Haunting look at the story behind the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. Beautifully written. ( )

I had no idea that this novel had anything to do with Jane Eyre. **If you've never read Jane Eyre and are planning to, you might want to stop reading here. **I happened to see it the other day at the library and picked it up. So here we go.

Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the background of "Bertha" the first wife of Rochester from Jane Eyre. It's supposed to clear up the mystery of why she ending up being the crazy lady in the attic.

And I say "supposed" because it didn't really clear up anything to me. At the end of the book, I still feel that "Bertha" a.k.a. Antoinette Cosway, the wealthy Creole girl from the Caribbean, is still such a mystery.

Let's be honest. I didn't really like this book. Classic literature it may be but here's why I had problems with it.

1) Rochester doesn't really seem like the Rochester from Jane Eyre. That said, if he's supposed to come off as an evil man who enslaves her in his attic....it kind of failed. You could see where he seemed just as stuck in having to marry her as she was to him. And there was no logical reason for him to start calling her "Bertha", it was out of character, and it just bugged me. (A large portion in the middle of the book is written from Rochester's perspective. I DID like that.)

2) The book jacket made it seem as if she had no choice in marrying him. As if against her will she was forced. But I didn't really see that in the book either. I couldn't really see WHY she had to marry him or why she did.

3) She remains a complete mystery. If she's supposed to be strong-willed, I don't see it. If she was supposed to be an innocent who was manipulated, I don't see it. I'm just not sure where the author was wanting to take this character.

4) The characters were confusing, the writing was confusing...I'll just leave it at that.

What I did like about this book:

1) The very beginning is very vivid. It's the part where Antoinette is a child, growing up as a Creole without a father, and the social changes that happen on the island where she lives. I'd tag this as "classic" just from that small section. Then the book just goes down-hill from there.

2) In a weird way, I could never get a picture of what Antoinette looked like. Maybe it was purposeful since Antoinette was caught between worlds, not fitting into either one. I thought that was a really powerful writing tool she used.

3) I did like the parallel between Jane's upbringing and Antoinette's. Lots of similarities.

4) Jean Rhys. I am kind of fascinated about the author herself. I'd love to read a book just on her. ( )

I don't know from Jane Eyre, but Wide Sargasso Sea is a gorgeous dream of a short novel. I was most impressed by Rhys' ability to evoke the sensual details of the island setting using concise language. Rhys manages to immerse the reader in the post-colonial Caribbean setting without resorting to wordy descriptions. Comparable to a David Lynch flick. ( )

This was a wonderful book, a deceptively simple narrative that holds a remarkable complexity within its few words. The book operates on many levels -- beginning, most obviously perhaps, with its transformation of characters from Jane Eyre. Essentially a prequel to Bronte's novel, Wide Sargasso Sea gives us Bronte's characters in an unflinching, postmodern light, stripped of sentimentality and endowed with all the depth and contradictoriness of realism.

The postcolonial world Rhys presents is powerfully reminiscent of Edward P. Jones's The Known World: in both novels, slavery is a complex phenomenon linked to both class and race. The relations between Antoinette and Mr. Rochester embody those of the colonialized and the colonizer, as Rochester's initial consuming passion for Antoinette subverts itself into a poisonous state of incomprehension, suspicion, and mental and physical domination. ( )

I have long admired Jean Rhys' novel, for the voice she gives to 'Bertha', the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre'. As Antoinette Cosway, a creole heiress from the Windward Islands, the literary device becomes a vibrant, beautiful character, adding a fresh perspective to the original story. How successful Rhys is probably depends on the reader's awareness of the original Rochester in 'Jane Eyre', although it is possible to read this brief narrative as a stand-alone piece.

The language, particularly in the first half of the book about Antoinette's childhood in a decaying paradise, is poetic and and sensual, based on Rhys' own heritage. The colours and aromas bring the exotic location to life, and create a world far apart from England and Thornfield. Antoinette's deceased father was a slave owner, and her troubled mother the daughter of a slave owner - old money on the islands, and mistrusted by the newly emancipated islanders. Both women are left behind in the faded glory of their station, with only a handful of 'faithful' servants as family. Rhys' description of the poverty, confusion and antagonism of this old world is very evocative, and the strongest part of the story.

