Portraits d’Une Femme: A Comparative Study of Jean Rhys’s Antoinette and Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha

Leila Hajjari, Hossein Aliakbari Harehdasht, Yasaman Mirzaie

Abstract


Reading Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea after Brontë’s Jane Eyre, one does not sympathize with Jane anymore, nor does she really see Brontë’s Bertha as an imbruted partner for Mr. Rochester. This paper will take a comparative look at the way Antoinette Cosway is presented and treated in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and at the way Bertha is presented in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The study of some dominant themes in Rhys’s novel, themes such as racial discrimination, imperial oppression, place attachment, displacement and its influence on Antoinette, will work as technical elements of the comparison. In particular, the motif of Antoinette/Bertha’s madness in an imperialistic and patriarchal society will be analyzed in details. The scholars who are interested in post-colonialism will find this paper useful in that it discusses the role of the colonizer and the colonized with regard to the female characters of the putative novels.

 


Keywords


Charlotte Brontë; Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys; Wide Sargasso Sea; Imperialism; Post-Colonialism; Madness

Full Text:

PDF

References


Brontë, C. (1999). Jane Eyre. London: Wordsworth Editions.

Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2005). The Norton anthology of English literature (8th ed., Vol.2). New York: Norton.

Herischian, N. (2012). Jean Rhys’s wide Sargasso sea as a hypertext of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: A Postmodern perspective. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 1(6), 72-82.

Ismailinejad, Z. S. (2015). Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso sea: An ecocritical reading. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 49, 146-154.

Knepper, W. (2011). Postcolonial literature. London: York Press.

Konzett, D. C. (2002). Ethnic modernisms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Manzo, L. C., & Devine-Wright, P. (Ed.). (2014). Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods, and applications. New York: Routledge.

Rhys, J. (1992). Wide Sargasso sea. New York: Norton.

Savory, E. (2009). The Cambridge introduction to Jean Rhys. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Savory, E. (2004). Cambridge studies in African and Caribbean literature: Jean Rhys. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1985). Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism.Critical Inquiry,12(1), 243-261.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/9703

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2017 Leila Hajjari, Yasaman Mirzaie

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

 

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture