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wezelvis's review against another edition
5.0
This is the second perfect novel I've ever read, after To The Lighthouse. It's the kind of vulnerable space that working with books makes me want to cherish and protect, but that I can't remain inside for too long, because it would kill me.
internetnomads's review against another edition
2.0
I had weeks and weeks to read this book, and I never got past page 30. This is a slim novel, so for me to set it aside means something didn't mesh well. I couldn't be bothered to care about the narrator, who seems to disappear from the story.
mcjones4's review
4.0
A very interesting re-telling of the life of a familiar character from Jane Eyre (Bertha), but from her side of the story!
jasondangelo's review against another edition
4.0
*Wide sea of spoilers ahead*
I first read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in an upper level college course about colonialism in 1993. I was aware, of course, that the novel told the story of Rochester’s madwoman-in-the-attic wife. I had read Jane Eyre only three years earlier, and my Norton edition is filled with hastily written marginalia declaring Rochester to be a smug, self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, so I was excited to see him revealed as some kind of monster and victimizer. I was in fact so caught up with the novel’s connections to the Bronte classic that I did a grave injustice to the book and did not read it for what it really was, its own story. There is certainly enjoyment in seeing the points where the narratives cross over, but if you come to Wide Sargasso Sea looking for Jane Eyre tie-ins, you will not only be disappointed, but you will lose the opportunity to find a heartbreaking and compelling narrative all its own.
The novel is divided into three parts. In the first section, Antoinette narrates her time from the 1833 British emancipation act, when she is a small child, to when she is a young adult, being removed from the convent by her stepfather to meet the man he plans for her to wed. At the time that the slaves in the British colonies were freed by the emancipation act, the British government promised financial compensation to the slaveowners, but that compensation was a long time in coming. Families like Antoinette’s that relied entirely on slaves found their funds rapidly depleted and their estates increasingly rundown. Antoinette and her mother lived near poverty, rejected by the wealthier white British families and scorned by the black islanders who struggled with their own poverty.
This state of being between two worlds and belonging to neither defined Antoinette’s existence. Many times does Antoinette state that she does not know who she is or where she belongs, and Rhys makes use of the recurring theme of looking glasses as a way of showing Antoinette’s crisis of identity. She occupies a no man’s land at the intersections of white and black, European and Caribbean, colonizer and colonized, wealth and poverty, privilege and disenfranchisement. Traditional critical discussions of Wide Sargasso Sea have centered on the cultural, racial, and national complexities that make up Antoinette’s identity crisis and their inevitable contributions to her madness. But the reason the novel has endured over the last 50 years is not because of any of the political quandaries it casts light upon, but because it allows the problems and confusions of poor Antoinette to live and breathe with reality and subtlety. Antoinette is not some puppet for Rhys. She is a sympathetic, heartbreakingly tragic figure with a real life dimensionality. As I found myself marveling at the depth of the characters, I was drawn to Rhys’s treatment of “madness” itself.
In my memory of my first reading, I would have told you that Rochester (who interestingly remains unnamed in the novel) drove Antoinette to madness with his cold cruelty. But of course Antoinette is already in a fragile state before Rochester takes her away for their honeymoon. Having watched her mother’s passionate outbursts at her own powerlessness, having been rejected by her mother when she needed her comforting touch, having been taunted and physically assaulted by other children, Antoinette sought nothing more in this world than safety. When she lay in bed as a child, she would say to herself, “I am safe.” When her father died and she and her mother slid into poverty, Antoinette notes that “feeling safe in bed . . . belonged to the past.” When her mother begins to fall apart, Antoinette observes this in terms of safety: “Once I would have gone back quietly to watch her asleep on the blue sofa—once I made excuses to be near her when she brushed her hair, a soft black cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe.” The world is hostile and a threat to Antoinette’s personhood and sanity. (As a side note, I find it not coincidental that Wide Sargasso Sea and The Painted Bird were written and published around the same time since they are both haunted by horrible cruelty.)
