Small Axe

Race, Creole, and National Identities

in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and
Phillips’s Cambridge
Vivian Nun Halloran

As postmodern historical novels dramatizing slavery and its legacy in the anglophone Carib-
bean islands, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1993)
problematize Englishness as a national and cultural identity that may or may not be dependent
upon race and also reject the Creole as an identity subordinate in status to that of European.¹
By questioning the prevailing nineteenth century assumption of an inherent relationship link-
ing the observable geographical boundaries of a state and the essential character of its national
culture, Cambridge destabilizes Englishness as a homogeneous racial signifier for whiteness
in its depiction of London as a bustling metropolis with a small but visible population of
Black Britons, while Wide Sargasso Sea portrays Creole Jamaican society, black and white, at a
moment of crisis, on the eve of the arrival of the first wave of indentured servants from India.²
Both novels suggest that social demarcations between English and Creole cultural identities
are artificial because they ultimately depend on chance—on the geographical accident of a
given person’s or character’s place of birth. However, neither text denies the historical racial and
social hierarchies enforced by English planters and civil servants in the West Indian colonies

1. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966; reprint New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1982) and Caryl Phillips, Cambridge
(New York: Vintage, 1993).
2. For more information on indentured servants in Jamaica, consult William A. Green, “The West Indian and
Indentured Labour Migration—The Jamaican Experience” in Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834–1920,
ed. Kay Saunders (London: Croon Helm Ltd., 1984), 1–41, or Verene Shepherd, “The Dynamics of Afro-Jamaican-
East Indian Relations in Jamaica, 1845–1945: A Preliminary Analysis,” Caribbean Quarterly 32, no. 3–4 (1986):
14–26.

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as rhetorical tools to carry out the work of empire building. Rhys’s and Phillips’s anachro-
nistic portrayals of four characters facing cultural identity crises—Antoinette and Mannie in
Wide Sargasso Sea and Emily Cartwright and the slave who calls himself David Henderson
in Cambridge—are postmodern in their insistence on both the status of the individual as a
more important social agent than the community, and also on the very impossibility of the
individual’s existence as a unified subject. Through the performative utterances of racial others,
by name calling or insults, these four characters are transformed from plantation owners and
slaves, to “white niggers” and “black Englishmen,” respectively.
Through these four temporary transformations, Wide Sargasso Sea and Cambridge suggest
that the myth of an identifiable, unified national character evident in terms such as English-
man and Creole is based as much on socially codified patterns of behavior as it is upon a
person’s inherent physical and/or racial attributes. Although both Wide Sargasso Sea and Cam-
bridge criticize the racial essentialism and nativism that marked England’s actual involvement
in the slave trade and plantation economies in the West Indian colonies after emancipation,
the depictions in the novels of these four failed performances of transcultural identity acknowl-
edge the historically insurmountable power of European whiteness as a hegemonic ideal of
racial purity. Wide Sargasso Sea and Cambridge depict instances in which specific characters
use insults or name calling to cross socioeconomic boundaries and occupy the social role typi-
cally associated with a specific racially homogenous group to which they do not belong—poor
blacks or wealthy whites or both. As insults, the terms “white nigger” and “black Englishman”
rely on their apparent status as oxymorons, or juxtaposition of opposites, for their particular
sting. The double nature of the insults highlights the tension created by the coexistence of
two diametrically opposed values (whiteness—niggerness, blackness—Englishness) as much
as the semantic and ideological gulf separating one from the other. However, if these were not
plausible categories to contemplate within the respective Caribbean societies of Cambridge
and Wide Sargasso Sea, the shame associated with them would be lost. Precisely because the
novels themselves imagine “black Englishmen” and “white niggers” as viable though admit-
tedly marginal cultural identities in nineteenth century England and the Caribbean, Phillips’s
and Rhys’s texts can be read as postmodern, postcolonial critiques of the exclusionary rhetoric
of contemporary English nationalism and Caribbean Creoleness.
Wide Sargasso Sea and Cambridge both describe sociocultural transformation with respect
to the same two categories, “white niggers” and “black Englishmen”; however, Rhys’s novel
portrays this crossing as a rhetorical exercise in reconfiguring black-white relations in the
wake of emancipation and the pending arrival of yet another group of exploited laborers from
outside the Caribbean, while Phillips considers the matter strictly one of individual choice.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Afro-Caribbean characters are the only ones who use the terms “white

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nigger” and “black Englishman” as insults that convey the Jamaican black Creole community’s
disapproval of a given character’s behavior. These public instances of performative name calling
constitute what I call the racial abject, a term that designates the visual spectacle of humili-
ation and shame occasioned by a person’s skin color as it functions to signify both race and
poverty. The racial abject depends on the rhetorical focus of the audience’s gaze on the object’s
unmediated skin color to give rise to feelings of revulsion.³ The four metamorphoses in the
novels could be read as examples of the kind of literary minstrelsy Susan Gubar examines in
an American context in Racechanges because they seem to function as instances of “the travers-
ing of race boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability,
white posing as black or black passing as white, pan racial mutuality.”⁴ However, given the
limited scope of the performances of the transformations under discussion—whether as insults
or as self-designations—none of them fit the rubric for the large-scale spectacle of entertain-
ment that Gubar considers. Since the characters’ physical appearances never undergo any
demonstrable, outward alteration in either novel, the transformations in question constitute
transcultural, rather than racechange performances. Antoinette, Mannie, David Henderson,
and Emily Cartwright declare themselves to be, or live as, either “black Englishmen” or “white
niggers” only within a private realm of discourse or experience, away from the public eye. Thus,
the cross-racial performance of white characters who claim or are assigned the social role of
“niggers” and black characters who see themselves or are considered “Englishmen” in Wide
Sargasso Sea and Cambridge neither confirm the predominant social stereotypes at work in the
respective nineteenth century societies they depict, nor do they overtly challenge commonly
held assumptions about racial purity.
Law professor Randall Kennedy argues that the term “nigger” can be, and frequently is,
applied across racial boundaries in his controversial treatise, Nigger: The Strange Career of a
Troublesome Word (2002):
Generally a reference to people of color, particularly blacks, nigger can refer to people of any hue.
. . . But more and more the word is being applied ecumenically. Sociologist John Hartigan reports
that poor whites in Detroit often refer to their white neighbors as niggers. Typically they mean the
word as an insult. But they do not necessarily mean for it to be a racial insult.⁵

