Wide Sargasso Sea Research Paper
Wide Sargasso Sea Essay
Walls
Walls. They have acted in the same way for centuries; they have given people a sense of security, yet at certain times walls turn on people. For some these walls of safety become walls of entrapment. Walls take the very same actions in Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, as they surround the main character, Antoinette Cosway, for her entire life. The use of walls acts as a significant part of Antoinette's life as they turn her from feeling safe and secure to feeling imprisoned and trapped. Antoinette finds walls very comforting primarily during her childhood. She, as a child, lives in a world where her mother is insane and the slaves have been recently freed. For her, this is a troubling time as she neither …show more content…
Here she started adulthood and thus began the transformation of walls of safety to walls of imprisonment. This change is first noticed in the very end of the first part when Antoinette has her dream. This dream consists of a nameless man (who we later recognize as Rochester) who leads Antoinette through the forest and into an enclosed garden: "We are no longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees. I do not know them" (Rhys 60). At this time she feels unsafe because in her dream she is being forced, to go with this man of whom she fears, by the man and the tree. Antoinette marries Rochester, which leads her to a life of sadness. In her marriage to Rochester, Antoinette dies a spiritual death and then awaits her literal one. Rochester learned to hate Antoinette and so he locked her in the attic at Thornfield. This demonstrates clearly the imprisonment that walls create. Jean Rhys tells this part of the story to explain why Antoinette becomes crazy in the novel, Jane Eyre. This is Rhys' purpose in writing the story. She wanted to put reason behind "Bertha's" actions. Antoinette has the desire to live again and thus she decides to burn down the house. This desire to live is a correlation to the religious ideas of an afterlife. When she lit the house on fire a wall of fire shot up giving her protection against the people she
Walls
Walls. They have acted in the same way for centuries; they have given people a sense of security, yet at certain times walls turn on people. For some these walls of safety become walls of entrapment. Walls take the very same actions in Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, as they surround the main character, Antoinette Cosway, for her entire life. The use of walls acts as a significant part of Antoinette's life as they turn her from feeling safe and secure to feeling imprisoned and trapped. Antoinette finds walls very comforting primarily during her childhood. She, as a child, lives in a world where her mother is insane and the slaves have been recently freed. For her, this is a troubling time as she neither …show more content…
Here she started adulthood and thus began the transformation of walls of safety to walls of imprisonment. This change is first noticed in the very end of the first part when Antoinette has her dream. This dream consists of a nameless man (who we later recognize as Rochester) who leads Antoinette through the forest and into an enclosed garden: "We are no longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees. I do not know them" (Rhys 60). At this time she feels unsafe because in her dream she is being forced, to go with this man of whom she fears, by the man and the tree. Antoinette marries Rochester, which leads her to a life of sadness. In her marriage to Rochester, Antoinette dies a spiritual death and then awaits her literal one. Rochester learned to hate Antoinette and so he locked her in the attic at Thornfield. This demonstrates clearly the imprisonment that walls create. Jean Rhys tells this part of the story to explain why Antoinette becomes crazy in the novel, Jane Eyre. This is Rhys' purpose in writing the story. She wanted to put reason behind "Bertha's" actions. Antoinette has the desire to live again and thus she decides to burn down the house. This desire to live is a correlation to the religious ideas of an afterlife. When she lit the house on fire a wall of fire shot up giving her protection against the people she