Alienation in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys's

Alienation in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys's

Introduction

Jean Rhys

Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, known throughout the literary world as Jean Rhys, was born on August 24, 1890, in Roseau, Dominica which is 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 formed the events depicted in her novel. Perhaps most remarkably, Rhys's great-grandfather was a slave-owner who acquired a Dominican sugar plantation in the nineteenth century, but after the Emancipation Act was passed his estate fell on hard times. Successive riots led to the looting of the house, which was eventually burned by arsonists. Rhys visited her family's ancestral residence in 1936 and was extremely affected by the experience. She allegedly had the idea for Wide Sargasso Sea not long thereafter.

Rhys grew up feeling alienated and alone in the Caribbean as a white girl in a chiefly black community, like Antoinette. She moved to England for schooling in 1907, at the age of sixteen, but after the death of her father she was forced to halt her studies. Before working as a volunteer during World War I, she then drifted into a series of jobs that included chorus girl, mannequin, and artist's model. In 1919 she married a minor Dutch writer by the name of Jean Lenglet. They had two children, a daughter and a son who died in infancy. During the 1920s they traveled randomly 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, are manifest in her works, most of which deal with wandering 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 novels 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."

Even though 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 broadly 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 shunned literary circles and retired to England where lived in poverty, and developed a fondness for alcohol that would haunt her rest of her life. In 1949 she was arrested for assaulting neighbors and police, and in 1958, she was rediscovered as one of Britain's great writers after the BBC aired a dramatization of Good Morning, Midnight. The much-revised Wide Sargasso Sea 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.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea displays the complication of the experiences of the human psyche, especially in issues of racial and gender segregation. Perhaps, her attempt to combine the thematic concerns of her previous novels explains the reason not only for the complexity of the narrative, but also for its vast achievement in the literary sphere, despite her prior public disappearance from the literary scene. According to Elaine Savory (1998: p. 1):

It is crucially important to explore the contexts of Rhys’s work, especially her placement of the role of writing in her life and of race, class, nationality, gender and religion. She was interestingly contradictory on these subjects, and inclined therefore to tell a story which was Janus-faced, capable of capturing opposing readings of the world which usually failed to communicate well with one another.

According to a critic Anne B. Simpson, this text that offers "ambiguous and mutually incompatible interpretive possibilities."

Rhys’s parental heritage being born of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother,   positions her between two competing ideologies:

‘one that sought to exoticize Caribbean life and one that incorporated the racial pluralism of West Indian values’. 

To have been brought up by black servants, got her introduced not only to the language of the native Caribbean people, but also to their customs and religious beliefs. Her upbringing has a great deal of influence on her masterpiece. Going by these complexities in her life, Panizza (2009: p. 1) describes Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea thus:

Because of its hybridity, its medley of cultural references and moods, the extreme passions and fears it unfolds, Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys’s most problematic novel, revealing the author’s own psychological complexity and the inner conflict that tore her mind apart and that is variously reflected in all her heroines. With them, Jean Rhys shared the Caribbean origins and the difficult integration into British society that resulted in a mental split that she in writing, her characters in living, will try to resolve.

The novel opens a short while after the 1833 emancipation of the slaves in British-owned Jamaica. The protagonist, Antoinette, relates the story of her life from childhood to her arranged marriage to an unnamed Englishman. As their marriage progresses, Antoinette, who he renames then confines to a locked room, falls down into madness.

The novel is three parts. Part one takes place in Coulibri, Jamaica and is narrated by Antoinette. In it describing her childhood experiences, she reviews several facets of her life, including her mother's mental instability and her mentally disabled brother's tragic death.

Antoinette's story begins when she is a young girl in early nineteenth- century Jamaica. The white daughter of ex-slave owners, she lives on a run-down plantation called Coulibri Estate. Five years have passed since her father, Mr. Cosway, supposedly drunk himself to death, his finances in ruins after the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833, which untied black slaves and led to the termination of many white slave owners. Throughout Antoinette's childhood, hostility blaze between the crumbling white aristocracy and the bankrupt servants they employ.

