragmentation of subject, temporality, and narrative form so central to the shape of Wide Sargasso Sea have been variously attributed to modernist, postmodern, and Caribbean influences. The fragmentation of a coherent self and linear time already apparent in Rhys’s city novels are an obvious modernist source, one shaped by the characteristic fragmentation of European modernism, later understood through the use of Claude-Levi Strauss’s concept of bricolage to describe modernist piecing together. Wide Sargasso Sea’s fragmentations have also been aligned with postmodern indeterminacy and decentering, or understandings of Antoinette’s subjectivity as a field of competing discourses shaped by the pressures of colonialism and patriarchy. The novel’s Caribbean context points to Patrick Chamoiseau’s créolité—in its later plural sense—“the torrential ambiguity of a mosaic identity” that is the Creole “situation.”[26] Créolité could explain the text’s fragmented narrative and identities, identities that fragment and reform within Édouard Glissant’s understanding of creolization as “exemplified by its processes”—not contents—and “interplay of relations”—not universals.[27] While each of these discourses helps contextualize Rhys’s fragments, turning to the resources of religious visual culture affords her a way to bring together fragmentation in a kind of broken unity through the practice of stained glass, a form built of fragments that nonetheless achieve a timeless coherent beauty.

Christian stained glass visualizes stories that run the gamut of traditional Christian iconography, including events from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament—especially the crucifixion of Jesus and images of the Virgin Mary—and from the lives of saints. In one important kind of stained glass, the hagiographical window told the story of a saint’s life, often in separate medallion shapes throughout the window. It was this visual form that most likely spoke to Rhys since it contained a whole life in an instant and closely prefigures the final visionary sky image of Wide Sargasso Sea. This stained glass form, unlike a text that must be read within time, could, in a single visual instant, convey an entire life’s story and claim it as holy.

In her chapter “The Syntax of Stained Glass” from The Unspeakable Mother (1989), Deborah Kelly Kloepfer identifies the narrative implications of Rhys’s references to stained glass. These suggest “visual rather than narrative memory; Antoinette compares her way of seeing and remembering to a stained-glass window, an image that serves as an alternative to text.”[28] Kloepfer’s analysis only briefly connects stained glass with its religious history—and, following Roger Rosewell’s analysis of the form, it would be better to say that stained glass offers Rhys visual and narrative memory.[29] But this visual religious culture gives Rhys something more than a metaphor for how the novel’s story could be perceived both separately and simultaneously; it claims Antoinette’s life as sacred, like those lives found so frequently in Christian iconography. Rhys sees in stained glass’s complex legibility and sacred authority the means to represent and valorize the fragments of the broken Creole Antoinette.

Stained glass window
Fig. 1. Alfred Gérente, Creation, Adam & Eve; Cain & Abel, south nave, Ely Cathedral, 1849. Photograph by Steven Jugg © The Stained Glass Museum. Used by permission of Ely Cathedral.

In Smile Please, Rhys describes her first experience of “wonder in England” as the time when she set foot in Ely Cathedral and saw its majestic stained glass windows (fig. 1):

The first time I felt a sense of wonder in England was when we, a few of the boarders at the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge, were taken to Ely Cathedral. There were no pews or chairs, only a space, empty, and the altar, and stained-glass windows. The pillars on either side were like a stone forest. I was so excited and moved that I began to tremble.

The classical mistress, Miss Patey, was in charge of the flock. Afterwards we went to have tea with one of her friends. We sat on a verandah with flagstones. I took the cup of tea that was offered to me but my hands were shaking so much that I dropped the cup, which was, of course, smashed. (82, emphasis added)

The windows Rhys would have seen across England during the early 1900s were in “the neo-Gothic style,” emulating the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century medieval method of panels of colored glass assembled with lead borders, often in complex mosaics of vibrant color, as well as, from the 1870s, a trend toward “a more pictorial style in muted colors” and the influence of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Rosewell, Stained Glass, 65-66). The windows Rhys saw at Ely would have almost all been installed between the 1840s and 1880s.[30] Because Rhys consistently described England as grey and colorless, compared with the bright colors she associated with Dominica, the brilliant colors of Ely’s windows would have no doubt reminded her of the intensity of Caribbean color, which she has Antoinette evoke early in Wide Sargasso Sea: “I lay in the shade looking at the pool—deep and dark green under the trees, brown-green if it had rained, but a bright sparkling green in the sun. The water was so clear that you could see the pebbles at the bottom of the shallow part. Blue and white and striped red. Very pretty” (Rhys, Sargasso, 13). As Lilian Pizzichini observes in her biography of Rhys, Dominica, Rhys’s island of birth, has “colours more vibrant than anywhere else on earth.”[31] Or, as “Rochester’s” cold, unmoved British eyes have it on seeing Caribbean color, “It was all very brightly coloured, very strange, but it meant nothing to me” (Rhys, Sargasso, 45). “Too much blue,” he complains earlier, “too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red” (41).

