From Jane To Antoinette: On The Subversion Of The Archetypal Cinderella In Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys(1890-1979),was a 20^thcentury Dominican and British novelist who might still be regarded avant-garde today.Her Wide Sargasso Sea(1966),a prequel of Charlotte Bront(?)'s Jane Eyre,marked the peak of her career as a novelist.In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys creates the wordless and seemingly negative character,Antoinette(Bertha Mason),a rebelling woman living in the milieu of a 19^th century colony.As a mixed blood,a woman of no consequences,she is ruthlessly trampled upon.In my opinion,it is her psychologically realistic portrait of Antoinette that earns Rhys a place in the literary canon.However,while I undertake my limited study on Wide Sargasso Sea,I notice that few critics have examined or even mentioned the interrelations among Cinderella, Jane Eyre and Antoinette,which is indeed crucial in the study on the characterization of Antoinette,the heroine in Wide Sargasso Sea.Cinderella is the titular heroine of the well-known fairy tale in Europe and elsewhere.She could be regarded as an archetypal character emerging in many literary works,including Jane Eyre,though superficial metamorphoses are allowed. Although the novel Jane Eyre is generally regarded as one of the greatest feminist works,the fate of the heroine is actually very.similar to that of Cinderella,falling into the repeated kitsch once more.Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea challenges Bront(?)'s so-called feminist consciousness embodied in Jane Eyre and invites those who have read Jane Eyre to compare the two women living in the same age,and to deplore Bertha's tragedy and inquire into causes of it from her own point of view.Rhys lets Antoinette talk and vent her sorrows,while in Jane Eyre Bront(?)deprives the same woman the right to voice her opinion and forces her to remain silent.In exploring what is behind the tragedy,be it social or psychological, epistemological or ontological,Rhys subverts the capitalist and the phallocentric discourse taken for granted by the applied reader,who is used to the Jane Eyre type of "self-made" heroines and recognizes them as representatives and advocators of feminism in the 19^thcentury.Analyses in my thesis are employed mainly form the perspectives of mythological and archetypal approach,and occasionally from that of feminist criticism.By comparing the hidden archetypal Cinderella in Jane Eyre and the anti-archetypal Wide Sargasso Sea respectively,I come to the conclusion that the novel Wide Sargasso Sea is basically subversion of the archetypal Cinderella story and that of Jane Eyre as well.The anachronism betrayed in Antoinette the self-reflexive heroine,as in contrast to the miserable girl Cinderella in the tear-jerker and the titular heroine in Jane Eyre, the self-assumed "independent woman," shows Jean Rhys,feminist or no feminist, was ahead of her time as an avant-gardist embracing radical thoughts concerning women's emancipation in all aspects,but mainly in the ideological and spiritual sphere.I hope that my attempt in reconstruct Wide Sargasso Sea will provide a novel and reasonable approach to the understanding of the canonical work.