Self identity in_jean_rhys_wide_sargasso

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SELF-IDENTITY IN JEAN RHYS’ WIDE SARGASSO SEA
Olusegun, Elijah
Department of English
University of Lagos, Akoka
Introduction
The literary history of the West Indies is one steeped in the amalgamation and pluralism of
different racial and ethnic colourations. It is one dominated by slavery and the quest for both
personal and cultural identities. The slaves have been freed especially in the wake of
Emancipation Act in 1834. The colonials have all but departed, but their vestiges still remain in
the Caribbean leaving a cache of hatred and resentment. Those that are the product of slavery,
indentured labour find out that they could no longer trace their roots or origin. They begin to
resent those they perceive had made them perpetually uprooted both physically and
psychologically from their cultural and ideological backgrounds. Writers like Derek Walcott,
George Lamming, Claude Mackay, V.S Naipaul, Sam Selvon all express this displacement in
their literary works. The West Indian authors include descendants of indentured labourers from
India, and various Europeans descendants and descendants from African slaves. Slavery is part
of the tradition that shaped the West Indian socio-cultural identity. There are always attempts by
writers to embark on a cultural and psychological quest for their roots from which they feel
alienated. This multiplicity thus gives varied tones to the literary output of West Indian writings.
The West Indian narratives are the works written by the West Indian about the West Indian
reality.
Background Context
Kenneth Ramchand in The Background to the West Indian Novel (1970) observes that “the social
and economic deprivation of the majority; the pervasive consciousness of race and colour; the
cynicism and uncertainty of the native bourgeoisie in power after independence; the lack of a
history to be proud of; and the absence of traditional or settled values” (4) all contribute to the
emergence of West Indian literary traditions. As observed earlier, these writers try to capture the
socio-historical, economic, cultural parallels of the West Indies. Ramchand further notes that the
‘formlessness of West Indian society, and the existential position of the individuals in it to the

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extent that they are described as being involved in the quest for national and personal identity”
(5-6) constitute the overriding themes of many West Indian literatures.
The Notion of Self Identity in Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea
This essay will examine the notion of self-identity in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) in
order to understand the plurality that confronts the West Indian society. Wide Sargasso Sea is set
in the 1830s. It examines the master-slave relationship that characterise West Indian history.
Slavery was part of the tradition that shaped West Indian socio-cultural identity. There are
always historical allusions to how it has shaped their sociological and psychological
development. The novel opens with the girl Antoinette as narrator. She describes her childhood
experience living with her mother, Annette on a derelict plantation. Their habitation is in ruins
due to neglect and desertion by their servants who till the farmland. They are avoided by the rest
of the whites and derided by the Negroes in the neighbourhood. The decline of their habitation is
momentarily arrested when Annette marries Mr Mason, a rich Englishman who hopes to revive
the plantation and make it profitable again. The novel draws attention to writers of European
descent in West Indian writings, that is, the white writers who were born or grew up in the
islands. Jean Rhys belongs to those who are called White West Indians. She has a Welsh father
and a creole mother. She married a Dutchman. In other words, her ethnic plurality constitutes a
shaping narrative in most of her novels. Just like Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys is confronted by two
competing ideologies – one that sought to exoticize Caribbean life and one that incorporated the
racial pluralism of West Indian values. Rhys was influenced by the black servants who raised her
and introduced her to the language, customs and religious beliefs of the native Caribbean.
Jean Rhys has been haunted by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). The ‘mad Creole heiress in
the early 19th
century’ in Bronte’s novel is a product of an inbred, decadent, expatriate society
resented by the recently freed slaves whose superstitions they shared. Most of these White West
Indians languished uneasily in the oppressive beauty of their tropical surroundings, yet cannot
fully integrate their lives amidst the growing hostility of the Negro community. The novel
reflects the distinct sensibilities of a West Indian writer and bears the stamp of European
modernism.

