Characters:

In two columns, make notes on the role and significance of:o Antoinetteo Rochester

Do the same witho Antoinette’s immediate family

Annette Old Cosway Old Mason Pierre

o Antoinette’s wider family

Aunt Cora Daniel Cosway Alexander Cosway Sandi Cosway Richard Mason

o The servants

Christophine Baptiste Amélie Grace Poole

o Any others you think are significant, such as

Tia

 Contrasts and oppositions in the characters of Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is structured around a pattern of contrasts and oppositions:

Man / woman Black / white Rich / poor Coloniser / colonised England / Caribbean.

This is discussed in more detail in Structure of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Characters in the novel can also be fitted into this overall pattern and related to the novel’s themes:

Gender Race Identity

Jean Rhys ensures that these oppositions are not simplistic by making some of them into mirror opposites, in which similarity co-exists with difference.

Annette / Christophine

These two women can be seen as contrasted mother figures in relation to Antoinette.

Annette, lonely, fearful and reduced to poverty, is a distant and distracted figure Christophine is closer, more nurturing.

But these oppositions are complicated by race:

Christophine is black and Antoinette, despite her love for her, also inherits a family history of white dominance and exploitation

Christophine protects Antoinette at Coulibri, but she also practices obeah and the child is afraid of this.

Annette and Christophine also provide Antoinette with contrasted role models in terms of their behaviour and values as women:

Annette relies on her sexual power to regain economic security Christophine, despite her relative poverty, is free and independent, although her power as a

practitioner of obeah also exposes her to danger from the authorities.

Antoinette / Tia

Rhys uses this contrast of characters to examine racial oppositions. However, she avoids simplistic relationships:

Although Antoinette’s family is reduced to poverty, this is shown as relative when compared to Tia’s

White dominance is undercut by Tia’s cleverness Their exchange of dresses signals a persistent theme in the novel, the confusions and tensions

around Antoinette’s cultural identity.

Aunt Cora / Mr Mason

As representatives of the white planter class, these two characters display some similarities, but they contrast in their relative histories:

Aunt Cora, like Annette, comes from a family with a long history in the Caribbean over several generations. Mason is a recent incomer

Through long association she understands more about the black community than Mason, who is ignorant

Their differences are shown most sharply in their responses to the riot at Coulibri The weakness of the old planter community in the face of economic and cultural change is shown

in the decline of Aunt Cora and her failure to protect Antoinette from Mason and Rochester.

Rochester / Sandi

Antoinette’s suitors form another contrasted pair, although one has his own substantial narrative and the other remains a shadowy figure whose relationship to Antoinette is never fully disclosed. Racial

tensions as well as differences in the emotional bond between Antoinette and these two men are examined through this particular opposition.

Rochester / Daniel Cosway

Oppositions between these two characters are very apparent.

Rochester is securely identified within the dominant white, English, colonial class Cosway is of mixed race and, as his letters show, exists uneasily and bitterly between the black

and white communities.

Yet these two demonstrate surprising similarities:

Both have a bad relationship with their father Both resort to dishonourable ways of raising money Cosway’s gossip fuels Rochester’s racial prejudices but also forces to the surface latent

insecurities concerning his own identity.

Like Antoinette and Tia they are, in several ways, mirror opposites.

Antoinette and Rochester

As the most strongly contrasted pair of characters in the novel, their relationship acts as a focus for the story’s key themes.

Gender

Antoinette and Rochester represent one of the most basic of oppositions, man versus woman. A conventional set of oppositions around gender could look something like this:

Man / Woman

Dominance / Submission

Power / Powerlessness

Active / Passive

Strength / Beauty

Rational / Intuitive

Narrative genres in Wide Sargasso Sea - realism and Gothic

Realism

A realist novel is one which gives the impression of recording an actual way of life – a  ‘window on the world’. It does this through:

A believable story Plausible settings Characters resembling people in real life.

Jane Eyre is one of the most famous realist novels of the nineteenth century. Brontë’s nineteenth century version of realism involved:

A belief that although characters were complex they were unified, with asolid, stable identity Assuming that outward appearance gave insight into the inner personality. People could

be known by what they looked like A sense of moral stability - characters could be evaluated and judged with confidence.

