7/7/2023 0 Comments Wide sargasso"My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed - all belonged to the past," Antoinette says wistfully on the very first page, and throughout the story she longs for a return to what she remembers as the innocent and happy days of her girlhood. Related to the theme of British Imperialistic Decline, nostalgia plays an important role in the text from its outset. Rochester's intense need to control Antoinette represents the British fight to maintain economic and legal control over an area they considered their territory. Much of the descriptive detail in the work serves to underscore this theme for example, Coulibri Estate has fallen into a state of utter disarray and Antoinette says that she "did not remember the place when it was prosperous." Throughout the work we see the English struggling to maintain their tenuous grasp over the island while simultaneously grappling with the reality that this domain is very different from Europe. By moving the timeframe of the story to just after the passage of the Emancipation Acts, Rhys emphasizes this aspect of her novella. Wide Sargasso Sea is an end-of-empire text that charts the downfall of English colonialism in the Caribbean, a process that began with the abolition of slavery. Buy Study Guide British Imperialistic Decline
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