Wide Sargasso Sea

The picture was classified and rated with a restricted NC-17 rating in the USA due to its explicit sexual content. Distributor Fine Line Features decided not to appeal the decision in order to try and gain a lower classification rating to make the movie marketable and able for younger audiences to attend. The New York Times reported "Fine Line Features, the art-film division of New Line Cinema, has accepted the rating for 'Wide Sargasso Sea (1993)' which includes male frontal nudity".

The film's source Jean Rhys 1966 book of the same name has been described as both a post-modern novel and a post-colonial novel.

According to study website Shmoop, "[Source novelist] Jean Rhys first read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 1907, when she arrived in England as a teenager. As a native of the Caribbean herself, she was 'shocked' by Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Mason, Rochester's Creole wife who was locked up in the attic (Rhys 1999: 144). Nearly fifty years later, Rhys turned the story of Brontë's 'madwoman in the attic' into a full-length novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which pretty much established Rhys as one of the greatest novelists in the twentieth century . . . Wide Sargasso Sea also alters the historical setting of Jane Eyre by pushing the chronology up almost thirty years later in order to take advantage of another foundational moment in Jamaican history, the abolition of slavery in 1834. Setting the novel during this tumultuous period enables Rhys to situate the figure of the white Creole woman in the complex of shifting race relations under British colonial rule".

The film was made and released about twenty-seven years after its source novel of the same name by Jean Rhys had been first published in 1966.

The "Sargasso Sea", according to website Wikipedia, "...is a region in the gyre in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is bounded on the west by the Gulf Stream; on the north, by the North Atlantic Current; on the east, by the Canary Current; and on the south, by the North Atlantic Equatorial Current. This system of ocean currents forms the North Atlantic Gyre. All the currents deposit the marine plants and refuse they carry into this sea".