Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

What is Wide Sargasso Sea about? - It's about many things but the one topic that arises is this:

A traumatized woman (Antoinette) is brought together with a vain hard hearted man (Mr. Rochester) and the woman will be brought low and the man will triumph through it, by force and power, breaking her down.

In M. Atwood's novel Bodily Harm, Atwood begins with this quote: 

"A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast a woman's presence...defines what can and cannot be done to her." - John Berger, Ways of seeing.

In this sense the anti-hero of this book, Antoinette is a woman who has her guards down. 

I'm reminded of Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's little speech Why we should all be feminists and she brilliantly points out that women are always in all places (since the Empire at least) been ushered to be pleasing onto men, flexible and quiet. A quiet woman is considered acceptable and ladylike. Her voice is expected to be pleasing and soft, open to interpretation. In other words, she's expected to have no will of her own, no opinion and no pre-conception of things to come. She is like the colonized land, existing on another man's prerequisite, she is to be molded or naturally fold into anything he wants and the preference is that she does so of her own accord, that she strives to not offend by her being. In Antoinette's case the provocation she makes on her society is that of sheer and quiet existence, her very being is too much for the islanders, she is essentially unwanted because she is the descendant of a slave owner it's only when she's later denied of her husbands love when she becomes loud and starts to make noise, then she's locked away. 

The topic of Wide Sargasso Sea is also Empire, it's a real depiction of what life was like post emancipation of slaves in the far colonies of Jamaica and Dominican Republic. The "poor white nigger" aka. the former slave owners now destitute and out of business are treated as the scum of the earth. The best depiction is misery. The main character of the book is Antoinette who's father died and left her mother with young children in a destitute state. The hardships on the beautiful flowery island is described from a child's view. Antoinette's mother was much affected by loss and poverty and social ostracism. The old stout black woman nanny and house-help Christophine resembles Mother Africa, she is large and doesn't waver. She believes in God but also wields old power from the continent (Ghana, Twi) Obayi = Obeah the art of healing, spells etc. A male obeah-man in the Caribbean islands could be seen as philosopher, a healer, a priest but the single mother Christophine was demonized much like medieval witches. Her involvement in the story remains much motherly, caretaking and enduring, she tries to support Antoinette but it's clear that the losses she experiences in her early childhood impacts her deeply. Antoinette like her mother too never really realizes that she's traumatized. 

The author of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys was a bit mystical, thought to be dead, but yet she lived solitary and forgotten in the 1960's England, like the woman in the attic but a hundred years later. Her publishing friends, especially Diana Athill helped row the final text to shore. In a fit of rage and as a sign of revenge towards her husband Jean Rhys allegedly burned the first manuscript. She had been struggling with the story of Jane Eyre for long because Rhys was a Creole and she needed to give voice to Bertha Mason, Rochester's "mad" wife much like Edith Stoner, in John Williams novel Stoner, would deserve to be heard. It's an admirable task to write a prequel to a story so famous as Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre. I've read it and only now after also reading Rhys novel, I realize that Rochester and Heathcliff (from Wuthering Heights written by another Brontë sister namely: Emily) have much in common, maybe they where cousins. 😅

The book was divided into three parts, in the first part the reader get's to know the childhood of Antoinette Mason (Cosway) in the second part Mr. Rochester narrates his side, at this point I become interested in his possible trauma, I want to try to understand his view too and I try to explore it, as I will shortly explain. Then in the third part of the book Antoinette is on her way to England with Rochester and finally spirals into madness as she is locked away. 

Mr. Rochester's trauma

In Jane Eyre we come to know what the ill tempered rich guy really thinks of his wife who is already by then locked away in the attic "Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family: idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard! - as I found out after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points." 

No! In Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester doesn't struggle to say the N word, he didn't find a problem as the islanders in the fact that Antoinette's father had been a slave trader but he found great fault in Anette or Bertha, the mother of Antoinette for the fact that her mind faltered under the burden of the white mans sins. 

Jean Rhys writes him up as a liar because in her story the married life is at first bliss, and Antoinette aka. Bertha is not mad. Right after the wedding Rochester was very happy with his wife, happiness continued until a jealous and embittered relative set out in the name of "Christian duty" to explain some family histories hoping to gain 500 pounds. 

