Jean+Rhys,+Wide+Sargasso+Sea+(1966)

Jean Rhys, timeless novel //Wide // //Sargasso Sea// (edited by Judith L. Raiskin) takes place in the Caribbean and depicts the relationship between the French Creole colonial and colonial people  from the early nineteenth- century era. The m ain character, Antoinette is a young white girl who lives in Jamaica where her and her family are not welcomed by the locals due to her parent's being ex-slave owners. This story captivates the audience as it explores the different accounts of her life growing up and how her family dealt with the negative criticism from the locals on a daily basis as well as how it affected the family in such an alarming and life altering way. After becoming an adult, Antoinette faces the sad truth about her life reflected by certain events that took place from her childhood of being disliked by so many, no fault of her own doing. Rhys does an elegant job of informing her audience about Caribbean and colonialism culture as well as race from a women's point of view.

**//Wide Sargasso Sea//** Wiki page
Preface, ix-xiii Intro, 3-7 Novel, 9-112

Write (300-500 words) Part A: After reading the novel //Wide Sargasso Sea// as well as viewing our educational Wiki page please answer the following questions in your post for question 3 from the Foum 8 assignment. After leaving Granbois, what do you think ultimately provoked Antoinette's husband in making the decision to abandon her by leaving her at a home in England? What is your hypothesis on what became of Antoinette in the end after she decides to explore other aspects of the home? (You must use two quotes from this novel which support how you came to your conclusion.)

Part B: How did the author's life experiences growing up in the West Indies affect how she was able to create the character Antoinette? Do you think Antoinette's husband would have felt and treated Antoinette differently if she would not have desired and searched for acceptance within the British society?

=Biography of Jean Rhys (1890-1979)= Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, the woman who would become known throughout the literary world as Jean Rhys, was born on August 24, 1890, in Roseau, Dominica, one of the former English colonies in the Caribbean. Like the heroine of her most famous work, [|Wide Sargasso Sea], Rhys was of Creole heritage; her father was British while her mother was a native white West Indian. In fact, Rhys had a         great deal          in common with the character of Antoinette Cosway, and her personal experiences likely shaped the events depicted in her fiction. Perhaps most notably, Rhys's great-grandfather was a slave-owner who acquired a Dominican         sugar plantation          in the, but after the Emancipation Act was passed his estate fell on hard times. Subsequent riots led to the looting of the house, which was eventually burned by arsonists. Rhys visited her family's ancestral abode in 1936 and was extremely affected by the experience. She purportedly had the idea for Wide not long thereafter.

Like Antoinette, as a white girl in a chiefly black community, Rhys grew up feeling alienated and alone in the Caribbean. In 1907, at the age of sixteen, she moved to England for schooling, but after the death of her father she was forced to discontinue her studies. She then drifted into a series of jobs that included chorus girl, mannequin, and artist's model, before working as a volunteer during World War I. In 1919 she married a minor Dutch writer by the name of Jean Lenglet. The couple had two children, a daughter and a son who died in infancy. During the 1920s they traveled haphazardly about the continent, occasionally taking up residence in Paris, where they lived as Bohemian artists and were exposed to the developing genre of modernism. The feelings of displacement Rhys must have experienced during this time (as throughout her life) are manifest in her works, most of which deal with drifting and marginalized women transplanted far from their roots.

Lenglet was sentenced to prison a few years later, and in 1924 Rhys met and began an affair with the modernist literary critic Ford Madox Ford, who encouraged her to write. Their romance eventually ended with much bitterness, but Rhys nevertheless continued to support herself as an author. In 1927 she published The Left Bank and Other Stories under her penname. This was followed by the Postures (1928, American title Quartet); After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931); [|Voyage in the Dark] (1934); and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). The scholar Francis Wyndham, who was instrumental to Rhys's rediscovery in the second half of the twentieth century, has stated that all of these novels are rather autobiographical in nature and deal with essentially the same female protagonist at different stages of her life. Indeed, Rhys once declared, "I have only ever written about myself."

