Wide Sargasso Sea

Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on the surface seems to be a
pathetic love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her
marriage to an English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several
crucial cultural and political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europe’s
alternative and potential “other,” are depicted. “Orientalism, in Said’s formulation, is
principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others”. Accordingly, within the
context of this paper, the other version of the story of “the othered” will be examined
from a post colonialist perception through the representations of the characters
especially, that of Mr. Rochester. His orientalist and “othering” attitude towards
Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the Caribbean and the related crucial identity
problems of Antoinette will be discussed within the framework of this postcolonial
reading on Wide Sargasso Sea.
Key Words: postcolonialism, orientalism, postmodern paroody, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane
Eyre

Starting in 2011, coastal areas of the Caribbean Sea and tropical Atlantic Ocean began to experience extraordinary yearly accumulations of pelagic Sargassum brown alga. Historical reports place large quantities of Sargassum only in the North Atlantic (mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and the Sargasso Sea). Accumulations of Sargassum in the tropical Atlantic have continued. We used a numerical particle-tracking system, wind and current reanalysis data, drifting buoy trajectories, and satellite imagery to determine the origin of the Sargassum that is now found persistently in the tropical Atlantic. Our analyses suggest that during the extreme negative phase of the winter 2009-2010 North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), unusually strong and southward-shifted westerly winds explain the transport of Sargassum from the Sargasso Sea (∼20-40°N, 80-20°W) into the far eastern North Atlantic. Our hindcast Sargassum distributions agree with surface current simulations with the inclusion of "windage". Windage is the additional, wind-induced drift of material floating at the free surface resulting from direct wind forcing on the sea surface, as well as on floating or partially-submerged objects. In our simulations, windage is included as an added vector (speed and direction) to the model-computed surface ocean currents equivalent to 1% of surface wind velocities. Lagrangian analysis of the regional circulation suggests that (1) part of the Sargassum subsequently drifted to the southwest in the North Equatorial Current (NEC) and entered the central tropical Atlantic, arriving in the Caribbean by the spring of 2011, with (2) another portion continuing southward along the coast of Africa in the Canary Current, eventually joining the seasonally-varying system of tropical Atlantic currents and thereby delivering a large Sargassum population to the tropical Atlantic. Since then, Sargassum patches aggregate from March to September in massive windrows along the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) under the action of converging winds. The windrows follow the ITCZ in its seasonal northward migration in the central tropical Atlantic. They are stretched across the central tropical Atlantic as the ITCZ crosses the latitude of the seasonal formation of the North Equatorial Counter Current (NECC). These patches and windrows are exposed to high sunlight and open-ocean upward flux of nutrients due to eddy and wind-driven mixing in the central tropical Atlantic. During the northern spring and summer, as the Sargassum drifts farther north with the ITCZ, large portions of the population are advected into the eastern Caribbean Sea. Some of these patches remain dispersed as the ITCZ migrates southward, and re-aggregate into new windrows as the ITCZ intensifies the following March-April. If wind mixing is strong and the mixed layer is deeper than about 50-60 m in the southern tropical Atlantic at this time, the Sargassum will bloom and form a massive windrow. Otherwise, the bloom will be inhibited. The extreme 2009-2010 NAO wind anomaly could be considered as triggering a biosphere "tipping point" that caused important ocean-scale ecosystem changes in the tropical Atlantic, with significant recurrent social and economic consequences. Understanding whether this new expanded geographic range of massive Sargassum blooms is temporary or whether it will revert to its pre-2009 distribution requires sustained monitoring and research.

In this manuscript, I examined Csáth Géza(1887-1919)'s short story, <Black silence(Fekete csönd)>, Charlotte Perkins Gilman(1860〜1935)'s novel, The Yellow Wallpaper, and Jean Rhys(1894-1979)'s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. with the viewpoint of the solution of the insanities and its process which the protagonists wore in the novels respectively. Among these three novels, only the <Black silence> deals with the insanity of the narrator from the sight of man writer, and others are from the women writers with the psychiatrical narrative. In case of Wide Sargasso Sea, Berta Mason who performed a dependant personality(character) in Jane Eyre, was brought to the fore as a protagonist by the writer, and the its narrative is also developed from her standpoint into main story. However, Charlotte Perkins Gilman who was once hypochondria deals with the insanity of woman on the base of her experience. All three works have other bases of their narratives separately, in other words, the personality in <Black silence>, the postcoloniality in Wide Sargasso Sea, and the femininity in The Yellow Wallpaper, but with the common motive called the insanity the writers worked out the problems of healing or the reconciliation of the characters showing unique narratives and polished styles.

