Inge Kommeren

Dr. Birgit Mara Kaiser

Migration and Diaspora

21-01-2020

Presences in Wide Sargasso Sea: The Impossibilities of Colonialism

John McLeod defines diaspora as “a new way of being, an emergent mode of perception and

engagement with the world” (237) in his book Beginning Postcolonialism. Diaspora as a term

has evolved, at least within postcolonial theory, from meaning “the movement and

relocation of groups of different kinds of people throughout the world” (McLeod 236) to a

state of mind that is characteristic for people with a diasporic past, either directly or

indirectly. That diaspora or displacement is an important theme in Wide Sargasso Sea, is

evident in the title alone. It refers to the sea to the east of America, which is known for the

treacherous seaweeds that often bring ships down, yet it needs to be passed in order to get

to Europe. In other words, the title symbolizes the difficulty of bridging the gaps between

cultures. And those gaps, as the title suggests, are wide. The story has often been read as a

response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This is not mere coincidence, as the inspiration for

the story was Rhys’s dissatisfaction with the character Bertha in the book, as she has written

herself (Letters 1931-1966 296-7). Though much can be drawn, and has been drawn, from a

comparative reading between the two texts, I want to focus in this paper more on the text

itself. Inayat Ullah argues in their article that the text "rejects the claims to universalism

made on behalf of canonical Western literature and seeks to show their limitations of

outlook”, and though I agree with this, the article falls short, in my opinion, in showing how

this is exactly achieved. The relationship between Antoinette and her husband is one of the

focal points of the book. It illustrates these difficulties, of bridging the gaps between

cultures, on a deep and personal level. Both Antionette and her husband, as I will show, live
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diasporic lives, both physically and in spirit. By illuminating how this relationship develops,

and using Stuart Hall’s article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” I want to explicate how the

text points out the difficulties that come with the authority the west imposes on other

cultures, and how it deems colonialism as ultimately unsupportable.

Before I start, however, I would like to make clear my choice of words in this paper.

Many papers written about Wide Sargasso Sea refer to Antoinette’s husband as ‘Mr

Rochester’ or ‘Rochester’. Though, again, this isn’t a coincidental form of intertextuality, and

even has been made explicit by the author themselves, I have chosen to refer to the

character as ‘Antoinette’s husband’ or ‘the husband’ in this paper, as the character remains

(deliberately, I think) unnamed within Wide Sargasso Sea. I do this because I think it’s

important to keep in mind that though the text is based on a ‘canonical’ and famous text, it

also exists on its own. I do not wish to impose an interpretation on it informed by the

western culture and canonical work that it is trying to disavow, or at least critique.

I will first outline the theory on Caribbean cultural identity as presented by Stuart Hall

in his article. He first defines cultural identity in two ways: fixed and preformed. The first is

defined “in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’” (Hall 223). The

second, however, does not recognize the existence of a true ‘essence’, which can be

somehow recovered, but sees cultural identity as “the different ways we are positioned by,

and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (225). Hall argues that though

cultural identity is found in similarity, it is also found in difference, especially where the

Caribbean is concerned. He writes:

We might think of black Caribbean identities as ‘framed’ by two axes or vectors,

simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of

difference and rupture. (226)

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The Caribbean cultural identity, as Hall defines it, is a positioning between two axes; that of

difference and that of similarity. The Caribbean cultural identity, or rather identities,

positions themselves “in relation to at least three ‘presences’ […]: Presence Africaine,

Presence Europeenne, and […] Presence Americain” (230). The Presence Africaine represents

“the repressed”, and is “the unspoken, unspeakable ‘presence’ in Caribbean culture” (230).

It represents the slaves who were forced from their homes to the Caribbean, and whose

culture was supressed by the colonisers. This presence has therefore been recovered over

the years. However, as Hall points out, “Africa must […] be reckoned with by Caribbean

people, but it cannot in any simple sense be merely recovered” (231). In other words, the

Presence Africaine in Caribbean culture is not an African ‘essence’ that hails, unchanged and

unpolluted, directly from Africa, but is a unique repositioning of the Caribbean people in

relation to their African descent. The Presence Europeenne is one often seen as personified

in the colonizers. Hall points out, however, that this presence is also present within the

Caribbean people and therefore Caribbean cultural identities. He writes that “it is nowhere

to be found in its pure, pristine state […] always-already creolised” (233). The Presence

Europeenne is not one that can be “thrown off like the serpent sheds its skin” (233), but one

that must be reckoned with too. Hall argues that this dialogue can be achieved “without

terror or violence” (233) with the third presence: Presence Americain. He defines this

presence as the land, “the juncture-point where many cultural tributaries meet” (234). It is

the Terra Incognita where both Presence Africaine and Presence Europeenne can redefine

themselves on equal footing. He writes that “America, Terra Incognita – is […] itself the

beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference” (235). He goes on to point

out that “the diaspora experience […] is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the

recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (235). The combination of these

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presences, therefore, define Caribbean cultural identities, which are intrinsically diasporic

and diverse in nature.

