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and black women. But what matters in this case is not historical reality
but fantasy, both individual and social. Just as Antoinette is presumably
the daughter of old Cosway and not of a black man, so too the origin
of the colored population could be shown more accurately by an
encounter between a white man like Cosway and a black slave concu–
bine. But that scene would have nothing like the shocking force of this
one. It would simply show the kind of nominally illicit sexual activity
that poses no threat to the social structure.
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. And the possible
result-pregnancy and a child of mixed race-is harder to hide and pre–
sents a greater threat to the "purity" of the white racial line than does
the by-blow of a man. Had the kind of scene depicted here occurred
more often in real life, white separateness and supremacy would soon
have disappeared, along with white pretensions to moral superiority.
Thus this is a subversive scene of origin, a representation of what
must
not
happen.
It
contains the one truly forbidden sin in this corrupt
Creole paradise, and therefore in a sense its cornerstone, the fundamen–
tal taboo on which it is structured. The attraction of white men to black
and brown women is openly acknowledged and everywhere evident in
light-skinned offspring of uncertain paternity. The corresponding attrac–
tion of white women to black men must be entirely repressed. (Refer–
ring to this subject in a letter, Rhys writes "The men did as they liked.
The
women-never.")
In a society founded on white hegemony, the act
suggested in this scene is the most degrading and anarchic-and thus the
most erotically charged, the most capable of liberating repressed desire.
The scene of the mother with the black man is at the heart of
Wide
Sargasso Sea,
in some sense a scene of origin for the novel itself, con–
taining its central motifs of race and sex and the connection between
them. Here the sexual domination inherent in slavery is represented,
but with the races of the parties reversed, as if in fulfillment of an
unconscious wish. The combined horror and excitement derive from
this idea of eroticized enslavement, in which elements of sexual fantasy
and historical reality converge. In a society barely beyond slavery, the
sadistic and masochistic aspects of sexual feeling find ready to hand a
pattern, a relationship, a vocabulary of images. The sadomasochistic
primal scene becomes identified with a social institution in which sex
is a transaction between masters and slaves. Female sexual pleasure is