Precedents for this association of colors and the feminine in Rhys’s work predate Wide Sargasso Sea, appearing throughout the earlier fiction of the thirties in the form of material culture in fashion, book covers, and writing implements. In Good Morning, Midnight (1939), Sasha eyes a dress with a similar color scheme: “I have seen myself in it. It is a black dress with wide sleeves embroidered in vivid colors — red, green, blue, purple. It is my dress.”[32] She will later think of artificial jewels in “red, green and blue” (Rhys, Complete Novels, 434). In her own life, Rhys loved these colors in dresses and her own fashion, she admired them in the colorful covers of now-vintage Penguin books, and they were the vibrant power in the pens that initially pulled her into writing. When she was first rooming in Fulham, Rhys relates in Smile Please that she wanted to brighten the space with colors. As she was walking, she “passed a stationer’s shop where quill pens were displayed in the window, a lot of them, red, blue, green, yellow” (Smile, 103). Entering the shop to buy some of these pens to “cheer up” her table, she saw the black notebooks that would come to contain Voyage in the Dark (1934) (104). The association Rhys had between these colors and the act of writing explains Antoinette’s description of her cross-stitching/writing agency in similar colors.

Voyage in the Dark also contains an extended sequence in a church that connects these sets of colors with religious stained glass and prefigures the final fire colors of Wide Sargasso Sea. The child Anna Morgan, sitting bored in church at the repetition of a Litany, “would bite the back of the pitch-pine pew in front, and sigh, and read bits of the marriage-service” (Rhys, Complete Novels, 26). But despite her remembered boredom, she also remembers the colors of the church glass, “Red, blue, green, purple in the stained-glass windows. And saints with bare, wax-colored feet with long, supple toes,” and then, upon leaving the church, she remembers the Caribbean scene in echoes of the last images of Wide Sargasso Sea, “Walking through still palms in the churchyard. The light is gold and when you shut your eyes you see fire-colour” (26). This close proximity of stained glass color, “Red, blue, green, purple,” followed by “fire-colour” recalls the last page of Wide Sargasso Sea: “Aunt Cora’s patchwork, all colours,” and the famous flames (Sargasso,112). Antoinette’s final “all colours,” in turn, echoes Anna’s wording when she sees a series of dresses: “The dresses, all colours, hanging there, waiting” (Rhys, Complete Novels, 16, emphasis added). Rhys first identified with vivid colors in her native Caribbean land, sea, and skyscapes. She saw in those natural environments the mystery and majesty Antoinette describes as “large,” “beautiful,” and “wild” like the garden of Eden (Sargasso, 10, 11). These colors moved her in the religious stained glass of the churches of Dominica and the only place she found wonder in England, Ely Cathedral. Rhys saw these same colors in dresses, décor, writing implements, and women’s fashion. This accumulation of writing, sacred power, joy, and color would be consolidated in Wide Sargasso Sea as a stained glass window.

Wide Sargasso Sea as a Stained Glass Window

Wide Sargasso Sea’s fragmentation and sense of narrative simultaneity, where time becomes unclear and moments seem to overlap or happen all at once, might be seen to come from the aesthetic of cultural and formal fragmentation and temporal experimentation long thought in studies of modernism to originate with the cerebral speculations of the high male modernists. But reading the novel as a stained glass window shows instead that Rhys drew fragment and simultaneity from religious visual culture. Stained glass offered her a form that could present a whole composed of discrete fragments and that, like the hagiographic saint’s life window, could afford a view of an entire life in parts but also in a simultaneous single instant. Unlike the despair of much modernist fragmentation, stained glass transformed brokenness through sacred power, in a vision of triumphant life beyond material death. Wide Sargasso Sea’s modernist structure, its fragmentation and narrative simultaneity, is thus revealed to be deeply drawn from religious visual culture.

Rhys understood her own writing process for the novel in a way that resembled the making of stained glass as well as women’s patchwork quilting. In 1959, as she worked through the famous writer’s block that was broken by the Eucharist, she wrote first to Selma Vaz Dias and then to her daughter, Maryvonne, of the process of assembling the novel. To Selma, on January 10th, [1959], she wrote (echoing Aunt Cora’s sewing), “There’s a lot of cutting, joining up – all that patchwork – and one major difficulty to be solved” (Rhys to Dias, Letters, 159). To Maryvonne, some months later, on May 4th, 1959, she repeated the same metaphor, “About my book [Wide Sargasso Sea]. It is done in the way that patchwork would be done if you had all the colours and all the pieces cut but not yet arranged to make a quilt” (Rhys to Moerman, 162). Judith L. Raiskin describes the agonizing refinement and revision that led to the pitch-perfect tone and pacing of the novel as a similar patch-working process: “What read in the final version as simple, perfectly crafted descriptions, interior monologues, and dialogues, begin in exercise books and on loose pieces of paper as repetitions of key words and phrases worked in slightly different combinations, highlighted by slightly different tenses, word order, and the deletion or addition of adjectives” (preface to Sargasso, x).

