WILD WOMEN IN WILD LANDSCAPES: ECOFEMINIST PERSPECTIVES AND COLONIAL POWER IN BRONTE’S JANE EYRE AND RHYS’S WIDE SARGASSO SEA

This thesis examines the relation between women, nature, and colonial power in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) from an ecofeminist and postcolonial lens. It supports that both books construct “wild women” in “wild landscapes” as places of resistance against imperial and patriarchal dominance. Through Jane Eyre’s moral and natural landscape and the exotic and colonial landscape of the Wide Sargasso Sea, this study illuminates how gender, environment, social hierarchy, otherness, and racial ideologies are all interconnected. This thesis argues that Brontë presents nature as a site of moral clarity and limited liberation for women within Victorian boundaries, whereas Rhys reclaims Bertha Mason’s silenced figure, renaming her Antoinette Cosway, as a testimony of female trauma, colonial displacement, and otherness. With this comparative approach, this thesis explores that the representation of wild women and wild landscapes exposes broader tension between freedom and control and ultimately redefines wildness as a complex space of oppression and empowerment.