Feminist Literary Criticism
- kelsey welch
- Apr 25, 2020
- 10 min read
Feminist Ideals in Jean Rhys's novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, and a little insight into Jean Rhys.
"With Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys's last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind." - Goodreads
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian literary scholar and renowned feminist critic, argues in her 1985 article, “Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism”, that no one should be able to read nineteenth-century British Literature without acknowledging the fact that that literature played an important role in British Imperialism. Novels, like Charlotte Brontë’s supposed ‘feminist novel’, Jane Eyre, justify a colonial violence that Euro-American feminists disregard. Author Jean Rhys could have found a kindred spirit in Dr. Spivak, as the message portrayed in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea epitomize a majority of Spivak’s sentiments. Two Euro-American feminists—read: white feminists—by the names of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar could make more convincing and inclusive feminist arguments than simply saying that Jane married well in Edward Rochester; they could, instead, argue the fact that that same marriage is helped along and funded by the dirty money that Mr. Rochester acquires through his marriage to Bertha. Feminist Theory has rose through the ranks of the literary community in the last fifty years and when this theory is used to analyze Jane Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, it highlights the already prevalent feminist themes of the novel, like female empowerment, refusal to conform, and a woman’s place in society—thus, shoving the main character, Antoinette Cosway, into the limelight; continually, more than just the oppression of women, namely Antoinette, is focused upon courtesy of this theory, and rather the emphasis is placed upon how the success of some women, namely Jane Eyre, is built on the backs of other women’s unhappiness or (un)wellbeing.
Wide Sargasso Sea reinforces the patriarchal ideology that men hold the primary positions of power in society, and they are predominate in the roles of moral authority and social privilege. Antoinette Cosway, a woman with ideals and a stark sense of self, cannot escape the role that was given to her/forced upon her by both her brother and her husband. For all intents and purposes, Antoinette is treated as a commodity. From an economic standpoint, Antoinette is a very wealthy woman, but once she is married to Edward Rochester, all of her wealth becomes his. She is cautioned against this path by a woman named Christophine:
“All women, all colors, nothing but fools,” Christophine says.“Three children I have. One living in this world, each one by a different father, but no husband, I thank my God. I keep my money. I don’t give it to no worthless man” (Rhys 42).
Yet, Antoinette marries anyway, and is sucked into the standard practice of the patriarchy.
Continually, from the moment Antoinette is married, Mr. Rochester attempts to steal from her her identity. Mr. Rochester refuses to call her by her given name, and instead re-christens her ‘Bertha’—exerting his power as a man over her. This is also a tactic that Mr. Rochester—and countless real men and women from Britain—have historically used to assimilate other cultures. * Antoinette rejects this colonization, and says, “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name” (Rhys 88). Couple this fact with the uprooting of Antoinette’s person from the only home she’s ever known—Jamaica—and disrupting her life so entirely by a move to England, Mr. Rochester effectively wages psychological warfare on Antoinette. She is powerless to stop the effects of the patriarchy—like most of the other strong women in the novel. Taking into account that this novel was written in 1966—when the second wave of feminism was beginning—many of those modern ideals can be found woven into this novel meant to take place in 1834. With a presentist's view in mind, a reader can conclude that the clear objective of this novel is to showcase the patriarchy in all its horrid, oppressive glory. This novel shows the damaging effects of said patriarchy, and the femininity displayed in Rhys’s version of the year 1834 is directly influenced by the need to do just that.
Moreover, Christophine is the only female character—the only character of any gender—that is able to escape the wheel of the patriarchy. In addition to her previously mentioned quote, Christophine says to Antoinette, “Get up, girl, and dress yourself. Women must have spunks to live in this wicked world” (Rhys 60). It is because of the existence of this character that it can be argued that the entirety of the novel, while enforcing patriarchal ideologies, is rather a critique of the whole system. Rhys is showing her audience that Antoinette’s fate is what awaits women when they are subjected to the system. Rhys also shows that Christophine is an anomaly in escaping this wheel, and, historically, a woman who has borne three children out of wedlock will be a social pariah. This means that there is merit in the interpretation that Christophine is not married because no one wanted to marry a 'disgraced' woman. No matter which of these interpretations a reader chooses to go by, Christophine is still an escapee of the patriarchy.
