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| Wide Sargasso Sea |
| 作者Author / Jean Rhys 珍里絲 |
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Wild Sargasso Sea
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Jean Rhys
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*Pagination in green: Wide Sargasso Sea. Introd. Francis Wyndham NY: Norton, 1982. Originally published in 1966;
Pagination in red: Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. Norton Critical Ediction. NY: Norton, 1999. |
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 Part I
Part II and III
Rochester and Antoinette
The Ending of WSS: Different Spaces and the Madness
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| Part I: The influence of Race and Gender inequalities on family/racial relationships |
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How do these racial problems influence Annette and Antoinette?
1. Annette--What does she want? Why is the horse so important to her? Why is she aloof from Antoinette? Why does she turn silent after the doctor's visit of Pierre?
2. Antoinette -- How is she different from her mother? How does she survive? What do her dreams mean?
Clues:
Female Creole Identities
Annette
(Antoinette's explanation: "How could she not try for all the things that had gone so suddenly, so without warning" (18)
- the Cosways/Masons vs. the others: the others in the party p. 28, hated more by the blacks 34,
- the horse; p. 18/10
- her son; p. 19/11
- her views of Godfry and Sass p. 22/12
- gay and a good dancer 29;
- Annette vs. Mr. Mason -- p. 32/19; p. 35/20
- Coco p. 41/22
- What happened to her afterwards? Antoinette's account: p. 130- 134/78
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Antoinette
- the garden 19/ 10
- her reaction to the death of the horse: pretends that it does not happen.
- need of her mother p. 22/; rejection by her p. 26; 27; -pushing the daughter away pp. 20; 47
- the daughter's gradual losing of the mother p. 22; 26-27;
- loneliness; isolation from Jamaican society: e.g. the way to the convent pp. 48
- find refuge in nature without moving p. 23/13; solitude 28 /16 shingle 37, be contented
- her dreams p. 26/15; pp. 59-60 --1st dream: sense of overall antagonism;
2nd dream: fear for the future and possibility of marriage and being confined.
- the second refuge in the convent p. 53; 55; 57 (its simplistic eductaion of the world, nations seen in color p. 55; its lack of mirror, values and order, its standard of beauty Helene's coiffure p. 54-56)
- death impulse p. 92
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Racial Relationships: Antoinette and Christophine Christophine is practically Antoinette's caretaker, but is Antoinette intimate with Christophine?
Clues:
- Part I:
Christophine pp. 20-21-- only one friend; quiet voice and quiet laugh; Antoinette's fear of the things hidden in Christophine's room 31
- Part II: p. 112/ 67-- after Christophine says she does not know England, Antoinette thinks: "but how can she know the best thing for me to do, this ignorant, obstinate old negro woman. . ."
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Racial Relationships: Tia and Antoinette
Kamau Brathwaite--"No matter what J Rhys might have made Antoinette think, Tia was historically separated from her by the ideological barriers embedded in the colonialist discourses of white supremacy"
treatments of blacks
An unidentified black is a source of menace and a threat to Antoinette.. . .in much of Rhys's writing there exists only the Manichaean division of "good blacks"--those who serve--and "bad blacks"--those who are hostile, threatening, unknown. . .. the relationship [between Tia and Antoinette] is based on the production of difference through the racialist stereotypes of the hardy, physically superior, animallike, lazy negro. . .[lazy black--sleep after eating] and the sensitive whilet child, on the other hand, contemplates nature, seduced by the "reve exotique."
p. 89 The "narrative function" enacts a sentimental fiction of friendship between the black and white girls even as the "textual function" demystified and undercuts it.
The death of her planter father and the ending of slavery reduce Antoinette and her family to penury, from white to black. "Real white people" have money.The racial superiority depneds upon the economic ascendancy achieved by unpaid black labor. Without money, Antoinette's family become niggers, isolated from the rest of white society.
Fanon--"In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich."
three pennies--from Christophine to Antoinette to Tia
the presentation of the black mob: 42, 38
Are the conflicts between Antoinette and Tia inevitable? What is the significance of their switching clothes in one scene and looking at each other as if they're looking at a mirror in another?
- their playing together p. 23
- their betting p. 24
- the black's invasion p. 45
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| Part II and III |
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"The most seriously wrong thing with Part II is that I've made the obeah woman the
nurse, too articlulate.," Rhys.
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| Rochester and Antoinette |
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Causes for the conflicts between them:
1. Race/Culture: different cultural backgrounds:
--her limited understanding of the world -- p. 55; "Is it true,' she said, `that England is like a dream?" p. 80
-- Rochester's fever; gazed at by the natives pp. 67-69; his lack of understanding of Christophine pp. 85-86 (too slow, not lifting her skirt); blanks in his mind76
2. Gender: Rochester's motivation for getting married
- "not yet" p. 77; p. 89, 90; He dislikes the people around, but he does not reveal it ('not yet').
