Hello Friends,
This blog is my response to the assignment assigned to us by our Prof. Dr.DilipSir in subject The Post - Colonial Studies. My topic is the Themes of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. So, Read, understand and enjoy. Happy Learning!
Key Facts about Wide Sargasso Sea
Full Title: Wide Sargasso Sea
When Written: early 1950’s–1966
Where Written: Cornwall, UK, and Devon, UK
When Published: 1966
Literary Period: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism
Genre: Postcolonial novel, revisionist novel, coming-of-age novel (bildungsroman), 20th-century feminist writing, postmodern novel
Setting: 1830’s Jamaica
Climax: Antoinette and Christophine return to the house at Granbois to confront the husband after his infidelity, Christophine and the husband argue, he makes the decision to leave Jamaica
Antagonist: The husband, Daniel Cosway
Point of View: First person, multiple points of view; Part One is in Antoinette’s point of view, Part Two switches back and forth between Antoinette’s and the husband’s points of view, and Part Three between Antoinette’s and Grace Poole’s. In all sections of the novel, each narrator is looking back at the events that occur from an unspecified future vantage point. For Antoinette in Part Three, this means that she narrates from beyond the grave.
"Our parrot was called Coco, a green parrot. He didn't talk very well, he could say Qui est la? Qui est la? And answer himself Che Coco, Che Coco. After Mr. Mason clipped his wings he grew very bad tempered. . . .
I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire."
Major Themes in the novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
1. Otherness and Alienation
2. Slavery and Freedom
3. Women and Power
4. Truth
1. Otherness and Alienation
The problem of otherness in the world of Wide Sargasso Sea is all-pervading and labyrinthine. The racial hierarchy in 1830’s Jamaica is shown to be complex and strained, with tension between whites born in England, creoles or people of European descent born in the Caribbean, black ex-slaves, and people of mixed race. The resentment between these groups leads to hatred and violence. Antoinette Cosway and her family are repeatedly referred to as “white cockroaches” by members of the black population, and are eventually driven from their home by a mob of discontented former slaves. These dynamics are further complicated by the fact that inclusion and exclusion in the novel are based not solely on race, but also on geographical origin, appearance, wealth and status, and fluency in shared cultural symbols and values.
As such, the major characters in Wide Sargasso Sea are primarily defined by their separateness from any cultural group. The novel opens with Antoinette explaining, “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and the white people did. But we were not in their ranks.” Antoinette and her family, though white, do not belong to the dominant class of white Jamaicans, for many reasons including local disapproval of her mother Annette Cosway’s behavior, appearance, and French origins, as well as the family’s poverty after the death of Alexander Cosway, Antoinette’s father. Christophine, Antoinette’s black nurse, suffers a similar type of exclusion. A native of Martinique, she is set apart from the other black people of the region. As Antoinette describes, “Her songs were not like Jamaican songs, and she was not like the other women.” The novel makes repeated reference to Christophine’s headdress and clothing, which she styles “Martinique fashion,” despite having lived and worked in Jamaica for many years. When Rochester arrives in Jamaica to wed Antoinette, he is repeatedly disoriented and paralyzed by his failure to understand Caribbean culture and custom.
It is alienation that leads the characters of the novel to the destructive acts at its center. Annette, driven by her family’s exclusion from white society, is driven to seek remarriage to the wealthy Mr. Mason, a union that ultimately brings about the tragic loss of her son, her home, and her sanity. The mob at Coulibri, angry at the disenfranchisement and exclusion that the Mason’s opulent house symbolizes, is driven to commit the violence and arson that destroys Annette and Antoinette’s family. Later in the novel, Daniel Cosway, the mixed-race, illegitimate child of Alexander Cosway, is obsessed with avenging his marginalized existence. His exclusion from the Cosway family leads him to write a series of letters to Rochester maligning Antoinette and her family. These letters disturb Rochester, and form the catalyst for his ultimate distrust and distaste for Antoinette.
The consequences of alienation become both increasingly isolating as well as increasingly dire as the novel progresses. The tensions at the start of the novel are between groups, “us” vs. “them.” Race and class difference leads an entire mob to burn down the house at Coulibri, and the family escapes damaged but together. Over the course of the novel, however, the family is drawn apart, and by the end, Antoinette is alienated even from herself. Rochester denies her even her own identity by repeatedly calling her “Bertha,” and in her madness and captivity she speaks of “the ghost of a woman they say haunts this place,” unaware that she is referring to herself.
