Wide Sargasso Se The Effect Of Losing One's Name On Identity

Lauren Mapp
EN 3414
Dr. Andrea Spain
12 November 2014
What’s in a Name? The Effect of Losing One’s Name on Identity Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea has received a lot of attention for being a story written back to Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea focuses on the life of Bertha Mason, starting from her childhood and following her to the fatal fire seen at the end of Jane Eyre. In her youth, Bertha was known as Antoinette Cosway. Over the course of her life, she is reduced to a creature more closely resembling an animal than a woman until, and continuing even after, her husband eventually locks her away. Although the critics come to a consensus that Antoinette is reduced to some sort of mad creature, they do

The Rochester figure notices how the life has started to go out of her. He even compares her to a corpse after their one night tryst, getting up and covering her “as if [he] covered a dead girl” (Rhys 83). At the very end, of the section he “watche[s] the hate go out of her eyes. […] And with the hate her beauty” (Rhys 102). He even says that he forces it out of her. The tone of the passage indicates that he gets some kind of pleasure from ruining her this way. Antoinette Cosway has already had her identity and her voice stolen from her. Without her hatred for her husband, Antoinette loses the last vestiges of her humanity and truly becomes Bertha

Her version of the incident that occurs between Richard Mason and herself is quite different from the way it was told in Jane Eyre. In fact, this Bertha does not even remember what has happened until Grace Poole tells her. Richard Mason did not even recognize his step-sister. The problem is, Richard knew Antoinette Mason, a girl who, even though she had already begun losing her identity and voice, was once a lively and beautiful woman. The woman he saw in the third floor room at Thornfield was Bertha Mason, some wild creature who, imprisoned in her solitude, has lost touch with reality. Bertha even acknowledges this, frantically searching for her old red dress and exclaiming, “If I had been wearing my red dress Richard would have known me” (Rhys 110). That dress is from an earlier period in her life, before she was Bertha. Its bright color signifies it as something of Antoinette, not Bertha. She is acknowledging that, had she been dressed up as Antoinette, Richard would have recognized her, but he has no clue who or what Bertha is and had no way of placing