Like Brontë, Rhys illustrates the painfully limited role of women in Victorian society. The subjection of women to male authority is an important theme in both Charlotte Brontë's nineteenth-century novel and Jean Rhys's twentieth-century revision. Later she repeats that they are 'abandoned, lied about, helpless.' Even though she marries to get out of this predicament, Antoinette finds herself in the same position as Rochester's wife. 'Now we are marooned,' Antoinette's mother says after the death of her horse prevents her from leaving the grounds of the family's estate. As a result they live in a state of almost complete social isolation.

Both the black majority and white minority on the island marginalize Antoinette and her Creole family, making them outsiders on two fronts. The notion of the minority as 'other' is important to post-colonial studies and to our understanding of the tensions at play in Wide Sargasso Sea. This conception of history, however, is somewhat ironic the time for which Antoinette yearns so desperately is the same period in which the vast majority of the island's inhabitants were living as slaves. She remembers Coulibri as having a garden as 'large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible,' but laments that over time it has 'gone wild.' Rhys repeatedly represents the past in Biblical terms, as a state of grace from which mankind has fallen. 'My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed - all belonged to the past,' Antoinette says wistfully on the very first page, and throughout the story she longs for a return to what she remembers as the innocent and happy days of her girlhood. Related to the theme of British Imperialistic Decline, nostalgia plays an important role in the text from its outset. Rochester's intense need to control Antoinette represents the British fight to maintain economic and legal control over an area they considered their territory. Much of the descriptive detail in the work serves to underscore this theme for example, Coulibri Estate has fallen into a state of utter disarray and Antoinette says that she 'did not remember the place when it was prosperous.' Throughout the work we see the English struggling to maintain their tenuous grasp over the island while simultaneously grappling with the reality that this domain is very different from Europe. By moving the timeframe of the story to just after the passage of the Emancipation Acts, Rhys emphasizes this aspect of her novella. Wide Sargasso Sea is an end-of-empire text that charts the downfall of English colonialism in the Caribbean, a process that began with the abolition of slavery.

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