Content deleted Content added
|
|
Line 43:
===Race===
Antoinette and her family had been slave owners up until the [[Slavery Abolition Act 1833]] and subsequently lost their wealth. They are called "[[white nigger]]" by the Island's nativeblack inhabitants because of their poverty and are openly despised. Rochester, as an Englishman, looks down on Antoinette because she is a [[Creole peoples|Creole]]. Antoinette is not English and yet her family history reflects her as a white woman. Lee Erwin describes this paradox through the scene in which Antoinette's first house is burned down and she runs to Tia, a black girl her own age, to "be like her". Antoinette is rebuffed by violence from Tia, leading to her seeing Tia "as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass". Erwin argues that "even as she claims to be seeing "herself," she is simultaneously seeing "the other", that which only defines the self by its separation from it, in this case literally by means of a cut. History here, in the person of a former slave's daughter, is figured as refusing Antoinette", the daughter of a slave owner.<ref name="erwin">{{cite journal|last1=Erwin|first1=Lee|title='Like in a Looking-Glass': History and Narrative in ''Wide Sargasso Sea''|journal=Novel: A Forum on Fiction|year=1989}}</ref>
===Colonialism===
|
Article Images