Customer Reviews

Wide Sargasso Sea

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I picked up this story because I'm working my way through Time's 100 All Time Best Novels, not realizing that it was intended to be a prequel to Bronte's Jane Eyre, and was pleasantly surprised.

Rhys took issue with Bronte's character Mrs. Rochester, who was of Carribbean descent like Rhys herself (Creole), and set out to create a story that explains how that tragic figure came to be. In Rhys' tale, the original Mrs. Rochester (the young Antoinette Cosway) had a relatively happy, whimsical beginning in the West Indies, but was eventually driven to madness by a combination of racism, sexism, and colonial oppression. Derided by black and white residents alike for her Creole heritage, and stripped of material belongings by her English husband, she ends up the "mad woman in the attic" that Bronte describes.

It's a short novel, told from both Antoinette's and her husbands point of view, but rich with social commentary.

The book is split into three parts. The first one is the childhood of future Mad Wife in the Attic from her perspective, the second is from the perspective of a newly-wed Edward Rochester and, in a short and confusing part, by Bertha, and the third one is by Bertha at Thornfield. Why is part two confusing? Because it's all told by Rochester, and then it jumps and you don't immediately realise that the perspective has shifted, and once you're used to it, it switches back to Rochester.

The first time I read this book, I hated it, and was left with a feeling of being annoyed that the author had completely failed to understand Rochester. I even said (aloud!) "Well, I disagree" after I closed it. On a second read, I still can't agree with Jean Rhys, but I enjoyed the book more. Having read a bunch of books about writing now, I can appreciate the book in a sort of aesthetical way. It's well-written, the characters have very distinct voices and the use of senses drags you in and gives such a rich colour and flavour that you partially forget that you're reading a book. Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894 and was half-Welsh and half-Creole, so she knows what she's talking about with regards to the Caribbean, and you can tell. It can only have been written by someone who knows what it's like there. Now, if only the characters weren't supposed to be Charlotte Brontė's ...

That's the biggest problem. She's referred to as Antoinette, not Bertha; even though she's "Bertha Antoinetta Mason" in Charlotte Brontė's original. In the UK, your first name, your given name, is the one that goes first. Hence why "Bertha Antoinetta Mason" logically should be "Bertha Mason", not "Antoinetta Mason". In the book, she's Antoinetta but calls herself Antoinette, because that's what her mother was called. Bertha is a name she doesn't like and that Rochester insists on calling her because umm, IT'S HER NAME?

Richard Mason is only her stepbrother. Her mother was married to a guy called Cosway, who apparently went crazy and died. The mother then remarried Mr. Mason, father of Richard, and she started losing her mind after her son (the "complete dumb idiot" Rochester refers to in the original) died. I think part two even mentions old Mr. Mason having died before the marriage or at least close to it - there is some way that he seems to be removed from the whole set-up. And who did the original say arranged the wedding? Mr. Mason and Richard with old Mr. Rochester and Rowland. The Masons were as in on it as the Rochesters, eager to be rid of her before the Rochesters would realise the mistake they had made.

Then there's a point where young Antoinette is at school, and she is going to embroider "1839" on something. I thought "Jane Eyre" was set around 1838? I'm also left with the impression that she's taken out of school at the age of 17 in order to get married off. Rochester is around 21 or 22 at the time, and Bertha is a good five years his senior (her age being something the Masons had lied to him about before the wedding). Rhys claims Antoinette's mother died the year before the marriage - the original says Rochester first thought the woman was dead but he came to find out that she wasn't, "she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum."

Also, Brontė is clear to point out that he wasn't allowed to be alone with her before the marriage and they hardly spoke two words to each other. That way, Edward never had a chance to get to know her beforehand, because if he had, he would never have married her. They had nothing in common and he found her a woman with infantile intellect and he couldn't keep a conversation with her even if he tried.

