WHO STOLE THE SOUL IN "WIDE SARGASSO SEA?

"
Author(s): Faizal Forrester
Source: Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2 (MAY 1994), pp. 32-42
Published by: Journal of West Indian Literature
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23019868
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 WHO STOLE THE SOUL IN
WIDE SARGASSO SEA?

- Faizal Forrester

I begin with a question: who stole the "soul" in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso
Sea. It is an important question, seeing as I am not the first to ask it
Antoinette Cosway's parrot, Coco, is the first inquisitor: "Qui est La? Qui
est la?" or "Who is there? Who is there?"1 If Wide Sargasso Sea is a "fictive
nation" or a "faraway" worlding2 , then who lives there? The following
essay will attempt to answer these questions, my central point being that
the divisive agents at work in Wide Sargasso Sea remain disturbingly un
resolved by the novel's conclusion, or, if we factor in Jane Eyre, its
beginning. As a result, Wide Sargasso Sec? perpetually escapes from the
reader; its signs are always constantly retreating, even after multiple read
ings. It is not a writing that seeks to bridge cultures, but neither is it a
"specular" writing, one that is a "mirror" which reflects "the colonialist's self
image."4 Instead, Wide Sargasso Sea is a writing that is haunted: it is pos
sessed by an already dead protagonist, whose destiny has already been
written, locked within the "cardboard" world of Jane Eyre.
Laura Niesen de Abruna, in the essay "Twentieth Century Women
Writers From the English Speaking Caribbean"5 puts forth the argument
that, in Wide Sargasso Sea, there is "a successful syncretism between the
white Creole woman Antoinette and the black Creole woman Tia." Abruna
reads Antoinette's "torching of Rochester's baronial cage" as "an act of
liberation engendered by her final ability to find connectedness with Tia.
Even though it costs her life." The very fact that Antoinette, as she is about
to fulfil her destiny as Bronte's madwoman and jump to her death, sees not
only "the pool at Coulibri," but also her childhood friend Tia, is, for Abruna,
a sign that Antoinette is reaffirming "her identification with Tia"6. An
toinette sees "not herself or a colonialist self image but the African
Caribbean woman Tia."
In Abruna's reading, Antoinette Cosway, because she negates "the self,"
transcends "the values, assumptions, and ideology of her culture"7. Abruna
concludes on an optimistic note, stating that Antoinette's suicide/murder

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demonstrates that bonding is possible for white Creole women and African
Caribbean women if the women can bracket the sexism, racism, and im
perialism that are thrust upon them.8 But is this really the case in Wide
Sargasso Sea? Is Rhys's text as optimistic as Abruna's reading of it? Is it
possible to reclaim Antoinette Cosway (the victim, the madwoman, the
puppet of the Law) and her final incendiary act as a symbol of liberation?
It seems to me that Abruna's reading of the text is undermined by the fact
that, in Wide Sargasso Sea, any attempt Antoinette makes to see herself
mirrored in the landscape of her birth, or to find any gesture of belonging,
ends in failure: blood, tears and, finally, fire. In Wide Sargasso Sea,
Antoinette's first attempt to find in Tia the recognition of commonality, or
even a gesture of belonging, results in the spilling of Antoinette's blood and
Tia's tears: "I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that
was left of my life as it had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by
side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I
will be like her." (p.38)
Antoinette believes that she can be "like" Tia, because they eat the "same
food" and bathe in the "same river." However, this is not the case. We learn
in an earlier passage (ironically, from Tia, herself) that Antoinette and her
family are outsiders. Tia names Antoinette the "white nigger," who is "poor
like beggar." The difference is that "real white people...got gold money" and
"old time white people nothing but white nigger now".(p.21)9
Tia s stone of recognition, as a result, carries, with its throwing, the
blood and tears of this racial division:

When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I
did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only
something wet, running down my face. 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 (p.38).
This image of Tia is an important one for the novel: she functions as both
Antoinette's "looking glass" and reflection. My point is that Tia is the mirror
that throws the stone of painful recognition: a reflection of Antoinette's
racial difference, what she is and has always been a colonial exile. Tia's
tears, then, are also Antoinette's tears of recognition:"It was as if I saw
myself. Like in a looking glass." It is at this point in the text that Antoinette,
seeing herself in Tia, "like in a looking glass," but being stoned for it, loses
her childhood innocence. This shattering of mirrors, or Antoinette's failure
to efface the "native," Tia, and step forth as "the real Caliban," parallels the
burning of the old estate, Coulibri.10 (The other West Indian 'hidden place,"

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or faraway, in Wide Sargasso Sea is Granbois, which is, in Antoinette's
psyche, a substitute for Coulibri.) Coulibri, with its "golden ferns and silver
ferns," "roses," "rocking chairs" and "the picture of the Miller's Daughter,"11
is the symbol of an old Empire built on slavery. As a result, this torching of
Coulibri removes/ severs Antoinette from any claim to real "Englishness";
she is neither white nor black. Antoinette is, rather, caught between two
unresolved "faraways," two worlds which are fictions, and her status, or
lack of one, as I will explore later, is a register of the unnatural, of the
undecipherable.12Thus, the burning of Coulibri, coupled with the blood
and tears of self recognition, is the first stage in Antoinette's insanity. This
descent into madness ends in the fictive, "cardboard" world of an English
attic, also known as Jane Eyre but it begins in the "faraway" of Wide Sargasso
Sea Antoinette Cosway is trapped between two cultures, clearly without
status, a condition which is directly linked to her descent into madness.
Antoinette Cosway belongs to no place and, in the final analysis, to no one:
she is powerless, in terms of her own self definition/ determination.
Antoinette's destiny is locked within an imposed narrative of exile: racial,
spiritual and cultural. She is labeled a "white nigger" by Tia; declared "mad"
and to have "zombie" eyes (meaning she has a dead soul), by two of the
island children; and she is culturally explained to "Rochester," by Chris
tophine, her African Caribbean advisor, as being, " not beke like you,
but...beke, and not like us either" (p.128).
In Rhys's novel, as in most texts, several cultural discourses meet, but
in this particular "writing," any meeting of the sort is doomed to violence
and is defined in opposition to the "natural." Antoinette's "outsider status,"
which is established from the novel's very beginning13, leads me to ask the
following questions: Did Antoinette Cosway ever belong to Coulibri? and,
if not, then how should we read Antoinette's final dream, the images of
Coulibri, as well as of Tia? Should we read Antoinette's suicide as a tragic
reflection of what she has always lacked, which is the emotional and
cultural rootedness of a determinate childhood? Antoinette Cosway is
victimized by an Imperialist history which has never been conducive to a
successful cultural syncretism. She is thus trapped within other people's
definitions of "what" she is a sexual and colonial exile: any instance where
there might have been an opportunity for harmonious inter cultural, or
inter racial, relations, end in disaster, violence and /or deceit: this condition
runs throughout the novel.
Rhys makes the violence of colonialism explicit in the text. This
"violence" is the result of a clash of cultures: a spiritual and cultural conflict
between the island's European and African elements. 1 am thinking here of

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four passages in which these tensions erupt: the "cursing" duel being fought
between Aunt Cora and "the man with the machete" (p.37), the narratives
of insanity imposed onto Antoinette by the island children (p.41),
Antoinette's violent appropriation of Christophine's "Obeah" powers
(pages 89, 98), and the effects of this "black" magic, on a very "white"
"Rochester" (pp.115,116). When taken together, along with the burning of
Coulibri, the betrayal of Tia, and the deaths of both Antoinette's mother
and her brother, Pierre, these passages confirm that, in Wide Sargasso Sea,
there is no cultural harmony. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the Christian and the
"Obeah," or, voodoo, spiritualities stand in opposition, in battle. Consider,
firstly, the battle for souls between Aunt Cora and the "man with the
machete," which happens in Part One of the novel. This religious exchange
is channelled through different ways of cursing: "He let the bridle go and
thrust his face closer to hers. He'd throw her on the fire, he said, if she put
bad luck on him. Old white jumby, he called her. But she did not move an
inch, she looked straight into his eyes and threatened him with eternal fire
in a calm voice" (p.37).
Although this man backs away, there is no resolution to the spiritual
conflict, since we are dealing here with two different sets of religious
politics. Aunt Cora is firmly grounded in a white Christian ideology,
brought to the island through the social mission of imperialism: the "man
with the machete" is an observer of the animistic approach to creation,
exported from Africa to the West Indies through slavery. What we have,
then, are two religious polarities, to neither of which Antoinette truly
belongs.
In Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette's assumption that, because
she is born in the West Indies, Christophine's "Obeah" powers will also
work for her, is a tragic confirmation of her status as a spiritual exile.
Christophine warns Antoinette that "Obeah" magic and spells do not have
their desired effect on white people and, consequently, will not work on
Rochester: "So you believe in that tim tim story about Obeah...too besides,
that is not for beke. Bad, bad trouble come when beke meddle with that."
(p.93).
Christophine's message is a warning that black ritual practices are
culture specific, not to be used by whites as "cheap remedies for social evils,
such as Rochester's lack of love for Antoinette."14 Antoinette, however,
reads Christophine as a god.15, endowed with the powers of creation:Yes
you can, I know you can. That is what I wish and that is why I came here.
You can make people love or hate. Or...or die" (p.93).
The very fact that Christophine's "Obeah" magic, her love potion, leads

