PROSE
Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea
‘Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century.’
Michele Roberts
Why this book?
The July LitSalon Challenge focused on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as one of the defining works of English literature. For August we are suggesting you read another classic: Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s provocative interpretation of the story of the first Mrs Rochester, which provides a powerful counterpoint to the bitter-sweet ending of Jane Eyre.
A note about language
The meaning of the term ‘Creole’ (originally any person of European – mostly French or Spanish – or African descent born in the West Indies; contemporary use describes a white person born and raised in the islands) shifts, depending on when and where it is used. This stirs up complex issues surrounding ethnicity and heritage that lie at the heart of Wide Sargasso Sea.
The story
Against the lush and decadent background of 1830s Jamaica, we see Antoinette Cosway, a young, sensitive Creole heiress drawn into marriage with a young Englishman whose mind is increasingly poisoned against her by rumours of family madness and mixed-race ancestry. The clash of cultures and personalities leads inexorably to the tragic destruction of her identity, incarceration in the attic of Thornfield Hall and the conflagration that finally enables Jane and Rochester to marry.
The writing
Although the work was conceived in the shadow of Jane Eyre, the scope of Jean Rhys’s vision would be limited by seeing the work simply as a feminist response to Brontë’s iconic novel. Rhys draws on her intimate knowledge of the Caribbean to bring to the surface the voice and agonies of the ‘madwoman in the attic’, considering how she may have arrived in that debilitated state and improbable location. The novel addresses the mysterious character of Edward Rochester, as well as the complex, liminal Creole world that creates Antoinette.
The novel’s spare language holds surprising complexity, full of contradictions and fragmentations. Vivid and compelling, the writing is jazz-like with discordances and sharp images. Child-like direct observations combine with sophistication in the clarity and scope of the central character’s view.
The reading
“A novel is not an allegory…. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathise, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Although a much shorter work than Jane Eyre, this book is written with passion and at least as much fury. In a letter to a friend, Rhys wrote angrily “Everything must be for the ‘reactionary 19th century romance’ . . . That unfortunate death of a Creole! I’m fighting mad to write her story.” The issue of identity – of who she is in a context and world-view that constrains her self-hood – is a thread that weaves through Antoinette’s painful story, but also finds resonance in the ‘autobiography’ of Jane Eyre.
Some questions you may wish to consider while reading:
- Antoinette’s loneliness is terrible, to what extent does it resemble Jane Eyre’s experience of loneliness and isolation? What do both characters learn about receiving, giving and deserving love?
- Does the portrayal of Edward Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea change your view of him and of his eventual marriage to Jane? Do you feel sympathy for him?
- What is the effect of the changing narrations in Wide Sargasso Sea? Does this enhance our understanding of the central characters?
- How does this compare to our understanding of some of the same characters derived from the episodic structure of Jane Eyre?
- In both books houses burn to the ground, what does this signify?
- Wide Sargasso Sea raises many issues about colonialism (or post-colonialism) and race. How does Rhys illustrate the racialised culture of the Caribbean in this historical moment? What do relationships (between Antoinette and Christophine, for example) reveal about the violent effects of structural racism? Is this limited by Rhys’s own indeterminant identity?
The author
The daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother (please see note about language above), Jean Rhys was born in 1894 and spent her childhood in Dominica before coming to England at the age of sixteen. In 1927 she published her first book, a collection of stories under the title The Left Bank, followed by a number of novels, perhaps the most famous of which is Good Morning, Midnight (1939, its title taken from an Emily Dickinson poem of the same name). Although admired by writers and critics, her work fell out of print during World War II and it was nearly twenty years before she was rediscovered living reclusively in Cornwall. Publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 was a literary sensation, with the novel winning both the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W.H. Smith Award. This late success was followed by publication of further collections of short stories – many written during her period of relative obscurity – Tigers are Better Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976). She died in 1979 and her unfinished autobiography Smile Please was published posthumously in the same year.
Content courtesy of Toby Brothers, Founder and Director of the London Literary Salon & Nicky Mayhew, Associate Director.