If you're going to write a spin-off of something, at least have the decency to stick to the facts as they've been laid out in the original. Make up things that aren't in the original as much as you want, but the bits that are in the original, please get them right. From what I've gathered, Jean Rhys had a fixation on Mrs. Rochester so trying to apologise for her behaviour by giving her a backstory that doesn't quite add up to Brontė's original is understandable. If the characters hadn't been from "Jane Eyre", the book would've been excellent. As for now, I think it's okay. It's a good book, but she's got the events and main characters wrong.

It's my firm belief that Bertha Mason wasn't half as interesting a person as Jean Rhys makes her out to be. Yes, Bertha is a victim of sorts - being married off to someone who doesn't know the true you just so that your family can breathe a sigh of relief and hope it'll be too late to do anything about it by the time the groom notices something's wrong - but she's not a victim in the way that Rhys wants her to be. Bertha was mentally ill, not just some spirited girl who didn't like the husband she'd been married off to. I don't think she was ever really fully aware of what happened, and while that is sad in itself, I think Rhys just tried a bit too hard to make her sympathetic when she quite clearly never meant to be anything other than a woman whose mental illness was bad to begin with but quickly got worse.

I loved the biogrpahy of Jean Rhys which gave me motivation to re-read all her books. None held a candle in my opinion to her last novel, this masterpiece. It pulls you into the sensual Caribbean, it gives so much in the way of the relationship that began in Charlotte Bronte's "JANE EYRE"... You don't have to know the Bronte story to totally enjoy the atmopherics here. There is love and hate, black and white, lush descriptions and even when you aren't sure who is talking, this novel is a complete gem, rare and quite a miracle given Jean Rhys' life, how she wrote this toward the end of it, how she wrote like an angel. Highly recommend.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is written as a prequel to Jane Eyre and tells the story of Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester's "mad" wife. The story is set in the West Indies and is divided into 3 parts. The first is about her childhood, written from her perspective, the second details her marriage to an English man (who is never named, but who is assumed to be Mr Rochester) during which she begins her descent into madness, told from the perspective of Mr Rochester and the third is during her time locked up in the heights of Thornfield Hall from Jane Eyre with her carer Grace Poole from whose perspective this section is told. It was a great read, short, but very well written. Jean Rhys certainly had a talent for beautiful and sensory descriptive language and this was definitely what I loved most about this novel.

"Humanity does not start out from freedom, but from limitations and the line not to be crossed."
~ Michel Foucault

I. The Masculine
The historical criticism of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea has focused largely on either postcolonial or feminist readings of the text. The dialogue has been so focused on claiming the text, the author, or the protagonist that it has become known as "the Helen of our wars" by the Barbadian critic Kamau Braithwaite (qtd in Su 388). There is, I feel a critical approach missing from the debate. Carine Mardorossian states, "[Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea] constantly thwarts an easy identification with the white Creole protagonist" (1071). As a male reader, I can understand this lack of identification with Antoinette. From this standpoint, I propose a masculinist reading of Wide Sargasso Sea. The critical debate over the text has washed over the main male character and has made him represent many different things to many different people. Usually his appearance is structured as representing the dominate ruling class ideology, oppressing the minority group that the particular reading is trying to claim the text for, either as masculine power or the empirical dominance. However, I argue otherwise. The character is not powerful as representative of anything within the text. Caroline Rody notes, "Rhys rewrites him as an anonymous, lost voice in a place where the very existence of his fatherland is questioned" (219). Antoinette's husband has no home that he is able to move comfortably within the text. A sympathetic reading towards the main male character is possible in a masculinist reading of Wide Sargasso Sea: this will be done by examining the Rhys's work in context with Jane Eyre, and then the focus of the paper will be an examination of Antoinette's madness and the possible actions available to her husband.
A sense of trepidation creeps over the soul of the critic who might want to wave a flag and claim a masculine reading of any text, as any reading issuing forth might easily be construed as latently masculine. An acknowledgement of power structures is in no way inherently misogynistic. Noted feminist critic Nina Baym repudiated the entire formulation of feminist theory, noting that it "addresses an audience of prestigious male academics and attempts to win its respect" (45). At the time of her writing, even having to identify as feminist created acknowledgement of the power structure. Feminist theorist claimed status as outsiders, but still recreate the structure found within the dominant taxonomy: "This repetition of authoritarian structures betrays an infatuation with male forms and deconstructs the feminist project" (Baym 45). As Baym was writing in the in the 1980's, it is evident from this defense that much has changed in the criticism since that time, as an openly masculine take needs its own justification.

