Wide Sargasso Sea

Even the exotic West Indian setting couldn’t save this novel for me. It begins well enough, with details about how the once-successful white Jamaican slave-holding Cosway family has fallen into serious decline after Britain's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and the death of the protagonist Antoinette’s father. Were it not for the loyalty of the family’s cook from Martinique, the Cosways would be even further up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Racial hostilities boil beneath the surface of this lush and sinister island.

The still-young Mrs. Cosway, a shadow of her former self, remarries. Unfortunately, as the resentment of the blacks continues to mount, Mason, her new husband, doesn’t heed the woman’s pleas to leave the show more island. Coulibri, the formerly idyllic estate is burnt down, Antoinette’s disabled younger brother dies of injuries sustained in the fire, and the girl’s mother descends into madness. Fast forward a few years and Antoinette is being married off by her step-brother, Richard Mason; a sizeable dowry is the bait. Enter (the never-named) Mr. Rochester, a naive but arrogant weakling, an unfavored son sent from England by his father to make a financial deal, which, unfortunately for all concerned, involves marriage to a sexually alluring if less-than-respectable young woman.

Okay. Fair enough so far. Then the novel takes a nose dive. A prequel to Jane Eyre, its prose, which always sounds more contemporary than authentic, now becomes increasingly vague, muddy, and unintelligible. And here we are again, right back in Jean Rhys territory, mired in the story of yet another beautiful woman who wants only to be loved but who’s tormented by the hatred by a cad. Rochester has been taken in by the rumours about the Cosway family, Antoinette’s promiscuity, and her incipient madness. Like clockwork, he predictably tells his wife he doesn’t love her. The now desperate heroine thinks obeah, voodoo magic, might help. It doesn’t; it cannot. The way it works in a Rhys novel is that rejection is inevitable and more or less emotionally fatal to the protagonist. There are no exceptions here. Antoinette goes mad.

Had I the interest—or had Rhys given me any reason to actually care for her characters, I suppose I could’ve tried to parse the tangled writing, whose style is of the stream-of-consciousness variety. To me it reflected the impaired thinking of a writer too long under alcohol’s influence.

I know almost everyone thinks this book is a masterpiece. All those years I heard about it and believed I was missing something! Well, now I’ve read it, and I don’t think I was. show less

... and, so, what?

The racism - Rhys' - sickened and finally exhausted me. It was like wading through that Sargasso sea to find any authenticity in her world, beneath.

What Rhys remembers of the Caribbean from her childhood is like any memory of a child: vivid colours, hallucinatory footsteps haunting the moonlit gardens, the restless of fever. Her descriptions of place are so evocative! Lucid and lurid.
The characterization is terrifying - but it's Rhys' terror. Each character is consumed by racism ("white cockroach" indeed); no one exists beyond it, including Rhys. Whatever the authenticity of that point of view, wading through the slurs and hatred was sickening - and exhausting. There is no authentic narrator. There isn't any show more essential truth. (I refuse to accept that "black people are evil and scary and always know more about your business than you do" as the final message. And I certainly don't need a book to have a Great Point To Make - pretty words are quite enough sometimes - but all the while I felt Rhys struggling to speak/not speak some Vast Truth, this book supposedly an exposition of that truth, and finally NOTHING WAS SAID.)

Rhys herself had no idea, I think, of what the hell she wanted to say.
Or I missed whatever-it-was.

Okay, so she's bothered by Bertha Mason: fine. Re-writing literature is an exercise in Modern Feminist Theory. So re-write Rochester to be a conniving ass; re-write Bertha as Antoinette, and sane as anyone in this novel.
But what is your point? No one has clean hands: yes, yes, but what is your point?

When I finished reading this novel I threw it across the room. show less

This book had been on my shelves for years before I finally picked it up for the Read Caribbean challenge. I expected it to be heartbreaking, part of why I kept putting it off, but I didn't know the half of it. I am not sure if I can ever read Jane Eyre again. When I finished this I sat there feeling like my heart had been ripped from my chest, so it was difficult to have the distance to think more critically about it. Given a little more distance, I remain impressed by the richness of the writing -- the atmosphere, the commentary on the class and race structures of colonialism.

So glad I finally picked this up. An amazing read.

Famously a prequel to Jane Eyre, this book can be read with great pleasure entirely on its own terms. Exploring the effects of Caribbean colonial life on one family through the life of Antoinette, a slightly unhinged young girl who grows up, escapes her through what turns out to be a highly unsuitable marriage, and ends in madness. The multiple layers of duplicity and betrayal among all of the characters as they act almost entirely in their own self interest, creates a texture as complicated as the political and social webs they find themselves involved in. Rhys's prose has a riches and vividness that is more visual than almost any other writer I can think of, as bright and intensely colored as the islands she writes about. Strangely, show more though, the historical contexts plays for almost nothing; the sense of place is astonishingly present, the sense of time almost totally absent. show less

As a study in disintegration Wide Sargasso Sea is relentless. The main protagonist is forced to watch her mother gradually fall apart, and then she herself follows a similar journey. In fact it's hard to name a single character who doesn't follow a downward spiral. There have been many analyses of this mid 20th-century novel that distinguish it as feminist, post-colonialist and postmodern, and describe it as a prequel or an example of 'writing back' or rewriting (it overlaps the chronology of its literary inspiration). Many make reference to 'the madwoman in the attic', thus bringing the most marginalised figure in Jane Eyre stage centre and turning Wide Sargasso Sea a reconfiguring of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel. No doubt all show more these things are true, but anything I add to these observations would be superfluous and, anyway, beyond my capabilities.

So I shall instead focus on just three points -- madness, fire and poison -- and put down my thoughts on how they inexorably lead to the disintegration of the significant actors in this tragedy.

It wasn't till the 60s and later that a sea change in respect of women's mental health was beginning to be noted, in which the catch-all term 'hysteria' (encompassing anything from anxiety and distress to post-natal depression and even so-called sexual incontinence) and its often barbaric treatment started to be regarded in medical circles as both inadequate and inappropriate. Jean Rhys' historical novel, playing out as the reign of William IV give way to Queen Victoria, naturally reflects its period setting; but it also portrays contemporary establishment attitudes to women, attitudes which sadly still prevail in large sections of society.

Consider Annette Cosway, Martinique-born widow of a former slave-owner from Jamaica. After the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833 her mansion Coulibri near Spanish Town, Jamaica was shunned by the estate's former slaves, slowly succumbing to a shabby desolation. A re-marriage to recently arrived Englishman Mr Mason improves neither relations nor conditions; as a Martinique Creole she is not only despised by the local Afro-Caribbean population but also looked down at by the overseas English. As well as sensing this alienation she neglects her daughter Antoinette in favour of her sickly son Pierre. The tragedy that tips things over the edge for Annette leads to her much greater degradation when she is sent away to a new confinement by her second husband. Alienation, witnessing violence and death, harsh treatment and imprisonment -- is it any wonder she becomes a 'hysteric'?

Then we come to Annette's daughter Antoinette, who narrates a large part of this story. She regards herself as neglected or ignored by a succession of individuals -- her mother, her childhood friend Tia, her stepfather -- then trifled with first by her dead stepfather's son and then the man she is married to. She in turn loses status, close family, the places she loves, the love of the man she married, even her name. She is in effect incarcerated -- as were so many women regarded as 'mad' until recent times -- by feeling besieged at Coulibri, sent to a convent school, trapped in a loveless marriage at the estate of Granbois near Massacre in Dominica and then confined out of sight in Thornfield Hall. Is it any marvel that she too goes mad? Most telling is her observation, "I am not used to happiness. It makes me afraid." What outlet then is there for her from fear?

Two colours dominate the novel. Greenery is Annette's husband overwhelming impression of the West Indies, particularly the forest surrounding the honeymoon mansion of Granbois ("great wood", no doubt named from its environs). He first finds it magical and intoxicating, then oppressive and threatening. The other colour is red, and that is associated with Annette. Red is the colour of the fire in Part One, of the robin's breast in a song and of the wine in Part Two, of ants and roses and red earth which after it becomes mud doesn't dry quickly; it is alluded to in the name for strong coffee ('bull's blood') and referenced in the wound Antoinette gets when a stone hits her and in the red curtains at Thornfield in Part Three. And all are pre-echoes of the fire that we know is to come in Jane Eyre, the fire that is evoked in the concluding paragraphs of Wide Sargasso Sea. As a symbol of all-consuming passion in all its forms it's hard to better it.

The third element that leaps out at me -- out of so many in this tale -- is poison. The poison prepared by Christophine that marks the tipping point in the novel, when the Rochester character ceases to care for his bride, and the metaphorical poisons that sicken people's minds, such as rumour, resentment, prejudice and lies.

For a tale set in the 19th century in the Caribbean we may expect many of the stereotypical tropes that speak of its exoticism to Europeans, and one is these is obeah, or folk magic. If, when we read of love potions, we may think of Tristan and Isolde and the tragedy that ensues, then the potion that is administered just over two-thirds of the way through Wide Sargasso Sea is of this nature: nothing good can come of it.

When Antoinette's aunt tells her it's a great mistake to go by looks then, like a great many other statements in these pages, it holds a significance greater than its immediate context suggests. In Jean Rhys' most famous work nothing is as it seems on the surface.

This Penguin student edition is authoritatively introduced and annotated by Hilary Jenkins, though I left most of the discussion for after I had read the novel. I was pleased to discover I was not the only one to consider that, as well as Sargasso prefiguring Jane Eyre, the life of Antoinette Cosway -- the Bertha Mason of the Bronte novel -- provided many parallels to the Bronte character's experiences.

http://wp.me/s2oNj1-sargasso show less

This compelling short novel creates a very plausible back story for Bertha Mason Rochester, the "mad woman in the attic" of Jane Eyre's Thornfield Hall. Born Antoinette Cosway, and re-named "Bertha" by her disillusioned husband, this woman should be a sympathetic figure, but I found I could not take her part, as I could not quite get a grip on the true cause of her madness. Did she break up (as her West Indian servant and confidant Christophine refers to her mental disturbances) because of unrequited love for Mr. Rochester, or because her own mother drifted into insanity and rejected her when she was a young girl, or because she witnessed her mother being sexually exploited and was therefore predisposed to sexual dysfunction herself? show more Christophine blames Mr. Rochester for "(making) love to her till she drunk with it...till she can't do without it. It's she can't see the sun any more. Only you she see." Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Rhys's story is the suggestion that Antoinette has been driven mad by lust. If your romantic soul has shared Jane's love and compassion for Mr. R since you first read the classic, you will hate what Rhys has done to him. Because if it's hard to warm up to Antoinette, even after knowing what all happened to her in her childhood, it's impossible not to see Rochester as heartless, cruel and vindictive here. Even though he does not put his wife away from him, but takes her to England and has her cared for in what was probably viewed as a benevolent fashion at the time, his automatic rejection of her based on a letter filled with accusations of congenital madness, interracial affairs and incest; his inability to accept her culture and concepts of beauty as equal to his own; and his blatant act of infidelity within her hearing make him one reprehensible SOB. A tragic fire in Antoinette's childhood foreshadows the ultimate "bad end" she eventually visits on herself. Brilliantly done, and mightily unsettling. show less

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys was originally published in 1966 as a response to the novel Jane Eyre. This small volume touches on many issues including race, class and feminism. Although only 152 pages long, it is packed with story, with the first part being dedicated to Antoinette’s early years as the daughter of an ex-slave owner. The middle part of the book is narrated by Antoinette’s husband, who married her for a payment of $30,000.00. Once he learns that madness runs in her family, he begins to detect signs of Antoinette’s insanity. He leaves the island and takes himself and Antoinette to England where she is totally isolated. The third part of the story is narrated once again by Antoinette. She has no sense of time or show more place. She resorts to violence when she feels threatened and she has a recurring dream of setting the house on fire as she feels that she can never be free until she ends both her life and the place in which she is imprisoned. The book ends with Antoinette holding a candle, leaving her prison and walking downstairs.

Beautifully written and terribly sad, the book appears to be Jean Rhys’ answer to the trope of the “madwoman in the attic” by allowing us to see Antoinette as a real person living a very tragic life. While Charlotte Bronte gives us one version of the “truth”, Jean Rhys gives us another. Evocative, passionate and dark, Wide Sargasso Sea is an interesting companion read to Jane Eyre. show less