Colonial Silence and Feminine Voice: A Comparative Study of Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea

 

Colonial Silence and Feminine Voice: A Comparative Study of Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea

Assignment : 203 The Postcolonial Studies

Hello learners! The present assignment discuss Colonial Silence and Feminine Voice: A Comparative Study of Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Rewriting the Canon: From Empire to Counter-Discourse

Feminine Voice and the Problem of Authorship

Antoinette’s Fractured Voice

Susan Barton’s Struggle to Author

Silence as Resistance and Trauma

Feminine and Colonial Hybridity: Negotiating Identity

The Ethics of Rewriting: Rhys and Coetzee’s Postcolonial Aesthetics

Conclusion

Personal Information:

Name : Mer Jyoti R

Batch : 2024-26

Sem :3

Roll no : 7

Enrollment no : 5108240021

Pepar-203: The Postcolonial Studies

Topic : Colonial Silence and Feminine Voice: A Comparative Study of Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea

E-mail I'd : jyotimer2003@gmail.com

Introduction

The colonial encounter has long been marked by silences of the colonized, the enslaved, and particularly of women who occupy a doubly marginalized space as both subjects of empire and patriarchy. Two powerful novels, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), interrogate these silences by rewriting canonical texts of the British literary tradition: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Both Coetzee and Rhys turn to metafictional and revisionist strategies to give voice to figures erased or misrepresented in the original texts Friday, the colonized slave, and Antoinette (Bertha Mason), the Creole “madwoman in the attic.”

In these postcolonial rewritings, the struggle to speak becomes central. Coetzee and Rhys explore how language, gender, and race intersect to construct or suppress identity within the colonial framework. While Rhys’s Antoinette fights to assert a self silenced by English patriarchy and colonial racism, Coetzee’s Susan Barton attempts to narrate Friday’s story but finds herself confronting the limits of representation itself. Thus, both novels become meditations on the politics of voice and the ethics of storytelling asking who speaks, who is spoken for, and what remains unsaid.

This essay examines how Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea engage with the themes of colonial silence and feminine voice, highlighting how Rhys and Coetzee challenge canonical authority, subvert colonial discourse, and reimagine the place of the marginalized subject in narrative history.

Rewriting the Canon: From Empire to Counter-Discourse

Both Wide Sargasso Sea and Foe participate in what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction” fiction that self-consciously rewrites history and literature to expose their ideological underpinnings (Hutcheon 110). By revisiting canonical English novels, Rhys and Coetzee not only revise the imperial imagination but also destabilize the authority of Western narrative forms.

Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea serves as a prequel to Jane Eyre, reclaiming the silenced history of Bertha Mason the Creole woman whom Brontë’s Rochester imprisons in the attic as the embodiment of madness and savagery. Rhys renames her Antoinette Cosway and relocates her story to Jamaica and Dominica, thus restoring her cultural and geographical context. The novel transforms Brontë’s “madwoman” into a complex subject whose identity is fractured by colonial hybridity and patriarchal oppression. As Gayatri Spivak argues, Rhys’s rewriting “makes visible the ideological construction of the Other woman in imperial discourse” (Spivak 249).

Similarly, Coetzee’s Foe reimagines Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of Susan Barton, a woman who becomes a castaway on Cruso’s island and later attempts to write his and Friday’s story. By replacing Defoe’s omniscient narrator with a female storyteller, Coetzee exposes how colonial adventure narratives silence both women and the colonized. The novel’s metafictional structure Susan’s correspondence with the author Foe (a fictionalized Defoe) underscores the difficulty of giving voice to the voiceless. Friday, whose tongue has been cut out, becomes the ultimate emblem of colonial silence, reminding readers that certain traumas remain beyond representation.

Feminine Voice and the Problem of Authorship

In both novels, female authorship functions as a site of resistance but also of profound struggle. Rhys and Coetzee foreground women who attempt to articulate their stories within structures designed to silence them. Yet, while Antoinette’s voice is consumed by madness and fragmentation, Susan Barton’s authorship is challenged by patriarchal literary control.

