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A review by savaging
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
4.0
For lit. classes I was asked to read Jane Eyre four or five times, but what a disservice that it was never coupled with this book, the story of the crazy woman in the attic and the gaslighting that got her there. Decades before this book, Ford Madox Ford wrote that Rhys had "a terrific -- an almost lurid! -- passion for stating the case of the underdog." How else would a person stop to think about that awful and ugly obstacle-to-love, Bertha, and feel the unspoken story there?
Rhys is a master at showing the subtlety behind polite and mannered cruelty. She diagnoses out all the symptoms of Rochester's ego-centrism -- his greed, possessiveness, and hatred for anything too wild or too happy or self-sustaining, like the people and the land his wife loves.
'I feel very much a stranger here,' I said. 'I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side.' 'You are quite mistaken,' she said. 'It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out long ago when I was a child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you call on so often.'
Rhys is a master at showing the subtlety behind polite and mannered cruelty. She diagnoses out all the symptoms of Rochester's ego-centrism -- his greed, possessiveness, and hatred for anything too wild or too happy or self-sustaining, like the people and the land his wife loves.
'I feel very much a stranger here,' I said. 'I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side.' 'You are quite mistaken,' she said. 'It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out long ago when I was a child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you call on so often.'