As to the simultaneous temporality of the stained glass form, Rhys had earlier intimated something of the simultaneous visual and narrative time suggested by stained glass with her first serious attempt at writing, the novel Voyage in Dark, the temporality of which she described in a 1934 letter to Evelyn Scott:

The big idea – well I’m blowed if I can be sure what it is. Something to do with time being an illusion I think. I mean that the past exists – side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was – is.

I tried to do it by making the past (the West Indies) very vivid – the present dreamlike (downward career of the girl) – starting of course piano and ending fortissimo.” (Letters, 24, emphasis added).

Akin to Ezra Pound’s earlier idea of Imagistic poetic superposition, Rhysian apprehension is similarly simultaneous: “All this I saw and heard in a fraction of a second,” Antoinette states of her final vision (Rhys, Sargasso, 112). Yet the temporal experiments of Voyage in the Dark are more complex than Pound’s earlier European modernism because they demand a Saidian contrapuntal reading, juxtaposing and throwing into relief the power inequalities of colony and metropole, avant la lettre, searching for their own tenuous power and provisional recompense.

Reading Wide Sargasso Sea as stained glass makes much better sense of the clear linkage between parts 1 and 3, which now are seen to be their own discrete pieces of narrative but ones also perceived simultaneously in a single moment. Tom Sheehan imagines that in the novel’s final part “time has been displaced and space (or space-time) runs through the fissure.”[33] Problems of time are indeed suggested by the final vision of part 3 where the immolation Antoinette is about to commit fulfills the terrible dream of hell that ends part 1. Antoinette’s description of her life in the sky in her dream near the end of part 3 suggests such a temporal disruption:

I don’t know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it. I saw the grandfather clock and Aunt Cora’s patchwork, all colours, I saw the orchids and the stephanotis and the jasmine and the tree of life in flames. I saw the chandelier and the red carpet downstairs and the bamboos and the tree ferns, the gold ferns and the silver, and the soft green velvet of the moss on the garden wall. I saw my doll’s house and the books and the picture of the Miller’s daughter. I heard the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger, “Qui est là? Qui est là?” and the man who hated me was calling too, Bertha! Bertha! The wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings. (Rhys, Sargasso, 112).

Elements of her last vision recall part 1’s characters (Tia, Coco the parrot), settings (Coulibri), and objects (her doll’s house, books, pictures). The mode of reading opened by stained glass better explains this temporal problem by first allowing the two parts to still exist separately as linear events. Then, if the reader, as it were, moves a step back from these events, the entire narrative can also be seen altogether as if it were visually perceived as a whole in a permanent narrative present. Turning to religious visual culture thus solved a temporal problem for Rhys, one that preoccupied other modernists as well: how to convey motion and the passage of time as well as the eternal and the permanent? The emphatically visual qualities of the final scene of Wide Sargasso Sea and the novel’s emphasis on the simultaneous perception of different moments of time make sense when they are understood together as the visual narrative simultaneity of Christian stained glass.

In part 3, the “tree of life” that Antoinette sees in flames in her final vision calls back to the earlier, “wild” “tree of life” from part 1 in a symbol that transforms the meanings of indigenous and Catholic myth as well as the iconography of stained glass and popular quilting, a crafting practice that, as with stained glass, makes unity out of fragments (112, 11). The clearest origin for this image is the second chapter of Genesis, where two trees are present in the Garden of Eden, “the tree of life” and “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” to quote the language in the King James version that Rhys would have most often heard (Gen. 2:9 [KJV]). Rhys’s personal emphasis on affect, happiness, and the immanence of ordinary life would have attracted her to this first tree rather than the second, which, by knowledge, might have suggested abstraction, coldness, and the false ethics of British masculine imperialism. While the tree of life appears in a few more places throughout the Bible, it emerges as a key symbol in the book of Revelation, where it promises a reward for perseverance and stands for fruitfulness and healing (Rev. 2:7, 22:2 [KJV]). The tree’s apparent destruction at the close of Wide Sargasso Sea can thus be read as a visual indictment of British imperial violence; the burning of a piece of the Caribbean environment stands, by synecdoche, for British violation of their colonies, and, by metonymy, for the violent end of Antoinette’s own life. Other sources for the image exist as well. In the 1980s, Wilson Harris suggested that Rhys had “intuitively woven” these myths “into the tapestry of Wide Sargasso Sea” because the burning “tree of life” recalls Arawak and Macusi creation stories.[34]

As a popular symbol in stained glass, Eden’s trees would have likely been visual features of the churches Rhys visited, though these images would have almost always been of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” which became central to the Christian reading of the Genesis 2 narrative as a fall from grace into sin. While Ely cathedral does not have an image of the tree of life in its stained glass, the 14th-century Prior Crauden’s Chapel nearby has a floor decoration that features Adam, Eve, and the tree of life, which Rhys might have seen (Allen). Ely does have a tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the image pictured in Figure 1. If trees were a widespread feature of Christian stained glass, the “tree of life” was also a favorite symbol in quilting, which perhaps explains and enriches the reference to “Aunt Cora’s patchwork.” Heather Audin notes that “[t]he ‘Tree of Life’ design became popular in Europe after its introduction through the import of Indian textiles. Characterized by a central tree with flowers and animals, it represents immortality, protection and healing in many cultures and was considered to be the representation of everything foreign and exotic.”[35]

