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.
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