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to Rochester's infidelity, a breach of Christian morality, is proof enough
that both spiritualities cannot and will not secure for Antoinette Cosway a
spiritual and sexual happiness. Finally, there are the descriptions of the
island children, one boy and one girl, to consider:
The boy was aboutfourteen...he had white skin, a dull ugly
mouth and he had small eyes, like bits of green glass. He
had the eyes of a dead fish. Worst, most horrible of all, his
hair was crinkled, a negro's hair, but bright red, and his
eyebrows were red...the girl was very black and wore no
head handkerchief (p.41).
The boy is "mulatto.' He is racially mixed, but this racial mixture,
between the African and the English, is read as an aberration. The boy is
"ugly." His features, indicative of the cross cultural elements which con
stitute the island, are, instead of being beautiful, "horrible," in both
combination and colour. While both of these children appear to be "harm
less and quiet," they are rather venomous, but their sting is prophetic. These
children are in direct confrontation with Antoinette Cosway because they
are taunting her with death, introducing to the text the crucial narrative of
insanity. The girl's words foreshadow Antoinette's destruction:
look like crazy girl, you crazy like your mother...she have
eyes like zombie and you have eyes like zombie too (p.42).
Thus, along with Tia's betrayal and Christophine s definition of
Antoinette's cultural/racial identity, these words confirm, for the reader,
Antoinette Cosway's status as an exile. She has been inscribed with the
narratives of madness and soul death, which will, in Part Two of Wide
Sargasso Sea, be written, for 'Rochester', by yet another "violent" mulatto,
Daniel Cosway.
These four passages all confirm Antoinette Cosway s status as a spiritual
and cultural exile, but they also help to place her insanity within a specific
socio-cultural/ economic context: Antoinette can be read as the victim of a
dominant discourse (a European, white, male one at that) which dis
courages any succesful syncretic possibilities. We should be reminded here
of the fact that, although medical discourse would claim otherwise, mental
illness cannot be pathologically diagnosed; it remains that mysterious,
imaginary disease which is defined and policed by repressive state ap
paratuses, such as Rochester's "Letter of the Law."
Rhys's project of "writing" Bertha Mason a "life," then, is an important
one: it gives Bertha Mason humanity. Bertha is no longer that wild haired,
hideous monster or creature found in Bronte's fiction. Rhys gives Bertha

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Mason a childhood, a name, a voice and a history which places Bertha
Mason's madness within a socio cultural/economic context. However,
Rhys is unable to give Bertha Mason an ending, because one has already
been written for her.
Gayatri Spivak, in Three Women s Texts and A Critique of Im
perialism," reads Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre's "reinscription." Spivak
argues that in the final dream sequence (p. 155), "Rhys makes Antoinette see
her self as her Other, Bronte's Bertha." Antoinette "acts out Jane Eyre's
conclusion" and recognizes herself "as the so called ghost of Thornfield
Hall." In a brilliant analysis of Antoinette's final words, "Now at last I know
why I was brought here and what I have to do," Spivak argues that we can
read this (Antoinette's words) as her having been brought into the England
of Bronte's novel: "This cardboard house" a book between cardboard covers
"where I walk at night is not England ."In this fictive England, she must play
out her role, act out her transformation of her "self" into that fictive Other,
set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the
feminist individualist heroine of British fiction.
Thus, when she jumps to her death, Antoinette is exiting Wide Sargasso
Sea in order to enter another text, this one being Jane Eyre. Antoinette is
recognizing her role in the unravelling of Bronte's gothic romance: for Jane
Eyre to be happy, Antoinette must kill herself. Thus, according to Spivak,
Wide Sargasso Sea can be read as "an allegory of the general epistemic
violence of imperialism, the construction of a self immolating colonial
subject," Bertha Mason, for the "glorification of the social mission of the
colonizer," be it person/s or text/s.16
We cannot, as a result, read Antoinette Cosway s torching of
Rochester's Baronial cage" as an act of liberation, because all that is left of
her is blood, tears and fire. In Antoinette's final dream, she does see Tia and
Coulibri from the "battlements" of Thornfield Hall:

