Wide Sargasso Sea Research Paper
The Symbolism behind Animals In the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Rhys portrays the life of a young creole woman, named Antoinette, who lives on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Throughout the novel, Antoinette experiences much difficulty with her identity. Antoinette looks like a white woman, and the majority of the people who live on the island of Martinique are black, so Antoinette feels like an outcast. She has conflicted feelings because she is half black, and half white, and therefore does not know how to fit in. Not only does Antoinette struggle with her feelings of isolation, but so does her creole mother Annette, and her English husband, Rochester. In order to portray this in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys uses animals to symbolize
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One day when Antoinette walks home, a young, native black girl approaches her and calls her a “white cockroach.” “I never looked at any strange negro. They hated us. They called us white cockroaches. Let sleeping dogs lie. One day a little girl followed me singing, "Go away white cockroach, go away, go away” (p. 23). This shows how Antoinette and her family constantly have to deal with the threats and abuse from the black community on the island. The use of the cockroach is to symbolize the idea of race, and the infestation that is Antoinette. Rhys compares her to a cockroach because she does not belong on the island. She is not welcome by the people of the island either. If you fight cockroaches, then they often get worse. This symbolizes the fact that Antoinette cannot do much about the alienation that she experiences on Martinique. She can’t fight the abuse. The white cockroach symbolizes her feelings of captivity. Later in the novel, Rhys mentions the white cockroach again. “It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (p. 102). Antoinette seems to be suggesting that she does not belong to the white race or the black race. She feels very lost because she cannot identify with either of these
One day when Antoinette walks home, a young, native black girl approaches her and calls her a “white cockroach.” “I never looked at any strange negro. They hated us. They called us white cockroaches. Let sleeping dogs lie. One day a little girl followed me singing, "Go away white cockroach, go away, go away” (p. 23). This shows how Antoinette and her family constantly have to deal with the threats and abuse from the black community on the island. The use of the cockroach is to symbolize the idea of race, and the infestation that is Antoinette. Rhys compares her to a cockroach because she does not belong on the island. She is not welcome by the people of the island either. If you fight cockroaches, then they often get worse. This symbolizes the fact that Antoinette cannot do much about the alienation that she experiences on Martinique. She can’t fight the abuse. The white cockroach symbolizes her feelings of captivity. Later in the novel, Rhys mentions the white cockroach again. “It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (p. 102). Antoinette seems to be suggesting that she does not belong to the white race or the black race. She feels very lost because she cannot identify with either of these