InWide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys tells the story of a young Creole woman, Antoinette Cosway, growing up on the island of Jamaica. However, you probably know her as Jane Eyre‘s Bertha Mason, the iconic “mad woman in the attic.” We follow Antoinette as she tries to navigate racial tensions, her ultimately doomed marriage to Rochester, and the many problems in her family. In Jane Eyre, Bertha is a furious spectre, barely more than a grunting animal trying to scratch our heroine’s eyes out. Wide Sargasso Sea, on the other hand, gives Antoinette a voice, her own story to tell, and even her own name (I’ll come back to this).
If you have ever taken any class that touched on postcolonialism in literature in your life, you know this title. Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the ultimate must-read titles in the field, a work that other postcolonial rewritings of classic literature are measured by; this is how it’s done. As a fan of both Jane Eyre and reworkings/reimaginings of well-known stories, it is downright embarrassing that I have not read this novel until now. However, when I came across a copy in a second-hand bookstore, I decided that it was finally time to correct this oversight. So did it live up to the hype?
You said I was a liar. I’m not. If I were I’d have said I loved you, and I don’t. I dislike you less than anybody in the world. People think you are good, but you are bad, and hard-hearted. I will let everyone know what you have done.
Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.
Meanwhile Emily Brönte just said “We can make each otherworse.”
Mary Shelley said, “I can make him
Charlotte Brontë said "he is the worst but I love him”.
so Charlotte Bronte read Emma by Jane Austen and was really interested in this minor character named Jane Fairfax who was poor and would have been a governess had she not married well and then Bronte wrote her own novel exploring the plight of the poor governess who married this guy named Edward Fairfax Rochester in a novel called Jane Eyre and my point is don’t let anyone tell you shit about fanfiction.
Villette. Charlotte Brontë. Penguin Classics, 1980 (first published 1853).
After an unspecified family disaster, protagonist Lucy Snowe travels to the fictional city of Villette to teach at an all-girls school where she is unwillingly pulled into both adventure and romance. The novel is celebrated not so much for its plot as its acute tracing of Lucy’s psychology, particularly Brontë’s use of Gothic doubling to represent externally what her protagonist is suffering internally.
I don’t get emotional about literature much, but when I do, it’s over Jane Eyre’s ‘Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and little that I am soulless and heartless?’ speech. Charlotte Brontë wrote that for ugly girls everywhere.
