Abstract
Since the novel’s publication, coinciding with both feminism and 1960s “free love,” it has been surprising how little attention has been paid to the sexuality of Antoinette and Amélie (to say nothing of Jane Eyre, of course, lurking in the background), other than in Sue Thomas’s The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Sexuality is in itself a many layered “text,” often more performance than disclosure. This chapter “reads” three eras of sexual “revolution” relevant to thinking about the novel: the world of the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, the worlds of Paris and London in the first half of the twentieth century and the world in which we live now (part materialist Tinder and Bumble, part renascent right-wing phobia about sexual, racial and class “transgressions”).
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to remember that re-naming is a key part of colonialism—whether of places or people being claimed by a colonizing power. Rhys’s strategy of denying a name to the husband who himself changes the name of his wife without her desire or permission, from Antoinette to Bertha (the latter being the name of the imprisoned wife in Jane Eyre.).
- 2.
Rhys’s dating of the novel’s action is specific. In a letter (August 22, 1962), she says the time of the fire is “1839,” when the “white creole girl” is about 14 (Letters). Though emancipation was made legal in 1833, it became fully implemented only in 1838. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, so it was written in the immediate period after slavery was ended in British territories. Rhys wrote in a letter (February 5, 1959) that she had read Jane Eyre “too much” and had to discard “all” she had written at that point, because it was a “bad imitation” (Letters 161). In both novels, the shadow of the slave plantation is cast over all characters.
- 3.
Carole Angier specifically links the unnamed husband to Rhys’s lover, Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, citing both the husband’s account of his ability to hide his feelings after instruction to do so as a young child, and Rhys’s view that Lancelot’s feelings battled with his upbringing (65).
- 4.
Apart from long known slave money funding for such revered institutions as Oxford University and for aristocratic mansions such as Harewood House in Yorkshire, recent historical research has uncovered the devastating truth about the huge extent to which money was made by slave-ownership in Britain, which Catherine Hall and her team of scholars describe as being hidden from view by “strategies of euphemism and evasion” (2014, 1). Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park was begun in 1811, just four years after abolition of the slave trade, and well before slavery was abolished in British colonies. In the novel (whose title likely signals the name of the judge, Lord Mansfield, in the Zong case), Austen’s representation of the male patriarch, Thomas Bertram, makes clear his dual roles as head of an English household and owner of a slave plantation in the Caribbean. Austen admitted Thomas Clarkson, the indefatigable fighter for Abolition.
- 5.
I recognize that using the term “queer” in this context might not sit well with everyone. I understand that to generalize its usage away from the LGBT community could cause some concern, but it is used with great respect, for the important frame it can give to a subversive effect of Rhys’s writing.
- 6.
For example, this form of behavior was illustrated in the October 2018 confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanagh on his way to a seat on the Supreme Court.
- 7.
Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma. Andrea Stuart represents Napoleon as being very distressed at separating from Joséphine, at least while he was in her presence, but he went ahead with the divorce, remarriage and he got his male heir.
- 8.
Kimmel argues that though feminists often argue that men feel powerful, men actually feel powerless as individuals even though their gender holds power collectively. This makes them angry (39–40). Kimmel says only a tiny proportion of men believe they are powerful (41).
- 9.
Thistlewood was 29 when he arrived in Jamaica in 1750. At the time, Jamaica was “the most productive of the British slave-plantation, sugar-producing colonies in the West Indies” (Hall, xix). A bitter irony is that Thistlewood’s diary is an important source of names for enslaved people on his plantation, because such information, “by daily record over thirty-six years” is rare (Hall xxi).
- 10.
Thomas Thistlewood’s papers are now available in the Beineke Library at Yale in digital form. Hall only quotes from the diary, as does Burnard.
- 11.
Punishment was designed to terrorize because as Burnard says, whites “were in an extremely precarious situation in mid-eighteenth century Jamaica. … Africans outnumbered Europeans by a ratio of 9 to 1, and slave revolts and Maroon attacks were common” (138).
- 12.
In Richardson’s 1740 novel, of course, virtuous Pamela, by holding out against her employer’s advances, secures marriage to him and a good life.
- 13.
This managed duels and was forbidden in 18 states of the United States by 1859. It died out in the north first. It was a way for men to settle serious disputes, usually ending in the wounding or death of one. It did require a certain recklessness or courage.
- 14.
In his journal he claims he was “worn down” with fatigue and “anxious cares” and on the night he is accused of molesting one of his nieces, he was “almost literally incapable of sexual connection” (Bleser 172).
- 15.
Edward Said’s well-known essay “Jane Austen and Empire” actually loosely connects Mansfield Park and Wide Sargasso Sea, but seems so vague as to be unhelpful in doing so. Said says Austen’s novel prefigures “later English history as registered in fiction,” among which are “these distant but convenient treasure spots” in novels such as Wide Sargasso Sea (93). Said seems to have barely comprehended Rhys’s novel, which was not written just to provide “local metropolitan benefit” but as a counter to a novel in the English canon, a challenge to British (local metropolitan) readers.
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Savory, E. (2020). The Lineaments of Life and Death: Desire, Sexuality and Manhood in Wide Sargasso Sea. In: Savory, E., Johnson, E.L. (eds) Wide Sargasso Sea at 50. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_12
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