Comparing Wide Sargasso Sea to Jane Eyre
How does your reading of Wide Sargasso Sea alter your perceptions of Jane Eyre? Reading Wide Sargasso Sea has altered the way that I now read Jane Eyre. It has become a prequel to Jane Eyre and has allowed for me to experience the role of Bertha from a different perspective giving her a background and explaining how she came to be in this situation. The use of different narratives has been a technique that has also created a different way of perceiving Jane Eyre. Bertha’s role in Jane Eyre was as a person that I felt very little sympathy for. She stood in the way of not only Jane’s happiness but also Mr. ... What Wide Sargasso Sea did was that it allowed for me to discover how Bertha may have come to be mad, and that she may not have always been mad. When reading Jane Eyre I always assumed that she had simply gone mad and that Rochester was unlucky to have married this crazy woman. However, my views on this were changed after I read Wide Sargasso Sea. ... ” This links to Jane Eyre when Jane is unsure of whether she should be marrying Rochester or not. It demonstrates the similarities and differences between the character of Jane in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’ Antoinette. ... Jane because she feels that in marrying Rochester she will lose her freedom when husband and wife power relations come into play, and Antoinette because she is somewhat naïve having grown up on her own with little parental guidance and because she is afraid of what marriage is and what it will entail. ... Jane however shows willpower and although she is passionate towards Rochester, she cannot go through with the initial marriage because it as she would not be being truthful to herself in the sense that being someone’s wife she will be expected to become passive. Seeing the different ways that these two characters accept their fates indicates Rhys’ attempts to place Antoinette in a time before Jane’s, when women had little choice but to accept what is handed to them.