Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Think of a ‘classic’ you
were forced to read in high school or college, some supposedly great book that
you hated, that bored you, that left you cold. Now pick it up again, read the
first chapter or two, and see what you think. Chances are, the story will be
different than you remembered it. That is what happened to me the other day when,
sorting the books on my shelves, I discovered my old copy of Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel
Wide Sargasso Sea, bought on whim,
when I hadn’t a nickel to spare, at the old Brentano’s in Greenwich Village, a
choice I remember regretting at once.
What hadn’t I liked about
it? For the life of me I couldn't remember. Curious, inspired by my friend
David’s recent praise of the novel, I scanned the first few pages and was
hooked, so that by three o’clock that afternoon I had read it straight through.
I sat amazed: surely someone had changed the story on me, for this novel was
brilliant—sharply imagined, poetically crafted, darkly twisted in its setting
and characters, in its storyline, phrasing, and detail. A ruined estate, a
ghost of a mother, a parrot in flames. What more could one ask for?
What I liked especially
about the novel this time around was the fact that, while it is a bold and
original story in its own right, set mostly in the British West Indies and conceptually,
thematically complete, it is further enriched (if one happens to have read
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) by Rhys’
fleshing out of Rochester’s infamous madwoman in the attic, his first wife, the
Creole and suicide, Bertha Antoinetta Mason. Rhys herself loved the novel Jane Eyre, read it throughout her life, yet
always what moved her most about the story was not the protagonist herself but the
minor, obliquely rendered Bertha, Rochester’s violently insane wife. As a woman
and writer, Rhys wondered at the cause of this woman’s distress, at the story
behind it, restless and dissatisfied with the little she knew.
While such re-imagining of
famous novels is now grist for the mills (of Jane Eyre adaptations Rhys herself wrote that “[t]here have been
umpteen thousand and sixty already”), what Rhys accomplished with Wide Sargasso Sea is something
altogether different. No money-making scheme, she sought to humanize—and in
this way more fully understand—this terrifying footnote of a woman she calls
Antoinette by moving her center-stage and reducing the men in her life to shadows.
In so doing the woman is no less mad, but it is a madness with which one can
sympathize, for which one can grieve, a harrowing affliction of mind and heart
that one can see for what it is: the residuum—cruelly concentrated in a single
person—of nearly three centuries of slavery and oppression, the toxic half-life
of British patriarchal and colonial rule.
Jean Rhys was one of the twentieth century’s
foremost writers, a literary artist who made exquisite use of the raw material
of her own turbulent life to create fiction of memorable resonance and
poignancy. Between 1928 and 1939, Rhys
published four novels, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight, which brought
her critical acclaim but not fame. After
almost thirty years of obscurity, the successful publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 led to her
rediscovery. She died in 1979. (W.W.
Norton)
Peter Adam Nash
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