This blog is Assignment writing onPaper 203: The Postcolonial Studies assigned by Professor, Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
- Name: Nidhi Dave
- Roll no: 16
- Enrollment no: 4069206420210005
- Email ID: davenidhi05@gmail.com
- Batch: 2021- 23( MA Semester 3)
- Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Racism in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea is both a response and a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, set in the West Indies and imagining the lives of Bertha Mason and her family. Bidisha describes how Jean Rhys’s novel portrays the racial and sexual exploitation at the heart of western civilisation and literature.
✴️Introduction:
The novel Wide Sargasso Sea is written by Jean Rhys in order to highlight multiple issues like gender discrimination, the opposite nature of male and females, how the desires of the central characters not fulfilled and how all these things lead to the 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, but they got married and the consequence was so dangerous that Antoinette had to suffer for a lifetime. Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel written by Jean Rhys is a novel that is written with special purpose as to describe the earlier life of Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre, whose original name is Antoinette in the novel. It shows her life from the very beginning of her life, how she is married to Rochester and how her psyche gets worse and worse. The entire process is described here and the reasons responsible for that are also described at lengths.
✴️Title:
The title of the novel is very important. The Sargasso Sea is a large area where there is a huge attention of seaweeds (sea plants) in the North Atlantic Sea. Just like these weeds, the characters here also are tangled in the web of emotions and ideas- they seem to be drowning each other. Thus, the title of the novel is actually the showcase of what it actually is.
🔆Wide Sargasso Sea:
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.
Wide Sargasso Sea is also a valuable historical work, written in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, which explores Victorian paternalism, sexualised 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 colonisers while Spanish colonial exploration is a past influence, and many formerly profitable estates are in decline because of the absence of exploited labour and a slump in the sugar market.
🌟Racism in Wide Sargasso Sea
Racism is most commonly used to name a form of prejudice in which a person believes in the superiority of what they consider to be their own “race” over others. This most often takes the form of believing that those with other skin colors—especially darker skin colors—are inferior physically, intellectually, morally, and/or culturally, and mistreating and discriminating against them because of this. Such a belief typically promotes the notion that white people are “the default”—that whiteness is “normal” and that people with other appearances are the ones who are “different” (and “inferior”).
The word racism is also used to mean a system of oppression based on this kind of prejudice that is thought to be embedded into the fabric of society and its institutions, resulting in ongoing mistreatment and injustice in many, many forms. This is often called systemic racism, institutional racism, or structural racism. These terms imply that such racism is upheld by laws, policies, traditions, and institutions—and the people who keep them in place.
✴️Definition:
"The belief that races have distinctive cultural characteristics determined by hereditary factors and that this endows some races with an intrinsic superiority over others."
"Abusive or aggressive behavior towards members of another race on the basis of such a belief."
Racism is most commonly used to name a form of prejudice in which a person believes in the superiority of what they consider to be their own “race” over others. This most often takes the form of believing that those with other skin colors—especially darker skin colors—are inferior physically, intellectually, morally, and/or culturally, and mistreating and discriminating against them because of this. When used in this way, racism typically refers to a system that has oppressed people of color all over the world throughout history. Such a system is often thought to operate through white people using the advantages that the system gives them (often called white privilege) to maintain their supremacy over people of color (often called white supremacy).
✴️Race and Gender issues in Wide Sargasso Sea
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 that she reflects in her heroine. Like Rhys, Antoinette is a sensitive and lonely young Creole girl who grows up with neither her mother’s love nor her peers’ 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 worsen 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.
Wide Sargasso Sea is constructed following the terms of a literary and historical discourse which takes Europe, and precisely England, as origin and reference. The starting point of the novel is Jane Eyre; consequently, it bears the features of the English classical literary canon which celebrates western standards while looking down upon non-Western values. The relationship which is at stake in Wide Sargasso Sea is that of the Creoles, Black or White, and women, to the colonizer. It foregrounds the issue of race.
✴️Race:
After the secession of the British rule over India, Britain passed the sovereign power to the two newly formed countries – the Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The Partition of India did not only bring the creation of the new countries, but also brutal conflicts which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. “Never before had anything even remotely like it been attempted. Nowhere were there any guidelines, any precedents, any revealing insights from the past to order what was going to be the biggest, the most complex divorce action in history, the breakup of a family of four hundred million human beings along with the assets and household property they had acquired in centuries of living together on the same piece of earth.”Its consequences were also the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir and the 1971 conflict over Bangladeshi independence.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, the white characters cannot see coloured 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 as 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 laborers – cookies 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.’
In the Wide Sargasso Sea, the white race is not one cohesive and homogeneous whole. On the contrary, it is characterized by a deep fracture which divides the group into two separate entities: the British who were born in England, on the one hand, and the British who were born on the island, on the other hand. The second group is called the white Creoles. The two entities do not have the same approach to life and consequently their mutual social relationships are not constructed on an egalitarian basis. On the contrary, they are based on power and a sense of superiority endowed to those who were born in England. As a matter of consequence, the relationships are also tinted with disdain, particularly when they go from the first group to the second one.
✴️Rochester as a new type of Colonizer:
We all know that the British had colonized many countries and the Caribbean is one of them. But here the character of Rochester is shown as a different and new type of Colonizer who had colonized a Creole Antoinette. So, here we find an oppressor who neither respects creoles nor the black ones. Rochester’s dominated identity is reflected in Antoinette’s capture and his domination over her. There is nothing like identity for the poor woman as Rochester destroys it and changes her name as well. By the end of Part 2 of the novel, where he is leaving Caribbean and going to England with Antoinette, he utters that:
“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain...
She had left me thirsty...”
