Fetch Siintää Sargassomeri Assembled By Jean Rhys Accessible In Document
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Rhys takes us to the West Indies, an environment that is heavy, languid, stifling, and claustrophobic, It is not surprising that people go insane here, what is surprising is that anyone is able to keep their sanity, In this world of mysticism, racial mixtures and moving boundaries, is born the tragedy that becomes the catalyst to one of the greatest love stories of all time.
But that is afterthis story belongs, not to the governess, but to the wife,
Antoinette Cosway is a girl who is pressed beyond her limits, Subject to her environment and her mothers precarious hold on her own wits, Antoinette is destined to be a mix of all that is fragile and all that is fierce.
She battles, and narrowly wins, until she is sold into marriage to her unlucky bridegroom, His lack of understanding of who she is, and her unconventional worship of him, take her beyond the limits of her abilities to cope, and plunges her into a darkness that is frightful.
There is a mix of voodoo, mystery and madness in this novel that is riveting, You pray for help and hope for this poor girl, and yet you know it is not coming, for you know her end before you even begin her story.
You have glimpsed her before, almost without pity, but in Rhys hands you find the pity and it is all encompassing,
Short and sweet and fantastic, One hundred and ninety pages of power, A mustread.
I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain, I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know, I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness, Above all I hated her, For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness, She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it,Im sure I never would have read Wide Sargasso Seahonestly, Im not sure I ever would have even heard of itif it were not included on the Pop Chart LabEssential Novels list.
I read sitelink Jane Eyre a couple of years ago, so I was mildly curious to read a backstory of that novels “madwoman in the attic.
” Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems with this book,
Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, As a child in Jamaica, her slavetrading family lost its wealth when slavery was abolished, She is eventually married off to young Edward Rochester, though neither really loves the other, He cheats on her, is emotionally cruel, and eventually begins calling her Bertha rather than her actual name, Antoinette does indeed slowly go mad, The final dozen pages of the book take place within the timeline of sitelink Jane Eyre, and the novel ends with Antoinette about to start the fatal fire.
I am honestly not certain what I was supposed to get from Wide Sargasso Sea, Theres a lot about race here, and that could have been a corrective to the problematic racial parts especially about Bertha in sitelink Jane Eyre.
But the Antoinette of this novel is hardly a sympathetic victim, Again, her parents were slavetraders who lost their wealth when slavery was abolished, By modern standards and this book was published in, who is supposed to be sorry for the slavers And this novel posits thats theres a history of madness in Antoinettes family, so its not clear that its Edward or England or gender roles in marriage that drives her mad.
Now, its possible I went into this book with an unhelpful attitude, Does anyone agree with the Goodreads description of Antoinette as “one of fictions most fascinating characters” I mean, I remembered her character, but she was hardly as interesting as Jane Eyre herself.
Worse though, is the following assertion from the novels Introduction:
In spite of its connections to Charlotte Brontës novel, Wide Sargasso Sea is more than, to use a contemporary term, fan fiction.That, my friends, is just utter nonsense, Wide Sargasso Sea is literally a fan fiction, a possible backstory of Bertha, and to a lesser degree, of Edward, I have trouble imagining anyone would have cared about this novel but for its connection to sitelink Jane Eyre, Moreover, the ending here would be incomprehensible without a familiarity with the original novel,
It is its own jewel of a novel, which can be read with or without its original inspiration in mind,
Theres some nice writing here, and theres a lot of intertwining of character and setting that reminded me of sitelink Wuthering Heights, But Wide Sargasso Sea just isnt very interesting, and theres nothing here that isnt done better in any number of other novels, Youd never have heard of it if it werent for the fan fiction connection to sitelink Jane Eyre, And I cannot believe that anyone would place this derivative work on a topnovels list of any kind, Not recommended. An epic romance made meek, singular, aromatic, ethereal, surreal, A fresh little nugget of splendor, of muchneeded prose perfection, This is gothic romance at its absolute height, It's perhaps the best piece of fanfiction ever, amp I say this as "WSS" is in actuality a side story formulated for the emblematic crazed woman smack in the middle of "Jane Eyre", But it takes a life of its own, . . merging elements of brutal nature and brutal nurture both, to birth a spectacle like one I've never experienced before, Not short of magical, it's baffling how truly impactful these short novels really are, Rhys gives us so much by giving us the absolute least, Leaving the reader naturally to ask for more,
There are specks of Graham Greene the impeccable here as well as Toni Morrison the visionary SO the best of the best in the best.
To be read IMMEDIATELY, "Wide Sargasso Sea": certainly a masterpiece, no thanks.
review to come /,
tbr review
short classic supremacy!!! Probably contains some spoilers
“Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible the tree of life grew there.
But it had gone wild, The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell, Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest trees, the light was green, Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched, One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root, ” Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
I was curious to read this book as it was considered a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre.
So I guess this counts as fanfiction At least its very wellwritten fan fiction!
The writing style is of course different from Jane Eyre.
