The book is told in three parts, in the first part, Bertha, or Antoinette Cosway as she is before being renamed, is detailing her childhood brought up by that ‘infamous mother’. She challenges and questions it, illuminating what has gone before and reminding us that, In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys doesn’t so much as give Bertha a voice, she gives us a new way of looking at such a well-known book. A plot device rather than a character, she serves to represent the darkness in our pasts that can reignite in the present with devastating consequences. Alcoholism, adultery and insanity are blamed and Rochester explains how he was forced to marry this Creole woman and bring her back to England. Everything we learn about her comes from Mr Rochester and his brother-in-law and everything confirms the evidence of her madness. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, the archetypal madwoman in the attic does not speak.
In this best-selling novel Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about. Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors’ sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home. She is sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Jean Rhys’s reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction’s most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.Ī sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean.
This week’s book celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and was written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It’s a way for readers to take stock of what they own and get excited about the books on their shelves and on their devices. Shelf Control is a weekly meme created by Lisa at Book Shelf Fantasies where bloggers feature books they own and would like read.
0 kommentar(er)
