Racialized Sexuality in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

By Lucy Sandeen

Thesimilarities between Jane and Antoinette’s lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea lives are uncanny and no doubt intentional. In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys had the opportunity to construct an entirely new character for Brontë’s Bertha Rochester, a marginalized and demonized obstacle to Jane and Rochester’s marriage. Rhys chose to give Bertha (or Antoinette, as she is known in Wide Sargasso Sea) a life that parallels Jane’s in many ways but is influenced and shaped by her experiences with race in the Jamaican colony. Both girls find themselves without a family at a very young age. Jane and Antoinette are both rejected by the mother figures: Jane’s aunt shuns and ridicules her, and Antoinette was neglected by her mother, who always “...

pushed [her] away, not roughly, but calmly, coldly, without a word, as if she had decided once and for all that I was useless to her” (Rhys 18). Most notably in both books, Antoinette and Jane were both in love with Rochester. Their relationships with Rochester, however, are drastically different in the power dynamics within and the depth of the relationship. Jane’s is based in intellectual and emotional compatibility and affection. Antoinette’s, however, is based in sexual desire and one-sided affection. While Antoinette and Jane share many parallels, the differences in the nature of their relationships with Rochester are determined by their respective racialized sexuality.

Wide Sargasso Sea is told by the alternating perspectives of Antoinette and Rochester, and both narrations are flawed and skewed by the narrator, which results in a fog of ambiguity surrounding her history and specifically her race, both in her lineage and appearance. The only glimpses of her appearance are given through her comparisons to others and through Rochester’s constant questioning. At the boarding school, Antoinette’s race is questioned in an interaction with one of her peers:

‘Please, Hélène, tell me how you do your hair, because when I grow up I want mine to look like yours.’

‘It’s very easy. You comb it upwards, like this and then push it a little forward, like that, and then you pin it here and here. Never too many pins.’

‘Yes, but Hélène, mine does not look like yours, whatever I do.’

Her eyelashes flickered, she turned away, too polite to say the obvious thing.’ (Rhys 49)

Hair is one of the most obvious indicators of race, and one of the most stigmatized, and the fact that Antoinette’s hair is fundamentally different from Hélène’s and Hélène is “too polite to say the obvious thing” suggests that Antoinette is of mixed ancestry and that her hair reveals her ethnicity. Rochester, too, is critical of Antoinette’s appearance and questions her true descent:

[Antoinette has] long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either. And when did I begin to notice all this about my wife and

Antoinette? After we left Spanish Town I suppose. Or did I notice it before and refuse to admit what I saw? (Rhys 60)

Rochester’s insecurities about Antoinette color their relationship. His insecurity about her race—“Creole of pure English descent she may be, but [her eyes] are not English or European either”—and his belief that he has been deceived in marrying her ultimately doom their relationship. Antoinette’s mixed heritage is alluded to in Jane Eyre as well: Jane recounts her frightening experience with the “ghost” (Antoinette) in the night and refers to her “blackened inflation of the lineaments,” the “purple” hue of her complexion, and her “swelled and dark” lips—all characteristics that may be attributed to those of a person of color (Brontë 541).

Antoinette’s racial lineage is also ambiguous, and there’s question to whether or not she is actually her mother’s daughter; her mother undoubtedly loved her brother Pierre more than Antoinette and rejected her desperate pleas for affection. Antoinette’s father has also slept with other women and has children by different mothers. As a result, Antoinette has several half-siblings, many of whom are mixed-race. In general, the line between black and white in the colony is blurred. Racial castes are defined not by black and white but instead by European, White Creole, Black Creole, and Black. Antoinette’s family’s racial definitions are blurred as well, and Antoinette’s heritage is unknown, but her appearance reveals that she is mixed. In contrast, Jane Eyre is most definitely white—there is no question about her ancestry.

The differences in Antoinette and Jane’s ethnicities fundamentally alter the power dynamics and the nature of their relationships with Rochester. Although there are factors that set Jane and Rochester unequal in their relationship, these ultimately balance out and in the end; the two finish on relatively equal footing. They are only able to do so because of their one fundamental similarity: race. Antoinette, on the other hand, is in a perpetually subjugated position in her relationship with Rochester for numerous reasons, the most notable being race. The two are opposites: she is beautiful, he is not; he is wealthy, she is not; she is a mixed Creole

Jamaican girl, and he is from England. It takes time for the two to warm up to one another, but Rochester eventually gains Antoinette’s hard-earned trust:

She looked at me and I took her in my arms and kissed her.

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she said.

‘I’ll trust you if you’ll trust me. Is that a bargain? You will make me very unhappy if you send me away without telling me what I have done to displease you. I will go with a sad heart.’

