Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel that focuses on the construction of gender and race in Jamaica. The novel expresses how race determined your social class and role in society. Antoinette and her family are Creoles and slave owners, and that causes the blacks to resent them, even after the Emancipation Act was passed. The whites don’t accept them either because they’re Creoles and not fully white. In Trevor Bernard’s Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, he says, “Whites were in an extremely precarious situation in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica. On the one hand, they had established an awesomely productive economy in which they made enormous profits. On the other hand, they made these profits within a highly distorted social structure that included a mass of exploited, brutalized, and resentful slaves.” This claim supports Rhys’ ideas expressed in her novel. Antoinette is taunted and harassed by a girl of color, Tia. She calls her a white cockroach and tells her to go away and that nobody wants her and her family around. Her and her family are not accepted by the society at all.
Bernard also states, “Jamaica whites’ fear of a slave revolt is palpable in the complaints they made to imperial authorities about the danger they were in, the draconian laws they passed to keep their servile population in check, and the grandiose, expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful schemes they hatched to increase white settlement in the island”. In another scene early on in the novel, Annette feared of the blacks rebelling against her family. This was a constant fear of hers. She knew they were not wanted in the neighborhood, and therefore she asked to move to England. Mr. Mason thinks she’s overreacting. Annette tells him, “They are more alive than you are, lazy or not, and they can be dangerous and cruel for reasons you wouldn’t understand.” (page 29). They did resent the whites, and eventually, the blacks do act violently, burning down their house.
Gender played a role in society in Jamaica as well in the 1840s. Women during this time depended on men in terms of money and protection. Women were the caregivers and men owned property and slaves. Annette married Mr. Mason who was wealthy, and he took care of her and her family. Antoinette later marries Rochester for similar reasons, but later realizes she is trapped in this horrible marriage. But nonetheless, she must stay because of societal norms.