Wide Sargasso Sea And The Voice Of Bertha Mason

A new paper exploring Wide Sargasso Sea;

“allowing Her To Tell Her Story”: Wide Sargasso Sea And The Voice Of Bertha Mason

by Bouzid Nadjet
مجلة قبس للدراسات الإنسانية والاجتماعية (Qabas Journal for Humanities and Social Studies) Volume 9, Numéro 1, Pages 1666-1679 (2025)

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys writes back to one of the colonial classics, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. As a postcolonial endeavour, Wide Sargasso Sea, tells the story differently, and uses dialogism to revise the story including the voiceless characters as main actors in the plot. In this respect, this paper examines how Rhys unfolds the story using three different narrators unlike the first person narrator of Jane Eyre through highlighting the concept of dialogism as developed by Bakhtin. As such, dialogue, in this postcolonial text, highlights the author’s attempt to defy the imperial practice of denying the colonized subjects a voice in the story. Bertha Mason, the Creole character who is locked up in the attic, does not have any dialogue in Brontë’s novel. Instead, she is represented as a beastly unhuman being who lacks a language, growls like animals, and is thus unable of any human-like dialogue practice. Recent literature on Rhys’s work have solely focused on the feminist postcolonial representation of a Creole marginalized woman who is denied a voice to tell her story. Gayatri C. Spivac's Can the Subaltern Speak? is among the most famous texts in the field. However, the use of dialogue in Rhys' novel has not received the due attention it deserves. As such, the present paper seeks to spotlight on the use of dialogue in the postcolonial novel of Wide Sargasso Sea as a means to fight imperialism as represented in Brontë’s Jane Eyre.