"Wide Sargasso Sea" and "Jane Eyre": Dialogism of The Prequel and The Original

Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1965, and immediately caught the attention of critics. Its publication helped to save Jean Rhys from the obscurity into which she had fallen after her previous novels, published between the First and Second World Wars, went out of print. Wide Sargasso Sea won Rhys the esteemed W. H. Smith Award and the Heinemann Award, and earned her a place in the literary canon. The novel seeks to recreate the 'true' story of Bertha Mason, the mad Creole wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Rhys explores the complex relationships between the old slaveholding West Indian families, white and black West Indians, and the new English settlers in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Rhys attempts to correct what she viewed as an injustice of Brontë's by telling the story of Bertha Mason (referred to in the majority of Wide Sargasso Sea as Antoinette Cosway). After thoroughly reading Jane Eyre, Rhys writes in her own notes that she "discovered what a fat (and improbable) monster [Bertha Mason] was." She believed that Brontë "took her horrible Bertha from [a] legend [so she has] the right to take lost Antoinette."

Set mainly in Jamaica and Dominica, the country of Rhys's birth, Wide Sargasso Sea describes how Antoinette became the 'mad woman in the attic', Bertha Mason, of Jane Eyre. In Brontë's novel, Bertha is a monster, described as violent, insane, and promiscuous:

"it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face"

In this description of Bertha, Brontë renders indeterminate the boundary between human and animal as well as male and female; Bertha's gender is lost in Jane's description and replaced by the neutral pronoun 'it'. In nineteenth-century England, the very existence of such a "strange wild animal" would almost eliminate Jane's hope of marriage to Mr. Rochester in spirit as well as the law. It would seem reasonable to assume from her lack of humanity and consequential inability to react socially with other characters, that the Bertha of Jane Eyre is not much more than a plot device, serving to present a legal barrier to Mr. Rochester's marriage to Jane whilst weakening his social standing in the community. In rather sharp contrast, Rhys creates a vulnerable young woman whom readers pity, seeking, unsuccessfully, to fit in to a new world where the old inequalities and prejudices are suddenly upturned to result in her becoming a "white cockroach". She is told to "go away, go away. Nobody want you."

The themes explored in the novel - especially those of the race relations between newly freed slaves and their former owners and the status of women - have drawn the close attention of critics. Some critics debate the merits of the novel, saying that it relies too closely on Jane Eyre and cannot stand on its own worth. Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea that "it is in no sense a pastiche of Charlotte Brontë and exists in its own right, quite independent of Jane Eyre." This, however, would seem to be contradicted by Rhys's own notes, in which she demonstrates an acceptance of the existence of Jane Eyre as essential for her novel to function. She indeed seems only too aware of what she would lose by "cutting loose from Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester - Only too well. (Indeed can I?) Names? Dates?"

Certainly, Wide Sargasso Sea forces readers to re-examine Jane Eyre and consider the significance of race in the nineteenth-century English novel. There are, in fact, three characters from Rhys's novel who directly correlate to three from Brontë's: Edward Rochester, Bertha Mason, and Grace Poole. Rochester remains nameless throughout Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea, referred to only as "that man" or "my husband". In this complex relationship between a novel and its prequel, names establish a clear link; Rochester's anonymity in Wide Sargasso Sea emphasises the implied importance of his character, and gives a strengthened authority to his account.

The implication that he is the narrator of Part Two, combined with the circumstance occurring in both novels involving a substantial sum of money changing hands in the marriage of a Creole, demonstrate a clear link between the two Rochesters. The surname of the step-father and step-brother of Bertha (originally Antoinette) is "Mason" in Wide Sargasso Sea, linking her character in both first and last name to the Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre. Antoinette refers to her 'carer' as Grace Poole - the name of Bertha's caretaker in Jane Eyre. In this essay, Grace Poole acts only as further evidence to support the link between the novels, as readers are left feeling neither pity nor anger towards her character.

Although Rhys claims only to have wanted to give Bertha a voice and a history, "I had material for the story of Mr Rochester's first wife. The real story - as it might have been," there is no question that Wide Sargasso Sea has evolved in part into a full prequel to Jane Eyre. The prequel to Jane Eyre was published long after the publication of Brontë's novel in 1847. Because of the large period between publications, it is obvious that the two authors did not communicate with each other, and even if any collaboration had been considered desirable, which is doubtful in the light of Rhys's notes, it would have been impossible.

