Isolation and Alienation in Wide Sargasso Sea

How does isolation and alienation affect the characters in WSS?

Ambivalent racial and cultural identity – Antoinette [tone, diction]

Madness – Antoinette, Annette [narrative style, stream of consciousness]

Aggression, threatened – Rochester, Daniel Cosway [tone, diction]

Isolation and alienation affect the characters in WSS by causing Antoinette’s racial and cultural identity to become ambivalent, and also driving them closer to the brink of madness, as seen in the case of both Antoinette and Annette.

As Antoinette is marginalized by both the whites and the blacks, she is regarded as a double outsider, causing her ambivalent racial and cultural identity, as seen in the tone and diction used. Antoinette tells Rochester about how she has “heard English women call [them] white niggers”, and that “[she] often wonders about who [she is] and where is [her] country and where [does she] belong and why [she] was ever born at all”. Here, the syntax and listing convey a sense of displacement and confusion, which is an effect of Antoinette’s marginalization and her indeterminate identity. Antoinette’s tone is also one of desperation, which suggests her yearning to belong and reflects her lack of acceptance to either community. This is also echoed by Christophine, who states that Antoinette “is not beke like [Rochester], but she is beke, and not like us either”, suggesting that Antoinette is constantly trapped in an ambivalent and indeterminate region due to the alienation she experiences from both the blacks and the whites. Consequently, Antoinette is continually subjected to the framing and definition of both races. This is evident by how she tells Rochester that Annette saw that she was “growing up like a white nigger”, where her use of the word “white nigger” shows how she has internalized the views of other people, reflecting her confused cultural identity. Therefore, isolation and alienation cause Antoinette to develop an ambivalent cultural and racial...