Graduate Work

Britain’s Other
By Scott Hays

Driven Mad by Love, Sex, and the Colonial Presence
in Jean Rhys’ Novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’
Scott Hays

In Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea, the fictional character Antoinette Cosway quickly challenges our every presumption about who exactly was the madwoman-in-the-attic in the novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. Here was a formerly beautiful and wealthy white Creole woman whose arranged marriage to Edward Rochester literally drove her insane, violent, and bestial (she eventually burned down the Thornfield mansion and plunged to her death in flames, in Jane Eyre). But what really drove this woman mad, from this reader’s perspective, was love (or the lack thereof), sex, and the colonial presence in her life.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, which is set in Jamaica and Dominica during the 1830s, Antoinette struggles to find her self-identity amidst the historical resistance of black Caribbeans to European domination. In fact, the young blacks call Antoinette “white cockroach” and “white nigger,” both epithets for the Euro-Creole woman who “ bears the brunt of guilt for the history of slavery and the cruelties perpetrated by her ancestors.” In some ways, white Creoles experience a double dose of a “quintessential aspect of Caribbean experience, the marginality of living in between cultures. They descend from a class that no longer exists and whose history is morally shameful. They feel close to a black culture that they cannot be part of and that can only resent them, and they may still look to a ‘mother’ country that long ago abandoned them and still considers them inferior.”

An early passage in Wide Sargasso Sea clearly defines the beginnings of a person unable to grasp any sense of herself, when Antoinette mentally finds a place “somewhere else” where she can become “someone else. Not myself any longer.” This type of colonial experience and class ambiguity positions Antoinette within a series of possessions and dispossessions, often leaving her homeless and ultimately vulnerable to the whims of her interim caretakers. We as readers can only presume to answer the question of what it means to diagnose and judge a white Creole woman as insane and bestial, based not only on her colonial experience, but also on her eventual forced marriage to Edward Rochester and the larger gendered colonial system that comes with that particular experience.
It’s here we discover a relationship between Rochester and Antoinette based on sex rather than love: “As for the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. I did not love her,” Rochester says. “I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (55). Rochester clearly lusts for Antoinette, while she seems to fall in love with him. Yet he tries to convince himself that he should marry Antoinette for her money. Antoinette tells Rochester that he doesn’t know anything about her, to which he replies, “I’ll trust you if you’ll trust me. Is it a bargain?”, as if this is more a business transaction than marriage.

England during this period was rigidly hierarchical, organized on principles of wealth, status, and gender. The prevailing social and legal system gave a man control over his wife’s property and her person. Marrying Antoinette enables Rochester to acquire all her possessions, while her decision to marry him demonstrates her desires to feel safe and protected. From Rochester’s perspective, however, he is Antoinette’s property—which seems to distance him even more from her love. The dynamics of their relationship is based not on what they give to one another, but on what they take. Even the letter he writes to his father demonstrates this attitude: “The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition. . . I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet...”

Eventually, Rochester takes away what little affection his has left for Antoinette after receiving a letter from Daniel Cosway, the son of Antoinette’s biological father from a different woman. In this letter, Daniel insinuates a sexual relationship between Antoinette and Mr. Mason. “But old Mason take a great fancy for the girl Antoinette and give her half his money when he die” (pgs. 58). Whether the allegation is true or not, Rochester seems to become further alienated from Antoinette. Again sexual relations play an important factor by arriving at yet another issue—trust. What little trust that existed between them quickly disintegrates. And when she realizes that nothing will convince Rochester of her innocence, she turns to sex again by asking Christophine for help. “Yes you can, I know you can. That is what I wish and that is why I came here. You can make people love or hate. Or. . . or die. . .” (pg. 76).

Antoinette believes that through the power of voodoo, Christophine can cause Rochester to love her again by having sex with him one more time. In the end, though, the plans fails when Rochester ends up having an affair with Amelie, which only further exasperates Antoinette’s descent into eventual madness. We we already know from reading Jane Eyre, Antoinette ends up the madwoman-in-the-attic. Perhaps if she had been raised in England; perhaps if she had been loved by someone, anyone; perhaps if sex hadn’t been her only way to exert a certain amount of power of Rochester; perhaps if all this had happened, Antoinette might have ended up sane, after all.

WORKS CITED
Emery, Mary Lou. “Modernist Crosscurents” from Jean Rhys at ‘World’s End: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Harrison, Nancy R. Jean Rhys and the Novel of Women’s Text. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sardasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1966.

Simpson, Anne B. Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Thorpe, Michael. “The Other Side”: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre from ARIEL, a Review of International English Literature, 8:3 (July 1977), 1977

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