Romance and Anti-Romance: From Bronte's Jane Eyre to Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
Joyce Carol Oates
Jean Rhys's haunting and hallucinatory prose poem of a novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), boldly tells the story— authentic, intimate, and unsparing, because first-person confession—of Mrs. Bertha Rochester, the doomed madwoman of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Yet Rhys's novel is more than a remarkably inspired tour de force, a modernist revision of a great Victorian classic: it is an attempt to evoke, by means of a highly compressed and elliptical poetic language, the authentic experience of madness—more precisely, of being driven into madness; and it is a brilliantly sustained anti-romance, a reverse mirror image of Jane Eyre's and Rochester's England. Rhys's sympathy is fully with the innocent Creole heiress who is married off to the visiting Englishman, Rochester, and trapped in a loveless (but not, it seems, atypical) marriage: born Antoinette, she is rebaptized Bertha by her husband, and brought back to England, to Thornfield, to be kept in captivity like a wild animal. When Jane Eyre is surprised by the "Vampyre" in chapter 25 of Charlotte Brontë's novel, Bertha has become a savage, "fearful and ghastly," and possessed of a "discolored" and "lurid" visage; glimpsed more closely, she is not a human figure at all, but bestial, repellent. ("It grovelled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.") Yet the first Mrs. Rochester, in Rhys's novel, is despised by her Englishman husband precisely because she is beautiful, and because, in the frank sensuousness of her beauty, she is aligned with the "magic" of the West Indies which he finds treacherous. One way of life, one vision, makes war upon its opposite; for all of the West Indies is dismissed by Rochester as dreamlike and unreal, just as, by extension, all of the non-(or anti-) English world must be dismissed by the English, before it can be conquered and exploited. (Rhys's novel is set in the 1830's and 1840's.)
