How Effectively Is Madness Portrayed in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar?

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How effectively is madness portrayed in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar? Between the 1940s and 1970s, in response to the conditions which were fuelling the second wave of feminism, literary women were exposing accounts of male oppression and irrationality towards women who would hitherto have been perceived as mentally ill. The Bell Jar (1963), by Sylvia Plath is a perfect example of an exposure of male brutality not uncommon of the time in which it was written: the account of the Argentinean misogynist, for instance, who beats and attempts to rape the novel’s protagonist. A few years later, ‘as if both to stress the historical weight of such behaviour and to emphasise the post-modern woman’s horror at its intensification’, Jean Rhys wrote a prequel to the classic Jane Eyre, rewriting the relationship between Bertha Mason Rochester and her husband from the point of view of the ‘madwoman in the attic’. In Wide Sargasso Sea, repainting the image given to the reader of Rochester, Rhys characterises him as the antagonist rather than the hero portrayed Jane Eyre, sympathetically transcribing Bertha’s stream-of-consciousness as the oppressed wife sinking into the madness he helped to cause. The first comparison to be made, therefore, is that the reader has a possible pre-existing knowledge of some characters and issues present in Wide Sargasso Sea. In Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic was given no voice, incapable of uttering any intelligible speech. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys gives her an entire perspective and narration. This raises the possibility of an allegorical reading: the reader learns that Antoinette is the descendant of a Creole Caribbean family whilst Rhys also draws on an understanding of the position of plantation families following Emancipation. In contrast, the introduction of Rochester in her novel establishes him as a
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