Hello Monks...
Here I am going to compare Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea and Character of Antoinette and Jane Eyre by applying Feminism and postcolonialism.
Introduction of Wide Sargasso Sea :
Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966 toward the end of Jean Rhys's writing career, was the most successful of Rhys's literary works. The novel was well received when it was first published and has never been out of print. It also continues to draw the interest of academics and literary critics today. The popularity of Wide Sargasso Sea might be based on several factors. The general reader might enjoy this novel for the captivating story of a lonely young woman who is driven to near madness by her need to be loved. Literary theorists, on the other hand, find Rhys's novel rich in the portrayal of the damaging effects of colonization on a conquered people and the debilitating consequences of sexual exploitation of women. Another group of readers, those interested in multiculturalism, might be drawn to Wide Sargasso Sea for the insider's view that Rhys provides of nineteenth-century life and culture on a Caribbean island.
Compare Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea and Character of Antoinette and Jane Eyre by applying Feminism and postcolonialism :
One of the central features of postcolonial theory is that it examines the impact and continuing legacy of the European conquest, colonization and domination of non European people and cultures. It focuses on the power being used by the colonizers to dominate and control the colonized in occupied territories. Among other critical perspectives, postcolonial theory is informed by feminist theory. Feminist theory deals with women’s gender, rights, identity, oppression and their position in society.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, Jean Rhys tells the story of Bertha Mason (Antoinette Cosway), Rochester’s West Indian first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The daughter of a Welsh father and a Creole Dominican mother, Rhys sought to provide a fictional life for a character that, though of the utmost importance for the development of Brontë’s narrative, exists only peripherically, confined as she is to both madness and seclusion in the attic of Rochester’s mansion.In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys uses the Brontë novel as a pre-text for relocating and reinscribing, to use Bhabha’s terms, Antoinette/Bertha in a story of her own. The narrative is divided into three parts: the first, which covers Antoinette’s childhood and youth up to her marriage to Rochester, is told by the protagonist herself; in the second Rochester describes his arrival in the West Indies, his marriage and the disastrous relationship with Antoinette; the third and final part is again narrated by the protagonist. As Rochester himself remarks about his arranged marriage,
“I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks”
Developing a fever immediately after his arrival, the illness makes it even more difficult for him to understand the local social behavior, especially that of the former slaves. The natural exuberance of the place renders him sick:
“Too much blue, too much purple, too much green.
The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger” (WSS 59).
Antoinette is still more ambivalent, both in racial and in social terms. The daughter of a white father and a Creole mother, she is part of a decaying colonial aristocracy, now threatened by a black majority of freed slaves. The power scheme in West Indian society is, thus, more complex than the opposition colonizer/colonized would allow.
Antoinette’s status as a Creole “is not only a mark of personal/social instability, but also a model for the destabilization of a set of binary constructs (white/black, insider/outsider, and so forth) which provides a spurious rationalization in Wide Sargasso Sea for the selfprivileging practices of colonial power”
In fact, as the old plantations begin to decline, much of the English tradition on the islands is eroded, as we can see in the passage where Rochester describes Mr. Mason’s (Antoinette’s stepfather) room. There was a crude bookshelf made of three shingles strung together over the desk and I looked at the books, Byron’s poems, novels by Sir Walter Scott, Confessions of an Opium Eater, some shabby brown volumes, and on the last shelf, Life and Letters of... The rest was eaten away. (WSS 63)
There are no simple dichotomies for Jean Rhys. In a mimicry of their own oppression,blacks now discriminate against the impoverished whites. The same, but not quite, as Bhabha would say. Even the slave trade is rendered as a multifaceted historical event, rather than a simplistic exploitation of black people by the whites. In fact, the issue of power is problematized in rather complex terms in the novel. Such conflicting subject positions are acted out in the beginning of the novel, when Antoinette’s only childhood friend, the back girl Tia, cheats her into losing the few coins she had and steals her nice clothes, leaving Antoinette to return home in Tia’s shabby dress, their positions reversed. After a few conflicting incidents, Tia throws a rock at Antoinette, who remarks:
“We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass” (WSS 38).
The second scene is Antoinette/Bertha’s final dream, in which she has visions of her past life in the West Indies. After a detailed description of the sights, sounds and smells she remembers, she tells us:
"I heard the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger, Qui est là? Qui est là? and the man who hated me was calling too, Bertha! Bertha! The wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings. It might bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones. But when I looked over the edge I saw the pool at Coulibri. Tia was there. She beckoned to me and when I hesitated, she laughed. I heard her say, You frightened? And I heard the man’s voice, Bertha! Bertha! All this I saw and heard in a fraction of a second. And the sky so red. Someone screamed and I thought, Why did I scream? I called ‘Tia!’ and jumped and woke." (WSS 155)
However we may answer these questions, Rhys’s novel interrogates Jane Eyre, reading it against the grain and bringing to light the cultural conventions on which it is built. Jean Rhys reveal the historicity and the naturalized character of the dominant scripts of Western culture. Antoinette transgress the limits imposed by conventional narrative and refuse to be contained in the roles assigned to them. Antoinette escapes madness by healing the split between self and other and destroying the colonial house in which she is imprisoned. Antoinette is too colorful, too sensuous, too free. She is a polluting threat to the social order that Rochester stands for.
References :
- BHABHA, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
- BRONTË, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Penguin, 1999 [1847].
- HUGGAN, Graham. “A Tale of Two Parrots”. Contemporary Literature, v. 35, n. 4, p. 643-660, 1994. http://www.accessmylibrary.com. Access January 10, 2009.
- RHYS, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Penguin, 1966.
THANK YOU
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