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

My first read for 2016, and ohemgee, what a stunner.

This brief but sumptuous novel -- originally published in 1966, but reissued this year by Norton with a lovely introduction from Edwidge Danticat -- imagines the life of Bertha Mason, the "madwoman" from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

Shifting viewpoints between Antoinette, as she prefers to be called, and a young Englishman we assume to be Rochester, we see a vivacious young woman pinned down by society, powerless and frustrated, pushed to her emotional limits. Is she mad? Rhys suggests she isn't, but her husband -- perhaps a little mad himself -- feels otherwise, and he has the power to punish her and declare her such.

I have to confess that Jane Eyre is not one of my favorites books, show more so I was predisposed to like Antoinette and hate Rochester. Yet Rhys managed to make Rochester sympathetic, in a way: he's a young man who has to marry for money, and worse, a "Creole" rather than a proper Englishwoman. For a moment, he's even taken with Antoinette but his conservative mores and twisted attitudes about sex and desire transmute his interest into disgust.

Worse, the Caribbean landscape -- hot, wet, and wild -- seems to give Antoinette strength, which repels him:

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it. (p156)

This is a quick read -- about 170ish pages -- but it invites deep lingering and re-reading (I ended up reading it for a second time a few nights after finishing!). Rhys' writing, as seen above, is lush and evocative, and she can, in a handful of words, paint a scene vividly.

I was strongly reminded of stories like "The Yellow Wallpaper" -- could women's madness be the way men and society cage them and tell them they're mad? -- and while I felt fury toward Rochester, I didn't loathe him as I anticipated. I felt terrible for them both, these passionate people who couldn't connect and were oppressed, in different ways, by society. I was also struck by a similarity to Rebecca, especially with women in both books dreaming of returning to their beloved burned estates.

This edition has a lovely introduction by Edwidge Danticat which reads like an argument for why #WeNeedDiverseBooks. It's a love letter to a story about oppression, colonialism, and solidarity, and might be one of my most favorite introductions to a classic novel ever.

By accident, 2016 might shape up to be my year of (inspired by) Jane Eyre, in a fashion. In my queue for this year was this book; Catherine Lowell's novel about a Bronte descendant, The Madwoman Upstairs; Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele, a murderous retelling, of sorts; last year's Re Jane;  the short story collection Reader, I Married Him; and a poetry collection, The Jane and Bertha in Me. I ought to just put Jane Eyre in as a reread and see if my feelings for it change!

A must read -- not just for fans of Jane Eyre -- but for anyone who enjoys feminist literature, or novels fraught with unspoken sentiments and explosive desires. 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

This novel was conceived as a prequel to Jane Eyre; it fleshes out and gives voice to Rochester's first wife—here known as Antoinette Cosway—describing her earlier years, and shows us how she ended being the madwoman in the attic. The story begins in the Jamaica of the post-emancipation act, with young Antoinette describing the difficulties her mother, brother and herself experience as poor white Creoles. Antoinette's father, a former slave owner and skirt-chasing alcoholic, has passed away, leaving his beautiful young second wife the Colibri estate, which is slowly falling to pieces. Shunned by the rich white population and despised by the blacks who call them "white niggers" and "white cockroaches" the threat from their neighbours show more is very real, and Antoinette has every reason to feel her safety compromised as tensions are mounting. The estate's only horse has recently been poisoned and her mother retreats into mental breakdown, all but ignoring her daughter. Things briefly seem like they might improve when the rich Mr Mason marries her mother, but he ignores his wife's pleas to leave the island, believing her to exaggerate the danger of their situation, until the family is violently driven from Colibri by an angry mob.

The second part of the book is told by Antoinette's new husband, the un-named Mr Rochester. Their honeymoon starts off with great passion, but Rochester describes his contempt for the island, it's people and for his wife from the beginning. He retreats from her abruptly, even refusing to call her by her own name (he calls her Bertha instead) and Antoinette falls into despair. Rhys's Rochester is despicable man; clearly stating he's married the young woman for her money, he's quick to believe malicious gossip about her and then write her off as mad when she is distraught by his attitude. This is a short but very rich novel which brims with passion, exoticism, and despair of course, since we know all too well the terrible fate that awaits this sensitive young woman. The perfect follow-up to a reading of Jane Eyre, yet at the same time holds up very well as a great little novel in it's own right. show less

I loved this book. For me, *Wide Sargasso Sea* is stronger than *Jane Eyre*, though the connection between the two adds an interesting layer rather than being essential to the experience.

What makes this novel work so well is how completely Jean Rhys places the reader inside Antoinette’s world. Coulibri, in particular, feels less like a setting and more like a memory—fragmented, vivid, and unstable. You experience it the way Antoinette does, without full understanding but with complete emotional clarity. That sense of disorientation carries through the entire book and becomes the foundation for everything that follows.

Rhys doesn’t rely on plot mechanics or romantic tension to carry the story. Instead, she builds a psychological and show more environmental reality that steadily shapes Antoinette’s identity. There’s no sense of manipulation or convenient narrative turns. Once the instability is established, it deepens in a way that feels inevitable and true to the world the novel creates.

Because of that, the connection to *Jane Eyre* feels secondary. It’s a compelling addition, but not necessary to appreciate the novel. *Wide Sargasso Sea* stands fully on its own as a story of displacement, control, and the gradual loss of self.

If anything, reading it this way makes the link to *Jane Eyre* feel less like a foundation and more like an aftereffect—something that exists outside the novel rather than something it depends on. show less

Spoiler alert: Mr. Rochester definitely comes off as the selfish, arrogant, self-pitying villain in this Jane Eyre prequel that imagines the events leading up to his wife Bertha's madness and attic confinement. But he's not the only villain in the piece: colonialism, sexism, racism, greed, and misogyny also play roles in this heartbreaking tale of a woman traumatized and betrayed to her ruin.

First things first, she's Antoinette in this tale - Bertha being a cruel nickname that Rochester assigns her after he, Othello-like, allows himself to be convinced by an Iago stand-in that he's been tricked into marrying a madwoman. Humiliated, he lashes out at Antoinette as the source of his disgrace, seeking revenge: first by humiliating her, show more then betraying her, then labelling her as mad before finally ripping her away from her beloved tropical island and whisking her off to England to live the rest of her life as his prisoner.

But who gets to define madness? At what point do the combined impacts of grief, disenfranchisement, betrayal, and profound social isolation cross over into madness? Rhys paints an aching portrait of a woman whose only crime is loving too deeply. Perversely, even her passionate nature, the result of having grown up in the lush and sensual tropics, is construed as evidence of madness - lust in a woman being, in those Victorian times, a sure indicator of mental dissipation.

Rhys's storytelling is elegant, inventive, and evocative. Her character sketches are as artfully brutal as her descriptions of Jamaica are exquisitely sensuous. Sweeping in its themes (pride, greed, love, grief) but explicit in its tragic examination of female agency, I get why this continues to show up on "Greatest Works of English Literature" lists. show less