Merging new characters with old once again proves unsatisfying, though. Rochester is allowed a say in the middle of what should be Antoinette's story, and although his voice is distinct from hers, his introspection is far from convincing or necessary. His role is to explain the marriage between a creole and an Englishman - her money - and why he brought his mad bride with him to England, but the abstract introspection he lapses into makes Rochester sound just as unbalanced as 'Bertha'. If Rhys had spent more time building Antoinette's character - her lack of identity, the fear that she might suffer a breakdown like her mother, her relationship with Christophine and the other servants - and less trying to work in Charlotte Bronte's creations, then there would be no need to make such comparisons at all. ( )

How many of us, when reading Jane Eyre, actually paid much mind to Bertha Rochester, nee Mason? Her role in the book is perfunctory, standing more as an obstacle to be overcome than a person in her own right. But Wide Sargasso Sea reclaims her identity; she is not Bertha (which Rochester re-christens her as without her input, simply because he likes the name better) but Antoinette, a spirited Creole girl whom Rochester marries on a vacation to the West Indies.

It's a story that's also a sharp criticism of colonialism and men's perceptions of women's roles in their lives. Antoinette's character and love for her island get crushed in her traditional Western marriage to Rochester. Soon into the marriage he begins to avoid her, on account of secondhand rumors that madness runs in her family - rumors that could have been explained with a discussion, but no, he trusts the word of men over his wife. Thus his fear of Antoinette's madness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as her feelings of oppression and domination by men literally drive her insane, at least in a "socially unacceptable" manner of speaking. Rochester speaks of Antoinette scornfully, likening her to a marionette, but he doesn't acknowledge that that's what he was hoping for in the relationship from the start. ( )

I wanted to read this book for years before I actually did, but the anticipation was better than the real thing. Gives Mrs. Rochester a definite hard-luck story. It may be a shining example of modern feminist classical literary retelling, but I liked my Mr. Rochester the way that he was, and won't give him up so easily. ( )

I'd been looking forward to this book for a while, but in the end I found it frustratingly under-written and half-conceived. Little enough attention was given to motive and actual character that the characters came across as unbelievable and inconsistent, moving from one false start to the next without clear understanding or motivation. It's as if we have the framework for a strong piece of work, but only the framework. In a way, I feel as if Rhys wrote the parts of the work which interested her or involved the most emotion to her mind, and little enough else that we just don't believe it. In a word, I have to say it simply felt uninspired. ( )

My Caribbean phase continued. Can't add much to what has already been so eloquently said by others BUT I'm glad I read it even if I found it muddled and confusing in parts. My yellowing secondhand copy has an introduction by Francis Wyndham which was helpful in putting the book in perspective. ( )

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is one of those novels: I know I ought to read them, because they're touchstones of entire genres of creative and critical writing, but I put them off for one reason or another. Well, let me be blunt: I put off reading anything else by Jean Rhys after slogging through her incredibly bleak 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight in a British Modernism class in college. Regular readers of this blog will know that I do not shy away from the dark or dismal. Most of my favorite authors are widely regarded as "depressing," and I'm sure for many people there wouldn't be much to choose between the comically cynical (Bukowski, Céline, Thompson, Beckett) and the fluidly psychological (Woolf, Welty, Rushdie, Joyce). I devour the works of all these writers with abandon, and find many of them laugh-out-loud funny. But Jean Rhys almost did me in. Good Morning, Midnight struck me as the actual experience of clinical depression, distilled into book form. There was absolutely no relief from drab, ugly surroundings and crushing loneliness, not even in the form of a few equally-depressed friends to share the protagonist Sasha Jensen's burden, or an occasional wry humorous touch. There seemed to be no passion, love, or even affection left in any part of Sasha's psyche. Dismal, unredeemed, solitary alcoholism reigned from the book's opening pages to its brutal close. When I put it down, I had had enough.