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It is not difficult to recognise in Wide Sargasso Sea the plight of some white creoles at
Emancipation, caught up between social forces and with nowhere to belong to; as the Creole
Antoinette explains to her English husband when they hear the Negroes taunting song:
“It was a song about a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of
us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave
traders. And I have heard English women call us white niggers. So between you
I often wonder who I am and why I was ever born at all.” (102)
There is a sense of withdrawal for those born and raised in the West Indies as White. The
resentment they faced from the large population of the blacks suffocates their existence.
Antoinette and her mother live on a lonely plantation where they are the subject of taunts from
both the whites and the blacks. Antoinette’s mother is then saved by her marriage to a rich
Englishman, Mr Mason, only to be plunged into madness after a Negro uprising. Her parrot’s
wing is clipped and burnt alive, her son, Pierre is also consumed by the fire. The parrot’s clipped
wing and eventual burning foreshadows the treatment that will be meted out to Antoinette in her
enforced crypt in an attic in England. The bird is shackled and maimed, mirroring Antoinette’s
own flightless dependency. Later, it is a letter from an embittered mulatto that destroys
Antoinette’s marriage and leads to her removal and confinement in an attic in England.
The novel foregrounds the story of Antoinette (Bertha in Jane Eyre) by making her the voice (or
the other voice in the story) thus giving the audience a perception of truth from the broken
woman. The first segment of Wide Sargasso Sea narrated by the young Antoinette, describes her
childhood experience living with her mother Annette. The end of slavery has accelerated the
decline of their estate, which is now essentially in ruins. The Cosways have few white friends
and Antoinette grows up in essential isolation, radically alienated from other people. She is so
reserved that she refuses to even look at the faces of the few ‘friends’ who show up to arrange
her mother’s marriage to Mr Mason (28).
Most of the former slaves seem to regard the Cosways with contempt, referring to them as
‘White cockroaches’. Antoinette finds it difficult to understand the contempt towards her
mother’s marriage to Mr Mason. (28). The subsequent Negro uprising and her injury from Tia,

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her childhood playmate, leaves Antoinette physically and emotionally hurt. The destruction of
their house leaves her mother emotionally disturbed as well. Even at the convent where she is
supposed to find relative comfort, she finds it hard to relate with people or express herself
coherently. With her mother locked away, disparate accounts of her madness fills the island
particularly from the servants and Antoinette’s distant cousin, Daniel Cosway who tries to
intimidate her husband into paying him for their father’s waywardness. Antoinette displays a
mature and calm demeanour in relating her experience of her mother’s rumoured ‘madness’ and
the circumstances that led to her being locked away. She dispels the ominous rumour that had
been peddled, first by her distant cousin, Daniel Cosway and then Amelie and the coloured
servants. They speak ‘lies’ according to Christophine over time and believing fully in it that
nevertheless makes it the truth. The predominance of insanity in the novel forces us to question
whose recollections are trustworthy. The fragmented memory of an unstable woman like
Antoinette opens up the possibility of alternative stories and imagined realities
One of the dominating themes of the story is hatred; deep and concerted hatred for historical
mistakes. Mistrust rules the heart of people who have been deceived, denied their cultural
heritage and the antecedent of slavery. There is a feeling of displacement for all the characters in
the novel. Antoinette finds that she could not leave Coulibri – her entire life and experience had
been dominated by the environment, yet together with her family, they have no other place they
could call home. When their house is burnt down, they felt a sense of total and irreparable loss.
Mentally and physically they were displaced. The feeling of insecurity, betrayal, guilt and
despair are all as a result of the inhuman treatment meted out to slaves before the emancipation.
The emancipation only fuels the deep-rooted hatred in the mind. This accounts for the gloomy
picture that characterises the worldview of the West Indians. It is one filled with sorrow and
bitterness. The animosity among people of different racial identity is visibly seen in the contempt
of the black servants towards the whites. Even the mulatto, Antoinette’s cousin is embittered and
will rather blackmail the husband into giving him money on account of his marriage to a White
West Indian. Antoinette recounts the death of a ruined planter, Mr Luttrell “one calm evening he
shot his dog, swam out to sea and was gone for always. No agent came from England to look
after his property.” (17)

