Book 216: Dominica (English) – Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean RHYS)

Yet one day when I was waiting there I was suddenly very much afraid. The door was open to the sunlight, someone was whistling near the stables, but I was afraid. I was certain that hidden in the room (behind the old black press?) there was a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut, dying slowly, slowly. Drop by drop the blood was falling into a red basin and I imagined I could hear it. No one had ever spoken to me about obeah – but I knew what I would find if I dared to look.

It’s maybe a surprise to find some top-class literature from one of the world’s smallest countries (I have only the last few still to publish), but here we are in Dominica with Jean Rhys. I didn’t realise when I chose Wide Sargasso Sea (despite having watched the film) that this masterpiece is actually an extension (or rather a prequel) of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – which I sadly haven’t gotten around to reading yet, although I’m familiar with the story. It is set in Jamaica, Dominica and England at the time when slavery was abolished (in theory at least). Rhys takes Brontë’s insane, imprisoned Bertha Mason (whose real name, in Rhys’ story, is Antoinette) and imagines her back story, giving her a voice, along with that of her fascinating but intimidating husband Edward Rochester (not actually named in this novel). He insists on calling her Bertha against her will – which is equivalent to cursing someone in obeah (‘sorcery’/spirit worship).

The novel is divided into three parts: first Antoinette tells of her sad childhood, then Rochester recounts his first marriage, and in the third we are in England following Antoinette’s chaotic mentality.

Antoinette’s mother was from French-speaking Martinique. She is a Creole, so halfway between the black and white worlds but accepted by neither, for the blacks despise the poor whites too, and her life seems equally tentative. She grows up in a haunted house in Jamaica with the black ‘obeah woman’ Christophine.

Here we are much more aware than in Brontë (I think) of the colonial relationship between Jamaica and Dominica, on the one hand, and Britain on the other, both obviously in the real world and more subtly in the power relationship and lack of mutual trust between Antoinette and Rochester. Both of them seem to be always lying and concealing. In fact, it seems as if everyone is lying, or at least unreliable. Each other’s world seems unreal and inexplicable to them. Maybe both of them are mad, or is he ‘just’ a drunkard? Rochester hates the night – and blacks. As for her, is she innocent? devious? mad?

For such a short novel, this story is brilliant, adding a lot of depth and different perspectives to the Jane Eyre story. There is a lot of cleverness, like the pun between Antoinette and Marionette (for that is the way he manipulated her), and beautiful writing. It is unsettling, mysterious, and spooky. Yes, a small masterpiece.

Rhys, Jean (1890 – 1979), Wide Sargasso Sea, London, Penguin, 2001 (first published 1966), ISBN 978-0-140-81803-1