Patterns of the zombie in Jean Rhys'sWide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

Interpreters generally agree that a major part of the strength of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea comes through its suggestiveness, its reliance on inference, and its ability project possibilities of action and implication beyond just those of its central causal episodes. The novel rewards those who give it not just a careful close reading, but who also explore its potential for extra-textual stories and avenues of meaning. This potential is both promoted and subdued by the narrative's framing and texture, about which so much has been written. Todd Bender, for example, argues that this novel is an open text — one where the shifts from fictive reality fantasy work to force the reader into constructive activity — as opposed the more traditional closed narrative where most of the connections are reliably spelled out (97-98). The very name Bertha Cosway Mason Rochester suggests some of the complications in her shifting identities and Rhys's re-evaluation of her character invites investigation into the moral subtleties involved in the problems of identity. The title itself of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's popular critical investigation The Madwoman in the Attic demonstrates how emblematic this character has become in reassessing our critical perspectives. Clearly, the figure of Antoinette will continue be an important focal point for re-examining fictional techniques and the range of ideas that fiction can incorporate. But learning read allusion and implication in relation Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea comes first, for it is only when readers learn assimilate Rhys's montage of impression and sensation that a more complete sense of the design emerges from her work. Narrative patterns not central the surface stories of the first-person chronological discourses start emerge once we start sense links behind repeated images and suggestions, and these patterns then begin take on new significance. The best example of such discovery is, of course, how much knowledge of Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason we bring the novel and at what point and in what ways that knowledge informs our reading. The history of Antoinette's involvement with her cousin Sandi is another important story almost entirely concealed from the central narratives

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