ELIZABETH DALTON
Sex and Race in
Wide Sargasso Sea
J
EAN
RHYS, in life apparently a quite unpolitical person, has become
since her death a star of the feminist and postcolonial canon. In par–
ticular,
Wide Sargasso Sea,
Rhys's rewriting of
Jane Eyre
from the
perspective of Rochester's mad Creole wife, is now discussed primarily in
terms of postcolonialism and the politics of race. The novel's depiction
of racial tension and violence in the West Indies, derived partly from
Rhys's own childhood and family history in Dominica, offers the basis
for this kind of reading and for the debate over the author's sympathies
in the racial conflict. What tends to be left out of the political focus, how–
ever, is virtually everything that appeals
to
the imagination and the emo–
tions : the vivid, dreamlike atmosphere, the poignant account of
childhood trauma and loss, the disturbingly masochistic sexuality.
Literature inevitably contains unconscious motifs and fantasies, but
the traces are especially evident in this passionate novel, above all in the
treatment of race and its connection with sex. The concern with racial
identity and the fears and fantasies of miscegenation that pervade
Wide
Sargasso Sea
can be interpreted psychoanalytically as well as politically.
At the heart of the novel is an extraordinary scene of repressed sexual
desire, a revelation that embodies a myth of origin not only for the hero–
ine but for her Creole society as well . The political dimension of the text
is complicated and rendered ambiguous by these unconscious fantasies
and fears.
Rhys's novel recounts the early life of Antoinette Bertha Mason, here
called Antoinette Cosway before her adoption by Mr. Mason. The
Cosways are Creole planters, former slave-owners ruined by emancipa–
tion. Hated by the blacks, these "old-time white people" are also, para–
doxically, despised as "white niggers" by the more recent English
colonists because of their long intimacy with blacks. The lush, over–
grown garden of Coulibri, the Cosways' estate, is a microcosm of the
moral and sexual ambiguities of their situation, a kind of corrupted
Eden: "the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild . ..a smell of dead
flowers mixed with the fresh living smell." Recalled often in dream and
memory, the garden is rich in symbolic overtones: "Orchids flourished
