What is Wide Sargasso Sea about?
An introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea. Wide Sargasso Sea is both a response and a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, set in the West Indies and imagining the lives of Bertha Mason and her family. Bidisha describes how Jean Rhys’s novel portrays the racial and sexual exploitation at the heart of western civilisation and literature.
When was Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys published?
Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel by Jean Rhys that was first published in 1966. Read a Plot Overview of the entire book or a chapter by chapter Summary and Analysis. See a complete list of the characters in Wide Sargasso Sea and in-depth analyses of Antoinette, Christophine, and Mr. Rochester.
Is Wide Sargasso Sea a prequel to Jane Eyre?
Told in three voices — those of white Creole, Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester, the young Englishman she marries, who implicitly reveals his own name to be Edward Fairfax Rochester when he renames her Bertha, and Grace Poole, Bertha’s keeper at Thornfield Hall — Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre.
Who are the characters in Wide Sargasso Sea?
Read our full plot summary and analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea, scene by scene break-downs, and more. See a complete list of the characters in Wide Sargasso Sea and in-depth analyses of Antoinette, Christophine, and Mr. Rochester.
What is the setting of Part I of Wide Sargasso Sea?
1830s Coulibri, near Spanish Town, Jamaica; 1840s Granbois, near Massacre, Dominica; and Thornfield Hall, England. While the novel never gives us the exact year, we know that the novel is set in Jamaica at some point after 1834. (By the end of Part I, Antoinette mentions that she enters the convent in 1839 [I. 2.4.
Is Wide Sargasso Sea Set in the Caribbean?
Wide Sargasso Sea is set on two Caribbean islands, Jamaica and a 'honeymoon island'. This is not named but is very like Dominica, where Jean Rhys was born.
Where does Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea live?
Coulibri EstateAs a young girl, Antoinette lives at Coulibri Estate with her widowed mother, Annette, her sickly younger brother, Pierre, and gossiping servants who seem particularly attuned to their employers' misfortune and social disrepute.
Where does Part 2 of Wide Sargasso Sea take place?
Part Two begins with Antoinette's new husband's narration. He is never named in the novel. He and Antoinette have just married and are on their way to spend their honeymoon in the Windward Islands at Granbois, an estate that had belonged to Annette. They are stopped in a town called Massacre, and it is raining.
What island is in the Sargasso Sea?
the Bermuda islandsThe Sargasso Sea, which encompasses the Bermuda islands, was first mentioned by Christopher Columbus, who crossed it on his initial voyage in 1492.
Why is Antoinette called Bertha?
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.
Is Antoinette a Creole?
Because she is a Creole woman living in the English colony of Jamaica, Antoinette quickly learns that the English as well as Caribbean society consider her an outsider, one whose place in the world is ranked disgracefully below the two cultures of which she is composed.
Is Antoinette Cosway Creole?
Antoinette's mother is a creole woman from Martinique, living on the Jamaican plantation with Alexander. Antoinette and her mother are unable to fit in with the other white people in Jamaica. This is due to the fact that they are from Martinique originally, a French colony, rather than the Jamaican English colony.
Is Antoinette black?
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.
Did Rochester sleep with Amelie?
Amélie, Antoinette's maid at Granbois, sleeps with Rochester after he is poisoned by Antoinette. But she's not just a saucy vixen. Like Tia, she taunts Antoinette with racist slurs, and Rochester notes a disturbing similarity between her features and Antoinette's.
What place seems like a dream to Antoinette?
This violent dream is literalized not in Wide Sargasso Sea, but in Jane Eyre, when Bertha Mason burns Thornfield to the ground and jumps to her death. Antoinette thus remains innocent in Jean Rhys's novel. While she gets her violent revenge in Jane Eyre, she only dreams of it in Wide Sargasso Sea.
Why did Antoinette marry Rochester?
As the second son, he inherits nothing from his father's estate, and has to marry Antoinette if only for his own financial survival. (He could also have, you know, gotten a job, but that would have conflicted with his gentlemanly pretensions…) And he's understandably humiliated by his situation.
What race is Antoinette 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.
Is Wide Sargasso Sea based on a true story?
Rhys drew on aspects of her own life story in Wide Sargasso Sea. She was born in the West Indies in 1890 to a Creole mother of Scottish descent and a Welsh doctor father. Aged 16, she was sent to live with an aunt in England, and briefly pursued dreams of becoming an actress.
Should I read Jane Eyre before Wide Sargasso Sea?
You don't need to have read Jane Eyre to love Wide Sargasso Sea, but if you have, you will never think of it in the same way again. Wide Sargasso Sea writes back to Jane Eyre as a prequel.
Why is it called 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 is the wide Sargasso Sea?
Wide Sargasso Sea is a visceral response to Charlotte Brontë ’s treatment of Mr Rochester’s ‘mad’ first wife, Bertha, in her classic Victorian novel Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys reveals the horrifying reality that might lie behind a man’s claim that a woman is mad, and humanises Brontë’s grotesque invention, the now-archetypal and heavily symbolic ...
When was Wide Sargasso Sea published?
Published: 25 May 2016. Wide Sargasso Sea is both a response and a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, set in the West Indies and imagining the lives of Bertha Mason and her family. Bidisha describes how Jean Rhys’s novel portrays the racial and sexual exploitation at the heart of western civilisation and literature.
Is Rochester a slave master?
Rochester is not a slave master but a prospector who regards the traumatic exploitation of slaves with flippant faux respect as he pretends to watch his language: ‘not nigger, not even negro, black people I must say’. [2] He is infected by a sense of racial and cultural superiority, insular ignorance and visceral racism, revolting against his new surroundings as if against a food he isn’t familiar with and so doesn’t like. While the newly married Antoinette proclaims happily, ‘This is my place and everything is on our side’, Rochester self-pityingly perceives the landscape as malevolent. He projects his own slyness on to nature: the sea moves ‘stealthily’, the place is ‘not only wild but menacing’, birdsong is ‘a very lonely sound’, rain sounds ‘inexorable’, the smell of flowers is ‘overpoweringly strong’ and the trees are a ‘green menace’.
What is the setting 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.
Who is Christophine in the book?
Christophine, rumoured to be an obeah woman, has been both a slave and servant of the Cosway and Mason families and is hired when Antoinette and Rochester honeymoon at Granbois, an estate in Dominica.
What were the effects of the degeneracy of the Creole people?
White Creole degeneracy was seen to be an effect of the tropical climate, the physical and social environment, living in close, domestic proximity to non-white people, and the corrupting influence of slave ownership.
What is the vitiating reach of the system of primogeniture by which property was inherited by
Rhys, rather, exposes the absence of a Married Women’s Property Act in Britain at the time the novel is set, the vitiating reach of the system of primogeniture by which property was inherited by eldest sons , and too convenient use of the criminalisation of obeah.
Who is the Englishman in Wide Sargasso Sea?
Told in three voices — those of white Creole, Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester, the young Englishman she marries, who implicitly reveals his own name to be Edward Fairfax Rochester when he renames her Bertha, and Grace Poole, Bertha’s keeper at Thornfield Hall — Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre.
Where is Sargasso Sea?
The Sargasso Sea is part of the Atlantic Ocean north-east of the Caribbean. Cut off from ocean currents, it is relatively becalmed and harbours drifts of sargassum seaweed. Sargasso seaweed with waves and sandy beach. Wikimedia Commons.
When was Smile Please published?
At her death Rhys was working on autobiographical vignettes which, edited by Diana Athill, were published in 1979 as Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Adapted from Jean Rhys' award-winning novel, this is a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and paints a rather different story of Mr. Rochester's first wife. Set in lush 19th century Jamaica, this is the story of the relationship between a passionate Creole heiress, Antoinette, and a brooding Englishman, Edward Rochester.
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A beautiful rendering of a powerful novel about madness, race, sex and culture. Read it years ago and this sensitive and frightening film is going to send me back to the book for a re-read. As a young woman I didn’t fully understand it. Now in my 6th decade I think I know a bit more.
What is the significance of the location in Wide Sargasso Sea?
The significance of location. Wide Sargasso Sea uses locations from Jean Rhys' childhood and family history. Both Coulibri and Granbois are based on estates owned by her family. This familiar landscape is very precisely defined in the novel. However, place and landscape are more than simply the setting for the action.
How are places and landscapes used to develop character?
Places and landscapes are also used to develop character: They can be used to represent the character's state of mind and/or their sense of personal, racial and cultural identity. For example, Rochester's sense of the Granbois study as a refuge is related to his English identity.
What is Rochester suspicious of?
Rochester is increasingly suspicious of Antoinette, the servants and the landscape. At war within himself, he rejects what the woman, the place and the culture have to offer him.
How is the structure of a novel defined?
The structure of the novel can be defined by the various settings in which the action occurs. Each part has a different location and each place a particular atmosphere and significance.
Where is the setting of the third part of Jane Eyre?
Part three: England. This part is set at Thornfield Hall in cold, grey England. It is the place of Antoinette's imprisonment and her final act of rebellion as she burns the house down. This fulfils the plot of Jane Eyre but in a way which leaves Antoinette's fate open and ambiguous.
The Significance of Location
- Wide Sargasso Seauses locations from Jean Rhys' childhood and family history. Both Coulibri and Granbois are based on estates owned by her family. This familiar landscape is very precisely defined in the novel. However, place and landscape are more than simply the setting for the action. They are elements in the structural and thematic patterns of ...
Place and Structure
- The structure of the novel can be defined by the various settings in which the action occurs. Each part has a different location and each place a particular atmosphere and significance.
Houses, Rooms and Spaces
- Within these places are particular houses, rooms and other spaces which also contribute to the novel's structural pattern and thematic content. Like so much else in the novel, they can be seen as a set of contrasts or mirrored oppositions. For example: At Coulibri: 1. The rooms and spaces inhabited by the white family versus those of the blackservants 2. Antoinette's bedroom versus …
Place and Character
- Places and landscapes are also used to develop character: 1. They can be used to represent the character's state of mind and/or their sense of personal, racial and cultural identity. For example, Rochester's sense of the Granbois study as a refuge is related to his English identity. However, the fragility of that identity in this alien place is represented metaphorically through the worm-eaten …