Luckily, Wide Sargasso Sea is a much different novel. This re-working of Jane Eyre's madwoman-in-the-attic, which Rhys set largely in her native West Indies, was published in 1966 - ten years after most people thought its author had perished in an alcoholic stupor. It was instrumental in kicking off the whole field of postcolonial studies, and remains a touchstone text. Although the story of Antoinette Bertha Mason's terrifying childhood, arranged marriage, and subsequent slide into insanity is certainly dark, a few factors save this late novel from the all-out brutality of Rhys's early work. For one thing, whereas Good Morning, Midnight is set on the cold, rain-drenched streets of Paris and London, which Rhys and her characters plainly detest, Wide Sargasso Sea unfolds in the sometimes-sinister but always vibrantly beautiful West Indies, a place Antoinette loves passionately. (This alone separates her from Sasha, who I remember as loving nothing, even tepidly.) Rhys's feelings about her Dominican roots are not unmixed, but she and Antoinette share an ability to relate deeply to the West Indian landscape in a way she certainly doesn't do with Europe.

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible - the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered - then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, and deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.

Encapsulated here is the tension of Antoinette's early life: a neglected existence in a beautiful place she loves, which is nonetheless full of darkness and forbidden objects and ideas. It is also host to an explosive racial politics that means she is never fully "at home," even in the house where she grows up. As the young daughter of a former slave owner just after emancipation, she is caught in a position impossible for a child to understand: her parents and the other white colonizers represent a shameful legacy that has recently been rejected, but she in turn is rejected by the black community for her white skin (and privileged attitude). Rhys conjures the oppressive atmosphere of secrets and fear with a sure and vivid hand; I love her style, particularly in the sections narrated by Antoinette.

Not only that, but I was pleasantly surprised by the complexity Rhys brings to both Antoinette and her husband (who is not explicitly named, but is patterned on Brontë's Rochester). Rochester is not cast as an unmitigated villain, nor Antoinette as a blameless victim. Their relationship from the first has the doomed cast of a Greek tragedy, but not because one or the other begins the story as a tyrant. I admired Rhys's subtlety and compassion in this regard: she obviously feels strongly for the oppressed West Indians both black and white, but she does not pretend that any particular member of the oppressing class is a heartless monster. At the same time, being a sympathetic person doesn't stop Rochester (or Antoinette, for that matter) from perpetuating the prejudices and cruelties begun by their compatriots.

Rhys does make a number of decisions that puzzle me - chief among them, the structure of the novel. One of her stated aims in Wide Sargasso Sea is to give a voice and a personal story to the "poor ghost" Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë's novel. This is what she starts out doing, letting Antoinette Bertha Cosway/Mason narrate the events of her childhood and early adulthood. But then, just as we reach the eve of Antoinette's meeting with Rochester, the narration switches to his internal monologue. With one brief exception, we don't regain Antoinette's narrative voice until she has succumbed to madness and been locked up in Thornfield Hall. This was obviously a conscious choice on Rhys's part, but it strikes me as such a strange one: just at the point when the reader would benefit most from Antoinette's point of view, she is silenced. I can think of a number of rationales for structuring the book this way; if it was important to Rhys to make Rochester a sympathetic character, for example, the easiest way is to get inside his head. In one of the essays appended to my edition (the Norton Critical), Lee Erwin argues that the structure of Wide Sargasso Sea is meant as a reaction against the traditional Regency/Victorian novel that ends (we assume happily) with the heroine's marriage. Antoinette's story seems to "end" with her wedding, but since her marriage rather spectacularly doesn't work out, she must return to enact the only other traditional feminine ending: madness and death. Erwin also points out that Rochester's narration, in which he is disgusted because his white wife reminds him of a black woman, lets us see how closely allied are the white Creoles and the black ex-slaves in the eyes of the colonizer, even if they are forever sundered in their own eyes. All of these ideas are interesting, but I was still left unsatisfied with Rhys's decision to let Rochester tell such a large portion of Antoinette's story. In a novel this short, it seemed tantamount to denying Bertha Mason a voice all over again.