In ‘writing back’ against Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys also made use of these elements. But her novel uses realism in a way influenced by EuropeanModernism. Jean Rhys, like other early twentieth century writers in this movement, believed that:

Character and identity were more elusive and fragmented People often feel that they are made up of contradictions, in feelings, opinions and behaviour That the unconscious affects behaviour and attitudes in ways that cannot be fully understood

or expressed That a novel could be more ‘realistic’ by finding ways to represent elusive, contradictory and

fragmented inner thoughts and feelings That such novels could be less judgemental and more compassionate.

Gothic

Jane Eyre mixes realism with Gothic conventions and supernatural elements. The word Gothic was originally applied to stories which dealt with wild passions and supernatural terrors. Later it also included stories which concentrated on strange or claustrophobic psychological states.

Wide Sargasso Sea also makes use of Gothic conventions: the action includes omens or premonitions, dreams, incarceration and poisonous potions, for example. However, Jean Rhys also develops the genre to give it a Caribbean dimension: 

The wild landscapes of the European Gothic tradition (mountains, ruins, castles) are replaced by a tropical forest represented in terms of intense heat and colour, mysterious roads and the ruins of slavery

The atmosphere contains specific racial tensions and Caribbean beliefs about obeah and spirits

The Gothic tradition made use of dreams as a way of accessing the inner life of characters. In Wide Sargasso Sea landscapes, action and characters are often presented in a dreamlike and hallucinatory way. But they are presented in this way because we see them though the eyes of Antoinette and Rochester. Both characters see the world distorted by their troubled states of mind.

Modernism, dreams and the supernatural

The significance of dreams

Jean Rhys, like other twentieth century writers, made use of the ideas of Sigmund Freud concerning dreams as expressions of psychological states. She uses dreams as:

Means for exploring the inner lives of Rochester and Antoinette Devices for articulating things that the characters cannot consciously know or express, even to

themselves A way of taking readers below the surface of apparent realism in the novel As means for representing secret or hidden aspects of Caribbean culture As presentiments for what is to come.

Antoinette’s dreams

Antoinette has three dreams which form a sequence:

The first at Coulibri (Part one, section 3) The second in the Mount Calvary convent (Part one, section 12) The third at Thornfield Hall (Part three, section 7). 

As critics have noted, each is triggered by an event or situation that brings her closer to the final act of burning down Rochester’s house. 

Rochester’s dreams

Rochester’s experience in the forest around Granbois in Part two has dream-like qualities. It also shows strange parallels with Antoinette’s experience in Part one, after her dream as she walks in the forest around Coulibri.

If we compare the two we see that:

Stream of consciousness is used to narrate Antoinette’s experience of alienation and loss of identity, of being ‘no longer herself’

Rochester’s account appears more rationally narrated, although he is preoccupied with suspicions about his family

The forest has an effect on him and he lapses into a dream like state under an orange tree. When he comes back to himself, he sees a little girl who runs from him in terror. She thinks he is a ghost, a zombie

In a sense he too is ‘not himself’. The use of a dream-like state and intimations of the supernatural convey to readers the depth of his alienation, loneliness and culture shock.

Ghosts 

Wide Sargasso Sea follows Jane Eyre in making references to ghosts at certain points in the action. Sometimes Rhys deliberately re-uses supernatural incidents from the earlier novel. For example, in Part three, as Antoinette wanders in Thornfield Hall while Grace Poole is asleep, she is seen as a ghost by others. She is enacting Bertha’s sinister presence in Bronte’s story.

However, Antoinette has more independence in Rhys’ story. In her dream she feels that the ghost of Thornfield Hall is following her, then she sees the woman with flowing hair. She says that the image was framed in gilt yet somehow familiar. This may be a picture, perhaps the one painted by Jane that she showed to Rochester. Or, if the frame is a mirror, Antoinette encounters her own image and perhaps recognises herself.

Zombies

Jean Rhys also makes use of a Caribbean figure, the zombie. This is a particular kind of ghost made by obeah practitioners when they steal the soul or spirit of a victim. This figure operates in the novel in different ways.

