wide sargasso sea
Critical approaches to Wide Sargasso Sea » Contemporary critical assessments
Modernist approachesFeminist approachesPsychoanalytical criticismPost-colonial approachesChallenging European cultural supremacyA revised perspectivePost-colonial approaches and ChristophineHistoricist approaches
Modernist approaches
These tend to avoid racial and political commentary on the novel. They focus instead on such aspects of form as:
Jean Rhys' pared down style
Her interest in representing the inner life and fragmented identities of her characters via stream of consciousness
Her use of multiple narratives
Wide Sargasso Sea presents a challenge to these approaches. Although the novel retains Rhys' characteristic style, it is not set in an early twentieth century urban world but a century earlier in the Caribbean. The novel also has links with earlier, non-Modernist kinds of writing like the Gothic.
Feminist approaches
An approach through the novel's treatment of female experience is a standard critical perspective. The novel was published as the ‘second wave' of the feminist movement was getting under way in the 1960s, so that many of its early (and later) readers had a particular interest in examining literary texts from this perspective.
Jane Eyre, too, has been the focus for feminist approaches. One of the most famous was by two American academics, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In 1979 they published The Madwoman in the Attic; the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. In this study, they took Bertha Mason as a symbolic figure, one who represents the way in which women's voices were silenced or suppressed in nineteenth century society and the way in which that affected literary texts. Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen as another, fictional, treatment of the same theme. For more information on this, see the Texts in detail > Jane Eyre > Critical attitudes to Jane Eyre > Feminist criticism and literary history.
Feminist literary criticism
Modernist approachesFeminist approachesPsychoanalytical criticismPost-colonial approachesChallenging European cultural supremacyA revised perspectivePost-colonial approaches and ChristophineHistoricist approaches
Modernist approaches
These tend to avoid racial and political commentary on the novel. They focus instead on such aspects of form as:
Jean Rhys' pared down style
Her interest in representing the inner life and fragmented identities of her characters via stream of consciousness
Her use of multiple narratives
Wide Sargasso Sea presents a challenge to these approaches. Although the novel retains Rhys' characteristic style, it is not set in an early twentieth century urban world but a century earlier in the Caribbean. The novel also has links with earlier, non-Modernist kinds of writing like the Gothic.
Feminist approaches
An approach through the novel's treatment of female experience is a standard critical perspective. The novel was published as the ‘second wave' of the feminist movement was getting under way in the 1960s, so that many of its early (and later) readers had a particular interest in examining literary texts from this perspective.
Jane Eyre, too, has been the focus for feminist approaches. One of the most famous was by two American academics, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In 1979 they published The Madwoman in the Attic; the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. In this study, they took Bertha Mason as a symbolic figure, one who represents the way in which women's voices were silenced or suppressed in nineteenth century society and the way in which that affected literary texts. Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen as another, fictional, treatment of the same theme. For more information on this, see the Texts in detail > Jane Eyre > Critical attitudes to Jane Eyre > Feminist criticism and literary history.
Feminist literary criticism