3. My thoughts on the racial abject as a category were inspired by my reading of Leonard Cassuto’s The Inhuman Race:
The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Cassuto’s
discussion of the visual and rhetorical exaggeration of African and Native American body parts and/or behavior
made me think of the effect of such depictions on readers, which eventually led me to the abject.
4. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5.
5. Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 43. Also see
John Hartigan, Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1999).

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As Kennedy points out in Hartigan’s work, the rhetoric of racial prejudice is sometimes
deployed to ostracize those people of low socioeconomic status. While Kennedy’s provocative
etymological history is strictly American in scope, textual instances where the term “nigger”
functions as the rhetorical signifier of the poverty and loss of cultural capital of white Creole
inhabitants of the Caribbean islands are not unheard of. In his 1962 travelogue, The Middle
Passage, Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul recalls seeing “little groups of ‘poor whites,’ English, Irish,
French and even Germans” during his Caribbean travels. He deems them to have suffered a
great cultural loss because, “they have forgotten who they are.”⁶ Naipaul quotes Patrick Leigh
Fermor’s pseudo-anthropological travel narrative of the Caribbean basin, The Traveller’s Tree,
in support of his assessment. Fermor had already used the same cross-racial juxtaposition
of terms to describe a group of “Breton poor whites” whom he considers the “degraded”
inhabitants of The Isles of the Saints (or Les Saintes—Terre de haut and Terre de bas):
The remarkable thing about them is that they have turned themselves into Negroes in all but
colour, and if all races of the Caribbean sea were to be repatriated to their countries of origin, the
Santois would now feel more at home in the African jungle than in Brittany. They have long ago
forgotten the French language, and speak nothing but the Afro-Gaulish patois of the Negroes, and
are more inexpert in correct French and more illiterate than the humblest black inhabitants of the
Guadeloupean savannahs.⁷

Rather than repudiate this madcap repatriation scheme as a racist exercise in ethnic cleansing,
Naipaul complacently echoes his own dismay at the white Santois’ apparent fall from social or
cultural grace or both. Regardless, both Naipaul’s Middle Passage and Fermor’s The Traveller’s
Tree attest to the dismissive social attitude in the Caribbean that equates black skin with
poverty or lack of economic resources, but reserves the lowest possible social status for white
people who lack culture and education, as well as money. Fermor’s characterization of these
Creolized inhabitants of a francophone island, although it dates about a hundred years after
emancipation in the British West Indies, still resonates with the same paternalistic racism that
fuels the disdain of the white, Jamaican planter society elite and the black Jamaican Creole
community who act as the arbiters of good taste and high society in Wide Sargasso Sea.
In her first-person narrative, Antoinette recalls being aware of the racial tensions between
black ex-slaves and white ex-slave owners as a child, but even as she reports hearing a “strange
negro,” a little girl with no claims to friendship call her a “white cockroach,” she does not
seem affected by the insult precisely because it is impersonal.⁸ When her only playmate, the

6. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (1962; New York: Vintage, 1981), 204.
7. Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree: Island Hopping in the Caribbean in the Nineteen Forties, (quoted in
Naipaul, Middle Passage, 204)
8. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 23.

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Jamaican-born ex-slave Tia, questions the adequateness of Antoinette’s performance of white

identity on the island, she experiences a moment of what Du Bois calls, “double conscious-
ness,” by being simultaneously aware of how (racial) Others view her negatively only because of
the color of her skin, while also maintaining her own sense of herself.⁹ Antoinette’s experience
of double consciousness, however, is not an epiphany; it does not prompt her to stop using
racial stereotypes when addressing herself to those she considers inferiors. Momentarily switch-
ing the narrative focal point, Antoinette verbally parrots Tia in a performance of Jamaican
black Creole identity as she recounts the day her friend calls her a “white nigger.” Tia’s role in
this exchange is primarily that of a spokesperson for the black Jamaican Creole society. Her
insult is not gratuitous but, rather, is prompted by Antoinette’s initial, racist name calling.
Hearing herself addressed as a “cheating nigger,” Tia responds bitingly:
That’s not what she hear, she said. She hear all we poor like beggar. We ate salt fish—no money
for fresh fish. That old house so leaky, you run with calabash to catch water when it rain. Plenty
white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They didn’t look at us, nobody
see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger
better than white nigger.¹⁰

