My purpose with writing this paper is to analyze how Rhys subverts Bronts novel and in what way this

subversion contributes to a possible revaluation of the original work, what links can be found between the two texts and to answer the question: can the Postmodern rewrite be regarded as an independent, self-sufficient work or it can be fully understood only in connection with its Victorian counterpart? First I will present you the connections between the two novels, the common motifs, themes, the levels on which the dialogue between these two is realized after which I will draw a parallel between the two female protagonists and finally I am going to make some conclusions about the originality of the postmodern rewrite. The concept of gender and race If we start to analyze these two novels, we realize that gender and race are two of the most important themes discussed in both of them. Both works can be regarded as feminist novels. However, we meet two totally different gender treatments. In Jane Eyre there is a constant willingness of the female protagonist to overcome male oppression. Women are supposed to feel very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel They need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano (JE, Chapter12) This famous quotation from Bronts novel expresses Janes view on gender differences. Although in the Victorian age women were considered inferior to men, and they were not supposed to interfere in any kind of scientific or philosophical discussions or to express their opinions in such affairs, Jane, bravely protests against female oppression. In this way, Bronts female protagonist marks the beginning of the liberation of the female from the male-dominated society. While Jane is treated by Rochester as his equal: My bride is here [], because my equal is here (JE, 257). Antoinette is never considered as Edwards equal. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Edward sees her wife as an object that is capable only of satisfying his sexual desires. They cannot communicate as Rochester and Jane can in Bronts novel: Nothing that I told her influenced her at all (WSS, 78). Antoinette becomes a puppet, perceived by her husband as the woman who lacks that selfdiscipline which Jane has in Bronts novel. Rochester is disgusted by Antoinettes lack of sexual restraint because this Rochester, whom Rhys portrays as an Englishman, living a sinful life, still holds on to the Victorian qualities of a woman. Race is again perceived differently by the two authors. In Jane Eyre otherness is represented by Rochesters wife, the Creole mad woman in the attic. She is locked away, isolated from the normal people. She is considered to be a dangerous, monster-like figure. The darkness of her skin suggests the darkness of the personality; she is presented as a ghost, a dark, inhuman figure, someone of whom one should be afraid of. And I have heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am (WSS 85), Antoinette tells her husband. Her weak personal identity can be linked to her unstable national identity. She is looked down upon by both white and black people, she being a Creole, the daughter of a slave owner and a Martinique girl. She grew up like this; ever since she was a little girl she experienced her otherness. She has never been accepted, not even by her own mother: once I touched her forehead trying to smooth it. But she pushed me away; [] as if she had decided once and for all that I was useless to her (WSS 17). She gets alienated from her mother

at such a degree that she becomes a little afraid of her (WSS 17). In her childhood, beside Christophine, Tia is her only friend, but she loses her too when she unjustly takes her money and says to her: Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger (WSS 21). Tias words contain the primary issue of the Creole: they do not know how to behave, like white or like black people. They were born and they live in such conditions which left a deep mark in their national identity and their unstable position in society has negative effects on several grounds of their lives. Antoinettes childhood anxieties of race go on in her adulthood as well. By marrying an Englishman she is constantly confronted with her otherness. Edward cannot accept her and he cannot accept the way of life she leads either. He never treats her as his equal and Antoinette feels that, she feels that she is different, different in a negative way. Before being influenced by Daniel Cosways letter, Edward has some strange feelings, but still he lives a happy and passionate life with her young, beautiful wife, although he confesses he does not love her: As for the happiness I gave her; that was worse than nothing. I did not love her []. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did (WSS 78). He perceives Antoinettes alterity. The fact that he renames Antoinette, giving her a more English name is an attempt of the English gentleman to change Antoinette herself, which is impossible and damages his wifes sense of identity even more. Antoinette does not like his husband calling her Bertha, but he still does, continually reminding her that he does not accept her the way she is and thus tries to change her. While Bront portrayed Bertha as a dark, mad, inhuman figure, Rhys gives a more detailed description of Antoinettes character which is more complex than the one presented by the Victorian novelist. Rhys presents the process of Antoinettes dehumanization while Bront reflects only on the result of the racial prejudices and oppressions. So reading Wide Sargasso Sea the reader gets to understand and show empathy towards the Creole mad woman, who experienced so much oppression and differentiation during her lifetime. Antoinettes insanity is the result of her being treated and considered mad because of her mothers past. In conclusion, gender and race are presented in a close connection by Rhys, both pointing to Antoinettes otherness. Bronts treatment of gender relations is something revolutionary in the context of the Victorian value-system. Her race treatment, however, is the opposite to that of the gender; there is nothing revolutionary about it. In Jane Eyre we meet a typical human behaviour towards otherness: people are afraid of what they do not know and instead of getting to know it, they misjudge it, ignore it or in this case, they lock it away and keep being afraid from it. Another difference which has to be mentioned is that, while Antoinette is predestined to be constantly oppressed by the stronger sex, Jane by having a strong character and being highly selfconscious succeeds in escaping from the male-domination, in Wide Sargasso Sea this escape is portrayed as something impossible to achieve. By this, I argue, Rhys parodies the optimism and naivety of the Victorian novel. The motif of the mad woman The motif of the mad woman is a recurrent gothic element in fiction writing. In Jane Eyre this motif also serves to the gloomification of the atmosphere at Thornfield Hall. In the novel the mad woman is viewed as the other, she is an outcast, a ghostly figure. Bertha and her mysterious apparitions contribute to the novels gloomy atmosphere. Bertha is different from several perspectives: in appearance, in mental health, in liberty and nationality. She is described by Jane as having a savage face. Rochesters wife represents the other, this suggesting an inferiority to the other characters that are portrayed as the colonizer while Bertha as the colonized.
