Name Bhatt Riddhiben D.
Sem 3
Roll No. 15
PG year 2020-2022
PG Enrollment No. 3069206420200004
Paper Name 203 (The Postcolonial Studies )
Topic Name An analysis of the Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea"
Submitted to Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English
An analysis of the Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea"
CONTENTS :
Introduction
Characters in Wide Sargasso Sea
The Creole Woman Antoinette Cosway
The patriarchal Mr Rochester
The Link Between Womanhood, Enslavement, and Madness
“There is always the other side, always.”
The Complexity of Racial Identity
Conclusion
Work Cited
Introduction :
Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best-known literary postcolonial replies to the writing of Charlotte Bronte and a brilliant deconstruction of what is known as the author’s “worlding” in Jane Eyre .The novel written by Jean Rhys tells the story of Jane Eyre’s protagonist, Edward Rochester. The plot takes place in the West Indies where Rochester met his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason. Wide Sargasso Sea influences the common reading and understanding of the matrix novel, as it rewrites crucial parts of Jane Eyre .
The heroine in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea , Antoinette Cosway, is created out of demonic and bestialic Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. Rhys's great achievement in her re-writing of Bronte's text is her creation of a double to the madwoman from Jane Eyre . The heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea, the beautiful Antoinette Cosway, heiress of the post-emancipation fortune is created out of the demons and bestialic Bertha Mason. The author transforms the first Mrs Rochester into an individual figure whose madness is caused by imperialistic and patriarchal oppression.The vision of Bertha/Antoinette as an insane offspring from a family plagued by madness is no longer plausible to the reader. ] In this essay I would like to focus on the factors which led to the madness of the protagonist.
Characters in Wide Sargasso Sea :
“ ‘Fearful and ghastly to me […]!
It was a discoloured face – it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!’ ”
Antoinette Cosway
Mason Rochester
Annette Cosway Mason
Pierre Cosway
Christophine Dubois
Alexander Cosway
Mr. Luttrell
Godfrey
Sass
Maillotte
Mr. Mason
Richard Mason
Aunt Cora
Mannie
Sandi Cosway
Louise de Plana
Mother St. Justine
Sister Marie Augustine
Caroline
Amélie
Other Minor characters
The description of Antoinette Coswayin Jane Eyre is indeed very frightening. However, the way in which Jane Eyre describes her and the fact that Antoinette’s story is only told by Rochester, gives rise to doubts about the truth within the reader. Thus, Jean Rhys wrote her counterpart Wide Sargasso Sea to Brontë’s Jane Eyre in order to reveal the story about Bertha Mason and Antoinette Cosway respectively.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the counterpart to Wide Sargasso Sea. Here, Antoinette is depicted as a crucial person, who had become mad and over all a monster. After reading Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys felt the urge to unfold the story as she felt that some parts were missing so that post-colonial characters were set in the wrong light (cf. Rhys vii). Therefore, she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea and corrected the story in order to give adequate reasons for Antoinette becoming mad and to justify that Mr Rochester was not as innocent as he is portrayed in Jane Eyre. Therefore,the following will give an outline about the relevant factors for becoming mad in Antoinette and Rochester’s lives.
The Creole Woman Antoinette Cosway :
Antoinette Cosway is one of the protagonists in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea. The novel starts with a description of Antoinette’s experiences in childhood. Already in the very few sentences at the beginning of the novel, Antoinette and her family’s status in society is illustrated as she says that “[t]hey say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks”. Antoinette is a Creole woman, meaning that she is a white girl growing up in Jamaica, one of Britain’s colonies. Living in a country where most of the population is black, her fate is determined already at the beginning. Antoinette states her difficulties to find her place in society and her belonging as she is caught between two different cultures. This difficulty is underlined by the fact that the plot takes place after the Emancipation Act in 1833, where slaves were freed and were no longer obliged to serve some higher-stated white families. In addition, Antoinette’s mother Annette expands the degree of the family’s marginalization due to her being a Martinique woman and therefore, being not accepted by both, the black community and the British Jamaicans. Some day, Antoinette is even insulted for being a “white cockroach”. Hence, Antoinette grows up in complete isolation, having big difficulties in defining her own personality and belonging.