By not quoting her playmate directly, but rather repeating her words in third-person narra-
tion, Antoinette demonstrates that she has internalized and accepted her friend’s criticism
and reported gossip even as the parroting itself constitutes a double performance of the racial
abject through both utterance and mimicry. Although the “nigger” invective each little girl
uses is the same, it plays a different rhetorical role within each argument. Antoinette uses it
as a synonym for blackness and a sign of Tia’s moral inferiority. She accuses Tia of cheating
because she changes the rules on their underwater somersault contest after the fact to suit
her own interests. Tia, however, changes the noun’s discursive function. When she uses it,
the word’s meaning does not inherently denote a specific racial profile nor describe a moral
flaw but, rather, it signifies poverty. As such, this newly minted economic indicator demands
a racial modification in order to fully convey the degradation it implies. For Tia, Antoinette
is a “nigger” because her family cannot properly perform its whiteness through the display of
wealth typical of other members of the ruling white planter class in Jamaica. When Tia insults
Antoinette, she does so to convey her friend’s loss of class prestige, her fall from “Old time
white people” to “white nigger” at the same time that she celebrates her own class stability as
a “black nigger” whose material circumstances have not deteriorated as a result of emancipa-
tion. This vitriolic exchange finally ends when Tia switches dresses with Antoinette to visually

9. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994).

10. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 24.

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symbolize how their respective classes and racial groups have traded places or undergone social
transformation.
Antoinette recognizes and negotiates racial difference by playing with a “nigger,” some-
one whom she considers racially inferior to her, thereby leaving herself open to the charge
of guilt by association. She never defends herself against the accusation of being a “white
nigger” because Antoinette knows that her own preference for playing outside and getting
dirty marks her as poor and degraded; it means that “what Tia said is true”.¹¹ Regardless of
her own embodiment of the racial abject, Antoinette believes that her mother’s social stand-
ing is more complex and less ambiguous than her own. From her daughter’s point of view,
Annette’s beauty spares her the shame of publicly admitting the loss of income and prestige for
which, as head of the household and widow of the plantation owner, Mr. Cosway, she would
have been directly responsible. Not having a dowry, Annette relies on her physical charm to
land a second husband, Mr. Mason. Antoinette regards her mother as “without a doubt not
English, but no white nigger either. Not my mother. Never had been. Never could be.”¹² Only
her reportedly wild, sexual antics in the sanatorium finally strip Annette of what little social
standing and respect her beauty afforded her once she become widowed.
The second instance of cultural transformation in the novel is the result of an ex-slave’s
heroic service to his master during a crisis. Although Mannie is but a minor character in Wide
Sargasso Sea, he stands out because he is Antoinette’s favorite out of all the new black servants
hired by her stepfather when he assumes control of Coulibri plantation. By foiling the ex-slaves’
plan to kill the Masons by burning down the house, Mannie finds himself the object of scorn
of the black Creole majority in Coulibri and, by extension, in Jamaica: “Somebody yelled, ‘But
look the Black Englishman! Look the white niggers!’ ”¹³ Mannie never explains his motives
within Antoinette’s narrative, but her previous declaration of affection towards the loyal ser-
vant suggests a narrative doubling between herself and Mannie, since each is an individual
upbraided by the Afro-Jamaican Creole community for performing the wrong racial identity.
In this context, the ex-slaves see Mannie as a colonial mimic because of his allegiance to the
English master. The novel’s juxtaposition of “Black Englishman” and “white niggers” implies
that that the time for both powerful plantation owners as masters and prestigious black slaves
as house servants is past—life in the Mason/Cosway household is an anachronistic reenact-
ment of the past of slavery and, thus, is destined to fail. The anonymous comment reinforces
the sense of black Creole Jamaicans as a collective unit, which regards Mannie as nothing less
than a race-traitor because his individual behavior differs from that of the group. As they use

11. Ibid., 26.

12. Ibid., 36.
13. Ibid., 42.

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it, the term “black Englishman” does not imply a redefinition of the dominant English cultural
and racial matrix in England at all. Because he is on the receiving end of an insult he suspects
might be based on truth, Mannie’s disgrace is equivalent to the shame of the Masons’ and
Cosways’ loss of economic status and their previous involvement in the slave trade.
During a personal confrontation between Mannie and “one of the blacker men” who set
the fire, the words “Black Englishman” once more act as an invective.¹⁴ This speaker directly
addresses Mannie and warns him to break the ties of loyalty that bind him to his employer
and master: “Run away, black Englishman, like the boy run. Hide in the bushes. It’s better for
you.”¹⁵ Mannie’s only rhetorical comeback in this situation is to echo the discourse of slavery
by questioning his tormentors’ humanity: “What all you are, eh? Brute beasts?”¹⁶ During
the period of slavery, Mannie and his fellow servants were legally considered “chattel,” thus
Mannie’s retort urges his peers to reject the damaging power of the dehumanizing classifica-
tions that should have been erased by emancipation. His question challenges the group to
reject violence, raise their expectations for their own behavior, and exhibit the compassion
that would prove their humanity. Unlike Antoinette, Mannie never explicitly accepts or rejects
the identity of “Black Englishman,” but he does eventually leave the service of the Masons.
Mannie’s speech ultimately fails, not because his behavior marks him as someone who wants
to imitate the English as his accusers would claim but, rather, because as a free man, Mannie
cannot imagine how to be a black Jamaican outside of the plantation economy.
Rather than depicting a community’s condemnation of an individual’s behavior as Rhys
does in Wide Sargasso Sea, Caryl Phillips features two characters, David Henderson and
Emily Cartwright, who initially act as impartial observers of hybrid communities of “white
niggers” and “black Englishmen” and later decide to join them in Cambridge.¹⁷ Unlike the
performative name calling in Rhys’ novel, the transformations Phillips portrays are primarily
self-chosen, not imposed from without. Cambridge’s Emily Cartwright and David Hender-
son are not narrative doubles of each other like Antoinette and Mannie, but their respective
paths to self-definition share some parallels. They inhabit the same island space and interact
frequently without developing any full appreciation of the other’s circumstance. Both David
Henderson and Emily Cartwright have been displaced from their home environments by

14. Ibid., 44.

15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 43.
17. In keeping with my argument that David Henderson only considers himself an Englishman, I will use his English
name throughout, despite the fact that within the novel he undergoes several name changes—from his original
African name, Olumide, to Hercules and Cambridge as two of his slave names. The novel’s title, Cambridge, denies
Henderson any agency in choosing his own identity by rhetorically fixing it as that of a slave, thereby recognizing
the hegemonic power of white slave masters as agents of empire and de facto arbiters of humanity.

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New World slavery; Emily volunteers to personally inspect her father’s plantation holdings in
the unnamed Caribbean island, while Henderson is twice abducted by force—first from his
African village, and later from a ship at sea—and sold into bondage. Once away from their
respective birthplaces, each character constructs a new cultural identity to assimilate to life
in a strange place. However, while Emily Cartwright undergoes a process of creolization that
involves an experience of the racial abject through the utterance and performance of “white
nigger” as a functional cultural designator, David Henderson never relinquishes his self-chosen
identity as a “Black Englishman.” By remaining true to his idea of himself, Henderson finds
redemption from the mire of the dehumanizing rhetoric of slavery despite the fact that no one
outside his immediate circle of friends ever fully acknowledges his Englishness.¹⁸
Through David Henderson, Cambridge proposes “black Englishman” as a viable cultural
identity, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, but situates it within the context of early nineteenth century
England, rather than in a West Indian island, like Jamaica. Unlike Mannie, his counterpart
in the Rhys novel, Henderson writes his own first-person neoslave narrative in the novel.¹⁹
He is not Creole, or native to the Caribbean, but instead African by birth. He severs all ties
of affection to his birthplace in favor of England as his chosen homeland. Within his first-
person narrative, Henderson proclaims himself to be “an Englishman, albeit a little smudgy
of complexion.”²⁰ His anachronistic reading of “Englishness” as a diverse cultural identity is
predicated on its ability to encompass variances in “complexion” without assigning any inher-
ent negative racial stereotypes to “smudginess.” As such, Henderson’s continued identification
as a “black Englishman” is not abject, but celebratory.
Despite the male protagonist’s idealistic notions about the tolerance of his new home-
land, Cambridge portrays the tense social atmosphere in London and the English countryside
that rejects such attempts at inclusion within the national imaginary. Through Henderson’s
spiritual adviser, Miss Spencer, Phillips lays out the landscape of racism and xenophobia that
surrounds the black Englishman and his white wife as they embark on an internal missionary
campaign around England. In his narrative, Henderson remembers: “Miss Spencer insisted

18. Mary Seacole was a free, mixed race medicine woman born in Jamaica who eventually tended to British troops in
the Crimea during the war. In her book, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857; reprint New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), which recounts her travels and service to the Crown, she makes a case for
herself as an “English woman.” She does wonder whether the Russians who saw her “thought they [English women]
all had my complexion” (189).
19. I use the term neoslave narrative loosely here, since there are some important differences between the narrative
stance Henderson affects as a writer of his confession and autobiography and the rhetorical flourishes common to
most slave narrators. For one thing, the document within the novel is written while Henderson is still living as a
slave, called Cambridge, on the unnamed Caribbean island. For another, the purpose of the document is not to
decry the evils of slavery, but rather to take responsibility for the crime of murdering the overseer, Mr. Brown, and
to explain the events that led up to it.
20. Phillips, Cambridge, 147.

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that the commonly held assumption that a black Englishman’s life consisted of debauchery,
domestic knavery, and misdemeanour, served as a false and dangerous model.”²¹ While
Henderson’s self-definition prizes the label “Englishman” without any racial markers, his bene-
factress cannot separate his blackness from his Englishness, though the one was inherited and
the other learned or acquired later. Miss Spencer looks to Henderson to adequately perform
his blackness so as to simultaneously dispel misconceptions about the moral shortcomings
of black people in England and to encourage other Black Britons to fully integrate into the
religious life of their adopted country.
Henderson’s own understanding of the role of blacks within British society is more
complex than Miss Spencer’s. He goes out by himself into the London streets and sees blacks
occupying all levels of the social hierarchy.²² In his study of black seamen during the time of
slavery, W. Jeffrey Bolster describes London as “the hub of the black Atlantic” because “more
blacks from distant regions concentrated in London than anywhere else.”²³ Ironically, the same
British law allowing slavery to continue in the West Indian colonies facilitates Henderson’s
renewed enslavement. Although he had lived as a free man in England thanks to the Somerset
decision, which outlawed slavery on English soil, a corrupt white sailor kidnaps Henderson
on board the ship that should transport him to Africa, and sells him in the Jamaican slave
market.²⁴ The abduction at sea is an extreme example of both double consciousness and the
racial abject at work: Henderson realizes his claim to Englishness does not make sense to
the white sailor because he reads the missionary’s “smudgy” black skin only as a signifier of
inhumanity. For his part, Henderson refuses to recognize either the sailor’s or the overseer’s
performance of whiteness as signifiers of the English nationality they claim. He elevates the
freedom he experienced in England to a national value or right and therefore considers anyone
who would enslave another to be non-English.
David Henderson’s performance of cultural transformation is the most thorough of the
four I describe because it is both internalized and also fully articulated. While the totality of
this character’s experience cannot be reduced to a single, unified subject, especially since his
humanity has been repeatedly denied and he has been known by multiple names, David Hen-
derson is this man’s chosen identity. Despite his geographical displacement from the land he

21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 142–43.
23. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 19.
24. In the first chapter of Black Jacks, Bolster contends that it was not unusual even for freeborn black sailors who
worked as crew during slaving expeditions to find themselves put up for auction along with the cargo they had
helped transport. For an in-depth historical analysis of the significance of the Somerset decision, see Steven M.
Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (London: Melroyd
Lawrence Books, 2005).

