Wolfgang G.

Müller

The Intertextual Status of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso

Sea: Dependence on a Victorian Classic and
Independence as a Post-Colonial Novel

1. Introduction
Jean Rhys spent her childhood and youth in Jamaica, where she developed a
life-long sensitivity to conflicts of race, sex and religion and fascination with
colonial history. When she came across Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre,
she found the treatment of Rochester’s first wife, the Jamaican Creole Bertha
Mason, grossly unfair and permeated by deep-seated prejudices towards the
West Indies.1 Her novel Wide Sargasso Sea took its origin as a criticism and
revision of Brontë’s account of Rochester’s first marriage in Jamaica. It came
to be acknowledged as an exemplary attack on a master narrative (Friedman
122), which found many successors and fired the postcolonial debate. The
relationship between Brontë’s Victorian classic and Rhys’s post-colonial
classic raises fundamental questions concerning intertextuality and its ideo-
logical implications. In what follows the intertextual status of Wide Sargasso
Sea will be discussed with a focus on the problem of the novel’s dual charac-
ter as a derivative from a Victorian classic and an original work of post-
colonial fiction.
It is quite obvious that Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea could not have
been written without its pretext, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. As a text it
owes its existence to the Victorian classic, from which it is derived, sharing
elements of the plot with and re-using characters from the earlier novel. As
such it is an instance of a derivative text (Müller, “Derivative Literature”).
Yet it is equally evident that a characterisation of Wide Sargasso Sea, a
modern classic and the much-praised paradigm of post-colonial literature, as
merely derivative would be inappropriate. Rhys’s novel exemplifies how
problematic a merely descriptive or taxonomic application of intertextual

1 In an interview she said, “I was convinced Charlotte Brontë must have had something
against the West Indies and I was angry about it. Otherwise why did she take a West Indian
for the horrible lunatic, for that dreadful creature?” (Rhys 2001, ix). For a biographical
analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea see Hulme. Rhys denied a relationship between her own
person and the protagonist of her novel: “This is nothing to do with me. It is imagination,
and the time is 1840 or so, when really I wasn’t alive.” (Qtd. from Neck-Yoder 185)
64 Wolfgang G. Müller

categories can be. Wide Sargasso Sea represents a paradoxical mix of de-
pendence on a pretext and aesthetic originality and independence. It fills in a
gap in Jane Eyre by supplying the earlier life history of Bertha Mason, the
Creole wife of Edward Rochester, i.e. the time anterior to her imprisonment
in Thornfield Hall, but in its revision and extension of Rochester’s account of
his marriage with Bertha Mason in Jamaica it opens up a new vision, “a
complex of lives, relationships, and social facts of the colonial island world
that are utterly absent in Jane Eyre” (Rody 305). With the introduction of a
great number of ethnically and hierarchically differentiated characters and
their conflicts and with references to real and invented West Indian places
such as Spanish Town, Martinique and Coulibri Estate and to historical facts
such as the Emancipation Act and its effect on the white plantocracy, the first
pages of Wide Sargasso Sea already lead us into a world which could not be
more different from the world of Jane Eyre. Also the name of Rhys’s novel,
with its reference to the Sargasso Sea, which stretches between the West
Indies and the Azores, separating and at the same time connecting Europe
and the Carribean, “the ‘mother’ and its ‘daughter’ island colonies” (Gosh-
Shellhorn 181, Sternlicht 104), opens perspectives alien to Jane Eyre. Jean
Rhys was aware of the problem of her work’s dependence on and inde-
pendence of its pretext. In a letter she speaks of “hook[ing] on my Mrs
Rochester to Charlotte Brontë’s” (Rhys, Letters 149), while in another letter
she refers to the possibility “to unhitch the whole thing from Charlotte
Brontë’s novel”, but rejects this idea, because “[it] is that particular mad
Creole I want to write about, not any of the other mad Creoles” (Rhys,
Letters 153).
Before we broach the intertextual issue, a brief characterisation of the
general features of the two novels may be useful in order to bring home their
distinctiveness as works of fiction: on the one hand there is the Victorian
fictional autobiography set in nineteenth-century England, with a disad-
vantaged orphan as a protagonist who successfully struggles against what is
predominantly male repression and gains independence and finally happiness
in love. The story is told in an orderly chronological way covering five
phases from childhood to womanhood in the life of the protagonist. The
narrator is the protagonist, who tells her story about ten years after her
marriage, frequently addressing the reader and presenting a heroine who
tends to debate with herself in critical situations. By way of contrast, Wide
Sargasso Sea tells the story of the marriage of ethnically different persons, an
unnamed Englishman (Brontë’s Edward Rochester) and the Creole heiress
Antoinette Mason (Brontë’s ‘madwoman in the attic’, Bertha Mason), whose
mutual alienation in the carefully represented multi-racial colonial world of
the Caribbean triggers a catastrophe. The narrative form of the novel is a