The First Mrs. Rochester And Her World: A Tentative Study On Characters In Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys, a Dominica-born English descendant, accomplished her post-colonial work Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. This novel serves as a prequel to the English canon Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte published in 1847. Wide Sargasso Sea is placed in an ambiance of the Creole culture and landscape.The heroine bases herself on the mad woman in Jane Eyre—Bertha whose name is restored by Jean Rhys as Antoinette. She is struggling in the patriarchal system and finds herself in a dilemma in that she belongs neither to the upper white class nor to the lower black community, which renders her and her family the bottom creatures in the society.Just like most of the Rhysian women, Antoinette is not well educated and not exactly equipped with particular skills and from a family where love is scarcely found, however, she is not a follower of the traditional social values and is perspective to sense the hypocrisy existing in the patriarchal system in her own way.Wide Sargasso Sea is all about struggle, examining women's fate in the reinforced patriarchal hierarchies. It focuses primarily on its characters' psychology and mental development and shows female identity being shaped by social influence larger than individual capability. By probing into the formation of Antoinette's and others' dispositions, Jean Rhys interrogates a social structure that would classify women and men according to their compliance with biased standards of sexual behavior and submission to the patriarchal systems. I would like, further, to read Rhys's text not only as a challenge against the British Empire and its dominant order, but also an occasion to approach the complexity and subversion that underlie various characters in this novel.