Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Author's background

Wide Sargasso Sea was written in 1966 by a Dominica born author Jean Rhys.

She was born in 1894 and moved to England when she was 16 years old.

Rhys never adjusted to the move from the West Indies to England.

She always felt cold and removed and imagined that the character Bertha Mason from the novel Jane Eyre must have felt the

same.

Rhys had financial difficulties, she was married three times and she was also a heavy drinker.

She had always a feeling of displacement that we find in her characters.

She struggles against racial oppression, and primarily against the dictates of patriarchy.

In her novels she offers psychoanalytic readings, through its exploration of the unconscious.

She died in England in 1979.

About the Novel

Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea as a response to stereotypes given by Bronte’s 19th century English culture.

Rhys’s many difficulties led her to empathize with Bertha's suffering.

She takes the reader deep through her psyche as a way to better understand Bertha/Antoinette and the cause of her madness.

Setting : Forty years of 1800, some years later the emancipation of slaves (decadence and decline of colonies, chaos, lawlessness, arrival of new settlers in search of gifts and property).

The plotAntoinette was a creole, daughter of ex-slave owners. She lived on a plantation called

Coulibri Estate with her mother and her sickly brother.

The family's finances went in ruins after the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833.

Throughout Antoinette's childhood there is hostility between white aristocracy and the impoverished black servants.

When Antoinette was 17, her stepfather arranged her marriage with Mr Rochester. He begins to have misgivings about the marriage: he knows little of his new wife and he agreed to the marriage because he was desperate for money.

In add, Rochester receives a menacing letter that warns of the madness that's deep-rooted in Antoinette's family. After reading this, the relationship between them deteriorates.

Antoinette tries to regain her husband's love but she fails.That makes Antoniette mad and violent.

They moved to England where he locked her in a garret room in his house, under the watch of a servant. Antoinette has no sense of time or place. She become mad because she was left alone and abandoned.

She has a recurring dream about going out from her prison to explore the house and set it ablaze.The novel ends with Antoinette walking down from her prison to act on her dream.

Main topics

Womanhood, Enslavement, and Madness

Disease

and Decline

Magic and Incantation

Nature

Oppression of Slavery and Entrapment

Complexity of Racial Identity

Fire

Main charactersAntoinette

The character of Antoinette derives from Charlotte Brontë's depiction of a deranged Creole outcast in Jane Eyre. Rhys creates a story for Bertha, tracing the development of her mental and emotional decline.

Antoinette is the opposite of the female heroines of 19th century novels, who are more rational and self-restrained (as Jane Eyre). She has a wild imagination and an acute sensitivity.

Her restlessness and instability stem from her inability to belong to any particular community.

Rhys humanizes "Bertha's" tragic condition, exploring Antoinette's terror and anguish.

Rochester

He is pressured into marrying Antoinette, although he knows nothing of her. He doesn’t understand his new wife, so he begins to hate her.

Rochester remains nameless in the novel and that highlights his implied authority that allows him to confer identity on others.

He progressively refashions Antoinette into a raving madwoman.

Having totally rejected his Creole wife and her native customs, he exaggerates his being cold, logical, and authoritarian.

Both characters are essentially orphans, abandoned by their family members to fend for themselves. Both Rochester and Antoinette struggle for some sense of place and identity.