Wide sargasso sea

WIDE SARGASSO SEA

by Jean Rhys

MUNIRAH BINTI MD SOFI2011142310029

FARAHANAHIDAYU BINTI RAHIBIN2011142310025

PLOT CHARACTERS SETTING THEME MORAL VALUES


PLOT ANALYSIS

TRAGEDY PLOT

THREE ACT PLOT ANALYSIS


MAIN CHARACTERS

MINOR CHARACTERS

ANALYSIS ON MAJOR CHARACTER

CHARACTER ROLES


TIMES

PLACES


MAIN

MINOR


SINCERITY

HONESTY

PATIENT

RESPECT

LOYALTY

KINDNESS

HELPING

PROTECTIVE

PLOT ANALYSIS

INITIAL SITUATION

CONFLICT

COMPLICATION CLIMAX

SUSPENSE

DENOUEMENT CONCLUSION

After Coulibri burns down, her brother dies, and her mother goes mad, Antoinette ends up in a convent school in Spanish Town, Jamaica.

INITIAL SITUATION

After a month of courtship, Antoinette marries Rochester.

We know it's odd to describe a marriage as a conflict, but in Antoinette's turbulent world, marriage is an incredibly fraught thing. Marriage isn't a union of two people in love, but a financial arrangement manufactured by her stepfather and her stepbrother. Instead of insuring her security, her apparently well-intentioned stepfather's goal, Antoinette's wealth is signed over to Rochester, thus resulting in her loss of economic freedom. To be fair, Rochester in the beginning seems to have some genuine feeling for Antoinette – remember the part where he promises to trust her if she trusts him? But whether this promise can withstand all the baggage they bring into the relationship…well, that's why their marriage is a conflict.

CONFLICT

Rochester receives a nasty letter from Daniel Cosway/Boyd, Antoinette's alleged stepbrother, who claims all kinds of awful things about Antoinette and her family.

COMPLICATION

CLIMAXAntoinette slips Rochester

some voodoo Viagra, but it works a little too well – after sleeping with Antoinette, Rochester beds her maid.

SUSPENSEDistraught, Antoinette runs away to

Christophine's, and, when she returns, she has an ugly quarrel with Rochester.

The climax, or climaxes, of the novel generate(s) a series of reactions that worsen the situation. Instead of talking things over reasonably, everyone – Antoinette, Rochester, and to a lesser degree Christophine – seems to feed off each other's volatile emotions until they become lost in a blazing mess of acrimony. In such a state, neither Antoinette nor Rochester seems able to distinguish love from hate, and they both alternate between fiery rage and icy calm. It's difficult to know who to believe or who to sympathize with at this point.

DENOUOMENTRochester decides to ship Antoinette

back to his manor in England.Rochester has Antoinette declared insane,

ships her back to England, and locks her up in his attic. Confining her in this way is really only finishing off geographically what he's done to her on a physical and emotional level. Having already appropriated her fortune, he now lays claim to her entire person, symbolically indicated by the fact that he re-names her "Bertha." In Part III, Antoinette's narrative reflects this loss of self through her constant questioning of who and where she is.

CONCLUSION Antoinette has a dream where she sets fire to the entire

house. When she wakes up, she escapes from her attic room and walks down a dark hallway by candlelight.

While it may seem that the novel concludes with Antoinette's setting fire to Thornfield Hall, technically it's only in her dream where she sets fire to the house. The novel actually ends with Antoinette waking up from her dream and walking down a "dark passage." It's true that she says that she finally knows what she has to do, but she never specifies what this mysterious task is. For a fuller discussion of the ending, see our "What's Up with the Ending?" But let's just note here that the open-endedness of the ending seems fitting for a novel that has been driven by conflicting perspectives, a novel that has never given us readers the "truth" of what happened from an impartial or omniscient point of view. No one in the novel is exempt from its relentless perspectival clashing, not even the seemingly cool and calculating Rochester, and the novel isn't about to let us off the hook either.

