Jean Rhys
Um, hi. This is my first post. Nice to be here.
I kind of wagged work the other afternoon and did a bit of second-hand-bookshop-browsing and came away with quite an armful. One of which was Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of those books I've vaguely heard of but were never really sure what it was about. Hint: there is no sea in it. It's an imagined pre-history of the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre, aka the mad woman in the attic. In Jane Eyre, she is a gothic beast, unfeminine, mad, tropical, sensual, a perfect foil to Jane's purity and rationality.
Jean Rhys imagines her rather differently. Antoinette's a bit lost, a bit unloved, and very scared, living in Jamaica when the recent emancipation of the slaves has made white people unwelcome. The first part of the book covers part of her childhood, which is quite tragic and results in her mother going mad. The second part is written from the view of Mr Rochester, and if about his marriage, which he kind of falls into because he's greedy for money and Antoinette has plenty. During their honeymoon, things begin to go wrong. Rochester finds out he is a figure of fun for having married a woman with a family history of mental problems (probably from inbreeding), who also has black blood. Antoinette is desperate to make him love her, and resorts to voodoo, which doesn't work and leaves her angry, impotent and trapped.
The third part is set in England, and this is where the story crosses Jane Eyre. It's a strange book, because you already know the ending - mad woman, burning house - she can't escape her fate. But she knows she can't, and this makes her real, instead of the animal other that Charlotte Bronte imagined.
The writing creates a sense of dread and doom all the way through to the end. Reading it late at night gave me a bad case of the creeps. It's only 150 pages long, but packs a lot in.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
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1 comment:
Yeah I've meant to read that one for a while now too (although bythe sounds of it might need to avoid reading it alone on the late train home with strange fidgety men in my carriage). Nice idea to give the voiceless 'extra' in a fiction a chance to be the lead in theoir own story and to express their perspective... this idea is similar in a way to those recent refairytaling books of Gregory Maguires: "In Wicked, we saw The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch and in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, we viewed Cinderella from one of the stepsister's point of view. Mirror, Mirror is the telling of Snow White from not only the title character's point of view, but also from her father's, the wicked witch's, and a mysterious 8th dwarf."
I read wicked and really liked it as a more fleshed out imagining of the Wizard of Oz universe - with all the institutions and power structures and ethnic tensions painted in. And the idea of spin, where the character of the Wicked Witch and how she is interpreted by Dorothy and the others is the result of politics and propaganda. And let's face it, I just liked the character of the wicked witch, Elphaba - gotta love a strong green woman.
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