That the final page of the novel is informed by imagery, the idea of visions, and the visual has been long noted. But that final vision begins to assume a religious cast nearly a page earlier, beginning from the time Antoinette wakes from her dream and says it was the “third time,” a resonant Christian number coupled with the prophetic status of dreams in the Hebrew Bible and in Christian traditions (Rhys, Sargasso,111). The clearest religious intertext for her vision is the Book of Revelation or the Revelation of John. Antoinette’s anaphora “I saw” is the same visionary repetition used by the writer of the Book of Revelation. Her phrase “Then I turned round and saw the sky” (112, emphasis added) appears to quote Revelation 1:12, “And I turned to see the voice that spake to me” (KJV, emphasis added).

While it draws on images from the Book of Revelation, particularly fire, the components of Antoinette’s dream-vision are simultaneous—“all my life was in it”—rather than in linear narrative form as in John’s, where one image in the vision comes after the other (Rhys, Sargasso, 112). Such a change from the source text is explained by the temporality of stained glass as well as by Antoinette specifically mentioning first “the grandfather clock,” referencing time, and then “Aunt Cora’s patchwork, all colours,” with the two “alls,” life (time) and colors (the visual), uniting (112). This last reference to “all colours” calls readers back to part 1, where Antoinette had first described her aunt’s work on a bedspread: “As she talked she was working at a patchwork counterpane. The diamond-shaped pieces of silk melted one into the other, red, blue, purple, green, yellow, all one shimmering color. Hours and hours she had spent on it and was nearly finished” (33). As with her final vision, here visual color (“all one”) and time (“hours and hours”) are brought together. These references to “all colours” in parts 1 and 3 are joined as well by part 2 when “Rochester” watches a Caribbean sunset and thinks, “We watched the sky and the distant sea on fire – all colours were in that fire and the huge clouds fringed and shot with flame” (52, emphasis added).

Part 2, in turn, has Antoinette directly evoke this mode of stained glass visual remembering, to re-member being a literal putting the pieces of a body back together, so that memory, like stained glass, is the piecing together of fragments to achieve a whole:

I can remember every second of that morning, if I shut my eyes I can see the deep blue colour of the sky and the mango leaves, the pink and red hibiscus, the yellow handkerchief she [Christophine] wore round her head, . . . but now I see everything still, fixed for ever like the colours in a stained-glass window. (71)

“I see everything still” works in two senses of “everything still.” In the one, adverbial and temporal sense, everything persists, remains, endures; in the other, adjectival sense, everything is still, stationary, in a single piece arrested in time and space. Because Antoinette’s final vision in part 3 is one of burning fire, we see a prolepsis in part 1 when the pieces of Aunt Cora’s silk seem to melt into each other.

With patchwork and stained glass now linked by their procedures of construction, “counterpane,” the sewing practice of juxtaposing one pane of cloth with another, takes on a new punning meaning as well, with “pane” suggesting equally a sheet of glass (33). Rhys’s final vision for Antoinette is not a stained glass in the traditional religious sense, but a kind of counterpane to those traditional religious images, a counterfaith. Drawing from them, their structuring of time and narrative, their aesthetic and meaning-making power, Rhys’s practice puts resources of religious visual culture to new purposes where an oppressed Creole identity takes the sanctified and celebrated place of patriarchal religion and capitalist empire. That Antoinette’s final “triumph” is painful and borne of a life of pain further puns on counterpane, as a pain that counters and passes judgement on the English model of life that has so oppressed and imprisoned her. While Sandra Drake correctly reads this final scene as a battle “fought and won” by Antoinette “in flame,” her contention that the “story [is] ultimately one of triumph, accomplished in the terms of the Afro-Caribbean belief system” can be expanded so that the ending, rather than oppose Afro-Caribbean to Western, equally claims for its own the powers, symbols, and structures of Christian visual culture itself.[36]

