Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys, 1966

I’m not completely sure what I think of this novel. It didn’t grab my interest particularly, although I’m interested in the themes around colonialist influence on England and English literature and I can enjoy a novel that explores grand passions. But the storytelling here is a bit abstracted, leaving a lot to be inferred. And the shifting narrators – it sometimes takes pages to identify who is telling the story – further distances the reader.

The novel explores the way racism and colonialism destroy the possibilities of a loving relationship between the Caribbean heiress Antoinette Cosway and the English landowner Edward Rochester. Both seem to have lost the money that supports them: Antoinette’s family lost its wealth when slavery was abolished in the British Empire; Rochester’s English estate is agricultural and his family has not caught on to the industrial revolution. Antoinette’s mother marries the wealthy Mason, who arranges her marriage to Rochester with presumably a rich dowry. Antoinette initially refuses Rochester, but comes to love him after he reveals his vulnerability. He hates the colonial isles and their history, but comes to accept Antoinette’s beauty and spirit and wants to resettle her in England. Rochester’s mistrust of islanders and his inherent racism lead him to jealous resentment when Antoinette’s mixed-race half-brother tries to undermine her. In her frustration at his growing coldness, she turns to rum and magic potions. This goes badly and leads to violence. Eventually Rochester convinces Antoinette to come to his estate in England. She hates the unfamiliar land and the cold, and he has her confined to an attic suite. And this is where Antoinette becomes Rochester’s mad wife Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

The somewhat disjointed narrative reflects the disorientation that Antoinette and Rochester feel. They are pulled by emotional, social and economic forces that they can’t withstand or even recognize. Antoinette loves the sensuous richness of the islands, but the racist and colonial tensions isolate her from the divided island communities, except for a few long-time Black family servants. In the end she has no one except the husband who has been poisoned against her. Rochester is drawn to the beauty of the Jamaican country, but fearful of the forest he doesn’t know and people he doesn’t trust. He thinks the England he knows will be a refuge, but his wife cannot live there and becomes increasingly delusional. This makes sense of the book’s title, which I didn’t entirely understand until I looked it up. The Sargasso sea is a patch of the Atlantic between the Caribbean and Britain that forms a gyre driven by four Atlantic currents. It’s actually clear and productive, but has a reputation for tying ships up in pools of seaweed. Like the Sargasso Sea, Antoinette and Rochester are pushed in different directions by forces beyond them, which pull them under and drown them.

Rhys doesn’t fill in the details of these stories. Instead, she leaves it to the reader to imagine the confusion, misunderstanding and resentment that Antoinette and Rochester feel, in spite of a love that seems to develop between them. But the love is short-lived when Rochester feels uncomfortable in Antoinette’s Jamaican household, especially when dealing with black servants whom he does not trust. His isolation and discomfort make him easy to manipulate by Antoinette’s half-brother. Her intimacy with her black servants, her love of the tropical forest that he finds foreign, and her inability to meet the English social customs that he knows play into his mistrust. His English reserve increasingly turns into a cold distance, which she does not understand. When she turns to her black servant Christophine for extra-normal help, he thinks she is trying to poison him. And it’s not entirely clear whether Christophine is trying to help or hinder their relationship.

Because so much of the novel is left to inference and interpretation, I found that I did not feel for the characters and their evident tragedy. Perhaps I’m just not drawn to the plight of the slave-owning colonists and their inability to find emotional satisfaction. I may be more sympathetic to the fires that the Jamaicans set to Antoinette’s family home and to the one she later sets to Rochester’s home.