Although Wide Sargasso Sea presents itself as a distinctly
modern rewriting of Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys clearly adopts more
than a general plotline, or paradigm from her Victorian
predecessor. Rhys, for example, maintains an air of the
supernatural throughout her novel, and this theme often
manifests itself in the author's treatment of nature as
something which reflects the internal, emotional and mental
chaos of the characters themselves. Thus, like Brontë, Rhys
allows this expressionistic tendency to fuse matters of style
and text with matters of theme and content in her novel. Using
devices such as personification, symbolism, allegory and
metaphor . . . sentence fragmentation, ambiguous verb tenses,
and infected prose, Rhys, therefore, reveals Wide Sargasso Sea
as a work which emerges out of the Victorian aesthetic and roots
itself in the definitive struggle of Modernist prose. Aside from
these stylistic trends, Rhys furthermore, relies on setting as a
central force of meaning in her text. For example, in the