The Dream Interpreter : A Historical and Postcolonial Analysis of the Development of Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract: This essay will discuss Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea from a postcolonial and historical perspective, to show how Rhys’s recreation of Bertha Rochester’s past (Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in Jane Eyre) can make her end appear triumphant. The analysis will be based on a combination of aspects from the novel’s contemporary English and Caribbean societies and Edward Said’s thoughts about Orientalism, mainly the binary opposition between Europe and the Orient and the creation of Orientalist knowledge. Said’s theories and historical actualities will be used to identify how colonial and patriarchal values in the novel influence the development of the heroine Antoinette through her upbringing and later how they are used to reduce her into a madwoman. The analysis will conclude that Antoinette’s rebellion against patriarchal and colonial oppression in the last part of the novel provides an opportunity to interpret her predetermined end in Jane Eyre as triumphant.