The Wide Sargasso Sea By Jean Rhys

I am finding it difficult to wrestle the magnitude of this book into a mere blog post.

Yes, it is only 100 pages - though, then again, these pages are the product of 27 years. Meaning each sentence, each word, each bit of punctuation has been placed with such precision that each, in turn, knock you out. This book is charged with an enduring type of power - crackling with an electricity that continues to shock the reader, long after the author, and her reputation, has disintegrated into dust. My world history teacher substituted the word “novel” for “mood.” Meaning Jean Rhys managed to craft not merely a really good story, composed of something so banal as words, but rather a feeling - newly devised, stewing awkward, undefined, in my brain.

How?

Jean Rhys is returning home, to Dominica, after x years apart. Her ship is ensnared by sargasso - a type of seaweed found in a particular part of the Atlantic. Her voyage is delayed.

Why Jean chose to name her book “the wide sargasso sea” remains undefined. It suggests suffocation - perhaps alluding to her childhood spent as a colonial Victorian. Or perhaps a present day - in which she is tied by the need to write and record this story. Her character, too, is suffocated by expectation. By her past. Note George Eliot’s words that:

“The happiest woman, like the happiest nation, has no history.”

Or else the sargasso refers to a state of being stuck - mere moments, mere miles, away from a destination.. As if Jean Rhys, in this short novel, is trying to say something - but can’t quite finish. Her sentence trails off….similar to how the heroine, abruptly, was killed by a fire. With so much left to live. To do. To say.

The ocean is an in-between stage; dividing England from the Caribbean, places that defined Jean Rhys. Dominica was her home - overlaid with british culture, England thus manifesting itself as a dream to the young Jean. As a creole, she was neither black nor white. Neither Caribbean nor british, but somewhere in between. In her biography, Jean describes this state as being almost invisible. Transparent. Like the zombies that infused Caribbean legend. She lived as though she were not quite real, not quite tangible; floating, unseen, through a vivid landscape of which, in her novels, is lended a dreamlike quality.

The novel follows the life of Antoinette Cosway - otherwise known as Bertha, who first appeared to the public in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In this context, she represents the european perspective of colonization. A creole woman; mad, but seductive. Glimpsed, but never quite pinned down. Most significantly, she must die before Jane, an white Englishwoman, is free to attain her dreams. Antoinette is the “mad woman in the attic;” a shadowy figure who flits across two centuries of english literature . We see her in the “Green Dwarf;” authored by a teen Charlotte, of whom allocated her the role of a cackling jailer.

In “the wide sargasso sea,” this figure is finally given a voice of her own. Using which she can assert her assert, much like the words of John Clare:

“I am—yet what I am none cares or knows.’

She attaches herself to material things; as if they further prove her existence. For example, a red dress that she feels “like herself” in. When transplanted to England - of where the culture there eat away at her selfhood - the dress loses this power, leading her to the conclusion that it must be a replica. She seeks out intensity. A vividness to which she clings to. This leads to her being consumed by flames - sought for their fierce temperatures, and bright orange hue. A colour evocative perhaps of her Caribbean birthplace.

I was struck by the colour palette in this novel. When reading Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, I was similarly entranced.Both writers delineates England as cold and grey - a contrast to the vividness clinging to exotic places. I rummaged for symbology in each tint; red, for example, must represent the unsaid; the passions that burn buried beneath the surface. Stifled by society. Like the crimson rocks Rachel and Terence glimpse beneath the sea. Colours communicate feelings, or proclaim identities (recall Jean’s conflict with being neither white nor black.) They are infinite; resting in between the simple categories of black and white. They are more than surface deep.

There is more to say on this book. Yet I have mulled over this post for far to long. My recommendation, thus, is to pick up “the wide sargasso sea” and

Let music make less terrible

The silence of the dead;

-LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON

P.S. On the silence of the dead….

Woolf also sought to lend a voice to the voiceless in history - such as woman. One of her characters, Orlando, harboured an affinity for “the oak tree,” of which he/she later transcribed into a poem. Recently, I stumbled on an anglo saxon poem called the “wife’s lament” in which the narrator’s husband “ordered me anchored in a woody grove, under an oak-tree.” The oak tree was again mentioned - as both a prison, and comfort. Another fun fact: Oak-trees are monoecious, meaning they are both female and male. Virginia

I am now reading about an “englishwoman at the edge of the empire” during the Victorian era - in an attempt to colour history with some women's voices.