Thesis on "Jane Eyre and Wild Sargasso Sea"

Thesis 3 pages (1035 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Rochester Through Different Eyes

An orphaned girl. A mad woman locked and hidden away. A small village school that is both a refuge and another form of adversity. These things and many more appear both in Charlotte Bront's classic novel Jane Eyre and the companion piece written to it almost one hundred and twenty years later by Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. The huge similarities in plot -- and in the two protagonists -- are not accidental; Wide Sargasso Sea is in many ways an exciting and somehow updated re-imagining of Bront's masterpiece. The overlap does not just occur with similarities, however, but by the direct connection of several characters. Rhys takes Bertha Mason, Edward Rochester's mad and attic-imprisoned wife in Jane Eyre, and traces her life as a child in the Caribbean isles, through her marriage and subsequent imprisonment in England, and up to that fateful moment when he departs the attic with a lighted candle in hand. Instrumental in the both the stories of Antoinette -- Bertha's real name, as we learn in Sargasso -- and Jane is Edward Rochester, an enigmatic man who can be viewed in many ways by both books. His characterization seems to be left purposefully ambiguous by both novelists; he is neither wholly condemnable nor at all redeemable. Rochester is selfish, well-meaning, cowardly, and independent -- the quintessential Byronic hero. Yet in many ways, though Jane Eyre spends much time documenting Rochester's Byronic flaws and charting the protagonist's reactions to them, it seems to focus more on the "hero" aspect of this label, whereas the view with which he is seen in Wide Sargasso Sea is far more direct in exposing the weakness and vulnerability of his character.


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