THEMES IN WIDE
SARGASSO SEA
The Oppression of Slavery and Entrapment
The Oppression of Slavery and Entrapment
The specter of slavery and entrapment pervades Wide Sargasso Sea. The ex-slaves who worked on the sugar plantations of wealthy
Creoles figure prominently in Part One of the novel, which is set in the West
Indies in the early nineteenth century. Although the Emancipation Act has freed
the slaves by the time of Antoinette’s childhood, compensation has not been
granted to the island’s black population, breeding hostility and resentment
between servants and their white employers. Annette, Antoinette’s mother, is
particularly attuned to the animosity that colors many employer-employee
interactions.
Enslavement shapes many of the relationships in Rhys’s novel—not just those between blacks and whites. Annette feels helplessly imprisoned at Coulibri Estate after the death of her husband, repeating the word “marooned” over and over again. Likewise, Antoinette is doomed to a form of enslavement in her love for and dependency upon her husband. Women’s childlike dependence on fathers and husbands represents a figurative slavery that is made literal in Antoinette’s ultimate physical captivity.
The Complexity of Racial Identity
Subtleties of race and the intricacies of Jamaica’s social hierarchy play an important role in the development of the novel’s main themes. Whites born in England are distinguished from the white Creoles, descendants of Europeans who have lived in the West Indies for one or more generations. Further complicating the social structure is the population of black ex-slaves who maintain their own kinds of stratification. Christophine, for instance, stands apart from the Jamaican servants because she is originally from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Furthermore, there is a large mixed-race population, as white slave owners throughout the Caribbean and the Americas were notorious for raping and impregnating female slaves. Sandi and Daniel Cosway, two of Alexander Cosway’s illegitimate children, both occupy this middle ground between black and white society.
Interaction between these racial groups is often antagonistic. Antoinette and her mother, however, do not share the purely racist views of other whites on the island. Both women recognize their dependence on the black servants who care for them, feeling a respect that often borders on fear and resentment. In this manner, power structures based on race always appear to be on the brink of reversal.
The Link Between Womanhood, Enslavement, and Madness
Womanhood intertwines with issues of enslavement and madness in Rhys’s novel. Ideals of proper feminine deportment are presented to Antoinette when she is a girl at the convent school. Two of the other Creole girls, Miss Germaine and Helene de Plana, embody the feminine virtues that Antoinette is to learn and emulate: namely, beauty, chastity and mild, even-tempered manners. Mother St. Justine’s praises of the “poised” and “imperturbable” sisters suggest an ideal of womanhood that is at odds with Antoinette’s own hot and fiery nature. Indeed, it is Antoinette’s passion that contributes to her melancholy and implied madness.
Rhys also explores her female characters’ legal and financial dependence on the men around them. After the death of her first husband, Antoinette’s mother sees her second marriage as an opportunity to escape from her life at Coulibri and regain status among her peers. For the men in the novel, marriage increases their wealth by granting them access to their wives’ inheritance. In both cases, womanhood is synonymous with a kind of childlike dependence on the nearest man. Indeed, it is this dependence that precipitates the demise of both Antoinette and Annette. Both women marry white Englishmen in the hopes of assuaging their fears as vulnerable outsiders, but the men betray and abandon them.
Theme of Race
Race is absolutely integral to the way that the characters understand themselves and their place in society. Some writers and scholars claim that Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea portrays black characters as flat stereotypes – child-like, primitive, animalistic. But what if we were to give the novel the benefit of the doubt? That's not to say we should excuse the language. Instead, we might consider how everything is told from acharacter's point of view, and not necessarily the author's. It could be that these characters' expectations about race are tested by the novel itself, particularly with a Creole character such as Antoinette, who alternately identifies with both white and black communities. (See our discussion of "Race" in "Character Clues" for a rundown of racial categories operating at the time of the novel.)
