Feminist liberalism in

Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys

In writing the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, it was the ambition of writer Jean
Rhys, to create a history and understanding of the character Bertha Rochester,
infamous Creole mad wife of Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys
set herself up to appropriate Bronte's story, the consciousness of a woman who
goes insane (Bertha), and the perspective of an English gentleman (Rochester).
It took Rhys nine years to create these characters and this story that
empathetically provided culturally accurate defense for both Bertha and
Rochester. Rhys herself lived in Dominica until she was sixteen and in England
for the remainder of her life. Rhys ' mother was Creole, like Bertha Rochester,
and her father was Welsh. With this ancestry, Rhys lived in a multicultural
setting and was likely sensitive to the differences of people of various cultures.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side to
Jane Eyre. The story of Bertha, the first Mrs. Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea is
not only a brilliant deconstruction of Bronte’s legacy, but is also a damning
history of colonialism in the Caribbean.
Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea between 1945 and 1966. The story of the
conflicting cultures is examined in the character of Antoinette Bertha Cosway, a
West Indian. As a child she is called “white nigger” by her black playmate. She
marries a constrained and domineering Englishman, Edward Rochester, and
follows him to his home country. Like Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre,
she ends up confined in the attic of her husband's country house. Much of the
action of the novel takes place in the West Indies. In her madness and misery,
Antoinette burns up the house and herself. Black women Rhys considered
stronger than white.
The story is set just after the emancipation of the slaves, in that uneasy time
when racial relations in the Caribbean were at their most strained, in 1839, six
years after slavery was abolished in the British Empire, of which Jamaica was
part.
The novel is divided into three parts. In the first, Antoinette is the only
narrator. In the second part, Rochester takes over, but his narrative is interrupted
briefly by Antoinette. In the third part, the English nurse Grace Poole is the
narrator, until Antoinette regains the narrative voice. This first-person narration
is significant because it lets the reader see the world through the subjective gaze
of flawed characters. In Parts I and II, Antoinette reveals her own naivety by
relating her story. She so obviously does not understand the world she has been

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born.
As the book opens, the former slave-owners and the newly freed slaves await
compensation from the British government. This tension erupts as the fire at
Coulibri. The black workers burn the symbol of white oppression, the plantation.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys focuses on the differences between people who
come from various places.
The symbolism of the title suggests the barriers, such as bodies of water, that
separate people. Rochester and Bertha’s conversations comment on their
difficulty of understanding one another due to their opposing upbringing and
culture: It is Rochester’s inability to feel comfortable in Jamaica and Bertha’s
inability to understand England that forms a barrier between them. Rochester
admits that Bertha is a stranger and that he cannot empathize with her.
The story is set just after the emancipation of the slaves, in that uneasy time
when racial relations in the Caribbean were at their most strained, in 1839, six
years after slavery was abolished in the British Empire, of which Jamaica was
part.
Rhys explores the complex relations between white and black West Indians,
and between the old slaveholding West Indian families and the new English
settlers in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Set mainly in Jamaica and
Dominica (the country of Rhys’s birth) the novel describes how Antoinette
became mad. In Bronte’s novel, Bertha/Antoinette is a monster, described as
violent, insane and promiscuous. Rhys creates instead a sympathetic and
vulnerable young woman who seeks, unsuccessfully, to find her place, she
attempts to fill in the blanks of a fictional character's life story, creates a
biography for Bertha Mason/Antoinette Cosway, in the beginning of the novel is
a child living on the overgrown and impoverished Coulibri Estate in Jamaica.
Antoinette (Rhys renames her and has Rochester impose the name of Bertha
on her when their relationship dissolves) is descended from the plantation
owners and her father has had many children by Negro women. She can be
accepted neither by the Negro community nor by the representatives of the
colonial centre. As a white Creole she is nothing. The taint of racial impurity,
coupled with the suspicion that she is mentally imbalanced brings about her
inevitable downfall.
Rochester, who is never named in the novel, is not portrayed as an evil tyrant,
but as a proud and bigoted younger brother betrayed by his family into a
loveless marriage. His double standards with regards to the former slaves and
Antoinette’s family involvement with them are exposed when he chooses to
sleep with the maid, Amelie, thus displaying the promiscuous behavior and
attraction to the Negro community which he accuses Antoinette of harboring.
Their brief days of happiness at Granbois are halted by his willingness to believe
the worst of Antoinette. His betrayal of her is set up before he receives the
information from Daniel Cosway.
The narrator of Part II is Edward Rochester, the hero of Charlotte Bronte’s

