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Wide Sargasso sea themes
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Lauren Mapp EN 3414 Dr. Andrea Spain 12 November 2014 What’s in a Name? The Effect of Losing One’s Name on Identity Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea has received a lot of attention for being a story written back to Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea focuses on the life of Bertha Mason, starting from her childhood and following her to the fatal fire seen at the end of Jane Eyre. In her youth, Bertha was known as Antoinette Cosway. Over the course of her life, she is reduced to a creature more closely resembling an animal than a woman until, and continuing even after, her husband eventually locks her away. Although the critics come to a consensus that Antoinette is reduced to some sort of mad creature, they do …show more content…
The Rochester figure notices how the life has started to go out of her. He even compares her to a corpse after their one night tryst, getting up and covering her “as if [he] covered a dead girl” (Rhys 83). At the very end, of the section he “watche[s] the hate go out of her eyes. […] And with the hate her beauty” (Rhys 102). He even says that he forces it out of her. The tone of the passage indicates that he gets some kind of pleasure from ruining her this way. Antoinette Cosway has already had her identity and her voice stolen from her. Without her hatred for her husband, Antoinette loses the last vestiges of her humanity and truly becomes Bertha …show more content…
Her version of the incident that occurs between Richard Mason and herself is quite different from the way it was told in Jane Eyre. In fact, this Bertha does not even remember what has happened until Grace Poole tells her. Richard Mason did not even recognize his step-sister. The problem is, Richard knew Antoinette Mason, a girl who, even though she had already begun losing her identity and voice, was once a lively and beautiful woman. The woman he saw in the third floor room at Thornfield was Bertha Mason, some wild creature who, imprisoned in her solitude, has lost touch with reality. Bertha even acknowledges this, frantically searching for her old red dress and exclaiming, “If I had been wearing my red dress Richard would have known me” (Rhys 110). That dress is from an earlier period in her life, before she was Bertha. Its bright color signifies it as something of Antoinette, not Bertha. She is acknowledging that, had she been dressed up as Antoinette, Richard would have recognized her, but he has no clue who or what Bertha is and had no way of placing
Jane Eyre’s inner struggle over leaving an already married Rochester is the epitome of the new "lovemad" woman in nineteenth-century literature. Jane Eyre is the story of a lovemad woman who has two parts to her personality (herself and Bertha Mason) to accommodate this madness. Charlotte Bronte takes the already used character of the lovemad woman and uses her to be an outlet for the confinement that comes from being in a male-dominated society. Jane has to control this madness, whereas the other part of her personality, her counterpart, Bertha Mason, is able to express her rage at being caged up. As what it means to be insane was changing during Bronte’s time, Bronte changed insanity in literature so that it is made not to be a weakness but rather a form of rebellion. Jane ultimately is able to overcome her lovemadness through sheer force of her will.
Charlotte Bronte utilizes the character of Bertha Rochester to interrupt Jane’s potential happy ending with Mr. Edward Rochester. Bertha is announced by Mr. Briggs as a way to stop the wedding and it also shows how hopeless Jane’s situation is. “That is my wife “said he. ‘Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know—such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours! And this is what I wished to have,’” (312) and “’I wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout,’” (312) are quotes that express Mr. Rochester’s reasons for trying to remarry while he already has a wife, meanwhile showing his disposition towards said wife. Had Mr. Briggs and Mr. Mason not been present for the ceremony, Jane may have lived happily in ignorance. Due to Bertha’s involvement however, Jane could never truly call herself Mr. Rochester’s wife. She says, “’Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by yourself. If I lived with you as you desire—I should then be your mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical—is false.’” (323) This quote shows that as a result of Bertha’s exposure, Jane refuses to marry Mr. Rochester. The influence that Bertha’s brief debut had on Jane’s life was significant enough to hinder the growth of her relationship with Mr. Rochester.
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
The Novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte took a surprising twist when Bertha "Mason" Rochester was introduced. Bertha leaves a traumatizing impression on Jane’s conscious. However, this particular misfortunate event was insidiously accumulating prior to Jane’s arrival at Thornfield. Through Bertha, the potential alternative dark turn of events of Jane’s past are realized, thus bringing Jane closer to finding herself.
