Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Danger Jane

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Anyone else read this? I first read it my freshman year of high school and while I liked it, it was a tough read. I could tell there was a LOT I wasn't getting at the tender age of 15. I just read it again a few weeks ago and I was pretty well blown away. I think I prefer it to Jane Eyre, in fact. Opinions?
 

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I had a similar reaction to you in my first year at University. I do need to read this again.

I did like Rhys's earlier novel Quartet (filmed by Merchant Ivory), which reads as very "modern" for something written in the 1920s. I ought to read her other three 20s/30s novels sometime, but I could say that about a lot of things!
 

Marian Perera

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I studied Wide Sargasso Sea for my A'Levels. It was a difficult read when I first tackled it on my own, but when the entire class got in on it and I started seeing the patterns and symbols, I enjoyed it.

I heard there's also a film of Wide Sargasso Sea, but I'm afraid to watch.
 

Darklite

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I just got back from a university tutorial where we are studying this very book. I think I might like it a lot better if I could get past the idea that techincally all this is is a piece of fan fiction. I think Rhys totally transformed Mr Rochester, and not in a way I can connect to the character I read about in Jane Eyre. I have been advised to separate the two novels but I am finding that hard to do, and I'm not sure whether Charlotte Bronte would be delighted or horrified by Jean Rhys's take on Mr R's time in the West Indies.

And don't be afraid of the screen adaptation (BBC version, I don't know if there's another), it stays pretty close to the book, though if I remember rightly it begins somewhere around part two of the novel- I don't think we get to see Antoinette as a child.
 

reenkam

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I just read it for a class, actually. To be honest, I wasn't really a fan. Parts seemed overwritten and flat to me, though there were some good scenes.

Then again, I haven't read Jane Eyre so maybe I was missing a key component.
 

Danger Jane

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For some reason, I really didn't have a hard time separating Bronte's Rochester from Rhys's. I originally read the two a few months apart but haven't read Jane Eyre in about four years, so that probably made separating the two easier.

I can see how you thought some parts were overwritten. I guess that's my preference? It made comprehension hard the first time around, but I really appreciated the symbolism and the patterns, like QOS said. I'll probably read some of her other books soon*.


*when there isn't a 24-inch-tall stack of books next to my bed anymore.
 

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I heard there's also a film of Wide Sargasso Sea, but I'm afraid to watch.

Yes, there is, made in 1993 and rated NC-17 in the USA (18 in the UK). I have seen it but remember so little of it that it clearly made no impression.
 

Dawnstorm

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I read Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea back to back for a seminar called "Novels and Re-Writing". I do prefer that novel to Jane Eyre. To me it worked both as a standalone and as a response to Jane Eyre, though not so much as a "prequal". It's less fanfiction than criticism, I think. When reading Jane Eyre, Jane started out with a bonus - I liked her as a child. But as the novel continued I came to like her less and less. At the line, "Reader, I married him!" I thought, "Good for you. You deserve each other."

I thought the mad wife in the attic was horribly misrepresented and I blamed Jane's PoV for that. It's as if the mad wife had been brutally consequent in her independence and payed the price; what Jane could - child of Victorian England - could not have done. Not really. Bertha's Rochester's black spot, and Jane's bizzarro universe twin. She had to be ignored in that book.

I think part of why I like Sea so much (apart from the language) is that Rhys filled the blanks for me in a satisfying way. Also, we know how the character ends up, so this gives the whole a book a sense of tragedy. Antoinette is pretty uncompromising in her passion and moves to a country that lacks even the imagination to see her as anything other than... Bertha. There's really only one slot she could fill; if it hadn't been the attic it would have been the asylum.

Rochester and Antoinette broke each other, basically. The characters we meet in Jane Eyre are very different. Rochester can fall in love again, though, because he's a man, and because he's got the advantage of familiar ground.

It's not a prequel, though. It turns Jane Eyre's sympathy structures upside down in exactly the way I liked it. It did help me figure out why I started to dislike Jane more and more over the course of the novel, although I started out liking her a lot as a child. As I said, it works better if you read it as a response than as a prequel.

***

Random fact: I remembered the title as "Wild Sargasso Sea". Hah! Talk about bias. :D

(It probably helps that Jean Rhys's background is very similar to Bertha's. ;) )