Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Representation of the Colonized in Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys) and Foe (J. M. Coetzee)

on

 Paper: 203 (M.A)

Paper Name: Postcolonial Literature


Introduction 

Postcolonial literature often seeks to disrupt the dominant imperial narrative by giving voice to those silenced, marginalised, or erased by colonial power. In this context, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) represent powerful rewritings of canonical colonial texts, in which the colonised (or formerly colonised) subject struggles for representation, identity, and agency.

While Rhys revisits the backstory of the so-called “madwoman in the attic” from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Coetzee revises and interrogates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, centring on the silenced figure of Friday. Both novels, in distinct ways, dramatise the politics of voice and silence, the subaltern’s struggle to speak (or to be heard), and the continuing legacies of colonial power.

This assignment critically analyses how each novel gives voice (or fails to give voice) to the colonised and how representation and narrative authority operate and compares both to highlight shared and divergent strategies. Ultimately, it shows how rewriting becomes a postcolonial tool of reclamation and critique.

Analytical Discussion

1. Theoretical Framework: Voice, Silence, and Representation

Before analysing the novels, it is essential to outline key theoretical concepts from postcolonial discourse:

  • Subalternity: Gayatri Spivak’s question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) underscores the colonised subject’s exclusion from institutional voice and agency.

  • Silence as resistance or erasure: Silence may signify both suppression and refusal to be co-opted into colonial discourse. In Coetzee’s Foe, Friday’s silence encapsulates this paradox (El Idrissi, IJLLS, 2023).

  • Narrative authority and rewriting: As Linda Hutcheon explains in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), rewriting canonical texts allows postcolonial authors to challenge imperial narratives and propose alternative histories.

  • Hybridity and identity: Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity helps to understand Antoinette’s “in-between” identity as a Creole woman—neither wholly European nor African (JCEW Journal, 2023).

These ideas frame both Rhys’s and Coetzee’s projects as acts of literary resistance through form, voice, and silence.

2. Wide Sargasso Sea: Giving Voice to the Creole Woman

“There is always the other side, always.” – Wide Sargasso Sea

2.1 Context and Narrative Structure

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea serves as a prequel to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, narrating the life of Antoinette Cosway (later Bertha Mason) in post-Emancipation Jamaica and then in England (Britannica). The novel’s three-part structure — Antoinette’s childhood, marriage to the Englishman Rochester, and confinement in England — mirrors her gradual silencing and loss of agency.

2.2 Voice and the Colonised Woman

Rhys grants Antoinette subjectivity through first-person narration. This allows her to articulate her hybrid, liminal identity — as a white Creole who belongs neither to the English colonisers nor to the black Caribbean community. Her fragmented identity represents the postcolonial condition of “double exile”. By giving her a psychological and emotional interiority, Rhys restores to Bertha/Antoinette the humanity erased by Brontë’s colonial imagination (JCEW Journal).

2.3 Silencing, Madness, and Resistance

Antoinette’s so-called madness is not mere psychological instability but a symptom of colonial and patriarchal violence. Zeeshan (2022, JCI) argues that madness becomes her form of resistance against “double colonisation”—both by empire and patriarchy. Rochester’s renaming of her as “Bertha” represents linguistic domination, an attempt to rewrite her identity. Rhys’s narrative thus reverses the colonial gaze, reclaiming the silenced woman as a subject of her own story.

2.4 Representation of the Colonised Other

Although Antoinette is not an indigenous subject, the novel exposes the broader colonial hierarchies shaping race, power, and identity in the Caribbean. The ruins of the plantation economy and racial tensions underscore the psychic and cultural devastation wrought by empire. A cultural materialist reading (Bekler, 2023, DergiPark) reveals that Rhys’s depiction of decaying colonial society parallels Antoinette’s inner collapse.

3. Foe: The Voiceless Slave, Narrative Authority, and Silence

3.1 Context and Rewriting Strategy

Coetzee’s Foe reimagines Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, foregrounding the silenced figure of Friday and the narrator Susan Barton, a shipwreck survivor. The novel exposes the politics of storytelling and authorship embedded in colonial narratives.

