Racism, Our Old Friend: "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys

Early on in Jean Rhys' 1939 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, narrator Antoinette Cosway describes a time of day particular to the region she grew up in, a moment when "though it is hot and blue and there are no clouds, the sky can have a very black look." Few passages of this book say "Caribbean gothic" to me more than this one, which unlike many classic European gothic novels, manages to evoke the sinister, bleak atmosphere trope even as it paints the picture of a hot, sunny day.

If you've read Jane Eyre, you know about the madwoman in Mr. Rochester's attic--her identity more as a secret than a person, her seemingly unreasonable devotion to her husband, and her presentation of an obstacle between Jane and Mr. Rochester's eventual union. Bertha's story, elaborated nearly a century later by Rhys, is a completely different kind of gothic novel, yet in many ways, also aligns nicely as a companion with its source material--despite their wildly distinct settings and narrative voices.

To me, one of Rhys' most interesting choices in this prequel of sorts is her use--or non-use--of names. Bertha Mason/Rochester is nearly unrecognizable at the start of Sargasso, partially because this isn't her name at all--she is Antoinette Cosway, daughter of a former slaveowner and a legendarily beautiful French-descended mother (also Antoinette). As so-called "Creoles", Antoinette and her mother are depicted as outsiders no matter where they go: they're white yet have never been to Europe, they speak the Jamaican "patois" of their West Indian home as fluently as English. At the same time, they live surrounded by newly freed slaves who, not without reason, clearly resent and blame the Cosways for their poverty and disenfranchisement. Antoinette's father, usually called "Old Cosway" in the novel, is described as a notorious womanizer, and we later learn that he fathered many children with his slaves. Much older than Antoinette's mother, he is dead by the time the book begins, leaving his wife and two children living in the shadow of their former wealth. Though they still have some servants and live on a plantation, it is clearly rotting from the inside, and they are often ridiculed by their black neighbors for living in the same level of poverty as the slaves they once owned, as "running with calabash" to catch rainwater and lacking clean dresses on the rare occasion that visitors come calling.

Antoinette does not become Bertha until much later in life, when she has met and married Mr. Rochester--who himself is never named. The reader can only deduce his identity by his marriage to Antoinette. Conversely, Antoinette takes on many names--first the surname Mason when her mother remarries (this time the father of the Mr. Mason we get a glimpse of in Jane Eyre, though he is only briefly referenced in Rhys' novel), and later, presumably her husband's name when she marries--Rochester, as readers of both novels can assume. Yet even after she has taken his surname, Mr. Rochester still strives to change her, finally beginning to call her "Bertha" when their marriage has begun to sour. We never learn where exactly he got this name--mommy issues, or did it come to him in a dream?--we only know that though it clearly disturbs her, this stifling of her identity in this way seems important, even essential to him. A clue may come in one brief moment during Mr. Rochester's narrative section in Part 2 of the novel, when he begins to rhyme Antoinette's name with "marionette" in his mind: "Antoinette, marionette, Antoinetta, marionetta." Whether consciously or not, he does often seem to struggle to ever really know his bride, perhaps because he questions whether she is even real, or simply a product or puppet of her fraught upbringing. Of course, his solution to that seems to be remolding her into a new kind of puppet, complete with a new, more classically British name.

As a West Indian Creole herself, Jean Rhys wrote what she knew, and thus wisely refrains from commenting from the point of view of the black Jamaicans--though we see a great many of these former slaves through Antoinette's eyes, as many of them are her friends, neighbors, and even surrogate family. Though setting the novel from the perspective of former slaveholders and white expats might be seen as dated and irrelevant in the 21st century, I do think that Rhys broke a lot of ground with her novel, in particular disabusing the reader of a vision of "white saviorism" in the 19th century Caribbean. People like Antoinette and her mother are often referred to as "old ones", former slaveowners of European descent who nevertheless spent their lives in the West Indies and know little else, while the Masons and Rochesters are "new ones"--post-Emancipation arrivals with theoretically no blood on their hands, who are also much wealthier than the struggling Cosways. Yet Rhys shows us that in many ways this "new order" is nearly as bleak as the former slaveholding empire was. A central character Christophine, Antoinette's nurse who is in many ways more of a mother than Mrs. Cosway herself, remarks on this, saying that the "new ones" are "just as bad--more cunning, that's all." The new ones, she insists, still have the "Letter of the Law", they still have chain gangs and "tread machines to mash up people's feet."

