Making comparisons between two texts is quite an interesting task for students. We have to see both the texts, their narrative, style, character, theme and lots of other things also. So now you understand today's topic. And it is about the comparison between "Jane Eyre" and "Wide Sargasso Sea". So let's start,
First see the brief introduction of Jane Eyre. "Jane Eyre" (originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë, published under the pen name "Currer Bell". The first American edition was published the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman which follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.
Widely considered a classic, this novel gave new truthfulness to the Victorian novel with its realistic portrayal of the inner life of a woman, noting her struggles with her natural desires and social condition.
Now see a brief introduction of "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 Brontë.
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.
Comparison between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
We have basic information now. So let's compare both the novels. Wide Sargasso Sea is both a response and a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, set in the West Indies and imagining the lives of Bertha Mason and her family. Bidisha describes how Jean Rhys’s novel portrays the racial and sexual exploitation at the heart of western civilisation and literature.
∆Intertextuality :-
Reference of a text which is mirrored and reflected in another text, is call intertextuality. So an author influences by a text and creates a new original work of literature by using another existing text. It puts two texts in an interdependent situation so in order to produce meaning, these two texts stand in relation to one another. Intertextuality becomes one of the central ideas of cultural postmodern and contemporary literature.
Jean Rhys writes Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to a nineteen century classic, Charlotte Bronte's Jean Eyre, which has always been one of the greatest novels in English Literature and most popular love stories. Rhys extrapolates events that earlier occurs in Bronte's Jean Eyre. She uses the idea of intertextuality in her novel in order to tell an alternative story of a later novel although she comes from a very different background and presents her novel in a different century in contrast to Bronte. It can be better said that
Wide Sargasso Sea is a hypertext of Jean Eyre.
∆Characters :-
As we all know, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' is a prequel to Jane Eyre. So we connect both the main characters with each other.
Jean Rhys' reinterpretation of Rochester’s and Bertha’s relationship is not at all times compatible with Brontë’s Jane Eyre. As soon as her narration adds depth to Bertha’s personality and transforms her into a human being with a background and feelings, the beast in the attic is no longer a tenable concept. Therefore, Wide Sargasso Sea achieves more than a mere filling in the blank of Bertha’s history. It makes a reader who is familiar with both novels, challenge Rochester’s personality, and inevitably Jane’s judgement as his admirer. Rhys' novel is not so much a prequel to Jane Eyre, as an alternative version of the story. It focuses on the profound differences between Rochester and his wife, who has lived a life so alien to him that communication between the two proves almost impossible. It questions whether Bertha (in this novel Antoinette) carries indeed the sole responsibility for Rochester’s unhappiness. Wide Sargasso Sea suggests that he himself and various external influences contributed to the disastrous ending of their marriage which would eventually drive Bertha into madness.
∆Themes :-
Another thing that Rhys takes from Bronte's Jane Eyre and uses it in Wide Sargasso Sea is the idea of dream which is a prevalent theme in both novels and it foreshadows the future and reflects the suppressed desires and fears of the two heroines in these two works.
Bronte in her novel Jane Eyre uses dreams to express the repressed material in the unconscious mind of Jean as well as foreshadowing a future that finds a way to consciousness. Rhys rewrites Jean Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea by using its theme of dream and diffuses it in every line of her novel. The two characters who are also heroines in these novels see dreams which foreshadow their future, and their lost identities that both of them repress in their unconscious, finds its way to their consciousness in their dreams.
In the novels Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, the theme of loss can be viewed as an umbrella that encompasses the absence of independence, society or community, love, and order in the lives of the two protagonists. They deal with their hardships in diverse ways. However, they both find ways to triumph over their losses and regain their independence.
∆Subject Matter :-
Actually Jean Rhys composes Wide Sargasso Sea as a creative response to Jean Eyre by using one of the postmodern devices, intertextuality. Jean Rhys isn't satisfied with this tragic ending that happens to Bertha and she is not agreeing with the presentation of Bertha Mason, while reading Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. She decides to write a story of Bertha's life.
So she takes the character of Mr. Rochester's first wife, Bertha Who has a secondary role and a minor character in Bronte's novel and makes her major character in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, while she creates a backstory for this major character named her Antoinette also she is sometimes called Bertha by other characters through the course of novel.
