Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a narrative prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre through the eyes of the racially ambiguous Antoinette. A postcolonial work, Wide Sargasso Sea explores the intersections of race, oppression and identity, and in the retelling of Rochester’s honeymoon with Antoinette, these categories become increasingly vague. First and foremost, Antoinette is a white Creole who enters the text as racially ambiguous. Growing up in Jamaica, Antoinette and her family were part of the white minority, and Antoinette states, “I never looked at any strange negro. They hated us, they called us white cockroaches” (Rhys 13). Throughout the novel, the epithet of “white nigger” is used to describe Antoinette, illustrating the conflict of her racial identity.
In the second part of the novel, Antoinette and Rochester honeymoon to the island of Granbois, and the account is narrated from Rochester’s point of view. Perhaps most telling is the way Part Two begins. Rochester states, “So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse” (Rhys 65). The section begins with a string of contradictions—“advance and retreat;” “better or for worse”—that set up the ambiguity that pervades the narration.
As Antoinette and Rochester travel to their honeymoon estate, they are caught in a downpour and are forced to take shelter. Rochester takes this opportunity to scrutinize the physical appearance of his wife. He states, “She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (Rhys 67). Here, Rochester’s imagery portrays Antoinette as neither Creole nor European, but rather somewhere in between. Further, the diction of “alien” to describe her eyes posits Antoinette as foreign and inherently different.
When the couple travels to their Granbois estate, they make a stop for a drink at a natural spring. Antoinette offers Rochester some water, and Rochester makes the comment that “Looking up smiling, she might have been any pretty English girl and to please her I drank. It was cold, pure and sweet, a beautiful color against the thick green leaf” (Rhys 71). The statement that Antoinette could “have been any pretty English girl” again calls up her ambiguous racial identity. In this moment, she appears “white” to Rochester, and he believes she could pass for European descent. It is interesting to note that he follows up this thought with colorful imagery that uses the diction of “pure”—a clear contradiction to how he views the racial composition of his wife.
This racial ambiguity is mentioned again when Rochester flashes back to how he played the attentive suitor when calling upon Antoinette. He states, “It was all very brightly colored, very strange, but it meant nothing to me. Nor did she, the girl I was to marry . . . but I must have given a faultless performance. If I saw an expression of doubt or curiosity it was on a black face not a white one” (Rhys 77). This new world is “very strange” to Rochester, but it is interesting that he notes the “color,” which can be figuratively applied to the racial demographic. In addition, by acting for the “whites” and not the “blacks,” Rochester demonstrates an air of racial superiority—he does not regard his “white” wife as his racial equal and is entering this marriage for economic reasons. This premise simultaneously calls upon slave rhetoric that inadvertently relegates Antoinette to a “black” body despite being consistently referred to as “white.”
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