In contrast, the angel of the house represents the desired patriarchal image imposed by men in society. The “madwoman in the attic” represents a female who has an irrepressible level of rebellion towards patriarchal standards of women. Patriarchal images of women who dominate Victorian literature typify the often debated binary oppositions - “madwoman in the attic” and “angel of the house”. Edinburgh University Press, 2003.Bertha Mason: A 21st Century Woman Trapped in 1847 Shanghai Ballet’s, Fan Xiaofeng, as Bertha Mason 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,' in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, eds., Feminist Postcolonial Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Snow on the Cane Fields: Women's writings and Creole Subjectivity. New York: New York University Press, 1986. A Critical Study of the Novels of Jean Rhys. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 'Plantation Owners and Apprenticeship: The Dawn of Emancipation'. 'Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: Colonial History, English fiction and British Empire.' Twentieth Century Literature, 1997, pp. White Supremacy.' Journal of Caribbean Literatures. 'Postcolonial Discourse in ‘Wide Sargasso Sea': Creole Discourse vs. 'The Best Living Novelist.' New York Times Book Review. This essay argues that Rhys's description of the heroine's losing sense of safety fundamentally produces an ambivalent form of madness, which deconstructs the western invention of Jamaica, offering possibilities to rewrite the Creole cultural identity. Rhys's intention to challenge Bertha's image as a lunatic and the relevant themes such as race, madness, colonial history have been discussed in a great many of academic works, but the connection between Antoinette's repetitive articulation of her losing sense of safety and her 'madness' regretfully attract little attention. Renaming Bertha as Antoinette, Jean Rhys gives the Creole woman back her deprived voice and writes her a 'life', resisting Charlotte Brontë's distorted representation of the West Indian woman and the imperial and patriarchal discourse embedded in her text.

As an example of rewriting English literary canons, Wide Sargasso Sea presents the life experience of Bertha Mason, 'The Madwoman in the Attic' in Jane Eyre, from the Jamaican side and exposes the distortion and construction of the colony history.

Wide sargasso sea bertha mason