{"id":206,"date":"2014-01-28T08:12:39","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T13:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/?p=206"},"modified":"2015-12-14T07:20:27","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T12:20:27","slug":"cosway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/cosway\/","title":{"rendered":"Antoinette Cosway"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"cosway\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Character:\u00a0<\/strong>Antoinette Cosway<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Source Text:<\/strong> <\/span>\u00a0Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea<\/i>. New York: W. W. Norton &, 1998. Print. Norton Critical Edition.<\/p>\n

Entry Author: <\/strong>Lauren Cyr<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Antoinette Cosway\u2019s mixed race serves the purpose of alienating her from her peers, and contributes to her eventual confinement in the end of the novel.\u00a0 Antoinette\u2019s father, a white man from England named Alexander, was a former slave owner who ran a plantation in Jamaica. \u00a0He fathered many other illegitimate children with his slaves.\u00a0 Antoinette\u2019s mother is a creole woman from Martinique, living on the Jamaican plantation with Alexander.<\/p>\n

Antoinette and her mother are unable to fit in with the other white people in Jamaica.\u00a0 This is due to the fact that they are from Martinique originally, a French colony, rather than the Jamaican English colony.\u00a0 Antoinette is, however, also unable to relate to the non-white villagers as well.\u00a0 The villagers refer to Antoinette as \u201cwhite cockroach,\u201d in reference to her creole\/white race.\u00a0\u00a0 Antoinette is also the daughter of a former plantation owner; her class sets her apart from the other slaves.<\/p>\n

Antoinette\u2019s European heritage puts her into contact with her eventual husband, Mr. Rochester, a white man from England.\u00a0 He comes to Jamaica in order to marry Antoinette.\u00a0 He continually tries to subdue the Creole side of her, which he associates with madness.\u00a0 For example, he decides to rename Antoinette (her mother\u2019s Creole name) \u201cBertha,\u201d a more English sounding one.<\/p>\n

In addition to changing her name, Rochester also seeks to change Antoinette\u2019s language, further fragmenting her identity. Antoinette\u2019s language contains remnants of her Creole heritage, a heritage that Rochester believes to be inferior. When Antoinette speaks to him, Rochester is reminded of her \u201cinferior\u201d background. To him, not only is Antoinette Creole, she is also the wrong type of Creole. When Antoinette speaks, she does so by \u201cchattering in patois,\u201d the patios a blend of the language of the colonizing with the colonized.\u00a0 Antoinette\u2019s heritage stems from Martinique, a country colonized by the French.\u00a0 Thus her language is a combination of French and a native tongue, twice removed from Rochester\u2019s English.<\/p>\n

Rochester devises a plan to move Antoinette to England, in order to further suppress her Creole heritage.\u00a0 In a move that symbolizes the influence of white English men over the Caribbean people, Rochester takes ultimate control of Antoinette by locking her in attic for the rest of her life.\u00a0 He sees Antoinette as a source of madness, and hopes that by locking her away in England, he will be able to put her aside and forget about her. Antoinette is rejected by the blacks on the island for being too white, and by her husband for being too Creole.\u00a0 Her fragmented identity and struggle for finding a sense of place leads to her eventual madness at the end of the novel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Character:\u00a0Antoinette Cosway Source Text: \u00a0Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton &, 1998. Print. Norton Critical Edition. Entry Author: Lauren Cyr Antoinette Cosway\u2019s mixed race serves the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":207,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20629],"tags":[20618,20594,20578],"class_list":{"0":"post-206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wide-sargasso-sea","8":"tag-creole","9":"tag-female","10":"tag-white","11":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}