Wide Sargasso Sea’s "Madwoman" in the Burning Attic: Postcolonial Subversion in Response to Jane Eyre

Examining the postcolonial retellings in Wide Sargasso Sea : Its connections to Jane Eyre and its intellectual linkages to feminist-postcolonial scholarship/thinking.

With Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys presents a postcolonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s critically acclaimed work, Jane Eyre (1847). This prequel decentralises Jane's narrative as an empowering female heroine and focuses instead on the woman who has been unjustly remembered (or perhaps forgotten) as ‘Bertha Mason’ – now taking centre stage in Wide Sargasso Sea as Rhys’ protagonist, Antoinette Cosway. In this article, we will explore how Antoinette’s tumultuous past led to her transformation into the infamous Madwoman in the (Burning) Attic.

A Postcolonial Retelling

Before we dive headfirst into Antoinette’s demise, let us make clear our understanding of the novel’s postcolonial context. Following the rise of mass political consciousness in the post-WWII era, many colonies gained the self-determination to independently assert their political will. The result was an unprecedented explosion of postcolonial discourse, not only discussing the decolonisation process in a linear timeline (after 1945), but also the continual resistance against colonialism as a whole throughout the centuries before, as explored by Rhys.

Though the novel was written and published in the latter half of the 20th century, Wide Sargasso Sea is set primarily in the 1830s. The story begins shortly after the Emancipation Act (1833) took effect, which marked the abolishment of slavery in most British colonies, including Jamaica, where the bulk of the novel unfolds. At this juncture, it is important to note that the timeline of Antoinette’s marriage to Rochester in Jane Eyre (inferred to be before 1800) has been moved forward to the late 1830s to allow for postcolonial discussion.

This postcolonial retelling and reframing of Jane Eyre in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea raises interesting questions about identity, female agency and oppression at the intersections of gender and race, explored particularly through the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ trope. Rhys reimagines Brontë’s Bertha as a product of cultural displacement and oppression, hence critiquing how both colonial and patriarchal ideologies work in tandem to create the conditions of her madness. By the end of the novel, Bertha Mason is transformed from a symbol of otherness into the fully realised individual of Antoinette Cosway, shaped by a history of systemic violence and erasure.

Unpacking the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ Trope 

The novel follows Antoinette Cosway from her adolescence spent at Coulibri Estate in Part One, to her marriage with Rochester in Part Two, and finally her descent into madness at Thornfield Hall in Part Three. 

The trope, however, is not unique to Antoinette. Women who defy societal norms or deemed difficult have long been labelled as ‘mad’. In fact, let us take a look at another madwoman who has surfaced over the past few centuries. Most notably, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman follows an unnamed female narrator who has been locked in a room by her husband. Her mental psyche grows increasingly unstable from the seclusion as she develops an obsession with the wallpaper, which seems to come to life before her eyes. Shortly after Jane Eyre was published, the trope undergoes an expansion from its original domain, where the ‘attic’ now becomes a representative token for any confined space a female has been isolated in.

The enduring relevance of the trope undoubtedly lies in its adaptability to various contexts, such as the postcolonial one in Wide Sargasso Sea. It shines a spotlight on the dehumanisation of colonised individuals, as observed in Antoinette’s racial and cultural displacement. In feminist readings, the trope criticises the societal structures which entrap women physically and psychologically, as illustrated by Antoinette and Gilman’s narrator. Thus, by retelling Bertha’s tragic story, Rhys challenges readers to reconsider the systems of power that confine and label women as ‘mad’.

This reframing of Bertha also invites a deeper understanding of the trope’s literary roots. Bertha Mason (née Antoinette Cosway) in Jane Eyre is widely claimed to be the irrefutable origin of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ trope. The trope embodies a literary and cultural archetype for women who have been silenced and marginalised on the account of their madness – an erratic expression of emotion which diverges from rational societal behaviour. These women undergo a process of traumatic dehumanisation as they are forcibly concealed from the outer world in the attics of their estates, a place where the forgotten are locked away and stripped of feminine agency.

The term/trope itself was coined and conceptualised by feminist theorists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. The theorists assert that 19th century literature splits female characters into two main archetypes: “angel” and “monster” (19). Bertha clearly falls into the latter category as a monstrous “other”, seeing that her physical form has been repeatedly beastialised into a “goblin appearance” (Brontë 434) by both her husband, Rochester, and Jane in Jane Eyre.

