Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a Hypertext of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: A Postmodern Perspective

Abstract

This study gains significance as the findings can shed more lights on the postmodern concept of hypertextuality to show that there is no originality in literature and any literary work can be the repetition, continuation, or mixture of previous texts. In the case of this study, that is to show, how a twentieth-century literary work like Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea can be the parody of Brontë’s nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre. Moreover, such a postmodern perspective widens various ways of concentration on the literary works, so that, one could interpret in what ways two texts are united and grafted which results in either parody or pastiche. This study attempts to demonstrate mostly those focused aspects in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre that highlight the concept of hypertextuality, including the analyses of Rochester’s character in the novels, as a Byronic hero in Jane Eyre and an anti-Byronic hero in Wide Sargasso Sea; and also the study of the characters of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway, as women narrator of the novels as well as focusing on the dream texts of the novels.