On Wide Sargasso Sea

We have come across an appreciation of Wide Sargasso Sea by Wendy James, whose first novel - Out of Silence - has been published recently.

In it she summarises and explains this well-known prequel that, as she says, has become a classic on its own two feet. The beginning will be familiar to anyone who loves books:

Conclusions may be, as George Eliot once remarked, 'the weak points of most authors', but it should be a universally acknowledged truth (and one that offers a partial excuse to the much put-upon author) that the end of a novel is never the end of the story. Some narratives live on in the mind of the reader indefinitely - characters, events, the narrative voice, all are absorbed, assimilated; the most powerful narratives can inform the reader's present, influence their future, transform their understanding of the past. The most resonant stories gradually assume a myth-like status, become part of a cultural consciousness. Such stories exist perpetually in a kind of literary imaginary, where the possibilities of new narratives - retellings, variations, subversions, extensions, revisions, even refutations of the original - are endlessly generated.

And her own conclusion is certainly not a weak point:

Wide Sargasso Sea is a quintessentially 20th century novel - concerned with uncertainty, with the fluidity of truth and fiction, of past and present, appearances and reality, madness and sanity - and yet remains elementally connected to the concerns of its mother-narrative. It's a 'historical novel', of course, but Rhys's recreation and apprehension of this past are so complete, so unselfconscious, so unforced, that that becomes almost incidental. In remarkably lucid and deceptively simple prose she gives each of the protagonists a memorable and distinctive voice, while somehow managing to provide a singular, organic vision of the oppressive and potentially violent nature of the world that she's describing. The entire narrative is charged with a relentless, fevered anxiety - a kind of sensory prefiguring of the novel's nightmarish finale. And it's a finale that the reader requires, has always required, almost welcomes. For without Antoinette's tragic end, there can be no triumphant return to Thornfield Hall - and no happy ending - for Jane.

Now comes the time when this 50% of BrontëBlog ashamedly confesses that she has never read Wide Sargasso Sea, and what's more, has never feel drawn to read it.

Categories: Wide_Sargasso_Sea, Books, Jane_Eyre