These lines mean that he does not love the Caribbean people and their lifestyle and therefore he is willing to go to England and to satisfy the thirst that he had.
✴️Identity of Black and white
Here, blackness appears as an essential identity, a foundational category. The black Creoles are depicted as an undifferentiated and unreasoning mass of people, physically alike and full of hatred.
🌟The black individual has no personal identity, no distinctive psyche; he is just a portion of a whole body of non differentiable people.
🌟The same objectivising and derisive use of “they” to talk about the black creoles is recurrent in the narrative. The young narrator offers an illustration: referring to her mother standing in the glacis and visible to anybody who could pass by, Antoinette says: “They stared, sometimes they laughed."
🌟Another illustration is given by her mother Annette, two years after her second marriage. Mason, Annette’s second husband, looks at the Blacks the same way.
🔸In Wide Sargasso Sea, the British racial classification equates ex-slaves with poverty or lack of economic resources.
🔸In the novel, black Caribbean own nothing, which, according to colonial history, is not a distortion of the past. The imperialist ideology which has structured the West Indies has set the categories of representation.
🔸The legal castes of slaves are replaced by a race-colour system of stratification.Consequently binary oppositions which are at work in the diegesis assign the lower level of the society to the black characters, deprive them of any power, consider them as subaltern and ultimately reduce them to silence. The dominant white characters make up the hegemonic group while black Creoles form the landless rural proletariat.
✴️Unequal Power Between Men and Women:
"Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent, but they are not English or European either.”
- In a place like Coulibri (and many other places similar where there were slaveries), white men have the sexual license to be with any women. The offspring with light colors seen in this island were proof of white men domination. But a white woman with a black man? It is seen as a disgrace.
- There was a scene related to interracial sex, of Antoinette’s mother with a black man that she accidentally witnessed when she was a child.
- Her mother was mentally ill and her husband sent her to be looked after by a black couple, and she saw how her mother surrendered in the black man’s kiss and into his arms.
A white man does not really degrade himself with a black woman, because the male is assumed to dominate the female as white dominates black. But a white woman who submits willingly to sex with a black man is seen as degrading her race as well as herself.
🔶Racism in Wide Sargasso Sea
🔅The first example I want to dissect is at the very beginning of the book, when the horse dies. Godfrey, a black servant that stayed at Antoinette’s house, is known for being somewhat untrustworthy and morose. After the horse dies in part one, he mentions, “The Lord made no distinction between black and white, black and white, they are the same for Him”. At first glance, we may think he is talking about the death of the horse. Although there is an argument for that, if we compare the Lord’s idea of life and death to black and white, there may be a racial meaning behind it. There is cause to believe that he is using these words to support himself, because Annette initially backhandedly blamed him for the horse dying. His savage remark was a reminder to not hold his race inferior. Godfrey’s attitude was further proved to be very morbid towards the white people, as he later said: “ this world doesn't last so long for mortal man”. Even though his character’s role was small, Godfrey emulates key points on racism in Wide Sargasso Sea.
🔅The second example we are going to look at is when Antoniette makes “friends” with the little girl named Tia, who actually bullied her. As Antoniette walked home one day, Tia called her a “white cockroach”. This comment precedes an odd formation of friendship between the two girls, but a nasty round of comments follows at a playdate at the pool. When Tia takes Antoinette’s pennies, Antoniette snaps “Keep them then, you cheating nigger,” and Tia replies with a rant on how “Real white people, they got gold money”. I would have never expected such a heavily loaded conversation to happen between two children, but it reflects well on the current racial tension in the west indies in the late 1830’s. The emancipation of slavery for Jamaica was passed in 1834, so the tensions between the black people and the white people were still deflating. Instead of the previous reality of the white people being able to overpower people of color, the black people were able to fight back, and often used it aggressively to expose prejudices.
✴️Conclusion:
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea foregrounds a West Indian community in which the social relationships between the characters are entirely determined by race and gender. These two social axes are the sources which foster and nurture the controlling process which attributes power to the White group and silences the Blacks considered as subaltern. England and nineteenth-century racial assumptions are the main referential of the narrative. Consequently races are addressed from an essentialist and nativist perspective. The colonialist discourse at work in the narrative is reinforced by a patriarchal ideology which confers supremacy to men over women. Such a social structure cannot but breed tensions and frustrations which impede mutual understanding and harmony in the community. In the face of this colonialist and phallocratic system, some characters choose to comply with the prevailing order and conventions, whereas others display defiance and resiliency. In this confrontation, what must be retained is not the outcome, but the intention.
🔆Works cited:
- Senegal, de Dakar. "Race and Gender in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea," LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research , vol. 6, no. 1, 2009, p. 16, Accessed 4 Nov. 2022.
- Patel, Ripal . "Racism in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea ," International Journal of Social Impact , vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, p. 4, Accessed 4 Nov. 2022.
- , Chita. "Book review: ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys." https://herotherstories.wordpress.com/2020/06/14/book-review-wide-sargasso-sea-by-jean-rhys/. 14 June 2020.herotherstories.wordpress.com. Accessed 4 Nov. 2022.
- 18, Joyame . "Analyzing Racism in WSS ." ENGL 123, Section 003 Introduction to Fiction: Adaptation, Intertextuality, and Fidelity. 30 Oct. 2018.introtofictionf18.web.unc.edu/2018/10/analyzing-racism-in-wss/. Accessed 4 Nov. 2022.
- "Racism ." https://www.dictionary.com/browse/racism.
- Bidisha. "An introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea ." Discovering Literature. 25 May 2016. www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-wide-sargasso-sea. Accessed 4 Nov. 2022.
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