Wide Sargasso Sea is a post colonial novel by Jean Rye. It is a typical subversive manoeuvre characteristic of post-colonial texts,which employs the strategy that the writer takes up a character or characters and uncovers its colonialist assumptions,subverting the text for post-colonial purposes. The novel acts as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's famous 1847 novel Jane Eyre. It is the story of Antoinette Cosway (known as Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre), a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage with Mr Rochester and relocation to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Rhys's novel re-imagines Brontë's devilish madwoman in the attic. As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation.
For the main character in the novel,the character of Antoinette derives from Charlotte Brontë's repellent ,disgusting and gloomy wife of Mr’s Rochester. Rhys creates a prehistory for Bronte's character, tracing her development from a young solitary girl in Jamaica to a thoughtless and impertinent lunatic wife.By fleshing out Brontë's one-dimensional madwoman, Rhys enables us to sympathize with the mental and emotional decline of a human being. Antoinette is a far cry from the conventional female heroines of nineteenth- and even twentieth-century novels, who are often more rational and self-restrained (as is Jane Eyre herself). In Antoinette, by contrast, we see the potential dangers of a wild imagination and an acute sensitivity. Her restlessness and instability seem to stem, in some part, from her inability to belong to any particular community. From the perspective of post-colonialism, we may find inJane Eyre,there indeed exist the colonialist ideology, which