Wide Sargasso Sea

The direct source text — impossible to read Wide Sargasso Sea without it, and impossible to read Jane Eyre the same way after

Morrison does for American slavery what Rhys does for Caribbean colonialism — gives the silenced, destroyed woman a consciousness and a voice

The imperial text Rhys answers — the 'darkness' in Conrad is the African continent; in Rhys the darkness is England and the colonizer's mind

Both novels center a woman's voice within a landscape — Hurston's Florida South and Rhys's Caribbean work similarly as consciousness-shaping geography

Both novels end with a woman's death as the only available exit from a world that will not allow her full personhood — and both end ambiguously on whether that exit is defeat or transcendence

Both novels are about women whose identity is systematically dismantled by men with institutional power, and both recover that identity through voice — one in letters, one in fragmented narration