Rewriting The Canon

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel written by Dominica-born English writer Jean Rhys. In the novel, Jean Rhys rewrites the story of Rochester’s mad wife Bertha Mason from Charlotte Bront?’s Victorian classic Jane Eyre. The novel was an immediate success after its publication. Critics are attracted to Rhys’ s imaginative retelling of the story. Rhys’ s rewriting also calls attention to the unjust depiction of Bertha as a ghost-like, dehumanized and insane woman in Jane Eyre. Although this novel depends largely on Jane Eyre, its originality and aesthetic value should not be underestimated.With the rise of cultural studies and post-colonialism, more and more scholars have engaged themselves in the study of the relationship between power and literature. As a well-known rewriting of the canonical Jane Eyre and as a literary work which gives voice to “the mad woman in the attic”, Wide Sargasso Sea is of great importance as a subject for the investigation into the relationship between power and literature.Based on important theories concerning power and literature in post-colonial and cultural studies, especially on Edward Said’s ideas about the relationship between power and literature and his views of cultural resistance, this thesis argues that through its rewriting of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea exerts a powerful resistance from the periphery of power relation against the imperial ideology maintained through the text of Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea exposes that it is such ideology that causes conflicts between different cultures and makes both the colonizer and the colonized unable to obtain their sense of identity. This thesis points out that Jane Eyre helps to maintain the imperial ideology and analyzes the two aspects of the resistance of Wide Sargasso Sea against the imperial ideology. The resistance is firstly achieved through resisting the dominant discourse of Jane Eyre and then through representing the colonizer and the colonized both as victims as a way to resist cultural hegemony.