TRAGEDY PLOT

Anticipation Stage

Dream Stage

Frustration Stage

Nightmare Stage

Destruction or Death Wish Stage

ANTICIPATION STAGE

After a difficult childhood, Antoinette comes of age in a convent school, where all the sermons about the blessed life after death make her wonder whether happiness is possible in this life.

DREAM STAGE

Antoinette seems to have found happiness through a sexually satisfying relationship with her newhusband, Rochester.

FRUSTRATION STAGE

Antoinette's marriage soon sours when Rochester receives a letter filled with malicious gossip from Daniel Cosway/Boyd.

NIGHTMARE STAGE

Convinced that sex is the only way to get Rochester to love her, Antoinette slips Rochester a voodoo aphrodisiac, but he gets violently ill, and sleeps with her maid.

Destruction or Death Wish Stage

To retaliate, Antoinette flirts with a number of men and has an affair with Sandi Cosway. Rochester has her declared insane and confines her to an attic room in his English manor, where she ultimately escapes with dreams of burning down the house and everyone in it.

Part 1

Part 11

Part 111

THREE ACT ANALYSIS PLOT

THREE ACT ANALYSIS PLOT

Act IAfter a troubled childhood and adolescence, Antoinette meets and marries Edward Rochester.

Act IIWhile their honeymoon is passionate at first, it cools drastically when Rochester receives a letter containing malicious gossip about Antoinette. It becomes downright frigid when Antoinette drugs Rochester and Rochester sleeps with Antoinette's maid.

Act IIIRochester hides Antoinette away in his estate in England, but she escapes with murderous dreams of setting fire to the whole place.

MAIN CHARACTER

ANTOINETTEROCHESTER

CHRISTOPHINE

Antoinette - The daughter of ex-slave owners and the story's principal character, based on the madwoman Bertha from Charlotte Brontë's gothic novel Jane Eyre. Antoinette is a sensitive and lonely young Creole girl who grows up with neither her mother's love nor her peers' companionship. In a convent school as a young woman, Antoinette becomes increasingly introspective and isolated, showing the early signs of her inherited emotional fragility. Her arranged marriage to an unsympathetic and controlling English gentleman exacerbates her condition and pushes her to fits of violence. Eventually her husband brings her to England and locks her in his attic, assigning a servant woman to watch over her. Delusional and paranoid, Antoinette awakes from a vivid dream and sets out to burn down the house.

Rochester - Antoinette's English husband who, though never named in the novel, narrates at least a third of the story. Rochester, the youngest son of a wealthy Englishman, travels to the West Indies for financial independence, as his older brother will inherit his father's estate. When Rochester arrives in Spanish Town he comes down with a fever almost immediately. He is pressured into marrying Antoinette, although he has only just met her and knows nothing of her family. He soon realizes the mistake he has made when he and Antoinette honeymoon on one of the Windward Islands. Eventually, they abandon the Caribbean lifestyle Rochester has come to abhor. They move back to England, where he locks his deranged wife in an upstairs garret.

Christophine - A servant given to Annette as a wedding present by her first husband, Alexander Cosway. Christophine, like her mistress, comes from Martinique and is therefore treated as an outsider by the Jamaican servant women. A wise and ageless figure, Christophine is loyal to both Annette and her daughter, and she exercises an unspoken authority within the household. Christophine practices obeah, a Caribbean black magic, with which she tries to help Antoinette regain first her husband's love and then her sanity.

MINOR CHARACTER

ANNETTE MR. MASON AUNT CORA

ALEXANDER COSWAY AMELIE SANDY

COSWAY

RICHARD MASON TIA

DANIEL COSWAYPIERRE

Character Roles

Protagonist

Antagonist Foil

PROTAGONIST

Antoinette is clearly the character around which the

novel's events revolve. Her first-person narratives in Parts I, II, and III frame Rochester's and

Grace Poole's narratives.

