Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Set in Jamaica in the 1830s, Wide Sargasso Sea  is the unofficial prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and tells the secret story of Rochester's first wife, Bertha Mason. The author, Jean Rhys, felt that Bronte's gothic tale dealt unjustly towards the mad woman in the attic and wanted to offer her a voice. The book is divided into three parts told from fluctuating viewpoints: Antoinette Cosway herself (Bertha's pre-marriage name), her husband, a young Rochester, and later on, her keeper, Grace Poole. Following the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833, Antoinette's plantation owning, colonialist family are left ruined and without an identity. As a child, Antoinette watches her widowed Creole mother remarry and eventually descend into madness, a condition prophesied by the local population to be inherited. Later on, Antoinette is married to Rochester, who, bewildered by the exotic beauty of Jamaica and his Creole wife, enters the reunion against his better judgement.

What follows is an eventual disenchantment as vicious rumours about his wife's history begin to circulate. Thus poisoned against her, Rochester drives Antoinette towards the same fate as her mother. This feminist re-imagining of the events leading to Antoinette's incarceration in Thornfield Hall won a lot of acclaim when it was published and remains an influential example of postcolonial literature. Saturated with voodoo black magic and Lacanian imagery, it is often cited in terms of its psychoanalytical content to highlight the repression of women, identity, passion, and desire. Literature professors love it for its themes of race. slavery, and displacement, topics I'm not overly interested in. As a result of my nonchalance, I did not rate the book very highly or fully enter into its impassioned agenda. I also found some of the literary devices rather cumbersome and preachy, such as the burning parrot with clipped wings to foreshadow Antoinette's fate in Jane Eyre.

2/5