Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys takes place after the Emancipation Act of 1833. This act was created to free all of the slaves in Jamaica during this time. The freeing of these slaves leads to interesting dynamics and relationships between the whites, the blacks, and the creoles of Jamaica. These relationships influence the construction of the Jamaican society during the 19th century. Wide Sargasso Sea reveals to us a hierarchical structure in Jamaica due to race. This hierarchical structure is essentially how much white blood people contain. The purer you are on either spectrum, be that black or white, the more respect you obtain from either side. This hierarchy has been a part of the Jamaican society for generations. Not only is the society influenced by race but also by gender. Gender’s roll in this society is that women are traded for currency and property, which is done through marriage. These marriages are meant to connect families and are nothing more then contracts. Women at this point in time have their marriages arranged by strong male figures in their family.
Wide Sargasso Sea illustrates to us this hierarchical system of society multiple times throughout the novel. The characters that Jean Rhys uses for this are Annette and her daughter Antoinette, two creole women post emancipation. Annette and Antoinette own an ex-slave plantation, this in addition to being creole leads to great mistreatment and discrimination by their newly named servants. A scene from the novel which perfectly represents the discrimination creole people of Jamaica experienced is, when Antoinette tells the reader how the blacks of Jamaica felt about her mother and her:
“I never looked at any strange negro. They hated us. They called us white cockroaches. Let sleeping dogs lie. One day a little girl followed me singing, “Go away white cockroach, go away, go away.” (I.1.3.2)
The servants and blacks of Jamaica both call Antoinette and Annette “white cockroaches”. This name is meant to show that while their appearance might be that of a white European they are not truly white because they will always be a “cockroach” or black on the inside.
This quote from Wide Sargasso Sea can be related to a passage from the reading The Island Race by Kathleen Wilson. In this passage Kathleen talks about the importance of being truly white in Jamaica in the 18th century. A quote describing the conditions in which someone can be named white is:
“English rights an liberties belong to English, or British, subjects, “born of British parents” or sufficiently removed from miscegenated roots to be seen as white and Christian; to be “called English” meant to be “free from all taint of the Negroe race.””(148)
The excerpt from the chapter The Black Widow shows us that the importance of being able to call yourself white in Jamaica has be of great for generations. People who could not call themselves white didn’t have the same rights as a pure white person at this time. This continues over into the time of Wide Sargasso Sea after emancipation because people who are not fully white or black are still mistreated due to not being either, being seen as not pure by the whites and traitors by the blacks of Jamaica.
Discrimination due to race isn’t the only hardship Antoinette has to deal with over the course of her life, she also must deal with being a woman in 19th century Jamaica. In Antoinette’s later years in the novel she is married off to a European man who is not named but is implied to be Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. This marriage is cultivated by Antoinette’s step fathers son Richard Mason. Richard all of Antoinette’s inheritance and pays him to marry her. Antoinette has no choice in this marriage and is treated harshly by the man leading to her eventual decent into madness. This shows us what gender meant in Jamaica at this time. It means that if you were a woman you were to be sold off in order to make the men of the families richer in property, money, and stance.