Antagonist RochesterWhile Antoinette encounters a lot of hostility

in the novel, none really matches the drubbing she gets from Rochester. The fact that he makes passionate love to her in the beginning only magnifies the hurt he inflicts after he receives the damning letter from Daniel Cosway/Boyd. And did we mention that he locks her up in his attic?Christophine

From Antoinette's childhood on, Christophine serves as a source of comfort and some pretty solid relationship advice. Her behavior at times, however, does call into question how pure her intentions really are.

Tia to AntoinetteAntoinette refers to Tia in Parts I

and III as her reflection. Despite their racial differences, Tia represents how Antoinette, as a Creole, identifies more strongly with the black Caribbean community than with white society.

SETTING•Coulibri, near Spanish Town, Jamaica

1830s

•Granbois, near Massacre, Dominica

1840s

•Thornfield Hall

-

MAIN THEMES

RACE

IDENTITY

LANGUAGE LOVE

MORTALITY

Race Race is absolutely integral to the way that

the characters understand themselves and their place in society. Some writers and scholar claim that Rhys’s Wide Sagasso Sea portrays black characters as flat stereotypes – child –like, primitive, animalistic. We might consider how everything is told from a character’s expectations about race are tested by the novel itself, particularly with a Creole character such as Antoinette, who alternately identifies with both white and black communities.

IdentityWhile Antoinette’s constant questioning of

who she is takes center stage, many of the other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea also struggle to make sense of their identities during the tumultuous historical period described in the novel. Character must navigate challenges to the ways that race, gender and class their affect their identities. Their mental states are often altered due to illness, alcohol, narcotics, or even oboeh. Often, other characters serve as mirrors or doubles who reveal unexpected desires and commonalities, as Tia does for Antoinette.

Language and Communication

Language in Wide Sargasso sea isn’t just medium for communicating thought s and feelings but a social force that actually shapes the fates of the characters. It marks a character’s place in society, as when the black characters use a dialect of English that sounds broken or even obscene to the white characters. It can signal the introduction of a foreign or exotic element, as when Christophine speaks in patois, a dialect of French spoken in the Carribean.

LOVERomantic love inn the novel is

constantly thwarted by all the baggage the characters bring into their relationship, including their past histories and their ideas about race, gender, and class. Antoinette is not necessarily exempt from the same kind of racism that marks Rochester’s attitude toward herself and Amelie, as her relationship with Sandi Cosway shows.

MORTALITYDeath for Antoinette and Rochester

become a potent metaphor for all of he ways in which selves can be lost, transformed, or destroyed. The novel plays on the literary tradition of equating death with orgasm in order to suggest how sex between the characters can be a form of control, rather than pleasure.

The novel is also littered with people who act like zombies, beings that are both alive and dead, and ghosts, beings that neither alive nor dead.

MINOR THEMES

THE SUPERNA-

TURALPOWER VERSION-S

OF REALITYCONTRAS-

TING REGION

MORAL VALUES• Antoinette loves Rochester sincerely.• Even they just know each other, she

accept his proposal.• She also always try to comfort him.

Sincerity

• The trouble they had face, make them realize to become honest with each other.

• Antoinette tell Rochester everything about her mother madness.

Honesty

• Antoinette such a blissful girl, she patient with the person around her that hate her.

• She know everything about what other people say to her mother and family.

Patient

MORAL VALUES• At first, Antoinette and Rochester

respect each other.• After Rochester know about Annette,

he starts to make distance with Antoinette.

Respect • Antoinette is loyal towards Rochester.• Christophine asks her to leave

Rochester and find another man, but she refused because her loves towards Rochester.

Loyalty • Antoinette is a kind person, because

she always tries to satisfy Rochester heart.

• She tries to persuade him when there misunderstanding between them.

Kindness

MORAL VALUES• Christophine love Antoinette.

Because of that she always help her and support her.

• when Antoinette sad with Rochester behaviors, Christohpine help her to make obeah.

Helping

• Christophine protect Antoinette and family for ages.

• When other people tried to bullied them, she used her influence in community to defend them.

Protective

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Wide sargasso sea