Paper Name: Paper 203: The Postcolonial Studies
Paper Code: 22408
Topic Name: Racism in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Name: Divya Sheta
Roll No.:06
Enrollment No.:4069206420210033
Email ID: divyasheta@gmail.com
Batch:2020-23 MA SEM-III
Submitted to : Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MK
Bhavanagar University.
- Introduction:
Racism is a big issue during the colonialism
period. The novel Wide
Sargasso Sea is written by Jean Rhys in order to highlight multiple issues like
gender discrimination, the opposite nature of males and females, how the desires
of the central characters are not fulfilled, and how all these things lead to madness. The entire identity of the main character has been shattered and taken
away from her. Antoinette was a Creole girl and
Rochester was an
English white man still they got married and the consequence is so dangerous that Antoinette had to suffer for a lifetime.
The gender issue within the framework of the patriarchal order
imposed by the imperialist ideology foregrounds the lives of two female
characters: the white Creole protagonist and a woman of color. Throughout her
life, the former constantly strives to replicate the dominant ideals, values,
and conceptual structures. As for the latter, she appears as a self-determining
agent, a defiant subaltern who opposes a strong resistance to the oppressors’
ideology. Her resistance appears in many different forms.
- About the Author:
Jean Rhys, original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams,
(born August 24, 1890, Roseau, Dominica, Windward Islands, West Indies—died May 14,
1979, Exeter, Devon, England), West Indian
novelist who earned acclaim for her early works set in the bohemian world of
Europe in the 1920s and ’30s but who stopped writing for nearly three decades,
until she wrote a successful novel set in the West Indies.
The daughter of
a Welsh doctor and a Creole mother,
Rhys lived and was educated in Dominica until she went to London at the age of
16 and worked as an actress before moving to Paris. There she was encouraged to
write by the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Her first book, a collection
of short stories, The Left Bank (1927), was followed by such
novels as Postures (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).
After moving to Cornwall she wrote nothing
until her remarkably successful Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that reconstructed
the earlier life of the fictional character Antoinette Cosway, who was Mr. Rochester’s mad
first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre. Tigers Are
Better-Looking, with
a Selection from the Left Bank (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976),
both short-story collections, followed. Smile
Please, an unfinished autobiography, was published in 1979.
- About the Novel :
The wide Sargasso Sea is a visceral response to Charlotte Brontë’s treatment of Mr. Rochester’s ‘mad’ first wife, Bertha, in her classic
Victorian novel Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys reveals the horrifying reality that might lie behind a man’s
claim that a woman is mad, and humanizes Brontë’s grotesque invention, the
now-archetypal and heavily symbolic ‘madwoman in the attic. The novel is a
vindicating howl of rage and injustice, and a skin-flaying revelation of
personal sadism.
The wide Sargasso Sea is also a valuable historical work, written
in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, which explores Victorian paternalism,
sexualized racism, and the complex social and political history of the West
Indies. Rhys vividly imagines Rochester’s time there when he met Bertha, who is
a Creole – a naturalized West Indian of European descent. The Emancipation Act
freeing slaves but compensating slave-owners for their ‘loss’ has been passed,
England and France are the dominating and competing colonizers while Spanish
colonial exploration is a past influence, and many formerly profitable estates
are in decline because of the absence of exploited labor and a slump in the
sugar market.
The novel is alternately narrated by Antoinette (Bertha’s much more elegant
real name) and Rochester and has three settings: Antoinette’s crumbling West
Indian family estate, Coulibri; an unnamed honeymoon house on a different
island; and finally the attic room in which Antoinette is imprisoned in
Thornfield Hall in England. In the West Indian settings, Rhys skilfully evokes
the seething impulses of anger, trauma, fear, mockery, and suspicion between,
amongst, towards, and from former slaves originally from Africa, black West
Indian servants who are the children of slaves, mixed-race illegitimate
children of white plantation owners who impregnated female slaves, non-white
naturalized Creoles, former slave-owners, house masters, newly impoverished
plantation owners, colonial interlopers and prospecting entrepreneurs wanting
to buy derelict estates. Despite the ending of slavery, the story is far from
over: violent justice, a raw fight for survival and the possibility of yet more
waves of exploitation are still to come. The hierarchy of racial difference is
finely demarcated and noticed by everyone.
Antoinette is a lonely, intelligent, brooding individual who yearns for a
mother figure (and finds one in her maid and ex-slave Christophine), yet the
reasons for the rejection of Antoinette by Annette (her mother) are never made
clear, while slanderous lies fill the space of ignorance and doubt.
- Issues on Race:
Following the English referentiality, there are two races in Wide Sargasso Sea: the Blacks and the Whites. This distribution derives from the prevailing nineteenth-century English assumption of an inherent relationship linking the geographical delimitations of a state and the essential character of its national culture. Such an approach, enforced by English planters in the Caribbean colonies, considers Englishness as a homogeneous racial category distinctive by color, of the Black Jamaican Creole, another racial group. In other words, the English assumption suggests that there is an identifiable, unified national character evident in such terms as Englishman and Creole, based on socially codified patterns of behaviour, and a person’s inherent physical and racial attributes. This means that, referring to the English approach, race is based on essentialism and nativism. Besides, such a view marked England’s involvement in the slave trade and plantation economies in the West Indian colonies.