When Bertha started to act insane in Jamaica, Rochester brought her back to Britain, because a "wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke… and the air grew pure… The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty" (399). Rochester 's experience of the wind from his home country suggests that he believes it is superior to Jamaica, a viewpoint that Jean Rhys supports in her 1966 book about Bertha 's early life Wide Sargasso Sea. There is a school of thought that "human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism" (Lerner 278). If so, it is possible that with the pre-existing racism of the day that Rochester saw Bertha as less-than a person because of her heritage, beginning her descent into
Bertha had a big effect on Jane future. Since she is still legally married to Mr. Rochester and Jane couldn’t move forward and be happy. The significance of Bertha is that she has an effect on some people. The things she does either brings people goes or farther apart. Jane has been disappointed multiple times and she just has to move forward. Jane doesn’t let certain things get to her. She thinks about them but doesn’t go crazy that she starts to worry. Jane has experienced things that have really shaped the person she has become.
With the death of Bertha, Jane is now able to live with the man she loves. Bertha's death precedes a successful union between Rochester and Jane. When they are finally reunited, they are equal (Showalter 122). When Rochester and Jane finally get together, their relationship succeeds due to the fact that he has learned how it feels to be helpless and how to accept the help of a woman (Showalter 122).
Jane Eyre has been acclaimed as one of the best gothic novels in the Victorian Era. With Bronte’s ability to make the pages come alive with mystery, tension, excitement, and a variety of other emotions. Readers are left with rich insight into the life of a strong female lead, Jane, who is obedient, impatient, and passionate as a child, but because of the emotional and physical abuse she endures, becomes brave, patient, and forgiving as an adult. She is a complex character overall but it is only because of the emotional and physical abuse she went through as a child that allowed her to become a dynamic character.
Each work focuses on the female search for liberation; Anna through sex, and Jane money. However, the feminist figure of note in Jane Eyre is not Jane herself, but Bertha Mason, the mentally ill wife of Mr. Rochester. Bertha is stripped of her autonomy and literally confined in her husband’s attic for defying Victorian expectations. Rather than the “angel of the house,” she becomes the demon. Bertha ultimately dies by suicide, like Carmilla, for her deviance from Victorian standards.
The association with Bertha and fire may also be symbolic of the 1830s slave uprisings in the West Indies, where slaves used fires to destroy property and to signal to each other that an uprising was about to take place. Thus, Bertha’s character is used by Bronte to draw focus on the passionate colonial woman and to remind nineteenth-century readers of the recent slave uprisings. Bertha’s
The brief snatches of trivial dialogue interspersed with interior thought perfectly encapsulates the couple’s ambling pace, a transient moment of marital bliss. Whilst Rhys uses dialogue to sustain the journey narrative, like Conrad, she also uses cyclic repetition of image patterns. These give structure, pace and purpose to potentially monotonous journeys. In Wide Sargasso Sea these are primarily of fire and heat, linking to the novel’s pivotal Coulibri blaze and intertextually to the Thornfield fire in Jane Eyre. Likewise, Conrad uses black and white imagery to link different stages of the journey.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side to Jane Eyre. The story of Bertha, the first Mrs Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea is not only a brilliant deconstruction of Brontë's legacy, but is also a damning history of colonialism in the Caribbean.
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.
Jane Eyre is a novel written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847, it is written in the first-person narrative. The plot follows Jane Eyre through her life from a young age and through the novel the reader sees Jane maturing from a young girl into adulthood, Jane also goes through many emotions and experiences and the book touches on many themes for example love, social class and religion.
The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys were produced at different times in history. Indeed, they were created in different centuries and depicted extensively divergent political, social and cultural setting. Despite their differences, the two novels can be compared in the presentation of female otherness, childhood, and the elements that concern adulthood. Indeed, these aspects have been depicted as threatening the female other in the society. The female other has been perceived as an unfathomable force that is demonic in nature but respects these enigmatic threatening characters. The female other has been portrayed as intensely alienated while grows knowing that their actions are subject to ridicule, rumor,