Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

 Thinking Activity: Wide Sargasso Sea

This blog is the response to the thinking activity task assigned by Yesha madam. In this blog, I am going to write on Post Colonial context of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. 

Jean Rhys,  (born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she was mainly resident in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her writing

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest world in his mansion. Antoinette is caught in a patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica. The Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation.

What is Post Colonialism?

"Postcolonialism... involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects"

According to the glossary of literary terms by M.H. Abrams,

The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature, and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have focused especially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean islands, and South America.

Wide Sargasso Sea: Post Colonial Reading:

A postcolonial reading of Wide Sargasso Sea would focus on the ways in which the novel deconstructs the colonial narratives of the West Indies. In particular, the novel challenges the portrayal of the region as a paradise for white settlers. Instead, it shows the reality of life for the indigenous people, who were oppressed and exploited by the colonialists. The novel also highlights the hypocrisy of the colonialists, who claimed to be civilizing the region while simultaneously engaging in atrocities.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel by Jean Rhys that was published in 1966. The novel is set in the 1800s and tells the story of a woman named Antoinette Cosway, who is of Creole descent. The novel is a postcolonial reading of Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys presents a different perspective of the Caribbean than what was typically seen in literature at the time. She portrays the islanders as complex and multi-dimensional people, rather than the one-dimensional characters that were often seen in novels set in the Caribbean. Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be one of the most important works of postcolonial literature.

This novel is divided into three parts. The first part takes place in Colibri, a sugar plantation in Jamaica, and is narrated by Antoinette as a child. 

The Second part alternates between the points of view of Antoinette and her husband during their honeymoon excursion to her mother's summer estate Granbois, Dominica. 

Part Three is the shortest part of the novel; it is from the perspective of Antoinette, renamed by her husband Bertha.

Rhys uses these multiple voices to tell the story or retell the story with that of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre was a romantic novel, it didn't hold any postcolonial arguments like what Rhys has done with her novel. The novel also is a feminist work as it deals with the inequality between men and women. While Jane Eyre only interprets the White perspective and Rhys decides to write a prequel rather than a sequel to Jane Eyre, which describes the white creoles and blacks' perspective.