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Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

Start date: August 1, 2018

Finish date: August 31, 2018

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Jan 13, 2012 Antonomasia rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novella, 2013, decade-1960s, 1001-books, 1993-97

[3] First of all, I'm not a huge fan of Jane Eyre - that doesn't mean I hate it, simply that I'd rate it 3.5 and call it a YA fairytale. I'm also no fan of Mr. Rochester: the only male heroes in mid-Victorian literature I ever went crushy-crushy over were Sidney Carton, Will Ladislaw and Gilbert Markham. Not into cruel.
And I don't generally have a problem with writers basing characters on themselves and their experiences. Lots of books I love probably wouldn't exist if authors didn't do that.
Bu [3] First of all, I'm not a huge fan of Jane Eyre - that doesn't mean I hate it, simply that I'd rate it 3.5 and call it a YA fairytale. I'm also no fan of Mr. Rochester: the only male heroes in mid-Victorian literature I ever went crushy-crushy over were Sidney Carton, Will Ladislaw and Gilbert Markham. Not into cruel.
And I don't generally have a problem with writers basing characters on themselves and their experiences. Lots of books I love probably wouldn't exist if authors didn't do that.
But if you're rewriting someone else's characters and grafting your own experiences and thoughts on to them in ways that don't correlate with details in the original, I won't be happy with that. There's even a paragraph from JE in WSS that shows Rhys hasn't fully explained Rochester's change from nice boy to bastard - he wasn't very nice in the first place in her version. (Presumably he is based on various ex-lovers, what they said or what the depresssed, traumatised Rhys assumed they were thinking about her.) And I remember always having the impression from JE that Grace Poole really wasn't that bad.

It's not quite fair to expect meticulous scholarship; that wasn't the author's modus operandi. As Andrea Ashworth vividly describes in her introduction, Jean Rhys wrote this in her seventies, alcoholic and chronically very depressed, in a cold run-down cottage after a miserable, unsuccessful life. She wrote on scraps of paper which were pieced together into the novel and it shows. There are some odd shifts in attitude and outlook in the characters which make perfect sense when I imagine scenes and paragraphs written at different times by someone who was forgetful or drunk. (It's a lot easier to notice changes like these as a reader than a writer. They are also exactly the sort of thing which makes me cautious about my own writing: I would most probably do the same, unable to fulfil my own standards.)

The book is also a perfect example of what for me is The Wrong Kind of Depressing. It made me feel mired and ... urgh... I could see exactly why, in my teens, I abandoned it during Part One. (Whereas some books I failed to finish at that time I now really like, e.g. Possession.)It was such a slog - the rows in Part Two were the heaviest going - and I would have given up again had it been much longer than its 150 pages. I don't like to fling at someone else an accusation which still echoes from my childhood "Why do you always have to be so negative?" (Which actually was said by someone who I didn't want to tell many things I liked because they were too precious, and who was rarely capable of reflecting joy and exuberance, instead flattening it.) Antoinette / Rhys never goes in for "it could be worse" when she's on the island, when most of the time it could be, or any amplification of the enjoyable or beautiful bits, or effort to enjoy things and squeeze out what juice there is, or any humour. Some people certainly are that depressed for many years, for their whole lives, and that's still a valid life; but it makes me feel worse to read something written from that perspective.
(Rhys, when she was finally successful, simply said it was too late. "Sigh ... I'd have liked this to happen when I was younger and better looking, but better late than never I suppose" - that I could understand. I think she lacked any possible image - being someone who ran on image and was too tired or miserable to envision a new one - of an older woman as being interesting, a female old roué, bedsit poet, literary elder states(wo)man.)

That doesn't mean I begrudge her success: I'm terribly glad for her that it happened - what a relief after everything else she went through. I really don't want to read her other books, but suspect they might be better as literature than WSS. Which I think was a fortunate case of the right concept at the right time. (It is good on the economic / postcolonial side: wife as faulty product - which the man was himself pressured into obtaining by others and social strucure generally. Also got me wondering to what extent the emotional and legal sides can be seen separately. But as a whole it could have benefited from even tighter editing, regardless of whether I personally found it too relentlessly miserable in its earlier half. TBH I'd probably get more enjoyment from having to write essays on it than from reading the thing.) ...more

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Nov 27, 2021 Anu rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, world, feminism, challenge_travel

It's been touted as the prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë but I wouldn't have known so if I wasn't told about it. This books stands on it's own and I liked it better than it's so called sequel. Now Wide Sargasso Sea is much more of a gothic novel than Jane Eyre and is far less puritanical.

"It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders."

The world of British slave owners in c It's been touted as the prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë but I wouldn't have known so if I wasn't told about it. This books stands on it's own and I liked it better than it's so called sequel. Now Wide Sargasso Sea is much more of a gothic novel than Jane Eyre and is far less puritanical.

"It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders."

The world of British slave owners in colonies such as Jamaica and Trinidad was completely unknown to me. This book opened my eyes to the fraught relationship among the ancestors of these slave owners, the imported slaves and the island locals. At the time that this story takes place, the whites aren't rich anymore, abandoned by the British government, they have become the laughing stock among descendants of the slaves. The story is also a more personal account of the struggles that Antoinette and her mother Annette have with their Creole heritage and their colonialist circumstances in later life.

You can almost smell the wild tropical flowers and feel the humidity and heat on your skin while reading this book. The atmosphere created by Jean Rhys is at once sensuous and oppressive. Antoinette's situation is mirrored by the stifling and still weather that surrounds her. Her descent into madness is beautifully crafted by the author - it chronicles why a young and beautiful woman like her is driven to irrationality and delusions. Others believe that she inherited it from her mother, but society had a far bigger role to play. This descent into chaos and madness is nuanced and convincing. Even Edward Rochester's actions and cruelty are far better explained here. His feelings of loneliness, fear and abandonment give credibility to his incredible emotional abuse but of course does not condone it.

The story is steeped in the mysterious island magic or obeah, nefarious gossip and racial tension. There is this foreboding sense of doom even in the most light-hearted scenes of the book. I wish Jean Rhys' books were easier to find - it took me a year to get my hands on Wide Sargasso Sea. ...more

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Jan 17, 2025 Stefanie rated it really liked it

This is about a tortured woman, Antoinette, written by a tortured woman, Jean Rhys.
It is a poignant story seen through the lens of her difficult life, full of hurt caused by abuse and abandonment by her mother as well the same from many men. Her story, she declares, must also be Bertha’s story, shining a light on the character, Mr Rochester, who she encourages us to hate. Evidently Rhys read Jane Eyre over and over again and struggled for 8 or nine years to bring Bertha’s story to life. Finally ...more

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Apr 04, 2018 Swati rated it really liked it

A very compelling back story to the mad ex wife ‘Bertha’ in Jane Eyre. While Jane Eyre got ingratiating at times due to being plot-driven, this book felt more authentic and much more character driven. Highly recommend.

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