Such a reading allows us to see anew Rhys’s engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), her central motivation for writing Wide Sargasso Sea, particularly the Christian project Brontë’s novel endorses. Rhys’s appropriation of Christian iconography consciously rewrites Brontë’s ending, specifically Jane Eyre’s final masculine, colonial missionary sense of purpose and its linkage of personal death and salvation. Brontë’s conclusion emphatically restates British Christian piety and a missionary mandate, with St. John Rivers’ departure to India as the figure of an “apostle, who speaks but for Christ.”[37] Jane appeals to the visionary not only with the name St. John, traditionally held to be the author of the gospel, letters, and, most importantly here, the Book of Revelation, which we saw Rhys revise, but also by language drawn from the Book of Revelation itself. Brontë’s line “who stand without fault before the throne of God; who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb; who are called, and chosen, and faithful” draws directly from Revelation 14:5, “for they are without fault before the throne of God,” and resonates with other passages in Revelation that link the throne of God with the image of Jesus as Lamb, such as Revelation 22:1 (KJV) (Jane Eyre, 385). These selections from Revelation, which ends the Bible, signal the end of Jane Eyre itself, but they also attempt to sacralize the text as a whole and the individual life it has imagined even while, as Edward Said recognized in Culture and Imperialism (1993), these religious gestures participate in the valorizing of the missionary and colonial enterprises that make Jane’s life possible.[38] By taking a symbol from that same biblical book, the symbol of the tree of life, and then setting it aflame at the end of her own novel, Rhys suggests that the missionary, imperial logic endorsed by Brontë was in reality a project of oppression, destruction, and death that betrayed those same biblical sources, which also promise freedom, fruitfulness, and life. If Brontë’s Christian vision for the novel’s conclusion unites religious and nationalist pieties, Rhys instead appropriates religious imagery for a Creole, woman’s belief, one that claims a very different kind of “triumph” through Antoinette’s death, a moment “fixed for ever like the colours in a stained-glass window” (Sargasso, 71).

The Triumph and the Cost of Faith

If Antoinette’s final oneiric vision contains the counter in counterfaith with its critique of British imperialism and hypocritical patriarchal forms of Christianity, how does it also express a positive faith? Rhys’s desire that Antoinette’s “end” be “in a way triumphant” suggests that she understood her character’s final act as one of tragedy and defeat but also purpose and direction (Rhys to Dias, Letters, 157). I suggest that it is in Antoinette’s final language of obligation, “what I have to do,” that a form of faith emerges, one that trusts the powers that guide her, entrusting them even with her own life (Rhys, Sargasso,112). Such faith, one that will require the sacrifice of Antoinette’s own life to achieve her triumph, moves the relationship between modernism and religion beyond its sometimes intellectual abstractions in male modernists and into the more pressing question of what kinds of demands it places on those who have faith. The faith in Rhys’s counterfaith turns out to be a demanding one: Antoinette’s trust in the powers that direct her course require her to sacrifice her life itself for the sake of her final “triumph.”

Understanding her death as one that assumes power through total self-sacrifice revises the tragic madwoman destroyed by British imperial patriarchy into a sanctified prophet-Christ figure immortalized by Rhys in the literary-visual form of stained glass. Antoinette’s seemingly impending death at the end of the novel is described in the terms of an external command: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do” (112, emphasis added). This injunction culminates the interior questioning of her purpose throughout the third section: “What is it that I must do?” (106), “What am I doing in this place” (107), “something I must do” (106, 107, 111). The passive voice of the final understanding in the novel, “why I was brought here,” might be read to apply to “Rochester’s” motivations in bringing her across the ocean. But this explanation fails to do justice to the sentence when the “and what I have to do” is understood as burning down the “Rochester” estate, itself a metonymy for imperial England. Such a reading of this line as religious command is reinforced when we read it as linking back to Antoinette’s childhood sense of the security of Catholic certainties: “I find it very comforting to know exactly what must be done” (34). Antoinette understands that a spiritual power brought her to England, and that power now enjoins on her a sacrificial death so as to pass judgment on the avarice, violence, and iniquity of “Rochester” and, metonymically, the whole of the British imperium.

This power revises Hebrew and Christian biblical texts, deploying them in support of Antoinette. In her dream vision of the rooftop, she imagines being preserved in the terms of Psalm 91, a key psalm that promises divine protection and safety, the last a driving psychological need for Antoinette: “It [the wind] might bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones” (112, emphasis added). In the King James version, the text of verses 11 and 12 of the psalm reads, “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. / They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Ps. 91:11–12, emphasis added). But in Rhys’s repurposing, the spiritual power has been modified: From the divinity of a Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible and the angelic to the amorphous “it” and its grammatical antecedent “the wind,” a common image of the spirit or pneuma that resists clear identification and definition—and that is not discernibly male. By empowering “the wind” with spiritual force, Rhys also aligns repurposed religious scripture with ecological tropes of windy island Caribbean climates.

