According to Jean Rhys, "The Creole in Charlotte Bronte's novel is a secular figure: repugnant, which doesn't matter, and not even once alive, which matters" (Kimmey 113). In Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre, the Creole character and Rochester's deranged wife, Bertha Mason, is described as "purple face[d]" (Bronte 342), a "demon" (Bronte 351), and a "clothed hyena" in feet on “his hind feet” (342). Furthermore, Bertha is described by Rochester as having a "mask" instead of a face, "red balls" instead of eyes, and a body of "mass" compared to the humanly innocent "form" of Jane Eyre (Bronte 343). While Bronte portrays her Creole woman character exclusively as a ravenous madwoman at the “hellmouth,” Rhys chooses to take Bertha Mason outside the confines of the Thornfield Hall attic and paint her as an individual with a background, a narrative, and , above all, a life (Bronte 343). Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea deconstructs the stigma associated with Bronte's Bertha Mason and shows another side of Rochester's mad wife through the character of Antoinette, a girl who descends into madness due to her lifelong isolation and destructive marriage to the figure of Rochester. In response to the demonic, "not once alive" Creole character that Bronte plays in Jane Eyre, Rhys uses Antoinette as a means of giving an identity to Bronte's Bertha; this process of humanization occurs by defining Antoinette's self through images of fire and light, which indicates Antoinette's passion as a Creole woman. Furthermore, Rhys creates this identity (which is fully matured and realized by the end of the novel) to emphasize Rochester's role in Antoinette's, or Bertha's, descent into madness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay While Bronte chooses to omit the events that led to Bertha's downfall, Rhys creates a novel that is both explanatory and encouraging as it allows the madwoman to enter the attic a humane depiction. In other words, Antoinette's personal narrative affirms and explains the events that will lead to her destiny as a mad woman confined to the attic of her husband's English house. Furthermore, Rhys places emphasis on the question of identity and how important it is to the overall plot surrounding the figure of Bertha Mason. As a girl of European descent growing up in post-emancipation Jamaica, Antoinette suffers from isolation from society and her family. The first line of the novel expresses this feeling of isolation: “They say when trouble approaches, and so did the white men. But we were not in their ranks” (Rhys 9). Although Antoinette is from a white European family, her mother, Annette Cosway, is a "Martinican girl" (from a French colony), which distances the family from the English settlers living in Jamaica (Rhys 9). Additionally, due to the Emancipation Act, Antoinette's parents are no longer successful slave owners. According to Tia, in fact, the family is “poor as a beggar” (Rhys 14), which leads the black community of Jamaica to despise them and call them “white cockroaches” (Rhys 13). As a member of a poor white family that once owned slaves, Antoinette is not only isolated from the surrounding community, but invokes shame in her mother; in Annette's eyes, Antoinette is proof of the downfall of the Cosway family. Because she can never truly belong to a particular group, Antoinette doesn't know how to define herself: she constantly looks towards the people around her. This method, however, is problematic because many people in Antoinette's life distance themselves fromshe. Antoinette's inability to gain a sense of belonging to her community, her family, and, later, her husband, leads to her demise. As Maritza Stanchich states, Antoinette “struggles with [her] identity to the point of madness” (Stanchich 454). Although Antoinette struggles with her identity during her shameful and isolated childhood, through her personal narrative, she is able to define herself through associations with various images regarding the sun, fire, and light. For example, Antoinette tells her new husband, Rochester, “I was always happy in the morning…never after dark, for after dark the house was haunted” (Rhys 79). While Antoinette feels safe and happy when the sun rises, she fears the night, the moment when darkness takes over. Furthermore, Antoinette seems to be the happiest and in the best shape when she is in the light. During his part of the story, Rochester states that "the light changed her" and that he had "never seen her look so cheerful or so beautiful" (Rhys 82). Even after Rochester believes he has been poisoned by Antoinette, he describes his face as "smooth and very young again" (Rhys 83). He then adds, however, that this beauty of Antoinette must be a "trick of the light", implying that Antoinette's beauty is deceptive and