Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys (1966)
“The madwoman in Charlotte Brontë's attic finally gets to speak — and what she says demolishes everything Jane Eyre took for granted.”
EraPostmodern / Caribbean Modernist
Pages190
Difficulty★★★☆☆ Challenging
AP Appearances7
Character Analysis
The madwoman in Brontë's attic given a full human history. Antoinette is not mad when the novel begins — she is dispossessed, isolated, and without community. Her 'madness' is the result of the systematic destruction of identity: displacement from her homeland, renaming, imprisonment. Rhys makes her the most lucid voice in the novel at precisely the moment she is being declared irrational.
How They Speak
Lyrical, sensory, attuned to place — her consciousness lives in the external world of the island rather than the internal world of self-analysis