Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Incipient Female madness

readers with a unique view into the progressive deterioration of the protagonist’s mind and spirit. Upon looking further into Antoinette’s relationship with her mother Annette, readers gain a whole new outlook on insanity. It can finally be seen that these two women are mentally damaged by numerous external factors that are beyond their control. The cruelty of life and people around them have created unbearable living situations for these women. For example, Rhys shows how Antoinette’s husband Mr. Rochester deprives her of love and stripped away her identity when he constantly calls her by another woman’s name (Bertha). Throughout the novel, many have presumed that her ‘illness’ is genetically caused by her mother. However, neither of them had a genetic predisposition to madness and genetics is not an end-all-be-all explanation. Genetics is one factor among a multitude of multi-risk factors which can lead to mental instabilities. (Baker, 2009) Antoinette’s ‘madness’ begins with the solitude of her childhood when she was left by her father, excluded from people in her village which left her with no friends. All of these factors exacerbate her mental condition(s) when she received the cold, emotionless treatment from her husband. At the beginning of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Rhys wrote about Antoinette’s mother’s dependence on her newfound husband, Mr. Mason, to restore her wealth and social status, and he caused her great distress when he ultimately abandoned her. This notion may lead readers to wonder if whether or not the Cosway women has bad luck with men in general or if it is a recurring pattern. Annette displays her psychological instability over and over again in the first part of the text which then later became clear when she tried to kill her husband. This disorientated representation of Annette was caused by the mistreatment she received from the men in her life, which later reflects onto her daughter Antoinette’s life as she was sold to a cold-hearted, controlling and power-craving man. It is to no surprise that Antoinette loses her mind towards the end of the novel. Just like Mr. Rochester, readers have anticipated this to happen all throughout the story. However, the protagonist’s mental breakdown may have triggered a possible genetic condition which predisposes her to mental illness in addition to environmental factors. Moreover, Rhys suggested that the

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