when I looked over the edge I saw the pool at Coulibri. Tia
was there. She beckoned to me and when I hesitated she
laughed. Someone screamed and I thought, why did I
scream? I called "Tia!" and jumped and woke. (p.155)
Indeed, Antoinette calls out to Tia before jumping over the edge, but
this does not mean that Antoinette has recognized Tia as an African
Caribbean woman; nor does it mean that Tia is the "other" who constitutes
Antoinette's self image. After all, Antoinette's vision of Tia is, like the
memory of mother, Annette, all "mixed up in (the) dream" (p. 51). Tia and
Coulibri must be, at this stage in Antoinette's madness, more a fiction than
a memory. When Antoinette jumps to her death she is not, as Abruna

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believes, negating the "self," or recognizing her affinity with the native
female other but is, rather, attempting to restore the "self." Antoinette is
jumping back into a lost childhood, albeit an insular one; it is, regardless,
the only "self" written for her: the benevolent writing which Rhys offers her
in Part One of Wide Sargasso Sea. Thus, Antoinette's death is the result of
her ongoing search for "a door opened" where she is "somewhere else,
something else,"(p.24) an exit out of insanity, out of the "cardboard" world
of Jane Eyre. So I return to my beginning question: who stole the soul in Jean
Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea? It is Antoinette's soul that is in question. And
there are four usurpers: A) History: imperialism, the Law/legalities, police
and prisons. B) Money. 1. Antoinette, as a child, is called a "white nigger"
because her mother is poor. 2. "Rochester" marries Antoinette for her
stepfather's money. 3. Antoinette recognizes money as the Empire's great
passion when she says: "Gold is the idol they worship."
C) Rochester. Rochester + his refusal to just "love" Antoinette without
control, or, Rochester + control + his Orientalist projections onto Antoinette
and Granbois a simultaneous lust and repulsion.
Antoinette Cosway is marginalized by an Imperialist history, a
civilization's "passion" for money, and an agent of/for patriarchy: these
three culprits all contribute to her sense of spiritual, emotional and cultural
exile. However, the most crucial of these thieves is Jane Eyre, itself, the fourth
and final usurper. I say this because, when reading Wide Sargasso Sea, there
is an immediate sense that something is missing from the equation. What
is absent is a soul. A soul is usurped because Jane Eyre, another writing,
stole it; more specifically, Antoinette Cosway, regardless of a determinate
childhood and a context for her madness, must still enter the closure that
is Bertha Mason. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette's transformation, from
exile to insanity, is traced as the novel progresses, but there is always that
frightening awareness on the part of the reader of her eventual destination.
As a result, the early references in the text to Antoinette Cosway's already
"written" destiny carry with them an irony that is both powerful and eerie.
Therefore, Wide Sargasso Sea is a haunted place, spooked by a pre
destination. Antoinette Cosway is doubly victimized: first, by an actual
history, such as the historical and material forces already examined, and,
second, by a literary history, Jane Eyre. As a result, Rhys can only do so much
for Bertha Mason, because Bertha's destiny is written elsewhere: Wide
Sargasso Sea, then, is after the fact, a beginning to a protagonist who is
already dead. Jane Eyre closes Bertha Mason's life. In Wide Sargasso Sea, there
are numerous passages that suggest Antoinette's awareness of her destiny,
of how her life will end, and how she will be resolved.

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 Antoinette Cosway states: none of you understand anything about us"
(p.26). Is she also speaking to the reader? We have known very little about
Bertha Mason, other than the fact that she is Bronte's mad, voiceless and
imprisoned "creature" in an attic. Similar to the image, in Rhys's text, of St.
Innocenzia (p.45), we have also known Bertha Mason as a "relic," not as a
symbol of beauty, but, rather, of that infamous Victorian madwoman. In
Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason might as well not be in the book since "we do not
know her story"; she is given no humanity until Wide Sargasso Sea. There
are three crucial episodes in Rhys's text which foreshadow Antoinette's
destiny as Bronte's "other." It is Antoinette who summarizes the relation
ship between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre when she says to "Rochester"
that: "there are always two deaths, the real one (insert Wide Sargasso Sea)
and the one people know about (insert Jane Eyre)" (p.106).
In Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea, "Rochester" begins to call Antoinette
Cosway "Bertha Mason." We know now at this moment that Antoinette's
transformation is finally completed: she is now Bronte's "creature" and she
will recognize this in her final dream: "Qui est la? Qui est la? and the man
who hated me (Rochester) was calling too, Bertha! Bertha!" (p.155). An
toinette even says to "Rochester": "I wish to stay here in the dark...where I
belong" (p.112). And "Rochester" is fully prepared to grant her this wish;
his final words of the novel are,

