Book: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

I was unfortunate enough to have been introduced to Wide Sargasso Sea by watching the 1993 film version.  In the intervening 17 years, I have forgotten many details and now remember only my overall impression of the film.  It seemed like housewife softcore or something aired on Showtime late at night that my brother and I, in our childhoods, would have giggled over.  Lots of moist skin, dresses perpetually falling off shoulders, trite filmmakers trying desperately to make 1830s Jamaica as exotic and sexy as possible.  With my recent reading of Jean Rhys' 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, upon which this film was based (I use "based" loosely), I have at last realized what an injustice was done to Ms. Rhys and her book. (And an aside 'thank you' to my friend Drue who made this all possible by lending me the book!)

Wide Sargasso Sea is a "parallel novel" - a novel using characters or plotlines from another work, written by a different author.   In this case, Jean Rhys annexes Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in order to refigure the villain of that piece, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, Rochester's insane, dangerous and dissolute wife.  Rhys provides this pathetic and loathsome shadow figure from Jane Eyre with a sympathetic back story that, in the process, rewrites our understanding of Rochester and the plot of Jane Eyre itself. 

Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette Mason, a white creole (a Jamaican-born member of the slaveholding class) who grew up in 1830s Jamaica, just after the dissolution of slavery in the West Indies.  The action of the book occurs mainly in the West Indies and is told through first person narration: that of Antoinette herself and of Edward Rochester.  Rhys changes few of the details offered by Brontë - Rochester ventures to the West Indies, is taken ill and, before he knows it, finds himself married to Antoinette in a union largely engineered by Antoinette's step-brother and Rochester's father.  

Initially enthralled with the young woman, Rochester quickly begins to harbor suspicion and dread of his new wife.  He hears malicious rumors about the so-called madness of Antoinette's mother and of her young brother, who died years earlier when the family's home was destroyed by fire.  Additionally, the "exotic" quality (for an Englishman) of Jamaica and of Antoinette begins to discomfort Rochester, as does her attachment to Christophine, her childhood nurse and practitioner of obeah.  For Rochester, all of the West Indies seem to harbor some dark "secret"; something unnamed, but dangerous and duplicitous, that he associates with Jamaica, Christophine, Antoinette's servants and, soon, with Antoinette herself.

Rochester's feelings of alienation from Jamaica and its inhabitants, including his new wife, coupled with the gossip he has heard about her family,  contribute to Rochester's ultimate conviction that he is the victim of a malicious plot and that he has married a mad woman who wants only his money.  For Antoinette's part, the "madness" of her mother seems less some inheritable insanity and more a result of grief over her son's death in the fire, as well as an offshoot of her unwillingness to fit the mold her two husbands (Antoinette's father and step-father) had fashioned for her. This both prefigures Antoinette's own end as a lunatic imprisoned in Rochester's English home and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for Rochester.  Antoinette's behavior is culturally unreadable to Rochester, who attributes insanity to it.  He believes that madness runs in her family, and his own subsequent treatment of Antoinette soon drives her, in fact, mad, turning her into the gibbering, murderous "Bertha"* from Jane Eyre. 

Essentially, throughout the novel, Rhys demonstrates how Rochester's presumed cultural superiority and attendant prejudice against West Indian culture instills in him a kind of paranoia that ultimately destroys Antoinette.  By fleshing out Antoinette's story and by portraying Rochester in his attitude of cultural superiority and resulting paranoia, Rhys creates a sympathetic, though not uncritical, depiction of Antoinette and her past that Jane Eyre completely lacks.   

Any sympathy generated by Rhys for Antoinette, however, is instantly problematized given that Antoinette's family once perpetrated and flourished by slavery.   The reader meets Antoinette as a young girl: slavery, the source of her family's wealth, has ended; her father has died; her mother has grown reclusive; and the resentment and distrust of black creoles and former slaves for former slaveholders, like Antoinette's family, is beginning to bubble up. The world into which Rochester enters is already fraught with its own racial and class tensions.  His British imperialist sense of entitlement and superiority only add to this volatile and destructive mix.

I became so smitten with this subtle and complex book that I shamelessly exploited Nick's University of New Orleans online account.  I scoured JSTOR and found dozens of scholarly articles written about Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea.  Unsurprisingly, the majority of articles explore the novel within a post-colonial and feminist methodological framework.  I admit to a strong preference for the post-colonial over the feminist evaluations.  I may be ultimately more offended by colonial attitudes than by sexist ones, though I think the two comprise an insidious symbiotic system of prejudice that Wide Sargasso Sea explores deftly.  The post-colonial articles focus on silence, voice, powerlessness and empowerment and the (in)ability of a white author, albeit a West Indian one, to truly represent that subaltern.  

The spiraling and overlapping complexities of this novel beg such questions and concerns.  Rhys took Jane Eyre, usually considered a sort of proto-feminist work, focused on a character marginal to that novel and created another work in which that character is both your protagonist and antagonist, both innocent and guilty, central and peripheral.  I get the sense that Rhys identified with women characters who usually get short shrift in fiction - sometimes sympathetic, but usually caricatured "fallen" women, who are not all bad, but only sometimes good.  Evidently her earlier novels, which I fully intend on reading, also possess such protagonists.  In any event, Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best novels I have read in some time.  And I will warn everyone I know away of that wretched movie by the same name.

*One of the most overt attempts to erase Antoinette's Jamaican, "exotic" personality and submit it to his own control, is Rochester's insistence on calling her "Bertha".



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