Document Type
Article
Abstract
While Jane Eyre has been lauded as a feminist novel, its modernist prequel Wide Sargasso Sea clearly aims at recovering the lost voice of the much-maligned Bertha Rochester from an altogether different feminist perspective. In her 1985 essay on these two novels, Joyce Carol Oates highlights their dual relationship in terms of romance and anti-romance, regarding Rhys’s novel as “a reverse mirror image of Jane Eyre’s and Rochester’s England.” Commenting upon the brief encounter between Jane and Rochester’s first wife as depicted by Jean Rhys, Oates also points out that, “[i]nhabiting contrary worlds, one woman is a savage to the other; the other, a ghost.” In her 2012 novel Mudwoman, Oates investigates such a complex legacy in the confrontation between M.R. Neukirchen and the traumatic past that resurfaces in her life just as she appears to have reached the pinnacle of her career. The connections between these three novels will help me elucidate the consequences of this tainted inheritance and explore the two faces of feminism guiding Oates’s approach—both the bright side and the dark side of women’s fight for recognition and equality.
DOI
10.15867/331917.6.2
Citation Information
Durrans, Stéphanie
(2025)
"The Mudwoman in the Academia: The Spectral Presence of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway in Joyce Carol Oates's Mudwoman,"
Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies: Vol. 6, Article 5.
DOI: 10.15867/331917.6.2
Available at:
https://repository.usfca.edu/jcostudies/vol6/iss1/5
