Review: "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys

I wanted to like "Jane Eyre" so badly.

And I did like her--Jane Eyre the character. Jane wasn't the problem. It was that fucking Lord Rochester. What an asshole. I want to dig up his imaginary corpse and punch him in his dusty, moldering nuts.

Fortunately, there's a version of that story where Rochester isn't portrayed as a smoldering aloof hero--a Batman of the English countryside, if you will--but rather the greedy, insufferable white devil I suspected him to be all along.

Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" is about Rochester's first wife, the madwoman in the attic, Bertha. In "Jane Eyre," Bertha is said to be Creole, a woman of British descent born and raised in the Caribbean colonies. Rhys shifts the timeline of her book to coincide with the emancipation of slaves in Jamaica, and re-imagines "Bertha" as Antoinetta, a daughter of slave owners who lose everything when they were unable to make the shift to a post-slavery world. An unnamed English nobleman, whom we assume is Rochester, marries Antoinetta for her stepfather's money when she's barely seventeen and fresh out of the convent school. While at first they are happy together at a small house in the Jamaican countryside, a man claiming to be Antoinetta's half-brother by her biological father and a former slave contacts the nobleman. The man tells him that Antoinetta's mother went mad, that Antoinetta herself had shown signs of madness as a girl, and that Antoinetta's stepfather and stepbrother swindled in nobleman into marrying an obviously defective piece of merchandise. The nobleman then refuses to touch or speak to his wife, who doesn't understand why he's suddenly treating her so coldly, and then she actually does go mad when the nobleman dismisses all of her servants, takes her to England, and shuts her up in the attic so he won't have to look at her anymore.

I feel like there should be a name for this genre, where non-western or minority writers re-tell a classic Western story from one of the non-western or minority character's point of view. Rhys re-tells "Jane Eyre" from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic; David Henry Hwang re-imagines Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" as a spy story with an actual Peking opera star as Butterfly; Alice Randall re-writes "Gone With the Wind" with Mammy's daughter (and Scarlett's half-sister) as the narrator.

These types of stories are fascinating to me because one, there are not enough minority voices in literature, and the further back in history you go, the less there are; and two, it's a valuable exercise to contrast how white writers see and portray minority characters and how those characters see and portray themselves. These works break down white constructs of what it means to be black, or Oriental, or Creole, and re-define them based on how actual black people, Orientals, or Creoles experience race and identity.

By doing this, the writer also breaks down and re-defines the concept of whiteness, which hitherto has been the unexamined default, the norm, defined by what it is not rather than what it is. The apparatus of societal power is exposed  by those crushed underneath it, to those who are its beneficiaries but are barely aware of its existence. James Baldwin in "The Devil Finds Work" talks at length about how white people can never really know black people, but how black people know white people better than white people know themselves because such knowledge is necessary for survival in the white man's world.

Works like "Wide Sargasso Sea" reveal aspects of "Jane Eyre" and the character of Lord Rochester that weren't present in the original novel, in addition to offering a richer and more meaningful back-story for a marginalized character from the original work. The relationship between the colonizer, England/Rochester, and the colonized, Jamaica/Antoinetta, moves to the forefront of the story and illuminates how larger societal ideas about life and civilization affect individuals. "Jane Eyre" presents the events as one unlucky individual with an insane wife without examining the very ideas of sanity and insanity and how they relate to colonialist attitudes about the effects of geography and environment on individuals living away from the civilized motherland.

I could go on in this vein--I haven't even really touched on Rhys's shifting of the timeline of her book to coincide with emancipation and how the black characters in her book deal with freedom and have to re-define their relationships to the whites in Jamaica. But I've already written way more than I planned to about "Wide Sargasso Sea" and I'm afraid that the only people who will find this interesting are other scholars of postcolonialism (which my spell-check doesn't even recognize as a word, so I know I'm drifting pretty far from the mainstream with this review already).

