Jane Eyre/Wide Sargasso Sea

If you're reading this you probably know that Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is the story of Mr. Rochester and the madwoman in the attic before Jane Eyre ever shows up. I almost don't know how to describe my reading experience of WSS.

First, I was blown away by its depth and lushness, all of the themes it touched.

Second, I don't know what to make of Rochester in WSS. He seems far more complicated than in JE. In WSS he is a very sexual man, in JE it's all about the intellect, right?

What do you think?

Oh, I think Rochester's pretty sexual in Jane Eyre. He's restrained, though, because he's sadder, older and wiser than he was when he lived in the Caribbean.

My memory of Jane Eyre, which I've re-read several times, is clearer than my memory of Wide Sargasso Sea, which I only read once, but my impression is that the two books are very different stylistically. You're right about the lushness, which gives the book a radically different flavor, I think, than Jane Eyre, which vividly portrays the strait-laced, coldly brutal quality of the England of that period. The Jamaica of WSS is, by contrast, hot (in more ways than just the weather) and brutal.

** SPOILERS **

A lot of the events of WSS are perfectly consistent with the hints in JE about Rochester's past. To me, though, there was an inconsistency in his character between the two novels. In JE, though his flaws are legion (at least by Victoran standards), he does have a sense of responsibility and a fundamental kindness. His treatment of his mad first wife may be shocking by the standards of today when we don't believe in keeping people shut up in attics, but he does hire a housekeeper to look after her, and though Bertha has repeatedly tried to murder him, he treats her with a sort of compassionate detachment. If my memory of WSS is correct, he treated Antoinette (Bertha's alter ego) with no compassion at all.

This is a great subject for a comparison! I'm eager to hear what other people think.

I'm not sure the character of Rochester is that disparate between the two. While he was crueler, less sympathetic in WSS, that's also something that can be explained away by his growth and maturity. Experiencing the consequences of your own vicious actions can have as much impact on your future character as experiencing the consequences of the vicious actions of others.

I don't know. Rochester's mistreatment of Antoinette/Bertha didn't have terribly serious consequences to him personally, not of the sort a truly vicious person would be much hampered by. In Jane Eyre, one had the sense he had become sexually involved with Bertha out of thoughtlessness, and when she became pregnant recognized his obligation to the child, if not to her. The realization that his actions could be quite hurtful to other people was the first step on the road to greater maturity - but a young man who was not merely thoughtless but cruel would not be particularly concerned about hurting others. I don't want to argue that it's impossible for cruel people to reform, but I think it would take more than the troubles Rochester went through.

If I recall correctly, in Jane Eyre, Rochester was essentially seduced and trapped into marriage with Bertha - or that's the version of the story he tells Jane - while in Sargasso Sea, Antoinette was an innocent girl whose family set her up. Am I remembering this right?

I think I meant seeing what his treatment of her did to her. It's been a long time since I've read WSS, but doesn't she start to lose it when he leaves her for long stretches at a time and the witch doctor woman is able to start implanting all sorts of jealous thoughts in her head? (and doesn't Rochester eventually sleep with the witch doctor?) I definitely don't remember her as ever being an innocent girl - she marries Rochester for money, after all - but my memory here could be way off, too.

Okay, did I miss something? Was the story about the little girl (Therese, Cecile?) as the child of a French lover a fabrication? I didn't get that Rochester had impregnated Antoinette.

Rochester didn't sleep with the witch doctor, he slept with Antoinette's servant, Amelie, while she was in the next room, which is what I think completely destroyed their relationship and was too much for Antoinette to bear.

Ant. didn't trick R., her stepfather did. The only calculation that I saw Antoinette involved in was to approach the obeah for a potion to make him love her or at least desire her, which she did out of desperation when she discovered there was a vast difference in R.'s mind between passionate sex and real love, which became apparent after the half-brother planted the doubts; if he'd loved her his reaction would have been different.

Maybe the idea is that he could never have loved Ant. like he loved JE b/c she was not his intellectual equal, no matter how beautiful and sensuous she was. And he would never have been happy in Jamaica, it was too wild for him.

R. felt justified in his cruelty because 1) he felt he'd been tricked, which he had, and 2) he thought she'd intentionally poisoned him. But to me the one of the worst cruelties was to take Ant. away from her beloved island which was part of her and off to cold, bleak Victorian England.

Thanks, citygirl, for the refresher! Clearly, my memory of WSS has grown wispy and faint. I can't even remember the witch doctor anymore. I do remember how young Antoinette was - a scene of her walking to the convent school in her schoolgirl's uniform sticks in my mind (unless I am importing that from another book).

Interesting that both novels begin from the perspective of girls in boarding schools: Antoinette in a convent school, Jane Eyre in a Protestant-run school. That hadn't occurred to me until now.

Good catch, margad. I hadn't noticed that. Another similarity is that both girls have decisions made for them by self-interested relatives, but I guess that was most common in that era.

A prequel to Jane Eyre; where have I been? So I've mooched WSS and hopefully soon I'll be able to compare with you.

This thread has made me want to go back and pick up WSS from across the room where I'd thrown it in irritation about a third of the way in.
Jane Eyre is one of my first favorite books, I've been reading and rereading it since I was a child and when I read the way Rochester was presented in WSS it irritated me so much I didn't want to read it. Evidently my er, putting down of WSS was premature.

Thanks citygirl, I shall do so.

Back into the stack it goes.....

I'm glad you guys are going to check out the book. I found it a really worthwhile experience. I felt totally sucked into mid-19th century Jamaica. I loved Rhys' descriptions of the place and its people and customs. I was surprised by the coverage of race relations and the emancipation of slaves and its effect. I recommend the Norton Critical Version, if you have it handy b/c it explains some of the historical references, but it's not necessary to have annotations to enjoy the book.

The Jamaica setting is so different from the English setting of Jane Eyre. It's interesting that Brontë chose to give Rochester a Caribbean past. It may have been important to her to stress that Rochester had been influenced by a dramatically different culture. Jane Eyre is pervaded by a sense of the insidious negative influence of the tropics, and yet Rochester's ideas about male-female relationships are in such stark contrast to the rigid English ideas about gender roles that it may be she felt she needed to give him a background of exposure to a strikingly different culture in order to make him credible. In a sense, then, the tropics also influenced Rochester in a strongly positive way.

Brontë never traveled outside Europe and probably knew very little about the Caribbean, but she did study in France for several years and found the experience profoundly life-altering. She may have used the Caribbean as an even stronger symbol of the liberating power of travel and exposure to other cultures.

It occurs to me now that St. John was training for a ministry in the tropics, with the idea of bringing English ideas about religion and culture to the tropics for the people there to adopt. He is a mirror-image of Rochester in some ways.