II. The Wide Sargasso Sea Stands Alone.
Many commentators on Wide Sargasso Sea have debated on the role that the novel plays when considered in context with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. The main question being: Are Bertha and Edward Rochester were indeed the same characters as Antoinette and her husband from the text of Wide Sargasso Sea? To determine this, one of the easiest ways to disconnect the two sets would be to demonstrate a temporal discontinuity between the texts, a task easy to do. In Wide Sargasso Sea, there is only place where the time is tied down concretely, "I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Cavalry Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839" (31). It is at this point the reader knows the date and can place the text within its historical context.
This historical context, however, is not quite the one present in Bronte's work, "When she set out to rewrite Jane Eyre, Rhys deliberately shifted dates to write about post-emancipation times; indeed, Jane Eyre's acquisition of the recently published Marmion locates the events occurring in Bronte's novel around 1808 and not after 1833" (Mardorossian 1086). From this information, it is easy to separate the two texts. If the events of Jane Eyre were happening in 1808, it would be impossible for Antoinette Cosway Mason to be even alive when Thornfield estate was burning and Bertha Mason Jumped from the roof, since "[Antoinette] would have been born in 1822 or 1823, well before the emancipation act, which did not go into effect for another year after its enactment in 1833" (Erwin 209).
The fact that this is even a question within the scholarship on Wide Sargasso Sea implies that there is a familiarity with Bronte's text even before approaching Rhys's work. Michael Thorpe argues in part, that if there was a connection, "[Rhys] did not assume that her readers' remembrance would be anything but dim, and perhaps composed of stereotypes" (173). This knowledge allows the reader to approach the text with little, if any, bias, as Thorpe reads the connections as tenuous. This can be important for any reading of the text. Within a masculinist reading though, this lack of bias is extremely important as Rhys crafted the character of the husband to be a black slate, an enigma that can receive many of the masculinist reader's projections. The disconnection also frees him from the sins and transgressions of Edward Rochester and allows him to be answerable only to his own actions. For this matter to be settled, it can be illuminating to go back to authorial intent. Over the course of the decades Rhys worked on this slim novel, she had many different names intended for the text, including The First Mrs. Rochester. In her mind there was a connection, but in a letter to her editor, Francis Wyndham, as the novel as nearing completion in 1964, "I think there were several Antoinettes and Mr. Rochesters. Indeed, I am sure. Mine is not Miss Bronte's, though much suggested by `Jane Eyre'" (Letters 140 emphasis mine). From the words of Miss Rhys, it is finally possible to separate the two texts, and declaim along with Sandra Drake, "the novel stands on its own" (149).

