What is the message of Wide Sargasso Sea?
Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation.
What is the historical context of Wide Sargasso Sea?
Wide Sargasso Sea, though, is set in the late 1830s and the 1840s. Rhys’s choice of historical setting enables her to draw on and try to work her way through planter class and Lockhart family mythology about the economic and social impact of the abolition of slavery.
What is Antoinette’s culture?
Antoinette is a part of the European white culture she’s inherited from her family and the Caribbean culture she was born into. Antoinette both fears and admires the Caribbean culture and the sense of identity that her black servants have.
Is Antoinette white or black in Wide Sargasso Sea?
Antoinette, her mother, and her brother are all Creole characters. Technically they’re white, so you’ll often hear them referred to as “white Creoles.” But even though they’re white, it was commonly believed that the island climate “contaminated” their race, making them lesser whites, so to speak.
What are the major themes of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea?
Wide Sargasso Sea Themes
- British Imperialistic Decline.
- Nostalgia for the Past.
- Alienation of “The Other”
- Patriarchal Tyranny.
- The Corrupting Power of Money.
- Female Madness.
- The Illusion of Absolute Truth.
What is the racial situation as Antoinette is growing up?
As Antoinette is growing up racial tension is everywhere. She is growing up in a time period where former slaves were now liberating people. People in Jamaica lean more to the darker complexion of their people and Englishmen still walk around with a sense of superiority.
What is the significance of the title Wide Sargasso Sea?
The title of the novel refers to the Sargasso Sea, a vast area of the northern Atlantic Ocean which is home to sargassum, a kind of seaweed. The Sargasso Sea is legendary for being an oceanic black hole, where ships get ensnared by huge forests of floating seaweed, or drift helplessly when the wind ceases to blow.
What important historical event has just taken place when the novel Wide Sargasso Sea begins?
The Emancipation Act has freed slaves in the British colonies.
What is Antoinette’s culture in Wide Sargasso Sea?
As a white Creole, she straddles the European world of her ancestors and the Caribbean culture into which she is born. Left mainly to her own devices as a child, Antoinette turns inward, finding there a world that can be both peaceful and terrifying.
How is Antoinette portrayed in Wide Sargasso Sea?
Antoinette is a sensitive and lonely young Creole girl who grows up with neither her mother’s love nor her peers’ companionship. In a convent school as a young woman, Antoinette becomes increasingly introspective and isolated, showing the early signs of her inherited emotional fragility.
How is the theme of slavery dealt with in Wide Sargasso Sea?
The Oppression of Slavery and Entrapment 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.
How does Rochester manipulate Antoinette?
He ultimately refashions Antoinette into a raving madwoman and treats her as a ghost. Having totally rejected his Creole wife and her native customs, Rochester exaggerates his own cool, logical, and distinctly English rationale; he asserts his total English control over the Caribbean landscape and people.
What does the looking glass symbolize in Wide Sargasso Sea?
Rhys uses the concept of mirrors in particular throughout Wide Sargasso Sea to symbolize Antoinette’s double identity, madness, and ultimately deteriorated selfhood under a system of patriarchal oppression.
Is Wide Sargasso Sea a feminist novel?
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea can each be seen as feminist texts when considering their social and historical context, but Wide Sargasso Sea presents a more post-modern form of feminism which takes into account the complexity of male-female interaction to find that efforts to transcend …
What is the significance of the title in Wide Sargasso Sea?
What is the significance of slavery and entrapment in Wide Sargasso Sea?
The Oppression of Slavery and Entrapment The specter of slavery and entrapment pervades Wide Sargasso Sea. 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.
Why does Rochester rename Antoinette?
Rochester refers to Antoinette as “Bertha” as a way of ensuring that she surrenders into his idea of a woman, as opposed to who she truly is.