Madwoman as the Imprisoned Other:

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in Light of French Feminist and Anglo-
American Feminist Literary Theories

Marja-Liisa Helenius
University of Helsinki, 2003

‘There is always the other side, always.’ (Rhys 99)

Introduction

Jean Rhys, who was born to a Welsh father and a white Creole mother, spent her
childhood in the Caribbean islands and later moved to England. Her last novel, Wide
Sargasso Sea, which she wrote in 1966, is the story of the madwoman in Charlotte
Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason – or rather the story of Antoinette Cosway,
the young Creole heiress from Jamaica, before she became Bertha Mason. Rhys was
haunted by the character of the madwoman in Brontë’s novel, and so she decided to
write her life (Wyndham 3-6). The novel has undeniable links with colonial context,
since the protagonist is discarded by both the black Caribbean as well as the white
English societies and thus forced to see herself as ‘the other’ in terms of race.
However, Antoinette is a character ‘othered’ also in terms of her gender, and thus she
is doubly marginalized. Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen as a strongly feminist text, for
Jean Rhys tries to justify Antoinette’s behaviour and discover why she became the
appalling, beastly madwoman she appears to be in Jane Eyre. Rhys tells the story of
Antoinette – or Bertha – from a woman’s point of view, defending her against the
prejudices of the male-centered world, where a woman who does not live according to
the standards set for her is deemed mad.

Hélène Cixous, a significant theorist representing the French feminist movement of

literary criticism, claimed that women should create their own style of writing,
écriture féminine (Selden 143), embracing an utterly feminine role. Wide Sargasso
Sea seems like an undeniable specimen of this kind of feminine writing. However,
features from the Anglo-American feminist theory, represented by such critics as
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, can also be seen in the novel. Gilbert and Gubar
claim that women authors break the female stereotypes by seemingly submitting to
them but simultaneously converting them. It can be argued that, though Cixous’s
French feminist approach and Gilbert’s and Gubar’s Anglo-American view both
emphasise that women must break the silence by writing and thus liberating
themselves from the prisons built by men, the two critical movements also differ in
many ways and partly contradict each others’ arguments. Where Cixous celebrates
femininity, Gilbert and Gubar see feminine writing and submissive female characters
as a mask, a way of subverting the roles that men and patriarchal conventions have
imposed on them. Wide Sargasso Sea abides to the ideas of French feminism in its
poetic, liberated and emotional style and language and in its emphasis on the feminine
experience, but it can also be associated with Anglo-American criticism and read as a
work that criticises and converts patriarchal ideals and stereotypes.

It is evident that Antoinette is not only ‘the other’ in terms of race, but also in terms of
being ‘the Other’ to the man, using the expression of the founding French feminist

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Simone de Beauvoir (Selden 137). In the novel, Antoinette defines herself through
Edward Rochester, the British man she was almost forced into marrying, after
everyone else has abandoned her. In Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester was seen as the victim,
a man who had suffered because of the burden of a mad wife, but in Wide Sargasso
Sea it is Antoinette who is the real victim, even though Rochester is not a simply evil
character, either. In the beginning, Rochester wants to be good to his wife, but
because he does not understand her, her culture or her powerful sexuality, he ends up
fearing and then hating her. Antoinette gives herself to him completely, though she is
afraid, and thus it seems to be Rochester’s rejection that finally destroys her and
drives her into insanity. As Carole Angier states in her book on Jean Rhys, Rochester
could have loved Antoinette, but he let his fear and weakness control him (Angier
552). Furthermore, being a man and thus ‘the One’ in power, he uses this power to
crush Antoinette with his hate, to turn her into ‘the Other’.

