Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea- The Empire Writes Back

Hello, and I'm Bob, and I sweated through this video like I was in the Caribbean, or like I was in the house when it was on fire. But no, it's just me at 8pm, struggling with the British Summer.

Anyway, in this video, I wanted to explore 'Wide Sargasso Sea' as a response to 'Jane Eyre', and think about how thinking about (post-)colonialism allows us to think a bit more deeply about 'the Canon'.

Books Mentioned:

Charlotte Bronte- 'Jane Eyre'
Jean Rhys- 'Wide Sargasso Sea'
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin- 'The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures'
Jane Austen- 'Sense and Sensibility', and 'Pride and Prejudice'.

[soniajohnson]

Thank you for this. Read both a long time ago, so maybe time for a reread with reading Wide Sargasso Sea first. Not sure about Sense and Sensibility, but in Mansfield Park Fanny Price goes to live with the Betram family and we read of Sir Thomas Betram going to his plantation in Antigua.

[knittingbooksetc.]

Here the weather is a bit cooler today, but it’s been hell hot.

[apocalypsereading]

with the lighting as well it looks like you're in an oven that gets turned up a bit more with every video. i also melt in the heat, solidarity! anyway love this type of video. read The Secret Garden recently and was genuinely shocked by the huge role that colonial India played in a story apparently about the wonders of the English countryside, I swear they talk about rajahs and snake-charmers on every other page. there must be a good paper on that somewhere. they made me read wide sargasso sea in high school without the benefit of jane eyre (tho think i knew the story from the telly) and you can imagine how clueless my whole class was. postcolonialism? sure. at least the fiery finale was a surprise!

[attention]

There are so many rewrite/novels that are built around Jane Eyre, I cant keep track. Haha. I have actually not read a single one, but if it did, it would be one like this, and not just a modern rewrite. 😎 Oh! But "The Empire Writes Back, " does sound more like something I would really get into. (When I read the title of this video, I didn't know it was an actual book, I was a bit confused on why you put that pun 😂).

[johncrwarner]

The name "jean" can be the French male name pronounced [ʒɑ̃] - the pronunciation you used or it can be the Scottish female name (a form of Jane) pronounced as [ˈdʒiːn]
Jean Rhys was female and likely pronounced her own name in the English /Scots way.

So not so much getting character names "wrong" or "unfamiliar" as seeming to change the gender of Jean Rhys.- which I found interesting.
How am I aware that "Jean" has a pronunciation of [ˈdʒiːn] - that we had a neighbour called Jean when I was growing up and so I was confused when I first encountered Gene Kelly - whose named sounded female LOL