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loves and the degradation of being legally considered an object instead of a person, Henderson
never gives up his claim to Englishness within his neoslave narrative.
On Caribbean shores, Emily Cartwright and David Henderson face the daunting task
of assimilating to a new society in which customs and social norms are unknown to them,
much like Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea. While Henderson manages this transition by living
a double life, outwardly performing the duties of a slave but remaining steadfast to his English
ways in private, Emily Cartwright cannot differentiate between the multiple roles she plays
in this society and passively relinquishes her Englishness through her disregard for English
rules of ladylike conduct from the moment she sets foot on the island. Like Mr. Rochester in
Wide Sargasso Sea, Emily Cartwright is a white English subject who experiences the uncanny
when she meets West Indian white Creoles.²⁵ Their abject poverty and the intimacy they
share with the African servants and slaves shocks both European observers. Like Rochester,
Emily Cartwright, also faces the prospect of an arranged marriage back in England. Rochester,
however, actually marries white Creole Antoinette and drives her mad by constantly convey-
ing his loathing for her hybridity, but Emily Cartwright is both fascinated and repelled by
the white Creoles she observes and eventually undergoes a process of creolization that makes
her one of them.
Cambridge deploys the word “nigger” in the context of Caribbean Creoleness in the same
way that Fermor uses it to describe the Santois in The Traveller’s Tree. Affecting a tone of ethno-
graphic or anthropological objectivity in her first-person narrative, Emily notes with surprise
that both poor white laborers who originally came to the island as indentured servants and
English planters fallen on hard times have become creolized and are now trapped in a state of
social limbo, legally free but economically not self-sufficient. In the plight of the white Creole
community on the island, Emily finds the degraded model of whiteness that she herself will
come to embody at the narrative’s close. She imbues it with a sense of the community’s femi-
nization because of its inability to chart a course for the future independent from the authority
of the wealthy, white ruling class. Although she had previously been “horrified” upon hearing
the term “nigger” applied to the ship’s black pilot,²⁶ Emily uses the same epithet emptied of
its racial connotations when she describes the “poor white creoles”:
Although outnumbered by their superiors, there are not a few of these pale-fleshed niggers enduring
these lamentable conditions. But not all of these poor-whites came to the island as poverty-stricken
indentured servants. Some had suffered from ill-fortune or improvidence, and fallen from the

25. Unlike Rochester, Emily is female. Her gender puts her at a greater disadvantage than Rochester because it deprives
her of the opportunity to take charge of economic matters and the like.
26. Phillips, Cambridge, 17.

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comparative wealth of slave ownership and a position of some standing in the white community,
to the depths of poverty and depredation.²⁷

From Emily’s point of view, poverty, whether as an original condition translated from Europe
to the Caribbean, or as a marker of degradation signifying the loss of status from plantation
owner to destitute outcast, is the universal signifier of a “nigger” identity.²⁸ Like Antoinette
does with Tia’s insult in Wide Sargasso Sea, Emily Cartwright here parrots received opin-
ions from some other source. As a new arrival, she has not had the time to come to these
conclusions herself, and therefore promulgates them unfiltered in her travel journal.
The final phase in Emily Cartwright’s creolization is told from the perspective of an
omniscient third-person narrator. Emily’s pregnancy, the result of an affair with the Creole
overseer, forces her to abandon her father’s plantation and taken up residence in Hawthorn
Cottage, the abandoned house she had noticed after seeing the “pale-fleshed niggers” for the
first time. Her only helpers during her confinement and labor are the white “slave doctor”
who talks to her about her future return to England, and Stella, Emily’s personal slave in her
father’s plantation.²⁹ Like the young Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, Emily’s precarious status
as “the mistress” is finally “secure” when she has reached the nadir; there is no lower social
station she can occupy. Despite having come down in the world, Emily does not find either
solace or companionship among the white Creoles or “pale-fleshed niggers” she had previously
observed. Instead, slaves from her father’s plantation care for Emily during her pregnancy.
As was the case in Wide Sargasso Sea, the black Creole island community, here represented
by the slaves, is who determines which performances of whiteness are legitimate, and which
are abject. As the arbiters of racial and cultural authenticity, black Creole characters in both
novels enact a shadow social hierarchy that works parallel to, although separate from, white
Creole and European prejudices.
While both Jean Rhys and Caryl Phillips share a Caribbean cultural frame of reference in
their discussions of Creole whites, the two writers approach the term “black Englishman” from
completely different ideological positions. Other novels by Phillips demonstrate a sensibility
in line with the black British cultural studies project of debunking the inherent association
between race, ethnicity, and nationality in England. The postmodern approach to fractured
subjectivity, evident in the intertextual, fragmentary, and polyphonic nature of his texts, attests
to Phillips’s prismatic vision of any unified identity as a fragile and temporary construct. Jean

27. Ibid., 108.

28. Ironically, her next use of a racialized term in this passage contains nothing of the insult or ignominy Emily has
associated with white Creoles. She uses the label “black Samaritans” on page 108 to convey her high praise for the
ex-slaves who continue to help their old masters and mistresses survive.
29. Phillips, Cambridge, 194.

