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PARTISAN REVIEW
seen as enslavement, and powerlessness and submission are imagined as
erotically exciting.
The relationship between slave and master is suggested throughout
the novel in various forms. It appears, for instance, in the marriage of
Antoinette's mother with Mr. Mason, to whom she sells herself to save
her family from destitution. There is a powerful image of the mother
bent backward in Mason's arms, her long hair touching the floor, that
suggests the same voluptuous submissiveness that appears later with the
black man, and also in Antoinette's relations with Rochester. All these
pairings, as well as the encounter of Rochester with Amelie, are charac–
terized by inequality of power, economic bondage, and hints of sadistic
and masochistic pleasure. Even Rochester himself feels that he was sold
by his father into bondage-that of a marriage for money-although it
is Antoinette who ends up confined and penniless. The relation of mas–
ter to slave, with its knot of race and sex, desire and hatred, power and
dependence, excitement and shame, is a kind of shadowy template
behind every sexual relationship in the novel.
It
is perhaps involved even
in the tormented love of Antoinette for her mother.
The submissiveness of the slave, however, turns eventually to rage
and rebellion. As the blacks burned Coulibri, so Antoinette, at the end
of the novel, burns Thornfield Hall, fulfilling the destiny created for her
in
Jane Eyre.
In Rhys's version, the act takes place in a dream of the
past: as Antoinette leaps from the ramparts she calls Tia's name, in a
final attempt to rejoin the lost black self of childhood.
The issue of race in
Wide Sargasso Sea
goes beyond history and pol–
itics to the unconscious, where racial feelings have their deepest roots.
The novel's most memorable images-the garden of Coulibri, the fire
and Tia throwing the stone, the red-haired boy and the bad-smelling
girl, the mother in the arms of the black man-are dreamlike in their
haunting power, and like dreams they represent the conflicts of the
unconscious. In its fidelity to the unresolved nature of those conflicts,
Wide Sargasso Sea
has a kind of painful, masochistic integrity. It is dis–
turbingly honest in its exploration of the fantasies and the tangled, con–
tradictory desires not only of a Creole society, but of the Western
imagination itself in its continuing struggle with the dilemma of race. Its
political sympathies-whether with the oppressed black majority or the
dispossessed white minority-are finally as profoundly ambiguous as
the unconscious conflicts in which they are rooted.
