A Cultural Materialist Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, published in 1966, gives a voice to the silenced woman Antoinette, who was a victim of both patriarchal and colonial society. The novel, written to serve as a prequel to Jane Eyre, aims to destroy the Eurocentric perceptions constructed by the British writer Charlotte Brontë in her novel titled Jane Eyre against Antoinette, known as Bertha Mason. Brontë, in her novel written more than a century earlier, had given little place to Antoinette and depicted her only as a mad woman. Antoinette, in search of a female identity, struggles to find her identity after the emancipation of Jamaica. Aiming at freeing a woman of mixed race, who is stuck within two ethnicities and cultures, Rhys becomes an intermediary in giving a voice to the madwoman who was imprisoned in the attic by her British husband Mr Rochester in England. In her attempt to get rid of the oppressions she has experienced by the two cultures and to reach the freedom she desires, Antoinette finally commits suicide by jumping off. In this study, cultural materialism has been used in order to reflect the social, economic, and political conditions along the power relations of the period.