In addition to using protagonists as copies of an earlier cast (Antoinette Cosway Mason is Bertha Mason,
her unnamed husband is Mr. Rochester), she extends these apparent relationships to other minor characters.
Family ties
Mr. Mason, the Englishman who marries Antoinette’s mother, has been named after Bertha’s brother; and
the woman who is paid to look after the mad Bertha is named Grace Poole in both texts. Both Brontë’s and
Rhys's Rochesters have been sent (displaced!) into an alien, colonial culture for financial reasons, since
elder brothers inherited the family estate.
In a similar sense, both brides have married an Englishman to restore the family to the identity and stability
of the dominant social order.
Three families
The Cosways
Mr. Alexander Cosway Pierre
Mrs. Annette Cosway Sandi
Daniel
Antoinette
The Rochesters
Mr. Rochester (Father)
Mr. Rochester (Son)
Antoinette
The daughter of ex-slave owners Grows up with neither her mother’s love nor
Sensitive and lonely young Creole girl friends
Married to an Englishman Inherited emotional fragility
Annette
Antoinette’s husband
Antoinette’s unnamed English husband. He was very angry after discovered that
The youngest son of a wealthy Englishman Antoinette used black magic
He is pressured into marrying Antoinette to him.
Got married because of wealth
Christophine Dubois
A very loyal black servant. A wise and ageless figure who practices obeah
From Martinique (black magic).
Treated as an outsider by the Jamaican servant A wedding gift from Mr. Alexander Cosway to
women. Annette.
Neighbours or friends
Mr. Lutrell Sister Marie Augustine
Louise da Plana Caroline
Mother st. Justine Cousin Julia, Cousin Ada, Aunt Lina
Follow-up in reverse
Having applied her own approach to the issue of the surpressed ‘Other’ in Victorian fiction, Rhys continues
her follow-up by seemingly going back in time and space, thus reversing in various ways the absent or
omitted segments from Brontë’s novel by concentrating on her creative re-interpretation of events and
characters that had far-reaching effects on the life and fate of this minor and neglected character.
Double and even triple oppression
Through her creation of Antoinette Cosway, Rhys creates a parallel character to Bertha Mason of Brontë
with the intention of creating a different, not altogether naïve character, quite different from the horrific mad
woman in the attic.
The madness of Bertha, or in other words, previously uknown Antoinette, is totally related to the double
and even triple oppression that she suffers as a woman from the patriarchy and as a Creole woman in the
West Indies, the burden that places her just in-between sneering white English society and newly
emancipated slaves.
New kind of narrative universe
At the same time, Rhys subtly makes a number of striking comparisons between Jane Eyre and Antoinette
by presenting some details that both characters seem to have shared without being aware that their life
stories – from childhood to the point of marrying the same person – can be seen as spectral reflections.
This mirroring technique brings two texts to a much closer level, where, in the intertwined narratives, they
happen to form a new kind of narrative universe that emerges on the surface.
A multiple narrative
In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys shifts the perspective on Jane Eyre by expressing the viewpoints of the
different characters in the source material, so taking a different structural approach to the first-person
narrative technique employed by Brontë.
She wrote her version as a multiple narrative, giving Bertha a previously-unheard voice.
Antoinette’s narration
The sections narrated by Antoinette in the first, with some segments of the second, and, finally, in the third
part, where she emerges to the narrative surface again as Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester although her
husband keeps calling her Bertha, are given in the past tense.
They might appear to have been written in England, at Thornfield Hall of Jane Eyre, in an isolated country
mansion of unspecified size, with a number of apparently unused rooms that become important to the
narrative during the 'Bertha Mason' passages. They can also be understood as Antoinette's recollections
during her rare moments of lucidity at Thornfield Hall
However, if one compares the narrative of either Antoinette in her native, Caribbean setting with the one of
her English husband, and, again, the way Rochester presents his character once back to his normal habitat
in England in relation to Antoinette/Bertha’s lunatic outbursts in the same setting; many differences can be
observed.
