WSS critical readings

FEMINIST READING

  • Antoinette has a forced dependency on the very world that excludes her

  • Represents a modernist perspective on the suffering of a woman: the abstract sense of nothingness Antoinette endures is so much worse then the concrete and real suffering Jane experiences and therefore can deal with

  • Post modern form of feminism which takes into account the complexity of male - female interaction to find that efforts to transcend deep-set gender norms are nearly hopeless

  • Lewkowicz :They are as helpless as moths

  • God is not a source of comfort, but rather just one more being not to be trusted.

  • Religion, like love, is unfamiliar and beyond her comprehension.

  • Antoinette has no clue what would make her happy because she has so little sense of identity.

  • WSS maintains a steady absence of faith in woman’s ability to transcend the oppression of her gender... strikingly different kind of feminism.

  • Dream "reveals Antoinette's fears of what marriage will be: she will be entrapped, violated, despoiled, and exploited like a colonized possession"

  • A is not fearful of sex. Yet she: ‘cannot distinguish between intense pleasure and intense pain’

  • She prefers the predictable and physical threats of nature to the unpredictable and emotional threats people pose

  • The garden offers ultimate escape, return to the womb, its evils are not evils.

  • Ant and the tropical islands are a ‘extension of eachother’

PSYCHOLOGICAL READING

  • McKenzie “Like the Sargasso Sea, a mass of seaweed surrounded by swirling currents in the Atlantic Ocean, novel’s troubled heroine is suspended between England and the West Indies and belongs fully to neither”

  • WSS as ‘metaphor for the complex currents of the human psyche’

  • Antoinette ‘represents the centre of the cyclical nature of the human brain’

  • Vrankova “Accordingly, Jean Rhys’s story of alienation is centered on two crucial metaphors: the sea and the island.

    • The sea as an image of separation and an increasing distance suggests the split in both space and time: the conflict between different civilisations, between the past and the present... as well as between the inner world of the individual and the surrounding reality...’

  • Although biases based on race, gender, and religion are outward signs of man's evil nature, the true cause of estrangement in people is due to a few psychiatric disorders that are difficult to identify and difficult to treat.Antoinette is not "mad" prior to her seclusion; rather, her physical and emotional alienation from society and her husband causes her to lose control and erupt in violent rages, allowing the reader to observe civilization's detrimental effects on a person.