Her description of the garden is equally distasteful - as ‘beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there but it had gone wild.a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh, living smell.Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched.The scent was very sweet and strong. the use of the excessive ‘too much’ suggests that this luxuriance is unwelcome and somehow unsavoury. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green.’ (p.59). There is a commonality of theme here which Rhys echoes and subverts in Wide Sargasso Sea to create a repeated image that is superficially drenched in light, where intensity creates a sensory overload, ‘Everything is too much.

’ (Chapter 27) show the crucial, gothic characteristic of light and shadow to enhance a sense of intangible fear in the reader. Emily Brontë’s description of the gaunt landscape which ‘lay in shadow.bare masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish a stunted tree’ (Chapter 18) and of Cathy, whose ‘face was just like the landscape.shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient. It is evident that others, notably Wuthering Heights, use setting and the contrasting play between darkness and light as an invaluable tool in creating the sense of encroaching danger inherent in gothic texts as Rhys does in Wide Sargasso Sea. The genre relies on a distinctive range of features to create and signify the presence of anxiety. Jane Eyre is punctuated by claustrophobic English imagery to add an atmospheric sense of terror, particularly noticeable in Brontë’s description of the violent Thornfield countryside, where the landscape seems animated by some nameless, feral horror the beck is ‘a torrent, turbid and curbless: it tore asunder the wood, and sent a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or whirling sleet and for the forest on its banks, that showed only ranks of skeleton.’ (p.64) Rhys utilises a backdrop of potent gothic mechanisms and echoes the stricken anarchy of post emancipation colonial rule in her writing to enhance the audience’s reading and to enable her protagonist to hold a slanted mirror to the world of Jane Eyre.Īt first, it seems incongruous that the vibrant, post colonialist backdrop of Wide Sargasso Sea, soaked by the ‘brazen sun’ (1) should be so richly entangled with the shadowy landscapes of the European gothic. To what extent is a reading of Rhys’ novel enhanced by considering source texts other than Jane Eyre?

Sargasso sea novel