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Contesting (Post-)colonialism: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Three Neo-Victorian Rejoinders

  • Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
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Abstract

This chapter looks at three generations of texts, beginning with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It establishes the important connection between two literary responses to Victorian literature, namely the wider neo-Victorian genre and a more specific subset of it, which reconsiders the nineteenth century from a postcolonial perspective. These two are yoked together in Jane Eyre’s literary daughter, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is considered by many critics to be the foundational neo-Victorian text. I then read three Anglo-American neo-Victorian novels which return to both Brontë’s and Rhys’s models. In particular, I focus on how these later works reorient the narrative focus away from the empowered Creole Antoinette (Bertha Mason) in Wide Sargasso Sea back to the British characters of Jane Eyre.

Keywords

Adaptation Charlotte Brontë Cannibalism Jean Rhys Neo-Victorian Victorian 
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Authors and Affiliations

  • Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
    • 1
  1. 1.Hong Kong Baptist UniversityKowloon TongHong Kong

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