In the following essay, Mezei examines the narrative structure and presentation of Antoinette's madness in Wide Sargasso Sea. According to Mezei, Antoinette's deteriorating mental state is linked to her inability to remember and recount her story.

In the following essay, Porter examines Rhys's portrayal of alienated and dispossessed female protagonists and the interrelationship of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre.

In the following essay, Curtis examines the use of paradoxical imagery and metaphor to portray Antoinette's death and transformation in Wide Sargasso Sea.

In the following essay, Luengo discusses gothic themes and motifs in Wide Sargasso Sea, especially the significance of landscape, the occult, and the characterization of victim and villain. "In the final analysis," writes Luengo, "Wide Sargasso Sea must be read as a novel about anxiety."

Although Wide Sargasso Sea was set almost entirely in the Caribbean, its first critics were more interested in its links with the Victorian classic, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), for it told the story of Rochester's mad wife kept in the attic of Thornfield Hall. The point that Jean Rhys' book was a radical revaluation of Jane Eyre and its European attitudes from the perspective of a West Indian Creole was largely missed. (p. 111) As Proust knew, memory can intensify and ma...