Erika Pugh

Caribbean Women Writers

So says Antoinette Cosway, the central figure in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The white Creole daughter of a former slave trader, Antoinette struggles through life in Jamaica in a search for her own sense of identity. The black community does not accept her because she is white, and because of her Creole background, she does not fit in to the world of her English husband, Rochester. As a result of her disassociation with identity, she suffers a mental breakdown and descends into "madness." Society’s refusal to accept her, her mother’s unsupportive example, and her failed marriage are all separate components of the reason for this disassociatation and her eventual loss of sanity.

Jean Rhys, herself a white Creole from Dominica, has taken the mad Creole wife of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and given her a voice. Bertha, the character in Jane Eyre, out of whom Antoinette was created, is banished into silence by madness. Because she is considered mad she cannot be taken seriously, as madness, according to social ideology, cannot be presented logically (Nixon 274). Rhys, in 1969 commented that she felt that Bertha "seemed such a poor ghost" (Nixon 275) that she thought she would like to write Bertha a life. She did just that. Divided into three sections, Wide Sargasso Sea begins with Antoinette’s narrative on her childhood and homeland. The second section is told primarily from the point of view of Antoinette’s husband, Rochester. The third section consists of Antoinette’s reaction to England and her ultimate descent into madness.

Existing as a white Creole woman in post-emancipation West Indian society, Antoinette Cosway lives a life of "inbetweenness" (Adjarian 4). It is this sense of "inbetweenness," of belonging to neither culture, which is the primary factor in driving Antoinette into madness. While she is at once able to move between black and white cultures, she is also scorned by those cultures. Antoinette is "neither English and rich, nor native and part of the community of slaves freed by the Emancipation Act" (Nixon 276), and she "must navigate her way through these treacherous landscapes of Creole and English identity" (Ciolknowski 3). In recalling her childhood, Antoinette remembers being harassed walking to school:

She remembers that even Tia, an early childhood friend with whom she used to walk to school, would harass her. Tia would harass Antoinette because Antoinette’s family, once a wealthy slave-owning family, was just as poor as many of the black families living nearby. Antoinette says there are "plenty white people in Jamaica. 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 24). Here it seems that Antoinette cannot win. She is attacked for being white, yet in the same paragraph, it seems that she is attacked again for not being white enough. Tia later attacks Antoinette again when, after her house has been burned to the ground, she tries to turn to Tia for comfort. As she runs to Tia, wishing to "be like her" (45), she gets hit in the face with a rock that Tia threw at her. She looks at Tia, "we stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass" (45). The image of the looking glass is important here because it symbolizes Antoinette’s need to find her "other" self – her identity. Her inability to reach through to the other side of the mirror symbolizes her inability to find and grasp that other self.

Another immediate contribution to her lack of a sense of identity is her childhood rejection by her mother, Annette. "And my mother, so without a doubt not English, but not white nigger either. Not my mother, Never had been" (36). A former slave owner, Annette is a beke who cares too much for money and class and her own "eroding social status as a slave owner in a post-emancipation culture" (Adjarian 203). Antoinette’s sense of identity is never validated by her mother, Annette, who did not approve of Antionette’s behavior. "Then there was that day when she saw I was growing up like a white nigger and she was ashamed of me, it was after that day that everything changed" (Rhys 132). As a result she turns to Christophine, a Martinican black house servant, for nurturance (Adjarian 203). Christophine, however, cannot give Antoinette the sense of completion she is looking for because "race and class differences keep them separated" (Adjarian 203): Christophine is black, Antoinette is white. Antoinette will always be beke, but she does not have the views and values of money that most beke have. Because she is a woman, she does not have access to her beke money, but she is barred from the black culture because of her whiteness. Despite her close relationship with Christophine, Antoinette is still not let entirely into the black culture.

Antoinette fails to find a unified "sense of self" (203) in her "mothers," and as a result, looks for it in her new husband. She does not find it because he does not love her. Although their relationship runs smoothly and happily for some time, her new husband, Rochester, states "it meant nothing to me. Nor did she, the girl I was to marry. When at last I met with her I bowed, smiled, kissed her hand, danced with her. I played the part I was expected to play" (Rhys 76) and Antoinette did not know any better. Differences between Antoinette’s Creole culture and Rochester’s English culture become more and more apparent to the reader as the story progresses. They did not really understand one another – this deepened her sense of alienation and drove her closer to madness. Rochester tells Antoinette, "So much of what you tell me is strange, different from what I was led to expect" (Rhys 135).

Rochester describes Antoinette as English in heritage, yet not quite English, or even European, in culture. "She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either" (Rhys 67). Rochester does not understand the Creole culture, which Antoinette loves, and she has no understanding of England. To her, England is a fantasy place. "Her mind was already made up. Some romantic novel, a stray remark never forgotten, a sketch, a picture, a song, a waltz, some note of music, and her ideas were fixed. About England and about Europe" (Rhys 94). Rochester’s lack of understanding about the Creole culture becomes apparent in a discussion between the two of them about Christophine.

