On the Making History website, Miri Rubin characterises this practice as ‘an approach which considers the domain of representation and the struggle over meaning.’ The novel is a valuable source because it highlights how the shifting ideologies of race and gender intersect with each other to create dominant cultural representations that remain so influential today.ĭissatisfied with Brontë’s portrait of the Caribbean as a Dominican-born white Creole, Rhys rewrote Antoinette’s story, bringing the marginalised elements of Jane Eyre to the centre. Wide Sargasso Sea ’s examination of the impact that colonial ideologies of race, gender, and class have on a personal relationship is highly relevant to the practice of cultural history. This idea of the importance of alternative narratives inspired my university studies on history, gender and the complexities of cross-cultural interactions. I found this ‘other side’ by accident, and I felt frustrated that I had stumbled on the book by sheer luck and not through my academic curriculum. One important line struck me: ‘There is always the other side, always.’ (106) I first encountered the novel when I was seventeen, five years after I had studied Jane Eyre at school, reading all its vivid, hallucinatory, and disturbing 156 pages in one sitting. She becomes Brontë’s ‘intemperate and unchaste’ creation who thwarts Jane’s marriage to Rochester, spiralling into madness and, eventually, arson and suicide (Brontë 270). In Rhys’ version of the story, Antoinette’s marriage to an unnamed Englishman in the 1830s unravels dramatically following revelations of her mother’s alleged promiscuity and mental disintegration. Rhys wrote the novel in response to Brontë’s oblique representation of the Caribbean and Mr Rochester’s first wife, investigating processes of oppression through the character of Antoinette Mason, renamed Bertha by her husband as a means of controlling her identity.
Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966) by Jean Rhys is a dark, compelling novel that charts the backstory of the infamous ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), exploring themes of colonialism, gender, and power. Then we are there.There is always the other side, always (Rhys 106) She said, ‘After this we go down then up again. It was cold, pure and sweet, a beautiful colour against the thick green leaf. This is mountain water.’ Looking up smiling, she might have been any pretty English girl and to please her I drank. The she picked another leaf, folded it and brought it to me. She dismounted quickly, picked a large shamrock-shaped leaf to make a cup, and drank. A bamboo spout jutted from the cliff, the water coming from it was silver blue. Or perhaps it was the first time I had felt simple and natural with her. It was the first time I had seen her smile simply and naturally. ‘This is the boundary of Granbois.’ She smiled at me. Now the sea was a serene blue, deep and dark. We rode on again, silent in the slanting afternoon sun, the wall of trees on one side, a drop on the other. She stopped and called, ‘Put your coat on now.’ I did so and realized that I was no longer pleasantly cool but cold in my sweat-soaked shirt. ‘What bird is that?’ She was too far ahead and did not hear me. Meanwhile the horses jogged along a very bad road. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. None of the furtive shabby manœuvres of a younger son. I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love. No provision made for her (that must be seen to).
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The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition. I looked down at the coarse mane of the horse … Dear Father. I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hill too near.
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Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. They will be at Granbois long before we are.’Įverything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. ‘What a extreme green,’ was all I could say, and thinking of Emile calling to the fishermen and the sound of his voice, I asked about him. There was a soft warm wind blowing but I understood why the porter had called it a wild place. We pulled up and looked at the hills, the mountains and the blue-green sea. On one side the wall of green, on the other a steep drop to the ravine below.