Wide Sargasso Sea

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 c

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rse and she has to be shut away for she try to kill her husband—madness not being all either” (Rhys 515). Most writers seeking advice from other, more experienced, writers are often told “Stick to what you know.” In terms of culture and geography, in many ways Rhys does not stick to what she knows in Wide Sargasso Sea. Many critics have lambasted her characters as being nothing more than the black stereotypes of a white mentality “Gregg terms Rhys’s portrayals of the West Indies and race ‘racialist’ and remarks that every non-white character in Wide Sargasso Sea is drawn from the history of white stereotypes of black people: Tia as cheating, hostile nigger; Amelie as lusty wench; Daniel as hateful mulatto; Christophine as black mammy” (Savory 134). However, in exploring terrain unfamiliar to her Rhys is risking a dialogue about issues between cultures and locales. She is attempting to discuss the issues as she views them and has the courage to express herself despite the possible lack of knowing other cultures and identities. In this manner, she is being broader than those who fear breaching such a dialogue because she is being human, not white, black or another culture. She knows in order to bring the individual closer
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Approximate Word count = 1332
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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