Of course this perspective, ultimately written by a white woman, should be taken with a grain of salt, of course there are atrocities of the slave trade which can never be equaled. The book contains the odd questionable remark from Antoinette's aunt Cora in particular, a former slaveholder who is often cast in the role of a strong, defiant woman in contrast to the wishy-washiness of "new ones" like Mr. Mason. Where Mr. Mason patronizes black people, insisting that "they are children who wouldn't hurt a fly", Cora counters with an opinion that in many ways is just as harmful, saying that "unhappily children do hurt flies"--not arguing Mason's infantilization, but rather using it to villainize people of African descent. Both Cora and Mason drastically misunderstand the black West Indian experience, even as they are surrounded by black servants clearly listening to this exchange. Tellingly, this argument occurs in response to Mason's own mention of an idea to bring in "coolies", so-called "laborers" from the East Indies, to work the land---when it comes down to it, he, like the island's former slaveholders, doesn't quite view non-whites as human, either. And even supposedly strong-willed Cora ultimately fails to protect her own niece from what turns out to be an abusive marriage, though it is clear that Cora had her own misgivings about Mr. Rochester right from the start. Instead, she is described as literally "turning her face to the wall" when Antoinette visits to ask for her help.

Yet Rhys keeps her introspection clearly centered on Antoinette and her mother's experience, and that of the white West Indian "heiresses" in general. Antoinette's adolescence is filled with the paradox of being an heiress with only two dresses to her name, living on a large estate where even so, one must use a bucket to catch raindrops. She often seems to see herself as an equal to her black neighbors and servants, though Rhys is careful to show that Antoinette is far from unaware of the stark racial divide--at one point during an argument she calls her only friend a "cheating n**er", later saying something similar to Christophine, showing that she has long held an understanding of the power bestowed on her by her race. She is also aware that something is not quite right with her mother. The book grows increasingly candid about Mrs. Cosway's mental illness, though it is set in a time that lacked the terms to characterize it as such. Instead, the depressed, anxious Mrs. Cosway is described as "foolish", "not sensible", and hysterical by other members of society, including Mr. Mason. In most of her childhood recollections, Antoinette seems frightened by her mother, who can be unpredictable and violent.

This, as it turns out, serves as a prelude to Antoinette's own young-womanhood, when she begins to suffer from a similar condition, the "mysterious" malady which eventually transforms her into the feral creature in Mr. Rochester's attic. Modern readers have to wonder how much of this is genetic or chemical, and how much is an effect of Antoinette's treatment first at the hands of her own mother, and later, those of her husband. During his narrative section, Mr. Rochester makes Antoinette out to be conniving and unreliable, to the point that even the reader begins to sympathize with him a little, wonder if there is something she isn't telling us. Racial mixing also seems to be a generalized fear in this world--at one point, Antoinette sees a mixed boy and describes it as a "horrible" sight, though Mr. Rochester seems more preoccupied by the possibility of being unable to tell a person's race. This anxiety extends to his own wife-- he describes her as being almost "too beautiful", to the point that something seems "off", her "long, dark eyes" are "not English or European either." Even the sound of her voice is immediately abrasive to him, "mocking", "like a warning I did not choose to hear." Later, during his affair with a biracial servant Amelie, Mr. Rochester is disturbed by her resemblances to Antoinette. It occurs to him that "it's possible, even probable in this cursed place" that they might be related--and he is equally bothered that Amelie appears less Caucasian than he initially thought. Though it's never explicitly stated, it's possible that he suspects that Antoinette herself might be mixed-race (a question that some critics of Jane Eyre have also raised). Either way, he clearly views her as a creature entirely different and apart from himself, and this troubles him.

At the same time, it becomes increasingly likely that Mr. Rochester's own narration is just as unreliable as Antoinette's, if not more so. He often seems to put himself up on a pedestal as a being filled with endless goodness, so that anything bad that happens is never his fault. If his marriage sours, it is because Antoinette's own family neglected to fill him in on her history of "madness." He sees himself as a warm, generous man, yet other characters later describe him as "cold" and "hard as a board." Though he seems to acknowledge that Antoinette started out uncertain about sleeping with him, he insists almost vehemently that she soon became "just as eager...as I was." His general understanding of female sexuality seems to place himself as the passive party; later, when he has sex with Amelie, he implies that she seduced him, says that she was "laughing throughout." We were taught by Brontë to see Mr. Rochester as a tortured soul who only needs the tender administrations of Jane Eyre to be returned to his formerly sunny disposition--what if this is just who he is?

By the novel's very brief final section, Antoinette has indeed completed her metamorphosis into the madwoman in the attic, in large part due to Mr. Rochester's English attic itself, whose constant surroundings muddle Antoinette's sense of time. Yet in this case, the attic and the person it hides is not the book's true gothic secret. Here, unlike in the source material, there is no big reveal at all. We start out knowing exactly where we're headed, that one way or another, the teenage Antoinette Cosway will somehow be molded into Bertha Rochester by the novel's end. In Rhys' work, the gothic is not present in creepy attics or English heaths, nor even, most of the time, the Cosways' own moldering mansion, but rather in the natural architecture of young Antoinette's surroundings. It's in the oppressive heat in the inappropriately British drawing rooms of the 19th century Caribbean, the ever-present threat of violence against blacks, the fear of racial intermingling, and the dread of mental "hysteria." It's in the time of day when the sky is bright yet ominous, cloudless yet dim.