Although the author does not make Rochester into a stereotypical villain, but rather
gives the readers a chance to feel sympathy also for him by telling the middle part of
the three-part novel from his point of view, he is still the typical male, conventional in
many ways. He has respect for traditional values such as property and personal
honour, and he is rational as opposed to Antoinette’s emotional nature. Indeed, in the
vast amount of imagery and symbolism in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester is compared
to the wind, to a hurricane that breaks the tree representing Antoinette (Angier 563).
More significantly, Antoinette calls Rochester ‘a Stone’ (Angier 563). Though
Antoinette has a chance to refuse the marriage, the society is pressuring her into
marrying. After the marriage ceremony she is basically at the mercy of her husband.
All of her inheritance and possessions belong to her husband, and she must obey him.
When he decides to go to England, she must follow. When the marriage starts to go
wrong, the old, wicked servant Christophine tells Antoinette to leave her husband, to
hide somewhere and later ask for a part of her money back. Christophine actually
speaks with a voice of a very independent woman. She says: ‘A man don’t treat you
good, pick up your skirt and walk out’ (Rhys 83). She also comments that marrying is
a foolish thing for a woman to do. She says that though she has children, she has had
no husband: ‘I keep my money. I don’t give it to no worthless man” (Rhys 83).
Antoinette, however, is not strong enough to leave Rochester, because she wants him
to love her. Even though she ends up passionately hating Rochester in the end for
discarding her, she still lets him control her and take her to England to live in
captivity in his house. She lets him kill her emotionally, without a visible fight. As
Angier states, ‘the cold and rational Englishman crushes the world of feeling – that is,
the world of the heroine – beneath his feet’ (Angier 558). Thus Antoinette exemplifies
the victim of male dominance and female subordination.

The Unexplored and Dark Continent of Femininity:

Hélène Cixous and the French Feminist Theory

Cixous’s Theory and the Elements of Ecriture Féminine in Wide Sargasso Sea

The novel Wide Sargasso Sea is filled with dreams and metaphors, with haunting and
inexplicable images. Considering the prophetic dreams and the intuitions of the
protagonist, as well as the allusions to voodoo magic and spirituality, it is evident that
the novel goes far beyond the surface of reality. The unconscious is very clearly
present in the novel, for Antoinette’s intuition and the strong feeling of destiny, of the

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inevitability of life, seem to control her. The marriage of Antoinette and Rochester is
doomed from the beginning, even though neither of them can consciously admit it. In
the terms of the French feminist Julia Kristeva, the ‘semiotic’ aspect – the anarchic,
the irrational, the unconscious stream of language that derives from the female body –
controls the novel, letting the female unconscious run free (Selden 142). The rational
and organised ‘symbolic’ aspect dominates in the real world – in the world governed
by the Law of the Father, where preset roles for men and women are waiting for them
when they enter language (Selden 141). The ‘symbolic’ aspect, where the male
language prevails, is hardly visible in Wide Sargasso Sea. Even the part of the story
that is told through Rochester’s eyes cannot sustain its rationality, but the mystical
‘semiotic’ stream eventually takes over, making the novel a strong example of
écriture feminine.

Hélène Cixous emphasises that by this act of creating their own transcendent and
poetic language that derives from the unconscious and irrational rather than from the
formal and rational conscious that controls men’s writing, women will break away
from the patriarchal tradition. The poetic language of Wide Sargasso Sea indeed
reflects the emotions of the protagonist, and the sexuality – even the violent side of it
– depicted in the novel was very daring and groundbreaking for a woman writer in the
1960s. Furthermore, Rhys presents the idea of a woman as an imprisoned victim
oppressed by the standards and ideals prevailing in the patriarchal, phallogocentric
society dominated by the male form of logos, language (Selden 139). Cixous writes in
her essay “Utopias” that ‘woman must write woman’ (Cixous 247), encounter and
embrace her gender and sexuality without being afraid or ashamed of it. In Wide
Sargasso Sea, Antoinette tries to repress her feelings and gives in to the silence. After
a futile attempt to explain her past, she says to her husband: ‘I wish to stay here in the
dark… where I belong’ (Rhys 105). Antoinette does not dare to leave the ‘Dark
Continent’, using Cixous’s term, by which she can only mean the female sexuality
and the feminine side that has been repressed. Cixous states that the continent is ‘still
unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be
explorable’ (255).

Cixous says of the silenced women: ‘Muffled throughout their history, they have lived
in dreams, in bodies (though muted), in silences, in aphonic revolts’ (Cixous 256).
Wide Sargasso Sea is filled with dreams, silence and shadows and emotional,
colourful language that bursts through the rational male voice. Antoinette begins her
story with the voice of a shy young girl, frightened of the world and frightened of
rejection, and her voice is then replaced and repressed by Rochester’s voice. He tells
the middle part of the story from the male point of view, but his voice is shaken and
towards the end it becomes more and more like Antoinette’s, unreal and confused,
poetic and dreamlike. At certain points Antoinette’s voice bursts through and disrupts
Rochester’s narration. As also Kathy Mezei states in her essay, Rochester loses
control of his narration, and Antoinette’s thoughts and words invade his mind and his
speech (Mezei 10). In the very end, Antoinette – now turned into Bertha – regains her
voice, though she has lost everything else – happiness, home and sanity.

Furthermore, Cixous sees femininity as something close to nature; écriture féminine is

to her ‘a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea
we feed’ (Cixous 260). Wide Sargasso Sea certainly offers plenty of nature imagery,

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all of which is associated with Antoinette; she feels at home among the colourful
nature of the island. She says:

The sky was dark blue through the dark green mango leaves, and I thought, ‘This is my place
and this is where I belong and this is where I wish to stay’. (Rhys 82)
Rochester, on the other hand, feels threatened by the untamed and colourful nature of
the island. He says: ‘I had reached the forest and you cannot mistake the forest. It is
hostile’ (Rhys 78), and he feels ‘lost and afraid among these enemy trees’ (Rhys 79).
At several points he makes known his unease and the feeling that he does not belong
there, among the forests and rivers and purple skies, but among the people in the
‘rational’ cities of England. To him the island seems like a dream, mysterious and
secretive. Antoinette is a part of nature, which seems to corroborate Cixous’s theory
of the woman as ‘the Dark Continent’ – dark and unexplored and thus threatening –
and of the feminine consciousness as in touch and as one with nature. Even the name
of the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, alludes to the ever-changing, deep and secretive part
of nature – the sea that separates Antoinette’s home island and England. Cixous
writes: ‘we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers,
children, waves… More or less wavily sea, earth, sky’ (Cixous 260), and Antoinette
indeed seems to be the sea – never belonging anywhere, but floating in between.
When they come to England, she believes that they got lost at sea and arrived
somewhere else. She says: ‘When I woke it was a different sea. Colder’ (144). She
has left behind her beautiful home island as well as the Sargasso Sea, with its purple
or green sunsets, and she feels lost.

All the elements of écriture féminine seem to be present in the novel: symbols of
female captivation and liberation – such as the looking glass – and the flamboyant
colours as well as the beautiful language. The language in Wide Sargasso Sea, just
like Cixous’s explosive language, is liberated and mesmerising, as women
themselves, for Antoinette mesmerises Rochester. Women and nature are depicted as
seductive, leading men to temptation, hypnotising them. Even Chistophine’s voice
hypnotises Rochester: ‘I thought, but could only listen, hypnotized, to her dark voice
coming from the darkness’ (Rhys 123). Cixous’s idea of women ‘flying in the
language and making it fly’ (Cixous 258) is apparent in the novel, for in her last
dream, Antoinette ‘walked as though I was flying’ (Rhys 150), and when she finally
jumps to her death in the dream, she felt that her hair ‘streamed out like wings’: ‘It
might bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones’ (Rhys 152). Of course,
the wind will not carry her and she will not be able to fly in reality, but is doomed to
be crushed by the hard stones that symbolise the patriarchy. In her dreams and in the
language, however, she always flies.

The line between dream and reality is a thin one in this novel. Antoinette does not
believe that anything but the beauty of the island is real: ‘How can rivers and
mountains and the sea be unreal?’ (Rhys 58). To her, England seems like a dream:
‘Yes a big city must be like a dream’ (Rhys 58), and when she is finally taken there, it
still seems unreal: ‘It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard’ (Rhys 144). Also
Rochester, to whom the beauty and mystery of the island of Jamaica seemed untrue, is
mesmerised by the nature: ‘Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest’s a
lie’ (Rhys 133). Rochester comes to his senses – the hate clears his head and leaves
him ‘sane’ (Rhys 136) – but he still acknowledges that Antoinette is a part of the
island, and that is why he fears and hates her: ‘she belonged to the magic and the

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loveliness’ (Rhys 136). Dreams are the place where Antoinette lives. Women and
nature are both connected to the mystery of life – ‘the secret’ that both frightens and
intrigues men, like Rochester, who thinks: ‘What I see is nothing – I want what it
hides – that is not nothing’ (Rhys 64).