Antoinette suffers not only from exclusion from society, but also from rejection by her mother. Antoinette has lost her father and thus, her mother is alone caring for both Antoinette and her little brother Pierre. Though Antoinette tries to calm her mother while she is sitting on the balcony, she pushes away, not roughly but calmly, coldly, without a word, as if she had decided once and for all that [Antoinette] was useless to her''. This, in fact, underlines her mother’s rejection. Later on, Antoinette is really frightened after having had a nightmare, but instead of being soothed by her mother, Antoinette is accused of having woken up her brother Pierre, underlining her mother’s preference of Pierre.Antoinette’s description of her mother’s behaviour displays her suffering of being a single mother and being excluded by society.
Since childhood and throughout Antoinette’s marriage with Rochester in Jamaica, Christophine plays a significant role in Antoinette’s life. Christophine was given to Antoinette as a present for Antoinette's father’s wedding. Though Christophine is much blacker than the other servants on the Coulibri Estate, Antoinette respects her very much and portrays her as a person of trust. By means of contact with Christophine, Antoinette increases her knowledge about the Martinique culture, as Christophine is a Martinique girl like her mother. Thus, Christophine symbolizes in a way Antoinette’s strong connection with the island. When her mother marries Mr Mason, Jamaica is threatened by a person from the, for Antoinette unknown, country England.
Here,Christophine portrays security, safety and home for Antoinette and expands in this way by their immense bond . Due to Antoinette’s marriage to an Englishman, the black community targets her even more than in her childhood. Expanding more and more her irritation about her belonging and identity, “it is Christophine that turns for stability”. In the Wide Sargasso Sea, Christophine is a symbol for rationality. She is by no means naive for she does only believe in the existence of something that she has witnessed by herself. In fact, Christophine and Antoinette’s relationship should actually remind the reader of a relationship between white and black but instead, Christophine functions rather as Antoinette’s mother, giving her advice and helping her to endure every occurrence. As Jaising states, “Christophine functions as a stabilizing counterforce to Antoinette’s identity crisis and as reinforcement in the latter’s struggle against Rochester” . Nevertheless, Christophine is not able to prevent Antoinette’s confinement at Thornfield Hall and her ultimate downfall into madness.
The patriarchal Mr Rochester :
The man Antoinette marries, who actually remains unnamed for the duration of the novella. Despite this, he narrates most of the second part of the text, and from his story it quickly becomes clear that he is based on the hero of Jane Eyre. Rochester, an Englishman, travels to Jamaica at the urging the Mason family, who pressure him into a hasty marriage with Antoinette. He complies, largely because he needs the tidy sum of money they are offering him; as his father's second son, he stands to inherit nothing under the law of primogeniture. Immediately upon arriving in the Caribbean, he catches fever, and he suggests that this also has something to do with the rapidity of his nuptials. Soon after the wedding, he decides that he has made a terrible mistake, as he comes to believe that he has been tricked into marrying a girl with bad blood in her veins. Rochester retaliates for this perceived deception by taking his cruelty out on his new wife. His behavior causes her to have a mental breakdown, after which he takes her back to England and locks her in the attic of his mansion.
The Link Between Womanhood, Enslavement, and Madness :
Rhys also explores her female characters’ legal and financial dependence on the men around them. After the death of her first husband, Antoinette’s mother sees her second marriage as an opportunity to escape from her life at Coulibri and regain status among her peers. For the men in the novel, marriage increases their wealth by granting them access to their wives’ inheritance. In both cases, womanhood is synonymous with a kind of childlike dependence on the nearest man. Indeed, it is this dependence that precipitates the demise of both Antoinette and Annette. Both women marry white Englishmen in the hopes of assuaging their fears as vulnerable outsiders, but the men betray and abandon them.
