Wide Sargasso Sea

Title:	Wide Sargasso Sea
Creator:	Jean Rhys
Date(s):	October 1966
Medium:	novel
Fandom:	Jane Eyre
Language:
External Links:	Wide Sargasso Sea on Wikipedia
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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a professionally published novel that has often been compared to fanfiction. To summarize this work using fannish terminology; it is a Jane Eyre pre-canon story and it is canon-compliant.

Wide Sargasso Sea humanizes Antoinette Cosway, "the mad woman in the attic" who, when we meet her in Jane Eyre, has been renamed Bertha by her abusive husband. This novel tells her story from her childhood in Jamaica to the end of her unhappy marriage in England. Rhys reframes her experiences from a feminist and post-Colonial perspective.

Published in the 1960s, before the premiere of Star Trek:TOS and the dawning of modern media fandom, Wide Sargasso Sea is often cited in academic works related to transformative fan communities. It's also a work that many fans consider transformative, but it is not considered fanfiction. Wide Sargasso Sea is often discussed when fans wonder why professionally published transformative works are more accepted than amateur works of fanfiction.

Wide Sargasso Sea's Relationship to Fandom

Wide Sargasso Sea and its relationship to transformative fandom has been the subject of commentary from fan studies scholars and fans alike. Although as a professionally published novel it is not typically considered "true" fanfiction, it is often examined through the lens of fanfiction, with comparisons drawn between how it and amateur transformative works approach their "canons".

In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson contrast the reception of Wide Sargasso Sea with a similar work, The Wind Done Gone:

Jean Rhys's 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea, which, as a prequel to Jane Eyre, can be legitimately called fan fiction, was published commercially as any other book and has received critical acclaim. However, Alice Randall's 2001 novel The Wind Done Gone, which retells the story of Gone With The Wind from the point of view of Scarlett's half-sister Cynara, was the object of a lawsuit that nearly prevented its publication.

Anna Wilson cites Wide Sargasso Sea as an example of a text that "shares formal qualities with fan fiction" but was not created within a fan community:

Analyses that define fan fiction as first and foremost transformative also often favor expansive definitions of fan fiction that include modern published fiction that transforms source texts whose copyright has expired. Such texts share some formal qualities with fan fiction but were not created within fan communities; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Wide Sargasso Sea are probably the most frequently given examples (see, e.g., Pugh 2004, 194–95).

One fan cited Wide Sargasso Sea as an example of restitutive fanfiction, that is fanfiction that redresses issues with the source text:

[ktyxdovahkiin]: It is worthwhile to be aware of “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys, which is after all fanfic aimed at redressing certain omissions and unpleasant elisions in Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”. That book is perhaps one of the best examples of this restitutive function of fanfic.

A critique by two fans of Wide Sargasso Sea as a published "fanfic" and its trueness to the "canon" of Jane Eyre:

[ambitious-witch]

I normally like to write published fanfic from classics because I like new takes in stories or different POVs... But god I detest how Wide Sargasso Sea has completely fucked with people's perspective of Jane Eyre and make it all about how Be[r]tha was the misunderstood Woke Queen and that Bronte was apparently racist. [...] I tried reading that book but I got bored of it after a couple of chapters, it felt so slow and never ending. Ironically, the original Jane Eyre... Wrote nearly 200 years ago, felt more modern than the prose of that book.

[cto10121]

It was assigned reading for my Modernist Fiction course, which was frankly laughable since the whole novel is completely unintelligible without reading or at least knowing what happens in Jane Eyre, which was not assigned (fortunately I had read Jane Eyre by then, but I still cringe in pity for the other students). It was a forgettable experience of essentially bad writing—two-dimensional characters, no development, piss-poor voice (Rochester’s POV was indistinguishable from Antoinette/Bertha’s), a poetic style without the substance, no proper realization of its themes (colonialism, women’s autonomy, etc.) the works. Even the connection with Jane Eyre was weak; I’ve read fanfics more true to the canon and lore of the original works than WSS. And yes, Charlotte Brontë’s prose was much better and more accessible than Rhys. (I’ve also heard that Brontë-is-racist thing—something about Bertha’s description in the attic? I really haven’t read the book in a long while, so I can’t say if the criticism is valid).