Post Colonial Literature

ILS2215

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Wide Sargasso Sea: Alternate Ending

Wide Sargasso Sea: Alternative Ending

Madison Phillips

Through this alternative ending to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea I wanted to communicate that Mr. Rochester did not win. I could not let him win. I would not let him win because that would mean another defeat of the indigenous and another win for the colonizer. I will not let Antoinette fade into the abyss, her rage and bravery will be remembered and her fight to keep her sanity commended after years of lonely warfare.

Starting in Part Three, page 160 to 162:

“In this room I wake early and lie shivering  for it is very cold. At last Grace Poole, the woman who looks after me, lights a fire with paper and sticks and lumps of coal. She kneels to blow it with bellows. The paper shrivels, the sticks crackle and spit, the coal smoulder and glowers. In the end the flames shoot up and they are beautiful. I get out of bed and go close to watch them and to wonder why I have been brought here. For what reason? What is it I must do? When I first came I thought it would be for a day, two days, a week perhaps. I thought that when I saw him and spoke to him I would be a wise serpent, harmless as doves. ‘I give you all I have freely,’ I would say, ‘And I will not trouble you again if you let me go.’ But he never came..I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking glass.” (Rhys, 160-162)

. . .

I once dreamt of merciful sunlight kissing my face. I dreamt of foggy mountains and mysterious frogs in endless ponds. I dreamt of consuming oceans, benevolent seas and peaceful waves nipping at the shore as dawn approached. I once dreamt of a loving, forgiving husband. But now my dreams have changed. Now I dream of fire and brimstone. Of a cleansing, roaring, white light just beyond the horizon. I dream now of revenge like an unsatisfiable hunger and I will wait patiently for the time to come. For my time to come; when it came I was not ready.

When I first arrived in what I was told was England I was in disbelief. I did not remember the long trip that must have taken the better part of a month. Not one of the servants would tell me where my husband, the monster, was or when I would see him again. Did they not know whose money they were being paid with to keep me his prisoner? I did not understand why I could not leave my room. Despite all of this I was still hopeful but defeated, ready to surrender to my husband, the monster, if he would only promise to love me or leave me to my own accord. Days passed and turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and after four years I stopped counting. Everything was the same. When it became apparent that I was his prisoner, his toy to keep all my remaining love for him vanished. All I wanted was my freedom from this monster that I was forever connected to. But where would I go now that this monster had stolen my heart, my money, and my home? Things could never be the same.

They tried, that is the people the monster hired, to keep me locked up. They took away my looking glass and left me with little furniture and dignity. But they could not take away my curiosity. Stealth like, I would wait until the dead of night. I knew it was safe to explore when my keeper passed out from her colorless elixir. The moonlight would illuminate what little there was in the room through the only window.

I snuck out just about every night. Creeping through the halls, learning my new environment. I could have left any of those nights really. I could have escaped this life in a cage, but I decided to stay and feign my descent into madness. It would make my revenge easier to obtain that way. I knew everyone that came in and out of my house but none were like the strange woman who showed up last winter, I think her name was Jane. Ah, yes, Jane Eyre I remember now. She was teaching the small illegitimate daughter of the monster. She had a wan aura about her that drew me closer. She did not know it but we were connected. She was sad I was sad for her. I recognized Jane’s despair and could see it in myself. Around day six I noticed the look The Monster gave her, the gleam in his eye. He used to look at me like that. That is before he had me in the palm of his hand at the altar but after the initial introduction. I knew that look all too well. He wanted Jane, to conqueror her but yet he had nothing to gain from his interest in her, which interested me.

After observing them for months I noticed the Demeanor of the Monster had changed.  He looked at Jane the way I had always hoped he would look at me. She wasn't beautiful like me,  she wasn't rich like me, she was not interesting like me, but she was young. Even so, when their love affair started I still did not hate her. I pitied her and when I caught wind of their engagement, I knew I must save her.

A week later on the eve of their engagement I visited Jane in her room. Quick as the wind and silent I slipt into her room and sat beside her. She woke up but did not scream. Eyes as wide as could be she asked me what I was doing in her chamber. She called me ghost. So I told her the tale of Antoinette and warned her of the same fate that may soon be hers. There was resistance but once I escorted her to my room she was speechless. Jane broke into tears, she could not believe she almost fell for the monster’s lies. I helped Jane gather her things and she left minutes before dawn. I believe she said she saw a monastery that might take her in. Out the back door Jane slipped out and I was content. I saved a woman’s life.

