Mountain Devil

Recommend: No.

Wide Sargasso Sea starts off promisingly. Part One depicts a mother and daughter living in Jamaica, both white, in the 1800s. Their residence is a sprawling plantation, named Coulibri, that has been abandoned and left for ruin with the abolition of slavery. The mother is beautiful and cold, constantly disappointed with the isolated life she must endure.

A frown came between her black eyebrows, deep – it might have been cut with a knife. I hated this frown and once I touched her forehead trying to smooth it. But she pushed me away, not roughly but calmly, coldly, without a word, as if she had decided once and for all that I was useless to her.

Part One can be spectacular. The writing, when focused on the mother and daughter, is clear and sharp. They are both treated with hostility by the black townsfolk. Other white people, ‘real white people’, also spurn the broken family, as outside of their decaying estate, mother and daughter have no wealth or prestige. And yet, with the world turned against them from all angles, neither can provide any comfort to each other. There is little love between mother and daughter. I sense they are only still together because of some abstract feeling of safety in numbers.

The only salvation they can find is within the grounds of the plantation, which are lush and untended, wrecking a beautiful green havoc in the tropical weather. The grounds are a place of solitude where mother and daughter can individually hide from the nasty realities of racism and poverty that lurk outside the estate’s boundaries.

I went to parts of Coulibri that I had not seen, where there was no road, no path, no track. And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think ‘It’s better than people.’ Black ants or red ones, tall nests swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin – once I saw a snake. All better than people.

I was so enjoying the story in Part One. It was had gothic unease but also sweltering tropical claustrophobia. The estate, Coulibri, was as much a character as the mother and daughter, and more of a character than the few remaining slaves that distractedly attended to the estate. This first part concludes, shockingly, with an incredible fire that consumes Coulibri. There’s an incredible scene where a parrot, unmentioned previously, rises from the house with wings burning. This is the end the protection and colour that Coulibri provided mother and daughter, and the beginning of the end of their stories.

Part Two jumps ahead in time. The mother is dead and the daughter, Antoinette, has grown (she seems in her late teens at this stage) and married. Her husband is the generically respected Englishman Mr Rochester. Interestingly, Part Two is narrated by Mr Rochester. It is a complete tonal shift from Part One that was narrated by a pre-teen Antoinette. Gone from the prose is the wonderment of Jamaican wilderness, replaced instead by dread and distrust of these unkempt surroundings. I can feel the sick confusion of Mr Rochester as he follows his new wife up the jungle hills on horseback in the following excerpt:

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger.

It’s not only the land that Mr Rochester cannot get a firm hold of. He also struggles to control his wife. And in being unable to control land or woman, control over his own sanity eventually falters too. The writing from Mr Rochester’s perspective becomes progressively unmoored – it is the grammatical unravelling of a pompous Englishman. Towards the end, Mr Rochester seems to have lost it.

You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.

Somewhere around the last third, I fell out of infatuation with this book. It became more difficult to read. The plot emerges only briefly from large sections where Mr Rochester is raving to himself. While it was structurally exciting to see the first person narration shift from Antoinette in Part One to Mr Rochester in Part Two, we spent too long in Part Two. The decline of Mr Rochester is less interesting to me – he is clearly an outsider, so it is not a surprise that Jamaica emerges the unforgiving victor. By the time we are back with Antoinette in Part Three, she’s certifiably insane, and the cool descriptions of Jamaica and her mother in Part One feel long ago. I think we spend so long with Mr Rochester because the novel is actually a spin off of a character of the same name in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I haven’t read Jane Eyre and have none of that context, so any such plot complexities were totally lost on me. There was probably a lot more depth to Part Two if I’d have had contextual understanding of Jane Eyre.

I was also unclear about the slaves in the plot, and some become main characters. But are they even slaves? It is mentioned in the first few pages that slavery had been abolished. So I think they’re just hanging around not because they have to, but because staying with their former masters provides more money than alternatives. Yet the Antoinette is still referred to as ‘master’, so the former slaves must be mentally stuck in time. It’s like they’re struggling to break away from their history, the same for which can be said of Antoinette, who returns as an adult to Coulibri and inhabits her deceased mother’s insanity. 

The former slaves are poorly characterised. They seem to live entirely without joy, and are bland, dimensionless characters. Structurally, they are held at arms length from us to emphasise that even though they live side by side with Antoinette, their difference in class makes them totally separate (and without loyalty) to Antoinette. All that would be fine, except one, Chrisophine, becomes a primary character. Scenes with Chistophine were bland and I desperately wanted her to just leave the plot completely.

Wide Sargasso Sea was a good book but its central conflicts were so extreme, with too little character development prior, that Rhys fell into melodrama. Mr Rochester and Antoinette fall into lust, and then into hatred, and then into madness so quickly, and without much subtly, that the plot grows too far fetched, and ultimately this is why I don’t recommend it.