jane eyre and wide sargasso sea essay

Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea” Essay

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Introduction

Analysis of jane eyre by charlotte bronte, analysis of wide sargasso sea by jean rhys, comparison of the two novels and their influence on other authors.

Two novels, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys have been considered as seminal works in relation to feminism and the development of the female character. While Charlotte Bronte wrote her novel a few centuries before Jean Rhys wrote her novel in the 1980s and the work of Jean Rhys acts as a prequel to Jane Eyre. The paper provides an analysis of the two novels and presents some salient facts related to the character development and the era in which the two authors lived. In this paper, first, an analysis of both the novels is performed and a section that gives a comparison of the two works is provided.

Charlotte Bronte who lived in England from 1816 to 1855, set the story in Britain of the 1800s when societal disparities were at their peak, the industrial revolution was at its peak and the deprived lived under distressing conditions. Jane Eyre was an orphan who lived with her aunt, Mrs, Reed, and her cousins. Her immediate kin regarded her more as a burden and made her do all the hard work and she lived in a constant environment of scorn and hatred. After a few years, she went to Lowood School, which was a semi-charitable institution for girls, graduated with honors, and took up a job as a teacher.

After some years she went to Thornwood Manor, owned by Edward Rochester, to care for his ward Adele. Jane loved the place and gradually fell in love with Thornwood who proposed to her. Edward had hidden the fact that he was married and that his wife was a raving lunatic of Jamaican origin and imprisoned in the manor and though Jane heard the madwoman making noises, Rochester exerted his influence to dissuade her. Jane also discovers that she had an uncle who was ready to adopt her but Mrs. Reed revealed this fact as she lay on her deathbed and she had hidden this fact as she disliked Jane.

On the day of the marriage, the lunatic managed to enter Jane’s room and tore up her dress. The marriage was halted by a Lawyer who claimed that Edward was already married. A deeply distressed Jane left the manor and landed in Marsh End, the home of St. John Rivers and his two sisters, Mary and Diana. These people loved and cared for her. John proposed marriage and he anted Jane to go with him to India, but she refused and she had a vision of Rochester calling her. She goes to Thornwood manor to find the place burnt down, the lunatic wife dead and Rochester broken and crippled. She still loves him, marries him, and gives birth to their son (Signet Classics 1982).

Jean Rhys in her widely acclaimed novel, narrates the story of Antoinette or Bertha Mason, a white Creole heiress. Jean has based her character on the lunatic wife of Mr. Edward Rochester, who is one of the central figures in Charlotte Bronte’s novel. The tale relates the story of Antoinette as she grows up in Jamaica after slavery has been abolished in the country. Being of mixed blood, Antoinette belongs neither to the White group nor the blacks and she is in constant search of her identity. The blacks hate her and the white hold her in contempt. She marries an Englishmen who is not named but is implied as being Mr. Rochester from the novel Jane Eyre.

The couple has nothing in common and her husband begins to distrust her, her cultural and ethnic background since she is half Creole, her actions and gives her the name of Bertha. She is torn and mentally anguished with the suffering she undergoes, the alienation from her husband, the manipulation she sustains from her black brother, and her very sanity is in danger. Her husband continues his humiliation and distrust and calls her a madwoman and a lunatic, ultimately driving her insane (Signet Classics 1982).

The two works bring into strong contrast the willpower and psyche of the two women. Jane Eyre is portrayed, as an independent woman who can make her own decisions, is not cowed down by what men in her life want her to do. This can be seen in many instances such as when she leaves Thornwood Manor when she finds that her fiancés is already married and again when she rejects John the pastor who proposes to her. Jane is depicted as a woman who has been struck by misfortune but that she has a fighting spirit and can fight back (Maggie. 1995).

The Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Seas is an emotional cripple who is supplicating people for identity and kinship. The woman is struggling between her dual identity of being a part Creole and part White. She is manipulated and humiliated by the men around her, all of whom want to take advantage of her weakness. She is a mere pawn in the big game, easily manipulated, has all her self-respect taken away from her, and is totally at the mercy of fate. She is an exile within her own family, and regarded as a “white cockroach” by her scornful servants, and despised by her husband. She obviously cannot find peace anywhere and in any kind of setting (Rhys, Jean. 1999).

While Jane did have men who wanted to marry her for her strength of character, Antoinette is despised by her husband and she has no takers. Jane is an orphan who had a very difficult and hard childhood and was made to work as a menial and do all the hard work. While Jane had no one to take care of her during her childhood Antoinette at least did have a stepmother Christophine, who monitors Antoinette’s husband’s attempts to assert dominance. She is forcing the girl to make her own choices and advises her “woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world” (Schapiro, 1994).

In keeping with the concept of modern novels, Jean Rhys has examined the concept of female sexuality rather boldly. Antoinette is not depicted as a virgin but it is mentioned that she has already experimented with sex before marriage and the only thing that she and her husband want from each other is physical sex. The female sexuality is vigorously examined by Ryes without restraint and there are quite a few sentences full of symbolism and Antoinette is unfortunately not able to understand the difference between orgasm and pain she equates an orgasm as if she is dying and she says to her husband on one of the occasions when they have physical contact “Say die and I will die. You don’t believe me? then try, try, say die and watch me die”.

There is a dream sequence in the novel when Antoinette finds herself in a forest filled with trees and she says “the trees that jerks violently is phallic”. Charlotte lived in a different era when female sexuality was not even acknowledged and she shows great restraint in depicting sexuality. There is no mention of any activity between her Fiancée and later John the young pastor. All the men keep away at arm’s length and there is a total absence of physical relations (Thorpe, Michael. 1999).

The student of the paper would like to suggest that the story of Antoinette is of a woman who is imperiled in her own struggles and that she is a loser. Now Antoinette did have an estate, albeit broken down and she did have a household of her own and was financially secure.

She allowed people and men to control her life and sanity when she could have easily fought back. Her husband actually never physically beat her but tortured her mentally, isolated her, and drove her insane and she allowed this to happen even though she could have at least resisted. She had many choices ranging from freedom to enslavement and she chose the latter. The student of this paper would like to argue that Jane Eyre was a winner and though she underwent immense hardships, she resisted being overcome by her troubles and made choices that appealed to her conscience.

The paper has analyzed the works, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and after discussing the plot and story, has made comparisons of the two novels. Though Jean Rhys has based her heroine on the character of the lunatic wife of Thornwood from Charlotte’s novel, there are vast differences in the characters. Antoinette from Rhys novel is shown as a weak woman, a loser who is easily manipulated by the men in her life.

Jane Eyre on the other hand is shown as a strong woman, who makes her own decisions and has her own say in matters of personal interest. The two characters are the antithesis of their times as Jane is actually a character from Victorian England who is supposed to be weak and easily manipulated but is strong and independent while Antoinette, created in the 21 st century is shown as a weak character who would be found in Victorian England.

Signet Classics 1982. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Signet Classic, Penguin Books USA Inc. New York.

Maggie. 1995. Third World Feminisms: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. Practicing Feminist Criticism: an introduction. Great Britain: Prentice Hall.

Madden, Diana. 1995. Wild Child, Tropical Flower, Mad Wife: Female Identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Ed. Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Rhys, Jean. 1999. A Norton Critical Edition: Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Schapiro, Barbara Ann. 1994. Boundaries and Betrayal in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Literature and the Relational Self. Ed. Jeffrey Berman. New York: New York University Press.

Thorpe, Michael. 1999. The Other Side’: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre.” A Norton Critical Edition: Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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English literature essays, jean rhys and charlotte bronte.

by Jenia Geraghty

I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker

I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all

Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys composed their novels in different centuries and came from very different backgrounds. However despite these disparities the use of symbolism in their narratives can be compared. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is a creative response to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre , a nineteenth century classic, which has always been one of English Literature's greatest and most popular love stories.

Jane Eyre is a story of true love that encounters many obstacles and problems, but surmounts these troubles to fulfil destiny. The main source of trouble is Rochester's insane first wife, Bertha Mason, a lunatic Creole who is locked in the attic of his country house, Thornfield Hall. The problem is eventually solved, tragically, when Bertha escapes and burns Thornfield to the ground, killing herself and seriously maiming Rochester in the process. The social and moral imbalances between Jane and Rochester are then equalled by his punishment for his previous actions, and Jane's rise in status due to an inheritance. This ending, however, did not satisfy the Dominican-born Jean Rhys. She disagreed with Bronte's presentation of Bertha Mason and set out to write 'a colonial story that is absent from Bronte's text'. Rhys's story tells the story of Bertha, and relates Bertha and Rochester's meeting, and their doomed marriage. In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys shifts the perspective on Jane Eyre by expressing the viewpoints of the different characters in the source material, so taking a different structural approach to the first-person narrative technique employed by Bronte. She wrote her version as a multiple narrative, giving Bertha a previously-unheard voice. Rochester, even though un-named in Wide Sargasso Sea , takes over the narration in part two, and Grace Poole enlightens us at the opening of part three. Rhys can be seen as repaying Bronte for her failure to give Bertha a voice by not allowing Jane one, even though she does appear in the novel. Antoinette, as Bertha is named in Rhys's novel, declares, 'There is always the other side', and this proves to be the governing theme throughout both novels.

