![]() ![]() The novel is narrated by Antoinette (Bertha’s real name) and Rochester. England and France are the two most powerful colonisers competing for new colonies, while Spanish Colonisers are history and many other formerly lucrative estates are in decline because there is no exploited labour and a fall in the sugar market. The Emancipation Act has been passed which freed the slaves but compensated the owners for their ‘loss’. ![]() Bertha is a Creole – a naturalised West Indian of European descent. Rhys imagines the time when Rochester met Bertha. The novel is set in 1800 explores the complex social and racial history of the West Indies along with sexualised racism and issues related to Victorian paternalism. It is a powerful cry of rage against racial injustice and a crippling revelation of personal sadism. In the process, she also humanises Brontë’s grotesque creation, the archetypal, and extremely symbolic figure of the ‘mad woman in the attic’. Rhys in her novel points towards a horrifying reality that may lie behind a man’s claim that a woman in ‘mad’. ![]() It is a response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, specifically its visceral treatment of Mr. Jean Rhys’s canonical work the Wide Sargasso Sea, written in 1960 portrays the tendency of racial and sexual exploitation deeply rooted in the heart of Western civilization and literature. A Thousand Splendid Suns | Honest and Spoiler-Free ![]()
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