Wide Sargasso sea

Hello reader :)  This is a response blog task given by my teacher on Wide Sargasso Sea written by Jean Rhys about  Post colonialism. 

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys, CBE  born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she was mainly resident in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" Summary

Below is a summary of "Wide Sargasso Sea" broken down into three sections based on those within the story.

Part One

Part one of "Wide Sargasso Sea" begins in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. A young white girl named Antoinette, the daughter of former slave owners, lives on Coulibri Estate, her family's run-down plantation with her mother, her sickly younger brother, Pierre, and a handful of servants. Moneyless due to the Emancipation Act of 1833 which freed the slaves, Antoinette's father supposedly drank himself to death, leaving behind his wife and children. Antoinette spends most of her days alone on the estate. Her mother, a beautiful young woman who has been ostracized by the community, spends her days aimlessly pacing out on their covered balcony. Antoinette's only friend is a young girl named Tia, the daughter of one of the servants, who one day turns against Antoinette unexpectedly.

One day, a group of well-dressed visitors comes to Coulibri. Among them is a wealthy Englishman named Mr. Mason. After a brief courtship, Annette and Mr. Mason are married. For the first time in years, Annette seems happy. Mr. Mason restores Coulibri to its former glory and brings in new servants, but discontent rises among the freed black servants and one night, during a protest, the house is set on fire. Antoinette's mother saves Pierre and the family flees from their home.

Six weeks later Antoinette wakes up and learns that she has been ill since the incident. Cora tells her that Pierre died and her mother had gone mad following the trauma of that night, so Mr. Mason sent her to the country to recover. Christophine takes Antoinette to visit her mother, but the once beautiful woman is unrecognizable and she becomes upset when she realizes that Pierre has died. Antoinette goes to her, but her mother violently flings her away.

For the next several years, Antoinette lives at the convent school. Cora moves back to England for a year and Mr. Mason travels for months at a time, visiting Antoinette occasionally but always bringing her gifts. During this time, Antoinette's mother dies. When Antoinette is seventeen, Mr. Mason tells her that he will have friends visiting from England and indicates that he hopes to present her as a young woman fit for marriage. At the end of part one, Antoinette wakes up from a nightmare and reflects on the death of her mother and the nightmare.

Part Two

Part two is narrated by Antoinette's new husband. It begins with their arrival at Granbois, a small estate on one of the Windward Islands owned by Antoinette's mother where they intend to spend a few weeks for their honeymoon. He admits to knowing very little about his wife, having agreed to marry her out of desperation when her stepbrother, Richard Mason, offered him 30,000 pounds to propose. He feels increasingly uncomfortable at the estate and begins to feel as though he was taken advantage of.

Soon after their arrival, the man receives a letter from Daniel Cosway, one of Antoinette's father's illegitimate children. Daniel warns the man of the insanity that runs in his wife's blood. Antoinette begins to sense that her husband hates her, so she begs Christophine for her help. Christophine tells Antoinette to leave the man, but she refuses. That night, Antoinette returns home and tells her husband about her past. They talk late into the night and when he wakes, he believes he was poisoned. Afraid Antoinette will wake up, he runs out of the house and into the woods. He sleeps in the woods for several hours and when he wakes again, he returns to Granbois where Amélie, one of the servants, brings him wine and food. He sleeps with Amélie while Antoinette sits in the next room, able to hear everything.

The next morning, Antoinette goes to Christophine's home. When she returns, she is drunk and goes straight to her bedroom. When Antoinette calls for more to drink, her husband keeps the servants from taking her more, forcing her to come out of her bedroom. Antoinette is drunk and mad and when her husband refuses to give her the bottle, she bites him. Christophine comforts her and takes her back to her room, then returns to yell at the man for his cruelty. It is that night that he decides to return to England and to take Antoinette with him.

Part Three

In the third and final part of the story, Antoinette is the narrator. Her husband has brought her back to England where she lives locked in the attic under the care of a servant named Grace Poole. Now violent and deranged, Antoinette has lost all sense of time and believes that they never made it to England. When her stepbrother, Richard, comes to see her, she attacks him with a knife, though she has no recollection of this incident when Grace tells her about it later. Antoinette has a recurring dream about stealing Grace's keys and exploring the house, but she never makes it to the end. The third time she has the dream it ends with her setting the house on fire. Believing that she has to fulfill her dream, she grabs a candle and exits the attic.

