Wide Sargasso Sea

WRITER’ S VOICE Group Discussions/Writing Write in complete sentences, answering each question fully. 1. What is the tone of the novel? How do you know it is the tone of the novel? Find at least five examples/quotes from the novel that demonstrate the tone, and explain why these quotes develop the tone. In the first part, the tone of the novel is neutral and a bit mystery. The author does not make much opinion or equivalent towards the slavery’s situation. She sets a tone of frightening…

cunning, that's all'(WSS,11), only marks out what is not there and makes plain the impossibility of any appeal to the past against an equally feared future. It is a past only existing in the parenthesis; 'My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed-all belonged to the past'(WSS,5). The novel's figure for its own narrative is Antionette's dream, with its twice delayed near the conclusion and its dreaded but inevitable forward propulsion. The dream in a sense suggests a subsuming of the…

Throughout history, identity has gained the connotation of being one’s personality and behaviour. In Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, those that harbour an true identity of their own form a healthy mentality, whereas those that are deprived of possessing a true identity deteriorate mentally. The characters’ ability to form a healthy mental state is inhibited by their loss of self-identity, loss of racial identity and by gender interfering with their ability to embody a true identity. Therefore,…

coffin, and a period of mourning. The second form of death can occur anytime throughout a person's lifespan, usually stemming from a devastating event that causes one to lose who he or she is on the inside and making him or her zombie-like. Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel by Jean Rhys inspired from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, demonstrates this idea of two deaths. Rhys uses the motif of zombies, demonstrated through her characters of Annette, Rochester, and Antoinette, to illustrate that the death…

Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys two different journeys are told. Jane Eyre tells the story of a trouble young orphan who eventually becomes the wife of someone who cares very deeply for her. On the other hand, Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea is a secluded young child who lives to become mentally crazy and a drunk after suffering through a troubled childhood and marriage. Charlotte Bronte, author of Jane Eyre, and Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, portray the…

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys discusses White-Black relations during a crucial changing point in the West Indies. According to Maria Olaussen, the Wide Sargasso Sea showed that racism was still alive during the setting 's time, although the Emancipation Act, otherwise known as the Abolition of Slavery Act, had already been put in place (65). In my own opinion, I believe that Rhys showed racism with her characters throughout her work of the Wide Sargasso Sea. In Wide Sargasso Sea racism between…

Throughout Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, it is evident that one of the central ideas is control. Control is shown both directly and indirectly, and as a mental or emotional idea. Although control is an important central idea, it is crucial to tie in the central idea of unsure love, to connect the two and trace their development. The idea with unsure love is when two “lovers” are together, but the two aren’t truly in love, and subtle signs can be picked up off their unsure love To start,…

Throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, components such as the loss of loved ones, and the cruelty of life and people, drive Antoinette to lunacy. Her madness is more than just a trait passed on genetically, it is brought about by her ill-fated life throughout the novel. The essential component that has driven Antoinette to madness has been none other than Rochester himself. Rochester has added wood to the already scorching fire which represents Antoinette’s madness. Rochester goes as far as telling…

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a prominent post-modern novel, and rather progressive at that. Taking Bronte’s crazy woman in the attic from Jane Eyre, Rhys proceeds to attack some ideas Bronte illustrated and highlight some ideas Bronte left out entirely. One of Rhys’ most tangible ideas that is rather representative of post-modern authors and that of this novel is the idea of truth and whether or not there are absolutes "truths". In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys demonstrates that there are no…

While the first two sections of Wide Sargasso Sea hold an impossible sense of tragedy, the last section, teeming with Antoinette's ravings and the mania of her dream, is still more beautiful than her life was sorrowful, and this manic beauty is redeeming for her. The scorned Mrs. Rochester spends her last days consumed with the beauty of vivid colors and visions of flames, and ultimately dies in a scene that, according to her prophetic dream, will equal in its unrepressed beauty the natural…