Bertha continues to be degraded into something less than human:

“What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.” (Brontë)

The objectifying pronoun “it” used to describe Bertha throughout the novel not only reveals  Rochester’s linguistic choice to reduce her into an animalistic entity, but forces the reader into alienating her from humanity as well. With the knowledge of Bertha’s Creole heritage, the use of verbs “snatched”, “growled” and “grizzled” emphasises a primal, untamed aggression which mirrors essentialising colonial depictions of the Creoles’ putatively ‘savage’ culture and being. The intersection between gender and racial oppression in imperialist discourse here is then drawn out in Wide Sargasso Sea. 

In comparison to Bertha’s complete and utter derangement in Jane Eyre, Antoinette is depicted to still have some limited semblance of control over her sense of self and actions, as she is able to provide a narrative, albeit fragmented, during her otherwise lucid moments in Part Three. She actively observes and questions the conditions of her captivity:

“There is one window high up – you cannot see out of it. My bed had doors but they had been taken away. There is not much else in the room.” (Rhys 161)

With her simple descriptions, we are compelled into experiencing the forefront of Antoinette’s bare desolation. Her room emulates the desolation of a jail cell, though these conditions are arguably worse for her psyche. The window, through its transparency, while offering an opportunity to connect with the outside world, is just out of reach given its inaccessible height; a futile endeavour within her captive state that denies any sort of perspectival clarity and knowledge beyond her entrapment. She is not only trapped by her physical space, but forced to retreat into the instability of her mind. On the other hand, the absence of doors, suggestive of a porous opening, would usually entail an escape into freedom. Here, however, that porousness is markedly oppressive as she is robbed of her privacy, and rendered hyper-visible in her confinement. Her condition reflects a perverse form of visibility shaped by the gaze of her captor, Rochester, as the absence of a physical barrier invites constant surveillance. Therefore, she exists in a space which constantly exposes her but denies her any meaningful connection to people, her culture, self or otherwise, reducing her to an object of pitiful control.

Process of Antoinette’s Madness

The defining moment of Antoinette’s childhood is the fire set by an angry mob of recently emancipated slaves which burns down Coulibri Estate, her childhood home, in Part One. Her brother Pierre dies in the fire, which becomes the unequivocal breaking point for their mother, Annette. After Antoinette falls violently ill in the six weeks afterwards, she is awoken to the memory of the fire:

“What was the use of telling [Aunt Cora] that I’d been awake before and heard my mother screaming ‘Qui est là? Qui est là?’, then ‘Don’t touch me. I’ll kill you if you touch me. Coward. Hypocrite. I’ll kill you.” (Rhys 42)

At this point, Antoinette’s narrative is warped into a fragmented sense of time as she only remembers the echoes of a memory from her unconscious state. Annette’s words here not only convey her terror and desperation but also a jarring eruption of violence. The repetition of “I’ll kill you” emphasises her escalating instability, suggesting her descent into a state of uncontainable fury fueled by grief. Annette’s anguish reflects the broader violence inflicted upon her and all other women marginalised by colonial hierarchies, situating her resultant madness as both a consequence of and a challenge to the forces of patriarchy and imperialism. Through this lens, her rage is not just a symptom of her unraveling, but a testament to the profound violence inflicted upon her as a woman and a colonial subject.

This moment also links Annette’s unraveling to the family’s parrot, Coco, who becomes a significant symbol in the narrative:

“He didn’t talk very well, he could say Qui est là? Qui est là? and answer himself Ché Coco, Ché Coco. After Mr Mason clipped his wings he grew very bad tempered, and though he would sit quietly on my mother’s shoulder, he darted at everyone who came near her and pecked their feet.” (Rhys 38)

In Antoinette’s recollection, Coco, whose clipped wings make him incapable of flight, reflects Annette’s inability to escape the confines of colonial society and her status as a White Creole woman viewed with suspicion and disdain by both the colonisers and the colonised. Annette’s repetition of “Qui est là?” (meaning “Who is there?) inverts the parrot’s imitation of human language – the human now imitates the bird. This imitation disrupts the conventional hierarchy of human superiority, emphasising the extent to which Annette has been dehumanised by her circumstances, as the phrase marks her final beastialisation into a frenzied animal, disoriented and unaware of her reality.

Moreover, Coco’s fiery death during the estate’s destruction parallels Annette’s ultimate descent into madness. Trapped by its clipped wings, Coco burns alive, reflecting the broader entrapment of colonised women such as Annette and Antoinette who are oppressed by racial and patriarchal constructs. The parrot’s immolation thus symbolises the devastating consequences of colonial violence, which consumes not only physical spaces but also the spirits of those it subjugates. 

