Antoinette’s initial exposure to exile with her mother and brother forces her to grow up assuming all men are dishonest. Throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette clearly has some trust issues. While she initially feels Rochester drawing her in like a moth to the flame, she has second thoughts about marrying him and almost cancels their wedding. Without giving much of a reason, she simply says, “I’m afraid of what may happen” if she were to marry him (Rhys 46). Readers, not left with much context, can easily infer that she is untrusting by Rochester’s next line. He says, “I’ll trust you if you’ll trust me. Is that a bargain?” (Rhys 47). With the promise of peace, Rochester is able to convince Antoinette to marry him; however, he only keeps his …show more content…
Often, Rochester tricks her into answering questions in a way he deems unsuitable, simply to chastise her. He does this when he questions her about her mother’s death and again when he calls her dressing habits into question (Rhys). Rochester adds to his horrible treatment of Antoinette when he has sex with Amèlie. According to Rajeev Patke, “[h]er husband’s deliberately casual adultery with a coloured servant in Antoinette’s house distastes and dispossesses her of the only place she had learned to identify herself with as her natural habitat and patrimony” (192). Serving as the ultimate betrayal and reinforcing the bitterness and trust issues that Annette drilled into her head, Antoinette becomes more unstable. Edward Said expresses that “the exile experience constitutes an “unhealable rift between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”” (137). As the couple’s relationship becomes more and more precarious Rochester taunts Antoinette’s already fragile state. Rochester’s feelings of entrapment or rather his feelings of self-pity, pressed further by his question, “[p]ity. Is there none for me? Tied to a lunatic for life-A drunken lying lunatic-gone her mother 's way (Rhys …show more content…
Already full of self-criticism and self-loathing (Grigg 140), Antoinette begins feeling an “unconscious sense of guilt,” the result of an identification with someone to whom the person has been erotically attached; and it is “often the sole remaining trace of the abandoned love –relation” (Grigg 141). While Rochester is determined not to love her, he cannot help but feel responsible for her, after all part of the exile, and therefore her undoing is attributed to him. Unable to walk away from the marriage, he sets out to make the best of it the only way he knows how, by locking her away, exiling her
Within Rhys’s novel, he incorporates the normality of the West Indies during the nineteenth and mid- twentieth centuries. Antoinette, the main character, who happens to be a white Creole, is mistreated and discriminated because of her identity. Throughout the text, characters are victimized by prejudices. For example, Antoinette and Annette become victims of traumatic experience as they face numerous kinds of mistreatment. Antoinette had to deal with an arranged marriage, which results her becoming distressed. Throughout this marriage, she was treated irrationally by her husband, Rochester and servants. She was unable to relate to Rochester because their upbringings were incompatible. She had to stomach the trauma of being shunned because of her appearance and identity. She was called names, mainly “white cockroach”, and was treated as an
Initially, there is an underlying struggle of duty verses love. Both families of the “star-crossed lovers”, especially the Capulets, focus on a successful marriage having an emphasis on d...
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
Jane continues her new life at Thornfield now with the interest of Mr. Rochester and she thinks about the concept of marriage. Charlotte Bronte shows the way each character thinks of each other and how they treat each other. Jane is treated like an invisible un-acknowledgeable maid. Mr. Rochester treats her oppositely unlike his guests. While Jane sits and observes the guest she has an interesting analysis on their looks, behavior and status. Jane’s response to Mrs. Ingram’s engagement made her look like she is better than Mrs. Ingram.
The story begins with the Marquise de Merteuil corresponding with Vicomte de Valmont regarding a luscious new act of ‘revenge’, as she describes it, against the Comte de Gercourt. The young Cecile de Volanges has just come home from the convent and her marriage to Gercourt has been arranged. However, before he can wed the innocent child, Merteuil proposes Valmont ‘educate’ her, thus spoiling Gercourt’s fancy for untarnished convent girls. Valmont is uninterested in such an easy seduction and is far more aroused by the thought of lulling The Presidente’ de Tourvel, the very epitome of virtue, into submission. And so the tale unfolds.
“Said he, ‘I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake,as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind!’”(Gilman, 774) shows John begging her to withhold all feelings to save herself, him, and their child from any further pain. This suppression of feeling caused the mental confinement that the narrator felt. He hadn’t known in asking her to do so, it would cause such a reaction. While, Brently Mallard’s consistent pressure of being a perfect wife on Mrs. Mallard caused her conflicting ideas on his death as her being set free. “And yet she had loved him-sometimes. Often she had not.” (Chopin, 785) shows Mrs. Mallard's rethinking of her feelings towards her husband. The release of pressure caused by her husband death caused her to rethink and find her true feelings towards him. Mr. Mallard had unknowingly applied this pressure upon his wife because it was simply what he had always thought a woman should be which is learned from society. Meanwhile, Henry Allen consistently ridicules and rejects Elisa’s ideas of breaking free of the set standards of what a woman should be not knowing the effects it had on her. “Oh, sure, some. What’s the matter, Elisa? Do you want to
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.
