A Postcolonial Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Res. Asst. Nee enel

Erciyes University, nesesenel@erciyes.edu.tr

Abstract
Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on the surface seems to be a
pathetic love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her
marriage to an English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several
crucial cultural and political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europes
alternative and potential other, are depicted. Orientalism, in Saids formulation, is
principally a way of defining and locating Europes others. Accordingly, within the
context of this paper, the other version of the story of the othered will be examined
from a post colonialist perception through the representations of the characters
especially, that of Mr. Rochester. His orientalist and othering attitude towards
Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the Caribbean and the related crucial identity
problems of Antoinette will be discussed within the framework of this postcolonial
reading on Wide Sargasso Sea.

Key Words: postcolonialism, orientalism, postmodern paroody, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane
Eyre

In postmodern literature, after the fading away of the colonial discourses and the rising of
literary voices from the former colonies on issues like self-identity, there appears a new
literary genre, in which the writers try to give voice to the margins cultural, political and
sociological identity and question the imposing power of the supposedly superior
mainstream society. Especially with the impact of second wave postcolonialism, the
postcolonial writers in literature started to write for a specific purpose, using the language of
the mainstream power and aiming at the same target (Ashcroft 1989: 23). Wide Sargasso Sea is
such an attempt to exert a previously silenced voice using the mainstream methods and
language with the basic purpose of constituting a cultural self for the formerly suppressed
voice of the Creole peoples. Jean Rhys applies the customs, ways and tradition of the center,
that is, Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre, to tell the story of the other, the periphery. The point of
view that was misjudged, disregarded and silenced in Jane Eyre now turns out to be the basic
key perception in Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the story of the other is chiefly displayed. In
her postcolonial reply, Rhys rejects the imposing imperialist ways and methods of fiction
writing to identify the repressed ones, because Postcolonialism wants to disrupt,
disassemble or deconstruct the kind of logic, ideologies of the West (27).

In this sense, Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea is an indispensible postmodern and postcolonial
novel, which is perfectly written as a reply to Charlotte Brontes Jean Eyre. Via her
deconstructionist method, Rhys adroitly plays upon the theme, characters and general
plotline of Jane Eyre, utilizing all the blessings of parody and pastiche method of a
postmodern novel, which marks Wide Sargasso Sea as a flawless postcolonial parody of
Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre. In her rewriting the main parts of Jane Eyre, Rhys gives voice to

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the deliberately silenced Jane Eyre characters with a postcolonial attempt to unearth the
other side of the related character and the story. The mad woman in the attic, Bertha
Mason, Edward Rochesters first wife who was a silenced character of Bronte, coming from a
creole origin and manifested to the readers as a woman with a dark and horrific image
through the writers intention of othering, becomes Antoinette Cosway, a key figure of Wide
Sargasso Sea, in which the othered, repressed and silenced mad womans story is retold to
unearth the orientalist attitude of Brontes story towards the West Indies and the Creole
culture. Therefore, it would not be farfetched to mark Wide Sargasso Sea, as the story of the
other, whether it is the story of the othered Bertha, or othered Creole women, in general.
In her new narration of Berthas story, Rhys focuses on her life as Antoinette in the West
Indies and puts forward the reasons for her arguable madness, questioning the post
colonialist intentions of Bronte. Through the new version Jane Eyre, the unknowns of the
Creole life of Antoinette, of her mother Annette, of her marriage with Mr. Rochester and of
main issues which were left blank are narrated from a new point of view with a desire to
create a new understanding of the other.

Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on the surface seems to be a pathetic
love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her marriage to an
English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several crucial cultural and
political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europes alternative and potential
other, are depicted. Orientalism, in Saids formulation, is principally a way of defining
and locating Europes others (Ashcroft 2001: 50). Accordingly, within the context of this
paper, the other version of the story of the othered will be examined from a post colonialist
perception through the representations of the characters especially, that of Mr. Rochester.
His orientalist and othering attitude towards Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the
Caribbean and the related crucial identity problems of Antoinette will be discussed within
the framework of this postcolonial reading on Wide Sargasso Sea.

