Intro
Let's keep things rolling on the Jane Eyre front by taking a look at Jean Rhys's humdinger of a re-telling of the story in Wide Sargasso Sea, written over a century later in 1967. Rhys was a Caribbean-English writer, and her remake of Charlotte Brontë's novel puts all of the emphasis on Antoinette Mason, known in Jane Eyre as the crazy, attic-dwelling Bertha Rochester, the original "madwoman" in the attic.
By focusing on Antoinette's early life as a white Creole woman growing up in Jamaica, Rhys draws out all of the gruesome details of British colonialism in the West Indies. That's right: Jane Eyre isn't just a sweeping feminist love story; all kinds of nasty history lurks in the background. And darling Eddie with his wife-locking past may not always have been as charming as he seemed to our sweet Jane.
Quote
There is one window high up—you cannot see out of it. My bed had doors but they have been taken away. There is not much else in the room. Her bed, a black press, the table in the middle and two black chairs carved with fruit and flowers. They have high backs and no arms. The dressing-room is very small, the room next to this one is hung with tapestry. Looking at the tapestry one day I recognized my mother dressed in an evening gown but with bare feet. She looked away from me, over my head just as she used to do. I wouldn't tell Grace this. Her name oughtn't to be Grace. Names matter, like when he wouldn't call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass.
Analysis
Quite the tearjerker, huh? As you might have guessed, the "I" in this passage is Antoinette Mason, Edward Rochester's wife. In Jean Rhys's version of this story, Ed refuses to call Antoinette by her real name once they're married, and re-names her Bertha instead. That's just one of lots of things he does to undermine her dignity—no wonder she went crazy.
At this point in the novel, Antoinette is living in her tower room at Thornfield, where she's watched constantly by Grace Poole, a woman hired to look after her. Antoinette's sanity comes and goes (hence thinking she sees her dead mother), and readers are meant to feel a lot of sympathy for her. After all, we've watched her go from being a lively, beautiful young woman to a desperate, imprisoned creature. Kinda makes you re-think the beauty of Jane Eyre's marriage to Edward, dunnit?
One of the coolest (and complicated!) readings of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea that you'll ever see was written by the postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In her 1985 essay "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Spivak argues that no one should be able to read 19th-century British literature without taking account of the fact that that literature was an important part of British imperialism.
She says that, by representing an ideal vision of England to English people, and by subtly teaching those people to value England's "civilizing" missions overseas, novels like Jane Eyre helped to justify colonial violence. Ouch. She also points out that Euro-American feminists like Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar could do a whole lot better than praise Jane for marrying well, when that marriage is helped along by the dirty money that Edward gets through his marriage to Bertha/Antoinette. Double ouch.
By reading Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea next to each other, Spivak makes a serious challenge to feminist theorists who were happy to make Jane Eyre their hero. Like many of the other antiracist and postcolonial feminists we've seen, she argues that feminist theory can't just care about women's oppression: it has to start thinking about how women's happiness, like Jane's, has been built on the sadness of others.