The truth of Berthas mother was that Antoinette's she had lost her husband, then her fortune then her sickly little son in the fire set to their home. Unlike the servant woman Christophine the real Bertha didn't have the grit to continue. After these "revelations" ill tempered in Rochester began to malevolently destroy his wife. Why? - Because she wasn't perfect. That's my theory, based on the text. He felt like he had been tricked into the marriage again and again. The psychological terror he instilled is by repeatedly calling his wife "Bertha" Antoinette pleads with her husband and seeks remedies from her former nanny, but no obeah tricks cure him rather they backfire and affect Antoinette. Then there started to be talk of taking her off the island and far across to England. Antoinette pleaded with her ill willed husband "You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know that's obeah too." 

Since childhood Antoinette had bad forebodings and dreams that a bad man would come to take her away and thus it all unfolded, her dreams came true. It's a sad world where a woman's highest dream is that her worst nightmares won't come true. Rochester realized that England for his wife was like a dream, a place where all would be well. Christophine tries to warn him from going back and she questions weather England exists at all. It's not that she's an illiterate uneducated woman, what she means is that England exists only in our mind, this is the same idea that I learned in Les Mis France for the French is only in their head. 

Eventually trough hazy psyched up ways as Antoinette is locked up in the attic of the Rochester castle she realized that it was hers to set the house on fire and so she did leaving Rochester's fort ablaze. 

While reading Jane Eyre one feels with the passions of the young governess and middle aged saucy master of the house. Mr. Rochester loses his sight in the fire and his wife, since Antoinette throws herself off the roof and dies. Then one finds oneself wiping tears as the poor bastard Mr. Rochester is blinded and finally humbled, groping around the oak tree for his true love's hand. But one doesn't muster any compassion for the madwoman in the attic who by then is dead. And that is the reason Jean Rhys had to had a say. 

Great literary critic John Sutherland in his book How to be well read - a guide to 500 great novels meanly recounts that Jean Rhys was a wino in her 70's who was cooped up drunk in a shed in Devon scribbling Wide Sargasso Sea on a notepad. Yet Sutherland counts her book as one of the 500 finest that Western literature has to offer and I'd say the same. Sutherland says that Rhys wrote a life for Bertha with the most delicate artistic tact, as a side dish she paints some character into Mr. Rochester but this time, one find no great sympathy for him yet a full picture emerges from both Brontës and Rhys' work: he is a man without honor haunted by his own smallness. 

Rochester suffered from inferiority complex towards his brother and was constantly trying to please his father. He wrote to his father talking of his illness, it's unclear what he suffered from except fevers, and one is wondering perhaps there was an illness of another sort. His small-mindedness concerns money and greed. At a point Antoinette tries to get away and then he is gripped with jealousy and doesn't want to let her go for the fear that she might meet another man. She is not frightened but she's ready to burn, to go down in the flames with him. Only he doesn't go down in the flames, he survives and then finds true love in a much younger governess otherwise known as Jane Eyre.

"Women must have spunks to live in this wicked world" in the end, for me the Ghanaian stout Mama wins, she puts her big foot down and has the final say. Bertha Masons short fly through the attic window and cross the sky was not the F*ck you finger that the world was waiting for, but it was her own kind of life. I was and will continue to be profoundly affected by this book in a good way. For such a short novel it had a myriad of layers. It's not a happy feel good read, it's food for thought. 

Finally in the end notes I learned more about why the book is called Wide Sargasso Sea at all, it has to do with the fact that Sargasso weed widely covered the seas that the colonizers sailed on. Their ships would get tangled in the weeds and wrecked. The weeds are like the ways to women, like Herland or Amazonia, you'll never really find it, and you'll seek and seek for that female Eldorado but how can you find something that you won't allow to exist on it's own perquisite, as it is, as she was, as she is now?

Mr. Rochester doesn't have a trauma, he's just a dick. Women and colonized countries and people have a lot in common, it's like living under a lid, and all your life you just want to get out, a fine entrapment. So console yourself with the fact that Babylon, and the finest of kingdoms, as well as the Empire and the West more in general has already been brought down. There is only one Kingdom incorruptible by mankind. I find it befitting to end with a psalm, number 24 from the Bible: 

The earth is the Lords, and the fullness thereof 

For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in His holy place?

He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul into vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.  

Much as Jean Rhys struggled with Charlotte Brontës novel, in the end they both go together, and the grand lesson is that in the end Rochester was humbled and made it hopefully to the holy hill but at what prize? Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea is not about the fate of one man but of the life of two women, and what it means to live and to love.

Here's a picture of Jean Rhys when she was young