Wide Sargasso Sea

Rating:
Summary: Wide & Murky Sargasso Sea
Review: Jean Rhys's enduring 1966 novel has been one of the more unique opuses of my reading experience - for, though it's been some two or three years since I've read it, I've been stumped - unable to form any very distinct or profound impression. Even at this point, I can only say that WIDE SARGASSO SEA is an ingenious work of poignant contradictions.

I actually first heard of this book a few years ago, when I rented a movie by the same name. I watched that movie and, despite a few minute clues, did not until the very end recognize it as being prequel to one of my all-time most beloved novels: Charlotte Bronte's JANE EYRE. This story chronicles the untold tale in Bronte's novel - the history and mystery behind Mr. Rochester's secret in the attic unveiled, the madwoman in the attic endowed with a soul. "Bertha" Antoinette Cosway-Mason is a Creole heiress living in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830's whose isolated and tragic upbringing is augmented by the cultural chaos of that place and that time. Shunned by both the English and white population and the recently freed slaves, then further burdened by her manipulative relatives and insane mother, Antoinette's childhood and early adulthood was as intensely oppressive as was the beauty of her surroundings. The first chapters of this novel are told in her voice - and what a marvelous voice it is - such richness, such poetry - "Great splashes of sunlight as we ran up the wooden steps of the refectory. Hot coffee and rolls and melting butter. But after the meal, now and at the hour of our death, and at midday and at six in the evening, now and at the hour of our death. Let perpetual light shine on them." The tempo simply flows right through you; it is beautiful.

Rhys's lyrical prose is beyond doubt a manner of genius; and I do believe this book is worthy of a classic. It really could have been brilliant, but it is riddled with flaws. First of all, the language is so exquisitely overflowing that it's almost a distraction. Yet within the context of the first section of the story - Antoinette's voice, encompassing her life before her marriage - I suppose may be overlooked and given up to the whims of the narrator.

The second section, however, is from Mr. Rochester's point of view - from his first acquaintance with his bride and to their home in the West Indies, nearly through the balance of their time together on the islands. Rochester, who at the time is a very young English gentleman: a second son raised within the stringent confines of British landed gentry - arrives in a place totally alien to anything he has ever known, completely wide-eyed and ignorant of everything, from the temperamental weather patterns to the quirks of the denizens of that place. Yet Rhys gives him a lush, worldly and poetic voice, not at all unlike that of Antoinette's. In fact, when the narration switches briefly back to her, it's only distinguishable by studying closely the sway of the narration and pronoun use. Antoinette, incidentally, never refers to Rochester by name at any time during the entire book. Truly, though the author had essentially free reign with the character of "Bertha," as that entity was only faintly drawn out in JANE EYRE, she was considerably restricted when it came to Rochester. In drawing him out, Rhys has failed on two counts: the first in that his language sounds too embedded within the lyrical rhythms of the alien landscape he supposedly fears and does not understand, to ever ring true for a young man of his circumstances; the second in that, notwithstanding the anger and bitterness felt toward his father and elder brother, Mr. Rochester's actions in this story do not in any way ring true to the man as Bronte wrote him. He's barely recognizable.

The third, and final, portion of the story reverts back to Antoinette's point of view - this time from the garret room of Thornfield Hall. Though the writing here remains quite pretty, the narration completely loses its coherence. This loss may be construed as understandable - as the narrator would by now be quite mad - but it just doesn't strike true. The language is inconsistent - smooth and flowing in places, choppy in others. The tragic consequences of a bitter young man's revenge and a damaged young woman's confusion gets entirely lost here in the author's imposingly scattered prose.

I am sure that, judged in its own right, this novel can quite easily be classified as a work of art. But loving JANE EYRE as I do, I am sorely unqualified to make the distinction. Yet I cannot deny that I was mesmerized by the overwhelmingly lush impact of the writing in WIDE SARGASSO SEA. Sick with a lingering fever and lamenting his fate, the young bridegroom makes the trudging maiden journey with his new bride to their honeymoon house in an island place called Massacre ~ "Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger."

Ah, yes indeed ~

Rating:
Summary: Ok, but not the best prequel to Jane Eyre
Review: If you haven't read Jane Eyre, than do not start with this book. If you have read Jane Eyre, than Wide Sargasso Sea may make some sense to you.

The book focuses on Mr. Rochester's former bride who, in Jane Eyre, currently resides in the attic. The novel characterizes her childhood and depicts several reasons why the main character went insane. The structure of this book is not simple to follow because chapters alternate in first person narration between characters. Also, in the latter chapters, the novel's disorganized narration is used to display the onset of the main character's madness.

In high school, I wrote a paper that diagnosed the main character's (I can't remember her name) madness as schizophrenia. Thus, if you are interested in psychology, you may find this novel interesting.

