John Mccullough's Reviews > Wide Sargasso Sea

For umpteen pages in Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre there lurked a shadowy ghost that was revealed slowly to be the monster that was Rochester’s first wife, not that the Rochester Jane first met could be mistaken for Mr. Rogers. Jane was met by two people who despised each other and had it in their hearts to hate the world. Because his wife was from The Indies it was not expected by early Victorian England that she should be acceptable under any circumstances, but this one was really, really bad. Hard to explain why, but easy to believe.

Author Jean Rhys (Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams) was also born in The Indies, and was sent away to England where she encountered prejudice because of her origin and the island accent she could not change to “proper English.” Did I mention she was half Scottish and half Welsh? A genuine Celt, not a nice thing to be in England, really. She became a rich man’s mistress for a while, barely survived an illegal abortion and eventually entered the world of avant garde Bohemians.

Why did Rhys become interested in Rochester’s nightmare wife? The character she creates in Sargasso is very much like herself. Creole. Mother from an island plantation family. Father an English transplant to The Islands. Completely disrespected once in England. Birds of a feather, eh? I think she wanted to defend her island sisters and at the same time create in her mind a fictional heroine damaged by English arrogance and stuffiness. It was to be the resurrection of Bertha Antoinetta Mason as a human being. Rhys returned to beginnings, to Antoinette Cosway as a young girl who suffered the indignity of being a female, from an economically fallen plantation family, despised for their poverty by their fellow creoles, despised by their former slaves because of their slavery past and their poverty, openly called “white niggers.”

Mother marries an Englishman, Mr. Mason who isn’t a bad chap, really, who marries mum for her money and the plantation. Antoinette has a mentally deficient brother, Pierre. Former slaves’ anger boils over and they burn the house, killing Pierre. Mother suffers mental problems. Mother marries Antoinette off to Edward Rochester, another Englishman looking to marry into island wealth, such as it is. Edward and Antoinette marry, but both carry mental baggage which spins out of control to the point that Rochester derisively renames his wife Bertha Antoinetta to antagonise her and her few island friends. Eventually he decides to cut bait and return to England with this festering near-corpse of a wife that he has partially destroyed. It should never be forgotten that she and the islands also destroyed him until “redeemed” by Jane.

The book strikes me as incomplete. It was partially written just before Rhys suffered a heart attack and finished it two years later after a long recuperation. On the other hand, the book concentrates on the crucial years of Antoinette’s life, the portions that formed – and destroyed – her. Very efficient.

The book is heralded as a critique of colonialism, which has been a vicious curse, indeed! The pompous British view of the islands and islanders she portrays is crushing. Englishmen fishing for wealthy wives to alleviate their poverty, very much like the “Penny Princesses” that rescued the fortunes of wastrels such as Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who married Jenny Jerome. Not to forget the colonial views of England toward the Irish, Scots and Welsh that may have been on Rhys’s mind – she DID change her “Rees” name to the Welsh spelling “Rhys.”

It is also acclaimed as a feminist novel, and it is. But given the treatment of women in the Western World, it is an exemplary exploration of how women were openly regarded at the time of the story and more subtly still regarded today by many. That story can’t be explored too many times.

The Goodreads quantitative scoring seems to be average or below for such a “classic,” but written reviews seem to divide more sharply. Perhaps only those who feel strongly about the book, positive or negative, are inspired to write their praise or disgust. It is not a perfect book, but it gets the story across in elegant style.