Dark Exposure: Roberta Stoddart’s The Bertha Room
Isis Semaj-Hall, PhD
May 2023

Under the bright sunlight, Jamaica’s mountains are blue, ganja is green, and the waters are aquamarine. Our dawns are pale yellows and soft blues, while our sunsets are a dancing flame of oranges, reds, and purples. In sunny Jamaica, we are taught to never expose our darkness. But Roberta Stoddart, Kingston-born and now a Port of Spain resident, uses her art to confront what was once concealed. Her work encourages viewers to shine light on the hidden uncomfortable truths, as this may be the only way for us to heal.

With a novella that is set in the immediate post-emancipation time of the late 1830s Jamaica as her palette, Stoddart paints the story of Antoinette “Bertha” Cosway, the white-presenting creole protagonist in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Notably, author Rhys (1890-1979) was a white Dominican author who saw herself reflected in Charlotte Brontë’s Caribbean “madwoman in the attic,” a foil of a character in the English classic Jane Eyre (1847). For this reason, Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, her Jane Eyre prequel, with a sympathetic pen. Like the fictional Antoinette/ Bertha, Rhys understood the double, if not triple rejection of what it felt like to be unwanted by her family and by the black majority in the British colony of her birth, and later also felt unwanted by the English whites when she emigrated to England at the age of sixteen. For Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys leaned into her own difficult life in order to write empathetically of Antoinette’s.

In an early scene in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is shown attempting to explain to her soon-to-be husband what it was like growing up in the immediate aftermath of emancipation, a time that left her without any sense of belonging at all. The ex-slaves “hated us” and “[t]hey called us [poor whites] white cockroaches,” she says to the cold Englishman. “One day a little [black] girl followed me singing, ‘Go away white cockroach, go away, go away.’ I walked fast, but she walked faster. ‘White cockroach, go away, go away. Nobody want you. Go away.” This heart-wrenching scene emphasizing her traumatic childhood of color and class ridicule highlights the deep feelings of unbelonging that go on to darken all relationships for Antoinette/ Bertha. For Bertha, having been abandoned by her father, rejected by her mother, despised by her age-mates, and later exploited by her husband, she felt perpetually ostracized and alone.

Wide Sargasso Sea is an important contribution to the study of both Caribbean and English literature because of how the novella humanizes the cruelly depicted “madwoman in the attic” of Brontë’s novel. Similarly, Roberta Stoddart’s The Bertha Room is a new and necessary intervention on Jane Eyre’s darkest character. Stoddart paints Bertha as a sympathetic figure whose development was stunted under patriarchy’s gender rules, and viewers can see this in the infantilized facial qualities of her subjects. Thinking of composition, how and where Stoddart arranges Bertha seems representative of Bertha’s dis/connection to herself and others. And the frigid social environment of colonial Jamaica, is reflected in the cold color schemes and stark unwelcoming backgrounds of the pieces. Stoddart paints scenes that critically imagine the complexity of post-emancipation’s colonial relationships. With Bertha as the recurring subject, Stoddart’s paintings interrogate what happens when people are used, traumatized, discarded, and hidden away like “a memory to be avoided, locked away.”

Standing before the piece titled “Madwoman in the Backroom,” an overt nod to Brontë and Rhys, a viewer is immediately transfixed by the nearly crossed eyes, closed mouth, and open vagina that is Roberta Stoddart’s portrayal of the infamous Bertha character. Stoddart’s Bertha is spread wide and intimately exposed over fifteen square inches of linen. With her dress’s multiple layers gathered in hand, Stoddart’s Bertha squats squarely at the center of a black canvas. Bertha’s sour milk colored face, décolletage, and thighs contrast with the dark color of her skirt, boots, and pubic hair. This “Madwoman’s” sallow skin and pink vulva call our attention, but it is the painting’s blackness that shines brightest. Textured and sculpted by Stoddart’s paintbrush, Bertha’s raven-hued locks reflect what feels like impossible light in this scene of darkest exposure. Standing before the Bertha of “Madwoman in the Backroom,” viewers are forced to reflect. We must reflect upon all the discomfort that we, like Bertha, are conditioned to and supposed to keep hidden under layers of un-confrontable shame, trauma, grief, loss, and guilt.

Rhys’s re-characterized Bertha becomes the vehicle through which Stoddart can investigate the dark space of loneliness and the dark emotional state that surfaces when an identity is broken by colonialism. Laid bare across a total of fourteen distinct paintings, each depicting a sullen-expressioned Bertha in a different anti-tropical setting, Stoddart upends and makes visible the Caribbean’s colonial underside. In this way, The Bertha Room casts a flood of bright moonlight on what was once in the shadows. Stoddart’s work exposes the inky dark of night that we were meant to forget and hide away. These are paintings meant to be seen, displayed, and discussed in the open and in the light. They reveal the hurt that Rhys’s Bertha – and all of us of the Caribbean -- dam behind wide eyes and broken smiles. The Bertha Room pieces reveal the hurt that Brontë’s Rochester – like all exploiters and users of the Caribbean -- tries to conceal behind selfish lies and behind figurative and literal attic doors.

