Fire Causes Mental Illness in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

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Recommended: impacts of childhood trauma on the development of children thesis

Almost anyone that has had the misfortune of enduring an early childhood traumatic experience will readily admit that it has had lasting effects on his life. A traumatic occurrence at an early time in one's life will not only change the person's way of thinking, but it will also alter the relationships that this person has with certain people, places, or things. Normally comfortable settings will suddenly become extremely uncomfortable. People that the child was once at great ease with unexpectedly are transformed into completely different people in the child's eyes. For an adult, traumatic experiences are easier to handle, at least in my opinion. But for a child, going through a tragic event could completely destroy the type of character that a child has been molded into. A prime example of a traumatic early childhood experience is a fire, especially when the fire occurs in the child's home. When she was a child, Antoinette Mason of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea endured a residential fire at Coulibri. This fire was the chief cause behind the development of Antoinette's mental illness later in life. Everyone knows that the potential exists for a residential fire, but no one thinks it will ever happen to them. Helaine Greenberg points out that "Residential fires are an epidemic in the United States. Each year more than 500,000 residential fires result in approximately 5,000 deaths and 21,000 injuries" (Greenberg 1). Obviously, residential fires occur a lot more frequently than one may think. As the cliché states, the proof is in the pudding. Statistics do not lie. Many more residential fires occur than most may believe. Based on Helaine Greenberg's statistics, roughly 71 people are killed or injured by residen... ... middle of paper ... ...ne. "A Social Work Perspective of Childhood Trauma After a Residential Fire." Social Work in Education. Vol. 19, Issue 1. (January 1997). Online. EbscoHost. April 2003. Liu, Kate. "World Literature in English: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Online. URL: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/worldlit/caribbean/rhys.htm. 2003. Mardorossian, Carine M. "Shutting Up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Callaloo. 22.4, 1071-1090. (1999). KENTLINK. March 2003. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. Somer, Eli. "Posttraumatic Dissociation as a Mediator of the Effects of Trauma on Distressful Introspectiveness." Social Behavior and Personality. 30(7), 671-682. (2002). Online. KENTLINK. April 2003.

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