Wide Sargasso Sea: Full Analysis

Analysis, Pages 7 (1748 words)

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The conflation of literary forms despite criticisms provides fruitful dimension to a novel and speaks to the fluidity of post-modern novelists and their contextual circumstance. Recognised by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse is the emergence of the novel as 'another kind of writing, as a diary, a journalistic account…a travel narrative. Born out of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, this examination of the novel form further revealed its inextricable links with the notion that genre has more than a theoretical reality.

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Genre, however, is arguably a negotiation of prescribed conventions that change according to writers intent and the reader's expectations; thus genre conventions are not prescriptive but fluid.

Generating the capacity to amalgamate literary genre is Jean Rhys’ 20th-century prequel to the infamous Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea. Examined for its rich interaction with Gothic convention or that of postcolonial deliberation, established is Rhys’ ability to allow these conventions to speak of intersectional issues its Creole protagonist encounters. Alternatively, Leila Abdelrazaq’s graphic narrative, Baddawi relies on the collaboration of linguistics and illustrations to illuminate her conceptual story-telling.

Standing as two paradigms of the mailability of the novel form and that of genre these authors can be compared to Maurice Blanchot’s notes on Hermann Broch: “Like many others authors of our era, he experienced that impetuous impulse of literature that no longer tolerates the distinction of genres and wants to shatter the limits.”

Engaging with gothic conventions Wide Sargasso Sea surpasses the genres obvious attributes of wild visions and super natural trepidations instead finding weight in the fragility of the human psyche when subject to claustrophobic spiritual conditions.

The novel noted as awaiting its ‘proper literary context’, can be analysed for its overtly gothic tendencies, compared to works such as Lewis’s The Monk and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho Anthony Luengo claims that Wide Sargasso Sea supersedes these gothic classics and is in fact a far more compelling and striking Gothic novel.

Investigating this assertion, Rhys use of gothic customs are clear, however not in the typical sense. Rhys surpasses Gothic conventions, dismantling tropes of flickering candles, creaking doors or mysterious portraits maintaining fascinations with the ghost as a ‘mental phenomenon’[footnoteRef:7] which can be located in Antoinette’s psyche. The action is instead produced through prophecies, dreams and incarceration. In addition, the evocation of landscape and atmospheric elements further projects racial tensions and moulds the genre into a Caribbean dimension.

The panoramic scope can be recognised for its binary function: firstly, it serves as an inversion of European Gothic tradition replacing mountains and castles with tropical lushness that captures dense heat, beaming colours, eerie roads and the ruins of slavery.[footnoteRef:9] Secondly, Wide Sargasso Sea sceneries and action are frequently explored in hallucinatory imagery. Rhys aware that the core of Gothic genre exceeds the conservatively scary, her inquisition of the human mind exercised in Antoinette. Further, the text burgeons in gothic fictions attraction to the colonial world as source of the paranormal and mysterious, colonial dimension tempting “a new sort of darkness—of race, landscape, erotic desire and despair”

Alternatively, Abdelrazaq’s graphic narrative works with the intricacy of image, craftwork and historical inquisition reducing the novel form to puncture the complexities of the refugee crisis. The literary form emerging out of the 18th century received perilous criticism with suggestions that it would threaten ‘the abilities of youth to distinguish between reality and artificiality’.In reference to Hillary Chutes validation of this narrative genre is its plausible ability to amalgamate imagery and prose to penetrate barriers of the ‘un-representable’, and further communicate contemporary discourses. Further she states, “Against a valorisation of absence and aporia, graphic narrative asserts the value of presence, however complex and contingent.

Simply, Baddawi’s power lies precisely in its use of genre. The seemingly “thin” use of language and elementariness of the illustrations holds heavy historical, figurative and ideological information. The story orbits her father Ahmad’s reality, a Palestinian refugee, a small boy thrust in front of the audience draw as a monochromatic figure with messy hair and a stripy t-shirt.

Abdelrazaq chooses to embellish the pages of Baddawai with tatreez. A traditional craftwork, this illustrated embroidery extends itself as an homage to her heritage and contextualises her novel within the eastern Mediterranean despite its conception in America. This pictorial form aids Abdelrazaq’s representation of violence combatting its common fate of narrative dismissal echoed throughout history. Her use of minimal origin thus does note reduce the sensitivity of the subject matter but induces an inexhaustible source of visual possibility. Chute refers to this as the “risk of representation,” a form that manipulates the construction of image and language to symbolise the “unsayable”.

Rhys also saturates her text with historical concern, Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell suggests that Wide Sargasso Sea responds ‘to the nationalistic mood [in the West Indies] of the late 50’s and 60’s,’ thus Rhys attempts to position herself in West Indian literature. Prominent in this reading of the text is the limbo of nationalism; denoted as a ‘response to the loss, rather than the recovery of a “place to be from,” enacting a struggle over identity which is a peculiarly modern rereading of West Indian History.’

