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Title: Wide Sargasso Sea
Author: Jean Rhys
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: A borderline hallucinatory literary spin on Jane Eyre, from the perspective of the mad wife in the attic.
Thoughts: I loved Jane Eyre as a child. Rereading it as an adult, I've been struck by the incredible creepy assholish tendencies of Rochester. Jane gets her revenge, really, in the end, when he is left entirely in her power. But despite knowing that Rochester is a lying jerk, it never occurred to me to question his story about his first wife, Bertha.
Given the treatment of the mad--and the ease with which Regency English men could declare their womenfolk to be so--I really should have wondered how much that story was true.
Jean Rhys' feminist classic alternates between the viewpoints of Bertha (nee Antoinette, whose very name Rochester strips from her in their power battle) and Rochester. Antoinette may not be quite all the way sane at the beginning. By the end, she is most definitely mad. But she's not the only one--the entire book, from any perspective, has the quality of a fever dream.
And her madness is entirely thrust upon her by outside circumstances. Yet, to avoid admitting responsibility, the people surrounding her insist that madness is an intrinsic quality, that Antoinette is irreparably tainted from childhood and therefore to blame for whatever befalls her. And it is this insistence that finally pushes her over the edge.
More than anything else, this is a psychological horror novel. I do not think it could have been written today. There's a claustrophobia I think modern Western women are mostly spared. That's not to say that women are equal and feminism is dead, but this kind of book is a vivid reminder of the attitudes and circumstances that led the early feminists to fight so hard.
But it's more than a polemic. It's a tragedy, full of memorable characters and lush imagery. Political considerations are merely an afterthought that emerge organically from a rich story that takes us deeper into a world that seems familiar but is far more strange than we first imagined.
Author: Jean Rhys
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: A borderline hallucinatory literary spin on Jane Eyre, from the perspective of the mad wife in the attic.
Thoughts: I loved Jane Eyre as a child. Rereading it as an adult, I've been struck by the incredible creepy assholish tendencies of Rochester. Jane gets her revenge, really, in the end, when he is left entirely in her power. But despite knowing that Rochester is a lying jerk, it never occurred to me to question his story about his first wife, Bertha.
Given the treatment of the mad--and the ease with which Regency English men could declare their womenfolk to be so--I really should have wondered how much that story was true.
Jean Rhys' feminist classic alternates between the viewpoints of Bertha (nee Antoinette, whose very name Rochester strips from her in their power battle) and Rochester. Antoinette may not be quite all the way sane at the beginning. By the end, she is most definitely mad. But she's not the only one--the entire book, from any perspective, has the quality of a fever dream.
And her madness is entirely thrust upon her by outside circumstances. Yet, to avoid admitting responsibility, the people surrounding her insist that madness is an intrinsic quality, that Antoinette is irreparably tainted from childhood and therefore to blame for whatever befalls her. And it is this insistence that finally pushes her over the edge.
More than anything else, this is a psychological horror novel. I do not think it could have been written today. There's a claustrophobia I think modern Western women are mostly spared. That's not to say that women are equal and feminism is dead, but this kind of book is a vivid reminder of the attitudes and circumstances that led the early feminists to fight so hard.
But it's more than a polemic. It's a tragedy, full of memorable characters and lush imagery. Political considerations are merely an afterthought that emerge organically from a rich story that takes us deeper into a world that seems familiar but is far more strange than we first imagined.
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Date: 2014-02-13 04:07 pm (UTC)From: