Debunking Imperialist Discourses and Setting Up Resistance: Wide Sargasso Sea as a Reflexive Text of Englishness

In reading Jean Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea, many critics have focused on this novel's function as a critique of Jane Eyre's English imperialistic subjectivity by identifying what counter-discourses this novel delivers. This essay, however, attempts to read this novel not by identifying counter-discourses against English imperialism but by drawing attention to its process of debunking the falsity of supposedly universal gaze of English subjectivity toward colonial others. The difficulty of finding counter-discourses to imperialism in Wide Sargasso Sea derives mostly from the main character Antoinette's racial identity as white Creoles. The in-between position of white Creoles after the abolition of slavery in the West Indies determines the characterization of Antoinette as a precarious and unstable figure in historical terms. Besides, Rochester's gaze toward Antoinette, which ceaselessly mystifies her historically oriented presence, contributes to her isolation from the reality. That is, Antoinette's character is not able to form an effective site of resistance against imperialistic discourses. Rather, this essay argues that a site of resistance in Wide Sargasso Sea can be found only by debunking imperialist discourses embedded in Rochester's narrative that mystifies and thus exploits Antoinette's historical presence. Ironically, this work of debunking is triggered by Christophine, who is tacitly complicit with imperialistic projects as a black Creole, since she at least functioned as a catalyst by which imperialistic discourses revealed and thus de-mystified themselves even though she did not conduct an act of resistance herself. Indeed, Rhys's critical reconstruction of imperialistic English subjectivity through Rochester's narrative should be said to derive from her insightful recognition of the newly established Englishness in the post-colonial period of England.