Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: a post-colonial
rewriting of Jane Eyre.
Roberta Grandi
Università della Valle d’Aosta
All begins with what seems
almost a happy ending
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, published in 1847
• Jane is an orphan who, refused by the family of her aunt Mrs Reed,
grows up in the (horrible) boarding school Lowood. She becomes a
strong-willed and well educated young woman and is hired at the
great mansion Thornfield Hall as the teacher of the young Adele,
Mr Rochester’s natural daughter.
• Though plain and poor, she conquers the heart of the moody Mr.
Rochester who asks her to marry him in Chapter 23.
Almost…
• The marriage (8:10-end)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSWcj9M1
wLE
• So, just on the point of getting married, Jane
Eyre finds out that Mr. Rochester is already
married, and that his wife is still alive.
• But where is she?
The First Wife
(Chapter 26)
•
•
The madwoman in the attic: (start/2:00)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4liBKwBBKM
• “Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and
maniacs through three generations. Her mother, the Creole, was
both a madwoman and a drunkard!--as I found out after I had wed
the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before.”
• [...]
• “bound to a bad, mad, and embruted partner”
• [...]
• “In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran
backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human
being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all
fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it
was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild
as a mane, hid its head and face.”
The Fire
(Chapter 36)
• And what happens to Bertha?
• Bertha gives fire to the house and dies in the
fire: (3:40,30/5:10)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4liBK
wBBKM
A Masterpiece of the Western Canon
•
•
•
•
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been considered a potentially subversive text
because of its social and political position.
Jane Eyre is a young woman, orphan and low born, who fights for
emancipation and liberty. She wants to lead her life independently without any
external control.
Jane manages to provide herself with a lower middle class education, which
enables her to be independent enough to earn a moderate income as a
teacher.
As a partner of Mr. Rochester, she rejects his despotism, characteristic of a male
aristocrat of his era, and is reluctant to be his subordinate. She questions
women’s position in society with regard to working rights and equal
opportunities. She does not comply with the conventional norm which
forces women to be restricted to the domestic sphere only. On the contrary
she wants to take full advantage of her keen intellect, as a man in her
position would normally do. Above all, she, a servant, marries her master, thus
disturbing the social order.
–
From Nikos Karkavelias, Bertha must be kept silent, 2001, http://www.qub.ac.uk/imperial/carib/Berthasilent.htm
Chapter 23:
• "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an
independent will, which I now exert to leave you." [...]
•
"My bride is here," he said, again drawing me to him, "because my equal is here,
and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"
Feminist Critique and Post-colonial perspectives
•
•
•
•
•
From The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, 2002
p. 172 “Women in many societies have been relegated to the position of “Other”,
marginalized and, in a metaphorical sense, “colonized” [...] They share with
colonized races and peoples an intimate experience of the politics of oppression
and repression, and like them they have been forced to articulate their
experiences in the language of their oppressors. Women, like post-colonial
peoples, have had to construct a language of their own when their only
available “tools” are those of the “colonizer”.
Remember Virginia Woolf?
p. 173 “both feminist and post-colonial critics have reread the classic texts [...]
demonstrating clearly that a canon is produced by the intersection of a number
of readings and reading assumptions legitimized in the privileging hierarchy of
a “patriarchal” or “metropolitan” concept of “literature. [...] to change the canon is
to do more than change the legitimate texts. It is to change the condition of
reading for all texts.”
p. 191 “Some contemporary critics have suggested that post-colonial is more
than a body of texts produced within post-colonial societies, and that it is best
conceived as a reading practice.”
Feminist Critique and Post-colonial
perspectives
•
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination,
published
in
1979,
examines
Victorian
literature
from
a feminist perspective. Authors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw their title
