Charting the Empty Spaces of Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea"

Abstract

The idea of woman as alien in a patriarchal culture has now become widely accepted within the women's movement. In her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys addresses this alienation by representing patriarchy as women's Sargasso Sea: like the apparently navigable but in fact treacherous ocean, patriarchy's surface offers inviting opportunities, but its real substance chokes all progress. The women's movement at present charts two courses through this sea: one travels the mainstream of economic and social realities; the other maintains secret, marginal routes from which it subverts those realities via guerrilla attack. Wide Sargasso Sea shows both of these strategies, assimilating and remaining marginal, in action; it indicates that assimilating is not only disastrous as a personal strategy, but invalid or at least incomplete as a means of interpreting any experience, including that of reading a novel.