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. By rewriting Jane Eyre, Rhys attempts to construct a history that is not only detached from the dominant world established in Jane Eyre, but grounded within the hauntological realm of the Caribbean. The hauntological realm in which Rhys constructs, not only provides a degree of agency within a realm of uncertainty, but establishes a degree of restraint too.
Megan Mericle argued that both Jane Eyre (1847) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) suggests the liberation of their respective female protagonist from the oppressive conventions in which they find themselves captive (Mericle 2012, 236). While Brontë’s Jane Eyre asserts the independence of Jane Eyre to have derived through her escape from restrictive patriarchal conventions, Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea follows an alternative narrative where it is through repression that Antoinette
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Throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette remains subject to Rochester’s physical control. Rochester exercises this control through renaming Antoinette, ‘Bertha’ (Rhys 2000, 86) and “marionette” (Rhys 2000, 99), to Antoinette’s inevitable confinement with the Thornfield attic (Rhys 2000, 115). Although Antoinette is physically confined within the attic, Grace Poole does not fail to mention that Antoinette has not however “lost her spirit” (Rhys 2000,116). Therefore, we need to look beyond the realm of the physical in order to discover spaces of liberation, spaces that are interestingly secretive, haunted, or merely
In the poignant novel The Light Between Oceans, author M.L. Stedman successfully communicates central ideas through the use of literary techniques. Through the careful use of letters, particularly written by Tom, the growing guilt of his character due to his actions was successfully portrayed by Steadman. The grief endured by Hannah and Isabel is effectively depicted through the use of imagery. Tom and Isabel’s families. Toms moral dilemmas are portrayed through the symbolism of the lighthouse and the title of the novel The Light Between Oceans. The readers are offered a profound insight into the various themes through the deliberate use of literary techniques.
In the novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Antoinette Mason’s identity is frequently discussed. Antoinette, the daughter of ex-slave owners and a woman whose life is dictated by mental illness, grows up in the Caribbean as a Creole during the nineteenth century. As a young adult, she is forced into a marriage with a white man from England, an event that ultimately leads Antoinette to her downfall. At the start of the novel, Antoinette and the characters around her are optimistic about their identity and future. As the plot progresses, Antoinette increasingly struggles to understand who she is and what her future entails. Ultimately, Antoinette loses her identity and her purpose. Throughout the text there are many reoccurring motifs. A motif
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it,” stated Herman Melville. As implied, without theme, no novel can be considered “mighty” or have any depth. Theme is essential in any work of art. Jane Eyre is a novel by Charlotte Brontë that takes the reader through the experiences of Jane Eyre, from childhood to adulthood. This includes her love for Mr. Rochester, who is the master of Thornfield Hall, the school in which Jane works at as an adult. Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel by Jean Rhys, includes
In the novels Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, the theme of loss can be viewed as an umbrella that encompasses the absence of independence, society or community, love, and order in the lives of the two protagonists. They deal with their hardships in diverse ways. However, they both find ways to triumph over their losses and regain their independence.
Jean Rhys' complex text, Wide Sargasso Sea, came about as an attempt to re-invent an identity for Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre, as Rhys felt that Bronte had totally misrepresented Creole women and the West Indies: 'why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester's wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I'd write a story as it might really have been.' (Jean Rhys: the West Indian Novels, p144). It is clear that Rhys wanted to reclaim a voice and a subjectivity for Bertha, the silenced Creole, and to subvert the assumptions made by the Victorian text. She does so with startling results.
In its simplest form, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre tells the story of a young woman, Jane Eyre, who grows up poor, makes the decision to be independent, does so, and, eventually, marries rich. The novel follows her from her childhood to her reunion with the love of her life and she, throughout it, deals with classism and sexism and exhibits her own form of feminism. By the end, it becomes clear that, with this semi-autobiographical novel, Charlotte Bronte was providing a criticism on society’s discrimination toward those of a lower class, a subtle argument against the male-dominated society’s treatment of women, and an even subtler call to action for women to find their own agency outside of the men in their lives. On another end, however,
this is a dangerous place for them to be in, and that, like Eden, the
A patriarchal society is a world in which men are the sole decision makers and hold positions of power. As a result, women are introduced to a world made by men, and a history refined by a man 's actions. In Jean Rhys 's Wide Sargasso Sea, conceptions of gender are purposefully problematized. Women characters such as Antoinette and Christophine are pitilessly exposed to constraints of an imperial world.Wide Sargasso Sea presents a modern form of feminism which takes into account the intricacy of male-female interactions to find that efforts to surpass gender norms are despairing.
In 1966, Jean Rhys published her novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’. The story depicts the life of Antoinette Cosway, her marriage to a mysterious Englishman, and her eventual descent into madness. The story is a prequel to ‘Jane Ayre’ by Charlotte Brontë, and gives the woman in the attic a voice. This essay looks at the use of narrative in ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, and evaluates how this informs the interpreted meaning of the text.
The theme of isolation is explored in Bronte’s novel; Jane Eyre. This theme is also developed in The Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Both pieces present different types of isolation, such as isolation due to location and the isolation of a character due to their social status, such as Jane’s status as a governess. The various ways in which isolation is present in each of the texts show how inescapable and unavoidable isolation is for the characters in both Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso, with it being present in such a large way in their lives.
The novel in which Jane Eyre stars in can be seen criticizing many aspects of those times such as the role and nature of women, child negligence and social hardships for those in a lesser class. Jane Eyre’s alienation from society allows for a greater reveal of the story’s culture, values, and assumptions. It’s presented through the use of gender, class and character conflicts throughout the story. On multiple occasions, Jane is judged for the presented factors reflecting the type of society Jane lives in and what the times were like at that time.
Authors, Jean Rhys and Charlotte Bronte constructed their novels in completely different time periods and came from different influences in writing. Jean Rhys’s fiction book, Wide Sargasso Sea is an interesting relation to Jane Eyre. The female character of Jane Eyre forms into a furiously, passionate, independent young woman. The female character of Jean Rhys’s illustration is a character that Jane will know further on as Rochester’s crazy wife who is bolted in an attic. Jean Rhys further studies this character, where as Charlotte Bronte approved that it was left explained (Thorpe 175). Antoinette, considerably like Jane, evolves in a world with minimal amount of love to offer. Both these women are taken cared of as children by
In Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea, whether Antoinette Cosway really goes mad in the end is debatable. Nevertheless, it is clear that her life is tragic. The tragedy comes from her numerous pursuits for love and a sense of belonging, and her failure at each and every one of these attempts.
Identity is portrayed as a crucial element to life in both novels Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Bronte, and Wide Sargasso Sea written by Jean Rhys. The protagonists in both novels experience hardship when attempting to acquire a sense of identity resulting in insanity or virtual madness..In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, identity and insanity are presented as connecting themes through symbols that emphasize societal expectations, conflict between race, blindness, duality and their damaging effect on Jane, and her mirror Antoinette who both suffer from insanity due to their non-existent place in society.
The discussion about intertextuality shows that both these two novels contain feminism thoughts, just as Wang Tao’s study has supported that Wide Sargasso Sea is the transcendence of Jane Eyre at the reflection of feminism thoughts. If further explore, we can see that enough researches have been done to dig out the hidden ideas in the two novels. Liu Liang has “made a comparison of womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by probing into their different attitudes towards patriarchy and sex to find the difference between modern feminism and older feminism”(129). The different experiences of the two heroines indicates that Jane Eyre contains the traditional feminism that women should pursuit equality at work opportunity, while Wide Sargasso Sea