Transcultural Motherhood in “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys and “Annie John” by Jamaica Kincaid

In the world today, the question of cultural identity is becoming increasingly hard to answer. As globalization occurs and cultures intermingle, the notion of firm borders between cultures begins to falter, and in its place come concepts of hybridity (Welsch 198), entanglement (Nutall 17), transculturality (Welsch 194), and so on. But even before this modern era of globalization, there was a significant amount of cultural intermingling as observed during the era of colonialism. Works of postcolonial literature provide a means to observe and negotiate with such conceptions of culture, as many novels explore characters, or societies on a larger scale, who develop a notion of identity rooted in the coalescence of multiple cultural identities. For example, the novels Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid provide insight into the complex transcultural identities developed in two colonized Caribbean islands, Jamaica and Antigua. Specifically, both novels focus on the developing identities of two young girls, Antoinette and Annie John, as they come to terms with the multitude of cultural influences at play in their societies and within themselves. Additionally, a key aspect of both texts is the relationship between mother and daughter, a relationship which I believe may have a significant connection to transcultural identity development. This paper is an attempt to dive deeper into this relationship, and explore the connection between motherhood and identity. Specifically, I aim to answer the following question: how is the mother figure constructed as a source of an entangled transcultural identity in Jean Wide Sargasso Sea and Annie John?

My analysis will begin with a short discussion about transculturality, so as to establish my theoretical framework and clarify the relationship between transculturality, entanglement and the role of the mother in postcolonial fiction. Following this will be an analysis of both novels, focusing primarily on the ways that mother figures instill aspects of both Western and indigenous culture into the lives of Antoinette and Annie that ultimately impact the characters’ identity formation. This analysis will also shed light on the ways identity is perceived within the individual as well as by outsiders.

Transculturality and Motherhood 

In order to analyze the emergence of transcultural identities within the selected works of postcolonial fiction, the concept of transculturality must first be addressed. A concept “appropriate to most cultures today” (Welsch 194), transculturality challenges the notion of single cultures, which Wolfgang Welsch describes to be unifactory, folk-bound and separatory – three factors that are seemingly “untenable” in today’s world (195). Transculturality also challenges concepts such as interculturality and multiculturality, which both reaffirm a notion of cultures as islands defined by “homogeneity and separateness” (Welsch 197). In contrast, transculturality, a “consequence of the inner differentiation and complexity of modern cultures” (Welsch 197), pursues ideas of permeations, mixing and entanglement. Sarah Nuttall defines entanglement as “a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with; it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored or uninvited” (1). Looking at transculturality as a form of entanglement draws attention to “sites and spaces in which what was once thought of as separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways” (Nutall 20). Transculturality within identity as a site of entanglement will be the main focus of this paper.

Wolfgang Welsch argues that transculturality can take place on two levels – the macro and the micro. Macro-level transculturality deals with the entanglement of cultures on a larger scale. Welsch sites the development of a European or global identity as an example of transculturality on the macro-level (197). Alternatively, transculturality on the micro-level focuses on the individual, evaluating the ways in which every person is a unique “cultural hybrid” (Welsch 198). In the following analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea and Annie John, I will focus on transculturality at its micro-level, as my intention is to evaluate the individual characters of Antoinette and Annie John and the ways in which their identities develop throughout the course of both novels.

Another important aspect of my analysis of the aforementioned novels is the concept of motherhood, or the mother figure. The way that gender, and particularly the gendered figure of the mother, is represented in postcolonial fiction can be interpreted as an example of transcultural negotiation, as different culturally-tied conceptions of gender and its associated roles may become entangled and debated through works of literature. Andrea O’Reilly explains that many postcolonial literary works “seek to contest European stereotypes of the indigenous woman or mother and counter with their own portrayals” (1004-1005). Liz Gunner insists that this is particularly the case when it comes to postcolonial women writers,  who have “often produced startling and dissonant accounts of themselves” in attempts to to challenge culturally and nationally tied “female iconographies” (136). In my analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea and Annie John, I hope to evaluate how female characters, with a particular focus on mothers, are constructed as embodiments – and eventually sources – of transcultural identity and ways of thinking. 

