The crucial question, Wide Sargasso Sea, as a work of art might seem to pose is whether it

can stand and be judged alone or whether in the view expressed by Walter Allen-- it is only
"a triumph of atmosphere [which] doesn't exist in it's own right, as Mr Rochester is almost as
shadowy as Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason." Jean Rhys's own comment, "She seemed
such a poor ghost. I thought I'd like to write her life" might seem to lend support to Allen's
generalizations suggesting, as it does, that Rhys expended her creative effort upon an act of
moral restitution to the stereotyped lunatic creole heiress in Rochester's attic. A dull
stereotyped remembrance of Jane Eyre would make Rochester a passionate, Byronically
moody man, his life blighted by the secret existence of the mad wife in the attic, a character
who is little more than a fragment of a 'gothic' imagination. Wide Sargasso Sea, in it's even
handed treatment of both the sexes through the inward presentation of Rochester's
viewpoint stands apart from Jane's victorian eye.

The development of Rhys's narrative, where it centres upon Antoinette bears striking
resemblances to Bronte's portrayal of the younger Jane. Both the heroines grow up
fatherless and emotionally threatened by those who take charge of them; they live much
within themselves and within their imaginations, made fearful by emotional as well as
physical insecurity. Jane is an orphan, Antoinette virtually one. In fact Jane's experience is
such that she might have recognized Bertha's suffering at the Thornfield Hall: her agonies in
the red room where her aunt confines her, correspond to Bertha's isolation, while her
temptation to a superstitious doubt of her own reality, as when she peers in the looking glass
is counterpointed in Rhys's novel by the looking glass motif linked with Antoinette, who
constantly needs one to be reassured if her identity. Another implicit link between Jane and
Antoinette is in the "charm" of exotic far places conjured up for by Gulliver's travels- but her
imagination more often torments than consoles her, inflamed by her daily struggle for
survival. Those around her set her down as "a mad cat" subject to "tantrums". Before she
goes to Lowood she is, like Bertha, virtually confined and treated as a wild, unstable,
"passionate" being. It is hardly surprising that the pictures, she paints at school, which she
later shows Rochester, recall her fevered imaginings: one, of the "woman's shape to the bust
.............the eyes shone dark and wild, the hair streamed shadowy", might seem to
pronounce the catholic belief of presentiment of Bertha as she is later shown, but in any later
account Bronte did not point to any such link.
Jane finds support and inspiration in the example of saintly Helen Burns but Antoinette
can only envy the well-adjusted de-plana-sisters, especially Hélène. Antoinette, opposite to
Jane's experience in Helen, can only learn from her how ill-fitted she is to enter the life
beyond the convent where she acquires no sheild against reality. Jane however goes
forth-armed with the saving talisman of Helen's Christian example which keeps her proof at
the centre against her later misfortune and temptation. The significance of Bronte's Helen
Burns clearly crystallizes later when Jane rebuffs Rochester's plea for love after he has
confessed his "terrible life" with the words "trust in God and yourself. Believe in Heaven.
Hope to meet again there". Jane's severe morality reflects her creator's views--"sin itself is a
species of insanity". Bronte's moral forcing, despite her casting of Jane as a seeker after
liberty and self-determination, is reductive and constricting. Nowhere is this more clearly
revealed than in the novel's de-humanization of Bertha, the hapless creature for whom her
own experience might have taught her more than a perfunctory plea for pity, soon set aside
by Rochester. This dehumanization of Bertha is the most striking difference between the two
novels.
In Bronte's work, the coarse assumptions about madness, mingled with the racial prejudices
is inherent in the insistent suggestion: "the fiery West Indian" place of Bertha's upbringing
and her creole blood are the essence of her lunacy: "Her mother was both a madwoman and
a drunkard". Later she is "my Indian messalina", a byword for debauchery, while Rochester's
own confessed peccadilloes go under the milder name of "dissipation". Of course, the
blackening of the dehumanized creature from the West Indian past readily serves Bronte's
purpose of winning sympathy for the deceived and deluded Rochester from both Jane and
those of the Victorian audience, prone to racial prejudices. It's evident that Bertha's humanity
had not been sufficiently realized: it was easier to make a mere figure of a character who
was, unlike Rochester and Jane, wholly imagined as a means to glorify the other chief
characters. In his account, Rochester explains that Bertha's descent from "idiots and
maniacs through three generations" was concealed from him, but also that her, "gross,
impure, depraved" vices "prematurely developed the germs of insanity" Thus according to
Rochester, Bertha must be both congenitally insane and yet depraved before the madness
shows itself- a shaky diagnosis but convenient or else it would've been possible to pity her.
Essentially our pity is needed for Mr Rochester. In wide Sargasso Sea, getting behind
Bertha's insanity, Rhys soughts to win her reader's understanding and compassion for those
whose state of mind is often and for deeply complex reasons, just the opposite side of a thin,
sometimes illusive dividing line from "normality". Rhys set herself not only to the task of
humanizing the West Indian exotic but also to portray, subtly and sympathetically, its effect
upon Edward. The underlining of Jane and Antoinette as women draws out the hidden
affinities between Antoinette and Edward, affinities which are substance if their plight and
tragedy.
Consistent with her approach, Rhys gives more credible human substance even to the minor
figure of Grace Poole, Bertha's sullen jailor, presenting her as another victim, "sinking low so
that she may sink no lower": "After all the house is big and safe, a shelter from the world
outside which, say what you like, can be a black and cruel world to a woman" This passage
implicitly echoes the security Antoinette feels in the cold "refuge" of her convent, contrasted
with "outside": In Rhys's work the madwoman and her jailor are, unwittingly, sisters beneath
the skin.

In the post war period the development of newer critical theories and strengthening of the
past ones fueled the trend of rewriting of the already prevailing literary classics. This
reinventing of old works furthered the development of critical evaluation techniques. Jean
Rhys and a host of other novelists have adopted subversive points of view to produce
intriguing new insights into classic works of fiction.
[ In Foe, JM Coetzee borrows a female castaway’s viewpoint to reinvent Robinson Crusoe.
Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife takes its cue from a scant paragraph's worth of
references to the captain's missus in Melville's Moby-Dick. In March, Geraldine Brooks
explores the story of Little Women from the perspective of the girls’ absentee father. Great
Expectations has been reconsidered by Peter Carey, whose Jack Maggs gives Magwitch’s
version of events, and by Ronald Frame, whose Havisham reappraises Dickens’ fabulously
desiccated bride-in-waiting. Nothing, it seems, is sacred – even that Old English epic,
Beowulf, has been retold from the point of view of ‘the other’, thanks to Jack Gardner’s
Grendel. ] By giving voice to the marginalised and the maligned, these parallel tales appeal
to our egalitarian worldview. It’s a kind of cultural revisionism, yet even as these works
challenge the canon, they’re simultaneously reinforcing it. Good literature is a product of its
age. Great literature may tap the zeitgeist but also functions as a time-release capsule,
packed with meanings and messages that will resonate with future generations in ways that
the authors themselves cannot necessarily imagine. Bertha Mason seemed a “poor ghost” to
Rhys, and that choice of noun says plenty: the story in which Brontë embeds this dishevelled
lunatic renders her absence a haunting kind of presence, and keeps her nagging at the
imagination long after the novel’s final page has been turned. If books like Jane Eyre weren’t
so extraordinarily good in the first place, these apparent voids wouldn’t beg to be filled