The Power of the Female Sexuality: ‘I will write my name in fire red’

Sexuality plays an important role in the novel, as in all of Rhys’s work. Her writing
represents the period in feminism when ‘a new type of frankness about sexuality’
begins to show in women’s literature (Selden 136). The gynocritic Elaine Showalter
states that in Victorian times, ‘[s]exual appetite was considered one of the chief
symptoms of moral insanity in women’, and therefore she concludes that Bertha
Mason was seen as suffering from ‘moral madness’ (Olaussen 60). This was mostly
due to men’s desire to control and repress women’s sexuality. In Wide Sargasso Sea,
Rochester is clearly afraid of Antoinette’s sexuality, and her beauty both attracts and
repels him, because it is not the kind of beauty he is used to. In the beginning, when
they are riding together, he says: ‘Looking up smiling, she might have been any pretty
English girl’ (Rhys 50). This obviously pleases him, because he would prefer a
‘normal’ girl, feminine in a conservative way. When Antoinette becomes mad and
Rochester sees her for the first time, he ‘was too shocked to speak. He hair hung
uncombed and dull into her eyes which were inflamed and staring, her face was very
flushed and looked swollen’ (Rhys 114). Antoinette has become the opposite of the
pretty and normal English girl she could have been.

Cixous claims that men need to be afraid of women because it arouses them, and
therefore they associate ‘death and the feminine sex’ as ‘two unpresentable things’
(Cixous 255). Indeed, Rochester needs to hate Antoinette to gain his own sanity. It
could be argued that men need to associate women with death in order to control them
– they need to ‘kill’ them emotionally to suppress them, and that is what Rochester
does to Antoinette:

‘Die then! Die!’ I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow,
by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun
was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager
for what’s called loving as I was – more lost and drowned afterwards. (Rhys 68)

As the French feminists, Rhys resists the phallocentric ideal of female sexuality
(Selden 139) by describing Antoinette’s sexuality in a shockingly direct and, at times,
brutal manner. Angier points out Rhys’s idea about men and love: ‘men rob love with
sex’ (Angier 543). For men, sex equals love, and when Antoinette offers herself to
Rochester, he can only respond with sexual desire, which turns into hate. And for that
reason, emotionally he is ‘a Stone’. Antoinette is more passionate in every way, until
Rochester kills her emotionally and she becomes, as in voodoo or obeah, a living
dead.

Furthermore, the colours in the novel are extremely vivid and flamboyant, and they
seem to be linked to the female sexuality. The colour red is one of the strongest
metaphors in the novel – the colour of sexuality, passion, dreams, emotions, violence.
This suggests that even though Antoinette is extremely sensitive and though one
cannot see her battle on the outside, she is fighting on the inside. Cixous states that

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women’s fragility is ‘equal to their incomparable intensity’ (Cixous 256), which
certainly applies to Antoinette. She is extremely passionate, and there is a fire inside
of her that even captivity cannot extinguish. Even at the very end, her caretaker Grace
Poole says: ‘she hasn’t lost her spirit. She’s still fierce’ (Rhys 142). As a young girl in
the convent, Antoinette’s favourite colour was red: ‘I will write my name in fire red,
Antoinette Mason, née Cosway’ (Rhys 34). A powerful metaphor for sexuality is the
red dress that Antoinette herself loves, but which does not please Rochester,
undoubtedly because it emphasises her sexuality and passion, and – in Rochester’s
mind – makes her seem like a whore. Her love for the red dress, ‘the colour of fire and
sunset’ (Rhys 147), is perhaps her way to rebel: ‘I took the red dress down and put it
against myself. ‘Does it make me look untemperate and unchaste?’ I said.’ (148). The
colour red, inevitably linked with fire, makes passion seem dangerous, something to
be feared: ‘I looked at the red dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread
across the room’ (Rhys 149). Indeed, Rochester is sexually aroused when he sees
Antoinette in her white dress, because white traditionally symbolises virginity and
purity and because white women should, traditionally, be modest and chaste. His
passion and desire is aroused by the thought of an innocent, virginal woman – a
woman Antoinette in reality is not. Antoinette changes from the virginal bride
wearing a white dress into the ‘rejected scarlet woman’ in a red dress (Olaussen 67).