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But besides this racial otherness there is another feature of this woman, which contributes to her being considered as the other and this is the fact that she is mentally unstable. Her madness places her in a world which cannot be understood by the sane characters. The West Indian Creole is portrayed here as an uncivilized person. In Jane Eyre then we encounter the anxiety of Englishness, theme studied and analyzed in Sarah Whittemores thesis entitled The Importance of being English: Anxiety of Englishness in Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre and Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea. In this study Sarah Whittemore argues that Janes Englishness is highly dependent on Berthas Otherness. In order to highlight Janes qualities, her national identity, Bront uses a character which is totally the opposite, being characterized by double otherness. So the whole novel is dominated by this paradigm, the Englishness versus the Otherness (Whittemore, 2008). Berthas double Otherness highly contributes to Janes Englishness suggesting the opposition of black and white and that of mad and healthy, self-conscious. In Wide Sargasso Sea the motif of the mad woman is not the same as in Jane Eyre. Rhys does not use this motif, as Bront did, for the sake of making the novel gloomier, ghostly, and more gothic but as an instrument of portraying the consequences of the racial prejudices and their effect on the individual. In Rhyss novel, the female protagonist is no longer just a mad woman surrounded by uncertainties, she gets a voice and with this, the opportunity to tell her life-story. Reading this work we no longer consider her a rather negative character as we did in Bronts gothic novel but we feel compassion towards her. In Part One of Wide Sargasso Sea, where Antoinette relates her childhood, all the unordinary and unpleasant things that happened to her, every fact that she relates, every single event (their house being burnt down by the former slaves, her mother going mad, her being laughed at and discriminated by both white and black people, the incident at the pool with Tia) foreshadows her tragic destiny. From the very start we can notice that she is doomed to alienation. At the beginning of Part Two, when we are told that Antoinette, a young Creole woman, daughter of a former slave, with a hard childhood that resulted in her weak national identity, has been married to an Englishman, our premonitions get stronger and start to pity her even more. The biggest difference between the two portrayals of the mad woman is that at Bront the mad woman is an inhuman, savage, dark figure, whereas at Rhys she is a poor woman who being too weak, lost her sanity as a consequence of her being continually laughed at, unaccepted, looked down upon, ignored, outcast and unloved both by society and the ones close to her. In Jane Eyre Rochester says that this malady of Bertha is inheritance from her mother, who was also a mad woman, but in Wide Sargasso Sea we see that there was much more than a simple genetic disease. Antoinette, the double of Jane? If we start to analyze the two female protagonists of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre we discover a lot of differences but also similarities. Comparing the childhood of these two we draw the conclusion that as a children they were pretty much the same, Both heroines grow up fatherless and emotionally they are threatened by those who take charge of them; they live much within themselves and their imaginations, made fearful by emotional and psychical insecurity. Their life as children is driven inward (Thorpe1999, 103). Janes being locked in the red room is something similar to Antoinettes captivity at Thornfield Hall. Furthermore, in Chapter 2 when Jane is locked into the red room and looks into the mirror she thinks what she sees is unreal; All looked colder and darker in that visionary hallow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me[] had the effect of a real spirit. (JE, 8). The looking-glass motif is used by Rhys too in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette always needs a mirror in order to be reassured of her identity (Thorpe, 1999, 103): There is no looking-glass here and I do not know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. (WSS, 147). Both characters have a place where they find peace, for Jane it is Lowood, for Antoinette it is the convent.
