The Fullness of Female Presentation in Wide Sargasso Sea Anonymous College

Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea can be regarded as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian realist novel Jane Eyre which liberates the marginalized. Rhys’ text fixes the problem of perspective between Jane, the Angel in the House, and Bertha Mason, the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ by giving Bertha’s story of life before Thornfield that is denied to us by Brontë’s narrator. Rhys achieves this aim in Wide Sargasso Sea through the depiction of a militant female subject whose battle for individualism is prohibited by the world she inhabits. Rhys’ depiction of settings, colonialism and domestic cruelty help present the reader with the life of a ‘poor ghost’ that lurks in the margins of Jane Eyre without ever being given the agency to express her own biography.

Rhys presents the natural landscape of Wide Sargasso Sea as a mysterious force that is threatening its protagonist and offers insight into the reality of Bertha Mason’s concealed life. A type of narrative fatalism is established through setting whereby Antoinette’s life is silenced from birth to death. This is evident from the opening of the novel with the imagery of the convent where Antoinette spends her adolescence. Antoinette’s first-person narrative describes the...