Exile, Marginality and Dislocation in Jean Rhys “s Wide Sargasso Sea

An prominent figure in mid 19th century fiction in English, Jean Rhys spent her entire
adult life in Europe, the experiences of her childhood on the Carribean island of
Dominica. Her novel The Wide Sargossa sea explores the untold experiences of the
Creoles. Rhys mother s family were Creoles, a community with a lost identity born and
naturalized in West Indies yet always conscious of their British lineage. The ambiguity of
being an insider/ outsider both in England as well as the colony West Indies shaped Jean
Rhys' world eventually leading to a sense of exile and marginality . This paper examines
this sense of exile and marginality as experienced by the protagonist Antoinette Cosway,
Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargossa presents her own unique experiences of the
dislocation of the white Creole women, the riots in 1844 following Emancipation of the
slaves. A revisionary writing it is a brilliant retelling of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s
Classic masterpiece of the 19th century from a post colonial feminist perspective.

Exile, Marginality, dislocation , creole , identity, re-visionary writing

Introduction

Coloured people are regarded as ‘others’, outsiders by some western people ,

especially if they are in minority. Although coloured people living in foreign lands
are forced into slavery, they end up being the majority and outnumbering the whites
who were their colonizers. With this great dichotomy in numbers between whites
and blacks, it is apparent that white colonizers will begin to be alienated and
displaced in a foreign land. A feeling of isolation overpowers them when their power
as colonizers declines greatly due to the emancipation of slaves; now being a
minority in a foreign land, they will feel both a sense of isolation and a lack of
belonging
Literature Review
The problems of cultural displacement and a shaky sense of one’s own identity have been
the main concern of the twentienth century Caribbean writer, Jean Rhys. As a white
Creole writer living in England, Rhys attempts to capture the ambivalence of what it
means to be caught between two cultures and never able to identify fully with
anyone.Wide Sargasso Sea has often ben regarded as the quintessential postcolonial
novel.The term refers to fiction written by people of formerly colonized cultures in which
“those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it,
domesticating it … carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers”.
(Salman Rushdie”Commonwealth Literature does not Exist”). As Jesse Matz points out in
The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction, postcolonial fiction is ‘post” in two ways. First
it deals with what happens to colonized peoples and places fater colonialism has ended”.
Matz also regards the postcolonial condition as a mindset which directly and indirectly
questions and rewrites the assumptions that helped to create and maintain imperialism.

Known largely through her late masterpiece WideSargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1890-1979),
originally Ell Gwendolen Rees Williams, is an intriguing figure in mid-20th century
fiction in English. Although she spent her entire adult life in Europe, the experiences of
her childhood on the Caribbean island of Dominica shaped her most profoundly as a
woman and as a writer. Her father, a Welshman was a doctor who came to Dominica as
Medical Officer.Her mother Minna came from a family, originally from Scotland, who
had lived in Dominica for four generations..jean Rhys’ great-grandfather, John Potter
Lockhart, acquired a plantation in Dominica in 1824. After his death in 1837, his widow
was left to run the estate. The riots in 1844 following Emancipation of the slaves led to
the destruction of the estate and the burning of the house.Rhys visited the plantation and
was affected by the experience.Rhys’ mother’s family were thus creoles, a community
with a divided identity – born and naturalized in the West Indies yet always conscious of
their British lineage. The effects of this divided society on cultural identity and a sense of
being exiled in one’s own land is one of the main themes of Wide Sargossa Sea.
Rhys’s narrative unfolds in a highly impressionist style, giving complexity
to the narrative by having more than one narrative voice. In the first section
of the novel, Bertha Mason whom Rhys renames Antionette Cosway tells us
of growing up in the West Indies amid social unrest and family
insanity.Rochester not named in the novel, arrives from England, to make
his fortune, and narrates the middle section of the book, revealing
insecurities accentuated by his unfamiliarity with the lush, decadent
atmosphere of his new wife’s home. The final section takes place in England
and is again narrated by Antionette, culminating in a fiery dream which
prefigures the inferno in which Bronte’s Bertha kills herself and maims
Rochester.Rhys has made a deliberately choice in placing much of the
narrative from Rochester’s point of view; she has admitted that it would
make it excessively and suspiciously sentimentl to place it largely from
Bertha’s point-of-view.

Re-visionary writing has become an important technique in contemporary literature with

feminists taking the lead in presenting new readings of familiar myths and stories which
question the asumptions of patriarchy deeply embedded in them. It is a matter of what
Ashcroft and Griffith refer to as “appropriation”, to seize the story and present it from the
perspective of the original marginalized “Other”. InWide Sargasso Sea, JeanRhys went
back to the memories of her Carribean childhood and created a brilliant re-telling of Jane
Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s classic masterpiece of the nineteenth century from a postcolonial
feminist perspective.