Jane was going to marry in my wedding dress, that cheap bastard that monster. I slipped it on and looked in the mirror. How beautiful I still looked, how elegant, I admired myself. Screams broke out in the courtyard. I did not have much interest in that so I waltzed down the hallways as the sun’s first rays were breaking against the forest.

Continuing to dance around the kitchen the sunlight felt refreshing through the windows and then suddenly, black. I woke on the floor, my face was swelling and I could not feel a thing. That monster had hit me, his devoted wife!! He picked me up and through me against the wall. It was then I got a good look at him. He had blood splattered across his chest and murder in his eyes. I was scared. I learned later that the quarrel in the courtyard was the monster catching Jane running away. He was hunting for quail early you see. They fought, Jane told the monster that she knew about me, that I had visited her. A misfiring of the gun they say is what happened when he went to grab her. There was a hole the size of a ripe tomato in her chest where her heart should have been. Did he not know this could have all been avoided if he only let me go?

He slipped coming at me again as I regained my breath on the floor and I took that as my chance to flee. He ran after me but I was quicker. I knew my home well and that he was not expecting. I knocked tables over as I ran to buy myself time and that is how the fire started. When I reached the roof the house was already set ablaze, I will be honest I was terrified.

The court will have you believe that on the roof I somehow overpowered my husband, the monster, but I will tell you the truth. When I reached the roof not even a second later he burst through the door. The flames illuminated his face in a violent manner and I knew I was going to die. He charged and I dodged, nothing more, nothing less. He did not calculate his movements he must of forgotten that we were on a small balcony on the roof. The monster missed me but caught onto my dress instead and tore it as a last ditch effort to save himself from falling off the roof to his death. That bastard, that dead bastard tore it!! That inconsiderate dead bastard, he knew it was my mother’s. The servants, his servants, my captors found me on the roof and held me hostage until the authorities showed up.

Each servant gave a statement testifying that I murdered the bastard, the monster, my husband. The court decided that I was responsible for the death of Jane Eyre (poor girl) and the three other servants that perished in the fire. I did not mean for anyone to die and the fire was not my fault. Would you believe that the court refused to believe my side of the story? They refused to believe that I was being treated as a prisoner for what I found out last week was fifteen years! Now I have an execution date, it was decided last night that I will burn at the stake and I cannot help but laugh (Antoinette laughs uncontrollably for two minutes).

But anyway, that’s why I am here. What are you in for?

Work Cited

Rhys, Jean. "Part Three." Wide Sargasso Sea. N.p.: Popular Library, 1966. 160-62. Print.

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Blog Post 11: Prospectus

For my final assignment, I have chosen the creative essay option. I will be extending Wide Sargasso Sea from around the beginning of Part Three when Antoinette wakes up in England in Mr. Rochester’s hidden crawl space.

“In this room I wake early and lie shivering for it is very cold. At last Grace Poole, the woman who looks after me, lights a fire with paper and sticks and lumps of coal. She kneels to blow it with bellows. The paper shrivels, the sticks crackle and spit, the coal smoulder and glowers. In the end the flames shoot up and they are beautiful. I get out of bed and go close to watch them and to wonder why I have been brought here. For what reason? What is it I must do” (Wide Sargasso Sea, 160)?

In my alternative ending to Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette wakes up in the crawl space as described in the book, however, instead of fading into the ghost of the former strong woman that she had been, Antoinette is transformed into a new being of rage. Antoinette waits patiently for years for her lover to greet her in England but after a solemn realization that she is now his ‘pet’ something snaps in her.  Antoinette takes frequent trips out of her room at night and at first is torn between running away or staying and feigning her slow descent into madness. Antoinette plays coy and helpless while planning her revenge; waiting patiently for her loving husband to return home. Then a new woman arrives in the home, Jane Eyre. Antoinette observes Jane closely for weeks and holds pity for this young woman for falling for the same deception she had many years ago. Antoinette visits Jane in her bedroom the night before her wedding and shares her story. Although Jane was frightened by this strange woman in her room she heads Antoinette’s advice and escapes minutes before dawn. After Jane has left Antoinette puts on her old wedding dress and slowly waltz down the hall. She had saved a young woman’s life, Antoinette felt almost whole again. There was a loud quarreling and a single gunshot in the courtyard as the sun peeked from behind the hills; Antoinette kept dancing down the ceaseless halls. The quarreling was Mr. Rochester trying to convince Jane to stay and him at one point dragging her by the collar. A misfire of his hunting gun while trying to lug Jane back to the house left a hole where Jane’s heart should have been. Antoinette kept dancing.

