Caroline 's Reviews > Wide Sargasso Sea

***SPOILERS HIDDEN***
***NO JANE EYRE SPOILERS***

Published nearly 120 years after Jane Eyre, the famous classic that inspired it, Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys's attempt to give Bertha Mason (here going primarily by the name "Antoinette Cosway") a detailed back story. It's crucial to read Jane Eyre before starting this. There's simply no understanding what happens in Wide Sargasso Sea otherwise. Although this doesn't matter because although Rhys's vision was strong, her execution was terrible, and Wide Sargasso Sea isn't worth reading anyway.

Rhys imagined Antoinette as a Creole girl in a gorgeously lush Jamaica, with the story opening at the height of political and racial tensions there. Unfortunately, this atmospheric setting can't compensate for Rhys's surprisingly weak and hazy portrayal of Antoinette.

This prequel is divided into three parts. A young Antoinette narrates part one; part two is narrated mostly by Mr. Rochester (nameless in this book for no reason); and part three is once again narrated by Antoinette, this time as an adult. Part one starts promisingly, but when Rochester materializes in part two, suddenly Antoinette is an adult woman, newly married to him, and the union is a loveless one. The time jump is too abrupt to work. Then, upsetting the smooth flow of part two, Antoinette's voice interrupts at one point, giving the impression that Rhys had trouble organizing the story.

The story is most intriguing and moves more quickly when it opens, when young Antoinette is trying to make sense of her relationship with her mother. Here's a part rich with the potential to add much-needed psychological depth, but Rhys neglected it so sorely that it's hard to understand why she included anything about their relationship. Another trouble spot concerns Rochester. Rhys allotted him a generous chunk of the story but didn't flesh out the man any more than she fleshed out Antoinette. Ample narrative devoted to him matters little nor should it change how fans of Jane Eyre feel about Rochester. His portrayal here is too colorless to inspire any passionate opinions (unlike his portrayal in the source material, notably).

Rhys's prose is horrible, both stylistically and technically. It's choppy and often convoluted; some punctuation is missing throughout or used incorrectly; and large sections, especially toward the end, veer into stream-of-consciousness. Repeated rereading, slower and with greater concentration, offers no help. Apparently nonsense is the point.

Rhys lacked a fine-tuned ear for speech, failing to use it to make her characters distinct. Rochester's impressions of their natural surroundings are striking not because of content but because they sound like Antoinette's:

Rochester: "One morning soon after we arrived, the row of tall trees outside my window were covered with small pale flowers too fragile to resist the wind. They fell in a day, and looked like snow on the rough grass—snow with a faint sweet scent. Then they were blown away. [...] It was a beautiful place—wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret."

Antoinette: "I can remember every second of that morning, if I shut my eyes I can see the deep blue colour of the sky and the mango leaves, the pink and red hibiscus, the yellow handkerchief she wore round her head, tied in the Martinique fashion with the sharp points in front, but now I see everything still, fixed for ever like the colours in a stained-glass window."

Wide Sargasso Sea failed in its goal to shed light on Antoinette and make her human. Her sections should be the most powerful, yet she remains as she did in Jane Eyre: a shadow of a woman, indistinct, scary, never able to be truly understood or even pictured. But probably most inexcusable is that Rhys implied that Antoinette's plunge into insanity (view spoiler)[could have been avoided had Rochester shown her more love and adoration (hide spoiler)]. This would be laughable if it weren't so offensive—in more than one way.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a waste—of pages and of readers' time. Anyone eager to know more about the mystery woman from Jane Eyre won't find the answer in these pages. Bertha Mason, it seems, is fated to remain a mystery. Maybe one day a talented writer will take on the challenge of giving her a compelling backstory. I'll eagerly read it.