Abstract
Wide Sargasso Sea is the first of Rhys’s novels not to be set in a historical period through which she lived. For her, this raised questions of realizing fact and, in Part Two, of imagination in familiarizing herself with the tenor of the West Indies and her characters in the 1830s and 1840s. Rhys’s memories of her great-aunt Jane Woodcock’s stories and songs helped her hone a more precise sense of place, situation, and history, located in the subjective points of view of her characters. Rhys’s imagining of the relationships between Rochester and Antoinette and Antoinette and Christophine crucially draws on the eighteenth-century song “Adieu foulard, adieu madras,” which has been identified as an originary text of the French colonial mythology of the doudou.
This chapter reframes Rhys’s writing of Wide Sargasso Sea by addressing blind spots in the stock biographical narrative arcs about her, and drawing freshly on published letters, unpublished manuscript material (including letters), and fiction published by Rhys while she was writing her magnum opus. In particular, the influence of Rhys’s great-aunt, a talented seamstress, can be seen in the aesthetic of quilt making in the novel, as can Rhys’s use of the Creole songs that she passed down to her great-niece.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Rhys’s letter to Vaz Dias on 16 October 1956 (Letters 133).
- 2.
For a discussion of the stories, see Thomas, “Jean Rhys’s Cardboard Doll’s Houses.”
- 3.
Rhys, “MY GREAT-AUNT JEANNETTE LIVED IN her room,” quoted in Thomas, “Jean Rhys’s Cardboard Doll’s Houses” 46.
- 4.
On the allusions to Shakespeare, see Thomas, Worlding and Little. On the allusions to Baudelaire, see Taylor-Batty. Rosenberg addresses the British colonial romance in Rhys’s writing (184–191). The quotation is from 184.
- 5.
In “The Cardboard Dolls’ House,” Rhys emphasizes the relative sexual naivety of the protagonist Phoebe, who, not picking up the sly reference to the secret courter, finds the song slightly scary, imagining an amorphous creature tapping outside at night (3).
- 6.
The song was popularized by Christy’s Minstrels (“Cheer Up Sam”).
- 7.
Murdoch notes the allusion to the song (159–160) but does not examine its reach.
- 8.
Rhys gives the translated title in the first version of the ending of Voyage in the Dark (382).
- 9.
Rochester overhears the song “about one day and a thousand years” when Christophine is trying to comfort Antoinette (Rhys, WSS 90) and alludes to the lyrics when he thinks about Baptiste’s indifference to the age of the rum at Granbois: “A hundred years, a thousand all the same to le bon Dieu and Baptiste too” (98).
- 10.
On the structure and use of the glacis, see Monnereau.
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Thomas, S. (2020). Jean Rhys Getting the “Feel” of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea. In: Savory, E., Johnson, E.L. (eds) Wide Sargasso Sea at 50. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3_9
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