This dream reflects young Antoinette's undeveloped sense of self-awareness. I could hear heavy footsteps coming closer and though I struggled and screamed, I could not move. Someone who hated me was with me, out of sight. I dreamed that I was walking in the forest. Like Jane's dreams, they give much insight to Antoinette's maturing character and provide important foresight into future events in her life.Īntoinette's first dream takes place in her childhood, the night after her playmate Tia cheats her out of three pennies, steals her dress, and dismisses Antoinette as a 'white nigger' (24). These parallel the three dreams Jane Eyre has as she grows increasingly anxious over her marriage. Over the course of the novel, Antoinette has a series of three dreams which she describes as different manifestations of the same dream. Jean Rhys was clearly as aware of the various uses of dreams as Charlotte Brontë. Indeed, the functional components of Antoinette's dreams often parallel those of Jane's dreams. Both characters also reveal interior selves when dreaming Jane's dreams reflect a part of her consciousness that she represses and Antoinette's dreams reflect a part of her consciousness that she has trouble expressing. The dreams of protagonist Antoinette are often clairvoyant like Jane's. In Jean Rhys's postcolonial re-writing of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, dreams serve many of the same functions that they serve in the original.

While dreams in Jane Eyre are tidy and contained, the dreams of Wide Sargasso Sea are jumbled and swamplike. In Wide Sargasso Sea, dreams leak into the waking world of the narrators, thus giving the novel a dreamlike tone. In Jane Eyre, dreams can drive or reflect waking life, but the two entities remain largely distinct. The novels, though, have different attitudes towards the distinction between dreams and reality.

Dreams in Wide Sargasso Sea also often contain parallel imagery to dreams of Jane Eyre.

In both novels they also foreshadow events for the benefit of the characters and the reader. In both works, dreams provide glimpses of the repressed or unexpressed emotions of characters. This essay is Part II of Alan Gordon's 'Dreams in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.' The first part, which discusses Jane Eyre, reesides in the Victorian Web.ĭreams are prevalent in both Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre, and in Jean Rhys's 1966 postcolonial re-writing of it, Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide sargasso sea bertha mason