The purpose of this paper is to examine how Antoinette, a white Creole woman in Jamaica, recovers her own identity in Jean Rhys''s Wide Sargasso Sea. This paper draws on Julia Kristeva''s theory of abject, which means the being on the boundary, to examine Antoinette''s racial ambiguity between the white and the black.
Antoinette is called a “white cockroach”or a “white nigger”by the black people after the Emancipation Proclamation in Jamaica. In order to acquire her social identity as a white, Antoinette marries Rochester, an English gentleman from the mainland of the British Empire. Rochester is a representative of the nineteenth-century male-dominant European ideology which places the white male atop of the gender hierarchy. From Rochester’s point of view, Antoinette is not an English like him but an incomprehensible “abject”and belongs to “the semiotic chora”which, according to Kristeva, deconstructs racism, imperialism, and patriarchy that Rochester as an Imperial British represents. Therefore, to maintain his superior position to Antoinette as a white British gentleman, Rochester stipulates that Antoinette is a drunken lunatic who has gone her mother''s way, and renames her as Bertha and then as Marionette which means a puppet. Eventually Rochester regards Antoinette as the other and deprives her of her own identity by confining her in the attic of Thornfield in England.
However, through Antoinette, Rhys shows that the symbolic order can be vulnerable by the semiotic elements. It is because the symbolic order is maintained by law and order which are based on an acute dichotomy, but the being on the boundary like Antoinette can interfere with the law and order and eventually put the symbolic order in a perilous state. Therefore, in part Ⅱ of the novel, Rochester becomes confused about her and threatened to lose the power as a white male from the mainland to control the Jamaican black community, its nature, and Antoinette, too, all of which are regarded by him as others and belong to the semiotic chora. Besides, his logical narrative style becomes disjointed and fragmented, and he starts to mimic a black female voice like a parrot. By describing Rochester''s vulnerability, Rhys seems to suggest that the European patriarchal system can be vulnerable as well under the influence of the semiotic elements.
In this novel, Antoinette has three dreams that seem to predict her tragic destiny and in which she is repressed by an English man. In the first and second dreams, Antoinette follows a man who will be her husband, despite being desperate and terrified, without stout resistance. However, in the third dream, she finally tries to overcome her fright and to fight against her fate by setting fire to the Thornfield which is owned by Rochester and in which she is confined. She also rejects the name‘Bertha’which Rochester gave to her, by jumping down from the attic of the Thornfield when he calls her by that name. In this third dream, Antoinette fulfills Kristeva''s “herethics,”which means to embrace heterogeneity and to bind the subject and the other by combining the dichotomous concepts with the conjunction “and”: civilization/nature, white/black, male/female, the subject/the other, and so on. Antoinette can recover her racial identity by giving up being accepted by either the white or the black and by admitting herself as a “being on the boundary.” Through Antoinette''s quest for her identity, Rhys seems to suggest the possibility of embracing diversity by deconstructing the binary logic in race and gender.