But we know, of course, that Antoinette is not borne up—at least as the Brönte ending of the Creole “madwoman” has it. And many readings of Wide Sargasso Sea understand Rhys’s own ending, which cuts off before any suicide, as implying the fragmentation of Antoinette’s body upon those stones after the dissolution of her mind, a conclusion of pathos, mental instability, and a tragic suicide. Understanding the end as an act of faith and what Terry Eagleton calls “radical sacrifice” instead recasts Antoinette as a heroic figure whose final moments in the novel are ones not deluded by madness but guided by faith in a power outside herself. While sacrifice might have been consigned to the well-forgotten religious past, Eagleton’s later critical work explores how “death, tragedy, sacrifice, dispossession” also allow for “renewal, transformation, and revolution.”[39] The dialectic of sacrifice’s historical development, from propitiation of divine powers into a morally empowering transformation of the self, opens up the possibility of sacrifice’s radical value, so that “[i]f sacrifice involves yielding something up, it is in order to possess it more deeply,” where “[s]acrifice concerns the passage of the lowly, unremarkable thing from weakness to power. It marks a movement from victimhood to full humanity” (Eagleton, Sacrifice, 8). Rather than powerlessness, sacrifice as a political and ethical act can use one’s own death as a way of entering into fuller life, for others and, in an act of faith in life beyond death, for oneself, for a greater vision of “flourishing” (7). Through this understanding of the “radical kernel” within what is seemingly a “profoundly conservative” religious form such as sacrifice, Eagleton suggests that “one of the most savage of human actions (human sacrifice) reappears in the guise of martyrdom as one of the most sublimely ethical ones” (8, 26–27).

Understanding Antoinette’s final act as a sacrifice motivated by faith makes better sense of Rhys’s own intention that her death be somehow “triumphant.” Rhys herself was “fighting mad to write her [Antoinette’s] story” (Rhys to Dias, Sargasso, 137). Describing the ending to Diana Athill, she wrote almost cheerfully, “She [Antoinette] burns the house and kills herself (bravo!) very soon” (Rhys to Athill, Sargasso, 145). Being borne up, the religious imagery of the earlier paragraph, now becomes the burned up of the novel’s final lines: “But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage” (Rhys, Sargasso, 112). The language of borne up and burned up in the context of sacrificial death figures Antoinette as Christ-like through the shared Johannine terms for the death of Jesus, which is described frequently as a salvific “lifting up” following a typological reading of Moses and the serpent (John 3:14, 8:28, 12:32–34 [KJV]). This Christian description imagines the crucifixion as an exultation, rather than a defeat—or an exultation through defeat—in a structure that Rhys employs to make Antoinette’s death “in a way triumphant” (Rhys to Dias, Letters, 175). Bearing up, burning up, and lifting up each in turn describe Rhys’s authorial raising up of Antoinette in two senses. In the first, Rhys literally lifts up Antoinette by installing her life into stained glass, the practice of which involves heating and melting of glass (burning up) and which occupies an elevated position in the architecture of churches, one that requires the spectator to literally look up to, admire, and emulate, the figure installed there. This aesthetic practice, borne of the melding of literary and visual culture, also allows Rhys to raise up Antoinette from the abyss of historical loss.

Such a reading shows how the novel’s complex final image of sacrifice and affirmation in “burned up” is a transcendent gesture of faith. The language “light me along the dark passage” is now read in a tone of determination and confidence, what Sandra Drake, reading for Afro-Caribbean belief, rightly calls “authority and assurance,” but a tone that can also be read as empowered by the tropes of lightness and darkness borrowed from the symbolic vocabulary of the Gospel of John, where the darkness does not overcome the light (John 1:5; Drake, “Thematics,” 201). The novel’s final word, “passage,” challenges the listless stasis of the Sargasso Sea with a term of movement, while “light me” suggests being carried or moved along by the light of the flame, itself an image resonant with biblical images of guidance, empowerment, and faith (the burning bush in Exodus 3, the tongues of fire in Acts 2:3 [KJV]). As indeterminate and ambivalent as this final passage (in two senses, the written text and Antoinette’s movement) might be and has been taken to be, it is, when read for its suggestiveness of faith, resonant with notes of hope. Its final gestures would shape other postmodern engagements with cautious optimism amid seeming indeterminacy, particularly in the context of oppressive patriarchy. The ending to Margaret Atwood’s narrative of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), for instance, shares Rhys’s final imagery of gestures upward, movement, light, and dark: “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.”[40]

Modernist Faiths

Rhysian counterfaiths demonstrate how religious visual culture and the religious imaginary it represented, its attractions of hope and unity amid brokenness, could shape the form and content of modernist impulses to witness, protest, and survive amid the alienations of empire and patriarchy. By describing Rhys’s complex search for unity amid brokenness, counterfaiths connects with and extends Stephen Kern’s exploration in Modernism After the Death of God: Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification (2017) of how, amid the decline of the “governing narrative and a fixed set of answers” offered by Christianity’s forms of cultural “[u]nity,” “modernist intellectuals and artists move toward unification in unending and never complete searches for wholeness, order, and meaning.”[41] While such modern thinkers and artists, including James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, and Virginia Woolf, knew they could not establish a “system of thought as tightly unified as traditional Christianity . . . they were still driven by the same basic need as were Christian thinkers to make their understanding of themselves, other people, and the world cohere” (Kern, After the Death, 8). The subsequent “dialectic of fragmentation and unification” that developed in part from what Kern identifies as a tension between hatred of some features of Christianity, particularly Christian sexual morality, paradoxically coupled with an ambivalent attraction to some of its features, often aesthetic ones, drove a writer such as Woolf to seek new, replacement kinds of unification in literary form and subject matter so as to compensate for those unities that had been lost with the waning of Christian unity (157, 4–5). Kern sees this “unifying effort” in Woolf’s work in “the simultaneity of happenings” in Mrs Dalloway, where the search for a unification that might replace lost Christian unity appears in that novel’s single setting as well as its unified time and action, but always in “non-totalizing unities” (160, 168). Akin to Kern’s reading of Woolf as a writer in search of unification through literary forms designed to represent simultaneity, Rhys fashions her own simultaneous form by engaging with the Christian unity afforded by the narrative instant of stained glass.[42]