Via her creation of Antoinette Cosway, Rhys creates a parallel character to Bertha Mason of
Bronte with the intention of creating a nave character from the horrific mad woman in the
attic. The author transforms the first Rochester into an individual figure whose madness is
caused by imperialistic and patriarchal oppression (Swietlik 2005: 2). The madness of
Bertha, or in other words, previously Antoinette, is totally related to the double and even
triple oppression that she suffers as a woman from the patriarchy and as a Creole woman in
the West Indies, the burden that places her just in-between white English society and newly
emancipated slaves. Throughout her life, she is left to live under a hegemonic oppression
from her supposedly beloved husband, and the harassment of not being a pure white blood
from White English society and whats more, the subjugation from the newly freed slaves
who were previously working in their plantations. These three factors could be adduced as
the main points that push Antoinette to madness, which is again questionable on the
grounds of its reality. However, what Rhys adroitly parodies in Wide Sargasso Sea is a new
perspective of sympathy for the mad woman in the attic. The vision of Bertha/Antoniette as
an insane offspring from a family plagued by madness is no longer plausible to the reader
(Spivak 1985:270). Now, instead of binding any empathic relation for Mr. Rochester, who is
the ideal masculine character from Jane Eyre, the reader mostly devalues his attributes and
acts; and instead, favors the pitiful and misfortunate fate of the beautiful Creole heiress,

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Antoinette. The work, in itself, is a great opportunity to comprehend the detrimental and
maddening results of power oppression articulated on those repressed agents, on the
other. Shedding light on this perception, Swietlik in his essay recounts that:

In Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side
to Jane Eyre. The character of the mad Creole is given voice, dignity,
identity and right to tell the reader her side of the story. The
protagonist knows that the fate of her mother and the tragic history of
her whole family can be misjudged and misunderstood by others. That
is why the heroine assures her husband: There is always the other
side, always.(Swietlik 2005:4).

In her attempt to give voice to the silenced side, Jean Rhys portrays what was formerly
marginalized and othered as a crucial and dominant figure, displaying the importance of the
perception in which the margins could also have the ability to become a center. According to
Howells, Rhys speaks from a self-consciously marginal position raising issues of gender and
colonial difference in fiction of resistance which are always compromised by the conditions of
female dependency (1991: 58). Accordingly, to be able to focus on the viewpoints of the
silenced other, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys replies to Brontes imperialist way of fiction
narration from a one fixated white English point of view, through several points of view and
narrations. She both leaves a space for the views of the silenced Jane Eyre characters and she
also adroitly calls forth multiple narrations of different characters in the classic technique of
almost all postmodern novels. In Wide Sargasso Sea, as opposed to the first person narration of
Jane Eyre, Antoinette, Mr. Rochester, Grace Poole all serve as narrators throughout the story,
which gives the readers an opportunity to grasp the questionable reality via three different
points of view. Therefore, in her telling the story of the other, Rhys perfectly dances among
different viewpoints, instead of fixating on just one point of view, which raises the readers
understanding of the previously marginalized and newly centralized side.

To compare and contrast these two parallel stories of the related Creole women, Gayatri
Spivak in her essay, The Three Womens Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, appreciates
Rhys for her ambitions to tell the story of Bertha from a perspective of the Creole, however,
she also attacks the author for marginalizing the native peoples of West Indies (Swietlik
2005: 3).Therefore, basing on the perception of Spivak, in her postcolonial reply to Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys also subconsciously downgrades the native inhabitants of the
Caribbean via her character depictions in which the native inhabitants are portrayed as open
to sexual abuse, unreliable, performing obeah in its extremes, and abusing the main
characters. In all these depictions the native West Indians are manifested to the reader as
nothing but dark, abusive, minor characters, who are a used to identify the pureness and
ideality of White and even Creole white characters.

