The Frame

[In the full paper, this was preceeded by a general introduction to postcolonialism, which I co-wrote. Then I used I Walked With a Zombie to illustrate an analysis of a colonial discourse text, following Edward Said’s example, and my co-writer wrote about a postcolonial text.]

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said is largely concerned with colonial rather than postcolonial discourse; that is, he prefers to use postcolonialism as a lens through which to view canonical Western texts and uncover an additional layer of meaning, a layer which betrays the Western author’s complicity, whether conscious or unconscious, in creating and sustaining Empire. The text I am going to look at is not quite canonical, unless you happen to be studying the canon of 1940s B horror films – if you were, I Walked With a Zombie would be one of your touchstone texts. And though Said might not have considered a second-string 1943 American horror film as canonical Western literature, it does have close ties to a work which certainly is, and which is often discussed in postcolonial terms – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Producer Val Lewton was given the title I Walked With a Zombie by his studio overlords and told to come up with a story to go with it. Rather than create a cheap exploitation-style horror film of the type the title would lead you to expect, Lewton chose to create a lush, moody reimagining of Jane Eyre set in the contemporary West Indies. Jane becomes Betsy, a young nurse just out of school (her headmaster’s name was Lowood, a reference to the school Jane attended in the novel) who is sent to the Holland plantation in the Caribbean to care for Jessica Holland, the wife of the current plantation master. Jessica suffers from an unknown condition which has rendered her essentially mindless and passive – she appears awake and can follow commands, but cannot speak and reacts to nothing. She is, in fact, a zombie, not in the modern, post-Night of the Living Dead conception of dangerous, flesh-eating zombies, but in the cultic voodoo version which simply means a corpse reanimated through ritual into an entity devoid of self and obedient to its creators. In relation to Jane Eyre, she is Bertha Mason, rendered Other by the influence of Caribbean culture and now a burden on her husband Paul and his growing desire to romance Betsy.

The West Indian setting of I Walked With a Zombie makes explicit the power relationships that are more implicit in Jane Eyre, somewhat as Wide Sargasso Sea would do a couple of decades later. In this way, it is possible to look at I Walked With a Zombie as a postcolonial text rather than a colonial one – in fact, it is possible that Jean Rhys had Lewton’s film in mind when she created the moody setting of Wide Sargasso Sea (Aizenberg 463). However, just as the zombie itself is a liminal figure, caught between life and death, I Walked With a Zombie is a liminal text. In some ways, it seems to interrogate the (male) imperial power that subjugates both the master’s wife and the plantation’s black servants. On the other hand, it reinscribes stereotypes of “darkies” as inalienably different and naturally inferior, and ends with a problematic proclamation of the justness of Jessica’s death.

I have a few film clips to show. Note that I have edited them all to keep them brief, so if you have seen or do see the film and notice some dialogue or something missing, that’s why. This clip is the nurse Betsy arriving on the island and driving to the plantation with a black servant.

Though the driver tells of his ancestors being brought to the island chained on a slave ship by Holland’s ancestors, he has a smile on his face, not particularly seeming to mind that he continues to work for the slaver’s descendents, and Betsy answers this narrative of violent transportation by naively remarking on the beauty of the island – implicitly suggesting that the African slaves were coming from an ugly place to a beautiful place and thus should be happy. Martha P. Nichimson argues that Betsy’s very naivete works to create the opposite reaction in the viewer and that the film itself actively questions the imperial attitudes of the white plantation masters. Certainly she is correct for modern viewers, attuned to look for imbalances of power between majority and minority peoples; however, the depiction of blacks through the rest of the film upholds the existing imperial and Hollywood stereotypes almost completely. Hence, though perhaps Lewton does argue with the practice of slavery, he does not appear to deny the essential racial inferiority of the island’s black population. This seemingly contradictory position was espoused as early as 1902 in J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study, which Edward Said says “attacks imperialism for its heartless economics, its export of capital, its alliance with ruthless forces, and its façade of well-meaning ‘civilizing’ pretexts. Yet the book offers no critique of the notion of ‘lower races,’ an idea Hobson finds acceptable” (Said 241). I Walked With a Zombie appears to share Hobson’s attack on imperial economic practices such as slavery through plantation owner Paul’s apparent regret at the sadness of the black population which he recognizes as stemming from their former slavery, but also his willingness to define non-whites as ‘lower races.’

This next scene shows Alma, the black maid, bringing Betsy breakfast on her first morning on the island. Here Alma is the perfect picture of the affable, accommodating black servant, happy to provide luxury services to white ladies. Alma and the other servants residing on the plantation depict the domesticated Other, the one which is, Homi Bhabha’s terms, “almost the same, but not quite” as the white owners (86). The flip side of Alma’s “mimicry” of whites for Bhabha is the Other which remains a menace, exhibiting “a difference that is almost total but not quite” (91). That menace is embodied in the blacks who live not on the plantation, but at the Home Fort, the much more primitive black settlement. The mimic and the menace are not completely separate; though we never see Alma go to the Home Fort, she is quite familiar with it and after suggesting that Betsy take Jessica there to see if the witch doctor can cure her condition, explains how o get there and that they will have to pass by the guard Carrefour.

