Wide Sargasso Sea Critics Comments

“The fragmented narrative and multiple voices make the novel resistant to a single authoritative truth.”

“Antoinette’s deterioration is read as the accumulation of social and personal abuses rather than innate pathology”

M. Sakkthi Shalini and Marie Aruna

“Rhys text rethinks names, identity and belonging in a colonial context”

Fumagalli

“Rhys presents creole identity as fragmented in the wake of emancipation”

C. Greeny

“Rhys writes back to Jane Eyre, giving voice to the colonial ‘other’ the earlier novel silenced”

G.C Spivak

“The novel uses intertextuality and irony as central postmodernism devices”

Shirin

“By narrating Antoinette’s perspective, Rhys destabilises the madwoman stereotype”

Carolyn E. Williams

“Rochester’s renaming of Antoinette as ‘Bertha’ is a linguistic act of colonisation - he overwrites her selfhood with Englishness”

Elaine Savory

“He possess and silences her to restore his sense of masculine honour”

Judie Newman

“Rhys reverses the gaze - the coloniser becomes the paranoid and alienated subject”

Helen Tiffin

“His narrative unreliability exposes how madness is projected onto Antoinette in order to preserve his sanity”

Sue Thomas

“Rhys’s Rochester is not the romantic hero but the imperial agent who’s story reveals its own corruption”

Spivak

“Antoinette embodies the divided self of the postcolonial subject - alien to both coloniser and colonised”

Helen Tiffin

“Rhys Creole heroin exists in a space of cultural ambiguity, where identity is both inherited and denied.”

Elaine Savory

“Rhys turns marriage into a metaphor for colonisation - Antoinette is conquered as both a woman and and a Creole”

Judie Newman

“Antoinette’s descent into madness is the only means left to assert her selfhood.”

Angela Smith

Rhys keeps the madness for the last act — making it the ultimate act of rebellion.”

Catherine Rovera

“Christophine embodies a strength that Antoinette admires but cannot access — the power of rooted identity.”

Sue Thomas

“Rhys legitimises Creole speech as a site of resistance — Christophine’s words carry power, not translation.”

Judith Raiskin

“Obeah is the only power system that escapes the control of empire — and therefore must be demonised.”

Carolyn E. Williams