SOURCE: "Wide Sargasso Sea and the Gothic Mode," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 15, No. 1, April, 1976, pp. 229-45.

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."

Critics have so far failed to place Wide Sargasso Sea within its proper literary context, the Gothic mode of fiction. This is not to say that it should be considered a Gothic novel in the traditional and strictest sense of the term. More than time separates its author from the late eighteenth century world of such quintessentially Gothic novelists as Ann Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis. Nowhere as sentimental as Radcliffe, much less sensationalistic than Lewis, Rhys moves much deeper than either into the unstable...