Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Novel – 125 pages - my copy (Penguin paperback; 2001) bought frantically in December 2006 four days before my Literature exam
- 3 nods out of 5 -
Jane Eyre is noted as one of the finest novels of English fiction; enjoyed and studied by thousands each and every year. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, written one hundred years later, is less well known. But both novels share a link; the first shows the manic character of Bertha, while the second brings out Bertha’s beginnings years before Jane’s arrival.
Bringing characters back to life upon the page is popular with readers, hence the continuing – perhaps monotonous – practice of writers sticking with particular detectives and families. Such re-imagining is rarely achieved to any high level; main reasons include the reconstruction of a character at conflict with our own memory of the first reading, as well as the reconstruction occurring not by the hands of the original author, but rather by a later writer seemingly bereft of their own ideas. Wide Sargasso Sea could be targeted for both of these reasons, being written a century after the original and with the character of Bertha transformed into the sensual, emotional and human Antoinette.
Rhys succeeds in taking the reader through an action packed story of 125 pages, taking in themes of love and marriage and wider issues of slavery and race. Set in the West Indies in the post-emancipation of slavery in the 1830s, the novel charts the innocent beginnings of Bertha in her original incarnation as Antoinette. Her family are outcasts, of the old slave owning class that are hated by the people of the island. Never finding a place in society, she believes she finds acceptance with a man who remains unnamed throughout the novel, but who is clearly Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre. The young Rochester is suspicious of the island and its ways, ending the novel as Antoinette’s jailer, removing her from the place of her birth, removing her name and her nature.
The West Indies are brought to full colour, as is to be expected by the native Jean Rhys. The landscape becomes overbearing for both our and Rochester’s eyes: ‘Everything is too much…Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near’ (p.39). In many ways, it is a more alive and exciting novel than Bronte’s Jane Eyre, though its mysteriousness also acts as a barrier to truly embracing these characters.
The book ends back in more familiar climes in England, where the now branded Bertha takes a flame to Rochester’s home. ‘I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do,’ come the lines from the concluding paragraph. What comes next is the engulfing fire, of Bertha’s death and Antoinette’s final liberation.
Despite the lack of great inter-textual fiction – and Wide Sargasso Sea, despite its fans, is not “great” – the idea itself will long continue to hold sway. For instance, what became of a middle aged Holden Caulfield at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, of the early years of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, and even perhaps of the next instalment of Pooter’s The Diary of a Nobody.
Novel – 125 pages - my copy (Penguin paperback; 2001) bought frantically in December 2006 four days before my Literature exam
- 3 nods out of 5 -
Jane Eyre is noted as one of the finest novels of English fiction; enjoyed and studied by thousands each and every year. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, written one hundred years later, is less well known. But both novels share a link; the first shows the manic character of Bertha, while the second brings out Bertha’s beginnings years before Jane’s arrival.
Bringing characters back to life upon the page is popular with readers, hence the continuing – perhaps monotonous – practice of writers sticking with particular detectives and families. Such re-imagining is rarely achieved to any high level; main reasons include the reconstruction of a character at conflict with our own memory of the first reading, as well as the reconstruction occurring not by the hands of the original author, but rather by a later writer seemingly bereft of their own ideas. Wide Sargasso Sea could be targeted for both of these reasons, being written a century after the original and with the character of Bertha transformed into the sensual, emotional and human Antoinette.
Rhys succeeds in taking the reader through an action packed story of 125 pages, taking in themes of love and marriage and wider issues of slavery and race. Set in the West Indies in the post-emancipation of slavery in the 1830s, the novel charts the innocent beginnings of Bertha in her original incarnation as Antoinette. Her family are outcasts, of the old slave owning class that are hated by the people of the island. Never finding a place in society, she believes she finds acceptance with a man who remains unnamed throughout the novel, but who is clearly Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre. The young Rochester is suspicious of the island and its ways, ending the novel as Antoinette’s jailer, removing her from the place of her birth, removing her name and her nature.
The West Indies are brought to full colour, as is to be expected by the native Jean Rhys. The landscape becomes overbearing for both our and Rochester’s eyes: ‘Everything is too much…Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near’ (p.39). In many ways, it is a more alive and exciting novel than Bronte’s Jane Eyre, though its mysteriousness also acts as a barrier to truly embracing these characters.
The book ends back in more familiar climes in England, where the now branded Bertha takes a flame to Rochester’s home. ‘I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do,’ come the lines from the concluding paragraph. What comes next is the engulfing fire, of Bertha’s death and Antoinette’s final liberation.
Despite the lack of great inter-textual fiction – and Wide Sargasso Sea, despite its fans, is not “great” – the idea itself will long continue to hold sway. For instance, what became of a middle aged Holden Caulfield at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, of the early years of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, and even perhaps of the next instalment of Pooter’s The Diary of a Nobody.
