Wide Sargasso Sea - Appunti e analisi

BRITISH COLONIALISM OF THE WEST INDIES

- England was the most successful of the colonizer’s countries: British presence in

the Caribbean area and Jamaica dates back to the 17th century.

- During the second half of the 17th century, colonialism was linked to mercantilism

(based on establishing gold and silver reserves) and to sugar and coffee

plantations using slave labour imported from West Africa. Economy was based on

plantations and based on the slave trade.

- The object of adventurers, especially the British, was not to stay permanently

in the West Indian colonies but to return to Europe with their fortunes made.

- The plantations and slavery created a hierarchical society based upon ‘racial’

distinctions and law. Society could be divided into 4 categories of people:

1. blacks and slaves;

2. people of mixed ethnicity;

3. white descendants of European settlers;

4. British people

- In the 18th century, MISCEGENATION (cohabitation, sexual relations, marriage,

or interbreeding involving persons of different ethnicity) created an intermediate

stratum of free ‘people of colour’ (persons of mixed ethnicity) and free ‘Blacks’

(manumitted people of African descent).

- However, only whites enjoyed full civil rights. The free ‘mixed-race’ and Black

populations suffered many legal disabilities. The enslaved, who included many

mixed-race persons by about 1800, were nonpersons, pieces of property to be

bought and sold.

EMANCIPATION

➔ Slavery Abolition Act, 1833

➔ It was an act of Parliament course that abolished slavery in most British colonies,

freeing more than 800,000 enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and South Africa. It

received Royal Assent on August 28, 1833, and took effect on August 1, 1834.

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➔ In 1831 there was a slave revolt in Jamaica (The Baptists War). It was supposed

to be a peaceful general strike but it soon escalated after Baptist preachers received

news that no emancipation had been granted to them by the British King.

Violence soon erupted with crops and plantations being burnt to the ground.

The rebellion was squashed with force.

WHAT IS WIDE SARGASSO SEA?

- It is a RESPONSE to Charlotte Bronte’s novel because it gives Antoinette (Bertha)

the voice she doesn’t have in Jane Eyre;

- It is a PREQUEL because it deals marginally with Antoinette’s imprisonment in

England and because the events narrated precede Jane Eyre’s story (in fact she is

never mentioned in Wide Sargasso Sea);

- It is an ALLEGORY of this colonial imposition of the different.

- Antoinette is a HEROINE of British fiction but there is a darker side of her

Britishness, which is the colonial imperialist imposition of Western British values on

other populations.

ANTOINETTE’S FAMILY TREE

She’s the daughter of Mr Cosway and Annette. She has a brother, Pierre, who can hardly

walk and speak and dies young.

Mr Cosway had 2 other children: Daniel is the son of a slave-woman (who Antoinette doesn’t

consider as her half-brother) and Alexander is the son of Mr Cosway’s first wife (who has a

son named Sandi with whom Antoinette shares a relationship).

When Mr Cosway dies, Annette marries Mr Mason, a British gentleman, because she needs

money. Mr Mason already has a child, Richard Mason (the man who shows up at Jane

Eyre’s wedding).

RELEVANCE OF THE EMANCIPATION ACT IN THE NOVEL

Rhys introduces a distinction between pre-emancipation plantocracy and later English

planters (like Mr Mason) who brought new capital to the States previously maintained by

slave’s labour.

- Cosway’s family had owned slaves. The breakdown of plantation society and the

poverty isolated Antoinette and her mother until marriage to an Englishman saves

them from economic ruin.

- The freed blacks, who had mocked (deriso) the whites’ financial degradation, react

with violence to their new wealth and burnt the family estate.

- Antoinette’s background is wealthy planter class of English descent, but in fact, her

mother is from Martinique, and the family has been reduced to virtual poverty after

the post-Emancipation financial crash.

WHITE (female) MARGINALITY

- Christophine is Antoinette’s nurse. She was bought by Mr Cosway as a present for

Annette and she is a black woman from Martinique that plays the role of a mother

figure for Antoinette.

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- She describes Antoinette to her English husband as not completely white like British

people but too white to be creole. So she belongs in some indeterminate region

between the two.

- Antoinette is marginalized because of her mixed-race, because she is economically

insecure and socially isolated even though she will become rich. She is also

alienated from both black and white communities.

- Antoinette has limited control over her life and future because she is educated in

a convent after the fire and the only preoccupation is that the scar she has on the

face won’t ruin her wedding day.

- In the marriage between Antoinette Cosway and Edward Rochester, the

imperial/colonial relation is clear. Antoinette is Rochester’s prisoner in England. She

undergoes a sort of enslavement and as the slaves rebelled and set on fire

Coulibri Estate, she will do the same with Thornfield Hall, in order to regain her

identity.