Theme of Identity
While Antoinette's constant questioning of who she is takes center stage, many of the other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea also struggle to make sense of their identities during the tumultuous historical period described in the novel. Characters must navigate challenges to the ways that race, gender, and class affect their identities. Their mental states are often altered due to illness, alcohol, narcotics, or even obeah. Often, other characters serve as mirrors or doubles who reveal unexpected desires and commonalities, as Tia does for Antoinette.
Theme of Language and Communication
Language in Wide Sargasso Sea isn't just a medium for communicating thoughts and feelings, but a social force that actually shapes the fates of the characters. It marks a character's place in society, as when the black characters use a dialect of English that sounds broken or even obscene to the white characters. It can signal the introduction of a foreign or exotic element, as when Christophine speaks in patois, a dialect of French spoken in the Caribbean. In the form of gossip or lies, language can inspire as much fear and distrust as an actual threat, and it can manufacture scandals that ruin people's lives. As a product of language itself, the novel wrestles with the medium, drawing attention to the ways in which stories are told and received.
Theme of Mortality
While there are certainly many deaths in Wide Sargasso Sea(Antoinette's entire family, for example), neither Antoinette nor Rochester actually die. Instead, death for them becomes a potent metaphor for all of the ways in which selves can be lost, transformed, or destroyed. The novel plays on the literary tradition of equating death with orgasm in order to suggest how sex between the characters can be a form of control, rather than pleasure. The novel is also littered with people who act like zombies, beings that are both alive and dead, and ghosts, beings that are neither alive nor dead.
Theme of Love
You're more likely to see the theme of love treated in Wide Sargasso Sea under one of its many associated emotions: desire, lust, trust, and happiness, but also hate, fear, and jealousy. Romantic love in the novel is constantly thwarted by all the baggage the characters bring into their relationship, including their past histories and their ideas about race, gender, and class. Antoinette is not necessarily exempt from the same kind of racism that marks Rochester's attitude toward herself and Amélie, as her relationship with Sandi Cosway shows.
Theme of The Supernatural
Obeah (called "vodou" or "voodoo" in the French-speaking Caribbean), a folk religion indigenous to the Caribbean, casts a huge shadow over this novel, though whether its magic really works is up for debate. (Read more about obeah here). Obeah seems to inspire fear more through what it's rumored to do rather than through actual feats of magic. The Haitian revolution in 1791 was thought to be initiated by a voodoo ceremony, and obeah practitioners were imprisoned because they were thought to encourage slave insurrections (Rhys 1999: 75). InWide Sargasso Sea, obeah is often juxtaposed to Christian beliefs and to rational, scientific thought, bringing up questions about how different systems of belief operate.
Theme of Power
Wide Sargasso Sea investigates the theme of power by looking at such institutions as marriage, empire, and slavery. These institutions are all ways in which a person or a group of people can dominate others. For Antoinette and her mother, marriage is a legal arrangement that results in the loss of their economic freedom. Through characters such as Mr. Mason and the Luttrells, the novel shows how the island colonies provided a rich source of income to England, the seat of imperial power. And racial relations continue to register the effects of slavery, even after it is officially ended in 1833, as the hostility of the Cosways' former slaves attest.
Theme of Versions of Reality
As you read Wide Sargasso Sea, you might catch yourself asking, "OK, would somebody please tell me what's really going on here?" And you wouldn't be alone. In a novel that's written in such a deceptively simple style, all we get are different versions of events, and never what reallyhappened. Without an objective, omniscient narrator telling us what's going on, the novel invites us to question the distinction between dream and reality, madness and sanity, superstition and reason, truth and falsity. By giving us a patchwork of different, equally compelling perspectives, the novel casts suspicion on anyone who would dare dismiss any one of those perspectives as less valid than the others.
Theme of Contrasting Regions
England and the Caribbean are constantly opposed in Wide Sargasso Sea, but what's more important is to think of England and the Caribbean are ideas, products of the imagination. England is just as much an exotic fiction to Antoinette and Christophine as the Caribbean is to Rochester. By exoticizing England in this way, the novel is overturning a long tradition of looking at non-European countries as other, alien, uncivilized – and thus ripe for colonial conquest, as seen in Rochester's constant attempt to get at the "secret" of the locale. Instead of being a far-off, foreign locale, the Caribbean becomes a place that reflects back on the characters' own notions of Englishness – you could say that one set of islands is a reflection of the other.
