Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea from a French feminist perspective
Jean Rhys, who was born to a Welsh father and a
white Creole mother, spent her childhood in the Caribbean islands and later
moved to England. Her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote in 1966,
is the story of the madwoman in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, Bertha
Mason – or rather the story of Antoinette Cosway, the young Creole heiress from
Jamaica, before she became Bertha Mason. The novel has undeniable links with
colonial context, since the protagonist is discarded by both the black Caribbean
as well as the white English societies and thus forced to see herself as ‘the
other’ in terms of race. However, Antoinette is a character ‘othered’ also in
terms of her gender, and thus she is doubly marginalized. Wide Sargasso Sea can
be seen as a strongly feminist text, for Jean Rhys tries to justify
Antoinette’s behaviour and discover why she became the appalling, beastly
madwoman she appears to be in Jane Eyre. Rhys tells the story of Antoinette –
or Bertha – from a woman’s point of view, defending her against the prejudices
of the male-centered world, where a woman who does not live according to the
standards set for her is deemed mad. The novel has undeniable links with
colonial context, since the protagonist is discarded by both the black Caribbean
as well as the white English societies and thus forced to see herself as ‘the
other’ in terms of race.However, Antoinette is a character ‘othered’ also in
terms of her gender, and thus she is doubly marginalized. Wide Sargasso Sea can
be seen as a strongly feminist text, for Jean Rhys tries to justify
Antoinette’s behaviour and discover why she became the appalling, beastly
madwoman she appears to be in Jane Eyre. Rhys tells the story of Antoinette –
or Bertha – from a woman’s point of view, defending her against the prejudices
of the male-centered world, where a woman who does not live according to the
standards set for her is deemed mad.
Hélène Cixous, a significant theorist representing the
French feminist movement of literary criticism, claimed that women should create
their own style of writing, écriture féminine , embracing an utterly
feminine role. Wide Sargasso Sea seems like an undeniable specimen of this kind
of feminine writing. However wide Sargasso Sea abides to the ideas of French feminism
in its poetic, liberated and emotional style and language and in its emphasis
on the feminine experience, but it can also be associated with Anglo-American
criticism and read as a work that criticises and converts patriarchal ideals
and stereotypes.
In the novel, Antoinette defines herself through Edward
Rochester, the British man she was almost forced into marrying, after everyone
else has abandoned her. In Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester was seen as the victim, a
man who had suffered because of the burden of a mad wife, but in Wide Sargasso
Sea it is Antoinette who is the real victim, even though Rochester is not a
simply evil character, either. In the beginning, Rochester wants to be good to
his wife, but because he does not understand her, her culture or her powerful
sexuality, he ends up fearing and then hating her. Antoinette gives herself to
him completely, though she is afraid, and thus it seems to be Rochester’s
rejection that finally destroys her and drives her into insanity.As founding
French feminist Simon de Beauvoir would interpret it is clear that in the novel
Antoinette is not only “the other” in terms of race , but also “the other” in
terms of the man.
Rhys does not construct Rochester into the
stereotypical villain by showing the story only from Antoinette’s point of view
but portrays him as a victim of circumstance and gives him voice by letting his
point of view be heard in the middle part of the novel. He
has respect for traditional values such as property and personal . .
Though Antoinette has a chance to refuse the marriage, the society is
pressuring her into marrying. After the marriage ceremony she is basically at
the mercy of her husband. All of her inheritance and possessions belong to her
husband, and she must obey him.When he decides to go to England, she must
follow. When the marriage starts to go wrong, the old, wicked servant
Christophine tells Antoinette to leave her husband, to hide somewhere and later
ask for a part of her money back honour, and he is rational as opposed to Antoinette’s
emotional nature. Indeed, in the vast amount of imagery and symbolism in Wide
Sargasso Sea, Rochester is compared to the wind, to a hurricane that breaks the
tree representing Antoinette . Christophine in many ways represents the free
woman , she says: ‘A man don’t treat you good, pick up your skirt and walk out’
. She also comments that marrying is a foolish thing for a woman to do. She
says that though she has children, she has had no husband: ‘I keep my money. I
don’t give it to no worthless man”.
The marriage of Antoinette and Rochester is doomed
from the beginning, even though neither of them can consciously admit it. In the
terms of the French feminist Julia Kristeva, the ‘semiotic’ aspect – the
anarchic, the irrational, the unconscious stream of language that derives from
the female body – controls the novel, letting the female unconscious run free.
The rational and organised ‘symbolic’ aspect dominates in the real world – in
the world governed by the Law of the Father, where preset roles for men and
women are waiting for them when they enter language. The
‘symbolic’ aspect, where the male language prevails, is hardly visible in Wide
Sargasso Sea. Even the part of the story that is told through Rochester’s eyes
cannot sustain its rationality, but the mystical ‘semiotic’ stream eventually
takes over, making the novel a strong example of ecriture feminine. Hélène
Cixous emphasises that by this act of creating their own transcendent and poetic
language that derives from the unconscious and irrational rather than from the formal
and rational conscious that controls men’s writing, women will break away from
the patriarchal tradition.
All the elements of écriture féminine seem to be present
in the novel: symbols of female captivation and liberation – such as the looking
glass – and the flamboyant colours as well as the beautiful language. The
language in Wide Sargasso Sea, just like Cixous’s explosive language, is
liberated and mesmerising, as women themselves, for Antoinette mesmerises
Rochester. Women and nature are depicted as seductive, leading men to
temptation, hypnotising them. Even Chistophine’s voice hypnotises Rochester: ‘I
thought, but could only listen, hypnotized, to her dark voice coming from the
darkness’ . Cixous’s idea of women ‘flying in the language and making it fly is apparent in the novel, for in her last dream,
Antoinette ‘walked as though I was flying’ , and when she finally jumps to her
death in the dream, she felt that her hair ‘streamed out like wings’: ‘It might
bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones’ . Of course, the wind
will not carry her and she will not be able to fly in reality, but is doomed to
be crushed by the hard stones that symbolise the patriarchy. In her dreams and
in the language, however, she always flies.
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel of many
dimensions. The fluent, poetic and dream like style and language and the
imagery and symbolism in the novel emphasise the victimisation and the
emotional tumult of the protagonist. Through the experiences of the
protagonist, the novel expresses the victimisation and the oppression of women
in the patriarchal, or in French feminist terms, the phallogocentric society.
In the spirit of the French feminists, Cixous in particular, Rhys’s language
seems to derive from the unconscious, emotional and subjective – in Julia
Kristeva’s terms, the ‘semiotic’ – feminine experience of the writer, and therefore
it can be seen as an example of écriture feminine. In light of the
AngloAmerican feminist theory it can be argued that Rhys also converts the
traditional stereotypes of women by making the reader sympathise with the
emotional and sexual madwoman. Sexual and emotional oppression seem to be the
key ideas in the novel, for Antoinette lets herself be victimised by the enemy,
the man she was tricked into marrying. In the end, however, after Rochester has
drained her of all emotion, she manages to break free from the suffering by
making her last act of self-determination. With this last step, Rhys turns her
‘madwoman’ into the symbol of female liberation.
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