Rochester gaslights, manipulates and deliberately confuses Antoinette, whose instincts are correct in warning her off him. April 30, 2015 April 30, 2015 / alfarnbach. Following a string of only mildly successful novels and short stories, Rhys disappeared off the radar, and many believed her dead. Instead of a shrieking specter, we get a psychologically nuanced portrayal of Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a young white Creole girl coming of age in Jamaica while it was still a British colony. Wide Sargasso Sea is both easy and difficult to place in Jean Rhys’s canon. The first Mrs. Rochester recalls how she met her future husband and eventually came to be imprisoned in the attic at Thornfield Hall. Yet this intimate, delighted malice is all his own. A sly letter from a local mixed-race man calling himself Daniel Cosway alleges to Rochester that not only was Antoinette’s mother mad, her first husband Mr Cosway was also ‘raving’; Antoinette has inherited both doses and Daniel Cosway is himself one of Mr Cosway’s many illegitimate mixed-race children. As Antoinette comes of age she senses, and the reader knows, that her life is going to take a permanent turn for the worse. She shouts that Mason ‘sneered’ at her like a ‘grinning hypocrite’ when she warned him. Bertha’s mother is a Creole. Rhys uses multiple voices (Antoinette's, Rochester's, and Grace Poole's) to tell the story, and deeply intertwines her novel's plot with that of Jane Eyre. Rochester received £30,000 for marrying Antoinette ‘without question or condition’, with no provision made for her, and she becomes wholly economically dependent on him. From the beginning he ‘watched [Antoinette] critically’, deciding that ‘Creole of pure English descent she may be, but [her eyes] are not English or European either’ but ‘long, sad, dark, alien’. In Bronte’s novel, Bertha Mason is more monster than human, locked away for a decade in secret, in the attic of Thornfield Hall, where her demonic laughter and “savage” snarls disturb the residents of the mansion, including Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea. and in-depth analyses of His greatest fear is of being laughed at by the only people he respects: other English men. Cosway attracts tacit excusal, his powerless female victims are pilloried and Annette is slandered because she ‘encouraged’ him. The book details the life of Antoinette Mason (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha), a West Indian who marries an unnamed man in Rhys exemplifies Postmodern Intertextuality in her usage of more than one narrator in the novel, Antoinette, Rochester, and Grace Poole. When Aunt Cora tries to answer back, Richard Mason resorts to classic ageist sexism, macho aggression and accusations of madness or stupidity, shouting, ‘for God’s sake shut up you old fool’. When Antoinette’s aunt Cora intercedes on behalf of Antoinette, Richard Mason describes Rochester to her as ‘an honourable gentleman, not a rascal’ whom he ‘would trust … with my life’. His sexual usage of Amélie, as with his usage of Antoinette, is a revenge against imagined provocations: he thinks Amélie is sneering at him, ‘full of delighted malice, so intelligent, above all so intimate’. While the newly married Antoinette proclaims happily, ‘This is my place and everything is on our side’, Rochester self-pityingly perceives the landscape as malevolent. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is a beautiful postcolonial response to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Bertha is the madwoman locked in the attic by her husband Rochester, the simmering Englishman whose children Jane has been hired to tutor. In Jane Eyre, Jane struggles with her identity as a governess for aristocratic children.As a governess, she is expected to behave in the way that aristocratic people do. Antoinette is a lonely, intelligent, brooding individual who yearns for a mother figure (and finds one in her maid and ex-slave Christophine), yet the reasons for the rejection of Antoinette by Annette (her mother) are never made clear, while slanderous lies fill the space of ignorance and doubt. Instant downloads of all 1428 LitChart PDFs (including Wide Sargasso Sea). Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in late May while on vacation in Telluride, Colorado. 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