Jean Rhys (1894-1979)

Life and works

Jean Rhys was born on the island of Dominica in the West Indies in 1894, the daughter of a doctor of Welsh descent, and moved to Britain when she was sixteen. After briefly attending the Perse School in Cambridge and the Academy of Dramatic Art, she had a series of different jobs, working as a chorus girl or an extra in a film. In 1919 she moved to Paris where she lived for many years and married the first of her three husbands. In Paris she met the writer Ford Madox Ford who wrote an enthusiastic review of her first book, published in 1927, a collection of short stories called The Left Bank. This was followed by Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Goodmorning Midnight (1939). None of these were particularly successful, probably because they were so far ahead of their time in theme and tone. A long silence followed, during which Rhys lived in England. With the outbreak of war she dropped out of sight until twenty years later when she was rediscovered thanks to Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It was her first novel in over 25 years and was a great success. After its publication, some of her early books were reprinted, and were followed by two late collections of short stories and by her unfinished biography Smile Please (1979). Jean Rhys died in 1979.

Focus on the text: Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is set in Dominica, Jamaica and England during the 1830s. It tells the story of Bertha Mason, here called Antoinette Cosway, the "mad" wife of Mr Rochester, the principal male character of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. From Bronte’s text we know very little about Bertha, apart from the fact that she is considered mad and she lives locked up in the attic of Thornfield. Jean Rhys, fascinated by this character, decided to give her a "life" and construct a story around her. Commenting on her idea, and on the possibility of giving a voice to a character from an already existing novel, Rhys once wrote:

"When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I’d write the story as it might really have been She seemed such a poor ghost I’d try to write her a life"

Jane Eyre provided the initial inspiration for an imaginative work which is a great work of literature in its own right, independent of its model. The novel is divided into three parts. The first section is told in Antoinette’s words, telling of her childhood and family and her education in a convent. By contrast, the second part is narrated by the young Mr Rochester and describes his arrival in the West Indies, his marriage to Antoinette and its disastrous consequences. At the end of this section Antoinette is again given the opportunity to speak. The third section is once more narrated by Antoinette, but the scene has now changed to England, and in particular the attic of Thornfield Hall, the house where most of Jane Eyre is set, where Antoinette/Bertha has been imprisoned because she is considered dangerously mad. At the end of Wide Sargasso Sea, as in Jane Eyre, Antoinette/Bertha sets fire to the house. But in Rhys’s novel we can understand much more about her because she has been given the chance to express the solitude, the suffering she experienced, the sense of alienation she felt with a man who never understood her and never really tried to do so. This was exasperated further by her childhood, when she was often left alone because of her mother’s "madness".

Features

Although all Rhys’s novels are extremely autobiographica1, the most original aspect of Wide Sargasso Sea is its intertextua1 aspect. Giving voice to a secondary character of another novel means filling the gaps, the silences in that novel, constructing a point of view which can widen its horizons and its "life". As in all her other books, the point of view that Rhys chooses to explore is that of the oppressed wom.an in a male-dominated society who has very little chance to speak. This difficulty, or sometimes impossibility, for women to speak is brilliantly expressed in Voyage in the Dark through the phrase "speaking from under water". In this case the woman emerges from her suffocating liquid prison and narrates her story herself. Another interesting aspect of this nove1 is the alternation of voices. The fact that the story is narrated both by Antoinette and Rochester allows the reader to see the events from two different points of view and to understand how the two characters see each other. Antoinette’s first-person narrative is extremely significant, especially because Bronte’s book tells us so little about her. However, Rochester’s voice is also important. In fact, we discover that after all he is a weak man, afraid of everything, and especially of his wife’s sensuality, equated with that of her country which is always referred to as ’too much’.

The language used by Rhys is often highly symbolic, especially in the description of nature and the use of colours. The Caribbean islands are described as a paradise, full of intoxicating but menacing flowers, whose scent is too much for Rochester, and the environment is often associated with Antoinette herself.

[Graeme Thomson, Silvia Maglioni, Literary Links. Literature in Time and Space, vol.3, Genova, CIDEB, pp.264-266]