Identity Crisis in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The film The Sea Inside shares the heart warming real life story of a man named Ramon Sampedro. At the young age of twenty-six he suffered an accident while diving into shallow waters of the ocean that left him a quadriplegic. Now at the age of fifty-four, Ramon must depend on his family to survive. His older brother Jose, Jose’s wife, Manuela and their son Javi do their best to take care of Ramon and make him feel loved. Although Ramon is extremely grateful to his family and friends for their help all these years, he has come to see his life as aggravating and unsatisfying. He wishes to die with the little dignity he has left in his life. However, Ramon’s family is dead set against the thought of assisted suicide and the

After spending a few months in France, she begins to realize it isn’t quite as beautiful as first imagined. While working at the Villa of Green Happiness she realizes that she is trapped within the compound and has nobody to talk in this country. She also realizes that her skin color is a burden on her and therefore gets treated like an object by her employers rather than a human being. . “The venom was poisoning her heart” (140). In Africa, white skin is rare and exclusive to the wealthy but in France its black skin that is rare but is no way associated to wealth.

for; we are introduced to her from when she is young so we know and

Life is full of obstacles. The Old man has many, but chooses to push through life. One of his obstacles is the fact that he lives a lonely life. Santiago lost his wife and never remarried. He has no children or family to comfort and support him. The only companion Santiago has is the local boy. The boy is fond of Santiago, but his family is not. The boy’s parent do not think Santiago id good for the boy because the man is unlucky. The boy brings Santiago food and companionship. Even though the boy is a friend to Santiago he still has an empty part that should hold family. The old man continues through life with no wife or children and on to his next journey with the sea.

Even before beginning this article, its title suggests the content will be discussing perhaps the relationships between those who are enslaved, and their owners. However, this is misleading, as instead of creating discourse about the micro-level relationships, Donovan writes a piece that targets the relationship between slaves, and Ile Royale as a whole. It appears as though the main point in Donovan’s paper is that slaves, and slave trading in the 18th century was not a new phenomenon, but rather a practice that had begun back in the 16th century (1995, p.4). Later in his piece, he refers to Ile Royale as a multiracial society and that “black and Panis slaves were neither invisible nor

In Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea, whether Antoinette Cosway really goes mad in the end is debatable. Nevertheless, it is clear that her life is tragic. The tragedy comes from her numerous pursuits for love and a sense of belonging, and her failure at each and every one of these attempts.

A patriarchal society is a world in which men are the sole decision makers and hold positions of power. As a result, women are introduced to a world made by men, and a history refined by a man 's actions. In Jean Rhys 's Wide Sargasso Sea, conceptions of gender are purposefully problematized. Women characters such as Antoinette and Christophine are pitilessly exposed to constraints of an imperial world.Wide Sargasso Sea presents a modern form of feminism which takes into account the intricacy of male-female interactions to find that efforts to surpass gender norms are despairing.

‘Children of the Sea’ is a harrowing story written by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American woman who expresses her personal trauma and horrors through her literature. ‘Children of the Sea’ opens with an undisclosed man writing a letter to his beloved as he travels across the sea from his home, where is lover is also writing letters directed to him. The letters they write to one another dictates the plot and reveals the two unnamed narrators lives.

In the novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Antoinette Mason’s identity is frequently discussed. Antoinette, the daughter of ex-slave owners and a woman whose life is dictated by mental illness, grows up in the Caribbean as a Creole during the nineteenth century. As a young adult, she is forced into a marriage with a white man from England, an event that ultimately leads Antoinette to her downfall. At the start of the novel, Antoinette and the characters around her are optimistic about their identity and future. As the plot progresses, Antoinette increasingly struggles to understand who she is and what her future entails. Ultimately, Antoinette loses her identity and her purpose. Throughout the text there are many reoccurring motifs. A motif

In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Mr. Vincent, a slave-owning Creole, is an example of the racialized otherness in the novel. Because he is Creole, it is assumed that he has “moral flaws,” and even the narrator says he is “totally deficient” of reasoning (218). Unintentionally reflecting the bias of her time in Belinda, Maria Edgeworth portrays Mr. Vincent to be a morally deficient character simply because he is Creole, which results in his ruin.

Authors, Jean Rhys and Charlotte Bronte constructed their novels in completely different time periods and came from different influences in writing. Jean Rhys’s fiction book, Wide Sargasso Sea is an interesting relation to Jane Eyre. The female character of Jane Eyre forms into a furiously, passionate, independent young woman. The female character of Jean Rhys’s illustration is a character that Jane will know further on as Rochester’s crazy wife who is bolted in an attic. Jean Rhys further studies this character, where as Charlotte Bronte approved that it was left explained (Thorpe 175). Antoinette, considerably like Jane, evolves in a world with minimal amount of love to offer. Both these women are taken cared of as children by

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys shows the delicate balance between madness and sanity. Throughout both novels there is a lot of unusual behavior to say the least from Antoinette. There are many factors that can have a detrimental effect on one’s mental stability which is shown blatantly through the relationship between Antoinette and Bertha. This shows the relationship and balance between inherited factors and environmental influences such as other people and events that are happening around the person.

Gordon, Alan. "Dreams in Wide Sargasso Sea." Dreams in Wide Sargasso Sea. Victorian Web, 21 May 2004. Web. 19 Nov. 2014.

   Jean Rhys' complex text, Wide Sargasso Sea, came about as an attempt to re-invent an identity for Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre, as Rhys felt that Bronte had totally misrepresented Creole women and the West Indies: 'why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester's wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I'd write a story as it might really have been.' (Jean Rhys: the West Indian Novels, p144).  It is clear that Rhys wanted to reclaim a voice and a subjectivity for Bertha, the silenced Creole, and to subvert the assumptions made by the Victorian text.  She does so with startling results.

The discussion about intertextuality shows that both these two novels contain feminism thoughts, just as Wang Tao’s study has supported that Wide Sargasso Sea is the transcendence of Jane Eyre at the reflection of feminism thoughts. If further explore, we can see that enough researches have been done to dig out the hidden ideas in the two novels. Liu Liang has “made a comparison of womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by probing into their different attitudes towards patriarchy and sex to find the difference between modern feminism and older feminism”(129). The different experiences of the two heroines indicates that Jane Eyre contains the traditional feminism that women should pursuit equality at work opportunity, while Wide Sargasso Sea