Jean Rhys

'There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now . . . Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?' If Antoinette Cosway, a spirited Creole heiress, could have foreseen the terrible future that awaited her, she would not have married the young Englishman. Initially drawn to her beauty and sensuality, he becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to reach into her soul. He forces Antoinette to conform to his rigid Victorian ideals, unaware that in taking away her identity he is destroying a part of himself as well as pushing her towards madness. Set against the lush backdrop of 1830s Jamaica, Jean Rhys's powerful, haunting masterpiece was inspired by her fascination with the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. 'Brilliant. A tale of dislocation and dispossession, which Rhys writes with a kind of romantic cynicism, desperate and pungent' The Times

Wide Sargasso Sea

sage lynn

All this was long ago, when I was still babyish and sure that everything was alive, not only the river or the rain, but chairs, looking-glasses, cups, saucers, everything.

We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.

I clung to Aunt Cora as you would cling to life if you loved it.

Soon we were back in the shifting shadows outside, more beautiful than any perpetual light could be[.]

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

I think this quote is a very clever way to both show the drastic changes to Antoinette’s life following the end of slavery and to show how little she understands them, but having now progressed further into the book, I also think it’s a very interesting observation about the state of white society on the island without forced labor. 

The racist characters in this book may try to attribute this standstill to the “laziness” of the black people who won’t work unless forced to, but I see instead a group of white people incapable of picking themselves up and addressing their own needs in the absence of free, forced labor — The roads are in disrepair because they will neither pay someone to fix them nor do the work to fix them themselves, but prefer instead to wallow and play the victim. 

Bethany Jenkins

“When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed - all belonged to the past.)”

“She spoke hesitatingly as if she expected me to refuse, so it was easy to do so.”

Wide Sargasso Sea quotes

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