Theme of Exile
Andrea Ashworth in her introduction to the novel writes;

“Rhys had since her childhood in Dominica in the British West Indies, been keen
to give expression to the untold experiences of the Creoles… The creoles were in
Rhys opinion, misunderstood and maligned both by the blacks of the island and
by the wealthier white Europeans who came to settle in the West Indies after
slavery was abolished, taking advantage of the new economic climate and
usurping the Creole’s superior perch”
At the same time, they were racially privileged in relation to the Africans
who existed as bond labourers and subalterns. This created a severe
conflict between the white and black population of West Indies.
Antionette Cosway, the heroine of the novel, is born in the middle of
this conflict.. She is the daughter of a white Creole woman and a former
slave owner of English descent in Jamaica, who sinks into destitution
after the liberation of the black slaves by the emancipation Act of 1833.
The fact that Antoinette’s family is descendant from a generation of
English slave-owners only fuels the animosity of the islanders.The
family continues to carry the stigma of slavery and is, therefore, viewed
as a family of colonizers. This connection makes Antoinette alienated
from the black people of the island. She is also excluded on the basis of
her mother’s Creole nationality, from the fortune seeking English
community. In fact, she does not belong anywhere. She is rejected and
despised by both the black and the white populations in the West
Indies. The black community does’nt accept her because she is white. At
the same time, she does’nt fit into the world of the whites who consider
those of mixed races as inferior to themselves. As a white Creole,
Antionette becomes double outsider; “white nigger” for the Europeans
and “white cockroach” for the blacks as she explains to her husband in
the novel:
… a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they ( the blacks)
call all of us who were here before their own people in
Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I h’ve heard
English women call us white niggers. So between you I
often wonder who I am and where is my country and where
do I belong and why was I ever born at all( (Rhys, 2001, p.85).

These two phrases are important in the novel because they encapsulate the paradox
of the Creole who feels his/her double exile. While Antionette is at once able to move
between the black and white cultures, she is also scorned by both of them and is
thus forced to see herself as “other”. She is not English enough for England nor
Caribbean enough for the Caribbean and is, therefore, doubly exiled on her island
home and her mother country, having no place to truly belong. M Adjarian points out
that Antoinette lives a life of “inbetweenness’ ( )It is this sense of
“inbetweenness” of belonging to neither culture which is the primary factor in
driving Antoinette into madness.

Though Antoinette is of English descent, she is very much entangledwith the island
landscape. One of her first childhood memories is that of the garden at Coulibri
which she loves despite its wilderness:
Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the bible-the tree of life
grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of
dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell … All Coulibri had gone wild
like the garden, gone to bush (Rhys 16-17).
According to A .Smith, Antoinette’s play mate Tia can be seen as an image of possible
healing for her sense of fragmentation . But Tia acts as part of the black mob that
sets fire to Coulibri, Antoinette’s family estate.
Then not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all
That was leftnof my life as it had been, We had eaten the same food, slept side
by side, bated in the same river. As I ran I thought I will live with Tia and I will
be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. When I was close I saw the jagged
stone in her hand ….. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she
began to cry . We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was
as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass .(Rhys, 38)
Antoinette desires to be accepted by the island people and is reluctant to say good
by to her life in coulibri even though the people’s hostility towards her is evident.
The island is all that she knows and she is desperate to identify with with it through
Tia for she feels that they have shared the same experience of oppression because of
their ethnicity.Antoinette looks directly at Tia as if she is looking into a mirror, tia
becomes like a mirror that serves to reflect Antoinette’s self identity. Erika Ough
explains that the image of the looking –glass or mirror is important because,”it
symbolizes Antoinette’s need to find her “other” self-her identity. Antoinette’s
illusions are shattered when Tia throws the stone at her face , or rather, at what she
represents: the hated-slave owning class, breaking the mirrow image and driving
Antoinette into the realization that she does not belong and that she is not like Tia.
The reality is that the racial boundaries are set: Antoinette is white while Tia is
black. Antoinette represents the colonizer, Tia the colonized. This situation makes
her realize how radically out of place she is among the black people of Jamaica and
how futile her wish to become one of them truly is.
As a child Antoinette’s has experienced rejection by her mother, Annette. Their
relation was one without much dialogue and understanding, yet Antoinette is
convinced of her mother marrying an Englishman and leaving the island .Annette
does not have an endearing relationship with her daughter, favouring instead Pierre,
her mentally retarded son
Theme of Displacement
A displaced person is forced to move from the comfort of their familiar suroundings
to a whollnew place which is unfamiliar and strange to them. In these new
surroundings, a person will have difficulty ssimilating into the new culture and
slowly, a sense of seclusion will start to emerge leading to loneliness and paranoia.
In the novel, the main characters experience displacement and are deeply affected
by it, such that it influences their behavior and daily life. For Antoinette, although
she was born and raised in the Caribbean she never felt like she belonged as as she
ws creole; and as for her husband, he felt displaced as he had trvelled hundreds of
miles from the comforts of his home country to a foreign one which was a strange
new world to him, with neither relatives nor close friends .
The colonized populaces can also experience same sense of displacement. Leorna
Farber, in her journal ‘Dis-location, Re-location: Colonial & Postcolonial narratives of
white Displacement in South Africa” mentions two critics, Melissa Steyn and Gerald I
Ange, who have had their say on the matter of the decolonization period, noting that
the colonizers felt disconnected from their European roots’ ‘ during this period
(2009, p.7) From this it seems the European colonizers felt displaced when they
were in a foreign land, and especially when their sense of superiority was
decreasing.