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Jane Eyre. He is never named in Rhys’s novel, but the details he gives of his life
make it clear to the reader that he is a younger version of Bronte’s character.
The narration of Part II begins several months after Antoinette voiced her fears
of leaving the sanctuary of the convent for the outside world. In that time, Mr.
Mason has died and his son, Richard, has arranged the marriage of Antoinette to
Rochester. Put ashore in the town of Massacre, Dominica with his new bride,
Rochester thinks to himself,
Grace Poole, another character from Bronte’s Jane Eyre, begins the narration of
Part III. In Bronte’s novel, Grace is the woman hired to care for
Bertha/Antoinette when she is locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s
home in England. In Rhys’s novel, Grace tells of how Rochester’s father and
brother have died and how Edward has become very wealthy. He has instructed
his housekeeper to hire Grace at extremely high wages to look out for the mad
woman, Antoinette. Grace calls her “that girl who lives in her own darkness”.
English House vs. the Caribbean Spaces
Self-enclosed gardens: the garden in Coulibri and the forests in both Coulibri
and Granbois, the “enclosed garden”. Antoinette dreams of a house with “thick
walls”, “blazing fires and the crimson and white rooms”; places without looking
glass: the convent the house in England (Thornfield in Jane Eyre)
England: “a black and cruel world to a woman” for Grace.
Antoinette in the house: relationships between Grace and Antoinette: Grace is
kind, but in lack of understanding; a speaking, rational, perceptive and knowing
subject: “she hasn’t lost her spirit”; plans to convince Rochester to let her go
home. Signs of “madness”: look at the tapestry; loss of memory, does not
remember fighting Richard.
Rhys’s use of the mirror in Wide Sargasso Sea, to symbolize the duality of
the self, can be seen to parallel Bronte’s. The two selves – the reflected self and
the “real'” self – are separated from each other. Antoinette relates that when she
'was a child and very lonely (she) tried to kiss her (her own reflection). But the
glass was between us – hard, cold. Self-wholeness is prevented by a looming
solid wall. In women’s writing can be seen to represent patriarchal judgment,
Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, illustrates how Antoinette's identity is so
completely diminished through patriarchal oppression that when she looks in the
mirror she does not recognize her own reflection. All the mirrors Antoinette
looks into, in order to imagine a self for her, are distorted or cracked. When the
mob sets fire to her house, Tia casts a stone at her.
Rhys’s great achievement in her re-writing of the Bronte text is her creation of
an external double to the madwoman, which transforms the bestial Bertha into
an individual woman who has been “othered” by imperialistic and patriarchal
oppression. Her madness is shown throughout the novel to be a reaction to
oppression.
Her dreams merge into a circular pattern of enclosure from which Antoinette
cannot escape. The first three dreams occurs after Antoinette’s literal separation

