Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the Silence and the Voice

Abstract

The re-telling of a story from another point of view can be seen as a process of deconstructing an enunciation based on a certain perspective into a new one with new way of seeing. It is a process of tackling a text from a different point of view to explore issues that have been kept unexplored for a long time in the same way Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been kept and isolated in her attic room. Jean Rhys’s in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea sets a debate or dialogue to revision or re-examine the history of the other and gives a voice to people that have been overlooked and silenced in Bronte’s Jane Eyre for a long time. In giving a voice and a considerable space of existence to Berth, Rhys cursors Bronte's failure to see the other as human with expectations and aspirations regardless to her race, the colour of their complexion and religion. Jane Eyre’s Bertha or Wide Sargasso Sea’s Antoinette, the Creole woman who has been introduced to the reader by Bronte’s Jane Eyre as the mad woman, has been kept in the dark and allowed no chance to speak up herself. Rhys in her novel negotiates Bronte’s Jane Eyre and presents a new reading of the mad woman in Jane Eyre. The story of Antoinette or Bertha is not only a retelling of a story or viewing the other side of a story, but rather it is an attempt to explore and expose the narcissism and patriarchy of the Victorian society concerning the other.