It is sure that geography does play almost no role in determining the oriental approach of the
West towards the rest of the world, which is based on Eurocentric universalism as it is put
forward by Edward Said in his Orientalism (1978). If the aforementioned society does not
string along with the power structures of the West, then that very society is doomed to be
labeled whether as East, the rest, and always as the other. Said identifies a European

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cultural tradition of orientalism, which is a particular and longstanding way of identifying

the East as other and inferior to the West. The orient, he says, features, in the Western mind
as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (Barry 2002: 186). So what is East, the rest,
non-West, becomes a projection of all the qualities and features which the West would not
like to attach to itself. In a way, to be able to identify and acknowledge its own identity as
pure good and the ideal reason, the West makes use of the binary oppositions in which the
pure whiteness always depicts the West. That is why, in most literatures of the West, such
qualities like cruelty, savageness, inferiority, laziness, corruption belong to the non-Western
societies but goodness, reason, hard work, all the ideal labels are manifested to belong the
West. Another main oriental attitude of the West towards nonwestern societies has been to
perceive the rest as the exotic, mystical and seductive other companion combined with a
desire of identifying those other peoples as homogenous masses instead of recognizing their
individual choices and variations (Barry 2002: 187).

The aforementioned orientalist or imperialist attitudes are pretty apparent in Wide Sargasso
Sea in the characterization of Mr. Rochester, a white Englishman who is debarred from his
family heritage because of the restricting English laws and, on the other hand, seeks a
sudden union with Antoinette due to solve his financial problems. The unnamed Mr.
Rochester, at the beginning of the story, seems to be fascinated by the ways of Antoinette;
however, this illusion lasts only until the honeymoon when he is shaken by the awareness
aroused by the brother-in-law and Amelia that Antoinette is from bad blood. From that
moment on, the orientalist attitude of Mr. Rochester towards Antoinette gradually unearths
itself. However, his Eurocentric Universalist attitude cannot only be directed at Antoinette,
but it could also be referred to his contempt for the native Caribbean people.

In this sense, based on the conceptualization of Edward Said, the basic two orientalist
attempts of othering and mythicizing of the West towards the East are very dominant within
the characterization features of Mr. Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea. In the second chapter of
the novel, as Mr. Rochester and Antoinette stay in Granbois for their honeymoon, the
orientalist attitude of Mr. Rochester towards West Indians comes to the surface. When he is
served coffee by Christophine, the servant he obviously dislikes due to her commitment to
obeah, he rejects the drink with disgust. Upon the insistence of Antoinette, he says, I like
the drink, but I hate the language (Rhys 1969: 45). This very succinct statement of Mr.
Rochester is enough to unearth his attitude towards the people of the West Indies; he surely
likes the land, its richness, the plantations, the natural beauty, and the exoticism of the
nature, which cannot be attained in his homeland, England. All the same, the very cultural
semblance of the West Indies is the issue that disturbs him; it is the other people themselves
that intrude Mr. Rochester. This annoying cultural semblance surely refers to the native
language, their customs and traditions, their native obeah conventions and all the other
related issues, which do not smell like the Europeans, or suit a set of Eurocentric universal
values. As Mr. Rochester fails to appreciate West Indians and their values from their own
perspective but from a much broader unjustified vision of universality, he fails to welcome
those cultural and regional differences as blessings and comes to take them as inferior facets
of corruption. It is even the key point as Mr. Rochester begins to think as he was told
beforehand, that he is married to the wrong kind, which is a kind that cannot truly fit into
white pure Englishness, but which again does not ally with the more inferior Nigger kind.