I recommend Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" for fans of classic literature, especially "Jane Eyre"; people who enjoy the hard-to-name genre of non-white authors re-telling white stories from the perspective of non-white characters; and anyone interested in the history of the Caribbean and the Age of Imperialism.

Final Grade: B+.

Baldwin Blowout!

The BF and I were watching clips of "Totally Biased" online and a drag queen made a joke about the Stonewall Riots that I didn't understand. She said, "And I think James Baldwin was there, too," and the studio audience laughed and laughed. Every schoolyard instinct in my headspace lit up like a Chanukah Bush: everyone is laughing and I don't know why, so it must be a joke at my expense!

So the BF loaned me his copy of "The Devil Finds Work" to convince me the TV people weren't mocking me, and we find ourselves here today. I'll be reviewing "The Devil Finds Work" (1976), "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" (1968), and "Giovanni's Room" (1956), all works by writer, activist and world traveler, James Baldwin.

Baldwin (1924 to 1987) was an important literary voice in the black civil rights movement. You may be familiar with Baldwin's more famous works, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and "Notes from a Native Son," both of which deal with the experience of being black in America. He was also gay, which explains the "Totally Biased" reference that confused me so, and brings me "Giovanni's Room."

This was only Baldwin's second published book, so he was pushing the boundaries of social mores in literature right out of the gate. The main character is an American man living in Paris in the 1950s. He is engaged to another American, but she goes out of town for a while and he moves in with a young Italian man, Giovanni. The book opens with the narrator sitting up all night, getting drunk in a small rented house on near the coast because Giovanni is going to be executed in Paris the next day. The narrator backtracks from there, relating how he fell in love with but ultimately betrayed Giovanni and left him in the state that lead to his execution. It's a story of shame, love and lost, not exactly good times, but an interesting read that provides a frank and honest description of homosexuality from a time when the topic was still very taboo.

"Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" is also about homosexuality--or rather, bisexuality--but mostly it's about art, specifically the experience of the black artist in America. The main character of the book is a very famous black actor who suffers a heart attack on stage, which leads him to consider the life choices he's made and the people he's met along the way. I like this book because of the gulf it describes between the artist as an individual and the artist as he exists as a symbol for his audience. The main character struggles with his desire to live an unorthodox life that is true to his chosen craft, because it is at odds with the expectations his family and community has for him. They want him to be a preacher, like his older brother, or at least get a regular job and raise a family of his own, while he would rather travel, be on stage, and fuck a lot of people (wouldn't we all). Not that his vision of himself as an artist is perfect either, though. He has to struggle for many years, playing the roles of servants and bootlicks on stage because those are the only roles available to black actors, before he gets his break. I really enjoyed and admired how "Tell Me" so thoroughly explored the profound ambivalence that comes with being an artist and a public figure, especially as the artist realizes that the things he holds most dear are the things that most alienate him from others.

"The Devil Finds Work" was the first book of Baldwin's I read, as I mentioned earlier, but chronologically it comes last. It's not really a book at all, but an extended essay on the portrayal of blackness in American film. It was very dense and took the the longest to read of the three, even though it's the shortest. Unfortunately, I'm sure a lot of the essay's brilliance was lost on me, because I haven't seen any of the movies referenced in it (except for "The Exorcist"). The BF writes in the margins of all of his books, so there were plenty of notes to help me along, but I'm hard-pressed now to remember any of the points Baldwin made.

I'm not what you'd call a film buff. Movies unsettle me for their ability to deliver a huge emotional wallop in a relatively short amount of time. I prefer novels, which give me space and time to inhabit the characters' worlds and absorb their struggles; or television episodes, for the the same reason. So it a weird way, "The Devil Finds Work" was a pretty good way for me to explore the deeper meanings of film without having to put myself through the experience (ordeal?) of actually watching the movies.

Since this was a special post, I'm not going to grade any of the books. I'll just end with stating that James Baldwin is one of the Great American Authors and you should read his work if you get the chance (not the later stuff though, my local librarian told me that his last three novels were awful).