Zombiism resulting from loneliness, alienation and insecure personal identity

Annette, Antoinette’s mother, experiences a spiritual death, which her daughter calls a ‘real’ death, as well as an actual physical death. This is the result of her unhappiness at:

The death of Pierre The tensions of living in a place of racial conflict Her abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to be caring for her.

Zombiism caused by Rochester’s brutal treatment of Antoinette

When Rochester renames his wife Bertha, he breaks her connection with her mother, Annette. Antoinette accuses him of using obeah since that renaming takes away her spirit, her identity. He turns her into a person who is metaphorically ‘dead’ and has no freedom, but is instead both psychologically and economically enslaved to him.

Zombiism resulting from Rochester’s psychological trauma

During his walk in the forest around Granbois, Rochester is mistaken for a ghost, a zombie. The incident suggests that, in resisting and repressing so much that the Caribbean has brought alive in him (sensual response, sexuality), he too has suffered a kind of death.

Zombiism caused by the conflict between Antoinette and Rochester

Just as Antoinette accuses her husband of using obeah to dominate her, so she asks Christophine for a love potion to manipulate him. According to the critic Judie Newman, the rituals intimated in the text (the white powder, the poisoned drink) are obeah practices for turning a victim into a zombie, a person lacking independence or memory. Newman sees Rhys’ use of the zombie as a way of showing shifts between victim and aggressor in the relationship between Antoinette and Rochester.

Time and narrative

There are different ways of approaching time in Wide Sargasso Sea and these can be related to the wider thematic concerns of the novel.

Time in which the novel is set

Wide Sargasso Sea is set in the years immediately after the 1833Emancipation Act which freed the slaves. This can be worked out by counting back Antoinette’s childhood from the only date in the novel, 1839. Antoinette works this date onto her embroidery just after she goes to the Mount Calvary Convent school. It is odd, therefore, that the communities in the novel are so silent or evasive on the topic of slavery when it was central to the recent past. As Antoinette explained to Rochester, those days were later rarely spoken of. This is part of apattern of silences and secrets pervading the novel as a whole.

Time in the development of the narrative

In Part one, Antoinette, like Jane Eyre, is telling the story of her own growth and development. There are detailed narrations of particular scenes and conversations –  for example, the episode of Tia’s trickery over the dress and the fire at Coulibri. These are given specific treatment because they are so important in shaping Antoinette’s perceptions and identity through her youth and marriage.

Sometimes the narrative will move quickly through longer periods of timesuch as Antoinette’s stay at the convent school. She is a child when she enters the school and over 17 and marriageable by the end of part one. The convent is a refuge; its value is that its routines are kindly, stable and pleasant. Antoinette is protected, troubling experiences are fewer and the narration, therefore, need not linger once the atmosphere of these years has been established.

On the other hand, the narration may move swiftly over experiences which the character either cannot or does not wish to remember. Antoinette’s voyage to England from the Caribbean, for example, is recalled only in fragments.

Disrupted chronology

Gaps and dislocations in time

The asterisks placed in the centre of the blank space between sections of the novel often indicate gaps or shifts in time. These are a means of organising the text and developing the narrative through time, an

alternative to conventional chapters. However, Wide Sargasso Sea does not move smoothly forward in time; the chronology is disrupted, there are gaps or flashbacks.

Antoinette’s narratives

These offer further examples of a disrupted chronology. Some incidents are narrated long after they happened. For example: 

Antoinette narrates a visit to her mother in Part one. This comes after Antoinette’s illness but before she goes to the convent school. It is clear to the reader, if not to Antoinette herself, that her mother is mentally ill and being looked after away from the family

It is only much later in Part two that Antoinette describes a second visit to her mother in which she saw her abused by her guardians. This is an experience that Antoinette has suppressed, in line with a general ‘forgetting’ about Annette’s ‘madness’ and other family secrets. 

Again, this is part of a pattern of secrets and obscured histories in the novel in general.

