The initially vague and disorienting changes of narrator in Wide Sargasso Sea have an interesting effect on the book and how its read. At first, I didn't like leaving Antoinette, our first narrator, because I didn't want to leave the character I was beginning to side with and viewed as the protagonist. I thought it put a bump in the flow of the novel just as I was settling in and getting oriented after the somewhat confusing start. Still, even with my concerns, I continued to enjoy the novel so I decided that it wasn't all that bad and began trying to figure out why Rhys would choose to switch narrators as she does. I have come up with a few reasons. First of all, getting an outside opinion of Antoinette helps develop a picture of her more completely in a reader's mind. During the first part, the reader only hears from Antoinette speaking about her isolated unhappy little world. She tells us about herself on the inside but having the narrator change and hearing about Antoinette from someone who is shoved into her little world and forced to try to connect with her gives us a better idea of what Antoinette appears to be on the outside. It also helps the reader get to know Rochester, who, to many, seems like a villain in this story. If the whole novel was told from her perspective, Rochester could seem like this terrible man who came, uninvited, into her life and who didn't even try to make their relationship work. When Rochester narrates, we get his side of the story and we learn that his home life was extremely unhappy and as a result, he continues trying to please his father in his adult life. We also see how Rochester thinks of his relationship with Antoinette and how he sometimes tries to comfort her or regrets not loving her and it makes him and his position much more sympathetic. The third and most subtle effect the changes of narrator have is that they sort of mimic the confusion, disorientation, and sense of not belonging that Antoinette feels. Throughout her life she struggles with finding her social position in the community she lives in and passes through a variety of different living arrangements as a result. I guess it is kind of a stretch but going from narrator to narrator keeps us a little confused about who we should side with just like Antoinette. And If, in fact, the two narrator are supposed to mirror Antoinette's awkward position between black culture and white, and Rochester is clearly the white culture side, does that mean in that Antoinette would be representative of black culture? and if so, what does this say about the side Antoinette chooses, or wants to choose, to identify with? and Why would she identify with the black culture more that white? They both seem to hate her. But why wouldn't she?
It seems that my last idea left me with more questions than it answered... but its still an interesting idea.
1 comment:
It's interesting to see now how the questions you end this post with ended up being central to the article you presented in class on Monday. But it's important that, from the first lines of the novel, the colonial situation is presented in terms that aren't clearly reducible to "black and white"--there are white "ranks" (this minority) and black "ranks" (the recently emancipated majority), but there are also the English, who separate themselves from the Creoles (or whites of West Indian birth). And Antoinette's family, at the start of the novel, doesn't have a clear place in any of these categories. A good part of her cultural identity is formed by Christophine (the songs she knows, the tone of voice she uses sometimes that freaks Rochester out because she sounds like "one of them"), but this doesn't at all mean that she'll be accepted as part of the culture, or even that she identifies herself this way (she sort of *does* want to be "an English girl," even if her idea of what that means derives mostly from fairytales).
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