Themes in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The main themes in Wide Sargasso Sea are slavery and entrapment, the
complexity of racial identity and womanhood or feminism. In all of
these themes the main character who projects them are Antoinette and
Christophine. The theme slavery and entrapment is based on the ex-
slaves who worked on the sugar plantations of wealthy Creoles figure
prominently in Part One of the novel, which is set in the West Indies
in the early nineteenth century. Although the Emancipation Act has
freed the slaves by the time of Antoinette's childhood, compensation
has not been granted to the island's black population, breeding
hostility and resentment between servants and their white employers.
Annette, Antoinette's mother, is particularly attuned to the animosity
that colors many employer-employee interactions. Enslavement shapes
many of the relationships in Rhys's novel-not just those between
blacks and whites.
The second theme refers to subtleties of race and the intricacies of
Jamaica's social hierarchy play an important role in the development
of the novel's main themes. Whites born in England are distinguished
from the white Creoles, descendants of Europeans who have lived in the
West Indies for one or more generations. Further complicating the
social structure is the population of black ex-slaves who maintain
their own kinds of stratification. Christophine, for instance, stands
apart from the Jamaican servants because she is originally from the
French Caribbean island of Martinique. Interaction between these
racial groups is often antagonistic. Antoinette and her mother,
however, do not share the purely racist views of other whites on the
island. Both women recognize their depe...
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...a's colorful brightness. A
nightmare that is also a premonition, the dream takes place among
"tall dark trees" that lead to an enclosed stone garden. Following a
sinister and faceless man, Antoinette finds herself in a foreign place
that portends her future captivity in England.
Antoinette compares the garden at Coulibri Estate to the biblical
Garden of Eden, with its luxurious excess and lost innocence. In her
own words, the garden has "gone wild," assaulting the senses with its
brilliant colors, pungent odors, and tangling overgrowth. The flowers
look vaguely sinister; Antoinette describes one orchid as being "snaky
looking," recalling the biblical fall and man's decline into greed and
sensuality. The decadent Creole lifestyle as portrayed in the
novel-predicated upon exploitation, wealth, and ease-finds its natural
counterpart in the fallen garden.
Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn, has many techniques implemented into the book. Nunn creates numerous themes and situations that can result in wide variety of lessons that ranges from environmental issues to life lessons. Nunn uses certain techniques in this book to introduce characters and situation into the plot. The way he apply his themes is very powerful but there is a more effective way of catching the reader’s attention.
In the book, The Killing Sea by Richard Lewis, Sarah and Peter have distinctive points of view on how to interact with their parents. On page 5, the book states, “The mother whispers, put on your scarf. This stupid dress is enough. I’m drowning in sweat.” From this quote, the reader has perspective that Sarah is a brat and doesn’t know how much her parents do for her. On page 5, the book states, “He couldn’t imagine any teenage girl in Meulaboh defying her mother like this” However, Sarah doesn't understand what her parents do for her. Peter perceives what they do and he respects them for it.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys gives new life and identity to Bronte’s Bertha Mason as the protagonist Antoinette Cosway. The novel opens to Antoinette’s narration, “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said”. In those first sentences, Antoinette faces issues of identity within two cultures. She distinguishes herself from the white people, referencing that in that society there is a hierarchy of power among the white creoles. Her rank limits her ability to claim whiteness, for she is the daughter of a now impoverished family. However, in noting Christophine, who serves as the only mother-like figure hints that Antoinette’s beliefs are shaped by those of the black society she...
In the article “The City and the Sea”, by Meera Subramanian she says, how Richard George a local artist joined an association called each side Bungalow Preservation Association not knowing nothing about sea surges or dune ecology, with $15,000 that was given to them to just plant trees. Subramanian also says, how the NYC Green Thumb, which is the community garden city network supporter helped with the established plants to be watered through the first susceptible summer. She goes on saying, that on either side from where the dunes ended from Beach 27th street the water from Sandy’s flood penetrated there, so the double-dune system that was a few blocks on both sides was able to protect the place. Subramanian says, how the high-water that mark
To be able to discuss adequately how the master narratives of Bronte and Rhys’ time are revised, one must first understand what those master narratives were and what the social mood of the time was. From there one will be able to discuss how they were revised, and if in fact they were revised at all.
In both ‘Eve Green’ and ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, the protagonists experience fear in many guises. Although traumatic events in both Eve and Antoinette’s lives do lead to moments of sudden, striking fear, fear is also presented as having the potential to be subtle and muted, and therefore, “haunting”. Fletcher and Rhys seem to suggest that this form of fear is more damaging to the psyche than fear in its more conspicuous manifestations, as it is more deeply intertwined with the characterisations of the protagonists, therefore allowing for the fear to “pervade” the novels. As a result, it could be argued that fear has an almost constant presence in each novel, particularly because fear is seemingly linked to other prominent themes in each novel.
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.
loss of his slaves. Annette is left with no one of her colour or class
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway was written as Hemingway 's comeback book. Hemingway was a great writer, according to “11 Facts About Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea”, written by the website mental floss, before The Old Man and the Sea his last best book was For Whom the Bell Tolls which was written in 1940. Hemingway went a decade before he wrote and had another book published. In 1950 Hemingway published Across the River and Into The Trees, but it was not very good so people said that Hemingway was done with his years of good writing. In 1952 Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea and it was his comeback book. Throughout the book, Hemingway uses Santiago and his long time out in the sea to show that it is important to never give up.
master at his art and he keeps practicing it in order to better himself. The
The book “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex” by Nathaniel Philbrick is tragic, eyes widening and heart wrenching where all the morals and ethics are gravely subjected to situation and questioned when it comes to survival. What they must do for survival? How man love their lives and no matter what strikes upon them, holler from behind, ambush their morale, yet they want to keep going just for the sake of living. The book is epitome of such a situation that encounters survival over morality. However, in the thrust of knowledge and oceans of secrets locked inside the chambers of this world, there is a heavy price men have to pay in the ordeal of yearning for knowledge.
Wide Sargasso Sea depicts Antoinette Cosway, a white creole woman and descendent of the European colonizers, torn between her white creole identity and her affiliation with and attachment to the colonized, black people of postcolonial Jamaica. Black people negate Antoinette because her father was a slave-owner and the English people condemn her because she comes from the West Indies. Antoinette is neither fully accepted by the colonized black people nor by the white European colonizers. She continuously struggles to negotiate between completely opposing expectations and spaces of black Jamaican and white European cultures. Consequently...
While Jane Eyre is told exclusively from Jane’s point of view, Wide Sargasso Sea is told from three different vantage points. The novel begins from Antoinette’s point of view and through her narrative, we as readers can appreciate her character and share her feelings and travel with her from Jamaica to Rochester’s manor. In the first part of the novel, Rhys handles the narration so as to show Antoinette growing up, remembering her childhood and youth up to the point when her marriage to Rochester is arranged. As a child, Rhys has Antoinette recalls rumors pertaining to her family. Rhys is conveying to the readers that Antoinette is still speaking, but is, at the same time, is portraying how the while populace views her family in the Caribbean. As readers, we are able to see how Antoinette and her family are different from the people in this community.
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,
Never Give Up The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway was written as Hemingway's comeback book. Hemingway was a great writer, according to “11 Facts About Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea”, written by the website Mental Floss, before The Old Man and the Sea. His last best book was For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was written in 1940. Hemingway went a decade before he wrote and had another book published.