2. Slavery and Freedom
Freedom in the novel is double-edged and troubled. Its ideal is presented in stark contrast, again and again, to its reality. At the start of the novel, we see that the Emancipation Act of 1833 leaves discontent and violence in its wake. Mr. Luttrell, a white former slaveowner and neighbor to the Cosways, commits suicide after Emancipation, unable to adjust to the new social and economic landscape. At Coulibri, the local population of black former slaves is deeply angry. As Antoinette remembers at the start of the novel, “They hated us.” Even the children threaten and enact violence on white people. A girl follows a young Antoinette singing, “White cockroach, go away, go away. Nobody want you.” Antoinette’s one-time friend Tia, a black girl, ends up hitting Antoinette in the head with a rock as the mob burns her family’s house down.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, freedom can mean abandonment or isolation, the fear of which leads many to enter complacently and sometimes even willingly into their own imprisonment. We see this with various black servants who elect or wish to stay on with their former slave masters, including, notably, one young boy who cries “loud heartbreaking sobs” because Rochester refuses to bring him to England to continue in his service. Of this boy, Antoinette tells Rochester, “He doesn’t want any money. Just to be with you.” This holds true for relationships as well. After Annette’s marriage to Alexander Cosway, which was characterized by repeated infidelities, ends in his death, she becomes preoccupied with her isolation, referring to her new status as being “marooned,” and enters into another marriage, to Mr. Mason, with restrictive and then disastrous results. When Antoinette’s marriage to Rochester first begins to deteriorate, she imagines leaving him, and is urged by Christophine to “pack up and go,” but does not. This decision leads to her literal imprisonment by Rochester.
Even if it is violent and ultimately tragic, freedom is shown to be inevitable, the necessary path to redemption in the novel on both a societal and personal level. Oppression and imprisonment are unsustainable. Antoinette ends the novel and her life by setting fire to the house in which she is imprisoned by Rochester. Her narration ends with a sense of purpose and self-knowledge that she lacked in the rest of the novel. In reference to her own emancipating destruction, she says, “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.” This fire connects her to the angry mob that, in an act of protest against their own oppression, sets fire to her family’s house early on in the novel. Both seek freedom in the flames.
3. Women and Power
The female characters in Wide Sargasso Sea must confront societal forces that prevent them from acting for and sustaining themselves, regardless of race or class. The two socially accepted ways for a woman to attain security in this world are marriage and entering the convent. Marriage ends disastrously in most cases, especially for the Cosway women. Husbands have affairs, die, ignore their wives’ wishes with tragic results, imprison them, take their money, drive them to madness. In Annette Cosway’s case, her marriages destroy not only her life, but also her children’s lives. Her first husband, Antoinette’s father, carries on multiple affairs publicly, one of which yields a child, Daniel Cosway, who eventually has a hand in destroying Antoinette’s happiness. When Alexander Cosway dies, he leaves the family destitute. Annette’s second husband, Mr. Mason, ignores her pleas to move the family away from Coulibri, leaving them vulnerable to the attack that destroys their home, kills her son Pierre, and precipitates Annette’s decline into madness. For Antoinette’s part, it is clear that her marriage is for the financial benefit of Rochester, who sleeps with their servant Amelie within earshot of Antoinette while still on their honeymoon, and eventually imprisons Antoinette in the attic of his home in England. It is claimed in a letter from Daniel Cosway to Rochester that madness runs in the Cosway family, but for both Annette and Antoinette, their descent into madness is a direct result of the grief and desperation brought to them by their husbands. The nuns at the convent school, though seeming to be outside of this system, spend their lives training their female students to be respectable wives of wealthy men.
The female characters who embody strength and agency are those who elect to remain outside of these structures. The most notable example is Christophine, a powerful and respected figure in her community. Other servants fear her, largely because of her expertise in obeah, a Caribbean folk magic, and Antoinette depends on her. Christophine tries to counsel Antoinette to protect herself and her fortune by telling her that “Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world,” and, “All women, all colours, nothing but fools. Three children I have. One living in this world, each one a different father, but no husband, I thank my God. I keep my money. I don’t give it to no worthless man.” There is also Aunt Cora, a widow who does not remarry. She is a relatively stable force in Antoinette’s life, able to control her own health and movements, able to provide for Antoinette’s childhood. She promises safety for the young Antoinette and follows through on it. Amelie, though a minor character, is also pivotal in demonstrating that power comes to women only outside of traditional marriage. She manipulates sex to exercise control over her employers, Antoinette and Rochester. After sleeping with Rochester, she receives money from him, and speaks of her plans to move to Rio to continue this tactic: “She wanted to go to Rio. There were rich men in Rio.”
Female independence is shown to be temporary, though. Women who do assert themselves outside of or in direct defiance of the system of marriage are ultimately thwarted by men in some significant way. It eventually comes out that Christophine is wanted by Jamaican law enforcement for her practice of obeah, and Rochester plans to turn her in. Even Aunt Cora is ignored when she attempts to persuade Richard Mason to secure Antoinette’s inheritance, and she despairs to Antoinette, “The Lord has forsaken us.”
4. Truth
Wide Sargasso Sea is a revisionist novel, written to complicate and push up against the accepted truth of Antoinette or “Bertha” Cosway’s character as it is put forth in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre—the archetypal “madwoman in the attic.” The novel questions the very nature of truth in its premise, form, and content.
Within the novel, truth is shown to be slippery at best, difficult if not impossible to recognize and trust. Every story has at least two competing versions. The narration itself is unstable, switching between the perspectives of Antoinette and Rochester, often giving the reader contradictory perspectives and opinions on the same characters and events. Daniel Cosway, in his letters to Rochester, provides a troubling version of the history of the Cosway-Mason family, at odds with Antoinette’s narration, thereby injecting a third competing narrative. Cosway’s version highlights Alexander Mason’s depravity, and casts Annette, Antoinette, and Christophine as self-serving liars.
Many of the characters’ identities are forged in gossip and hearsay. Christophine, in particular, is a character with multiple backstories. When Rochester writes to Mr. Fraser inquiring about her, there are shown to be conflicting accounts of her whereabouts (“my wife insists that she had gone back to Martinique... I happen to know that she has not returned to Martinique”) and even her name (“the woman in question was called Josephine or Christophine Dubois.”) When Rochester decides to turn her in, he highlights the indeterminacy of her identity in the novel, “So much for you, Josephine or Christophine. So much for you, Pheena.” Even Antoinette is not entirely sure of Christophine’s abilities, and can only speculate at the scope of her obeah prowess. Rochester’s interactions with Antoinette are also riddled with confusion about the truth. He tells her, “So much of what you tell me is strange, different from what I was led to expect,” and in his narration remembers, “She was unsure of fact—any facts.”
Even the senses are not to be trusted. Vision plays tricks on people, and hallucinations abound. As a child, Antoinette cannot be sure whether she sees or imagines seeing feathers and chicken’s blood, remnants of obeah rituals, in Christophine’s room. While at Granbois, Rochester becomes lost in the woods and stumbles upon a paved road, where he frightens a child walking by. Later, he is assured that there was never a road there. Of Granbois and the mysterious instability of the senses that he experienced there, Rochester remembers, “it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing—I want what it hides.”
Denial or madness are shown to be the two alternatives for dealing with the crushing and confounding nature of truth in the novel. Either a character can “turn her face to the wall,” and deny the complexity and tragedy before them, as Christophine accuses Aunt Cora of doing, or go mad with grief, as Annette and Antoinette both do. Rochester ultimately takes the path of denial by imprisoning Antoinette, shutting her away forever rather than reconciling the truth of her nature and their marriage with what he’d expected, or been led to believe. Even Christophine finally retreats into denial, or refusal, when Rochester and Antoinette leave for England. Rochester offers, “You can write to her,” to which Christophine replies, “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know,” and walks away without saying goodbye.
Thank you.
2,484 Words.
Works Cited
1. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Penguin UK, 2001.
2. "Wide Sargasso Sea Themes." LitCharts, www.litcharts.com/lit/wide-sargasso-sea/themes.