Adaptation and Appropriation by Sanders Julie;

Author:Sanders, Julie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: ‘Just another adaptation’?

During an early period of her life when she is housed and schooled in the Dominican Convent of Saint Innocenzia, the protagonist of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Mason, reads the lives of the saints. She notices that Innocenzia herself has no story in these compendious volumes: ‘We do not know her story, she is not in the book’ (Rhys 1987 [1966]: 45). This phrase could serve as an epigraph to the entire narrative. For what Rhys’s novel famously achieves is to provide a marginal character from a canonical work of English literature with a complicated history and a voice. Indeed, Patricia Waugh has suggested that by this action Rhys almost prophetically called into being postmodernism’s recurring interest in voicing the silenced or absent characters of the canon: ‘prophetically and proleptically she caught what would come to be the dominant literary concerns of the next twenty-five years: the feminist theme of the suppressed “madwoman in the attic”; the structuralist rediscovery of “intertextuality”’ (1995: 203). Waugh’s own reference here is to Gilbert and Gubar’s work of criticism The Madwoman in the Attic (2000 [1979]). This text, as Waugh suggests, postdates Rhys’s novel but encapsulates and extends her interest in the silenced female character of Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester’s first wife, Bertha.

The literal (and literary) ‘madwoman in the attic’ in Rhys’s novel is Bertha Antoinette Mason from Jamaica. In Brontë’s novel, Bertha is reduced to a mad cackle heard emanating from the upper floors of Thornfield Hall, the sub-Byronic Mr Rochester’s family home. Suffering from an hereditary form of insanity, she has been incarcerated by Rochester in an attic room watched over only by the servant Grace Poole and concealed from the world. Bertha is marginalized in the text both socially and spatially: Rochester is even prepared to undergo a bigamous marriage to Jane to conceal the truth. In practice it is during the wedding ceremony that the truth is uncovered in public, with painful results. Rhys’s correspondence, in which she describes the composition of Wide Sargasso Sea, makes it clear that she was always anxious to address the marginalization of the part-Creole Bertha:

The Creole in Charlotte Bronte’s novel is a lay figure – repulsive, which does not matter, and not once alive, which does. She’s necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls and laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry – off stage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage.

(Rhys 1985: 156)

Rhys has a personal investment in this approach, being white, West Indian and conscious always of being an outsider in the societies in which she lived. In a movement akin to those we have already explored in re-visions of Shakespearean texts, Rhys transports a marginal character from the periphery to the centre; her onstage, offstage evocations in the quoted letter are highly suggestive in this respect.

In a method comparable to other literary appropriations that seek to voice silenced or oppressed characters, Rhys achieves her aim of recuperating Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea by means of first-person narration.

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