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Wide Sargasso Sea - Coggle Diagram
Wide Sargasso Sea
LANGUAGE
Language of failure against the language of imperialism
Continually shifting tones
Uncertainty of words
Antoinette's language drifts into an area where Rochester cannot follow her. She straddles the 2 types of language in the novel.
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Language of commerce mixed with language invocation of poetry.
Image, echo, atmosphere & dream --> imagery of fire important throughout
Mode of perception that pervades the novel --> uncertainty and unease through the use of rumours and gossip. Starts at her mother's wedding. Builds feeling of isolation and the over-looked child as the listener = similar to JE
Servants = repository of secrets. Similar to JE. In WSS, servants are always changing, past tension and present uncertainty.
Through Christophine, we understand Antoinette's capture between cultures. She gives the assertion of freedom and independence. = "This is free country. I am free woman". These words are not spoken by the heroine like in JE, but by her closest mentor as she leaves Antoinette forever. Christophine is replaced by the English Grace Poole.
CONTEXT
Jean Rhys: born in the Caribbean in 1890
- Naming was important in her works
- She was an outsider in the general culture that was Anglican, English and white
- In 1912, she started writing as a form of therapy
- In 1924, her husband was arrested & her daughter was cared for by someone else
- She had an eccentric & unique personality
Other novels = Mackenzie; Voyage; Good Morning Midnight
All 3 focused on troubled women who "break every rule of propriety" (Elaine Savory, Encylopeida of 20th c. Fiction)
Modernism = breakdown of sense of self: fragementation of individual subjectivity
Déscartes: "I think therefore I am" = he is certain of the thinking self. Self-confidence is lost in modernism
Ontological certitude of the self; contrast with Rhys's doubts of 'think, perhaps I am'
Belief in England is a motif throughout: part of the way the novel debates with the English tradition.
COMPARISON TO Jane Eyre
JE & Empire
Feminist text, Jane fights for her own economic independence = slavery in text. Bertha Mason portrayed as the 'mad woman in the attic' and Jane is the British white redeemer who saves Rochester. Only when Bertha dies is Jane able to marry Rochester.
Jane is framed by Brontë as a "rebel slave"
Racism in Jane Eyre
Jane's economic independence is tied up with the slave trade --> origins of that moment = Jane's uncle is part of the Caribbean slave trade
The independence celebrated by feminists in JE is fundamentally inseparable from the systemic violence of the colonial system
She writes her name in "Indian ink" = name of the book
Is Jane a racist??
WSS concerned with how we re-read great works of fiction = questions the stability of the literary canon
IMPERIALISM
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1) 1500s-1600s: Plunder = European states seize exotic resources & labour (slaves) from the 'New World'
2) 1600s-1990s: Colonization = imposition of a settlement onto a new landscape
3) 1800s-1990s: 'Improvement' Imperialism = natives thought of as savage, barbaric, in need of civilising etc. (Heart of Darkness)
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SLAVERY & EMPIRE
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Sugar plantations = disciplined labour, fuelled Industrial Revolution in Britain
Slavery abolished in 1833 = setting of the ruined plantation & factory in WSS: spectral remnants of slavery era
NARRATIVE FEATURES
Names and naming
WSS has its own autonomy and independence, but it is still intended as an intervention into colonial discourse
"interrogation of the agency of the 'classic text'" (John McLeod, 'Beginning Post-colonialism')
Symbolic violence of naming: "Antoinette's identity is always being defined in relation both to men and by men" (McLeod)
Rochester is never truly named = we just infer it because we know of JE --> critics read it as part of a feminist critique of imperial & patriarchal symbolic violence
Revenge on Rhys' part for re-naming Antoinette to Bertha
Limited narrative freedom as it is in the form of a prequel, more questioning. Novel it repsonds to is already existing and by a different author from a different time period = difficult to get right
Narrative structure
3 parts of novel allow us to hear the voices of both Antoinette and Rochester. A is an honest and searching narrator: she and R speak to each other and also across each other's narratives
Part 2: Rochester's voice= an account of and by the oppressor
His narrative begins with a sense of resigned fatalism (like Antoinette's). Cultural strandedness in a foreign country. He makes close, tense observations
IDENTITY
Account of a disappearance of a childhood home and an identity: "I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window" --> fragility of protagonist is marched by a fragility of fragmentation in language
Sense of exile -- outside of culture or between the two, heroine trying to find a voice or sense of self
Rochester is outside the culture in Jamaica, then he takes Antoinette out of her culture by bringing her to England
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