Wide Sargasso Sea reflects the distinct
sensibilities of a west Indian writer, but also bears the stamp of European
modernism. At sixteen Jean Rhys left home and moved to England aligning herself
more closely with her fathers welsh heritage. Her life was characterized by a
feeling of displacement and the lives of her characters which left her unable
to root herself to her ancestor’s home.Wide Sargasso Sea purposefully problematizes its conceptions
of gender. "All women characters in Rhys's fictions are mercilessly
exposed to the financial and gendered constraints of an imperial world" .This
imperial world is created and controlled by white men. While Jane too is
excluded, the result for Antoinette is the development of a forced dependency
on the very world that excludes her. She represents a particularly modernist
perspective on the suffering of woman: the abstract sense of nothingness
Antoinette experiences is so much worse than the concrete and real suffering
Jane endures and can therefore deal with and even battle. For Antoinette, even
happiness is not real and elicits fear . The differences between the portrayal
of each of these two women's lives significantly changes the way we as readers
understand how each novel conceives of womanhood and its associations.Wide Sargasso Sea maintains
a steady absence of faith in woman's ability to transcend the oppression of her
gender. Rhys's novel depicts the near impossibility of "success" for
a woman in a patriarchal world. This is a strikingly different kind of
feminism. Whereas Jane has developed many resources and defences she can rely
on to get her through her tribulations, Antoinette is virtually defenceless.
She rarely protects herself, like when she visits her mother (who she knows is
undependable and unloving) and goes to her mother with love, only to be
rejected yet again. She has a similar episode with Rochester. Fully aware that
he does not, she asks him if he loves her and invites the misery his answer of,
"No, I do not" brings .Antoinette's problems are deeply rooted in
colonialism. The violence of both her family's and country's pasts have
hindered her ability to live a full, happy life. Antoinette becomes obsessed
with security and protection, looking for comfort with the victims of slavery.
Rhys's postcolonial lens characterizes Antoinette as existing between the
harshly divided worlds of blacks and whites, between formers slaves and former
slave owners. As a Creole woman, Antoinette's relationship to the black
population combines hatred and pity, wants of acceptance and desires for
separation. During such an ebb and flow of emotions Antoinette first forms a
relationship with Tia, a black girl of approximately the same age. After blacks
set fire to Coulibri, the family escapes from there burning mansion, and
Antoinette runs toward Tia. She is unable to hate the blacks despite their
violent reactions to her presence: "As I ran I thought, I will live with
Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not" .
Antoinette identifies with a different racial group, at the same time that she
flees from the result of its violent actions. She cannot fully come to terms
with her own guilt and its resulting isolation.
Jean Rhys's
attempt to re-examine a Victorian masterpiece is inherently political. One must
read Wide
Sargasso Seawith the analytic lenses of feminism, postcolonialism,
and modernism. From its narrative structure to the voices of its characters,
this novel is clearly not a work of Victorian literature, despite its setting
in that period. Antoinette Cosway, also known by Brontë's readers as Bertha
Mason, is a female character unable ever to find security or happiness. The
fallen paradise that surrounded her life in the Caribbean was never in fact a
heaven-like place. This fact plagues her internal demons as she desperately
attempts to escape her fate as a tragic heroine. Antoinette Cosway is divided
between two cultures, and not simply between the black and white populations of
Jamaica. She is caught between existing in a Victorian time characterized by a modern
writer. Her allegiance to Victorian ideals explains why she fights so hard to
keep her relationship with her husband and her isolated life at Granbois
intact. It is, however, her modern characterization by Rhys that causes her to
fail. She cannot survive an imagined world where justice is lost and actions
are not redemptive.Jane Eyre's individuality and
strong perseverance are only possible because she still exits in a just world.
Chaos appears when that world begins to examine itself, free its slaves, and
question the horrors of its past. It is in this chaos that Antoinette Cosway is
burned alive.
The idea of woman as an alien in a patriarchal society is now widely
accepted within the woman’s movement.In
this novel Jean Rhys talks about this alienation by representing
patriarchy as women’s Sargasso sea.The
woman’s movement at present charts two courses through the sea- travelling the
mainstream of economic and social realities
and the other maintains secrets, this novel shows both these strategies.
No comments:
Post a Comment