Inequality in race & gender that's present in the societies - Essay Example

Jane Austen narrates of the adventures of Catherine Morland who is depicted to be a very nice girl with overactive imagination. In the novel Catherine gets to meet Henry Tinley and she is swept off her feet by him. It doesn’t take a long time for her to be invited to Tinley’s home, the sinister Northanger Abbey; there is where she realized that she just happened to have made a wrong judgment by judging a book by its cover. It is clear that there are common themes in both the books like; love, shame, inequality in race and gender.

It is easy to notice that there tend to be similarities between the two characters in these books despite the fact that the two books were written in different period and different environments. Therefore in this essay, Catherine and Briony will be compared as I try to explore and compare the different styles and languages that have been used by Jean Rhys and Jane Austen. In the novel Northanger Abbey, Catherine, a 17 years old girl with a thin awkward figure and a sallow skin without color, is used as the main character.

Catherine is impressionable and she is a girl who likes to fantasize but soon she will come to differentiate between fiction and reality, and be able to learn who are true and false friends through her experience. Catherine is a girl in a family of nine siblings and her parents and they are neighbors with the Allen’s family who just live next door. Her mother had given birth to three sons before now delivering Catherine (Austen, 129). The difference between the two families is that the Allen’s are better off financially than Catherine’s family. When Mr. Allen was ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution, they went and choose Catherine.

But Catherine had never been far from her family before the Bath. In the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is the main character. The story starts when she is just a small girl. Her mother is a second wife and her dad seems to have left them. Antoinette is born and brought up in Jamaica where the whites and the black co-exist. It is sad that she grows up with a lot of difficulties. First is that her father left and second is that the blacks around them are not giving them the peace of mind.

They keep staring badly and them and speaking ill of her family and particularly her mother. She faces a couple of threats as just a young girl. The external threat is that the black have so much hate towards them that the even go ahead to poison her mother’s horse. It is evident that there are some common themes in the two novels. One of the themes is inequality in race and gender. In the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, there is seen to be that rivalry between the white and the blacks. The black majority, who are the natives of Jamaica, don’t seem to be pleased with the existence of the whites in their homeland.

They even go ahead to calling the whites “white cockroach” or “white negro”. It is so sad that it is not only the black majority who are after Antoinette and her Creole family but also the white minority who marginalize them (Rhys & Charlotte 2007, pg. 32). And the two novels also focus on the gender issues and inequality. Antoinette’s mother goes through a lot despite her being a second wife. The fact that her husband is no longer around gives the Black majority and the white minority the opportunity to marginalize her and her family.

In the novel Northanger abbey, gender plays a deterministic