As a twentieth-century West Indian writer, Rhys was able to expose implicit assumptions and ideals in Bronte's writing, such as imperialist England's attitude toward her colonies. Rhys lets Antoinette narrate her tale, revealing the 'other side' of Bronte's story: what occurred in the years before and after Mr. After years of contemplating Charlotte Bronte's Creole madwoman Bertha Mason, Jean Rhys set out to give voice to what is mute in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Edinburgh University Press, 2003.The Wide Sargasso Sea - (1966). 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,' in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, eds., Feminist Postcolonial Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Snow on the Cane Fields: Women's writings and Creole Subjectivity. New York: New York University Press, 1986. A Critical Study of the Novels of Jean Rhys. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 'Plantation Owners and Apprenticeship: The Dawn of Emancipation'. 'Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: Colonial History, English fiction and British Empire.' Twentieth Century Literature, 1997, pp. White Supremacy.' Journal of Caribbean Literatures. 'Postcolonial Discourse in ‘Wide Sargasso Sea': Creole Discourse vs. 'The Best Living Novelist.' New York Times Book Review. This essay argues that Rhys's description of the heroine's losing sense of safety fundamentally produces an ambivalent form of madness, which deconstructs the western invention of Jamaica, offering possibilities to rewrite the Creole cultural identity.

Rhys's intention to challenge Bertha's image as a lunatic and the relevant themes such as race, madness, colonial history have been discussed in a great many of academic works, but the connection between Antoinette's repetitive articulation of her losing sense of safety and her 'madness' regretfully attract little attention. Renaming Bertha as Antoinette, Jean Rhys gives the Creole woman back her deprived voice and writes her a 'life', resisting Charlotte Brontë's distorted representation of the West Indian woman and the imperial and patriarchal discourse embedded in her text. As an example of rewriting English literary canons, Wide Sargasso Sea presents the life experience of Bertha Mason, 'The Madwoman in the Attic' in Jane Eyre, from the Jamaican side and exposes the distortion and construction of the colony history.

Wide sargasso sea bertha mason