POSTMODERNIST CROSSCURRENTS AND CONCENTRIC CIRCLES IN THE WIDENING GYRE OF WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Abstract

This article explores the postmodernist elements woven into the tapestry of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a rewrite of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys revisits Jane Eyre to narrate the unwritten story of the mad woman in the attic, Mr. Rochester’s first wife. Thus, Dominican-British writer gives voice to Antoinette, silenced and locked away in the attic by Mr. Rochester. Hence, she subverts the European colonial and patriarchal discourse. Widely considered as a modernist novel, Wide Sargasso Sea harbors several postmodernist features, too. Unlike a modernist novel, which clings to the notion of a coherent self, Wide Sargasso Sea portrays an unstable self, which resonates with the postmodernist idea of an individual identity as fluid and contingent. Moreover, Wide Sargasso Sea deploys numerous postmodernist techniques such as multiplicity of narrative voices, subjectivity of narration, contingency and fluidity of individual identity, intertextuality, deconstruction of grand narratives. This study therefore examines the postmodernist crosscurrents and concentric circles in the widening gyre of this novel.