Antoinette was a Creole girl and Rochester was an English white man. So there is clearly a difference between them in terms of race and gender as well. The novelist shows us that Antoinette is a weak character mainly because of her being female
and black. Rhys finds herself caught up in two different cultures and is not
sure about her own identity so she reflects on her heroine. Like Rhys,
Antoinette is a sensitive and lonely young Creole girl who grows up with
neither her mother’s love nor her peer companionship. In school as a young woman, Antoinette becomes
increasingly lost in thought and isolated, showing the early signs of her inherited emotional vulnerability. Moreover,
Antoinette’s passion contributes to her melancholy and implied madness. Her arranged marriage to an unsympathetic and controlling English gentleman worsens her condition and pushes her to fits of violence.
Eventually, her husband brings her to England and locks her in his attic,
assigning a servant woman to watch over her. Fearful, Antoinette awakes from
a vivid dream and sets out to burn down the house. an unsympathetic and controlling English gentleman worsens her condition and pushes her to fits of violence. Eventually, her husband brings her to
England and locks her in his attic, assigning a
servant woman to watch over her. Fearful, Antoinette awakes from a vivid dream and sets out
to burn down the house.
Christophine
is also used as a symbol to depict poverty among black Jamaicans. She is
one of the well-off black characters for she can claim ownership of a house
Annette has generously given her. Yet, her dwelling is characterized by utter
destitution. She has no real furniture. When she is outside, in the yard, under
her mango tree, she has nowhere to sit except on a box. Inside the house, apart
from a bench, there are only two wobbly chairs. On her bed, she has the same
counterpane she has always used because she is unable to afford anything else
to replace it. Antoinette reports on the destitution: “I followed her into the
house. There was a wooden table in the outer room, a bench, and two broken-down
chairs… She still had her bright patchwork counterpane.
From the
essentialist perspective, materialistic destitution goes hand-in-hand with
ignorance and savagery. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the white characters cannot see
colored people as human beings who are capable of thought and reasoned
determination. They are stereotyped as children and the ignorance associated
with them is usually read as the source of their laziness and passivity. They
cannot make deductions or come up with sound conclusions. That is why in the
scene of the burning of Coulibri, the racist planters portray the white Creoles
as victims of a malevolent mob of Blacks. Yet, the episode preceding
Antoinette’s depiction of the collective face sheds light on the seemingly
unjustified and unreasonable violence of the ex-slaves. Myra, one of the
servants, overhears Mason saying in the course of a conversation, that he
intends to bring indentured laborers from India to replace the newly emancipated
black Creoles he considers too lazy people. These laborers are called
“coolies”, an Indian word meaning hired worker or burden carrier. The narrator
says:
My stepfather talked about a plan to import labourers –
coolies he called them – from the East Indies. When Myra had gone out Aunt Cora
said, ‘I shouldn’t discuss that if I were you. Myra is listening.’ ……Do you
mean to say –‘. I said nothing, except that it would be wiser not to tell that
woman your plans – necessary and merciful no doubt. I don’t trust her.’ ‘Live
here most of your life and know nothing about the people. It’s astonishing.
They are children – they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Discrimination due to race isn’t the only hardship Antoinette has to deal with over the course of her life, she also must deal with being a woman in 19th-century Jamaica. In Antoinette’s later years in the novel, she is married off to a European man who is not named but is implied to be Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. This marriage is cultivated by Antoinette’s step fathers son Richard Mason. Richard all of Antoinette’s inheritance and pays him to marry her. Antoinette has no choice in this marriage and is treated harshly by the man leading to her eventual decent into madness. This shows us what gender meant in Jamaica at this time. It means that if you were a woman you were to be sold off in order to make the men of the families richer in property, money, and stance.
- Conclusion:
In Wide Sargasso Sea, the
representatives of the racist western ideology cannot see the ex-slaves as
actors in their own history of liberation. In addition to that, they view the
black subjects’ metaphysical beliefs as signs of backwardness. That is the
reason why they consider the beliefs in zombi and Obeah practices as
foolishness. Primarily, “negro religious tradition” such as Obeah was
identified as criminality. It was appropriated by the dominant power as grounds
for punishment. The wide Sargasso Sea foregrounds Obeah as a secret African
religion that survived the period of slavery in spite of the colonizers’
prohibition that the slaves practice any religion from which they might draw
for empowerment. “It is traditionally represented
as a source of resistance that assisted in slave rebellions and inspired fear
and awe among believers.”
Works Cited
“An Introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea.” British Library,
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-wide-sargasso-sea.
“Jean Rhys.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Rhys.
“Racism in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.” International Journal of Social Impact,
https://ijsi.in/articles/racism-in-jean-rhyss-wide-sargasso-sea/.
Samb, B. “Race and Gender in Jean Rhys's Wide
Sargasso Sea.” Lwati: A Journal of
Contemporary Research,
https://www.ajol.info/index.php/lwati/article/view/46520.
Wide Sargasso Sea,
https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/yonistefanomatt/?page_id=16.
“Wide Sargasso Sea.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wide-Sargasso-Sea.
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