Wide Sargasso Sea

When I read that Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea was a prequel (written in the twentieth century) to the classic novel Jane Eyre, I decided to not only read Wide Sargasso Sea but also Jane Eyre, which I’d never read. Rys’s novel, I must say, now having read Jane Eyre, did not add much to that story. It is fascinating that an author can take an element from any other novel and expand on it. Here, Rys tells the story of the madwoman who lives in Mr. Rochester’s attic in the classic. The story Rhys has fashioned is fascinating, but it didn’t truly add anything to Charlotte Bronte’s novel, as, I suppose, it shouldn’t, because Jane Eyre stands alone already and doesn’t need expansion. I will say that I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea, that Rhys is a fine writer, and that the book’s story, itself, stands alone and could have had its characters named any other names other than the ones from Bronte’s novel.

Truth can lie between two different realities. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester’s plans to marry Jane are frustrated by the revelation that the long-suffering man is already married and in fact, his mad wife is locked in the attic. But what is her story? And if she is ‘mad’, how did she get that way? The wife is Antoinette Bertha Mason Rochester, nee Cosway; she prefers Antoinette. Rhys is masterful showing the descent of Antionette’s life and mind as well as the gradual rise of Rochester’s contempt and control of her. The evolution of Antoinette’s voice from clarity to ‘madness’ is exquisite and sad. Like Rhys herself, Antoinette is of Creole descent. We meet her growing up in Dominica with her widowed mother and disabled brother. From the beginning, Antoinette is unsure of who she is. As white Creoles, they are rejected by both the English and the Blacks, who call them “white cockroaches.” As women, they lack status or agency. After the Emancipation Act frees the slaves, Antoinette’s slaveholding family, once wealthy, becomes destitute. Antoinette’s mother pursues the only option she believes is open to her, and marries a rich white carpetbagger, Mr. Mason. Mason decides to replace the family’s remaining servants with Eastern coolie workers. The staff overhears, however, and they set fire to the home, Coulibri, resulting in the death of Antoinette’s brother and leading to her mother’s emotional devastation. Mr. Mason abandons his mad wife to abusive caretakers and sends Antoinette to convent school. It is his responsibility to identify a husband for her, howe ver, and he does. It’s an unnamed English gentleman, though readers of Jane Eyre will recognize him as Mr. Rochester. As a second son, Rochester needs the money bequeathed to Antoinette by her stepfather. They wed, and at first the match seems successful. Rochester breaks down Antoinette’s reserve through affection and physical passion. Antoinette responds, opening herself to experience a happiness her childhood had trained her to never expect. Yet Rochester has a nagging distrust of his exotic Creole wife, and antipathy for Dominica. Geography becomes a proxy for the perceptions and misperceptions of the spouses. Neither view the home of the other as “real.” Antoinette sees England as cold and dark; in her eyes Dominica is lush, beautiful and fragrant. Rochester views the technicolor Dominica as ominous and threatening, as if he were about to be devoured by a giant Venus flytrap. And then there is the Sargasso Sea, a dead-calm oceanic mire that Dominica borders upon. For Antoinette, it’s a metaphor for her deepest fears. For Rochester, it is a physical barrier between himself and his beloved England. Rochester receives a letter received from a man who may or may not be Antoinette’s brother by her father and one of his slaves. The letter warns Rochester he was tricked into marrying a degenerate girl with a family history of madness. These allegations prey on Rochester’s insecurities and cause him to abruptly reject Antoinette. Her fragile sense of identity shaken and desperate to win back her husband’s affection, Antoinette resorts to means which unintentionally goad Rochester into acting on his worst impulses. The rift between them devolves into a chasm leading to her own undoing. Rochester drags his broken wife to cold and dark England, where he confines her to the attic, under the care of servants paid for their discretion. The Wide Sargasso Sea is a stunning work of understanding and empathy for all characters in this book – and the next.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in late May while on vacation in Telluride, Colorado. Once I was aware that this book was a prequel to Jane Eyre about the mad, passionate first wife of Mr Rochester, nothing would keep me from it - outside of a penny-priced copy of it being available on Amazon and it spending months & months stowed away in my bookshelf. So, after much ado, I dove in. It's a little disorienting to read between its dual narration and Antoinette's aggressive, spiteful prose, but it also reminds me of Alice Hoffman's A Marriage of Opposites headstrong heroine and her plight to know herself and who to trust in an almost anti-paradise.

