Wide Sargasso Sea
The Creoles in Wide Sargasso Sea are outcasts. They live with a divided identity and distance from the world. After the death of Antoinette’s father their behavior nearly causes their entire world to crumble. The family suffers greatly due to their distance from the rest of the world. The purpose of this paper is to show you the family’s divided identities and how it effects their everyday life, along with the consequences that follow.
Antoinette, the main character and the daughter of ex-slave owners, is a far cry from rational and self-restrained. Antoinette is a sensitive and lonely young Creole girl who grows up without the love of her mother and peers friendship. Left mainly to her own devices as a child, Antoinette turns inward, finding that the world can be both peaceful and frightening. In school as a young girl, Antoinette becomes increasingly isolated, showing the first signs of her inherited emotional instability.
Her arranged marriage pains her, and she tries to call it off, feeling intuitively that she will be hurt. Undeniably, the marriage is an incompatibility of culture and custom. She and her English husband, Mr. Rochester, fail to relate to one another; and her past deeds, specifically her childhood relationship with a half-caste brother, sullies her husband's view of her. Ultimately, her husband brings her to England and locks her in the attic, assigning a servant woman to watch over her.
In Antoinette we see the potential dangers of a wild imagination and an acute sensitivity. Her restlessness and instability seem to come from her failure to belong to any individual community. An outcast within her own family, a "white cockroach" to her disrespectful servants, and a quirk in the eyes o...
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...Antoinette has various divided identities and by reviewing the characters as I have above, you can see where those identities come from. Each character effects Antoinette individually in the ways that they treat, care, and behave towards her. Learning from each of these characters they help shape Antoinette’s divided identities with their own equally divided identities.
Works Cited
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea . New York: Walace Literary Agency, Inc., 1999.
Team, Shmoop Editorial. Character Analysis. 11 November 2008. 30 April 2014. .
Wide Sargasso Sea. n.d. 1 May 2014. .
Wide Sargasso Sea: Overall Analysis. 15 May 2008. 29 April 2014. .
It shows that people’s opinions of her matter to her more than her opinion of herself. Also, it is shown that her mother is the one who gave Jeannette the confidence to tell the story of her past, which later provoked her to write this memoir.
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Towards the middle of the memoir, the theme is shown through the irony of Jeannette’s mother’s situation as well as Jeannette’s feelings towards
influence all her life and struggles to accept her true identity. Through the story you can
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys gives new life and identity to Bronte’s Bertha Mason as the protagonist Antoinette Cosway. The novel opens to Antoinette’s narration, “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said”. In those first sentences, Antoinette faces issues of identity within two cultures. She distinguishes herself from the white people, referencing that in that society there is a hierarchy of power among the white creoles. Her rank limits her ability to claim whiteness, for she is the daughter of a now impoverished family. However, in noting Christophine, who serves as the only mother-like figure hints that Antoinette’s beliefs are shaped by those of the black society she...
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Antoinette's story begins when she is a young girl in early nineteenth- century Jamaica. The white daughter of ex-slave owners. Five years have passed since her father, Mr. Cosway, reportedly drunk himself to death. As a young girl, Antoinette lives at Coulibri Estate with her widowed mother, Annette, her sickly younger brother, Pierre.Antoinette spends her days in isolation Discontent, however, is rising among the freed blacks, who protest one night outside the house. Bearing torches, they accidentally set the house on fire, and Pierre is badly hurt. The events of the night leave Antoinette dangerously ill for six weeks. She wakes to find herself in Aunt Cora's care. Pierre has died. When Antoinette is seventeen, Mr. Mason announces on his visit that friends from England will be coming the following winter. He means to present Antoinette into society as a cultivated woman, fit for marriage. Richard Mason offered him £30,000 if he proposed. Desperate for money, he agreed to the marriage. After the marriage everything seemed to be fine but then after a while Antoinettes husband started drifting away from her. This drove her crazy and made her question her marriage. The story ended with Antoinette locked up in England in Rochesters house.
Antoinette’s relationship with Tia represents several values for her. Their relationship embodies several racial metaphors. Tia is the symbol of the person Antoinette greatly desires to be but never could. She embodies the black character that is free from alienation that is accepted by her community, unlike Antoinette who is neither black nor white. She struggles to decipher her own identity. The novel opens with the portrayal of the Cosways’ ruin after the emancipation, due to the fact that they formerly owned black slaves. They call them white cockroaches ‘I never looked at any strange negro. They hated us. They called us white cockroaches’ (Pt1 Pg 9). They do however find security with some of the blacks, namely the ones that are not from Jamaican decent, such as Christophine and Tia. Antoinette not only finds herself in the hatred of the black community but also the new English Colonists reject them due to their long intimacy with blacks and due to the fact that they are ‘Creole’ and not English labeling them ‘white niggers’. Therefore Tia represent a girl of approximately Antoinette’s age, someone she can relate to, that is black and therefore has the privilege of being accepted into society. She was strong unlike Antoinette ‘sharp stones did not hurt her feet, I never saw her cry’ (Pt1 Pg9), therefore she looked for strength, comfort and a sense of belonging with her.
In other word, Europeans identified them superior than other non-Europeans, which made them identified as the self and non-Europeans as “the other.” This connects to Antoinette’s husband
loss of his slaves. Annette is left with no one of her colour or class
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