However, if you did read Jane Eyre, you probably won't find much connection with it in Wide Sargasso Sea, other than the main character and Mr. Roachester. Also, in contrast to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea is by no means a lite read, and is very depressing.

Rating:
Summary: Gulfs of many kinds
Review: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Highly recommended.

Jean Rhys, troubled by the one-dimensional Bertha Mason in Brontë's classic Jane Eyre, or perhaps seeing an opportunity to take the depiction of Creoles out of the hands of English writers, decided to "write her a life." The result is Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre (Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea) finally steps out of the realm of caricature and becomes both human being and symbol. In the Norton Critical Edition edited by Judith L. Raiskin, several commentators expound on their views of what that symbolism means from a Caribbean, British, and feminist perspective.

First, I have noticed that several reviewers mistakenly assume Antoinette is of mixed race (the modern assumption about what Creole means). In the context of the time, however, Creole meant a person of English or European descent living in the Caribbean. Rhys makes this even clearer with terms such as "white Creole" and "white cockroach." This is an important distinction because it, combined with her French ancestry and poverty, sets Antoinette apart from the wealthy English and from the former slaves on the islands who are of African descent. That theme of having no home, no society, nowhere to go, and, essentially, being nonexistent, is integral to the storyline-and fits in perfectly with Bertha's role in Jane Eyre.

Another important point is that Antoinette's mother (as well as her nurse) is from Martinique, a French island at a time when the French and the British were in bitter conflict. This makes Antoinette even more alienated from the societies in which she dwells but of which she is not a part. It's interesting to note that some of the academic commentators mistakenly attribute her mother's birthplace and the origins of the nurse Christophine (one calls her a Haitian, no doubt because of that island's strong associations with obeah) and even get Christophine's name wrong.

Although there are parallels between Antoinette and Jane, between Antoinette and the Black child Tia, and even between Antoinette and her carefully unnamed husband (Rochester), this is a brilliant novel that does not depend on the reader's knowledge of Jane Eyre; like Antoinette herself, it stands alone. There are also many cycles throughout the book, including Antoinette's repeated dream. Antoinette's lack of identity is reinforced by Rochester's invocation of a principle of obeah; he calls her Bertha, a name that is not hers (this also emphasizes the predominance of an English identity over that evoked by the French name Antoinette). There are the clear dichotomies between Rochester and his England, where he is a disenfranchised second son, and Antoinette and her Caribbean, where she belongs neither to the wealthy whites or the freed slaves.

Wide Sargasso Sea evokes the Bible several times. Rochester's father and older brother betray him to Antoinette's stepfather Mason for 30,000 pounds, alluding to the 30 pieces of silver that Judas Iscariot takes from the Romans for betraying Christ. There are numerous references to a rooster or cock crowing at key moments, as the cock did after Peter had denied Christ three times. The Christian allusions are intermixed with the presence of obeah throughout-just as the Christian faith and obeah beliefs from Africa became intermingled in the Caribbean.

Reality and dream are equally inseparable. "Is England like a dream? . . . She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up." The unnamed husband (Rochester) retorts, "Well, that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream." Their erotic life is no less a dream. "I watched her die many times . . . Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. . . . It was at night that I felt danger and would try to forget it and push it away."

Rhys, saddled with the pre-determined ending of Jane Eyre, manipulates its foreshadowing and symbolism brilliantly. Rochester says, "I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place." Obeah woman Christophine responds, "You choose what you give, eh?" In a return to the beginning, Antoinette, determined mad by an equally mad Rochester, burns down Thornfield Hall, just as her own childhood home was burnt by the freed slaves who held her and her mother in such contempt ("white cockroach").

There are seemingly endless layers of meaning within the slight 112 pages of Wide Sargasso Sea, about ethnic and national identities, about imperialistic and patriarchical repression, about madness, and about the relative relationship between reality and dream. Ultimately, Antoinette reclaims her identity and reality through a dream-and with her death. The more times you read this rich novel about a poor woman, the more you will discover.

Diane L. Schirf, 8 December 2002.

Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: I absolutely love this book! The imagery is startling and fresh, the atmosphere almost chaotically alive, and the voices are clear, not at all ponderous reading. Though many who have read Jane Eyre worry that they will not like Rhys's portrayal of Rochester, they should not skip this gem! Rochester is another person in Bronte's novel and says himself that he regrets his earlier actions. "Wide Sargasso Sea" is the best book I've read in a long time; treat yourself!

Rating:
Summary: Ugghhh...
Review: What an awful book! It was not anything I'd read again!

Rating:
Summary: "Less than Zero," starring Mr. Rochester
Review: I read this book because it's on the reading list for an English class I was thinking of taking -- I don't think I'll take the class after all!

