Wide Sargasso Sea - Bertha Mason as a victim of Racial Oppression Essay

Wide Sargasso Sea - Bertha Mason as a victim of Racial Oppression - Essay Example It is the most successful novel of Rhys that consists of three parts and each of these parts is written using the narrative voice of different characters of the stories. The novel basically deals with the theme of racial discrimination and the roughness of displacement and integration. It deeply and sensitively describes the cultural barriers that exist between the whites and the blacks and explains the insecurities and adjustment problems that commonly arise when the people from different cultures are set to live together and use to hold certain prejudice for each other. Rhys touchingly describes the intricate relations of oppressor and oppressed through the depiction of the marital relations of the main character Antoinette that has been drawn from the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. The novel has been plotted in Jamaica and depicts the time after the liberation of the slaves in Caribbean. That was the depressed era when the tension over the issue of the racial inequity and hatred was on the peak level in Caribbean. The main character of the story is a lady Antoinette who spent her childhood in the West Indies and frequently faced the problems related to the ethnic prejudice and shrewdness. She neither succeeded to adjust among the white Europeans nor among the black Jamaicans whom she belongs but due to her white Creole heiress she remained different to them as well.