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Rhys explores the complexities of competing white Creole identities in the West Indies rather
than trying to find the black in the Union Jack as Cambridge does. Her novel portrays black
Creoles as having both a regional identity as well as a diasporic allegiance, especially through
the character of Christophine, born in Martinique but fully accepted within Jamaican society.
By beginning at a crucial turning point in race relations in the Caribbean, with references to
the importation of Indian indentured servants after emancipation, Wide Sargasso Sea breaks
out of the black-white binary of race relations that characterizes most US and Caribbean
literature. Rhys’s emphasis on her female protagonist’s hybrid status as a linguistic, religious,
and cultural outsider to the Jamaican society she occupies, and Phillips’s insistence on the
overt historical interaction between whites and nonwhite persons and communities in Eng-
land, attest to the postcolonial critique of absolutist national discourses operative in both the
hegemonic world each novel imagines and in other nineteenth century British texts to which
these twentieth century postmodern novels allude.
Through these specific investigations of rhetorical transformation, Wide Sargasso Sea and
Cambridge simultaneously cover two distinct temporal planes—the diachronic span of the
historical setting and the synchronic time of the texts’ creation as twentieth century cultural
artifacts. They do not conflate the two eras; rather, they continue an ongoing project of redefin-
ing Englishness. Each novel signals its protagonist’s cultural hybridity most explicitly through
the trope of multiple naming. David Henderson’s birth name was Olumide, but his masters
call him Hercules and Cambridge, while Rochester changes Antoinette’s name to Bertha
Mason so as to convey his disgust in her creoleness. These rhetorical changes are superficial
because they do not alter the way either protagonist thinks of himself or herself, thereby sug-
gesting a utopian notion that both race and nationality might be nothing more than a state
of mind. However, the plot of each text contains enough historical verisimilitude to argue
that the most any strategic performance of cultural transformation could amount to would
have been an isolated and unacknowledged act of resistance against the hegemonic ideology
of white, European racial superiority feebly performed by Creole and creolized peoples, both
black and white.
The postcolonial challenges of Phillips and Rhys to concepts of race, citizenship, and
nationality work on the ideological level of their respective narratives but have only a small
effect in the diegesis. In Wide Sargasso Sea and Cambridge, the transformation scenes that con-
test “white nigger” and “black Englishman” identity markers constitute aporias where preva-
lent notions of race, class, and cultural stability are profoundly undone through the emphasis
on the degradation of “whiteness” and “Englishness” as signifiers that can be convincingly
performed. Despite the destabilizing challenge these two terms offer to race relations within
the world of each novel, not one of the four characters in question can resolve this aporia or

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successfully balance the responsibility of living up to his or her respective double label. The
choices they face as social outcasts are: conforming to dominant norms of behavior (Mannie),
madness (Antoinnette), death (David Henderson), or seclusion (Emily Cartwright).
Geography and displacement influence how each novel portrays the social construction
of Englishness and creoleness as well as how each modulates discussions of the racial abject. In
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys anachronistically locates this cultural and ethnic marker squarely
within a twentieth century paradigm of creoleness that links a person’s birthplace to his or her
national identity regardless of race.³⁰ According to this logic, a character’s birth in England
proper imbues the (white, male) subject with an indelible Englishness that is incorruptible,
not affected even by a protracted stay in the tropics. Thus, Antoinette’s British stepfather, Mr.
Mason, and her husband, Mr. Rochester, maintain their Englishness untainted throughout
Wide Sargasso Sea despite the former’s marriage to a Catholic Martinican Creole woman,
Annette, and the latter’s poverty and lack of prospects as the second son of an aristocratic
father. The novel opens with Antoinette’s discussion of the various levels of legitimacy and/or
racial authenticity ascribed to white Creole society in Jamaica. These standards regarding
national identity do not apply to female subjects in the same way that they do to men in
the novel. The transnational web of interrelations that form the infrastructure of the British
Empire prevent Englishness from being either an inheritable or a transferable quality. The
mere accident of a character’s birth in the West Indies instantly renders the infant Creole,
not English, despite the national purity of his or her lineage. If the child is legitimate, male,
wealthy, and white, he grows up to receive a proper British education abroad as does Richard
Mason, Antoinette’s stepbrother. If the legitimate child is female, she is educated by a tutor at
home or in a religious school, as is Antoinette. Because the school she attends is Catholic and
instructs students in French, her education further affirms Antoinette’s status as an ethnic and
cultural outsider to Jamaican society despite having been born on the island.
Their fellow white plantation mistresses revile Annette and her daughter, Antoinette,
because they have lost all their money and social standing. Their poverty, combined with their
Catholicism and Martinican roots, are enough to problematize their white racial identity.
Remembering her childhood in the run-down plantation Coulibri, Antoinette describes the
moment when she first realizes her family’s national difference from their neighbors, all of
whom had previously lived in privilege and enjoyed a level of opulence supported by the labor

30. Rhys’s use of a distinct “Jamaican” cultural identity is anachronistic because at the time the novel is set, shortly after
the passage of the Emancipation Act in 1833, Jamaica was still a part of the British Empire and did not actively
clamor for its independence. Among white Creoles, there was no distinctly “Jamaican” national or cultural identity
separate from an English one. In the section where she describes the island of her birth, Mrs. Seacole mentions a
“Creole race,” that tends to be lazy but does not describe members racially.

