The wide sargasso sea and pygmalion - a comparison
...ducation and background, though personally the prefix of Colonel would have indicated this, as the majority of the audience were of middle to upper classes. The lower classes portrayed as poor beasts, who came from the poorer areas such as Lisson Grove were mocked by their poor grammar and speech. Jean Rhys though chose to entrap the reader early on in the novel to hook the reader with many questions opened up and left unanswered to which the reader must read on to answer for themselves. The opening section is seen through, though not explicitly stated, a child’s eyes and events seen from this point of view. This imagery portrayed by Rhys of exotic far away places and fauna was too, or should have been, an enticement to a contemporary audience to read on, much as England would have seemed to the inhabitants of the West Indies. It is said that in a play nothing of much interest is related to the audience in the first five minutes in order to allow time to arrive and settle down, this, one drawback the novelist does not have to address. The opening line seems to substantiate this, “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did” We the reader are now aware there is, or was, trouble and there is a race issue involved, how can you not read the next line. We are then treated to the initial characters definition and make-up and the proverbial stage is set. The exposition is complete with the line that begins….”The road from Spanish town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and the road repairing was a thing of the past.(My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed – all belonged in the past.)”. The reader is now aware that the first person narrator speaks from a place that has seen better days, has no friends, father or safety. The second section of Rhys novel throws the reader off as if they had missed something, when the first person narration is taken over by Antionette’s prospective husband as opposed to the first section where it was Antionette who spoke herself. We are given no warning of this event and it is only through further reading does this become relevant. This it seems was an obvious ploy by the writer as it occurs once more in the final section with Antoinette taking over the narration. There seems to be confusion intertwined within the story, not through the writing itself but as an aim to confuse the reader and give that added sense of confusion the character Antoinette senses. This in contrast to the character Eliza in Pygmalion who struggles to make herself understood and part of what she believes is normal society. Her struggle with dialogue and etiquette would have been seen as comedy, by contemporary audiences, though through Shaw’s writing it was really the upper crust that was being ridiculed. By the time Eliza emerged a Lady in Act five it was all too obvious it was the high classes who were seen as shallow and weak. The parallel scenes in Pygmalion were used for dramatic effect and artistically orchestrated by Shaw. The first such one was when Eliza went off to be bathed, this obviously couldn’t be shown to a Victorian audience, but nevertheless would have taken the shock value from her arrival if shown. Shaw places her father in this scene to have a conversation with Mr Higgins, though this would have been suffice, Shaw added a touch of sarcasm to the proceedings by making her father only take five pounds because making him richer would be the ruination of him. This scene gave Eliza enough time to make her dramatic entrance as the image of a lady. The second such scene was act 4, after the garden party, Higgins and Pickering were discussing how well it had gone, though not shown, the audience were treated to a very vivid and positive review of how it had gone and the fact Higgins had won his bet. This could not have been staged within the restraints of a play but used the imagery and imagination of the audience much the same as Rhys uses in the imagery of the novel, to portray the spectacle. Though not strictly the same there were reported gaps in the wide Sargasso sea that transformed Antoinette. An example of this was the c...