Popular Culture Review Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2010 | Page 73

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.