Hello ! This blog is our study novel wide Sargasso sea by Jean Rhys and task by Yesha Bhatt. In Blog I am Written Postcolonial theory to Jean Rhys novel wide Sargasso sea.
Postcolonial Studies by Jens Rhys Novel Wide
Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys, original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, born August 24, 1890, Roseau, Dominica, Windward Islands, 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 the 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. 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).
After moving to Cornwall she wrote nothing until her remarkably successful Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that reconstructed the earlier life of the fictional character Antoinette Cosway, who was Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Tigers Are Better-Looking, with a Selection from the Left Bank (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976), both short-story collections, followed. Smile Please, an unfinished autobiography, was published in 1979.
About The Novel
The book details the life of Antoinette Mason (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha), a West Indian who marries an unnamed man in Jamaica and returns with him to his home in England. Locked in a loveless marriage and settled in an inhospitable climate, Antoinette goes mad and is frequently violent. Her husband confines her to the attic of his house at Thornfield. Only he and Grace Poole, the attendant he has hired to care for her, know of Antoinette’s existence. The reader gradually learns that Antoinette’s unnamed husband is Mr. Rochester, later to become the beloved of Jane Eyre.
Much of the action of the novel takes place in the West Indies. The first and third sections are narrated by Antoinette, the middle section by her husband.
Characters
Antoinette
Annette (mother of Antoinette)
Tia (Black girl Cheated Antoinette)
Pierre (Insane brother)
Daniel Cosway (Step Brother of Antoinette)
Amelie (maid)
Bertha (husband renamed Antoinette)
Grace poole (caretaker)
Mr. Rochester
Mr. Richard mason (Step father of Antoinette)
Christophine (Nurse)
Sandi Cosway
Aunt Cora
Alexander Cosway
Madewoman attic - : Annette and Antoinette
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a “prequel” to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a young woman, from a “Creole” family of declining fortune, who’s made to marry Mr. Rochester, taken to England, renamed Bertha, and, on being driven insane, locked in Rochester’s mansion attic. A mere gothic archetype in Jane Eyre, a dangerous madwoman with no voice of her own, the Antoinette Cosway of Wide Sargasso Sea is intelligent, sensual, and perceptive. Her narration reveals what Jane Eyre arguably obscures: racial violence, colonial exploitation, and the patriarchal power relations that, over the course of her disastrous marriage, drive Antoinette to insanity. What can Rhys’s rewriting of a classic teach us: about Empire, race, and slavery—and about Jane Eyre and the legacy of classic European literature itself?
In this course, we will read Rhys’s novel, a landmark of feminist and postcolonial fiction, as an entry to thinking about larger questions surrounding the colonial history of the West Indies, literary intertexuality, canon-building, and the novel as a genre. How does Rhys’s rewriting both draw on and challenge Jane Eyre and its cultural legacy? What part does horror play in postcolonial intertextuality and critique? As we read, we’ll explore important questions of racialization, subalternity, and the representation of “third-world” women, in both Wide Sargasso Sea and classic Western fiction. And, we will ask: How does Rhys’s novel help us rethink feminist critique and the paradigmatic “mad woman in the attic”? How do “decolonizing fictions” challenge racialized identities and Eurocentric structures of subjectivity and the linearity of time? How might we re-read Jane Eyre—critically and recuperatively—in light of Antoinette’s narrative and testimoni.
They spread false stories about the family, jeer at them for their poverty, kill the only horse the Cosways own, and ultimately burn the house down. Christophine, a black servant from Martinique (equally isolated for that reason) is the only person to stay devoted to the family, the only consolation Antoinette has. She is also the only person who doesn’t trust the Englishman brought from England – he is willing to marry Antoinette because he is essentially a fortune-hunter.
But even he is more subtly drawn than Bronte’s ‘manly man’ Rochester. He finds everything bewildering: the landscape, manners, customs... The situation becomes even more complicated when letters arrive from someone who calls himself Daniel Cosway to say that the Englishman had been fooled into marrying Antoinette. There was madness in the family, and no one would tell him the truth... The results are predictable. He refuses to have anything to do with Antoinette, sleeps with one of the servants. In the end, he decides to take Antoinette to England, where he incarcerates her in an attic...
No comments:
Post a Comment