Writing Brands into Historical Silences: Insights from Wide Sargasso Sea

In 1966, Jean Rhys returned from the dead. After the war, the author of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) had mistakenly been presumed dead. She was a revenant, a zombi, a living dead haunting the pebbly beaches in Cornwall, herself haunted by memories of her Creole upbringing. She might have developed a taste for rum cocktails—she was briefly put in a mental hospital after attacking a neighbour with a pair of scissors—but she also had a mission; to bring justice to Mrs. Rochester, the “madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Accordingly, Jean Rhys’s best known work, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), is a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Brontë’s original. In this paper, we advance theory on decolonial marketing and transformative branding through a reading of Rhys’s late literary masterpiece, hoping to grant her spectres a hospitable memory.