by Jay (Tue Jan 26, 2010)
I first read ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys
when I was at university. Going through a dungarees and Doc
Marten-wearing ‘Rad Fem' phase as I was at that time, I gobbled it up it for
its feminist themes of male dominance and oppression. But I also found myself
drawn to something in it that I couldn't quite put my finger on. There was a
haunting strangeness, a dark heart to the Caribbean, and it transported me into
a place and time to which I had never previously given any thought.
The book is the prequel
to Charlotte Bronte's ‘Jane Eyre,'
published in 1849, one of the most influential novels in English literature. ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea' looks at the
character of Antoinette ‘Bertha' Mason, Mr Rochester's first wife. Shut away
for her lunacy, you may recall, she lives in the attic of Thornfield Hall and
eventually burns down the house. She is given almost no characterful flesh in
the book, although she is described as Creole; West Indian from white European
descent.
Jean Rhys, herself a
Creole born in Dominica, gives Antoinette a voice and a past. An heiress on a
Jamaican plantation, Antoinette belongs to neither the white European upper
classes nor the black Jamaicans of African descent. As a woman, she also has
very few freedoms in this highly patriarchal society.
The book was published
in 1966, and marked a dramatic return from obscurity for Rhys whose previous
work, ‘Good Morning, Midnight,'
was released 27 years earlier. The novel examines Antoinette's sense of
isolation, and of not fitting in (something that was a running theme in Rhys'
own life). It develops her rebelliousness and instability, her cynicism and
vulnerability through both her own words and those of her husband, whose
viewpoint is strikingly different to hers over issues such as racial equality.
‘The Wide Sargasso Sea' is not,
it has to be said, a happy read. But there is beautiful language and striking
imagery in its pages. As a voracious reader, I tend to be disciplined about
getting rid of books I know I will never read again for fear of one day being
found dead underneath an avalanche of pages. But this one stayed, tucked away
on a shelf, until I took it down 20 years after I first read it.
The reason I revisited
it was because I had recently traced my family tree and found, to my
astonishment, that my great grandmother was born in Antigua in exactly the same
era in which ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea'
is set. Like Mrs Rochester, Sarah Hall was also Creole, from an old plantation
family. Like Mrs Rochester, she too, as far as I can tell, was forced away from
her home and over to England to be married; in great grandmama's case, after
her first husband died in a boating accident. While I have no proof, I believe,
or possibly like to believe, that she too suffered from living in a patriarchal
society where women, white and black, suffered massive constraints. If there
was no prospective second husband amongst the plantation class in Antigua,
Sarah Hall would have had no choice but to move away, having absolutely no
means of supporting herself.
Since my discovery - and
my Dad is gone now so I can't ask him how this all got lost in my family
history - I have been to Antigua and made contact with a whole distant family I
never knew about. I've seen the old plantation house in which my great
grandmother lived and dug through the National Archives office. And, hell, this
is Antigua. It is stunningly beautiful and there is a different beach for every
day of the year. But that dark heart is still there, beyond the tourist
destination dream.
Now, I like to imagine
romantically, that I understand what lies behind those echoes that I first
sensed half my lifetime ago; that deep sense of grieving and not belonging,
that fascination with a place in the world at once so beautiful and yet so
brutal. They weren't just in the book, they were in my genes.
