Jean Rhys, a white author, is often hailed as a feminist before her time by modern feminists. However, she is also ahead of her time in her willingness to question the institutions of society (language, economics, politics, religion) that oppress the cultures and voices of other peoples. If we examine Wide Sargasso Sea, we can see this demonstrated, a novel in which she is giving voice to not only “the other” gender but also to “the other” non-dominant culture.
Wide Sargasso Sea is obviously an attempt to give voice to silenced gender, for it is a fiction of a fictional character, the mad wife of Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Antoinette, who, herself, had no voice in the latter work. We only knew of Antoinette from the perspective and biased opinions of Rochester. He portrays her as a victim, powerless in the face of his control of her, and, mainly, as a foreigner. This outsider status occurs to women who are repressed in a male dominated society. However, it is a status that also belongs to those who are of a culture that is not the dominant one. We see this depicted in the outside status described by Christophine at the beginning of Wide Sargasso Sea “They say trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were no in their ranks” (Rhys 465).
The product of a silenced voice is often internal conflict in individuals, all the more so when the voice is silenced by the community-at-large. The dominant community institutionalizes its values, transmits them through the socialization process, and then ostracizes and/or rejects anyone refusing to adopt them. We see Rhys deal with this process as a source of conflict in the individual not only in terms of gender silencing, but also racial silencing. As one critic comments, Wide Sargasso Sea is comparable to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! In this aspect because both “Offer fascinating accounts of the ways in which larger conflic...