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of their black slaves: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother.” Even
as a girl, Antoinette understands that her own and her mother’s racial identity and status, their
whiteness, is not on a par with that of their neighbors; she knows that this racial contamina-
tion is inherently tied to her mother’s permanent status as a foreigner, “a Martinique girl” but
also that it does not mark her as a “white nigger.”³¹
Unlike Englishness, which can be possessed solely by a male individual born in England
in Wide Sargasso Sea, creoleness is not only passed down from (white) mother to (white)
child. In Antoinette’s case, it also trumps the child’s own birthplace as an indicator of both
nationality and ethnicity. Thus, Antoinette always effectively occupies the same subject posi-
tion in Wide Sargasso Sea as her does her mother, Annette—they are both forever “Martinique
girl[s]”—despite the fact of Antoinette’s hybrid lineage: she was born in Jamaica and her father
was an Englishman. Black Martinican or francophone creoleness is not passed down from a
mother to her offspring. Within the world of this novel, a black character’s birthplace grants
him or her a more authentic claim to a Creole “Jamaican” identity than does Antoinette’s
hybrid cultural heritage, represented by her father’s English blood and her mother’s Martini-
can customs, religion, and language. Tia and Antoinette are a case in point. The girls get to
know one another because of the longstanding friendship of their mother and mother figure:
“She [Christophine] had only one friend—a woman called Maillote, and Maillote was not
a Jamaican.”³² Antoinette describes Maillote through negation, as “not a Jamaican” instead
of by affirmation, as someone who comes from someplace. However, the character’s French
name, Maillote, suggests that like Christophine, Antoinette, and Annette, she too hails from
the francophone Caribbean islands. As a foreign-born outsider, Maillote occupies a different
kind of black Creole identity than that of the Jamaican ex-slaves who lived and worked in Cou-
libri. Because they were both born on the island, Maillote’s daughter Tia and Christophine’s
unnamed son who lives in Spanish Town are considered fully “Jamaican” by their peers.
Wide Sargasso Sea suggests that racial and ethnic categories are a reflection of both physical
differences and cultural assumptions by presenting Antoinette’s and Rochester’s contrasting
first-person views of post-emancipation Caribbean society without the editorial interference
of an omniscient, third-person narrator. Antoinette describes her society either through
racial categories—blacks, whites—or else by making references to nationalities—“Jamaican,”
“Martinique girl.” She never uses the term Creole to describe herself or anyone else in her
first-person narrative. In contrast, her English husband often incorporates this same word

31. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 17.

32. Ibid., 21.

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into his own narrative. Rochester uses it privately, as a constant reminder of the pride of place
he occupies within the imperial cultural economy despite his lack of a fortune of his own.
Rochester’s status as an Englishman commands respect and envious admiration even from
white Creole Jamaicans who have inherited wealth, like Roger Mason.
The cultural, racial, and national tensions that permeate the novel’s first section contrib-
ute to the protagonist’s growing sense of alienation even before she marries Rochester. As a
postcolonial text, Wide Sargasso Sea depicts empire as a pan-European enterprise by remarking
upon the imperial influences of the French in the New World through repeated references
to Martinique. Antoinette’s perception of her own claim to whiteness as precarious and con-
taminated and her description of her family as outsiders within Jamaican society because of
their Martinican origin in the novel’s opening two paragraphs attest to her own condition as
a colonized and colonizing subject. In effect, she is complicit in the oppression of others, yet
not fully benefiting from the advantages her skin color should afford her.
The novel by Rhys never portrays a unified white Creole society within any of its Carib-
bean settings: the Jamaica of Antoinette’s childhood, Trinidad as the destination for Annette’s
and Mr. Mason’s honeymoon trip, or even Antoinette’s and Rochester’s stay in her family’s
estate in the Windward Islands. The racial instability and the hybridity inherent in the various
Caribbean Creole identities, which apply to both white and black characters alike in Wide Sar-
gasso Sea, precipitate Rochester’s crisis of confidence in his young bride’s sociocultural pedigree.
Antoinette’s illegitimate half-brother, Daniel Cosway, only succeeds in sabotaging Rochester’s
opinion of his advantageous marriage match. Rochester was already unnerved by his inabil-
ity to correctly “read” or interpret whiteness in a Caribbean context. Even before receiving
Daniel’s letters, with their allegation of miscegenation in the Cosway family and suggestion of
hereditary insanity, Rochester reminds himself to regard his wife’s ethnicity differently from
how he views his own: “Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be,
but they are not English or European either.”³³ Rochester recognizes Englishness as a cultural
identity only within a European setting; he therefore regards Antoinette’s white Creole identity
as uncanny, familiar but not quite real to him. His wife’s lineage is never as much in question
in the novel as is the visual spectacle of her physical appearance—from Antoinette’s “dark”
locks to her “dark” eyes—because he believes that “darkness” is the opposite of an abstract
Englishness he can only articulate through negation. This recognition of difference within a
shared claim of Englishness leads Rochester to question Antoinette’s fitness to publicly fulfill
the role of wife, especially once they relocate to England.

