According to Jean Rhys, “The Creole in Charlotte Brontë's novel is a profane – repugnant character who does not matter, and not once alive , what matters” (Kimmey 113). In Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, the Creole character and Rochester's disturbed wife, Bertha Mason, is described as "a purple face[d]" (Bronte 342), a "demon" (Bronte 351), and a "dressed hyena » standing on “its hind legs” (342). Additionally, Rochester describes Bertha as having a "mask" instead of a face, "red balls" for eyes, and a "bulky" body compared to the human "form" of the innocent Jane Eyre (Bronte 343 ). While Bronte portrays her Creole woman character solely as a ravenous madwoman with a "mouth of hell", Rhys chooses to take Bertha Mason from the confines of the attic of Thornfield Hall and portray her as an individual with a background, a story and, above all, a life (Bronte 343). Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea deconstructs the stigma associated with Bronte's Bertha Mason and shows another side of Rochester's mad wife through the character of Antoinette, a girl who descends into madness due to her lifelong isolation and her destructive marriage with the figure of Rochester. In response to the demonic, "not once alive" Creole character that Bronte plays in Jane Eyre, Rhys uses Antoinette as a means of giving Bronte's Bertha an identity; this humanization process is done by defining Antoinette's self through images of fire and light, which signify Antoinette's passion as a Creole woman. Furthermore, Rhys creates this identity (which is fully matured and realized by the end of the novel) in order to emphasize Rochester's role in Antoinette's or Bertha's descent into madness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay While Brontë chooses to omit the events that led to Bertha's downfall, Rhys creates a novel that is both explanatory and thought-provoking as it allows the madwoman to attic a human representation. In other words, Antoinette's personal narrative sets out and explains the events that led to her fate as a madwoman locked in the attic of her husband's English home. Additionally, Rhys emphasizes the issue of identity and its importance to the overall plot surrounding the figure of Bertha Mason. As a girl of European descent growing up in post-emancipation Jamaica, Antoinette suffers from isolation from society and her family. The first line of the novel expresses this feeling of isolation: “They say that when trouble comes, you close ranks, and that's what the white people did. But we were not in their ranks” (Rhys 9). Although Antoinette comes from a white European family, her mother, Annette Cosway, is a “Martiniquaise” (from a French colony), which distances the family from the English settlers living in Jamaica (Rhys 9). Additionally, due to the Emancipation Act, Antoinette's parents are no longer good slave owners. In fact, according to Tia, the family is "poor as a beggar" (Rhys 14), causing Jamaica's black community to look down on them and call them "white cockroaches" (Rhys 13). As a member of a poor white family that once owned slaves, Antoinette is not only isolated from her surrounding community, but she evokes shame in her mother; In Annette's eyes, Antoinette is proof of the downfall of the Cosway family. Never managing to truly belong to a particular group, Antoinette does not know how to define herself: she is constantly turned towards the people around her. This method is problematic, however, becauseMany people in Antoinette's life distance themselves from her. Antoinette's inability to gain a sense of belonging to her community, to her family, and, later, to her husband, leads to her eventual downfall. As Maritza Stanchich says, Antoinette “struggles with [her] identity to the point of madness” (Stanchich 454). Although Antoinette struggles with her identity throughout her shameful and isolated childhood, through her personal narrative she is able to define herself through associations with various images regarding the sun, fire, and light. For example, Antoinette tells her new husband, Rochester, “I was always happy in the morning…never after sunset, for after sunset the house was haunted” (Rhys 79). If Antoinette feels safe and happy at sunrise, she is afraid of night, when darkness takes over. Additionally, Antoinette seems to be happiest and happiest when she is in the light. During his part of the story, Rochester states that "the light changed her" and that he had "never seen her so gay or so beautiful" (Rhys 82). Even after Rochester believes he was poisoned by Antoinette, he describes her face as "smooth and very youthful again" (Rhys 83). He then adds, however, that this beauty of Antoinette must be a "trick of light", implying that Antoinette's beauty is deceptive and visible only in light (Rhys 83). Rochester's