The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys by Elaine Savory

Author:Elaine Savory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

In a 1959 letter, written whilst she was working on Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys described her earlier novel, Voyage in the Dark, as expressing how “the West Indies started knocking at my heart.” She added: “That (the knocking) has never stopped” (L:171). She felt she could only write “for love” about two places, Paris and Dominica.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a departure from Rhys’s other full-length fiction. Firstly, the narrative is split between two first-person narrators, Antoinette, who opens and closes the novel, and her unnamed husband. Telling a good deal of this story in a man’s consciousness had a kind of rehearsal in Sasha’s appropriation of some aspects of sexual and emotional dysfunction associated conventionally with maleness. Then the story is highly intertextual with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys’s version is mostly a prequel, the story of the woman who is mad in the attic and Rochester when he was young, but in the last part Antoinette dreams of setting fire to the house, which joins Rhys’s story to Brontë’s.37 Rhys revisioned Jane Eyre’s lurid description of the Creole wife, which reflected nineteenth-century British stereotypes about white Creoles, as well as the role of dreams and ghosts and the colour red in Jane Eyre. Brontë gave Rhys a wonderfully grand level of violence for her last protagonist: in Bronte’s novel, the house is destroyed and Rochester is deeply scarred and loses his sight. The intertextuality with Jane Eyre also means Rhys can merely reference this violence without having to repeat it. In Wide Sargasso Sea the husband is not named, an effective retort by Rhys to the renaming or erasure of names performed by colonialists and planters: I refer to him here as “Rochester.” The importance of self-naming and the misnaming of others as an aspect of dominance reverberate often in Rhys’s fiction: after all, she renamed herself.

This story also gave Rhys a vehicle to explore her difficult outsider relationship with England. As for Brontë’s novel, Rhys said in a letter (L:262) that she had “brooded over Jane Eyre for years.” She was, she wrote, “Vexed at her portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr Rochester.” She had reread Jane Eyre in 1957, when she felt she had nearly forgotten Creole. In 1958, she wrote: “It might be possible to unhitch the whole thing from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, but I don’t want to do that … I have got a plausible story and a plausible way of telling it” (L:153–4). She created a story full of Gothic romance, entirely different in tone and style from Good Morning, Midnight. Wide Sargasso Sea is a writing back to Jane Eyre done before such intertextuality became identified as a widespread postcolonial response to colonial literary canons. Rhys also deftly structures parallels that weave together the new story and the old, her novel and Jane Eyre (most evidently, a mad woman confined in a house she will destroy).

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