Rochester's prescience is an example of a prominent theme in Jane Eyre , in which premonition and the supernatural appear throughout the story. Both Jane and Edward believe in the signs they read in eyes, in nature and in dreams. Jane's own surname, 'Eyre', comes from the name of a historic house in which a madwoman lived, but Bronte also intended it to mean being a free spirit. Jane indeed has a frightening experience and actually sees herself as a spirit in the Red Room mirror at Gateshead, where she subsequently has a fit. Jane encounters the legend of Gytrash in her fit, 'A great black dog behind him', a tale about a spirit that appears in the shape of either a horse, dog or mule that haunted solitary ways and followed isolated travellers. Jane describes Rochester's dog as Gytrash before she knows to whom he belongs, suggesting that she had a premonition from the vision she saw in her fit that this encounter was to spark off the most incredible aspect of her life. Jane's dreams form a firm base for the prediction of what is to happen in her life. The symbolism of her dreams forecast her future. When she dreams of a garden that is 'Eden-like' and laden with 'Honey-dew' Rochester proposes to her. That night, however, the old horse chestnut tree is struck by lightning and splits in half, foretelling the difficulties that lie ahead for the couple. The theme of dreams and foresight is also used by Jean Rhys:

Antoinette's dreams appear to be just as significant as Jane's, and Rhys no doubt found inspiration for developing Antoinette's character through the idea of Jane's dreams and premonitions. In Bronte's time writers would often employ the technique of 'word-painting' at pivotal moments in the text and use landscape imagery to integrate plot, character and theme. In the scene where Jane describes herself as 'tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea', for example, Bronte warns the reader that Jane's romantic interlude is not an entirely positive turn of events. The emphasis on 'unquiet sea' informs the reader that Jane may well be in danger. This technique adds to the gothic element of the story, and heightens our response to the characters' perceptions of their predicaments. Similarly, in Wide Sargasso Sea , Rochester and Antoinette's marriage can be seen as being doomed from the start due to the landscape that they pass through on their journey to the honeymoon house. They stop in a village named 'Massacre' where it is raining and rather grey, and Rochester takes an instant dislike to the place because of the name and the inhabitants, both of which he describes as 'sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps'; words which appear to convey his whole attitude to all those who surround him. Later Rochester describes the night the couple spent in Massacre, emphasising that he lay awake all night listening to cocks crowing; a symbol of deception. In the Bible Jesus says to Judas, 'before the cock crows, you shall deny me thrice', and this line, interestingly, appears in the novel further on when Rochester confronts Antoinette about her history. Just as the name Jane Eyre can be seen to reflect Jane's character, the title of Rhys's novel can be seen to reflect the development of its plot. The Sargasso Sea, ('Sargasso' being the weed that gives that part of the North Atlantic its name), is almost still but at its centre has a mass of swirling currents, an image suggestive of Antoinette's character, and of the turmoil of her imprisonment and the method of her escape. There is a limit to the extent to which we can see Wide Sargasso Sea as an interpretation of Jane Eyre , and we must remember that in some respects Rhys's novel takes pains to distance itself from Jane Eyre . The distinction is seen particularly in the inclusion of post-colonial theory in Wide Sargasso Sea . Antoinette is aware from a young age of the element of imprisonment that hangs over the West Indies;

The dead flowers represent the institution of slavery, while the fresh living smell represents what has come and will come in a post-emancipation society. In 'Women and Change in the Caribbean', Momsen wrote that when slavery was abolished in the nineteenth century, 'Women were taught that marriage was both prestigious and morally superior'. She also points out that accepting and following the lifestyles of the whites facilitated social mobility, and when Rhys's protagonist Antoinette marries she is seen as forsaking the customs and values of the Negroes. Antoinette, as a French Creole, has both black and white blood in her, which causes her much confusion;

She is aware of her family's history and that she has a black and a white side to her. Her actions and thoughts appear to indicate that she is trying to form her identity in a time of change, turbulence and conflict. The theme of black and white also links to the colour imagery presented by both writers, not only in the context of skin colour, but also in terms the colours that surround them in their environments. Antoinette's one time friend Tia, calls Antoinette a 'White Nigger' meaning that the emancipation has left the white slave owners in the same position as the blacks. Neither has power or money and both are resented by the new white people moving into the Caribbean. The 'white nigger' is neither a white person nor a black person, but is regarded as inferior to the Negroes. A range of imagery in the form of colours is associated with the development of the intrigue behind Antoinette's madness, and Jane's love for Rochester. Rochester describes Bertha as having 'red balls' for eyes and a 'mask' instead of a face. This use of figurative language makes Bertha appear a grotesque monster, while in contrast Jane is likened to 'an eager little bird'. We can also compare the difference between how the symbolism of fire distinguishes the representations of Jane and Antoinette's characters. Rochester describes the West Indies as 'Fiery' and we see his dislike of this unfamiliar environment grow to overpowering proportions, until he decides to shoot himself. He is prevented by 'a fresh wind from Europe', which entices him home. This scene echoes Jane Eyre , where Jane hears Rochester's voice calling her back to Thornfield. Rochester undoubtedly associates Jamaica with evil and so Bertha's fiery, manic disposition fits in with his view of the Caribbean. England is seen as 'pure', Jane is described as having 'clear eyes' a 'face', this healthy description informing us of her mental health. Rochester wants a true English Rose 'this is what I wished to have' (laying a hand on Jane's shoulder). Bertha's fiery, hateful and wild nature is the opposite of Jane's prim and typically English reserve. The passionate nature at the heart of the novel is epitomised in Jane's metaphor for her love for Rochester, 'Fiery iron grasped my vitals'. Jane's fire is in her love whereas Antoinette's fire is one of pain and fear. Fire also links Jane to Bertha, both in passion and in the actual setting of fire, most notably the fire that kills Bertha but symbolises rebirth in the character of Rochester. In Wide Sargasso Sea fiery emotions surround the character of Antoinette and her progression into her 'zombie-like' state. The 'zombie' theme sums up Rhys's main point about insanity and spiritual death that she introduces in the form of the Caribbean magic, Obeah. Rochester discovers this black magic and is even accused by Antoinette of performing it on her; 'You are trying to make me into someone else, that's Obeah too'. It is Rochester's calling her 'Bertha' after he discovers her history, and that her mother's name was close to her own, that sparks this outburst by Antoinette. The fuel keeping Antoinette alive before she suffers her final death is hate, 'before I die I will show you how much I hate you'. This hate stems from the way she was presented in Jane Eyre , and Grace Poole informs us, 'I don't turn my back on her when her eyes have that look'. Ultimately, Antoinette's only possible solution, because of her zombie-like state, is to follow her dead spirit into death, 'now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do'. The death of Antoinette/Bertha heralds the end of Rhys's story, but is the turning point for Jane and Rochester in Jane Eyre . From the destruction of Thornfield and Rochester's disfigurement through his selfless actions in rescuing others from the fire, he is able to redeem himself and find contentment. After he has suffered and felt pain, mentally and physically, and lost his arrogance and pride, he finally realises his true self:

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Jean Rhys’s Novel Wide Sargasso Sea

Analysis of Jean Rhys’s Novel Wide Sargasso Sea

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 29, 2019 • ( 1 )

When Wide Sargasso Sea, her last novel, was published, Jean Rhys (24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was described in The New York Times as the greatest living novelist. Such praise is overstated, but Rhys’s fiction, long overlooked by academic critics, is undergoing a revival spurred by feminist studies. Rhys played a noteworthy role in the French Left Bank literary scene in the 1920’s, and between 1927 and 1939, she published four substantial novels and a number of jewel-like short stories. Although she owes her current reputation in large measure to the rising interest in female writers and feminist themes, her work belongs more properly with the masters of literary impressionism: Joseph Conrad , Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. She began to publish her writing under the encouragement of her intimate friend Ford Madox Ford, and she continued to write in spite of falling out of favor with his circle. As prizes and honors came to her in her old age after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea , it must have given her grim satisfaction to realize that she had attained entirely by her own efforts a position as a writer at least equal to that of her erstwhile friends.

Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet, reflects closely her misadventures with Ford Madox Ford. The heroine, Marya Zelli, whose husband is in prison, moves in with the rich and respectable Hugh and Lois Heidler. Hugh becomes Marya’s lover, while Lois punishes her with petty cruelties. The central figure is a woman alone, penniless, exploited, and an outsider. In her next novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the central figure, Julia Martin, breaks off with her rich lover, Mr. Mackenzie, and finds herself financially desperate. Voyage in the Dark tells the story of Anna Morgan, who arrives in England from the West Indies as an innocent young girl, has her first affair as a chorus girl, and descends through a series of shorter and shorter affairs to working for a masseuse. In Good Morning, Midnight, the alcoholic Sasha Jensen, penniless in Paris, remembers episodes from her past which have brought her to this sorry pass. All four of these novels show a female character subject to financial, sexual, and social domination by men and “respectable” society. In all cases, the heroine is passive, but “sentimental.” The reader is interested in her feelings, rather than in her ideas and accomplishments. She is alienated economically from any opportunity to do meaningful and justly rewarding work. She is an alien socially, either from a foreign and despised colonial culture or from a marginally respectable social background. She is literally an alien or foreigner in Paris and London, which are cities of dreadful night for her. What the characters fear most is the final crushing alienation from their true identities, the reduction to some model or type imagined by a foreign man. They all face the choice of becoming someone’s gamine, garçonne , or femme fatale, or of starving to death, and they all struggle against this loss of personal identity. After a silence of more than twenty years, Rhys returned to these same concerns in her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea . While the four early novels are to a large degree autobiographical, Wide Sargasso Sea has a more literary origin, although it, too, reflects details from the author’s personal life.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea requires a familiarity with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In Brontë’s novel, Jane is prevented from marrying Rochester by the presence of a madwoman in the attic, his insane West Indian wife who finally perishes in the fire which she sets, burning Rochester’s house and blinding him, but clearing the way for Jane to wed him. The madwoman in Jane Eyre is depicted entirely from the exterior. It is natural that the mad West Indian wife, when seen only through the eyes of her English rival and of Rochester, appears completely hideous and depraved. Indeed, when Jane first sees the madwoman in chapter 16 of the novel, she cannot tell whether it is a beast or a human being groveling on all fours. Like a hyena with bloated features, the madwoman attacks Rochester in this episode.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a sympathetic account of the life of Rochester’s mad wife, ranging from her childhood in the West Indies, her Creole and Catholic background, and her courtship and married years with the deceitful Rochester, to her final descent into madness and captivity in England. Clearly, the predicament of the West Indian wife resembles that of Rhys herself in many ways. In order to present the alien wife’s case, she has written a “counter-text,” an extension of Brontë’s novel filling in the “missing” testimony, the issues over which Brontë glosses.

Wide Sargasso Sea consists of two parts. Part 1 is narrated by the girl growing up in Jamaica who is destined to become Rochester’s wife. The Emancipation Act has just been passed (the year of that imperial edict was 1833) and the blacks on the island are passing through a period of so-called apprenticeship which should lead to their complete freedom in 1837. This is a period of racial tension and anxiety for the privileged colonial community. Fear of black violence runs high, and no one knows exactly what will happen to the landholders once the blacks are emancipated. The girlish narrator lives in the interface between the privileged white colonists and the blacks. Although a child of landowners, she is impoverished, clinging to European notions of respectability, and in constant fear. She lives on the crumbling estate of her widowed mother. Her closest associate is Christophine, a Martinique obeah woman, or Voodoo witch. When her mother marries Mr. Mason, the family’s lot improves temporarily, until the blacks revolt, burning their country home, Coulibri, and killing her half-witted brother. She then attends a repressive Catholic school in town, where her kindly colored “cousin” Sandi protects her from more hostile blacks.

Part 2 is narrated by the young Rochester on his honeymoon with his bride to her country home. Wherever appropriate, Rhys follows the details of Brontë’s story. Rochester reveals that his marriage was merely a financial arrangement. After an uneasy period of passion, Rochester’s feelings for his bride begin to cool. He receives a letter of denunciation accusing her of misbehavior with Sandi and revealing that madness runs in the family. To counter Rochester’s growing hostility, the young bride goes to her former companion, the obeah woman Christophine, for a love potion. The nature of the potion is that it can work for one night only. Nevertheless, she administers it to her husband. His love now dead, she is torn from her native land, transported to a cruel and loveless England, and maddeningly confined. Finally, she takes candle in hand to fire Rochester’s house in suicidal destruction.

In Brontë’s novel, the character of the mad wife is strangely blank, a vacant slot in the story. Her presence is essential, and she must be fearfully hateful, so that Jane Eyre has no qualms about taking her place in Rochester’s arms, but the novel tells the reader almost nothing else about her. Rhys fills in this blank, fleshing out the character, making her live on a par with Jane herself. After all, Brontë tells the reader a great deal about Jane’s painful childhood and education; why should Rhys not supply the equivalent information about her dark rival?

It is not unprecedented for a writer to develop a fiction from another writer’s work. For example, T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) imagines that some of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians were transported to England, escaped captivity, and established a thriving colony in an abandoned English garden, where they are discovered by an English schoolgirl. Her intrusion into their world is a paradigm of British colonial paternalism, finally overcome by the intelligence and good feeling of the girl. This charming story depends on Swift’s fiction, but the relationship of White’s work to Swift’s is completely different from the relationship of Rhys’s work to Brontë’s. Rhys’s fiction permanently alters one’s understanding of Jane Eyre . Approaching Brontë’s work after Rhys’s, one is compelled to ask such questions as, “Why is Jane so uncritical of Rochester?” and, “How is Jane herself like the madwoman in the attic?” Rhys’s fiction reaches into the past and alters Brontë’s novel.

Rhys’s approach in Wide Sargasso Sea was also influenced by FordMadox Ford and, through Ford, Joseph Conrad. In the autumn of 1924, when Rhys first met Ford, he was writing Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance . Some thirty years earlier, when Joseph Conrad was just beginning his career as a writer, his agent had introduced him to Ford in hopes that they could work in collaboration, since Conrad wrote English (a language he had adopted only as an adult) with great labor. Ford and Conrad produced The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903) as coauthors. During their years of association, Ford had some hand in the production of several works usually considered Conrad’s sole effort, although it has never been clear to what degree Ford participated in the creation of the fiction of Conrad’s middle period. About 1909, after Ford’s disreputable ways had become increasingly offensive to Conrad’s wife, the two men parted ways. Immediately after Conrad’s death in 1924, however, Ford rushed into print his memoir of the famous author. His memoir of Conrad is fictionalized and hardly to be trusted as an account of their association in the 1890’s, but it sheds a great deal of light on what Ford thought about writing fiction in 1924, when he was beginning his powerful Tietjens tetralogy and working for the first time with Rhys. Ford claimed that he and Conrad invented literary impressionism in English. Impressionist fiction characteristically employs limited and unreliable narration, follows a flow of associated ideas leaping freely in time and space, aims to render the impression of a scene vividly so as to make the reader see it as if it were before his eyes, and artfully selects and juxtaposes seemingly unrelated scenes and episodes so that the reader must construct the connections and relationships that make the story intelligible. These are the stylistic features of Rhys’s fiction, as well as of Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Conrad ’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Henry James ’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and Joyce ’s Ulysses (1922).

An “affair”—the mainspring of the plot in an impressionist novel—is some shocking or puzzling event which has already occurred when the story begins. The reader knows what has happened, but he does not understand fully why and how it happened. The story proceeds in concentric rings of growing complication as the reader finds something he thought clear-cut becoming more and more intricate. In Conrad ’s Lord Jim (1900), the affair is the scandalous abandonment of the pilgrim ship by the English sailor. In The Good Soldier , it is the breakup of the central foursome, whose full infidelity and betrayal are revealed only gradually. Brontë’s Jane Eyre provided Rhys with an impressionist “affair” in the scene in which the mad West Indian wife burns Rochester’s house, blinding him and killing herself. Like Conrad’s Marlow, the storyteller who sits on the veranda mulling over Jim’s curious behavior, or The Good Soldier ’s narrator Dowell musing about the strange behavior of Edward Ashburnham, Rhys takes up the affair of Rochester and reworks it into ever richer complications, making the initial judgments in Jane Eyre seem childishly oversimplified. “How can Jane simply register relief that the madwoman is burned out of her way? There must be more to the affair than that,” the secondary fiction suggests.

One of the most important features of literary impressionism is the highly constructive activity which it demands of the reader. In a pointillist painting, small dots of primary colors are set side by side. At a certain distance from the canvas, these merge on the retina of the eye of the viewer into colors and shapes which are not, in fact, drawn on the canvas at all. The painting is constructed in the eyes of each viewer with greater luminosity than it would have were it drawn explicitly. In order to create such a shimmering haze in fiction, Ford advises the use of a limited point of view which gives the reader dislocated fragments of remembered experience. The reader must struggle constantly to fit these fragments into a coherent pattern. The tools for creating such a verbal collage are limited, “unreliable” narration, psychological time-shifts, and juxtaposition. Ford observes that two apparently unrelated events can be set side by side so that the reader will perceive their connection with far greater impact than if the author had stated such a connection openly. Ford advises the impressionist author to create a verbal collage by unexpected selection and juxtaposition, and Wide Sargasso Sea makes such juxtapositions on several levels. On the largest scale, Wide Sargasso Sea is juxtaposed with Jane Eyre , so that the two novels read together mean much more than when they are read independently. This increase of significance is what Ford called the “unearned increment” in impressionist art. Within Wide Sargasso Sea, part 1 (narrated by the West Indian bride) and part 2 (narrated by Rochester) likewise mean more in juxtaposition than when considered separately. Throughout the text, the flow of consciousness of the storytellers cunningly shifts in time tojuxtapose details which mean more together than they would in isolation.

Because Wide Sargasso Sea demands a highly constructive reader, it is, like The Good Soldier or Heart of Darkness, an open fiction. When the reader completes Jane Eyre , the mystery of Rochester’s house has been revealed and purged, the madwoman in the attic has been burned out, and Jane will live, the reader imagines, happily ever after. Jane Eyre taken in isolation is a closed fiction. Reading Wide Sargasso Sea in juxtaposition to Jane Eyre , however, opens the latter and poses questions which are more difficult to resolve: Is Jane likely to be the next woman in the attic? Why is a cripple a gratifying mate for Jane? At what price is her felicity purchased?

The Doppelgänger , twin, or shadow-character runs throughout Rhys’s fiction. All of her characters seem to be split personalities. There is a public role, that of the approved “good girl,” which each is expected to play, and there is the repressed, rebellious “bad girl” lurking inside. If the bad girl can be hidden, the character is rewarded with money, love, and social position. Yet the bad girl will sometimes put in an appearance, when the character drinks too much or gets excited or angry. When the dark girl appears, punishment follows, swift and sure. This is the case with Marya Zelli in Quartet, Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark, and Sasha Jensen in Good Morning, Midnight. It is also the case in Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The education of Jane Eyre consists of repressing those dark, selfish impulses that Victorian society maintained “good little girls” should never feel. Jane succeeds in stamping out her “bad” self through a stiff British education, discipline, and self-control. She kills her repressed identity, conforms to society’s expectations, and gets her reward—a crippled husband and a burned-out house. Rhys revives the dark twin, shut up in the attic, the naughty, wild, dark, selfish, bestial female. She suggests that the struggle between repressed politeness and unrepressed self-interest is an ongoing process in which total repression means the death of a woman’s identity.

Principal long fiction Postures, 1928 (pb. in U.S. as Quartet, 1929); After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 1930; Voyage in the Dark, 1934; Good Morning, Midnight, 1939; Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966.

Other major works Sort Fiction: The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927; Tigers Are Better-Looking, 1968; Sleep It Off, Lady, 1976; The Collected Short Stories, 1987. Nonfiction: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 1979; The Letters of Jean Rhys, 1984 (also known as Jean Rhys: Letters, 1931-1966).

Bibliography Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Harrison, Nancy R. Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander, and David Malcolm. Jean Rhys: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. Staley, Thomas. Jean Rhys: A Critical Study. London: Macmillan, 1979.

The Experience of Womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

Sherry lewkowicz '06, english 156 , brown university, 2004.

[ Victorian Web Home —> Neo-Victorian Authors —> Jean Rhys —> Leading Questions ]

Wide Sargasso Sea was Jean Rhys's effort to rewrite, or more accurately, to elaborate on and complicate, the history presented by Charlotte Brontë's classic novel, Jane Eyre . The eponymous protagonist of Jane Eyre develops into a fiercely independent, self-assured, moral, and passionate young woman. The protagonist of Rhys's text is the character who Jane will know later only as Rochester's lunatic wife who is locked in the attic. Rhys explores this character who Brontë herself acknowledged was left somewhat unexplained (Thorpe 175). This exploration takes the form of a three part narrative, the middle part being in the first person voice of Rochester (although he is never named), the other two being the voice of Antoinette (who will later become the madwoman Bertha of Jane Eyre ). This narrative structure skews ideals of imperialism (and therefore patriarchy) by challenging concepts of narrative authority, particularly of a white male authority, as Rochester is inserted in between Antoinette's two accounts. Antoinette, much like Jane, grows up in a world with little love to offer her. Both women are cared for as children by inattentive and dysfunctional relatives, both lose their first friend, and both have a profoundly isolated and lonely childhood. However, while Jane is able to define herself by rejecting the labels others place on her and form a very sturdy and distinguished identity, Antoinette is baffled by having a body, a life, a spirit. She is ignored by almost all but Josephine and has little interaction with others, which arrests the development of her sense of identity. Schapiro notes that Wide Sargasso Sea "explores a psychological condition of profound isolation and self-division . . . the condition is bound up with another of the novel's characteristically modernist themes: the conviction that betrayal is built into the fabric of life" (84).

Wide Sargasso Sea purposefully problematizes its conceptions of gender. "All women characters in Rhys's fictions are mercilessly exposed to the financial and gendered constraints of an imperial world" (Humm 187). This imperial world is created and controlled by white men. While Jane too is excluded, the result for Antoinette is the development of a forced dependency on the very world that excludes her. She represents a particularly modernist perspective on the suffering of woman: the abstract sense of nothingness Antoinette experiences is so much worse than the concrete and real suffering Jane endures and can therefore deal with and even battle. For Antoinette, even happiness is not real and elicits fear (Rhys 55). The differences between the portrayal of each of these two women's lives significantly changes the way we as readers understand how each novel conceives of womanhood and its associations.

In her essay "Boundaries and Betrayal in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea ," Barbara Ann Schapiro presents an analysis of literature which considers the psychological motives and possible diagnoses of characters, as she explains, "the pertinent issue in psychoanalytic literary criticism . . . is a question of how the suffering shapes the text and relates to the cultural context" (Schapiro 86). In Wide Sargasso Sea , the answer to this question is inherently feminist in that the "cultural context" is one where a dominant group (white men) oppresses other groups (women, former slaves, servants, etc.) and to be female means to negotiate the suffering caused by this domination. Antoinette's mother negotiates this suffering poorly, or rather, not at all, and Antoinette's unresolved relationship with her rejecting mother exposes her early on engenders a deep sense of instability and mistrust. As Teresa O'Connor notes, "maternal indifference and failure coincided with the failure of colonialism in developing a clearly defined and centered people . . . the mother country too failed to give sustenance and definition to its child colonies" (qtd. in Schapiro 85).

Both novels are feminist works, though each approaches feminist issues quite differently. Whereas Jane has concrete beliefs in what women deserve, as well as obtainable goals for how she imagines her place in society as a woman; Antoinette does not even know where to begin to desire change or to assert herself. In her novel Rhys considers the possibility that perhaps, the gulf between men and women (and this extends to any power binary, such as former master/former slave) cannot be breached. Perhaps the differences are so great, or more importantly, so established and internalized that Antoinette cannot ever have the sense of security, happiness, and pride that Jane finds by the end of Jane Eyre . Rhys's novel reflects the changing status of woman in the twentieth century as it was written post-colonization and post two world wars. The characteristically modern anxieties present in Wide Sargasso Sea results in a female protagonist who, although existing in roughly the same time period as Jane and experiencing much of the same challenges, represents a much more modern conception of a woman. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea can each be seen as feminist texts when considering their social and historical context, but Wide Sargasso Sea presents a more post-modern form of feminism which takes into account the complexity of male-female interaction to find that efforts to transcend deep-set gender norms are nearly hopeless.

One approach to understanding the differences in how Jane and Antoinette deal with being a woman is by looking at their religious beliefs and spirituality. As a child, Jane expresses her doubt and uncertainty in the existence and power of God. She questions her unwaveringly faithful friend Helen, "Where is God? What is God?" (84). Worried about where Helen will go after death and if Jane too will go there, she asks herself, "Where is that region? Does it exist?" (84). But as Jane matures and becomes an adult, her faith solidifies and she comes to have a clear belief in God. When Jane is distressed by the decision of whether to stay in England or accompany St. John as a missionary in India, she entreats Heaven for guidance, "I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right; and only that. 'Show me, show me the path!'" (422). Jane's devotion is unwavering, she repeatedly draws on her faith in God for strength. Her spirituality is very personal and romantic, as opposed to the Evangelical devotion of Brocklehurst or St. John. Jane believes more in finding herself than in serving others or God, as St. John so fervently believes. She thinks, "If I join St. John , I abandon half myself: if I go to India, I go to premature death . . . By straining to satisfy St. John till my sinews ache, I shall satisfy him--to the finest central point and farthest outward circle of his expectations. If I make it absolutely: I will throw all on the altar -- heart, vitals, the entire victim" (Brontë 407). The last line of Jane Eyre is "Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!" (456). Brontë inserts elements of spirituality in the final dramatic scene when Jane reunites with Rochester. Rochester tells Jane that "Ôwhen you rose upon me so unexpectedly last night, I had difficulty in believing you any other than a mere voice and vision, something that would melt to silence and annihilation, as the midnight whisper and mountain echo had melted before. Now, I thank God! I know it to be otherwise. Yes, I thank God!'" (451). Brontë goes on to describe Rochester as he prays:

He put me off his knee, rose, and reverently lifting his hat from his brow, and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood in mute devotion. Only the last words of the worship were audible.

"I thank my Maker, that, in the midst of judgment, he has remembered mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!"

Then he stretched his hand out to be led. [451]

And Jane is there to lead him. "Jane's soft ministry" will guide Rochester back to health and happiness (449). As a woman, Jane finds comfort in religion and belief.

One of Rhys's first mentions of Antoinette's spirituality refers to Annette's funeral. Like Jane, Antoinette has difficulty finding comfort in religion when confronted with the death of someone close to her. Antoinette recalls, "Christophine cried bitterly but I could not. I prayed, but the words fell to the ground meaning nothing." (36). Antoinette is unable to feel the loss of her mother because she has always been mourning this loss. When Rochester asks why she lied and said her mother died when she was a child, Antoinette replies, "it is true. She did die when I was a child. There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about." Unlike Jane, Antoinette carries the distance from and distrust of a higher being she feels for the rest of her life. The death that "people know about" is the significant death for Antoinette, not the physical death in which Christianity believes the soul goes to God. For Antoinette, whether she believes in God or not is simply irrelevant, no amount of faith will change the actual circumstances of her existence.

"You are always calling on God," she said. "Do you believe in God?"

"Of course, of course I believe in the power and wisdom of my creator."

She raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth turned down in a questioning mocking way.

. . . "And you," I said. "Do you believe in God?"

"It doesn't matter," she answered calmly, "what I believe or you believe, because we can do nothing about it, we are like these." She flicked a dead moth off the table.'" [Rhys 76-77]

They are as helpless as moths, Antoinette sees no distinctions between humans and insects. Antoinette sees both herself and her husband as marionettes without control over their lives. For Antoinette, the world is godless, the only magic is that of Christophine's, which completely backfires, could be said to be key factor that leads to Antoinette's tragic ending. Mr. Mason believes in God, like Rochester, while Coulibri burns he "stop[s] swearing and began to pray in a loud pious voice . . . 'May Almighty God defend us'" (25). Observing the horrific scene of the house burning, the people laughing and cheering it on, and Mr. Mason praying, Antoinette remarks sardonically that God, "who is indeed mysterious, who had made no sign when they burned Pierre as he slept -- not a clash of thunder, not a flash of lightening -- mysterious God heard Mr. Mason at once and answered him. The yells stopped" (25). Mr. Mason as a man can call on God and even gets a response, all this is completely "mysterious" to Antoinette, who does not see any logic in the situation, God did not seem to notice Pierre's death, but now he silences everyone to watch her mother's parrot fall burning to his death. God is not a source of comfort, but rather just one more being not to be trusted. Later, Antoinette corrects Rochesters thoughts about Dominica and God:

"I feel very much a stranger here," I said. "I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side."

"You are quite mistaken," she said. "It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out, long ago when I was a child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you call on so often." [78]

Antoinette is confused by Rochester's calling on God as much as she is completely confused by his sudden rejection of her. Religion, like love, is unfamiliar and beyond her comprehension.

Jane and Antoinette are both distressed by the issues posed by being a woman in a male-dominated society, but they each deal with these dilemmas in a unique way. Jane has a very romantic and Victorian approach, whereas Antoinette has a distinctly modernist approach. Jane battles a daunting but distinguishable foe. She is headstrong and stubborn, refusing to be mistreated, whether it be by Aunt Reed, Brocklehurst, or Rochester. She manages the socially ambiguous position of governess with dignity and practicality. Jane Eyre takes a special interest in the lives of women and the internal psyche of one particular, bright woman. The novel upholds a belief that women can achieve their goals. Jane gets what she wants: she marries Rochester, she finds (as well as creates) a family, she becomes socially respectable and even gains financial independence. Rochester loves Jane as a wife and respects her for her intelligence and talents. Jane also has no trouble at all in describing how she feels women are restricted, she says:

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrowed-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making pudding and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex." [Brontë 112-13]

Jane is direct and clear and even addresses her readers. Such bold, impassioned and direct words would never pass Antoinette's lips. The oppression Antoinette suffer under is so much more obscure and underground that what Jane deals with that, not only would it be near impossible for Antoinette to articulate it, she has trouble even recognizing it. Antoinette has no clue what would make her happy because she has so little sense of identity.

Wide Sargasso Sea maintains a steady absence of faith in woman's ability to transcend the oppression of her gender. Rhys's novel depicts the near impossibility of "success" for a woman in a patriarchal world. This is a strikingly different kind of feminism. Whereas Jane has developed many resources and defenses she can rely on to get her through her tribulations, Antoinette is virtually defenseless. She rarely protects herself, like when she visits her mother (who she knows is undependable and unloving) and goes to her mother with love, only to be rejected yet again. She has a similar episode with Rochester. Fully aware that he does not, she asks him if he loves her and invites the misery his answer of, "No, I do not" brings (89).

Deanna Madden speaks of Antoinette's dream (the second one like it, in which Antoinette is chased in a forest by heavy footsteps and feels unable to scream or save herself) as a product of her sense of helplessness and "powerlessness as a young woman in a patriarchal society" (165). The feminine clothing she wears in the dream is representative of an ideal femininity, the white dress is symbolic of virginity and also of her mother. The tree that "jerks" violently is phallic. The dream also "reveals Antoinette's fears of what marriage will be: she will be entrapped, violated, despoiled, and exploited like a colonized possession" (165). In her dream and in real life Antoinette is fearful of men and sexuality, with good reason.

Another major difference in how Brontë and Rhys deal with women's issues is their treatment of sex. Brontë ignores the issue of sex as much as possible, although Jane's sense of restraint is tangible. Antoinette is not fearful of sex and has already experimented with Daniel before her marriage. Yet Antoinette cannot distinguish between intense pleasure and intense pain, for her an orgasm is like dying:

"Say die and I will die. You don't believe me? then try, try, say die and watch me die.'

"Die then! Die!" I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers . . . Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was -- more lost and drowned afterwards."

Sex is Antoinette and Rochester's only form of communication and they are communicating only their lust and desire for each other, not love. Sadly, Antoinette hopes their desire for each other, which is so powerful, will develop over time into love. But Rochester is not interested in loving Antoinette. From a feminist viewpoint, it is easy to see Rochester as simply cold and cruel, but he too is sorry that there is a lack of genuine communication in their relationship. As Schapiro says "Both characters are furious at being unrealized by the other" (99). Rochester is unable to love what he sees as an object, a possession. He is also unwilling to make the effort to get to know Antoinette, to understand her, to love her. He begins to call her "Bertha", signaling the beginning of his separating himself from her (ironically he tells Antoinette he likes to call her Bertha because it is a name dear to him). As readers we are immediately made nervous by this new name, not only do we sense Rochester's impending erasure of Antoinette, but we associate the name Bertha with the madwoman he will lock up in the attic of Thornfield Hall.

Rochester is disturbed and intimidated by the sexuality of Dominica's landscape, it seems too free, too lush, descriptions of garden. Although Antoinette recognizes that "it had gone wild," nature is a safe haven for her, that is, until Rochester destroys this sense of security also. She tells him, "I loved this place and you have made it into a place I hate. I used to think that if everything else went out of my life I would still have this, and now you have spoilt it." (88). Maggie Humm views the garden as an image of "the pre-Oedipal world of mothers and infants" (189). Nature is a sort of utopia which Antoinette created for herself in the absence of an attentive mother, she describes the safety she finds in the garden at Coulibri:

When I was safely home I sat close to the old wall at the end of the garden. It was covered with green moss soft as velvet and I never wanted to move again. Everything would be worse if I moved. [13]

Nature is also a haven from people, who Antoinette has deep mistrust of. She prefers the predictable and physical threats of nature to the unpredictable and emotional threats people pose:

I went to parts of Coulibri that I had not seen, where there was no road, no path, no track. And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think "It's better than people." Black ants or red ones, tall nests swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin -- once I saw a snake. All better than people.

Better. Better, better than people.

Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer. [16]

The garden offers ultimate escape, return to the womb, its evils are not evils. For Rochester, the landscape has "too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills to near" (41). Nature overwhelms him. Longs for the orderly landscape of his homeland with its simple and clear designations of authority. Master/servant, Man/woman, Rich/poor. All these binaries are skewed in Dominica, it has all gone awry. Rochester tries to deny Antoinette's sexuality by limiting her access to his speech and therefore to any understanding of the symbolic (Humm 192). "Antoinette is so closely identified with her tropical islands that they seem to be extension of each other. The landscape becomes engendered through this close identification, and Antoinette becomes a manifestation of place" (Madden 166).

Jane is invested with much more power and control than Antoinette. She gets revenge on her Aunt Reed, and redemption. In Antoinette's world, there is no revenge, no redemption. There are second chances but people fail them; Antoinette resorts to using Christophine's love potion after trying to make Rochester understand through words, but it only makes him ill and more alienated from Antoinette. Antoinette does have the power of sight, Rochester notes her eyes:

She wore a tricorne hat which became her. At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and can be disconcerting. She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either. [39]

Antoinette sees too much, her eyes are too big for Rochester, he is threatened by her knowledge, he says "you don't know the world" but yet she knows so much more than him because she has experienced so much sadness and pain, he is dismissive of her pain, uses sex to ignore her suffering (53):

"I am not used to happiness," she said. "It makes me afraid."

"Never be afraid. Or if you are tell no one." [55]

Rochester says of Antoinette, "she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did." (55). Rochester cannot communicate his true feelings, he cannot be honest like Antoinette. Yet he feels that he is the one that has been deceived and lied to (about Antoinette's bad blood). He cannot even answer her question if he is happy in Dominica, and dodges the question with the reply of, "Who wouldn't be?" (53). Rochester ponders at one point "How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy" (61). When Antoinette describes her similar induction into secrecy and repression, Rochester responds "you have never learned to hide it" (79). For once, he is right.

Set in roughly the same time (the events of Rhys's novel take place some thirty years later than those in Jane Eyre ), but the spirit of modern feminism is infused into the older feminism of Jane Eyre . Whereas in Jane's world, women are literally restricted from participating in society as men do, in Antoinette's world this repression has gone underground. It is ideology and norms about femininity which are oppressive, and therefore so much more difficult for Antoinette to rise against or even to confront. Rhys's work expresses the challenge of dealing with this new, and perhaps more dangerous, repression, signaled in Wide Sargasso Sea by new uses of style, voice, and narrative structure. As Schapiro states, "in its reworking of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , Rhys's novel makes the shift in literary sensibility from the nineteenth to the twentieth century particularly discernible . . . the collapse of rational order, of stable and conventional structures on all levels, distinguishes Rhys's vision and places it squarely within the modernist tradition" (Schapiro 84). Rhys's very modern portrayal of the woman's experience in patriarchy is "one of both forced dependency and exclusion. Thus for a girl, betrayal is indeed interwoven with dependency, troubling a girl's relational history from infancy through adulthood, and affecting her relationship with her own infant should she herself become a mother" (Schapiro 85). Sadly, we never discover what kind of mother Antoinette would become. She is so restricted (emotionally and later physically) by Rochester and by the confines of her identity, which developed in an environment painfully lacking in love or security, that she desires only to leap to her death.

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre . Signet Classic, Penguin Books USA Inc. New York: 1982.

Humm, Maggie. "Third World Feminisms: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea ." Practicing Feminist Criticism: an introduction. Great Britain: Prentice Hall, 1995.

Madden, Diana. "Wild Child, Tropical Flower, Mad Wife: Female Identity in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea ." International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Ed. Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Rhys, Jean. A Norton Critical Edition: Wide Sargasso Sea . Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Schapiro, Barbara Ann. "Boundaries and Betrayal in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea ." Literature and the Relational Self. Ed. Jeffrey Berman. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Thorpe, Michael. "'The Other Side': Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre ." A Norton Critical Edition: Wide Sargasso Sea . Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Last modified 21 May 2004

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Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the Silence and the Voice

Abstract The re-telling of a story from another point of view can be seen as a process of deconstructing an enunciation based on a certain perspective into a new one with new way of seeing. It is a process of tackling a text from a different point of view to explore issues that have been kept unexplored for a long time in the same way Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre has been kept and isolated in her attic room.

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Re-telling a story from a different point of view is a process of deconstructing a culturally based assumption into a new one with new way of seeing. Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea sets a debate or dialogue to revision or re-examine the history of Bertha the Creole who has been overlooked and silenced in Bronte’s Jane Eyre for a long time. In giving a voice to Berth, Rhys cursors Bronte's failure to see the other as human with expectations and aspirations regardless to race, the color and religion.

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Iris Rezaie

The novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys portray women's roles in two very different societies. Both novels presented feminist ideals that were unheard of before their publication. Brontë's novel is set in Victorian England in the early 1800s, a time in which women's rights were limited and their roles within society were strictly defined. Rhys' novel is set in the mid-1800s, and it explores one of Jane Eyre's minor characters, Bertha Mason. The novel takes place in the postcolonial Caribbean and briefly in England. Although the novels are set in roughly the same time period, the periods in which they were written were vastly different. Jane Eyre was published in 1847, a time when England was undergoing the Industrial Revolution and a restructuring of the social system. Brontë's novel illustrates the changing view of women in British society through its protagonist, Jane Eyre. Like the women of Brontë's time, Jane fights to gain a new independence in her society. Rhys' novel was written in 1966, just after universal suffrage was established in Dominica. The novel portrays Antoinette Cosway, later to be known as Bertha Mason. It uses metafiction to illustrate the plight of women trapped in an imagined world of expectations and Antoinette's descent into madness caused by attempts to restrain her wildness and independence. The research will examine the feminist themes present in both of these novels and determine whether they were advanced for their time or limited by their culture. The research will use specific examples from both novels, the work of critics contemporary to both Brönte and Rhys, and modern critics to support my conclusions. The novels will also be compared and contrasted with each other, as each presents a unique female perspective. Brönte's treatment of the character of Jane as a wild thing unduly tamed by society contrasts sharply with Rhys' treatment of Antoinette as wildness unbridled-a woman whose own wildness brings about her destruction. In conclusion, the research will demonstrate that both novels have differing, but similar feminist themes such as independence, respect and empowerment. But both novels are also somewhat confined by their time period and culture, in that their female heroines are forced to occupy traditional female roles.

A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre. Margarete Rubik y Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (eds): 39-49. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2212-6

Barbara Arizti

Pakistan Journal of Gender Studies

Mirza Muhammad Zubair Baig

The character of Bertha Mason has been stereotyped as a “madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Bronte’s novel “Jane Eyre (1847).” Jean Rhys in her novel “Wide Sargasso Sea (1966),” has tried to re-inscribe her character as Antoinette by analyzing how the imperialist and patriarchal forces led a woman from the wide world of Sargasso Sea to the attic of Thornfield Hall England. My contention to this corrective process of rewriting as rerighting is that, in an effort to authenticate Antoinette’s character, this writing has othered Annette, Antoinette’s mother, and has, in return, created another madwoman who has been left unattended in the plot that should have written back to the canon instead of furthering canonical images.

Adele Hannon

This paper will examine the politics if gendered roles and subsequently explore how gendered perspectives regarding the nature and the role of the Victorian woman has evolved through the medium of adaptation. This progressive direction for women has established innovative perspectives within feminist discourse, where literature, particularly in the realm of popular culture, now transcends barriers of sexual identity. This research will deconstruct the identity of Bertha Mason as written in Jane Eyre and reconstruct our interpretation of her as the feminine ‘Other’ by looking at her inaugurated tale in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Inauguration according to Jacques Derrida is 'the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new' (Caputo, 1997, p. 6). Descending from his theory of deconstruction, it explores new meaning by interrogating habituated conventions. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, we are never even given the narrative from Bertha Mason’s perspective. However, Derrida challenges us to accept these unfamiliar definitions without disregarding the old. This essay aims to deconstruct Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea by following Derrida's philosophy of inauguration. Her post-colonial novel re-imagines Charlotte Brontë's madwoman in the attic. By rewriting the male/female binary opposition portrayed in Jane Eyre, which sees woman as subordinate to man, Rhys dismantles it and repairs the disproportion of authority by providing Bertha Mason with a voice. Voice and silence therefore become significant determiners of monstrosity. The justification behind demonising a being without a voice is rooted in primitive instinct that sees one who lacks linguistic control as more animal controlled by instinct rather than human disciplined by intellect. Utilising anamorphosis can contribute to this process of knowing, revealing the unspeakable and ultimately prevent a prejudiced blindness from consuming our relationship with the ‘Other’.

Decolonial Subversions

This article will examine Wide Sargasso Sea as a revisionist prequel to Brontë's Jane Eyre. Using the first revisionary ratio of Harold Bloom, Clinamen, the article argues that Rhys depicts a proactive female servitude through the figure of Christophine who, unlike Jane and the other female servants in Brontë's text, challenges the patriarchal rule of the unnamed Rochester instead of blindly abiding by it and resists being othered or essentialized by him. This, in a way, liberates the narrative from the filial bond with Brontë's text, providing an original plot that stands on its own. The article will also suggest that despite her so-called limited agency, as suggested by many critics, Christophine masters navigating through the interesting constraints of color, gender, and class.

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Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: Comparing The Peculiarities of Narrative Techniques

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DOI: 10.26689/jcer.v3i6.952
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Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: A Glimpse at Female Writing Divergence and Consensus from Jane and Antoinette

Published 2 December 2019

4 References

In wide sargasso sea.

Highly Influential

“A Room of One’s Own”

Argument essay about the nature of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.

mhmmclx 1 / - May 9, 2011 #1 Hello, I'm new here but I've always browsed around the forum and realized that this is a great place for students who need help. I am doing an essay on Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Here is the prompt: Make an argument about hte nature of Jean Rhys's response to Jane Eyre. This should not be a "compare and contrast" but an argument about Rhys is saying in response to Cb. Does she repeat themes or agendas? Diverge from them? Pay homage? Remember to ground your argument in technique, ie HOW Rhys constructs her response. I wrote the introduction and I believe I have a claim, but I'm having trouble with the structure/outline of the essay. My teacher stated that the essay should not be a compare and contrast but in order to discuss the themes, agendas, similarities or differences of the two stories, I still have to compare and contrast them.. Help? Here is my introduction: The Search for Identity in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre has inspired the production of various works such as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. In Jane Eyre, Bronte focuses on Jane Eyre's struggles and hardships in the Victorian society whereas in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys concentrates on Antoinette Cosway's life before and during her madness from several perspectives. Both characters share similar characteristics and situations but there are a few great differences as well. In England, an environment that strongly adheres to the Victorian values and beliefs, Jane fights for female individuality and happiness because she lives in a society based on Christian belief of justice. On the other hand, Antoinette lives in Jamaica, a paradise that does not have such values, even after the emancipation of slaves; she is culturally divided between two races, both of which reject her and her family. In a society that promotes justice and equality, Rhys shows that a woman is unable to find her identity and a sense of belonging due to society and its problems. If you've read both books, it would be nice if you can help me. Right now, I am not sure what I have so far will develop into a good essay or if it is what the teacher is looking for. Another alternative would be to write about the differences between Bertha (known as Antoinette in Jane Eyre) and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea.. Any advice would be helpful! :)

/ /

Haven’t you heard? It’s a brat summer . Charli XCX’s latest album is the template for hot-weather antics. Big feelings, slutty outfits, and partying are all on the menu. But you’re not excluded from having a brat summer if you’re more of an indoor kid than a club kid. Countless brat-summer book lists have popped up on social media, giving recs for hot-girl books to read at a bar with a martini and a side of fries .