Time of narration

An additional puzzle in the novel is the time at which Antoinette is narrating her story:

Part one must be told by an older Antoinette. Although the narration stays close to a child’s perceptions, there are occasional asides which indicate she is remembering her past life. For example, it is important to her to capture the memory of the hot convent classroom before it is lost. This is expressed with an urgency that indicates her memory is fading

Her narration in part two, section 11 is also told from memory as her final recall of the colours of Christophine’s world make clear. There is also a puzzling reference to selling one of the rings given to her by Aunt Cora. The inference seems to be that these sections are narrated from some point after leaving Granbois and her final incarceration in Thornfield Hall

In Part three, as Antoinette’s grasp on reality seems to slacken, her sense of chronological order also becomes more confused. Incidents are related out of order, such as the journey to England, the episode in which Antoinette acquires a knife, the conversation with Sandi.

In this way, Jean Rhys is able to represent a mind under stress and a state of mind in which subjective experience has become more important than rationality and outer reality.

Signifying the future

Wide Sargasso Sea is full of premonitions of its end: 

The connection to Jane Eyre, in itself, suggests Antoinette’s fate as the mad wife in the attic Characters have dreams or experiences which foretell the end of the novel. Antoinette’s

dream sequences form a narrative that shows what will happen to her. In part two, section 16, Rochester has sex with Amélie and afterwards sees the distressed Antoinette with red eyes and disordered hair, swearing at him. The depiction foretells not only how Antoinette will be in part three, but also employs the same vocabulary as Rochester uses to describe his wife in Jane Eyre

After his argument with Christophine, Rochester draws a house with a stick woman alone in one of the rooms. His diagram is a plan for a return to England and a fate for his wife. These are ideas that he has not yet been able to express to himself

Recurrent images and symbols are also used to suggest the ending. The colour red and references to fire and light pervade the first two parts of the novel. These provide indications of the setting and actions in Part three as well as Antoinette’s state of mind. The argument between Rochester and Christophine concludes with a form of curse centred on Rochester’s eyes. Again, this foretells the plot of Jane Eyre: Rochester will be blinded in the fire that kills Berth

Themes

Difference: gender, race and identity

The centrality of difference and Otherness

Wide Sargasso Sea is organised into a series of contrasts and oppositions so the notion of difference is central to the novel. It is an idea that draws together the novel’s three main themes; gender, race and identity. They are deeply interconnected and this, in itself, is one of the most important ideas in the book.

A related idea you may come across is Otherness. This term comes from ideas about the way in which we construct a sense of our personal identity (who we are) by dividing what we think is ourself from what is not ourself, i.e. the Other(s).

These ideas of difference and otherness have been applied to aspects ofculture:

Gender: in a patriarchy where men are dominant, women are defined as ‘not men’ or Other Race: in cultures dominated by colonialism or other forms of oppression, those who dominate

define the subject race as different, not them – asOther.

Definition of the Other

Defining a group as ‘Other’ usually involves:

Fearing the Other because they are different Setting up a hierarchy in which the Other is inferior (and not simply different) Projecting onto the Other things that ‘we’ are not. This may say more about the dominant

group than it does about their subjects. Men, for example, may feel that emotions and intuition are not ‘masculine’. Thus they may project irrationality and intuition onto their notions of women as Other.

Race and colonialism

Racial difference in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is built on a set of assumptions about racial difference centred on the construction of the Caribbean as ‘Other’ to English culture. The novel shows attitudes developed through Britain’s long political and economic dominance over other parts of the world. It exploited these ‘others’ but justified this by projecting onto them a range of negative associations. In so doing, the strange and alien could be controlled, reduced in power and dominated. Bertha in Brontë’s novel can be seen as representing this distorted view of the Caribbean. This issue is discussed further in Contemporary critical assessments > Post-colonial approaches.

Wide Sargasso Sea constructs the ‘other side’; it gives back a voice, identity and culture to the silenced and dehumanised Bertha Mason. The novel also constructs a much more varied and less stereotyped Caribbean world. Jean Rhys shows the complex racial groupings, black, white, ‘coloured’, as well as the way in which the specific colonial history of individual islands produced a very rich mixture of cultures.

Antoinette, race and identity

Antoinette’s childhood shows her positioned between the white and black communities. She has affinities with certain black characters such as Tia and Christophine, but cannot fully identify with them. She is white, brought up with a set of values based on superiority and dominance.

