TAKING, OR SPURNING, THE IMPERIAL ROAD


 By the 1780s Jamaica had one of the highest rates of servile rebellion in the
 New World, had an overwhelming majority of slaves to whites, had an
 impenetrable mountain interior which could (and did) harbour escaped
 slaves entirely beyond any hope of recapture, and even worse, was home
 to entire bands of escaped slaves in their hundreds (the Maroons) who
 could (and did) erupt in armed conflicts against the planters on such a
 large scale that they were called the Maroon wars by the planters rather
 than "mere" rebellions..... This provided them with a profoundly unsettling
 reminder that their slaves were not by nature either docile or harmless, but
 were perfectly capable of staging an armed rebellion that might prove
 impossible to stop, and engulf not a country or district but the entire Island.
 .... "fear and loathing" the two are often inextricably linked in the
 human mind was the reaction of Jamaican planters to the slave inside the
 slave system, and their reaction to the possibility of the slave outside the
 system bordered on the hysterical. 5

 Wide Sargasso Sea accurately portrays the actual fear-filled environment
of post-Emancipation Jamaica. Here the subtext seems to read as the author's
own fears based on her childhood in Dominica a reading supported by
Rhys's autobiographical reflections in Smile Please:6 "There's no doubt that
a certain wariness did creep in when I thought about the black people who
surrounded me .... Did they like us as much as all that? Did they like us at
all? .... This was hatred, and if you think that a child cannot recognize
hatred and remember it for life, you are most damnably mistaken.... They
hate us. We are hated. / Not possible. / Yes it is possible and it is so" (49). So
a hundred years after the societal upheavals of Emancipation, the terrified
consciousness remains, in the experience of young Rhys.
 Ramchand, in the same 1970 study of four novels by white West Indians
mentioned earlier, notes that the depiction of blacks in these works was
usually of a comforting-nanny and/or ominous-obeahwoman stereotype. The
former possibly reflects the limitations of whites' encounters with blacks,
given an environment of social exclusivity where the white person's closest
contact with a black person may traditionally have been with his or her
nurse; and the latter, the precariousness of the white person's position in a
black hate-filled environment (so that there would always be the possibility
that the faithful trusted nanny is not really to be trusted).
 As Ramchand points out, in The Orchid House the sinister undercurrent is
personified principally in the obeahwoman Majolie, who tries to poison the
child Hel. The obeahwoman, symbol of black evil and source of terror, appears
also, as Ramchand notes, in Christopher in the figure of Old Rose, and in


5 M. J. Steel, "A Philosophy of Fear: The World View of the Jamaican Plantocracy in
a Comparative Perspective", The Journal of West Indian History, 27. 1 (1993): 4-5.
6 Jean Rhys, Smile Please (1979; London: Penguin Books, 1981).