“Everything is too much,” is how Rhys’s Rochester described Jamaica in Wide Sargasso Sea. “Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red.” That kind of rainbow-bright, paradisaic Caribbean colorscape is wholly absent from Stoddart’s portrayal of postcolonial reality and sentimentality. A far cry from the swaying symbols of Caribbean tranquility, in “White Donkey” and “White Cockroaches” the region’s signature palm trees are painted as menacing shadows and as the exposed dry bones of a parasol, respectively. And with titles plucked from the pages of Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, “All of Our Children,” “Back Room Bertha,” “Bertha,” “Doudou Doll,” “Rochester,” “Sand Doll,” “Sleepwalkers,” and “White Cockroach” are painted with skin colored palettes of not-quite-whites and brownish-blacks that seem to whisper with questions about racial purity and race mixing in the Caribbean. While the crimson red intensity of “Immortel” and “Bertha and the Jancro” slip beneath the skin, perhaps colorfully leading us to consider how we, like Bertha and Rochester, play dress-up with our perceived and projected bloodlines.

Roberta Stoddart’s richly complex oil paintings showcased in The Bertha Room, prove that it is dark under the metaphoric flotsam of Wide Sargasso Sea, darker still under the shade of the palm tree’s symbolism, and perhaps darkest of all where racial, familial, patriarchal, and post-colonial trauma festers muted and unseen. No longer can we hide from exposure. The time has come to shine light on the dark secrets of the Caribbean.

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i. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, p 13.

ii. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, p 13.

iii. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, p 103.

iv. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, p 41.

Surviving the Dream

My point of Origin is Jamaica. An island of exquisite and improbable beauty, its majestic Blue Mountains, dense dark rainforests, rolling plains and aquamarine seas are unlikely backdrops for its savage past and deep, mysterious secrets. Slavery struck terrible fear into the hearts of both perpetrators and victims alike.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence it was clear that reality was the cornerstone to be avoided at all costs. Investigating nothing, ashamed of everything, we were never to remember. I forgot my Self in the crushing collision of several traumatic histories, in which perpetrators and victims regularly switched roles. Starving for love in a colonial cane field, my sense of belonging grew progressively precarious.

Denying both shadow and light, I stifled my separation and suffering. I was dealt ‘a deep amnesiac blow’1. Desperation was mine. Deep inside I felt like Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Bertha’2, Jean Rhys’ ‘White Cockroach’3, Michelle Cliff’s ‘Madwoman In The Back Room’4.

Emotional drunks fight fear with ethanol and fire. My blood comes to the boil, a red hurricane raging and roaring along the gullies to the sea. Wounded birds are restless and fearful creatures, trembling in idolatry and envy before the status symbols of their culture.

Embracing my spiritual identity, mine is the lifelong process of reclaiming and accepting all of who “I Am”. Seeking to make sense of Caribbean pathologies, I strive to create work as a whole person. What becomes urgent is the process of authentically mapping my original and unique journey of healing and awakening. By doing so I hope to stimulate conversations around what is universal. My work, therefore, is the fire through which I journey to connect to reality and to love. Ultimately, God may be what “I Do”, as well as what “I believe”5.

Copyright Roberta Stoddart 2006/2022

1. Michelle Cliff, Abeng, 1984
2. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 1847
3. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
4. Michelle Cliff, The Store Of A Million Items, 1998
5. Roberta Stoddart, The Storyteller, 2007

Trauma. Fear. Shame. Loss. Grief. These monumental forces have formed the unrelenting pressures of my lived reality in Jamaica since birth. I consider many questions in my work, in my endeavor to understand and survive deeply felt historical wounds and everyday tensions. In Jamaica there are intense pressures around Race. Class. Gender. Sexuality. Financial and Social Inequity. Cruelty. Brutality. Belonging. When confronted with such sustained pressure, how do we discover our true identities? When we are overwhelmed, how do our feelings and wounded selves manifest? Is this madness a sane response to an insane world? What are the forces that apply this pressure, and how can the human spirit survive it? How can one live an authentic spiritual life without sleeping or dying in the midst of often crushing Pain?

Embracing my spiritual identity, mine is the lifelong process of reclaiming and accepting all of who “I Am”. Seeking to make sense of Caribbean pathologies, I strive to create work as a whole person. What becomes urgent is the process of authentically mapping my original and unique journey of healing and awakening. By doing so I hope to stimulate conversations around what is universal. My work, therefore, is the fire through which I journey to connect to reality and to love. Ultimately, God may be what “I Do”, as well as what “I believe”.

An outline of my three artworks in Pressure:

It must be a Duppy or a Gunman (1998), titled with a borrowed, well known lyric, was motivated by a visit to my Black great-grandmother’s grave in a dilapidated graveyard, and by a dead gunman I envisaged after hearing the spray of bullets on that same day. Thinking about the lack of Love in memoriam, the quickness with which Death can come and its inevitability, I decided to marry the two themes. Duppy is also my first known painting to utilize the color “black” mixed from a variety of blue, red, and yellow paints.