And speaking of the appended essays to the Norton Critical Edition: I got a lot out of them. I collect Nortons but don't always read the additional materials; sometimes I finish the actual novel and feel "done." This time, though, maybe because the novel itself is so concise, I felt primed for some high-quality critical responses, and the Norton editors did not disappoint. I especially appreciated Sandra Drake's discussion of how Rhys incorporates West Indian obeah/voodoo beliefs, specifically imagery around zombi-ism, into Antoinette's story. She points out that:

Like many Caribbean beliefs, the zombi is of African origin. A number of African societies thought that bokors - "sorcerers" who turned great powers to evil ends - could reduce persons to automatons and force them to do the bokor's will, including work for him. A number of Caribbean scholars have been intrigued with the question of why this belief should have attained much greater importance in the Caribbean than in Africa, coming to its fullest development in Sant Domingue, later Haiti. Laroche and Depestre suggest that it was because it was so well suited to represent the condition of plantation slavery in the Americas.

So interesting! I will quite possibly never think of zombie movies in the same way again. Drake goes on to explain that Caribbean believers in obeah/voodoo feared zombi-ism much more than they feared death, since they believed that upon death their spirits would be transported back to Africa, whereas zombi-ism trapped the spirit indefinitely in a helpless slave state. Therefore, she argues, Antoinette's "awakening" from her zombi trance and plunge off the roof of Thornfield is actually a triumph, rather than a tragedy. I started out quite skeptical about this claim, but I have to say that Drake summons such strong textual evidence that I ended up more or less convinced.

As a postcolonial re-telling of Jane Eyre, Rhys's novel was hardly a revelation to me. When I studied Brontë's novel in college, there wasn't a student in the class that didn't gag, groan, or otherwise react negatively to the passage where Rochester equates the West Indies to a sinfully contaminated Hell, and is about to commit suicide until a "wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement...and the air grew pure." To a modern reader, the cultural chauvinism and xenophobia in this scene fairly leaps off the page; I hardly need an entire response novel to convince me of it. That wasn't the case, though, in 1966, and the fact that some of Rhys's points now seem obvious is a testament to how influential Wide Sargasso Sea and similar studies have been over the past forty years. Not only that, but its stylistic and character-driven merits make it a compelling read even without its political agenda.

A haunting, but often confusing, story of how the over-privileged unravel when they are forced to swap places with the under-privileged, when the oppressors become the oppressed. ( )

Fantastic. If one is going to write a prequel/sequel/any other "quel" to a classic, this is how it's done. It took a character that was little more than a plot device in Jane Eyre (which was largely to the times the Bronte sisters lived in and their own deep prejudices towards anyone who wasn't British) and gave her a tragic backstory. The novel is wonderful to read whether or not you've read Jane Eyre. Though it only enhances the enjoyment when you get see Rochester through both Antoinette's (Bertha's) and Jane's eyes. ( )

This book got better - the beginning was all a bit muddled and confused, but got more exciting in the second half as things started to happen... ( )

Believable back story of Antoinette Bertha Mason--Mr. Rochester's "mad" first wife in Jane Eyre. Some beautiful moments and insights into the nightmares of Colonialism and a post-slavery society. But I don't understand the raves. Much of the dialogue was flat. Point of view was often confusing in its shifts. Glad I read it, but just as glad it's over. ( )

I enjoy being able to walk around a library and just browse, not having to decide if I want to purchase something. I get a chance to be adventurous, selecting an author I've never heard of before or pulling a random title from the shelf to take home. A week ago, I found one such book: "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys. The title caught my attention because I'd heard of it, but as a movie not a book. I slid the novel from the shelf, read the spiel on the back, and held onto it for the remainder of the hour that I walked up and down the rows. And yes, I did check it out and began reading that night.