Antoinette lives at Coulibri Estate with her widowed mother, Annette, her unhealthy younger brother, Pierre, and gossiping servants who seem mostly accustomed to their employers' hard luck and social disrespect. Antoinette spends her days in segregation. Her mother, a beautiful young woman who is detested by the Jamaican elite, spends little time with her, choosing to pace lethargically on the house's glacis (the covered balcony) instead of fostering her child. Antoinette's only companion, Tia, the daughter of a servant, turns against her surprisingly.

One day, Antoinette is amazed to find a group of graceful visitors calling on her mother from Spanish Town, the island's version of a refined city. Among them is an English man named Mr. Mason who, after a short courtship, asks for Annette's hand in marriage. When Mr. Mason and Annette honeymoon in Trinidad, Antoinette and Pierre stay with their Aunt Cora in Spanish Town.

In the short-term, Mr. Mason has had the estate repaired and restored to its previous magnificence, and has bought new servants. Discontent, however, is rising among the freed blacks, who protest one night outside the house. Bearing torches, they unintentionally set the house on fire, and Pierre is badly hurt. As the family flees the house, Antoinette runs desperately towards Tia and her mother. Tia throws a pointy rock at Antoinette, which cuts her forehead and draws blood.

The events of the night leave Antoinette seriously ill for six weeks. She wakes to find herself in Aunt Cora's care finding that Pierre has died. Annette's madness, which has exposed itself steadily over the years, has fully surfaced after the shock of the fire. When Antoinette visits her mother, who has been placed in the care of a black couple, she hardly recognizes the spectral figure she encounters. When Antoinette approaches, Annette aggressively hurls her away.

Antoinette then enrolls in convent school along with other young Creole girls. She lives at the school with the nuns for several years, learning everything from proper ladylike posture to the tormented histories of female saints. Antoinette's family has all but abandoned her: Aunt Cora has moved to England for a year, while Mr. Mason travels for months away from Jamaica, visiting only sporadically.

Mr. Mason announces on his visit that friends from England will be coming the following winter, when Antoinette is seventeen.  He wants to present Antoinette into the world as a sophisticated woman, fit for marriage. At the end of part one, at this point, Antoinette's commentary becomes more and more tangled, jumping from present- tense descriptions of her life in the convent to mixed-up recollections of past events.

            Part two interchanges between the points of view of her husband and of Antoinette during their 'honeymoon' excursion to Granbois, Dominica. Possible catalysts for Antoinette's downfall are the mutual suspicions that develop between the two and the maneuverings of Daniel, who claims he is Antoinette's brother; he impugns Antoinette's reputation and mental state and demands hush money. Christophine's, Antoinette's old nurse, open suspect of the Englishman and his belief in the hateful accounts about Antoinette worsens the situation; then he openly becomes unfaithful to her. Her increased sense of suspicion and the bitter disappointment of her failing marriage unbalance Antoinette's already unstable mental and emotional state.

Antoinette's husband, an Englishman who remains unnamed, narrates part two. After a wedding ritual in Spanish Town, he and Antoinette goes on a honeymoon on one of the Windward Islands, at an estate that once belonged to Antoinette's mother. He begins to have uncertainties about the marriage as they move toward a town ominously called Massacre. He knows very less of his new wife, having approved to marry her days before, when Mr. Mason's son, Richard Mason, offered him £30,000 if he proposed. Desperate for money, he agreed to the marriage.

When the couple arrives at Granbois, Antoinette's hereditary estate, the man feels progressively more uncomfortable around the servants and his strange young wife. Unfriendliness grows between the man and Christophine, Antoinette's surrogate mother and a servant who exercises great authority in the house. The man soon receives a threatening letter from Daniel Cosway, one of old Cosway's unlawful children.

The letter, venomous in tone, warns of Antoinette's immorality, saying that she comes from a family of derelicts and has madness in her blood. After reading this letter, the man begins to identify signs of Antoinette's mental illness.

Sensing that her husband hates her, Antoinette, asks Christophine for a magic love potion. Christophine diffidently agrees. When the man asks Antoinette about her past, that night they argue passionately. He gets up the next morning believing he has been poisoned, and he later sleeps with the servant girl, Amelie, who helps him pull through. Antoinette hears everything sitting in the next room.

Antoinette leaves for Christophine's the next morning. When she returns, she seems to be entirely mad. Drunk and out of control, she begs with the man to stop calling her "Bertha," a name he has given her without explanation. Antoinette then bites her husband's arm, drawing blood. After she collapses and falls in bed, Christophine rails at him for his unkindness. That night, he decides to leave Jamaica with Antoinette.

Part three is the shortest part of the novel; it is again from the point of view of Antoinette, now known as Bertha. She is now mainly limited in 'the attic' of Thorn field Hall, the Rochester mansion she calls the "Great House". The story traces her relationship with Grace, the servant who is assigned the task of guarding her as well as her evermore disintegrating non-life with the Englishman as he hides her from the world. He makes empty promises to come to her more, which actually becomes less as he ventures off to pursue relationships with other women—and eventually with the young governess Jane Eyre. Antoinette/Bertha decides to take her own life voicing her thoughts in stream of consciousness and believing it her destiny. A hidden captive, Antoinette has no sense of time or place; she does not even believe she is in England when Grace tells her so. Violent and furious, Antoinette draws a knife on her stepbrother, Richard Mason, when he visits her. Later she has no memory of the incident. Antoinette has a frequent dream about taking Grace's keys and exploring the house's downstairs quarters. In this dream, she lights candles and sets the house on fire. One night, she wakes from this dream and feels she must act on it. The novel ends with Antoinette holding a candle and walking down from her upstairs prison.

As a result of its multitalented nature, the narrative has been interpreted from various perspectives, such as feminism, post-colonialism, and so on. on the other hand, it is the belief of this study that the story has more to say concerning the complex psychological effects of the human nature called ‘segregation’ on whoever it possesses and wherever it is domiciled. Moreover, it has more to say “through its experimentation with narrative and exploration of the unconscious.”

Particularly, segregation does not only affect the female characters in the story, male characters are also affected; it does not only affect the colored characters, white characters are not left behind. Therefore, the whole narrative is described as “a brilliant psychological portrayal” (Sandra Drake, 1999: p. 194).

Alienation in Wide Sargasso Sea

To commence with, the narrative is divided into three parts, with Rhys’s protagonist, Antoinette, narrating the first part whereas her unnamed husband narrates the second part, and then the third narration goes back to her. Rhys’s advanced narrative point of view is indicative: it assumes the complex, rising and falling nature of the human psyche and its powerlessness in establishing the ‘centre’ amidst intermingling emotional and psychic occurrences that trouble it. Rhys first suggests this very nature of the human mind through her title, Wide Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea is said to be located mid-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the West Indies. It is famous for its complex currents, which make it very difficult for sailors to steer. McKenzie (p. 1) puts it this way:

Like the Sargasso Sea, a mass of seaweed surrounded by swirling currents in the Atlantic Ocean, the novel’s troubled heroine is suspended between England and the West Indies and belongs fully to neither.

Rhys, therefore, uses the Sargasso Sea to center the intricate nature of the currents of the human mind as regards race, sex, and isolation. On the other hand, amidst these, she attempts to trace the ‘centre’ of the circular nature of the human psyche in the character of her heroine, Antoinette. Fascinatingly, locating the ‘centre’ is dominant in Caribbean works that examine issues of slavery, exploration, segregation, and so on:

The explorer’s narrative, always pointing from the center to the islands located at the margins of the seas, is a narrative produced by the center, for the center, and of the center. (Harry Garuba, 2001: p. 61).

This is what Rhys attempts to achieve in her masterpiece. Having grown up amidst different kinds of people in the West Indies, she determines to write her story centering attention on islands, as the Caribbean is known for these. She attempts to find, as it were, the significance of her life experiences. However, as W.B. Yeats boldly declares in his classic poem, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” (line 3). For Rhys’s characters, things, in one way or the other, fall apart such that the centre, which is as far as this study is concerned, the human psyche, is fettered, tattered, and eventually shattered. The whole narrative, in the words of Howells in Kamila Vrankova (2007: p. 123-124), is the psychologically traumatic effect of segregation and alienation:

Accordingly, Jean Rhys’s story of alienation is centered on two crucial metaphors: the sea and the island. The sea as an image of separation and an increasing distance suggests the split in both space and time: the conflict between different civilisations, between the past and the present... as well as between the inner world of the individual and the surrounding reality....”

Therefore, the popular saying that, “The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart” should not be abandoned because the consequences of such winning of the mind are generally disastrous.

