Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre an
How and why are selected canonical texts re-written by female authors? Answer with close reference to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea is a relatively still sea, lying within the south-west zone of the North Atlantic Ocean, at the centre of a swirl of warm ocean currents. Metaphorically, for Jean Rhys, it represented an area of calm, within the wide division between England and the West Indies. Within such an area, a sense of stability, permanence and identity may be attained, despite the powerful, whirling currents which surround it. But outside of this ‘sea’, one may be destabilised, drawn away by these outside forces, into the vast expanse of ‘ocean’ between the West Indies and Europe. Outside of these metaphorical and geographical oceanic areas, one may become the victim of these currents, subject to their vagaries and fluctuations, no longer able to personally define, with any certainty, where one is culturally or geographically located. For Jean Rhys, Jane Eyre depicted representations of a Creole woman and West Indian history which she knew to be inaccurate. ‘Bertha Mason is mad; and she came from a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations. Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!’ She is further described as having a ‘discoloured face’, ‘a savage face’ with ‘fearful blackened inflation’ of the features, ‘the lips were swelled and dark’; described as a demon, witch, vampire, beast and hyena1. But nowhere in the novel does Bronte allow ‘the madwoman in the attic’ to have a voice, to explain what may have caused her madness. Rhys says: ‘The mad wife in Jane Eyre always interested me. I was convinced that Charlotte Bronte must have had something against the West Indies and I was angry about it. Otherwise, why did she take a West Indian for that
References: ANGIER, Carole: Jean Rhys London, Penguin, 1992. BAER, Elizabeth. R: ‘The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway’, in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, eds The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development London, University Press of New England, 1983, pp.131-149. BOUMELHA, Penny: ‘Jane Eyre, Jamaica and the Gentleman’s House’, Southern Review, 21 July 1988. BRONTE, Charlotte: Jane Eyre Middlesex, Penguin, 1994. ERWIN, Lee: ‘Like a Looking Glass’: History and Narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea in Novel, Winter 1989 HAVELY, Cicely Palser: Wide Sargasso Sea: Real and Imagined Islands BBC TV, 1998. NEWMAN, Julie: ‘I Walked With a Zombie’, in The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions London, Arnold, 1995. RHYS, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea London: Penguin, 1997.