Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys(1966)
A white Creole girl grows up on a crumbling Caribbean estate in the years after Emancipation, caught between the Black community that distrusts her and the English world that will devour her. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel gives voice to the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre, restoring to Bertha Mason a name, a history, and a landscape of jasmine and flame. Antoinette Cosway's marriage to an unnamed Englishman traces the colonial logic of possession: he renames her, confines her, and calls her madness what is in fact the wreckage of everything he could not control. Rhys wrote with spare, feverish beauty, and her novel stands as both a postcolonial reclamation and a story about the violence of being narrated by someone who refuses to see you whole.
If you loved this
Brontë wrote the house; Rhys opens the locked room and lets the woman inside finally speak.
Morrison gives another silenced woman her voice back, and the ghost in the house is just as real.
Shakespeare's Caliban anticipates Antoinette: another colonial subject whose island is taken and whose story is told by others.