We must remember that Jane Eyre was written long before Wide Sargasso Sea, and consequently, I assume that it was Rhys's intention from the outset for readers to read Jane Eyre before her novel. After all, there is no debate as to whether Jean Rhys created her novel to act as a prequel to Brontë's. I believe it is important to read Jane Eyre before its prequel, as the savage portrayal of the heartless Mr. Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea - "Don't cry either. Crying no good with him" - would no doubt have cast an ominous shadow over the caring, empathic Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre: "Oh, Jane, what did I feel when I discovered you had fled from Thornfield...What could my darling do, I asked, left destitute and penniless?" Inevitably, the antipathetic view of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre would be softened by her empathetic portrayal in Wide Sargasso Sea. Due to the fact that the two novels present such contrasting views of Bertha and Mr. Rochester, a consonance cannot be achieved between their conflicting descriptions. Cognitive dissonance ensues, and one finds himself torn, unable to decide which of the seemingly opposite character descriptions to believe; readers' sympathies tend to lie with the incapacitated Mr. Rochester at the closing of Jane Eyre, whereas readers of Wide Sargasso Sea tend to sympathise with the unjustly imprisoned Bertha. It is not possible for readers to pity both characters simultaneously, as the two characters cannot both be victims. In my belief, a satisfactory consonance can only be achieved if one separates the characters to the extent of them being unique to their respective novel, thus wholly detaching them from their partners. Whether the characters in the two novels are factually analogous is inarguable. However, it is not inevitable that a character in one will influence the reader's opinion of his equivalent in the novel's partner once the reader comes to accept the characters to be unique in their own right.

Certainly, mentally severing the characters from their partners is possible, and indeed necessary to avoid irresolvable cognitive dissonance. However, it is perhaps not altogether desirable; Wide Sargasso Sea may partially lose its underlying essence if a full separation of characters is achieved, since Rhys documents its creation spawning from a need of hers to fill an apparent void left in Jane Eyre; she felt that Brontë did not give 'the mad woman in the attic' a full enough portrayal for her to be a convincing character. Being descended from a Creole mother herself, it is more than possible that she may have felt it an insult for Bertha to be described only in accordance to the stereotyped 'mad Creole heiress' of the nineteenth-century: "But I, reading it later, and often, was vexed at her portrait of the 'paper tiger' lunatic, the all wrong Creole scenes" This note, written by Rhys a year before Wide Sargasso Sea's publication, suggests a personal, and almost unique, anger towards Brontë's portrayal of Bertha in Jane Eyre, which she may have felt helped justify her claim to using the character of Bertha Mason; to 'set right' a racial injustice of Brontë's.

Rhys successfully explores complex themes of social relations in Wide Sargasso Sea in a way that is not possible in Jane Eyre. However, I do not believe, as she did, that it was necessary to use the well-known characters of a renowned novel to perform such an exploration. Indeed, she has written in her notes that "It is that particular mad Creole I want to write about, not any of the other mad Creoles." It is possible to argue that Rhys perhaps feigned such a fascination in order to attempt to justify to us, or perhaps to herself, her reason for analogising her key characters to those of Jane Eyre. It is conceivable that her singular motive for forming the analogies was to rescue herself from the aforementioned obscurity she had collapsed into by launching Wide Sargasso Sea from the shoulders of an already famous novel; there would, of course, be no objection from Jane Eyre's author.

Apart from the clearly comparable traits of the main characters in the two novels, other, equally compelling dissimilarities exist; these dissimilarities spawn not from the characters' differences in behaviour, but from the not-so-obvious differences in the characters' style of speech. Over one hundred years had passed between the publications of the two novels, resulting in distinct cultural changes. Throughout the nineteenth century, imperialism was an undertone of almost all British literature. Wide Sargasso Sea was published over twenty years after World War II, a war which brought an end to the age of imperialism. It was written in the age of the American Civil Rights Movement, in which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, increasing the black population's regard within the American white community. Mr. Rochester describes his stay in the West Indies, one of the nineteenth century's fields of imperial conquest, as hell:

"One night I had been awakened by her yells...it was a fiery West Indian night...'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell! This is the air, those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can....Let me break away, and go home to God!'...A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure...It was true Wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path...The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty...'Go,' said Hope, 'and live again in Europe...You have d0one all that God and Humanity require of you.'"

Here, a factual similarity can be clearly seen between the two Rochesters' abhorrence of the West Indies when reading the Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea's account of his hatred:

"I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. And above all, I hated her."