Madness leading to alienation:

The psychological cause of the different levels of madness that spread through the narrative leads to the alienation of characters. Madness at various levels is preponderant in Antoinette’s family, starting with her father, Alexander Cosway, who is said to have drunk himself to death; then to her mother, Annette; also, her brother, Pierre, and lastly Antoinette herself. Ironically, though she claims to hear a sound in her head while she is enslaved by her husband, an indication of madness, she claims to know the reason for her forced migration from Jamaica to England.

While making use of different levels of relationship, such as daughter/mother, friend/friend, individual/society, wife/husband, Rhys’s narrative explains segregation’s clever manipulation of the human psyche through ‘hatred’. The series of unfavorable and unfriendly conduct of the native blacks towards their non-black neighbors in the narrative justifies this claim. Antoinette feels alienated from Annette, her mother, as a grown-up child. She assumes that her mother’s abrupt change in behavior has something to do with Pierre, her mentally-disturbed brother:

My mother got a doctor from Spanish Town to visit my younger brother, Pierre, who was staggering when walking and could not speak clearly. I do not know what the doctor said or what my mother said to the doctor, but I do know that the doctor did not return and, thereafter, my mother changed (WSS, p. 7).

Possibly, Pierre’s psychological illness, as well as the poor state of the family, due to the course of the British Emancipation Act of 1833, which freed black slaves in Jamaica, is accountable for Annette’s somewhat deterring behavior which makes her abandon and discourage Antoinette’s affectionate advances:

My mother wanted to be seated next to Pierre or walk wherever she wanted without anyone bothering her, wanted peace and quiet.... My mother said: “Leave me alone, I want to be alone” (p. 8).

According to Anne Simpson (2005: p. 116),

Rhys creates a mother in Annette who is genuinely incapable of offering love to her daughter, who repeatedly fails to mirror Antoinette’s attitudes and behavior, and who thereby demonstrates how a child’s sense of her own reality may be steadily eroded.

Such a child is forced to abandon the:

Belief in love and in loving. Instead, ordinary hate establishes itself as the fundamental truth of life. The child experiences the parents’ refusal of love and their constant aloofness or harshness as hate, and he or she in turn finds his or her most intense private cathexis of the parents to be imbued with hate.... To be cathected by a parent, even to the point of becoming a reliable negative self-object for him or her, is a primary aim for children, as their true dread is that of being unnoticed and left for dead (Bollas: 1987, pp. 129-130).

Antoinette does not only feel alienated through her mother’s aloofness, she also feels hated by the native black Caribbean people in her neighborhood. The black children around her neighborhood taunt her: 

One day a young girl followed me, singing “Go, white cockroach, go, go.” I started walking fast, but she walked faster. “White cockroach, go, go. Nobody wants you here. Go away” (p. 10).

Antoinette even feels hated from her friend, Tia, a black Caribbean girl. On one occasion, she refers to Tia as a ‘nigger’; her friend, on the other hand, strikes back by saying that Antoinette and her family are “white niggers,” not like the “real white people” who have riches and status. Afterwards when she returns home wearing Tia’s clothes, because the latter steals her clothes, her mother feels embarrassed to see her daughter’s slave-like appearance. Considering that her mother is embarrassed of her, Antoinette decides that what Tia says about her must be true. As a result, she doubts that she can never fit in to white or black people. Therefore, she feels psychologically alienated, seeing herself as an alien and an outsider.

Most touchingly, her feeling of hate and alienation reaches its culmination and her world collapses when once again Tia, her closest and only friend, throws a stone at her during the fire episode that claims Pierre’s life and destroys Annette’s parrot, Coco:

Then, not far away, I saw Tia and her mother, and ran to her because she was all that remained of my life, as it had been. We shared the meal, we slept next to each other, and we had bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and be like her.... When I came, I saw the rough stone surface that was holding, but I saw the cast. Nor felt. Just noticed something wet ran down my face. I looked and saw her face contorted, as if to like to mourn. We looked, with blood on my face and tears in hers (pp. 29 & 30).