These lists are good, but has anyone done the work to go track by track and pick a book for each song on the album? Of course not; that would be insane. Overly indulgent. Bratty, even. So without further ado:

This book narrates how actress–model–”It” girl Julia Fox became everywhere, so Julia. Down the Drain depicts Fox’s tumultuous childhood, teen years, and adulthood. Look, there’s a lot of tumult. When Kanye West is like only the fifth-most aggro and chaotic man in your life, that’s a memoir. It’s a book about a person who refuses to live anything less than an iconic life, despite all the problems that causes.

. “Club classics”

I want to read Emily , I want to read Anne, I want to read with George (Eliot). But seriously, folks, Jane Eyre is the cuntiest of the (club) classic lit canon. As a narrator, Jane is somehow clear-headed and self-deluded at the same time, the perfect brat POV. It is a hoot and a half to sit in a bar surrounded by vapid rich people and dive into a book in which the rich are just as vapid, petty, and, dare we say? Horny.

. “Sympathy is a knife”

And then we have this book to rip off the veneer of Jane Eyre ’s “happily ever after,” the same way “Sympathy is a knife” undercuts brat ’s hyphy posturing with self-doubt and jealousy. “Sympathy is a knife” pops the “all us pop girls are like a family” bubble that consumer-friendly white feminism demands. Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Jane Eyre ’s Bertha before she became the prototypical madwoman in the attic. It’s a postcolonial takedown of Jane “becoming a missionary in India will fix all my problems” Eyre.

. “I might say something stupid”

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

I promise I didn’t pick this book just because the cover is brat green . That’s only part of it. “I might say something stupid” is a song about feeling out of place at a party, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower is like 70 percent feeling out of place at parties. (The other 30 percent is feeling out of place at school and a third spoilery thing .) It’s also about finding a sense of belonging with your fellow freaks, which is what Charli’s angels feel within the fandom.

. “Talk talk”

N.P. is a book about translation, but also about a translated book called N.P. Most of all, it’s about the failures of language to capture reality, to bridge the gap between people and those they love. Everyone in the book is transfixed by language while crushing on one another; they find that no language (written, spoken, English, Japanese) is up to the task of conveying the depth of their feeling. No amount of speech will bring the characters as close together as they want. Charli sings “I wish you’d talk talk to me,” but what this book presupposes is maybe that’s never enough.

. “Von dutch”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion

From the No. 1 bitch of New Journalism, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Didion’s ode to California. In much the same way, Charli’s song (and the remix with Addison Rae) offers quintessential Los Angeles, with the titular Cali-based brand, references to shopping on Melrose, and the single’s cover art featuring the Chateau Marmont’s signature mismatched furniture. If you recognized the Chateau Marmont’s furniture, this book is for you.

. “Everything is romantic”

Edgewise: a Picture of Cookie Mueller, by Chloe Griffin

Cookie Mueller lived her life in a singular way that was an extension of her crazy appetite for experience. Cookie grew up in Baltimore, joined John Waters’s film collective in the ’70s, had a child in Provincetown, then became a literary luminary of ’80s New York. Her writing romanticized everything, even meeting the Manson girls. This oral history of her life, which Waters contributed to, creates a snapshot of a woman who could find the divine in trash. It also talks a lot about falling in love (again and again) in Italy.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

You’d think this book about mother-daughter trauma would be for “Apple,” wouldn’t you? But Divine Secrets speaks so gorgeously about unself-conscious girlhood and the desire for all women to rewind to that time before they ordered their lives for the male gaze. In “Rewind,” Charli laments what she’s lost by growing past that time when she was less concerned with her appearance and her position in the pop world. The same wounds wind through generations in this book. Well, with less concern for pop superstardom.

Like Charli’s tribute to hyperpop inventrix Sophie , Grief Is for People is a memoir about a person’s love for a friend, collaborator, and mentor. Someone who challenged them, intimidated them, and comforted them in equal measure. What’s more, it’s about how every death feels bigger yet smaller after COVID and the cruelties of the 21st century.

. “Girl, so confusing”

What better way to commemorate female frenemyship than this book of essays by Caroline Calloway’s one-time ghostwriter ? As YouTube essayist D’Angelo Wallace pointed out , Beach’s book is so much more than the drama that launched her to notoriety. The book touches on topics like political activism, body image, and class.

(Side note: this rec is for the original version of “Girl, so confusing.” The appropriate book for the Lorde remix is Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin , by Marion Meade . A biography of four women writers during the Roaring ’20s, it highlights how every “It” girl has struggles of her own, much like Lorde’s verse.)

Many options, by everybody

There are too many books about generational trauma! Too many stories, too many rotten apples. That’s probably why “Apple” has countless fanvids on TikTok soundtracking every story imaginable. Succession , The Bear , Ladybird … everybody gets an apple! Even Gilmore Girls . Especially Gilmore Girls. So it’s really more a personal choice which book best documents the love and hate and attempts to individuate that occur within a family. You could go for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous , by Ocean Vuong , if you’re in an epistolary mood. Or The Namesake , by Jhumpa Lahiri , to honor Charli’s Indian roots. Or the one-two punch of Unsinkable , by Debbie Reynolds , and Postcards from the Edge , by Carrie Fisher , if you want a mom’s POV in there as well. The possibilities are endless.

Truly, an Eve Babitz book could work for almost every song on brat . The California hedonism of “Von dutch” brings Slow Days Fast Company to mind. The new co-biography about Babitz and Didion is perfect “Girl, so confusing” material. But Sex and Rage is pure “B2b,” with its endless samey days and an ex who keeps coming back like a turd that won’t flush. Here, Babitz fictionalizes two toxic exes, Earl McGrath and Ahmet Ertegun, that she can’t seem to evade. If you want good evidence for why exes shouldn’t try to stay friends, read Sex and Rage.

. “Mean girls”

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

You know we had to do it to them. “Mean girls” is a song about a New York girl who’s kind of annoying but also freakishly adept at getting attention. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is basically the titular mean girl in book form — a novel that’s had a certain corner of the culture in a chokehold for six years now. She’s everywhere, she’s kind of annoying about it, and she’s a lot darker than her ubiquity would hint at.

. “I think about it all the time”

In Motherhood , Sheila Heti designs her own version of the I Ching to try and figure out whether being a mother or being an artist is the better way to honor her ancestors. She vacillates between these competing ideas (that maybe don’t need to compete at all) in the exact same way Charli’s song does. It’s eerily similar vibes.

What better pairing for Charli’s song about doing coke in the bathroom than a firsthand account of the rise and fall of Studio 54? Haden-Guest makes Studio 54 sound like both the best and worst party in the world. More important, it was a party no one was really capable of stopping. You think the feds can stop a good time? Think again. The story starts before Studio 54’s founding and ends only with Steve Rubell’s death.

. “Hello goodbye”

“Hello goodbye” is a song about a person so destabilized by a preemptive breakup they feel out of their mind and “a nervous wreck.” The Moustache is about a guy who loses his mind when his wife refuses to acknowledge that he used to have a mustache. It’s the little things, you know?

Charli saved her sluttiest slut anthem for the deluxe edition. It’s a song about the dance of flirting, of dirty talk, of fun lingerie, of tramp stamps. Sluts brings this same joie de vivre to the very concept of sluttiness. Are you born a slut or are you made one? Does it suck to be a slut, or does it in fact rock? These are the questions that are left overanswered by the debut collection from Dopamine Press.

. “Spring Breakers”

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

“Why are the pretty ones always insane?” It’s a question Chief Wiggum asks in a Bad Era episode of The Simpsons , but it’s also a question that runs through “Spring breakers” and My Sister the Serial Killer. Or, rather, those pieces of art explore what makes the insane so hot. My Sister the Serial Killer is way funnier than you’d assume from the title and premise (a nurse covers up for her sister’s black-widow tendencies until her crush becomes the next potential victim). There’s glamour — and humor — in casual cruelty.

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Wide Sargasso Sea

Examining femininity in "wide sargasso sea" emily murphy.

As the cult of domesticity grew during the nineteenth century, society began to fixate on the proper role of a woman. Jean Rhys examines the contradictions and consequences involved in setting such standards through documenting the decline of Jane Eyre’s “madwoman,” Antoinette Cosway. Forever the victim of alien ideals, Antoinette struggles to reconcile her exotic, passionate behavior with the pristine reserve valued by the European world. Yet, although convention discouraged sexuality, Rochester lusts after the Caribbean women, further aggravating Antoinette’s moral confusion. Ultimately, Rochester fears Antoinette’s explosive passion and eradicates it through suppressing her exotic heritage. Rhys creates a world of cultural tension in which Antoinette fails to resemble either the quintessential Caribbean or European woman.

The females in Antoinette’s life promoted several disparate lifestyles, crippling Antoinette’s ability to develop as a woman. Christophine epitomizes one facet of the Caribbean woman; single and independent, she believes that a dependency on men leads only to heartache and danger. Christophine detests the man assumed to be Rochester, and advises Antoinette, “Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked...

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Wide Sargasso Sea: Appropriation Jane Eyre
(DOC) A Comparative Analysis of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jean
Comparison of Jane Eyre with Wide Sargasso Sea Essay Example
A Reimagined Response: Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea Free Essay Example
Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea influence by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Essay
Internal Emotions in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Free Essay Example

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''Jane Eyre'' (1973) "I'm Engaged, Miss Ingram!"
Jane Eyre Video Essay
1. Wide Sargasso Sea
Stewart Copeland: Tracks from "Wide Sargasso Sea" OST
Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse: Helen Tiffin (Jane Eyre VS Wide Sargasso Sea)
5 ENCHANTING Quotes Wide Sargasso Sea #shortsquotes #bookquotes #shorts

COMMENTS

Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea" Essay
Analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Jean Rhys in her widely acclaimed novel, narrates the story of Antoinette or Bertha Mason, a white Creole heiress. Jean has based her character on the lunatic wife of Mr. Edward Rochester, who is one of the central figures in Charlotte Bronte's novel. The tale relates the story of Antoinette as she ...
Power and the Cultural Other: Insights from Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso
Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys's . Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) mutually manifest the emphasis, extent, and consequences of British rule on the home front as well as on the West Indies islands. The effect of British power is illustrated in both of these novels via the use of two frequently recurring images that impart
Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
However despite these disparities the use of symbolism in their narratives can be compared. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is a creative response to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a nineteenth century classic, which has always been one of English Literature's greatest and most popular love stories.
"Wide Sargasso Sea" and "Jane Eyre": Dialogism of the Prequel and the
Settings in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Essay. In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, the setting is the hot and colorful West Indies in post-colonial days. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre the setting is murky gray England: the heart of the empire and Mr. Rochester's home.
Path to Independence: Comparison of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre's
Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre are both relatively isolated women struggling to survive in a male-dominated society. Although both women are striving to attain similar goals of happiness, equality, and a sense of selfhood or identity, the former fails and the latter succeeds.
Analysis of Jean Rhys's Novel Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea. Wide Sargasso Sea requires a familiarity with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). In Brontë's novel, Jane is prevented from marrying Rochester by the presence of a madwoman in the attic, his insane West Indian wife who finally perishes in the fire which she sets, burning Rochester's house and blinding him, but clearing the way for Jane to wed him.
PDF and Wide Sargasso Sea: A Comparative Study
Bertha, a 'mad woman in the attic,' is made captive in England after she arrives from Jamaica, symbolizing 'Oriental Other.'. Rochester's account of his marriage is nothing but a trick ...
PDF Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre
ernal and external counterpart. This dissertation aims to analyse the character of Bertha Mason in two literary masterpieces, namely Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rh. s's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). By focusing on Bertha Mason as the embodiment of the so-called Other, the dissertation will analyse her crucial function in t.
Changing Perspectives in Literature: Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
To do so i have chosen the two quintessential English novels, such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre(1847), and its prequel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) written by Jean Rhys. The first novel was belonged to the Victorian period and the second novel Wide Sargasso Sea will help us to know how the colonial subjects or colonial others has been oppressed ...
Jane Eyre Essay
Wide Sargasso Sea uses the erasure of Antoinette's story from Jane Eyre to challenge a canon which is misrepresentative of British colonialism. However, Wide Sargasso Sea "does not adopt the adversarial strategy of dehumanizing Rochester" (Thieme 78). Rather, Rochester is also presented as a victim and in contrast to Jane Eyre's ...
The Experience of Womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea was Jean Rhys's effort to rewrite, or more accurately, to elaborate on and complicate, the history presented by Charlotte Brontë's classic novel, Jane Eyre.The eponymous protagonist of Jane Eyre develops into a fiercely independent, self-assured, moral, and passionate young woman. The protagonist of Rhys's text is the character who Jane will know later only as Rochester's ...
Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the Silence and the Voice
This essay aims to deconstruct Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea by following Derrida's philosophy of inauguration. Her post-colonial novel re-imagines Charlotte Brontë's madwoman in the attic. ... May 2013, 29-41 Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the Silence and the Voice Ahmad Mzeil AL- Madinah International University 11th, Floor Plaza Masalam ...
Jane Eyre Essay
Jane Eyre Narrative Voice in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Anonymous 12th Grade. In a first-person narrative reflecting on the past, like Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre or Jean Rhys' expansion thereof, Wide Sargasso Sea, the presentation of the memories which constitute the story immensely affects the thematic impact of the work by ...
Comparing Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre Essay
The changes in societal norms and culture generate a change in the context of adaptations created during these time periods. Jane Eyre was written in the early nineteen hundreds, while Wide Sargasso Sea was written in the 1960's. During the time period between the two novels, there were major changes in culture and societal ideals.
Jane Eyre And Wide Sargasso Sea Essay
Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso Sea is a fascinating connection to Jane Eyre. The female character of Jane Eyre shapes into an energetic, autonomous woman. The female character of Jean Rhys ' representation is a character that Jane relates further on Rochester's insane wife locked in a room. Jean Rhys further evaluates Antoinette while ...
Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre: Challenging the Canon
The misappropriation of the cultural other in Jane Eyre becomes a metaphor for the preclusion of alternative narratives from the traditional canon. Yet, Wide Sargasso Sea is dependent on Jane Eyre as an intertextual referent, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing its canonical status. The concept of a canon of English Literature began in ...
Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: Comparing the ...
In a first-person narrative reflecting on the past, like Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre or Jean Rhys' expansion thereof, Wide Sargasso Sea, the presentation of the memories which constitute the story immensely affects the thematic impact of the work by reflecting the narrator's feelings about their experiences.In the aforementioned novels, both narrators' memories are colored by their own ...
Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: A Glimpse at Female Writing Divergence
This essay mainly focuses on the female writings in the 19th and 20th century that are represented by Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, considering the strong connections between them. In particular, the stark contrasts between the two fictions' settings, plots and attitude toward love and female identities leave plenty room for exploring the interconnections.
Jane Eyre Wide Sargasso Sea Essay
Decent Essays. 1528 Words. 7 Pages. Open Document. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea haunts the narrative of Jane Eyre through the construction and recognition of the uncanny. Rhys incorporates the uncanny within her rewriting of Jane Eyre through the utilization of narrative devices and ambiguous representations of physical spaces.
Argument essay about the nature of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre has inspired the production of various works such as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. In Jane Eyre, Bronte focuses on Jane Eyre's struggles and hardships in the Victorian society whereas in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys concentrates on Antoinette Cosway's life before and during her madness from several perspectives.
Wide Sargasso Sea Essay
Join Now Log in Home Literature Essays Wide Sargasso Sea Narrative Voice in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Jane Eyre Narrative Voice in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea Anonymous 12th Grade. In a first-person narrative reflecting on the past, like Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre or Jean Rhys' expansion thereof, Wide Sargasso Sea, the presentation of the memories which constitute the story ...
Every Charli XCX 'Brat' Song If It Were a Book
Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys $14 And then we have this book to rip off the veneer of Jane Eyre 's "happily ever after," the same way "Sympathy is a knife" undercuts brat 's hyphy ...
Wide Sargasso Sea Essay Questions
In either case, please carefully explain your reasoning. 4. Jane Eyre is considered one of the defining texts of the literary genre known as the Gothic, and Wide Sargasso Sea is often referred to as a work of "Caribbean Gothic" fiction. Choose one of the fundamental tropes of the Gothic mode - such as incest, doubles and the uncanny, mothers as ...
Jane Eyre Essay
Examining Femininity in "Wide Sargasso Sea"Emily Murphy. As the cult of domesticity grew during the nineteenth century, society began to fixate on the proper role of a woman. Jean Rhys examines the contradictions and consequences involved in setting such standards through documenting the decline of Jane Eyre's "madwoman," Antoinette Cosway.

Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea” Essay

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London School of Journalism

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Analysis of Jean Rhys’s Novel Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea

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The Experience of Womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

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Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: A Glimpse at Female Writing Divergence and Consensus from Jane and Antoinette

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“A Room of One’s Own”

Argument essay about the nature of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.

. “Club classics”

. “Sympathy is a knife”

. “I might say something stupid”

. “Talk talk”

. “Von dutch”

. “Everything is romantic”

. “Girl, so confusing”

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. “Mean girls”

. “I think about it all the time”

. “Hello goodbye”

. “Spring Breakers”

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