Gender Oppression and the Consequent Madness in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

Jean Rhys, through her ground breaking novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, portrays the journey of a French Creole woman Antoinette from a troubled childhood to her eventual culmination into madness. This novel is a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre and was published in England in 1966. Jean Rhys’s protagonist Antoinette is the representation of the character “Bertha” in the novel Jane Eyre. Through this novel, Jean has given Bronte’s “Bertha” a chance to tell her side of the story of how she ended up in the attic alone and mad which finally ended up in her demise. Madness is an inherent theme which plays an important role and also acts as a consequence of gender oppression. This paper intends to study the inherent gender oppression that the protagonist Antoinette faces from her husband and the consequent madness that follows from this oppression in Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Through a detailed analysis this paper tries to investigate how Antoinette’s husband Mr. Rochester, by his patriarchal male supremacy and domination, oppressed Antoinette to the point that she not only lost her identity but also slipped into madness. The main motive of this paper is to show how Antoinette’s culmination into madness is not just a result of mental illness but also the result of long repressed scars of her traumatic upbringing which are exacerbated by her husband's rejection and cruel behaviour of her which completely erodes her self-esteem ultimately culminating into madness. This paper attempts to prove that Antoinette's abusive patriarchal husband drives her "mad" on purpose and his view of Antoinette as "mad" is the result of her not living up to his Victorian standards of restrained sexuality.