1. Francis Gilbert Goldsmiths
WIDE SARGASSO SEA

2. Your first impressions
 What did you think of the novel on first
reading?

3. Placing Wide Sargasso Sea in
a theoretical context…
 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber, ‘Infection of the
Sentence’, in The Mad Woman in the Attic, pp.45–92.
“A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The Wrinkled Maker lie
Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria – “
Emily Dickinson

4. The female artist
 What does it mean to be a woman writer in a
culture whose fundamental definitions of literary
authority are…overtly and covertly patriarchal?
(page 45)
 Page 49 “Unlike her male counterpart, the
female artist must first struggle against the
effects of a socialization which makes conflict
with the will of her (male) precursors seem
inexpressibly absurd, futile, or even…self-
annihilating.”

5. Hysteria
 Page 53 “It is debilitating to be any woman in a
society where women are warned that if they do not
behave like angels they must be monsters.
 “Hysteria…is by definition a “female disease”, not so
much because it takes its name from the Greek word
for womb, hyster (the organ which was in the
nineteenth cenutry supposed to “cause” this
emotional disturbance) but because hysteria did
occur mainly among women in turn-of-the-century
Vienna, like many nervous disorders, was thought to
be caused by the female reproductive system, as if
to elaborate upon Aristotle’s notion that femaleness
was in and of itself a deformity.”

6. The young girl
 “Most obviously, of course, any young
girl, but especially a lively or imaginative
one, is likely to experience her education in
docility, submissiveness, self-lessness as in
some sense sickening.”

7. Degrading options
 “What the lives and lines and choices of all
these women tell us, in short, is that the
literary woman has always faced equally
degrading options when she had to define
her public presence in the world.” Page 64.

8. Rebellious characters
 Page 77. “Even the most apparently conservative
and decorous women writers obsessively create
fiercely independent characters who seek to
destroy all the patriarchal structures which both
their authors and their authors’ submissive
heroines seem to accept as inevitable. Of
course, by projecting their rebellious impulses
not into their heroines but into mad or
monstrous women (who are suitably punished in
the course of the novel or poem) female authors
dramatize their own self-division, their desire
both to accept the strictures of patriarchal
society and reject them.”

9. Anxieties about space
 Page 83. “In fact, anxieties about space
sometimes seem to dominate the literature
of both nineteenth-century women and their
twentieth-century descendants. In the
genre…heroines who characteristically
inhabit mysteriously intricate or
uncomfortably stifling houses are often seen
as captured, fettered, trapped, or even buried
alive.”

10. Gubar and Gilbert – summing
up…
 What are the key points that these critics are
making about literature written about
women, literature written by women and
female authors? Do you agree/disagree?
Evaluate their critique…

11. Tiffen’s critique
 Helen Tiffen, ‘Post-colonial Literatures and
Counter-discourse’, in Ashcroft, Griffiths and
Tiffin, PCSR, pp.99–101
 Tiffen views Wide Sargasso Sea as “canonical
counter-discourse”
 Post-colonial writer takes up a character or
characters, or the basic assumptions of a
British canonical text, and unveils those
assumptions, subverting the text for post-
colonial purposes.

12. Great literature in colonial
cultures -- Tiffen
 European texts captured those worlds, ‘reading’
their alterity assimilatively in terms of their own
cognitive codes. Explorers’
journals, drama, fiction, historical
accounts, ‘mapping’ enabled conquest and
colonisation and the capture and/or vilification of
alterity. But often the very texts which facilitated
such material and psychic capture were those
which the imposed European education systems
foisted on the colonised as the ‘great’ literature
which dealt with ‘universals’; ones whose
culturally specific imperial terms were to be
accepted as axiomatic at the colonial margins.”

13. Post-colonial counter-
discursive strategies
 “Post-colonial counter-discursive strategies involve a
mapping of the dominant discourse, a reading and
exposing of its underlying assumptions, and the
dis/mantling of these assumption from the cross-
cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified
‘local’. Wide Sargasso Sea directly contests British
sovereignty – over persons, place, culture, language.
It reinvests its own hybridised world with a
provisionally normative perspective, but one which
is deliberately constructed as provisional since the
novel is at pains to demonstrate the subjective
nature of point of view and hence the cultural
construction of meaning.”

