Wide Sargasso sea: Changing ways

Changing Ways Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea between 1945 and 1966. Critic Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell writes in "The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Women In Fiction", that "the novel is a response to the nationalistic mood in the West Indies of the late 1950's and 1960's"(35). Rhys shows in an uneasy time when racial relations in the Caribbean were at their most strained, it represented a space occupied by so many empires and so many …

…secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her"(103). Which is the point when he prepares to leave the Caribbean and decides to bring Antoinette with him. His sudden and largely unexplained decision to render his wives lifelessness and mad-to "force the hatred out of her eyes"- makes Rhys's Rochester a more complex and psychologically interesting character than Brontes prototype.