Voices from the Margins: Power, Madness, and Female Agency in Jane Eyre

Post colonialism is a major aspect in subaltern studies through which the silenced victims are given voice. The paper attempts to establish recognition for the doubly colonised subaltern. The instinct of a human, who claim to be in a power structure, demands natural indifference towards the subaltern in terms of their race, gender, social class and political inferiority. This dominance questions the fundamental, cultural, psychological and ethnic awareness of a society. The study elucidates the hegemony, ambivalence and ideologies of the suppresser and the suppressed subaltern with special limelight to Bertha Mason, in both texts namely Jane Eyre by Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. These exts disclose the personal augmentation in human that paves way to the social condemnation of the subaltern. Bertha Mason is silenced because of the imperial mindset in the nineteenth century England. This imperial dominance is one of the roots of subaltern studies. Metanarratives used in the Wide Sargasso Sea explain this appropriate hybridity, a new trans-cultural or cross cultural form that arises in terms of the oppressed.