Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

Wide Sargasso Sea is both easy and difficult to place in Jean Rhys’s canon. It is at once, as one critic asserts, ‘a logical outgrowth of the developments in the previous four novels’,¹ and quite different in treatment and subject matter, if not theme, from the four earlier novels. Rhys, of course, first used her West Indian background for material in Voyage in the Dark, and even in her first volume of stories explicit West Indian backgrounds are used in two of them. But the themes in Wide Sargasso Sea are more than an outgrowth of the earlier novels; they do, as I pointed out earlier, embody many of these same themes, but there are many subtle variations and real differences, especially in the treatment of the male personality. Her characterisation of Edward Rochester, for example, is by far the most complex and fully drawn male she has ever accomplished. Wide Sargasso Sea is very much a part of the Rhys canon, dealing as it does with those aspects of personality and human relationships which have always engaged her. In spite of the limitations in the character of Antoinette, the novel simultaneously deepens and, in several important ways, reexamines the nature of male and female understanding, suggesting an attitude different from her earlier novels and one especially more understanding and comprehensive of male behaviour and feeling.