Thoughts on Wide Sargasso Sea

I have decided, after some internal debate, that I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea. It was a difficult book for me to get through. It's a novel that centers around madness and suicide, racism and violence, and ultimately despair and lost hope. Even though it was fairly short, I found that I kept having to put it down just to get out of the characters' heads. In the end though, it's also a novel that touches on a lot of important issues, including those dealing with gender and post-colonialism, and I guess I felt more informed (?) when I finally finished reading it.

One of the things I found most interesting was the theme of being protected, or who or what is protecting Antoinette, and safety that Jean Rhys weaves through her novel. In the first section, Antoinette is just a little girl living in some awfully dangerous and confusing circumstances. Her mother is slipping away from her and she feels threatened by everything around her. Even her home doesn't seem safe. She has to continually tell herself she's safe (10) but does she actually believe it? She is so desperate to feel protected by something that she believes in the safety of her stick. "It was not a stick, but a long narrow piece of wood, with two nails sticking out at the end... I thought I can fight with this, if the worst comes to the worst. ... I believe that no one could harm me when it was near me." (18) I initially found this passage kind of funny and endearing (I remember sleeping with a frying pan when I was little when my parents left me with a babysitter) but then I saw the desperation in it. My parents always came home making home feel safe again but Antoinette has a constant sense of forboding and a shingle to protect her. Does the stick do anything? No. It just gives the illusion of safety. Eventually she outgrows her belief in its protecting power, only to replace it with something else.

In the second section of the novel, Antoinette believes that Rochester has arrived to rescue her and protect her. He recalls when she tells him, "... everything is on our side. ... I used to sleep with a piece of wood by my side so that I could defend myself if I were attacked. That's how afraid I was." (42) Through her marriage to Rochester, Antoinette feels comforted. He makes her feel happiness. She likes to be told by him "you are safe" (56). However, this safety is once again just an illusion. He begins to believe the stories he is told about her family, and he takes away his love, her happiness, and the safety he once provided her with.

In the final section, Antoinette is imprisoned. But it seems she is finally protecting herself instead of relying on something or somebody for her safety. She is violent (118). Is she driven to violence by madness? Sure. But in her final actions, the suicide that is not explicitly stated but we know occurs, she is protecting herself from a life of imprisonment. She takes back her own agency and frees herself from a lifetime of anxiety. Death seems to be the only place where she will find true safety.