68
Popular Culture Review
white, and she’s nearly always a she (463). Her point is well taken, particularly
when Tomeur presents, as one of the great shocks late into the film, the image of
two pale women in their nightgowns, walking through a cornfield, to be stopped
dead cold by the figure of a tall blind black man. Later, Wesley will carry
Jessica away from the same man and into the sea. Aizenberg also argues that
later appropriations of Tomeur—she includes Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea among
them—will complicate the racial, colonial, and postcolonial concerns of the
source material (466).
The problem, as Aizenberg sees it, is that Tourneur’s vision of the West
Indies hinges to a great regard on “the highly complex nature of cultural
relations, especially unequal cultural relations” (462). The women at the heart of
Jane Eyre and I Walked With a Zombie are, to some degree, complicit in the
colonial side of these cultural relations because they reassert the primacy—the
rightness—of these power structures: their vulnerability to the colonized
legitimates the rights of the colonizer. See, for example, Creole Bertha’s
threatening of Jane in Stevenson. See, too, the stark black figure presiding
blankly over Jane and Betsy in Zombie, and later the even more dramatic
voodoo ceremony in which a young black man summons, with a colonial-era
ceremonial sword no less, a Barbie-like doll which, in turns, draws Jessica into
the jungle. The madwoman is drawn deeper into her madness.
Where the two movies differ most dramatically is in their treatment of their
madwomen. The first effects her presence by suggestion, the second by silence.
Jane wants Rochester, but is impeded by the shadowy presence of Bertha.
We hardly see Bertha—we hear her laughter, and we are witness to interrupted
moments of her madness, but the closest we get to actually seeing her is a shock
of hair and a (very zombie-like) hand grasping at Jane from the darkness, just
before the door is shut. What’s more, Jane is for the most part unaware of her
ghostly rival. She knows something is off, she just doesn’t quite know what.
When Bertha makes her presence known, it is only through sound and, like a
ghost, through the aftereffects of her actions, like the fire she sets in Rochester’s
bedroom.
Jessica, on the other hand, will make her presence known visually. Betsy
will catch of glimpse of Jessica, then will freeze when the latter makes her way
at her. Jessica will be mostly visible. Her eyes will be blank, but she will move
at a leisurely pace, and she will not—not quite—be threatening. This scene, this
moment of first contact, is strange not simply because it subverts Val Lewton’s
own rules for suspense (never show the presence or cause of fear, merely
suggest it), or even because it strays so far from his source material (Charlotte
Bronte). Both are worth noting, but what I find immeasurably stranger still is
that it brings to the surface the central tension at the heart of Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
At the heart و H