This blog is response of thinking Activity given by professor Yesha Ma'am. Here I discuss about The Madwomen in the Attic : Annette - Antoinette.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea is a postcolonial novel by Jean Rhys, published in 1966. It gives readers an alternative view of Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre, written from the perspective of Bertha (or Antoinette, as she is known in this novel) – Rochester’s ‘mad’ wife who lives in the attic of Thornfield Hall. It can be seen as a prequel, as it depicts Antoinette’s upbringing in Jamaica as a white Creole heiress, her difficult relationship with Rochester, and the events that contribute to her decline.
THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA”, a multi-layered and complex novella by the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys is specifically written from the perspective of a ‘creole’ women (a mixed breed of the black slaves from Africa and the early French settlers, forming half of the West Indian population), Set in wild, magical Jamaican scenery, in the aftermath of emancipation. Anoinette Mason, the woman in the novella is a small supporting character in “JANE EYRE” by Charlotte Bronte.
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 sea weed. 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.The title invites the reader to consider how the characters can be thought of as trapped in their own Sargasso Seas. They may be suspended in the murky passage between two worlds of England and Jamaica or between racial identities.
The Madwomen in the Attic : Annette - Antoinette
What about Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic, who was she really?
The novel is written in three parts: Antoinette’s childhood in first person, the courtship and marriage with Rochester as narrator, and their return to England. Rochester’s name is not mentioned, though Rhys does use the name and character Grace Poole in Part Three, Antoinette’s guard and keeper in the classic. Grace Poole is the connection between both books, and she is a gate keeper of sorts to the English life downstairs and the Jamaican wife, walled in with her memories. Maybe the author’s decision to keep Rochester nameless has to do with the abuses of everyman or any man, the power and control he may have over another, especially a woman.
This novel is popular on reading lists for Third World Women Studies. It also explores post colonial life in the Caribbean after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, so there are racial themes as well as feminist ones. Rochester is flawed and complicated but his position is not an easy one as the second son sent to the Caribbean to bring home his fortune through his marriage to Antoinette, a local heiress and a woman of dubious heritage.
Jean Rhys’s idea was both original and brilliantly simple: to write the “prequel” to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and to uncover the secret of Mrs Rochester, the mad woman in the attic. In Brontë’s classic novel of 1847, little is known about Rochester’s first wife other than her Creole background and the tragic lunacy which culminates in the burning of Thornfield Hall. Rhys resolved to reconstruct this personality and to examine the events and emotions which led to her madness.
Wide Sargasso Sea is thus the story of Antoinette Cosway and her relationship with an unnamed Englishman who we realise to be Rochester through an elaborate web of allusions and clues. The novel could, of course, have run the risk of seeming contrived or of reading like a deliberate pastiche. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth, as Rhys’s own preoccupations and extraordinary technical skill make the book entirely distinctive in imagination.
What is lacking in Brontë’s novel fills that of Rhys: a real sense of the Caribbean as a place both real and symbolic. This is not the sun-kissed idyll of popular legend, however, but a mysterious and often sinister world in which reason and love are condemned to disintegration.
From the outset, Antoinette’s initial narrative describes an uneasy childhood set in post-emancipation Jamaica, in which the genteel poverty of the former slave-owners only inspires the hatred and derision of the former slaves. The society which Rhys evokes is decadent and fragile, an idea reinforced by her descriptions of the garden at the run-down Coulibri estate, where the vegetation is over-lush and threatening.
Antoinette’s childhood is abruptly ended by an arson attack which destroys the house, and her mother’s ensuing madness (both events ironically prefigure her own destiny). Her stepfather is only too happy to marry her to an Englishman, who, it is clear, is attracted by a large dowry. In return, Antoinette is to be provided with a husband “of good race”. Not surprisingly perhaps, the marriage is blighted from the beginning by suspicion and paranoia. Is she also “of good race”? What truth lies behind whispers of inherited madness?
For Rochester, who narrates the second part of the novel, the island where the couple spend their honeymoon is oppressive and menacing rather than exotic. By place names we know it to be Dominica, Rhys’s native island of volcanic mountains and dense rain forest, but Rochester sees it as a place which is paradoxically too beautiful and equally cruel:
. . . I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour. I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her.
His initial erotic attraction to Antoinette turns to revulsion. Surrounded by conflicting rumours and deep-seated fears of this unknown world, Rochester adopts the cruelty which he thinks he sees in the landscape. A mix of jealousy and sadism poisons the marriage. As the couple leave their honeymoon home, madness is already apparent in Antoinette’s “blank lovely eyes”.
The brief final section is set in England. A virtual prisoner in Thornfield Hall, Antoinette shivers in the cold and fantasises about fire. The scene is set for the Gothic horror of Jane Eyre. And by now it is abundantly clear why the mad Mrs Rochester came to die in Brontë’s terrifying inferno.The sexual repression, social isolation and emotional trauma that Bertha undergoes after being betrayed and cheated on by Rochester are shown by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea as reasons responsible for Bertha’s (supposed) madness.
She wasn’t always mad; (if at all) her containment had made it so.
Thank you
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