The Wide Sargasso Sea How does your view of Antoinette change from part one to part two? What are the reasons for these changes and how does Rhys' writing achieve this?

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The Wide Sargasso Sea

How does your view of Antoinette change from part one to part two? What are the reasons for these changes and how does Rhys’ writing achieve this?

When we meet Antoinette for the first time, she is a child of no more than 10. The absence of a definite age mirrors her flightful and relaxed personality. This is a common technique involving several factors that forms a bond between the reader and the character. Her innocence as a child is taken for granted, and therefore any aspect of her life will be both honest and frank in its description. “She was much blacker – blue-black with a thin face and straight features.” Because of the use of stream of consciousness writing, her comments on and interactions with the world around her are simple, direct and open. This is shown through her interpretation of various objects. “Our garden was large and beautiful as that Garden in the bible – the tree of life grew there.” As common with other writers such as Joyce in “Portrait of the artist as a young man”, Rhys adds an element of autism to the observations of the child. “I sat close to the old wall at the end of the garden. It was covered with green moss”. The absence of direct meaning or symbolism, added to the already plain language serves to arouse the reader’s sympathy for the character. We take her brutal honesty in her observations “I went up to him but he was not sick, he was dead and his eyes were black with flies” straight to heart without attempting to analyse it for being coloured with emotion or biased with interpretation based on previous experiences.

Interestingly, perhaps one of the downsides to this simple observational style is the lack of importance shown towards aspects of her life that she enjoys. For example, in Aunt Cora “an ex-slave owner who had escaped misery, a flier in the face of providence”, she describes her only in unemotional terms, and does not give us the benefit of understanding this woman’s importance. The only aspects of Antoinette’s life that truly characterise her childhood by reaching a deeper emotional level are those that frighten or anger her. “Everything would be worse if I moved” is particularly prophetic in its childlike perceptiveness, for of course, this is the time of her life that she will be happiest, and everything will go downhill once she moves to Granbois. This affects the reader in several ways. The introduction of the main character as a child creates a sort of “intsa-empathy”. There is the honesty, the brutality, “A horrible noise swelled up, like animals howling, but worse”, and most importantly the history which is carried over into the second part. By sharing such violent and shocking experiences, especially from the subdued viewpoint of a child that can neither analyse nor instigate meaning to, we as readers develop a sense of intimacy with the character. This becomes an important weapon that Rhys uses in the second part of the book when she evolves the reader’s anger towards Rochester, while only appearing to describe events.

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The characters’ thoughts and dreams are a very important in their depiction, particularly as the text uses the stream of consciousness narrative. The dreams perhaps symbolise best the characters desires and fears. In Rochester’s narration, there is a period where he hungers for Antoinette “I was thirsty for her, but that is not love.” Here, the conscious thought and dreams run into each other, while the physical actions and happenings are played down. This perfectly illustrates the fervour and confusion of this period of his life. “It was not a safe game to play – in that place. Desire, ...

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