From Jane Eyre (1847) to Wide Sargasso Sea (1966): Bertha Mason’s identity (re)construction in post-colonial anglophone prose

• Autor(a) principal: Alves de Souza, Giovane
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Soares Fernandes, Auricélio
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Pontos de Interrogação (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://www.revistas.uneb.br/index.php/pontosdeint/article/view/v13n1p319
• topic: Crítica pós-colonial; Identidade; Literatura latino-americana; Literatura inglesa; Postcolonial Criticism; Identity; Latin American Literature; English Literature

The advent of colonial criticism, after the second half of the twentieth century, brought to light other ways of reading the world, showing how discursive mechanisms of identity construction commonly reinforce power relations established from colonialism and that are sustained until the present. Based on this, we seek, in this article, to investigate the way in which the identity construction of the character Bertha Mason took place, in the novel Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Brontë, and how, in response to the author’s imperialist feminism, Jean Rhys rewrote the story of the same character in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) from another perspective, giving voice to a Caribbean woman silenced in the previous plot. In order to do so, we take as input the considerations of Spivak (1985), Gilbert and Gubar (2000), Woodward (2014), Bacellar (2020), among others. Our study considers that literature, from a postcolonial perspective, questions the oppressive discourse that permeates the representation of Latin American and Caribbean cultures, allowing the emergence of other ways of seeing the world, refuting stereotypes and breaking silencing. [Received on: March 14, 2023 - Accepted on: June 10, 2023]