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An alternative restricting imperialist attitude of Mr. Rochester can easily be traced when he
attempts to call Antoinette Bertha, which sounds much more English than Antoinette, a
typical Creole female name. Throughout the story, Mr. Rochester also objects to Antoinettes
own authentic ways of clothing and hair dressing, proposing new Western alternatives.
These acts of changing name to Bertha or disturbing her natural ways of fashion are nothing
less than an orientalist attitude to impose an identity and a culture on a post-colonial subject,
which would give rise to several self-individuality problems in the related subject. As Frantz
Fanon puts forward in The Wretched of the Earth, throughout history, the colonizing power of
Europe, devalued the histories of the colonized nations, alleging those histories as pre-
civilized voids and from then on the history and culture of the related nation was marked
by the arrival of the European colonizers through their imposed educational systems (1965:
43-46). Imposing a history on to a nation is nothing more than imposing a new limited
identity on the colonized people by the Colonizer that exerts his power. Accordingly, Mr.
Rochester as a white superior Englishman attempts to impose a new more English name on
Antoinette, he also executes an identity, a created past and a culture on her, which again
pushes her further to madness, the only place where she could find peace, away from the
hegemonic oppressors.
The time period that the novel covers is also of crucial importance. Rhyss story takes place
during the years following the Emancipation Act (1833) in Jamaica, the critical period when
the racial problems were very complex and controversial. During that time, there were three
different ethnical communities in the society that would fire up the density of the social
tension; the Black, the Creole, and the White community. Now, upon regaining their
freedom, the newly emancipated ex-slaves were highly outraged towards their previous
owners, who were either White Creoles or White English. Throughout the society, the
rebellious nature of the ex-slaves would always haunt the reader each time Black community
tried to take revenge on their former owners. The revenge and the hatred of the Blacks is
pretty evident as they burn the plantation house of the Cosway Family, or as Amelia sleeps
with Mr. Rochester, and even when Christophine advises Antoinettes on her madness.
However, it would be impossible not to agree with Spivak that although Rhys in Wide
Sargasso Sea, recounts the story of the silenced other Creole woman, even with her post
colonialist perception, she, herself, fails to avoid othering the Black community in the West
Indies. Through her depiction of the black characters, she makes the same mistake of treating
them as homogenous masses with no individual differences. Nearly all ex-slaves or the paid
servants of the novel are portrayed as revengeful, demonic and infernal characters of
corruption with almost no good ambition. Even Christophine, Antoinettes dear black
advisor, raises suspicion due to her devotion to obeah and her partial abuse of the emotional
stress of Antoinette, within the minds of the readers. Accordingly, even when Jean Rhys
writes back to create another version from the perspective of the suppressed Creole people,
she others them.

The social status of the Creole society is also another issue, which is a highly central matter
for the novel to identify the in-betweenness that Antoinette suffered from the much inferior
Black community and the much superior white English society. The social depression that
Antoinette, and of course other Creole characters suffer in the novel stems from her mixed
ethnic origin which is called by Homi Bhabba hybridity, and the result of this hybrid

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culture surfaces as in-betweenness. In his book, Cultures in Between, Bhabba recounts about
hybrid cultures as follows:

I have developed the concept of hybridity to describe the construction of cultural

authority within conditions of political antagonism or inequity. Strategies of
hybridization reveal an estranging movement in the authoritative, even
authoritarian inscription of the cultural sign. At the point at which the precept
attempts to objectify itself as a generalized knowledge or a normalizing,
hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategy or discourse opens up a space of
negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal. Such
negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration. It makes possible the
emergence of an interstitial agency that refuses the binary representation of
social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic that does not
seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from
which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic
memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy: the
outside of the inside; the part in the whole. (1993: 212)

The Creole culture that Antoinette originally belongs is no exception to Bhabbas aforesaid
hybridization of cultures. She does not belongs to the authoritative mainstream English
Culture in West Indies and is therefore estranged from the superior context culture. Nor
does she belong to the alleged inferior black community which is another culture that she
and her mother Annette, frequently despise and make fun of in the story. This aspect of
Antoinettes hybrid culture pushes her to suffer from all the traumas of in-betweenness.
However, a new estranged Creole way of culture is created that neither purely fits into the
mainstream white English society nor into the black society.

The double oppression that Antoinette undergoes relatively much evident within the
context of the novel via several relationships that she develops such as her morbid marriage
to Mr. Rochester, her pathetic pursuit of relief from Christophine, and her hateful relation to
Amelia, who would not obey Antoinettes imperatives. Even the social space in which
Annette and her daughter are fated to live in search of rich white English husbands is
enough to recognize their restricted in-between status in the society. The patriarchal
subjugation that Antoinette experiences as a woman intensifies her repression, causing her
to endure double othering of the society both as a woman and as a postcolonial subject. The
triple oppression under which Antoinette tries to acknowledge her self-identity leads her to
the final place of resolution, which is nothing less than a desirable madness.

