Otherness and alienation are significant features throughout Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Adichie’s “Checking Out” and Phillips’ “Growing Pains”, particularly regarding the race and social class of the characters featured within these texts. In this...

Reflection versus Conversation

The 19th and 20th centuries introduced readers to a variety of prominent authors who are still read today. Two of these prominent and well-read authors from each period include Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys...

Scorching flames, conflagration, burning. The imagery of fire has long been linked to power and passion. Fire can enact complete obliteration, and yet can also forge a new beginning where only scattered ashes of the past remain. The symbolic motif...

Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre are both relatively isolated women struggling to survive in a male-dominated society. Although both women are striving to attain similar goals of happiness, equality, and a sense of...

In the beginning of Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway, a young creole woman, lives in poverty with her mother, Annette, and her brother, Pierre, on the island of Jamaica. In the society in which they live, Antoinette is...

Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1965, and immediately caught the attention of critics. Its publication helped to save Jean Rhys from the obscurity into which she had fallen after her previous novels, published between the First and Second World...

As the cult of domesticity grew during the nineteenth century, society began to fixate on the proper role of a woman. Jean Rhys examines the contradictions and consequences involved in setting such standards through documenting the decline of Jane...

Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from a modern, postcolonial standpoint. Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic” from Bertha Mason’s own point of view. In Jane Eyre, Bertha...

According to Jean Rhys, “The Creole in Charlotte Bronte’s novel is a lay figure—repulsive which does not matter, and not once alive, which does” (Kimmey 113). In Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, the Creole character and Rochester’s deranged wife, Bertha...

In the novella Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, the idea of cultural identity is explored through the symbolic significance of names. Although his name is never stated, it is assumed that the man that Antoinette marries is Rochester based upon the...

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea comes to a tragic end where the protagonist, Antoinette, is left as a mad woman in an attic. Rochester asks “Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”(Rhys 51). It is clear that Antoinette is a beautiful thing with a...

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys uses her female characters predominately in a feminist style. The narrative itself is a rewriting of the literary history of Jane Eyre with a focus on the marginalised Bertha Mason both as a woman, a creole and in her...

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is regarded as a striking Caribbean novel, lying between the world of capitalism and post-Emancipation West Indies. However, many critics frequently tend to overlook the marginality of women in the post-colonial era...

From the witch hunting hysteria of the 17th century, to the biblical belief that all objects touched by a menstruating woman became unclean, female sexuality has been regarded by men with fear and hostility for thousands of years. Accused by...

In life, different variables affect an individual’s growth. These variables can include any aspect of a person’s life, ranging from family influence to personal passions. In the novels Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the authors use certain...

In a first-person narrative reflecting on the past, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Jean Rhys’ expansion thereof, Wide Sargasso Sea, the presentation of the memories which constitute the story immensely affects the thematic impact of the work...

Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the most important post-colonial works that examines the effect of colonialism on Jamaica. Part of this examination is the exploration of how the aftermath of slavery affects Antoinette’s relations with...

“How will you like being made exactly like other people?” is a question that echoes through Antoinette’s mind early within Jean Rhys’s responsive and revisionist text, Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys 22). Constructing her protagonist from Charlotte Brontë...

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006) by Maggie O’Farrell presents the powerlessness of women through Esme’s fate in the institution after her refusal to conform to married life, and also via Kitty’s expectations to become a wife and mother (and...

"I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only...

In Dr. William Harris’s Carnival of Psyche: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, an analysis of Rhys’s 1966 postmodern “prequel” to Jane Eyre, Harris attempts to evaluate the significance of “intuitive myth” on the novel’s psyche. “Attempt,” however, is...

How fragile is identity? “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys challenges this question through the eyes of two characters, Antionette Cosway and Edward Rochester. Set in post-emancipation Jamaica, the novel follows the story of young Antionette, a...

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Dolly by Susan Hill both show connections between humans and the natural world. Rhys presents the rich landscape of postcolonial Jamaica to be difficult to harmonise with yet as able to provide comfort, which is...

In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys weaves the tale of a severely-oppressed woman and her trials through life. Several critics have argued for post-enlightenment, post-colonialism, and identity-based themes in Wide Sargasso Sea, claiming these...