Wide Sargasso Sea Mental Illness
In this paper, I will prove that Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea demonstrated the cause of Antoinette’s madness was caused by her husband’s actions and not by genetics. I will demonstrate through quotations and additional sources the mental breakdown of Antoinette. Antoinette Cosway, the protagonist of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, demonstrates what occurs when one loses their sense of self when displaced from their home. Antoinette Cosway, has never felt at place in the world and this is apparent in the beginning of the novel. The Cosway family has lost their wealth leading them to feel out casted in their own community. She is constantly tormented about being a “white cockroach” from people around her and it again once she leaves her
…show more content…
“Antoinette's psychological breakdown can also be linked to unconscious expectations she takes into her marriage with Edward Rochester, which, in the end, are never satisfied” (Adjarian 203). In the beginning of the novel Antoinette is looking for her place in someone's life. She is driven from her home; she's loses her mother and is then married off to a man who doesn't love her. Antoinette believes that her marriage will take her from her negative and allow to be who she believes to be. England is where she can achieve all the desires that she craved and she wouldn't be seen as a white cockroach. Her status would be different and she would be seen as the wife of an English man. “I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you. I will be a different person when I live in England and different things will happen to me” (Rhys 100). Yet instead she does not get these desires and once again is abused with slurs and abandonment. The one person that was supposed to give Antoinette these options ends up driving her further into an insulation. “When she sees that this is impossible and that she cannot achieve the wholeness and interpersonal union she desires because of her social and economic in betweeness, she gradually begins her downward spiral” (Adjarian
“Antoinette's psychological breakdown can also be linked to unconscious expectations she takes into her marriage with Edward Rochester, which, in the end, are never satisfied” (Adjarian 203). In the beginning of the novel Antoinette is looking for her place in someone's life. She is driven from her home; she's loses her mother and is then married off to a man who doesn't love her. Antoinette believes that her marriage will take her from her negative and allow to be who she believes to be. England is where she can achieve all the desires that she craved and she wouldn't be seen as a white cockroach. Her status would be different and she would be seen as the wife of an English man. “I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you. I will be a different person when I live in England and different things will happen to me” (Rhys 100). Yet instead she does not get these desires and once again is abused with slurs and abandonment. The one person that was supposed to give Antoinette these options ends up driving her further into an insulation. “When she sees that this is impossible and that she cannot achieve the wholeness and interpersonal union she desires because of her social and economic in betweeness, she gradually begins her downward spiral” (Adjarian