Mira Ferguson Character Analysis

The characters that reject the notion of mimicry, Christophine and Amélie, are the characters that are triumphant. The ‘new colonizer’, as theorised by Moira Ferguson, no longer has power over them and ‘the text covertly intimates that the African-Caribbean communities drove out the English and White creoles’. They have found the power of resistance in their difference. David Murray has said that,
‘if one aspect of the project of western civilization was to make the inferior others, by education and example, as much like the whites as possible, another aspect was to maintain precisely that difference which justified white authority.’
The ‘not quite’ of Bhabha’s mimicry cannot be empowering for the colonised if it ‘justified white authority.’ Ferguson’s theory explains how their power through their nationality ‘dissolve the rights [Rochester] assumes to “take up… airs of superiority”’. In the light of Ferguson’s theory, Christophine overpowers Rochester, and supplies Antoinette with …show more content…
O’Connor believes ‘the religious and political conflict is integral to the struggle between Rochester and Christophine’. Christophine’s ‘religion’ is linked to voodoo and named Obeah, which ‘seems to be enfolded within the dominant religion’. When Rochester, who is ‘always calling on God’ (p. 81), is deceived into drinking a product of Christophine’s dark ‘religion’ it can be seen as Christophine taking control of him. Wide Sargasso Sea contains many biblical images, such as when Antoinette calls Christophine ‘damned black devil from hell’ (p. 86), and Rochester naming Christophine a ‘devil’ (p. 106). Due to her power through Obeah, Christophine becomes the antithesis of Christianity. Therefore, to Rochester at least, when Christophine takes ‘charge’ (p. 98) it represents the failure of assimilation into western civilisation. Richard Dyer has