6 - People in and out of place: spatial arrangements in Wide Sargasso Sea

Summary

I cannot have stressed the poverty and isolation of that family at Coulibri (round about 1834) – Emancipation time etc) enough. They would not have been able to get to Spanish Town – far less to Granbois which is in another island (Dominica of course, my island, though I don't want to be precise about that).

(L: 232)

Wide Sargasso Sea is Rhys's most celebrated novel and it has been extensively and variously discussed by critics. Since its first publication, critics have been fascinated by its relation with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. This remains a significant critical concern. This relation has much to do with location, the Caribbean text writing back to the English one. Jane Eyre, in Brontë's novel, is poor and displaced within England. The novel's pivot is class, (underpinned by money), not national identity: Erwin (1989) argues that Wide Sargasso Sea's absence of sure national identity is the most important difference between it and Jane Eyre. Although Rochester's mad wife, imprisoned in the attic, is clearly a stranger in England, her nationality and affiliations are repressed in the text. Jane eventually discovers herself an heiress, Rochester loses some of his physical ability and charm and some of his property: their marriage is at last possible.

Rhys's rewriting of Brontë not only privileges the Caribbean but does a great deal to move Rochester out of the realm of the Gothic romance and explain his capacity for cruelty.