1 Kallatt

Madhulica Kallatt

Professor Jai Singh

IWL-C009

Semester 4

H00MALIE20190049

25 May 2021

Erasure and Silence in Wide Sargasso Sea and Foe

Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea are both postcolonial responses to canonical British texts,

which work to “[restructure] European ‘realities’ in post-colonial terms, not simply by

reversing the hierarchical order, but by interrogating the philosophical assumptions on which

that order was based” (Ashcroft et al. 32). Although both texts work to dismantle colonial

assumptions and prejudices, they proceed in different ways. Both texts engage with the

erasure of a woman’s sense of self by man who colonizes her identity. This paper aims to

illustrate how each text reveals the process of this colonization, while engaging with the

racial and post-colonial dimensions which these women interact with in the texts .

Foe (1986), a novel by South African writer J.M. Coetzee, is a response to Daniel

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,

of Tork, Mariner), where Coetzee introduces a new character named Susan Barton, who

spent a year on the same island as Crusoe (referred to as ‘Cruso’ in Foe), and Friday. The

story revolves around Susan’s attempts to get a writer named Foe (a fictionalised version of

Daniel Defoe) to turn her account into a novel. However, this process faces a complication

because Friday’s story, which is an integral part of Susan’s, is rendered inaccessible due to

Friday’s muteness. During the course of the novel, readers witness Susan struggle with
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ownership over her story as Foe gradually encroaches on it, erasing Susan’s identity in the

process.

On the other hand, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Dominica-born British writer Jean

Rhys, is a response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It is a prequel which follows the

experiences of Antoinette Mason (neé Cosway), a white Creole woman from the Caribbean,

who becomes Rochester’s first wife, known as ‘Bertha Mason’ in Jane Eyre. Rhys, who was

Creole herself, found Brontë’s treatment of Rochester’s Creole wife Bertha prejudicial, and

through Wide Sargasso Sea, she attempted to humanize Bertha, providing context for

Bertha’s Jane Eyre counterpart, who was simply a device of insanity and Gothic horror.

Thus, both Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea engage in a ‘counter-discourse’ which

“challenges… a dominant or established discourse (specifically those of the imperial centre)

… from the periphery… recognizing the powerful ‘absorptive capacity’ of imperial and neo-

imperial discourses” (Ashcroft et al. 50). In re-orienting the story to focus on the peripheral

character of ‘Bertha’ from Jane Eyre and creating the character of Susan Barton who was

erased from Robinson Crusoe, these texts are “not simply evincing the democratic instincts of

postmodernism” by reversing the centre-periphery positions of the characters, but are

“engaging in politically-charged revisionism” (Brauner 655).

Since these dominant discourses are “presented as natural… or as a substrate upon which

the text is built”, subversive texts such as Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea aim to expose those

contexts which are ignored by Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre since they do not serve the

colonial purposes of the aforementioned texts (Lane 18).

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Wide Sargasso Sea exposes the untold story of Antoinette/Bertha, laying bare the socio-

psychological causes of her behaviour in Jane Eyre, thereby challenging the belief put

forward in Jane Eyre of Bertha being “congenitally depraved” due to her descent from “idiots

and maniacs through three generations” (Thorpe 102, Brontë qtd. in Thorpe 102).

Antoinette is shown to have been isolated and othered since childhood. She is othered by

the white Creoles because of the poverty of her family (“They say when trouble comes close

ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks”) and because her mother

was a “Martinique girl” (Rhys 9). She is othered by the black community not only because

her family owned slaves before the passage of the Emancipation Act, but also because of the

impoverishment of the family, as seen in Tia’s retort to Antoinette:

Real white people, they got gold money. They didn’t look at us, nobody see them

come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger

better than white nigger. (Rhys 14)

Antoinette seems to almost lead an orphaned existence, her father being dead and her

mother being neglectful. Even before the death of Pierre and the arson of their Coulibri

estate, Antoinette’s mother treated Antoinette with disregard and coldness:

…She pushed me away, not roughly but calmly, coldly, without a word, as if she had

decided once and for all that I was useless to her. She wanted to sit with Pierre or

walk where she pleased without being pestered, she wanted peace and quiet… ‘Oh,

let me alone,’ she would say, ‘let me alone,’ (Rhys 11)

Much of the first part of the novel, which describes Antoinette’s childhood, is fraught

with anxiety, fear, isolation, and insecurity, due to imminent danger and threat from all
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directions. Antoinette describes this state of perpetual fear in Part Two of the novel as a fear

“of nothing, of everything” (Rhys 44). Her childhood of isolation and fragmented social

relations thus made her vulnerable to the othering she faces from Rochester, her husband,

who is the final straw who breaks Antoinette.

