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Foreword
Jean Rhys
achieved literary fame with her acclaimed novel Wide
Sargasso Sea. The novel is a moving and beautiful
account of the life of Antoinette Cosway, the fictional
character who becomes the madwoman in the attic in
Charlotte Brontė's Jane Eyre.
Jean Rhys
achieved literary fame with her acclaimed novel Wide
Sargasso Sea. The novel is a moving and beautiful
account of the life of Antoinette Cosway, the fictional
character who becomes the madwoman in the attic in
Charlotte Brontė's Jane Eyre.
Jean Rhys
draws on her childhood memories of the Caribbean to
create the magical, dangerous landscape of Wide
Sargasso Sea, bringing to life a character who
has haunted fiction readers for more than a century.
Discussion
Questions
1. As a child,
Antoinette Cosway wonders why the nuns at the convent
do not pray for happiness. When Antoinette and Mr.
Rochester arrive at their house after their wedding
and journey, they drink a toast with two tumblers
of rum punch. Antoinette says, "to happiness." Why
does happiness elude her? When is she happy and what
happens to those moments of happiness?
2. Antoinette's
childhood is heavily overcast by threat. What are
the threats from outside her household? What are the
threats from within? To whom and to what does she
turn for protection?
3. What is
the racial situation as Antoinette is growing up?
What does it mean that she gets called "white cockroach"
and "white nigger?" How well do Antoinette and her
mother understand the mindset of recently liberated
slaves? What about the outsiders like Mr. Mason and
Mr. Rochester?
4. 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?
5. Sandi,
Antoinette's cousin who is black, makes an appearance
in each of the three sections of the novel. Were you
surprised by Antoinette and Sandi's last scene together?
What are the barriers that keep these two characters
apart? In your opinion, could these barriers have
been surmounted?
6. Mr. Rochester
seems to marry Antoinette for money, or perhaps for
lust, or perhaps for power. Mr. Rochester makes love
to Antoinette in part to gain power over her. Antoinettte
persuades Christophine to use the power of her obeah
to entice Mr. Rochester to her bed. Amelie has sex
with Mr. Rochester for her own purposes, and Mr. Rochester
sleeps with Amelie for his. What are the relationships
between money, lust, sex, and power in the novel?
7. Perspective
switches two times in the novel. What is the effect
of reading the same story from different people's
points of view? Which narrative voice do you trust
more? Why?
8. For Antoinette,
England is a dream; for Mr. Rochester, the Caribbean
is a dream. How do these perceptions keep them from
understanding each other? Do they want to understand
each other? How does it protect each of them to remain
distant?
9. Many of
the characters are mad and many are drunk. How do
madness and drunkenness serve the characters? Do they
give the characters freedom? protection? the ability
to see the truth? the ability to hide from it?
10. Whose
account of Christophine seems closest to the truth
to you? How does her obeah work or not work under
these circumstances? How good is her advice? Can Antoinette
follow it?
11. Language
plays an important role in the novel. Mr. Rochester
cannot understand patois. Does this give his "servants"
power over him?
12. Mr. Rochester
starts to call Antoinette "Bertha," instead of her
real name. "Names are important," she says toward
the end of the novel. Does changing her name separate
her from her family and her home?
13. In Jane
Eyre the madwoman in the attic is a very unsympathetic
character, an obstacle that stands in the way of the
union of Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontė
portrays Mr. Rochester as a man with a dark past who
nevertheless is not to blame for the burden with which
he is saddled. Wide Sargasso Sea obviously sees this
situation from a different angle. What are some of
the factors that might have led to the difference
between Charlotte Brontė's version and that of Jean
Rhys?
14. Wide
Sargasso Sea has two fires-one in the first section
and one in the last. How are these fires related?
Who dies, who goes crazy, who is set free? Is there
a parallel between the parrot in the first fire and
Antoinette in the second?
Jean
Rys - A Brief Biography
Jean Rhys
was the author of five novels, including Wide Sargasso
Sea. The heroines of her novels all have different
names-Marya, Julia, Anna, Sasha and Antoinette-but
they all share biographical details with their author,
and they are all like her in some way: passionate,
lonely, despairing, difficult, brilliant, manipulated
and manipulating in turn. Her heroines grow directly
out of her life, following her from one difficult
situation to the next.
Born Ella
Gwendolen Rees Williams on the island of Dominica
in 1890, Jean Rhys took on many different names during
her lifetime-stage names, pen names, married names.