POETRY
This month we are suggesting you read three poems by two of America’s greatest poets, contemporaries writing in the nineteenth century and still influencing poetry today. Coming from very different backgrounds, both produced distinctive, daring and revolutionary work that continues to feel fresh and alive in the twenty-first century.
Reading the expansive, unfettered writing of Whitman alongside the poetry of the equally famous but far more constrained Dickinson gives us evocative material to consider: her fierce formality contrasts with the looseness of his vision. Both were reaching for the stars in their creative endeavours!
Emily Dickinson
I started Early – Took my Dog
I started Early – Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me – And Frigates – in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands – Presuming Me to be a Mouse – Aground – opon the Sands – But no Man moved Me – till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe – And past my Apron – and my Belt And past my Boddice – too – And made as He would eat me up – As wholly as a Dew Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve – And then – I started – too – And He – He followed – close behind – I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes Would overflow with Pearl – Until We met the Solid Town – No One He seemed to know – And bowing – with a Mighty look – At me – The Sea withdrew –
I started Early – Took my Dog can be read on the Poetry Foundation website, which also offers a guide to the poem. There is also a reading of the poem accompanied by an animated film to view here.
Dickinson wrote this poem about the beauty and power of the sea from the depths of her imagination. She lived a reclusive life and had never actually seen the ocean, although she did walk in nature (near her home) with her dog.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
Tell all the truth but tell it slant (which can also be read on the Poetry Foundation website) tells us much about the poet’s view of human nature and perhaps also about her art.
Dickinson is a poet of what is broken or absent. She uses skipping rhymes to delve deep into the heart of human experience, refusing to separate the realms of mind and body, allowing exterior experience to illuminate interior states. Her poems at first seem playful, even simple, but there is much to be found beneath the surface of the language. The ever-present narrator becomes a widening container of passionate and metaphysical experience. In spite – or perhaps because – of her reclusive existence, her imaginative world is epic.
About Emily Dickinson:
Now acknowledged as one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, into a prominent Calvinist family. The daughter of a politician and community leader, as an adult she chose to live a largely secluded life – conducting most of her relationships by letter – and was widely regarded as an eccentric. Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, but after her death in 1885 her family discovered more than 1,700 poems and the first collection of her work was published in 1890.
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
The full 1892 version of Song of Myself is also available to read on the Poetry Foundation website. It is a very long poem and for our purposes we suggest you read just the first four sections (although you are, of course, very welcome to read the whole work).
A number of readings of the poem are available online, and the version here (complete with visual images) is very rewarding. We also challenge you to read it OUT LOUD yourself, Whitman’s rhythms and images need light and space!
Walt Whitman was a visionary: charged with the wonder of a new world, a new nation; at the same time horrified by his direct experience as witness to the violence of the Civil War. Through his art he celebrated the essential spirit of democracy at the heart of the American body.
Whitman’s work burst out of the formal boundaries of literature and poetry. His subject matter ignores the conventional censoring of bodily experiences – desire, sexuality and pleasure. His poetry is uniquely encompassing – of many regions and lives, of epochs and beliefs – I have heard echoes of his galloping verses in the Book of Job and the work of Alan Ginsberg, while references to Whitman crop up in Joyce and T.S. Eliot and his style is easily reflected in post-modern experimentation.
Whitman calls on the reader to BE in the vibrant world, the natural world, the vitalising city. His poetry is compelled rather than constructed – writing, re-writing, publishing and republishing, even reworking the final edition of Leaves of Grass (his entire volume of poetry) from his deathbed – and this reflects the explosive and struggling growth of a new nation, full of hope and possibility.
“Do I contradict myself?
Section 51, Song of Myself
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
About Walt Whitman:
Born in 1819 on Long Island, Walt Whitman spent his childhood and much of his adult life in New York. During his life his work – in particular his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass – was controversial, its overt sensuality condemned by some as obscene. A journalist and essayist as well as a poet, Whitman has been described as ‘the father of free verse’ and, along with Emily Dickinson, is celebrated as one of the architects of a uniquely American poetic voice. The modernist poet Ezra Pound called him “America’s poet . . . He is America.” When he died in 1892 in New Jersey, his funeral was a public event.
Content courtesy of Toby Brothers, Founder and Director of the London Literary Salon.