In her relationship with Rochester, she dares to reach for more than mere safety. The shy and self-protecting girl of the first section is replaced by a charming, happy young bride in the second section, narrated by Rochester. She is talkative. She is earnest. She seems genuinely delighted with her new husband as she loves him and believes he loves her. But all that improvement comes to a crashing halt when Rochester’s dislike of Antoinette and the Dominican island lead him to greater acts of cruelty, culminating in his sleeping with the servant Amelie within earshot of Antoinette. In the aftermath of this betrayal, Rochester has a long conversation with Christophine, Antoinette’s childhood nanny, and the only person who seems to care about Antoinette’s well being. This conversation, or rather, confrontation, is for me the heart of the novel.
In this confrontation, Christophine accuses Rochester of wanting to “break [Antoinette] up”: “you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without it. It’s she can’t see the sun any more. Only you she see. But all you want is to break her up.” Christophine repeats the phrase “break her up” to describe Antoinette’s emotional and mental meltdown. She never uses the words “crazy” or “mad.” It is Rochester who first uses the word “mad” when he asks Christophine, “And that her mother was mad. Another lie?” Christophine responds: “They drive her to it. When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away. They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. Question, question. But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her. They won’t let me see her. I try, but no. They won’t let Antoinette see her. In the end—mad I don’t know—she give up, she care for nothing. That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk. That man, and others. They they have her. Ah there is no God.” For Christophine, all that happened to Annette was that “she los[t] herself for a while.” But instead surrounding her with kind words, friends, a loving husband, they diagnose her as “mad” and treat her as such. That declaration of “madness” is Annette’s doom, for with it, she is discarded by her husband and family and left in the “care” of strangers who have no interest in helping, only in taking advantage of a powerless and hurt woman. And when Rochester won’t be swayed by Christophine’s words to love Antoinette and nurture her, Christophine declares: “You think me a fool? You want her money but you don’t want her. It is in your mind to pretend she is mad. I know it. The doctors say what you tell them to say. That man Richard he say what you want him to say—glad and willing too, I know. She will be like her mother.”
When someone is broken up, she is a sympathetic creature to be healed and made well again. When someone is “mad,” she is something to be feared and locked away. “Madness” is a tool for blameless dismissal of another human being. As if to drive the Christophine’s point home, once Rochester forces Christophine to leave, he thinks: “She’s as mad as the others.” Boom. With the one word, Rochester rids himself of needing the consider anything said to him.
This distinction between madness and broken up ties in neatly with the novel’s larger concerns about race, culture, and colonization, since it is the European men who give the diagnosis of madness like an obeah curse, bringing a dramatic end to fates of Antoinette and her mother. In the section that follow’s Rochester’s talk with Christophine, Rochester seems as broken up as Antoinette ever was, employing broken syntax and passionate outbursts. But this momentary outburst, not even three pages in my edition, does not result in “madness” as Rochester regains his composure and determination in the next section. Both Antoinette and Rochester suffer the same ailments, but one is bundled off to an attic in England while the other gets to establish himself as a Byronic hero.
I first read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in an upper level college course about colonialism in 1993. I was aware, of course, that the novel told the story of Rochester’s madwoman-in-the-attic wife. I had read Jane Eyre only three years earlier, and my Norton edition is filled with hastily written marginalia declaring Rochester to be a smug, self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, so I was excited to see him revealed as some kind of monster and victimizer. I was in fact so caught up with the novel’s connections to the Bronte classic that I did a grave injustice to the book and did not read it for what it really was, its own story. There is certainly enjoyment in seeing the points where the narratives cross over, but if you come to Wide Sargasso Sea looking for Jane Eyre tie-ins, you will not only be disappointed, but you will lose the opportunity to find a heartbreaking and compelling narrative all its own.
The novel is divided into three parts. In the first section, Antoinette narrates her time from the 1833 British emancipation act, when she is a small child, to when she is a young adult, being removed from the convent by her stepfather to meet the man he plans for her to wed. At the time that the slaves in the British colonies were freed by the emancipation act, the British government promised financial compensation to the slaveowners, but that compensation was a long time in coming. Families like Antoinette’s that relied entirely on slaves found their funds rapidly depleted and their estates increasingly rundown. Antoinette and her mother lived near poverty, rejected by the wealthier white British families and scorned by the black islanders who struggled with their own poverty.