The depictions of the Caribbean are beautiful, Its a relatively short book and it tells the story of Mr, Rochester's first wife, Antoinette Cosway, whom he met in Jamaica, The themes explored in the book are very postcolonialism discusses the relationships between former slaves and slaveowners after Emancipation, identity Antoinette is Creole and is therefore not accepted by either the blacks or the whites and madness.
Ive just finished reading a book about the Suffragette movement that looked into historical accounts of insanity in women, I had no idea that the word "hysteria" was first used to describe a supposed mental ailment that women suffered from all because they had a uterus.
sigh Apart from being frustrated by that piece of pseudoscience, what's also frustrating is the fact that historically a lot of people were unaware that the environment one lives in can make one "crazy.
" Women in particular, who were often reliant on men and didnt have their own freedom were obviously more likely to suffer from nervous breakdowns,
Im pretty sure most readers will change their opinion of Rochester after they read this, I will definitely see him in a less than favourable light when I do reread Jane Eyre, SPOILERS HIDDEN
NO JANE EYRE SPOILERS
Publishedyears after sitelinkJane Eyre, the famous classic that inspired it, Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhyss attempt to give Bertha Mason here going primarily by the name “Antoinette Cosway” a detailed back story.
A fan of Jane Eyre and of the movie version of Wide Sargasso Sea, I greatly looked forward to reading this book.
I want to stress how crucial it is to read Jane Eyre before starting this, There's simply no understanding what happens in Wide Sargasso Sea otherwise, Though perhaps that doesn't matter, because I don't recommend this anyway, Rhys's basic vision was strong but her execution terrible,
To provide some brief background, Rhys imagined Antoinette as a Creole girl in a gorgeously lush Jamaica, with the story opening at the height of political and racial tensions there.
Unfortunately, this atmospheric setting cant make up for Rhyss surprisingly weak and hazy portrayal of Antoinette,
This prequel is divided into three parts, A young Antoinette narrates part one part two is narrated mostly by Mr, Rochester whom Rhys for no valid reason chose to never name and part three is once again narrated by Antoinette, this time as an adult,
Part one starts off promisingly enough, but when Rochester materializes in part two, Antoinette is suddenly an adult woman, newly married to him, and the union is a loveless one.
This jump in time is too abrupt to work, Upsetting the smooth flow of part two, Antoinettes voice randomly interrupts at one point, thus giving the impression that Rhys had trouble organizing this story,
The story is most intriguing and moves more quickly when it opens, when young Antoinette is trying to make sense of her relationship with her mother.
Heres a part rich with the potential to add muchneeded psychological depth, but Rhys neglected it so sorely that its hard to understand why she included anything about their relationship at all.
Another trouble spot concerns Rochester, Its unclear why Rhys allotted him such a generous chunk of the narrative, Rhys didn't flesh out Rochester any more than she fleshed out Antoinette, so significant narrative devoted to him matters little, nor should it change how fans of Jane Eyre feel about Rochester.
His portrayal here is simply too colorless to inspire any strong opinions,
Rhyss prose is horrible, both stylistically and technically, Its choppy and oftentimes convoluted some punctuation is missing throughout or used incorrectly and large sections, especially toward the end, veer into nonsensical, difficult to follow, “stream of consciousness”like territory.
I honestly had no idea whatsoever what some of her sentences meant, despite repeated reading,
Rhys lacked a finetuned ear for dialogue, and she didn't use dialogue to make her characters distinct, Its striking, for instance, that Rochesters impressions of their natural surroundings sound remarkably like Antoinettes:
Rochester: “One morning soon after we arrived, the row of tall trees outside my window were covered with small pale flowers too fragile to resist the wind.By far, though, Wide Sargasso Sea's biggest misstep is in, well, its very reason for being: its depiction of Antoinette, Her sections should be the most significant, most powerful of the entire book, yet she remains almost exactly as she did in Jane Eyre: a shadow of a woman, indistinct, never able to be truly understood or even pictured.
They fell in a day, and looked like snow on the rough grasssnow with a faint sweet scent, Then they were blown away, It was a beautiful placewild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness, And it kept its secret, ”Antoinette: “I can remember every second of that morning, if I shut my eyes I can see the deep blue colour of the sky and the mango leaves, the pink and red hibiscus, the yellow handkerchief she wore round her
head, tied in the Martinique fashion with the sharp points in front, but now I see everything still, fixed for ever like the colours in a stainedglass window.
”
The missed opportunity here for a threedimensional Antoinette is so very, very disappointing Rhys only skimmed the surface of this mystery womans history,
Finally, probably most inexcusable is that Rhys implied that Antoinettes plunge into insanity .
This would be laughable if it werent so offensivein more than one way,
Wide Sargasso Sea is a disappointment all around and a classic I would have been no worse off for skipping, Anyone eager to know more about the mystery woman from Jane Eyre wont find the answer in these pages, Bertha Mason, it seems, is a character fated to remain a mystery, Maybe one day a really talented writer will take on the challenge of giving her the backstory Rhys failed at miserably, I'll eagerly read it. .