In 1966, the Dominican writer Jean Rhys published her most celebrated work, the novella Wide Sargasso Sea. It marked her return to the literary scene after a near twenty-year’s gap, and it inspired a large body of scholarship and study.
Wide Sargasso Sea took as its focus the character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte BrontĂ«’s Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, who like Rhys hails from the Caribbean, is characterized as insane, animalistic, bestial, terrifying. She in many ways embodies the stereotypes that existed about Creole women in England at the time BrontĂ« was writing.
Rhys challenged this representation of Creole women with a reimagining of Bertha Mason, and she so completely brings this character to life, gives her so fully her own rich story that readers might not realize at all that she comes from another novel.
In my English Language & Literature class, I am teaching Wide Sargasso Sea. Students at first found the reading a terrible challenge. What was even happening? Who are these characters? After a few days of work together, a student came to me on Friday asking, “Jimmy, are you sure this story isn’t real?” That’s what I want to explore a bit today–what is Rhys doing in her text that makes it so very vivid, so very, very real?
Rhys’s novel takes place in the 1830s and 40s in Jamaica and nearby islands. The story opens in medias res, just after the abolition of slavery. Bertha Mason, who in Rhys’s retelling is called Antoinette Cosway, is the daughter of a white Creole family who lost their economic power with the act of emancipation. Tensions between the family and the formerly enslaved people are high, and race is a central theme of the novella. Some critics have argued that Rhys’s novella caricatures Black people in the same way Jane Eyre caricatured Creoles; others have disagreed.
After the family’s home was burned down by the mob and her brother killed, Antoinette’s mother has violent outbursts. Deemed insane, she is kept under supervision at a cottage in the countryside. Near the end of Part 1, Antoinette has gone to live and study at a convent in Spanish Town, the capital city of Jamaica at the time. Rhys writes,
This convent was my refuge, a place of sunshine and of death where very early in the morning the clap of a wooden signal woke the nine of us who slept in the long dormitory. We woke to see Sister Marie Augustine sitting, serene and neat, bolt upright in a wooden chair. The long brown room was full of gold sunlight and shadows of trees moving quietly. I learnt to say very quickly as the others did, 'offer up all the prayers, works and sufferings of this day.' But what about happiness, I thought at first, is there no happiness? There must be. Oh happiness of course, happiness, well. But I soon forgot about happiness, running down the stairs to the big stone bath where we splashed about wearing long grey cotton chemises which reached to our ankles. The smell of soap as you cautiously soaped yourself under the chemise, a trick to be learned, dressing with modesty, another trick. Great splashes of sunlight as we ran up the wooden steps of the refectory. Hot coffee and rolls and melting butter. But after the meal, now and at the hour of our death, and at midday and at six in the evening, now and at the hour of our death. Let perpetual light shine on them.
What is it here that might make someone wonder, is this real? Paradoxically, I think the dreamlike tone is part of it. The language moves so smoothly from one idea to the next that we get only impressions, never a fully realized fact before we slide into the next image. We see the long dormitory with its nine beds and the watchful nun sitting at one end in her wooden chair, and before we can ask a question, we are pulled into the repeated prayers and Antoinette’s wondering about why happiness has been omitted.
This is the voice of someone living this experience, not an exterior narrator. A thoughtful narrator who wanted readers to have a clear, straightforward view would have chosen different details to share with us–would perhaps have described the dormitory more completely, or the scene in the bath where the young women are ludicrously trying to wash themselves while still wearing their underwear–this might have been a whole scene. Instead Rhys offers us just a few words of description, the way these impressions might appear in someone’s real memory. It is a description more for Antoinette herself than for the reader, the kind of description we might give ourselves in our own minds.
The choice of details mixes objective descriptions indiscriminately with subjective feelings and thoughts–the narrative becomes a stream of Antoinette’s consciousness: we hear about the smell of soap in the bath, followed by Antoinette’s judgement of the activity (this bathing ritual is “a trick to be learned”). The language of the prayers, “now and at the hour of our death,” jumbles with the list of times–“after the meal… and at midday and at six in the evening.” At the end of the first paragraph, we hear the indistinct adult voice of a nun, or perhaps Antoinette’s internalization of the way the nuns hedge on the childish concerns of their young pupils: “Oh happiness of course, happiness, well.”
This dreamlike narration feels real because it seems to emerge from the character naturally, without the artifice of a planned description. Even as it hides so many of the details from us, it reveals the character in every word. We feel like we are listening to someone’s running thoughts. We have a feeling that there is a very real world on the other side of the words, that much more exists than Rhys is showing us. Rhys has imagined the impressions of this character so vividly and chosen them so clearly that it feels perhaps that Rhys the author was in that convent, washing herself under a chemise.
Rhys also plays with time to create a sense of realism. She jumps over time without explanation and requires the reader to catch up. This happens at the break between Part 1 and Part 2 of the novella. We last saw Antoinette preparing to leave the convent; at the beginning of Part 2 then, she is already married to the unnamed man that we know is Charlotte BrontĂ«’s Mr. Rochester. This hurtling through time emphasizes the way Antoinette’s life rushes by her without agency. The things that happen seem inevitable because Rhys robs us of the chance to see Antoinette’s decisions (we do dip back, briefly, to the arrangement of the wedding, but only later; the beginning of Part 2 forces us to reorient ourselves).
The reorientation readers have to do each time Rhys skips time is part of the larger requirement Rhys places on readers to pay careful attention. The language is hard. The stream-of-consciousness narration requires us to interpret it in order to make logical sense of the story. The omission of any contextual details forces us to either research 1830s Jamaica or to muddle through confused. All of these choices place a high bar to entry for readers, and I am sure many readers would be so off-put that they would never make it past the first pages. Yet the reward Rhys gains is an audience who is staring so intently at the text that they have the sense the story is real. We pay such careful attention because we must, and the result is that we are invested. An easy read is also easy to put down and forget. A text we have to focus on sticks itself onto our minds.
Finally, the conflict. It has been a while since I’ve written about conflict here on Words Like Trees, but it is one of my biggest questions about writing and about literature. Western literature typically uses conflict as its driving engine, and this is something I have questioned, wanted to challenge, wondered how it all fits together–is it inevitable? I want to say now that I see how Rhys is using conflict at its most powerful. From the first line of the book–“They say when trouble comes…” she writes. The book is dripping with conflict, right down to the binary oppositions that saturate the above-quoted passage (the peaceful dormitory and the abrupt clap of the wooden signal; the “place of sunshine and of death.” On the novella’s second page is an image that I can’t remove from my mind–a horse lying peacefully beneath a frangipani tree, beautiful, perhaps resting, but then we learn the horse is dead. Flies cover its eyes. The conflict in Wide Sargasso Sea is so intense, so relentless, it keeps the heart pounding, and that makes it feel real.
Writing out all these ideas, the power of Rhys’s novel starts to loosen. I can look at it perhaps a bit more distantly, and I can consider how I could learn and use these things. I’ve been working to do so during this last week in my own writing time.
What texts stand out to you as visceral and real? What do you do to create those feelings in your writing?
Thank you for stopping by. Best wishes for the coming fortnight till I write again,
Jimmy
Words like trees 