Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
eternally implicit in the colonial discourse, but Rhys’ commentary is most powerful when discussed in relation to Brontë’s original novel. If, in retrospectively writing the character of Bertha Mason into Antoinette Cosway, Rhys had breached the bounds of Jane Eyre , Brontë’s novel would not have had a commentary on the voices of the silenced within culture. By instead working cumulatively from the subdued cruelties embedded in Brontë’s novel, Rhys makes it so Jane Eyre frames the discourse surrounding colonial suppression within the literary canon. Rhys does not try and dismantle the canon, instead proving that, without collapsing, it can absorb and contain resistance and discourse through modern readings of its works by revealing their suppressed nuance through her own works. When Rochester taunts Christophine, saying she can write to Antoinette in England, knowing that she is unable to, accidentally he points out a major flaw in the canon. The literary canon is an entity whose members are determined by academics by teaching them, but historical exclusion of certain demographics in education still reverberates within literature today. Although Rhys calls this out, she does not call for the canon’s dissolvement, instead beginning to counteract it. When Christophine responds, ‘Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know’, 14 she illustrates how canonical texts are not all-encompassing, with exterior influences, such as education and culture – and to an extent the events of Rhys’s novel. In conclusion, the discourse between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre is iconic of how postcolonial retellings possess the power to interrogate and revitalize canonical texts in modernity. Rhys, by unveiling the patriarchal and colonial skeleton that holds up Jane Eyre ’s skin of progressiveness, revealed the complexity of the novel’s progressiveness and triggered an ongoing conversation surrounding it. By working cumulatively on Jane Eyre , Rhys proves that canonical literature is able to accommodate remonstrant discussion regarding itself without collapsing. Wide Sargasso Sea and the intertextual dialogue with Jane Eyre are emblematic of the numerous and often supressed influences which have moulded the literary canon and dare the reader to question the canon’s authority. Bibliography Bown, A. (2018) Bronte: Jane Eyre. MASSOLIT: https://massolit.io/courses/bronte-jane-eyre Brontë, C. (1847) Jane Eyre. London Martin, R. (1966) Charlotte Brontë’s Novels: The Accents of Persuasion. London Ng ũ g ĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature . London Rhys, J. (1966) Wide Sargasso Sea. London Rodrigues, J. (2018) Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre. MASSOLIT: https://massolit.io/courses/wide-sargasso- sea-and-jane-eyre Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. New York Spivak, G. (1984) ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12 : 243–261 Wilson, R. (2022) Literary Value and the Canon. MASSOLIT: https://massolit.io/courses/literary-value-and-the- canon
14 Rhys 1966: 104.
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