Looking for Wide Sargasso Sea

We have came across this article by Ellen Vanstone published on The Walrus April Issue (2006) entirely devoted to Jean Rhys and particularly to Wide Sargasso Sea. The author visits Dominica looking for Jean Rhys' origins:

As a girl, I identified with the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: she was good, she was brave, she was intellectually and morally superior to everyone around her. Though not good-looking in a flashy way, and forced to toil as a lowly governess, she inevitably attracted the love of her master, Mr. Rochester. Unfortunately, he had a mad wife locked up in the attic, so Jane couldn’t marry him. But in the end, her goodness prevailed, winning her the man (after his wife conveniently perishes while burning down Thornfield Hall) and a respectable career as a wife and homemaker.

Later, I discovered Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 novel that is the supposed prequel, and modern rebuttal, to Jane Eyre, and I briefly identified with its heroine: the impoverished, neglected Creole beauty, Antoinette, who is unappreciated by her dysfunctional family in Jamaica and callously married off to a broody, uptight Englishman. He (though unnamed, we know it’s Rochester) is soon appalled and repelled by his wife’s true, passionate nature—not to mention the madness that runs in her family—and starts calling her “Bertha.” Heartbroken, Antoinette soon begins to unravel. After a disastrous honeymoon, set on a decrepit estate in Rhys’s native Dominica, the poor girl is whisked off to dank, drizzly England, loses her mind altogether, and is locked up in the attic of Thornfield Hall. There, inexpertly guarded by the gin-soaked Grace Poole, Antoinette dreams of making a big, warm fire, like the one that destroyed her family home when she was a child. (...) (Read more)

Not for nothing does Carole Angier, in her definitive 1990 biography, Jean Rhys, call Rhys and her lover Ford “perhaps the two greatest artists of self-pity in English fiction.” By this point, I was starting to identify with Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea—entranced, then alienated, he ends up despising Dominica and the woman who brought him there: “I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

And yet, rereading those lines, I was struck again by what makes Rochester’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard: the fact that he comprehends his own tragedy. Despite her initial resentment at Charlotte Brontë’s dismissive portrayal of the Creole wife, Rhys ultimately succeeded in creating a masterpiece by portraying Rochester with sympathy and Antoinette without sentimentality. So in fact I couldn’t really hate her. But I’d definitely had enough of her. (Read more)

And on Unofficial Inquisition, another article about Wide Sargasso Sea can be read today:

Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS) as a whole can be seen as a Derridian "rupture and a redoubling" of the canonical text of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Wide Sargasso Sea serves as evidence of the rupture which occurs within Jane Eyre due to the text's own ambivalence and breaking down of traditional power binaries normally reinforced by the hierarchical canonization of texts, such as economic and social constrictions placed on women in the setting of the English "country house" or upper class, country society. (Read more)

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