Search results
Going far beyond the pitying stance taken by Bronte, Rhys humanizes "Bertha's" tragic condition, inviting the reader to explore Antoinette's terror and anguish. A detailed description and in-depth analysis of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea.
As a young girl, Antoinette lives at Coulibri Estate with her widowed mother, Annette, her sickly younger brother, Pierre, and gossiping servants who seem particularly attuned to their employers' misfortune and social disrepute. Antoinette spends her days in isolation.
The protagonist and partial narrator of the novel, Antoinette Cosway is a creole, or person of European descent born in the Caribbean. Throughout the novel, her relationships with others are marked by alienation, exclusion, and cruelty, so that she consistently seeks solace in the natural world.
Antoinette has a short-lived friendship with a little black girl, Tia, until the two fall out over a bet while they’re swimming, and Tia runs away with Antoinette’s money and clothes. After seeing Antoinette in Tia’s dirty dress, Annette resolves to lift the family out of poverty.
Analysis. The novel opens with Antoinette ’s narration, looking back at her childhood in 1830’s post-Emancipation Jamaica. Antoinette and her family are isolated, socially and geographically.
A young Antoinette Cosway, her brother, Pierre, and her mother, Annette, live at Coulibri, a rundown estate. Mr. Mr. Cosway, Antoinette's father, who died a few years earlier, was in financial ruin after the slaves were freed, and the hated slave owner drank himself to death.
