‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys

 About the author :

Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams on 24 August 1890 on the Caribbean island of Dominica to a Welsh father and a Creole mother of Scottish descent. At the age of sixteen, in 1907, Rhys was sent to England, where she attended school and attempted to start a career as an actress. During her time in Britain, she was often mocked for her foreign accent and struggled to fit in at school and in her career. Rhys later worked as a chorus girl. In 1910, she began a tumultuous affair with wealthy stockbroker Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, which, when ended, left Rhys heartbroken. In her despair, Rhys took her hand at writing, keeping diaries and notebooks recording her emotional state during this time: this greatly informed her later writing.

In 1919, she moved around Europe after meeting and marrying Frenchman Jean Lenglet, the first of her three husbands. By 1923, Lenglet was arrested for illegal activities leaving Rhys to seek refuge in Paris.

During her time in Paris, Rhys came under the patronage of English writer Ford Madox Ford who published some of her short stories in the magazine The Transatlantic Review. She received much support from Ford, with whom she later began an affair.

By the end of her extensive literary career, Rhys had published five novels and seven short story collections. In 1960, she retreated from public life, living in rural England until her death on 14 May 1979.

‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ :

‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1966), Jean Rhys’s best-known novel, contemplates the life of Bertha Mason Rochester, a minor character in Charlotte Brontë’s novel ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847). Rhys made a career out of writing novels and short stories that contemplated the lives of unconventional women. She wrote and published most of her fiction in the 1930s, then went out of print for several decades. The rise of feminist and postcolonial literary studies brought a renewed interest in Rhys’s work, and ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ has become a widely studied work of fiction.

‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is divided into three parts. Part One takes place in Jamaica during the 1830s shortly after Great Britain passed the Emancipation Act and ended slavery in its West Indian colonies. Antoinette Cosway, the protagonist, narrates this section and chronicles her early life on her family’s Coulibri Estate. Following the new law, the Cosways have freed their slaves, but the estate has fallen into disarray.

 

Antoinette and her mother Annette live there with their servants, including Antoinette’s nurse, Christophine. Like Antoinette, Christophine is originally from Martinique. She was Mr. Cosway’s wedding present to his young wife.

Annette remarries an Englishman who has recently arrived in Jamaica to profit from the white Creole landholders’ dire economic straits. His name is Mason, and he has a son named Richard. Under Mason’s direction, Coulibri Estate thrives again and some of the formerly enslaved people who worked there even return. Others, however, resent the presence of the white family. One night, a mob gathers and burns the house down, first attacking the room in which Antoinette’s disabled brother Pierre sleeps. The mob forces the family to flee in the middle of the night.

Pierre dies from injuries sustained in the fire. The tragedy triggers a breakdown within Annette, and she is committed to a sanitarium in the country. Mason uses his wife’s hospitalisation as an excuse to stay away from Jamaica. Antoinette stays for a short while with her Aunt Cora until she sends Antoinette to live and study at a convent. She remains there until she marries her husband whom she meets through her stepbrother.

In Part Two, Antoinette and her new husband honeymoon at a house in Dominica where she and Aunt Cora used to spend their summers. Antoinette’s husband initially dislikes the Caribbean landscape but warms to it after getting to know some of the locals. One of them, Daniel, writes a letter to Antoinette’s husband, warning him about the dark secrets in Antoinette’s family. Antoinette’s husband visits Daniel at his home on the island where Daniel continues to discourage him from loving Antoinette.

Daniel’s words turn Antoinette’s husband, who has never truly loved his wife, against her. He accuses her of having been dishonest about her origins, while also acknowledging that he, too, has not been forthcoming. One night, with Antoinette in the next room, he has a brief affair with their servant, Amélie. Antoinette becomes increasingly unstable and attacks her husband with a broken rum bottle. He bans Christophine from the house in Dominica, accusing her of exacerbating Antoinette’s instability. Christophine leaves, claiming that she has given Antoinette something to help her sleep. Antoinette will remain in this state of repose, Christophine says, until her husband demonstrates proper love for her. If he doesn’t, Antoinette will descend into madness like her mother.

Antoinette’s husband ignores Christophine’s advice. He plans to leave Dominica and return to Jamaica with his wife. While departing, he tells her that he despises her as much as she does him and that he will express his hatred as perpetual coldness.

In Part Three, Antoinette is locked away in an attic room of her husband’s estate and is cared for by a woman named Grace Poole. She dreams of escaping her quarters and walking through the corridors of the strange house. In one dream, she sets fire to the house with a lit candle. One day, after Grace falls asleep, Antoinette seizes the woman’s keys and sets out down the corridor with her candle resolved about what she must do. 

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