In a traditional novel, the author composes the story to describe fictional character and events usually in the form of a sequence. On the other hand, Jean Rhys subverts traditional literary structure by having multiple characters narrate the story. Rhys wrote the novel to include racial, gender and cultural identity to help the reader understand what it meant to be a ‘Jamaican mad women’ rather than just a mad woman. She uses the three factors to give the story meaning. By having more than one narrator as well as racial, gender, and cultural identity, it sets an impact on the story to give it more originality. “ In Wide Sargasso Sea, the young blacks call Antoinette “ white cockroach” and “white nigger,” epithets for Euro-Creole woman
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This plays an important role because it shows how her struggle foreshadows Antoinette’s future. The foreshadowing of what happens to Annette that will happen to Antoinette’s life is the fact that she dies from a fire because that is the way her daughter dies at the end of part 3. In Part I Antoinette describes her mother, “ The Jamaican ladies have never approved of mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said”. (p. 9) The fact that Annette gives the reader this piece of information rather than Antoinette herself allows that traditional literary structure to be broken. Rhys gives a racial identity to Antoinette immediately through the eyes of Annette and it essential for to keep that in mind because it builds up the life of who Antoinette is from the eyes of her daughter. Mary Lou Emery states in her essay that, “ Reading Wide Sargasso Sea, we find the named the specific historical and social forces of the female homelessness and exile it chronicles. And we come closer to answering the question of what it means to diagnose and judge female Caribbean “character”. (p. 167) This explains how the perspective of the“Caribbean character” sets a standard for the novel to build up the madwoman towards the end with the cultural
This plays an important role because it shows how her struggle foreshadows Antoinette’s future. The foreshadowing of what happens to Annette that will happen to Antoinette’s life is the fact that she dies from a fire because that is the way her daughter dies at the end of part 3. In Part I Antoinette describes her mother, “ The Jamaican ladies have never approved of mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said”. (p. 9) The fact that Annette gives the reader this piece of information rather than Antoinette herself allows that traditional literary structure to be broken. Rhys gives a racial identity to Antoinette immediately through the eyes of Annette and it essential for to keep that in mind because it builds up the life of who Antoinette is from the eyes of her daughter. Mary Lou Emery states in her essay that, “ Reading Wide Sargasso Sea, we find the named the specific historical and social forces of the female homelessness and exile it chronicles. And we come closer to answering the question of what it means to diagnose and judge female Caribbean “character”. (p. 167) This explains how the perspective of the“Caribbean character” sets a standard for the novel to build up the madwoman towards the end with the cultural