Women, Slavery, and the Problem of Freedom in Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys's presentation of the post-Emancipation Jamaican setting of Wide Sargasso Sea as one of despair subverts a conventional, progressive conception of history: that the end of slavery marked a triumph of good will over vicious greed and a spiritual and ethical advance for mankind. In the novel, the locus of despondency is Antoinette, for whom the Abolition of Slavery Act means the deaths of her immediate family members. As the Imperial Abolition of Slavery changes the political status of the West Indies from British protectorates to colonies, Antoinette suffers a child hood without protection and an adulthood of cultural and gender oppres sion. From Antoinette's perspective, the liberation the New English bring both rips away safety and imposes new, repressive social controls. While laying out the psychic costs for Antoinette, Rhys wages a broader, anti Enlightenment critique of European, masculinist rationalism, objectivism, and liberalism. In Rhys's defiant vision, sex and violence drive human be havior, and women's profound differences from men further defy the basic assumptions of humanism. Sexual difference marks a radically alternate relationship to power, language, and meaning. Rhys's experiments to forge a new discourse to accommodate this relationship are fierce. The resulting troubled and troubling narrative world challenges readers to accept truly disturbing and widely offensive extended metaphors of femininity and the primitive, of Africa and unbridled sexuality, of sadomasochism and historical slavery, of black-on-white rape and emancipation, and of vio lence and sexual liberation. Through these difficult analogies, Rhys plays with the meanings of "slavery" and "freedom" to suggest, audaciously, that the Abolition of Slavery was emblematic of a civilizing force the world was better off without.

European women as bonded slaves is one of the most pivotal of these metaphors. Protesting not a lack of women's rights but a set of European expectations for Creoles, Rhys ironically borrows the Enlightenment analogy of women's subjugation and chattel slavery. In its revision of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea highlights Charlotte Brontë's use of the eighteenth-century, bourgeois, feminist, woman/slave analogy that Mary Wollstonecraft made famous. As Wollstonecraft frames the comparison, women "may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent" (5). In contrast to Brontë's heroine, Jane, Rhys's Antoinette is "slave-like" for the very reasons Woll stonecraft isolates; vanity, sexual proclivity, uncultivated reason, inadequate education, and undeveloped virtue. Wollstonecraft opines, "An immoder ate fondness for dress, for pleasure, for sway, are the passions of savages; the passions that occupy those uncivilized beings who have not yet extended the dominion of the mind, or even learned to think with the energy necessary to concatenate that abstract train of thought which produces principles" (187). In her unbridled sexuality, propensity for gazing in the mirror, disregard for facts and abstract principles, and fetishization of her red dress, Antoinette is virtually a composite of the women Wollstonecraft warns against and against whom Brontë created her plain, independent, morally-virtuous heroine. Rhys changes none of the terms of Brontë's madwoman. She remains beautiful, "intemperate and unchaste" (Brontë 334, Rhys 110), and homicidal-suicidal. Wide Sargasso Sea privileges the very qualities that Brontë-and Wollstonecraft-denigrates.

Antoinette's enactment of the slave metaphor insinuates a view of master-slave dynamics as more raw, natural, authentic, empowering, and erotically-charged than abstract, intellectualized, liberal equality is. Antoi nette stores an erotic power, something similar to what Nietzsche coins the "Eternally-and-Necessarily Feminine," a concept that Wollstonecraft and Brontë, as well as their twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist heirs, categorically reject in order to achieve the rights of men. Arguing against the "dream" of "equal rights, equal education, equal claims, obligations" between the sexes, Nietzsche's description of the power women wield from a subordinate position mirrors Rhys's presentation of Antoinette as connected to nature, beautiful, vain, poorly-educated, melancholic, and love-starved: "What inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature, which is more natural than man's, the genuine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey, the tiger's claw under the glove, the naïveté of her egotism, her uneducability [sic] and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, scope and movement of her desires and virtues" (Beyond 168). Consequently, Antoinette's "slave" qualities create a dependence on men that puts her in a precarious but erotically potent position. The novel champions what Marianna Torgovnick calls "unconscious taboo urges, of the violence and sexuality repressed by the Victorians but encoded in the primitive and exposed by the modern" (Making). Wide Sargasso Sea posits gender and cultural difference as giving the lie to legalistic conceptions of social equality.