Decolonial Feminism in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

The study reads Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea through a decolonial feminist lens, arguing that Antoinette Cosway’s trajectory exposes how imperial marriage law operates as an extension of colonial conquest. Situated in post-emancipation Jamaica, the novel reveals a palimpsest of racial capitalism in which Antoinette’s thirty-thousand-pound dowry functions as the legal mechanism that transfers land, labour and female sexuality into English patriarchal hands. Rochester’s renaming of her as “Bertha” performs the colonial imperative to overwrite local identities, while the removal of her wedding dress, jewels and finally her body to an English attic enacts the literal dispossession of a creole woman whose cultural coordinates are erased in the metropole. The paper foregrounds how intersecting racial, class and gender hierarchies render Antoinette a liminal subject, belonging neither to the Afro-Caribbean community nor to the British elite, and therefore doubly vulnerable to imperial capture. By restoring Antoinette’s childhood memories of poisoned horses, obeah women and decaying great houses, Rhys reclaims the “madwoman in the attic” as an embodied archive of resistance. Her psychological fragmentation is read not as pathology but as the somatic register of structural violence: a refusal to internalise the colonial script of white femininity and a cry against the epistemic erasure that colonial law demands. Through this re-centring of creole epistemologies and Caribbean affective economies, the novel becomes a praxis of decolonial feminism that interrogates empire at its most intimate site—marriage—while insisting on the possibility of justice grounded in local knowledge, indigenous memory and the refusal to be renamed.