About the writer
Jean Rhys, original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, born August 24, 1890, Roseau, Dominica stands, West Indies—died May 14, 1979, Exeter, Devon, England, West Indian novelist who earned acclaim for her early works set in the bohemian world of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s but who stopped writing for nearly three decades, until she wrote a successful novel set in West Indies.
The daughter of a Welsh doctor and a Creole mother, Rhys lived and was educated in Dominica until she went to London at the age of 16 and worked as an actress before moving to Paris. There she was encouraged to write by the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.
Works of Jean rhys
Her first book, a collection of short stories, The Left Bank (1927), was followed by such novels as Postures (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Characters of novel
About wide sargasso sea
Wide sargasso the title represents 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.
The title invites the reader to consider how the characters can be thought of as trapped in their own Sargasso Seas. They may be suspended in the murky passage between two worlds, between England and Jamaica, for example, or between racial identities, as Antoinette struggles with her white Creole heritage. But the terrors of the Sargasso Sea are also largely mythical, the product of sailor lore rather than historical or scientific fact. By linking itself to this mythical tradition, the novel asks the reader to consider the role of stories and fictions in the characters' lives, particularly when it comes to encountering experiences that are foreign, alien, and strange.
Antoinette Cosway, a creole, or Caribbean person of European descent, recounts her memories of growing up at her family’s estate, Coulibri, in Jamaica in the 1830‘s. Her family, consisting of her mother, Annette, and her mentally disabled younger brother, Pierre, are destitute and isolated after her father’s death and the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833, which freed Jamaica’s slaves. Annette becomes withdrawn and depressed, shunning Antoinette and talking to herself. Antoinette seeks refuge in the gardens and the company of her nurse Christophine, who is known for her practice of obeah, a voodoo-like folk magic. Antoinette has a short-lived friendship with a little black girl, Tia, until the two fall out over a bet while they’re swimming, and Tia runs away with Antoinette’s money and clothes. After seeing Antoinette in Tia’s dirty dress, Annette resolves to lift the family out of poverty. She soon marries Mr. Mason, a wealthy Englishman. Mr. Mason has Coulibri completely renovated. The show of ostentatious wealth causes resentment in the neighboring village of poor ex-slaves. Annette and Aunt Cora, fearing retribution, urge Mr. Mason to move the family out of harm’s way, but he ignores them. One night, a mob sets fire to the house at Coulibri. The family narrowly escapes, but Pierre is badly injured. Antoinette descends into a fever for six weeks. When she finally awakes, she learns that Pierre has died, and that her mother Annette is being kept at a convalescent house in the country. Antoinette goes to visit her, but finds her mother unrecognizable, mad with grief.
Antoinette begins to attend an all-girl’s convent school. The nuns there instill the values of chastity and good behavior in their students, and place a high premium on appearance. Antoinette is comforted by the routines of the convent, but fails to find faith or solace in prayer. After eighteen months, during which time Annette has died, Mr. Mason comes to visit her and informs her that he is taking her out of the convent school, implying that there is a suitor waiting for her. Antoinette has a recurring nightmare about a stranger leading her through the woods and up a flight of stairs.
So, let's see wide sargasso sea as a post colonial novel
What is post colonial theory?
postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism. Postcolonialism signals a possible future of overcoming colonialism, yet new forms of domination or subordination can come in the wake of such changes, including new forms of global empire. Postcolonialism should not be confused with the claim that the world we live in now is actually devoid of colonialism.
Postcolonial theorists and historians have been concerned with investigating the various trajectories of modernity as understood and experienced from a range of philosophical, cultural, and historical perspectives. They have been particularly concerned with engaging with the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment—as expressed in social, political, economic, scientific, legal, and cultural thought—beyond Europe itself. The legacy is ambiguous, according to postcolonial theorists, because the age of Enlightenment was also an age of empire, and the connection between those two historical epochs is more than incidental.
Wide sargasso sea as a post colonial novel
Introduction
Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best-known literary postcolonial replies to the writing of Charlotte Bronte and a brilliant deconstruction of what is known as the author’s “worlding” in Jane Eyre .The novel written by Jean Rhys tells the story of Jane Eyre’s protagonist, Edward Rochester. The plot takes place in West Indies where Rochester met his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason. Wide Sargasso Sea influences the common reading and understanding of the matrix novel, as it rewrites crucial parts of Jane Eyre .
Jean Rhys’s attitude towards the representation of West Indian in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
Jean Rhys, who spent her childhood in the West Indies, read Jane Eyre as a teeneager and regreted the fact that she could not contribute to the story of Bertha Mason. The first Mrs Rochester, who is presented in Jane Eyre as a creature between a human and an animal, represents threat for the heroine and her marital happiness with Rochester.
Some important dialogues of novel
There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
-Antoinette
Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest's a lie.
-Rochester
There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now.
-Antoinette
Have all beautiful things sad destinies
-Rochester
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