In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is very clear from early on that race is going to be a big topic looked at in the book. The Emancipation Act was only recently passed, and the Cosway family has not received the compensation that they were due from losing their slaves. With old Cosway dead, the rest of the family is left in financial ruin, and this is something noted by many people around the Coulibri estate. The Cosways are thrown into the lowest socioeconomic class until Annette remarries a rich Englishman. But they are one of the most hated families in the area; ex-slaves still hold resentment for being held as slaves, but also for old Cosway's explorations into slave women. The upper class now dislikes them because they don't like that someone from outside their class was brought into it. So, Cosways probably won't have an easy time making friends with anyone.
Something that really struck me about the situation that the Cosway family was in was the term "white [n-word]." I think this is very interesting because the ex-slaves see people like the Cosways as even lower than they were. Tia explains this quite well when she and Antoinette are ending their friendship: "Real white people. they got gold money...Old time white people nothing but white [n-word] now, and black [n-word] better than white [n-word]." Because the Cosways have fallen out of the upper class, Tia and her friends and family see them as the lowest of the low. The Cosways are social and economic outcasts, there seems to be no place for them anywhere. The upper class made of stuffy old white people don't want contamination from the lower classes and the lower class made of ex-slaves don't want anything to do with white ex-slave owners.
The Cosway family doesn't experience much trouble that comes from outside of these issues. Pierre dies because a drunken mob of ex-slaves. These ex-slaves, for reasons not totally known had decided to make an attack on the Cosway family and estate, first setting fire to the room where the already weak Pierre was sleeping, causing the entire house to burn down, and then attacking the fleeing Cosways. Antoinette, during this scene has a sense of the reason they are being attacked. She knows that everyone hates their family, and this is why she runs to Tia with the hope of being let into their family. She wants to escape hers so that she can have friends and be liked and no longer attacked. But we know how that turns out. Tia has been indoctrinated into the ideas that white people are evil and poor white people are the absolute worst, and so she throws the stone at Antoinette, rejecting Antoinette completely from her life.
Antoinette was born into a very unfortunate situation where, if this were the Indian caste system, she would be an "untouchable" even though her family was previously well enough off. She has no chance of making friends due to the passing down of hatred from parent to child. The only place that seems fit for her is the convent where she is only thrown because her family is all dead or gone away.
The fact that Antonoinette is at a disadvantaged position, from the beginning, does seem like an important theme (so far) in Wide Sargasso Sea. You bring up the passing on of malevolence towards Annette to Antoinette, which seems significant among the other ways the Cosway family has dropped in reputation. These other ways include the examples of how both the upper, and ex-slave classes alienate Antoinette and her Mother (as well as Christophine, because of how imposing she can be.)
ReplyDeleteThe use of the n-word in part one struck me as different as well. In the context they use it, it seems as if they use it more to describe one's socioeconomic status rather than their race, as they still specify black and white. I can see how poor white people would be seen as the lowest caste, because they are considered "untouchable" (like you said) by both white and black people. Other poor people hate them for subjecting them to years of slavery, while rich people don't want to associate with them because they are an embarrassment, having an unprofessional father and losing their fortune. I'm curious to see how Antoinette handles the outside world after being isolated her entire childhood and sheltered in a convent for her teenage years, especially since her stepfather is looking to marry her off.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is a really interesting dynamic that you point out, that somehow the Cosways are not only not part of the higher status that the British whites are granted, they are in some ways even lower than the ex-slaves, because there is no place for them. In the environment, neither the richer whites nor the ex-slaves want to associate with the Cosways, leaving them in the precarious position of being stranded and isolated. They have enough going on that neither group will accept them, and so even though they may be slightly better of economically than the ex-slaves, they are in a worse place overall because they lack a community or anything resembling support outside of Antoinette's family.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is very interesting that the sense of white privilege is completely lost without a strong economic background. The Emancipation Act brings a sense of confidence it seems, to the ex-slaves, who are eager to oppress the whites who had caused them so much misery. They are indeed successful in this venture as they manage to alienate the Cosways completely. Tia, a young girl, even buys into this idea whole-heartedly, possibly implicating that she is part of the new generation which will solidify this new social hierarchy.
ReplyDeleteGiven her extensively damaged view of societal interaction at this point, it makes me wonder how much of a recovery Antoinette will be able to make in upper-class society if she goes back to England with her husband. She already strikes Mr. Rochester as especially dark, morbid, frail, and unaware of the world as a whole. The inauthentic friendships among the upper class centered around politesse and her purely physical relationship with her husband seems to indicate that she will not ultimately find the fulfilling friendships that she lacked as a child.
ReplyDeleteAs we enter part two, the reasons for the hatred towards the Cosways seems to only accumulate, after reading the letter from one of Cosway's bastards where he warns Rochester about the inherited madness. The jury is out for me as to whether or not the Cosways deserve it -- at what point have they paid enough for being slaveowners? I certainly sympathize with the black Jamaicans and understand their vitriol, but I'm a little more fed up with the other "elites" of white Jamaican society.
ReplyDeleteThere's an irony in the appropriation of the n-word by black Jamaicans to denounce the recently fallen "old time white people"--and, as usual, this irony has nothing to do with anything that Antoinette could help, just something she's born into. But the white creoles have made so much of their wealth as "evidence" of their alleged racial superiority, there's an undeniable logic in Antoinette's paraphrase of how her family is viewed: if their superiority resided in their wealth, once they lose their wealth, that status goes with it. They are no longer "real white people"--a definition of "real" that Antoinette's ancestors played a direct role in establishing.
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