9. 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
10. CONFLICT
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.
11. 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
12. CLIMAX
Antoinette slips Rochester some
voodoo Viagra, but it works a little
too well – after sleeping with
Antoinette, Rochester beds her
maid.
13. SUSPENSE
Distraught, 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.
14. DENOUOMENT
Rochester 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.
15. 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.
17. 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.
ANTICIPATION STAGE
18. Antoinette seems to have found
happiness through a sexually satisfying
relationship with her new
husband, Rochester.
DREAM STAGE
19. Antoinette's marriage soon sours when Rochester
receives a letter filled with malicious gossip from
Daniel Cosway/Boyd.
FRUSTRATION STAGE
20. 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.
NIGHTMARE STAGE
21. 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.
Destruction or Death
Wish Stage
23. THREE ACT ANALYSIS
PLOT
Act I
After a troubled childhood and adolescence, Antoinette meets
and marries Edward Rochester.
Act II
While 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 III
Rochester hides Antoinette away in his estate in England, but
she escapes with murderous dreams of setting fire to the whole
place.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. MINOR CHARACTER
ANNETTE MR. MASON AUNT CORA
ALEXANDER SANDY
AMELIE
COSWAY COSWAY
DANIEL
RICHARD TIA COSWAY
MASON
PIERRE
30. 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.
31. Antagonist
Rochester
While 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.
32. Tia to Antoinette
Antoinette 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.
33. SETTING
• Coulibri, near Spanish
1830s Town, Jamaica
• Granbois, near
1840s Massacre, Dominica
- • Thornfield Hall
34. MAIN THEMES
RACE
MORTALITY IDENTITY
LOVE LANGUAGE
35. 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.
36. Identity
While 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.
37. 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.
38. LOVE
Romantic 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.
39. MORTALITY
Death 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.
40. MINOR THEMES
THE VERSION- CONTRAS
SUPERNA POWER S OF -TING
-TURAL REALITY REGION
41. MORAL VALUES
• Antoinette loves Rochester sincerely.
• Even they just know each other, she
Sincerity accept his proposal.
• She also always try to comfort him.
• The trouble they had face, make them
realize to become honest with each
Honesty other.
• Antoinette tell Rochester everything
about her mother madness.
• Antoinette such a blissful girl, she patient
with the person around her that hate her.
Patient • She know everything about what other
people say to her mother and family.
42. MORAL VALUES
• At first, Antoinette and Rochester respect
each other.
Respect • After Rochester know about Annette, he
starts to make distance with Antoinette.
• Antoinette is loyal towards Rochester.
• Christophine asks her to leave Rochester
Loyalty and find another man, but she refused
because her loves towards Rochester.
• Antoinette is a kind person, because she
always tries to satisfy Rochester heart.
Kindness • She tries to persuade him when there
misunderstanding between them.
43. MORAL VALUES
• Christophine love Antoinette.
Because of that she always help
her and support her.
Helping • when Antoinette sad with Rochester
behaviors, Christohpine help her to
make obeah.
• Christophine protect Antoinette and
family for ages.
• When other people tried to bullied
Protective them, she used her influence in
community to defend them.
