Closely analyse the presentation of Rochesters character in Jane Eyre. In the course of your writing make comparisons with the way Rochester is presented in Wide Sargasso Sea.

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Closely analyse the presentation of Rochester’s character in Jane Eyre. In the course of your writing make comparisons with the way Rochester is presented in Wide Sargasso Sea.

Edward Rochester is an upper-class British gentlemen of 19th century Britain. The character of Rochester features heavily in both Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea: similarly presented for the most part, but with differences which result in quite different conclusions. The culture and society that each novel is portraying can be considered to be a main contributing factor to this difference: set in two very different cultures and involving two characters (Jane and Antoinette) with very different upbringings and sets of values and beliefs, the character is similar in both but also a world apart.

In Jane Eyre, Rochester’s character is a dark, deceitful, brooding, selfish but romantic and passionate anti-hero: though truly loving Jane, he seeks to manipulate her for his own selfish reasons at every turn, and though he calls her his “equal”, he rarely acts as though she is. He is both a symbol of hope, and a symbol of patriarchal oppression, for Jane. In the novel, he illustrates themes of deceit, inequality, class struggles, male dominance and, eventually, female empowerment. Much of the imagery associated with him in the novel is related to fire: “the light of the fire on his granite-hewn features”, “Don’t keep me long; the fire scorches me”; the suggestion is made throughout that his overpowering personality and ruthlessness in pursuit of what he selfishly wants would somehow consume and destroy Jane’s free and equally passionate spirit: all-consuming, animalistic passion is ultimately shown in the form of Rochester‘s mad wife Bertha. As Barbara Hill Rigney comments, “[Bertha] serves as a distorted mirror image of Jane’s own dangerous propensities towards ‘passion’”; Bertha’s condition in Jane Eyre is one which reflects Jane’s own dangerous situation as much as Jane’s premonitions reflect her future danger. Rhys echoes these elements of the supernatural and foreshadowing in her own adaptation. Rhys’s own portrayal of Rochester paints a picture of his controlling nature obliterating another’s identity, Antoinette’s, who is without the strong sense of self and Christian morality Jane possesses (which gives her the strength to leave Rochester).

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Jane’s perception of Rochester as a god-like figure (“I could not, in those days, see God for his creature; of whom I had made an idol.”) is somewhat similar to the role he plays within his own circles and the role he plays within the patriarchal society her resides in: he is the master of the house, a well-liked figure among high society, and is dominant to Jane throughout most of the novel. Rhys’s presentation of the character is similar in Wide Sargasso Sea: a white, British man of wealth (especially when compared with the poverty that the Cosway ...

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