Wide Sargasso sea

Hello everyone,

This blog is about the novel wide Sargasso Sea by Jean. This novel is  both a response and a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, set in the West Indies and imagining the lives of Bertha Mason and her family. In this blog how Jean Rhys’s novel portrays the racial and sexual exploitation at the heart of western civilisation and literature. Wide Sargasso Sea is also a valuable historical work, written in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, which explores Victorian paternalism, sexualised racism and the complex social and political history of the West Indies. This blog is response to the task assigned by Yesha Bhatt Ma'am as thinking activity.

So first of all i would like to give introduction of the writer:-

Jane Rhys:-

Jean Rhys  original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, West Indian novelist who earned acclaim for her early works set in the bohemian world of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s but who stopped writing for nearly three decades, until she wrote a successful novel set in the West Indies named - Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys has established herself as one of the most remarkable novelists in the twentieth century. Her special

personal background fosters her unique perspective of literary creation. Born in former British Caribbean colony and

growing up there, Jean Rhys’ novels focus on the life of Caribbean indigenous people, especially the miserable life of

women under the oppression of the patriarchal society, and Wide Sargasso Sea is the best representative of these novels.

Introduction of the Novel:-

The unique novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, seeks to recreate the true story of Bertha Mason, the Jamaican mad wife of

Rochester in Bronte’s 'Jane Eyre', Rhys wanted to explore the reasons why Bertha Mason went mad. 

The novel divided into three parts according to the  Narrator of the novel. Very first part was narrated by Antoinette, second part was by Antoinette and her husband and third part by again Antoinette.

The novel talked about the identity of the women, racial identity in the post colonial period through the character of the Bertha Mason who had Creole identity. The novel discuss the theme like, post colonialism, Creole identity of the people, marriage and most important condition of the women as rejected wife , slavery and Ethnicity etc...

1)Post colonialism - post colonial response to Jane Eyre:-

First of all what is post colonialism:-

The term ‘Post colonialism’ is widely refers to the representation of race, ethnicity, culture and human identity in the modern era, mostly after many colonised countries got their independence. Post colonial literature is the literature of countries that were colonized mainly by European countries. Post colonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjected people. In post colonial theory, voice given to the characters whose identity came into centre of the post colonial.

 

Post colonial literature mainly focused on the themes like,

1) Exile and Elienation

2) Struggle and Opposition

3) Confusion of Identities - Multiculturalist

In this novel 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte discuss the Idea of colonialism and the identity crises of the characters. Main character of the novel Jane Eyre was orphan girl who lived with her aunt Mrs Reed who torture her a lot and after the passing of the time send her to lowood institution where she face many problems with teachers and made one friend name Helen Burns who died in the early age due to illness. When Jane turned into eighteen year she looking for the job of teacher and Mr. Rochester hiring her as governors for his daughter. There Jane save the life of Mr Rochester and after the passing of the time She fall in love with Rochester and Rochester proposed her and both dicied to get married in the church but at that time somebody came and tell to Jane that Rochester is already married - the wife of the Rochester named Antoinette- Bertha took into room there is no window and Rochester claims that she is mad, then Jane run away from the house of Rochester and at end of the Novel she came back to Rochester for marriage and expressed her love to him that's how story end. Bronte's novel deals with the other idea and the character of Bertha Mason- the wife of the Edward Rochester was deliberately silented by the writer, as the reply of the novel Jane tried to give the voice to the character of Bertha, Create a Creole identity of her in the novel Wide Sargasso Sea and make her leading character named whose name Antoinette. Many other characters like:-

-Annette Cosway Mason - Mother

-Alexander Cosway - Father of heroin 

-Antoinette Cosway Mason- Protagonist

-Pierre Cosway - brother - mentally challenged

-Mason - Annette's second husband

-Richard Mason - son of Annette and Mason

-Rochester - husband of Antoinette

-Amelie - maid

-Christophene - care taker of Antoinette 

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea depicts the story of a woman named Antoinette Cosway. Like Jean Rhys, Antoinette is white Creole, which means her ancestors were from Europe, but she was born in the Caribbean. Unlike Rhys, however, Antoinette is a heiress. In the novel, an English gentleman marries her. Although it is never explicitly confirmed, the English gentleman in question is supposed to be Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre.

In the Bronte's novel Antoinette was called,  “the mad Creole”    and the motto of the wide Sargasso Sea is to find out why she called mad Creole "There is always the other side, always.”

The novel set into Jamaica The white Creole daughter of a former slave trader, Antoinette, struggles through her life for her happiness, love and acceptation. The black community does not accept her because she is white. For her Creole background, she does not fit in to the world of her English husband, Rochester.

In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as a white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialist and the black native. she is at once neither English nor Jamaican, and is home in a nation that is not her original ‘homeland’ of England. This search for identity within a nation itself however is not unusual within postcolonial novels: ‘a major feature of postcolonial literatures is concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being, the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place’. The narrative of the novel itself and the language used is key to revealing and understanding Antoinette’s sense of self and the struggle that arises in this attempt, and this arises as a direct result of postcolonialism ‘one of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language’.

The first section of the novel is narrated by Antoinette and recounts her childhood and adolescence until she is married to an unnamed husband  (Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre). During the passage concerning the burning of her childhood home, we see Antoinette’s interaction with her childhood friend and native of the island, Tia. Antoinette runs to Tia and states,

 ‘As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not.’  

Part two of the novel is narrated by Antoinette’s husband, and describes how he marries Antoinette for her money due to his position as the second son in an age of primogeniture. However, the marriage quickly falls apart as the husband comes to see Antoinette as tainted with the suggestion that her father had affairs with his slaves and fathered children, and comes to doubt her mental state. She is not mad but she got applied madness as her mother was mad when she lost her son and someone tried to physically abused her. Antoinette also lost her mental stability and feel herself alone as her friend and husband cheated on her. 

The final is Antoinette’s narration in part three of the novel we see the impact that the control of her husband has had upon her, she now sees herself as doll, trapped in ‘cardboard walls’. As at the start of the novel, we see Antoinette is unable to identify with the idea of a nation, though here instead of race it is the country itself she cannot reconcile with. The burning of Thornfield she incites at the end of the novel is shown to clearly cycle back to the original burning of Coulibri which brought loss of identity, as we see her claim that ‘Tia was there’. The cyclical nature of the novel mimics and highlights the use of language within the narrative, showing Antoinette to never truly find an identity, stuck between black and white, and with the destruction of both Caloubri and Thornfield and her doubts that this is in fact England. This sense of being stuck within liminal space echoes through the other characters, with Christophine disrupting the colonial narrative of Antoinette’s husband, who struggles to maintain his position as patriarchal master of both Antoinette and Imperial England.

Conclusion:-

The post colonial reading suggest that during European rule and in 19th women had no identity they have to be dependent on their father and after the marriage on their husband, they never became free but in the novel Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette who is weak and lacking in necessary strength compared to Jane Eyre but at the end of the novel she burnt the house of the Rochester and make herself free from the everything.

I hope my blog is useful to you,

Thank you for visiting:-)