![]() Antoinette's husband has no home that he is able to move comfortably within the text. Caroline Rody notes, "Rhys rewrites him as an anonymous, lost voice in a place where the very existence of his fatherland is questioned" (219). The character is not powerful as representative of anything within the text. Usually his appearance is structured as representing the dominate ruling class ideology, oppressing the minority group that the particular reading is trying to claim the text for, either as masculine power or the empirical dominance. ![]() The critical debate over the text has washed over the main male character and has made him represent many different things to many different people. From this standpoint, I propose a masculinist reading of Wide Sargasso Sea. As a male reader, I can understand this lack of identification with Antoinette. Carine Mardorossian states, " constantly thwarts an easy identification with the white Creole protagonist" (1071). ![]() There is, I feel a critical approach missing from the debate. The dialogue has been so focused on claiming the text, the author, or the protagonist that it has become known as "the Helen of our wars" by the Barbadian critic Kamau Braithwaite (qtd in Su 388). The historical criticism of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea has focused largely on either postcolonial or feminist readings of the text. "Humanity does not start out from freedom, but from limitations and the line not to be crossed." Crazy and Worse Besides: The Madness of Antoinette Cosway Mason
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