The culture of Death and Magic in Jamaica was prevalent throughout its history and well supported with evidence in instances within Jean Rhys’ novel. The notion of death is first shown when the protagonist Annette experiences it first hand as a lot of her loved ones including her mother, her Aunt Cora, and Mr. Mason leave her throughout the novel. Death is personalized to Antoinette at an early age. The death of her horse foreshadows all the deaths Antoinette would have to endure, while also alluding to an evil undercurrent that hovers over the setting of the story. Death also had a slight connection to ‘zombies’ in the novel. ‘Zombies’ were not much talked about in the book, but It was alluded to when Christophine would share his supernatural tales that involved voodoo legends with Antoinette. Antoinette became fascinated with this whole idea of death and the supernatural that she eventually believed her late mother had become a ‘zombie’, or in turn, a body without a soul.
The notion of magic was also displayed because of Christophine’s obsession with supernatural and voodoo legends that eventually entered Antoinette’s mind throughout the novel, shown by her beliefs and ideas of her mother being ‘alive’ in a body with no soul. Clearly, being able to walk and follow orders without no soul alludes to all ideas of magic in the first place. Though her idea of her mother in the form of a ‘zombie’ was not the only supernatural thing she contemplates, it was also displayed when her mother’s parrot burned alive in front of her along with their house burning down. She believed that the death of the parrot would trigger a string of bad luck since she also thought it was bad luck to watch a parrot die.
The culture of death and magic in Jamaica is shown not only in the novel but also in secondary sources such as Vincent Brown’s “The Reaper’s Garden.” Within the reading, death is shown in a way of producing fear instead. Slaves of the colony were designated ‘demonstrations’ to other slaves by being hung to death to instill fear into the hearts of the watchers so they can have a response of obedience and respect (page 130). Moments like these allude to why Jamaica was “The Reaper’s Garden”, as death was a common thing to come by for many slaves. So common that 1,099 slaves lost their lives before the emancipation Act of 1833 (Surviving Slavery). That amount of number of lives were lost because of the harsh treatment of slaves and because of a product of instilling fear.
Though “Wide Sargasso Sea” had its characters not die because of harsh treatment and them being slaves, it did show to how Antoinette saw her loved ones die and how her mother came back in the form of a ‘zombie’. There is much resemblance to this idea of magic because many people believed that Slaves were basically zombies, since they only followed orders and nothing else just how a zombie would act. The novel and the culture in Jamaica come full circle as both, magic and death, are what slaves had to deal with when facing harsh treatment and orders as if they were magically made ‘zombies’, and dying as a result of what they had went throu