Antoinette's Belonging In Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea
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In Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea, the protagonist Antoinette is a sensitive and lonely young Creole girl with neither her mother’s love nor her peer’s companionship. Throughout the novel Antoinette attempts for love and a sense of belonging ends in tragedy as a result of Antoinette’s lack of a female role model she needed to show her how to actually love a man. Therefore, Antoinette did not know how to create a maintainable adult love because the only love she ever experiences was as a child when she still thought her mother loved her. As a child Antoinette, is deprived of parental love. Mr. Cosway, Antoinette’s biological father reportedly “drunk himself to death” (Rhys 29), leaving Annette, Antoinette’s mother to care for her, Annette does not…show more content… Choosing to spend little time nurturing Antoinette by favoring Pierre. Annette treats Antoinette as a problem she cannot get rid of. Annette most of the time does not acknowledge her daughter, thus residing outside of the natural mother-daughter bond. Annette’s bond with Pierre is seen several times throughout the first section of Wide Sargasso Sea, thus showing her knowledge of the difference between the bonding of parent to child. Antoinette wakes from a bad dream and when she wakes her mother is watching her. This moment should be heartwarming and a moment that Annette shows how much she cares for her daughter but that expression of motherly love does not occur for Antoinette. Annette only says, “You were making such a noise. I must go to Pierre, you’ve frightened him” (Rhys 27). This is a moment where a daughter really needs her mother’s comforting words and to feel loved and protected, but instead she get chastised for waking her brother. Antoinette adores her mother. She admires her mother’s beauty and yearns for her love. Antoinette describers an interaction between herself and her mother and how this one in particular had affected Antoinette. “I hated [my mother’s] frown and once