Following Robert Stam's "broad intertextual as opposed to narrow judgmental approach" this paper analyzes two different cinematic adaptations, one by John Duigan (1993) and the other by Brendan Maher (2006), of 'Wide Sargasso Sea'. The conclusion is that Maher's adaptation, though more removed from the plotline and dialogue of Jean Rhys's text than Duigan's, is the one much closer to the political as well as the aesthetic spirit of the "hypotext."

Este trabalho teve o objetivo principal de analisar a representação da personagem Antoinette em Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys – 1966) e na sua tradução brasileira Vasto Mar de Sargaços (Léa Viveiros de Castro – 2012). Para tanto, discuti a relação hipertextual da obra de Rhys com o romance Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë – 1847) e sua proposta política; perquiri o perfil tradutor de Léa Viveiros de Castro a fim de refletir sobre seu papel de mediação na tradução brasileira de WSS; busquei identificar possíveis alterações quanto à representação da personagem Antoinette, entre o texto fonte WSS e a tradução brasileira VMS. A pesquisa, de cunho qualitativo, está embasada nas perspectivas de tradução cultural, póscolonial e feminista, e de crítica literária feminista pós e decolonial para análise do corpus, cujas edições utilizadas foram: Wide Sargasso Sea, Norton Critical Editions, 1999 e Vasto Mar de Sargaços, Rocco, 2012. O trabalho está estruturado em três capítulos, precedidos por uma introdução: no primeiro, apresento a proposta de Jean Rhys em reescrever a história da personagem Bertha, com base em perspectivas culturais, feministas e pós-coloniais na literatura e na tradução; no segundo, abordo o papel de Léa Viveiros de Castro a partir das discussões desconstrutivistas e feministas nos Estudos da Tradução; e, no terceiro, apresento um cotejo entre a tradução brasileira VMS e o texto fonte WSS, observando a acentuação ou apagamento do potencial feminista póscolonial da obra. Os resultados apontam para necessidade urgente de traduções engajadas em transmitir o viés político das obras traduzidas, uma vez que o cotejo apresentado neste trabalho evidencia escolhas de tradução que podem vir a interferir no sentido proposto pelo texto fonte e, em certos casos, operar até mesmo de modo contrário ao que este pretende, construindo uma imagem da personagem Antoinette com seu potencial feminista pós-colonial atenuado. Ademais, constata-se invisibilidade da tradutora e as interferências do mercado editorial nas traduções.

Freudian discourses assert the nature of one's dreams to be revealing of that which remains unresolved or that which has not been properly addressed. These discourses also designate dreams as avenues of growth-that is, when analyzed and examined appropriately, dreams can be telling of the dimensions of one's personality that require further examination, subsequently allowing the individual to learn from, and about, themselves. In addition to providing an extra sensory perception of sorts, dreams, then, also operate as personal pedagogical tools. This pedagogy, unfortunately, is not exempt from internal or external influence(s), or what Freud refers to as stimuli. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud outlines four sources of stimuli that direct the dreaming process, two of which are the external sensory stimuli (the objective), and the internal sensory stimuli (the subjective); he goes on to state that it is widely understood that dreams are the culmination of several influences (Freud 31). This culmination, particularly with regards to the objective and the subjective sensory stimuli, is best exemplified in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, through the character of Antoinette. Socially underdeveloped as a result of only ever knowing herself in relation to other people (an issue addressed throughout in this work), Antoinette cannot find it in herself to be properly self-reflexive or self-examining, and thus Rhys situates her dreams at pivotal moments in the novel at instances where such examination is crucial. The absence of the self-examining action in her wakeful existence (or what may be regarded as "the real world",

