Publication details
Devils and Monsters : Unveiling the Dark Side of Marriages in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016)
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the book Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben write that “neo-Victorian writers have seized on the nineteenth-century family as a ready-made means of cultural critique, particularly from feminist, gender and postcolonial perspectives” (5-6). Consequently, marriage, as a theme in contemporary Victorian-era revisitations, only rarely depicts a successful and respectful union between two people. On the contrary, happy relationships are something out of the ordinary, primarily used to emphasise further the inequality and inherent dysfunctionality of the other marriages. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys revisits the silenced and villainised Antoinette/Bertha from Charlotte Bronte’s canonical work Jane Eyre (1847). The toxic relationship between her and her husband, Rochester, goes through various stages until ultimately reaching disgust and hatred. Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016) is concerned with finding the titular creature that haunts a small village. Nevertheless, it becomes clear throughout the story that other monsters also permeate the narrative. This presentation focuses on the various representations of marriage in the abovementioned novels. Be it Rochester’s madwoman in the attic or a union between a reverend and his angel in the house, it becomes clear that neo-Victorian literature refuses to romanticise the model of a patriarchal family. The idea of marriage as a private affair is left behind; instead, these neo-Victorian works present a harrowing dissection of its dark side. |
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