This journey undertaken by Betsy and Jessica crosses a liminal space, the boundary between civilization and savage. It actually takes much longer than the clip I have shown; I cut out about four minutes of them walking through fields and woods in order to save time. As they walk, the trail is marked by an animal and then a human skull, and finally by the encounter with the zombie guard, Carrefour. He is the embodiment of menace, his vacant stare marking him as almost completely Other. Both the high and low camera angles emphasize his towering height over the two women and thus the potential danger he poses them. However, he is not completely Other, because he and Jessica, a white woman, share the zombie condition.

Their shared condition suggests a connection between feminism and postcolonialism. Several critics have pointed out the similarity between the patriarchal domination of women and the imperial domination of colonial peoples (Williams/Chrisman 193-194). Even on a linguistic level, Freud has called woman “the dark continent” and imperialist adventure stories speak of “penetrating darkest Africa.” In I Walked With a Zombie, Paul’s half-brother Wesley, who also loves Jessica, accuses Paul of driving Jessica mad by forcing her to stay in the Indies when she wanted to leave (with Wesley). Jessica is also depicted by various characters as being overly passionate and sexual, another resemblance she bears Bertha Mason and thus the native Caribbean element, assumed to be sexually insatiable. Her zombification therefore appears as the punishment of a patriarchal system which fears female sexuality and simultaneously connects her to imperial subjugation of the African culture from which zombies come. Yet a black zombie and a white zombie are not quite the same: Carrefour’s condition, though menacing, is not depicted as inappropriate - Jessica’s zombie state is something foreign that should be cured if possible, whereas for Carrefour, being a zombie is appropriate to his race.

The person who links Jessica and the Home Fort within the film is Paul and Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Rand. She brought Western medicine and sanitary practices to the island, but had difficulty convincing the Home Fort blacks to follow her directions, until she figured out that they obeyed her if she told them their god Shango was the power behind the medicines: “it seems so simple to let the gods speak through me.” Mrs. Rand sets herself up as a god among the Home Fort people and eventually reveals that she is responsible for Jessica’s condition – angry that Jessica was tearing apart her family by causing rivalry between her sons, she asked the witch doctor to make Jessica a zombie. Paul and the doctor believe her imagination has run wild, setting up an ambiguity between Western domination and native voodoo. This ambiguity is further elaborated in the next clip.

In this scene, the Home Fort calls to Jessica through a voodoo doll. In the middle of this clip, Jessica is halted by Betsy, Paul and Wesley. Wesley argues for the power of voodoo, by which “they can make anybody do what they want,” while Paul claims it is not real, but only a trick used by the Home Fort people to frighten them. Here we have simultaneous action by the witch doctor and Wesley, one stabbing the voodoo doll with a pin, the other stabbing Jessica with an arrow. Is Wesley, as he would claim, being controlled by the voodoo, merely an instrument of the Home Fort’s need to eradicate a non-native zombie? Or is he appropriating voodoo as a scapegoat for his own actions? Either way, the Home Fort people lose – either they are a savage menace through the power of voodoo, or they are dominated once again by a white man using them to expiate his own guilt. The final voice over (the source or authority of which is unclear) states that Jessica’s death is just and that she is to blame for Wesley’s downfall as well:

“Oh, Lord God most holy. […] The woman was a wicked woman and she was dead in her own life. Yea, Lord, dead in the selfishness of her spirit. And the man followed her. Her steps led him down to evil, her feet took hold on death. Forgive him, Oh Lord […]. Yea Lord, pity them who are dead and give peace and happiness to the living.”

The “living” are Paul and Betsy, shown embracing as they are now able to embark on their life together, rid of the zombie wife and competitive brother. This ending is problematic. There is no evidence other than rumors from unreliable people that Jessica was “a wicked woman,” certainly not that she led Wesley into evil; there is a plausible argument that the film questions Jessica’s implication and obliquely suggests that Wesley and Paul are much more responsible for the family’s problems than either Jessica or the voodoo practitioners. On the other hand, even if the film does critique patriarchal and colonial values to a certain extent, and I think it does, it fails to make its colonized people anything other than domesticated mimics or savages, and upholds the distinction between a zombified black, which is nothing more than an extension of the black’s natural condition, and a zombified white, which is unnatural and deserves care and cure. Finally, the film ends with the unification of Paul and Betsy, thus reinscribing the colonial values of Jane Eyre, without even the mitigating punishment of Rochester’s blindness. Thus, I Walked With a Zombie stands as a somewhat nuanced colonial text, but a colonial text nonetheless, clearly showing the necessary Othering by which imperialism maintains control.

WORKS CITED

• Aizenberg, Edna. “I Walked With a Zombie: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 73:3 (1999): 461-66.
• Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. 85-92.
• I Walked With a Zombie. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. Prod. Val Lewton. RKO, 1943.
• Nochimson, Martha P. “Cinematheque Annotation: I Walked With a Zombie.” Senses of Cinema. http://www.senseofcinema.com/contents/cteq/07/44/i-walked-zombie.html Accessed 4/25/08.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Knopf, 1993.
• Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman. “Theorising Gender: Introduction.” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Crisman. NY: Columbia UP, 1994. 193-195.

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This paper originated as part of a paper on postcolonial theory for a course in Literary Criticism at Baylor University, April 28th, 2008.