But the feeling of something unknown and hostile was very strong ‘ I feel very much
a stranger here’, I said ‘I fell that this place is my enemy and on your side. (Rhys,
2001, p.82). In her novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys presents the idea of a lack of
belonging in the character of Antoinette; although she was born and raised in the
Caribbean, she never felt like she belonged there. This was due to the fact that she
grew up in a society that treated her poorly, and this drove her to become a loner..
Rhys here focuses on the mistreatment of her main character, Antoinette, because
she favours her and sympathizes with her, thus neglecting Antoinette’s husband.
If the idea of life as a maelstrom of aimless movement pervades Rhys’s early novels,
even that has disappeared by the time of Wide Sargossa Sea. Here there is no
movement at all, even in response to outside stumili ; here there is only statis,
stagnation, alienation, and madness. The floating point of view plunges the reader
into the midst of trouble in the novel’s first paragraphs, forcing him to figure out the
background as the narrative progresses:
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of
my mother, “because she pretty like pretty herself, Christophine said.
She was my father’s second wife, far too young for him they thought,
and, worse still, a Martinique girl. When I asked her why so few people came
to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate
where we lived was very bad and that road repearing was now a thing of the
past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed – all belonged to the past.

What could probably be understood from the above information , statement or

attitudes.What could be the reason why white people close ranks against the
Jamaican ladies and what is wrong with Martinique girls? What is the reality behind
this pervasive anxiety? The questions are not dealt with directly; the reader learns
eventually, that the family’s isolation is a result of political action ( the emancipation
which has freed Jamaican slaves but left Jamaican plantations to rot and ruin). The
reader like Antoinette herself, must decipher hints, overheard whispers, snatches of
distant conversation, gossip and and speculation to determine the direction of the
narrative. The only clear elements are the feelings of fear, threat, alienation, and
foreignness, the conviction that Antoiinette does not belong in her world.
The sense of being adrift is appropriate to the novel’s meaning, for it accurately
reflets the condition of its characters. Even more than Rhys’s other women,
Antoinette is a victim’s victim. Isolated from her neighbours by her white skin,
increasingly estranged from her mother, she moves from alienation to paranoia. Her
very identity seems to slip away from her as her name is changed to suit others’
needs. When her mother remarries to improve their social and financial situation,
she becomes Antoinette Mason, not Cosway; later Rochester rejects the mother’s
name of Antoinette to call her by her second name, so that as the novel goes on
Antoinette Cosway becomes Bertha Mason.
As she loses her name in a meaningless muddle of other people’s decisions, so does
she first acquire, then lose, her husband and his love. Rochester, himself a victim of
his family’s greed rather than a free agent, marries her to improve his fortune just as
her mother had done. Like everyone else in this Sargasso Sea, he is alienated and
threatened; stared at by strange eyes, he loses “the feeling of security” (Sargissa Sea,
75) along with any sense of purpose or fairness. Told with rumor and innuendo that
his wife is immoral and an inheritor of madness, Rochester does not question for a
moment; he rejects her as suddenly and pointlessly as he had chosen her in the first
place. No questions are asked or answered. Hatred and suspicion over powers him
and he is incapable of action. Antoinette is urged by Christophine to “pack up and
go” when Rochester turns away from her. Paralyzed she rejects the advice: “going
away to Martinique or England …. Is the lie”, she insists “ running away …. Is the lie”
(Sargossa sea, 113) . So she stays to confront what her passivity now makes it
inevitable, to sink into the despair and madness, not of an inherited fate but of her
own isolation. Holding her candle she realizes at last “why (she) was brought here
and what (she has) to do” (Sargossa Sea,189) burn down the mansion which has
become her prison instead of her home. It is appropriate that Bertha, the only Rhys
woman to take real initiative, can achieve only death and destruction by her action.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Wide Sargossa Sea is the fact that in it Rhys
chooses to develop characters presented very differently in Charlotte’ Bronte’s Jane
Eyre. Both Bronte and Rhys deal with social injustice and the issues of feminism, but
they present them in an entirely different ethical world. Clearly, Bronte sees a world
in which, however gross the injustice, remedies exist and the individual has value.
Good is good, evil is evil in Jane Eyre: For Rhys’s characters, good and evil are
indistinguishable. Behaviour is unmotivated and incomprehensible, humanity
mysterious and opaque, misfortune inevitable and struggle is useless. The essential
thing for Rhys woman is not moral triumph but survival, in a day to day fight she
cannot win but in which she means to conduct herself honorably:

Frickey M PierretteCritical perspectives of Jean Rhys, Three Continents Press

Washington, D.C