Colonising Within the Marriage in Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea Essay

Colonising Within the Marriage in Rhyss wide-cut Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys complex text, Wide Sargasso Sea, came about as an attempt to re-invent an identicalness for Rochesters mad wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre, as Rhys felt that Bronte had totally misrepresented Creole women and the West Indies why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to consume Rochesters wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought Id write a story as it might really have been. (Jean Rhys the West Indian Novels, p144). It is clear that Rhys wanted to reclaim a voice and a subjectivity for Bertha, the silenced Creole, and to subvert the assumptions made by the Victorian text. She does so with startling results. In her quest to re-instate Berthas individualism, Rhys raises issues such(prenominal) as the problems of colonisation, gender relations and racial issues. She explores the themes of displacement, Creolisation and miscegenation. However, the aim of this essay is to look at the marriage contract within the text, its effects on the participants sense of egohood and its comparisons with the colonial encounter. The marriage contract, for Rhys, is ultimately cast as a colonial encounter in the novel. However, the problem of displacement and a shaky sense of ones own identity are already well established in the first part of the text, long before the marriage takes place. It seems that Rhys wants to bring the problems of the Creole existence to the fore at the very beginning of the novel, and lay emphasis on Antoinettes feelings of alienation the white Creoles are neither part of the black slave community or veritable as European either (a lack of belonging that Rhys knew all too well) they say when... ...ys 109) physically displaces her, splitting her from the West Indies and any connection with a self image there is no looking-glass here and I dont know what I am like now...what am I doing in this place and who am I? (WSS 117). At this point in the novel, Rochesters role as coloniser and Antoinettes as colonised within the marriage are fully realised. Rochester, in the position of power, has successfully interpreted possession of Antoinettes wealth, property and identity. Antoinette, stripped of all three, has made the transition from Rhys text to the imperial construction of the mad woman in the attic of Jane Eyre. Works Cited Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London Penguin, 1997. Howells, Coral Ann. Jean Rhys. London Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. OConnor, Teresa F. Jean Rhys The West Indian Novels. New York New York University Press, 1986.