3.2 Silence, Subalternity, and the Archive

Friday’s tongueless silence embodies Spivak’s dilemma of subaltern speech. His inability (or refusal) to speak the coloniser’s language marks the limits of Western representation. As El Idrissi (2023, IJLLS) observes, Foe critiques the colonial archive that privileges written history over oral or embodied experience. Friday’s silence becomes an unsettling absence—a wound that disrupts narrative coherence.

“We must make Friday’s silence speak.” – Foe

3.3 Disability, Metaphor, and Colonialism

Gümüş (2025, DergiPark) reads Friday’s mutilation as an allegory of colonial violence: the erasure of the colonised subject’s agency and autonomy. The absence of speech, far from being a mere disability, symbolises the deep structural silencing embedded within empire and language.

3.4 Narrative Privilege and Gender

Susan Barton’s voice dominates the text, yet her attempts to speak for Friday reveal the impossibility of representing the subaltern within Western literary systems. Her interaction with the author figure “Foe” dramatises how textual ownership replicates patriarchal and colonial hierarchies. The narrative therefore critiques both imperial and gendered authorship.

5. Critical Discussion

The two novels employ contrasting yet complementary strategies for representing the colonised subject. Rhys’s method is reparative: she restores a suppressed voice by granting Antoinette agency and perspective. Coetzee’s approach is deconstructive: he exposes the impossibility of recovering the subaltern’s voice within the master’s discourse. 


Rhys’s Antoinette speaks — but her voice remains fragmented, haunted by alienation and patriarchal domination. Coetzee’s Friday does not speak — yet his silence becomes the most radical statement in the text. Both writers highlight how power operates through language: who can name, who can narrate, and who can be heard.

Gender intersects with colonial power in both cases. Rhys shows how colonialism and patriarchy jointly silence women; Coetzee uses Susan Barton to reveal the ethical dilemma of the Western narrator who wishes to “speak for” the subaltern but inevitably reasserts dominance.


Azam (2022, OAPub) compares these heroines as emblematic of postcolonial feminism: each resists invisibility through different strategies—articulation versus silence. Both authors reveal that the act of storytelling itself can be a form of control or liberation.

Thus, the politics of voice and silence in Wide Sargasso Sea and Foe invite readers to question not only who speaks but also the systems that define what counts as speech. As Wide Sargasso Sea reclaims a lost voice, Foe exposes the impossibility of ever fully recovering it.

Conclusion

Both Wide Sargasso Sea and Foe are landmark postcolonial rewritings that interrogate the power of language, authorship, and silence. Rhys gives voice to a marginalised Creole woman, illuminating the psychological and cultural trauma of colonial displacement. Coetzee, conversely, withholds voice from the enslaved Friday to dramatise the structural exclusion of the subaltern from history and narrative.

Together, they demonstrate two essential modes of postcolonial critique: Rhys’s affirmative reclamation and Coetzee’s ethical silence. One restores the lost story; the other questions the very conditions of storytelling. Both authors transform silence into a space of meaning, compelling readers to confront the lingering colonial hierarchies that shape who speaks—and who remains unheard.

References

  • Azam, Nushrat. “Heroines of the Postcolonial Era—Comparison of Portrayals of Feminine Voices in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.” European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2022.
  • Bekler, Ecevit. “A Cultural Materialist Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.” Yüzüncü Yıl Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, no. 61, Oct. 2023, pp. 88–101. https://doi.org/10.53568/yyusbed.1321437.
  • Coetzee, J. M. Foe. National Geographic Books, 2010.
  • ---. “Countering (His)Story: The Politics of Silence and Postcolonial Power in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe.” International Journal of Language and Literary Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, Sept. 2024, pp. 357–68. https://doi.org/10.36892/ijlls.v6i3.1779.
  • ---. “Disability as an Allegory of Colonialism in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Dicle Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, no. 38, Feb. 2025, pp. 90–102. https://doi.org/10.15182/diclesosbed.1526154.
  • Morris, Rosalind C., editor. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea. Columbia University Press, 2010. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/morr14384. Accessed 7 Nov. 2025.
  • Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Gardners Books, 2000.
  • Savory, Elaine, and Erica L. Johnson. “Wide Sargasso Sea at 50.” New Caribbean Studies, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3.
  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 1985. Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza Two Works Series: Ausst. Kat. Afterall Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London. Walther König Verlag, 2020.











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