Angier emphasises the victimising of women through their sexuality; she says that the
passion of men such as Rochester is aroused by ‘passive innocent girls, whom they
can imagine, and then turn into, the sad victims of men’ (Angier 565). Rochester leads
Antoinette to be locked away in his house as she saw in her prophetic dream, and she
passively follows him in her white dress: ‘I follow him, sick with fear but I make no
effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse’ (Rhys 40). As
Cixous suggests, men have a need to own women, to keep them submissive and silent,
for otherwise they might fly away. Rochester wants to both possess and dominate
Antoinette: ‘I’ll take her in my arms, my lunactic. She’s mad but mine, mine’ (Rhys
131). The only way to do this is to crush her resistance, her hate. He says: ‘I saw the
hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty’ (Rhys 135).
Only by making Antoinette a victim, a powerless madwoman, can Rochester repress
his own fear for her beauty and sexuality.

Behind the Masks of the Angel and the Monster:

Gilbert and Gubar and the Anglo-American Point of View

The Face of the Monster: The Feared Double in the Looking-Glass

The ideas of Anglo-American feminist criticism can be seen behind the fluent,
transcendent, feminine style of the novel. Rhys’s effort to justify the madwoman and
to make people sympathise with her seems to be an attempt to break the division
between the female stereotypes ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ that the Anglo-American
feminist theorists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar depict in their book The
Madwoman in the Attic. Gilbert and Gubar attempt to prove that female writers seem
to conform to the standards and stereotypes set by male writers while simultaneously
subverting them, and thus trying to establish their literary authority (e.g. Gilbert and
Gubar 13, 72). Thus the characters in their novels may be seen, to some extent, as the
author’s own – even if monstrous – double (Gilbert and Gubar 78). Gilbert and Gubar
suggest that women need to ‘kill the “angel in the house”’ as well as the angel’s

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double, ‘the “monster” in the house’ (17) – the stereotypes that male authors have
assigned women. They go on to suggest that, in reality, female writers have rarely
done this, but rather see themselves ‘through a glass darkly’ (Gilbert and Gubar 17),
adopting the views and stereotypes men have created for them.
Gilbert and Gubar declare that women have often accepted the inferior position that
men have assigned to them in literature, or, refusing to do this, they have decided to
mimic men – to become more masculine and even assume a male identity in order to
be taken seriously (Gilbert and Gubar 72). However, Gilbert and Gubar see
‘submerged meanings’ (72) in the texts of these female authors, and they think it
possible that women authors use the male form as a disguise in order to fight against it
and to project their own ideas (73) – a concept dating as far back as to the Trojan war
and the infamous wooden horse. Thus, by pretending to be angels, the writers
simultaneously conform to and subvert the literary standards of the patriarchal society
and achieve literary autonomy (Gilbert and Gubar 73). In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys
redeems her monster. Antoinette seeks the love of a man but is betrayed, crushed,
which evokes the reader’s sympathy. Indeed, Rhys subverts the female roles by
turning the ‘monster’ – the ‘madwoman’ – into a sympathetic character. Perhaps the
part of a victim is only a disguise – perhaps Antoinette seems to submit to male
dominance, but really she is waiting for a chance to liberate herself. Though she
seems to perceive her fate as inevitable, gives in and dies emotionally, she never
becomes Bertha – at least not the perfect ‘angel’ that Rochester wants her to be. She
says: ‘Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling
me by another name’ (Rhys 115). Renaming her is one way in which Rochester exerts
his masculine power over his wife, but Antoinette only seems to submit to it. Her
struggle is on the inside, and instead of becoming ‘the pretty English girl’ Rochester
wishes her to be, she becomes someone else entirely – someone much like her mother
was, the madwoman who is not simply a victim but not really a monster either.

Gilbert and Gubar draw parallels between the character of Jane Eyre and the mad
Bertha in Brontë’s novel. They claim that Bertha is Jane’s ‘other’, her alter ego, who
realises Jane’s secret impulses. Jane is therefore ‘the angel’ and Bertha ‘the monster’,
which ‘echoes Jane’s own fear of being a monster’ (Gilbert an Gubar 362). According
to Gilbert and Gubar, women are afraid to look into the looking-class for fear of
seeing an image of what they really are, the monster. This also applies to Antoinette,
who in vain searches for her own image all her life, identifying with her mother and
her black childhood friend Tia, but never truly discovering her identity. In the end,
she is not Antoinette anymore, but nor is she Bertha; she does not know who she is,
for she says: ‘There is no looking-glass here [in the attic] and I don’t know what I am
like now’ (Rhys 143). Antoinette may or may not be Rhys’s own double, but is seems
plausible that, to some extent, Antoinette is the reflection Rhys saw when she looked
into the looking-glass.

