Rebirth of Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea: rereading Jane Eyre in the light of postcolonial feminism

Abstract

The thesis intends to explore the evolving dynamics of feminist literature by examining how colonial histories eventually reform into postcolonial feminist voices. By investigating Jean Rhys’s reclamation of Bertha Mason or Antoinette Cosway, the underrepresented paranoid character in Jane Eyre, this research examines how Rhys creates a multidimensional figure of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea through a postcolonial lens. This paper also looks into Rhys’ contrapuntal reading of Bertha or Antoinette, reclaiming her white Creole identity, unveiling the colonial oppression contributing to the broader discourse of postcolonial feminism (Said, Culture & Imperialism). Contrapuntal reading, a term introduced by postcolonial theorist Edward Said in his work Culture & Imperialism, is a critical approach that analyses texts from two or more perspectives present in colonial literature. “In practical terms, “contrapuntal reading” as I have called it, means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England” (Said 66). The study investigates how Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea can be read contrapuntally to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which the author presents the position of a coloured woman in Victorian literature. The central focus of this paper will be on Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, redefining the character of Bertha in a different light from Brontë’s Jane Eyre and exploring how Rhys reads Brontë from an alternative angle. Through literary exegesis and a contrapuntal reading of Wide Sargasso Sea, this paper analyses how each novel sheds light on the other within the context of the current postcolonial feminist scholarship.