14. Writing back
 “Neither writer (Rhys in this case) is simply ‘writing
back’ to an English canonical text, but to the whole
of the discursive field within which such a text
operated and continues to operate in post-colonial
worlds…But the function of such a canonical text (eg
Tempest, Robinson Crusoe) at the colonial periphery
also becomes an important part of material imperial
practice, in that, through educational and critical
institutions, it continually displays and repeats for
the colonised subject, the original capture of his/her
alterity and the processes of its
annihilation, marginalisation, or naturalisation as if
this were axiomatic, culturally
ungrounded, ‘universal’, natural.”

15. Tiffen
 What key points is Tiffen making? Do you
think she’s right? Evaluate her critique…

16. The author – Jean Rhys
 Born Roseau, Dominica, one of the Windward
Islands
 Father was a Welsh doctor and mother a
Creole, a white West Indian
 Aged 16 came to England
 Married a Dutch poet after 1st WW.
 Rootless life on Continent, Paris and Vienna.
 1920s, The Left Bank

17. The young Rhys

18. Ford Maddox Ford

19. Rhys’ later life
 Husband arrested and jailed
 Meets Ford Madox Ford and his wife. He
encourages her writing, and she becomes his
mistress. Writes about it in Quartet.
 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930, Cape)
 Voyage in the Dark (1934, Constable)
 Good Morning, Midnight (1939, Constable)

20. The older Rhys

21. Rhys’s identities
 Actress, chorus girl, glamour girl, beauty
 “Mistress”
 Prostitute
 Wife
 Writer
 Bohemian
 Drunk
 West Indian Creole…
 Prisoner, both literal and figurative
 Ghost, zombi, witch, obeah practitioner

22. A great biography of Rhys

23. Rhys
 What do you think Rhys’ life tells us about
society? What do you make of it?

24. Sargasso Sea
 Inextricably linked with colonialism
 The sea is the a tract of the North Atlantic
Ocean lying roughly between Azores and
West Indians
 Calm but at the centre a great swirl of
currents
 What is the meaning of the sea for you?

25. Coulibri – prelapsarian
paradise??
 What are the best times of your life, for you?
How have they helped shape your identity
and sense of self?
 Biblical context: “Our garden was large and
beautiful as the garden in the Bible.” (pg 6)
 “We were alone in the most beautiful place in
the world, it is not possible that there can be
anywhere else so beautiful as Coulibri.” (A to
R, pg 83)

26. Hybrid identity
 Historical context, after the Emancipation of
the slaves.
 Uncertain position of the white
Creoles…Their hybrid identity…
 “Then there was that day when she saw I was
growing up like a white nigger and she was
ashamed of me, it was after that day that
everything changed.”
 What do you already know about hybridity?
What do you learn about it from this novel?

27. Memory, forgetting and
gender
 Antoinette (pg 85): “My mother hated Mr Mason. She
would let him go near her or touch her. She said she would
kill him, she tried to, I think. So he bough her a house and
hired a coloured man andwoman to look after her. For a
while he was sad but he often left Jamaica and spent a lot
of time in Trinidad. He almost forgot her.”
 “And you forgot her too,” I could not help saying.
 “I am not a forgetting person,” said Antoinette. “But she –
she didn’t want me.”
 Pg 87: “I remember saying in a voice that was not like my
own that it was too light. I remember putting out the
candles on the table near the bed and that is all I
remember. All I will remember of the night.”
Why is memory so important in this novel?

28. Fire!
 ‘There is no reason to be alarmed,’ my
stepfather was saying as I came in. ‘A handful
of drunken negroes’. (pg 19)
 ‘His crib was on fire,’ she said to Aunt Cora.
‘The little room is on fire and Myra was not
there. She was not there.’ (pg 20)
 What is the significance of fire in this novel
and in Jane Eyre?

