There is always the other side

A new Wide Sargasso Sea scholar paper:

There is always 'the other side': Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Colonial Madness in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea through Postcolonial and Postcolonial Feminist Theory

by Seema Gogoi

Dibon Journal of Languages, 1(3), 253–265 (2025)

This paper aims to analyse Jean Rhys’ critically acclaimed novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the “other side” of the story of Antoinette, who is dehumanized in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The objective is to critically engage with the issues of gender, race, and ethnicity in the Caribbean Islands as portrayed in the novel with the purview of postcoloniality. The colonial mission and the rampant exploitation of the natives in their land can be seen as a kind of madness under the guise of bearing the torch of civilization. The research has been conducted through the Postcolonial reading of the text, and the lens of Postcolonial Feminism helps to discuss the intersectionality in the novel of gender, race, ethnicity, hybridity, and the burden of a colonial self. This novel is also a quintessential example of studying Caribbean literature and its colonial history. Rhys shows the colonial history and heterogeneous culture and ethnicity of the islands like Jamaica and Martinique, slavery and the dehumanizing effect of it, and the question of identity, especially of Creole identity. As Chimamanda Adichie in the speech “The Danger of a Single Story” reflects how one side of the story creates stereotypes and provides kind of incomplete information. In Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Antoinette, who is later named as Bertha by Rochester, is portrayed as a beast that does not have agency of her own and as she is from a colonized and “uncivilized” island. Jane describes her anatomy and behaviour as similar to that of a beast and refers to as “it” not as “she”. This one-sided narrative has been deconstructed through Wide Sargasso Sea and gives voice to the colonized beings.  Rhys writes about the “the other” side of the story of Antoinette and how she and her mother Annette are driven into madness by their imperialist husbands. I will also analyse the major debate on madness in the novel- who is really mad Antoinette or the whole dehumanizing, exploitative imperialist mission. This paper will be analysed from the theory of Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and other Postcolonial thinkers, and also from the Postcolonial Feminist perspective.