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Antoinette, besides these common features with Jane, is quite the opposite of her. She is beautiful, whereas Jane is not. She does not have faith in God, whereas Jane becomes a good Christian at the end of the novel. Although Antoinette as well had the opportunity of experiencing Christian life, she has difficulties in finding comfort in religion. By this feature Rhys makes an allusion to the loss of faith of the modern individual. While Jane is a character who lives according to the Victorian principles, with a high sexual restraint (she does not let Rochester even touch her), Antoinette is the total opposite of her, sex represents her only way of communication with her husband. Jane is a self-conscious woman, direct, clear, and determined. Antoinette does not even know what she wants, she has no sense of identity. Thanks to her strong character, Jane finds love and happiness. Antoinette has a weak personality, she does not have a purpose in life, no ambitions and she does not find happiness or love although she uses a love potion to make her husband love her. Antoinette is fond of the Caribbean, she cannot imagine living anywhere else, she is fascinated by the colorful sights; this is the only place where she feels safe. Jane is attracted too by the exotic, she searches escape in reading Gullivers Travels. Maybe Rhys created a double for Jane. These two have many common features but have just as many differences as well. Mixing the two would result a more realistic character. Antoinette is like Janes negative, her darker side. Jane as a character is a little too perfect, she always makes the right decisions, she manages to act according to the Christian value-system, resists the temptation of being Rochesters mistress. Antoinette is the character to whom nothing turns out right. She is a lost person, she does not believe in anything, she does not have a goal is front of her. She is the very opposite of Jane. This opposition also reflects the distance between Victorianism and Modernism. So it can be argued whether Antoinette is the double of Jane. I think she is. They are like the two halves of one single person, the good side is Jane and the dark side is Antoinette, and this way they are the complements of each other.
I.

Conclusions

We saw that in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys presents the other side of the story already familiar to us in Jane Eyre. Bertha is given a story in Wide Sargasso Sea. Getting to know her story we no longer look at her as a dark, inhuman figure, we do feel sorry for her. This is the case with Rochesters figure as well. In Jane Eyre Rochester, although he mentions that he had lived a shameful life, is an exemplary gentleman. In Wide Sargasso Sea we get to know the darker side of his personality. He is in part responsible for Berthas going insane through the fact that he does not accept her, does not love her and does not even try to understand her. There is no willingness in him to make Antoinette happy, he treats her with the same prejudices Antoinette has been treated with all of her life. He listens to the gossip, to Antoinettes brother but he is not that interested to hear his wifes version, although Antoinette draws his attention that There is always the other side, always (WSS 106). The question which I want to answer in this paper is whether the postmodern rewrite can be judged alone, whether it is a self-sufficient work. In his study entitled The Other Side: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre Michael Thorpe asserts that Antoinettes story is Still only one side. In the same work Thorpe later adds: Though I have seen people ignorant of Jane Eyre respond to this novel as a self-sufficient work, it would be foolish to deny that many average readers come to it with some recollection of Jane Eyre and that Rhys relied in a general way on their doing so (Thorpe 199, 100) The fact that most of the readers come to it with some recollection of Jane Eyre does not exclude its self-sufficiency. Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel which can be fully understood even without knowing that Jane Eyre exists. It is dependent on Charlotte Bronts novel only on the ground that if we read it trying to discover the links to Jane Eyre then we find it much more interesting, it increases its literary value. In fact, only in Part three do we encounter the well-known
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English estate where the action of Jane Eyre takes place. Rochester is only referred to as the English gentleman. This also proves that we can fully understand and appreciate this rewrite even without having some previous recollection of the Bronts novel. The dialogue between these two texts, realized on several levels: the plot, the themes, the motifs used as well as on the level of the character treatment also proves that we are dealing with two individual texts. Wide Sargasso Sea is the other side of the story, it is as well still one side, but it is a self-sufficient one: it has a plot understandable out of the context of Bronts novel, it has well-built characters. Maybe the end, when Antoinette sets out to burn down the English estate would not be so clear to a reader without knowing the story from Jane Eyre, but it can be very much appreciated as an open-ended, writerly text in the Barthesian sense of the term. In conclusion it can be said that Wide Sargasso Sea is a self-sufficient work but reading it in the context of Jane Eyre tells much more to the reader, and what is more, it even enlarges our view on several aspects of Jane Eyre which in fact is the effect of the postmodern rewrit