Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is considered a postcolonial novel that responds to and revises Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. It explores themes of slavery, displacement, and male dominance through the character of Antoinette Mason, who becomes Mr. Rochester's mad first wife Bertha in Jane Eyre. The novel is set in Jamaica and examines issues of cultural identity and the legacy of colonialism through Antoinette's liminal position as a white Creole woman. It also uses language and the perspectives of both Antoinette and her husband to portray the complex race relations of post-emancipation West Indies society.

1. ‘Wide
Sargasso Sea’
as ‘a
Postcolonial
Novel’

2. Personal Information
★ Name :- Aarti Bhupatbhai Sarvaiya
★ Roll No :- 01
★ Enrollment No :- 4069206420220027
★ Sem :- 3(M.A.)
★ Batch :- 2022-2024
★ Paper No. :- 203
★ Paper Code :- 22408
★ Paper Name :- The Postcolonial Studies
★ Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English,M.K.B.U.
★ Dated on :- 2023
★ Email :- aartisarvaiya7010@gmail.com

3. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
4
2
5
About The Writer
‘Wide Sargasso
Sea’ as ‘a
Postcolonial Novel’
About Postcolonialism
Conclusion
3
About The Novel

4. About The Writer
❏ Jean Rhys, original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams,West Indian novelist who
earned acclaim for her early works set in the bohemian world of Europe in the 1920s
and ’30s but who stopped writing for nearly three decades, until she wrote a
successful novel set in the West Indies.
❏ She was encouraged to write by the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Her first book,
a collection of short stories, The Left Bank (1927), was followed by such novels as
Postures (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934),
and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). (Britannica)
❏ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that reconstructed the earlier life of the fictional
character Antoinette Cosway, who was Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Smile Please, an unfinished autobiography, was published in
1979.
❏ Notable Works: “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie” “Good Morning, Midnight” “Postures”
“Sleep It Off Lady” “Smile Please” “The Left Bank” “Tigers Are Better-Looking, with a
Selection from the Left Bank” “Voyage in the Dark” “Wide Sargasso Sea”. (Britannica)

5. About The Novel
❏ Wide Sargasso Sea, novel by Jean Rhys, published in 1966. A well-
received work of fiction, it takes its theme and main character from the
novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
❏ The book details the life of Antoinette Mason (known in Jane Eyre as
Bertha), a West Indian who marries an unnamed man in Jamaica and
returns with him to his home in England. Locked in a loveless marriage and
settled in an inhospitable climate, Antoinette goes mad and is frequently
violent. Her husband confines her to the attic of his house at Thornfield.
Only he and Grace Poole, the attendant he has hired to care for her, know
of Antoinette’s existence. The reader gradually learns that Antoinette’s
unnamed husband is Mr. Rochester, later to become the beloved of Jane
Eyre. (Britannica)
❏ Much of the action of the novel takes place in the West Indies. The first
and third sections are narrated by Antoinette, the middle section by her
husband.

6. About Postcolonialism
❏ Postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs
representing the aftermath of Western colonialism; the
term can also be used to describe the concurrent project
to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people
subordinated under various forms of imperialism.
Postcolonialism signals a possible future of overcoming
colonialism, yet new forms of domination or subordination
can come in the wake of such changes, including new
forms of global empire. Postcolonialism should not be
confused with the claim that the world we live in now is
actually devoid of colonialism. (Britannica)

7. About Postcolonialism
❏ Postcolonial theorists and historians have been
concerned with investigating the various
trajectories of modernity as understood and
experienced from a range of philosophical,
cultural, and historical perspectives. They have
been particularly concerned with engaging with
the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment—as
expressed in social, political, economic,
scientific, legal, and cultural thought—beyond
Europe itself. The legacy is ambiguous,
according to postcolonial theorists, because the
age of Enlightenment was also an age of empire,
and the connection between those two historical
epochs is more than incidental. (Britannica)

8. ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ as ‘a Postcolonial Novel’
❏ Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea is a fundamental postmodern and postcolonial novel, which is completely composed as an
answer to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Through her deconstructionist technique, Rhys adeptly plays upon the
subject, characters and general plotline of Jean Eyre, using every one of the gifts of spoof and pastiche strategy for a
postmodern novel, which stamps Wide Sargasso Sea as an impeccable postcolonial satire of Charlotte Bronte's Jane
Eyre. In her revising the fundamental pieces of Jane Eyre, Rhys offers voice to the intentionally hushed Jane Eyre
characters with a postcolonial endeavor to uncover the "other" side of the connected character and the story.
(Khushboo)
❏ Wide Sargasso Sea emerged as part of postcolonial literature where, both a national and a regional consciousness try
to assert difference from the imperial centre. (Biju)
❏ Wide Sargasso Sea is considered Rhys' masterpiece contribution to the era of postcolonial literature. The novel is
regarded as the prequel of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and is regarded as the most intensively studied and
insistently explored English novels. It has captured the world’s attention and aroused a heated discussion among the
literature circle. Wide Sargasso Sea can be categorised under myriad perspectives namely, a feminist criticism,
postcolonial criticism or a perspective of a double decolonization. (Deepak)

9. ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ as ‘a Postcolonial Novel’
❏ Jean Rhys portrays the characters of Rochester and Antoinette to describe and define wider race
relations typical of the West Indies where Europeans born or living there, educated to conceive of
England as home were culturally marked and excluded as inferior colonials. At the same time, they
were racially and institutionally privileged in relation to the African people brought there as slaves to
work in the plantations occupying a position of liminality .(Biju)
❏ Wide Sargasso Sea, though a postcolonial novel, is much more complex in terms of the identity of a
nation and nationhood as the main character of the novel, Antoinette, is a white Creole inhabitant of
Jamaica just after the emancipation act is passed; she is at once neither English nor Jamaican, and is
home in a nation that is not her original ‘homeland’ of England. This search for identity within a nation
itself however is not unusual within postcolonial novels: ‘a major feature of postcolonial literatures is
concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes
into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship
between self and place’ (Katie)

10. ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ as ‘a Postcolonial Novel’
❏ Three major issues; slavery, male dominance and displacement as highlighted by Rhys in her novel Wide
Sargasso Sea. It will also discuss the writer’s intentions on stressing these issues in her novel. (Deepak)
❏ In the novel, there is a constant rift between the Creoles and the Jamaicans. The black people continued to
serve the Creoles even after the passing of the Emancipation Act in 1833 . Part one of the novel shed light on
the ex-slaves who had worked on the sugarcane plantations of the rich Creoles. Although the Emancipation
Act had freed the slaves when Antoinette was still a child, the compensation of the black workers on the island
was overdue and the servants were still ill-treated by their white employers. (Deepak)
❏ Rhys also explores the theme of women’s subjugation to male authority in the Wide Sargasso Sea. In the
novel, female characters are introduced as feeble beings who are dependent on men around them for legal,
sexual and financial securities. When Antoinette’s father passes away, her mother relies on her second
marriage to bring back her status in the society. She wants to escape from Coulibri and regain status amongst
her friends.(Deepak)

11. ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ as ‘a Postcolonial Novel’
❏ The men in the novel can be categorised as ultimate opportunists who use their wives as a key to access wealth. Both Annette
and Antoinette are dependent on men near to them like children depending on their parents for things(Deepak)
❏ It can be argued that Antoinette is part of black society and always aware as the blacks of the differences and of the distance
between them.Antoinette and Rochester are representatives of two cultural worlds incapable of reciprocal understanding.(Biju)
❏ Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea is a product of postcolonialism and the use of language she does represents her extraordinary
ability to subvert the ideologies of the West. (Biju)
❏ Jean Rhys uses in her novel both Standard British English and the Jamaican varieties of English as the language of the
periphery, i.e. Creole and the English of black community. Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, by means of language,
emphasises and constructs the setting; the Creole, Black, and European identity; and the race relationships of the novel.
Rochester, representative of European discourse and power, rejects the varieties of English, and he refuses Creole as a
language which he dislikes and cannot understand. (Biju)

12. Conclusion
❏ Rhys, with the help of her colonial Caribbean Background,
paved her way into the world of literature with an idea of
sharing her modernist styles and themes via her literary
works. She managed to link her texts with the readers by
introducing modern themes like destitution, marginalised
identities, alienation, oppression and quest for
freedom.(Deepak)
❏ Her text Wide Sargasso Sea depicts many postcolonial yet
modern issues that many can relate to. She has penned the
novel by reconciling the plot with her own experiences.
Issues such as slavery, male dominance and displacement
are still part of our world but at different levels. The novel is
widely studied across colleges and universities due to its
depth and relevancy to the era till date. (Deepak)

13. References
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Jean Rhys". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Aug. 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Rhys . Accessed 17 October 2023.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Wide Sargasso Sea". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Sep. 2017,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wide-Sargasso-Sea
. Accessed 17 October 2023.
Ivison, Duncan. "postcolonialism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 May. 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/postcolonialism . Accessed 17 October 2023.
JUSTIN, BIJU. “Postcolonial Discourse in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea BIJU JUSTIN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH GOVERNMENT FIRST G.” INTERNATIONAL JOURNALS OF
MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH ACADEMY, 12 December 2019,
https://www.ijmra.us/project%20doc/2019/IJRSS_DECEMBER2019/IJRSSDec19BijuRy.pdf . Accessed 17
October 2023.

14. References
Maharaj, Dip Deepak. “Postcolonial Issues in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.” rjelal, 2021,
http://www.rjelal.com/9.S1.21/265-268%20Dip%20Deepak%20Maharaj.pdf . Accessed 18 October 2023.
Marsh, Katie Ashmore. “Wide Sargasso Sea: a postcolonial reading (part one).” The Bubble, 11 March 2018,
https://www.thebubble.org.uk/culture/literature/wide-sargasso-sea-a-postcolonial-reading-part-one/ .
Accessed 17 October 2023.
Nadiyah, Dr. Khushboo. “Postcolonial Discourse in Jean Rhys's “Wide Sargasso Sea.”” ijrpr, 2021,
https://www.ijrpr.com/uploads/V2ISSUE4/IJRPR328.pdf . Accessed 17 October 2023.

15. Thank You