III. Its Madness
The character of Antoinette's husband has no champion easily seen in the history of the criticism, even though he can be read sympathetically in the text of Wide Sargasso Sea. The readerly projection available for the masculine reader of the text allows the reader to become the character. He has no name, no history. Whatever the masculine reader wants him to be, he can become. Although there are points in the text where a readerly identification with the character can cause discomfort, by and large he is a sympathetic character, a victim both of the system of primogeniture that sends him out to the West Indies to seek his fortune and of a wife suffering from mental illness.
Yes, mental illness. Although modern systems of psychiatric categorization were not available in the time period in which Antoinette lives, the systems were around when Rhys was writing Wide Sargasso Sea. It can be too facile to construct Antoinette as "crazy," but there seems, in the historical imagination, a binary between sane/not sane. Humanity has a tradition of fascination with mental illness, in part because it is possible to define what you are by what you are not. Michel Foucault notes that "[Western Culture] maintained a profound, passionate relationship with mental illness, perhaps difficult to formulate for ourselves, but impenetrable to anyone else, in which we confronted dangers most vivid to us as well as what was perhaps the truth closest to us" (292). On the edge of the binary every person walks, and with every passing decade, the named pathways for slippage increase. Crazy, insane, and mad have blossomed out and diversified into many well-defined categories and sub-categories of mental impairment. With this knowledge, it becomes possible to recast the historical imagination and address the accusation of John J. Su in his discussion of the text, namely:
The absence of any medical basis for his accusation, not to mention his curious unwillingness to seek out a `cure' for her, reminds readers that applying the category of insanity to women has historically been a means of enforcing cultural and religious values on them as much as a diagnosis of physiological or psychic pathology (391).
While it can be argued that the classical first step in subjugating a class, gender, or race is to remove their humanity, this is not entirely at issue here. Instead, in this context, there is a definable medical basis, and through a historical lens, the curiously unwilling search for a cure is not so "curious."

IV. More Precisely, Its Schizophrenia
Elizabeth Abel, in her article, "Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys," identifies a thread running through the entire fiction corpus of Rhys in which all of her significant heroines are afflicted with madness that can be constructed by modern standards and defined as schizophrenia. She speaks generally about her texts, but Abel is still able to determine that madness is the central issue in Wide Sargasso Sea (172), and that more specifically her heroines:
Manifest several specific symptoms of schizophrenia: impoverished affect, apathy, obsessive thought and behavior coupled with the inability to take real initiative, a sense of the unreality of both the world and self, and a feeling of detachment from the body (156).
Abel begins her examination by looking at the degeneration of Rhys's characters: "Although Rhys describes her heroines' progressive degeneration, often in excruciating detail, she fails to provide an adequate explanation for this process" (156). It is through this thought process that Abel conveys realization that her heroines are schizophrenic; they "experience the world as a hostile environment and lead lives of isolation, detached from family and friends, unable to establish real contact with others" (156). This isolation is important for the development of Wide Sargasso Sea... Antoinette is seen early in part one, after the incident where Tia steals her three pennies and her dress, exclaiming, "Visitors! I dragged up the steps unwillingly -- I had longed for visitors once, but that was years ago" (Rhys 14). The reader is able to see that she is directed inward, at an early point in her life, before she encounters her future husband or even her stepfather. Her young psyche is still under construction and this divide between her self and other has been so internalized that she can recognize a point when she wanted human contact, but in a distant past. This sentiment is echoed by Carine Mardorossian, noting, "The first section of the novel abounds in scenes that show Antoinette's inability to comprehend the relationships between the few individuals that people her world" (1072). Not only is Antoinette isolated, she would not know how to identify relational structures if she wanted to.
The discussion of the disease in Abel's article continues on issues of causation, where "schizophrenia is a legitimate and not uncommon response to certain interpersonal interactions" (157). These are often traumatic events to the subject, Abel explains, "Because the real self attempts to remain unembodied in order to escape the threats to its identity, it tends to grow increasingly detached from concrete things" (158). Antoinette's sense of identity is at issue in part one of Wide Sargasso Sea. The best illustration of this identity crisis is her relationship with Tia. Even after being called "white cockroach" by Tia, young Antoinette continues to identify with the native child. But the act of violence in the scene at Coulibri between the two physically separates the two: "I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. ...We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass" (Rhys 27). Even with this act of violence, Antoinette identifies with Tia more than any other character in the book. An important note is this is the last place the reader sees Tia as a concrete defined character and not as part of Antoinette's constructed world within the text. This identification puts Antoinette into this vague middle ground where "she is not béké like you but she is béké and not like us either" (93) in the words of Christophine. Antoinette is left in the lurch, and had no real reference point from which to begin constructing a `real' self.
This scene is the defining point in the text, as Antoinette wakes up from her fever brought on by the incident with Tia, and her biggest concern is the mark on her head: "`My head is bandaged up. It's so hot,' I said. `Will I have a mark on my forehead?' `No, no.' [Aunt Cora] smiled for the first time. `That is healing very nicely. It won't spoil you on your wedding day'" (Rhys 28). Besides foreshadowing Antoinette's upcoming wedding, the concern for the mark on her head allows for an amazing moment of clarity from Antoinette later in part two, "But I think it did spoil me for my wedding day and all the other days and nights" (Rhys 80). Rhys shows that Antoinette is still capable of self-knowledge, humanizing her somewhat, but that knowledge is that she has been allowed to spoil. Important again is all of these events happened prior to the arrival of the unnamed husband into the text.
This humanizing self-knowledge sets Antoinette up in opposition of the construct that society structures around her. "Antoinette, like Rhys's other heroines, is necessarily split between the image thrust on her and her own knowledge of herself." (Abel 172). Antoinette is identified as unbalanced in the later section of part one by a menacing child in the street: "`Look the crazy girl, you crazy like your mother . Your aunt frightened to have you in the house. She send you for the nuns to lock up'" (Rhys 29). This construct is self-fulfilling. The more Antoinette is isolated, the more she internalizes the mental divide, and the more reason there is keep her separate from larger society. Antoinette searches for identity throughout the text: "I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, and different things will happen to me.... In that bed I will dream the end of my dream" (Rhys 66-7). Sadly, she knows that her own trauma is an exponential function, and that the dream must end.
Like most exponential functions, the logical conclusion is infinity, or the highest point possible. It is at this high point, England at the top the world that Antoinette is sequestered at the close of Rhys's novel. At this point of her self- deterioration, can the reader find the most outward manifestations of her disease: "Antoinette's schizophrenic symptoms are quite identifiable: she ultimately loses all sense of time and comes to gauge reality by private criteria." (Abel 173). In conversation with Grace Poole, Antoinette says, "Only I know how long I have been here. Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter time has no meaning" (Rhys 109). She has totally turned inward. The outside world has very little meaning anymore, and the chronology the rest of society has fallen apart for Antoinette. So has her vague sense of place: "That afternoon we went to England. There was grass and olive-green water and tall trees looking into the water. This, I though, is England. If I could be here I'd get well again and the sound in my head would stop" (Rhys 109). The world is cracking around her; there is no identification. Judith Raiskin identifies that "Antoinette continues to split the idea of England in two, maintaining an idea of an idyllic England separate from the reality of the England that has denied her freedom and civil rights" (256). Antoinette has entered the looking glass.
And from the looking glass, she turns around and sees herself, not as she has constructed in her mind, but as others see her. "It was then that I saw her - the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her" (Rhys 111-2). In the mirror Antoinette can see the ghost of the woman she once was, but not the idea of the self she has constructed in her own mind. Remember, this is in her dream; this is in a world she once called "Hell" (RHYS 36) in a more cogent time. In this, the end of her dream, she sees Tia, and the old way of life, and wants to escape, to return to an idyllic place that never existed except in her own mind. In this sense, "Antoinette's `real' death is not a demented suicide in the flames of Thornfield hall. That projected death is really only the one `everyone knows about'" (Drake 200). Antoinette has long been dead to the world. What began with Tia, was compounded with her husband, and has reached what can be constructed in the schizophrenic mind as the logical end, where "I know why I was brought here and what I have to do" (Rhys 112).
The novel closes with Antoinette walking away, certain of herself for the first time in the text of Wide Sargasso Sea. The decontextualization of the novel with Bronte's text creates an ambiguous place, where the reader cannot be certain why she was brought there or what she has to do. Antoinette has always calmly accepted her dreams, even if frightening. The dreams have served as prophecy to her, beyond her control. However, after awakening from such dreams, she has a new sense of agency, knowledge of self stronger than previously seen in the text. She may fulfill the prophetic dreams and alight to the spire, but she could also walk out the front door, to the England she always wanted to see.

