An abundance of critical works have been produced on Jane Eyre since its publication, with  many critical in the pejorative sense. Despite its apparent canonicity, the novel has sparked an ongoing discourse, oscillating between praise and derision. Cora Kaplan provides an excellent overview of these historical perspectives in a chapter of her book Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism, “Jane Eyre and Her Critics”

While a graph of its rising and falling reputation in the last quarter century gives too historically limited and too linear an impression of the controversy it continues to stir, we should remember that in the 1970s Jane Eyre briefly attained a unique status as a positively valued ‘cult text’ for second-wave Anglophone feminism. Since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined that description [...], Jane Eyre has become a much more tarnished and controversial emblem of Western feminism’s ambiguous political legacy. As mnemic symbol therefore, Jane Eyre’s narrative and its mode of telling memorialize no single event but a shifting constellation of stories, images, and interpretations. An iconic cultural artefact for feminism, it amplifies the dissonances within and along contemporary feminisms.

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Jane Eyre provokes different anxieties across eras of literary critique. In the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf wrote a scathing derision of the novel and the author’s inability to speak for women or anyone but herself. Kaplan suggests that the mnemic Jane Eyre produced a dissonance for Woolf between the feminist literature she wished to develop and a strong identification with the character (p. 20). Mid-century discourse shifted to the second-wave feminism of Gilbert & Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. They write that Jane Eyre is “a story of enclosure and escape, a distinctly female Bildungsroman,” about pursuing freedom in spite of, “difficulties Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome...” (p. 339). Sargasso Sea's publication precedes Madwoman in the Attic by 11 years, yet despite their inclusion of a Jean Rhys quotation at the beginning of the chapter, Gilbert & Gubar read Bertha as no more than a dark reflection of Jane (361). Here is where the discourse around Jane Eyre and WSS begin to converge.

     In her 1985 essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak followed up on previous critic of Jane Eyre as complacently supporting imperialism by comparing it with Wide Sargasso Sea. She writes in the terms of Gilbert & Gubar, Jane’s search for self and soul. Brontë reduces Bertha's humanity and denies her a soul by writing her as animalistic, thus her self-actualization is rendered unimportant (p. 247). Further, Spivak uses the same passages as in Madwoman as evidence for an opposing argument, such as the opening line “There was no possibility of taking a walk today [...] Out-door exercise was now out of the question.” Spivak sees Jane’s withdrawal as self-marginalization whereas the others read it as the beginning of her liberation (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979, p. 339. Spivak, 1985, p. 246).
Regarding Wide Sargasso Sea, Spivak is cautiously generous to Rhys’s work. She acknowledges some feats like refusing to give the Rochester’s analog a name, denying his patrilineal inheritance. Spivak also notes the way Rhys handled limits to her voice in her writing of Christophine. Christophine’s ultimate line “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know,” which Spivak interprets as her being “simply driven out of the story” without “narrative nor characterological explanation or justice,” (p. 253). A dissenting reading of the same line comes from John Su, who interprets “Other things I know” as Rhys conferring to Christophine a voice not bound to the page, acknowledging her limits in righting a black character as a white Creole herself (2015, p. 176). For both novels, the narrative of critique is divisive and complex, with questions of intersectionality, feminism, and empire provoking wildly different responses from different critics.

     Following this review of criticism, it is clear that while the novels have produced a vast body of work they have not produced consensus. The purpose of my research is not to bring a definitive conclusion to these arguments, but rather to employ modern techniques to examine the themes that have been integrated for decades and continue to provide new avenues for interpretation. Critics disagree on the nature of isolation for Jane and Antoinette, whether the novels examine colonialism or use it as a tool, and whether the novels are problematic or progressive for contemporary feminism. By applying digital tools, I hope to produce outcomes that may bolster a critical perspective or open new avenues of discussion.