As a result, rather than find a secular, surrogate unity, as Kern suggests his writers and thinkers do, Rhys retains the sacred but claims a personal interpretation of it through her own counterfaith (After the Death, 163, 175). Likely suspicious of the ways Christian unity has empowered projects of imperial oppression and wary of how unity and unification can find affinity with overarching systems, Rhys borrows from but tempers Christianity’s unifying power by turning to the mystery, greater openness, and personal wonder afforded by particular encounters with religious visual culture, an area less amenable to systematic control and more open to individual interpretation. Rhys thus aligns with de Gay’s reading of Woolf’s anti-institutional spirituality, where, in her approach to the religious visual culture of sacred space, “Woolf frequently breaks down the metaphorical walls that have been constructed to restrict access to the sacred.” (Woolf and Christian Culture, 140). For de Gay, Woolf saw the potential to reinterpret religious visual culture in sacred architecture and space, where those who come to such sacred spaces can “challenge discourses of political, academic or clerical power” by rewriting or refusing dominant narratives about these sacred spaces, so that the “sacred-as-holy” can become instead “something that is greater than the powers of the establishment” (140). Woolf’s encounters with the religious visual culture of churches in England and sacred spaces and architecture abroad shaped what de Gay sees as Woolf’s personal sense of “the possibility that there may be a valid object of worship in the form of a mystery that will be lost or diminished if one tries to pin it down” (140–41). De Gay shows how an encounter with the architecture and visual religious space of the Hagia Sophia was particularly formative for Woolf, where “the otherness of the building . . . gives her a sense of awe and mystery without calling upon her to assent to dogmas or pin anything down” (122).

The concept of counterfaith thus joins de Gay’s work on Woolf that does not “claim” modernist writers for Christianity but shows their “complex,” “subtle,” and “variable” uses of “Christian culture” (2, 6). De Gay demonstrates how, rather than a simple dismissive approach to Christianity, Woolf had a “detailed knowledge and understanding of the faith,” but one that she could turn against the patriarchal powers of the institutional forms of that faith itself (2). Quoting Woolf on a visit to Wells Cathedral—“if Christianity is ever tolerable, it is tolerable in these old sanctuaries”—de Gay demonstrates how she was a keen observer of the patriarchal powers of sacred structures but also the opportunities appropriating their powers might afford for “finding sacred space or sanctuary for women and social outcasts of many kinds” (3, 116). Woolf emerges anew, “not a religious writer in the sense of being part of a church or organised belief system,” but one with “a set of beliefs that involved other sorts of connection,” seeking to understand “what unites us with other people, with the world around us, and with a deeper reality,” in “a new form of joining together, but one that escaped the exclusivity of institutionalised religion” (9, 10). Rhys’s stained glass counterfaith takes part in that same search, seeking “new forms of joining together” that might yield new, less oppressive and patriarchal forms of faith, always without aspiring to any overarching system.

Revisiting our accounts of Rhys and religion through her late, intricate engagement with religious visual culture should in turn continue to revise the presumed secularity of other areas of literary history (postmodernism, postcolonialism, and women’s writing, among others) given her importance across a range of areas of inquiry. Her selective appropriation of religious visual culture, her ambivalence about cognitive belief, her affective attractions to ritual and its comforts, and her sincere, if hesitating and noncommittal, suggestions of a transcendent hope beyond death—and the new readings of her texts these positions open up—further demonstrate the need for a more widespread and deeper turn to religion and modernism in ways that are ever more “post-binary,” moving beyond the oppositional logics, orthodoxy/heresy, inside/outside, belief-as-cognitive-assent versions of religion that have long characterized modernist studies. Such a call would ask that we continue to move beyond what de Vries’s terms “classificatory regimes” in how we treat religion, moving ever deeper into the ambiguities and intricacies that exist between and beyond enduring binaries such as belief versus disbelief, what Kearney sees in anatheism, or de Vries opens up by adieu and à dieu, and the new possibilities afforded by counterfaith.[43]

