Wide Sargasso Sea

 

Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
One day we will have all become so fucking stupid that somebody will describe this as Jane Eyre fanfic, but thankfully that day remains some way ahead, at least in this house. Older boys and girls will doubtless remember that Jane Eyre is about a woman called Jane Eyre who sort of fancies her boss, Mr. Rochester. He kind of fancies her back too, but is unfortunately already married and keeps his crazy wife locked away in the attic so as to keep her from setting things on fire. It might be observed that the aforementioned crazy wife gets something of a raw deal in Jane Eyre, although in literary terms she's not much more than a piece of scary scenery provided so as to throw her husband's twattery into sharp relief. All the same, I guess Jean Rhys felt that the first Mrs. Rochester got something of a raw deal, hence this prequel telling her side of the story.

Antoinette Cosway is the approximately white daughter of a nineteenth century Caribbean plantation owner and heiress to a fortune, which is why she attracts the attention of the aforementioned Rochester, although he isn't specifically identified here. While I'm not convinced Charlotte Brontë's novel is quite the expression of patriarchy it might seem - her mad woman in the attic playing a more or less gothic and hence symbolic role rather than being ancestral to Bernard Manning jokes - it's hard not to be left a little uncomfortable by the first Mrs. Rochester, which was almost certainly the point; and Brontë was writing from a very much colonial perspective, which seems worth addressing

Rhys' Antoinette is a victim of her environment more than anything. Her life begins to fall apart in the wake of the abolition of slavery, leaving her and her dwindling family marooned - interred within a Caribbean existence which is itself mostly hostile to them. By the time Rochester turns up in hope of marrying her bank account, the psychological damage is mostly done, and the novel maps her falling apart over time, not so much for the sake of turning a victim into a martyr to any particular cause, but to render Antoinette as a rounded human being rather than just a one-dimensional reason why some better known English guy is a bit of a dick. No-one comes out of this looking good.

'Then I will have the police up, I warn you. There must be some law and order even in this Godforsaken island.'

'No police here,' she said. 'No chain gang, no tread machine, no dark jail either. This is free country and I am free woman.'

Additionally, to Rhys' credit, Wide Sargasso Sea makes no attempt to impersonate Brontë's novel, but rather is formed from dreamlike impressions with viewpoints shifting from one individual to another and keeping the reader guessing for much of the time. Thus we are afforded wildly variable sides of the same story obliging us to draw our own conclusions regarding Antoinette's state of mind and the ominous nature of her environment.

I suppose someone must have adapted it for screen with Hugh Grant or one of that bunch goshing and crikeying his way through a completely unrelated script in period costume, but it doesn't read like anything which would lend itself to that sort of distillation into lace, milkmaids and pretty pictures, so I hope not and I'm not going to look, just in case. Some things only really work as books, or work significantly better as books than in any other medium, and I suspect this may be one of them.