Wide Sargasso Sea

Hello readers! I am Divya Parmar and I warmly welcome you all to read my blog. This blog is a response to the thinking activity which is given by yesha ma'am. In this blog first I will discuss about The "Wide Sargasso Sea" and after that a short introduction about writer. Among the four points, I have chosen the first topic 'Postcolonialism: Postcolonialism: Postcolonial response to Jane Eyre. Hope this blog will help you to read Postcolonial responses. 

"Wide Sargasso Sea" 

Wide Sargasso Sea, novel by Jean Rhys, published in 1966. A well-received work of fiction, it takes its theme and main character from the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The book details the life of Antoinette Mason (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha), a West Indian who marries an unnamed man in Jamaica and returns with him to his home in England. Locked in a loveless marriage and settled in an inhospitable climate, Antoinette goes mad and is frequently violent. Her husband confines her to the attic of his house at Thornfield. Only he and Grace Poole, the attendant he has hired to care for her, know of Antoinette’s existence. The reader gradually learns that Antoinette’s unnamed husband is Mr. Rochester, later to become the beloved of Jane Eyre. 

  

Much of the action of the novel takes place in the West Indies. The first and third sections are narrated by Antoinette, the middle section by her husband. 

Jean Rhys :

Jean Rhys, original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, (born August 24, 1890, Roseau, Dominica, Windward Islands, West Indies—died May 14, 1979, Exeter, Devon, England), West Indian novelist who earned acclaim for her early works set in the bohemian world of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s but who stopped writing for nearly three decades, until she wrote a successful novel set in the West Indies. 

The daughter of a Welsh doctor and a Creole mother, Rhys lived and was educated in Dominica until she went to London at the age of 16 and worked as an actress before moving to Paris. There she was encouraged to write by the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Her first book, a collection of short stories, The Left Bank (1927), was followed by such novels as Postures (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). 

After moving to Cornwall she wrote nothing until her remarkably successful Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that reconstructed the earlier life of the fictional character Antoinette Cosway, who was Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Tigers Are Better-Looking, with a Selection from the Left Bank (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976), both short-story collections, followed. Smile Please, an unfinished autobiography, was published in 1979. 

What is postcolonialism? 

postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism. 

Postcolonialism signals a possible future of overcoming colonialism, yet new forms of domination or subordination can come in the wake of such changes, including new forms of global empire. Postcolonialism should not be confused with the claim that the world we live in now is actually devoid of colonialism. 

Postcolonial theorists and historians have been concerned with investigating the various trajectories of modernity as understood and experienced from a range of philosophical, cultural, and historical perspectives.

 They have been particularly concerned with engaging with the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment—as expressed in social, political, economic, scientific, legal, and cultural thought—beyond Europe itself. The legacy is ambiguous, according to postcolonial theorists, because the age of Enlightenment was also an age of empire, and the connection between those two historical epochs is more than incidental. 

 Postcolonialism: postcolonial response to Jane Eyre

Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best-known literary postcolonial replies to the writing of Charlotte Bronte and a brilliant deconstruction of what is known as the author’s “worlding” in Jane Eyre . The novel written by Jean Rhys tells the story of Jane Eyre’s protagonist, Edward Rochester. The plot takes place in the West Indies where Rochester met his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason. Wide Sargasso Sea influences the common reading and understanding of the matrix novel, as it rewrites crucial parts of Jane Eyre. 

The heroine in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea , Antoinette Cosway, is created out of demonic and bestialic Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. Rhys's great achievement in her re-writing of Bronte's text is her creation of a double to the madwoman from Jane Eyre . 

The heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea, the beautiful Antoinette Cosway, heiress of the post-emancipation fortune is created out of the demons and bestialic Bertha Mason. The author transforms the first Mrs Rochester into an individual figure whose madness is caused by imperialistic and patriarchal oppression. The vision of Bertha/Antoinette as an insane offspring from a family plagued by madness is no longer plausible to the reader. 

Although Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre seem to be enemies and contradictory characters in the Victorian novel, many critics find several similarities between the two heroines, their life and finally between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea . Seeing Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway as sisters and doubles is very popular with some critics who dealt with the works of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys. Nevertheless. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” also appreciates Jean Rhys for telling the story of Bertha Mason through the Creole perspective, but she criticises the author for marginalising the native inhabitants of West Indies.