Essay on The Emotional Journey in Wide Sargasso Sea

Jane Eyre is a personal journey for independence and belonging in an extremely unpleasant society. Jane Eyre is very distinctive from other romantic pieces of the era, in the fact that it portrays a woman searching for equality and dignity through independence from those who treat her as a second hand citizen. Finding independence is Jane’s only way to combat the situation she is stuck in time and time again throughout her life. Throughout Jane Eyre, Jane, attempts to find independence and a sense of belonging, while also attempting to form open and equal relationships.

Otherness is a state of isolating an individual because of the subversiveness they are considered to have within the society. The female and child otherness is a prominent issue in the novels, Jane Eyre (1847), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), though the stories were fashioned in different periods. There is a depiction of extensively different social, political and societal sceneries. Conversely, regardless of their variances, expositions of youthful, female otherness and aspects as regards selfhood could be associated to the writers’ predictions of the dangerous female other. According to numerous critics, Jane Eyre’s novel offers Jane as a social stranger. This marginalization leads to the otherness of Jane because she subverts conventional,

this is a dangerous place for them to be in, and that, like Eden, the

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.

Love is the strongest attribute two people can share together. A Midsummer Night's Dream uses love to show how powerful it can be. The four characters, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena, are the victims of Puck and Oberon's game with love. Puck and Oberon are two fairies who peruse to fix a problem in the story, but they fail and make the problem worse. Throughout the story there are different forms of love characters show towards each other. The forms of love the characters show are Eros love, Philia love, Storge love, Agape love, Ludus love, Pragma love, and Philautia love. The forms of love come from J.A. Lee's book "Colours of Love". In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespear shows the world the how much love really effects people's actions.

Emotions is a strong factor in Romanticism. Most of the actions that we do are generally based on our emotional state and emotions that we feel doing that action. In the case of our main characters, their actions are based on their feelings of bringing their tribe back, revenge on their enemies, and striving to live like any other being.​

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

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.

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.

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it,” stated Herman Melville. As implied, without theme, no novel can be considered “mighty” or have any depth. Theme is essential in any work of art. Jane Eyre is a novel by Charlotte Brontë that takes the reader through the experiences of Jane Eyre, from childhood to adulthood. This includes her love for Mr. Rochester, who is the master of Thornfield Hall, the school in which Jane works at as an adult. Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel by Jean Rhys, includes

   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.

Despite all his faults in Jane Eyre, the one virtue he maintains in that story is sorely lacking in the Wide Sargasso Sea, his personal integrity. “Nor was I anxious to know what was happening behind the thin partition which divided us from my wife’s bedroom” (Rhys 140). “You bring that worthless girl to play with next door and you talk and laugh and love so that she hear everything. You meant her to hear.’ ‘Yes that didn’t just happen. I meant it’” (Rhys 154). A man who is capable of treating Antoinette in such a way, of purposefully “breaking her up” as Christophine would say, makes one wonder if he is even capable of redemption in Jane Eyre. His little encounter with Amélie could be ascribed to his intoxication on the voodoo love potion, though by the time he sleeps with Amélie many hours have passed including a trip to the ruined house and a nap in its eerie surroundings. Furthermore, Rochester’s actions are inherently selfish. Motivated solely by greed, he seems to be unwilling to let Antoinette have even a small portion of happiness. He had the option to leave with at least half the dowry and let her move on with her life, but chooses instead to keep both her money and mind locked away in the attic of a cold, colorless castle. Regardless of whether this depiction of our Mr. Rochester is canon or not, Jean Rhys effectively makes us despise the new Rochester all by solely changing the

In 1966, Jean Rhys published her novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’. The story depicts the life of Antoinette Cosway, her marriage to a mysterious Englishman, and her eventual descent into madness. The story is a prequel to ‘Jane Ayre’ by Charlotte Brontë, and gives the woman in the attic a voice. This essay looks at the use of narrative in ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, and evaluates how this informs the interpreted meaning of the text.

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.

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