Gruesser, John. “‘Say Die and I Will Die’: Betraying the Other, Controlling Female Desire, and Legally Destroying Women in Wide Sargasso Sea and Othello.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 99–109. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40986147. Accessed 21 July 2021.
In this essay, Gruesser asserts that Wide Sargasso Sea is not only Othello’s feminist counterpart, but also a postcolonial revision of Shakespeare’s infamous tragedy. The structure of the piece compares and contrasts both male protagonists, Othello and Rhys’s Rochester, and female protagonists, Desdemona and Antoinette. Although Gruesser suggests additional connections between other characters, the analysis fixates strongly on the primary couples of which each story details. First, Gruesser claims that Othello and Antoinette are framed as the colonial Other, but are further divided by other factors, such as nationality, gender, and status. They are united in character by the perspective of the Other, and subsequent treatment of both Antoinette and Othello, lead them to unravel spiritually, emotionally, and physically. The author explains that jealousy, insanity, shame, and obsessive desire are the result of the continuous pressure that Antoinette and Othello experience as foreign people under the metaphorical thumb of colonizers.
The remaining half of the analysis then explores the similarities between Antoinette’s character and Desdemona. Both women are limited in their power, mostly due to their sex, but also in personality and the handling of their partner’s false accusations and later abuse. Given the historical and cultural context of the role of the female in English society, both Othello and Rochester are able and encouraged to pursue any thoughts of doubt with their wives, and are considered justified in their punishments of Desdemona and Antoinette. Within this lens, the men are unified in their villainy, while the women experience a similar destruction due to a gaslighting husband.
--Emily Tushar
