Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys calls attention to the “mad woman in the attic” in Jane Eyre through her postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which she tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, Mr. Rochester’s first wife, who turned mad shortly after the marriage. The mad woman appears as a disturbance in Jane Eyre, where she roams in the house late at night and sets fire. Readers get to know little about her through Mr. Rochester’s account, which, from his point of view, may not be wholly reliable. Set in Caribbean, Rhys traces all the way back to the time when the doomed marriage first started, and, with switching point of view in each three parts, gives a different account that does the character justice. Wide Sargasso Sea is a successful parallel novel not only in its brilliant adaptation and reinterpretation, but also in Rhys’ mesmerizing account of the West Indies, its beauty, cruelty and pain.

The complicated race issue in Wide Sargasso Sea requires some extra effort from the readers; therefore, in order to better appreciate the story, some understanding on history and the natives in the West Indies during 19th century is needed. Some readers might find the novel a little confusing in the matter of each character’s race and, to be more straightforward, their skin tone.

Wide Sargasso Sea abounds in the idea of diaspora, in which people cannot recall their past, fail to identify themselves with a certain race, and is uprooted then and again from their home or land. Annette and her daughter, the later Antoinette Cosway, are being caught between the “black” and the “white”, as each group calls them “white cockroach” and “white nigger”, they are isolated, ridiculed, despised and shun away among their people. Twice the house Coulibri becomes the sole shelter and belief its female owner attached herself to; however, both women loose their sanity when the house fails to secure them from the world. Mr. Rochester suffers also from the alienation when he finds himself trapped in the exotic and foreign land, with people different from his kind.

Mr. Rochester and Antoinette each holds a different hope as they become married, their marriage then easily tumbles down when their hopes dissolved in reality. Mr. Rochester gives Antoinette “a wish to live” when he marries her, their honeymoon takes place in Coulibri, Antoinette’s only safe ground; therefore, her insanity becomes inevitable when she lost trust in her husband and the house. Mr. Rochester, on the other hand, is at some level forced into the marriage in order to obtain the huge inheritance from the Cosway family. On finding Antoinette’s family madness history, he lost hope in the marriage, and is, as we later know from Jane Eyre, trapped in and tormented by it for many years.

Rhys' careful design in the switching perspectives in its three parts gives the reader a balanced account without any bias. As the narrator switches, in the three parts of the novel, from Antoinette to Mr. Rochester and back again, readers are introduced to the romantic and yet painful account of “the mad woman in the attic”. It is surely a novel that worth a second read.