suspicious view of Antoinette's association with light is important because it opposes Antoinette's view. Antoinette associates herself with light in her story in order to define herself; Rochester's suspicions of this definition as it relates to his wife's identity lead him to become extremely weary and unkind towards Antoinette. Rochester's distrust of Antoinette's happiness and beauty is what leads to the downfall of their relationship. As soon as Rochester hears about the madness that reigns in Antoinette's family, he considers Antoinette's passion (love, happiness, beauty) as threatening because of its excessive nature. In this novel, excess is what Rochester fears above all else in his relationship with his wife. According to Sylvie Maurel, “excess is naturally inherent to the universe of the Great Sargasso Sea” (Maurel 159). Rochester's discomfort with excessive surroundings is clearly evident during the newlyweds' journey to their honeymoon home: "Everything is too much... Too much blue, too much purple, too much green." The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too close. And this woman is a stranger…I didn’t buy her, she bought me, or so she thinks” (Rhys 41). After regarding the excessive nature of the Windward Islands with hatred, Rochester immediately thinks of his new wife; the association of excess with Antoinette is expressed in a way that focuses on the threat of Antoinette's self-affirmation and dominance in her beloved and natural environment. In other words, Rochester is afraid of Antoinette's belief that she has "bought" him - that, through the fiery identity Rhys has given him, Antoinette will somehow become dominant. other. The excess of association with Antoinette is also emphasized later. in marriage through the character of Christophine: “It’s because she won’t be satisfied. She’s a Creole girl and she has the sun in her” (Rhys 95). Not only does Christophine explain to Rochester that Antoinette has a passionate and excessive nature that will never be satisfied, but Christophine associates this idea of ​​excess with what constitutes Antoinette's identity: the sun. While Antoinette is desperate for love due to her isolated childhood, Rochester can never love her as much as Antoinette is ready to love him. Compared to theAntoinette's warm and emotional personality, Rochester's identity rests on a cold and hard surface. In other words, Rochester does not know how to love which creates a feeling of dissatisfaction in Antoinette. As a result, according to Maurel, Rochester “puts a check on excess” and “makes tragedy prevail over the idyllic world of romance” (Maurel 159). Susan Lydon states that “Jean Rhys…deflate[s] the Victorian cult of domesticity by suggesting that Bertha's madness in Jane Eyre is due to the abuses of an English patriarch” (Lydon 26). Rochester, the English patriarch, is threatened by Antoinette's brilliant intentions.Creole identity. As a result of this threat, Rochester creates a house that is “presented as [a] dangerous place that threaten[s] the female protagonist” (Lydon 23). Rochester's threat comes in the form of an attack on Antoinette's identity as a whole. Just as Rochester tires of the sunset, which illustrates "the distant sea on fire" and "huge clouds" that "shoot into flame," he tires of Antoinette's passion and identity. To cope with his disgust for women, Rochester renames his wife and gives her the name Bertha. In doing so, Antoinette's fragile identity is “now under attack,” with Rochester being the aggressor (Stanchich 456). Furthermore, Rochester is not only trying to eliminate his identity and the light images that accompany it, he is trying to give him his own identity – an identity that associates itself with darkness. Throughout his narrative in the second part of the novel, Rochester “constantly yearns for night and darkness” (Rhys 102). By renaming Antoinette and emphasizing Bertha's name, Rochester strives to completely defeat Antoinette's identity; Rochester says: “She will no longer laugh in the sun. She won't get dressed and smile at herself in the damn mirror. So happy, so satisfied” (Rhys 99). In this passage, Rochester directly connects Antoinette's happiness and confidence with her tendency to "laugh in the sun", or her ability to flourish in a brilliant, passionate, excessive state. More importantly, Rochester aims to hinder Antoinette's ability to identify herself as an individual: “Here's a cloudy day to help you. No brazen sun. No sun… No sun… The weather has changed” (Rhys 100). While a "cloudy day" identifies Rochester's character due to his hatred for the sunny and excessive climate of the Caribbean (the only place Antoinette loves and understands), Rochester's figurative suppression of the sun implies a suppression of Antoinette herself. imposes his own identity on Antoinette in order to "help" her (in other words, in order to extinguish any powerful sense of identity she has acquired), Rhys criticizes this imposing move as a betrayal. When Rochester symbolically declares that "the weather has changed", he thinks of what Baptiste recently told him: As Rochester angrily asks the reason for a rooster's excessive crowing, Baptiste responds: "Crow for the change of the weather" (Rhys 98). However, earlier in the novel, Antoinette explains that the crowing of a rooster means “betrayal” by a “traitor” (Rhys 71). By the end of the novel, Antoinette seems fully aware of the vulnerability of her identity in the hands of her traitorous husband. In the attic where she is confined in Rochester's house in England, Antoinette focuses on her red dress that Rochester had deemed "intemperate and immodest" (Rhys 110). For Antoinette, the red dress constitutes an exteriorization of her identity and reinforces her existence as an individual. Antoinette considers dress to be a distinctive feature of her identity that is easily recognizable to others; Antoinette tells her guardian, Grace Poole, "If I had worn my red dress, Richard would have recognized me."(Rhys 110). As a symbol of passion, sexuality, and love, the red dress evokes in Rochester the same feelings as Antoinette: bitterness and resentment. Understanding how Rochester copes with these negative feelings, Antoinette, in her questionable state of mind, is paranoid that Rochester and his accomplice, Grace Pool, "changed him" while she "wasn't looking" (Rhys 110). In other words, Antoinette fears that her identity will be compromised again by a stranger. While Rhys leaves this idea of ​​betrayal ambiguous throughout the novel, Rochester's eagerness to completely erase Antoinette's identity indicates his role as a traitor in the context of his marriage to Antoinette. This act of betrayal is significant in identifying Antoinette and, later, Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, because it blames the figure of Rochester. Lydon describes Rochester and Antoinette's home as a "menacing place" that "serves as a catalyst for women's action" (Lydon 25). Due to Rochester's betrayal of Antoinette's identity, Antoinette is forced to either "endure abuse or leave home, abandoning [her] role as the angel of the home" (Lydon 23). Antoinette, a vibrant girl from the tropics, surely never fit Rochester's idea of ​​an "angel of the house." Therefore, at the end of the novel, Antoinette has no ideology to tie her to the House of Rochester. In fact, Rochester and Antoinette's marriage is so dismantled that Antoinette only refers to her husband as "that man" (Rhys 110). Although Wide Sargasso Sea does not feature a protagonist who triumphs over adversity in typically heroic fashion, by the end of the novel Antoinette is able to "conjure her own destiny" and "take control for the first time" (Stanchich 457). In the last scene of the novel, Antoinette's “beautiful” red dress that “spreads around the room” like fire reminds her of something she “must do” (Rhys 111). Antoinette's dream further highlights and explains this necessary act. : in order to regain control of her identity and assert “feminine agency,” Antoinette must set fire to Rochester’s house, or dominantly assert her identity over the antagonist (Lydon 25). Additionally, Antoinette must escape the cold English home and find refuge in an afterlife based on her tropical childhood experiences. In order to achieve this domination and escape to an “ideal world” and a “modern Eden,” Antoinette must be sure of her identity, existence, and purpose (Maurel 157). Emerging from the attic and armed with a lit candle, Antoinette declares: “Now I finally know why I was brought here and what I must do. There must have been a draft because the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned again to light me along the dark passage” (Rhys 112). In this case and for the first time, Antoinette manages to find enough strength to protect herself from a "draft", or from anything that aims to extinguish her fiery identity. Additionally, Antoinette is finally comfortable with who she is and she is ready to use her identity as a "light" that guides her through adversity. For the majority of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is the “product of a childhood that robbed her of her capacity for strength, allowing Rochester to break an already broken spirit” (Stanchich 457). By the end of the novel, however, Antoinette finds strength in the discovery and acceptance of an identity, or in a strengthening of existence. For the first time, Antoinette does not rely on external points of view to define who she is. By accepting her passionate but “broken” self, the protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea is able to find meaning in an isolated life and a battered identity: 2012