She is friendless, has lost her name (Mr Rochester changes it into Bertha because

it was “more English” and easier to pronounce) and is regarded as a wild animal.

- When Antoinette marries Rochester, she is “bought” for profit. He marries her

because she’s wealthy. She is regarded as exotic and different, but also

incomprehensible and frightening.

She is an emblem: she's a white woman but she's not British because she's a

native of the islands.

STRUGGLE FOR SELF-REPRESENTATION

- As a child, Antoinette struggles to get her mother’s approval. But Annette (her

mother) is preoccupied almost exclusively with Pierre, Antoinette’s disabled brother.

She has undeveloped sexuality and is allowed limited freedom of self-

representation that becomes more and more limited when she enters the convent

and then when she marries Mr Rochester (right after she comes out of the convent

she gets married).

- Upon her initiation into sexuality, after the marriage, this privilege is curtailed,

and Antoinette’s narrative disappears for a large portion of the narrative (except for

the brief moment in which she consults Christophine).

MALE PROJECTIONS

We become spectators of a progressive rejection on the husband’s side of the apparently

innocent woman he has married and to the creation of a series of roles which Rochester

attributes to Antoinette in order to come to terms with the dangerous fascination with this

matriarchal seductive island and place.

The husband becomes the prey of an intense sexual passion for Antoinette that both

pleasures and disguises him. The more he becomes greedy for pleasure, the more he

grows indifferent to his wife’s needs.

Antoinette gradually assumes the roles of:

1. Eve/temptress

2. Whore

3. Witch (because of the “love potion” she asks Christophine to make)

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“MARIONETTE” ANTOINETTE

- This is Rochester’s final creation.

- He symbolically kills her by covering her up with the sheet and then brings her back

to life, but in another form.

- By becoming a doll, she can only be represented by others and controlled and

she can be spoken for (she doesn’t have a voice of her own).

THE RED DRESS

- The dress is a symbol of protection and freedom and identification with her true

nature, and it is the symbol of unchastity, unfaithfulness and of being sexually

promiscuous for Rochester.

- Both the woman and the dress had been locked away. This red dress which has

been locked away by her English captors is the true and undistorted image of

Antoinette's personality.

THE FIRE

- On a practical level, Antoinette «hits (Rochester) where it will hurt him most, in his

quintessential Englishness» by robbing him of Thornfield, his English heritage

(like he had done to her by robbing her, her Jamaican’s heritage).

- On another level, she proves that the ‘sanity’ of institutionalized patriarchy is

self-destructive, for repression and suppression will burn it up from within.

AN OPEN ENDING

- We ‘know’ only from the previous text, Jane Eyre, what the conclusion should be.

- After all, Antoinette’s madness is only a tale told by a ‘sane’ male whose motivations

are at best dubious. She is a representative of women’s constant, long struggle

against suppression in a society that still persists in perceiving women as

objects and not as subjects.

THE NOVEL

PART 1 - Summary

As Part I opens, Antoinette Cosway is a young girl living with her mother and brother at

Coulibri, her family's estate near Spanish Town, Jamaica. With the passage of the

Emancipation Act and the death of her father, the family is financially ruined. Moreover, they

are ostracized by both the black and white communities on the island. The black community

despises them for being former slaveholders, and the white community looks down on them

because they are poor, Creole, and, in her mother's case, French. Among the only servants

who remain is Christophine, a Martinique woman who is rumoured to practice obeah.

Motivated in part by her family's desperate situation, Annette, Antoinette's mother, marries

Mr Mason, a wealthy planter. This marriage, however, only seems to aggravate racial

tensions in their neighbourhood. One night, rioters burn the house down. The entire family

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narrowly escapes, all except Antoinette's brother Pierre, who, due to his exposure to the

smoke, either dies very soon after. Pierre's death devastates Annette, who goes mad with

grief. Mr Mason sends Annette off to an isolated house to be cared for by a couple of

colours. Antoinette is sent to live with her aunt Cora in Spanish Town. For a year and a half,

Antoinette attends a convent school there. Part I ends with Mr Mason back in Antoinette's

life, insinuating that plans for arranging her marriage are already underway.

SETTING AND NARRATION

- This part of the story is narrated in 1st person by the protagonist: Antoinette

Cosway (Bertha Mason).

- It is set in Jamaica.

Pages 5-6

➔ The novel starts with a sense of isolation and difference from these “others” (rif.

“They say”). The truth these “others” are telling may be valid for them but not for us.

➔ From the beginning is underlined the different racial and ethnic origins of c