Mr. Rochester is irresistibly driven by his feelings. He carries a long history of ignoring sound judgment, including his hasty and unwise marriage to Bertha Mason because he "was dazzled, stimulated...[he] thought [he] loved her"(310), and his ensuing licentious, wandering life in search of pleasure. He has grown so accustomed to burying good sense, that he is able to completely disregard the fact that he still has a living wife with a clear conscience. Swept away by his feelings, he ignores the law, and tries to justify marriage to Jane. His passion often exceeds his control, like when Jane tells him she must leave Thornfield. "‘Jane! Will you hear reason? Because, if you won't, I'll try violence'" (307), he tells Jane desperately. Mr. Rochester deludes himself into the belief that he listens to sound judgment, but in reality, what he calls reason is simply folly born from his uncontrolled passions.
One of the most startling scenes in Jane Eyre is when finally it is revealed that Mr. Rochester has been keeping his wife in his attic, in an attempt to keep her away from the eyes of society, and of course, his and Jane's. It is at once a tragic and horrifying scene as the woman comes into the view of the innocent love-struck heroine, who had no notion of Mr. Rochester's insane wife in the attic before the moment she is revealed. While Jane Eyre was a work of fiction, it is not such a far leap for a modern viewer to think that this would have been how Victorian families hid or dealt with their insane relatives, but was this sort of treatment of the mentally ill at home and under lock and key really the case? Or was Jane Eyre simply a work of fiction with little to none of it ground in reality at all? In this essay, the treatment of the mentally ill during the Victorian period both in the asylums and at home will be examined, as well as whether or not their actually was a mad woman in the attic.
First, one must beg the question, why does Rhys choose an allusion that nobody will understand? Rhys was fully aware that the title would not lend itself to easy interpretation. Why, then, did she stick with Wide Sargasso Sea instead of the more obvious ‘The First Mrs. Rochester’ or even ‘Creole’? Her seemingly unusual title choice is in actuality a carefully crafted selection that echoes her decision to write about the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre; it requires unpacking, just like Bronte’s Bertha. Like the lunatic in the attic, Rhys is asking the readers to not take her at surface value, but to question her reasons: “the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course s...
what a weak character she is. When Hamlet harasses her and tells her to go to a nunnery
Rhys divides the speaking voice between Rochester and Antoinette, thus avoiding the suppression of alternative voices which she recognises in Bronte's text. Rochester, who is never named in the novel, is not portrayed as an evil tyrant, but as a proud and bigoted younger brother betrayed by his family into a loveless marriage. His double standards with regards to the former slaves and Antoinette's family involvement with them are exposed when he chooses to sleep with the maid, Amelie, thus displaying the promiscuous behaviour and attraction to the ...
In lieu of the married Bertha fulfilling the feminine standards of an “angel of the house,” Bertha’s circumstances alter her into a “demon of the house” in her violent attacks and physical appearance. As Rochester approaches Bertha during his admittance of his first marriage, “the lunatic [Bertha] sprang and grappled his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek” (Bronte 381). Shortly after, Rochester explains to his audience that “Such is the sole conjugal embrace [he is] to know — such are the endearments which are to solace [his] leisure hours” (Bronte 381). In the second quotation, Rochester admits to desiring a wife that would perform some of the duties that Patmore outlines as a woman’s responsibility. By vocalizing his desire for a wife to hold and to amuse him with sentiments during his free time, readers can then deduce that Rochester expected Bertha to fulfill many of the same restrictive expectations that Patmore championed. In Patmore’s opinion, this type of relationship would result in “passionate duty love flames higher, / As grass grows taller round a stone” (Patmore 23-24). According to this depiction, the duty a woman faces in her relationship stokes the flames of her love for her husband. However, Bronte’s characterization of Bertha as beastly along with her many
Jane's true love for Roshester becomes appearant during her walks with him at Thornfield. Jane is affected by him so much that "[her] blanks of existance were filled up; [her] bodily health improved; [she] gathered flesh and strenght" (160). She felt like his "presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire" (166). When Blanche - a new woman in Rochester's life - came along, Jane began to grow jelous, which reveals how much she actually really loves Rochester. She begins to hate herself saying "he is not of your order: keep to your caste, and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised (184). With the presence of Blanche, Jane begins pointing out her insuficiencies and the things she hates about herself. This clearly expresses jelousy, and how much she is actually in love with Rochester.
Their relationship evolves from a platonic one to romantic one, Mr. Rochester proposes to Jane. But the wedding is cancelled due to the fact that Mr. Rochester is still married. Rochester asks Jane to be Mistress, She says no. Regardless of Jane love for him, her freedom is essential and she will not forfeit her honesty and self-respect. “Farewell! Was the cry of my heart as I left him. Despair added Farewell, forever!”(Bronte 272) Instead of taking a life of comfort, she runs away. She becomes homeless and then finds a stable home. When she returns to marry Mr. Rochester, she is independent wealthy woman. “Reader, I married Him” (Bronte 382)