Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman. After their marriage, the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.
Wide Sargasso sea was suggested to me by a fellow reader on Babelio after I published my review of Wuthering heights. It is a prequel for Jane Eyre, my favourite book on the planet. What happened before Jane Eyre, Jamaica, Mr Rochester's first marriage, Bertha's madness, everything is uncovered.
The atmosphere of this story is oppressive. The key word, at least for Antoinette, is safety. The heat, the poison underneath the beauty, the justified anger of the population against their exploiters, the obi (voodoo), the fear of the women left alone, the sense of belonging to a place that rejects you, being brought up like a native child when Antoinette is a white girl, or being of mixed race in the case of her brother.
This was violent. Not only the atmosphere, but also the violence that drove Antoinette's mother crazy and, let's not forget him, the violence of Edward Rochester who drove his own wife to complete madness. There may have been a latent state at the beginning, madness is everywhere in the island it seems, but even if Edward was driven into an unwanted marriage not knowing everything, he participated in it. The Brontë male "heroes" have never been nice, well brought-up characters (think Heathcliff) and Rochester is no exception, in the line of his father and brother. If he had tried to love her, if he had tried to empathize with her, listen to her, this may not have happened.
A short but powerful novel.
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