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While slaveholders were promised compensation for freeing their slaves, many slaveholders, like
Antoinette's father, Mr. Cosway, and her neighbour, Mr. Luttrell, never received payment and
were ruined. The newly freed slaves, on the other hand, are stuck in an apprenticeship system for
four years following the act which is just as bad as slavery: they are forced to apprentice for their
former owners, and the punishment for escaping was just as bad as the punishment under
slavery. Not surprisingly, the former slaves continue to bear a major grudge against their former
owners, and riots are common. Because so many plantations go under, many English investors
arrive at the island seeking a good deal. Antoinette’s husband is encouraged to seek fortune on
the Caribbean island through pre-arranged marriage just like her stepfather had done with her
mother.
Antoinette’s young husband, who narrates the second part of the novel, feels for her a mixture of
fascination and repulsion that can be seen as representative of the European attitude towards the
non-European as a whole. He represents those Europeans who are opportunists seeking a world
in which to improve their economic power. It is not surprising that he sees the West Indies Island
as one dreary and dreadful place far removed from human civilisation. After a while his love and
affection for Antoinette and the estate begins to turn to aggression and hatred. There is an overt
attempt to hurt her by sleeping with Amelie, a Creole servant. The husband’s seduction of
Amelie is ‘an overt exercise of racial power, clearly placing him in the line of succession of the
slave masters who used women slaves for sexual pleasure for hundreds of years.” (Booker &
Juraga, 168)
The novel presents the predicament of the post-slavery white planters in the West Indies as a
tragic one. The long years of slavery and indentured labours has produced a mixture of racial
plurality that it is essentially difficult to describe who a true West Indian is. The descendants of
White planters caught between their black former slaves and their white cousins back in England
are despised by both. They do not fully belong either to Europe or to the West Indies. In a similar
vein, the blacks who have the history of the middle passage are far removed from their roots both
physically and psychologically that they feel they do not belong to the West Indies. On the other
hand, the creoles who are ‘racially impure’ are caught in limbo as to the true status of their
identity. There is a community named “Massacre”. The origin of the name, nobody knows,

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neither could they explain the meaning or atrocities that led to the town being named ‘Massacre’.
The seeming gloomy atmosphere is enhanced by the belief in ghosts and zombies who are
restless and roam the village. Little wonder then that the little joy Antoinette finds in her
marriage is smouldered by this seeming darkness that consumes both the haters and the hated.
Through the singular narrating consciousness of Antoinette Cosway as a girl and as a married
woman, Jean Rhys creates a pattern of alienation within alienation, distress multiplied upon
distress, as first mother and then daughter are pushed towards madness and despair. The
emotional intensity in which we encounter the characters gives the novel its peculiar quality.
Their garden is likened to the ‘garden of Eden’ re-echoing among others the biblical allusions
that pervade the novel. “Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree
of life grew there. But it had gone wild.” (19) That the environment has gone wild suggests that
the atmosphere is toxic and has every element of destruction. The land turns to a hated place, it
turns to a hated and haunted place where every form of sanity is clouded by alienation. This
darkness corresponds with her unhappiness and her hate for her husband. It is possible to see that
the author is less interested in a specific view of the place itself than in using it as a highly
subjective landscape, upon which the impersonal and obscure forces at work in the characters of
love may be projected. The ‘terrified consciousness’ of the historical White West Indian is
revealed to be a universal heritage. The guilty consciousness of slavery, the novel reveals that
neither the blacks nor the whites immune from the hatred, bitterness, and resentment that is part
of West Indian history.
The spiritual failures of the White West Indian planters reveal their aversion to the spiritual
significance of the landscape. The inability to build socio-religious harmony resulted in the
stifling of every sense of belonging. The occurrences of dreams, nightmares and other
heightened states of consciousness are references to an outer socio-economic situation that is
recognisable as the fall of the planter class. The spirituality of the fictive world of Wide Sargasso
Sea reflects the attempts by the black Negroes to find spiritual connection to the earth through
the practice of ‘Obeah’. Wide Sargasso Sea laid bare the problems associated with the
Emancipation Act in 1833. It focuses on the spiritual failures and dissent of the planter class in
the West Indies. It also witnessed the financial ruin of many of them as the black slaves loathe

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their place of slavery. They refuse to work anymore and the ‘landscapes’ begin to dissipate under
unkempt and uncleared plantations. The forests begin to close in on the few inhabitants creating
a shadowy atmosphere of terror and fear. The island develops into a huge haunted and
nightmarish condition that threatens the psychological existence of the populace whether White
West Indians or creoles or black West Indians.
Stylistically, the novel adopts a narrative, temporal and aesthetic schemes that reflect a cultural
and racial pluralism. It features a web of symbols and images that underlies its dream-like plot
and informs its feverish snatches of dialogue. 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 landscape. Through rechristening ‘Bertha Mason’ as
Antoinette, Rhys is able to subconsciously place Antoinette in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
However, Antoinette rejects the apparent renaming by her husband in Wide Sargasso Sea.
Antoinette’s husband (who remains nameless throughout the narrative) refuses to call her
Antoinette anymore. Instead, he calls her Bertha. Antoinette says of this “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.” (180) This foregrounds the fact that Antoinette
would rather die than lose her identity. She asserts and accepts her ‘whiteness’ even as she grows
hostile to her maid servants: “I dare say we would have died if she’d turned against us and that
would have been a better fate. To die and be forgotten and at peace. Not to know that one is
abandoned, lied about, helpless. All the ones who died – who says a good word for them now?
(21-22)
The narrative voice has a shift from Antoinette to her husband and even to Christophine at some
point. It jumps through time and space. As a postcolonial work, the novel indicts England’s
exploitative colonial empire, aligning its sympathies with the plight of the black Caribbean.
Antoinette – a white creole remains a step removed from racial oppression, and struggles
primarily against the dictates of patriarchy. Mason is presented as a paragon of British imperial
virtues while Antoinette’s marriage to Rochester is an arranged marriage based on material
considerations. Women suffer from patriarchal oppressions because they are not allowed to own
properties or have financial independence. The novel incorporates modern and postmodern

