An Enhanced Reading of Jean Rhys' 'Wide Sargasso Sea'. Considering Source Texts Other than 'Jane Eyre'

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: Distinction, The Open University, course: M.A. English, language: English, abstract: This essay interrogates the way in which Jean Rhys utilises a backdrop of potent gothic mechanisms and echoes the stricken anarchy of post emancipation colonial rule in 'Wide Sargasso Sea' to enhance the audience's reading and to enable her protagonist to hold a slanted mirror to the world of 'Jane Eyre'. Rhys utilises a backdrop of potent gothic mechanisms and echoes the stricken anarchy of post emancipation colonial rule in her writing to enhance the audience's reading and to enable her protagonist to hold a slanted mirror to the world of 'Jane Eyre'. At first, it seems incongruous that the vibrant, post colonialist backdrop of 'Wide Sargasso Sea', soaked by the 'brazen sun' (1) should be so richly entangled with the shadowy landscapes of the European gothic. 'Jane Eyre' is punctuated by claustrophobic English imagery to add an atmospheric sense of terror, particularly noticeable in Brontë's description of the violent Thornfield countryside, where the landscape seems animated by some nameless, feral horror; the beck is 'a torrent, turbid and curbless: it tore asunder the wood, and sent a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or whirling sleet; and for the forest on its banks, that showed only ranks of skeleton.' (p.64)