Wide Sargasso Sea 901group thinking over those that would celebrate and
encourage individual expression.
Michael Little
rHyS, JEaN Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
It was a radio broadcast of Jean Rhys’s novel Good
Morning, Midnight (1939) in 1958 that led to a
renewed interest in the author. The popularity she
had enjoyed prior to World War II had faded, but in
1966 she published her masterpiece: Wide Sargasso
Sea. The novel takes as its protagonist Bertha Roch-
ester—renamed Antoinette Cosway—the “‘mad-
woman in the attic’” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
eyre (1847), although the only point at which the
two narratives are made directly intertextual is in
the final conflagration of Rochester’s home. Indeed,
Wide Sargasso Sea is framed by fire: Antoinette’s
childhood home is set alight by her stepfather’s
angry employees, and Rhys burned the first manu-
script during an argument with her husband.
Antoinette’s is the story of the marginalized
Other, the woman pushed to the edges of Roches-
ter’s house and the limits of the text. Throughout
the novel’s three sections, Rhys draws the passion
and loneliness of a girl who is always an outsider,
her family isolated by social class and race. These
differences later epitomize the threat of madness,
femininity, and the exotic which Rochester fears,
desires, and seeks to dominate. The novel is influ-
enced by Rhys’s own girlhood in Dominica and the
complex societal relations she witnessed between
the British colonizers and the black and white
Creole populations. However, it is Rhys’s reading
of the implicit attitudes to race, gender, madness,
memory, and the postcolonial in Brontë’s text which
most clearly subverts and reinscribes elements of
the dominant discourse and Victorian attitudes to
the Other.
Jessica Gildersleeve
Gender in Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s
novel Jane Eyre, revealing its marginalized discourse
of Antoinette Cosway, the first Mrs. Rochester. Jean
Rhys gives voice to the silenced Other ignored by
canonical Victorian literature through her explora-
tion of Antoinette/Bertha, the “madwoman in the
attic.” Rhys questions the oppositions inherent in
British patriarchal culture: those of class, race and,
significantly, gender. The novel makes clear the
dominance of Rochester’s language in the narrative
structure to demonstrate the Victorian doctrines
that silence Antoinette. That is, although the nar-
rative is divided between Antoinette and the delib-
erately unnamed Rochester, the voice of the latter
makes up the greater bulk of the novel and forms its
central third; the words of Antoinette are pushed to
the margins.
Jane Eyre is often described as a feminist text,
lauded for its brave exploration of the independent
and determined young Jane. However, Rhys was
uncomfortable with Brontë’s depiction of the first
Mrs. Rochester locked in the attic, her dark strange-
ness exiled to the attic. Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys
decided, would tell Bertha’s story: the young Creole
woman’s passion for an increasingly suspicious and
bitter man, who makes her a slave to his love and
sends her mad. The novel describes the construction
and destruction of female identity. For example,
Rhys demonstrates the way in which the several
names by which Antoinette is known disturb her
identity: “I often wonder who I am and where is my
country and where do I belong and why was I ever
born at all.” Born Antoinette Cosway, her surname is
changed to Mason after her mother’s marriage and
to Rochester after her own. Her husband insists on
calling her Bertha because he has discovered that
Antoinette was the name of his wife’s mother, but
also to demonstrate his power over her: “You are
trying to make me into someone else, calling me by
another name. I know, that’s obeah too.” The altera-
tions to her name mark shifts in Antoinette’s iden-
tity, from frightened girl to beautiful young woman,
from happy wife to raging madwoman. “Names
matter,” Antoinette reflects; indeed, they reflect the
patriarchal power structures underpinning the novel
and 19th-century life.
The attitude of the British colonizer is echoed in
Rochester’s treatment of Antoinette and his desire
to make her “mine.” The island, like Antoinette, is
strange and alien to Rochester. Its night is “[n]ot
night or darkness as I knew it but night with blazing
stars, an alien moon—night full of strange noises.”