Wicked, Crazy, and Opposite

"I've ner believed in  Charlotte's lunatic, that's why I wrote the book" (2)

Double (De)Colonization and the Feminist Criticism of Wide Sargasso Sea

Bronte's curiosity drove her to write "Sea". There just had to be a back story, for how often are people actually born crazy? There had to be a motivation for "Bertha" to try and kill Rochester and Mason, not to mention the grand finale fire. She gave a name, face and background to a minimal but very essential character in Jane Eyre. I am reminded of another author: Gregory Maguire. In his novel Wicked, Maguire tells the background story of a small but integrative character in The Wizard of Oz: the wicked witch. By giving her a name (Elphaba Throp) and a backstory (she, having green skin, was a victim of racism her entire life, though her condition was no fault of her own). In giving "character" to these figures, Maguire and Rhys humanize their actions. Both Elphaba and Antoinette were not orginally wicked or crazy, they were forced to become so by the circumstances life threw at them. I defy you to read The Wizard of Oz or Jane Eyre without feeling differently towards Glinda or Rochester.

"Rhy's West Indian protagonist faced the same sexual constraints and ideologies as the heroine of Bronte's imperial narrative" (3)

I just had to include this in my blog. It seems my line of thinking agrees with that of  the 1970's feminists, because they too have noticed all the simularities between Jane and Antoinette. There is a phrase in the next sentence of the paper that combines the issues of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality into something called a "matrix of domination", meaning that all these factors shaped Jane and Antoinette's psychological turn-outs. Mardorossian fugres that Jane and Antoinette are the opposite ends  "two sides of the same coin": both were surrounded by domination and oppression from the matrix their entire lives, but both reacted differently.