Seeing as Antoinette follows a similar psychological trajectory to her mother, it is widely accepted by other characters in the novel that her madness was hereditary. Antoinette’s step-brother, Daniel Cosway, even goes so far as to warn Rochester against the family’s supposed lunacy in a letter: 

“Is your wife’s mother shut away, a raging lunatic and worse besides?...Is your wife herself going the same way as her mother and all knowing it?” (Rhys 89)

Daniel weaponises the supposed hereditary nature of madness in the Cosway family to manipulate Rochester’s perception of Antoinette. His choice of words, such as “raging lunatic” and “worse besides,” exaggerates Annette’s mental instability, reducing her to a grotesque caricature of feminised madness. By doing so, Daniel perpetuates the stigma surrounding mental illness and reinforces the view of madness as both shameful and inevitable. He casts Antoinette as duplicitous, implying that she is aware of her inevitable descent into madness but deliberately conceals it from Rochester. This portrayal undermines Antoinette’s integrity, framing her not as a victim of her circumstances but as complicit in her perceived decline.

Interestingly enough, it is specifically the men of her family who continually assign the trend of familial madness to the feminine line of descent. Even Antoinette’s half-brother, Sandi, with whom she shared a comparatively intimate relationship, called her the “infamous daughter of an infamous mother” (Rhys 167), the repetition of their infamy reinforcing a painfully fatalistic semantic and biological link between mother and daughter, or reproduced by mother in daughter. As feminine madness (or irrationality) is traditionally juxtaposed against masculine rationality, the male characters dismiss the voice of Antoinette to be weak and vulnerable, instead of giving her full avenue or licence to tell her story as the ‘madwoman in the attic’. 

Additionally, Rhys’ naming conventions do little to overcome the assertion of the Cosway’s hereditary psychology, and it is done intentionally so to suggest the inevitability of cyclical generational trauma. When comparing Annette’s and Antoinette’s names, we can observe that they are similar. Upon further inspection, they only differ by the syllable ‘toi’, which is French for ‘you’. From an etymological perspective, the names of mother and daughter have a relational quality as they doubly mirror the other, as do their psyches. Yet, this variation in their names marks a small yet distinct difference in the existence of mother and daughter, implying that their madness may not solely be due to biology. The word ‘you’ inherently implies a distance between self and other, which suggests that while Antoinette is shaped by her mother’s legacy, she is not simply a replication of Annette. Rhys invites readers to view Antoinette’s fate as neither entirely predetermined nor entirely self-directed. Thus, this begs the question: is Antoinette’s madness truly hereditary, or is it the product of her experienced trauma? 

On the whole, the narrative structure of the novel mirrors Antoinette’s silencing and her story is refracted through multiple perspectives. While the narrative in Part One relating to her childhood is entirely done in Antoinette’s perspective, Part Two largely starts and focuses on her husband Rochester’s point of view, with her voice reduced to fragmented interjections. This deliberate narrative imbalance highlights the patriarchal lens through which Antoinette is perceived. Intriguingly, Rochester himself is left unnamed in Rhys’ novel, a narrative choice that further accentuates Antoinette’s erasure. Readers of Jane Eyre easily recognise him, but his anonymity  suggests a universalisation of male power as Rochester becomes emblematic of all men who project their interpretations onto women, reducing them to objects of male perception. The combination of familial condemnation and Rochester’s dominating gaze leaves Antoinette hyper-visible as an object of scrutiny yet simultaneously invisible as a subject with her own voice and perspective. Antoinette’s story is filtered and reinterpreted by the men around her, leaving her unable to fully articulate her experience and eventually succumbing to her madness.

Aside from her traumatic childhood in Part One, Antoinette’s marriage also pecks away at her identity in Part Two, which could be a contributing factor to her eventual madness. Rochester diminishes Antoinette’s sense of self when he begins to call her “Bertha”, a habit which he refused to erase though she persistently expresses her dislike for the name. In Part Three, Antoinette admits to the reader just how disastrous Rochester’s practice of misnaming her been to her identity:

“Names matter, like how he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass.” (Rhys 162)

Antoinette refers to herself in third person, indicating a final dissociation from her individual self. The personification of her identity metaphorically departs with all the material items she enjoys, leaving behind the dismal essence of her madness in her physical attic-prison. By erasing her name, he symbolically erases her voice and autonomy, transforming her into a figure defined solely by his gaze.

