Indeed, Antoinette’s husband does not love her, but he wants to control her. “Rochester’s preestablished knowledge and presentations produced by the Victorian ideologies of racial and cultural superiority are not just directed at his wife, but infuse his interactions with the black and colored population even more imposingly”( Roper 83). As an knowledgeable English man, Rochester, Antoinette’s husband, has extremely different background from Antoinette. He thinks he is powerful and noble. The ideologies makes him arrogant-- he wants to conquer and control; he wants to become the master of Antoinette even though he knows that Antoinette might become a madwoman staying with him. This is an proper example can be used to explain class and gender. Class makes the husband superior; through gender, it is clear that men strongly owns power and property, but women are victims. Imprisoned in the “cardboard world” for a long time, Antoinette feels so lonely. “Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her”(Rhys 180). She thinks of her childhood, and she does not remember many things. Undoubtedly, she becomes more abnormal. “One morning when I woke I ached all over. Not the cold, another sort of ache. I saw that my wrists were red and swollen”(181). Something bad has happened to the poor woman. “Grace said, ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that you don’t remember anything about last night’”(181). Grace’s words imply that Antoinette often forget about something. A submissive wife is changed by her husband’s indifference-- she endures loneliness, coldness and despair. Already forgets how long she has been in the upstairs prison, Antoinette said that hundreds of days and nights slipping through her fingers(184). She r... ... middle of paper ... ...Sea." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.2 (1989): 143-58. JSTOR. Web. 13 May 2014. Kamel, Rose. ""Before I Was Set Free": The Creole Wife in "Jane Eyre" and "Wide Sargasso Sea"" The Journal of Narrative Technique 25.1 (1995): 1-22. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2014. Mardorossian, Carine M. "Shutting up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea"" Callaloo 22.4 (1999): 1071-090. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2014. Roper, Valerie P. "WOMAN AS STORYTELLER IN "WIDE SARGASSO SEA"" Caribbean Quarterly 34.1/2, WOMEN IN WEST INDIAN LITERATURE (1988): 19-36. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2014. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. N.p.: Bruguera, 1982. Print. Smith, R. Mcclure. "'I Don't Dream about It Any More': The Textual Unconscious in Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea"" The Journal of Narrative Technique26.2 (1996): 113-36. JSTOR. Web. 12 May 2014.
In Heinrich Von Kleist's The Marquise of O. and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, the female protagonist is terribly mislabeled. The inaccuracies in treatment, administered by seemingly authoritative and knowledgeable characters -- family members and a medically certified spouse, respectively -- result in tragic deterioration of the state of mind of both the Marquise and The Yellow Wallpaper's narrator. The delineation of each character's weakness is comprised of blatant references to an applied infantile image and approaching unstable mentality. In The Marquise of O, the Marquise is thrust unwillingly into the external world; in The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is locked away unwillingly in an interior world. Though both are persecuted because of their gender, in The Marquise of O, the Marquise is troubled by the symbolic rebirth of her womanhood; while in The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is troubled by the symbolic death of her womanhood.
According to Elizabethan society, the center of Olivia’s dilemma with her marriage was ensuring her wealth, not marrying a man she loved (Joseph 170). Social class increases division among individuals in society. This play “ is not the story of a Juliet's or an Orlando's love .., but of the very realistic struggles and intrigues over the betrothal of a rich Countess, whose selection of a mate determines the future” (170). Readers looking past these boundaries created by class and gender, can find striking similarities in emotions characters have for each other. The personal struggles the characters face in this play demonstrate the obstacles that individuals faced because of their gender or place in the social hierarchy.
The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing but good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house." Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a "prison-like" room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.
Annette: This is Antoinette’s mother who provides a negative perspective on her daughter’s life. She always needed to be liked by everyone and this personality trait rubbed off on Antoinette, which reflected on her in a negative way later in the novel. “I was bridesmaid when my mother married Mr. Mason in Spanish Town...their eyes slid away from my hating face” (36). Neglected from her family and being less favored by her mother to her brother, Antoinette lives a life without love and peace, but with a lack of respect and with a husband who finds pleasure in asserting his male dominant power over his wife. Unfortunately, Antoinette has got many of her mother’s undesirable characteristics and possibly could have inherited the mental illness
In both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the main characters Jane and Antoinette are faced with hardships that affect each of them in different ways. In the passages below, the authors Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys illustrate that Jane and Antoinette grew fond of inanimate objects in response to the hurt that they had suffered in life. Although Jane and Antoinette appear to have come from painful backgrounds, each deals with her pain in a different manner, and therefore each leads a very different life into adulthood. Because of their varying attitudes towards life and hardships, Jane and Antoinette lived very different life styles despite similarities early in life.
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre depicts the passionate love Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester have for each other, and as Bertha Mason stands in the way of the happiness of Brontë's heroine, the reader sees Mason as little more than a villainous demon and a raving lunatic. Jean Rhys' serves as Mason's defendant, as the author's 1966 novella Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre, seeks to explore and explain Bertha's (or Antoinette Cosway's) descent into madness. Rhys rejects the notion that Antoinette has been born into a family of lunatics and is therefore destined to become one herself. Instead, Rhys suggests that the Cosways are sane people thrown into madness as a result of oppression. Parallels are drawn between Jane and Antoinette in an attempt to win the latter the reader's sympathy and understanding. Just as they did in Jane Eyre, readers of Wide Sargasso Sea bear witness to a young woman's struggle to escape and overcome her repressive surroundings. Brontë makes heavy use of the motif of fire in her novel and Rhys does the same in Wide Sargasso Sea. In Rhys' novella, fire represents defiance in the face of oppression and the destructive nature of this resistance.
Rochester’s personal journey with his identity is very provoking. When we encounter his character in Jane Eyre, we see the hostile and confident man in front of us. It is not until the Duigan film that my personal attention was drawn to his transformation. It is necessary when evaluating the main characters in both stories surrounding Rochester to look at his identity. This discovery questions whether it was necessary for Antoinette to lose herself. It has the potential to be that her craziness was at stake for Rochester to become his vision of himself. The complex character of Rochester should not be in the distance, but rather one in the spotlight, for his identity, masculinity, strength, and presence was at the cost of a woman.
BAER, Elizabeth. R: ?The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway?, in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, eds The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development London, University Press of New England, 1983, pp.131-149.
The seemingly glamorous life lived in the spotlight was not all it appeared to be for Marie Antoinette. Her life was by no means an easy one to live out. The downsides of this were that it strained her marriage, had very little time to herself and held few official responsibilities. “Widely circulated newspapers and inexpensive pamphlets poked fun at the queen’s profligate behavior and spread outlandish, even pornographic rumors about her.” Many people formed a trend by saying that Marie Antoinette was “to blame for all of France’s problems.” This became too much for her to handle on her own.
In conclusion, the novel of Wide Sargasso Sea paints a unique vision of the inherent racism within 19th century British culture. While the criticism that the portrayal character who are people of color is often one-sided and flat; they are painted through the eyes of the White and Creole characters that hold power and influence. This method of writing sets it apart vastly from that of Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park.
Mitchell, Sally. "Jane Eyre." Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Vol. 3. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Englewood Cliffs: Salem Press, 1983: 297-302.
While exploring the concept the ‘Other’ In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea we can begin to untangle the complexity of the forms of isolation and alienation that becomes to be considered the key characteristic of ‘the other’ and clearly represented in our protagonist Antoinette, who is perceived by her Jamaican society as not belonging. The complexities of Antoinette character comes from a culturally constructed identity that is displayed as being fundamentally different than the others around her. The Jamaican and black characters identify themselves as a majority and Rhys gives clear examples of how judgment is made to those who are lacking
Women are known to be lighthearted which is a reason they could be prone to a diagnosis like hysteria, most women in the Victoria era had it, which was treated with the recommended rest cure created by a man who felt women should be isolated from the society if they are depressed. In Jane Eyre and Wide Saragossa Sea, A female character named Bertha Mason or Antoinette is a good example of a suppressed woman in the Victoria era. Antoinette was born on a Colonial Island in Jamaica. She lived with her mother in a Community where she had almost no one to talk to and the people there dislike them. Before she married Edward Rochester, an apathetic English businessman, she became isolated and emotionally fragile. Rochester was forced to marry her, despite her problem because of his family arrangement. She got deranged after the marriage forcing Rochester to lock her up in his attic in London. Lack of care and isolation are just some examples of how women are suppressed in the society. Women need a lot of care when they do not receive the care they deserved they could feel isolated and suppressed. Antoinette's marriage made her situation worse but Rochester’s unsympathetic behavior towards her pushed her to be violent. Rochester felt he had all the power to control Antoinette which was the marriage downfall. “ The irony is, of course, that the very means by which Rochester would establish himself as a mature subject results in his inability to do so. By attempting to imagine Antoinette into the role of a proper English wife, he is forced to recognize her ultimate inability to conform to the discourses which constitute the normal within the frame of English upper-class subjectivity.” (Kendricks
Love can shine a light into mundane life, but can also swamp a traveller who longs for freedom. In gothic novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë depicts Jane’s different stages of life to display her growth from a little girl to a mature woman. Initially living in her aunt’s family as an orphan, Jane has never received parental love and is frequently being condemned. Often excluded from the family, Jane grows up with low self-esteem and a yearning for independence. After leaving her relatives, Jane’s education at Lowood promotes obedience and extreme frugality. Nonetheless, her natural inclination to liberty never diminishes. In front of Mr. Rochester, Jane tries to resist his control, but because she relies on immature forms of resistance,
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.