Abstract: This study tends to delve into the two important characteristics of postmodernism, intertextuality and irony in Wide Sargasso Sea which is written in 1966 by Dominica born British author Jean Rhys. Rhys shows every literary work is a continuation of another literary work by using intertextuality in her novel. She writes Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to a nineteen century classic, Charlotte Bronte’s Jean Eyre and this study attempts to focus on the aspects of subject matter, theme of dream and use of Gothic features which are become as an inspiration for Rhys to write an alternative story of later novel Jean Eyre by bringing the idea of postmodern intertextuality in Wide Sargasso Sea. This study also depicts different kinds of Irony which are used by Rhys in her novel to unfold the fact to the reader that how it is difficult to be a lonely woman in a creole position and try to buckle with inevitable future. So Rhys by using these features in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, h...

Race and culture are two important aspects of an individual's life as well as identity. Cultural pluralism can be stated as one of the factors which cause racism, because the presence of multiple cultures leads to a sort of competition between them for supremacy over one another. Different cultures compete for dominance over another, thus leading to the birth of a dominant political culture. In some nations, different cultures co-exist, for example, the term 'melting pot' is generally used to refer to the United States, which denotes the assimilation of people of different races and cultures into one homogenous whole. But with the advent of multiculturism, its proponents rejected the metaphor 'melting pot' in favour of terms such as 'salad bowl' or 'kaleidoscope', which denotes the intermixing and coming together of people of different races and cultures, but each one retaining and maintaining its distinct racial and cultural identity. Multiculturism, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the view or ideology which acknowledges the differences of the minority cultures, races or ethnicities from the dominant political culture. This paper studies the role that race plays in shaping of the fate of literary characters;two novels, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys have been taken into account (Rhys's novel is often seen as a prequel to Bronte's novel, as it is written from the viewpoint of Bertha Mason, a character in Bronte's novel, who was so highly discriminated against in the story that she wasn't even given a voice of her own).

Throughout "Wide Sargasso Sea"  by Jean Rhys, the notion of beauty is continuously followed by images of death or instability. Compared to "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte,
"Wide Sargasso Sea"  displays how detrimental the concept of beauty can be for those who are incapable of conforming to it...

This paper studies Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea according to the dialectic between rationality and madness. Retrieving the character of Mr. Rochester's mad wife from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the novel explores, through a postcolonial view, the ambiguities of madness — or what is perceived as madness — by showing that, even from the best-known stories, "there is always the other side, always!".

In 1997, Caryl Phillips published an anthology entitled Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging, a fascinating collection of texts by writers who were at some point based in Britain. However, because these authors were not born there, they were regarded as outsiders to English literature, a tradition that still now in the twenty-first century tends to be viewed in terms of racial and social continuity. As Caryl Phillips makes it clear in the preface to this volume, one of his intentions in bringing these literary voices together is to radically question the 'mythology of homogeneity' (xiv) that affects the way the nation views itself and its culture, and thereby make us reconsider Britishness and see it as hybrid in nature rather than 'pure'. Phillips's selection of writers and extracts from their work reflects the 'freight of expectation with regard to Britain' (xv) of these so-called 'outsiders' and their 'high anxieties of belonging', to adapt a phrase that Phillips has used in relation to himself as well ('The "High Anxiety" of Belonging'). The anthology also suggests that such cultural and existential ambivalence is in the end artistically fecund, as it gives rise in many cases to a formally daring literary production, wary of linearity and sterile order. There are about a dozen writers with Caribbean roots in this collection's impressive line-up, such as George Lamming and Samuel Selvon. There is no doubt that these authors' navigation between Britain and the Caribbean has, in various degrees, been an inspiration for Phillips, whose literary career has been visibly marked by his birth in the Caribbean island of St Kitts, which he left at a very early age. Even if Phillips has expressed himself openly about the influence of Lamming and Selvon on his work ('Following On'), it is with the only descendant of former colonisers in the list of Caribbean writers anthologised in Extravagant Strangersthe only 'white'

Written by Jean Rhys in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel presents the background for Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre of 1847. Two novels are indeed intertextual for using the same characters, namely Antoinette and Rochester, with the history of these characters first in Wide Sargasso Sea and then Jane Eyre forming the basis for respective narratives. However, Wide Sargasso Sea comes up with an alternative to Jane Eyre when handled with a feminist perspective and puts the emphasis on indigenous people along with their culture under the rule of the white European coloniser. In the comparative analysis of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea through gynocriticism, the paper shall reflect similarities as well as diversities in the texts referring mostly to the female protagonists, Jane and Antoinette, as active or suppressed women characters.

