Reader, I murdered him.
No . . . not who you’re thinking of. That’s how I wish Jane Eyre began after reading Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. I suppose that would mean the famous confession that opens Charlotte Brontë’s technically romantic novel would come from the supposedly mad woman in the attic, and, of course, if that were how Jane Eyre started, we wouldn’t know Jane Eyre [shrug]. That would be fine with me. It is a “classic” I used to try to at least respect, but no more! Rhys has freed me to embrace my dislike for the novel and basically everyone in it.
I know, I know . . . People love Jane Eyre. To which I say—no. Mr. Rochester is no dreamboat hero, and that scrappy, resourceful, articulate, resiliently dreamy Jane falls for him is burn-the-manor-down enraging. Still, I have tried to be open-minded. Several times, I tried to reconsider. For example, when Michael Fassbender played Mr. Rochester in the 2011 adaptation. And again, when the Michael Fassbender adaptation came to Netflix.
I like the moors. I like moody weather and pretty dresses. I like wearing pretty dresses in moody weather. I was stupidly into new wave (in the 90s!). I belonged to an actual *paper* mail fan club for The Cure (in the 90s!). I am primo Jane Eyre material. Even after attempting to read and enjoy for the, idk, third or fourth time post-Fassbender, I could not get through more than a few pages without getting angry, which I suppose is a more passionate response than when I picked up the novel in high school, when I was only indifferent. I guess what I am getting at is that I felt left out of something by not loving Charlotte Brontë’s most famous book. I wanted to be in on whatever it was people love about it. They love it so intensely, and I wanted to feel that, too. However, as an adult now old enough to have belonged to an actual *paper* mail fan club, I know better than to waste my intense love on lame-o Mr. Rochester. Trust those instincts, ladies. (Still looking for a good book as a holiday gift? Forget anything Keira Knightly could have starred in a mid-aughts adaption of, and go for The Gift of Fear.)
People love the Brontë sisters. That, I do get. They managed a lot with very little and are a fascinating family full of drama. Charlotte and Emily experienced the abusive boarding-school Jane endures; the inhumane conditions literally caused the deaths of two of their sisters, and the brother! I can see what’s admirable and interesting about them. There’s that excellent Elizabeth Hardwick essay about them from the 70s that covers them all much better than I can.
As Hardwick notes of Emily’s Wuthering Heights, it’s a “virgin’s story,” so I also get why it’s popular for bookish, withdrawn teens. The longing! The implications! I say to the bookish, withdrawn teens of the world, you are too good for Mr. Rochester; do not waste your implications on some guy who will eventually deny your very existence while seducing the teenage babysitter.
You know how when your very excellent friend has a crush, or god forbid, falls in lerve or whatever with a dude you can tell right away is a jerk with a capital J, extremely unworthy of your beloved friend. You just know, but you can’t point to any specific thing and say to them, “See. This guy is a non-Steve Martin super jerk.” Then it takes like two and a half years before the jerk fully reveals himself to your friend. (Is that what happened to sweet Grace in Bad Sisters? I suspect that is the preferred pattern of the Prick, since he takes time to ingratiate himself to the youngest sister before doing his best to ruin her life, as he has over the years with all of the older ones. Just assuming everyone has watched Bad Sisters because it is the best. WAY better than Jane Eyre.) But that’s not Mr. Rochester’s m.o.—this guy sucks from page one of both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Thank you, Jean Rhys. I was very happy to have something finally to justify my dislike of Jane Eyre. (As if his behaviour were not reason enough in the book, lolsob.)
So what if I may have confused Wide Sargasso Sea with Leonardo Sciascia’s Wine Dark Sea for a long time, even though, yessss, I know the latter is a phrase from Homer. (Sidebar: I have Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s The File on H. en route, which I am extremely excited about.) The titles are very similar, okay? Plus, I worked in a travel bookstore for a long time, where everything was organized by geography. It was heaven, but Sicily was a shelf near the Caribbean, so they are forever close to each other in my brain.
But back to how much Mr. Rochester sucks. His father and brother whom he resents so much were probably very fine-ish gentlemen (for the era, ugh…what a phrase), btw, to whom he was also a Jerk. I mean, he lies about maybe being engaged to another woman to make Jane jealous, then tries to marry Jane while HIS WIFE is still alive and in the attic. Not to mention the rages he flies into. The lewk Juno gave recently to a doggo friend describing the above scenarios in context of a relationship they were excited about:
Which brings us back to LOVING Jean Rhys. She was born and raised in the Caribbean, like her protagonist Antoinette Cosway, and her descriptions of the landscape she clearly pines for are imbued with a fragile magic:
“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 tree ferns, 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 thing brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered–then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.”
She writes of the lush jungle in a way that reminds me of the carefully crafted glass castles in an actual romance, the short story “Cold” by A.S. Byatt, in which a desert-born, heat-loving prince spins intricate glass sculptures for his wife, an ice princess. For Rhys, beauty is a sign of danger, like bright colors in flowers or small animals—aposematic warnings to predators.
It is actually fragile magic that comes to bring about the book’s ending. Maybe you have to believe in something, anything at all, for magic to not only reveal itself, but to have any effect on you. Terrible Mr. Rochester marries Antoinette for her money; when she wants to back out, he convinces her of his feelings for her. (I mean who knows? Maybe this guy has another secret wife, or wives, hidden in attics across the world.) When she tries to introduce him to the magical landscape she loves and takes great care to describe, he is only interested in gossip and rumors about her family and her mother, driven to desperation by the death of a son, and whom Rochester weaponizes to torment his poor wife. Her descriptions of a pool in the forest where she likes to swim are especially beautiful. In lieu of another block quote, here is Juno gracefully lounging in a hidden bathing pool in the jungle:
Antoinette becomes so heartbroken over her husband’s rejection that she convinces her childhood nurse Christophine to give her a love spell for him . . . Naturally, as a loveless man—who hates the bright colors of the jungle, the smell of flowers, all the people around him, Black and white—it doesn’t work, and after he is caught with a maid (Silly, Jane, did you think you were the first employee he ever went after??), Antoinette falls apart and is then basically imprisoned by him and renamed Bertha, as we know her in JE, because that’s the name he likes better.
Rhys, bless her, does not even give the husband a name, we just assume it’s loathsome Mr. Rochester, but he does narrate a good chunk of the book. Of Jamaica, he actually says, “I hated its beauty and magic and the secret I would never know.” Antoinette is herself a beauty, and he’s constantly narrating how unattractive he finds her. He hates her eyes, because he’s forced to see how unfeeling he is through them. He refuses to divorce her, to give her any freedom. “She’s mad, but she’s mine, mine.” His pleasure comes from destroying her.
In the introduction to the Norton edition I have, Edwidge Danticat recalls wondering, as Rhys must have, “I wonder who that crazy woman in the attic really is.” In the wonderful bookstore I worked at, some of Danticat’s books were shelved near Wine Dark Sea and Wide Sargasso Sea, on Haiti’s shelf. I can remember when Brother, I’m Dying came out, and I thought books didn’t get any better than that. Then I read her stories Krik? Krak!
I heard somewhere, I believe on an episode of Backlisted, that Rhys was once accused of being a witch; I might call her a fortune-teller. She doesn’t need to write the question that implicitly closes the book: Will Jane end up locked in an attic too someday? Of course she will.
P.S. Happy Winter Solstice! The next one will be sunnier, I promise.