He defined liminal individuals as “neither here and there they are betwixt and between positions assigned and arrayed by laws, customs ,conventions and ceremony” (359). Turner in his “Liminality and Communitas” describes liminality as “passage”, “movement” and “shift in and out of time”. The term “liminality” gained popularity in the twentieth century through the works of Victor Turner who expanded Van Gennep’s idea concept in his work. When the world around her tries to isolate her or to impose an identity on her she unconsciously creates a bubble around her in which she lives happily so liminality or her liminal existence is her escapist strategy. In Jane Eyer she is portrayed as just a mad woman living in the attic but in Rhys’ novel she is a daughter, wife, and lover hence a human who deserves happiness but who has ruthlessly been deprived off. In this novel we are provided with the childhood details of Antoinette/Bertha’s life so that we could to terms with her madness at the end which has already been written by Bronte.
In this novel Rhys chose the timeline to be a year after the emancipation act which makes it easy to highlight the racial tensions and the hatred the former slaves held for the white colonizers. The novel begins in 1834 in Coulibri, the slaves have been granted emancipation. Jean Rhys once said that throught her childhood she had been fascinated with the mad woman of Jane Eyre and she always wanted to give her a narrative, which she accomplished in her last novel (qtd in. Rhys’ rewriting of Jane Eyre highlights the orientalist perception of Bronte of the West Indies. Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is Jean Rhys’ attempt to give voice to the voiceless “mad woman” of Jane Eyre.
In doing so, it aims to highlight the importance of a sense of belonging and a foothold in shaping a person’s identity and sanity. The paper analyses the condition of the characters, especially the creole heiress in both of these novels, under the light of Victor Turner’s theory of Liminality. This paper analyses the liminal existence of Antoinette in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The portrayal of Antoinette in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a Liminal persona
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