Twentieth century witnessed writers challenging certain canonical English texts. The slow yet steady collapse of the imperial powers' direct control over their colonies, during the century, and at the same time, the desire on the part of the earlier colonized people to ascertain their cultural recognition, in a way other than the one established by the colonizers, have caused a great as well as new representative literature. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, being emblematic of this literature, portrays the voice of the formerly oppressed Other and thus sets up an assertion to the cultural distinctiveness of the earlier colonized Creole people. In this manner, this novel questions the elitism and exclusiveness of the say of the literature produced by writers from the powerful imperial nations, scrutinizing their well-established and fully though out perceptions about the weaker and, at the same time, colonized nations. While using the critical tool of

Jane Eyre has a long classical history in the canon of British literature. One of the novel's most apparent theme particularly in the 21st Century is imperialism.
This essay looks in particular at the imperialism within the novel of Jane Eyre and how this theme has then been taken within the 2006 BBC film adaptation.

In "Ways of Seeing", John Berger argues that the woman in the position of spectator is always inadvertently complicit in her own objectification into an image. In this essay, I will first argue for Berger's point that mediums of representation -in film and text -that privileges the symbolic metaphysics of presence often enrols the female spectator into a masculine position of viewership, the presentation of herself as an object of voyeuristic desire. Subsequently, I will attempt to argue for oppositional strategies then that women may adopt, even in the inadvertent role of spectacle, to disarticulate the male gaze.

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea has usually been regarded as a postcolonial offset to its 19th century ‘Grand Narrative’ – Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Both the texts have been by and large examined by critics as texts employing the format of the Bildungsroman, also popularly known as the ‘coming-of-age’ novel. Rhys’ work, through the account of Antoinette Cosway’s life, subverts this typically linear, male-centric genre, to formulate what we may phrase as the Anti- or Reverse- Bildungsroman. In conjunction with the previous perspective, this paper shall explore how Wide Sargasso Sea overturns even the Reverse-Bildungsroman at the end of the novel to set up the groundwork for yet another sub-genre, the Kunstlerroman, or the novel that documents the formation of an artist, and the simultaneous subversion of the associated tenet of the ‘double’ in Victorian Sensation formula, when Antoinette paradoxically gains a form of identity, an autonomy over her own life, and appropriates active agency, much like an artist, through madness, and ultimately, death. Keywords: Grand narrative; Contrapuntal; Bildungsroman; Reverse-Bildungsroman; Kunstlerroman; Artist; Madness; Double; Victorian sensationalism

Since the publication of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) two critical positions have persisted: one that considers the novel in relation to Jane Eyre (1847), ignoring the way it represents English identity and history in its own right; and another that focuses on the novel’s West Indian contexts and divorces it from the English traditions that inform its structure and plot. In this article (forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, Summer 2015), I argue that the novel sutures these dual inheritances through a critical representation of the English country house that adopts mid-century preservationists’ nostalgia for such historic sites in order to problematize it. Wide Sargasso Sea represents Thornfield Hall as a space in which post-imperial racialization takes place; examining the text as a country-house novel allows one to rethink its position in either a British or postcolonial canon, as well as the political possibilities and perils of preservation in English fiction.

Este ensayo traza las historias de Jane Eyre, protagonista de la novela homónima (Charlotte Brontë 1847), y Antoinette Cosway, protagonista de El vasto mar de los Sargazos (Jean Rhys 1966). Son historias paralelas de abandono y búsquedas fallidas que convergen en un punto: Edward Rochester. Se sugiere que el final feliz de Jane y el final trágico de Antoinette están determinados por la imposibilidad del etos victoriano, encarnado en Rochester, de aceptar el caos: el desorden que representa Antoinette —desorden de la alteridad— debe ser sometido. La represión, entonces, aparece como única posibilidad de existencia.