The expression 'Short and Sweet' sprang to mind immediately after I raced to the last sentence of the voluminous 120 page account of Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester's wife in the renowned "Jane Eyre". I found myself needing to re-read the last chapter furiously because I was, at that point, hungry for more. Before launching into it, I had misgivings about a very thin bit of literature that purported to illuminate the life of a tragic and obscure character, threatening the secure opinions of known figures in a widely enjoyed story. After all, this is a classic we're tampering with. With several false starts, a little research about the author and fanning through passionate love/hate reviews, I decided to abandon all my ideas about the preceding novel and not be an annoying purist. The author Jean Rhys, made a controversial move in shifting the Victorian timeline of the tale to that of the Emancipation period and in doing so, wove a complicated and poetic tapestry of a fractured Jamaican society fraught with themes of financial insecurity, elitism, imperialism, and existentialism; a showcase of human frailty with no one innocent, only varying degrees of vulnerability. As you might have gathered, it is not a light headed fable with hopping bunnies and tweeting birds that encircle a handsome prince and his radiant bride - the egg in this Easter hunt is rotten and the Mad Hatter is serving you arsenic. Do people actually lose their minds or do they simply create their own reality because the one they are presented with is unacceptable? Can external circumstances drive you to extreme decisions? Are you crazy for making them? I will admit to having been momentarily confused with several parts because the author allowed different characters to elaborate on their thoughts and events as opposed to a consistent point of view throughout. Consequently, I was invited to a more intimate seat with the personalities, some more repulsive than others. Having said that, I recognise the reason for the negativity towards the book. If you lionised the characters and their society in Jane Eyre, this poignant chronicle becomes a damning affront to your sacred cows. Reading it for what it is, I found myself hurled into a whirlwind of innocence, betrayal, abandonment, deceit, and cruelty, wrapped up in sad ribbons of dreams that reference lyrically across the tumultuous lives featured. If The Wide Sargasso Sea was a song, it would be a haunting elegy to real lives that have been and that are still trapped in dark webs of humanity.

I am disappointed to say that this is not a well-written book. I loved the idea of this "prequel", but the execution lacks merit. Certainly, one could look through the tatters of the Union Jack in 19th century England and find racism and fear in everything, including Jane Eyre. I am surprised that these are not more pervasive, considering that Charlotte Bronte was cloistered most of her life and obtained her view of the world mostly through contemporary English literature. Yes, it's a sad story that Mr. Rochester was a product of his time, and I would have liked to see his character develop more... or should I say disintegrate a little more over the course of Wide Sargasso Sea? I wish I had seen him in greater depth. I wanted to learn more of the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette Mason, who later became the mad woman in Mr. Rochester's garret. Somehow, I just never got to know her well enough from the pages of Ms Rhys's novel. Pity. When someone writes a novel based upon the story and characters of another novel, especially one of such wide acclaim as Jane Eyre, that someone should be as adept as the original author at handling and developing those characters. Jean Rhys was not up to the task.

I’ve never been a fan of Mr Rochester and really felt that Jane Eyre didn’t meet enough men to make any kind of choice. This was more true for Antoinette as she met no one except servants. Rochester, needing money, knew about this pretty girl who inherited money and was all alone. He took possession of all she owned, denied her the home she loved, described her as looking like any pretty English girl and made sure she knew he was unfaithful. He owned her madness.

