There seems to be a trend in some of these books that we have read in which characters stay in bad relationships. It is as if they chose to ignore their issues, and since we have an overview of the situation, we see that this turns out badly. This trend is especially seen in The Sun Also Rises and Wide Sargasso Sea. In The Sun Also Rises, the bad relationship is the one between Brett and Jake, where Jake is in love with Brett but since they can never be together, she continuously hurts him.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette finds herself in two separate bad relationships which she can’t seem to get out of. The first is when she was a child. This relationship is between Antoinette and her (so called) friend Tia. Their friendship is full of conflict but there were the two main times that pointed towards a bad relationship. The first was at the pool when they get into a big fight about somersaults. This encounter went beyond a normal fight between children and after that happened I thought that they would not like each other anymore. But it turned out, I was wrong because not much later when Antoinette’s family is leaving she tries to run to Tia and plans to live with her. Tia’s response is to throw a rock at Antoinette and this is what finally makes Antoinette realize they are not friends. This is the first example in the book of Antoinette not understanding the relationship she is in, which leads to more problems.
The second relationship is the one between Antoinette and Rochester. Their marriage is strange from the beginning since they barely knew each other at the time of their marriage. This lack of communication between them continues throughout the book and we see that despite being in this bad relationship they never break apart. There are times when Rochester is given the chance to simply leave, but for some reason he does not take it. Antoinette on the other hand loves Rochester, but he is just rude to her and sleeps with other people (This is very much like Brett and Jake). The relationship is failing, but Antoinette is trying so hard as is seen with the love potion, but all this makes it worse. The moral these books tell is that if the relationship is going very badly it might be better to just leave.
