Remembering the Future: The Temporal Relationship between Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

SummaryIf you can remember your future, can you change it? In this article, I examine this question with reference to the intertextual and temporal relationship between Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason burns down the house of her husband, Rochester. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Bertha, who has been renamed Antoinette, is locked in the attic and remembers her past in Jane Eyre which, in Wide Sargasso Sea, is located in her future. She remembers that she must set the house on fire in order to fulfil the role she plays in Jane Eyre, where she is an obstacle to be overcome before Jane and Rochester can end up together. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys critiques this role of the madwoman by providing Antoinette with a history and an explanation for her madness. This article explores the relationship between the two novels, arguing that, through the intertextual relationship, Rhys subverts conventional notions of time as linear and chronological in order to reject Brontë’s depiction of female madness, and to transform the interpretation of the madwoman.