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from Tia.
Tia is what Antoinette wishes to be – her projected double – strong and
resilient. Their separation is as painful to Antoinette as a splitting of the self.
The first dream, with its threatening “heavy footsteps” of “someone who hated
(her)… coming closer and closer”, anticipates what the progression of the dream
will carry her to: a division of the most extreme kind – madness. This lurking
mad-double follows Antoinette through her transition into maturity and
throughout the novel. There are similarities between the fire scene in Part I and
that in Antoinette’s dream (nightmare) in Part III. Elements in the last dream are
recurrent ones: followed by somebody, the hall with only red and white colors,
searching for the altar, Aunt Cora’s room, the “ghost”; escape from the fire, to
see “all her life” written on the sky.
Tia too, as “her own dark double” remains symbolically with her. Tia acts out
Antoinette’s own rage and grief (which her name – Tia – symbolizes), but from
the other side of the mirror of racial division. Tia throws a stone at Antoinette
which hurts her face, but as though it is happening to her image in the mirror,
she doesn’t feel it.
Antoinette’s marriage is the culmination of this enforced literal oppression,
and the second of her symbolic dreams anticipates it. The mysterious man of the
dream, the prophetic figure of Rochester, leads her into this prison of
unreciprocated love, (as Rochester will later do with his false protestations of
love and safety – his immaculate “performance”). It is when she is trapped in
her literal prison that Antoinette will have her final dream. In it she must jump
off the roof of the attic back into that past where her identity lies and join with
her projected double, Tia. Although her jump towards her own projected double
is an escape out of the suspended present into the past, the escape is illusory.
Although in spirit she jumps back into the past, in reality her jump ends in the
smashing of her physical body at the foot of the patriarchal house. Tragically she
must burn the house with herself inside it, in order to destroy the patriarchal
house of oppression. The only escape for Antoinette, from the terrible
oppression of patriarchy, is suicide.
Both have their own space, their different lives and communities, but both of
them are victims.
Rhys shows that Rochester’s cruelty towards Antoinette is due to a projection
onto her of his hate for his father, and the marriage arrangement which he has
been pushed into. His anger is the anger of the oppressed. Like Antoinette he is
a victim of imperialistic and patriarchal oppression. In this too they are doubles,
but they do not recognize their duality.
Both are trapped in the other’s world. The tragedy is that through their mutual
misunderstanding of each other, neither realizes that the following footsteps are
the steps of the other.
An exploration of the layered doubleness of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre
reveals that the doubleness of selfhood can exist across all boundaries and that

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we all have a double life lurking within us.
Jean Rhys’ protagonist, Antoinette, she is named by the local population of
her native island of Jamaica as a “white cockroach”.
Denial, in Wide Sargasso Sea, takes the form of the failure to love. The
unnamed man extrapolated out of Bronte’s Rochester, himself a second and
hence a dispossessed son, with a father to work out of his own system, is
incapable of anything beyond a mechanical lust fumbling about in a stupor, split
from love and care. His rejection of the guilt at the failure to love recoils on the
dispossessed woman in the form of hatred. She becomes like a mirror, first
wiped clean of her own self-hood, into which he then projects his self-hatred,
which he finally breaks up as he might a doll, chanting to her the lulling and
demeaning refrain “Marionette, Antoinette”, in an attempt to get rid of his own
guilt. The only wish Antoinette can nurse successfully in Wide Sargasso Sea is
to die, and like her mother, she dies more than once: What Rhys identifies is
man’s practice of voodoo or obeah upon woman: the plural deaths women are
made to suffer at the hands of men who acquire power over them. Her husband's
deliberately casual adultery with a coloured servant in Antoinette's house
distastes and dispossesses her of the only place she had learned to identify
herself with as her natural habitat and patrimony. England, his home and the
house he builds there with her money, transports what had first seemed to her its
dream-like unreality into nightmare. The tragedy is that he appropriates and
desecrates what he neither appreciates nor understands, a person emblematic “of
a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien,
disturbing, secret loveliness”. The feminine in Rhys gets wrecked on the failure
of love.
The themes explored in the novel are especially the status of women,
prejudice and the race relations between newly freed slaves and their former
owners.
In its formal techniques and thematic sources, Rhys’s novel incorporates
modern and postmodern devices of fragmentation, while drawing, at times, on
Romantic notions of sublimity, passion, and the supernatural.
Rhys allows us to interpret the fate of Antoinette differently by having the
ending open – Antoinette’s dreams of the fire and leap to her death –, but the
novel ends with her resolution to act rather than a description of her death or an
exact repetition of Bronte’s words.
An aesthetic experiment in modernist techniques and a powerful example of
feminist rewriting, Wide Sargasso Sea gives voice to a marginalized character
and transforms her original tragic demise into a kind of triumphant heroism.
Delving into the psyche of her principal characters, Rhys examines their
fragmented identities and unconscious fears, focusing on an inner world that
mirrors the impressions of an evocative physical landscape.
In the end, Rhys created a complex and multidimensional novel championed by
postcolonial, feminist and modernist critics alike, Wide Sargasso Sea struggles

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against dominant traditions and espouses the cause of the under-represented.