"Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys

261 pages

This novel gives a voice to Rochester's insane wife in the attic in Jane Eyre. It begins with the early life of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on an old plantation. She doesn't feel like she fits in anywhere, as she can identify with neither the black Jamaicans or the white Europeans. On top of that, her mother goes crazy and rejects her daughter, adding to Antoinette's feeling of loneliness and depression. At a young age Antoinette is married of to an Englishman (who remains nameless throughout the novel but represents Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre) and is taken away from the only home that she's ever known. By the time the couple arrives in England, Rochester has begun to suspect that Antoinette's family tricked him into marrying her, and she's begun to slip into madness. The first and third parts are narrated by Antoinette, while Rochester narrates the second part.

I like Rhys's idea of telling the madwoman's side of the story. I expected that it would blame Rochester for Antoinette's downfall, but I didn't find that to be the case (though he certainly isn't as blameless here as he seems in Jane Eyre). He's given the chance to speak for himself in part two, and the novel as a whole paints him in a sympathetic light. This story examines a lot of things, including racism, colonialism, and mental illness. I read the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Judith Raiskin, which includes several essays about these themes in Wide Sargasso Sea, which helped me understand them better (usually I don't care much for literary criticism--I only read this version because I was preparing for a book discussion). However, I'm not sure how interesting this novel would be to me if it wasn't tied to Jane Eyre. There's not a lot of action, which some people don't mind but often leaves me bored. I'm glad I read it to get a unique perspective on a classic tale, but it wasn't something that I particularly enjoyed reading.