Wide Saragasso Sea - Essay Example

Full The Importance of Resiliency in Children Why is resiliency important in children? The world is becoming crueler by the day, the troubles more difficult and the struggles more dangerous. When life was simple and easy, problems were encountered everyday. Therefore, in this more sophisticated world we live in, more trials are expected not only to be experienced by adults but also by growing children. Problems are parts of daily living and therefore they must be faced. It has been observed that there are those who seem to easily cope with the difficulties of life while others put quite a struggle.

If they are not able to overcome, they could suffer depression or even worse, psychological problems. The resilient children survive and thrive in this harsh world and thus it is important for them to have that characteristic early in life. In the story The Wide Saragossa Sea, the protagonist, Antoinette Cosway went through several turbulent waters as a child, suffering poverty and the struggles of her widowed mother until she was placed on a convent. Her trials were far from evil, though. When she was seventeen, her stepfather told her to go with him to England and her worries start all over again.

It is interesting to go over this young woman’s ordeals. Therefore, this paper will discuss how she dealt with her troubles and comment on her resiliency. Antoinette’s grandfather and father were slave holders and they lived at a place where Blacks were the dominant race. Their light-colored skin is in stark contrast to their neighbors. Consequently, they did not have many acquaintances. Their neighbors did not like her mother and they poisoned her horse which Antoinette found dead, being feasted upon by flies.

As a result, her mother stayed home most of the time, growing unsociable each day, even with her own daughter. Antoinette had a lot of questions for her mother who in turn had a lot of problems to think about. They were poor and that made the Blacks quite easy on them. The little girl learned to live with only one friend who stole her dress. As a child, she wondered why they never had any visitors and when they finally had some, she already got over that desire of entertaining visitors. She did not like it when she went home one day and saw some fair-skinned visitors on their front yard.

She had to escape the loneliness of their house when after that incident; her mother always went out on a borrowed horse. Then her mother married and she learned to love a stranger. Their neighbors started being rude to them and she saw how her mother persuaded her stepfather to leave the place. A fight often ensued because her stepfather disagreed to her mother’s idea. Then, the dreadful night came when their house was deliberately burned by their oppressors. The friend she thought would help her stoned her instead.

In my opinion, Antoinette was a courageous and resilient child who was able to overcome quite difficult circumstances during her childhood even though she later expressed some fear when she looked back to her life. After years of a secure life at the convent, Antoinette seemed to have gotten used to a quiet environment. When her stepfather asked her to move out from the convent, the nuns were excited for her but on the contrary, Antoinette was dismayed and thought they might never understand her.

“They are safe. How can they know what it could be like outside?”, she mused. Nevertheless, with the resiliency she showed as a child, Antoinette is believed to thrive outside the convent.