“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys (post 4): Belated, bizarre renaming of Antoinette, the protagonist

‘Don’t laugh like that, Bertha.’

‘My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?’

‘Because it is a name I’m particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said  (1, p. 81).

Comment: The author has Antoinette say “It doesn’t matter.” And many readers of fiction, having suspended disbelief, may gloss over how bizarre it is for a husband to suddenly address his wife by a different name than she has always had, and by which he married her.

Since Rhys intended this novel to be a prequel to Jane Eyre, and would want her protagonist to eventually be named “Bertha Rochester,” wouldn’t there have been a more credible way for her protagonist to be called “Bertha?” For a husband to suddenly address his wife by a different name makes him look like the crazy one. Is that what Rhys intended? Or is the reader supposed to interpret the husband as “Gaslighting” his wife? Had the husband seen that movie?

Another possible interpretation is that the author’s characters had minds of their own (like alternate personalities, not puppets), and this was how they insisted on doing things.

But I haven’t finished the novel yet, and maybe the protagonist’s sudden name change won’t look so bizarre when I do.

Same day:  Finishing, I found nothing worth adding. Search "Jane Eyre" for useful past posts, especially regarding Bertha's "familiar" (alternate personality).

1. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. Edited by Judith L. Raskin. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.