20: Wide Sargasso Sea

A book by Jean Rhys

What’s the point of prequels? More often than not, their key purpose seems to be to wring just a few more pennies out of a devoted fandom. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace has a widespread reputation for being an insult to the original trilogy, but it still made over a billion dollars at the box office. Meanwhile, Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy combined to take almost three billion dollars worldwide despite being a plodding bore-fest, the result of stretching a 320ish-page children’s book across nine hours.

The best prequels aren’t really prequels at all. Batman Begins breathed new and brilliant life into a franchise laid low by the abomination that was Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, but it’s more accurately described as a reboot than a prequel. And The Godfather Part II is both a prequel and a sequel to The Godfather.

Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, could perhaps be best described as a stealth prequel, because it is not immediately obvious to what other book it is linked. I had no idea of its existence until I watched the excellent Novels That Shaped Our World series on the BBC last year and discovered that someone in the 1960s had written a prequel to (SPOILER ALERT!) Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which told the story of Mr. Rochester’s Creole first wife, Bertha, the archetypal madwoman in the attic.

More than telling Bertha’s story, though, Rhys, writing more than a century on from Bronte, wanted to right a few wrongs. “She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I'd like to write her a life,” Rhys said.

Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a Creole mother. She moved to London aged 16, and on reading Jane Eyre, was “vexed at [Bronte’s] portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic, the all wrong Creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr. Rochester”. Thus Wide Sargasso Sea was born, retelling the story of Bertha, renamed Antoinette by Rhys, from her beginnings as a Creole heiress in Jamaica to her end locked up in the attic of Thornfield Hall after being driven mad by her husband.

Wide Sargasso Sea is beautifully written. The opening line is an absolute worldie: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.” That beautifully sets up the crushing outsider-ness Antoinette feels at every stage of the novel, both in her homeland and in England. As the legendary SparkNotes explains—in a much more pithy way than I was managing—because Antoinette is a white Creole "she straddles the European world of her ancestors and the Caribbean culture into which she is born". But she is rejected by both, and the consequences of that are devastating.

Dream-like, lyrical, mystical, shocking; all would be appropriate adjectives to adorn the cover of Wide Sargasso Sea. (Penguin went with the Guardian’s “compelling, painful and exquisite.”) I would also add in “revelatory”, because before seeing Novels That Shaped Our World, I had never picked up on Bertha's origins from reading Jane Eyre. (See the below video and this excellent article for a discussion of her treatment by Bronte).

I must admit, though, that there were parts of Wide Sargasso Sea where I did not have a clue what was going on. I think some of this was intentional, but I also think I confused myself by often attempting to link the narrative to my semi-recollections of the plot of Jane Eyre (which I read aged 18, longer ago than I'd care to consider). It may well be that this book is best enjoyed without any knowledge of its notable predecessor; which, I realise, will now be impossible for anyone who’s read this far into this post. To make the discovery by oneself that Antoinette is Bertha, that Bertha is Antoinette, would, I imagine, be pretty bloody mind-blowing.