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devices of fragmentation while drawing, at times, on Romantic notions of sublimity, passion and
the supernatural.
The compound first-person narrative technique employed by Rhys gives the novel a feel of
listening to the different characters tell their own story either directly to the reader or to another
character. It gives multi-perspective to truth and the veracity of different angles to situations.
Even though the characters all relate to the same experience, their racial identity plays a part in
how they perceive their world or the others in the story and more significantly, their perception
to the truth of their narration. Christophine – who denies her racial affiliation with the West
Indies instils in Antoinette sensitivity to nature and belief in the practise of ‘Obeah’. She is the
voice of authority, the one who explains the world to Antoinette and explains Antoinette to the
readers.
Images of disease, rot and illness also suggest the moral and financial decline of Antoinette’s
family. Disease is a kind of moral retribution, in that the Cosway family after generations of
abuse, inherits a legacy of alcoholism, madness, and deformity (the young boy Pierre is
degenerate). England offers no cure either and it is pictured as a dream far away from
Antoinette’s sensibilities. She further deteriorates when she is there. Ramchand opines that “the
theme of decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon”. The novel depicts the ‘terrified
consciousness’ to suggest the white minority’s sensations of the shock and disorientation as a
mass and smouldering black population is released into an awareness of its power. (224-25) The
resentment the whites faced from the large population of the blacks suffocates their existence and
this leads to the withdrawal for those born and raised in the West Indians as Whites.
Apart from the black servants who deride Antoinette and her husband, she also feels a sense of
betrayal from her husband. Antoinette was betrayed by her husband. A cock crows when
Antoinette is with her husband suggesting an allusion to the betrayal and denial of Jesus by
Peter. Indeed, Antoinette was later betrayed by her husband having sex with Amelie, a young
mulatto servant while she overhears their conversation about her. The multi-voice of the
narration means that we can have a glimpse of the different dimension and perspective to the
truth. She tells her husband the truth about her mother’s supposed madness. Her love was

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betrayed. She affirms her fear and dread at her marriage. The novel has a dark and gloomy
atmosphere. Antoinette is left with the burdens of a divided cultural identity, the hatred of the
blacks, the contempt of the whites and the responsibility of a dilapidated estate. Both the
husband and Antoinette struggle for some place and identity and enter the arranged marriage
with apprehension and anxiety. Fear ruled Antoinette’s life. The motif of madness is clearly
evident with her mother’s loneliness and solitary condition. She dreams of disaster, fire and
destruction of her world.
Conclusion
In conclusion, therefore, Wide Sargasso Sea “presents the predicament of the post-slavery white
planters in the West Indies as a tragic one. These characters are caught between their black
former slaves and their white cousins back in England, they are despised by both and do not fully
belong either to Europe or to the West Indies.” (Keith Booker, 169) The novel is therefore a
commentary on the racial plurality that dominates the West Indies. It raises the question of
identity that has influenced the literary tradition of the writers from the Caribbean islands who
are perpetually caught between the past and the present and the future. In the end, Antoinette
does not see a way out of the attic in Thornfield Hall where she has been locked up. This action
re-enacts the burning of their Coulibri Estate where she lost her brother and her mother’s parrot.
She sees suicide as a means of escape from the confinement of the hall. She burns it down
suggesting that it is only escape through death that can liberate the inhabitants of the Caribbean
from their identity crisis.

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Work Cited
Brooker K. & Juraga D. The Caribbean Novel in English. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann. 2001.
Rhy, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W Norton & Co. 1966 (print)
Ramchand, Kenneth. The West Indian Novel and its Background. London: Faber, 1970