Wide Sargasso Sea

 

I made mention earlier that Jean Rhys wrote a parallel novel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I also made mention that it is a worthy edition to Charlotte’s deeper narrative within her Gothic romance. (At its heart, Jane Eyre is just that, regardless its explorations of class, sexuality, religion, and feminism, wrapped within its bildungsroman format.)

So too is Wide Sargasso Sea; but where JE is rather melodramatic at times (especially in regard to its romantic exchanges), WSS is anything but. Hers is powerfully visceral in the modern sense where Charlotte Bronte’s novel is steeped in its Victorian sensibilities. Indeed, it is extremely modern in its bald-faced condemnation of what passed as normal at the dawn of the Victorian Age.

Georgian and Victorian novels rarely make mention of the British Empire’s practice of slavery on its West Indian plantations. Readers have to come to that realisation themselves. If they do. (I wonder how many do, really, as the narratives of novels of the day focus instead on how dashing the bourgeoisie were on their home shores, merely making mention that Mr. ___ make 20,000 pounds a year, and not how they made such a princely sum.) One need not guess in WSS. Edward Rochester (never named) is sent to Jamaica to land the wife of his family’s choosing, whose plantations were once explicitly called out for that practice. The family he marries into, although not slave-owning then, had history of just that prior to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, whose enacting impoverished the long-standing affluent Creole family.

The novel is largely not Edward’s story, however. It is Bertha’s, Edward’s mad wife discovered in Edward Rochester’s Thornfield attic in Jane Eyre, long since hidden away so as to bury what would surely have been a family scandal. Or should I say that it is Antoinette Cosway’s …. 

Let’s back up. Bertha Mason? Antoinette Cosway? They are one and the same. Jean Rhys had to do a little smoothing out in her rewriting our madwoman’s story. She has right to. Jean Rhys, a 4^th generation Creole of Welsh and Scottish descent, was a Dominican born (that’s the island of Dominica and not the Dominical Republic) British writer, who grew up in the West Indies. As she might thus know a thing or two about the West Indies, Jean Rhys can make some minor adjustments to Charlotte Bronte’s tale that do not meet her understanding of the islands.

Her decisions bring this novel to life. We learn a thing or two about West Indies history, about the culture there in the 19^th Century, about the stratums of race and society and poverty, and about the lingering hatred of the West Indian Blacks for the Creoles who owned them and oversaw the plantations. We’re treated to sights and sounds and smells, to dense forests, crashing seas, blinding days and humid nights aflutter with moths and abuzz with the cacophony of the unseen, and of the corruption of sickly-sweet orchids. Just enough to inform us that this is not an English novel; this is a Creole novel.

We follow Antoinette, not long after the collapse of Coulibri, the now impoverished sugar plantation she grows up on. Antoinette’s mother is forced to remarry, and their family’s return to affluence enrages those “native” blacks who once toiled under their oppression. Antoinette’s (simple-minded) younger brother perishes as Coulibri burns; her mother is driven mad by the loss. Antoinette is eventually “sold off” to an English aristocrat, who ultimately learns that his bride’s family is plagued by feeblemindedness and madness. He ceases to love her, and Antoinette’s precarious emotional state collapses, lending credence to the lies he’s heard concerning her family.

The story unfolds as we expect, its plot ultimately dictated by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Gothic novel.

The two novels are as similar as they are wildly different. As they must be. Charlotte Bronte’s novel is rooted in the English countryside she knew and understood. In Gentry and Aristocracy, in country manors and in charity boarding schools (otherwise known as orphanages). Her heroine is a governess, a calling she understood all too well. Charlotte knew little of the West Indies, a likely mythic land told of by few she knew and far between by those who very likely had interests there (sugar) but likely never set foot there personally. Hearsay, we shall say. Jean Rhys knew that world intimately from personal experience. I can only imagine how shocked and betrayed she must have felt coming “face-to-face” with Bertha Mason, that dark-skinned, animalistic, “madwoman in the attic,” and how she became compelled to humanise that unsympathetic, homicidal villain.

She did. Antoinette Cosway is as human and sympathetic as Bertha Mason can not be. I, personally, did grieve for Bertha, shut up as she was, under lock and key, denied sympathetic companionship and any pretense of humane compassion. Is it any wonder that she was mad? Were she not before being entombed, she must surely have been driven to be after years of confinement. 

I must say that I’m very happy to have read this on the heels of Jane Eyre. I wasn’t sure if I would be. I expected it to merely be a feminist rant against Charlotte’s novel. It is, I suppose. But it is so mush more, as well. One should not read one without the other, to my mind, because, in the end, both Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway are both remarkable characters. Jane is strong and pragmatic. She has a certain autonomy, ingrained in her by her boarding school upbringing. She is independent when women then could rarely claim to be. She is lucky in that regard because Antoinette was never given the opportunity to become what Jane could. She never had independence, never had control of her inheritance, no money, no marketable skills – no future; and she paid the price for that.