Comparing and contrasting

Jane Eyre and

Wide Sargasso Sea

Lorena González de la Varga

Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel written by Jean Rhys. A lot of critics have pointed out that

this novel is a kind of prequel of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte or a re-writing of this

work and this term paper sets out to explain the different elements which these works

have in common as well as the different treatments of the same themes that the two

authors make in each work. In order to make a conscientious analysis it is important to

have in mind what is Jane Eyre about and what motivated the writer to create this work.

Jane Eyre is a book written by Charlotte Brönte about an orphan who is sent to a

boarding school named Lowood where she meets Helen, a girl who is going to serve as

an example, as an inspiration, Helen is going to support her with her belief in God. Jane

becomes a teacher and is hired as a governess in Thornfield. She is going to teach a

French young girl which is under the guardian of Mr. Rochester. They, Jane and Mr.

Rochester, are going to fall in love and they decide to get married but, the wedding day,

Richard Mason announces that Mr. Rochester is already married and subsequently, other

marriage is not possible. At this point, Mr. Rochester is going to show Jane who his wife

is and why he has acted in this way. His wife, Bertha, is absolutely mad and he had

decided, long time ago, to lock her in the attic and hire a person to take care of her, Grace

Poole. Now Jane understands the different strange events that had happened in the

mansion since she arrived there such as the fire in Mr. Rochester room or the screams

and strange noises that in many occasions she heard at night. But, despite the love that

she feels for Rochester, she is unable to cope with the situation and decides to run away

and to live with her cousin John. Suddenly, she receives news from his aunt John Eyre

who has recently died and who has left her his heritage, and she decides to share her

money with her cousins. Her cousin John, a priest, asks her to be his wife and go as a

missionary with him but she refuses to do so and goes back to Thornfield. When she

arrives she is informed that the house has been burned by Bertha and that Rochester is

now completely blind but she decides to marry him because it is what she actually wants.

When reading Jane Eyre, we can see a closely relation between the lives of both, Jane

Eyre and Charlotte Brönte. Brönte's mother died when she was five and she was sent

with her friends to a boarding school named “Clergy Daughter” where they fell ill with

tuberculosis and two of them died. Probably, this serve as an inspiration to write about

Jane Eyre's stay at Lowood school and particularly to write the story of Helen who died

of tuberculosis as her sister did and who provide Jane with faith and love for live. After

that she became teacher and worked in “Roe Head” which probably also contribute to the

creation of Lowood institution in her writing. Some time later she received a marriage

proposal, which she refused, from a priest and, obviously, that is linked with Jane Eyre's

cousin proposal of marriage. So, throughout the novel of Charlotte Brönte we are going

to find a refection of her own life.

In order to compare and contrast the two works, Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, it is

important to make a brief resume of what Wide Sargasso Sea is about. This novel is

divided into three sections: The first one is narrated by Antoinette Cosway, a young girl

who lives on an ex-plantation named Coulibri with her mother Annette, her sick brother

Pierre and her “da” Christophine. Her mother gets married with a wealthy man, Mr.

Mason, and tensions between whites and blacks increase up to the point of burning

Coulibri and resulting in the death of his young brother, Pierre. Her mother falls into

madness and, unable to take care of her daughter Antointte, sends her to a boarding

school.

The second part of Wide Sargasso Sea is narrated by an unnamed narrator, Antoinete's

husband which is supposed to be Mr. Rochester. They have recently get married and they

went in their honeymoon to Grandbois, the house Antoinette has inherited. At the very

beginning they were very happy spending their time together but it seems that Mr.

Rochester is not comfortable at all, he mistrusts in Christophine and her Obeah magic

arts and he cannot understand their Caribbean way of life, so different from England.

Then, Mr. Rochester starts receiving letters from Daniel Cosway, Antoinnette's

stepbrother, telling him about the past of Antoinette and advising him about his mad

mother and the possibility of Antoinette suffering the same disease. Mr. Rochester

reaction to all the information provided by Daniel Cosway is to distance himself from his

wife and he starts to called her by her middle name: Bertha. Antoinette goes to talk with

Christophine and tells her about her husband change of behavior, here we have again the

story narrated by Antoinette. She asks her to use Obeah magic in order to achieve

recovering her husband's love for her. Once Mr. Rochester discovers that he has been

“poisoned” he decides to make love with Amèlie, one of the servants, and more or less,

forcing his wife to overhear it. Antoinette, unable to cope with the situation, goes to see

Christophine who provides her with drugs to help her to sleep and to forget. Mr.