Although her novels and short stories met with moderate success, Jean Rhys disappeared completely from the public eye between the years of 1939 and 1957, and was widely believed to be dead. Having divorced Lenglet in 1933, she went on to marry two other men, both of whom passed away and left her a widow. Rhys then retired to England, where she shunned literary circles, lived in poverty, and developed a fondness for alcohol that would haunt her the rest of her life. In 1949 she was arrested for assaulting neighbors and police, and in 1958, after the BBC aired a dramatization of Good Morning, Midnight, she was rediscovered as one of Britain's great writers. The much-revised Wide Sargasso Sea, which Rhys had been working on for years, was finally published in 1966, and it was awarded the W.H. Smith literary award the following year. In recognition of her literary contributions, Rhys was honored as a Commander of the British Empire in 1978. She died on May 14, 1979. Gradesaver LLC. "//Biography of Jean Rhys//" 1999-2004. n. pag. Web. 03 Feb. 2014 [|Jean Rhys Timeline and Biography w/pictures] [|Article on Jean Rhys sordid past]
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Literary Criticism
Reviews for this novel are of a more positive nature. Jean Rhys was moved by the novel //Jane Eyre// by Charlotte Bronte. However she was left with a longing to know more about the character, Bertha Rochester, in her novel Antoinette Bertha Mason. Jenia Geraghty discusses the intentions of Rhys in a review titled [|Jean Rhys and Charlotte Bronte]. In this review, Geraghty says that Rhys was not satisfied with the ending that was given in //Jane Eyre////.// She quotes Jean Rhys as saying the following about her interest in Antoinette, "She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought that I'd like to write her a life." The marriage between the two was doomed from the beginning, even before the fire at Thornfield Hall. This reviewer claims that the theme throughout //Wide Sargasso Sea// and //Jane Eyre// is "There will always be the other side". Another reviewer, Laura Fish, depicts the scene and time the story takes place in her article titled [|Book Of A Lifetime: Wide Sargasso Sea, By Jean Rhys]. Fish says, "Set in wild, magical Jamaican scenery, //Wide Sargasso Sea// depicts the trouble and confusion on West Indian sugar estates in the aftermath of the emancipation."(Fish 1) She says that the poor shows no discrimination against black or white, but that instead of showing freedom among the black population they are simply moved from one slavery to another. Part One of the novel, narrated by Antoinette, "urges the reader towards and understanding and acceptance of the mad woman in the attic." She describes the story of Antoinette to be "passionate and haunting". Yet another reviewer, Tammy Gottschling, wrote a review or analysis titled [|Searching for identity and love: An analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea]. Gottschling looks at the book as Rhys intending to give the doomed marriage of Mr. Rochester and Antoinette Mason a story of its own. She says, " 'Wide Sargasso Sea' is a novel about a woman seeking an authentic relationship with a man in the chaos and control, passion and disappointment, if she is to be true to herself and husband." (Gottschling1) She writes that the destruction of Antoinette (Bertha) and Mr. Rochester was inevitable. Rochester was sent to a culture he was unfamiliar with, uncomfortable in his surroundings. The reader is then forced to absorb the complexities of the character, Antoinette's humanity and her emotional despair is acknowledged. Instead of conforming to her husband's wishes, she instead "is willing to lose everything because there is nothing left to give of herself in her yearning to live while embracing the destruction."(Gottschling 5)

Historical & Political Context - Colonial West Indies
The West Indies were discovered by the colonial powers in 1492 with the famous voyage of Christopher Columbus. It so named by Columbus as when he found it he reportedly thought it was India. The Bahamanian island was promptly declared for Spain and renamed San Salvador. The rush then began for the European colonial powers to claim the new found territory. Every island that was "conquered" and fought over was given new names to replace the native terms that had been more commonly used prior to Columbus. The very act of taking away the nominal references from the locals set the precedent that //Wide Sargasso Sea// took place in; a world where a foreign power dominated over the local culture.

Although commonly referred to by a single word or phrase referring to the collection of islands in the tropical oceanic region between the United States and South America (i.e. Caribbean, West Indies), there is in fact a myriad of distinct cultures in the region. Not only were the native cultures unique in themselves, Britain, France, and Spain all had a major impact in the colonization of the West Indies. The clash of cultures and subsequent attempt to retain one's own culture was felt by native and colonist alike. Antoinette makes references to being descendants of the Jacobites from Britain (a group sentenced to labor in Jamaica for rebellions against the crown in the 17th and 18th centuries) and her family shows attempts to remain loyal to Britain. Annette comes from Protestant Martinique to live in Roman Catholic Jamaica after she marries. Cultural differences are not the only difficulties facing Antoinette. The Emancipation Act passed in 1933, shortly before the events in the novel, and her father had been a slave trader. Even though the white colonists ranked higher than the freed slaves, slave traders were considered the lowest of the low.



The Sargasso Sea is a region in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean that separates the Caribbean from Europe. The title represents not only the divide between the colonists and their native land but also the understanding between the colonists and the natives.



Video and Film Clips
A movie was released April 16,1993 for Jean Rhys book, Wide Sargasso Sea. Director of the movie was John Duigan. The movie included the following stars, Karina Lombard, Nathaniel Parker,and Rachel Ward.

Web Links (optional)
[|History and Rituals Common in Obeah] http://www.crossref-it.info/textguide/Wide-Sargasso-Sea/29/1913 http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-widesargassosea/hist.html http://www.bookdrum.com/books/wide-sargasso-sea/9780140818031/setting.html

Other (optional)
In 1998 //Wide Sargasso Sea// underwent a detailed edit conducted by Judith L. Raiskin to help give life to certain language used by author Jean Ryhs. In doing so, Raiskin educated the audience in understanding the complexity of civilization during the nineteenth century.

**Judith Raiskin Biography**
Judith Raiskin received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley, her MA from the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University (1989). She is the author of the book Snow on the Cane Fields: [|Women's] Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996) and the edidor of the Norton Critical Edition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1999). She is an [|Associate] Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of Oregon where she teaches post-colonial theory, [|Caribbean] and Pacific Island literature and travel writing.