Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea lies between Rochester's England and Antoi nette Cos way's island, between the opposite categories of colonizers and colo nized, between the world of capitalism and post-Emancipation West Indies, and between privileged men and dependent women. Among these oppositions, how ever, Rhys does not create easy allegiances. No single voice steers us through the conflicts of this Caribbean world. Rather, Rhys blends dialects and speaking voices, and interweaves forms of discourse among various narrators. She crosses traditional boundaries of uniformity for voice and draws unexpected parallels between factions. No single voice steers us through Wide Sargasso Sea because Rhys thwarts facile identifications with any speaker's point of view. In short, by manipulating narrative conventions, Rhys writes across the text's most apparent oppositions.

But frequently, Rhys's narrative technique, which complicates the superin tending dichotomies of oppression, is overlooked. Critics tend to stress Rhys's" revisionist" politics and emphasize her recuperation of" lost" voices. Judith Kegan Gardiner, Ellen Friedman, and Teresa O'Connor all argue for a separate, but parallel tradition for women's writing in Rhys's fiction. They, among others, detail Rhys's representation for women's marginality as a mere oxymoron of tra ditional structures. Accepting oppositions between men and women, and absence and presence, they read Wide Sargasso Sea as a text that restores the voices vic timized by historical silences. In so doing, they fix the cultural oppositions and sexual imbalances Rhys discerns. They treat characters' identifications as essen tially dissimilar and stable, and establish antithetical (even hostile) divisions among them. Their divisions structure critiques of the novel that equate voice and silence with, respectively, privilege and oppression. I want to demonstrate, however, that reading Wide Sargasso Sea only within such oppositional frame