Hemingway's Metamorphosis: The Hybrid Creole Language

Similar to the carnival’s tendency to fuse the officially homogenous and or centripetal language of the dominant discourses and the liminal centrifugal language of the suppressed voices is addressed and treated in WSS. As a novel in English that “serves to interrupt pure narratives of nation,” Rhys’s narrative celebrates the hybrid Creole language while setting it in opposition to English language, creating thus, a variety of dialects and an array of speech styles that ordinary people use in their use of language. It is a heteroglot writing that encompasses the very presence of heteroglossia that Bakhtin defines as: “The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects” (Discourse in the Novel 484). This incorporates
In other words, the text incorporates both the Standard English used by Rochester and Mr. Mason and the English, French, and Patois used by the Caribbean islanders such as Creoles and Blacks, it aims to celebrate hybridity that decentralizes the universality of her Rochester’s mother tongue. The novel, thus, incorporates many Creole’s songs like Christophine’s lullaby “Ma belle ka di maman li” meaning “my beautiful girl said to her mother,” that represents the mother’s voice. Other childish words are also used by Christophine when she talks to Antoinette such as “doudou,” meaning “little darling,” “doudou ché” meaning “dear little darling,” and others as “béké” meaning a white person (Rhys 70-71-70, Sumillera 29). Rhys’s embedment of these terms in a text written in English aims at showing the linguistic diversities of the West Indian society. She goes beyond that to display “that Creole can have a vitality and impact that Standard English lacks” (Rhys 151). It is a subversive strategy to create a heterogeneous space where she celebrates Bertha’s cultural specificities. The Caribbean novelist struggles to show the linguistic complexity of the post-emancipation Jamaican society. She rejects Brontë’s imperialist ideology that presents her Creole heroine as a voiceless beast that “growled like some strange wild animal” (Brontë
It liberates itself from clutches the conventional tedium of protest while embracing the carnivalestic joyful objection to the dominant system and subjection to openness and non-conformity serves to achieve regeneration preventing the enclosure within the system of patriarchal and imperial binarism. Rhys’s narrative thus, provides a new realm of possibilities that solemnize the mingling of miscellaneous voices, the multiplicity of different languages and the plurality of alternative realities while invalidating the tenability and solidity of infallible Truth/Reality, conclusive meaning and unified identity. To mock the sacred and challenge the normative, Rhys resorts to the use of the carnivalesque grotesque which is mightily tooted in the institution of the carnival and imbued with its spirit. Animated by laughter and degradation, the carnivalesque-grotesque Bertha/Antoinette celebrates her sexual deviance and cultural