This work suggests that race, class, and other cultural factors such as identity, play a huge role in producing a woman’s experience. Antoinette presents as a white woman, and for all intents and purposes she is; however, she is considered ‘Creole’, the mixed product of Caribbean Black and European White. In the 1830’s, when this novel is taking place, to be ‘Creole’ meant that an individual was an outsider of both the white and black communities—unable to find a home in either. The alienation that Antoinette feels from the Caribbean Black community is not altogether hard to understand considering her family are ex-slave owners, but the fact that she faces the same ostracization from the white community is a harder concept to explain. The simple explanation is that she was born in the West Indies, and to the ‘pure, British-raised, mind’ that is considered “other” and can, therefore, not be white—essentially, she is not European enough. Antoinette recounts the following:
“…I’ve heard English women call us ['us', meaning her family] white n******. 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 61).
Moreover, Mr. Rochester sees her as ‘less than'—less than a true European woman—because of the affection that she holds for Christophine, who is fully Caribbean Black: “Why do you hug and kiss Christophine?” Rochester asked her. “Why not?” was the amicable response of Antoinette. Rochester then says, “I wouldn’t hug and kiss them. I couldn’t” (Rhys 54). The blatant racism of this quote aside, Antoinette is shown to have a higher status than that of Christophine—showcased not only by this quote, but by Christophine’s ability to not marry and still not be considered a taboo woman—but a lesser status than that of a full-blooded Brit like Jane Eyre:
“She wore a white dress and she was humming to herself. […] she stopped and looked round. She saw nothing but shadows, I took care of that, but she didn’t walk to the head of the stairs. She ran” (Rhys 108).
Jane is even shown to be wearing a white dress here, which is stereotypically the color of purity, goodness, and virginity. Contrastingly, Antoinette spends the final few pages of the book obsessed with her red dress—“I took the red dress down and put it against myself. ‘Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?’ I said. That man said so (Rhys 110)—which symbolizes passion, lust, and fire. This subtle discrepancy between these two women further separates them and places them firmly in different classes based solely upon the imagery of a dress color. Overall, class and race not only separate women from men, but women from other women.
Defining femininity in Wide Sargasso Sea is difficult because the concept goes hand in hand with identity, which Antoinette struggles with throughout the novel—she struggles with it so much that the attempt to salvage/hang onto her identity eventually drives her mad. At every turn, people are attempting to undermine Antoinette, and no matter where she turns, people are telling her that she is wrong—that the way she portrays herself is incorrect. Antoinette resembles neither the European or the Caribbean ideals of womanhood/femininity; therefor, the easiest way to define femininity is to look at the metaphor of the entire novel: fire. Fire is a prevailing theme throughout the novel, and it is a metaphor of freedom or liberty, strength, and unwavering love. This concept goes hand-in-hand with femininity, for Antoinette seeks freedom—and, in actuality, never relinquishes her freedom—is strong—as she displays a strength unparalleled by any other character in the novel—and possess a love and yearning for her homeland that never abates. Therefore, femininity is fire for it is persevering and unyielding:
“There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage” (Rhys 112).
Continually, the only sense of sisterhood/female unity in this book is between Antoinette and either Christophine or Grace Poole. Neither female is particularly on Antoinette’s side in anything, so the concept of sisterhood is definitively lacking from this novel. Rather, the female unity that this novel inspires in its readers—and amongst its readers—is where this feminist concept rears its’ head. Intersectional feminists claim that “no woman is free until the black, queer woman is free” and Rhys achieves the 1960’s version of this statement in freeing the mad creole woman in the attic: “she seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d like to write her a life” (Rhys).
