Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea
Rhys, Jean
London : Deutsch, 1966
189 p. ; 21 cm

The famous response novel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), long considered a classic of Victorian fiction, or in more recent critical terms, a canonical work. The idea of the response novel, that it is a test and a correction of established representations, renders the latter term more timely. Wide Sargasso Sea is seminal in the creation of this mode in postcolonial fiction, which provides the other side of the story, an alternative narrative, from the point of view of a key character but one marginalized in the original text. In this case, that character is the first wife of the wealthy male hero and eventual husband of Jane, who appears in Jane Eyre as the (much written about) mad woman in the attic. A white Creole, child of the plantocracy, Antoinette is from an unnamed island in the Caribbean that bears remarkable resemblance to Dominica, Rhys’ native island. Thirty years in gestation, this novel can be seen as summative in Rhys’ work, both formally in its clean elegance and thematically in which the harshness of English character is matched by the violence of Caribbean society in the aftermath of slavery. Unrelenting and unredemptive, this is Rhys’ only novel set in the Caribbean, and one of two in which the protagonist is Caribbean. Her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, which provides her only account of her childhood in the Caribbean, is an informative companion piece to this novel, especially in its painful and unreflective portrait of racial enmities in her childhood.

A note about the response novel: Wide Sargasso Sea provides something of a paradigm of the response novel on the grounds of its timeliness, its celebrated critical reception and enduring presence. In presenting an alternative narrative to an established work, the response novel lays bare the moral, ethical and political structures that underpin all narrative form. Specific to the postcolonial text, such alternative narratives are from the point of view of the colonized. Here, in Wide Sargasso Sea, what is laid bare is the wealth gained through slavery, the exploitation of colonial women and the legacy of racial hatreds in the Caribbean. The response novel, however, is not widely used because of its strictly literary nature, but the idea of the alternative narrative generally is widespread, in history especially (the New Historicism, for example), memoir and autobiography, to cite other important forms, and is a defining characteristic of the postcolonial text. For other response novels, note the Australian novelist Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, a response to Dickens’ Great Expectations, the Sudanese novelist, Tayeb Salih, A Season of Migration to the North, a response to Othello, as is the novel The Nature of Blood by Caryl Phillips (St.Kitts/ Britain).

This copy is inscribed in red marker: To old uncle D: Happy Christmas late. JR 1967.

Wide Sargasso Sea was filmed in 1992.

H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois at Chicago Library
Daley Library - Special Collections/3rd floor (non-circ.)
PR9275.D653 R593 1966

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