February 5, 2010
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a great book. It is a magical, mysterious novel in which Rhys imagines the life of Jane Eyre's madwoman before Mr. Rochester takes her away from the Caribbean, carrying her across the wide Sargasso Sea to England and the attic. It is one of the most haunting novels I've ever read and every time I read it, I am struck anew by the twisted and layered elements of sadness, betrayal, and the abuse of love. Antoinette, the future Mrs. Rochester, is tied in a web she will never escape -- until she sets fire to the twine, silk, and canvas trappings that bind her. Bearing the weight of generations of enslavement of others by her family, she herself can never be free to love whom she wants, live where she wants, and be who she is, half-island, half-French, and never English. Her madness comes not from genes but from sorrow, the sorrow of having everything she felt to be real and true and beautiful taken away from her, and replaced by falsity, constriction, and ugliness.
How long must the sins of the parents be visited upon the children? Antoinette, island-born daughter of English and French plantation owners, suffers the hatred and scorn of the Black workers when emancipation from slavery finally comes; visitors from England look down upon her as a representative of generations of inbred, decadent, lawless islanders; and any future she has is lost amidst the English laws granting husbands total and complete control over their wives' assets. Raised in a horrible and isolating poverty wrought from the decrepitude of her parents' estate and behavior, then elevated to money via her mother's disastrous second marriage, and finally married off herself by a stepbrother who cares nothing for her, but only for sustaining his own depraved lifestyle, Antoinette never has a chance at redemption or emancipation or self-governance. She is a character truly manipulated by people and circumstances beyond her control, a slave as surely as anyone held by law and locks to serve as the master deems necessary.
Love comes to Antoinette only through the pity of Christophine, a Black woman from her mother's home island of Martinique. It is only Christophine's obeah magic and her love that might save Antoinette, granting her some kind of power against the rationality and brutality of the Europeans. In the end, the conflict between island ways and English laws will prove too much, and nothing can save the poor girl from herself, her husband, or her inheritance.
Antoinette is doomed and yet as I read the book I kept holding on to a hope that this time around she would get away on her own to live in the house left to her , and amongst the people and places of beauty -- and cruelty -- that she understands. England proves too cold, dark, colorless, and far more cruel than her island birthplace. Set in Jamaica and Dominica, I recognized the sea, blue and distant, and the river, running wild through bamboo; I've seen and smelled the frangipani, jasmine, and lush Royal palms. But the deterioration, the cruelty, and the hopelessness are unfamiliar, frightening, and very, very sad. I know why Mrs. Rochester set the fire. To feel again the warmth and see the colors she could understand, even though it is an understanding singed with pain and regret. She is not crazy, she is drowning in sorrow and she wants only to be saved.
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