From the beginning of Rochester’s narration, he finds the West Indian surroundings

overwhelming.

Everything is too much, I felt as 1 rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much

purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too

near. (Rhys 41)

He finds similarities between the surroundings and England, such as the red soil (“It’s red in

parts of England too”) and the house (“an imitation of a summer house”), but seems to reject

these as inferior compared to the English mainland (Rhys 42). Similarly, his view of the

people is also orientalist, describing their attire as “gaudy” and “savage”, and dismissing their

manners as unclean (Rhys 39, 43).

His perception of Antoinette, however, invokes a keener sense of uncanniness, since she

is a ‘white other’ (“Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or

European either”) (Rhys 39). We understand ‘uncanniness’ as “that class of the frightening

which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,” (Freud qtd. in Kristeva 183).

Antoinette is an uncanny figure for Rochester, since she looks like a white British woman,

but is culturally foreign to him. His feeling of uncanniness towards Antoinette pervades his

entire narrative, and is a primary factor in his othering of her.

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According to Kristeva, “uncanniness… is a destructuration of the self that may either

remain as a psychotic symptom or fit in as an opening toward the new, as an attempt to tally

with the incongruous” (Kristeva 188). In the case of Rochester, we see that uncanniness has

remained “a psychotic symptom”, which expresses itself in his deep hatred towards

Antoinette, especially after reading Daniel Cosway’s letter which claims that Rochester had

been duped by Antoinette’s family, and his own. While he is not surprised by the contents of

the letter, it triggers the dormant threat to his sense of selfhood in his relationship with

Antoinette, and he reacts by attempting to control Antoinette’s identity; he renames her

‘Bertha’ (“When he passes my door he says, ‘Good-night, Bertha.’ He never calls me

Antoinette now. He has found out it was my mother’s name.”) (Rhys 68).

By calling Antoinette ‘Bertha’, he imposes his own preferences (“I think of you as

Bertha”) onto her pre-existing identity and personal history, erasing her Martinique ancestry

which reflects in her name, and recalls her mother’s name (Annette), thereby also attempting

to divorce her identity from that of her “infamous mother”, who was the object of intense

ostracism and sexist shaming herself (Rhys 81, 110). He renames her simply because “it is a

name [he] is particularly fond of” (Rhys 81). This is reminiscent of the arbitrary manner in

which the West Indies was named, whose constituent parts already had names before the

colonizers renamed it and homogenized them under a single name, ignoring their distinct

cultural experiences, identities and histories.

Significantly, Rochester refers to Antoinette by her original name in his narration, but

when he speaks to her, he calls her ‘Bertha’, which is further evidence of this renaming being

an attack on Antoinette’s identity. Antoinette acknowledges this, and calls it a form of

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“obeah” (“Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me

by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.”) (Rhys 88). Further, through the comparison of

Rochester’s attempt to control Antoinette’s identity to obeah, Rhys illustrates how the

colonizers engage in practices analogous to those which they themselves found threatening

enough to suppress. It is through this “obeah” that Rochester breaks Antoinette, forcing her

into the role of ‘Bertha’ seen in Jane Eyre. We also see the patriarchal foundation of this

colonial process which forces Rochester’s will over Antoinette as her husband, and reshapes

her into the woman he wants her to be, namely, a mainland Englishwoman.

In Foe as well, the white male colonizer from continental England attempts to absorb and

manipulate the identity of the white female protagonist. Foe exercises this control by treating

Susan as an object in a story:

I am not a story. Mr Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of

myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the

shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. (Coetzee 129)

He attempts to absorb Susan into his totalizing narrative by creating a backstory for her,

conjuring up the characters of her ‘daughter’ and ‘maid’, whom she asserts she has never met

before, in order to force her into his narrative vision, which eventually culminates into

another work by Defoe called Roxana.

Who is she and why do you send her to me? Is she sent as a sign you are alive? She is

not my daughter. Do you think women drop children and forget them as snakes lay

eggs? Only a man could entertain such a fancy. (Coetzee 75)

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Coetzee’s allusions to Roxana are oblique, and would only be clear to the reader who is

familiar with this novel by Defoe. For instance, Roxana’s real name which is Susan, is only

mentioned in passing in Roxana, and more significantly, the name ‘Roxana’ is absent in Foe.

The connection between Susan and Roxana is only revealed by the story Susan’s ‘daughter’

tells about her upbringing in Deptford, and her father being a brewer, but even here, there is

no explicit mention of Roxana.

By alluding to Roxana instead of explicitly referring to it, Coetzee creates a sense of

disorientation, which is experienced when one is being subtly absorbed into somebody else’s

narrative. Therefore, the choice between withholding and relinquishing narratives has deep

implications on the autonomy and substantiality of the self in Foe, where authorship has a

totalizing effect on everything and everyone within the narrative. The sense of uncanniness is

also invoked in Foe through this process, which causes Susan to see herself as an other, and

question her substantiality.

The more obvious attack on Susan’s identity, however, is her erasure from Robinson

Crusoe by Foe. Even in her own narration of the story in her letters to Foe, she reflects how

she has let Cruso’s story take precedence over her own:

When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who

witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside

the true body of Cruso. (Coetzee 51)

Later, she attempts to re-situate herself within the story, but this attempt is hijacked by

Foe in order to make her story more ‘interesting’. Thus, by writing Susan into Foe, Coetzee

not only brings the question of her identity to the fore of an otherwise patriarchal story of
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male achievement and contemplation, but exposes the insidious ways in which her identity is

systematically erased not only in Robinson Crusoe, but also within her own self-perception.

While Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea expose the oppression and othering faced by Susan

and Antoinette in their respective texts, they also discuss the relationship of the colonized

people of colour with respect to both the white male colonizer and the white female

colonizer/slave owner.

In Foe, Friday’s silence is arguably the central concern of the text, which discusses the

power of narratives, and their implications on identity and substantiality. We can understand

this better through Merleau-Ponty’s idea of dialogue as a process of “encroach[ing] upon one

another”, which is only possible when the self and the other “belong to the same cultural

world” (Merleau-Ponty 139). The narratives of Susan and Foe belong to the textual world of

the english language, a colonial language which is “a tool with which a ‘world’ can be

textually constructed” (Ashcroft et al. 43). Since Foe and Susan operate within the same

medium of text and language as storytellers, Foe is able to infiltrate Susan’s story and

overpower it. Friday, on the other hand, belongs to a world which is “not a place of words”,

but “…a place where bodies are their own signs” (Coetzee 157). Therefore, since Friday does

not operate within Susan’s language medium, he is rendered mute.

However, I argue that Friday’s silence is also deliberate. He does not have a single

meaningful exchange with Susan or any of the other characters, despite Susan’s obsessive

efforts to communicate with him. Instead, Friday only responds to orders which he has been

taught (which he sometimes ignores), and expresses himself through singing, whirling
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around, playing the flute, and eventually drawing. Significantly, none of these instances of

self-expression are aimed at communicating with anybody. These are expressions which

Susan and Foe cannot understand, since they belong outside language in the realm of the

body and senses. For instance, Friday’s flute playing and humming can be reported about in

Susan’s narrative, but cannot actually be heard. Similarly, the glimpse Susan got of his

drawing can be described, but we cannot actually see it. The most explicit display of Friday’s

holding on to his story is his refusal to give up his slate to Susan to look at his drawing,

which he prefers to wipe out with his spit rather than give it up to Susan.

The power of Friday’s silence and non-cooperation lies in its function of denying the

colonists the ability to take over his story and distort it into their colonial narrative . Friday

thus protects himself from the perils Susan fell to in relinquishing her story to Foe. While it

might be argued that Friday’s story was written for him anyway in Robinson Crusoe,

Coetzee, through Susan, reminds us that “many stories can be told of Friday's tongue, but the

true story is buried within Friday” (Coetzee 118).

A similar discourse around silence is constructed in Wide Sargasso Sea, with black

characters both being silenced by the colonizer, and employing silence or ignorance as a form

of resistance against the colonizer. For instance, although Christophine directly challenges

Rochester in the second part of the book, asserting that “this is a free country and [she] is a

free woman”, this is also the last time she appears in the novel, without anything having

changed about Rochester’s treatment of Antoinette which is what Christophine was

attempting to persuade him to do (Rhys 96). Both she and Amelie were silenced after their

respective encroachments upon Rochester’s colonial authority, their resistance being

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criminalized and subsequently suppressed. Here too female characters are silenced by the

male authoritative figure.

On the other hand, it is when the black subaltern withholds information from the

colonizer, through silence or feigned ignorance, that colonial authority is threatened. The

black subalterns in Wide Sargasso Sea protect their culture and themselves from colonial

“appropriation and misreading” by withholding information, through denial or performative

conformity with colonial stereotypes (Mardorossian 1083). For instance, when Rochester

asks Baptiste about “a ghost” or “zombi” in the woods, Baptise responds that he “don’t know

about all that foolishness” (Rhys 63). Additionally, even in the ‘Obeah’ chapter in The

Glittering Coronet of Isles which Rochester reads to try to find out more about obeah and

zombies, the author notes, “Negroes as a rule refuse to discuss the black magic in which so

many believe… They confuse matters by telling lies if pressed” (Rhys 64). By keeping the

colonizers in the dark about aspects of themselves and their culture, they “turn ignorance,

usually read as innocent passivity, into a potent and performative force”, preventing the

colonizers from infiltrating their identity and culture, and misappropriating it (Mardorossian

(1083).

Wide Sargasso Sea also discusses the relationship between Antoinette, a white Creole

woman, and the people of colour in the text. Her relationship with them is deeply influenced

by her own sense of isolation and insecurity, since she lacks any sort of community to

identify with. Mardorossian argues that Antoinette’s self is so fragmented, that she “seems to

function merely by internalizing others’—especially her mother’s—language and

contradictory values” (1073). Therefore, in her childhood during the early parts of the novel,
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her othering of the black and coloured people often manifests as a defence mechanism to

humiliation and threat. She resorts to racial slurs and disparaging comments to elevate herself

above the threatening coloured other. She calls Tia a “cheating nigger”, when she loses their

bet, and makes racialized comments about the mixed-race boy and black girl who bully her

on her way to the convent:

He had a white skin, a dull ugly white… his mouth was a negro’s mouth…He had the

eyes of a dead fish. Worst, most horrible of all, his hair was crinkled, a negro’s hair,

but bright red… Her hair had been plaited and 1 could smell the sickening oil she had

daubed on it. (Rhys 29)

It is evident during the burning of the Coulibri estate, however, that these racial prejudices

(which Rhys includes in order to complicate the reader’s sympathy for the white Creole,

rather than demonize the black characters), only arise in the face of danger, and she otherwise

seeks the companionship of the black other in order to feel a sense of belonging:

I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it

had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river.

As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri.

Not to go. Not. When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but 1 did not see

her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I

looked at her and I 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. (Rhys 27)

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This passage highlights how Antoinette perceives Tia and herself to be two sides of the same

coin, having lived through similar experiences, and therefore how she seeks to “obliterate the

difference history and culture has set up between them” (Mardorossian 1083). However, here

Rhys also highlights the fact that this distinction cannot be obliterated so easily , and that their

historical and cultural experiences vary vastly despite having “eaten the same food” and

“slept side by side”, since Tia and her community have been systematically and brutally

enslaved and oppressed by the white Creoles and particularly by Antoinette’s own family.

Although Antoinette identifies with the black female community, she cannot become one of

them, and here she is forced to recognize that.

Later in the novel, we see the reflection of this recognition when Antoinette justifies and

explains the manners and customs of black people which Rochester disparages, which she

does not do as one of them, but as someone who understands and respects their culture. This

is evident in the following exchange between Rochester and Antoinette about Christophine’s

dress which trails behind her on the floor:

‘Whatever be the reason it is not a clean habit.’

‘It is. You don’t understand at all. They don’t care about getting a dress dirty because

it shows it isn’t the only dress they have.’

[...] ‘And she looks so lazy. She dawdles about.’

‘Again you are mistaken.’ (Rhys 51, 52)

Rochester knows he does not understand the West Indies or the people in it, but he views

this lack of comprehension as a secret which the space and its people keep from him, and

becomes obsessed with this ‘secret’ in his internal monologues (“It was a beautiful place—
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wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept

its secret.”) (Rhys 51). He believes Antoinette is part of this secret, and hates her for denying

him access to it:

I was tired of these people. I disliked their laughter and their tears, their flattery and

envy, conceit and deceit. And 1 hated the place. I hated the mountains and the hills,

the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and

its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty

which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic

and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing

for what I had lost before I found it. (Rhys 103)

Rochester’s idea of the ‘secret’ can be understood as Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the unsolvable

“mystery of the other” (135). There is a gap between himself and the other (Antoinette as a

Creole woman, the inhabitants of the island, the island itself) which he cannot bridge because

he refuses to relinquish his position as the subject. He refuses to go beyond himself and allow

himself to be vulnerable in trying to understand the other, yet he expects to find out the

‘secret’ (understanding the other) by force. The use of “thirst” here is significant since it

connotes a primal desire, which Rochester has clarified before is “not love” (Rhys 55).

