Quotation Study: Wild Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
On the importance of reading Rhys alongside Brontë...
This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!
These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.
There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is not just a companion piece to Jane Eyre — it is a necessary corrective. A ghost text that haunts the canonical novel it responds to. I believe it should be included in every edition of Jane Eyre, as essential as the foreword or the author bio. Bound to it not as an optional afterword, but as a parallel narrative, a second voice in the room. Although, I can’t help but wonder: would it be more disruptive — more effective — to read Wide Sargasso Sea first? To let Antoinette’s story shape our reception of Jane’s?
For those unfamiliar, Jane Eyre contains a figure who is often reduced to a plot device: Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic” as coined in the infamous essay. She is Rochester’s first wife, rendered monstrous, silent, and expendable in contrast to Jane. We never hear her voice, never read her thoughts. She is symbol, not subject — the gothic obstacle standing between Jane and her happy ending.
Rhys’s 1966 novel changes that. Wide Sargasso Sea gives Bertha a name — Antoinette Cosway — and with it, a history, a voice, and a context. We learn that she is Creole, born in post-emancipation Jamaica, suspended between racial categories, languages, and cultures. She is neither fully British nor fully Jamaican, neither wholly coloniser nor colonised. Her identity is fractured, and so is her narrative — splintered across shifting timelines, disjointed memories, and contested perspectives.
I thought I would take a more literary approach on this quotation study, emphasising the importance of reading Rhys’ novel.
“I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all.”
This is the existential crisis at the heart of Wide Sargasso Sea. It’s not simply about personal madness — it’s about historical dislocation. Antoinette’s confusion is not individual, but structural. Her psyche is unravelled by colonialism, by patriarchal violence, by cultural erasure. Her story is one of profound disempowerment: a woman displaced geographically, racially, emotionally — and finally, narratively.
This is what makes Wide Sargasso Sea so necessary. It reminds us that literary heritage is often built on erasure. That for Jane to be “liberated,” Antoinette had to be silenced. There is always another person silenced when another is upheld.
“You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know that’s not what I was.”
Rochester renames her. He calls her “Bertha” because Antoinette is too exotic, too foreign. It’s not just a renaming — it’s a colonisation of identity. This gesture mirrors what the British Empire did across the world: rewrote names, rewrote histories, and claimed ownership not just over land but over language, identity, and memory.
This is what Jane Eyre does, too — whether Brontë intended it or not. Jane’s voice dominates the narrative. She gets to be complex, evolving, morally righteous. Antoinette — Bertha — is flattened. We’re told she’s mad and dangerous, and we’re expected to accept that.
“There is always the other side, always.”
Rhys refuses it. She writes a confrontation. Rhys is telling us that every narrative has a counterpart — and that what we call “the truth” is always partial. Jane Eyre is not wrong, exactly — it’s incomplete. It’s told from a place of whiteness, of Englishness, of moral clarity that is only possible because someone else was made unknowable.
Rhys doesn’t just give Antoinette a voice — she gives her desire, rage, confusion, eroticism, and memory. She gives her a self, which is the one thing Brontë’s novel denied her. In doing so, she forces us to re-read Jane Eyre not as a feminist triumph, but as a story entangled with colonialism, race, and exclusion.
“You have no right to ask questions about my mother and then refuse to listen to the truth I want to give you.”
This could be addressed to Rochester, certainly. But it also feels directed at us — the reader, the literary tradition, the institutions that canonised Brontë while ignoring or sidelining Rhys. It asks us to interrogate whose truths we accept, and whose stories we refuse to listen to because they disrupt our sense of coherence.
Because ultimately, Wide Sargasso Sea reminds us that literature is not neutral. It emerges from — and participates in — systems of power. To read only Jane Eyre and not Wide Sargasso Sea is to see only half the picture. And yet the original narrative often retains more prestige, more literary capital, more affection. Jane Eyre is in every classroom. Wide Sargasso Sea is optional, extra — the other side.
If we’re committed to reading ethically, expansively, and with historical awareness, we have to read both sides. Seek it out however we can because the voice may not have had the chance to speak yet.
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