Wide Sargasso Sea

"Jean Rhys is a white writer who was born in the colonies, and later moved to Britain. Wide Sargasso Sea is a reimagining of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha, Rochester’s first wife. She’s described as a white Creole heiress, with Creole in this context meaning that she is too connected to Caribbean culture to be seen as culturally ‘white’ by the British Rochester. She sets it in the 1830s and 1840s, just after the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, and she re-christens Bertha as Antoinette. The reason you can reimagine Jane Eyre in this way is because Jane Eyre is an immensely colonial novel. The colonies pop up in it all the time. When Jane inherits money, it is from her uncle who’s made money in Madeira. At one point her cousin wants her to marry him and go to India to work as a missionary. Rochester has indeed met his wife in the Caribbean and brought her back to Britain. This shows you the extent to which colonialism permeates British society, the extent to which you can see colonialism as important even to the stories which we don’t think of as colonial. What Jean Rhys does is a post-colonial retelling. She draws out the themes that enable Antoinette to be cast as mad. And this madness is based – a little in Jane Eyre and quite explicitly in Wide Sargasso Sea – in a sense of the Empire as a corrupting space where white people make increasingly bad choices. There is a sense that you can’t go into Empire and come back unscathed. Antoinette and her family are caught between Europe and Jamaica, between the Empire and the metropole, between the colonial and the civilized. Antoinette is stuck in the two spaces and moving between them feeds into the idea that she is mad. There is this idea that she can’t exist in either. Antoinette’s family were initially slave owners and lost their slaves after abolition. They are Creole because they are Jamaican, but white, and they’re despised by everybody. The black Jamaican population see them as both former oppressors, and pitiful figures who are now lack authority. The British hate them because they are too Jamaican, they’re too colonial. You can write about that as a historical story; you could set out that narrative and say that this small group of people – slave owners who stayed in Jamaica – have this particular experience. But imagining it in a fictional narrative helps you to understand the feeling at the heart of all of this and this sense of dislocation. The first part is set on the sugar plantation Coulibri, in Jamaica. The descriptions of Jamaica are so lush, but also dangerous. There is a feeling of over-ripeness. This plantation that used to be rich is now ailing. Plants are growing all over the plantation house and there’s fruit everywhere and insects humming, and it’s too hot. Rhys is writing about her own upbringing in Dominica there. She’s describing a Caribbean that she knows very well, and there wouldn’t necessarily be a place for that in academic writing; and she’s writing this novel in the 1960s, towards the end of her life. She moved to England from Dominica when she was 16, and she’s filtering English feelings about the former colonies through her writing. It tells you a lot more about how people see Jamaica in that moment than then just the facts. There’s real defensiveness, I think, because of the assumption that when historians say ‘British society is shaped by Empire’ that they are implying that you and your life are shaped by Empire, and therefore you are a bad person. That’s not what historians are saying. We are saying that in order to understand, for example, British citizenship law, you have to understand imperialism, or to understand the education system or the police you have to understand imperialism. It was an important social structure at the times these things were set up and so inevitably shaped them and impacted them. You can’t talk about migration in Britain without talking about Empire, because you can see how migration was shaped very, very obviously by the structures of Empire and decolonisation. I think this defensiveness is very telling. People are really projecting their own assumptions. They want to defend their feelings about Empire, and the idea that the British Empire specifically has been liberal and good and civilisational and humane, but it simultaneously is apparently something that wasn’t that important and can be now completely forgotten and never talked about again. It doesn’t make sense."

"True. It was at the beginning of a tradition of literature that subverts the Victorian novel, right? To take a classic and twist it, make us see it completely anew. You can see in Wide Sargasso Sea a current that would develop through the coming decades—it’s the beginning of a wave of prequels that turned the concept of the villain and turn it on its head. Which then led to Wicked and Maleficent and other, similar prequels. My first reaction to what is essentially a prequel to my favourite novel ever was indignation. Like: this is fan fiction, at best. But then I read it, and I was blown away. It felt so transgressive. I didn’t know we could do that! I’ll never forgive Jean Rhys, though, for ruining Mr Rochester for me. I mean, I was so in love with him, growing up. He was my first literary crush. She destroyed him. But her language! It’s so economic. I find it mesmerising. I think she was very underappreciated. They accused her of only writing what she knew, apparently, which is hilarious because that’s now a writing prompt. But, yes, this is two things: a transgressive, experimental historical novel set in Victorian times; and also an early example of the villain’s origin story. I don’t know if it’s the first example, but it was the first time I encountered it. And I’m glad I discovered it. I was kind of immature in my reading tastes when I read it. I was so obsessed with Jane Eyre —that was it for me. I didn’t want to know anything else. But I’m so glad that I came to understand how amazing this was, and how it moved literature forward. How often can you say that of a book? And it’s another slim book as well. Another slap in the face. I wouldn’t presume to compare myself to any of these writers. I ended up wanting to do this almost accidentally, I didn’t set out to do it. It happened organically, as I say, grown out of the anger I felt doing research, and from reading the Bronte biographies and seeing everything they went through. I was just in that mood. I found this very aggressive character who offered me an outlet through dark humour, by subverting Victorian literature. I think all of these novels push that a little further. And, as freedom hopefully increases, and we have fewer taboos, then hopefully we can always have different angles to the same story."