The main male character in the story is supposed to be Mr. Rochester from "Jane Eyre," and the story centers around his relationship with his first wife, Bertha Mason (in "Wide Sargasso Sea" also named Antoinette Cosway). In "Jane Eyre," Bertha doesn't really figure much and was supposed to have been a madwoman from a long line of hereditary schizophrenics and idiots. But in "Wide Sargasso Sea" Bertha/Antoinette is really a nice, healthy, poor little rich girl, and it is Rochester's unkind, unsympathetic, hot-and-cold English ways that make her go crazy. An important idea in "Wide Sargasso Sea," in fact the premise that Jean Rhys sets out to prove, is that the portrayal of Rochester in "Jane Eyre" was a whitewash, and that he was really not a nice guy at all.

I really wanted to take this class so I worked hard at keeping my mind open, but I've gotten to page 160 and can't go on anymore. If this is Mr. Rochester, I'm Tom Wolfe.

In "Wide Sargasso Sea," for instance, Rochester is fully aware that he is marrying for money and he deliberately lies to Bertha/Antoinette, telling her he loves her. This Rochester is also a miser. He is sexually predacious and sleeps with one of the servants where Bertha/Antoinette can hear them in an (unforeshadowed and unexplained) attempt to use sex to mess with Bertha's/Antoinette's mind.

All right, that's not at all the Rochester in "Jane Eyre," but let's make allowances because he is 20 years younger at the time of "Wide Sargasso Sea" -- let's suppose that in "Jane Eyre," with age, he has become more honest, more sober, more generous. But he is prudent and refrains from telling Jane this version of earlier events. (Highly unlikely since he told her other unflattering things about himself, but vaguely possible -- let's close one eye and keep reading.)

But as we read on we stumble upon lots of other collateral evidence that Rhys' Rochester is really not Rochester, in fact is no man at all. For example: Mr. Rochester talks not as he does in "Jane Eyre," expressively and refinedly, in long, complex sentences with a poet's range of vocabulary, but almost exactly the same way that the other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea talk -- in often lyrical, but choppy and incomplete sentences. And sometimes he's downright awkward: for instance, on P. 69, Mr. Rochester looks at the countryside around him in wonder. " 'What an extreme green,' was all I could say," he tells us. Ouch.

Okay, in "Jane Eyre" it wasn't really Mr. Rochester who was talking, it was Jane telling us what Mr. Rochester said, so maybe it was Jane's eloquence, not his. But as the story progesses, he gets more and more un-Rochesterlike and the world of the book less and less early 19th century. Rochester and Antoinette hang out at her house all day for weeks on end: no local English gentry, travellers, or missionaries visit them; Rochester never goes out for long, brisk, English walks or, better yet, horseback rides; he doesn't think of work or any sort of industry at all. Even if he is supposedly getting over a fever, this is simply not English behavior.

Towards the end, in fact, Rochester's voice and character is completely indistinguishable from Bertha/Antoinette's. On page 149, the housekeeper is scolding him and he says, "I couldn't bear any more and again I went out of the room..." And in the next paragraph: "...it seemed to me that everything round me was hostile. The telescope drew away and said don't touch me." (Ooh, that hurts, all right.)

On p. 154 we learn why Rhys needed to rename Bertha "Antoinette" (besides the fact that Bertha didn't sound pretty to her 20th century ears) when Rochester admits that he, in a Freudian slip, started calling her Marionette -- this as proof of his wily "Gaslight"-type intention to psychologically destroy her. (Wow! Proof that, even in those days, men were just like they are now! Primo deconstruction, Rhys!) Rochester admits this, by the way, in the middle of a long tete-a-tete with Bertha/Antoinette's black servant, whom for some (again unforeshadowed and unexplained) reason he suddenly starts treating as an equal, even an intimate, where before he had logically held himself aloof from the servants. He even, on page 158, asks her opinion on how much money he should have to settle on Bertha if he left her! (That's when I had to leave!)

I've given the book two stars because Rhys writes well and often prettily. But she's simply not versatile enough, in voice or in psychology, to take on such a task as she has here.

Rating:
Summary: Who was the madwoman in Mr. Rochester's attic?
Review: Jean Rhys, the troubled author who was far ahead of her time in the 1920's, felt a strange kinship with Antoinette or Bertha Mason, the madwoman locked in the attic in Bronte's "Jane Eyre." From the first time Rhys read "Jane Eyre" she knew she would someday write her story because she felt she'd lived it.

Like Antoinette, Rhys grew up in the Caribbean, a troubled and hermetic world of Creoles, colonists and former slaves. Antoinette is truly a loner--the reversal of family fortunes causes her to be rejected by her own people, and despised by those who previously were on a lower rung of society. Throughout the novel, Antoinette is used, buffeted and never in charge of her own life. She feels that, as a woman, she is an object, not a person. As a woman, she is not in charge of her ultimate destiny, and this provides the conflict for the novel. Her madness is only an extension of this isolation and rejection.

