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   sagetrieb Teacher
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   This is a rather complicated question. Briefly, Rhys sees marriage thruogh the lens of colonialism, casting the marriage contract as a colonial encounter. However, the problem of displacement and a shaky sense of one's own identity are already well established in the first part of the text, long before the marriage takes place.  It seems that Rhys wants to bring the problems of the Creole existence to the fore at the very beginning of the novel, and lay emphasis on Antoinette's feelings of alienation: the white Creoles are neither part of the black slave community or accepted as European either. In any case, love has little to do with marriage.  The Marriage contract itself is negotiated by a series of men: Rochester's father and brother, Antoinette's stepfather, and her step-brother, Richard Mason. When Antoinette herself puts up a half-hearted resistance to the marriage, both Rochester and Richard Mason step in to push the contract along.  As Rhys constructs it,  marriage gives men power and renders women passive.  

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   Posted by sagetrieb on Thursday October 18, 2007 at 6:03 PM