Comparatve Essay on the Fat Black Womans Poems, Sula and...

These writers explore both the social roles that confine them and the bodies that represent the confinement. In light of this quotation, compare how the writers explore gender. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, and Sula by Toni Morrison are both novels that respond to the issues of women that are confined to their social roles. Grace Nichols book, The Fat Black Womans Poems, supports and also contrasts the views of both Rhys and Morrison. All three texts question gender roles and oppression in society. While Nichols is very outspoken and doesnt let her gender confine her, the main character in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette, is restricted by social and historical roles in her society. Characters like Sula are a threat to the†¦show more content†¦He suffers a certain paranoia around Antoinette and her family, and this paranoia can only be truly revealed using his thoughts. Rochester, as a white male, does not connect with his surroundings, he sees it as alien, and to overcome this infamiliarity, he asserts his power and regains control over his wife. For Antoinette, her first person narrative account of her story is a key way of the reader being able to understand her pains as a lonely Creole woman. Both Wide Sargasso Sea and The FBW’s poems give a strong voice to otherwise marginalized women and transforms them both from original tragic demise into a kind of triumphant heroism. Nichols uses humour as the main deconstructive strategy to be an efficient tool for subverting the myths that have oppressed black women. The woman’s body acquires relevance, as the poems focus on a black immigrant woman within a context of white supremacy. Nichols creates persona who she uses to represent the black female body and she constitutes a challenge to black women’s objectification in the Western (British) society, in which she is exiled. The writer occasionally speaks in the first person, has no name, so the third-person poetic voice refers to her as ‘the fat black woman’. The fat black woman refuses to be a victim and, therefore, rejects all the traps laid by racist and sexist society by means of stereotypes that aim at constricting her into limiting roles. It is her that