“Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (Rhys 39).

In Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” the themes of identity, diaspora, difference, and continuity are parallel with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. For Hall identity is “a production which is never complete” and can manifest itself in one of two ways. The first way identity can come about is by a “shared culture . . . a shared history and ancestry” or “a matter of  ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’”. The production of Bertha Antoinetta’s identity is convoluted between these two means of identification in that she is a white creole. Racially, historically, ancestrally she is European, but has been raised in the Caribbean. Her struggle with identity is present throughout Wide Sargasso Sea and is expressed in the difference between her and other characters.

Instances between Antoinetta and the male figures in the novel are most expressive of the difference that occurs with identification. Mr. Mason, Antoinetta’s stepfather, underestimates the hatred of the former slaves that inhabit the island and Antoinetta wishes to warn him “out here it is not at all like English people think it is” (Rhys 20). This makes it clear that there is a distinction in the way a European who was raised in Europe perceives a situation as opposed to a European raised in the Caribbean. Another example of this difference appears again between Antoinetta and Mr. Rochester, her husband from England, when he speaks of his wife he says “Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (Rhys 39). For Mr. Rochester they share an ancestral history but they are hardly relatable due to being raised on two different continents. 

Rhys portrays Antoinetta as a character who herself is constantly confused about who she is and where she belongs. Antoinetta says to her husband “It was a song about a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (Rhys 61).  This passage exemplifies how Rhys uses Antoinetta as a way to complicate what exactly makes up identity by raising issues not only of race, but socioeconomic status and geographical location. All of these factors are present even today as descendants of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and those affected by the Diaspora has persons questioning their identity.