‘Your sad heart,’ she said, and touched my face. I kissed her fervently, promising her peace, happiness, safety… (Rhys 71)

Rochester gains Antoinette’s trust by promising her what she’s longed for: security, happiness, love. And they do finally find some happiness together; Antoinette opens up to Rochester and fully trusts and loves him. She gives herself completely to him and tells him, “I never wished to live before I knew you.” (Rhys 83) Their relationship, however, is mostly sexual. Rochester exploits her love and betrays her trust. He makes her life miserable on the island and then locks her away in a room in England for ten years. Because of her race, their relationship is never equal; he always has the upper hand in their relationship.

The sexual nature of Jane and Antoinette’s relationships with Rochester are dramatically different solely because of race. Jane is very clearly white, and because of this, Rochester’s treatment of her is exceedingly romantic. He tells her,

I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you-especially when you are near to men, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. (Brontë 270)

His declarations of love are declarations of romance and completely lacking in sexual nature. He respects Jane as an intellectual being and his treatment of her in their relationship reflects that. Antoinette, on the other hand, is treated only as a sexual being. While Rochester may not immediately realize it, this treatment is solely because she is mixed. When Rochester speaks to Antoinette romantically, he admits it’s only so that he can sleep with her. He abuses her love for him and her trust of him for his sexual pleasure:

‘You are safe,’ I’d say. She’d liked that— to be told ‘you are safe.’ … As for the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. ...She was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did. (Rhys 84)

Antoinette is a “stranger to [him]” because they are two completely different people with different understandings of and places in the world. Because Antoinette is mixed, Rochester feels entitled to sex. While he never explicitly admits it, he relegates her to racial stereotypes of promiscuity that have long surrounded Black and mixed women and stem from the history of slavery. On slave plantations in the 19th Century, the rape of Black slave women was expected and criminally protected. Black women were often viewed as foreign, exotic, and not-quite-human sexual beings. Historian Elsa BarkleyBrown writes, “Throughout U.S. history Black women have been sexually stereotyped as immoral, insatiable, perverse; the initiators in all sexual contacts — abusive or otherwise” (Brown 305). Rochester subscribes to these stereotypes and describes Antoinette as a hyper-sexual creature. He claims, “She thirsts for anyone—not for me… She’ll loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter... She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would—or could” (Rhys 149). Rochester claims that Antoinette’s hyper-sexuality is because of her insanity, but he has in reality labeled her as insane in another indication of his differing treatment of her because of her race. He is terrified of the idea that he has crossed racial boundaries and has instead labeled her as insane. When he claims that she gives herself as “no sane woman would,” his definition for sanity is racialized and rooted in his fear. Christophine confirms this: “It is in your mind to pretend she is mad. I know it. The doctors say what you tell them to say” (Rhys 145). Rochester wants escape from his marriage to a mixed-race girl, but the only way he can accomplish this without revealing his condemning and humiliating secret is by deeming her insane. Because of her race and her perceived hyper-sexuality, Rochester is emboldened to sexually abuse her without consequences. Only Christophine finds out, and she confronts him: “I undress Antoinette so she can sleep cool and easy; it’s then I see you very rough with her eh?” (Rhys 137) While the difference in the two relationships could be attributed to the difference in Jane and Antoinette’s appearance—Jane is repeatedly described as plain while it is attested that Antoinette is exceedingly beautiful— Rochester does not base his relationships off of appearance. He chooses Jane over Ingram Blanche, who is described as beautiful, and he does not accept Antoinette’s beauty solely because of her ethnic ambiguity: “The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet…” (Rhys 64). He hesitates in acknowledging her beauty because she is not the “pretty English girl” he wishes she could be (Rhys 64).

Rochester treats Jane tenderly, romantically, and their relationship begins intellectually and ends with the two on largely equal standing. Antoinette is sexually used and abused and manipulated, then Rochester calls her mad, uses her sexuality as proof, and locks her up. He uses her as a sexual being and then stereotypes and shames her because of it—because she’s mixed. Her sexuality is no different than his, but she is not white and he is, and because of it, she is automatically promiscuous and therefore does not garner the same emotional and intellectual engagement and the same respect and love and that Jane does. Because she is mixed, she is doomed to a life of sexual abuse and neglect and darkness until she finally frees herself from her prison in Rochester’s attic.

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 3rd ed., Smith, Cornhill, 1847. Brown, Elsa B. “’What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 305, doi:10.2307/3178230.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. W.W. Norton & Company, 1966.

By Quinn Christensen

I feel you breathe for me.

All silver and sharp towers, catching glimpses of each building’s belly button as they reachreachreach towards endless blue.

I have fallen in love before, but you came as the biggest surprise. Because somehow, somehow all this silver comes with the gold of the prairiesSomehow this is still my Midwest.

I am unsettled

By how easily I might call you homeI never thought I’d dare to leave a piece of myself so close to the house I grew up in.

When my grandfather used to ask me every Thanksgiving if I had a boyfriend yet I always told him that I refused to fall in love with anything short of an adventure.

So Chicago, you midwestern masterpiece, you have made me wonder: if ours is the romance I choose will I have run away at all?

Zelle “Untitled”