Question:
In the book Wide Sargasso Sea, one character is described as “Your aunty old woman now, she turn her face to the wall.” What does that mean?
Claude:
This line refers to Aunt Cora, and “turned her face to the wall” is an old idiom meaning someone has given up on life — withdrawn from the world, lost the will to live, or is quietly waiting for death.
It comes from a biblical image (2 Kings 20:2, where Hezekiah turns his face to the wall to pray before death) and became a common expression in English for someone who has emotionally or spiritually surrendered. It doesn’t necessarily mean the person is literally dying at that moment, but that they’ve become passive, despairing, and disconnected from the living world around them.
In the context of Wide Sargasso Sea, it reflects how the older generation of Creole women have been broken by loss — loss of status, wealth, and belonging after Emancipation. Aunt Cora, once a proud woman, has simply stopped fighting. Jean Rhys uses the phrase to show how colonial and social upheaval doesn’t just destroy people violently; sometimes it just quietly extinguishes them.
