Antoinette Cosway, the main character of this novel, is the crazy woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys imagines the life of Rochester’s first wife and the events that drove her to madness, demonstrating her knowledge and understanding of Jamaican/West Indies history and culture as well as the powerful socio-economic forces that influenced post-Emancipation development there. As Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction,
…Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden to them: products of an inbred, decadent, expatriate society, resented by the recently freed slaves whose superstitions they shared, they languished uneasily in the oppressed beauty of their tropical surroundings, ripe for exploitation.
And that’s the cue for the nasty bastard Mr. Rochester to come in. The Cosway family had been wealthy slave-holding plantation owners for generations. Antoinette’s mother had married the much older Mr. Cosway while she still young, bore a daughter and son, and then lived without connections or protection after Mr. Cosway’s death. Alone and alienated, she focused her love and attention on Antoinette’s brother Pierre, who was severely disabled. The planation was falling apart, the freed slaves were resentful and menacing, and the more recent English immigrants sneered at families such as the Cosways. As the servant girl Tia tells Antoinette,
Real white people, they got gold money…. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white.
When Mrs. Cosway married Mr. Mason, it seemed that a turnaround was at hand, but what Rhys shows is that the newer English had little to no understanding of Jamaican people and their ways, and that they were mainly concerned with making as much money as they could. A series of terrifying events lead to the family breaking up, with Antoinette attending a school run by nuns while her mother descended into madness and her stepfather stayed away, traveling on business. When he returned, it was to arrange a marriage for Antoinette to Mr. Rochester. Rochester was without fortune, his older brother standing to inherit the family’s Thornfield estate. While not thrilled by his marriage arrangement,
…this woman is a stranger. Her pleading expression annoys me. I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks….
Rochester nevertheless sees the necessity and benefit of it, writing to his father,
The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition. No provision made for her…. I have a modest competence now. I will never be a disgrace to you or my dear brother the son you love …. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain?
Clearly not a bad bargain for Rochester, but a pretty crappy deal for Antoinette. She initially did not want to marry Rochester, but his passion in the early days of the marriage won her over. She tells him that he makes her want to live. Meanwhile, for Rochester,
As for the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did.
As Rochester grows colder and more cruel toward Antoinette, she turns to faithful family servant Christophine. While Christophine might be resented for throwing her lot in with an old white family, she was in fact feared and respected as a practitioner of obeah, mystical magical practices related to Voodoo and Santeria. When Antoinette’s marriage crumbles and she edges toward the same madness as her mother, Christophine tries to help her, but her “magic” can’t make Rochester love Antoinette or become an honorable man. The final showdown between Rochester and Christophine is quite a powerful scene. And for the Jane Eyre fans, there is this:
[Rochester] “… do you think that I wanted all this? I would give my life to undo it. I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place.”
[Christophine] laughed. “And that’s the first damn word of truth you speak. You choose what you give, eh? Then you choose.”
Wide Sargasso Sea ends as you would expect — with “Bertha’s” death in the fire at Thornfield. The story of how Antoinette acquired that name is an interesting part of the novel and serves as a demonstration of Rochester’s descent into cruelty and obsession, his own madness. You really don’t have to have read Jane Eyre to appreciate what this novel has to offer: the alienation and objectification of women, racism, colonial exploitation, and their impact on interpersonal relationships, all revealed in a beautifully written story.