The Madwoman in the Attic: Women Caged inside Male Texts

Gilbert and Gubar, as well as the French feminist Cixous, strongly emphasise the
importance of breaking free from the male text. Cixous writes: ‘I, too, have felt so full
of luminous torrents that I could burst’ (Cixous 246), encouraging women to write in
their own language, bursting through the male texts. Gilbert and Gubar write that
women themselves have ‘perhaps the power to reach toward the woman trapped on
the other side of the mirror/ text and help her to climb out’ (Gilbert and Gubar 16).

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Antoinette longs for freedom from the roles and ties that patriarchy imposes on her,
idealising and admiring the freedom of the black women. One of the most important
metaphors for freedom in Wide Sargasso Sea is the image of a woman as a caged
bird. Angier claims that the parrot Coco, who belonged to the family and died in the
fire when the black people burned Antoinette’s home at the beginning of the story,
represents an imprisoned soul, referring to Antoinette’s mother and also to Antoinette
(Angier 562). Because she was a white Creole woman of considerable fortune,
Antoinette had to marry to be socially acceptable, just like her mother had to marry
Mr Mason. Her true wish, however, was to be free. She had to conform to a life under
the domination of men, and finally the only way for Rochester to control her was to
destroy her. Similarly, Mr Mason had to cut Coco’s wings to control it, as Olaussen
points out (Olaussen 152).

Gilbert and Gubar write that in the nineteenth century ‘women were in some sense
imprisoned in men’s houses’ (83), and thus, symbolically, they were ‘locked into
male texts, texts from which they could escape only through ingenuity and
indirection’ (Gilbert and Gubar 83). When Antoinette – or now the mad Bertha – is
taken to England, she is held prisoner in the attic of Rochester’s house, like a bird in a
cage. Finally Coco died in the fire, at the same time saving the family from the black
people, who were frightened by the death of the bird since it is said to bring bad luck.
In the same way Antoinette finally dies in the fire, at least in her dream, for the actual
death occurs outside the novel in Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Setting the house on fire is
Antoinette’s last act of will, and by jumping off the roof she finally liberates herself
from the obeah state – the state of emotional death. And, ironically, her last act also
liberates Rochester, for now he is free to marry another woman and be happy.

Two Faces of the Medusa:

Comparing the French Feminist and the Anglo-American Approaches

As mentioned above, in addition to their similarities, there are significant differences

between Cixous’s French feminist approach and Gilbert’s and Gubar’s Anglo-
American approach, some of which I shall now investigate further.

Gilbert and Gubar perceive both stereotypes, the angel and the monster, as negative,
distorted images that should be killed. Whereas Cixous sees the Medusa-like, strong
and feminine character as nothing to be feared, Gilbert and Gubar see the ‘monster in
the house’ – or in the attic – as a horrid creature ‘whose Medusa-face also kills female
creativity’ (Gilbert and Gubar 17). Cixous, on the other hand, states that ‘[y]ou only
have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s
beautiful and she’s laughing’ (Cixous 255). Therefore it could be argued that the
French feminist theory sees Antoinette’s metamorphosis as taking over her own body
– as finally acknowledging her femininity. This interpretation can be supported by the
symbolism of the aforementioned white and red dresses, for example. Before,
Antoinette only wants to please Rochester and so she dresses in the white dress that
Rochester loves: ‘I’ll wear the dress you like tonight’, she says (Rhys 69). After her
transformation, she wants to wear her red dress, and it seems like one of the only
things that still matter to her: ‘But something you can touch and hold like my red
dress, that has a meaning’ (Rhys 147).

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In light of Cixous’s theory, one could argue that Antoinette’s madness is a rebellion
against the patriarchal repression and the male form of writing – and, before her
suicide, she destroys the prison that has held her captive by burning down the house;
an old, dignified English mansion representing the patriarchal tradition. In light of
Gilbert’s and Gubar’s theory, on the other hand, the transformation can be seen as
negative, as a sign of men’s victory over women rather than as a sign of female
liberation. Gilbert and Gubar write:

[T]his figure arises like a bad dream, bloody, envious, enraged, as if the very process of
writing had itself liberated a madwoman, a crazy and angry woman, from a silence in which
neither she nor her author can continue to acquiesce. (Gilbert and Gubar 77)

Both theories therefore see madness as a violent act of liberation, but Cixous’s theory
encourages this kind of violence, urging women to laugh like the Medusa, whereas
Gilbert and Gubar see it as negative but inevitable.

