Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea

von Jessica Diebowski

Wide Sargasso Sea: A Postcolonial Rewriting of Brontë's Jane Eyre Without doubt, the Victorian classic Jane Eyre has generated a number of intertexual references. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS) has been regarded as the most famous rewriting of Jane Eyre and a paradigm of postcolonial literature. The novel, a prequel to Brontë's Jane Eyre, tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress living in Jamaica. In remembering the representation of the character Bertha Mason/Rochester in Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys as a postcolonial writer, re-writes Brontë's account of Bertha, Rochester's first wife first, the 'madwoman in the attic' who is denied to have a voice. Thus, Rhys makes use of various narrative devices and techniques, not only to capture the reader's attention, but also in order to present a different version of Bertha. The inquiry the present volume seeks to undertake is not new in the field of postcolonial studies but rather aims at throwing more light on the strategies Rhys uses to rewrite the Victorian classic Jane Eyre.