Enslavement shapes many of the relationships in Rhys’s novel—not just those between blacks and whites. Annette feels helplessly imprisoned at Coulibri Estate after the death of her husband, repeating the word “marooned” over and over again. Likewise, Antoinette is doomed to a form of enslavement in her love for and dependency upon her husband. Women’s childlike dependence on fathers and husbands represents a figurative slavery that is made literal in Antoinette’s ultimate physical captivity.
The Complexity of Racial Identity
Subtleties of race and the intricacies of Jamaica’s social hierarchy play an important role in the development of the novel’s main themes. Whites born in England are distinguished from the white Creoles, descendants of Europeans who have lived in the West Indies for one or more generations. Further complicating the social structure is the population of black ex-slaves who maintain their own kinds of stratification. Christophine, for instance, stands apart from the Jamaican servants because she is originally from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Furthermore, there is a large mixed-race population, as white slave owners throughout the Caribbean and the Americas were notorious for raping and impregnating female slaves. Sandi and Daniel Cosway, two of Alexander Cosway’s illegitimate children, both occupy this middle ground between black and white society.
Interaction between these racial groups is often antagonistic. Antoinette and her mother, however, do not share the purely racist views of other whites on the island. Both women recognize their dependence on the black servants who care for them, feeling a respect that often borders on fear and resentment. In this manner, power structures based on race always appear to be on the brink of reversal.
The Link Between Womanhood, Enslavement, and Madness
Womanhood intertwines with issues of enslavement and madness in Rhys’s novel. Ideals of proper feminine deportment are presented to Antoinette when she is a girl at the convent school. Two of the other Creole girls, Miss Germaine and Helene de Plana, embody the feminine virtues that Antoinette is to learn and emulate: namely, beauty, chastity and mild, even-tempered manners. Mother St. Justine’s praises of the “poised” and “imperturbable” sisters suggest an ideal of womanhood that is at odds with Antoinette’s own hot and fiery nature. Indeed, it is Antoinette’s passion that contributes to her melancholy and implied madness.
Rhys also explores her female characters’ legal and financial dependence on the men around them. After the death of her first husband, Antoinette’s mother sees her second marriage as an opportunity to escape from her life at Coulibri and regain status among her peers. For the men in the novel, marriage increases their wealth by granting them access to their wives’ inheritance. In both cases, womanhood is synonymous with a kind of childlike dependence on the nearest man. Indeed, it is this dependence that precipitates the demise of both Antoinette and Annette. Both women marry white Englishmen in the hopes of assuaging their fears as vulnerable outsiders, but the men betray and abandon them.
Theme of Race
Race is absolutely integral to the way that the characters understand themselves and their place in society. Some writers and scholars claim that Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea portrays black characters as flat stereotypes – child-like, primitive, animalistic. But what if we were to give the novel the benefit of the doubt? That's not to say we should excuse the language. Instead, we might consider how everything is told from acharacter's point of view, and not necessarily the author's. It could be that these characters' expectations about race are tested by the novel itself, particularly with a Creole character such as Antoinette, who alternately identifies with both white and black communities. (See our discussion of "Race" in "Character Clues" for a rundown of racial categories operating at the time of the novel.)
Theme of Identity
While Antoinette's constant questioning of who she is takes center stage, many of the other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea also struggle to make sense of their identities during the tumultuous historical period described in the novel. Characters must navigate challenges to the ways that race, gender, and class affect their identities. Their mental states are often altered due to illness, alcohol, narcotics, or even obeah. Often, other characters serve as mirrors or doubles who reveal unexpected desires and commonalities, as Tia does for Antoinette.
