The long brown room was full of gold sunlight and shadows of trees moving quietly. We woke to see Sister Marie Augustine sitting, serene and neat, bolt upright in a wooden chair. Rhys writes, This convent was my refuge, a place of sunshine and of death where very early in the morning the clap of a wooden signal woke the nine of us who slept in the long dormitory. Near the end of Part 1, Antoinette has gone to live and study at a convent in Spanish Town, the capital city of Jamaica at the time. Deemed insane, she is kept under supervision at a cottage in the countryside. A little sunshine on a gray morningĪfter the family’s home was burned down by the mob and her brother killed, Antoinette’s mother has violent outbursts. Some critics have argued that Rhys’s novella caricatures Black people in the same way Jane Eyre caricatured Creoles others have disagreed. Tensions between the family and the formerly enslaved people are high, and race is a central theme of the novella. Bertha Mason, who in Rhys’s retelling is called Antoinette Cosway, is the daughter of a white Creole family who lost their economic power with the act of emancipation. The story opens in medias res, just after the abolition of slavery. Rhys’s novel takes place in the 1830s and 40s in Jamaica and nearby islands. What was even happening? Who are these characters? After a few days of work together, a student came to me on Friday asking, “Jimmy, are you sure this story isn’t real?” That’s what I want to explore a bit today–what is Rhys doing in her text that makes it so very vivid, so very, very real? Students at first found the reading a terrible challenge. In my English Language & Literature class, I am teaching Wide Sargasso Sea.

Rhys challenged this representation of Creole women with a reimagining of Bertha Mason, and she so completely brings this character to life, gives her so fully her own rich story that readers might not realize at all that she comes from another novel. She in many ways embodies the stereotypes that existed about Creole women in England at the time Brontë was writing. In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, who like Rhys hails from the Caribbean, is characterized as insane, animalistic, bestial, terrifying.

Wide Sargasso Sea took as its focus the character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It marked her return to the literary scene after a near twenty-year’s gap, and it inspired a large body of scholarship and study.

In 1966, the Dominican writer Jean Rhys published her most celebrated work, the novella Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide sargasso