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Both Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' and Jean Rhys' related novel 'Wide Sargasso Sea' use the character of Edward Rochester to reveal limits of patriarchal society and social constructs of masculinity.
This study gains significance as the findings can shed more lights on the postmodern concept of hypertextuality to show that there is no originality in literature and any literary work can be the repetition, continuation, or mixture of previous texts. In the case of this study, that is to show, how a twentieth-century literary work like Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea can be the parody of Brontë’s nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre.
This article by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was influential in introducing a post-colonial discussion and interpretation of Jane Eyre. She discusses the texts Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Frankenstein. Spivak in this essay writes back against feminist theory that focuses on Jane's agency to direct attention to Bertha who is not given this same level of articulation
Lori Pollock writes this article in reaction to the writings of Meyer, Spivak, and Gilbert and Gubar. She argues that Jane Eyre is a more subversive text than other critics have considered it and that it does not just promote imperialism. Additionally, she discusses the way slavery becomes a symbol of oppression. She displays there as being a questioning of British education systems especially in colonies and draws attention to the conflicts between the politics of imperialism and personal identity.
Many readers who are familiar with the Victorian literature are aware of Charlotte Brontē's masterpiece Jane Eyre. In the book, the lunatic lady held locked on the third floor of the house, may have stuck in your mind along with some thought-provoking questions. Who is Bertha Mason in reality? Why is she locked up? Is she really mad or does the narration show her to be a mad woman? And if so, what are the causes of her madness?
The paper focuses on Jean Rhys’s rewriting of the story of the fi rst Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. Taking as her subject the mad woman’s early life in the West Indies, Jean Rhys transforms Charlotte Brontë’s wintry romance into a tropical romance, or liberates the romantic material that is suppressed in Jane Eyre.
Returning to the much-noted relationship between Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and noting the central role of architectural structures in both texts, this essay analyses the ways in which the later novel 'revisits' and 'reinhabits' its forerunner.