I too can wait for the day when she is only a memory to be
avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or
a lie...(p.142).
"Rochester' has a blueprint for the new foreign hidden place (the attic),
as it will exist in Jane Eyre, where Antoinette will be locked away in the dark:
relegated to an obscurity symbol, a zombified stick drawing without a soul:
I drew a house surrounded by trees. I divided the third
floor into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman
a dot for the head, a larger one for the body, a triangle for
a skirt, slanting lines for arms and feet. But it was an
English house (pp.134-5).
This "house" is, of course, Thornfield Hall. And the woman? Grace
Poole, or, most likely, Bertha Mason, but in both cases, not quite/not a wife,
not quite/ not The Miller's Daughter. In either case, though, a madwoman
in the attic, since Grace Poole is also a female victim.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway's most prophetic, and moving,
vision is of a "faraway," "fictive nation" called "England". After all, the only
"England" she will ever know will be the one that kills her. Antoinette says

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and I cite almost the entire passage):
[ know that house where 1 will be cold and not belonging,
the bed 1 shall lie in has red curtains and 1 have slept there
many times before, long ago.
[n that bed I will dream the end of my dream. But my
dream has nothing to do with England...I must remember
ibout chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and
snow (p.92).
Her dream truly has "nothing to do with England" since the "England"
she will die in is merely a "worlding" from a Gothic Romance novel a
'cardboard" world. Thus, Antoinette, ironically, is usurped by "some
romantic novel," that same genre of writing which has, in the first place,
fixed her ideas about England (p.78). Antoinette will die in a romantic
novel; the "chandeliers and dancing" and "swans and roses," Antoinette will
never see, because Bronte meant them for Jane's eyes only.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway's "ongoing search" tor that
open door, which might enable her to restore the self, can only end in, or
be read as, a failure, not in/as liberation. Antoinette's journey into "Bertha
Mason" is tragic because she cannot escape fate. After all, it is easier to kill
someone once you have trapped them within writing as a fixed symbol. As
a result, how hard could it have been for Bronte to throw Bertha Mason
over the edge, or, to turn her from a woman into a monster? Bronte's Bertha
is a relic, a symbol. However, for Rhys, Bertha is someone quite different:
she is a woman who is mad, not a trivial symbol. What is wrong with this
picture? Rhys could be saying that there must be something wrong with
our history if it contains people like Bertha Mason. Essentially, someone
has lied about benevolence along the way. Thus, when Antoinette Cosway
finally recognizes herself as Bronte's "Other," Bertha Mason, the revelation
is as painful for the reader as it must have been for Jean Rhys, sitting down
to "write" Bertha a "life," knowing well in advance how it must all end.

Notes

The question "Qui est la? Qui est la?" is heard throughout Wide Sargasso Sea
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966) on pages 35, 39,and 155. Antoinette
hears this question before she jumps to her death. In the first two dreams of Wide
Sargasso Sea, Antoinette knows that there is someone with her, but she knows
not who. In the first of these dreams (p.23), she says, "Someone who hated me
was with me, out of sight." In the second dream, she identifies the person as being
male, but still unnamed: "I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save
myself...This must happen." The person is Rochester, who effectively, is un

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 named in the text. This question is not heard during the middle section of the
novel, which is narrated by Rochester.
o

I borrow these two terms from Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs (trans. Richard
Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). Barthes is suggesting that, in creating
the "fictive nation," the writer is, in no way, "claiming to represent or to analyze
reality itself." Writing creates, rather, "an emptiness of language," but it is also
this "emptiness of language" which "constitutes writing." For example, Rhys
reclaims for Bertha Mason not only a determinate childhood, but also a chance
to engage in a dialogue with her destiny, to rebel against Bronte's closed symbol
of madness. Because Bertha's history is unwritten in Jane Eyre, she is, thus, empty
of language. Bertha's voice is absent. Rhys, however, restores for Bertha Mason
a voice and writes for her the West Indian childhood Rochester speaks of in Jane
Eyre.