Madwoman in the Back Room (2008) is a portrayal of Jane Bronte’s Bertha from my 2008 series Full Moon Madness. In 1834 Antoinette Cosway, or Bertha, was a White creole outcast incapable of belonging to the Europe of her ancestors or to Jamaica, her birthplace. She is a “white cockroach” to the Blacks who hate her. Englishman Edward Rochester weds Bertha and refashions her into a raving madwoman on their honeymoon. Back in England, Rochester locks her away in his attic. Full of terror, rage and anguish, Bertha sets fire to her husband’s estate, killing herself and maiming him. In this work, Bertha has become completely unhinged, exposing herself as a deranged exile who has lost touch with her authentic self. Shame. Guilt. Rage. Grief. Loss. Suffering. On the surface, Bertha can fit neatly into a confluence of themes that form the bedrock of Caribbean social, political and cultural society and institutions. But Bertha cannot be simply reduced to a perpetrator of atrocities against the enslaved, as solely a woman of privilege, or to predictable feminine stereotypes. Bertha is also a victim of an oppressive patriarchal society.

Sleepwalkers (2009-2017), a large narrative, spanned a period of 8 years in the making. It further explores the concept of Full Moon Madness — that our limited conditioning puts us to sleep, and we long to awaken to our authentic selves and fulfill our potential. In Sleepwalkers, moonlight illuminates the honeymoon party and the dark, eerie landscape. The characters are ever‑fearful of zombification and the loss of their deluded selves. They are conditioned to survive. Literary inspirations for Sleepwalkers are Charlotte Brontё’s bleak Gothic novel Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s haunting supernatural prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff. My use of paint itself is sculptural in quality and symbolizes the unrelenting build-up of the psychological and emotional weight of the past and its burdened descendants. Moonlight only fleetingly illuminates the darkness of this permanent night.

>> Click to view artist’s statement PDF

The Sonic Life of Pressure

Excerpt:

Artist Roberta Stoddart has also long been engaged with similar themes. In her work, the question of pressure involves, among other things, the complexly entangled ways that colonialism continues to haunt the material lives of many Jamaicans—indeed, continues to haunt us all today. Negotiations of racialised, gendered, and classed belonging are recurring themes in her work, vividly linking past and present. These are not new themes. In works such as I Am (1999) and The Odd Couple (1999–2000), made more than twenty years ago, Stoddart explores questions of homelessness, vagrancy, and the vulnerability of people whose lives are treated as disposable. This disposability of life has a long history in Jamaica, and the Caribbean, where colonialised lives, dehumanised, were regarded as being of less value, replaceable.

Her exploration of vagrancy is not limited to the body. For example, in her large-scale “history painting,” Sleepwalkers (2009–2017), included in this exhibition, Stoddart draws inspiration from writers Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, and Michelle Cliff, to offer a vantage point from which to explore how the past lives on in the present: as a burden, as pressure on both the individual and society more broadly. This forms part of an ongoing exploration of a kind of spiritual vagrancy, especially of the contemporary “creole” white subject positioned within the afterlives of colonialism. This painting possesses a dreamlike quality, alluding to the hallucinatory landscapes of the European surrealists but in a distinctively Caribbean setting, with Spanish moss in the moonlit trees. The ghostly human figures and disquieting animals confront us with their enigmatic gazes, reminding us of the psychological dimension that is always a part of her work. The dreamworld that we enter invites us to consider the complex interiority of her subjects, black, brown, and white, positioned before us as in a nineteenth-century conversation piece. Yet this interiority is not simply about individual characters. Here Stoddart brings past and present together, revealing history’s defining role in the present. This work, like her corpus more broadly, connects the individual to larger structures of social relations impacted by the colonial past, by slavery and the world it created: individual to family, family to society, all implicated within this history. As with Stoddart’s allusions in Madwoman in the Back Room (2008) to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and to Jean Rhys’s expansion of that narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea, Sleepwalkers attunes us to how pressure works on our mental health, to the working of misogyny and patriarchal power that creates spiritual vagrants, especially of women. In the struggle against such pressure, we fight against the long, protracted, zombified sleep that always looms over us.

It is in her work It Must Be a Duppy or a Gunman, however, that Stoddart combines questions of the sonic with those of the visual, attuning us to the sonic life of pressure. She recalls that this work was motivated by visiting the graveside of her black great-grandmother and, on the same day, hearing the sound of gunshots, the sound of spraying bullets. While the duppy, the (haunting) spirit in the work’s title, recalls death and mourning, but also pasts and the wandering of past spirits in the present, the gunshots bring us squarely into the present: shata-tat-tat is the soundscape for many urban poor in Jamaica. It Must Be a Duppy or a Gunman borrows its title from that of a 1970s popular Jamaican song that humorously recalls the response to encountering ghosts.

Pressure, in Stoddart’s works, then, becomes capacious in its quality and impact, affecting us all, even if as differently constituted subjects. She reminds us that in our postcolonial present, which some scholars have described as a moment of post-memory, the long, drawn-out afterlives of the colonial past affect us all. In encountering her work, we are invited to reconsider whether limited notions of perpetrators or victims, of white or black, can fully comprehend the complexity of worlds that colonialism made. We are all implicated subjects under pressure.

>> Click to read full introduction