Fifty years of “Wide Sargasso Sea”

By S.J.

“THERE is always another side. Always,” notes Jean Rhys’s protagonist in “Wide Sargasso Sea” (1966). It seems like an obvious statement for a storyteller to make, but the idea of “writing back” was somewhat radical 50 years ago when authors in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean decided to use fiction to challenge the Eurocentric perspectives and colonialist themes dormant in Victorian and modernist classics. “Wide Sargasso Sea”, which approaches Charlotte Brönte’s “Jane Eyre” from the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, has endured as a landmark in the English-language canon for this reason.

It follows Antoinette, an isolated child, as she grows up on a crumbling estate in British Jamaica. Her father is an English slave-owner who, after the passage of the 1833 Emancipation Act, becomes impoverished and dies in debt. When Antoinette’s mother remarries, she is sent to a boarding school for creole girls where she becomes envious of the lighter-skinned pupils and rebuffs the friendship of her “coloured” cousins for fear of association. At 17, her wealthy stepfather arranges a marriage to an English gentleman, and it is at this point that Rhys’s novel begins to collide with Brönte’s: the charming English gentleman is Edward Rochester. But Antoinette’s hopes of romance are sunk when she learns that Rochester was bribed into the union. The unhappy couple settle in England, where Antoinette’s cultural displacement and isolation—and Rochester’s betrayal—lead to the climactic fire of both “Jane Eyre” and “Wide Sargasso Sea”.

Rhys wrote some of her own experiences into the novel. Growing up in Dominica—a French and then a British colony until its independence in 1978—she was born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams and attended an English boarding school from 16. She had a tempestuous love life and changed her name at Ford Madox Ford’s suggestion. Rhys had already written on themes of female alienation and cultural displacement in “Voyage in the Dark” (1934) and “Good Morning, Midnight” (1939), but “Wide Sargasso Sea” was by far the most powerful and provocative of her works. A late addition to a floundering writing career, it marked Rhys out as a pioneering female voice of the Caribbean.

Indeed, though set in the early 1800s, the novel tapped into the mood of the 1960s when issues of decolonisation, race relations and civil rights occupied the global consciousness. Antoinette is raised to fear the emancipated black slaves who resent the crumbling white aristocracy. Relations between creole whites and the white English are ambivalent: Rochester is simultaneously aroused and repelled by Antoinette’s “impure” whiteness. Rhys questions the description of “Bertha” as a racial ‘other’ in “Jane Eyre”, where she is “a savage face” with lips “swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the eyebrows black”. Native cultures look both ominous and pathetic through our protagonists’ eyes. Christophine, Antoinette’s Martinican nanny, still performs obeah (voodoo) and lives by her half-remembered native cultural practices. Antoinette is tempted to abuse Christophine’s spirituality, impulsively demanding a love potion off her as a newlywed; Rochester, conversely, is angered and frightened by it.

Yet the extraordinary style of “Wide Sargasso Sea” is as impressive as its content. Lyrical and evocative, Rhys’s language conjures a landscape while giving us a glimpse of Antoinette’s state of mind (“overgrown…and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell”). It also reveals Rochester’s unease and growing hatred of everything that belongs to Antoinette’s world, precisely because its pull is intense and threatening. For him, that same landscape has “too much blue, too much purple, too much green”. A language of sensory overload accompanies his growing paranoia about marriage and masculinity; he convinces himself that his father, Antoinette’s step-father and her step-brother are all laughing at him for marrying “spoiled goods”.

Rhys’s novel takes these familiar characters and fleshes them out. Both Rochester and Antoinette emerge from “Wide Sargasso Sea” as psychologically complex characters; in “Jane Eyre”, Rochester is portrayed as a noble misanthrope and “Bertha” the two-dimensional “madwoman in the attic”. Rhys’ scene-setting language creates characters that evoke the madness and damage of desiring ownership over a person, be it for marriage, sex, power or colonial exploitation. In the case of “Wide Sargasso Sea”, it is a heady mix of all.

A story of ill-fated lust and the traumatic experience of gendered colonialism, Rhys’s novel marked her out as a leading female voice in postcolonial literature. She and other such writers as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott and Ngugi wa Thiong’o found a means of self-representation, decolonisation and cultural revival in their stories. They now make up a body of new classics that fill out—and better reflect—the story of literature in English. But Rhys’s novel stands out among them for taking on complexities that few writers attempt in one novel; after all, the real Sargasso Sea, which lies between Europe and the West Indies, is notoriously difficult to navigate.