COVE

The presence of John Alfred Vinter's painting "The Miller's Daughter," pronounced by Antoinette to be her "favorite picture," (Rhys 21) serves the narrative of Wide Sargasso Sea by reminding the reader (and Antoinette) of her mixed heritage and intersecting cultural ideals. She will never be exactly like the "lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes," but Antoinette recalls the "dress slipping off her shoulders" and tries to emulate this fashion later in life to win over Rochester (Rhys 21). In doing so, Antoinette attempts to bridge the gap between her two cultural identities by resembling a beloved English trope: a rustic, naturalistic view on the young lovers. However, Antoinette lacks the skills to consider this cultural divide politically, as she has demonstrated throughout the novel in intimately personalizing each instance of racism (take her reaction to Tia's rant on page 14). Thus, Antoinette cannot conceptualize the idea that her perceived "otherness" cannot be erased by emulating English ideals. In fact, when she arranges her clothes to resemble the miller's daughter in the painting, the effect it has on Rochester is entirely counterproductive: "She was wearing the white dress I had admired, but it had slipped untidily over one shoulder and seemed too large for her. I watched her holding her left wrist with her right hand, an annoying habit" (Rhys 76). Although Antoinette's intention was pure, her manner of dress "confirms instead [Rochester's] suspicion that she has inherited her mother's madness and promiscuity ... Antoinette herself is incapable of realizing that in Rochester's eyes, her attire actually associates her with (black) female sexual wantoness and prostitution" (Mardorossian 1,076). This painting, then, becomes a symbolic idealization of what Antoinette can never fully achieve due to her status as a white Creole.

Mardorossian, Carine M. “Shutting up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys's ‘Wide Sargasso Sea.’” Callaloo, vol. 22, no. 4, 1999, pp. 1071–1090. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3299872.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Edited by Judith L. Raiskin, W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.