Now this question comes to the reader's mind: how can one know that Antoinette and her husband in Wide Sargasso Sea are the same characters in Jane Eyre who are known as Bertha and Rochester?
Through reading the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, it can be seen several times that Antoinette is called Bertha, without any pre-information about this name. So if the reader refers to Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, it can be seen that it has a character named Bertha who is imprisoned by her husband Rochester.
Bronte starts her novel with Jane's life, from her childhood till her maturity, and it is better to say that she writes about the story of Jane. So Rhys takes one of the minor characters of Bronte's novel who named Bertha as the heroine of her novel and gives her another name Antoinette. She starts to write about her life in the form that Bronte did earlier in Jane Eyre, by starting from Antoinette's childhood until her growth to a woman.
∆Women :-
The women in both novels endure a loss of personal freedom, both mental, and physical. Jane Eyre, in her blind infatuation with Mr. Rochester, allows her emotions to enslave her. She realizes her obsession when she states,
"My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol".
(Bronte 241)
By design, Rochester seduces Antoinette and deliberately makes her depend on him.
Christophine, Antoinette’s servant, in a conversation with Rochester accusingly contends
“you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without it. It’s she can’t see the sun any more. Only you she see. But all you want is to break her up.”
(Rhys 153)
After becoming totally enslaved by her feelings for him, Rochester adds insult to injury by physically abusing Antoinette. Her complete and total love for Mr. Rochester, who is passionless and devoid of any empathy, causes her to lose her mind.
Jane and Antoinette’s uninhibited desire to please those whom they love becomes detrimental to their peace of mind. Jane does everything she can to please St. John, her cousin, which ends with her completely paying no heed to her own thoughts and feelings.
Jane similarly leaves Rochester when she finds out about his deceit. When Antoinette realizes Rochester does not love her, she scorns him. Although the two women are fundamentally different people, they face many similar challenges throughout their lives. Jane and Antoinette respond to each type of loss they experience differently, and these choices ultimately demonstrate Jane’s inner strength and Antoinette’s inherent vulnerability, resulting in two very different endings, one happy and the other tragic.
∆Cultural Differences :-
The title of Jean Rhys’s last novel is a powerful metaphor for the main problem its protagonists face. An oval shaped area of the North Atlantic, the Sargasso Sea lies between the Azores and the West Indies,
“dividing and uniting Europe and the Caribbean”.
(Sternlicht, 104)
Wide Sargasso Sea clearly focuses on the dividing qualities of the waters and the disparity of its opposite shores. The manifold differences become more and more apparent in the run of Rochester’s and Antoinette’s relationship.
∆Patriarchy and colonialism :-
Charlotte Bronte’s famous Victorian novel, Jane Eyre, tells the story of a young plain governess who possesses intelligence, self-confidence, a will of her own, and moral righteousness. Bronte is consistently in her novel concerned with male and female equality, and love which created the pairing of these equals. In Jane Eyre, an apparently hopeless and horrible maniac character is locked in the attic by her husband Rochester. The character is Bertha Mason, Rochester’s West-Indian-born wife. Bertha in the novel is portrayed as an intrusion and a barrier to Jane’s marriage. On first reading, it seems that the character Bertha, so unsympathetically portrayed, is merely used to add to the dramatic tension of the novel. Some critics, however, such as Gilbert and Cubar see a deeper role for the character suggesting in The Madwoman in the Attic that Bertha characterized Jane’s ungoverned passion and rage. She is like the young Jane in the Red Room, early in the novel, locked in solitary confinement, and thus presenting a monstrous equivalent to Jane’s dark self. This is an interesting perspective from which one might view the character, Bertha.
However, it is also possible to re-consider Bertha’s role from the fresh perspective of patriarchy and colonial society. Kucich says in Jane Eyre and Imperialism that “Jane Eyre represents British Colonialist issues more strikingly than most other 19th century domestic novels”. Every woman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome oppression. Being not only a woman but also a West-Indian, that is a white Creole, Bertha experienced both women’s oppression and racial prejudice.
Bertha Mason in the attic served as a warning to other rebelling women against the patriarchy social restraints. Her situation indicated that all women must accept the social restraints in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. However in more recent times, Jean Rhys, a white Creole herself, wrote the story Wide Sargasso Sea from the point of view of Bertha’s view. The story is in many ways a re-evaluation of Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea to show how Bronte’s novel excluded the parallel plight of the Creole woman, Bertha Mason. Consequently, Jean Rhys gave a strong voice to Bertha Mason in the story. Bertha is not Bertha in Jane Eyre but Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. She is no longer a horrible mad woman in the dark attic, instead, she is a very lively Creole girl with her own spirits, thoughts and love.
