Indeed, in Jane Eyre, madness is portrayed as a fit of hysteria with hereditary causes, both moral and organic, through a degenerate Creole heiress indulging in lust and debauchery, who ends up a would-be murderess as well as a self-destructive maniac. Rhys’s gradual detachment may be put down to her determination to go beyond Brontë’s oversimplified depiction of madness and nineteenth century outlook. All had to be scrapped” (L 161), Rhys complained in a 1959 letter to Selma Vaz Dias. Then I found it was creeping into my writing. The late fifties appear as a critical period in the conception of Wide Sargasso Sea, because in 1957 Rhys was reading Jane Eyre over and over, and it dawned on her that she should be more wary of not being too influenced by Brontë: “One stupid thing I did was to read ‘Jane Eyre’ too much. But a decade later, she thought better of it and looked for a more elusive title for her novel, as “‘Story of the First Mrs Rochester’ away too much” (L 186). 3 The title that first occurred to her speaks for itself: “I think of calling it ‘The first Mrs Rochester’ with profound apologies to Charlotte Brontë and a deep curtsey too” (L 50), Rhys claimed in March 1949. The connection with Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic” is tangible if not explicit, and Rhys never made any attempt to conceal it.
But rather than a mere revision of Jane Eyre, some passages are in fact revisions of earlier sketches Rhys had written long before she ever intended to rework Brontë’s masterpiece. It is indeed in many respects a prequel to Jane Eyre, since Rhys’s purpose is obviously to fill in the gaps – to “explain” (L 214) 1 and “build up” (L 156) the madness of Bertha Mason. Ever since it was published in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea has been read as a postmodern-cum-postcolonial rewriting of the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the mad Creole wife in Charlotte Brontë’s novel. T (.)ġ The examination of Jean Rhys’s manuscripts sheds a new light on the complex and tortuous genesis of her last novel.
1 Jean Rhys’s published works will be abbreviated as follows: Letters (L), Voyage in the Dark (VID), (.).Węglowski, Edward Skarżyński Jerzy the first on the left in a group of people, among whom, among which: Wojciech Jerzy Has, Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, Krzysztof Penderecki in the club Pod Jaszczuram in Krakow during the discussion about the film Manuscript found in Saragossa Shot similar to item No.: NMK XX F 39686, Characters in slightly different poses. Skarżyński Jerzy the first on the left in a group of people, among whom, among which: Wojciech Jerzy Has, Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, Krzysztof Penderecki in the club Pod Jaszczuram in Krakow during the discussion about the film Manuscript found in Saragossa Shot similar to item No.: NMK XX F 39686, Characters in slightly different poses.