Therefore, his desire to understand the other is motivated by his desire to consume the other

to satisfy his “thirst”, while simultaneously fearing his own consumption by the other.

A parallel discourse surrounding ‘mystery’ and ‘consumption’ is constructed in Foe,

where Friday’s mouth symbolizes this “mystery”. Friday never wishes to open his mouth,

and Susan is too repulsed to try to open it and look into it, since she is haunted by her
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imagination of the stub of his tongue as “wagging and straining under the sway of emotion as

Friday tried to utter himself, like a worm cut in half” (Coetzee 119). The revulsion Susan

feels towards Friday’s mouth, and the ambiguity surrounding Friday’s status as a cannibal are

sources of immense horror for Susan, and could symbolize her subconscious fear of being

consumed by him. Like Rochester, Susan wants reciprocation from the other, but also fears

that he will consume her. Therefore, in Foe we see how Susan has been erased by Foe, and

fears erasure by Friday, but does not react to this fear by attempting to consume him; instead,

she tries to communicate with him.

On the other hand, Rochester reacts to his fear of consumption and desire to consume, by

invading and forcefully shaping Antoinette’s identity into the British ‘Bertha’; he colonizes

her identity in order to quench his “thirst”. He is left “longing for what [he] had lost before

[he] found it” (Rhys 103).

The impact of Rochester’s colonization of Antoinette is her inability to either recognize

herself as ‘Antoinette’, or know herself as ‘Bertha’:

Names matter, like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette

drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass.

There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember

watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw

was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried

to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my

breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and

who am I? (Rhys 102)

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Antoinette seems to have gone back and forth through Lacan’s mirror stage in her childhood,

acknowledging her reflection as herself, but also as an ‘other’, which is an unsurprising

symptom of her fragmented sense of self－a result of her social and psychological isolation

as a child. However, when she is later unable to recognise herself in the mirror in her dream

(“It was then that I saw her—the ghost. The woman with streaming hair”) and cannot

associate the vocalization of her scream with herself (“Someone screamed and I thought , Why

did I scream?”), her estrangement from her identity is complete, and she remains a referent

without a sign, unable to return to the mirror stage (Rhys 11, 112). Therefore, Rhys shows us

how Antoinette/Bertha’s incendiarism at the end of the novel is not “a maniac’s

melodramatic finale”, but the tragic outcome of Rochester’s colonization of her identity, as

well as the psycho-social trauma she underwent as a child.

This act of re-interpretation is the goal of works such as Foe and Wide Sargasso

Sea,which re-write and respond to the canon, laying bare the mechanics of patriarchal and

colonial ideology in their works, and adding context to the canon for a more nuanced

understanding of those marginalized by colonisation. According to Richard Lane, the canon

does not refer to a particular set of works , but is a “set of reading practices” (27) . Therefore,

in writing back to the canon , Coetzee and Rhys “contribute to and guide the ‘reading

practices’ of the new postcolonial canon” through Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea (Lane 28).
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Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts.

Routledge, 2007.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in

post-colonial literatures. 2nd ed., Routeledge, 2002.

Brauner, David. “‘Speak Again’: The Politics of Rewriting in ‘A Thousand Acres.’” The

Modern Language Review, vol. 96, no. 3, 2001, pp. 654–666. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/3736736.

Caracciolo, Marco. “J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the Embodiment of Meaning.” Journal of

Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 1, 2012, pp. 90–103. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.36.1.90.

Coetzee, J.M. Foe, Penguin Books, 1986.

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to ourselves. Columbia University Press, 1991.

Lane, Richard J. The Postcolonial Novel. Polity Press, 2008, pp. 18-32.

Mardorossian, Carine M. "Shutting Up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-

Entendre in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Callaloo, vol. 22 no. 4, 1999, p.

1071-1090. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cal.1999.0177.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other.” The Prose of the

World, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by John O’Neill, Northwestern University

Press, 1973, pp. 131-146.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999.
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