Through her portrayal of the relationship between Rochester and Antoinette, Jean Rhys made the implications of patriarchy and colonialism much clearer in Wide Sargasso Sea. The story of Bertha Mason was reconstructed through a perspective of feminism. Wide Sargasso Sea broke the authority of patriarchy and colonialism. Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea was a villain who was totally opposite to the revering image of Rochester Bronte had portrayed in Jane Eyre. Jennings stated that
“Bertha is a victim of her husband’s and her society’s double standards as much as and more than Jane”.
∆Gothic Elements :-
Another thing which connects wide Sargasso Sea to Jean Eyre is the use of Gothic features. Rhys is inspired by Bronte and powerfully makes use of Gothic elements in her novel, which are prevalent in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre was published in the middle of nineteen century, before the time of Jane Eyre, in the early nineteen century, Gothic novels were in fashion. So Bronte was influenced by Gothic novels while she was writing Jane Eyre and she uses Gothic Features in her novel.
All these elements of Gothicism are used in Jane Eyre to create a sense of spooky, horror and psychological suspense in the reader's mind. Rhys, inspired by Bronte's novel, also wants to create this feeling of suspense and frightening in the reader, and she takes gothic elements from Jane Eyre and brings them to Wide Sargasso Sea. Not only Rhys echoes the elements of Gothicism but also she builds them up in her novel. The atmosphere of Wide Sargasso Sea is full of superstitious Caribbean beliefs of Christophine about obeah and magic which gives the reader an idea of the supernatural and this is shown in the novel when Antoinette wants a love potion from Christophine.
∆Feminism and Postcolonialism :-
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys uses the Brontë novel as a pre-text for relocating and reinscribing, to use Bhabha’s terms, Antoinette/Bertha in a story of her own. The narrative is divided into three parts: the first, which covers Antoinette’s childhood and youth up to her marriage to Rochester, is told by the protagonist herself; in the second Rochester describes his arrival in the West Indies, his marriage and the disastrous relationship with Antoinette; the third and final part is again narrated by the protagonist, from her confinement on the third floor of Thornfield Hall.
By giving voice to both Antoinette and Rochester, Rhys mobilizes two different and opposed subjectivities, thus enacting a dramatic conflict both on the level of male-female relations and on that between the colonizer and the colonized. But this conflict is not as clear-cut as it may at first appear. As Rochester himself remarks about his arranged marriage,
“I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks”
(RHYS, 1966: 59)
In the luxuriant ambience of the West Indies, where the narrative begins, both characters display an unsettling ambivalence. Even though Rochester upholds the masculinist and colonialist discourse of power and domination, as he has after all succeeded in marrying a beautiful rich heiress from the colonies, he is affected by the new and strangely complex environment in more ways than one. Developing a fever immediately after his arrival, the illness makes it even more difficult for him to understand the local social behavior, especially that of the former slaves.
Antoinette is still more ambivalent, both in racial and in social terms. The daughter of a white father and a Creole mother, she is part of a decaying colonial aristocracy, now threatened by a black majority of freed slaves. The power scheme in West Indian society is, thus, more complex than the opposition colonizer/colonized would allow. As Graham Huggan remarks, Antoinette’s status as a Creole
“is not only a mark of personal/social instability, but
also a model for the destabilization of a set of binary constructs (white/black, insider/outsider, and so forth) which provides a spurious rationalization in Wide Sargasso Sea for the self-privileging practices of colonial power”
(HUGGAN, 1994: 657).
So we can say that both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea represent the voice of women in any historical period of protesting patriarchy and oppression. No matter whether in the 19th century or in the 20th century, women continue their search for independence and equality with men. Bertha Mason is a typical representation of women as victims of both patriarchy and colonialism.
Through rethinking Bertha Mason in these two novels, we can understand that there is not only one way to interpret one literary work. It is our ways of seeing and knowing literary work that make things different. Feminist criticism is a topical contemporary literature theory. However, it is also just one way to look at literature. As readers, we should learn to use a range of literature theory to look more deeply into literature works and learn to read critically.