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is a beautiful postcolonial response to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It's complex because in only 100 pages it touches upon multiple issues: race, feminism, and class. It also offers multiple points of view and addresses stains in human history that are ignored by Jane Eyre. That is, Wide Sargasso Sea reminds the reader that most of the white characters throughout these stories, with the exception of the British servants, made their fortune through trading men, women, and children. Unlike, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea is hardly a romance. In many ways, it is in fact, a chilling horror story that exposes the harsh realities of the world. While Antoinette Cosway lacks Jane Eyre's strength and inner dialogue that has captivated readers for centuries, she manages to leave the reader haunted. Ultimately, Jane succeeds where Anne fails because she makes the best of the unfair hand that she was dealt and overcomes adversity. Anne never seems to try very hard, leaving one to presume that she suffered from the same genetic defect that plagued her mother. The strongest woman in Wide Sargasso Sea is Christophine, a former slave who completely understands human nature.

Eufemia es de esos libros que empiezas “solo para ver de qué se trata” y terminas leyendo de corrido, aunque digas que no tienes tiempo. Su estilo irónico y directo te hace reír justo cuando pensabas que no se podía decir nada más absurdo… pero sí, se puede. Una historia que mezcla realidad y sarcasmo de manera brillante, ideal para quienes disfrutan reírse incluso de lo serio.

All time classic, arrived as promised

Me compré el libro porque tuve que leer para un trabajo Jane Eyre y supe que jane Rhys escribió esta novela contando la historia entre Rochester y Bertha Mason ( the mad women in the attic) desde otro punto de vista, el de el mismo Rochester y la misma Bertha. Recomiendo su lectura conjunta ya que Wide Sargasso adquiere un major significado y amplia nuestra comprensión del contexto histórico en el que se desarrolla la historia: el colonialismo europeo y principalmente el inglés. Es una lectura interesante que hace reflexionar sobre el papel que ha desempeñado la mujer en las distintas épocas y el que ocupa hoy.

WIDE SARGASSO SEA is the 'prequel' to "Jane Eyre". Through this short novel, Jean Rhys has given a voice to the mad woman in Rochester's attic; his first wife. The book has three parts and each part sees a different narrator. Part one takes place during Antoinette's childhood and it is she who narrates. Part two takes place just after Rochester and Antoinette marry and it is Rochester who narrates. Then finally part three, which takes place in England. Antoinette is now within the attic of Thornfield Hall. At the beginning of part three, we hear briefly from Grace Poole, Antoinette's guard, we then hear the remainder from Antoinette herself. Personally, this short novel really came to life during parts two and three. I found it interesting that during part two - following the marriage of Antoinette and Rochester - we hear the story from his point of view. Rhys wrote this novel to give the mad woman in the attic a voice, yet here she takes it away again to a certain degree. Although this is not meant as a criticism on my part, it is interesting to ponder why. However depsite all this, WIDE SARGASSO SEA is a beautiful, fraught novel of love, obsession, death, folklore and madness. There are many layers to this little book and many themes - for example, there is a recurrent theme of dreams and mirrors. Rhys is also an expert at not only creating very believeable characters but also at bringing the location to life. The way that she describes the forest, through the eyes of Rochester, really helps you to understand just how hostile he finds the foreign place he is living in with his new bride. I loved this book. Regardless of whether you have read "Jane Eyre" or not, there is much to enjoy here. I'm really looking forward to discussing it with my bookclub. Oh, and a final comment on this particular edition - I highly recommend it. I read this book in preparation for a bookclub; the introduction, explanatory notes etc, were very informative. And, as each page has small line numbers next to the text, the commentary does not have to get in the way of your reading experience - if you want the explanation, you just turn to the back of the novel and find the relevant note.

As expected and arrived on time.

Ik heb het pakket niet ontvangen (zogezegd vandaag 18/10 achtergelaten in brievenbus)...