Jean Rhys's place in international literature is complicated. She was
born in Dominica, but she moved to England at the age of sixteen, and all of her
writing was done in Europe. Her focus is on the Creole woman-- a woman of
European descent born or living for an extended period in the West Indies.
Critiques of Rhys's writing generally focus on class, gender, and race. O'Conner
notes of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea that
"Antoinette is, like her island, "colonized," her independence and autonomy
subsumed to British culture and to British law" (193).
Simultaneously, then, the colonial situation is used to represent Antoinette's
situation as a woman, a hierarchy based on sex in which she is exploited, and
Antoinette is used to represent the colonial situation; the colonizer suppresses
independence and autonomy for monetary gain.
However, in my opinion the appropriation of the colonial situation to
represent Antoinette's situation is privileged by the narrative focus on the
Creole woman and by the representation of blacks. Greggs comments:
"in much of Rhys's writing there exists only the Manichaean division of
"good blacks"--those who serve-- and "bad blacks"--those who are hostile,
threatening, unknown. . . . Even when they [Antoinette and Tia] become "friends,"
the relationship is based on the production of difference through racialist
stereotupes of the hardy, physically superior, animallike, lazy negro: "Tia
would light a fire (fires always lit for her, sharp stones did not hurt her
bare feet, I never saw her cry). . . . [A]fter we had eaten she slept at once.
I could not sleep, but I wasn't quite awake as I lay. . . looking at the pool" (23).
(The lazy black who only desires to sleep after eating is a common trope of
colonialist discourse). . . . The sensitive white child, on the other hand,
comtemplates nature. . . . The marks of "race" that structure the Antoinette/Tia
relationship undermine the narrative suggestion that it is a friendship. The text
insists upon the racial divisions even as it appears to be "transcending" them
(Gregg 88-9).
The question that this excerpt raises is 'is Rhys participating in the
racist assumptions her representations of blacks suggests or is she trying to
illuminate them?' The text
itself does have racist assumptions embedded in it. I think whether or not the
text is racist depends on the reader, and the interpretive strategy the reader
uses. Similarly, the same question could be raised about sexism. Antoinette,
along with other Rhys heroines, are less than virtuous, and do sometimes fill
stereotypes about women, but here I think we can see more clearly that Rhys's
text offers a criticism of British society than in her treatment of race, perhaps
because the Creole women are the main focus, and not secondary characters.