Wide Sargasso Sea 

The Dominican-British author Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, coming as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The novel follows the life of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole living in Jamaica shortly after the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. The story begins with Antoinette as a young girl, and follows her life as she grows up, marries, makes her way across the Atlantic to England against her own will, and eventually descends into madness. Antoinette eventually becomes Bertha, the madwoman and “transnational secret” (Clingman 140) encountered in Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

In his book The Grammar of Identity, Stephen Clingman provides an analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea that focuses on its role as a tale of navigation, both in the literal sense, and in relation to conceptions of identity and belonging. Clingman places navigation at the core of postcolonial and transnational fiction. Wide Sargasso Sea itself is “an act of translation” and “form of textual navigation” (Clingman 146), as it ties together Brontë’s novel with Rhys’ new postcolonial and feminist interpretation. The novel explores the dynamic between adjacency and exclusion, and the ways in which these concepts can become entangled within the identity of a single person. The opening lines of the novel establish Antoinette’s state of entangled identity: “they say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks” (Rhys 5). While discussing entangled identities, Clingman draws parallels between Rhys’ own life and that of Antoinette. Just as “Rhys was the non-Creole in Dominica, the monstrous Creole in England” (Clingman 139), Antoinette is portrayed as being too white for the native Jamaicans, and too Creole for the British. Transculturality and the question of belonging thus form the very core of Antoinette’s identity. In Clingman’s words, Antoinette is “almost the same, but not quite” (149). While Antoinette’s complex, entangled transcultural identity can be gathered from even just the first two sentences of the novel, the question of its origins remain. I argue that the mother figures in this novel, namely Annette and Christophine, may prove to be the answers to this question of origination. 

Antoinette has very little say over the identity people assign to her throughout the novel, largely because of the big reputation of her mother, Annette. At the beginning of the novel, we discover that Annette is a very closed-off figure, both from the society of the Jamaican elite, but also from her daughter, who she constantly pushes away, “not roughly but calmly, coldly, without a word” (Rhys 7). Mourning the death of the late Mr. Cosway and the life that she once had as a wealthy slave owner, Annette is a character entrenched in the cruel past of slave-owning and English power. Lacking motherly love, Antoinette finds comfort in other people, one of which is her friend Tia, the daughter of a servant in the Coulibri Estate, Antoinette’s home. When Annette remarries the wealthy Englishman Mr. Mason, her affinity to the Western world of the colonizer is affirmed. Following their marriage, Annette and Mr. Mason have the Coulibri Estate restored to the grand state it was in the years when they owned slaves. In doing so, Annette places Antoinette into an environment shrouded in Western influence, furthering the distance between Antoinette and the Jamaican culture and places she has become accustomed to. 

The rejuvenation of the Estate only worsens Annette’s reputation in the eyes of the emancipated slaves, who attack the house and burn it down. This attack ends with Tia throwing a rock at Antoinette’s face, symbolizing a break in the connection Antoinette has with the Jamaican people. The attack on Coulibri sends Annette into a bout of madness, from which we find that she never recovers. During this time, the relationship between Annette and Antoinette only worsens, and Annette begins to see her own daughter as nothing more than trouble (Rhys 26). Despite this degradation of the mother-daughter relationship, Annette’s reputation as a cruel madwoman follows Antoinette for the remainder of the book, as people begin to say to her “Look the crazy girl, you crazy like your mother” (Rhys 27). Annette’s madness becomes a defining part of Antoinette’s identity in the eyes of outsiders. Nobody sees Antoinette as a truly Creole woman, capable of getting along with those in Jamaican society. Instead, she is only seen as an outsider haunted by the shadow of her mother, a woman who the Jamaican people associated purely with the slave-owning Western world.

Unlike Annette, the servant Christophine represents Antoinette’s connection to indigenous culture. Christophine, a woman originally from Martinique, served as a motherly figure throughout all of Antoinette’s life, and during the novel she appears as a figure keeping Antoinette connected to her Creole identity. Even as Antoinette marries the Englishman Mr. Rochester and begins integrating more into a world of Western traditions, Christophine stays with Antoinette and remains as a figure rooting her to an indigenous past. This is primarily exhibited through Christophine’s knowledge of obeah, a Caribbean tradition of magic. When Antoinette feels that her marriage to Mr. Rochester is failing, she begs Christophine for an obeah potion to help solve her problems. Antoinette turns to indigenous tradition to help her in moments of crisis, reflecting a part of her that still feels connected to her Creole identity.