Although their sentiment is the same, the one hundred years that have passed have left an evident mark on both the attitude to this hell and the style of speech of the Rochester from Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys is noted for her technical style by Francis Wyndham in the introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea: "What struck me on the technical side...was the singular instinct for form being possessed by this young lady, an instinct for form being possessed by singularly few writers of English and by almost no English women writers." However, English grammar had evolved over those one hundred years in correspondence to the culture in which it was used. Unavoidably, therefore, the description by Rhys's Rochester of his hatred for his surroundings carries neither the imperialist undertone of Britain's superiority nor the antiquated fluency of style common to authors of the nineteenth century. When comparing these two passages, supposedly spoken by the same person, the Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea sounds infantile ("I hated...I hated...I hated...I hated...I hated") when compared to the competence with language expressed by the Rochester of Jane Eyre ("'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell! This is the air, those are the sounds of the bottomless pit!'").

Whether a person expresses himself implicitly or explicitly is a tendency individual to oneself. Throughout the entire novel, the Rochester of Jane Eyre expresses his hatred implicitly, whereas the Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea explicitly expresses his hatred five times within one passage. This is due to the Rochester of Jane Eyre's markedly superior control over language, which allows him to more subtly express his emotions whilst achieving an equal, if not greater, impact than his partner in Wide Sargasso Sea. I argue that these passages alone act as proof of sufficient weight to negate the possibility of the two Rochesters being one and the same.

In the passage spoken by the Rochester of Jane Eyre, he justifies the necessity for a shift beyond the laws of matrimony as divine injunction rather than human motive in this flight back to England. Indication of divine injunction ("I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can... [I] have done all that God and Humanity require of [me]") is wholly absent in Wide Sargasso Sea; human motive is evidently the sole driving force ("I hated the mountains...I hated her") of this Rochester. It is possible that during the time period between the settings of the two novels, Mr. Rochester's fury and explicitness had somewhat cooled with age. However, he is, nonetheless, an adult in Wide Sargasso Sea whose language had already fully developed; I deem it improbable and unconvincing, to probably a greater extent than Rhys believed the Bertha of Jane Eyre's existence to be, for the younger Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea's language to have evolved with his age to the language demonstrated by Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre.

Whereas a comparison can easily be made between the speech and behaviours of the two Rochesters, such a comparison is much more difficult to make between the two Berthas, primarily due to the Bertha of Jane Eyre's absence of dialogue. Parts One and Two of Wide Sargasso Sea occupy the bulk of Rhys's novel, telling the tale of the young Antoinette and her life in the West Indies, while Brontë allots nothing more than one page to Bertha's life history, relayed from third parties. The first occasion of disclosure in Jane Eyre is granted to the lawyer Mr. Briggs as he reads a letter written by his client, Bertha's brother, Richard:

"Edward Fairfax Rochester, of Thornfield England, was married to my sister, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, daughter of Jonas Mason, merchant, and of Antoinetta his wife, a Creole, at church, Spanish Town, Jamaica."

The second is granted to Mr. Rochester shortly after as he explains his predicament:

"Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad-woman and a drunkard! - as I found out after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before."

I run into two seemingly irresolvable frustrations in Richard Mason's letter when trying to resolve my cognitive dissonance: my primary frustration lies in him using a name, 'Bertha', which Rhys has recorded only Mr. Rochester to have used in her novel as it is, "a name that [he is] particularly fond of"; my second frustration lies in him referring to his sister, whom he had known as Antoinette all his life in Wide Sargasso Sea, as Antoinetta, the name of Antoinette's mother. These clear inconsistencies assert, in my mind, that the two Berthas are fundamentally different characters. Whether the inconsistencies were intended by Rhys is improbable; I consider it possible that although she claims in her notes that her biggest mistake was to have "read 'Jane Eyre' too much," she became so carried away in the creation of her novel that she overlooked Richard Mason's fatal letter.

If readers are unable to detach the novels from each other based on their own merits, I do not believe they truly know with whom their sympathies lie. Between Bertha and Mr. Rochester, the subject of Brontë's sympathies is conclusively the incapacitated latter, whereas Rhys's sympathies clearly and unarguably lie with the former. Through the link she created between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre, Rhys robs Brontë's Mr. Rochester of his due sympathy by demonising him in a life that his original creator did not conceive of. It is not a case of belief, it is a case of fact: Mr. Rochester is Charlotte Brontë's creation, and for that reason, whichever light she chose for him to be cast in is the truth. There is no question as to with whom my sympathies lie.