Furthermore, Cixous emphasises the difference between the rational male and the
irrational female, celebrating that distinction, whereas Gilbert and Gubar would prefer
to abolish the prejudices that the distinction summons. In the spirit of the French
feminists, Rhys indeed celebrates the female emotionality as a strength, but she also
acknowledges it as a weakness. She criticises the cold, rational male stereotype
incapable of real love and emotion. It could be argued that, at many points, Rhys
emphasises the difference between men and women instead of imposing equality.
Cixous says that ‘both sexes hesitate to admit or to deny outright the possibility of a
distinction between feminine and masculine writing’ (Cixous 253). As Cixous herself
sees the difference as positive, something to be celebrated, she rejects the neutral
‘bisexuality’ that many previous woman writers exhibit. A feminine type of writing
that Cixous favours in her theory is visible in Rhys’s poetic style that emphasises the
female experience as emotional and subjective. The irrational and the unconscious is
the source from which écriture féminine springs. Cixous states: ‘The unconscious,
that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive’
(Cixous 250). This ‘other country’ is a perfect place for ‘the Other’, but although
Cixous relishes in the fact that women live in the unconscious, that they make words
fly and the text erupt with their power and joy, she does nothing to eradicate the
notion of difference between men and women. Her language is powerful and
liberating, but she only emphasises the difference, and thus it can be argued that, to
certain extent, she ‘others’ the woman even further.

As opposed to Cixous’s theory, where the female body is the instrument for language
and life, it could be argued that in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette’s struggle happens
on the inside, and her body is only a shell, a disguise. Gilbert’s and Gubar’s theory
seems to abide here: the face of a victim is only a mask. A woman can surrender her
body to the man, and Antoinette can be seen as a captive of her body. Antoinette
becomes a marionette, without a will of her own. Christophine says to Rochester:

‘She tell me in the middle of all this you start calling her names. Marionette. Some word so.’
‘Yes, I remember, I did.’
(Marionette, Antoinette, Marionetta, Antoinetta) (Rhys 121)

Rochester renames her – he controls her body now, but not her spirit. Antoinette is
only a puppet, a doll: ‘The doll had a doll’s voice, a breathless but curiously

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indifferent voice’ (Rhys 135). This indicates also that men reduce women to objects in
order to control them, but inside the doll, underneath the disguise, there is still the
woman who would rather give up her body than her spirit.

There are many similarities between Cixous’s approach and that of Gilbert and Gubar,
for they both emphasise the liberation of the female voices living in captivity inside
the patriarchal text, but these two theories also contradict in many ways. Though the
fierce madwoman can be seen as a sympathetic character, breaking the boundaries
between ‘the angel’ and ‘the monster’ in light of Gilbert’s and Gubar’s theory, she is
still seen as a tragic victim. However, the distinctly emotional, feminine and dream-
like language and the emphasis on the difference between the cold, unfeeling and
rational male and the emotional and irrational female seem to relate the novel strongly
to the French feminist tradition and to Cixous’s theory that, though celebrating and
not striving to eliminate the difference between the sexes, advocates the ‘madness’ of
the text as an act of female independence.

Conclusion

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel of many dimensions. The fluent, poetic and
dream-like style and language and the imagery and symbolism in the novel emphasise
the victimisation and the emotional tumult of the protagonist. Through the
experiences of the protagonist, the novel expresses the victimisation and the
oppression of women in the patriarchal, or in French feminist terms, the
phallogocentric society. In the spirit of the French feminists, Cixous in particular,
Rhys’s language seems to derive from the unconscious, emotional and subjective – in
Julia Kristeva’s terms, the ‘semiotic’ – feminine experience of the writer, and
therefore it can be seen as an example of écriture feminine. In light of the Anglo-
American feminist theory it can be argued that Rhys also converts the traditional
stereotypes of women by making the reader sympathise with the emotional and sexual
madwoman. Sexual and emotional oppression seem to be the key ideas in the novel,
for Antoinette lets herself be victimised by the enemy, the man she was tricked into
marrying. In the end, however, after Rochester has drained her of all emotion, she
manages to break free from the suffering by making her last act of self-determination.
With this last step, Rhys turns her ‘madwoman’ into the symbol of female liberation.

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Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
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