Antoinette Cosway grows up on the slowly dilapidating Coulibri Estate in Jamaica. She spends much of her time as far from the house as possible, trying to keep to herself but also longing to be accepted by the newly-freed former slaves who see her as lower than they ever were. Her step-father stays away from the estate, much to the disappointment of her mother, and along with his absences and the distrust of the locals, she slowly goes mad. Antoinette's life changes -- for the better and the worse -- when Coulibri is burned to the ground forcing her into a convent while her mother is institutionalized.

Many years later, Antoinette's step-father returns to arrange a marriage for her to a young Englishman. The Englishman, however, wants only a match to bring him wealth and halfheartedly tries to love Antoinette. Instead, he loathes the island, the inhabitants, the house he now owns; he mistreats Antoinette, slowly drives her to madness. Eventually, he packs her up and together they head for his ancestral home in England where he locks her in the attic under the semi-watchful eye of Grace Poole. She manages to steal the door key while Mrs. Poole sleeps, sneaking around the upper floor hallways in the dead of night like a ghost for the rest of her days, sending a rumor through the little girls who live in the house that the place is haunted.

As it turns out, Antoinette is a character from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: the mad woman locked in the attic of Rochester's house. I enjoyed this possible history for a secondary character in a well-known novel. Why not give her a back story, a glimpse into what may have driven her to live in the attic? Having never read Jane Eyre, I feel more inclined to now, just to see how Antoinette fits with the story. Who knows: Antoinette may turn out to be more interesting than Jane. ( )

This book is brilliant!! Jean Rhys really kicked one out of the park here. A prequel to Jane Eyre, here we learn about Bertha (the woman in the attic). This is the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette Mason (aka Bertha). We learn how the two meet and how they wind up married. The book deals on themes such as assimilation, racism (inequality between Creole heiress Antoinette and British Rochester), patriarchal society, domestic violence, and postcolonialism and feminism. The descent into madness that Antoinette experiences can be traced to Rochester's extremely harsh, racist, unloving, treatment towards his wife, Antoinette - his goal is to erase her identity and treat her as nothing. In this book we learn about the woman Antoinette and her life and her dreams and how she slowly unwinds mentally and emotionally upon marrying Rochester and relocating to England. An amazing book written by a brilliant writer!!! It is the perfect counterpart to Jane Eyre. ( )

This was a quite beautiful tale of the ‘mad woman in the attic’ from [Jane Eyre]. It was very lyrical, flowing along quite peacefully for such a destructive story. I particularly liked reading about the Caribbean setting. Louisiana has a large Caribbean influence and it was striking how many aspects seemed so familiar – from the general descriptions of place to the complex interactions of varying racial differences. Some very complex themes on gender were also engaging. The ease with which women were used by the men in their lives and that abuse’s effect on the psyche of Antoinette, the differences in English and French law in regards to women and children, and the definition of insanity are all floating around the edges of this haunting tale. ( )

Blech. This is the most hackneyed idea. And something about this book just really, really bothers me. It makes me angry. I hate, hate, hate literary "revisitings." They make me want to vomit. Think up your own idea for god's sake. ( )

I'll never read Jane Eyre the same way again. Powerful modern point of view that makes you see all of the Victorian "villain females" in a sympathetic light. ( )

Fantastic response to 'Jane Eyre' with the fleshing out and full realisation of the figure embodying fear and insanity, the literal madwoman in the attic, of that novel. It also is a turn-around of colonial attitudes. Atmospheric, you can almost feel the humid heat roiling out of the pages.

Bertha Mason/Rochester is revealed as Antoinette Cosway. One of the primary themes of the novel is loss of identity and this is basically what happens to the main character, slowly everything that makes her who she is, removed piece by piece. In this Mr Rochester is the main offender and might be said to represent the Empire. He succeeds in symbolically erasing her by denying her name and replacing it with Bertha, just as original place names and slaves' names would have been anglicised or re-named. She puts this into words, telling him he is trying to make her into another person, but he has no pity for her: his own powerlessness in having to marry an heiress and her very happiness & self- assurance in their honeymoon surroundings make him jealous & ruthless.