The discussion about what the Caribbean cultural identity is, or what cultural

identities belong to the Caribbean people, is incredibly relevant to Wide Sargasso Sea. In

relation to the novel, it is the subject of much discussion. As I mentioned before, Ullah

argues in their article that Wide Sargasso Sea provides Antoinette/Bertha with a history and

a voice, thereby rejecting the framing the Creole identity was given by Jane Eyre (and, in a

broader sense, the west). However, as Inna Malissa bte Che Jamal points out in their article,

this is only showing one side of the story. However, they also write that “Rhys focuses on the

mistreatment of her main character, Antoinette, because she favours her and sympathizes

with her, thus neglecting Antoinette’s husband” (114), which, in my opinion, isn’t entirely

true. Most of the research has been on the ‘side’ of Antoinette, but, as Andrea Katherine

Hilkovitz points out in their book, “Rhys’s narrative demonstrates the extent to which

Rochester is, in his own right, constrained and tormented by this relationship” (35).

Antoinette’s husband is also provided with a share of the narrative, giving him a voice (which

his counterpart in Jane Eyre didn’t have). Hilkovitz goes on to point out that “[t]hough Wide

Sargasso Sea certainly works as a corrective to Jane Eyre, its tone is not mocking, nor was its

intent destructive” (39). They show effectively how Wide Sargasso Sea attempts to construct

a narrative that is on neither side, that merely tells a tragic story of a relationship gone

catastrophically wrong. That is, of course, not to say that Antoinette’s husband’s attitude

towards Caribbean culture isn’t the main catalyst for this catastrophe. He represents part of

a problem that Maria Cristina Fumagalli describes in their article as “the limited and rigid

model of representation and identification (the dichotomy white/black)” which they see as

“the root of Antoinette/Bertha's predicament” (68). It is this precise model that I want to
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explore further in this novel, and how it functions when looked at with the use of Stuart

Hall’s article. I want to illuminate, however, how this model also victimizes Antoinette’s

husband, though Antoinette does bear the brunt of its consequences.

The first part of Wide Sargasso Sea is narrated by Antoinette Cosway, who will later

become Bertha Antoinetta Mason. She starts this narration as such:

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were

not in their ranks. (Wide Sargasso Sea 3)

She goes on to describe why, illuminating how, because of their varying degrees of

difference, they are not part of the ‘in-crowd’ with anyone. Too poor and creolized to be

white, yet too much part of European culture to be tolerated by the local black community,

especially because her father used to be a slave-owner before the emancipation act had

passed. Because of the precarious situation the Cosways (consisting of Antoinette’s brother

Pierre, Antoinette, and her mother Anette) live in, and Anette’s favouritism for Pierre,

Antoinette grows up in isolation. Her relationship with her only friend Tia is tainted by the

political and cultural tensions that exist in Jamaica. Both call each other names that echo

these tensions, Antoinette calling Tia a “cheating nigger” (8) and Tia responding with “Old

time white people but white nigger now, and black nigger better that white nigger” (8). Just

before Antoinette and her family have to flee their estate because it gets burned down by

the black community, Tia throws a rock at Antoinette. Yet Tia is not described as hateful or

mean in this instance:

I looked at her and saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each

other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-

glass. (23)
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Tia is clearly not happy about throwing the rock, and seems to be shocked by its effect. She

too is a victim of the force that drove her to throw it, which is why Antoinette sees herself in

her. They started out as friends, but their relationship turned antagonistic when pressures

arose (mainly when the family came again to wealth with Anette’s second marriage) which

made it impossible for the two to ‘bridge the gaps’ between them.

This is similar to how the relationship between Antoinette and her husband develops.

Though the husband immediately, when his narration starts, points out his general disquiet

about his marriage, saying “Everything finished, for better or for worse” (36) to himself as he

prepares for his honeymoon, he also doesn’t hate her. She, in short, “meant nothing to

[him]” (44). As many have pointed out in their articles, the husband feels disquiet about his

foreign surroundings, saying

Everything is too much, I felt […]. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green.

