Claims of Heritage: Restoring the English Country House in Wide Sargasso Sea

Since the publication of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), two critical positions have persisted: one that considers the novel in the context of Jane Eyre (1847), ignoring the way it represents English identity and history in its own right; and another that focuses on the novel’s West Indian contexts and divorces it from the English traditions that inform its structure and plot. However, the novel sutures these dual inheritances through a critical representation of the English country house that adopts mid-century preservationists’ nostalgia for such historic sites in order to problematize this nostalgia. Wide Sargasso Sea represents Thornfield Hall as a space in which post-imperial racialization takes place. Examining the text as a country-house novel allows one to rethink its position in both a British and a postcolonial canon, as well as considering the political possibilities and perils of preservation in English fiction.