At the end of the novel, Antoinette has her third and final dream where she sees a woman/herself set fire to Thornfield Hall: 

“It was then that I saw her – the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her. I dropped the candle I was carrying and it caught the end of a tablecloth and I saw flames shoot up. As I ran or perhaps floated or flew I called help me Christophine and looking behind me I saw that I had been helped. There was a wall of fire protecting me but it was too hot, it scorched me and I went away from it.” (Rhys 169-170)

Following Antoinette’s disassociation with her self earlier on in Part Three, she recognises her disembodied state as the “ghost” and she transforms the premonition of the fire into reality. Her recognition of the “ghost” as herself is a pivotal moment of self-awareness/self-knowledge and disassociation. The “ghost”, framed in a “gilt frame,” recalls both colonial relics (artefacts encased and defined by Western constructs) and the confining narratives imposed upon her. By acknowledging herself as the “ghost”, Antoinette simultaneously accepts and rejects her othering. She becomes the ‘madwoman’ on her own terms, weaponising the label against the forces that sought to silence and erase her.

Towards the conclusion of the dream, Antoinette’s narrative shifts to from short, staccato sentences to the use of polysyndeton. The long, continuous sentences with a lack of punctuation amps up the pace of the novel as it reaches its climax – Antoinette/Bertha herself setting fire to the estate outside of the dream. Antoinette reaches a frenzy in her final narrative; perhaps the ultimate form of her madness. This disjointed style aligns her breakdown with historically gendered perceptions of hysteria, however Rhys frames this “madness” as a form of resistance. Antoinette’s supposed instability allows her to transcend the role of a women unfit for society imposed on her by patriarchal and colonial systems, reclaiming her identity even as it disintegrates. The dream-turned-reality becomes both an act of narrative closure and a rupture, as Antoinette’s story, once refracted through the male gaze, erupts into a final act of self-determination.

While Jane Eyre portrays Bertha’s final act of setting fire to Thornfield Hall as an irrational outburst, Rhys reframes this act as a moment of defiance. On a literal level, the fire is a destruction of the physical space which confined her and of the narrative that positioned her as subjugated and powerless. On a symbolic level, the fire is an act of creation as Antoinette’s actions momentarily reclaims agency, though it comes at the cost of her life. From a postcolonial perspective, the burning of Thornfield can be read as Antoinette’s final rejection of the colonial power structures embodied by Rochester and the estate. Yet, the uneasy resolution leaves readers questioning whether true liberation is possible with Antionette’s defiance as her actions still lead to her death, hence raising the issue of the limited avenues of resistance available to colonised and historically marginalised women.

Why This Postcolonial Retelling Matters 

Ultimately, the purpose of writing Wide Sargasso Sea is to provide Brontë’s madwoman, Bertha, a platform to tell her story. Antoinette represents a plethora of women who have been marginalised and dehumanised throughout history – the mad, female and racially complex. Rhys’ intention is clear on this aspect, but she still manages to subvert the expectation of fixing the lack of such representation by simply inserting a voice which typically goes unheard. According to Mardorossian, Rhys’ critics have claimed that Christophine, a black servant, was made “too articulate” (86). In response, Mardorossian wrote that:

“According to Theresa Winterhalter, Wide Sargasso Sea in fact "demonstrates that giving voice to oppressed peoples is more complicated than merely conferring narrative authority upon speakers" (215). The novel deconstructs the opposition between silence and voice and represents silences as discursive elements that ensure power effects.” (87)

In the case of Antoinette, we cannot be completely sure of the authenticity of her narrative, seeing that Rochester takes over most of the narrative in Part Two and treats her like a part of the estate in Part Three, an unsightly possession that must be kept out of sight at all costs. Having a voice does not always equate to sufficient representation, but is rather derived through understanding the implications of her words and actions, and the reactions of everyone around her. Nevertheless, regardless of whether Antoinette has successfully made her voice heard amongst the sea of patriarchal dominance and racial conflict, her story remains the pinnacle of tragedy after her fiery death of madness.

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References

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “The Queen’s Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male

Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity.” The Madwoman in the Attic. London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 3–44. 

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. The New England Magazine, 1892. 

Mardorossian, Carine Melkom. “Double [De]Colonization and the Feminist Criticism of ‘Wide Sargasso Sea.’” College Literature, vol. 26, no. 2, 1999, pp. 79–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112454.  Accessed 28 Dec. 2024.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. W.W Norton and Company, 1992.