Intertextuality and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea

English Literature shows that different works by different authors from different ears can be strongly interconnected to each other and have many common qualities and points. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a canonical postcolonial work in which the writer uses Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as an inspiration to reject the Victorian society and British colonial policies depicted in Bronte’s novel. Many issues like racial differences, binary oppositions, loss of identity and rejection of oppression are portrayed in Rhys’s novel as a response to the depiction of Bronte’s novel. Wide Sargasso Sea is also comparable with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart which is a postcolonial response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like Wide Sargasso Sea which is a criticism and response to the colonial novel of Bronte, Jane Eyre, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a response to the previous written novel by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness which, as Achebe believes, supports the policy of the British regarding African people and confirms Western superiority and the exoticism and inferiority of the colonized subjects. As Rhys refers to the colonialist aspects of Bronte’s novel, Achebe condemns the deplorable and offensive portraits of the Africans presented in Conrad’s work. This study is analyzing intertextuality and its significance in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.