This essay traces the stories of Jane Eyre, the heroine of the homonymous novel (Charlotte Brontë, 1847), and Antoinette Cosway, the heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). These parallel stories of abandonment and failed searches converge in one point: Edward Rochester. It is suggested that Jane’s happy ending and Antoinette’s tragic ending are both determined by the impossibility of the Victorian ethos, personified in Rochester, to accept chaos: the disorder represented by Antoinette —disorder of alterity— must be tamed. Repression, then, appears as the sole possibility of existence.

The aim of this essay is to place the Shakespearean character Sycorax as a symbol of anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal resistance. Throughout the analysis of this figure in The Tempest and its re-writings, I suggest a change from the theories that turned Caliban into an antiim-perial symbol towards a consideration of Sycorax for this role. I analyse the possibilities that this character opens in terms of rewriting , as well as the relation of the figure of the witch with her community. I also compare the ideas that Caliban personifies (including sexual violence), with those represented by Sycorax (the struggle against imperial and patriarchal forces). I ultimately defend that Sycorax fits better the position as a resistance symbol, since the struggles against masculine dominance must be addressed at the same level as those against imperi-alist oppressions.

Both postcolonial reading and writing are to a large extent characterized by an enhanced attention paid to the voices silenced by imperial hegemony, political repression and, in a broad acceptation of the postcolonial, by any form of domination, including patriarchy. By rewriting Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys made a deliberate choice of shifting the narrative from the white, male English centre to a West Indian, female margin, in order to rehabilitate the main subaltern in Bronte's novel, namely Rochester's Creole wife, the "madwoman in the attic" 12 . But in what seems at first a paradox, the author also gives a

In this paper I wish to focus on V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas, a novel now almost 20 years old, to explore issues with which post-colonial critics and theorists and some post structuralist critics are currently engaged - issues that cluster around intertextuality, agency and the body. I do not intend to offer a comprehensive reading of Guerrillas, but to focus on these issues by considering Naipaul's novel as a critique of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide Sargasso Sea has long been considered a masterclass in intertextuality. In this paper I attempt to make use of modern fan fiction studies to analyze the constant dialogue it has with its source material, Jane Eyre, and prove how Jean Rhys' novella is the quintessential piece of proto fan fiction (female) writing. The precursor to the current tv, film and literature phenomenon. This is an excerpt from the finished thesis.

It is well known that Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea reclaims Bertha Mason, the Gothicised ‘other’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This article reveals that, in doing so, Rhys’s novel also makes use of another canonical text: Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire’s poetry is of crucial significance to Wide Sargasso Sea, providing Rhys with an early title for her novel (‘Le Revenant’), with plot elements of Part II of the novel, and with elements of her characterisation of the Rochester figure. Of particular significance to Rhys are the poems in Baudelaire’s ‘Black Venus’ cycle that present a Gothicising, exoticising and sado-masochistic representation of his mixed-race mistress Jeanne Duval. Reading Baudelaire alongside Rhys casts new light on Rhys’s complex identification of the white Creole woman with blackness, her use of the Caribbean practice of Obeah, her conceptualisation of the zombi as a figure of both violence and resistance, and her critique of the white European man’s exoticising and racially-othering perception of the Caribbean. In using Baudelaire, Rhys places modernist and postcolonial perspectives and techniques in productive counterpoint: she draws on the lush rich languor of Baudelaire’s poetry and his challenge to staid bourgeois sexuality, but she also challenges that modernism, subjecting it to a critique that is just as powerful as her critique of Jane Eyre.

Resumen

En sus cartas al respecto de Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys explica cómo había estado releyendo Jane Eyre (1847) de Charlotte Brontë y que el personaje de Bertha, la primera Sra. Rochester, le había despertado un particular interés. Así, se propone escribir su historia a partir de la novela victoriana de Brontë. La transposición, sin embargo, no resultaría lineal sino impresionista. En nuestro trabajo, consideramos que es posible leer Wide Sargasso Sea como si Rhys hubiera tomado el retrato monumental y unívoco de Bertha, la “loca del ático”, y la historia que de su vida y primeros años de matrimonio hace Rochester en Jane Eyre para descomponerlos a través de diferentes perspectivas, recurso que, siguiendo la definición dada por Ford Madox Ford (1914), llamamos “impresionista”.

Tomando esta idea como base, sostenemos que Rhys reconstruye el retrato de Bertha a partir de la superposición de observaciones críticas sobre diferentes dimensiones, entre las que podemos distinguir: la observación de la tradición, comprobable en la relación intertextual entre esta novela y la de Brontë. La observación de la sociedad y del individuo sobre sí mismo, que considera las distintas miradas sobre la protagonista reunidas en la obra: miradas que representan las perspectivas de los distintos estratos de la sociedad jamaiquina del siglo XIX. Finalmente, la observación de la naturaleza. Éste es el punto en el que centraremos la presente tesina: las descripciones del paisaje caribeño que se presentan en la novela como un equivalente de la protagonista y que dejarían de representar el mero entorno geográfico de la acción para constituirse en una presencia que podría considerarse como un personaje más de la trama.

Nuestro trabajo profundiza principalmente en este punto. Las descripciones de los paisajes presentes en la novela se constituyen al modo de una obra de arte, es decir, adhiriendo a los parámetros de representación de la pintura de un paisaje, y de esta forma, participan de la serie literaria de la écfrasis. Retomando la definición de Mitchell, una écfrasis es “una representación verbal de una representación visual” (1994: 2), por lo tanto, al considerar las descripciones de Rhys como tales, las ponemos en un contexto de estudio que trasciende lo meramente estético o referente a un storytelling, sitúandolas en el campo de la teoría de la representación. Esto conlleva que las écfrases de paisajes presentes en la novela, no sólo se adscriben en una estética impresionista o incluso abstracta, sino que ciertas implicaciones ideológicas, políticas y sociales presentes en la conformación de estos movimientos pictóricos podrían leerse también en las descripciones de Rhys.

A partir de lo expuesto anteriormente, nos proponemos describir la función que las écfrases de paisajes cumplen en la construcción de Wide Sargasso Sea y ponerlas en relación con otros recursos literarios presentes en la obra. Entonces, podremos exponer la forma particular en la que el proceso de de-construcción y relativización propio de la novela impresionista se desarrolla en la obra de Rhys. Además, es nuestra intención final vincular dicho proceso con el género pictórico del paisaje y con las revisiones y reinterpretaciones que ha experimentado a partir del Impresionismo en la historia del arte. Creemos que desentrañar este proceso en Wide Sargasso Sea y, en especial, su vinculación con las artes pictóricas, echará luz sobre la obra.

Palabras clave: ÉCFRASIS-PAISAJE-IMPRESIONISMO-JEAN RHYS-CHARLOTTE BRONTË


Abstract

In her letters about Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys explains how she had been reading Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë again and that Bertha’s character, “the mad woman in the attic”, had interested her especially. Thus, she attempted to write Bertha’s story starting from Brontë’s victorian novel. The transposition, though, was not lineal but impressionist. In our thesis, we will consider that it is possible to read Wide Sargasso Sea as if Rhys would had taken the Bertha’s monumental and univocal portrait from Rochester’s story in Jane Eyre and she decomposed it in different perspectives, literary devise that, following the definition that Ford Madox Ford presents in his  classical essay (1914), we will call “impressionist”.

Starting from this idea, we argue that Rhys reconstructs Bertha’s portrait using a superposition of critical observations on different dimensions: the observation of tradition, found in the intertextual link between Rhy’s novel and Brontë’s. The observation of society and of the subject on himself, which includes the different looks over the main character that appear in the novel: looks that belong to the different social classes in the 19th Century Jamaica and represent their different perspectives. Finally, there is the observation of nature. This is the main motif of our thesis: the descriptions of the natural landscape that stand in the novel as an equivalent of the heroine and transcends the mere geographical setting of the story to become a presence which may be consider as one more character in the plot.