On Antoinette's way back to her room she imagined the next part of her revenge.Then suddenly she is on the floor and her face is swelling. Mr. Rochester knows everything and tries to kill Antoinette and she barely escapes with her life dashing down the halls, accidently pushing candles onto the carpet as she goes. Servants cannot catch her and the house goes up in flames. Antoinette finds herself on the roof and seconds later Mr. Rochester follows. Murder in his eyes as he sprints at Antoinette and misses her by a fraction of an inch, grabbing her wedding dress, tearing it substantially and falling off the roof to his death.

Antoinette quickly exits the burning house and is caught by the surviving servants and handed over to the police. All the servants testify that she was a murder. Antoinette’s execution date has been set.

This short story is an example of postcolonial literature because it demonstrates that the other can never escape her colonizer and that if you resist the patriarch death is your only option.

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Blog Post 9: The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Adichie’s short story novel, The Things Around Neck, was a fascinating read. Focusing on the Nigerian perspective of life in the United States and Nigeria this novel delves deep into the complicated world of assimilation to the bleak, convenient, white washed society that is American culture. The first eleven stories in Adichie’s novel focused on the need to leave Nigeria; There was always a component escaping Nigeria in hope of finding a better, more fulfilling life in the United States. People dreams of marrying someone who is already a citizen or to win the visa lottery to get in the Unites States. The twelfth and final story in The Thing Around Your Neck was a fitting way to wrap up the series of stories. The twelfth story, “The Headstrong Historian”, revolved around the return to Nigerian culture; the embrace of the motherland, reclaiming stolen identity and stolen culture. “It was Grace who, as she received faculty prizes, as she spoke to the solemn-faced people at the conferences about the Ijaw and Ibibio and Igbo and Efik peoples of Southern Nigeria, as she report for international organizations about the commonsense things for which she nevertheless received generous pay, would imagine her grandmother looking on and chuckling with great amusement. It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses, would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially change her name from Grace to Afamefuna” (The Thing Around Your Neck, 2015). When Grace embraces and reclaims her African name, Afamefuna, she recovers her past and present self; appropriately her African name translates to ‘My name will not be forgotten.’

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Post #9: Jumping Monkey Hill

Reading through The Thing Around Your Neck it was hard to choose one story to talk about. There were stories in the book that I found interesting and situations that I could not dream of finding myself in. I particularly enjoyed how she put a spotlight, an emphasis, on the ordinary person’s life and struggles. Chimamanda Adichie squeezes so much emotion and detail in 15 to 20 pages without saying much; the simplicity of her stories are welcoming but harness a depth that we the reader does not always consider.

For this post, I have chosen to analyze the short story “Jumping Monkey Hill”. The short story starts off with a man, Edward, clearly disregarding the subtle but clear hits from a woman that she was uninterested. When first reading this I thought to myself, well I’ve been there, a man demanding your attention and response, refusing to leave you be because he decides when the conversation ends. It was unoriginal, this is everyday life for most women and that is why it is important. This scene is a crucial foreshadowing for later in the story. Encounters with Edward escalate into inappropriate and sexually suggestive language towards women that have attended the conference as his equal. Yet, as these encounters grow more frequent no one speaks up about the improper and demeaning nature of them. The main character, fed up with these confrontations exclaims, “‘But why do we say nothing?’ Ujunwa asked. She raised her voice and looked at the others. ‘Why do we always say nothing’” (Adichie, 2009)? I cannot help but relate this back to what Chimamanda Adichie states in her speech We Should All Be Feminists.  To take a stand for yourself as a woman, to say no to a man, to deny him of his wants, to not fulfill his fantasies, to position yourself as his equal, to respect yourself, to be a feminist, collectively that is ‘un-African’. That is why no one spoke up to Edward. To question the patriarchy is not their culture, but also as Chimamanda Adichie states in We Should All Be Feminists, “Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing” (2013). Culture is not stagnant, it changes with generations. Edward not only had an air of misogyny and the creep factor to him but also a mist of the colonizer. His male gaze upon the women of the conference, his colonizer gaze; Edward wanted to dominate them.

[therorasaurus]

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Quality post 

[livguini]

I made this to encourage people to go out and vote!

