Shall We Sharpen Our Eyes and Circle Closer to the Beauty of the Husband? Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys – Liv Golvin
August 3, 2026
“She seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I’d try to write her a life.”
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys paints a picture of the English Creole population in the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery, and in doing so takes a famous love story (Jane Eyre) and turns it on its head. The book itself is obliquely written, in a way where we never really understand clearly what is happening, which mirrors the main character herself in her confusion, as she is dismissed to corners to be mostly an observer of life. Antoinette grows up feeling deeply, she understands the people around her and their connection to the humid natural environment and her maid Christophine’s Obeah (voodoo) that protects her. Her life has the sense of things gone, but not yet gone. Rhys works well within the confines of her readers already knowing how the story will end, which will not be happy. There is always a feeling that tells the truth of the moment, even if we won’t listen to it.
The readers are introduced to Antoinette as a child, rejected by her mother after the death of her father in favor of an epileptic younger son. The center image of her youth is her mother’s dead horse, ostensibly poisoned. She sees this bad omen and does not tell anyone. She is mostly friendless, isolated from society as a strange part of the world now that slavery has ended and her family income is gone. The fire that engulfs her childhood home serves as a mirror to how her story will end. It is not obvious at all that this woman will end up in Jane Eyre; we are not told her husband’s name until the middle of the book. I’m hesitant to even call it a “prequel,” as that is reminiscent of fantasy novels and Marvel movies.
In telling the story of Antoinette and her relationship to Mr Rochester, Rhys is able to capture the strange essence of being Creole– in Antoinette’s case, of English descent in the Caribbean. She does not natively belong to the island, but it is nevertheless her home, and this creates a complexity that she accepts easily, but others find strange. When confronted with an actual English husband, she discovers that while she does not belong to Jamaica, neither does she belong to England. She is a woman without a home, especially once unhappily married, as her homes and land have been transferred to her husband, who finds her as difficult, confusing, and unlovable as the island itself, which he describes as “too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.” When he talks about Antionette, his wife, he says “I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did.”
He wants Antoinette but can’t possess her, can’t love her, because he does not understand her. She is like the island– said to be livable, but bearing a sort of undercurrent of danger around every turn, with a history that everyone has forgotten, or misremembered. The couple honeymoons at a home located on the island of Massacre, and no one can remember how it is named. After all, what is in a name?
People are never just the remnants of a story, there is always a life involved. A human being with their own thoughts, feelings, history, a mother, a father, and everything else that goes with life. In giving Mr Rochester’s madwoman in the attic a life, Rhys effectively ruins the romance of Jane Eyre. Mr Rochester is not a good man. We believe by the end of Jane Eyre that the death of his wife, who was only ever a burden placed on him for being a second son, is that thing that sets him free and makes him pure for Jane, cleansed by the literal fire and suicide that sets the first Mrs Rochester and her husband free. Jane is straightforwardly English, not complex, but simple and kind. But after reading Wide Sargasso Sea, we see that Antoinette and he were happy for a time, after marriage. Why will his time with Jane be any different? Is the story devastating because we are sad for Antoinette, or are we anticipatorily sad for Jane? What makes someone deserving of love?
Isn’t it true that women, in searching for love, in wanting it badly enough, can become anyone’s madwoman in the attic? Antoinette herself can tell that her husband doesn’t want her, that he doesn’t love her, but she is stuck with him, so she tries to make the best of a bad situation. She is told to leave, but because she has no money of her own, she cannot. And it is not just because of her lack of freedom– inside Antoinette there is the pain of an unbearable optimism and hope that things will get better, that she will not be stuck anymore. So she instead asks Christophine for a love spell, despite the warnings, and in trying to regain control, she loses it all. In breathing life into Mrs Rochester, Rhys warns of the true nature of Jane Eyre’s story. Don’t men always say, yes she was crazy, don’t they lock us in the attic of their mind, keeping us tied to them but not actually a part of their lives.
There is a potential for madness in all of us. It’s about being misinterpreted; it’s about thinking you are begging to be loved when in actuality you are just begging to be seen, to be acknowledged for your pain, yes your pain, but also your goodness and your kindness, your hope, the wonderful things you could achieve if you were accepted. It’s giving up when you realize this isn’t going to happen, and surrendering to a fate that has been impressed upon you by someone else. Mr Rochester assumes that Antoinette will be mad like her mother, and she says okay. Since you cannot see what I actually am, I will be what you say, just so I can still be a part of what you see. The ghost in the attic always has a name, and a story, and lives there for a reason, even if the person who has trapped them there will not admit.