From Speech to Silence: Christophine’s Reclaiming of “Otherness” in Wide Sargasso Sea Anonymous College

“How will you like being made exactly like other people?” is a question that echoes through Antoinette’s mind early within Jean Rhys’s responsive and revisionist text, Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys 22). Constructing her protagonist from Charlotte Brontë’s insane Bertha Mason, Rhys aims to write the history, the preface, of one of the most discussed feminist figures in the literary canon. Giving voice to the voiceless, Rhys reconsiders the circumstance that culminated in Bertha’s (here Antoinette’s) descent into madness. However, one character in particular—Antoinette’s former slave and surrogate guardian, Christophine—maintains a refusal to subscribe to this question of erased identity that shapes the novel. A character “embedded in multiple hierarchies” (Hai 494), Christophine defies the subordination and assimilation of other, more powerful characters within the text whose actions aim to reduce her to the demeaning role of “other.” While her race, color, and gender all leave her open to discrimination and marginalization typical for members of these social groups, she subtly undermines these stereotypes not through overt, activist proclamations but through her silence and exit from a novel dominated by two white narrators.

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