Historicizing Madness

Some new scholar research on Wide Sargasso Sea:

Historicizing Madness in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Jung-Suk Hwang

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2021.1887073

Published online: 29 Mar 2021

Antoinette Cosway Mason in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), whom her English husband later calls Bertha—the name of a mad white Creole woman in Jane Eyre—has been a focus of discussion of Rhys’s novel, particularly regarding her madness and its implications of feminism and (post)colonialism. However, although largely neglected, depicting the post-emancipation British West Indies around the 1830s, Rhys represents various forms of physical and mental symptoms of madness, expressed not just by the white Creole woman but also by two important groups—white male colonizers and African Caribbeans. By focusing on the under-examined symptoms of madness, I will analyze how they reveal changing socioeconomic systems and the continuity of exploitation after emancipation. This reading also suggests how Rhys’s novel about the 1830s West Indies reflects her own madness/anger about her contemporary post-colonial world of the mid-twentieth century.