Naming and Silencing: Loss of Identity Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys is a re-writing of the novel Jane

Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bront West Indies from England, but it also signifies the end of the economic and colonial supremacy of England. In this extract Antoinette/ Bertha, the main female character, is in England enclosed in a very cold and dark room, isolated from the rest of the house and from the external world. Her long interior monologue gives the reader direct access to her mind and her reflections on how intensely painful is the perception of her condition of seclusion. Antoinette/Bertha observes and describes in very rational and logical terms the actions of Grace Pool, a lucidity that makes her appear a normal woman, very different from the image given of her in Jane Eyre. Grace Pool, the woman who looks after her, is in the room with her, lighting a fire with some paper and pieces of wood. Antoinette/ Bertha is really attracted by the fire because it gives light and warmth to the place in which she is kept prisoner, a warmth that she evidently lacks. The woman sleeps in her room at night; Antoinette pretends she is sleeping, but she actually looks at Grace counting the money that Rochester gives her to look after his mad wife, actually the price he has to pay to continue to hold Bertha hidden to the eyes of the world. At the end Grace puts the money in a bag and hangs it round her neck, drinks from a bottle on the table and then she goes to sleep; when she is fully asleep, Bertha tastes the drink. Then she begins to observe the room and tries to describe the few pieces of furniture in it: there is a table and two black chairs in the middle, and her bed. The other room next to this is covered with tapestry. The pattern of the tapestry reminds Antoinette of her mothers gown, an association that activates a train of memories and recollections of her past and opens an emotional wound that appears to have never been healed inside her. She remembers having once recognised her mother dressed in an evening gown with patterns similar to the ones on the tapestry and observes that, as in the past, her mother had totally ignored her presence looking beyond her as if she were invisible. The feeling of intense suffering that her mothers behaviour and lack of love provokes in Antoinette is a constant theme in the novel. Another theme is the importance of names. In fact, names matter she says when reflecting about how inappropriate the name Grace is for the

woman who is looking after her. This explains why when Rochester decided to call Antoinette by a different name, Bertha, she started losing her true identity; he wouldn't call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking glass, she concludes with intense sadness. Renaming is an obvious violence made to her which adds to the other forms of violence she has had to bear, as accepting to be uprooted form her native country against her will. So her past memories of perfumes and colours from the Caribbean gradually risk to be lost forever in the darkness and coldness of England, a country she does not know and does not acknowledge as her own. The mirror disappearing with her stands for the loss of her identity. In the past, the mirror with its hard and cold surface prevented Antoinette as a child to kiss her image. Now she can not look at herself since there is no mirror in the attic, because they are afraid she can break it and hurt herself. This is a further violence she has to bear: in fact, according to Jack Lacan, the mirror is a means to recognize ones self though the reflected image. The dislocation in time and place, as well as the impossibility for her to find a form of external recognition of her identity, determines the destruction of Antoinettes self. The passage hidden by the locked door is the one Antoinette uses to enter the official part of the house in Jane Eyre. A constant element in her life are the whisperings she hears; they can be interpreted metaphorically as the gossips that paint her as a madwoman. When night comes, she takes the keys of the room and opens it. She walks into their world, the patriarchal space that is denied to her and to which she is actually other. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard, she meditates: it is a false world, without light and colour, cold and immersed in darkness. Antoinette can not believe she is in England, since she thinks her ship lost its route in the Wide Sargasso Sea. She remembers that once, on the ship that was taking her to England, an officer brought her some food. She embraced the man and tried to convince him that she was kept prisoner. When Mr Rochester discovered them Antoinette-Bertha tried to break the small porthole in order to make the ship sink. The cardboard world is an artificial place she cannot escape, trapped as she is inside it, the fictional world of the original text, Jane Eyre, whose end cannot be altered. When Jean Rhys started to write the novel she meant to give Bertha a life: she managed to do it by giving her a voice, giving the reader the possibility of actually hearing

her speak her inner feelings directly; thus she set her free from the world of lies which imprisoned her. Yet, Rhys had to surrender to the impossibility of altering the conclusion of Brontes novel and had to accept for her heroine the tragic death by fire which would establish forever her fate as the madwoman in the attic.