Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Let me first say that this literary masterpiece deserved every last ounce of global acclaim that it won - so special that no film adaptation has come anywhere near to the book. This is the perfect novel, in form, in cadence, in concept. Pure magic.
That said, this glittering tome is my least favourite, plot-wise, of Jean's novels. Maybe because it is a standalone, with little in common with any of her other, less appraised works.
She herself saw the irony that this atypical epic, published in her dotage, from handwritten scrawl, was what it took to deem her a literary luminary. Of all the plaudits and her prestigious literary award, she said only, in pure Jean Rhys form: 'It came too late.' Only her old cult following could appreciate this understatement. For too many long decades she had been unfairly underestimated and shunned by highbrow critics and readership masses alike.
Rhys had lived in obscurity after her previous work, Good Morning, Midnight, was published in 1939. Wide Sargasso Sea, her astonishing and unanticipated comeback, became her most successful novel, winning her the 1967 WH Smith Literary Award and bringing her back into the public eye.
A prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, this is the backstory of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her Caribbean youth to her unhappy marriage to an unnamed English gentleman (implied as Jane Eyre's 'Mr. Rochester'). The story elaborates on how her captor-husband came to move Antoinette to England, rename her Bertha, falsely declare her insane and lock her away in his attic, where she then actually descends into madness.
Rhys uses multiple narrative voices (Antoinette's, Rochester's, and Grace Poole's), masterfully merging this plot with that of Jane Eyre. For the most part, however, protagonist Antoinette relates her life story from colonial childhood, to arranged marriage, to her attic room confines under servant Grace Poole's watch in [Rochester mansion] Thornfield Hall.
The novel begins circa 1834 after the Abolition Act ended slavery in the British Empire. Part One, set in Jamaica's Coulibri, is narrated by Antoinette who reflects, fragmentally, on her childhood, her mother's mental instability and her mentally impaired brother's tragic death.
Part Two alternates between perspectives of Antoinette and her unnamed English husband during their honeymoon in Dominica's Granbois. Antoinette's childhood nurse, Christophine, travels with the newlyweds as servant. We witness the advent of Antoinette's mental downfall after her husband receives a malicious blackmailing letter from one Daniel, an acquisitive native, demanding hush money and claiming to be Antoinette's distant illegitimate brother. For good measure, Daniel also alleges Antoinette carries a hereditary half-madness.
Loyal Christophine, resenting the groom's semi-belief in Daniel's crazed claims, aggravates matters with her open hostility. Perplexed and frustrated, Antoinette's new husband, feeling alienated in this foreign land, eventually lashes out, becoming openly unfaithful to his bride. Our heroine's swelling paranoia and despair at her failing marriage unbalance her already frail emotional state.
Part Three, the novel's shortest section, is from the perspective of Antoinette, now renamed Bertha. She is confined in the attic of Thornfield Hall which she calls the 'Great House'. We follow her relationship with servant-guard Grace Poole, as Antoinette's captor-husband hides her from the world. Promising to see her more, he pursues relationships with other women (eventually with his new young governess, Jane Eyre). In a final act of despair, Antoinette/Bertha decides to take her own life.
Her magnum opus, this is not your typical Jean Rhys, not that younger, wilder Jean her select following knew and loved, but it has nevertheless been justifiably hailed as one of the most important works of English literature ever penned.
Anyone who reads would be a fool to pass on this one.
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