Thinking Activity - Wide Sargasso Sea

 Hello Readers!

In this blog is my acedemic writing activity and this blog based on Post-Colonial novel 'Wide Sargasso Sea' written by Jean Rhys and this task given by our prof. Yesha Bhatt. Here I deal with the topic is Madwomen in the attic.

About Author:-

Jean Rhys, original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, (born August 24, 1890,died May 14, 1979), 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.

About Novel:-

The 1966 parallel novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys serves as a prequel to Brontë's novel. It is the story of Mason (there called Antoinette Cosway) from the time of her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to England. Rhys's novel re-imagines Brontë's devilish madwoman in the attic. Bertha serves as Jane's "double", juxtaposing the feminist character to a character constrained by domesticity.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, "Bertha Mason" is portrayed as being a false name for Antoinette Cosway. The book purports to tell Antoinette's side of the story, as well as Rochester's, and to account for how she ended up alone and raving in the attic of Thornfield Hall. According to the book, Antoinette's insanity and drunkenness are the result of Rochester's misguided belief that madness is in her blood and that she was part of the scheme to have him married blindly.

History of The Madwomen in the Attic:-

Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's critical study of British and American nineteenth-century women's literature, attempts to define a "distinctively female literary tradition."

Gilbert and Gubar take into account the cultural and political climate in which those authors wrote as well as the texts that those authors read. With those issues in mind, Gilbert and Gubar explore "images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles function as asocial surrogates for docile selves, [and] obsessive depictions of diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claustrophobia"

Wide Sargasso Sea in The Madwomen in the Attic:-

The title of the novel refers to the character Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), who not only suffers from madness but also serves as a double for the character of Jane. Gilbert and Gubar contend that Jane's central confrontation of the text is not with Mr. Rochester but with Bertha and her manifestation of Jane's emotions. In Jane's coming-of-age journey, she must face oppression, starvation, madness, and coldness at each of the estates in which she lives and works. At Thornfield, Jane meets her "dark double" Bertha, who acts out Jane's feelings of "rebellion and rage." Bertha is the only true "madwoman in the attic" in Gilbert and Gubar's critical study.

The Madwomen in the Attic In this novel:-

 In this novel we can see the Annette and Antoinette, both are (daughter or mother) suffering the Madwomen in the attic in this novel.

Annette:-

Antoinette's young and beautiful mother. Annette is the second wife first to Alexander Cosway and later to Mr. Mason. The white Jamaican women ostracize Annette because of her beauty and outsider status—she is originally from Martinique. A disembodied presence throughout the book, Annette shows signs of madness and melancholy in her daughter's earliest recollections. Often the subject of gossip, she feels abandoned, scared, and persecuted. After the fire, Mr. Mason leaves Annette in the care of a black couple who reportedly humiliate her and mock her condition. Annette dies when Antoinette is at the convent school.

Antoinette:-

Antoinette is a 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.

Antoinette derives from Charlotte Brontë's poignant and powerful depiction of a deranged Creole outcast in her gothic novel Jane Eyre. Rhys creates a prehistory for Bronte's character, tracing her development from a young solitary girl in Jamaica to a love-depraved lunatic in an English garret. By fleshing out Brontë's one-dimensional madwoman, Rhys enables us to sympathize with the mental and emotional decline of a human being. Antoinette is a far cry from the conventional female heroines of nineteenth- and even twentieth-century novels, who are often more rational and self-restrained (as is Jane Eyre herself). 

In Antoinette, by contrast, we see the potential dangers of a wild imagination and an acute sensitivity. Her restlessness and instability seem to stem, in some part, from her inability to belong to any particular community. As a white Creole, she straddles the European world of her ancestors and the Caribbean culture into which she is born.

Left mainly to her own devices as a child, Antoinette turns inward, finding there a world that can be both peaceful and terrifying. 

In the first part of the novel we witness the development of a delicate child—one who finds refuge in the closed, isolated life of the convent. Her arranged marriage distresses her, and she tries to call it off, feeling instinctively that she will be hurt. Indeed, the marriage is a mismatch of culture and custom. She and her English husband, Mr. Rochester, fail to relate to one another; and her past deeds, specifically her childhood relationship with a half-caste brother, sullies her husband's view of her. An exile within her own family, a "white cockroach" to her disdainful servants, and an oddity in the eyes of her own husband, Antoinette cannot find a peaceful place for herself.

             Thank you!!