They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks.I read Wide Sargasso Sea as a companion piece to my recent experience with Jane Eyre, and while I don't tend to bother much with these parallel stories, I have to admit that I was interested to learn what a later writer might have to say about Rochester's secret in the attic at Thornfield. So little is known about Bertha – other than her having come from the Caribbean and that the young Rochester felt himself tricked by his father into marrying a sick woman for her dowry – so I was further intrigued to learn that the author who decided to take on Bertha's backstory was herself a Caribbean-born transplant to England; I sensed that Jean Rhys must have had something unique and pertinent to add. And after finishing this book, and thinking that I was probably missing some of its deeper meaning, I was pleased to find this article (which is, helpfully, the review/overview of a biography of Rhys), and so much more clicked into place: Bertha is Rhys – the exotic bloom left to wilt in chill England; kept at the pleasure of men who don't want her; never fully crossing over that wide Sargasso Sea – and surely that is the author's story to tell. While I was intrigued by Wide Sargasso Sea on its own terms, in the context of Rhys' life experience, I find it elevated to something more; it deserves its place on the lists of “classics” on its own merits.
I never found the meaning of the title within the text, so I had to turn to Google to discover that it refers to a stretch of sea between the Caribbean and England that is so choked with sargassum (seaweed) and becalmed tides that it became legendary among sailors for bedeviling passage between the Old and New Worlds; so legendary that the Sargasso Sea took on a fantastical role in sailor lore and inspired SciFi writers of the early twentieth century. I had only encountered the imagery once before – in William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch– and after now finishing Rhys' book, I can see that she and Burroughs would have had many of the same influences. And after learning (from that article cited above) that Rhys had been one of the expats-in-Paris writing community in the 1920s (indeed, she was given her pen-name by Ford Madox Ford: and what does that say about Rochester rechristening Antoinette as Bertha?), her dream-fever, stream-of-consciousness style hearkens also to James Joyce – while being so much more accessible than Joyce (or Burroughs, for that matter). The idea of this famed Sargasso Sea impeding the passage between the Caribbean and England is the perfect metaphor for the barriers that Rochester and Bertha/Antoinette find between themselves; and the barriers that Antoinette and the other Creoles/Europeans find between themselves and the newly freed Black slaves. What a perfect title!
I appreciate that Rhys decided to play with Charlotte Brontë's timeline and move her story into the aftermath of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The resentment displayed towards Antoinette's widowed mother from the newly freed slaves is a palpable menace from the beginning; a menace that becomes manifest with fire and poisoning and murder; a rock thrown at a little girl that sends her into a bed-bound fever for weeks. Young Antoinette secretly watching as her delusional mother is kissed “full on the mouth” by the caretaker meant to watch over her, while the housekeeper observes and laughs, was one of the creepiest things I've ever read; that madness could be brought on by such environmental factors seems entirely plausible.
When Rochester enters the picture, he doesn't seem to have mentally crossed over that wide Saragossa Sea himself: He hates the intense colours of the Caribbean, can't stand the flowers and their perfume, is laid low by fever for weeks upon his arrival. He performs his filial duty by wooing Antoinette, but soon she, too, is an object of this hatred:
I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, 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.The story proceeds as we know it must – the ocean-crossing, the attic, life and romance carrying on below – but the Bertha we see in the attic isn't quite the animal we've met before.
When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don't know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it.I totally appreciate what Rhys achieved here – I don't know if it's apocryphal, but I learned that the first time she read Jane Eyre as a girl newly arrived in England, Rhys was offended by the notion of Bertha's missing back story (as though saying she was “from the Caribbean” was a full biography to the Victorian reader) – and it would seem, from her period of obscurity and self-imposed banishment in middle age, the book that Rhys was born to write. I loved the dreamy scenery, the unannounced shifting points-of-view, the feverishness of the whole. What it has to say about isolation, powerlessness, voicelessness was pertinent to the time period in which Wide Sargasso Sea is set, is refracted nicely through the lens of the time of its publication (1966), and remains relevant today. Loved it.
