Wide Sargasso Sea

10 Pages 2456 Words

nt pervades the novel. The ex-slaves who worked on the sugar plantations of wealthy Creoles figure prominently in Part One of the novel, which is set in the West Indies in the early nineteenth century. Although the Emancipation Act has freed the slaves by the time of Antoinette’s childhood, compensation has not been granted to the island’s black population, breeding hostility and resentment between servants and their white employers. Annette, Antoinette’s mother, is particularly attuned to the animosity that colors many employer-employee interactions.

Enslavement shapes many of the relationships in Rhys’s novel – not just those between blacks and whites. Annette feels helplessly imprisoned at Coulibri Estate after the death of her husband, repeating the word “marooned” over and over again. Likewise, Antoinette is doomed to a form of enslavement in her love for and dependency upon her husband. Women’s childlike dependence on fathers and husbands represents a figurative slavery that is made literal in Antoinette’s ultimate physical captivity.

Antoinette’s family is in an awkward position with the slaves in the area. Because they are poor, but white, they are called “niggers”. There are "plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They didn't look at us, nobody see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger." (Rhys 24) It seems almost as if Antoinette is in a no win situation, she is attacked for being white, yet in the same paragraph, it seems that she is attacked again for not being white enough. No matter what people try to do their past always haunts them, and this is the case in Wide Sargasso Sea as even Tia who had played with Antoinette in the past causes her harm by throwing a rock at her. "We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass...