Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre – August CC Book Club Selection

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<p>I felt very sorry for Antoinette and appreciated that WSS woke me to the fact that Bertha Mason—whatever her true backstory—was a human being with a soul and a history. Charlotte Bronte does not want us to see Bertha’s humanity. Jane says that Bertha, with her “discoloured face” is like “the foul German spectre—the Vampyre” (p. 198). She isn’t portrayed as human (perhaps to soften Rochester’s crime of locking her away ?). In a way, it’s surprising: the ahead-of-her-time feminist Charlotte Bronte betrays her sex where Bertha Mason is concerned.</p>

<p>I did not feel sorry for Rochester in WSS. I thought he was a victimizer more than a victim and I quickly tired of his self-pity. He does not exhibit the keen intellect of his prototype. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that the original Rochester has a sharp mind and is an astute observer of people. The WSS Rochester seems to think in an almost sluggish fashion and is too easily influenced by Daniel Cosway and others.</p>

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<p>I have a lot of thoughts about the Rochester of WSS, but I’m going to shut up for a while and listen to what others have to say.</p>

<p>I do agree that the WSS Rochester is not like the Jane Eyre Rochester. Despite the fact that Rhys used some of the same vocabulary as Bront</p>

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<p>Mary13-about Bertha. Some have suggested that Berta reflects Charlottes’s dark side, her repressed issues - sexuality and anger. Bertha allowed Charlotte to express it all-</p>

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Maybe it’s just that she was in love with Rochester and being in love changed her when she was near him. Also, much of Jane’s temper was aroused for matters she felt unjust. Her years at Lowood showed she wanted to be accepted and appreciated by her Lowood family. She worked hard and loyally to make it happen. </p>

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I think this is the core of what bothered me about WSS. It was much easier to forgive Rochester when I believed that Bertha was already insane when he married her. I agree that WSS makes Bertha human and makes her a victim of Rochester. I don’t like it. WSS wasn’t true to the feeling of Jane Erye. It should have been a free standing novel, not one linked to Jane Erye.</p>

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I still think this attitude is a reflection of the time in history that the book was written. Bronte was ahead of her time understanding women because she was one and knew her own inner feelings and desires. Understanding madness is a little more difficult within the parameters of the science and psychology knowledge of the 1800s.</p>

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I loved Jane’s relationship with the sisters. It was a normal “girlfriends” relationship that was uncommon for Jane and a joy to watch.</p>

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<p>I also loved how Jane Diana and Mary pursued their intellectual and artistic pursuits together! And how they affirmed these pursuits are important to a happy life.
I agree that Bronte did not let us see the human side of Bertha. I couldn’t feel any sympathy for WSS’s Rochester-although there was much in the Jane Eyre Rochester I did like.
I always felt a lot of sympathy for little Adele as well. I felt like she was patronized a lot. Hope she had a chance to develop her potential as well-and I always believed she was Rochester’s d-or at least could be.</p>

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<p>In post #80, PATheaterMom asked:</p>

<p>“One question I could not figure out is what turns Mr. Rochester against Antoinette-the letter? It seems so insubstantial.”</p>

<p>This is what I think:</p>

<p>Rochester felt that he had been “bought” as a husband for Antoinette, and this made him ashamed and consequently defensive/hostile.</p>

<p>He felt that Antoinette and the servants had a relationship that he could not understand and did not approve of. Sometimes it seemed like Antoinette was laughing at him. He felt like a stranger in a strange land and was very off balance emotionally because of it.</p>

<p>Antoinette annoyed him by not being very fact-oriented (p. 80) and by not seeming to pay attention to things he told her…he felt that nothing that he said seemed to influence her (p. 85).</p>

<p>Antoinette was different at night than she was in the day. At night, she talked about death to a troubling extent.</p>

<p>(All this was mentioned before Daniel’s letter ever arrived.) </p>

<p>I am not excusing the Rochester of WSS. I think he was basically a pig. But Rhys gave him a narrative voice, and to me he seemed more like a real person than the Rochester in Jane Eyre. </p>

<p>At Granbois, Rochester and Antoinette were very isolated. They hardly even ever saw the servants during their early days there, and they never saw anyone else either, except each other. They made love like crazy; she craved the oblivion of it, he wanted to possess her and break her spirit. Antoinette slept in. Rochester went out early and lounged in the bathing pool for hours. In the afternoon, she would join him there.</p>

<p>This scenario was very unnatural. The two of them hardly knew each other. If they had had more things to do, and if they had had an opportunity for more social interactions with a variety of people, I doubt the things that irritated Rochester about Antoinette would have loomed so large.</p>

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<p>I know posters have said they don’t like the WSS Rochester, but I found myself rather sympathetic by and large. He was only 26-ish at the time. One of the things he did which got my “mom” ire up was when they arrived at Granbois and there were wreaths in their room, he put one on and then removed it, dropped it on the floor, and then walked on it (p43). Grrr…</p>

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<p>Yes, Sylvan, he was young. Maybe not very smart, but also green. Could life experiences have eventually given him the wisdom of the Rochester of Jane Eyre, I wonder?</p>

<p>I hated how he persisted in calling Antoinette “Bertha” after a certain point. I was also shocked by something he said on p. 86, about how close Death had been in the darkness when he and Antoinette were making love. It sounded to me like he was being prideful about…how to put this politely?..about almost killing her with the vigor of his lovemaking. :(</p>

<p>The Rochester in WSS kind of seesawed back and forth, sometimes loving Antoinette and the environment at Granbois, and sometimes hating them. He did have his positive moments…some of them rather touching, I felt…but it was not enough.</p>

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<p>The 26 y.o. Rochester did buy Antoinette , her dowry was substantial. She had .homes in various islands. He did nothing but lounge and swim in the sunny islands for four years. He offered her sex, she gave him love.</p>

<p>Like so many innocent and impressionable women, Jane fell in love with her vision of Rochester, the victim.</p>

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<p>Yeah, but bookworm, Antoinette’s family gave Rochester all her money. So in a sense she/they bought him, not the other way around. When that happens, some men may feel emasculated and take it out on their wives.</p>

<p>Sex and love were presumably all mixed up together for Antoinette, as happens a lot with women. Did she know Rochester well enough to love him as a person, really? She might have settled for the physical love continuing, if that had been possible.</p>

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I also thought it was bizarre that he would call her Bertha if it wasn’t even one of her given names. </p>

<p>In the passage about “Desire, Hatred, Life, Death…” I took that to be talking about the depth of passion, abandonment, primitiveness that he felt in that place which must have seemed rather uncivilized compared to England. And the ideas of sex being all tangled up with desire (wanting sex) and hatred (hating himself for even getting into this situation, hating her for being the foil for his desires). </p>

<p>Hoping I’m getting my idea across here :)</p>

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<p>I obviously need to upgrade my reading material as I thought immediately of la petite mort.</p>

<p>[La</a> petite mort - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort]La”>La petite mort - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>(Hey, note wiki’s mention of literary critic Roland Barthes … I remember discussing him when we read The Elegance of the Hedgehog … but I digress)</p>

<p>and</p>

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<p>[Wide</a> Sargasso Sea Theme of Mortality](<a href=“http://www.shmoop.com/wide-sargasso-sea/mortality-theme.html]Wide”>http://www.shmoop.com/wide-sargasso-sea/mortality-theme.html)</p>

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<p>NJ?..mom, I totally agree that Antoinette mistook physical lovemaking as love. I’ve seen too many young girls do the same. </p>

<p>Agree also that her half- brother gave her and her money away, even tho aunt Cora argued to set up a Trust for her. There was mention in the book that Antoinette gave money to staff and never seemed aware of how she overpaid. She was naive about finances, and let her husband control her money. </p>

<p>This theme is timeless.</p>

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<p>Ahh, that makes more sense. So rather than betraying women with the characterization of Bertha, Bronte is making a powerful statement about the way that women were repressed. In her mind, women were as misunderstood as “lunatics” were at that time (as BUandBC82 pointed out).</p>

<p>That also turns the tables on the professor’s analysis that I paraphrased earlier. Maybe instead of Jane (i.e. women) being afraid of sex, it’s the reverse: Rochester—representing Victorian men in general—can’t deal with a woman’s overt sexuality.</p>

<p>Along those lines, I found something interesting. Jane describes Bertha as a “Vampyre” and Rochester says she has a “black and scarlet visage” and is “impure” and “unchaste” and “something of her breath (faugh!) mixed with the air I breathed” (p. 215). She bites Richard Mason: “’she has had her teeth here too, I think,’ ‘She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart,’ said Mason.” </p>

<p>Fast forward to 1897, fifty years after Jane Eyre was published. In that year, Bram Stoker wrote this in Dracula:</p>

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<p>There’s a lot of Bertha Mason in that description! Even the part where her male victim feels “ectasy” fits. Although couched in “proper” language, it’s pretty clear that the Rochester of JE initially has a strong sexual attraction to Bertha, as does the second Rochester in the honeymoon phase of WSS. In both books, sex is intertwined with death, la petite mort indeed. </p>

<p>The author of the site where I found the Dracula quote offers the following analysis:</p>

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<p>I wonder if Bram Stoker was at all influenced by Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre was published the year he was born.</p>

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<p>There was one thing in Wild Sargasso Sea that I didn’t understand. </p>

<p>Rochester noticed the remnants of an paved road in the forest near the ruins of an old house. He asked Baptiste about it, but Baptiste insisted there was no road.</p>

<p>Later, when Rochester found bottles of liquor in a chest at Granbois, he seemed to think that this proved the existence of a (former?) road.</p>

<p>I didn’t understand the connection between the liquor and the road. It seemed as if Rochester was assuming that liquor could not have been transported up there except by paved road, but I don’t know if that makes any sense.</p>

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I think you are being too literal (;)). In my annotated version, the priest who lived in the house which is now the ruin with “no road” was a defender of slavery who was very cruel and basically tried to eradicate the voodoo practices of the natives. His name became associated with superstitions, zombi’s, etc. in that area, and maybe to Baptiste the very place symbolizes the black arts which he wants to deny by even denying that there was ever a road there. </p>

<p>Later, Rochester asks who he is bringing rum for, Baptiste doesn’t respond, and Rochester sarcastically asks if there is “no road?” which I took to be a reference to his state of denial regarding Antoinette’s condition, as it were.</p>

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<p>Maybe I’m being too literal, Sylvan, I don’t know. On p. 131 Rochester says he thinks the liquor was smuggled. Maybe by a back road that’s now overgrown?</p>

<p>I found one piece of commentary that mentions that Rochester was happy to see the old road because it was a “vestige of prior colonization, a familiar landmark in this otherwise unknown territory.”</p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/across-the-wide-sargasso-sea-jean-rhys-s-revision-of-charlotte-bronte-s-eurocentric-gothic-45070.kjsp?STNAV=&RUBNAV=]La”&gt;http://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/across-the-wide-sargasso-sea-jean-rhys-s-revision-of-charlotte-bronte-s-eurocentric-gothic-45070.kjsp?STNAV=&RUBNAV=]La</a> cl</p>

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<p>I thought that Rochester was simply mocking Baptiste’s habitual taciturnity. Earlier, in response to one question after another, Baptiste had sullenly answered, “No road.” Later, Rochester asks him yet another question, and Baptiste doesn’t respond, so Rochester laughingly fills in the answer, “No road?” </p>

<p>That said, there are always layers to a book like this, and to me, bringing up the idea of the road again is a reminder of how lost these characters are, with neither Antoinette nor Rochester on the right path. It’s worth noting that Rochester is pleased to see the paved road—it’s familiar to him—whereas Antoinette, in one of her attempts to be happy, goes to a place where “there was no road, no path, no track. And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think ‘It’s better than people’” (p. 28). Emotionally, these two people travel on opposite paths and ne’er the twain shall meet.</p>

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<p>From the questions Mary gave us in post #69:</p>

<ol>
<li>How does Antoinette’s experience of her mother’s rejection shape her life? Is Antoinette like her mother? Could she have escaped her inherited madness? At what point is it too late? Is she really mad?</li>
</ol>

<p>These are good questions. In my opinion, Antoinette’s mother’s rejection made her solitary and mistrustful. I don’t think she was necessarily like her mother. The mother presumably had a normal childhood. Her nervous breakdown, or whatever you want to call it, happened in response to extraordinary events.</p>

<p>I don’t think Antoinette had an inherited mental illness. Possibly after she was taken to England and locked away, it was too late for her ever to be well again, though.</p>

<p>I’ve been meaning to note that I read Rhys’ “Voyage in the Dark,” about a character who grew up in Jamaica. The story takes place in England, but the protagonist tells us about her memories occasionally. She says that when she was growing up she wished she had been black. Black people were happy. White people weren’t.</p>

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<p>and along those lines, quotes and analyses from SparkNotes:</p>

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<p>[SparkNotes:</a> Wide Sargasso Sea: Important Quotations Explained](<a href=“http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/sargasso/quotes.html]SparkNotes:”>Wide Sargasso Sea: Important Quotes Explained | SparkNotes)</p>

<p>You can find a quiz at the end if you want to play. ;)</p>