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3. “Fighting Mad”
- University of Virginia Press
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3 “Fighting Mad” Between Sides and Stories in Wide Sargasso Sea In a 1958 letter to actress and friend Selma Vaz Dias, Jean Rhys detailed her desire to rewrite the story of the “Creole lunatic” in Jane Eyre. Despite the challenge, she delared herself firm in rectifying what she saw as the unfairness of Charlotte Brontë’s representation of the first Mrs. Rochester and related the difficulties of working with the original text. Although Rhys had described the project to Vaz Dias in previous letters—Vaz Dias expected a script form of the novel for performance —this letter provides more details about Rhys’s experimentation with various methods of representing her heroine’s story. Rhys informed Vaz Dias that she had decided to begin with Antoinette’s youth, with Antoinette telling her own story. In a postscript to the letter, Rhys urged, “I will not disappoint you. Come with me and you will see. Take a look at Jane Eyre. That unfortunate death of a Creole! I’m fighting mad to write her story.”1 In an earlier letter to Vaz Dias, Rhys attributed “Come with me and you will see” to St. Teresa of Aquila, with the invitation emphasized as religious ecstasy.2 Her use of this phrase further evidences Rhys’s dedication to the project of reclaiming Bertha. She wrote in another letter that on rereading Jane Eyre after beginning to rewrite Bertha, she “was a bit taken aback” to discover “what a fat (an improbable ) monster she was,” yet she would tell her story, “though not without pain struggle curses and lamentation.” Whether she had “any right” to rewrite Bertha, Rhys noted, was a separate question for a later time.3 Rhys’s letters expose her investment in what would be her last novel, which she had been contemplating in different forms since as early as 1945. Her phrasing of her commitment—“fighting mad”—resembles Erna Brodber’s description of “ancestral anger.” Although Brodber utilizes Afro-Caribbean examples to illustrate ancestral anger, Brontë’s Bertha, represented as merely an impediment in Jane Eyre—“necessary 70 “Fighting Mad” to the plot, but always,” Rhys emphasizes, “off stage”—evokes a similar anger in Rhys.4 Rhys’s emphasis on claiming Bertha (“her”) expresses how imperative it is for her to rescue this “poor ghost.” “Fighting mad” also reveals Rhys’s position vis-à-vis Jane Eyre and its century of readership . In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys had to contend with the established reading of Rochester’s mad wife and her legacy of lunacy. It is therefore understandable why it took Rhys twenty years to publish the novel, as she struggled with the literary method of “fighting” the earlier established representation of Bertha’s madness. Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, is Rhys’s last novel, finished considerably later than her first four novels, which were all published between 1928 and 1939. And while Wide Sargasso Sea shows similarities in style to the previous novels, the differences are significant, with the most significant, perhaps, being Rhys’s turn to the Caribbean as the primary setting; although she mentioned the Caribbean in previous novels, it was never her focus. Of her earlier heroines, Anna Morgan of Voyage in the Dark has the strongest relationship to the Caribbean : throughout the novel Anna experiences flashbacks to her youth in Dominica. In Wide Sargasso Sea, however, Rhys is wholly concerned with the West Indies; even the last section, set in England, focuses on the lost Caribbean space. Locked in the attic at Thornfield Hall, Antoinette (as Rhys renames Brontë’s Bertha) wraps herself in memories of Jamaica in an effort to keep warm. In Rhys’s previous novels, England is similarly cold and unkind to women, but for Antoinette it is particularly harsh. In the last section of the novel, Grace Poole tells Leah that Thornfield Hall is “big and safe, a shelter from the world outside which, say what you like, can be a black and cruel world to a woman.”5 In her other novels, Rhys’s protagonists find the world as Grace Poole describes it, but they seem to be searching for their own Thornfield Hall. Those women wander around Europe ostensibly searching for, yet never finding , a rich husband or protector like Rochester to prevent their wasting away from misunderstanding, loneliness, and poverty. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette achieves the permanent privileged situation they seek but finds that the loneliness and cruelty do not end outside the walls of Thornfield...