Theme of Language and Communication
Language in Wide Sargasso Sea isn't just a medium for communicating thoughts and feelings, but a social force that actually shapes the fates of the characters. It marks a character's place in society, as when the black characters use a dialect of English that sounds broken or even obscene to the white characters. It can signal the introduction of a foreign or exotic element, as when Christophine speaks in patois, a dialect of French spoken in the Caribbean. In the form of gossip or lies, language can inspire as much fear and distrust as an actual threat, and it can manufacture scandals that ruin people's lives. As a product of language itself, the novel wrestles with the medium, drawing attention to the ways in which stories are told and received.
Theme of Mortality
While there are certainly many deaths in Wide Sargasso Sea(Antoinette's entire family, for example), neither Antoinette nor Rochester actually die. Instead, death for them becomes a potent metaphor for all of the ways in which selves can be lost, transformed, or destroyed. The novel plays on the literary tradition of equating death with orgasm in order to suggest how sex between the characters can be a form of control, rather than pleasure. The novel is also littered with people who act like zombies, beings that are both alive and dead, and ghosts, beings that are neither alive nor dead.
Theme of Love
You're more likely to see the theme of love treated in Wide Sargasso Sea under one of its many associated emotions: desire, lust, trust, and happiness, but also hate, fear, and jealousy. Romantic love in the novel is constantly thwarted by all the baggage the characters bring into their relationship, including their past histories and their ideas about race, gender, and class. Antoinette is not necessarily exempt from the same kind of racism that marks Rochester's attitude toward herself and Amélie, as her relationship with Sandi Cosway shows.
Theme of The Supernatural
Obeah (called "vodou" or "voodoo" in the French-speaking Caribbean), a folk religion indigenous to the Caribbean, casts a huge shadow over this novel, though whether its magic really works is up for debate. (Read more about obeah here). Obeah seems to inspire fear more through what it's rumored to do rather than through actual feats of magic. The Haitian revolution in 1791 was thought to be initiated by a voodoo ceremony, and obeah practitioners were imprisoned because they were thought to encourage slave insurrections (Rhys 1999: 75). InWide Sargasso Sea, obeah is often juxtaposed to Christian beliefs and to rational, scientific thought, bringing up questions about how different systems of belief operate.
Theme of Power
Wide Sargasso Sea investigates the theme of power by looking at such institutions as marriage, empire, and slavery. These institutions are all ways in which a person or a group of people can dominate others. For Antoinette and her mother, marriage is a legal arrangement that results in the loss of their economic freedom. Through characters such as Mr. Mason and the Luttrells, the novel shows how the island colonies provided a rich source of income to England, the seat of imperial power. And racial relations continue to register the effects of slavery, even after it is officially ended in 1833, as the hostility of the Cosways' former slaves attest.
Theme of Versions of Reality
As you read Wide Sargasso Sea, you might catch yourself asking, "OK, would somebody please tell me what's really going on here?" And you wouldn't be alone. In a novel that's written in such a deceptively simple style, all we get are different versions of events, and never what reallyhappened. Without an objective, omniscient narrator telling us what's going on, the novel invites us to question the distinction between dream and reality, madness and sanity, superstition and reason, truth and falsity. By giving us a patchwork of different, equally compelling perspectives, the novel casts suspicion on anyone who would dare dismiss any one of those perspectives as less valid than the others.
Theme of Contrasting Regions
England and the Caribbean are constantly opposed in Wide Sargasso Sea, but what's more important is to think of England and the Caribbean are ideas, products of the imagination. England is just as much an exotic fiction to Antoinette and Christophine as the Caribbean is to Rochester. By exoticizing England in this way, the novel is overturning a long tradition of looking at non-European countries as other, alien, uncivilized – and thus ripe for colonial conquest, as seen in Rochester's constant attempt to get at the "secret" of the locale. Instead of being a far-off, foreign locale, the Caribbean becomes a place that reflects back on the characters' own notions of Englishness – you could say that one set of islands is a reflection of the other.
