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.”
Characters in Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys · 1966 · 6 characters analyzed
Cast: Antoinette Cosway (later 'Bertha'), The Husband (Rochester), Christophine, Annette Cosway (later Mason), Tia, Daniel Cosway.
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.
Lyrical, sensory, attuned to place — her consciousness lives in the external world of the island rather than the internal world of self-analysis