3 I am thinking here, specifically, of three issues. First, the politics of Imperialism,

which are an exercise in usurpation. For the colonized, who are, ironically,
supposed to benefit from Imperialism's "social mission," this actually means
cultural, social and economic dispossession. Secondly, the inner conflict of exile.
Antoinette might not consider herself to be in exile, but does she really belong,
in the post-Coulibriyears, to the West indian landscape? Rochester is also in exile,
being the victim of an entailed inheritance and the law of primogeniture. He is
buried alive at Granbois and subsequently must return to England, to God. And,
finally, there is the battle between men and women and their sex roles which, for
the most part, is revealed to the reader through Rochester and his writings of
Antoinette, Christophine and Amelie.
4 Abdul JanMohamed creates this framework for looking at colonialist literature
that attempts to explore racial "otherness." JanMohammed sees this literature as
being "specular," where the native is exploited, because all what s/he constitutes
is a reflection of the oppressor's self. The novels A Passage To India and Mister
Johnson, work in this way, and are, as a result, racist.

See Abdul JanMohammed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of

Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985):65.
5 Laura Niesen de Abruna, "Twentieth Century Women Writers from the English
Speaking Caribbean," (in Selwyn R. Cudjoe, edCaribbean Women Writers: Essays
from the First International Conference, Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications,
1990):96.
6 Ibid.,97.
7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Antoinette's family were once slave owners. They were the first of the white
colonialists. They remain symbols of the old Empire and this is why Coulibri is
burned by the Maroons. Thus, Antoinette is twice exiled in part one of Wide
Sargasso Sea. Antoinette is not a "real white person," because real white people
are supposed to be wealthy and "civilized." The facts of her mother's poverty
and Coulibri's decaying state both consequences of lack of funds throw the

Vol.6, No.2 41

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 Cosways into this definition of "white nigger." The Cosways are clearly outsiders
from the start of the novel. See the very first lines of Wide Sargasso Sea, "They say
when trouble comes...," as evidence of exile.

10 Gayatri Spivak's brilliant essay, "Three Women's Texts and A Critique of Im

perialism," (in Gates, Henry Louis., ed., Race, Writing, and Difference. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1985) develops this notion of "Caliban", the
deformed, "enslaved", and, dispossessed, island "native," robbed of language
and country. "Driven by a nostalgia for lost origins," like Antoinette and her
desire to restore the over grown Eden of her childhood, Coulibri, "we too run the
risk of effacing the "native" and stepping forth as the real "Caliban," of forgetting
that he is a name in a play, an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an
interpretable text."
11 The portrait of the Miller's Daughter, the "lovely English girl with brown curls
and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders,"(p.30) is what Antoinette
will never be. The portrait is tied to the myth of England; it is artifice, it is not
real. If Antoinette can never be like this "lovely English girl" or like Tia, then what
is she? Who is there? As Antoinette jumps to her death in the final dream of Wide
Sargasso Sea she sees what she is not, she sees both Tia and The Miller's daughter
(p.155). England, then, is the fictive nation, the faraway, for her; but so is the lost
Coulibri.
19
Again, what makes Rhys's text so complicated is what it is saying about An
toinette. Antoinette is the progeny of an old Empire, whose remnants are being
destroyed. This is symbolized in the text through the burning of Coulibri. She is
born in Jamaica because of this imperial heritage and is probably the victim of
inbreeding. There is the very real price to pay for being a part of a landscape,
which, although you consider yourself to be a part of because you have never
known any other, least of all England, your own English ancestors have usurped.
13
The veiy first lines of Wide Sargasso Sea read: "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 self'
Christophine said" (p.15).
14 Again see Spivak's essay, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism".
15 Christophine is also read by Rochester as a wish-granting "Devil" or demon; his
reading is an example of manifest racism as it is inherited through discourse. Her
blackness is interpreted as the sign of Satan or, at the very least, a source for
vulgar Dionysian pleasure. I suggest this because Rochester calls Christophine
a "devil," a "damned black devil from Hell" (p.lll).
16 Imperialists, of course, have always possessed a technology of warfare (see Eric
Woolf's Europe And The People Without History, as well as a repressive state
apparatus, such as the police and prisons. For example, what does Rochester
threaten Christophine with if she disobeys his commands? He threatens to call
the police, knowing that she has already been jailed. And why does Antoinette
almost kill Richard Mason, when he comes to visit with her in the attic? She
attacks him because he says the word, "legally." Antoinette is legally tied to
Rochester until death do them part.

42 Journal of West Indian Literature

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