Doubling and Madness in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

An Extended Literary Conversation

Most conversations are held in person — sitting next to someone on a train traveling toward a familiar or unknown destination, enjoying a coffee break at work, or waiting at a busy corner for the light to turn green. Then there are long-distance conversations: some by phone, others by instant message or email, and still others through more literary methods, with one author talking to another, or even with one author's characters talking to another's. This attenuated, though certainly not tenuous, form of communication is evidenced in the dialogue between Jean Rhys and Charlotte Brontë — or more accurately between the characters in Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea and Brontë's Jane Eyre.

The theme of Rhys's novel, and to a lesser extent of Brontë's, is that of doubling: of an image and its reflection, of a world that cannot be considered complete without twins. Rhys's novel contains a number of explicit references to doubled images, but on a broader level her entire novel is, of course, a double — a sort of doppelganger of Brontë's. It is the same story told by a different person for a different reason. Rhys's version is one in which nearly everything that Brontë assumes is questioned and often upended. The conversation that thus arises between the two women and their literary creations is one in which the truth of what is made clearer by what might be seen as the discrepancies between the reflections.

The main characters in the two novels are women who will greatly affect each other's lives as both enter into the biography of the same man. As the first and then the second wife of that man, they serve the same familial function in a world in which women were in many ways interchangeable. And yet both — and especially Antoinette, Rhys's protagonist — refuse simply to be auxiliaries in their own lives. Antoinette will not simply be a reflection of the world she sees. She will claim a slice of life as her very own. Or go mad.

Doubling Across Gender

In general, the two books and the two women each see another woman — often each other, but sometimes not — as their other self. Femaleness is replicable, repeated in other femaleness: women are always their own twins, the authors seem to suggest. But there are also times, especially for Rhys writing in a different era and for a different purpose than Brontë, when women can find their other half in a man. So prevalent and so pervasive are the images of a doubled consciousness that one can understand how this imagery alone would have prompted Rhys to write her answer to Brontë's novel and to make manifest the dialogue that was immanent in the text.

Both Jane and Antoinette can be seen as half-formed characters, half-finished souls. Something essential is missing from each of them — something taken from them at a young age — that leads each one to a constant examination of herself. Ironically, that diminution of self is acted out in terms of a mirroring of self-identity: knowing that they are somehow not enough, each woman constantly seeks completion in a mirror image of herself, a completion and understanding of herself that can only be developed through a consideration of how others see her.

Miller (1985) argues that one must be attentive to different types of doubled-ness. A double of the self can come from the outside. When this happens, as it does in both novels, that doubled self feels like a ghost or a possession — a demon that becomes part of one, a phantasmagorical pregnancy. But a sense of doubled-ness can also arise from the inside, from within the character herself, producing a sense of splitting and thus of madness.

References

Brontë, C. (2010). Jane Eyre. New York: Tribeca Books.

Gilbert, S. & Gubar, S. (2000). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Miller, K. (1985). Doubles: Studies in literary history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rhys, J. (1992). The wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton.