In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway’s husband begins calling her Bertha. She objects, of course. Bertha is not her name, and she does not recognize herself in it. But Rochester persists, and the name gradually begins to seem like something official. He has made a judgment about who his wife is, and his judgment carries more authority than her own. By the time Antoinette finds herself imprisoned in an English attic, nearly everything she might say about herself has been rendered inadmissible.
Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, more than a century after Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Brontë’s Bertha Mason is a frightening, largely voiceless presence: the madwoman Rochester keeps locked away at Thornfield Hall. Rhys went back and imagined the years before her imprisonment, granting Antoinette a childhood in Jamaica, a history of abandonment and racial estrangement, and an account of her marriage. The two novels make an interesting pair because Rhys asks us to reconsider what we thought we knew about a character whose identity had been established almost entirely by other people.
In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, philosopher Miranda Fricker gives a name to the kind of wrong Antoinette suffers. Epistemic injustice concerns the ways people can be harmed specifically in their capacity to know, understand, and communicate their experiences. Fricker identifies two primary forms. The first, testimonial injustice, occurs when prejudice causes someone’s word to be given less credibility than it deserves. The second, hermeneutical injustice, arises when gaps in our shared language and understanding make certain experiences difficult to explain, particularly for people already excluded from positions of social influence.
So much of what happens in fiction depends upon who is permitted to tell the story. Consider how easily a character’s reputation can precede them. Someone is described as unstable, dishonest, naive, or difficult, and subsequent events are interpreted accordingly. An angry reaction can easily become further evidence of instability. An attempt at self-defense confirms the original accusation. The character may have perfectly sound reasons for behaving as they do, but the people around them have acquired a way of explaining their behavior that makes those reasons irrelevant.
Rochester’s treatment of Antoinette works in much this fashion. His suspicions about her family, her ancestry, and her sexuality inform his interpretation of nearly everything she does. Her efforts to win his affection only deepen his mistrust. He becomes increasingly confident in his understanding of her, even as that understanding grows less adequate to the woman herself.
What makes Rhys’s novel so disturbing is the difficulty of separating Rochester’s private suspicions from the social power that gives them consequence. His version of Antoinette will determine where she lives, what freedom she possesses, and ultimately how she enters another novel. The reader knows something that the world of Jane Eyre has largely forgotten: Bertha Mason had another name, and there was once a woman who answered to it.
A rather different treatment of epistemic injustice appears in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. The novel opens with Yeong-hye’s husband explaining that he had always considered his wife unremarkable. He married her partly because she seemed unlikely to make demands upon him. Then she begins refusing meat, prompted by a series of disturbing dreams, and her decision produces an escalating crisis within the family.
Yeong-hye’s husband finds her behavior embarrassing and inconvenient. Her father regards it as intolerable disobedience. Other characters become fascinated by her body and the possibilities it seems to represent. Each develops an explanation for what she is doing, though Yeong-hye herself remains strangely remote. The novel offers only intermittent access to her inner life, leaving us dependent upon narrators whose understanding of her is profoundly limited.
Kang’s handling of perspective creates an uncomfortable predicament for the reader. We want to know what Yeong-hye means by her refusal. We wonder whether she is ill, whether she is making a protest, whether her transformation possesses some significance unavailable to the people around her. Yet even our attempts to interpret her risk repeating the actions of her family. We may be as impatient as they are to make sense of her behavior.
This is where Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice becomes particularly suggestive. Sometimes an experience exceeds the interpretive resources available to the people trying to understand it. The difficulty may lie partly in the assumptions embedded in the questions they ask. Yeong-hye’s family wants to know why she will not behave normally. Almost nobody seems interested in whether their understanding of normality has become part of the problem.
For a novelist, the implications extend well beyond stories involving overt prejudice or social exclusion. A marriage can sustain itself for decades on a mistaken understanding of one spouse’s character. A child may learn that certain feelings are unacceptable long before acquiring the language to describe them. Within a family, one person’s account of an old event may become so thoroughly established that everyone else begins to remember it that way.
These situations offer writers rich possibilities for conflict, especially because the people doing the misunderstanding need not be malicious. They may believe themselves perceptive, affectionate, or unusually fair-minded. Their confidence can make their failures of understanding all the more consequential.
After months or years of inhabiting a particular narrator’s perspective, writers may overlook the assumptions through which that narrator interprets other characters. A book writing coach approaching the work with fresh eyes can identify moments when the narrative appears to endorse judgments that the author intended to leave in question.
Sometimes a scene needs another character’s perspective. Sometimes a single gesture or remembered detail can undermine an apparently authoritative account. In other cases, the manuscript may do more by resisting the temptation to settle a disagreement. A coach can help an author distinguish productive uncertainty from confusion, and recognize when a character’s silence has artistic purpose or merely reflects a gap in the writing.
Rhys gave Antoinette a voice that an earlier novel had denied her. Kang, writing more than fifty years later, approached the problem from almost the opposite direction, allowing Yeong-hye’s relative silence to expose the limitations of everyone who speaks about her. Neither strategy offers a universal model for representing misunderstood characters. What the novels share is an interest in the consequences of being known incorrectly.
A person’s life can be profoundly altered by what others believe about them. Fiction has always understood this, long before philosophers developed a vocabulary for epistemic injustice. It appears in gossip, family legends, institutional authority, and the small humiliations of ordinary conversation. The novelist’s task is to discover how those judgments take hold, what sustains them, and what happens to the person who cannot make themselves heard.