from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's mad wife Bertha stays locked in
the attic.
•
Bertha becomes the symbol of the female characters in English fiction, victims of society
whose stories are forced to silence and told uniquely by male points of view.
•
At this stage, we are ready to try to reread Bertha’s story from a post-colonial perspective.
A Post-colonial “rereading”
• The first question is: Who really is the madwoman in the attic?
• And consequently: Was she really mad?
– If so, was she mad from the beginning? Then why did Rochester marry
her?
– Or when did she become mad?
– If not, why does he pretend she is?
• Is Rochester a reliable narrator?
• What really happened before?
• What can we imagine of Bertha’s past life?
• And finally, is Bertha her real name?
A Postcolonial Re-writing:
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
•
•
•
Jean Rhys was always troubled by the portrayal of the Caribbean Creole in
Bronte's novel, and in her novel she tried to give voice to the silenced
“Other”: Antoinette (Bertha) Cosway (Mason).
Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, West Indies. Her father, was a
Welsh doctor and mother, Minna Williams was a third-generation
Dominican Creole of Scottish ancestry. Rhys's Creole heritage, her
experiences as a white Creole woman, both in the Caribbean and in
England, influenced deeply her life and writing. Most of Dominica's people
are of African descent. The slavery had ended in the island in 1834.
“Set in Jamaica, Dominica, and England in the 1830s, it explores that
fluid historical era when black and white communities were
adjusting to emancipation.”
–
•
From Moira Ferguson – Sending the Younger Son Across the Wide Sargasso Sea: the New Colonizer Arrives
– 1993, p. 310
The story is set just after the emancipation of the slaves, in that uneasy time
when racial relations in the Caribbean were at their most strained.
Antoinette is descended from the plantation owners. She can be accepted
neither by the negro community nor by the representatives of the colonial
centre. As a white Creole she is nothing. The taint of racial impurity,
coupled with the suspicion that she is mentally imbalanced bring about her
inevitable downfall.
• From Moira Ferguson –
Sending the Younger Son
Across the Wide
Sargasso Sea: the New
Colonizer Arrives –
1993, p. 324
A Postcolonial Re-writing:
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
• But is Antoinette’s the only
silence?
• The re-writing goes further and
proposes different stories: the
voices of the blacks, the
“maroons”, the people who are
entirely forgotten, erased in
Brontë’s novel.
• The character of Christophine,
Bertha’s nurse and housekeeper,
is important as a centre of
alternative power and culture.
• Other secondary characters,
other “maroons” who have
different priorities and interests:
Tia, Daniel Cosway, Amelie.
A Postcolonial Re-writing:
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
• Since writing has long been recognised as one of the
strongest forms of cultural control, the rewriting of
central narratives of colonial superiority is a
liberating act for those from the former colonies.
Rhys's text is a highly sophisticated example of
coming to terms with European perceptions of the
Caribbean creole community.
•
From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966,
Introduction by Angela Smith
• p. vii “The Sargasso Sea lies between Europe and the
West Indies and is difficult to navigate, like the
human situations in the novel.”
• p. xiv “a sense of déjà vu [...] The narrative is both
familiar and unfamiliar, made strange by being seen
mostly from the perspective of the woman who
laughs, yells and acts but never speaks in Brontë’s
novel.”
• p. xxii “The plot is like the Sargasso Sea, where
weeds tangle together and resist being unravelled”
Post-Colonial Themes:
from Colonization to Decolonization, from Slavery
to Freedom
• The novel describes a fundamental element of Caribbean cultural
evolution: the passage from colonization and slavery to decolonization,
independence and nationalist consciousness. See Stuart Hall,
Negotiating Caribbean Identities, p. 282
• Jean Rhys writes a sort of family saga which acts as the representative of
the fate of the Creole people in the Caribbean Islands
• p. 313 “After 1834, when slaves were legally free, planters suicides were
not uncommon. Legal compensation they received often had to be paid
to insistent creditors, and sugar prices rocketed.”
•
From Moira Ferguson – Sending the Younger Son Across the Wide Sargasso Sea: the New Colonizer Arrives – 1993
• p. xxiii “The unspeakable story of human beings claiming, without pity,
to own each other, in slavery, marriage or parenthood, is the revenant
that haunts the novel.”