What makes Rhys a masterful novelist is her use of conversation and immediate events to describe the world in which Antoinette lives. There are no long passages of exposition; we see the world only through the eyes of the characters, mostly at the same time that they experience it. However, the immediate events and conversation or narration are so cleverly constructed that the reader sees through the narrator's eyes and can really see and feel the surroundings. This intimate point of view puts the reader in the skin of the character, but can be a bit confusing because we cannot always rely on the veracity of the narration. The point of view itself switches in the novel from first person to third person, in the second part, and back to first in the third and final portion, where Antoinette is locked in the attic.

The novel is in no way a re-write or version of "Jane Eyre." In "Jane Eyre", the madwoman is not really a character--she's a symbol for evil, for carnal and worldly desires yielded to without regard for the soul. "Wide Sargasso Sea" develops the madwoman into a character. Rhys slyly copies the beautiful symmetry of "Jane Eyre", where events occur in a sort of repetition; in "Jane Eyre", the heroine must leave a hostile home and find a haven, which then becomes hostile because it fails to nourish her soul with love (Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield and then Marsh House. Only when Jane can marry her Mr. Rochester on HER terms, does she find a true home.) In "Wide Sargasso Sea", Antoinette's home burns twice, a similar use of symbolism, here representing rejection by the world.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" is often listed as a "must-read" book --it certainly is a unique book and was far ahead of its time when Rhys wrote it. It's really worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: It's hard to write a book when everyone knows the ending....
Review: I am not a fan of "Jane Eyre", I am a fan of Jean Rhys. In my opinion "Wide Sargasso Sea" is far better written than "Jane Eyre." It is a good and insightful book, but I must admit, while I don't expect happy endings, that it is a bit frustrating knowing what happens to a character before even reading the book. I know exactly what will happen to this character in the end (not that I expect a happy ending, especially from Jean Rhys). That being said - I think it was a pretty good idea for a book. She took this character out of Jane Eyre who basically has not purpose other than to have created children and to keep Jane from being able to marry (if there's more to it than that, forgive me, it has been a long time since I read Jane Eyre and I didn't really like it), and she turned her into this amazingly three dimensional character as she follows her descent into madness, helped along by her husband.

The writing, as I would expect by Rhys is very descriptive and beautiful and the style of switching back and forth between the characters is quite interesting. Again, Rhys has written a very compelling novel.

Rating:
Summary: Wide Saragasso Sea
Review: The most impressive part of this novel is the beautifuly descriptive detail that Ms. Rhys uses to describe life in the Carribean. The book also deals with two highly charged issues- colonialism and slavery.

Antionette is half creole and half English and never fits in in either society. The whites can not fully accept her because of her color and the natives hate her for being the offspring of a slave owner. Antionette's mother loses her sanity after the natives set fire to the family own and kill Antionette's little brother. These events leave Antionette emotionally sacrred and isolated. Native surspicions and black magic lay in the undercurrent.

Antoinette is eventually driven mad by the will of her controlling husband who has no inkling of the truth behind the stories that have circulated about his wife.

Rating:
Summary: Butchers Edward Rochester
Review: Writing a novel which attempts to tell the story of the prologue of or the afterword to a great novel is always a high-risk undertaking. Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" is no finer example of how this type of novel can crash and burn.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" is Rhys's attempt to relate the story of Antoinette Cosway, the mad woman in the attic of Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". In "Jane Eyre" all we learn about her is that she is Edward Rochester's wife. She has gone mad and Rochester now keeps her secured in his attic. She eventually burns down Rochester's house and kills herself in the process. Bronte never gave any reason for Mrs. Rochester's madness nor even does she have Rochester himself explain it.

Rhys uses "Wide Sargasso Sea" to explain Mrs. Rochester's descent in to madness. Before becoming Mrs. Rochester, Cosway is a Creole heiress on a Caribbean island. The island setting is a mixture of humidity, sexual tension, voodoo magic, and steamy darkness. It's easy to see how someone might go insane in such a setting.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" does not fail so much for its depiction of the young Mrs. Rochester but for its depiction of Edward Rochester. Rhys's description of Rochester in these early years is so out of character with what he is in "Jane Eyre" as to be an entirely different man all together. Rhys butchers Bronte's original description of Rochester to create her own plot.

Herein lies the danger of tampering with a major literary character like Edward Rochester. Telling the back story of the deranged Mrs. Rochester is not dangerous because Bronte never fleshed out the character. However, she did do so with Rochester and Rhys paints a picture of him very different from Bronte's.

Telling the history of Mrs. Rochester was not a bad idea and could have made for a very good read. Rhys however botches it the moment she brings Edward Rochester on to the stage as someone entirely different from how Bronte painted him.