Home in Wide Sargasso Sea

The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like sunset and I knew that I would never see Coulibri again (Rhys 27).

While Post-Colonial literature frequently deals with issues of occupation, violence, and displacement, it is uncommon that the genre shows concerned for the displaced colonists who were no longer welcome in the lands of their birth and had never called Europe home. Jean Rhys fits this description, having came from a slave-owning family in Dominica who left due to social tension. Similarly, her character Antoinette Cosway is driven out of her home by violence from black Jamaicans due to circumstances wholly unrelated to Antoinette. Wide Sargasso Sea is a useful novel for discussing the sense of belonging which white Creoles were unable to find as the classic system of colonialism was being deconstructed.

The first section of the novel functions to give the character background of Antoinette's family before she meets Mr. Rochester. A defining feature of this background is the outcast place that white Creole's fill in West Indian society following the emancipation of the slaves. In the essay "Modernist Crosscurrents" the author Mary Emery mentions a line in one of Rhys' novels which has been used in collections of West Caribbean literature, the narrator in Good Morning, Midnight states, "I have no pride - no name, no face, no country. I don't belong anywhere" (qtd Emery 167). This lack of face and country is caused by the nature of the West Indies, being a society where the natives were decimated which was repopulated by European immigrants and African slaves. As such, these nations represented a full fledged fusion of African traditions and Europe laws and technology creating a brand new society. As Emery describes the situation, "Rhys' novels portray an absence rather than loss of identity and the homelessness of one who never had a home" (Emery 167). These quotations perfectly describe the situation of Antoinette, who grew up as a hated but powerful minority in a land still controlled by the English but primarily populated with former slaves.

The violent expulsion of the Cosways from their ancestral plantation is shown early in the novel as a traumatic event which marks the symbolic end of the Cosway family. Antoinette wakes up at night to find a mob of black West Indians outside of her family home yelling out the phrase "white nigger" and proceeding to set the house on fire. The trauma of this event is describe in detail, especially the death of her younger brother, "there was another smell, of burned hair, and I looked and my mother was in the room carrying Pierre...I thought, Pierre is dead. He looked dead" (Rhys 23). It is Mr. Mason's decision that it would be safe to stay in Coulibri, leading to the death of Pierre which ultimately led his wife to hate him. Antoinette tries to explain to Mr. Rochester the sheer cruelty which caused her mother to go insane, including the poisoning of her horse (79). Like her daughter, Mrs. Mason does not know what to do when expelled from her home which was previously a sort of island paradise.

The worst part of the trauma for Antoinette, apart from losing her home, is the realization that she will never be accepted in West Indian society. During the riot outside of her home Antoinette sees her best friend Tia, and imagines, "I will live with Tia and I will be like her" (27). As she is thinking this Tia throws a stone at her face, which causes her a serious injury. After waking up from this traumatic injury Antoinette is homeless literally and figuratively, with her house having been burnt down and herself being violently rejected by West Indian society.

European colonizers have recently been looked at as historical victimizers. In reality, many colonizers began poor and went to the New World seeking a fortune. By the time of decolonization, many of these families had been in the far reaches of European empires for generations, and many (such as Antoinette or Rhys before moving to England) had never been to Europe. Like Afro-Caribs, Creoles did not have a home besides the West Indies; unlike Afro-Caribs, society following decolonization was not a society which Creoles were welcome in. Instead, colonists in areas which were not primarily white ultimately fled their homelands and spent the rest of their lives in exile. Unfortunately for these exiles, there are not many places like the West Indies.

Emery, Mary L. "Modernist Crosscurrents." Wide Sargasso Sea. By Jean Rhys, Judith L.

Raiskin, and Charlotte Brontë. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. 161-73. Print.
Rhys, Jean, Judith L. Raiskin, and Charlotte Brontë. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print.