How and to what purpose does Rochester’s renaming of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, as well as the use of the rumor as a plot device, reframe colonialist Anglo-Saxon customs?

Beatrice Wedd

Jacket design by Eric Thomas

Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea is set first on the island of Jamaica, then on the Windward Islands, and, then, on the island of England. In these different locations and through two separate perspectives, it provokes and reframes the issues of identity and power. By reimagining the identity and background of Bertha Mason, first realized in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, Rhys reexamines her complicated independence and is successful both in embroidering sympathy and in relieving some prejudice surrounding her rise and fall.

One prominent divergence between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre is that, in the former, Rhys renames Bertha “Antoinette”. This divergence later resolves itself when Antoinette is referred to as Bertha by her husband, Rochester, midway through the novel, but it shows us that Wide Sargasso Sea could be seen as a prequel to Jane Eyre; offering the reader an explanation for the “animalistic lunacy” of Brontë’s character, Bertha Mason. Similarly, Rhys explores the rumor as a plot device when Rochester receives a slanderous account from Antoinette’s half-brother, Daniel, and allows it to…