From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, Introduction by Angela Smith
• p. 129 “mad Creole heiress in the early nineteenth century, whose
dowries were only an additional burden to them: products of an inbred,
decadent, expatriate society, resented by the recently freed slaves whose
superstitions they shared, they (p. 130) languished uneasily in the
oppressive beauty of their tropical surroundings, ripe for exploitation.”

From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, Introduction by Francis Wyndham
Post-Colonial Themes:
Caribbean Diaspora
• p. 282 “If the search for identity always involves a search for
origins, it is impossible to locate in the Caribbean an origin for
its peoples.”
• p. 283 “The melting-pot of the British islands produced
everywhere you look a different combination of genetic
features and factors and in each island elements of other
ethnic cultures are present.”
– Stuart Hall, Negotiating Caribbean Identities
• African inheritance, French, Spanish.
• p. 40 “Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English
descent she may be, but they are not English or European
either.”
– From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
Post-Colonial Themes:
Power
• The novel describes the island in a critical moment in which power
was being negotiated (or, better, contested) between the new
colonizers and the liberated slaves (who considered themselves the
legitimate inhabitants of the island).
• The new colonizer: Rochester
• p. Xii “With the confidence of his belied in his own cultural and
racial superiority he has stolen her spirit and driven her mad”

From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, Introduction by Angela Smith
• The liberated slave: Christophine
• p. 103 “No police here, -she said- No chain gang, no tread machine,
no dark jail either. This is free country and I am a free woman.”
–
From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
• p. 319 “A powerful member of the community, denounces the
political overlord; she exorcises his presence from the community.”
–
From Moira Ferguson – Sending the Younger Son Across the Wide Sargasso Sea: the New Colonizer Arrives – 1993
• (9:20-10:00) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJdUMlghVE&feature=related
Post-Colonial Themes: Language
•
p. Xi “ this isle is full of voices, speaking different languages and different
versions of English and French. Some of the words, such as obeah and zombi,
cannot adequately be translated into English. The culture of most of the
islands’ inhabitants is oral rather than literate.”
•
•
•
•
From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, Introduction by Angela Smith
p. 40 “debased French patois they use in this island.”
p. 104 “She began to mutter to herself. Not in patois. I knew the sound of patois
now. She’s as mad as the other I thought.”
P. 104 “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know.”
•
•
p. 7 “Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of
power is perpetuated.[...] Such power is rejected in the emergence of an
effective post-colonial voice. [...] the discussion of post-colonial writing [...] is
largely a discussion of the process by which the language, with its power, and
the writing, with its signification of authority, has been wrested from the
dominant European culture.”
From The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, 2002
•
•
From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
p. 8 English (Rochester)/ english (Antoinette - Christophine)/patois
From The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, 2002
(4:00-5:00) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lahSwzOAvmQ&feature=related
•
•
•
p. 45: Creole continuum (overlapping dialects and variations of english)
•
From The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, 2002
Post-Colonial Themes: Identity
•
Antoinette/Bertha: no race, no social class, no language, no culture, no property, no roots (orphan),
no name
•
•
Race:
p. 64 “a song about a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here
before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call
us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I
belong and why was I ever born at all.”
•
From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
•
(7:50-8:45) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lahSwzOAvmQ&feature=related
•
•
Social class:
p. 316 “She is, after all, a white creole who sometimes empathizes with ex-slaves.”
•
•
•
From Moira Ferguson – Sending the Younger Son Across the Wide Sargasso Sea: the New Colonizer Arrives – 1993
Culture:
p. 58 “I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or
feel as I did.”

•
•
Name:
p. 94 “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another
name. I know, that’s obeah too.”

•
From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
From Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
p.317 “Antoinette belongs to no one and belongs nowhere.”
•
From Moira Ferguson – Sending the Younger Son Across the Wide Sargasso Sea: the New Colonizer Arrives – 1993
An intertextual Element:
the Fire
• Annette Cosway (Antoinette’s mother) is driven crazy by the fire
of Coulibri estate.
• From freedom (freed slaves) to fire to madness
• p. 315 “Burnt estates became familiar signifiers of historical
resistance and revenge, of a celebratory post-emancipation
landscape.”
–
From Moira Ferguson – Sending the Younger Son Across the Wide Sargasso Sea: the New Colonizer Arrives – 1993
• Antoinette gives fire to Thornfield Hall in order to be set free.
• From madness to fire to freedom.
• (12:00-end)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2A3Y3uno5s&feature=relat
ed