Wide Sargasso Se The Intersection Of English And British...

Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea centers on the intersection of English and British colonial cultures through the union of Rochester and Antoinette Cosway. Rochester represents patriarchal and imperialist Victorian values, which Mary Lou Emery suggests thrive in part on â€Å"distinctions between...legitimate and illegitimate sexuality, madness and reason, primitive and civilized behavior, [and] fiction and fact† (428). Antoinette threatens these supposedly objective distinctions in her emotional (â€Å"‘Afraid of what?’...‘Of nothing, of everything!’† (Rhys 45)) and intellectual (â€Å"‘Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now.’† (Rhys 39)) uncertainty, which reflect the ambivalence of colonial, specifically black, culture towards English reason and fact. Antoinette’s most glaring dualities, however, appear in her subversion of racial and sexual conventions, and Rochest er ultimately perceives her as mad because these ambiguous identities confuse the essentialist binary systems that patriarchal and imperialist ideologies derive from, and with them his understanding of reality. The most obvious binary in Wide Sargasso Sea is the black/white racial binary. Imperialism holds race to be one-dimensional and static, and distinguishes only between two racial groups: white English colonists and black former slaves. This simplistic racial dichotomy cannot account for the multi-faceted reality of race in the West Indies, however, and is problematized when