Rhys’ Portrayal of the Complexity of Race Relations in Bertha’s History
Rhys depicts the intricacy of race relations in Bertha’s history by disfiguring her personality and identity. Bertha’s racial identity can be seen as ambiguous. According to the novel, Bertha can be imagined as passing as white or white until she is allied with blacks whenever she exists in the course of the action. Bertha has, therefore, become black, as her appearance in the novel is perceived. However, her status changes between object and subject, which confirms her shifting blackness that can be termed as twofold; her status shifts to an object on account of other characters as a figure (Brontë, 2018). Bertha engages with the aspect of her history as extensively as she does in the way genteel femininity boundaries are blurred in her so that even Rochester recognizes that a servant can never presume Bertha’s violent and unreasonable temper. In addition, her challenging and strange orders cannot be assumed, as they were Jamaican. So, she engages in a manner that states her gender instability is linked to her immorality. This underscores the reference to a clothed hyena described by Jane (Brontë, 2018).
In addition, Bertha engages in a manner that portrays her as a despotic mistress. Bertha’s domestic slaves face her tyrannical fury, given that her passions have enslaved and bestialized her. Bertha makes animal noises noisily in her madness and laughs. Hence, she is portrayed in a cell where she grovels “seemingly, on all fours” (Brontë, 2018). Bertha Creole’s identity was depicted in several ways. She was a depot who enslaved people, and the harem-possessing character, more of an oriental dictator, that saw Bronte invoke an oriental discussion invoking women’s freedom stock. As a distinctive Creole, Bertha desires countless violence, as in Jane’s relationship with Rochester. Bertha breaks out of her cell. Here, Rochester describes Bertha as lacking a face but a mask with eyes substituted by red balls, taking the reader back to her portrayal of demons and hyenas in attires with their hind feet supporting them. Thus, Creole’s female character is represented in Bertha as a violent madwoman who makes servants fearful. Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea depicts Bertha’s good side because she has a life, background, and narrative, hence deconstructing the stigma linked to her (Savory & Johnson, 2020).
References
Brontë, C. (2018). Jane Eyre. In Medicine and Literature (pp. 53-72). CRC Press.
Savory, E., & Johnson, E. L. (Eds.). (2020). Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 (p. 215). Palgrave Macmillan.
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Question 
Rhys’ Portrayal of the Complexity of Race Relations in Bertha’s History
Technically speaking, Rhys’s Antoinette is white. Her mother is a “Martinique girl,” and her father is Jamaican, but both are of European descent. Nevertheless, Antoinette is portrayed as different from her English husband.
How does Rhys portray the complexity of race relations in Antoinette’s/Bertha’s history? To what end does she engage with this aspect of her history as extensively as she does? In what way is Antoinette/Bertha’s Creole identity represented, and how is the fact of her Creole origins important, in Rhys’s book, to understanding the missing “life” Rhys wrote for Bertha?