Comparing and Contrasting the Feminist Qualities of Jane Eyre

And Wide Sargasso Sea

Introduction

Wide Sargasso Sea was Jean Rhys's effort to rewrite, or more accurately, to elaborate on and complicate, the history presented by Charlotte Brontë's classic novel, Jane Eyre. The eponymous protagonist of Jane Eyre develops into a fiercely independent, self-assured, moral, and passionate young woman.

Thesis Statement

The protagonist of Rhys's text is the character who Jane will know later only as Rochester's lunatic wife who is locked in the attic. Rhys explores this character who Brontë herself acknowledged was left somewhat unexplained (Thorpe 175).

Discussion

This exploration takes the form of a three part narrative, the middle part being in the first person voice of Rochester (although he is never named), the other two being the voice of Antoinette (who will later become the madwoman Bertha of Jane Eyre). This narrative structure skews ideals of imperialism (and therefore patriarchy) by challenging concepts of narrative authority, particularly of a white male authority, as Rochester is inserted in between Antoinette's two accounts. Antoinette, much like Jane, grows up in a world with little love to offer her. Both women are cared for as children by inattentive and dysfunctional relatives, both lose their first friend, and both have a profoundly isolated and lonely childhood. However, while Jane is able to define herself by rejecting the labels others place on her and form a very sturdy and distinguished identity, Antoinette is baffled by having a body, a life, a spirit. She is ignored by almost all but Josephine and has little interaction with others, which arrests the development of her sense of identity. Schapiro notes that Wide Sargasso Sea "explores a psychological condition of profound isolation and self-division . . . the condition is bound up with another of the novel's characteristically modernist themes: the conviction that betrayal is built into the fabric of life" (84).

Wide Sargasso Sea purposefully problematizes its conceptions of gender. "All women characters in Rhys's fictions are mercilessly exposed to the financial and gendered constraints of an imperial world" (Humm 187). This imperial world is created and controlled by white men. While Jane too is excluded, the result for Antoinette is the development of a forced dependency on the very world that excludes her. She represents a particularly modernist perspective on the suffering of woman: the abstract sense of nothingness Antoinette experiences is so much worse than the concrete and real suffering Jane endures and can therefore deal with and even battle. For Antoinette, even happiness is not real and elicits fear (Rhys 55). The differences between the portrayal of each of these two women's lives significantly changes the way we as readers understand how each novel conceives of womanhood and its associations.

In her essay "Boundaries and Betrayal in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea," Barbara Ann Schapiro presents an analysis of literature which considers the psychological motives and possible diagnoses of characters, as she explains, "the pertinent issue in psychoanalytic literary criticism . . . is a ...