There are also racist beliefs held by Rochester that Antoinette does not share, and does not seem to care to understand. This is clear when Rochester recalls a discussion between the two of them about Antoinette’s contact with Christophine.

‘Why do you hug and kiss Christophine?’ I’d say.

‘Why not?’

‘I wouldn’t hug and kiss them,’ I’d say, ‘I couldn’t.’

At this she would laugh for a long time and never tell me why she laughed" (Rhys 91).

Language is also a barrier standing between the English culture and Antoinette’s West Indian culture. It is not that Antoinette does not understand English – she does – it is that she also understands and speaks, quite fluently, the native French patios. Rochester describes Antoinette and Caroline standing "in the doorway of the hut gesticulating, talking not English, but the debased French patios they use in this island" (Rhys 67).

When Antoinette and Rochester’s marriage begins to fail, as a result of Rochester’s loss of interest in Antoinette, Antoinette goes to Christophine for help in winning back the love of her husband. Antoinette asks Christophine for the help of doudou. Christophine first refuses to help her in such a way because she is white. According to Christophine, beke cannot use doudou.

" ‘So you believe in that tim-tim story about obeah, you hear when you so high? All that foolishness and folly. Too besides, that is not for beke. Bad, bad trouble come when beke meddle with that’ " (Rhys 112). Christophine eventually gives in and uses the doudou on Rochester, but the spell backfires, Rochester is unfaithful, and the marriage is destroyed. Christophine made a strong point in telling Antoinette that the doudou would not work for her because she is beke. This is yet another way in which Antoinette’s lack of identity works to destroy her. Because she is Creole, she is aware of doudou and believes in its powers. Because she is white, however, she cannot use doudou.

An attempt at stripping Antoinette of her identity even further is made when Rochester renames her "Bertha". He does this in an attempt to make her to submit to all the "cultural and personal associations" of a white English woman that he has constructed for her (Adjarian 4).

She escapes this trap by confronting him. "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name" (Rhys 147).

The final and ultimate stripping of Antoinette’s identity is done when Rochester moves her and himself to England. By taking her away from her homeland, Rochester has taken her even further away from her identity as a West Indian woman. He has taken away any chance that she might have in trying to establish an identity. According to Nixon, it is this "removal from her natural home, her dispossession, that makes her mad" (280)

Once in England, Antoinette is seen as a mad woman. She no longer envisions England as a fantasy. Now she describes it as a "cardboard world where everything is colored brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it" (Rhys 181). Antoinette does a great deal of reflection during the short span of the book that covers her stay in England. She remembers a looking glass she used to have.

This passage is especially important because it raises the issue of identity again. The image of herself in the looking glass symbolizes her "other" self, the solid feeling of identity that she is missing. By moving Antoinette to England and by taking away her looking glass, Rochester has symbolically taken away any chance she has of establishing that identity. Antoinette has descended completely into madness.

Rhys suggests however, that Antoinette will be saved from this "living death" (Adjarian 8) in the last paragraph of the novel. After having a dream in which she sees herself burning Rochester’s mansion, Antoinette states "Now I know why I was brought here and what I have to do" (190). She then takes a candle from her room and walks down the hall. It is suggested that through burning down the mansion, Antoinette will gain back the power that she lost to Rochester. The flames will have purifying effects. It is also suggested that she will finally establish an identity for herself, even if it is through death. In the dream she has in which she burns down the mansion, Antoinette also sees a pool, near which Tia is standing, beckoning Antoinette to join her. This is significant in a way similar to that of the looking glass, with the reflection of Antoinette’s identity. The difference here it that this looking glass, the pool, is permeable. There is no hard cold glass to stop her from joining identities and her ability to get to the other side of the reflection symbolizes her ultimate "completion" of herself. By jumping into the pool, she will finally be able to merge the colonial blackness and Creole whiteness that have torn her apart and driven her to madness.

Antoinette’s disillusionment in her relationships with her mother and her husband, her lack of a strong connection with Christophine and Tia, and her inability to be completely understood by either the white culture or the black culture leave her as a woman without an identity driven into madness. Rhys’s depiction of the effects of colonialism in the West Indies is a dark one. Antoinette’s life is a picture of heartbreak, destruction and insanity in which there can be no "in-betweens." Rhys is able, however, to allow her character to transcend the bounds of repetitious entrapment which characterize so many stories of the Caribbean and allow her character liberation.

Adjarian, M. M. "Between and Beyond Boundaries in Wide Sargasso Sea." College Literature. v22. Feb, 1995. WilsonSelect, Online. Dec. 6, 1998.

Ciolkowski, Laura E. "Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: colonial history, English fiction, and British empire." Twentieth Century Literature. v43. 1997. WilsonSelect, Online. Dec. 6, 1998.

Hearne, John. "The Wide Sargasso Sea: A West Indian Reflection." Cornhill Magazine. v180 (1974): 323-333.

Nixon, Nicola. "Wide Sargasso Sea and Jean Rhys’s Interrogation of the ‘nature wholly alien’ in Jane Eyre." Essays In Literature. v21, n2 (Fall 1994): 267-284.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996.

Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. 1998.