ON WIDE SARGASSO SEA
Call it collective male guilt, or the result of living in a world where fathers never kept their side of the bargain, but I am drawn to stories of women who come undone and women who have to make do. Wide Sargasso Sea, despite its near unbearable tragedy, is one of the slyest of novels, certainly the best of its kind (in my opinion) a twentieth century deconstruction of the nineteenth century that never draws attention to the fact that deconstruction is exactly what it is doing. It’s not a postmodern novel even if the heart of it is a thoroughly modern concept.
Wide Sargasso Sea deconstructs the nature of the nineteenth century heroine to reveal her contradictory, fragile and rootless core. The novel exposes the hypocrisies of colonial society and the damage it causes to those who would not conform. It picks apart the Male hero to reveal a vicious center, a man whose strength comes not from his own might, but from destroying a woman’s strength. Ahead of its time, Wide Sargasso Sea was one of the first novels to show how a man exercises power by taking it from a woman. It breaks down the nature of what is called madness and reveals how much of what is merely a woman’s right to be everything and nothing, becomes dismissed as mental dysfunction, something the Kennedy clan still practiced up to the 20th century when they lobotomized their free willed daughter.
But the novel is not really about deconstruction. There’s too much humanity here for it to be dismissed as a hatchet job on a 19th century classic. For one, Rhys a white Creole woman reeling from the legacy of slavery herself, is writing what she knows. Antoinette is a spiritual cousin of the Faulkner’s Compsons, a woman dispossessed by a world that disappears from under her feet, leaving her nothing to stand on. But even more than that, Antoinette is woman who (paradoxically for a slave colony) views freedom and free will as essential to her being. Rochester, a man from England who insists on bringing England with him destroys her because he tries to make her what she is not, a social creation: a fake self that is essential for survival in his society. It is too easy to say that between the two of them is a clash of worlds but that’s exactly what happens and both pay a heavy cost.
Jean Rhys nails that point where female desperation leads to madness. But she also reminds the reader that victims are sometimes complicit in their misfortune: Antoinette’s innocent sensuality is also to an extent her fault. In many ways Antoinette is a wild child, thoroughly immature, but living in a land where she did not have to grow up. She is the woman that Edward Long savages in his 1700’s history of Jamaica, which sounds like Jean Rhys’ source material:
“[Women] bred up entirely in the sequestered country parts are to be pitied…their only examples of behaviour come from blacks…her ideas are narrowed to the ordinary.”
Antoinette would be one of the women Long condemns because she is typical of what happens to a Creole female in the colonies. I am reminded of how much of the African became adopted by the European without their knowledge or acknowledgment.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, children are cursed to live the lives of their parents despite their deliberate efforts to prevent it. Maybe Rhys is saying that self-destruction is in our nature, or that society will always destroy if we do not conform. Either way it’s a troubling ambiguity that I hope I bring to my book as well. Rhys reminds me that good and evil, black and white are never as they seem and perhaps the most triumphant thing a woman could do was endure.
|
|
Bio
When not solving the problem of world hunger or seducing the planet's most beautiful women I'm in a dark, remote corner somewhere with book, reading or writing the damn thing. My poet friend says she has a greater need to write than to live and I think I understand. Sure it's pretentious but I think a writer does write in order to search for meaning or at least to make some sense out of life. I know I do. I believe that people are essentially good but evil is always within us. I believe in God but lock my doors. I believe in freedom but put responsibility first. I have one dog, no guns, too many books and not nearly enough friends to share good wine with.
|
![[Add comment]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/reviews/comment._V47082259_.gif){kind=small}
