Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre An

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came from a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations. Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!’ She is further described as having a ‘discoloured face’, ‘a savage face’ with ‘fearful blackened
inflation’ of the features, ‘the lips were swelled and dark’; described as a demon, witch, vampire, beast and hyena1. But nowhere in the novel does Bronte allow ‘the madwoman in the attic’ to have a
voice, to explain what may have caused her madness. Rhys says: ‘The mad wife in Jane Eyre always interested me. I was convinced that Charlotte Bronte must have had something against the West
Indies and I was angry about it. Otherwise, why did she take a West Indian for that horrible lunatic, for that really dreadful creature?’2 So in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys rewrites Bronte’s canonical text according to her own, personal experiences, as both a white West Indian and a woman.

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Creole planter, rather than that of the emancipated slave.

The historical-fictional content of Wide Sargasso Sea is, by design, a prequel, or (p)review of Jane Eyre. Rhys called an early draft of the text Le Revenant: something that comes back, haunts, revisits. I
think the ‘haunting’ and ‘revisiting’ between Rhys and Jane Eyre is reciprocal. Here, she herself revisits her youth, through Antoinette, to experience Dominica in a way which previews the characters and content of Jane Eyre in a temporal sense; but in doing so, creates indelible perspectives which haunt subsequent re-readings of the book. She also establishes a literary relationship between Jane ...

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