visible only in the light (Rhys 83). Rochester's suspicious perspective on Antoinette's association with light is important as it opposes Antoinette's perspective. Antonietta associates herself with light in her story to define herself; Rochester's suspicion of this definition regarding his wife's identity leads him to become extremely jaded and spiteful towards Antoinette. Rochester's mistrust of Antoinette's happiness and beauty is what leads to the downfall of their relationship. As soon as Rochester learns of the madness that runs in Antoinette's family, he sees Antoinette's passion (love, happiness, beauty) as a threat to his excessive nature. In this novel, excess is what Rochester fears more than anything in terms of his relationship with his wife. According to Sylvie Maurel, “excess is naturally indigenous to the universe of Wide Sargasso Sea” (Maurel 159). Rochester's discomfort with excessive surroundings is made evident during the newlyweds' journey to the honeymoon house: “Everything is too much... Too blue, too purple, too green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too close. And the woman is a foreigner…I didn't buy her, she bought me, or so she thinks” (Rhys 41). After viewing with hatred the excessive nature of the Windward Islands, Rochester immediately thinks of his new wife; the association of excess with Antoinette is expressed in a way that focuses on the threat of Antoinette's assertiveness and dominance in her beloved and natural environment. In other words, Rochester is afraid of Antoinette's belief that she has "bought" him - that, through the fiery identity Rhys has given her, Antoinette will become dominant in one way or another. The excess association with Antoinette is also emphasized later. in marriage through the character of Christophine: “She is the one who will not be satisfied. She is a Creole girl and she has sunshine in her” (Rhys 95). Not only is Christophine explaining to Rochester that Antoinette has a passionate and excessive nature that will never be satisfied, Christophine is associating this idea of ​​excess with what constitutes Antoinette's identity: the sun. While Antoinette is desperate for love as a result of her isolated childhood, Rochester will never be able to love her as much as Antoinette is willing to love him. Compared to Antoinette's warm and emotional personality, Rochester's identity is based on onecold and hard surface. In other words, Rochester does not know how to love, which creates a feeling of dissatisfaction in Antoinette. As a result, according to Maurel, Rochester "puts a check on excess" and "causes tragedy to prevail over the idyllic world of romance" (Maurel 159). Susan Lydon states that “Jean Rhys… deflate[s] the Victorian cult of domesticity by suggesting that Bertha's madness in Jane Eyre is due to abuse by an English patriarch” (Lydon 26). Rochester, the English patriarch, is threatened by Antoinette's brilliance Creole identity. As a result of this threat, Rochester creates a house that is “presented as [a] dangerous place that menace[s] the female protagonist” (Lydon 23). of an attack on Antoinette's identity as a whole. Just as Rochester tires of the sunset, which illustrates "the distant sea in flames" and "huge clouds" "spewing flames," so he tires of the passion and identity of Antoinette. To cope with his disgust for the woman, Rochester renames his wife and gives her the name Bertha thus, Antoinette's fragile identity is “now under attack” with Rochester being the attacker (Stanchich 456). Furthermore, Rochester is not only trying to eliminate her identity and the light images that accompany it, he is trying to give her his own identity, an identity that is associated with darkness. Throughout his narration in the second part of the novel, Rochester “constantly longs for night and darkness” (Rhys 102). By renaming Antoinette and insisting on the name Bertha, Rochester is making an effort to defeat Antoinette's identity altogether; Rochester says, “He will never laugh in the sunlight again. She won't dress up or smile at herself in that damn mirror. So happy, so satisfied” (Rhys 99). In this passage, Rochester directly relates Antoinette's happiness and confidence to her tendency to "laugh in the sun," or her ability to thrive in a bright, passionate, excessive condition. More importantly, Rochester aims to hinder Antoinette's ability to identify as an individual: “Here's a cloudy day to help you. No brazen sun. No sun… No sun… The weather has changed” (Rhys 100). While a "cloudy day" identifies Rochester's character due to his hatred of the sunny, excessive climate of the Caribbean (the only place Antoinette loves and understands), Rochester's figurative removal of the sun implies a removal of the same Antoinette. While Rochester is imposing his own identity on Antoinette to "help" her (in other words, to extinguish any powerful sense of self she has acquired), Rhys is criticizing this grand move as a betrayal. As Rochester symbolically states that "the time has changed", he is thinking of what Baptiste recently told him: as Rochester angrily asks the reason for the excessive crowing of a rooster, Baptiste replies: "I crow for the changing of the weather" (Rhys 98). However, early in the novel, Antoinette explains that cockcrow means “betrayal” by a “traitor” (Rhys 71). At the end of the novel, Antoinette seems to fully realize the vulnerability of her identity in the hands of her cheating husband. In the attic to which she is confined in Rochester's home in England, Antoinette focuses on her red dress which Rochester had deemed “intemperate and immodest” (Rhys 110). For Antoinette, the red dress serves as an externalization of her identity and reinforces her existence as an individual. Antonietta sees the dress as a distinctive feature of her identity that is easily recognizable by others; Antoinette tells her caretaker, Grace Poole, “If I had worn my red dress, Richard would have recognized me” (Rhys 110). As a symbol ofpassion, sexuality and love, the red dress evokes in Rochester the same feelings as Antoinette: bitterness and resentment. Understanding how Rochester deals with these negative feelings, Antoinette, in her questionable state of mind, is paranoid that Rochester and his accomplice, Grace Pool, “changed everything” when “he wasn't looking” (Rhys 110). In other words, Antoinette fears that her identity will be compromised again by a stranger. While Rhys leaves this idea of ​​betrayal ambiguous throughout the novel, Rochester's desire to completely erase Antoinette's identity points to his role as a betrayer in terms of his marriage to Antoinette. This act of betrayal is significant in identifying Antoinette and, later, Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, because it places the blame on the figure of Rochester. Lydon describes Rochester and Antoinette's home as a “threatening place” that “serve[s] as [a] catalyst for female action” (Lydon 25). Because of Rochester's betrayal of Antoinette's identity, Antoinette is forced to "suffer abuse or leave home, abandoning [her] role as an angel of the hearth" (Lydon 23). Antoinette, a lively girl from the tropics, certainly never fit Rochester's idea of ​​an "angel of the house" figure. Consequently, at the end of the novel, Antoinette does not have any kind of ideology that binds her to the house of Rochester. In fact, the marriage between Rochester and Antoinette is so dismantled that Antoinette refers to her husband only as “that man” (Rhys 110). Although The Great Sargasso Sea does not feature a protagonist who prevails over adversity in a typically heroic manner, by the end of the novel Antoinette is able to “summon her own destiny” and “take control for the first time” (Stanchich 457). In the last scene of the novel, Antoinette's “beautiful” red dress that “spreads across the room” like fire reminds her of something she “must do” (Rhys 111). Antoinette's dream further highlights and explains this necessary act. : To regain control of her identity and assert “female agency,” Antoinette must set fire to Rochester's house, or dominantly assert her identity over the antagonist (Lydon 25). Furthermore, Antoinette must escape the cold English home and find refuge in the afterlife based on her tropical childhood experiences. To achieve this mastery and escape to an “ideal world” and a “modern Eden,” Antoinette must be sure of her identity, existence, and purpose (Maurel 157). Outside the attic and armed with a lit candle, Antoinette states: “Now I finally know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draft because the flame was flickering and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned again to light me along the dark passage” (Rhys 112). In this case and for the first time, Antonietta manages to find enough strength to protect herself from a "draught", or from anything that aims to extinguish her fiery identity. Furthermore, Antoinette is finally comfortable with who she is and is willing to use her identity as a "light" that guides her through adversity. For most of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is a “product of a childhood that robbed her of the capacity for strength, allowing Rochester to break an already broken spirit” (Stanchich 457). By the end of the novel, however, Antoinette finds strength through discovering and accepting an identity, or strengthening her own existence. For the first time, Antoinette does not rely on external perspectives to define who she is ", the protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea is able to find meaning in an isolated life and an abused identity to assert dominion over her own destiny.: 2012