Antoinette’s Fractured Voice

Antoinette’s narration in Wide Sargasso Sea is deeply fragmented, alternating between her perspective, Rochester’s, and occasionally an omniscient third voice. This fractured narrative form mirrors Antoinette’s disintegrating identity. Born of a white Creole family but rejected by both the black Jamaican community and the English colonizers, she occupies a liminal spaceneither fully European nor fully Caribbean. She laments, “I am not used to happiness… it makes me afraid” (Rhys 77), revealing her alienation from any stable sense of belonging.

Language itself becomes an instrument of domination. Rochester’s refusal to call her by her real name he renames her “Bertha” symbolically erases her identity. His statement, “I prefer Bertha for a name, it suits you better” (Rhys 87), exemplifies how patriarchal authority renames and redefines the female subject. Antoinette’s descent into madness thus reflects both the psychological violence of colonization and the linguistic erasure of women.

Rhys’s narrative strategy, however, reclaims this madness as a form of speech. As critic Helen Tiffin notes, “Antoinette’s madness becomes the only possible mode of resistance left to her, a rebellion within confinement” (Tiffin 327). In giving Antoinette her own voice, Rhys restores agency to a figure previously written as monstrous and inhuman. The novel ends with Antoinette’s dream of setting fire to Thornfield Hall a symbolic act of reclaiming narrative power and destroying the house of patriarchal and colonial oppression.

Susan Barton’s Struggle to Author

In Foe, Susan Barton’s attempt to narrate her experience on Cruso’s island reveals the gendered and epistemological limits of storytelling. She writes letters to the writer Foe, hoping he will shape her tale into a publishable narrative. Yet, Foe repeatedly silences and manipulates her, imposing the conventions of adventure fiction over her lived reality. He insists on adding excitement, cannibals, and heroism elements that appeal to a colonial readership but distort the truth. “You must learn how to tell your story in a manner of speaking that will engage the reader,” Foe advises (Coetzee 67).

Susan’s frustration exposes the patriarchal control over authorship and history. She insists on her authority as an eyewitness, yet she remains dependent on Foe’s literary mediation. Her story becomes a battleground between truth and fiction, experience and representation. As critic Dominic Head argues, “Susan’s authorship is both an act of self-assertion and a performance of its impossibility within a male literary tradition” (Head 121).

By positioning Susan as a narrator struggling to articulate both her own and Friday’s story, Coetzee dramatizes the ethical problem of speaking for the Other. Susan wants to give Friday a voice, but his muteness resists all translation. She confesses, “I cannot tell the story of Friday’s tongue… all that is left to me is to be the echo of his silence” (Coetzee 142). Thus, Coetzee complicates feminist authorship by confronting its complicity in colonial discourse: even the desire to “give voice” can become an act of appropriation.

Silence as Resistance and Trauma

Silence in both novels is not merely absence; it functions as a mode of resistance against colonial and patriarchal domination. Both Antoinette and Friday inhabit a silence that cannot be assimilated by the colonizer’s language.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette’s final silence her retreat into the dreamlike vision of fire marks her refusal to be defined by the English gaze. Her destruction of Thornfield is both literal and symbolic: a refusal to remain voiceless within the narrative of English domesticity. Similarly, in Foe, Friday’s silence becomes a powerful counter-discourse. His missing tongue stands as the physical manifestation of the colonial erasure of native voices, yet his silence also defies narrative control. Neither Susan nor Foe can fully interpret him, and this inscrutability disrupts the authority of both colonial and feminist narrators.

Spivak famously reads Friday as the “subaltern who cannot speak” (Spivak 283), arguing that Coetzee exposes the limits of representation itself. Yet Coetzee’s final scene where an unnamed narrator descends into a watery space to listen to Friday’s breath suggests that silence may harbor a different kind of speech, one rooted in bodily presence and rhythm rather than rational language. The novel closes with the haunting line, “The stream of his breathing is the only sound, soft and slow, secret and dark, all around me is water” (Coetzee 157). Here, silence becomes an ethical space of listening, where meaning arises not from dominance but from humility before the unspeakable.

Feminine and Colonial Hybridity: Negotiating Identity

Both Rhys and Coetzee situate their female protagonists in hybrid spaces geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Antoinette’s Creole identity embodies the tensions between Europe and the Caribbean; Susan, as a white woman stranded in the colonial world, experiences displacement and marginalization within male and imperial hierarchies. These liminal identities allow both authors to interrogate how colonialism and patriarchy construct “the Other.”

Rhys’s Caribbean landscape functions as a character in itself lush, sensual, and threatening. It mirrors Antoinette’s inner turmoil and symbolizes her fractured self. As she says, “There is always the other side, always” (Rhys 106). The duality of the Caribbean beauty and decay, passion and violence reflects the cultural hybridity that defines her existence. Her identity is shaped by the collision of European and African traditions, yet neither side fully accepts her. Thus, Antoinette’s madness becomes the expression of a colonial schizophrenia, a self divided by cultural contradiction.

In contrast, Susan’s hybrid position arises from her intersection of gender and imperial displacement. She is neither master nor slave, neither colonizer nor colonized. Her experience on the island destabilizes the hierarchy that Robinson Crusoe so confidently asserts. By rewriting the castaway narrative through a female consciousness, Coetzee subverts the colonial logic of control, turning the island into a site of moral and epistemological uncertainty.

The Ethics of Rewriting: Rhys and Coetzee’s Postcolonial Aesthetics

Both Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea engage in ethical rewriting not simply giving voice to the marginalized but interrogating the conditions under which such voices can be heard. Rhys’s feminist revision restores humanity to a silenced woman within a patriarchal colonial text. Coetzee’s metafiction, however, goes further to question the very possibility of representation whether the subaltern’s silence can ever be truly overcome by narrative.

In this sense, Rhys’s project is restorative, while Coetzee’s is deconstructive. Rhys seeks to recover the lost story of Bertha Mason, filling the gaps left by Brontë’s narrative. Coetzee, on the other hand, uses fragmentation and ambiguity to remind readers that certain silences cannot and should not be fully “filled.” As Dominic Head notes, “Where Rhys reclaims, Coetzee interrogates; both ultimately force the reader to acknowledge the moral cost of storytelling” (Head 118).

Both authors thus transform silence into a critical space of reflection, revealing how Western narratives depend on the erasure of the colonial and feminine Other. In confronting these silences, Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea invite readers to engage ethically with history, voice, and difference.

Conclusion

Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea are not merely postcolonial retellings of canonical texts; they are profound meditations on voice, silence, and the politics of storytelling. Both Rhys and Coetzee expose how colonial and patriarchal systems construct silence through naming, authorship, and language yet also reveal silence as a site of resistance and potential meaning.

Antoinette’s fragmented voice and final act of destruction reclaim her humanity from imperial narrative control. Susan Barton’s struggle to write, and her inability to speak for Friday, highlight the ethical dilemma of representing the Other. Friday’s silence, finally, stands as the ultimate critique of colonial discourse: a reminder that history’s wounds cannot always be spoken, only witnessed.

Through their innovative narrative forms and postcolonial consciousness, Rhys and Coetzee transform literature itself into a space of decolonization, where the marginalized reclaim agency through both speech and silence. Their works remind us that the path to voice is never complete that in the ongoing dialogue between silence and speech lies the ethical heart of postcolonial and feminist resistance.

Work cited :

Coetzee, J.M., et al. “Foe.” AbeBooks, Viking, NY, 1 Jan. 1987, www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?cm_sp=plpafe-_-coll-_-signed&an=coetzee&ds=5&n=&sgnd=on&sortby=1&tn=foe. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025. 

Head, Dominic. “The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee.” Cambridge Core, Cambridge University Press, www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-introduction-to-j-m-coetzee/30ACE56F9BC46570AA5E7A4CE99F9F1E. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025. 

Hutcheon, Linda. “A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.” Routledge & CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, 12 May 1988, www.routledge.com/A-Poetics-of-Postmodernism-History-Theory-Fiction/Hutcheon/p/book/9780415007061. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025.

Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/GardosBalint/gayatri_spivak_three_womens_texts_and_a_critique_of_imperialism.pdf. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025.

Wide Sargasso Sea.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Oct. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Sargasso_Sea. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025.

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