Rochester, who cannot bear anymore the situation since he is now aware of the damage

that he has created, he decides to sent Christophine away and to take his mad wife,

Bertha, and go back to London.

The third part of the book is narrated again by Antoinette with the exception of the

introductory paragraph which is narrated from Grace Poole's point of view, the woman in

charge of taking care of the mad woman of the attic that appeared in Jane Eyre, Bertha.

For the first time we have an overlapping of both stories Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso

Sea. Bertha goes for a walk at night through the corridors of the mansion and she sees a

woman dressed in white, which is probably Jane Eyre, and Bertha burns the house and

committed suicide, exactly the same story of Bertha in Jane Eyre.

It is very interesting to point out that, as it happened in Jane Eyre, the writer's live is

closely related with her main character. Jean Rhys was born in 1816 in Rosseau,

Dominica. Her mother was a creole woman with Scottish roots and his father was a

Welsh doctor. She went to a boarding school in England and had a maid, Meta. It is

obvious that there is a relation between Rhys and Antoinette's childhood, both being

creoles and both with a maid. Then, Rhys returned to Dominica after the riots and when

she arrived she found her house completely burned, an event which also contribute to the

creation of one of her greatest novels, Wide Sargasso Sea.

While here we have two stories completely independent, they are closely related in some

aspects:

Antoinette and Jane Eyre childhoods

We can see that both girls have lots of things in common in their childhood, both are

cared buy this dysfunctional relatives,both are fatherless, both are rejected and

threatened by their own family and are send to very strict boarding schools, both lost

their first friends and both of them spend most of their time alone and in their

imaginations and are subsequently becoming psychologically insecure. But while the

two characters are very similar, they have different reaction to their way of live a cope

the situation in very different ways. “Bertha is Jane's 'truest and darkest double: she is the

angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self that Jane has been trying to

repress ever since her days at Gateshead'” (Beginning Postcolonialism, p.152).

The other side of the story

Other important issue in Wide Sargasso sea is the importance of knowing the other side

of the story, not simply believe in what you have been told instead of contrasting other

versions of the same story. It is very well exemplified when Daniel Cosway tells Mr.

Rochester about Antoinette's past, he is going to believe what he have said without

taking into account his wife's version, he hears what he wants to hear and refuses to hear

what Antoinette has to say about it, he prefers to talk in other moment when she would

be more “reasonable”. With this work, Rhys tries to present us different versions of the

same story in order to force us to think about it and to make our own interpretation about

what had really happened in this story, it makes us see not only from the point of view of

a third person, Jane Eyre, but from the point of view of Mr. Rochester and from the point

of view of Bertha.

Feminist works

Both texts are considered feminists works, though each one shows different approaches

to feminism. In the case of Wide Sargasso Sea we can see that Antoinette lives in an

imperial world absolutely dominated by white men and as a result she is completely

dependent of this world which, at the same time, excludes her but she is even unable to

recognize it because she has no sense of identity; she is a creole who does not belong to

the English world nor to the black world, she does not know who she is. In addition, in

this work, Rhys emphasizes the idea that woman will never achieve success in a

patriarchal world, there is no hope for women in this aspect. Antoinette is always under

the rules of a men, first under his stepfather rule, Mr. Mason, and later on, controlled and

locked by her husband and she finally committed suicide, meanwhile in Jane Eyre we

have completely different feminism. Jane lives in a male dominated society in which

women are not allowed to do many things, but she battles for her rights, she is not going

to let anyone mistreat her. Obviously it is not the same case as Antoinette which is

completely controlled by men, she has no word because she is a woman and she has no

word because she is a creole while Jane is able to fight for what she believes, Antoinette

is completely unwilling to do so since it is not possible. As the story of Jane Eyre unfolds

we can see that she has achieved what she wants which is marrying Mr. Rochester and in

addition she acquires wealth as well as public recognize. With that, Brönte highlights the

fact that women can achieve their goals if they want to do that but, comparing it with

Wide Sargasso Sea, we can see that it is not so easy, that women in other situations are

unable to scape the patriarchal world. Other event in Wide Sargasso Sea shows us how

men have dominated the imperial societies, when Rochester makes love with Amèlie and

gives her money to convince her not to tell anything. At the same time, Rhys highlights

the corrupting power of money associated with an absolute dominance of women by

men, mainly if they are black women.

The importance of faith

We have two different approaches to faith in these works, First of all we have Jane, who

at the very beginning does not know who is God, mainly because she is worried about

his friend Helen, she does not know where she is going to go after death and she is very

confused “Where is God? What is God? (Jane Eyre, p.84). But, as time passes by and

Jane matures, she starts to have a hard believe in God, in some occasions she entreats

Heaven for guidance what highlights the importance she gives to God and to faith.