33. Ibid., 67.

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In her discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea as a text critical of the version of colonialism that
informs Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Gayatri Spivak assigns a static and binaristic conception
of race and nationality to Wide Sargasso Sea that glosses over inter-Caribbean or inter-Creole
prejudice within the novel. She contends that: “Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as per-
sonal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as
a white Creole child growing up in the time of Emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between
the English imperialist and the black native.”³⁴ As my discussion of racial categories in Wide
Sargasso Sea has demonstrated, “black native” is not an identity with any currency within the
novel. Rhys’s text imagines a complex spectrum of black Creole identities—Jamaican and Mar-
tinican—as well as occasional performances of black Englishmen, but no one describes himself
or herself as or is ever called a “native.”Wide Sargasso Sea portrays black identity as a broad
spectrum that encompasses regional and diasporic identities because it does not see national-
ity as a hereditary condition. Antoinette’s nanny, Christophine, makes the most of her exotic
origins by acting as a medicine woman to the slaves, but she downplays her sophistication
through linguistic passing.
Antoinette observes that her nanny’s diction and cadence of speech constitute a strategic
performance of her cultural identity for profit and personal benefit. Antoinette remarks upon
Christophine’s tendency to engage in linguistic passing when she says Christophine “could
speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, [but] she took care to talk as
they [Jamaican ex-slaves] talked.”³⁵ Since Christophine never pretends to appear to be physi-
cally white, her linguistic passing is also not an instance of racechange, according to Gubar’s
definition but, rather a strategic performance of class and national identity. By making her
speech patterns conform to that of her fellow black Jamaican servants, Christophine avoids
the ridicule and ostracism that later befalls Mannie.
Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge also features a similar familial dynamic decided in isolation,
without any linguistic exchange. Miscegenation is clearly part of the equation in this novel
because the African-born protagonist, David Henderson, takes a white English bride while
living as a free man in England. Whereas Wide Sargasso Sea depicts the coupling between the
races in the West Indies as a white, English vice perhaps attributable to the tropical heat, the
racial intermixing in Cambridge takes place on English soil and is consecrated through the
Christian marriage ceremony. In England, the union between Anna, who is poor, white, and

34. Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 269, emphasis added. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(1847; reprint New York: Signet Classic, 1997).
35. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 21.

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English, and David Henderson, a free African ex-slave, is made possible because of their shared
faith in God and a missionary zeal to spread the good news of the gospel throughout England.
Although it may be sanctified by heaven, the couple’s marriage constitutes too big a threat to
the worldview of the working class congregations to whom they appeal for funds to carry out
their religious work; they face constant threats of violence and aggression because open mis-
cegenation challenges the standard of racial purity that white Englishmen and women assume
is a fundamental part of their national character. Their idealistic marriage has no viable future
in the narrative; both Anna and the couple’s baby die during childbirth, thereby eliminating
the possibility of the emergence of a mixed race English future.
Cambridge’s version of life in nineteenth-century London can tolerate diversity within
its population, but not hybridity. More so than is the case in Wide Sargasso Sea, the world of
Cambridge is one where the prospect of the birth of a mixed-race child is more threatening to
the local working class blokes than is the small, but visible, population of proto-Black Brit-
ons—Afro-Caribbean servants brought to England’s shores as exotic status symbols by returning
plantation owners. For his part, David Henderson considers himself to be more of a cultural
insider than an outsider within English society because he has learned to read and is spiritually
“born again.” His purchase of the burial lot where his wife and child lie for all eternity could
be seen as the grim fulfillment of his desire to own a bit of English land and thereby feel like he
belongs to the country. After the loss of his family, Henderson travels as a missionary from his
church in the Blackheath mission to Africa but is kidnapped at sea and sold into slavery in the
Caribbean. Undeterred by his bad luck, he continues to see both the island and the people who
inhabit it through British eyes. Unlike Mannie or Antoinnette in Wide Sargasso Sea, Henderson
in Cambrige rejects all labels applied to him by outsiders. Henderson’s white Creole overseer,
Mr. Brown, knows nothing of his past, renames him “Cambridge,” and pairs the slave off with
his cast-off mistress, the unpopular and insane West Indian slave named Christiana.
Henderson’s forced second marriage closely approximates the British/(Martinican) Creole
match between Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. Outwardly, both partners
appear to belong to the same racial group—Christiana and Henderson are black, while
Rochester and Antoinette are (arguably) equally white. As English husbands, Henderson
and Rochester, each regard their respective Caribbean-born wives as not “English enough”
since Henderson considers Christiana’s familiarity with obeah and her Creole birth as major
obstacles that prevent him from loving her. Likewise, Rochester is wary of Antoinette’s hybrid
cultural status as a Martinican Creole, of her Catholic schooling, and of her connection to
Christophine and obeah. Neither male character can imagine returning to life in England as
the husband of an exotic Other; therefore they both distance themselves emotionally from
their wives in order to maintain the purity of their given or acquired Englishness.

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Throughout the Phillips novel, the connotations of the term Creole remain stable; there
are no competing interpretations of it based on a different Caribbean framework as was the
case with the Martinican infiltration of Jamaican society in Wide Sargasso Sea. In Cambridge,
Phillips presents the possibility of entry into identifiable imagined communities through
either illness or a change in economic circumstances. Emily distinguishes between the “poor
white creoles,” richer white creoles, and black creole slaves.³⁶ Only the first group is ever called
“white niggers.” For his part, Henderson uses the term Creole to refer to those people born
in the place he considers home, England. He opens his neoslave narrative with a dedication:
“I humbly beg that those of my dear England, Africans of my own complexion, and creoles
of both aspects might bear with me.”³⁷ In this formulation, Henderson’s metaphorical birth
through religious conversion in a given geographical place and a sense of national belonging
(“those of my dear England”) take precedence over any sense of emotional allegiance to his
birthplace: Africa.

36. Phillips, Cambridge, 109.

37. Ibid., 133.

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