Otherwise, why did she take a West Indian for that horrible lunatic, for that really dreadful creature? I hadn’t really formulated the idea of vindicating the mad woman in the novel but when i was rediscovered, I was encouraged to do so.’ I was convinced that Charlotte Bronte must have always had something against the West Indies and I was angry about it.
‘The mad wife of of Jane Eyre has always interested me. Rhys appears to have added a more personal approach in her writing of Wide Sargasso Sea as she is a woman born to a mother of Creole descent and she herself grew up on the island of Dominica.
This opinion is backed up by Rhys herself as she stated in many interviews that she would like the express the pleasant life Bertha could of had rather than the one she was given by Bronte in which she is imprisoned and seen as a deranged burden to her compassionless husband Rochester. Rhys’ seems to focus specifically on the portrayal of Bertha through the character of Antoinette Cosway within her novel. ‘If Wide Sea Sargasso in some ways violently decomposes the topographic and textual structures of Jane Eyre through various modes of geopolitical dispersal and displacement, this in itself a re-inhabiting of the modes of displacement internal to the workings of structure in Jane Eyre.’ Many see Rhy’s novel as an overall critical review of Bronte’s Jane Eyre ‘For while Wide Sargasso Sea pays respectful homage to Jane Eyre, it is primarily a critique: the previously silent madwoman speaks, and in the process exposes and inverts the patriarchal and colonialist presumptions and value systems around which the thematics of the precursor text coalesce.’ ‘When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make, Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful mad woman and I immediately thought I write the story as it might’ve really been. However, some readers may see this as Wide Sargasso Sea losing some of its meaning since the book is seen as Rhys’ portrayal of Bertha being normal rather than the mad woman she is conveyed as in Jane Eyre. You are able to read Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea on their own without being aware of their connections.
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