Goodreads | Wide Sargasso Sea

Kelly rated it:

03/01/08

bookshelves: fiction

recommends it for: people who loved Jane Eyre or love the gothic genre

The entire point and purpose of this novel is the atmosphere and the mood that it creates both in the minds of the character and the reader. That's really what I felt was the most accomplished thing here. It was very gothic, but managed not to feel antiquated or like all we needed was a few vampires and we had an Anne Rice novel. Rhys makes you feel the scents, the breezes and the raging emotions of the west indies that she is presenting, and I always love that in a novel.

The narrative poin...more The entire point and purpose of this novel is the atmosphere and the mood that it creates both in the minds of the character and the reader. That's really what I felt was the most accomplished thing here. It was very gothic, but managed not to feel antiquated or like all we needed was a few vampires and we had an Anne Rice novel. Rhys makes you feel the scents, the breezes and the raging emotions of the west indies that she is presenting, and I always love that in a novel.

The narrative point is to convey the other side of the story of Bertha, the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre. I thought she did a fairly good job of explaining to us how the woman ended up the way she was, and showing her slow descent into madness due to isolation and rejection that slowly breaks her down over the course of her life. For a slim volume, it manages to deal with a lot of issues, including virulent racism, colonial relations, sexual relations, and a post-slavery society. The idea of covering what things were like just after the abolition of slavery was especially interesting to me- how things didn't /really/ change, but just enough to make the society there an uncertain, toxic place to live.

The major problems I had with the piece relate to characterization and motivation. I have no idea why Rochester acted the way he did to his bride. We don't see enough of his thought process, except right at the very end, when he's already made his decision about her and we're moving into the Rochester and Bertha of the Jane Eyre we know, or right at the beginning, when the two of them were happy. I don't get why he starts to be the way he is to her, and the book doesn't explain it. It just happens. If you accept it, fine, but his character to that point doesn't explain that. He's not believable in that crucial middle section that drives his wife mad. She is, and so are the rest of the characters (though I'm uncertain about using almost the entire cast of black characters as a substitute for gothic monsters- with the exception of the terrifying Christophine.)

I just have to say too... I am so over these drowning Ophelia characters, who are so incredibly fragile and need saving all the time, and cannot possibly fend for themselves. The novel does explain how she got that way, but that rather annoyed me too. She got every excuse in the world to be helpless, and then didn't overcome that. This doesn't detract from how beautifully Jean Rhys paints a mind slowly succumbing to insanity, its just a personal thing that I've grown tired of.

Overall though, I'd recommend it. It won't take more than an afternoon or two to read, and its a very well done example of a mood piece. ...less

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Capitu rated it:

(review of isbn 0140189831)

02/11/08

bookshelves: 2008, chick-bookclub

Read in February, 2008

recommended to Capitu by: chicklit.com bookclub

Wide Sargasso Sea was such a pleasant surprise. It was a bookclub choice from an internet forum I enjoy, and I picked it up without much knowledge of what it was about, other than the notorious Jane Eyre connection. Fan fiction is a much older concept than many of us had previously considered. But, calling it fanfiction is too narrow a definition.
Jean Rhys novella – it is quite a short book – wrestles with the human necessity of belonging, and the dire cost of not belonging. The l...more Wide Sargasso Sea was such a pleasant surprise. It was a bookclub choice from an internet forum I enjoy, and I picked it up without much knowledge of what it was about, other than the notorious Jane Eyre connection. Fan fiction is a much older concept than many of us had previously considered. But, calling it fanfiction is too narrow a definition.
Jean Rhys novella – it is quite a short book – wrestles with the human necessity of belonging, and the dire cost of not belonging. The luxuriant vegetation and climate of the Caribbean, the economic turmoil brought up by the abolition of slavery, and the distrust between European and Creole, white and black in a time ripe with revenge from past wrongs is all brought together as we follow “Antoinette/Bertha” from childhood to marriage, madness and death.
In a strange coincidence, I read “Bury the Chains”, by Adam Hochschild just a few weeks ago. In this account of the civil movement to abolish slavery in the British Empire, a few chapters are devoted to the atrocities perpetrated by slave owners in the Caribbean. And so, I read with even more interest about the relationship between former slave owners and the newly freed population.
Jean Rhys was born in the island of Dominica 60 years after the time when the events in the book take place, but her descriptions carry such depth and understanding that I can only wonder that distress must have permeated all interaction between the two communities for many generations to follow – how could it be any different after all?
But, this book is not only about the relationship dynamics within the islanders. It makes us question madness, cultural crash, colonization, machismo, sexuality and fear of sexuality, superstitions…
I did feel torn between 4 or 5 stars, because as beautiful as the prose is, the sequence of events left me feeling lost a couple of times. I had to turn back a few pages, wondering that I must had skipped a page or two, just to find out that the narration had “jumped”. But, I wonder, in a book where the characters are going mad, could the narrative be simple and linear? Also, the third part of the book – Bertha locked in an attic in England – seemed a bit contrived. It makes me speculate how the book would be like without the Jane Eyre connection. Would it had been a stronger book if we followed this character without the knowledge of where she was heading? At the end I decided on the 5 stars because its small shortcomings - if I can call them that - were greatly overshadowed by its strengths, and because it is a book that will remain with me for a long time…
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