The experience of reading Jean Rhys'
Wide Sargasso Sea was like that of going into a time machine. First, I had heard of the book years ago from my dear friend Emily Childress-Campbell way back when she was just just Emily Childress and we lived in a cramped dorm where she kept illegal hamsters (or something like that...maybe they were gerbils? Anyway...), so memories of our Jane Eyre-esque conversations and the first time I ever watched the film, with her, came flooding back. Second, the book has not been released on
Kindle yet, so I had to order it from Amazon, and I found myself reading a real paper book again. Although I love my kindle, I do find a few things frustrating: like having to click a million buttons to flip back to a passage that was half the book ago, or not being able to see all of the cover art. Well, none of those technology fueled frustrations with which my grandchildren won't sympathize! I was able to flip back to reread certain passages to clarify something in the book as I read with ease, and the cover art was exotic and saturated, just like the world of the book into which I entered.
Wide Sargasso Sea was certainly the "tour de force" that the quote on the cover promises it will be. A neat 171 pages, including the introduction by Francis Wyndham, I read it in an evening. Being a Harry Potter generation-er who takes it seriously, I think that I have been indoctrinated into that kind of 3rd person narrative where we experience the events as if from over the shoulder of the main character, only sometimes going outside of the world of Harry's experience to get an outside perspective. My ride through
Wide Sargasso Sea was therefore, at times, a difficult journey because the first person prose could catch me off guard or make me feel a little lost. But never, I believe, was this without purpose, as I will later describe. Rhys takes us on a first person journey first from the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole girl who has been in raised in the Caribbean and is, at the beginning of the novella, under the care of her widowed mother, Annette, and her nurse maid, Christophine, just after the Emancipation Act has been passed on her island. The family, now being the descendants of former planters and slave owners, is shunned by the village they are near as well as isolated from other whites on the island due to the political climate and Antoinette's mother, who has a less than reputable history and soon is interred as a "madwoman." Later we see the story through the eyes of Mr. Rochester, who is never named but whom we recognize from Charlotte Bronte's famous
Jane Eyre. He is there to marry our heroine and gain her wealthy dowry. Finally we are returned to the story as it is in the hands of Antoinette during her final days locked away in an English manor under the same accusations as we saw befall her mother.
Through the first person narrative I was admitted into the world of the book not through detail of place and action, but through thought and emotion. The place descriptions were lurid and lush, giving me also the hazy feel of the heat, the saturated quality of the island. Much was often left unsaid until a character chanced to mention it, giving the storytelling a mysterious edge, which mirrored the mystery of the culture on the island. Sometimes I caught myself feeling frustrated by the inaction of the characters to defend themselves, only finding that this was probably how Rhys expected the reader to feel; as in the end I found that this kind of lethargic prose helped to illustrate the inability of some of the characters to express their desires or, once they had, the inability of the other character to comprehend. They were stuck in their own dreamlike perceptions of the world, captured in the dream like quality of the passages the write had given to us.
The book certainly makes me frown on the handsome and romantic figure of Mr. Rochester as he in cut in
Jane Eyre's cloth. The Bronte novel makes a sympathetic case for him, in which he is not without sin but repents and is worthy of the honorable Jane's love. However, seeing the sad case of his "Bertha," the nickname he gives Antoinette, one cannot help but feel sorry for the madwoman from
Jane Eyre, because the books gives us such a compelling glimpse into the world of a lost and confused little girl who lived in between worlds and only hoped for happiness.
It is not that I like Antoinette better than I like Jane. I find both to be compelling heroines and that each book, both
Jane Eyre and
Wide Sargasso Sea, gives us interesting insights into how society thinks that women should behave in regards to love and relationships. Both Antoinette and Jane overcome their fair share of obstacles. Jane is mistreated by her foster family, whereas Antoinette is cutoff emotionally from her mother and witnesses a mob burn down her own home. Jane is sent away to a horrid boarding school where she is starved and abused both mentally and physically, whereas Antoinette is sent to a nunnery where the people there confuse her and she is tormented on her walks through town. Jane, described as plan once reaching adulthood, persists through her circumstances and becomes both educated and independent, although guarded and unsure, whereas Antoinette, described by all as being beautiful, attempts to further please her step family by marrying a stranger, whom she readily begins to love. Whatever her abilities, Jane makes choices that are good and not wholly selfish but not too simperingly selfless either. She is a woman of dignity. Antoinette is just the opposite, a woman of fire and passion and full of love to give.
When Rochester does them wrong they each react in their own distinct ways. Jane runs, runs, runs. Meanwhile, Antoinette runs, but only to her nurse maid Christophine, to whom she begs to make Rochester fall back in love with her. Antoinette screams and cries for Rochester's love, and is never rational. The triumph of the novella comes only from Christophine's speech to Rochester at the book's climax. In the most champion moment of the book, Christophine berates Rochester for his ill treatment of Antoinette and says, "I tell her so. I warn her. I say this is not a man who will help you when he sees you break up. Only the best can do that." By "break up" she means become heartbroken. Rochester could have been as patient as Jane, as forgiving as Jane will be to him in later years when the next part of the story unfolds for him, but rather we see him become the cruel Mr. Rochester that we recognize from the beginning of
Jane Eyre. Antoinette is lost to him, becoming his mad little "Bertha," a wife to be hidden away.
So here is the moral of the story as I take it from
Wide Sargasso Sea, especially as it relates to
Jane Eyre:
We should all be free to love as passionately and as unrestrainedly as Antoinette, but we all have to try to be like Jane, lest we be labeled madwomen.
Or we could all be more like Christophine, who holds my favorite quote in the whole book:
"A man don't treat you good, pick up your skirt and walk out."
Amen, sister.
