Wide Sargasso Sea Flashcards
Karolina Tennholt - disconcerting
this disconcerts Mr Rochester, who, as the superior male authority, is not prepared to be placed in a passive female role
Antoinette’s discrimination for hybridity
imitating a negro’s voice, singing and insolent
white nigger
ghost of a woman who they say haunts this place - limbo between life and death
Forrester - Antoinette exile
Antoinette’s destiny is locked within an imposed narrative of exile: racial, spiritual and cultural
Homi Bhabha - sexualisation
Antoinette herself is incapable of realising that Rochester associates her attire with black female wantonness and prostitution
Sarah Sceats - sexualisation
if a woman is infected by sexual desire, she becomes transformed into a voluptuous monster, a creature who ceases to be the passive recipient of kiss and penetration and instead becomes active and penetrative herself
Rochester’s insanity and ownership
I tell you she loves no one, anyone. I could not touch her. Excepting as the hurricane will touch that tree - and break it
- two forms of female madness - doll like and overtly sexual and violent
zombis - marginalised
they cry out in the wind that is their voice, they rage in the sea that is their anger
antoinette freedom in the fire
it was red and all my life was in it
- journey from a ghost with no identity to a person with a past and a purpose
represents the construction and destruction of her identity
Foucault - madness
the possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion
- institutionalisation of reason that justified the pathologisation of those who fall outside societal norms
annette madness
she had not put up her hair and one of her plaits was loose
Andrea Tone - arbitrary standard of perfection
at a time when women were expected to be calm, cooperative and attentive to domestic affairs, definitions of mental illness were as culturally bound as their treatments
Bertha summarily shaped by Rochester
Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name
Landscape of the Other - nature
Men often ignore the complicated interrelationship between nature and women, nor ‘Mother Nature’ or ‘Mother Earth’. Hence, they speak highly of the exuberance of nature and the breeding ability of females
Shoshana Felman - mental illness
Far from being a form of contestation, ‘mental illness’ is a request for help, a manifestation of both cultural impotence and political castration
Freud - the doubling
A form of terror that converses into something long known to us, once very familiar, but has beacon terrifying because it corresponds to something repressed that has returned
Spivak- Antoinette
It is impossible for a woman as disenfranchised as Antoinette to express her own opinions
Samiraa Houcini - colonialism
A model anecdote that accounts life of hundreds of Creole girls lost in England after marrying Europeans
Operations carried out by colonialism contributed significantly to the assassination of people from their homelands, culture, traditions, and even their way of thinking
As a result of realising that one does not belong to a home any more… the feeling of belonging is replaced by perplexed feelings that reflect instability
Homi Bhabha - colonialism
either they adhere to the original or traditional identity that cannot confront the new world, or embrace the Western identity and culture that is strange to them
Erikson’s ego formation
In the adolescence stage… the person who succeeds in forming a cohesive self-image will appear from this stage with a strong sense of self-identity and will face adulthood with confidence
Samiraa Houcini - lack of maternal support
Antoinette is in the position of an orphan even before her mother passed away
Samiraa Houcini - dreams
In her dreams, Antoinette envisions her fears and repressed, traumatic events that she chooses not to deal with consciously
Samiraa Houcini - resistance and freedom
This form of resistance is perceived as madness to them; yet, it is a moment of sane comprehension of the critical and ultimately limited position she is held hostage in
Al-Saidi - Rochester in Jamaica
he is the unfamiliar, uncanny, unauthorised, inappropriate, and the improper
Freud - dreams
Dreams are where all the repressed traumas and dark desires reside
