Wide Sargasso Sea By Jean Rhys

“Theresa, a Haytien Tale” is a short story that was originally published in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper in the United States, in 1828. This fictional short story is centered around three free women of color, Madame Paulina, and her daughters, Amanda and Theresa, and their actions to help Haiti to become independent during the Haitian Revolution. The reason the author chose to publish “Theresa, a Haytien Tale,” a text that highlighted liberating roles for female heroine of color who aided in the Haitian Revolution, in Freedom Journal was because the story reflected and brought attention to the social issues occurring at that time in New York.

African Americans have been discriminated and were not treated fairly from the beginning of the American colonies up to the 1960s. Their history included about 250 years of slavery followed by another 100 years of discrimination. However, many people state that throughout the 1800s, the whaling industry helped African Americans thrive as a race. In addition, they were treated as equals and could gain glory and wealth from it. In most cases, this is not true because negroes for three main reasons. Almost all African people did not receive high positions on their crew ships. Also, they experienced segregation on ships and were treated not equally. Finally, they were taken for their cheap and hard labor in a dangerous, unrewarding industry. Using internet sources and the novel, In The Heart of The Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick, African Americans in the whaling industry had low status within crews and faced harsh working conditions as well as discrimination and racism.

The Canadian novel ‘Crow Lake’ by Mary Lawson, published in 2002, was awarded in Canada as First Novel Award in the same year it was published and won the McKitterick Prize in 2003. The author Mary Lawson was born and brought up in a small farming community in southern Ontario. After graduating from McGill University, she moved to England in 1968. She still lives there with her husband and sons, though she returns to Canada every year. The story took place in a small town called Crow lake in northern Ontario. In this book Kate Morrison, the main character, leads the reader through her journey for healing from past mistakes dealing with her family. At the beginning, Kate who is seven, and her siblings Luke, Matt, and Bo, experienced a tough time surviving after their parents were killed in a car crash, which impacted them for the rest of their lives.

Elaine Potter Richardson, more famously known as Jamaica Kincaid, is recognized for her writings that suggest depictions of relationships between families, mainly between a mother and daughter, and her birth place, Antigua, an island located in the West Indies. She is also familiarized with Afrocentrism and feminist point of views. Kincaid’s work is filled heavily with visual imagery that produces a mental picture in readers that helps them connect stronger to the reading. An example of this really shines through in her short story piece, “Girl.” This short story describes the life of a lower class woman living in the West Indies, and also incorporates thick detailing between the relationship between her and her mother. Jamaica Kincaid structures the story as if her mother is speaking to her. She writes broad, but straight to the point, allowing readers to imagine to picture her experience. Kincaid uses visual imagery and repetition consistently throughout “Girl” to reveal the theme and tone of the story; conflictual affair between a mother and daughter.

​Throughout time, many literature works of art have shown the common theme of man with the mindset that he is the superior being in control. Around the 1830s, literature took a turn from the romantic view of the world to a more natural take of the universe. One of the better portrayals of this naturalistic view is Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” in which the short story exhibits the lives of four men cast out at sea after their steamer, the Commodore, sank and they were then forced to take refuge in a life boat. This story follows the men through the focalizing viewpoint of the correspondent and descriptively as well as effectively portrays his psychologically changing viewpoints of the ocean and their take on nature as a whole. This short story is a classic representation of naturalism with the extensive use of literary tools such as personification, metaphors, and similes to convey the message that nature is indifferent to mankind and exhibits the steady-changing viewpoint of the correspondent as the story progresses.

- 1970s: Early 1970s seemed to be continuation of ‘60s. Banning of news reports of opposition and overseas, but impossible to silence people completely. Exiled parties and people who were released from the problem tried to let me people know what was happening, but difficult to create literature and art: segregational theatres and restaurants. Act of creating The Island is an act of defiance in itself: different people of different races coming together, monument to defiance of political tyranny, extremely difficult  strategy: no written script until after internationally famous, no evidence, no arrests!

