What is Wide Sargasso Sea About and Why Should I Care? The beauty of Wide Sargasso Sea is that it lets you have it both ways.) Can you love Jane Eyre and be seduced by Wide Sargasso Sea at the same time? Of course – many people do. (Oh, and can you 'get' Wide Sargasso Sea without having any idea what Jane Eyre is about? Absolutely. The novel challenges us to read these texts critically for the untold stories of characters who are marginalized because they don't fit into the dominant paradigm of what a hero or heroine ought to be. No wonder, then, that Wide Sargasso Sea isn't just a fascinating and entertaining story, but a work that has profoundly impacted the way that readers approach the 'great books' of Western literature. Setting the novel during this tumultuous period enables Rhys to situate the figure of the white Creole woman in the complex of shifting race relations under British colonial rule. Wide Sargasso Sea also alters the historical setting of Jane Eyre by pushing the chronology up almost thirty years later in order to take advantage of another foundational moment in Jamaican history, the abolition of slavery in 1834. The marriage of Antoinette and Rochester is no longer just a painful back-story, but a stage on which the sexes battle it out for emotional and economic control. The Caribbean is no longer an exotic afterthought, but a vibrant locale described with an eye trained on its dense social, cultural, and historical landscape.

Instead of a shrieking specter, we get a psychologically nuanced portrayal of Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a young white Creole girl coming of age in Jamaica while it was still a British colony. Wide Sargasso Sea isn't just a prequel, but a significant re-writing of one of the classics of Victorian fiction.

Nearly fifty years later, Rhys turned the story of Brontë's 'madwoman in the attic' into a full-length novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which pretty much established Rhys as one of the greatest novelists in the twentieth century. As a native of the Caribbean herself, she was 'shocked' by Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Mason, Rochester's Creole wife who was locked up in the attic ( Rhys 1999: 144). Jean Rhys first read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 1907, when she arrived in England as a teenager. OK, so we were kidding about the monkeys, but all that other stuff? It's all in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and it's widely considered a literary classic.

Zombies! Black magic! Riots! Rum-soaked Caribbean honeymoon! Squishy bugs! Monkeys!

Wide sargasso