Jean Rhys’s Postcolonial Feminist Response to Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Abstract

This article investigates Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a postcolonial feminist rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The study explores that Rhys transforms Bertha Mason, a silenced and racialized figure in Brontë’s novel, into Antoinette Cosway, a complex Creole subject whose history, voice, and displacement expose the connections between patriarchy, colonialism, race, and economic power. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of imperialism, Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, and feminist and postcolonial scholarship, the study analyzes Antoinette’s unstable identity, Rochester’s patriarchal authority, the politics of naming, marriage and confinement, and the representation of madness. Rhys’s narrative technique of giving the marginalized woman a voice while simultaneously raising the question of whether a subaltern voice can be fully recovered is given special attention. The destruction of Thornfield is further interpreted in the article as a vague act of resistance. It comes to the conclusion that Rhys's book challenges the colonial and patriarchal presumptions that enabled Brontë's portrayal of Bertha in the first place rather than merely correcting it.