"About a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all" Antionette moves constantly between identities and the novel's dominant pattern enlists Antionette into identifications with a range of black others, whether they be Tia, Christophine or the other slaves who destroy Coulibri. Such identifications are integral and can be argued. Wide Sargasso Sea releases Antionette from the Anglo centric feminism of Jane Eyre. Rhys's reclamation of the voice of the white Creole women
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I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass.(WSS,24) Antionette has suffered in fact a fate comparable with the black Creole one, her reaction to her captivity is the typical slave retaliation in the firing of the great house. Antionette's red dress provides a striking and supremely important contrast to the black dress of the earlier Rhys's heroines. Black there represented the ideal of male European taste. She wore black. Men delighted in that sable colour or lack of colour. The women believed that the black dress provided mask, protecting them from the critical observation of others, and it was also frequently seen as a potential which might ward off evil. But the black dress ultimately provides the women with the darker identity she seeks either. Her skin remains insistently pale, and the black dress only mirrors the cold, sad, northern world; it cannot invoke the warm happiness of a steamy one
I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass.(WSS,24) Antionette has suffered in fact a fate comparable with the black Creole one, her reaction to her captivity is the typical slave retaliation in the firing of the great house. Antionette's red dress provides a striking and supremely important contrast to the black dress of the earlier Rhys's heroines. Black there represented the ideal of male European taste. She wore black. Men delighted in that sable colour or lack of colour. The women believed that the black dress provided mask, protecting them from the critical observation of others, and it was also frequently seen as a potential which might ward off evil. But the black dress ultimately provides the women with the darker identity she seeks either. Her skin remains insistently pale, and the black dress only mirrors the cold, sad, northern world; it cannot invoke the warm happiness of a steamy one