Antoinette’s hope of sharing part of her life with her close friend is brought unexpectedly to an end when, like every other black Caribbean, Tia opts resentment rather than generosity. This is what hatred does: once it takes hold of the human psyche, it brings in other unpleasant things, such as hatred, resentment, and of course, madness, no matter how small which leads to alienation. In the story, almost all the characters, both blacks and Creoles, exhibit one or the other level of madness. Earlier on in the story, Annette’s isolated attitude, foretells her ultimate and absolute madness; Tia’s alternating display of hatred towards Antoinette predicts another level of madness; the arson raid carried out by Mr. Mason’s black servants, and much later, Antoinette’s husband’s forced and agonizing alienation all display one level of insanity or the other. And so, Antoinette has many archetypes for the exhibition of hatred. 

In view of the fact that both she and her family are alienated based on color and class, she bottles up not only the hatred of her mother, but also the jealousy of the local Caribbean people on the island. Her eventual rage at the end of the narrative is predictable by the hatred she experiences right from her childhood. During the smoldering of the Coulibri Estate, in her last encounter with Tia, Antoinette’s sublimation of her withdrawn id, a somewhat aggressive reaction to those who would later hurt her feelings, is predicted:

We looked, with blood on my face and tears in hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass (WSS, p. 30).

She is like a:

 “wounded child who has become an assailant in reaction to repeated experiences of neglect and loss” (Simpson, p. 117).

 So, by Antoinette’s experiences in the narrative, Rhys establishes a world in which everything rests on problematic and challenging relationships: between people of different nationalities, races, languages, classes, against which the struggle to maintain connection even within a family can seem puny and defeated (Savory: p. 136).

This hatred intensely presupposes what prejudices people of different races hold against one another as they get along in their relationships. The narrative begins in 1839, six years after the elimination of slavery in the British Empire, of which Jamaica was part. As a white daughter of ex-slave owners, Antoinette has a double difficulty, which makes her neither white nor black. Since her widowed Creole mother belongs neither to the black population not to the leading class, being detested by both groups, Antoinette:

 “... becomes a double outsider: ‘white nigger’ for the Europeans and ‘white cockroach’ for the Blacks” (p. 124).

Jean Rhys herself being a white Creole, Antoinette’s story reflects the author’s own “sense of displacement:” her feeling of being “dispossessed at home” and living as an exile in England (Vrankova).

Looking thoughtfully at the Cosway family, the hatred from their direct community brings domestic fear that looks intently each member in the face. For Antoinette’s mother, she does not only dread Pierre’s illness, she also fears the hatred of the black people in Coulibri against white Creoles. She tells Mr. Mason, her new husband, of her fears:

One day my mother said flatly: “We could leave the farm in the hands of an administrator. Here, people hate us. At least, hates me.... I do not want to stay in Coulibri. It is dangerous. It is dangerous to Pierre” (WSS, pp. 17, 20).   

At the opening of the story, Antoinette inquires why her family does not have friends coming around visiting; her mother tries to conceal her fears:

When I asked why so few people visited us, she said the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate, where we lived was very bad and now the road repairs had passed into history.... I got used to the solitary life.... (p. 6).

Regrettably for both Antoinette and her family members, “Mr. Luttrell, our neighbor and only friend” (p. 6) kills his dog and consequently commits suicide due to the economic crisis which former slave owners unavoidably experience because of the Emancipation Act that freed all British colonies at that time. 

Annette’s uncertainties become real when she loses her horse and her parrot, Coco, the family’s estate and Pierre, her son, to an arson raid set up by Mr. Mason’s black servants:

God! They have gone to the back! They set fire to the rear of the house! (p. 24).

Looking at the wife/husband relationship, the novel seeks to humanize the racially derogatory characterization of a West Indian madwoman. This is important for Rhys because, as Vivian Gornick (1986: p. 9) puts it:

All her life she felt herself a sexual innocent crushed by the Mr. Mackenzies of this world: men of power who were aroused by her and then turned on her, reviled and humiliated her, left her “all smashed up.”

Thus, through the character of Antoinette, Rhys seeks to correct the stereotypical depiction of the female folk, not only in Bronte’s Jane Eyre, but in most literary works. Though Rhys’s heroine hopes to find some relief in her English husband, who is Rochester in Jane Eyre, she is faced with perhaps the same hatred which she experiences as a little girl. Hence, she is damned as an outsider, who belongs neither to the Caribbean nor to England. Ultimately, conflict follows between European and West Indian consciousness through Antoinette’s fatal relationship with Rochester. As Vrankova (p. 124) puts it: 

Both Antoinette (Bronte’s Bertha) and her husband (Bronte’s Rochester) are trapped in an imposed and painful isolation.... In the marriage of the two protagonists, the cultural, social and religious differences become insurmountable due to the paradoxical similarity of the unsolved conflicts and frustrations deep in their minds.