Scoping the genre of ‘historical fiction’ Rhys limits chronological intricacies, personages or events that cement the reader within the historical circumstances only presenting a brief mention the Emancipation act, the historical occasion in 1833 that revived gradual freedom to slaves attached to British colonies. This colonial interjection lays as a foundation for the racial issues the novel will pursue however as argued by Gayatri Spivak, Rhys gambles with authorial perspective splitting storytelling between not just Antoinette, the white slave-owner’s daughter, but Rochester, a white Englishman.Language is manipulated to illuminate the paradigms of the novels unique setting, capturing interactions of the European, Black and Creole identities.

Structured around standard British English and the Jamaican varieties of English, language pronounces itself as a puncture to the racial implications of novel. Emblematised in Rochester is the magnification of European discourse, his refusal of Creole clearly stated in Rhys descriptions, “her coffee is delicious but her language is horrible”, “I can’t say I like her language” which is juxtaposed by creole expressions such as “I too old now” and “she pretty like pretty self”. Notable is the victimisation of Rhys’s protagonist in an imperialist society, the imposition and brutalisation of colonisation is realised here, as Antoinette remains in racial limbo, not black or white and thus at the mercy societal and racial prejudice.

This racial discrimination seamlessly relocates the texts within a post-colonial context. The novel addresses racial implications within two significant narratives and larger two oppositions, Antoinette’s and Rochester’s. The immigrant woman compromised by social and economic forces and Rochester, a metropolitan man and representation of refusal to acknowledge to these categories instead interprets racial difference in moral and sexual terms, specifically in terms of miscegenation and “contamination.”

Thus, Antoinette’s victimisation can be located on account of the racial discrimination she faces; the subordination forced on her by societal discourse determines almost immediately determines her doom as a mixed-race woman. This intentional interaction with historical archives further illuminates the text under a post-colonial light. The presence of colonisation as subject matter is described by Silvia Cappello as the emergence of 'cultural self-esteem' that then communicates itself in new forms of literature. Wide Sargasso Sea in this sense reveals itself as a ‘product of the modern postcolonialism and the use of language she does represents her extraordinary ability to subvert the ideologies of the West, deconstructing the European discourse and monocentrisim.’

The graphic narrative can be described as obtaining the role of narration, specifically in reference to illustrations making the ‘question of style legible, so it is form that also always refuses a problematic transparency, through the explicit awareness of its own surfaces.’ Based on this understanding it is the layers of ‘narrative language’ that Abdelrazaq utilises to represent the brutality of warfare and the extremities of sufferings her collection of characters endure. Abdelrazaq depiction of scenery is developed through the comics form combination of visual and narrative mediums. This gives her narrative the ‘unique ability to diagnose, and on occasion to resist, the structural and social violence embedded in the infrastructural layout of cities.

This is particularly the case in those cities that are home to large and yet still marginalised populations, including asylum-seekers and refugees.’ It is important to note, Abdelrazaq as a citizen of American, never having lived in Beirut herself echoes that of post-memory thus her stylistic forms can be read for an American audience, her intent to provide an understanding of her subjective history. This may raise issues of representational rights however the audience is aware of Abdelrazaq’s geographic orientation, stripping nothing from the comic’s political significance.

The narrative is illustrated through monochromatic tonal effects, blacks and white are fixed against each other concentrating the Beirut’s metropolitan and the Baddawi refugee camp. Aesthetically calling to the photographic medium, her frames are limited by the standardised pages however mimic aspects of Beirut during the Civil war. These images are fixed on the municipal, the urban exteriors of a dilapidated city punctured by bullet holes and torn by the devastation of difference.

This focus on the urban is premediated in attempts to reflect the dismissal of the resilient refugees. Found early in the novel is a ‘splash-page map’ that echoes tattered Beirut, corrupt by division Abdelrazaq centres the comic’s protagonist, Ahmad, amongst segregated zones. The construction of frames along with text generates a reflection of the city's inhabitants and further dramatises issues of urbanity, thus it is the play of aesthetics that symbolises the denominational division of her father’s past.

The mailability of the novel can be accurately summarised as “the perfect creole,”, in analysis of the constructions of genre strategically applied to the mentioned texts evident are echoes of other literary categories. Wide Sargasso Sea wrestles with its literary context with valuable considerations of the gothic and post-colonial however dressed in feminist undertones and modernist nuances. To consider it solely under one literary form would dismiss the novel as a revisionist piece. Baddawi on the contrary utilises a contemporary form to speak to a contemporary audience of in attempts to recover the historical narrative of the Palestinian refugee. Her unique application of the comic style, traditional applique and visual narrative pushes sensitive subject matter foregrounding suffering of marginalised groups.