Madness In Wide Sargasso Sea

The Victorian Era’s knowledge of mental health was generally inaccurate and misconstrued. People of Victorian society believed people who showed signs of madness are hazardous to society and should be locked away in an insane asylum. This greatly exaggerated response to ‘madness’ occurred in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Mason-Rochester, gradually becomes ‘mad’. Antoinette's husband, Rochester, unable to deal with her so called madness, sends her away to an insane asylum in England, removing her from her native island Jamaica. While applying the psychoanalytic lens to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, readers can see Antoinette Mason-Rochester not as a dangerous mad woman, but as a character struggling with

Antoinette became so paranoid from her mindset of being harassed that she became “so afraid, [she didn’t] know why, but so afraid. All the time”(105). As an attempt to cope, she tried staying away from people and or situations that made her uncomfortable (Monroe). Antoinette found refuge in nature whenever she felt threatened by people. She would wander into the lands near her home with the mindset that “if the razor grass cut [her] legs and arms [she] would think ‘It’s better than people”(25). She was forced to find comfort in nature because “there was no one to tell [and] no one to listen”(83) about the trauma she experienced. The lack of someone to confide in made her turn towards herself. In addition to avoiding situations, Antoinette denied a situation even took place to protect herself from the possible pain of a situation. She believed if she “[said] nothing [then] it may not be true”(54). Antoinette tries her best to cope with the trauma she faced as a child. She cannot succeed because the unconscious methods she uses to protect herself bottles up all of her emotions to the point where she will