Womanhood intertwines with issues of enslavement and madness in Rhys’s novel. Ideals of proper feminine deportment are presented to Antoinette when she is a girl at the convent school. Two of the other Creole girls, Miss Germaine and Helene de Plana, embody the feminine virtues that Antoinette is to learn and emulate: namely, beauty, chastity and mild, even-tempered manners. Mother St. Justine’s praises of the “poised” and “imperturbable” sisters suggest an ideal of womanhood that is at odds with Antoinette’s own hot and fiery nature. Indeed, it is Antoinette’s passion that contributes to her melancholy and implied madness.
“There is always the other side, always.” :
In Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side to Jane Eyre . The character “of the mad Creole” is given voice, dignity, identity and right to tell the reader “her side of the story.” The protagonist knows that the fate of her mother and the tragic history of her whole family can be misjudged and misunderstood by others. That is why the heroine assures her husband:
“There is always the other side, always.” :
This statement can be quoted as the motto of the novel and a as a message coming from the author, who based the plot of Wide Sargasso Sea on her own childhood experiences in Dominica: “Of course Charlotte Bronte makes her own world, of course she convinces you, and that makes the poor Creole lunatic all the more dreadful. I remember being quite shocked, and when I re-read it rather annoyed. “That’s only one side — the English side” sort of thing.”
The author was convinced that Charlotte Bronte misinterpreted West Indies and that the Victorian writer was even prejudiced against West Indian:B“The mad first wife in Jane Eyre has always interested me. I was convinced Charlotte Bronte must have had something against the West Indies and I was angry about it. Otherwise why did she take a West Indian for that horrible lunatic, for that really dreadful creature?”
Negative prejudices against people from West Indies has also Bronte’s heroine. The fact that Jane Eyre is prejudiced against West Indian proves the way she deals with Rochester’s version of his wife’s past. The protagonist discovers at the wedding altar that her beloved man already has a wife, who he imprisoned in his attic. The fact that Jane Eyre leaves his story about Bertha Mason and her madness unexamined can be put in relation with the stereotype of degeneracy and madness in the colonized territories. This kind of stereotypical thinking about the West Indies was common in the 19th century in England.
Jean Rhys, who spent her childhood in the West Indies, read Jane Eyre as a teeneager and regreted the fact that she could not contribute to the story of Bertha Mason. The first Mrs Rochester, who is presented in Jane Eyre as a creature between a human and an animal, represents threat for the heroine and her marital happiness with Rochester. In the letter to Selma Van Diaz, Rhys expresses her attitude towards the character of Bertha Mason and is in opposition to her representation in Jane Eyre
1. Growing up between two cultures:
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.”
The Complexity of Racial Identity :
Interaction between these racial groups is often antagonistic. Antoinette and her mother, however, do not share the purely racist views of other whites on the island. Both women recognize their dependence on the black servants who care for them, feeling a respect that often borders on fear and resentment. In this manner, power structures based on race always appear to be on the brink of reversal.
Whites born in England are distinguished from the white Creoles, descendants of Europeans who have lived in the West Indies for one or more generations. Further complicating the social structure is the population of black ex-slaves who maintain their own kinds of stratification. Christophine, for instance, stands apart from the Jamaican servants because she is originally from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Furthermore, there is a large mixed-race population, as white slave owners throughout the Caribbean and the Americas were notorious for raping and impregnating female slaves. Sandi and Daniel Cosway, two of Alexander Cosway’s illegitimate children, both occupy this middle ground between black and white society.
Conclusion :
Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best-known literary postcolonial replies to the writing of Charlotte Bronte and a brilliant deconstruction of what is known as the author’s “worlding” in Jane Eyre .As a consequence, it can be depicted not only how they influenced each other but also how other characters in the novel influenced them. Moreover, the analysis may show how extremely different they try to cope with their painful experiences. To conclude, at the end of this paper, readers will have alternative views on both Antoinette and Rochester. Whether one is in favour of Rochester or Antoinette, will then be one’s personal choice.
Work Cited :
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Jean Rhys". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Aug. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Rhys. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Wide Sargasso Sea". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Sep. 2017, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wide-Sargasso-Sea. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Gilchrist, Jennifer. “Women, Slavery, and the Problem of Freedom in Wide Sargasso Sea.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 58, no. 3, Duke University Press, 2012, pp. 462–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24246943.
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