Las flores demasiado rojas. Notas sobre la construcción de un paisaje impresionista en Wide Sargasso Sea de Jean Rhys

Abstract

In her letters about Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys explains how she was reading Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë and the character of Bertha interested her so deeply that she decided to write her story. This essay considers it possible to read Wide Sargasso Sea as if the authoress would had taken Bertha’s univocal portrait from Jane Eyre and decomposed it in different perspectives, a literary devise that we will call “impressionist”. Starting from this idea, we argue that Rhys reconstructs Bertha’s portrait using a superposition of different dimensions: the observation of tradition, the observation of society and of the subject on himself, and the observation of nature. The landscape descriptions presented in the novel are composed by resorting to the parameters for the representation of a landscape painting, and thus, becoming part of the literary series of ekphrasis. Therefore, if we consider Rhy’s descriptions as such, they should be studied in the context of theory of representation. This entails that certain ideological, political, and social implications that form these pictorial movements could also be read in Rhy’s descriptions.