What Are the Origins of Lunacy?

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Recommended: Females in 20th century literature

"'...She must at least be plausible with a past, the reason why Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds, ...." (Gregg, 82)

Throughout literature female characters have struggled for power, be it power over logic, emotion, or knowledge. Time and again women in literature have failed miserably, creating a concept that women in repressive societies who struggle for the power over logic, emotion, knowledge, and therefore their own freedom invariably end up committing suicide or suffer some mental illness; these characters, just as Bronte`s Bertha Mason, are often lacking development, perhaps because it is too taxing for a writer of a dominate culture to truthfully represent the characters of a colony. Either way, the theme proves pervasive enough to cause reader's to question the source of a female character's lunacy, whether it be the social/historical environment, or a result of the vast differences between the dominate and colony cultures. In this essay I seek to prove that Antoinette's lunacy was not merely a product of her environment (i.e. inbreeding/heredity), but more importantly a result of the vast and irreconcilable cultural differences between Rochester and her. He is like the bokor, and likewise she is the zombie.

I believe the historical setting of the novel sets up the importance of Antoinette`s environment. The background of Wide Sargasso Sea is set in Jamaica and Dominica circa the 1830s, and under British dominion. The British parliament had passed the Emancipation Act in 1833, outlawing slavery in Britain and its colonies (Erwin, 207). Colony p...

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... they produce." (Baucom 171)

Works Cited

Baucom, Ian. Among the Ruins: Topographies of Post-imperial Melancholy. Out of place: Englishness, Empire, and the locations of

Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

Drake, Sandra. "'All That Foolishness/That All Foolishness': Race and Caribbean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea." Critica 2.2 (Fall 1990): 193-206.

Erwin, Lee. "'Like in a Looking Glass': History and Narrative in Wide Sargasso

Sea." Novel 22.2 (1989): 207-16

Gregg, Veronica Marie. Jean Rhys' Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. : North Carolina Press, 1995.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea, A Norton Critical Edition. (background and criticism), ed. By Judith L. Raiskin New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.

Thomas, Sue. The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1999.

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