This state of being between two worlds and belonging to neither defined Antoinette’s existence. Many times does Antoinette state that she does not know who she is or where she belongs, and Rhys makes use of the recurring theme of looking glasses as a way of showing Antoinette’s crisis of identity. She occupies a no man’s land at the intersections of white and black, European and Caribbean, colonizer and colonized, wealth and poverty, privilege and disenfranchisement. Traditional critical discussions of Wide Sargasso Sea have centered on the cultural, racial, and national complexities that make up Antoinette’s identity crisis and their inevitable contributions to her madness. But the reason the novel has endured over the last 50 years is not because of any of the political quandaries it casts light upon, but because it allows the problems and confusions of poor Antoinette to live and breathe with reality and subtlety. Antoinette is not some puppet for Rhys. She is a sympathetic, heartbreakingly tragic figure with a real life dimensionality. As I found myself marveling at the depth of the characters, I was drawn to Rhys’s treatment of “madness” itself.
In my memory of my first reading, I would have told you that Rochester (who interestingly remains unnamed in the novel) drove Antoinette to madness with his cold cruelty. But of course Antoinette is already in a fragile state before Rochester takes her away for their honeymoon. Having watched her mother’s passionate outbursts at her own powerlessness, having been rejected by her mother when she needed her comforting touch, having been taunted and physically assaulted by other children, Antoinette sought nothing more in this world than safety. When she lay in bed as a child, she would say to herself, “I am safe.” When her father died and she and her mother slid into poverty, Antoinette notes that “feeling safe in bed . . . belonged to the past.” When her mother begins to fall apart, Antoinette observes this in terms of safety: “Once I would have gone back quietly to watch her asleep on the blue sofa—once I made excuses to be near her when she brushed her hair, a soft black cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe.” The world is hostile and a threat to Antoinette’s personhood and sanity. (As a side note, I find it not coincidental that Wide Sargasso Sea and The Painted Bird were written and published around the same time since they are both haunted by horrible cruelty.)
In her relationship with Rochester, she dares to reach for more than mere safety. The shy and self-protecting girl of the first section is replaced by a charming, happy young bride in the second section, narrated by Rochester. She is talkative. She is earnest. She seems genuinely delighted with her new husband as she loves him and believes he loves her. But all that improvement comes to a crashing halt when Rochester’s dislike of Antoinette and the Dominican island lead him to greater acts of cruelty, culminating in his sleeping with the servant Amelie within earshot of Antoinette. In the aftermath of this betrayal, Rochester has a long conversation with Christophine, Antoinette’s childhood nanny, and the only person who seems to care about Antoinette’s well being. This conversation, or rather, confrontation, is for me the heart of the novel.
In this confrontation, Christophine accuses Rochester of wanting to “break [Antoinette] up”: “you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without it. It’s she can’t see the sun any more. Only you she see. But all you want is to break her up.” Christophine repeats the phrase “break her up” to describe Antoinette’s emotional and mental meltdown. She never uses the words “crazy” or “mad.” It is Rochester who first uses the word “mad” when he asks Christophine, “And that her mother was mad. Another lie?” Christophine responds: “They drive her to it. When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away. They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. Question, question. But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her. They won’t let me see her. I try, but no. They won’t let Antoinette see her. In the end—mad I don’t know—she give up, she care for nothing. That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk. That man, and others. They they have her. Ah there is no God.” For Christophine, all that happened to Annette was that “she los[t] herself for a while.” But instead surrounding her with kind words, friends, a loving husband, they diagnose her as “mad” and treat her as such. That declaration of “madness” is Annette’s doom, for with it, she is discarded by her husband and family and left in the “care” of strangers who have no interest in helping, only in taking advantage of a powerless and hurt woman. And when Rochester won’t be swayed by Christophine’s words to love Antoinette and nurture her, Christophine declares: “You think me a fool? You want her money but you don’t want her. It is in your mind to pretend she is mad. I know it. The doctors say what you tell them to say. That man Richard he say what you want him to say—glad and willing too, I know. She will be like her mother.”