Rochester's cruelty to Antoinette seems born out of resentment about having been pressured into marrying for money by his own family and social expectations. Discovering an apparent history of mental illness in his new wife's family seems to suggest to him the path of ridding himself of his unwanted wife by deciding she is also mad.

It's a fascinating take on the first Mrs Rochester. Good stuff.

http://olvasonaplo.freeblog.hu/archiv... ( )

Overall this was a very interesting idea for a novel: take one of the most mysterious characters from classical literature and expand upon her backstory. And Rhys does not disappoint, she brings such a rich and detailed viewpoint of Antoinette (later dubbed "Bertha", as she is called in Jane Eyre) that one cannot help but sympathize with the girl who becomes the crazy woman in Thornfield Hall's attic room.

In particular, her identity crisis due to racial ambiguity spoke to me as a biracial woman. Using this as the basis of her illness at a time when race was deemed vitally important to a person's standing was a great take off point for her insanity. While racial differences have become more accepted, the relatively subtle (compared to more obvious displays in other novels) superiority complex of full-blooded whites to coloured and black people in this novel is still very much present in today's culture, despite the obliviousness of many.

Antoinette's insanity is very understandable as well. She is literally pushed to the brink and finally cannot bring herself back. No one offers her help and instead of being an evil woman who broke up Jane and Mr. Rochester, tried to kill her husband, and set his house ablaze, she becomes a sad woman who just needed a hug and some therapy. She was just genuinely a product of the times and her environment. Rhys draws this portrait of a woman harmed by society and her surroundings well and develops the Caribbean influences (drawn from her own background) pitch perfect.

This was not an easy read with a shifting point-of-view that is often hard to get used to or even identify. As Antoinette slips further into insanity her perspective in particular becomes unstable and difficult to comprehend. There are many motifs and some symbolism that is not obvious, but needs to be understood to get the full impact of Rhys' story.

In conclusion though, I definitely recommend it. It's a short book that on the surface can be easily comprehended. ( )

This was supposed to be the story of Jane Eyre told from the point of view of the crazy woman in the attic, Bertha Mason. It does the trick, I suppose, but this suffers from a far worse pacing problem—about 75% of the book is dedicated to Bertha's childhood, while the remainder is the only part that's actually devoted to the story of how Bertha interacts with Jane Eyre and the rest of the household once she's taken out of the Caribbean. It was remotely interesting to hear from her perspective and to sort of piece together exactly why she was mad, but it wasn't exactly the attention grabber that I thought it would (and thought it would have the potential to) be. Unfortunate, because while it was rather boring except for a few scenes, it was written quite well. ( )

The Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys’ reinterpretation of Jane Eyre. The author had been haunted by Charlotte Bronte’s book, mostly by the untold story of the madwoman in the attic, Mr. Rochester’s terrible secret. The main character, Antoinette, is the imagined first Mrs. Rochester, who in the end burns up the house and herself. The novel follows her descent into madness, both from her point of view and Rochester’s. The first and third sections are narrated by Antoinette (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha), the middle section by her husband.

A sensual and protected young Creole woman, Antoinette Cosway, grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean on a decaying plantation. She is sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who gives into his need for money and his lust. But ultimately he makes her pay for her ancestor’s sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home.

Pacing: Fairly slow; not much action.

Characterizations: Complex psychological portraits of dispossessed/outcast women.

Story Line: Woman/women struggle unsuccessfully against poverty, loneliness and humiliating dependencies on loveless men. Commentary on exploitative social structures and male-female power dynamics.

Frame: Haunting, “Caribbean Gothic” atmosphere, with an almost surreal quality. Spare, understated writing.

Geographic Setting: Caribbean/West Indies/Jamaica and England

Time Period: 19th Century

Other Similar Authors: Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Compared to the work of Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Faulkner for its gothic tone. Thematically: Geraldine Brooks, The March: a novel; Linda Berdoll, Darcy novels.

Loved it ( )