This book is about the life of a black young girl, Zarite (known as Tete) that is purchased at 9 years old by Violette, a mixed race prostitute, to be the personal slave of Eugenia Garcia del Solar, the Spanish wife of Toulouse Valmorain, a French guy owner of one of the biggest sugar plantation of Saint-Domingue, that is run by black slaves. Throughout the novel, Zarite tells her story as a representation of the exploitation of slaves on the island in the eighteenth century, their lives and how they fought for freedom. “He had never thought about Tete’s sentiments; he assumed they were very limited. In

She is a mix of a superior race that are slave owners, and a race of slaves. As the Englishman continues to dehumanise Antoinette, he becomes more and more comfortable with this mindset which later makes it easier to convince himself that everything he did was for her own good. In her article, Kristy Butler discusses the intertextuality between novels, stating: “Hauntological readings demonstrate that the literary ghosts of one text can haunt others” (Butler 130). When applied to the lens of the Antoinette and Bertha, the “literary ghost” that haunts the other text is Antoinette’s story and her later transformation into Bertha. In her article, Kelly Baker Josephs adds on to the opinion of another literary critic

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

In Wide Sargasso Sea, the main character is Antoinette Cosway. She is a young Creole woman who comes from a dysfunctional family. Her father, Alexander Cosway, dies before his character could be introduced. He was a former slave owner who had a plantation, Coulibri Estate, and was very wealthy. His name was tainted because his fondness of alcohol and he recklessly spent his money. People visited her father, Alexander Cosway, when he was alive, but not her or her mother, Annette. Antoinette asked her mother “why so few people came to see [them,] she told [Antoinette] that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where [they] lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past” (Rhys 15). In that quote,

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea attempts to prove just how closely intertwined dreams and reality are. Rhys meticulously weaves dreams into real life, ultimately creating a novel that conjures a very ethereal truth. Trying to draw the line between what is real and what is fake is nearly impossible and, by the end of the novel, the reader is left in a state of lucid uncertainty. Rhys’s clever use of slumber in Wide Sargasso Sea reveals an enhanced sense of character progression, the inevitability of fate and deeply rooted self-reflexivity, all of which create a novel predicated on doubleness and variability.

When I was a little girl at early of my age, I spent a wonderful time with my grandma near a sea in my hometown during the last two months of her life. That was the first time we saw the smile back to her face since we got the news that she got intestine cancer. Back to that time I was deeply impressed by how being around the sea was capable to change people’s emotion in such a positive way. The poet, Pablo Neruda, in his poem “The Sea” illustrates how the sea teaches a trapped man a lesson on how to be released from struggling to find freedom and happiness. The three crucial poem-writing elements, sound, structure, and figurative language make the power of sea more vivid just like a picture we could see and have physical feelings about. And when we try to get a deeper understanding of the poem, it is the sound that we hear first.

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.

The critical responses provided in the Penguin Books edition of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, states: “the only difference between [Jane and Antoinette] is their positons, one is on the edge of the empire, the other at its center” (162). The unnamed author of the response undermines the importance of this difference and fails to see how it affects the how each of the characters are represented. The lack of acknowledgement the position from which Jane narrates, the centre— characterised by Walker (1999) as white male and heterosexual— makes it easy to read her narrative as a chronicle of a marginalised orphan who overcomes the odds forced upon her by society and fate to become a self-sufficient, Byronic woman who defies societal expectations of women and asserts herself as a

Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel known for its approach on the post-colonial view of the colonizer and the colonized. It connects the 1800s view of the English (Mr. Rochester) and the West Indies (Antoinette), in which it expresses the complex social standards of society. Although, this view is prevalent in the novel, another issue is clearly expressed throughout the novel, female enslavement. Women are constantly devalued in the novel, showing as not having the same importance or significance as the colonizers, which in this case is Mr. Rochester. The colonial dominance demonstrate how treacherous women are portrayed, as a result, the novel shows how Antoinette became impelled into her insanity. Considering Christophine attempted to help