posted on 25 Jul 2019

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea is literally a breath-taking novel. The cloying, steamy, heavy atmosphere of the book forces you to gasp uncomfortably – it almost makes you want to run away from the pages to get a gulp of crisp clean air. It’s a mighty feat of imagination but it’s also a most wonderful piece of sustained modern Gothic writing that will haunt your mind forever after you’ve read it.

That was my impression of the novel when I read it for the first time over two decades ago and on rereading it this time around I have to say that I still couldn’t find a better way of describing it. The book was published in 1966 following a period of almost 30 years when Rhys had produced nothing for public consumption following a handful of novels and short stories in the late 1920s and early 1930s. WSS is almost always referred to as a ‘prequel’ to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in which the backstory of the ‘mad woman in the attic’, Rochester’s first wife, is filled in. Whilst it is certainly true that Jane Eyre and the possibilities of developing Bertha’s story was a fascination and inspiration to Rhys, to think about this in cinematic or televisual terms as a prequel is really to entirely miss the point.

For me at least, the Jane Eyre connection is merely a useful jumping off point for what would turn out to be both an astonishing feat of imaginative fiction and a sensitive and perceptive comment of gender, colonialism and ‘race’.

The book, although relatively short, is split into three parts. In the first we hear the story, through her own eyes, of Antoinette, a Creole girl living on a former plantation in Jamaica. Although West Indian, her white skin makes her a target for the hostility felt by the now liberated slave population towards their former colonial oppressors. When her mother marries an English landowner who doesn’t understand the powder-keg politics of the island, things go from bad to worse and their old colonial mansion-house is burned to the ground. Antoinette’s mother, Annette, we discover suffers what we’d probably now think of as a mental breakdown after her youngest son dies and she is sent away to live with a couple who effectively keep her captive until she dies.

Rhys does a superb job of not just embodying Antoinette but in conveying the fear and bewilderment of a child who cannot understand what is happening to her, how becoming ‘the other’ isolates her from those she thought of as friends. The alienation the child feels is somehow reflected in the physical, hostile environment that is almost sentient itself.

Section two moves time forward to when Antoinette is older and, being beautiful, is married off to another incoming Englishman ( this is Rochester although he isn’t explicitly named as such). For a variety of reasons the relationship between Antoinette and her new husband quickly deteriorate into mutual suspicion and acrimony and it is during this time that her husband insists that she take the name Bertha rather than Antoinette – the comparison between the ugly British name and the exotic, French-West Indian sobriquet are clearly symbolic of what is going on in that relationship.

Antoinette/Bertha tries to fall back on a traditional love-potion to solve her problems but only ends up virtually poisoning Rochester and it is at this point he decides he must get her away from the malign influence of the islands and return to England.

In the final, quite short, third section of the novel her already compromised mental health results in her being confined to an attic room in the house where her only real companion is the servant, Grace Poole. If you’ve read Jane Eyre, you’ll of course be aware of the end that awaits Antoinette/Bertha but I think the decision by Rhys to put us back inside the head of the now unbalanced first wife and to play out the denouement via what is effective a stream of consciousness is a brilliant one.

This is a complex novel at almost every level and summarising it is not easy but I don’t think I can do better than this from Laura Fish writing in The Independent newspaper back in 2000, so I'll let her have the last words:

‘Wide Sargasso Sea speaks of the history of cruelty and suffering that lies behind some of the West's accumulated wealth, a history which in Jane Eyre is secret and mysterious, and only appears in brief glimpses. This is a book that gives voice to neglected, silenced and unacknowledged stories, exploring different inflections of marginality – gender, class, race and madness. Where historical events, recorded in written discourse, have shaped the opinions of many of the people of the former British colonies and education is exclusively from a Eurocentric perspective, the recovery of "lost" histories has a crucial role to play in allowing access to events and experiences which have not previously been recorded. This idea of "writing back" by breaking down explanations for events and favouring more localised narratives and perspectives has informed my own work, especially in the voices of the former slaves in my latest novel. Wide Sargasso Sea is an inspiration. Certainly, before the phrase was coined, Jean Rhys was a post-colonial writer whose work reminds us that "there is always another side, always".’

 

Terry Potter

July 2019