Un-named “Rochester”
Rochester, even though un-named in Wide Sargasso Sea, takes over the narration in part two, and Grace
Poole enlightens us at the opening of part three. Rhys can be seen as repaying Brontë for her failure to give
Bertha a voice by not allowing Jane one, even though she does appear in the novel.
Antoinette, as Bertha is named in Rhys' novel, declares: 'There is always the other side', and this proves
to be the governing theme throughout both novels.
Subversive features
Wide Sargasso Sea as the experimental novel that can be safely described as "literary fiction," subverts
other literary genres or their sub-genre varieties, such as "Coming of Age," "Historical Fiction," "Horror
and Gothic Fiction," and “Modernism.“ In this sense it forecasts a number of subsequent features of Post-
Modernist and Post-Colonial literary devices, despite the fact that it had been published in mid-1960s.
Similarities in style
There are some similarities in style between the two novels. Like Charlotte Brontë, Rhys makes use of:
The Victorian Gothic tradition includes Images and devices central to Jane Eyre, including the colour
red, ghosts and dreams.
Gothic features
He also has uncanny experiences of the strange and eerie. The place feels full of ghosts, of the past, of
barely contained violence. Sometimes he feels as if he has become a ghost too.
By using Gothic and uncanny devices in her writing in this way, Jean Rhys is able to represent Rochester's
interior fears and conflicts about the place, its culture and Antoinette.
Differences
Nevertheless, there are obvious differences:
The first sections of Wide Sargasso Sea are set against Jane Eyre obliquely; even if one knows the latter
novel well, it does not become aware of it initially.
Antoinette Cosway is not immediately recognisable as Bertha Mason, although the name Mason may
provide a strong clue confirmed by Grace Poole's narration when opening Part Three.
The time scale is also more specific. Wide Sargasso Sea is set in the years immediately after the 1833
Emancipation Act, whereas Jane Eyre could be set any time between the 1820s – 1840s.
The ending of Wide Sargasso Sea was the place where Jean Rhys was faced with the sharpest
dilemma around similarity or difference. Was there a way in which she could avoid giving Antoinette the
same fate as Bertha, dying as she burns down Rochester's house? Readers should consider the final sections
of the novel:
In a sense Antoinette burns the house down twice, first in her dream and then setting off to do it for real,
although it is not explicitly mentioned.
Tone of voice
How should her tone of voice be interpreted? Is she resigned to the fate set for her by Charlotte Brontë, or
is there something new and different?
The critic Judie Newman thinks that Jean Rhys managed to evade the dominance of Jane Eyre through
this double burning.
Antoinette sets off with her candle and the text leaves it open as to what happens.
A web of ‘-quels’
Such an open ending leaves space for yet another work, or more of them, which could create a web of ‘-
quels’. In this way both the original and its follow-up keep the interest of such topics for a longer period of
time.
Eileen Williams-Wanquet (2007)
“[the] dichotomous either/or structure upholding patriarchy being replaced by a simultaneous both/and
structure as limits are abolished, dissolving the oxymoronic structure. Everything is also at the same time
its opposite.
As Antoinette says: “There is always the other side, always.” (WSS, 81).
Postscript: ‘Postquel’
In 2003 Polly Teale wrote an adaption of the novel as a play After Mrs. Rochester, which was first presented
in the same year in London by the Shared Experience theatre company.
This dramatisation revolved around Rhysʼs turbulent relationship with her daughter. It vacillated between
her life and fiction with the writer permanently accompanied by her most famous character, Bertha Mason,
appearing on stage throughout the play as Jeanʼs alter ego.
‘Postquel’
It came after Teale's earlier adaptation for stage of Jane Eyre (1997) and before the third part in the trilogy
of Brontë (2005).
One can label such an endeavour as 'postquel,' since it has blended novel and drama, as well as having been
written within controversial postmodernist and postcolonial tendencies in the more recent literary
production in English.