李昕桐

辽宁对外经贸学院 辽宁大连 116052

Abstract：Classics rewriting has become an important phenomenon in the 20th and 21st centuries in western literature. Through the analysis of a specific rewritten works, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, this paper will mainly focus on the new insights it offers us.

Key words: Classics rewriting, Post-colonial Perspective, Feminist Perspective

1. Introduction

The prevalence of the classics rewriting causes wild-spread criticism as to its unconventional themes which subvert the classics. However, there are also critics who support the rewriting process; for they think the retold stories provide a different perspective for readers.

Wide Sargasso Sea, a rewriting version of the famous Jane Eyre, has generally been regarded as a highly brilliant and sophisticated example of rewriting colonialist canons. The novel emerges as an attempt to reinvent an identity for Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha Manson. It not only gives a voice to the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, but also shows the double oppressions she suffers from racial prejudice and gender discrimination. Antoinette, later called Bertha, is a victim of both imperialism and patriarchism.

2 From Post-colonial Perspective

Helen Tiffin says that post-colonial counter-discursive strategies involve a mapping of the dominant discourses, a reading and exposing of its underlying assumptions…Wide Sargasso Sea directly contests British sovereignty---of persons, of places, of culture, of language. It reinvests its own hybridized world with a provisionally authoritative perspective (Tiffin 98).

In Jane Eyre, Rochester’s wife, Bertha, only appears four times in the novel and is depicted as a “monster”, and he also describes British’s colony, the West Indies, as “hell” and England as “an ideal heaven”. This actually reveals the suppression of the colony and the colonized people by the British imperialist policy.

However, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhy subverts the doctrine of Jane Eyre and describes the story of the mad woman that has no voice formerly in Bronte’s novel. Rhy reverses the former tale to tell the story from the mad wife’s point of view, displacing the center of interest completely. Thus the mad wife is no longer a horrid colonial secret, a “monster” to be locked away. She is given a voice to tell her story, and she also has logic of her own. Her own version of her marriage effects a complete reversal of Rochester’s one that he tells Jane Eyre. Married against her own will, she is deprived by her husband of her Christian name as well as her fortune, and was even brought into exile. However, by given a voice, she subverts the image of herself in Jane Eyre. She shows the readers that she is not a wild colored monster. She is a human being with her own feelings and thoughts.

Rhy’s description of the Caribbean landscape and culture also subverts the colonial tone in Jane Eyre. Instead of a hellish West Indies of “fiery nights” and hurricanes as described in Jane Eyre, she presents us a hauntingly beautiful earthly Paradise, “a lovely place in any weather, however far I travel I’ll never see a lovelier” (164), as Rochester himself acknowledges.

3 From Feminist Perspective

Spivak has acclaimed that the text of Jane Eyre is “a cult text of feminism” and Jane Eyre is “the feminist individual heroine of British fiction” (Spivak 244). In fact, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, can each be seen as a feminist text when considering their social and historical context. However, Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea is both a post-colonization and post-war work and so reflects the changing status of woman in the twentieth century. Therefore, Wide Sargasso Sea presents a more post-modern form of feminism. The comparison between the characterizations of the heroines can demonstrate the limitation of feminism in Jane Eyre and the outstanding achievement of feminism in Wide Sargasso Sea.

The first difference lies in how Bronte and Rhys deal with women’s issues in their treatment of sex. Bronte ignores the issue of sex as much as possible, while Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea addressed the sexual self much more. Mellown has stated that “Miss Rhys was one of the first women novelists in England to acknowledge a woman’s desire for sexual love…” (Mellown 124). Although Antoinette is terrified of her sexual awakening, and understands that women must be sexually subversive to men, she possesses a desire for her own and demonstrates a certain anxious anticipation for sexual experience. Her passion threatens Rochester, because a proper English wife should never express sexual yearning, nor should she cause her husband to lose caution and make him “breathless and savage with desire” (Rhys 96).

Another major difference is that both Jane and Antoinette are distressed by issue of self-defining posed by being a woman in a male-dominated society, but they deal with this dilemma in different ways. Jane’s self-realization is incomplete for she continues to repress her true identity in the face of Rochester’s patriarchy. This can be seen from the end of Jane Eyre; she serves Rochester in numerous ways, and therefore can never escape his patriarchal authority. Antoinette, by contrast, achieves self-realization through her madness. Antoinette’s madness allows her to be free from Rochester’s authority. As a women existing outside the restrictions of society, Antoinette possesses self-agency. She finally refuses to acknowledge Rochester’s patriarchal control and chooses her own fate.

Thus, Wide Sargasso Sea has not only infused the spirit of modern feminism into the older feminism of Jane Eyre, but also has also injected it with the fresh life and supplemented it with depth.

4. Conclusion

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys seeks to recreate the story of Antoinette Cosway, the Jamaican mad wife of Rochester in Jane Eyre. In telling her story, Rhys gives voice to the previously unheard mad woman. Previously described as a monster, as violent, insane and promiscuousl, Antoinette is recreated as a sympathetic and vulnerable young woman who finally successfully escapes from Rochester’s patriarchy through her madness. From a different perspective, Wide Sargasso Sea explores the race relations between black and white and the status of women.

Bibliography

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000.

Mellown, Elgin W. “Characters and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys”. Contemporary Women Novelist: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry. 12.1 (1985): 243-261.

Tiffin, Helen, Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Popular Library, 1966.