The hybrid ethnicity of Antoinette can be given as the basic reason why Antoinette cannot
come to terms with her identity, which is usually manifested as ambiguous. And her female
status also blurs Antoinette in her acknowledgement of a precise individuality. Throughout
the novel the character Antoinette, is referred to by the public as the daughter of Annette, or
as the wife of Mr. Rochester, or as Bertha, a name and individuality which is totally imposed
on her by the husband. Owing to the imposed identities on herself by other power holders,
Antoinette cannot strike a balance with her individual self. All the identity crisis is related to
Antoinettes inbetweenness and placelessness. Sexuality is also worthy of mention in

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relation to Antoinettes identity problem. In literature, black women generally are linked to
the sexual openness. Thus, Antoinette is portrayed as a female character that has a tendency
towards sexual freedom like those black peoples, which is truly a metaphorical manifestation
of her mixed ethnicity.

All the triple oppression that she tries to endure in life consigns Antoinette to a kind of
madness, the reality of which is disputable. Al the features of hybridity, in-betweenness,
unhomeliness, isolation, estrangement, lack of belongingness, identity crisis, the feelings of
insecurity, distrust, all kinds of economic, racial, patriarchal, sexual, colonial and class
oppressions, are reasons of that could take Antoinette a step further towards madness.
However, it would seem that the madness that she is pushed into or that she prefers to be
with, is an ideological reaction that Antoinette manifests against the all-oppressive powers in
her life. In relation to this, it is interesting to consider Spivaks famous essay Can the Subaltern
Speak?, in which she questions the status of subaltern women, that is, oppressed postcolonial
female subjects and tries to find a new way for these double oppressed women to raise their
voices against the patriarchal and postcolonial power exerts. Upon reviewing the current
situation of the subaltern via the theories of several post colonialist writers and theorists with
a liking for Derridas deconstruction, Spivak answers the very question that she directs at the
beginning. She believes that as long as the West denies judging the subaltern or the
postcolonial subjects on their own authentic values, and instead, favors a system of
judgment, which is Eurocentric universal, the subaltern cannot speak (Spivak 1988:144).

No, indeed, the subaltern has never been able to speak and if the world power structures and
economic systems do not alter, the subaltern will most possibly not be able to raise his voice
for freedom. However, there is a sure way out for the subaltern, from all the economic, racial,
patriarchal, colonial oppressions and that is madness and dreams. Antoinette revolts against
all those subjugating factors of her life in her recurring dreams in which she sets fire to the
whole captivating British prison-house. The subaltern, like Antoinette, has the dream and
desire of protesting against all the power structures that captivates, devalues, and decreases
their own identity. Maybe, one day they will wake up from their solicitous dreams and feel
like acting out their desires of freedom and a self-identity, just as Antoinette at the end of
Wide Sargasso Sea.

References

Ashcroft, Bill&Pal Ahluwalia. (2001) Edward Said. London: Routledge.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin .(1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Barry, Peter. (2002) Beginning Theory. Manchester: Manchester UP.
Bhabba, Homi K. (1993) "Culture's in Between." Art Forum 32.1: 167-211.
Coral, Howells Ann. (1991) Jean Rhys. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Fanon, Frantz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Constance Farrington. (1965) The Wretched of the Earth.
New York: Grove.

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Rhys, Jean. (1969) Wide Sargasso Sea. Harmondsworth.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan.
......(1995) Donna Landry, and Gerald M. MacLean. The Spivak Reader. London: Routledge.
....... (1985) "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12.1: 243-
61. Jstor. Web.
<http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1343469?uid=3739192&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=
70&uid=4&sid=21103404664593>.
Swietlik, Malgorzata. (2005) "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys as a Postcolonial Response to "Jane
Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. Landeu: Universitat Koblenz.

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