Wide Sargasso Sea

WIDE SARGASSO SEA round-eyed gulfweed Sea | Introduction When Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966 it helped to rescue its author, blue jean Rhys, from the obscurity into which she had fallen. Her previous novels and short stories, published between the dickens world wars, were out of print. Rhys, who had succumbed to an alcohol addiction, lived an isolated life in a remote village in England, a region she had ceaselessly despised. Wide Sargasso Sea caught the immediate management of critics, won the prestigious W. H. Smith Award and Heinemann Award, and earned Rhys a place in the literary canon. The unique novel seeks to mend the true story of Bertha Mason, the Jamaican mad wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre. In telling Berthas story (known in Wide Sargasso Sea as Antoinette Cosway), Rhys explores the complex transaction between clean-living and black western Indians, and between the old slaveholding West Indian families and the new English settlers in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Set mainly in Jamaica and Dominica, the country of Rhyss birth, the novel describes how Antoinette became mad. In Brontes novel, Bertha/Antoinette is a monster, exposit as violent, insane, and promiscuous. Rhys creates instead a sympathetic and vulnerable untested woman who seeks, unsuccessfully, to belong.

The themes explored in the novel, especially the status of women and the race relations between newly freed slaves and their former owners, have drawn the maintenance of critics. Other critics debate the merits of the novel, saying that it relies too closely on Jane Eyre and cannot stand alone. Certainly, Rhyss novel forces readers to reexamine Brontes novel and consider the import of race in the nineteenth-century English novel. When night comes, and she has had several drinks and sleeps, it is indulgent to take the keys. I know now where she keeps them. Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. They tell me I am in... If you want to relieve oneself a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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