V. What is to be Done?
Rhys allows the reader close contact with Antoinette's husband. Michael Thorpe says. "Part Two, which takes us at once into his consciousness, makes possible a sympathetic insight into him also" (178). This part, in fact includes most of the book, so much so that the reader is able to see many sides of the character, even if he remains this nameless cipher. Two points in the text illustrate the character's moral fiber in which he will do nice things for those less fortunate than him.
The first illustration in the text is a conversation between the character and Richard Mason prior to the wedding of Antoinette and her husband. "`She won't marry you.' ... I said, `If she won't, she won't. She can't be dragged to the altar. Let me get dressed. I must hear what she has to say'" (Rhys 46). At this point, right as the reader is getting to know the character, he allows himself the possibility of doing something selfless in the name of her happiness and desires. This selfless act might free Antoinette from herself, but that speculation goes beyond this examination.
This same man is gentle and caring with even the smallest, most helpless creatures. When a moth falls into a candle flame: "I took the beautiful creature up in my handkerchief and put it on the railing. For a moment it was still and by the dim candlelight I could see the soft brilliant colors, the intricate pattern on the wings. I shook the handkerchief gently and it flew away" (Rhys 48). He is able to admire beauty and treat with kindness even the smallest animals. One could consider the actions to foreshadow the plot, where Antoinette is a small moth, wanting to be set free.
When these aspects of the character are taken into account, his plans to "go back to Jamaica to consult the Spanish Town doctors and her brother," (Rhys 96) should be given the full benefit of the doubt. He states later that he will follow that advice (ibid). Wide Sargasso Sea's chronology is hard to locate, as discussed earlier, the time jump between the last two parts could reasonably have months or years. One can assume there was the consultation of the doctors on the best care that could be given to Antoinette at the time, and part three represents the given advice. To examine this idea, it would be illuminating to look at a possible alternative to the comparatively humane treatment she receives at the hands of husband: incarceration in London's famed Bethlem hospital perhaps as representative of care Antoinette would receive elsewhere.
Since the period of the novel cannot be firmly placed generalizations will have to suffice on this point, but should be illuminating as there is a sense of glacial change in the way the mad were treated until the rise of modern psychotherapy and the rise of pharmacology. Schizophrenia had not been formally identified as a disorder, so a broadening of the boundaries will open the gates to the point where Antoinette is "mad" once more.
In this history of Bethlem hospital, Roy Porter notes, "Between 1728 and 1852, Bethlem's physician's all came from the Monro family ... Continuity was the keynote. They brought in a few therapeutic innovations - cold and hot baths for instance - but Bethlem's mainstays were the familiar purgatives and emetics, with a routine spring bloodletting, and manacles for the troublesome" (42). This shows that hospitals, even London's Royal Hospital, were using medieval devices for treatment. Not medieval in a hyperbolic sense, but in a literal sense. To think that madness could be treated with such methods strikes the contemporary reader as disturbing at the least.
Porter describes that there have been constant scandals at the treatment of the inmates and the conduct of the supervisors at Bethlem for almost as long as it has been in existence. After one of these minor outrages, a parliamentary committee toured the facility in 1815, and took notes on the sights seen within:
`We first proceeded to visit the women's galleries,' testified Wakefield, `One side of the rooms contained about ten patients, each chained by one arm or leg to the wall. The chain allowing them merely to stand up by the bench or form fixed to the wall, or to sit down on it. The nakedness of each patient was covered by a blanket-gown only.' (Edward Wakefield qtd in Porter 43).
Compared to the contemporary measures taken for those identified as mad, Antoinette's confinement is seen in rather comfortable terms. She is free to move about her room, and possess clothing. There are no chains or manacles, only locks. Her keeper is sympathetic to her plight, knowing the "world outside can be a black and cruel world to a woman" (Rhys 106).
Antoinette's keeper, Grace Poole, brings the discussion back to the husband's magnanimous nature. His concern to keep his wife in the best possible situation makes him pay Poole "double, treble the money" (Rhys 105) if she is good enough and maintains consistency in her care. His situation is not one to be envied, and he knows it. Ultimately, he is a victim, lamenting, "And do you think I wanted all this? I would give my life to undo it. I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place" (Rhys 96).
VI. But...
This point is by no means the end of inquiry into a masculinist reading of Wide Sargasso Sea. There are many points an observant critic could identify within the text to counter that Antoinette's husband is not the most sympathetic character. He is by no means an exemplar of the human race, he is just one man adrift in a swirl of the culture, which subsumes his life and colors his perceptions of the world. A masculinist reading only allows for the viewing of more viewpoints.

Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth. "Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys." Contemporary Literature. 20.2 (1979): 155-177. JSTOR. 27 Oct. 2005 <http://www.jstor.org/search>
Baym, Nina. "The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 3.1/2 (1984): 45-59. JSTOR. 26 Oct. 2005 <http://www.jstor.org/search>
Drake, Sandra. "Race and Caribean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea." Critica 2.2 (1990): 97-112. Rpt in Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 193-206.
Erwin, Lee. "`Like in a Looking Glass': History and Narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea." Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 22.2 (1989): 143-58. Rpt in Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 207-16.
Foucault, Michel. "Madness, the Absence of Work." Trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel. Critical Inquiry. 21.2 (1995): 290-8. JSTOR. 15 Nov. 2005. <http://www.jstor.org/search>
Heston, Leonard. "The Genetics of Schizophrenia and Schizoid Disease" Science. 167.3916 (1970): 249-56. JSTOR. 26 Nov. 2005. <http://www.jstor.org/search>
Mardorossian, Carine. "Shutting up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Callaloo. 22.4 (1999):1071-1090. Project Muse. 26 Oct 2005. <http://muse.juh.edu/journals.callaloo/c022/22.4mardorossian.html>
Porter, Roy. "Bethlem/Bedlam: Methods of Madness?" History Today. 47.10 (1997): 41-7. Health Reference Center Academic. Thomson Gale. Kansas State University Libraries. 26 Nov. 2005. <http://find.galegroup.com>.
Raiskin, Judith. "England: Dream and Nightmare." Snow on the Cane Fields: Women's Writing and Creole Subjectivity. Minneapolis: UP of Minnesota, 144-52. Rpt in. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 250-8.
Rody, Caroline. "Burning Down the House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Ed. Alison Booth. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. 300-25. Rpt in Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 217-225.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Su, John. "Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 388-97.
Thorpe, Michael. "`The Other Side': Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre." Ariel 8.3 (1977): 99-110. Rpt in Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 173-181.
Wyndham, Francis, and Diana Melly, eds. The Letters of Jean Rhys New York: Viking, 1984. Selections rpt in Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 132-145

Book was in the conditions stated and arrived in appropriate time frame.
It was used but was in the condition stated..no surprises.

The book was in excellent shape and arrived in time for my college course. It was a good book to read and I finished reading it in a week!

I am disappointed to say that this is not a well-written book. I loved the idea of this "prequel", but the execution lacks merit.

Certainly, one could look through the tatters of the Union Jack in 19th century England and find racism and fear in everything, including Jane Eyre. I am surprised that these are not more pervasive, considering that Charlotte Bronte was cloistered most of her life and obtained her view of the world mostly through contemporary English literature.

Yes, it's a sad story that Mr. Rochester was a product of his time, and I would have liked to see his character develop more... or should I say disintegrate a little more over the course of Wide Sargasso Sea? I wish I had seen him in greater depth.

I wanted to learn more of the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette Mason, who later became the mad woman in Mr. Rochester's garret. Somehow, I just never got to know her well enough from the pages of Ms Rhys's novel. Pity.

When someone writes a novel based upon the story and characters of another novel, especially one of such wide acclaim as Jane Eyre, that someone should be as adept as the original author at handling and developing those characters. Jean Rhys was not up to the task.