"Names are important," she writes in Wide Sargasso
Sea. Her father, a doctor, was Welsh. Her mother was
from a Scottish family that had lived on Dominica
for generations-the family had owned slaves before
the liberation in 1834. Rhys had a difficult childhood,
but one filled with the beauty of the island. She
left for England at seventeen, bound, she hoped, for
a stage career.
Rhys began
by studying at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, which
she left to join the chorus of a popular musical,
Our Miss Gibbs. Now calling herself variously Vivien,
Emma, and Ella Gray, Rhys toured with the traveling
production for three seasons. The heroine of Rhys's
third novel, Voyage in the Dark, also toured with
the chorus of a traveling show. Rhys met Lancelot
Grey Hugh Smith during her years as a chorus girl.
He was her first lover. The relationship lasted only
eighteen months, but was in many ways her most lasting
affair, and she wrote and rewrote its history in her
short stories and in Voyage in the Dark.
Rhys stayed
in London throughout World War I. After the armistice,
she went to Paris to join (and marry) Jean Lenglet,
a Dutch journalist. The Lenglets drifted around Europe
together. Around this time, Ford Madox Ford took an
interest in Rhys's writings, and pieces of hers began
to appear in his magazine, the Transatlantic Review.
Jean Lenglet was imprisoned for "offending against
currency regulations," and Jean Rhys moved in with
Ford Madox Ford and his lover, Stella. Rhys and Ford
had an affair that finished her marriage and his relationship
with Stella-the turmoil and its demise became the
subject of Quartet.
After the
breakup of these relationships, Rhys went through
a difficult time, including the death of her mother.
These events became Julia's story in After Leaving
Mr. Mackenzie. Rhys then married Leslie Tilden Smith.
Although these were Rhys's most productive writing
years, they were also a bitter time of recrimination,
insecurity, guilt, alcoholism, and violence. The bitterness
of this characterizes Sasha in the last of these novels,
Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1939. Leslie
Tilden Smith died in 1945.
After the
fourth novel, which, like its predecessors, met with
critical acclaim but no popular success, Rhys disappeared.
Many thought she had died. A radio company wished
to make a radio program of Good Morning, Midnight
and advertised for information in connection with
Jean Rhys. She herself answered the ad. Francis Wyndham
contacted her, suggesting that she write a book for
the publishing house with which he was affiliated.
Ever a perfectionist, Rhys took seven years to complete
her beautiful novel Wide Sargasso Sea. It had been
twenty-seven years since the publication of her last
novel.
Wide Sargasso
Sea was based largely on Rhys's childhood experiences
in Dominica. Although she set the novel in Jamaica,
much of the landscape and many of the people described
were taken from her memory. Old Mr. Cosway, like Rhys's
great-grandfather, owned slaves. Rhys's own mother,
like Antoinette Cosway, married a man who came from
off the island and did not quite understand its politics.
Rhys's father, like Mr. Rochester, was an unlucky
second son, exiled from his home in part because of
a difficult relationship with his father. Rhys herself,
like Antoinette, left a childhood paradise, albeit
a treacherous one, for the cold, damp, cheerlessness
of England.
Wide Sargasso
Sea belatedly made Rhys's reputation. Rhys won the
Royal Society of Literature Award and the W. H. Smith
Award and was financially secure for the last thirteen
years of her life. She enjoyed the praise and recognition,
although she said it came "too late." In part because
of Rhys's tendency to fictionalize her history, and
in part because she was obscure for much of her life,
there continues to be a great deal of confusion about
her history. Hoping to set the record straight, Rhys
began a series of autobiographical sketches, later
published under the name Smile Please, but she died
before she could complete them. Jean Rhys died in
1979 at the age of eighty-seven in Devonshire, England.
Praise
for Wide Sargasso Sea
"Working
a stylistic range from moody introspection to formal
elegance, Miss Rhys has us traveling under Antoinette's
skin. It is an eerie and memorable trip." - The
Nation
"The novel
is a triumph of atmosphere-of what one is tempted
to call Caribbean Gothic atmosphere. . . . It has
an almost hallucinatory quality." - New York Times
Also
by Jean Rys
Norton now
has all of Jean Rhys's fiction available in paperback:
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 1931
Good Morning, Midnight, 1938
Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories, 1987
Quartet, 1929
Voyage in the Dark, 1934
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