The Politics of Gender, Class, and Race in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

The issues of gender, class, and race informed modern social as well as literary discourse and along with two world wars provide a backdrop and a context for Rhys’s fictive narratives. In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys exposes and indicts the operations of colonialism and decolonization. She looks closely at the lives of Creole women, both black and white, to determine the politics that account for their economic and psychological alienation. She illustrates the political construction and limits of the categories of race and gender and the overlapping oppressions that occur within them. She also examines the construction of the “proper subject,” the new white English settlers who begin building a new empire on the back of the old one by positing themselves as both innocent and entitled. By all accounts, Wide Sargasso Sea serves as a model and a guide for investigating the crisscross oppressions and intersections of race, gender, and class which are three visible intermeshing forces that result in and depend on the colonial vision of alienation and othering.