Antoinette’s nameless husband is shown as a man who has no moral respect for women; rather, he:

 “sees women as objects to be exploited for money and sex” (McKenzie, p. 59).

He agrees to marry Antoinette not only because he is offered thirty thousand pounds dowry by Richard Mason, Antoinette’s step-brother, but also because he would eventually own all her possessions. He admits that though Antoinette is good-looking, he sees her dark eyes as sad and alien. In marrying her, he confesses that he is only playing a role. And when he ultimately rejects her, he compares her with a dead girl:

“I drew the sheet over her gently as if I covered a dead girl” (WSS, p. 88).

 In one way or the other, Antoinette’s husband’s authority could be said to conclude and confirm her alienation and supposed madness. Thus, at the level of husband/wife relationship:

This novel is a powerful portrayal of the possible tragic consequences of patriarchy, which I take to be the sum of all material, sexual and ideological efforts to dominate women.... This domination plays a critical role in her eventual alienation, “madness”, and the dehumanizing control of her body which we see in her transportation and incarceration (McKenzie, p. 59).

Antoinette’s physical alienation from English society

Her husband’s refusal to acknowledge her:

 Her husband’s emotional indifference from Antoinette symbolizes the need for a good repute in European, upper-class society. His refusal to acknowledge Antoinette as his wife exhibits the arrogance and superior attitude that whites felt towards people of a darker and richer skin color. 

 Rhys’s story manipulation allows for the slow but steady descent of the relationship to be observed by the reader due to society’s stresses, in both Jamaica and England that inter-racial marriage cannot succeed. 

Antoinette’s husband breaks her heart because she loved him, thus giving emphasis to the separation. Because he loved Antoinette too, the only possible reason for him to fall out of love for her is his uncertainty of her “odd” behavior. The unexplained abandonment thus allows the reader to view society’s influences on their racial.

 Her physical isolation: 

Upon her arrival in England with her husband, Antoinette is placed in an attic where she is to live permanently. This physical withdrawal of Antoinette from white, upper-class English society reveals society’s wish to keep the races separated. Hence, unfairness and prejudices are common and seen as acceptable by whites. 

Antoinette’s passionate nature and colorful background, customs, and reactions to situations are interpreted by her husband and his servants as “crazy” and “lunatic”. They thus judge her on appearances and presence – two important possessions in English society at the time. 

Antoinette’s imprisonment also shows how the whites seek to control those of alternate skin colors. Her husband’s display of control in this situation illustrates white feelings of dominance and screams discrimination. 

Conclusion

Rhys’s heroine, as the author herself, is torn between two opposing worlds. Be sufficient it to say that her psyche is suspended between these two worlds; however, she belongs to neither. The racial and gender alienation, as well as the hatred, which she suffers in the hands of those she unconsciously thinks are her own people denounces her to be regarded as a madwoman. Just like the complex currents of the Sargasso Sea, the human psyche is tattered amidst complex human feelings, which compose complex human responses to issues of alienation. Though racial, gender, and religious prejudices are physical manifestations of man’s wicked nature, the real issue behind the human nature of alienation is precipitated upon some human psychological debilities which tend to be elusive and tenuous.

Antoinette is not “mad” before her isolation - it is because of her physical and emotional alienation from society and her husband that causes her to fly into wild rages thus allowing the reader to witness society’s negative impact upon a person.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Unknown. "Jean Rhys Biography, compiled by Lennox Honychurch." Cavehill.uwi.edu, 2014. Web. 1 Jan 2014. <http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/BNCCde/dominica/centre/jrbio.html>.

Unknown. "Lennox Honychurch: Jean Rhys Biography." Lennoxhonychurch.com, 2014. Web. 1 Jan 2014. <http://www.lennoxhonychurch.com/jeanrhysbio.cfm>.

Unknown. "Wide Sargasso Sea Summary." Shmoop, 2014. Web. 1 Jan 2014. <http://www.shmoop.com/wide-sargasso-sea/summary.html>.