Fight, love, and flee Cognitive dissonance in Horane Smith’s Lover’s Leap

Abstract

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd Horane Smith, the Jamaican-born award-winning Canadian writer, reworks the Jamaican legend of Lovers’ Leap in his novel Lover's Leap (1999), to renegotiate the past and uncover what is hushed up in history and literature. He brings to light the white mistress's relationship with the enslaved black man, a topic largely unexplored by writers and scholars. The enslaved black woman/free white mistress dichotomy places Jerome, the Jamaican black slave, in a constant state of dissonance. The subjectivity of the enslaved African is underexplored in the critical literature on Caribbean slavery, and besides, psychoanalysis in Caribbean literature is an underused critical approach; I am thus enticed to braid Leon Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance theory (1957) with Frantz Fanon's “psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem” in Black Skin White Masks (1952) to delve deep into Jerome's inner self and examine how he responds to attitude and behavior inconsistencies produced within various contexts of hegemonic power.