Rhys’s sympathy is fully with the innocent Creole heiress who is married off to the visiting Englishman, Rochester, and trapped in a loveless (but not, it seems, atypical) marriage: born Antoinette, she is rebaptized Bertha by her husband, and brought back to England, to Thornfield, to be kept in captivity like a wild animal. Yet Rhys’s novel is more than a remarkably inspired tour de force, a modernist revision of a great Victorian classic: it is an attempt to evoke, by means of a highly compressed and elliptical poetic language, the authentic experience of madness-more precisely, of being driven into madness and it is a brilliantly sustained anti-romance, a reverse mirror image of Jane Eyre’s and Rochester’s England. Bertha Rochester, the doomed madwoman of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys’s haunting and hallucinatory prose poem of a novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), boldly tells the story- authentic, intimate, and unsparing, because first-person confession-of Mrs.
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