Truth Theme Analysis

Wide Sargasso Sea is a revisionist novel, written to complicate and push up against the accepted truth of Antoinette or “Bertha” Cosway’s character as it is put forth in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre—the archetypal “madwoman in the attic.” The novel questions the very nature of truth in its premise, form, and content.

Within the novel, truth is shown to be slippery at best, difficult if not impossible to recognize and trust. Every story has at least two competing versions. The narration itself is unstable, switching between the perspectives of Antoinette and Rochester, often giving the reader contradictory perspectives and opinions on the same characters and events. Daniel Cosway, in his letters to Rochester, provides a troubling version of the history of the Cosway-Mason family, at odds with Antoinette’s narration, thereby injecting a third competing narrative. Cosway’s version highlights Alexander Mason’s depravity, and casts Annette, Antoinette, and Christophine as self-serving liars.

Many of the characters’ identities are forged in gossip and hearsay. Christophine, in particular, is a character with multiple backstories. When Rochester writes to Mr. Fraser inquiring about her, there are shown to be conflicting accounts of her whereabouts (“my wife insists that she had gone back to Martinique... I happen to know that she has not returned to Martinique”) and even her name (“the woman in question was called Josephine or Christophine Dubois.”) When Rochester decides to turn her in, he highlights the indeterminacy of her identity in the novel, “So much for you, Josephine or Christophine. So much for you, Pheena.” Even Antoinette is not entirely sure of Christophine’s abilities, and can only speculate at the scope of her obeah prowess. Rochester’s interactions with Antoinette are also riddled with confusion about the truth. He tells her, “So much of what you tell me is strange, different from what I was led to expect,” and in his narration remembers, “She was unsure of fact—any facts.”

Even the senses are not to be trusted. Vision plays tricks on people, and hallucinations abound. As a child, Antoinette cannot be sure whether she sees or imagines seeing feathers and chicken’s blood, remnants of obeah rituals, in Christophine’s room. While at Granbois, Rochester becomes lost in the woods and stumbles upon a paved road, where he frightens a child walking by. Later, he is assured that there was never a road there. Of Granbois and the mysterious instability of the senses that he experienced there, Rochester remembers, “it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing—I want what it hides.”

Denial or madness are shown to be the two alternatives for dealing with the crushing and confounding nature of truth in the novel. Either a character can “turn her face to the wall,” and deny the complexity and tragedy before them, as Christophine accuses Aunt Cora of doing, or go mad with grief, as Annette and Antoinette both do. Rochester ultimately takes the path of denial by imprisoning Antoinette, shutting her away forever rather than reconciling the truth of her nature and their marriage with what he’d expected, or been led to believe. Even Christophine finally retreats into denial, or refusal, when Rochester and Antoinette leave for England. Rochester offers, “You can write to her,” to which Christophine replies, “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know,” and walks away without saying goodbye.