Unsettling Black Servitude in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

It would be impossible to tell the story of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea without its Black servant characters, yet these characters have historically figured very little in existing scholarship on the novel. Self-consciously written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Wide Sargasso Sea is populated with servants whose movements, laughter, and behavior both unsettle and compel the cautious scrutiny of the novel’s white narrators. While Christophine—one of the novel’s most prominent servant figures—certainly stands out as a servant to both the narrators and readers of Wide Sargasso Sea, I hope in my paper to complicate readings of the character by considering how she functions in a relational context with the novel’s other figures of Black servitude which, in turn, I argue, enables investigation into the ways in which Wide Sargasso Sea represents relations of servitude in the first years of Emancipation. In this way, paying attention to the array of servant figures surrounding Rhys’s white narrators, I argue, dilates an understanding of Wide Sargasso Sea beyond simply, or merely, a reinterpretation of Jane Eyre from the perspective of its villainized madwoman in the attic; it also reveals the novel to be both a story about what happened in the Caribbean after the British Empire abolished slavery, and a record of imperial and colonial subjects affectively reorienting themselves within a disintegrating hegemonic order.