Presentation about Wide Sargasso Sea : The story of the Madwomen in the attic paper_3_sem_3

1. Prepared by :-Sneha Agravat
Sem-3
Roll no.:-16
Department of English MkBU

2. The Madwoman in the Attic
● Susan Gubar and Sandra M.
Gilbert
● Published:- 1979
● presents an analysis of a
trope found in 19th-century
literature. Gilbert and Gubar
proposed that all female
characters in male-authored
novels can be categorised as
either an angel or a monster;
women in fiction were either
pure and submissive or
sensual, rebellious, and
uncontrollable qualities in a
Victorian.

3. ● Gilbert and Gubar discuss the angel/monster trope in
novels written by women
● covering the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley,
George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and the Brontës.
● They claim that 19th-century female writers carried a
lot of rage and frustration about the misogynistic
world they lived in and the predominantly male
literary tradition they tried to enter, and that this
gender-specific frustration influenced these writers’
creative output.
● According to Gilbert and Gubar, their rage was often
shown through the figure of the mad woman.
● The title of the book is derived from Jane Eyre‘s
Bertha Mason, who is locked away by her husband
Mr Rochester in the attic of Thornfield Hall.
● She is an ominous character, full of uncontrollable
passion, violence, sensuality, and madness, almost
bestial in her behaviour.

4. Wide Sargasso Sea
● 1966
● Dominican-British author Jean Rhys
● novel serves as a postcolonial and
feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's
novel Jane Eyre, describing the
background to Mr. Rochester's marriage
from the point-of-view of his wife
Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress.
● now-archetypal and heavily symbolic
‘madwoman in the attic’
● explores Victorian paternalism,
sexualised racism and the complex
social and political history of the West
Indies.

5. Wide Sargasso Sea: The story
of the madwoman in the attic
● it still provides an important commentary
on class, male-female relations, and what
it means to be a white English gentleman
or woman – all of which Jane Eyre is also
concerned with.
● In Jane Eyre, Bertha is not given a voice,
but is instead declared mad by Rochester.
● Hearing her story in Rhys’ novel, however,
we feel far more sympathy for the confined
woman, taken far from her home and
everything she knows.

6. ● In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane herself is
barely mentioned, and Rochester is never
explicitly named.
● However, the reader does also get to read
the story from his point of view in addition
to Antoinette’s.
● Rochester – a Byronic hero in Jane Eyre –
is manipulative and unfaithful, yet unsure,
conflicted and insecure in this novel.
● no character is wholly villainous or heroic,
and the varying viewpoints help the reader
get a sense of the complex social rules and
expectations that frame the character
interactions.
● We can therefore be both sympathetic and
critical of each of the characters – and this
extends to the classic text too.

7. ● While reading Wide Sargasso
Sea problematises Rochester,
and thus Jane and Rochester’s
relationship, it doesn’t spoil
Jane Eyre as a work, or the
characters presented in it.
● Wide Sargasso Sea merely
gives the reader a nuanced view
on what, in Jane Eyre, is
presented by Rochester as a
clean-cut situation that Bertha
is mad.
● Here, we get to decide for
ourselves what to believe and I
think the experience of reading
Jane Eyre is richer for it.

8. ● In Jane Eyre was first read, most readers may
mainly focus on Jane. Jane was considered as an
unregenerate and undisciplined spirit. She
represented a protest against conventionality.
● Few thoughts were directed towards Bertha Mason.
Bertha in our minds at that time was just an
obstacle to
● Jane and Rochester’s happiness and was finally
removed by her own suicide during the fire at
Thorn-field.
● Thus Jane and Rochester could marry each other
at last and lead a happy life. Everyone was
contented with the ending and forgot about Bertha.
● However, it is striking for readers now to read the
work of Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea. When
putting on a feminist glasses and read Jane Eyre
again, readers pay much more attention to
everything about Bertha.

9. ● Form the period of Jane Eyre to Wide
Sargasso Sea, the colonies had gained
independence from the Great Britain. Jean
Rhys created the vivid and meaningful
character of the mad woman through feminist
perspective.Bertha Mason,Antoinette, was a
victim of patriarchy and colonialism. She was
a woman being oppressed and a victim who
could not speak for herself.
● Bertha Mason in the attic served as a warning
to other rebelling woman against the
patriarchy social restrains.
● Her situation indicated that all woman must
accept the social restrains in Bronte’s Jane
Eyre. However in more recent times, Jean
Rhys, a white Creole herself, wrote the story
Wide Sargasso Sea from the point of view of
Bertha’s view.

10. ● The story is in many ways a
evaluation of Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys
wrote Wide Sargasso Sea to show
how Bronte’s novel excluded the
parallel plight of the Creole woman,
Bertha Mason .Consequently, Jean
Rhys gave a strong voice to Bertha
Mason in the story. Bertha is not
Bertha in Jane Eyre but Antoinette in
Wide Sargasso Sea.
● She is no longer a horrible mad
woman in the dark attic, instead, she
is a very lively Creole girl with her
own spirits, thoughts and love.

11. Antoinette:
“Bertha is not my name.
You are trying to make me into someone else,
calling me by another name.”

12. Wide Sargasso Sea speaks of the
history of cruelty and suffering that
lies behind some of the West’s
accumulated wealth, a history in
which Jane Eyre is secret and
mysterious, and only appears in
brief glimpses. This book gives
voice to neglected, silenced and
unacknowledged stories, exploring
different inflections of marginality.
Conclusion

13. Refrences
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane. Eyre. London: Penguin books.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
Jiang, Qian. “A Comparative Study of Bertha Mason in LJane Eyrer and Lwide Sargasso
Sear from a Feminist Perspective.” Proceedings of the 2018 3rd International Conference
on Humanities Science, Management and Education Technology (HSMET 2018), 2018,
https://doi.org/10.2991/hsmet-18.2018.82.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.
The Narratologist. Literary Theory: The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). 6 Aug. 2015,
http://www.thenarratologist.com/literary-theory/literary-theory-the-madwoman-in-the-attic-
1979-by-susan-gubar-and-sandra-m-gilbert/.
Willmetts, Beccy. “Wide Sargasso Sea: The Story of the Madwoman in the Attic ...” Wide
Sargasso Sea: The Story of the Madwoman in the Attic, https://theboar.org/2016/04/wide-
sargasso-sea/.