The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman

[Antoinette] a stranger. (39)

Unlike what he is used to, in European (and Victorian) society, no passions or colours are

subdued. In Jane Eyre, passion is seen as a dangerous thing, and the source of

Antoinette/Bertha’s madness, as Villiers points out (53-54). Jane shouldn’t make the same

mistake as Bertha/Antoinette, who gave in to passion. The husband in Wide Sargasso Sea

sees this passion, reflected around him in nature and in Antoinette, as dangerous and

corrupting. Eventually, his belief in the dangers of passion lead him to want to purge it from

his wife, believing that she is “not English or European either” and that this is where this

danger comes from. Her lack of Englishness is what makes her dangerous to him, so he starts

calling her by an English name (Bertha) and tries to get rid of Christophine, her nurse, whom

he also sees as threatening. He tries to take away everything about Antoinette’s identity that
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isn’t European, by forcing the role of the obedient English wife onto her. He partially

succeeds, as we see in the last part of part two, when Antoinette apologizes to him for

promising to a servant boy that he would be taken to Europe with them when they left:

‘No, I had no right, I am sorry. I don’t understand you. I know nothing about you, and

I cannot speak for you. . . .’ (112)

She speaks as though he is the one in charge, who can make decisions. She doesn’t attempt

to allude to the fact that he has spoken for her, by forcing her to leave Jamaica, and has let

others speak for her, by believing the lies told about her family. She has accepted that she

cannot communicate with her husband at all. Once again, it is impossible to bridge the gap

that the model of racism and colonialism has caused between them, much like with Tia in

Antoinette’s youth.

Antoinette’s identity, therefore, is incredibly unstable. She doesn’t belong to the

black community, not even to the local Creole community, and definitely not to the

European community, as evidenced by the way her husband thinks about her. As she states

herself in the book:

So between you [Europeans and ex-slaves] I often wonder who I am and where is my

country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. (63)

Her sense of identity, which is more and more destroyed as the book nears its close, is pulled

apart between the two opposing forces that meet in the Caribbean. Yet both Tia and her

husband, who both, in a way, personify these forces, are also victims of these same forces.

As Hall points out in his article, though the idea of an essentialist cultural identity has its

benefits, it has its limits. And it is precisely this idea, that Antoinette’s ‘true’ identity lies

either with the Presence Africaine or the Presence Europeenne that eventually pulls her

entire sense of self apart. Hall posits that these two presences can meet equally and
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dialogue freely when Presence Americain is added to the mix; the Terra Incognita, the

physical land, that can transform both into something new. Antoinette, however, does not

have this option, precisely because she does not have this Terra Incognita: the estate she

grew up in was too much connected to its white slave-owner past to allow for her to take

part in the black communities. Later, when her mother remarries, she is forced further into

the role of the “English girl” by her stepfather. Then, when she marries, her husband, pushed

by the prevalent beliefs on morality, femininity, and sanity, forces her to change her identity,

which makes her finally lose her sense of self. Because the presences that reside within her

identity are never allowed to be present, but are either supressed or forced to the

foreground, because she is not allowed to make something new out of the existing norms,

she loses any identity, and becomes nothing more than the madwoman in the attic, an

obstacle to be overcome in Jane Eyre. By contextualizing the character Bertha/Antoinette

and providing her with a history, the text does more than subvert our interpretation of the

‘original’ text. It also provides us with a case study of how the prevalent ideas about race

and cultural identity, or at least those prevalent within the ideology of colonialism, can

destroy a person’s sense of identity.

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Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Reader’s Digest Association Limited, 1847.

Che Jamal, Inna Malissa bte, et al. “A Study of Displacement in Jean Rhys’ Novel Wide

Sargasso Sea.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 5, no. 5, 2014, pp.

111–118. EBSCOhost, doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.5n.5p.111.

Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. “Maryse Conde's ‘La Migration Des Coeurs’, Jean Rhys's ‘Wide

Sargasso Sea’ and (the Possibility of) Creolization.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures,

vol. 3, no. 2, 2002, pp. 65-87. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40986131.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity And Diaspora". Colonial Discourse And Post-Colonial Theory: A

Reader, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Routledge, 2014, pp. 222-237.

Hilkovitz, Andrea Katherine, "Re-Righting Jane Eyre: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso

Sea". Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, And Genre In Africa And The

African Diaspora, University Of Texas Libraries, 2011, pp. 29-40.

McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Rhys, Jean. Edited by Hillary Jenkins. Wide Sargasso Sea. Penguin Student Editions, 1966.

-------------. Letters 1931-1966. Penguin, 1985.

Ullah, Inayat, and Muhammad Arif. "Writing back to the empire: Righting Creole identity in

Wide Sargasso Sea." Language In India, June 2013, p. 256+. Gale Academic Onefile,

https://link-gale-com.proxy.library.uu.nl/apps/doc/A335921919/AONE?u=

utrecht&sid=AONE&xid=2be9d0ff. Accessed 21 Jan. 2020.

Villiers, Stephanie de. "Remembering The Future: The Temporal Relationship Between

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre And Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea". Journal Of Literary

Studies, vol 34, no. 4, 2018, pp. 48-61., doi:10.1080/02564718.2018.1538079.