Read: Mrs. Rochester, by Lisa Zeiger
I planned to write, not about Jane Eyre, but about Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel that pulls certain pitch-dark facets of reality barely touched by Charlotte Brontë, not that Brontë was a writer to ward off darkness.
Jean Rhys is my muse, a mentor I never met. Besides reading her books, I pondered her oddities, chronicled in Canadian novelist David Plante’s brief memoir of her in bibulous old age, in Difficult Women. Rhys’s final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, had long appealed to me as an apologia for my own emotional anarchy, along with her four much earlier novels, each about female trouble, from the insecurity and exploitation of girlhood to the creeping sexual invisibility and disregard of women in middle age.
Born in 1890, Jean Rhys is an important writer who all but tossed her talent away in a fruitless quest for love and financial security, the tangle we call marriage. The first tranche of her writing career lasted from 1927 to 1939, tumultuous, often poverty-stricken years in London and Paris. Working in dance halls, modeling for artists, being sparsely kept then dumped by older men, she married thrice, the third time to a felon who went to prison shortly after the wedding.
Within her chaotic life and character, Rhys brought order and deliberation to the pages she wrote out by hand in copy books, producing four novels and a book of short stories. Despair and scuttled hope were her themes, and it amazes me she was able to evoke them coldly in immaculate prose while living her real disappointments to the hilt, or indeed beyond the edge.
In the 1940s, Rhys withdrew from the sporadically public life she had led as a writer. From 1955 to 1960 she lived discontentedly in Cornwall, before moving to Cheriton Fitzpaine in Devon where she would spend the rest of her long life, dying at age 88 in 1979. After anonymous decades, she published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, having spent years drafting and perfecting it well before she settled in Cornwall. Rhys intended it as the account of the white Creole woman whom Jane Eyre’s Rochester marries for her dowry then keeps chained in his attic at Thornfield Hall under the gimlet eye of a surly minder, Grace Poole. Legendary editor and agent Diana Athill of André Deutsch gambled on publishing Wide Sargasso Sea. Of her deferred fame, Rhys remarked, “It has come too late.” She saw writing as inimical to happiness.
When I began, as obligatory research, to reread Jane Eyre, I was unexpectedly transfixed by Jane as a startlingly complex and modern character. I was overpowered by the novel’s sweep of rending anguish and joy. For all Jane’s moral rigor, I lived as if by proxy every iota of her passion for Mr. Rochester, which burns with all the wild intensity we associate with her mad, lawless shadow, Antoinette/Bertha, Mr. Rochester’s first wife and doleful secret. Brontë’s Jane Eyre is no less impassioned a woman than Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway, renamed and resurrected from Brontë’s Bertha Mason. I have the sense that Jane, too, knew all about the life and death kiss that sundered Antoinette‘s sanity.
I identify with both women. Like Antoinette, when scorned, I’ve felt the urge for arson. Jane, in high contrast, is practiced at what Nietzsche idealizes as “self-overcoming,” She retreats from love, from becoming Mr. Rochester ‘s mistress, to save her honor. And it is her honor in turn that incites Rochester to love her for a lifetime instead of an adulterous season in the south of France.
Much is made nowadays of the fact that Rhys grew up white in the English colony of Dominica, now the Commonwealth of Dominica, leaving for London at sixteen, and that Wide Sargasso Sea delves explicitly into the colonial pockets and prejudices lodged sub rosa in Jane Eyre. But my fascination with these two books is scarcely political; not aimed at airing the colonial laundry of either Brontë or Rhys. It is focused rather on the fate of women in love, white, black, or in between. Of course their plight as well as their ancestry is political, their personal subjugation a reflection both of male imperialism and their own complicity, driven helplessly by desire.
As a study of civilization and its discontents, Jane Eyre cuts far deeper than Sigmund Freud’s saturnine assessment of our sociosexual double-bind. Charlotte Brontë is an optimist to Freud’s wet blanket. Her heroine upholds the laws of God and man, surviving abandonment, wanderings, and suffering—all in perfect chastity—to live out at last her womanhood to the full. Compared to Brontë, Freud was a throwback, a born-again Victorian. Brontë, born in 1816, forty years before Freud and just three years before Queen Victoria herself, was, and is, a radical still. Jane Eyre was published in 1847, nine years before Freud’s birth; the novel exposes and personifies with great lucidity the categories of ego, superego and id. Where Freud is resigned to instinctual renunciation, Brontë grants Jane gratification and happiness, albeit attained through great sacrifice and loss. The high price she pays is preferable to the failure and frustration Freud would prescribe as our portion.
Over a hundred years have passed between the dramatic plaint of Jane Eyre and the lament and rage of Antoinette Cosway, speaking up at last. Antoinette is revealed by Rhys as misused and fallen rather than hereditarily mad and depraved as Rochester claims her to be. What she has become—in Jane Eyre she is compared to a hyena, among other beasts—is in part Rochester’s handiwork, an inconsolable sorrow and vengeance fomented by his rejection of her. Just as there are two Mrs. Rochesters (“Reader, I married him,” proclaims Jane at the end) so there are two Mr. Rochesters, the one who loves Jane unconditionally and the other who comes to hate Antoinette/Bertha for her otherness, for traits she cannot help.
What are we to make of Jean Rhys’s macabre fan fiction? I doubt Rhys would ever have used a word as pretentious as “appropriation” to describe her literary annexe to Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece. Rather, Jean Rhys poured absinthe into a wonderful old cask. Wide Sargasso Sea is part intoxicant, part remedy for what Rhys detected as slivers of untruth regarding Mr. Rochester.
To the strong voice of Jane Eyre, by turns bereft and exultant, Jean Rhys chimes in with Antoinette speaking to us in extremis. Both Bronte and Rhys understood the operatic power of the female narrative voice to sing of arms and the man, of the longing to be encircled by his arms.
In the literary and visual arts alike, I define a work of art as an artifact or text that reckons seriously with works hallowed in the past. It was not in vain that art students once sat in museums copying old masters. Similarly, writing can only begin with reading, and indeed with memorization, nowadays derided as a stultifying method of learning. But there is nothing rote about copying an image or reciting a poem. Such activity stocks our minds with lines, sounds, motifs, and associations that piece by piece we will one day make our own. I admire novelty in language, including slang, but only when it is embedded as luxuriantly as possible in the parlance of the past; like bristling cacti or rampant bamboo springing up in carefully bordered flower beds or ancient bulrushes. Talent grows best in memory’s loam.
Wide Sargasso Sea is both a corrective and an homage to the remarkable tale told by Charlotte Brontë’s plain, tiny governess, a splendidly individuated being who towers over many a great 19th century mind.