TheDaak review

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, W.W. Norton & Company, 2016, 176 pages, ISBN: 0393352560, ₹ 799

by Pratham Gupta

A key area of focus for feminist and post-colonial scholarship and praxis has been the project of (re)constructing narratives as spaces for revision, retelling and ‘creative intervention’ (Bhabha, 1994:3) in literary texts. Embedded within established narratives are hierarchies and asymmetries of power. Dismantling these hierarchies requires us to reconceptualize the narrative. As Virginia Woolf notes in her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, for women (and the colonised) to find a voice of their own, ‘’breaking the sentence’ and ‘breaking the sequence’ of the (dominant) narrative is of great importance. Revisiting old texts– looking back at them from a new, critical perspective, dragging to the centre-stage characters that are at the margins- constitutes a crucial enterprise in all emancipatory social theories aiming to break the hold that the past has over us.

An interesting and noteworthy work in this regard is Dominican-born Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Set initially in post-emancipation Jamaica and then in England, Rhys’s novel is a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre. The novel recasts Bertha, Mr Rochester’s first wife, as the tale’s protagonist. Though of utmost importance in driving Bronte’s story, the Creole-born character is, in the words of Spivak, ‘banished to the margins’ (Spivak, 1985), both literally– she is kept locked in the attic on the third floor– and figuratively– she suffers from madness and lunacy, thus morally condemned and pushed to the periphery. Rhys however yanks her from obscurity and re-imagines her in a story of her own.

Rhys’ retelling is divided into three parts, the first and third of which are narrated by Antoinette Cosway (as she was known before being made Bertha) and the second by Rochester. The first part spans Antoinette’s troubled childhood: born to ex-slave owners, she spends her day in isolation and poverty, distant as she is from her Martinican mother whose mental condition has been deteriorating following her husband’s death and ostracised by the natives who treat her with contempt for her class and race. Simmering discontent among the freed blacks manifests itself in the form of protests outside Antoinette’s residence. The house is accidentally set on fire, injuring Pierre, Antoinette’s younger brother, seriously, and forcing the family to flee. Upon recuperating from her six-week long malaise following the incident, Antoinette learns of her brother’s demise and her aggrieved mother’s descent into madness. At the end of the first part, Antoinette’s stepfather visits her in the convent, where she’s been living for several years among other Creole girls.

Antoinette’s English husband narrates the second part: his hastily done marriage for which he gets thirty thousand pounds, his misgivings about their marriage, his impatience with and dislike of the place and its people, their crumbling relationship as a consequence of a letter, infidelity on his part, Antoinette’s echoing of her mother’s frenzy and their ultimate departure for England. The third part is a recollection of Bertha’s (the name Rochester gives her) seclusion and emotional tumult in England, where she was locked in an attic and held captive under the supervision of Grace Poole, a servant. Violent and hysterical, she dreams of setting her husband’s mansion ablaze. Rhys ends the novel on an ominous note: Bertha walks down the stairs with a candle in her hand.   

Jean Rhys’s story from the perspective of the subjectified colonial is an authentic and unfiltered reflection of women’s social and psychological realities. Notwithstanding the subversive elements of her re-told narrative (which we unpack in a minute), things are to be said about Rhys’s writing style: her way of telling her story has a Ferrante-like quality to it, urgent, unsettlingly candid, attentive to details and not a word in the wrong place. Her ingenious method of first-person narration provides insights into the minds of the characters, making the narrative a fertile ground for identity formation and interaction.

The relationship between Mr Rochester and Antoinette Cosway typifies the sexual and colonial encounter. In the lopsided power dynamics, it’s not solely the facticity (a wrong word perhaps) of Antoinette being a woman that her subordination is based on, her status as a Creole– neither a European nor an African– equally sustains this imbalance. The seemingly trivial act of Rochester refusing to call Antoinette by her original name and choosing instead to use the name Bertha constitutes what Spivak calls as epistemic violence: the denial of the coloniser to acknowledge the local cultures and identities and attempting to remould them. Making Antoinette Cosway into Bertha Mason Rochester not only deprives her of something as fundamental to her being as her name but also imposes upon her an alien identity, one that is divorced from who she really is, one that defines her entire self in relation to the men in her life: she is the stepsister of Richard Mason who sold her and wife of Mr Rochester who bought her. Nothing more, nothing less.

Rochester and Antoinette symbolise two different beings, two different cultures, two different subjectivities. This is fleshed out adeptly through the diametrically opposite ways the two frame their narratives in their respective parts: hers fragmented, muddled, unpredictably moving back and forth and vividly raw and his overly critical, evaluative, prejudice-laden and finicky. Interestingly, it’s this distinctly ‘incoherent’ and ‘senseless’ way of speaking that characterises Antoinette in the third part of the novel when she loses any awareness of time and place, which poses a resistance to the masculine rationality that Rochester embodies. By constantly resisting the identity Rochester imposes upon her and breaking, as in not adhering to, historical and spatial continuity and consistency in the story she narrates, the colonised resists rationality, certainty and fixity, lying at the core of the imperial project. 

More importantly, Rhys’s narrative grounds female hysteria in systemic power dynamics: both Antoinette and her mother are driven to madness as a result of acute psychological trauma stemming from their experiences of isolation, abuse and ostracism. They mirror each other in this regard: in a patriarchal setting, both are forced to depend their sanity and well-being on (white) men, who exacerbate their suffering and push them to the brink of mental breakdown. Simultaneously their ‘in-betweenness’ engenders anxiety and uncertainty, their existence strung out between two incompatible cultures both of which are unwilling to accept them.  

The last scene of the novel is full of ambiguity: Bertha dreams of herself being beckoned by her black childhood friend while a man’s, most probably Rochester’s, voice calls her; she screams her friend’s name and jumps. Does this visionary reunion with her childhood friend reflect her reconciliation with and acceptance of who she is? Or does her jumping represent her ultimately succumbing to the cage she’s been imprisoned in? We never know. But we do know that the ‘madwoman’ of Jane Eyre wasn’t always such, that it was the interlocking system of oppression that pushed her off the cliff. And that says a lot about what Rhys’s retelling has been able to achieve.

References

Bhabha, Homi. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

Spivak, Gayatri C. (1985). Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism. Critical Inquiry, 12, 243-261.

Funck, Susana B. (2011). Of Mimicry and Woman: A Feminist Post-colonial Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea and the biggest modern woman of the world. Revista Estudos Anglo-Americanos, 36, 65-91.

Mardorossian, Carine M. (1999). Double [De]colonization and the Feminist Criticism of “Wide Sargasso Sea”. College Literature, 26(2), 79-95.