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[arousedhoe]

hey does anyone know the fastest way to clean up milk that’s covering every goddamn i nch of the  kitchen floor

[slightmood]

i know a gal……she’s on her way

[arousedhoe]

thanks

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[otherworldlydreamerxx-blog]

[strawberriglitter]

when you’re watching Too Cute and they separate the kittens/puppies at the end

[spacevixenmusic]

[blackmodel]

doctor: lets do some word association me: okay doctor: dog me: bark doctor: heart me: love doctor: man me: hypermasculinity, entitlement, transmisogyny, death, murder, incompetence

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Post # 8: Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea was a thought provoking read from not only Antoinette’s perspective but also Mr. Rochester’s. There was numerous foreshadowing throughout the novel warning us about what was later to develop. One of my favorite and possibly the most foreboding foreshadows was very early on in the novel. Antionette is gleefully chatting about the redness of the Earth in Dominica when Mr. Rochester brings the conversation back to England, “‘The Earth is red here, do you notice?’ ‘It’s red in parts of England too.’ ‘Oh England, England,’ she called back mockingly, and the sound went on and on like a warning I did not choose to hear” (Rhys, 1992). Mr. Rochester did not know what hell there would be to pay after he locks Antoinette up. He mentions Antoinette as a mad woman a few dozen times in the book, even before he drove her to insanity. Mr. Rochester wanted only to possess parts of Antoinette, only the fragments that would serve him. Gilbert and Gubar’s novel The Madwoman in the Attic clarifies what it is Mr. Rochester wants from Antoinette,“..the male artist often ‘feeds upon his female subject’s face’ not as she is but as she fills his dream” (1979). Bertha was what Mr. Rochester wanted from Antoinette, but no matter how hard he tried she would never be English. Mr. Rochester drove Antoinette crazy trying to change her, “But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them could be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that” (Kincaid, 1988). Mr. Rochester recognized himself as the victim, “Pity. Is there none for me? Tied to a lunatic for life -- gone her mother’s way” (Rhys, 1992). Regardless of his victimhood and the opportunity to leave what is his ‘burden’ with Christophine he refuses, “I’ll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She’s mad but mine, mine” (Rhys, 1992). Antoinette is a pretty object to Mr. Rochester nothing more than a toy. He takes pleasure in controlling, muting and, subduing her into a childlike helpless state. Mr. Rochester punishes Antoinette by locking her behind the walls, “She’ll not laugh in the sun again. She’ll not dress up and smile at herself in that damnable looking glass. So pleased, so satisfied. Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other” (Rhys, 1992). By the end of the novel, Antoinette is a shell of the former woman she was only gaining an obsession with fire. When Antoinette sets the mansion ablaze it is her past that calls her to jump off the roof. As the parrot dove to his death missing a part of his essence, his ability to fly, so did Antoinette missing her identity. Both echoing Qui est la? Qui est la? Che Coco, Che Antoinette.  

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Blog Post 6: Wide Sargasso Sea

Historically white people have a need to define the people around them as either white or not white; there is a need to control the different, the orient. In Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden he describes slaves as, “Half devil and half child.” (1899), To the 19th century English, since slaves were not white they were a godless, savage population that needed the white man’s generosity and wisdom. The white man fears what he does not know and to prove his dominance controls and regulates what is beyond his willingness to understand. Kincaid sums it up perfectly in A Small Place, “And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met turned English.” (1988) I think that the same thought can be extended to Wide Sargasso Sea. Mr. Rochester does not understand Antoinette. I found it puzzling that Antoinette is considered non-white, despite her pasty appearance. What does it mean to be white to a 19th-century white man, to Mr. Rochester? You not only need to be physically white but be born into a white life. To be born into a white life is to be born in England. There is a hierarchy of whiteness and to the 19th century English the hierarchy is equivalent to how human you are. Antoinette fell into a lesser subcategory of white class. Within Wide Sargasso Sea Mr. Rochester observes Antionette as if she is a mysterious wild animal and talks about her like she is not to be trusted.  Mr. Rochester recounts to himself a moment when he is watching Antoinette, “I watched her critically. She wore a tricorne hat which became her. At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and can be disconcerting. She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either.” (Rhys, 2016) Antoinette is not English enough, therefore not whole, which I presume is why he locks her up later in life. She is not English hence her lack of rights. Not quite English, not quite white, not quite human.

Work Cited

Kincaid, J. (1988). A small place. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Rhys, J., & Brontë, C. (1992). Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton.

[uppityfemale]

I’m so glad the Electoral College is going to betray us today for this disaster.

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