When someone is broken up, she is a sympathetic creature to be healed and made well again. When someone is “mad,” she is something to be feared and locked away. “Madness” is a tool for blameless dismissal of another human being. As if to drive the Christophine’s point home, once Rochester forces Christophine to leave, he thinks: “She’s as mad as the others.” Boom. With the one word, Rochester rids himself of needing the consider anything said to him.
This distinction between madness and broken up ties in neatly with the novel’s larger concerns about race, culture, and colonization, since it is the European men who give the diagnosis of madness like an obeah curse, bringing a dramatic end to fates of Antoinette and her mother. In the section that follow’s Rochester’s talk with Christophine, Rochester seems as broken up as Antoinette ever was, employing broken syntax and passionate outbursts. But this momentary outburst, not even three pages in my edition, does not result in “madness” as Rochester regains his composure and determination in the next section. Both Antoinette and Rochester suffer the same ailments, but one is bundled off to an attic in England while the other gets to establish himself as a Byronic hero.
ronnie2024's review against another edition
2.0
Disappointing! I thought the story line was jumbled, and I often had to re-read to determine which character was speaking. Three stars for the excellent depiction of mood and sinister atmosphere.
mary_lewispierce's review
5.0
Jean Rhys is a devastating writer. Her books are so good that I can only read them if I am in a good mental place. Otherwise, I find her too destabilizing.
This is her most beautiful novel. It is the narrative of the “madwoman in the attic” from Jane Eyre. It tells the story of Antionette and her early life in Martinique. It is about the cultural and family conflicts that derailed her sanity and brought her to England. It is also about the distance between two cultures, the Caribbean and the English and how that plays out in her relationship with Mr. Rochester.
This is her most beautiful novel. It is the narrative of the “madwoman in the attic” from Jane Eyre. It tells the story of Antionette and her early life in Martinique. It is about the cultural and family conflicts that derailed her sanity and brought her to England. It is also about the distance between two cultures, the Caribbean and the English and how that plays out in her relationship with Mr. Rochester.
liv_kr's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
rossetto_e_guai's review against another edition
4.0
Prequel Di Jane eyre, che ho probabilmente preferito al capolavoro della Bronte.
Il punto di vista è quello alternato di Bertha ( ben prima che venisse soprannominata così ) e di Rochester. Ho odiato Rochester nel romanzo originale e questo non ha fatto altro che accrescere il mio odio.
Insomma la storia è la distruzione di una donna la cui unica colpa è stata quella di amare l’uomo sbagliato, egoista e crudele. Non ho mai percepito Bertha come pazza, nonostante le descrizioni fatte dalla Bronte, ma come una ragazza introversa e magari difficile strappata alla sua terra e richiusa in una soffitta e questo farebbe impazzire chiunque. Comunque consigliato a tutti quelli che hanno letto Jane eyre sopratutto a quelli che non hanno come me empatizzato con la scialba Jane e con il pessimo Rochester.
Il punto di vista è quello alternato di Bertha ( ben prima che venisse soprannominata così ) e di Rochester. Ho odiato Rochester nel romanzo originale e questo non ha fatto altro che accrescere il mio odio.
Insomma la storia è la distruzione di una donna la cui unica colpa è stata quella di amare l’uomo sbagliato, egoista e crudele. Non ho mai percepito Bertha come pazza, nonostante le descrizioni fatte dalla Bronte, ma come una ragazza introversa e magari difficile strappata alla sua terra e richiusa in una soffitta e questo farebbe impazzire chiunque. Comunque consigliato a tutti quelli che hanno letto Jane eyre sopratutto a quelli che non hanno come me empatizzato con la scialba Jane e con il pessimo Rochester.
katrae22's review against another edition
2.0
I appreciate the idea of this book. I just didn’t enjoy it. I found no redeemable characters. And felt confused half the time.