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.

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i’m afraid I find this rather sexist commentary unsatisfactory – I am a big reader, and a PhD in rhetoric having done comparative literature MA and earlier a BA in literature at university – Jean Rhys was known to me well before Ford Madox Ford, and Joseph Conrad’s effect on her may or may not be salient. Her general viewpoint is very familiar to women, and ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is a classic to be sure – but for its deftness and display of her observational skills of character and oppression of Mrs Rochester. You sell her short by constantly referring back to her supposed influences – it’s rather than male luminaries had to be appealed to if you were even going to get a leg up into the male-dominated world – but don’t be taken in by her independence and strong intellect – nothing to do with the male influences – more to do with Jane Austen in that particular case … I really feel this entry lets her (and you) down, Leslie

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Wide Sargasso Sea

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Otherness and Alienation

The problem of otherness in the world of Wide Sargasso Sea is all-pervading and labyrinthine. The racial hierarchy in 1830’s Jamaica is shown to be complex and strained, with tension between whites born in England, creoles or people of European descent born in the Caribbean, black ex-slaves, and people of mixed race. The resentment between these groups leads to hatred and violence. Antoinette Cosway and her family are repeatedly referred to as “white cockroaches” by…

Slavery and Freedom

Freedom in the novel is double-edged and troubled. Its ideal is presented in stark contrast, again and again, to its reality. At the start of the novel, we see that the Emancipation Act of 1833 leaves discontent and violence in its wake. Mr. Luttrell , a white former slaveowner and neighbor to the Cosways, commits suicide after Emancipation, unable to adjust to the new social and economic landscape. At Coulibri, the local population of black…

Women and Power

The female characters in Wide Sargasso Sea must confront societal forces that prevent them from acting for and sustaining themselves, regardless of race or class. The two socially accepted ways for a woman to attain security in this world are marriage and entering the convent. Marriage ends disastrously in most cases, especially for the Cosway women. Husbands have affairs, die, ignore their wives’ wishes with tragic results, imprison them, take their money, drive them to…

Wide Sargasso Sea is a revisionist novel, written to complicate and push up against the accepted truth of Antoinette or “Bertha” Cosway’s character as it is put forth in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre —the archetypal “madwoman in the attic.” The novel questions the very nature of truth in its premise, form, and content.

Within the novel, truth is shown to be slippery at best, difficult if not impossible to recognize and trust. Every story has…

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Changing Perspectives in Literature: Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

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Kübra Baysal

Sally Jones

Görkem Neşe ŞENEL

Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on the surface seems to be a pathetic love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her marriage to an English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several crucial cultural and political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europe’s alternative and potential “other,” are depicted. “Orientalism, in Said’s formulation, is principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others”. Accordingly, within the context of this paper, the other version of the story of “the othered” will be examined from a post colonialist perception through the representations of the characters especially, that of Mr. Rochester. His orientalist and “othering” attitude towards Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the Caribbean and the related crucial identity problems of Antoinette will be discussed within the framework of this postcolonial reading on Wide Sargasso Sea. Key Words: postcolonialism, orientalism, postmodern paroody, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Eyre

Hossein Aliakbari Harehdasht , Yasaman Mirzaie

Reading Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea after Brontë's Jane Eyre, one does not sympathize with Jane anymore, nor does she really see Brontë's Bertha as an imbruted partner for Mr. Rochester. This paper will take a comparative look at the way Antoinette Cosway is presented and treated in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and at the way Bertha is presented in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. The study of some dominant themes in Rhys's novel, themes such as racial discrimination, imperial oppression, place attachment, displacement and its influence on Antoinette, will work as technical elements of the comparison. In particular, the motif of Antoinette/ Bertha's madness in an imperialistic and patriarchal society will be analyzed in details. The scholars who are interested in post-colonialism will find this paper useful in that it discusses the role of the colonizer and the colonized with regard to the female characters of the putative novels.

Farhana haque

The aim of this paper is to trace the elements of British colonialism and their superlative traits over their subordinate people. This paper will unfold the embedded colonial spirit in the works of the Nineteenth century British novel Jane Eyre. 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 by the British colonizers. Through the post colonial text like Wide Sargasso Sea we could see that how far the supremacist ideologies has been ingrained in literature. For example, in the novels Jane Eyrewe could able to see how the identity of the Colonizer has been created by the depiction of colonial other. Charlotte Bronte hasbeen exhibited this beautifully in her novel JaneEyre.If we attempt to detect the history of British imperialism there we will see the expansion of British colonies and simultaneously parallel with the British concern for a national identity, arising mostly in the Eighteenth Century. With the colonization of the Caribbean Islands and the other subsequent British satellites, identity within the British Empire became even more complex. This reinforced the need for a distinction to be made between the multicultural, colonized British subjects and the racially, culturally and religiously homogenous Britons who possessed the coveted " Englishness ". Such idea of English superiority found its voice in the narratives of English novels, especially in those which were written during the Romantic and the Victorian period which was the primetime for the British imperial conquest. As i have given my settled goal of tracingcolonial predisposition and the anatomy of their superlative traits i have designed my paper with some important and significant parts to present the British Imperialism and their smug of being the powerful rulers. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre will show how the British colonialism imposed their superiority towards the inferiors like West Indian creoles and shed further lights on this novel along with its post colonial counterpart, Jean Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea. Jane Eyre will unveiled the cultural hierarchy which was presented in the text and also will explore the contested nature and meaning of 'Englishness' throughout the narrative of the colonizer (Jane Eyre) and the colonized body (Wide Sargasso Sea). While Bronte's text constructed the definition of Englishness by juxtaposing English characters against the colonial other, Rhy's text did fight against Bronte's cultural hierarchy while simultaneously colluding with the colonial project.

Ashleigh Black

Ahmad Mzeil

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.

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

Nagihan Haliloglu

The aim of this paper is to discover how the author Jean Rhy's controversial post-colonial text Wide Sargasso Sea elucidates and agrees with the colonial project through her protagonist

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Jane Eyre — Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: Comparing the Peculiarities of Narrative Techniques

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

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

EF_Kevin 8 / 13258   May 11, 2011   #2 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 Yeah, it sure sounds like they are asking for compare and contrast, but actually this is a little different. You are writing about a particular concept associated with the response to Eyre. Both characters share similar characteristics and situations but there are a few great differences as well that are meaningful because of _______________________---(tell how they are meaningful and your sentence will become meaningful, too. 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. -----You are on the right track, but as you proceed keep this in mind: You are supposed to make an observation about what Eyre's MESSAGE was and what Jean Rhys' RESPONSE was. Interpret the stories to find the underlying conversation. :-)