Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway who becomes Bertha Rochester, the crazy lady in the attic, the first wife of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Rhys, troubled, as she should be, by the handling of Bertha in the novel (she remains a wild woman who never speaks and eventually sets the house on fire) here gives us Antoinette’s story growing up a Creole in Martinique and narrates the marriage between her and Mr. Rochester (who remains unnamed throughout Rhys’s novel).
I confess that I love Jane Eyre and, like most people, rooted for her in her love of Rochester, and yet I’ve always been annoyed by Bronte’s use of Bertha as a mere plot tool to deepen Jane’s plight and make readers all the more heartsick when she (and we) learn Rochester’s terrible secret. So I was eager to read Rhys’s novel and surprised by how different it was from what I expected it to be. For one thing, I didn’t expect to get so much of Rochester’s story and voice—he narrates nearly all of the second part. I also didn’t expect it to be so rich and complicated in the world that it presents. It’s not just Antoinette’s story and a story of an unhappy marriage; it’s also a meditation on race, colonialism, and the line between sanity and insanity.
It’s also a nearly perfect book—poetic, intricately written, and full of complex characters. Rochester is far from the villain one might expect given that the marriage was mostly one of financial convenience, and then, you know, that whole thing about the attic. He is someone who is made afraid because of the fear he is surrounded by in a colonial, post-slavery land, and this fear doesn’t allow him to love Antoinette, who, though Creole (and therefore white) is of less fine breeding than the wealthy former slave owners in the West Indies and is someone who is intimate with the blacks of the island. He desires her but never feels like he can know her. This is a story about the distances between people: Antoinette is hated by the blacks because she is white, hated by the whites because she is poor, and suffers because she has no real place, the result of colonialism. Rochester too feels this distance. He says of the West Indies, “I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know…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.”
I say it’s a “nearly perfect novel,” not perfect. The first part feels underwritten to me. I had to rely on footnotes to understand some of the context (and then many of the footnotes (in the Penguin edition) felt unnecessary and distracting—I know what a cockroach is!) and I wished that the story had stayed with Antoinette as a child longer. But once we get to part two and the marriage, I was wrapped up. Rhys spent a great deal of time crafting her language, and it’s obvious; I found myself as in awe of the poetry of the prose as I was the complex story she’s telling. And finally Bertha’s telling of her life in the attic is affecting, heady, and dream-like.
I confess that I love Jane Eyre and, like most people, rooted for her in her love of Rochester, and yet I’ve always been annoyed by Bronte’s use of Bertha as a mere plot tool to deepen Jane’s plight and make readers all the more heartsick when she (and we) learn Rochester’s terrible secret. So I was eager to read Rhys’s novel and surprised by how different it was from what I expected it to be. For one thing, I didn’t expect to get so much of Rochester’s story and voice—he narrates nearly all of the second part. I also didn’t expect it to be so rich and complicated in the world that it presents. It’s not just Antoinette’s story and a story of an unhappy marriage; it’s also a meditation on race, colonialism, and the line between sanity and insanity.
It’s also a nearly perfect book—poetic, intricately written, and full of complex characters. Rochester is far from the villain one might expect given that the marriage was mostly one of financial convenience, and then, you know, that whole thing about the attic. He is someone who is made afraid because of the fear he is surrounded by in a colonial, post-slavery land, and this fear doesn’t allow him to love Antoinette, who, though Creole (and therefore white) is of less fine breeding than the wealthy former slave owners in the West Indies and is someone who is intimate with the blacks of the island. He desires her but never feels like he can know her. This is a story about the distances between people: Antoinette is hated by the blacks because she is white, hated by the whites because she is poor, and suffers because she has no real place, the result of colonialism. Rochester too feels this distance. He says of the West Indies, “I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know…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.”
I say it’s a “nearly perfect novel,” not perfect. The first part feels underwritten to me. I had to rely on footnotes to understand some of the context (and then many of the footnotes (in the Penguin edition) felt unnecessary and distracting—I know what a cockroach is!) and I wished that the story had stayed with Antoinette as a child longer. But once we get to part two and the marriage, I was wrapped up. Rhys spent a great deal of time crafting her language, and it’s obvious; I found myself as in awe of the poetry of the prose as I was the complex story she’s telling. And finally Bertha’s telling of her life in the attic is affecting, heady, and dream-like.
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