Moreover, masculinity in Wide Sargasso Sea has the stereotypical definition of the term—that men must be strong, unafraid, and domineering/controlling of a situation and/or their wife. Mr. Rochester maintains his ‘manhood’ by sticking with what he knows because he is in control in a situation that he is familiar with. For example, Mr. Rochester refuses to accept the island of Jamaica, even though he is struck by its beauty and culture, because it is nothing like England, and, in turn, Antoinette is nothing like English women:
“I hated the mountains and the hills and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated [Jamaica’s] beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it” (Rhys 103).
Mr. Rochester is fearful of this land, fearful of Antoinette because she is from it, and this threatens his masculinity because he has no control over them—he is powerless and this powerlessness morphs to hatred, and hatred fuels the entirety of his life/masculinity. Furthermore, as soon as he realizes that Antoinette is not what he expected, he attempts to put her in a box—to confine her ‘otherness’. Mr. Rochester had an idea in his head about what a wife should be, and what a wife should act like. When the restraints that he places on Antoinette do nothing to quell her, he locks her away, and goes in search of a different wife in Jane Eyre. Overall, the concepts of femininity and masculinity are pitted against each other in Wide Sargasso Sea, and Rhys places her female characters in toxic situations that somewhat exploit their femininity in order to highlight the patriarchy.
On a more historical and realistic note, this novel was published in 1966, smack in the middle of the second wave of Feminism (previously mentioned)—which, while still largely excluding women of color and queer women, focused mainly on discrimination and equality. In the United States, it went hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights Movement, and was paralleled by movements like this throughout the world. Carrying many themes from both of these movements, this was a largely accepted novel when it was first published, one critic saying,
“the style of her [novel] is pristinely pared down in describing depravity and excess, perfectly balanced in invoking instability; she is a master of dialogue between characters for whom communication is mostly a lost cause” (Hulbert).
Even the harsher critics of this novel acknowledged that it provided an insight into the characters of Charlotte Brontë that would not have otherwise been possible.
Continually, like most work by Jean Rhys, there is a large amount of autobiographical content in this novel: “I have only ever written about myself, people have always been shadows to me” (Rhys). Originally christened Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, Jean Rhys was born in 1890 on the island of Dominica, West Indies. Her mother, and subsequently herself, was a Creole woman of Caribbean descent and Rhys was educated in a convent. Based on these facts alone, and if the audience were not aware that Wide Sargasso Sea were an addition to Brontë's Jane Eyre, critics could argue that the story is entirely autobiographical. According to a biography of Rhys,
“the black women who worked in her house as servants offered her access to a secret world and a secret language […]. Rhys would explore the tension between the ordered world of colonial life and the seductive world of island sensuality” (Encyclopedia).
Overall, the creativity that Rhys possessed to pen this novel stemmed largely from personal experience, and that “ghost” previously mentioned could very well have been a descriptor of Rhys herself.
Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, contributes to the history of post-colonial literature, and is heralded in the halls of feminist literature. Rhys strips down the siding, and demolishes the foundation that the house of colonialism sits on, and makes it justifiably impossible to condone imperialism. Lastly, Rhys showcases female characters and empowers them, yet she also shows the damages of the patriarchy—and that in some situations, no matter how strong the woman, the odds may yet still be stacked against them as it was with Antoinette Cosway.
* For the purpose of this article, I will be using the words 'colonizer' and 'patriarchy' interchangeably. I acknowledge that they are separate things, but they carry the same connotations—in being a term used for an oppressor.
works cited
Encyclopedia Inc, “Jean Rhys.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, The Gale Group Inc. 2019
Hulbert, Ann, “Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” New Republic, 1992
Rhys, Jean. Smile Please: An Autobiography, Anthony Smith Books. 1979
Rhys, Jean, ed. Raskin, Judith L. Wide Sargasso Sea, Norton Critical Edition, 1999
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism” The University of Chicago Press. 1985
(originally written for my ENG 360 course, Literary Theory)
Comments