Meanwhile, Antoinette seems not to be very worried about faith, she considers it not

useful “Christophine cried bitterly but I could not. I prayed, but the words fell to the

ground meaning nothing” (Wide Sargasso Sea, p.36). She cannot believe in God since

she has lost her young brother in a fire and she cannot understand why God did not do

anything to save him.

“It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you

are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out, long ago when I was a

child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you

call on so often” (Wide Sargasso Sea, p.78).

Different treatments of sex

In Jane Eyre Brönte does not mentions sex, although there are some scenes with a lot

sexual tension which is restrained as it happens when Jane and Rochester kiss each other.

Meanwhile, in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea we have a very different approach. The

presence of sex is constant throughout the work. He has experienced a sexual

relationship before marrying Rochester with Daniel. Once she gets married, her

relationship with his husband is only sexual, there is a lot of desire but not true love.

Rochester is not able to love Antoinette since he never was sure of marrying a creole

woman, he marries her because he is going to receive some money in exchange. He

considers her a kind of possession, as soon as he went on his honeymoon he starts asking

himself if he has made a good decision. While they are in the honeymoon he is in a kind

of dream, in which the main entertainment is sex and passion, but nothing else.

Sometimes he has lucid moments: “And when did I begin to notice all this about my wife

Antoinette?”, “After we left Spanish Town I suppose. Or did I notice it before and refuse

to admit what I saw?”. He is absolutely convinced that the people of the island look at

him with pity, he is completely paranoid and he can only see what he wants to see, it

seems like if he has been making an effort in order to justify what he is going to do in the

near future. He is aware that he has committed a mistake and that sooner or later he has

to do something to solve that. It seems like if Rochester, from the very beginning of the

marriage had already known that it was not going to work and it seems as if he himself

had forced Antoinette to fall into madness in order to achieve get rid of her, of the

greatest mistake he has committed in his life. But it is only one possibility and should not

be the correct one since there are very different points of view in this novel.

A change in time

Jane Eyre was published in 1847 but the action in the novel takes place between 1798

and 1808, but Rhys decide to change the dates to make it coincide with the British

Emancipation Act of 1833, an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom created to

abolish slavery in the British Empire. A lot of riots take place throughout the British

Empire since slave-owners, like Antoinette family, were supposed to be compensated for

the lost of slaves but this never happened. This explains why Antoinette's family were

completely ruined and why her mother Annette “needs” to get married as soon as

possible. With this shift in time, Rhys takes the opportunity to rise up political and social

commentary and to highlight the different problems that emerge from the colonies.

Antoinette, a Caribbean diaspora

Rhys uses the dates in order to provide the reader with information about the problems

emerging from the colonies such as the lack of identity and she uses that because she was

a child in a colony and her experience is very similar to the one happening to Antoinette

as a child as we have seen before. Antoinette's mother was a creole, she was born in

Martinique and she married a wealthy white man, the white people of the island are not

going to approve this marriage and as a result, the family is not going to be accepted in

society. The same happens with the black people of the island who cannot accept them as

members of their society because they are not black people, the Cosways live in

complete isolation, “forgotten” as Annette says. And the same happens with Antoinette,

she is the daughter of a creole woman and subsequently, she is not going to be accepted

in neither of the societies inhabiting the island, she is an outsider everywhere. “They say

when trouble comes close ranks, an so the white people dis. But we where not in their

ranks” (Wide Sargasso Sea, p. ). Here Antoinette talks about “them” not about “us”, she

is aware of her lack of belonging, of identity.

In order to emphasize the idea of not belonging anywhere and to make Antoinette more

closely related to Jane Eyre, Rhys decides to change the familiar relation between Bertha

and his father and brother, and she changes it and put in their place a stepfather and an

stepbrother making Bertha an orphan like Jane.

It is obvious that with this text, Rhys tries to shows us the live of Bertha and why she has

finished that way, the chain of events which lead her to madness giving us a different

perspective of the story written by Charlotte Brönte. In addition, Rhys shows us that

things are not always as they seem, that there are always multiple versions of the same

story that could helps us to be more objective as well as to be fair when passing

judgment. The reader has to ask himself/herself about Atoinette state of mind: Could

Antoinette have stayed sane if the events were different? Does she become crazy because

of her husband? Or was it a result of his lack of identity and love in her childhood?.

Rhys left this questions opened allowing the reader to have his/her own interpretation of

the story itself.