Our investigation focusses on in this specific subject. The landscapes descriptions presented in the novel are composed in words as a work of pictorial art, that is, by resorting to the parameters for the representation of a landscape painting, and thus, becoming part of the literary series of ekphrasis. Considering Mitchell’s definition, an ekphrasis is a “verbal representation of a visual representation” (1994: 2), therefore, if we consider Rhy’s descriptions as such, they should be included in a study context that transcends the mere aesthetics or a storytelling context, and they will be established as a subject of the representation theory. This entails that the landscapes ekphrasis of the novel, not only conforms to impressionist or even abstract aesthetics, but certain ideological, political and social implications that form these pictorial  movements could also be read in Rhy’s descriptions.

Based on our previous argument, we propose to describe the function of landscapes ekphrases in the narrative construction of Wide Sargasso Sea, establishing the link between this function and the other literary resources in the novel. Moreover, we will expose the particular way in which the process of deconstruction and relativization proper of the impressionist novel takes place in Rhys’s work. Furthermore, it is our final intention to link this process with landscape painting and with the revisions and reinterpretations that this pictorial genre has undergone since the Impressionism in the arts history. We believe that exposing this process in Wide Sargasso Sea and, in particular, its link with the visual arts, will shed light onto the novel.

By accident, the world-famous brewery Carlsberg became a central force in global marine science during the first three decades of the 20th century. Within a core group of scientists and managers, Johannes Schmidt (1877-1933) was the key figure combining the efforts of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the Danish state and several private companies. Launching 26 oceangoing expeditions Schmidt made landmark discoveries such as the breeding ground for the Atlantic eel in the Sargasso Sea. The scientific frontier was pushed literally kilometres into the deep sea and across the World’s oceans. While the formal North Atlantic Empire of the small state of Denmark was in decline, an informal empire of science was erected instead.

Pelagic forms of the brown algae (Phaeophyceae)
Sargassum spp. and their conspicuous rafts are
defining characteristics of the Sargasso Sea in the western
North Atlantic. Given rising temperatures and acidity in
the surface ocean, we hypothesized that macrofauna associated
with Sargassum in the Sargasso Sea have changed
with respect to species composition, diversity, evenness,
and sessile epibiota coverage since studies were conducted
40 years ago. Sargassum communities were sampled
along a transect through the Sargasso Sea in 2011 and
2012 and compared to samples collected in the Sargasso
Sea, Gulf Stream, and south of the subtropical convergence
zone from 1966 to 1975. Mobile macrofauna communities
exhibited changes in community structure and
declines in diversity and evenness within a 6-month time
period (August 2011–February 2012). Equivalent declines
in diversity and evenness were recorded in the same region
(Sargasso Sea, 25°–29°N) in 1972–1973. Recent community
structures were unlike any documented historically,
whether compared to sites of the same latitude range within
the Sargasso Sea, or the broader historical dataset of sites ranging across the Sargasso Sea, Gulf Stream, and south
of the subtropical convergence zone. Recent samples also
recorded low coverage by sessile epibionts, both calcifying
forms and hydroids. The diversity and species composition
of macrofauna communities associated with Sargassum
might be inherently unstable. While several biological
and oceanographic factors might have contributed to these
observations, including a decline in pH, increase in summer
temperatures, and changes in the abundance and distribution
of Sargassum seaweed in the area, it is not currently
possible to attribute direct causal links.

À luz é dado o caráter de representar a razão. É ela o que guia as almas perdidas dos marinheiros à deriva. Luz é antagônica à sombra. Sombra, então, é sinônimo da falta da razão. Para Jung (1991), sombra é para onde enviamos todas as partes do nosso ser que não seriam socialmente aceitas. Partes que não podem ser trazidas à luz do dia. Um sábio é dito como um ser iluminado. Este trabalho, busca lidar questões latentes às ações sombrias das personagens Bertha Mason (segundo Brontë e Rhys), refletindo a possível busca constante da personagem por criar/reproduzir luz, e Camila, refletindo sua possível busca constante por liberdade. Para tanto, retomaremos questões da construção do sujeito racional e do sujeito feminino. Pretendemos, neste artigo, fazer a aproximação entre as personagens a partir de duas categorias (casamento e morte, a busca por luz) que são recorrentes em suas narrativas. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: intertextualidade; loucura; casamento; Bertha Mason; Manhã Transfigurada.