by Tabitha Lopes
The steady rock of the waves gently wakes me from my haze.
The sea, which was once comforting to me, is saying goodbye to me.
I’m being taken away from its freedom, never to be with it again.
A new name to seal my fate.
A name that is not my own, for a life that is not my own.
To think that my husband hates the island is to think he looks at a colored painting and sees black and white.
He is missing the beauty, the beauty in me.
I lose that beauty a little more everyday that I conform to his love.
Is it too much to want something so simple? Is it too much to not want to give up the only thing I have left, the only thing I have ever loved?
The closer they are to me the less they understand me. Nobody understands me.
Only the waves and the wind speak my language, and this is our last conversation.
Nobody to relate to, nobody can relate to me.
This water is me. Colored a deep blue yet exceptionally clear.
I fear my deep blue is turning into a black abyss and nobody can see through me.
They do not extend their thoughts to think like me.
They do not look through my looking glass because they don’t envy my perspective.
But I couldn’t think of another life that would be as suitable for me as this one.
To live away from the island is to live without my soul.
They live here too but not like me.
One has a different relation with the island when it is your only relation, your best relation.
The only relation to never abandon me or hate me.
The island is the only friend who sees me how I want to be seen,
who knows me how I want to be known.
Will the waves, the water, the wind of my home miss me once I’m gone?
I will miss myself.
In a way I’m not leaving the Island.
To give myself the smallest bit of solitude I can destructively find comfort in the fact that Antoinette belongs to the Island, I am leaving as something new.
Something lesser, with something missing.
The only thing I can do is gaze out this window at the Wide Sargasso Sea, as one last breath, one last memory and connection to a part of myself I will never be with again.
REFLECTION
The book Wide Sargasso Sea really challenged me as a reader. Having read Jane Eyre previously, there were multiple perspectives to take into account. The most interesting thing though was to read about the childhood and early life of Antoinette. Rhys leaves me feeling like an injustice has been done to Antoinette because of the circumstances that were depicted of her early life. In this sense, as a reader we understand Antoinette, more than any character in the book does. People label her as mad and crazy, but as a reader we can connect the dots, and we see that what is labeled as madness is actually just misunderstandings.
Antoinette finds her identity in nature due to her being outcasted in her childhood. Nature doesn’t discriminate, nature is loving and reassuring. Early as a child, her sense of safety is rooted in nature, “I lay thinking, ‘I am safe. There is the corner of the bedroom door and the friendly furniture. There is the tree of life in the garden and the wall green with moss. The barrier of the cliffs and the high mountains. And the barrier of the sea. I am safe. I am safe from strangers.’” (Rhys 24). However, Edward doesn’t see it that way. While that is a tiny difference between man and wife, in the case of Antoinette, Edward not loving nature is a clear representation of how they are not meant to be. Edward says, “I feel very much a stranger here…I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side” (Rhys 117). Through a critical reader perspective, I can interpret this to mean that Edward feels very much a stranger to Antoinette. I think the fact that half of the story is told through his perspective highlights how he is trying to determine her identity (Kitanovska-Ristoska). He needs to take her away from the island to be in control, but by doing that he is taking away the only part of her identity that isn’t broken. The reason she is so connected to nature is because her race and country made it hard for her to be accepted, but the essence of the Island always accepted her.
Due to Antoinette being overshadowed even in her own story, I wanted to give more ink to her perspective. A dramatic monologue does justice for her character. The point of the dramatic monologues is when “A single person, who is clearly not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment.” (Sharp). In this moment in the monologue, we have Antoinette waking up from being drugged during her and Edwards departure to England. In my poem, she is looking out the window of the boat onto the Sargasso Sea, thinking about the fact this is the last time she is going to see it. To me, this is dramatic because it creates a critical moment that allowed for me to further explore the feelings of Antoinette, feelings that were overshadowed by Edward.
The line in the poem “Colored a deep blue but exceptionally clear”, is a real description of the Sargasso Sea from the High Sea Alliance. I wanted to incorporate real imagery to make the poem more grounded in reality. The other interesting thing I found in my research of the Sargasso Sea is that it is the only Sea to not have any land boundaries. Normally a sea has some land bounding its shape. Instead, the Sargasso sea is bounded by four different water currents that form its own area. Much like the shape of the sea, Antoinette’s identity is also bounded by currents out of her control; race, nationality, gender, family.
WORKS CITED
Kitanovska-Ristoska, Elena. “The Character of Antoinette in the Novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.” Horizons Series A, vol. 15, Sept. 2014, pp. 159–66. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=101688463&site=ehost-live.
Rhys, Jean. “Wide Sargasso Sea”, Norton & Company, 1966.
“Sargasso Sea”, High Sea Alliance. https://mpa.highseasalliance.org/sargasso-sea#:~:text=The%20water%20here%20is%20deep,carbon%20and%20pumping%20out%20oxygen.
Sharp, Avery. “Robert Browning and the Dramatic Monologue”, Baylor University, 1 Aug. 2012. https://blogs.baylor.edu/armstrongbrowning/2012/08/01/robert-browning-and-the-dramatic-monologue/
Sprockets and Springes 