This essay traces the stories of Jane Eyre, the heroine of the homonymous novel (Charlotte Brontë, 1847), and Antoinette Cosway, the heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). These parallel stories of abandonment and failed searches converge in one point: Edward Rochester. It is suggested that Jane’s happy ending and Antoinette’s tragic ending are both determined by the impossibility of the Victorian ethos, personified in Rochester, to accept chaos: the disorder represented by Antoinette —disorder of alterity— must be tamed. Repression, then, appears as the sole possibility of existence.