Living through the Narrative: Antoinette’s Search for Herself in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea

In this passage from Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette and her newlywed, Rochester, travel to their honeymoon estate, Granbois. The two are relatively unfamiliar with each other, so the excerpt features Rochester's initial perceptions of Antoinette, the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life. In surveying the land around him, Rhys connects the wilderness of the Caribbean island to the girl riding alongside the Englishman; in Rochester's mind, Antoinette becomes part of the nature surrounding him. Rhys suggests through the connection of nature imagery to Antoinette that the disparity between the two characters of opposite backgrounds will eventually result in a breakdown of their relationship.

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.

Written towards the end of her career in 1966, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea features the creole woman, hybridity, loss of identity, and madness. She reimagines history and uses literary tradition to suit her voice and what she wants to articulate. Rhys writes, or elaborates on the history of Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha or “the madwoman in the attic” in the 19th century novel Jane Eyre, and gives her the voice she was denied with Brontë. Instead of the “animalistic” fiery woman who was negatively portrayed because of her “madness,” Rhys allows the reader to understand the history that caused the wounds Bertha bore. As Burns says, “Rhys’s novel consistently undermines stereotypes by illustrating their constructed, sociological basis” (22). Rhys sets up explanations for the actions of her characters and challenges readers’ notions of the ideologies about blacks, creoles, and life in the tropics. Rhys shows that Antoinette is not to be thought of as a monster as she is portrayed in Jane Eyre but rather—a woman who had dreams, fears, desires, and hopes of finding her identity and place in her world. The transformation of the identity of the mad Creole Bertha Rochester to Antoinette Cosway, illustrates how Rhys fills the void that Brontë left by affording Bertha her side of the story. When Rhys decided to write the history of Bertha she uncovered the colonist ideology that is seen in Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre Bertha is considered “other” and in keeping with colonialism the

With part one and three told from Bertha’s perspective, the novel presents a more sympathetic and human image of Bertha, who was, according to the novel, born Antoinette Cosway in Jamaica. Bronte’s novel and Rhys’s prequel depict two different images of Bertha: one of spite, the other of fragile humanity, with Rhys’ novel rejecting the marginal status Jane Eyre portrays. Wide Sargasso Sea asks who is Bertha? Is she evil and insane? Or the victim of an oppressive society?

The division of a once unified people is an all too familiar story told just across the ocean. Black in Latin America: Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a documentary on the history of both countries, offers an inside look into how one island faces geographical and social division as a result of early European colonization. Despite the faults, this documentary demonstrates the resilience of African descendent peoples in the face of adversity and is successful in illustrating the pride they feel for their African roots.

These two novels are both feminist works, although each book leads to feminist problems somewhat differently. Jane has a strong foundation in what woman deserve, as well as achieve specific goals for how she portrays her spot in society being a woman; Antoinette has no knowledge where to start to change herself. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys poses the likelihood that maybe; the gap between women and men can’t be penetrated. Possibly, the unbalance is so great that Antoinette cannot have a feeling of cheerfulness and pleasure that Jane discovers near the end of the novel. Wide Sargasso Sea portrays the fluctuating position of woman in the twentieth century. Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre can single handedly be looked at as signs of feminist texts, however, Wide Sargasso Sea presents itself with more description on post-modern shape of feminism.

The theme of isolation is explored in Bronte’s novel; Jane Eyre. This theme is also developed in The Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Both pieces present different types of isolation, such as isolation due to location and the isolation of a character due to their social status, such as Jane’s status as a governess. The various ways in which isolation is present in each of the texts show how inescapable and unavoidable isolation is for the characters in both Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso, with it being present in such a large way in their lives.

Cruelty and Insanity in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea provides unique insight into the gradual deterioration of the human mind and spirit. On examining Antoinette and her mother Annette, the reader gains a new perspective of insanity. One realizes that these two women are mentally perturbed as a result of numerous external factors that are beyond their control. The cruelty of life and people drive Annette and her daughter to lunacy. Neither mother nor daughter have a genetic predisposition to madness, and their downfall is an inevitable result of the actions of those around them and the unbearable nature of their living situation.

Specifically, this has caused tension and neglect, from Annette towards her daughter with “the result for Antoinette [as] the development of a forced dependency on the very world that excludes her.” (The Experience of Womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea). Sherry Lewkowicz explains this in her essay The Experience of Womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, by detailing how those oppressed, beneath the roles of dominance, are usually stripped from their defenses. Mr Cosway was a drinker, a man who was despised and was known to have drunk himself to death. He provided no security for his family as well, as the Emancipation Act had not done them anything but create hatred and poverty, shown by how many black natives of the island turned against the Cosway family after the emancipation act, “I never looked at any strange negro.

   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.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, much of Antoinette Cosway 's life is concerned with her isolation and oppression. She is isolated and oppressed from her society, her mother, and,

Identity is portrayed as a crucial element to life in both novels Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Bronte, and Wide Sargasso Sea written by Jean Rhys. The protagonists in both novels experience hardship when attempting to acquire a sense of identity resulting in insanity or virtual madness..In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, identity and insanity are presented as connecting themes through symbols that emphasize societal expectations, conflict between race, blindness, duality and their damaging effect on Jane, and her mirror Antoinette who both suffer from insanity due to their non-existent place in society.

Jane Rhys complex writing for “Wide Sargasso Sea”, is devoted to events that explore the fate of a young lonely Creole woman, Antoinette, as she struggles to develop her self-identity in the midst of racial and cultural rejection. Antoinette finds herself trying to feel apart of something so desperately that she ends up clinging onto people that are socially “unacceptable” in her Carribean culture. One who goes by the name of Christophine, a servent that takes on a much more important role. A young childhood friend named Tia who has a significant impact on how Antoinette wants to be identified and lastly her husband whom she was forced into an arranged marriage with. The constant identity crisis that is endured results in the conflicts of Antoinette not relating with the other white characters, like her husband, and results in the roles being reversed when it comes to family and servants.

Jean Rhys 's Wide Sargasso Sea, written in 1966, is the deeper insight to one of the underlying characters in Charlotte Bronte 's Jane Eyre. In the novel, we experience the challenges one faces when having a cultural background and we see the entrapment of characters leading to indignation and hostility between the servants and their white employers. The enslavement and entrapment of individuals form many of the relationships throughout Rhys 's novel, not only between whites and blacks, but between family as well. Rhys uses situational irony, symbolism, and foreshadowing to show the underlying theme of how entrapping others can stimulate intense relationships between characters.

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