The Rhizomatic space of Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

This work is an approach to the rhizomatic cartography of Wide Sargasso Sea by Caribbean writer Jean Rhys from its markedly polyphonic structure, defined not only by the dialogic exchanges with the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, but also for its narrative structure. The work explores the ways in which the fictional topography is constructed through the interrelationship between the time-space of Jane Eyre and the time-space of Wide Sargasso Sea, and defined by the plurality of voices and discourses that overlap, contradict one another in the narrative of the Caribbean novel. The work examines the ways in which the "spatial history" of the character Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea allows a rereading of the colonial vision endorsed by Charlotte Brontë’s novel. Wide Sargasso Sea reveals the otherness that was suppressed in the novel Jane Eyre, by bringing to the fore the Caribbean spatiality as a dimension of human experience. It is this spatial dimension, taken from life material itself, which, however, always escapes representation, that Rhys explores in her fiction. The spatial history challenges the mythical imaginations of the imperial history object, legitimized by a logical, coherent speech. In contrast to the visibility of imperial history, is the invisibility of the object of spatial history, the dimension of what is lived and experienced, a story made up by tracks, traces of spaces. The spatial history begins and ends in the language, because through language space is symbolically transformed into a space with a history.