By outsiders, Antoinette is assigned the identity of her mother, the raving madwoman who refused to accept that the past world of slave-owning and complete European control was gone. However, behind closed doors, Antoinette’s identity is heavily influenced by the presence of the servant and mother-figure Christophine, who serves as a constant reminder of her Creole identity. Just as Annette sporadically draws Western influence into Antoinette’s life, Christophine remains a constant source of Caribbean influence. As such, these two mother figures significantly shape the identity that Antoinette develops throughout the novel, culminating in a rich transcultural identity that ultimately ostracizes Antoinette from both the Caribbean and Western worlds. 

Annie John

Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John follows the life of the titular character from the ages of ten to seventeen, with a particular focus on the relationship between Annie and her mother, Mrs. John. The story takes place in Antigua in the 1950s, meaning that the island still remained under British colonial rule. Kincaid herself was born and raised in Antigua, and – similar to the case of Jean Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea – many similarities can be drawn between the author and the characters in her story. However, while many of Kincaid’s most well known works, such as A Small Place, are nonfiction accounts of her life, Annie John is a fictional tale about a young girl growing up and finding her identity. Throughout the seven years of Annie’s life that Kincaid covers in the novel, I argue that Mrs. John serves as the ultimate source of the transcultural identity Annie exhibits by the end of the novel.

Unlike Wide Sargasso Sea, this novel begins with a very loving and close relationship between the mother and daughter. They would do many activities together, such as bathing, running errands, and cooking. Annie wanted to wear the exact same clothes as her mother and spend all her time “trailing in her footsteps” (Kincaid 27). For all of Annie’s life as a small child, Annie understands her identity to be an exact copy of her mother’s. Yet, this begins to change as Annie gets older, and is told by her mother that she “cannot go around the rest of your life looking like a little me” (Kincaid 26). However, despite Mrs. John no longer being the prime example of the person Annie wants to be, she still has a great influence over the identity Annie is to develop as she grows.

The society Kincaid writes about in Annie John is structured around the constant ringing of the “Anglican church bell” (13). The bell brought by the colonizers determines when Annie’s father must go to work, when Annie must go to school, and so on. Similar to the Anglican bell at the center of their society, Mrs. John builds much of Annie’s life around aspects of Western culture. In fact, Kincaid characterizes Mrs. John as viewing her colonizers in quite a positive light; her single issue with the English is the fact that “they didn’t wash often enough, or wash properly when they finally did” (Kincaid 36). When Annie was a child, Mrs. John encouraged her to go play games with the kids in her neighborhood, one of which was “discovering Africa”, where Annie and her friends would pretend to be the “savage tribes that tried to get in the way of the discovery” (Kincaid 96). When Annie was a bit older, Mrs. John enrolled her in a school with an English curriculum and a staff of all English teachers. Annie excels in this school, learning about a range of subjects from Latin to arithmetic to French. At one point, Annie’s academic performance results in her becoming prefect and winning a prize, “a copy of a book called Roman Britain” (Kincaid 73). Through Annie’s education, pushed for by Mrs. John, she becomes entrenched in aspects of Western culture and forms of thinking. 

There are a few moments where it becomes evident that Mrs. John’s positive attitude towards the Western world has shaped Annie’s identity. For example, when Annie and Mrs. John get into an argument, Annie daydreams about running away, deciding that the safest place for her to go would be Belgium. This suggests that Annie no longer associates Antigua or other islands in the Caribbean with a feeling of safety, but instead, through the education and beliefs placed upon her by her mother, she sees a European nation like Belgium as a safe haven. In a potential reference to Wide Sargasso Sea, Kincaid adds that Annie particularly likes Belgium because Charlotte Brontë, “the author of my favorite novel, Jane Eyre” (92), occasionally spent time there. 

Even though Mrs. John pushes many aspects of Western culture on to Annie, she does preserve a few aspects of her own traditional Antiguan culture. Similar to Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea, Mrs. John is a believer in obeah, and throughout the novel she occasionally submits Annie to certain obeah rituals. For instance, at the end of the novel Annie suddenly falls ill. At first, Mrs. John brings Annie to an English doctor, Dr. Stephens, who failed to find a reason for Annie’s sickness. As a result, Mrs. John calls for Ma Jolie, a woman from Dominica, to use her knowledge of obeah to cure Annie. Ma Jolie cleanses Annie’s room of bad spirits and provides Mrs. John with traditional medicines. Kincaid describes how both the prescriptions from Dr. Stephens and Ma Jolie end up on a shelf in the medicine cabinet together (Kincaid 118), perhaps a metaphor for the entangled, transcultural approach Mrs. John takes towards caring for Annie. 

The novel ends with Annie John on board a ship leaving the dock in Antigua. Annie, now seventeen years old, has decided to leave her home island to pursue an education as a nurse in England. The final chapter details her last hours in Antigua, as she says goodbye to the people and places she has known all her life. Annie reflects on the words “I shall never see this again” (Kincaid 145), first finding joy in the knowledge that she is going to the land whose culture has defined much of her life. This joy was then followed by sadness that comes with parting from her home, family, and indigenous culture. I argue that this divided reaction to leaving Antigua shows that Annie has developed a transcultural identity, wherein she truly feels rooted in both the Antiguan and English cultures. This entangled identity comes directly as a result of her mother’s insistence on engaging with English tradition and education, alongside the traditions indigenous to Antigua and the Caribbean.

Conclusion 

When considering the overall plots of both Wide Sargasso Sea and Annie John, many similarities may be pointed out. Both novels follow a young girl as she grows up and learns more about identity and the place she is from. Furthermore, Antoinette and Annie both end up in England by the end of their respective novels – although this occurs through very different means, as Antoinette is brought against her will, while Annie chooses to go to England for school. Ultimately, the most significant similarity between these two novels is the role that mothers, or mother figures, play in the creation of the transcultural identities of their daughters. The cultural identities of Annette, Christophine and Mrs. John ultimately shape the identities they pass on to or encourage in their daughters. However, the methods through which identity is created differ greatly between the novels. In Wide Sargasso Sea, a large portion of Antoinette’s identity is explicitly assigned to her by outsiders, who view her the same way they view her mother. Despite the connections to indigenous culture she maintains due to the presence of Christophine and knowledge of Caribbean traditions, in the eyes of the emancipated slaves, Antoinette’s identity is nothing more than a copy of her mother’s: a madwoman from the world of the colonizer. This essentially becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as by the end of the novel Antoinette, like her mother, has lost her mind. In contrast, the transcultural identity construction we see in Annie John occurs much more implicitly, as Mrs. John introduces aspects of both English and Antiguan cultures into Annie’s life. Just as she is a product of an English education, Annie also benefits from and learns about Antiguan tradition. Mrs. John never tells Annie who she is, but her actions ultimately determine the relationship Annie has with Antigua and England, which results in a rich, transcultural identity.

Although through different methods, the mother figures in both Wide Sargasso Sea and Annie John encourage their daughters to develop culturally-entangled identities. Interestingly, while this results in Antoinette feeling like an outsider from both Jamaica and England, Annie’s identity comes across as very securely rooted in the cultures of Antigua and England. As such, we have here two very interesting, and very different, portrayals of the relationship between transcultural identity and inclusion/exclusion. This relationship between transcultural identity and feelings of inclusion/exclusion may prove to be a promising area of future study in postcolonial literature.

Bibliography

Clingman, Stephen. The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford University Press, 2012. 

Gunner, Liz. “Mothers, Daughters and Madness in Works by Four Women Writers: Bessie Head, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Ama Ata Aidoo.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 14, 1994, pp. 136–151., doi:10.2307/521769. 

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. 

Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. Wits University Press, 2009. 

O'Reilly, Andrea. Encyclopedia of Motherhood. SAGE Publications, 2010. 

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Penguin Classics, 2016. 
Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, 1999, pp. 194–213., doi:10.4135/9781446218723.n11.