In Antoinette’s last vision, narrative fragmentation becomes final unity through the sacred storytelling power of stained glass. In this final act of unification, Rhys invites us to read Antoinette’s subjectivity not only as the tragic, fractured, multiple Creole self of the nineteenth century, but as a self whose multiplicity can be unified through the capacity of religiously-informed vision and the power of writing to give voice to lost life, that the fragments of Antoinette’s ruin can be brought together by the unifying power of a faith that surpasses the constraints of death itself, in an end that is “in a way triumphant!” (Rhys to Dias, Letters, 175). When Plante asked Rhys if she had faith, her response first looked to human longing and desire as a way of pointing toward what she then said might be the probability of something beyond death. Elaborating, she referenced “man-made things” as that which best expressed her faith, including “The Winged Victory of Samothrace” (Plante, Difficult Women, 57, emphasis added). With its broken, anonymous, female body, that statue, despite its brokenness, is the body of the goddess Nike, victory herself, one who joins with the female body of Antoinette, each physically broken by life, but victorious in death, made to be seen in a single instant and to express forever in art a vision of faith.

 

Notes

[1] Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens (Mona: Savacou, 1974), 55.

[2] David Plante, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 47.

[3] H.D. “Tribute to the Angels” in Trilogy (New York: New Directions, 1998), 103.

[4] Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 129.

[5] Ronald Firbank, Vainglory, in 3 More Novels (New York: New Directions, 1986), 11, 12.

[6] Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), xiii, 126.

[7] Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Judith L. Raiskin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 25, 76, 11. See also 101.

[8] Hent de Vries, Adieu, à dieu, a-Dieu, in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 217.

[9] Pericles Lewis, “Churchgoing in the Modern Novel,” Modernism/modernity 11, no. 4 (2004), 672–86 passim.

[10] Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernism Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19.

[11] Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11.

[12] Anthony Domestico, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 5, 8.

[13] Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 2.

[14] Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 125.

[15] Other significant studies in religion and modernism have focused on the decline or disappearance of God as well as concepts such as blasphemy and heresy. See Gregory Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Damon Franke, Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008); Joyce Wexler, Violence without God: The Rhetorical Despair of Twentieth-Century Writers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Steve Pinkerton, Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th–Century Word Made Flesh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[16] Elizabeth Anderson, Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 4.

[17] Susan Stanford Friedman, “Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison,” in The New Modernist Studies, ed. Douglas Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 92.

[18] May Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World's End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 20.

[19] “[Antoinette’s] end – I want it in a way triumphant!” Rhys to Selma Vaz Dias, April 9, 1958, in The Letters of Jean Rhys, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Viking, 1984), 157, emphasis added.

[20] Elaine Savory, “‘Another Poor Devil of a Human Being . . .’: Jean Rhys and the Novel as Obeah,” in Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, ed. Margarite Ferández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 217.

[21] Steve Pinkerton, “Religion in Rhys,” Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 88.

[22] Mary Lou Emery, “Misfit: Jean Rhys and the Visual Cultures of Colonial Modernism,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 3, no. 3 (2003): xi.

[23] Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 65.

[24] Carole Angier also uses this text as a concluding note in her biography. See Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (London: Penguin, 1992), 648.

[25] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5–6; Julian, “Short Text,” in Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 149; W. H. Auden, introduction to The Protestant Mystics, ed. Anne Fremantle (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 26.

[26] Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, “In Praise of Creoleness,” trans. Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar, Callaloo 13, no. 4 (1990): 903. For a further explanation of Chamoiseau’s development of creolization, see Wendy Knepper, Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction (Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2012), 99–101.

[27] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 89.

[28] Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 143.

[29] Roger Rosewell, Stained Glass (Oxford: Shire Library, 2012), 46.

[30] Dr. Jasmine Allen curates The Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral. I am grateful for her email responses to my questions about the cathedral’s stained glass, November 30, 2018.

[31] Lilian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 8.

[32] Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 359–60.

[33] Tom Sheehan, “Jean Rhys’s Caribbean Space-Time,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 4, no. 3 (2007): 150.

[34] Wilson Harris, “Carnival of Psyche: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966–1981, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek (Aarhus: Dangaroo Press, 1981), 127. The “tree of life” in Harris’s text appears as a quotation from page 155 of the “Penguin edition” of the book (127, 133n1). Harris gives an extended account of Wide Sargasso Sea in The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 49–54.

[35] Heather Audin, Patchwork and Quilting in Great Britain (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2013), 20.

[36] Sandra Drake, “Race and Caribbean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Rhys, Sargasso, 195, 194.

[37] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 385.

[38] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 12, 62.

[39] Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), ix.

[40] Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Anchor, 1998), 295.

[41] Stephen Kern, Modernism After the Death of God: Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification (New York: Routledge, 2017), 8.

[42] Kern also points to poetic attempts to convey emerging modes of modern technological “unification,” aesthetic experiments that produced unified and simultaneous forms that echo the simultaneity of Rhys’s stained glass window, such as Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose du Transsibérien, advertised, Kern notes, as “The First Simultaneous Book,” and what he describes as a “unified poem printed on a single sheet of paper two meters high, . . . visible, if not readable, at a single glance” (After the Death, 13).

[43] Hent de Vries, “Introduction: Why Still Religion?” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 97.