- not love her, 93
3. Race+ Gender: the letter from Daniel
Rochester's suspicion of Antoinette's madness; implication of Antoinette's sexual affair with others.
4. Gender: Rochester's self-centeredness and possessiveness: p. 94; the priest's ruined house--Pere Lilievre--Pere Labat -- self-centered 103
5. Race+ Gender: Antoinette's temperament--sense of doom and insecurity
6. Race+ Gender: Antoinette's insisting on using voodoo on "beke" (white people)
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name and identity--the African belief in name; naming as a way of constructing identities (the characters' attempts at naming themselves or the others in order to shape and construct their own/other's identities).
- Daniel Cosway--Esau (p.73)/Is he a Cosway? (p.94)
- Antoinette: called Bertha (p.68, 81, 88, 106-7); Marionette (p.92)--Why does Rochester change her names and the significance of this change of names? What is the significance in calling her Marionette (a doll)?
- the unnamed male narrator in Part II ('the man in Part III--Why does Rhys choose to let him be the main narrator? Why does she keep him unnamed? (Why does she want to have him sign his name in "Obeah Night"?)
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signs of betrayals--cock crowing (p.71, 97-8)
- When Antoinette leaves Christophine with the medicine she gives, she hears the cock crowing and says:
"This is for betrayal. But who is the traitor?. . . what does anyone know about traitors. . .?"(118/70-71) . What does she betray?
- Rochester's affair with Amele after the "obeah night" (p.84)--
Why is he having this affair? How do people around Rochester and change their attitudes toward him after this one-nigh-stand and why? (Antoinette, Amele, Baptiste)
- the untold love story between Antoinette and Sandi (p.30)--hints at their sexual relationship (p.72-3, 75, 109-10)--white dress (p.76) for Rochester and red dress for Sandi (p.109).
Why does Antoinette decide to go with Rochester but not Sandi?
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Rochester after the obeah night
- Rochester's hatred:
- mutual hatred (p.170/102)-- but this is told from Rochester's perspective.
- Rochester has given up all pretense of gentlemanliness. "If I was bound for hell let it be hell. No more false heavens. . . . You hate me and I hate you. We'll see who hates best. But first, first, I will destroy your hatred."
- // "Obeah Night" (p.143)
- His possessiveness:
- unwilling to let Antoinette go and marry someone else. (p. 159)
- his "obeah": changing Antoinette into "mad Bertha" (pp. 147; 166)
- Rochester's appearance in Part III : grey in his hair and misery in his eyes(105)
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| The Ending of WSS: Different Spaces and the Madness |
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English House vs. the Caribbean Spaces
- self-enclosed gardens:
- the garden in Coulibri and the forests in both Coulibri and Granbois
- the "enclosed garden" (p.36) Antoinette dreams. --> a house with "thick walls," "blazing fires and the crimson and white rooms." (106)
- places without looking glass: the convent (p.32) the house in England (Thornfield in Jane Eyre) (p.107)
- England
- "a black and cruel world to a woman" for Grace (106)
- "[their world] is, as I always knew, made of cardboard" (p.107)What is the significance of this metaphor? Why does Antoinette insist that she has lost her way to England? (clue: p. 109)
Antoinette in the house
- relationships between Grace and Antoinette: Grace is kind but in lack of understanding
- a speaking, rational, perceptive and knowing subject:
- "she hasn't lost her spirit." (106)
- plans to convince Rochester to let her go home.
- "Name matters."
- "Now finally I know why I was brought here and what I have to do."
- Signs of "madness":
- look at the tapestry
- loss of memory -- does not remember fighting Richard. (108)
- Time has no meaning, but the red dress does.
- different dreams (nightmares) (p.47, 72)
What are the similarities between the fire scene in Part I and that in Antoinette's dream in part III? Elements in the last dream:
- recurrent ones: followed by somebody,
- the hall with only red and white colors, searching for the altar, Aunt Cora's room, the "ghost";
- escape from the fire, to see "all her life" written on the sky.
What is the significance of the last paragraph of the novel?
- Antoinette does not burn the house.
- She unlocks the door and "shield[s]" the fire, which "light [her] along the dark passage."
- Other accounts of madness
- Daniel: [about Annette]: "she can't life a hand for herself and soon the madness that is in her, and in all these white Creoles, come out." (96/57); "crazy and worse besides" [suggesting wantonness]
- Rochester: "she mad but mine" (99).
- One critic's analysis:
"Antoinette has progressed from fearing the power of the Afro-Caribbean and moving away from its protection, to becoming not only mistress and user of the flame, but its protector.. . .The reversal--stylistically inscribed--is a textualization of the theme of the zombi, a literary acting out of a belief about its nature. For Laroches writes that the zombi is the incarnation of the only "truly feared death," but that its fate "is reversible and thus transitory. . . Salt is the agent which renews the awareness of life, the antidate to the spell which brought on the state of zombification. Is is similar to divine fire" (E & T; 56; emphasis added). (textbook 202)
- Different interpretations of the fire and red dress
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