29. Rochester’s misgivings…
 “How can one discover the truth, I thought, and that thought led
me nowhere. No one would tell me the truth. Not my father nor
Richard Mason, certainly not the girl I had married. I stood still, so
sure I was being watched that I looked over my shoulder. Nothing
but the trees and the green light under the trees. A track was just
visible and I went on, glancing from side to side and sometimes
quickly behind me. This was why I stubbed my foot on a stone
and nearly fell. The stone I had tripped on was not a boulder but
part of a paved road. There had been a paved road through this
forest. The track led to a large clear space. Here were the ruins of
a stone house and round the ruins rose trees that had grown to
an incredible height. At the back of the ruins a wild orange tree
covered with fruit, the leaves a dark green. A beautiful place.”
 What do you think this novel says about the nature of ‘truth’?

30. The other side to the story…
 From Rochester’s narrative:
 'He has no right to that name,' she said quickly.
'His real name, if he has one, is Daniel Boyd. He
hates all white people, but he hates me the
most. He tells lies about us and he is sure that
you will believe him and not listen to the other
side.'
'Is there another side?' I said.
'There is always the other side, always.‘
 Why do you think Rhys wanted to write ‘the
other to the story’?

31. Rochester and the natural
world
 End of Part Two, Rochester reflects:
 “I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and
the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I
hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would
never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty
which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her.
For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness.
She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst
and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”
 Why does Rochester hate this world so much? What
is the novel saying about the nature of the coloniser
here?

32. Birds, paranoia and identity
 “Our parrot was called Coco, a green parrot. He
didn't talk very well, he could say Qui est la? Qui
est la? And answer himself Che Coco, Che Coco.
After Mr. Mason clipped his wings he grew very
bad tempered. . . .
I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up
and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with
his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down
but his clipped wings failed him and he fell
screeching. He was all on fire.”
 Why is the clipping of the bird’s wing significant
in this novel?

33. Mirrors and Identity
 Part Three: Antoinette says:
 “There is no looking glass here and I don't know
what I am like now. I remember watching myself
brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at
me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite
myself. Long ago when I was a child and very
lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was
between us—hard, cold and misted over with my
breath. Now they have taken everything away.
What am I doing in this place and who am I?”
 What does this novel tell us about female
identity and identity in general?

34. The oral tradition
 Christophine says: “Read and write I don’t
know. Other things I know.” (page 104)
 In what ways does the novel challenge
received ideas about language and
standardisation? What’s the link with Mr
Oxford Don?

35. Names and power
 Pg 86: ‘Don’t laugh like that, Bertha.’
‘My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?’
Why does Antoinette rebel against her new name?
Why does Rochester want to give her one? Why is
Rochester never named in the book? What role
does naming play in the book and why?

36. Obeah
 Spirit theft
 Reduces people to the state of puppets, dolls
or zombis
 Rochester’s drinking of the love potion:
Antoinette is left bleeding and bruised
 “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to
make me into someone else, calling me by
another name. I know, that’s obeah too.”
 Why is Obeah so important in this novel?

37. Rochester’s subjugation of
Antoinette
 “Even when she threatened me with the
bottle she had a marionette quality.”
 He loathes Antoinette’s “otherness”; he is a
“practitioner of colonial obeah”.
 What do you think of the presentation of
Rochester in the novel? Does it make you
read Jane Eyre in a different light?

38. Antoinette, her mother and
Rhys
 An “uncanny” doubling of her mother’s story
 She marries an Englishman, is driven
mad, loses her sense of identity…
 Rhys to Francis Wyndham: “I am no longer a
doll, but a kind of ghost…”
 What is “uncanny” about this novel?

39. Deja Vu
 Links with Jane Eyre?
 The links between Annette and Antoinette
 The links between Daniel Cosway’s story and
the truth…
 How does the sense of déjà vu create a
“Gothic” atmosphere? A sense of the
uncanny…

40. Miscegenation
 Inter-racial marriage
 “Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure
English descent she may be, but they are not
English or European either.”
 The similarities between Amelie and
Antoinette; “They are related, I thought. It’s
possible, it’s even probable in this damned
place.” (page 81)
 What does this novel say about
miscegenation?

41. Sum up your thoughts in a
mind map…

42. How successfully does the novel
challenge colonial ideas?