Subaltern Gothic: ‘space’, ‘place’, and female voice in Jean Rhys’s <i>Wide Sargasso Sea</i>

This study reframes Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) as a Subaltern Gothic novel. It argues that Rhys transforms classic Gothic elements such as confinement, haunting, and spectral doubles into tools of resistance against colonial oppression. The analysis draws on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the subaltern to illuminate the epistemic silencing of the protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, who is denied a voice within the colonial narrative. Complementing this, Doreen Massey’s theories of space reveal how the Gothic landscapes of Coulibri (Jamaica), Granboi (Dominica), and Thornfield Hall (England)—respectively related to the themes of displacement, identity, and entrapment in the novel—are active sites of gendered and racialized violence. Within this framework, Antoinette’s descent into madness and her final act of arson in Thornfield Hall—the burning of the English manor—are reinterpreted as a ‘subaltern speech act’. This violent rupture is a form of spatial rebellion against her confinement. The Caribbean setting itself, depicted as a place of both beauty and terror, becomes a contested ‘third space’ where Antoinette’s identity is persistently destabilized, yet fiercely resists imperial categorization. Ultimately, by bridging postcolonial and feminist gothic theories, this study demonstrates how Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, considered as a postcolonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), dismantles the colonial framework of the latter by using spatial subversion to reclaim voice and agency for the silenced Creole woman.