| Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which functions as the prequel to Bronte's Jane Eyre, is the reinterpretation of the earlier novel. And in this novel, Rhys's radical feminist views are fully reflected.In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys reverses Bronte's text to tell the story from Bertha Mason's point of view, and moves the long marginalized 'madwoman' to the central place. Using the minor character of Jane Eyre, Rhys challenges the patriarchal legal system and moral values. In the novel, Rhys's heroine, the 'madwoman', is deprived of her fortune by her husband after marriage in accord with the English law, and becomes entirely dependent on her husband. Furthermore, her sexuality encounters her husband's coldness and antipathy, for feminine passion is a taboo in patriarchal society. The oppression of her sexuality leads to her rage which, together with her sexuality, is viewed as 'female insanity' by the 19th century patriarchal concept. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys questions the cause of 'female insanity' and reveals how the patriarchal law and the oppression of women's sexuality reduce a normal sane girl to a mad woman.Rhys doesn't merely reconstruct the biography of the "poor ghost", Bertha Mason. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys tells at least two stories: the personal story of Antoinette Cosway (the 'real' Bertha Mason in Rhys's version), and a narrative of English imperialism in Jamaica. And one of Rhys's achievements is that she incorporates colonialism into gender analysis. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys's heroine, a colonized Creole woman is rejected by the black and alienated by the white, thus isolated from both the black world and the white world, belonging to neither but existing in a strange limbo outside both. Antoinette's tragedy demonstrates that the patriarchal/colonial system not only displaces women but also deprives them as individuals of any means of independent survival! Rhys articulates the condition of oppressed cultural groups under European imperialism and the masculine oppression of women within European society.On the other hand, we will feel that Wide Sargasso Sea is not a one-sided portrait of woman's downfall. In the novel, Rhys presents the tragedy of woman oppressed and exploited by patriarchal/colonial authority. Moreover, she suggests the tragedy of man who is also victimized by patriarchy. Her hero is triply victimized: he is disinherited as the second son in accord with the law of primogeniture, which forces him into a marriage of convenience; his rationality (posited as 'necessary' and 'realthinking' by patriarchy) encounters his wife's passion, which leads to his hostilitytowards her; his male impulse to control woman makes him view his relationship with Antoinette as a battle in which he is no more the triumphant destroyer, but himself the destroyed when he loses.Through her examination of the tragedy of man and woman, Rhys has, in fact, shown us a tragic fact of the man-woman relationship under patriarchy. She stresses the gap between the young couple (namely, the gap between the powerful and the powerless, the oppressor and the oppressed, and between the different ways that they perceive the world). The unbridgeable gap between man and woman inextricably leads to their alienation. And in the novel, Rhys's man and woman fail to achieve a union. It is true that Rhys's novel is study of unfulfillment, of unreconciled oppositions and contrasts between woman and man. Rhys poses no ways of fulfillment because of the failure in reconciliation between oppositions and contrasts. We learn that Rhys's novel concludes with a dream: Antoinette sets fire to her prison, the symbol of patriarchal confinement of women. The dream suggests no reconciliation but destruction and rebellion. In fact, Rhys reveals that it is not only a dream of her 'madwoman', but also the only way out for most women in patriarchal society.Wide Sargasso Sea is the reinterpretation of Bronte's Jane Eyre, bringing added insight into the 19th century classic. This thesis intends to examine Rhys's radical and r...
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