The result is marginalisation from both communities as a white cockroach and a fractured sense of personal identity. Early in the novel, Antoinette says she wanted to be something or someone other than herself, often wondering who she really was and where she belonged.

One element in Antoinette’s split identity is the myth of England imposed on her by her white Creole culture, which looked to England as the metropolitan centre. Antoinette has an inaccurate vision of what England is like.

Antoinette and the Caribbean

In wishing to be like Tia and Christophine, Antoinette expresses a Caribbean aspect of her self. But that too is problematic.

Antoinette is a product of her white planter culture:

In wishing to be like Tia, Antoinette has to repress another side of herself. She is the daughter of a slave owner after all. One of the reasons for the pervasive sense of secrets, things hidden, things not spoken about, is that the white Creole community will not face up to their recent participation in slavery

Antoinette demonstrates their prejudices. She names only her black servants, the other blacks all look alike to her

Her attitude to Daniel Cosway is also a prejudiced one, as the language of his description in her narrative in Part one shows clearly.

Antoinette, women and slavery

One aspect of Wide Sargasso Sea that has attracted critical attention is the connection Jean Rhys makes between slavery and the oppression of white Creole women at this time.

The relationship between Antoinette and Rochester can also be seen as representing the relationship between coloniser and colonised, as well as the complex intersections of race with gender and identity:

Antoinette is economically enslaved in that, on her marriage, all her fortune becomes Rochester’s to do with as he wishes. The novel sets up a careful parallel between Antoinette’s condition in this respect and Christophine’s relative poverty but financial independence

Antoinette is also sexually and emotionally enslaved by the passion she feels for Rochester. Again, Christophine underlines this in her advice to leave Rochester, which Antoinette feels unable to take.

The novel also sets up a parallel between Antoinette and the black servantAmélie:

The similarity of name in terms of initial letter and French origins connects the two to Annette Rochester betrays Antoinette’s love and trust by having sex with Amélie He also shows his own ability to behave in a way characteristic of white planter men who

routinely used their female black slaves in this way

However, Amélie is no victim. She plans to use the money Rochester gives her to go to Rio. 

Through these parallels and contrasts, Jean Rhys shows us that Antoinette lacks the strength of Amélie and Christophine. Unlike them, her culture has not equipped her for survival. Antoinette maintains the racial prejudicesagainst black and mixed race people that are characteristic of her class and culture. Her description of the young Daniel Cosway in part one, for example, employs a very unpleasant and prejudiced vocabulary

Rochester, race and identity

In Jane Eyre England’s relationship with the colonies is represented in conventional nineteenth century terms as one of a moral and religious mission to ‘improve’ their subject cultures. This sense of mission masked, of course, economic exploitation.

In her Rochester character, Jean Rhys maintains the role of colonial exploiter who has assumptions of moral righteousness. Rochester’s English upbringing provides him with a set of moral standards against which he measures the Caribbean unfavourably. Jean Rhys exposes the hypocrisy of this position in various ways: 

Rochester behaves like a slave owner in his sexual relationship with Amélie Although the place and people have a profound effect on him, by liberating repressed aspects of

his personality, fear of this alien ‘Other’ and its power makes him draw back and retreat into the safety of his English identity

He tries to make Antoinette more English and less Caribbean (the change of name is a key sign of this process). When this fails, he stigmatises her as a representative of a degenerate culture.

Three part structure

Wide Sargasso Sea has an unconventional structure. Instead of the usual chapter divisions, it is arranged into three parts of unequal length. These parts are divided into sections, sometimes indicated by an asterix.

The three parts follow a chronological order from Antoinette’s childhood to her imprisonment at Thornfield Hall. This arrangement is to some extent dictated by the ‘master-narrative’ of Jane Eyre. However, within this broad chronological arrangement Jean Rhys’ novel evades the demands of the ‘master narrative’ by:

Breaking up the chronological order by using flashbacks, premonitions of the future and other ways of restructuring time and its significance

Avoiding the closure imposed by Bronte’s plot. The ambiguous endingof Wide Sargasso Sea deliberately leaves open the question of what happens to Antoinette.

In leaving her novel open in this way, Jean Rhys connects the formal structure of her novel to its overarching themes, opposition to racial and patriarchal domination.