Transcript Historical Background of Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Author's background
 Wide Sargasso Sea was written in 1966 by a
Dominica born author Jean Rhys.
 She was born in 1894 and moved to England
when she was 16 years old.
 Rhys never adjusted to the move from the
West Indies to England.
 She always felt cold and removed and
imagined that the character Bertha Mason
from the novel Jane Eyre must have felt the
same.
 Rhys had financial difficulties, she was married
three times and she was also a heavy drinker.
 She had always a feeling of displacement
that we find in her characters.
 She struggles against racial oppression, and
primarily against the dictates of patriarchy.
 In her novels she offers psychoanalytic
readings, through its exploration of the
unconscious.
 She died in England in 1979.
About the Novel
 Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea as a response
to stereotypes given by Bronte’s 19th century
English culture.
 Rhys’s many difficulties led her to empathize
with Bertha's suffering.
 She takes the reader deep through her psyche
as a way to better understand Bertha/Antoinette
and the cause of her madness.
 Setting : Forty years of 1800, some years later
the emancipation of slaves (decadence and
decline of colonies, chaos, lawlessness, arrival
of new settlers in search of gifts and property).
The plot
Antoinette was a creole, daughter of ex-slave owners. She lived on a plantation called
Coulibri Estate with her mother and her sickly brother.
The family's finances went in ruins after the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833.
Throughout Antoinette's childhood there is hostility between white aristocracy and the
impoverished black servants.
When Antoinette was 17, her stepfather arranged her marriage with Mr Rochester. He
begins to have misgivings about the marriage: he knows little of his new wife and
he agreed to the marriage because he was desperate for money.
In add, Rochester receives a menacing letter that warns of the madness that's deeprooted in Antoinette's family. After reading this, the relationship between them
deteriorates.
Antoinette tries to regain her husband's love but she fails.That makes Antoniette mad
and violent.
They moved to England where he locked her in a garret room in his house, under the
watch of a servant. Antoinette has no sense of time or place. She become mad
because she was left alone and abandoned.
She has a recurring dream about going out from her prison to explore the house and set
it ablaze.The novel ends with Antoinette walking down from her prison to act on her
dream.
Main topics
Oppression of
Slavery and
Entrapment
Womanhood,
Enslavement,
and Madness
Complexity of
Racial Identity
Disease
and Decline
Fire
Nature
Magic and
Incantation
Main characters
Antoinette
The character of Antoinette derives from Charlotte
Brontë's depiction of a deranged Creole
outcast in Jane Eyre. Rhys creates a story for
Bertha, tracing the development of her
mental and emotional decline.
Antoinette is the opposite of the female heroines of
19th century novels, who are more rational and
self-restrained (as Jane Eyre). She has a wild
imagination and an acute sensitivity.
Her restlessness and instability stem from her
inability to belong to any particular
community.
Rhys humanizes "Bertha's" tragic condition,
exploring Antoinette's terror and anguish.
Rochester
He is pressured into marrying Antoinette, although
he knows nothing of her. He doesn’t understand
his new wife, so he begins to hate her.
Rochester remains nameless in the novel and that
highlights his implied authority that allows him
to confer identity on others.
He progressively refashions Antoinette into a
raving madwoman.
Having totally rejected his Creole wife and her
native customs, he exaggerates his being cold,
logical, and authoritarian.
Both characters are essentially orphans,
abandoned by their family members to fend for
themselves. Both Rochester and Antoinette
struggle for some sense of place and identity.