Up a Backlit Staircase, Casting a Long Shadow_____69
The spectral other woman, the first wife. In order for the story
to proceed, there has to be an obstacle or an enemy, a threat to
the well-being of the main characters. In Jane Eyre, this
obstacle is provided by Bertha Mason, the foreign, beastly
woman-object who stands in the way of the harmony of the
present society. With the presence of Bertha, the
representation of ‘woman’ is split into two. Femininity is
polarized into love, understanding, and a capacity to listen to
the powerful man who perceives himself as a victim, on the
one hand, and uncontrolled sexuality, madness and a refusal to
cooperate with the (white) patriarchal order, on the other.
(145)
Jessica is a problematic Bertha: unlike Bronte’s Bertha, Jessica is not a
foreigner, and she is not—when we first meet her—a crazed sexual being. She is
anything but. She’s barely a presence, catatonic and hovering, her biggest threat
being proximity. Later Paul will insist that Jessica was, in fact all of the things
we expect of our Berthas. He will say that was selfish, empty, and dead, and that
he was never happy with her. He’ll even come uncomfortably close to Chow’s
description of Bertha as a “woman-object” when he describes Jessica as “a
possession, a beautiful possession to own and hold.” In that same scene, he
offsets Jessica’s qualities by contrasting them with Betsy’s. By calling Betsy
“clean, decent thinking,” he implies that Jessica was the opposite: dirty, and
dirty minded. Like Bertha.
Despite these similarities, one major difference haunts these texts. In
Bronte’s Jane Eyre and in the 1944 Robertson version, Bertha is largely
missing. She haunts by suggestion and by absence. Not so with Jessica: Jessica
is very much there. She may be dead—it’s never entirely settled whether she is
or not—but for all her supernatural echoes she refuses to leave the frame. Jessica
and Betsy share a great deal of screen time, though the latter is supposedly the
creature haunting the former. Betsy is the zombie Jessica walked with (which
they do, when Betsy takes the catatonic wife through the jungle and into the
failed voodoo ceremony). This familiarity with the uncanny may explain the
narrator’s oddly serene tone in her voiceover. Betsy can identify, will try to fix,
zombie-Jessica.
More troubling still is that Betsy is forced to confront and care for the
person standing in her way of Paul. Jessica is in every way imaginable Chow’s
“spectral wife, the other woman,” though her specter is solid and incontestable.
In every other version of Jane Eyre, the narrator/protagonist is allowed to desire
a married man because she doesn’t know that he is married. Every Rochester
withholds this key bit of information from every Jane. Betsy, on the other hand,
is aware of the situation: she is there precisely because it is her duty to care for
the ailing wife. I Walked With a Zombie allows its protagonist to solve this
impossible problem through a complicated moral calculus.